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by oblio 1047 days ago
> You can dispute it in the case of some hypothetical future architecture that requires physical real world enforcement of some state change on a decentralised ledger, sure, there you might have a point, who can say what the future holds?

It's the present day, not some future. You need real world enforcement of real world states.

I just realized! Cryptocurrency bros are pure function bros. Everything is pure and has no side effects!

Except for the fact that the world is a <<result of side effects>>. All that's nice about computers has to do with them printing to screen/paper, sending across the network, etc...

Similar story with money. All we care about is that effects they have on real life.

> that attack can be ruled out if you self custody.

Which puts a huge target on your head for any kind of real world malicious actor.

1 comments

> I just realized! Cryptocurrency bros are pure function bros. Everything is pure and has no side effects!

That's a fair criticism to the extent that any theoretical decentralised ledger process pipeline touches the real world, but the extent to which they do touch the real world, and the benefits available from each of them varies enormously.

> Which puts a huge target on your head for any kind of real world malicious actor.

If the choice is between that and having a bank and its chain of dependencies as a tyrannical real world dictator, I'd rather have to deal with that target than be trapped in that tyranny. That risk can be mitigated, it can be compensated for, structures can be erected to address it.

If you're slave to a tyrant, you're simply immediately subject to whatever their whims are. That is utterly unacceptable, even if it does theoretically reduce some risk for some people sometimes.

In a society that was not a cyberpunk dystopia, the price for instruments that allowed you to circumvent said tyranny would probably be much lower than it is. But this is not that world, I guess.