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by justajot 850 days ago
Yeah, it's definitely not ready. I agree with everything you are saying.

Though, the industry is aware of this and working on it. There is at least one company (Chia Network) where the on-chain language (ChiaLisp) is both capable and secure enough to allow for the sort of management needed to allow for self-custody to happen in a safe, sane manner. GUIs for this sort of thing aren't ready for the general public yet, but are definitely on the way.
4 comments
loveparade 850 days ago
Solutions have been on the way for more than five years, but literally nothing has changed and all we've gotten is pyramid schemes and gambling. Chains and protocols have exploded in complexity and technical debt to the point where nobody fully understands the attack vectors. By now I am convinced that anything beyond pyramid schemes is never going to happen.
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justajot 850 days ago
It's frustrating, I agree. People are obviously going to continue being people with pyramid schemes and the like. At the same time, there are enough who also agree that it's a mess, have closely studied the successes and mistakes of the past, and are building a solid foundation for doing this right. I mean, what we're really talking about here is creating a fundamentally new system for which the financial system operates upon ... it's going to take time ... longer than five years. And the progress that I've seen thus far is encouraging.
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troupo 849 days ago
> there are enough who also agree that it's a mess, have closely studied the successes and mistakes of the past, and are building a solid foundation for doing this right.

People who "closely study mistakes and successes of the past" are in a very rare supply in the crypto space, and for a good reason: because people who actually closely study mistakes and successes of the past don't want to touch that space even with a 10-yard stick.

The reasons were spelled out in no uncertain terms 7 years ago in https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/ten-years-in-nobody-has-c... and followup here https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustle... 17 years in, all those reasons remain the same.

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FireBeyond 849 days ago
> People who "closely study mistakes and successes of the past" are in a very rare supply in the crypto space

Unless you're talking about people who are studying the mistakes and successes of crypto scams, and are working to refine them (the scams), then you can find a few.

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danuker 850 days ago
Do you also consider Bitcoin a pyramid scheme?
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loveparade 850 days ago
No, I don't. But Bitcoin also isn't particularly interesting because it's not (very) programmable and not useful for mainstream use anyway. I don't consider Ethereum itself a pyramid scheme, just useless. The protocols on top of these chains though, nearly all pyramid schemes. The best way to describe Ethereum is that it provides a platform for pyramid schemes.
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reactordev 850 days ago
The base of the pyramid, if you will. I wouldn’t lump all contracts in with this but it does describe a vast majority of them.
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justajot 850 days ago
Hahaha, accurate.
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Quiark 850 days ago
What's the name of the function in ChiaLisp that returns true if this is an illegitimate transaction initiated by a hacker and false if it's being done by the real owner of the funds?
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FireBeyond 849 days ago
> where the on-chain language (ChiaLisp)

So all you need to do then is learn a Lisp? That sounds worth the effort for most non-tech people...

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lottin 850 days ago
It isn't a software problem.
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justajot 850 days ago
What is it?
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mratsim 850 days ago
The same problem as with passwords that has been plagging the security industry for decades.

Passwords, credentials and other high-risk high value intangible data are not associated with high-risk high-value AND our memory is not designed for random junk.

Maybe an anthropologist can study this phenomenon further.

We already have hints of that: our memory has evolved for thousands year to easily memorize places and spatial navigation, in thr past for food, water and danger. Today you go in a foreign place, just one visit and you know where everything is. At the same time, people can usually hold only ~7 concepts/numbers/objects in their head.

In memory competitions people leverage our spatial prowess with a technique called the memory palace, that was already used in ancient Greece and Roman Empire to recall anything, from bard tales to the Iliad and Odysseus.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci

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