[hbbio]

Somehow yes, and it's quite sad.

The blockchain technology itself is a marvel and the safety/security properties of properly decentralized systems are unmatched. The whole financial world would be better written using blockchain/smart contracts, same goes for voting/governance, etc.

But these scammers. So many of them... Easy to smell though, but the problem we need to fix is these scammers get most of the online traction/attention, taking it from truer builders.

[Arainach]

>The whole financial world would be better written using blockchain/smart contracts, same goes for voting/governance, etc.

Citation needed. Governance and finance absolutely need human judgment recovery edge cases such as "My house burnt down containing my ID (keys) and I need access to my bank account to rebuild it"

[simonw]

Right. All of these "finance and government would be so much better with smart contracts" suggestions seem predicated on the idea that human beings can design a system correctly on the first attempt and deploy an immutable version of that system they can then run independently forever without any bugs or exploits that need to be fixed in the future.

Human beings cannot do that.

[hbbio]

Good point.

It seems the common approach now is to make a v2/v3/etc. of your protocol and let your own users migrate. Previous versions will still run forever, but your frontend can push migration paths.

[hbbio]

Social recovery for smart accounts covers your use case

[Arainach]

Unlikely in practice.

"My house burned down and inside was my spouse, who was my reco ery contact"

"My recovery contact died / isn't speaking to me / is backpacking in the Himalayas"

The problem isn't technical. It isn't a formal mathematical problem. It's that the real world is messy.

There are plenty of other classes of problems too. "This person committed a crime and their assets need to be seized", etc.

[HideousKojima]

>The blockchain technology itself is a marvel and the safety/security properties of properly decentralized systems are unmatched. The whole financial world would be better written using blockchain/smart contracts, same goes for voting/governance, etc.

No, blockchain really isn't all that amazing. Blockchain is useful when you need something decentralized, immutable, and trustless. That trustless bit is the important part, there are existing solutions for decentralized immutable ledgers that work far better than blockchains and require far less compute power. And it turns out that the vast majority of human and business interactions and transactions are actually based on varying levels of trust.

And that's before you get into blockchain-specific issues like the Oracle Problem.

[tzone]

Most important property of blockchains is verifiable transparency. That is a huge deal and yes, most financial and government systems would be much better for people if they were built with that type of verifiable transparency.

Decentralization is important but isn't as important. There are many successful chains that aren't decentralized at all and are quite useful.

Most top/real projects in blockchains aren't immutable. Pretty much everything is upgradable/changeable, including blockchains themselves.

Trustless - even this part isn' true for most blockchain systems. They all contain various levels of trusting different entities.

It is the transparency and verifiability that is the key idea and most important improvement that blockchains bring.

[HideousKojima]

>It is the transparency and verifiability that is the key idea and most important improvement that blockchains bring.

You can have transparency and verifiability without blockchain, so long as you trust the parties publishing the ledger. So once again, trustless is really the key part to blockchain.

[hocuspocus]

> Most top/real projects in blockchains aren't immutable. Pretty much everything is upgradable/changeable, including blockchains themselves.

> Trustless - even this part isn' true for most blockchain systems.

Blockchains are immutable, trustless, permissionless. Otherwise it's called a database.

[hbbio]

Spoke to some people working at big banks: They say trust, or rather lack thereof, _between_ banks is a key issue. Blockchains solve that.

[hocuspocus]

No, they don't. Bank networks are fundamentally permissioned, only authorized entities are allowed to participate. Verifiability is a political/legal decision between these entities, not a technical limitation of existing systems.

[airstrike]

Somehow? The only objective value from crypto is anonymity. It only serves to incentivize shady behavior.

[hbbio]

I would say most current blockchains are pretty bad at privacy. Look at what onchain sleuths do.

Rather, blockchains enable anyone to provably check the state of the database. Your fintech app logs you out. No proof, and frustrating customer service hell for days/weeks/months.

[DrScientist]

> The whole financial world would be better written using blockchain/smart contracts, same goes for voting/governance, etc.

Eh? I thought blockchain didn't scale? As far as I can see blockchain swaps trust in banking institutions ( not to simply make up numbers in their banking systems ) - to trust in a majority based voting system where you don't know the people involved and you just hope the bad guys don't have a majority.

And the computational cost of running the distributed voting system - is many of orders magnitude higher than the computational costs of transactions in the we-trust-the-bank-model.

As for smart contracts - a quick google suggests that the cost of deploying a smart contract on Ethereum is 500 dollars - that's quite an overhead for the vast majority of financial transactions.

[ceejayoz]

> The whole financial world would be better written using blockchain/smart contracts, same goes for voting/governance, etc.

These are all scams, too. No.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO serves as a nice concrete example. "Code is law" fell apart as soon as the code resulted in a large enough bad outcome for enough people.