Comment by knorker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by knorker | Hacker News Reader

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But it doesn't. Not at all.

Society cannot be boostrapped on top of cryptodelusions, exactly because people will not accept it.

If your bank account gets drained through something "unfair" (hack, robbed, bug, etc...) society delegates power to courts to order your money back.

Society will drop "the blockchain" like day old garbage every time, because people Do. Not. Care, about it. They care that they live in a society of relative fairness, judged by their peers. Not by a bug in a program.

There is no link between the blockchain and reality in the shared delusion of society.

There is a link between the courts, and the government, and the treasury, and the shared delusion of society.

There have been armed uprisings against governments that don't live up to the promise. And to the extent people DON'T rise up against the government it's because the government has guns.

The blockchain has no guns. Society will just stop believing in it, when it's wrong. You can't just "stop believing in the government" (i.e. look at the success of "sovereign citizens").

The government of all levels doesn't go away when you're not looking at it. Nor the dollar (because of the government). The blockchain does.

Not sure what you mean by bootstrapping society. But I do think that most people won't keep all their money in crypto accounts. Instead, some people will probably just use crypto to move a bit of money around on the internet, maybe use it as a rainy day account, maybe do a group project. It could work pretty well for that.

But why?

I have multiple accounts because FDIC (and other reasons), and different investment platforms.

Using blockchain for a slush fund like this is just LARPing. And I get the thrill of "being your own banking", I really do. But that's all it is. And it doesn't make it in any way a good idea, for anybody and everybody.

Let's say I wanted to start a small podcasting collective with people from many different countries. We would all know each other in so far as any member of a small online group knows other members. We might want to have people tip our podcasts and streams, and we might want to use a system to split up that income to the people in the collective. Bitcoin can allow that kind of revenue splitting without having to mess with hiccups in the legacy financial system.

Whatever people's reasons, I don't think crypto is just one thing because there is a whole world of things people might use it for, and I can't trust myself to know of or approve or appreciate the value of all of them. In that way, crypto kinda reminds me of learning to play Go.

Yes, the world needs a system for microtransactions.

The thing is that your use case can be likened to you and your friends coming together to play poker, so we need a system for allowing anyone to create a casino of any size.

As for what I meant by "bootstrapping":

Why do we have money, society, or any other social construct? It's because we as humans believe in some form of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness".

Different cultures have different tradeoffs between these. And they may not recognize these things in people who don't look like them, or don't have the same gender, but the point is that this is the foundation of why we build social constructs such as government, police, and money.

The issues are complex, and sometimes contradictory, but this is what we bootstrap on.

Math is not that.

> for example, ownership of things like money accounts or even shares in group projects both come from and exist within our imagination, and crypto allows us to create rules and boundaries for those things

It does allow us to create those rules. But they are useless rules. Unless you think you can math-codify not only morality itself, but also exceptions and overrides.

And we don't know the exceptions until we encounter them.

Before we had DNA evidence we did not need to know what is "right" thing to do is, for someone who's just been proven innocent after 40 years. Not that we know now, either, but we have the mechanisms for trying, at least.

Blockchain enthusiasts want to make this impossible.

And that's why nobody will accept it. You think people are upset about the 1% now, imagine if it were literally impossible to change rules (laws, taxes, or anything else) that are clearly being exploited through a loophole.

It's the difference between mass surveillance and a proper legal court-approved search warrant.

This should not surprise you: People actually want search warrants to be a thing.

> I can't trust myself to know of or approve or appreciate the value of all of them.

Similarly you can't know the existence or value of all the things that a blockchain-based economy would make impossible.

Whereas the alternative (fiat currency) makes nothing impossible, as long as we can want it.

I think I understand your point a bit better now: people will not accept crypto because they prefer a mutable legal system over an immutable system of crypto contracts. However, your argument relies on taking an imagined crypto-future and applying it seamlessly over all of society.

Also, I think a crucial element in this equation exists in the form of all of us regular people that do not have power in the system today. Besides, so long as we have some combination of riots, guns, and jails, I wonder if people will experience much of a difference between a system of "who has the gold makes the rules" and "who has the egold makes the rules".

> I wonder if people will experience much of a difference between a system of "who has the gold makes the rules" and "who has the egold makes the rules".

If the people who don't have the gold are treated poorly enough, then in a democracy they in principle have the power to change it. In a non-democracy there's a second threshold where they will overthrow the power at a risk of their own lives.

You can't vote out the person with the egold, you can't rebel against them.

So yes, I do believe that the people who have egold and nothing to fear will be far more tyrannical than the people who have gold, for this reason.

If we could at least get online microtransactions for it, but we can't (at least with bitcoin) because of all its other technical flaws.

As you stated, people don't want crypto systems to seamlessly cover all of society. So, we can reasonably expect other systems to exist and also some crypto systems to exist. I have a cautious eye towards crypto, but a realistic future includes people using crypto for some things and using interpersonal agreements for other things.

What people want is incompatible with cryptocurrencies existing.

Maybe some use will be accepted, just like some level of murder is accepted. We sacrifice some lives for the benefit of not living in another type of dystopia.

But no, there's no harmony there. There is no right amount of AIDS in your blood.

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