Comment by gjulianm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gjulianm | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> I tried recently to explain to someone that cryptographically codifying law and contracts can be beneficial in a lot of ways (like transparency/enforcement in governance)

There's another trend with crypto discussions which relates to this idea you said. I see a lot of discussions on applications that follow the template: X has not been done, and X can be done with crypto, so now that crypto is available X will be done. It is very hard to discuss that maybe X wasn't done before not because of technology, but because of other issues.

For example, the problem of transparency and enforcement in governance is not that we lack the technology: it's that we lack the initiative and the detailed procedures. I also see a lot of discussions around NFTs being used to sell used digital games: again, it hasn't been done not because tracking ownership is difficult but because allowing that would take a large bite of game sellers/developers profits. 99% of the applications I see discussed can be done without blockchain, but people never seriously ask themselves why is that and instead say that crypto will solve it.

You're wrong about "lacking initiative and the detailed procedures" - that's exactly what blockchains were created for: As a response to opaque and unreliable systems. This is the solution to a systematic problem in governance.

Blockchains simply add verifiability of claims. Yes, you could create a central system which flags "bad actions" or something, but it'd be difficult to prove someone scammed you without the cooperation of the central authority. Breaking the rules digitally shouldn't be possible in a properly designed system, which is what some blockchains can provide.

Currently if someone says "no I didn't scam you", the truth of their statement is ambiguous without cooperative investigation. On a blockchain it's inherently unambiguous and the information is immediately available for all parties involved to know how to proceed.

Obviously this has more applications than scammers/cheaters, which is why blockchain tech is so heavily experimented with and being integrated in so many other areas of tech.

> You're wrong about "lacking initiative and the detailed procedures" - that's exactly what blockchains were created for: A response to opaque and unreliable systems. This is the solution to a systematic problem in governance.

You can't solve non-tech problems with technical solutions. If the government doesn't bother to have accessible documentation about how to do X thing, why would they bother to make a blockchain about it? If the knowledge about how to do X thing is not written down but depends on how a bunch people end up implementing it and never cared about it, how are they going to put those procedures into code?

> Yes, you could create a central system which flags "bad actions" or something, but it'd be difficult to prove someone scammed you without the cooperation of the central authority.

Given that we rely on the central authority to enforce rules, it doesn't seem too weird to expect them to cooperate.

> Currently if someone says "no I didn't scam you", the truth of their statement is ambiguous without cooperative investigation. On a blockchain it's inherently unambiguous and the information is immediately available for all parties involved to know how to proceed.

That's a naive way to look at it. We don't live in the blockchain. You'd still need cooperative investigation to ensure that what ended up in the blockchain is what the parties agreed to. Unless you move absolutely everything to the blockchain, including personal understandings and expectations of contracts, you will still need out-of-chain investigations.

I don't think you quite grasp that people are already building blockchains for government use. You keep saying "why haven't they done it yet then?" while they are actively working on it. I don't know why it took so long, but it's happening now.

Once you have verifiable "truth" in a system, it becomes a lot harder for it to become corrupt. "The emperor has no clothes" modality stops being profitable because there's a constant red blinking light re-assuring people that, in fact, he doesn't have any clothes on. If a central authority clearly goes against the protocols of the system, for a more realistic example: the police decide not to arrest someone who is proven to have stolen $10 million from someone, the system disintegrates due to it clearly and verifiably not being respected.

> You keep saying "why haven't they done it yet then?" while they are actively working on it. I don't know why it took so long, but it's happening now.

Yep, and we have seen some government bodies using Github or other platforms to publish open data, or to be more transparent on procedures, and yet most of them still don't do it. Which is my point: the problem is not lack of technology, but lack of motivation/human capability/initiative to do it.

> Once you have verifiable "truth" in a system, it becomes a lot harder for it to become corrupt. "The emperor has no clothes" modality stops being profitable. If a central authority clearly goes against the protocols of the system, for example: the police decide not to arrest someone who is proven to have stolen $10 million from someone, the system disintegrates.

I'm sorry but this looks incredibly naive. I can tell you a very real example: in my country, Spain, we have papers proving that, among others, a certain M. Rajoy, of the PP party, received money that came from illegal donations. The prime minister at the time, Mariano Rajoy from the PP party, denied that it was him on the papers. He didn't face any legal consequence.

There have been so many times that a central authority has clearly gone against the protocols of the system without it disintegrating... You can't apply tech solutions to a problem that's not at all about tech.

I don't dispute that this is mostly theoretical. But I wouldn't say it's naive, because we know that when people buy into systems they follow the rules as best they can. The problem occurs when others take advantage of the system to game it with plausible deniability, within the confines of said system. That's the entire point of "the emperor has no clothes" allegory. When people buy in to a broken system, broken things happen.

That's why you get papers "proving" someone's guilt, but no action taken because the handling of such situations lies outside of the common understanding of the system. I'm sure most people think to themselves "I'm sure if the papers were legitimate then that person would be in jail, there must be something else going on". When you codify the system entirely, and people buy into it, then someone submits papers recognized by the system to be authentic that prove someone is guilty of a crime, it's much more likely there will be enough pressure to take action in that case, because then people are thinking more along the lines of "those legitimate papers proved they're guilty, why are they still not in jail?"

Obviously one major problem is how to build a system which handles all of the edge-cases that crop up? One possible answer is to use a DAO which can modify itself through whatever means (usually democratic).

> I'm sure most people think to themselves "I'm sure if the papers were legitimate then that person would be in jail, there must be something else going on". When you codify the system entirely, and people buy into it, then someone submits papers recognized by the system to be authentic that prove someone is guilty of a crime, it's much more likely there will be enough pressure to take action in that case, because then people are thinking more along the lines of "those legitimate papers proved they're guilty, why are they still not in jail?"

Or people think to themselves "well, the papers are authentic but the meaning is open to interpretation" or "well, it's not such a bad thing" or "well, but the others are doing worse", or a myriad of things. All of those are real arguments I've seen made.

It is naive to think that you can codify everything into a system in a way where there's no open interpretation possible. It is naive to think that people will trust the system instead of what they heard the system says, or that people will trust the system over leaders, or the the people responsible for enforcing the system decisions and feeding the system information won't find a way to elude responsibility.

In general, it is naive to think that the problem of corruption, which is a problem about trust (if the person I like says he didn't do it or did it for a good reason, then I trust him above all else), enforcement (the ones responsible for enforcing the rules are the ones breaking them) and tolerance (people don't care that much about corruption if it doesn't harm them) will be fixed by a solution that at most will help a little bit in the enforcement part.

I think of it more in terms of a highly secure and decentralized online videogame. Most people will be happy just to play the game, some people will start guilds and min/max, some people will try to cheat. When someone is found cheating, the system gets patched to prevent others from doing it. The dynamics of a game nudges people into behaving within the incentive structure of the game mechanics - even though technically they could strip naked and /dance for a month straight.

In any well designed online game (please don't use shitty ones against me), cheaters aren't able to hijack the entire system or ruin an economy. Their exploits break the game temporarily and most of the time it doesn't affect that many people. In bad cases, the state gets rolled back, the exploit patched, and the game continues. Sometimes things are just unavoidable, and everyone counts their losses.

I think blockchain has the potential to make fairer and more resilient systems, and with new incentives as well. We can use game theory to try wildly different societal structures, and quickly switch to another one if one doesn't work well.

On some level, trust always has to be present. If we make the rules trustless, enforcement becomes the bottleneck (until Robocop?), but it's still potentially better than what we have now where we simply have to trust millions of other people not to fuck with anything too much.

> You can't solve non-tech problems with technical solutions.

This is useless and unconstructive generalizaton. AFAIK many non-tech problems were solved with technical solutions.

It's a basic fact. If a problem is caused by something that is not related to lack of technology, you won't solve it with a technical solution. This is obvious in any other field (for example, you won't see a doctor that says that drugs could fix poverty) but a lot of tech people don't seem capable of admitting that some problems cannot be solved by technology.

But aren't all problems just due to a lack of technology? Not enough food? Invent agriculture. Or invent the spear and the sandal so you can hunt further afield.

Technology is not a field. Technology is what humans apply to improve their lives.

> But aren't all problems just due to a lack of technology?

Not at all. I mean, to take your example:

> Not enough food? Invent agriculture.

Agriculture is invented and pretty advanced and yet there are a lot of humans suffering from hunger.

Technology is what humans apply to improve their lives when they don't have a way to do something. Sometimes the problem isn't knowing how to do something, but getting people to do it, to give you money for it, to use it in a responsible way, teaching them, logistical issues... Having the technology is far from enough in most cases.

The idea that "technology solves everything" permeates HN and you'll see it all over the place in threads about education, politics, corruption, music, math... Funnily enough, when the people who actually know about the topic show up in those threads, most of the time they end up explaining why the problem at hand is not at all technology related.

> Agriculture is invented and pretty advanced and yet there are a lot of humans suffering from hunger.

Perhaps we could invent a new thing to solve that too? Improvements to crop technology, breeding, farming methods continue to happen every year. Inventions like the Internet bring information to people in rural areas who might not otherwise have had access to it. Why can't we solve all these things with technology?

> Sometimes the problem isn't knowing how to do something, but getting people to do it, to give you money for it, to use it in a responsible way, teaching them, logistical issues...

But can't those things all be solved by inventing something? Let's say you wanted to teach someone something, perhaps even without their knowledge or against their will? Could someone not invent a thing or process for doing that?

It seems anything humans invent is just one more tool we accumulate as a society. Once it was language, then writing, then mass communication, now perhaps it'll be a secure economy.

> Why can't we solve all these things with technology?

Unless you invent a way to generate political will, eliminate wars, reduce inequality, no, I don't think you can.

> But can't those things all be solved by inventing something? Let's say you wanted to teach someone something, perhaps even without their knowledge or against their will? Could someone not invent a thing or process for doing that?

No, I don't think you can. You can't fix people not wanting to do things by tech (unless you want to create a slaving machine, and I don't think that's the idea), you can't make tech that magically eliminates energy requirements to transport or build things, or that eliminates costs. I think we need to be at least a little bit realistic when evaluating the problems.

I don't see one can be naive/deluded enough to think all problems can be solved by new technology. It's like someone saying that you only need a hammer for woodworking.

> You can't fix people not wanting to do things by tech

At some point, people were afraid of any technology. Now, they live online, eating highly processed food delivered by planes. Yes, you can ‘fix’ people. Just give them convenience.

> I don't see one can be naive/deluded enough to think all problems can be solved by new technology.

Who said that all problems can be solved by technology?

> Unless you invent a way to generate political will, eliminate wars, reduce inequality, no, I don't think you can.

Technological progress often goes against the will of governments. See Twitter-triggered revolutions.

The commenter above just said "But aren't all problems just due to a lack of technology?"

This looks like another useless generalizaton to me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com