Comment by ravenstine | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ravenstine | Hacker News Reader

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I think that's certainly a part of it, but it's not the whole story, and I suspect it's perhaps responsible for 1/3 of the story.

A bigger motivation, and perhaps the most quixotic one, is financial security.

No, I don't mean that cryptocurrencies haven't been highly unstable in value.

But the more that the cabal chooses to truly enter the 21st century, the greater the danger of that technology being used as a means of coercion. This has already been seen in the porn industry (both amateur and commercial) and, say what you want about the possible ethical issues with it, but people have the right to produce pornography in the United States and also participate in the same economic system as everyone else. The danger of companies like Visa and Paypal exercising political control over their customers for other reasons is non-zero, and I would even predict that the danger is at least moderate.

Whether you agree with that perspective is another thing. Many crypto enthusiasts, whether they are explicit about it or not, like the idea of creating an economic system that everyone can participate in that doesn't involve countless middle-men. If that wasn't the case, there wouldn't be a big push to create the Lightning network.

The other part of the desire for crypto, from my perspective, is a desire to be a part of a new frontier. We had the personal computing revolution, the internet, the web, web 2.0... and for those who missed out on those or merely miss them, crypto fills that void and provides a new realm of possibilities to explore.

> Whether you agree with that perspective is another thing. Many crypto enthusiasts, whether they are explicit about it or not, like the idea of creating an economic system that everyone can participate in that doesn't involve countless middle-men.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the whole blockchain thing depend on an uncountable number of middlemen to verify transactions? They just don't have to trust them. Not to mention they have to count on a market existing for the coins to give them value.

I guess the distinction would probably be commoditized middle-men.

Read, as distinct from our current champion middle-men, chosen by favor, regulation, and access to capital.

Explained simply, while there are indeed users acting as the middle man verifying transactions, you don't have to worry about trusting them because the system is built in a way where you know exactly what they're going to do.

To add to this idea of mining, theres a more grandiose theory that smart contracts are the additive tool that we can use to build all sorts of incentives in our society for people to collaborate effectively. You don't have to force people to collaborate towards the greater good if you can just incentivize them to build the thing you need. This allows them to mine out the value and build a better and more trust-less community at large. It's like a bug bounty but for problems in society.

> You don't have to force people to collaborate towards the greater good if you can just incentivize them to build the thing you need.

Wouldn't it be just as possible then to incentivise them to build things to the detriment of society (but that are to my benefit, of course)? We do that today with regular old money and regular old contracts.

We do that today because we are incentivized to acquire monopolies. Or in other words housing and other generalized assets that use a typical ownership model. If individuals can't "own" property, but instead "possess" property via a self assessed real time tax, you eliminate that gluttonous incentives that all humans have for accumulation.

With collective possession you can increase users stake in making sure that negative incentives don't exist. It's all in the game theory of realigning incentives, but before you do that you have to break down how the current system we live in at its foundational root is flawed.

My theory is that we don't understand the economic systems of the crypto economy because they aren't rooted in the same type of economics that exists in our current system. They are completely different incentive systems and are not correlated at all. We just confuse Capitalist values with crypto-economic values, thus leading to entire new schools of thought in how we organize ourselves manage systems.

Cryptocurrency involves numerous middle men, all of which charge very high fees. Miners, exchanges, smart contracts, they're all middlemen and they all charge fees.

It's not that crypto enthusiasts don't like middle men, it's that they want to be the middle men.

Rather than the argument of having middle men vs not having middle men, I’d say that the transparency, accessibility, and hard-set consensus rules are what make something like the Bitcoin blockchain useful. It also allows privacy by means of the ability to generate key pairs and addresses easily and at-will. This combo of features mean that even with middlemen, there are certain rules that cannot be broken without the participation and knowledge of those who use the system.

With banks, money can be secretly and arbitrarily transferred by individuals of power and in some cases even gate-kept from the initial depositors. With crypto I never have to worry about my money being falsely spent under the cryptographic security guarantees of something like Bitcoin. Even with > 51% attacks it would be practically impossible to rewrite significant portions of history and are mostly limited to reorganizing and deleting recent transactions.

This is a genuinely important point - there’s a strain of Puritanism baked into American (& more broadly western) culture that’s getting exported and enforced via our corporate dominance. Apple doesn’t allow porn on the App Store, Tumblr killed porn because of advertiser squeamishness, Onlyfans nearly killed itself because of bank pressure. Say what you will about porn, but 30 years ago gay rights would’ve fallen afoul of the same corporate conservatism - I’m broadly liberal and generally don’t believe a corporation lacks social responsibility, but I’m extremely uncomfortable with the degree to which our cultural values are encoded in especially our financial system.

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