Comment by miracle2k | Hacker News Reader

Comment by miracle2k | Hacker News Reader

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> That's revisionist history, smart contracts did not come until way later.

Smart Contracts were mentioned by Nick Szabo in 1997 (https://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/548). Satoshi literally added a scripting language to Bitcoin (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Script).

> Do you think your bank couldn't allow you to upload random code into their internal database? But there are many, many reasons why they shouldn't and they don't.

Yes I would like that ability please. What are the reasons they don't?

Also, you are seemingly making the mistake of getting lost in technological minutiae; yes, you can call it a stored procedure. In the end, it is all just zeros and ones being shifted around anyway. The financial network created on Ethereum is in key ways, in its /outcome/, fundamentally different from the existing bank network. It is one where an Iranian teenager can design a financial protocol on equal terms to Goldman Sachs. This is a desirable feature.

This design brings with it other consequences. Transfers are hard to reverse; you can consider that a benefit or a flaw, or either at different times. It is simply part of the the nature of the thing.

>Smart Contracts were mentioned by Nick Szabo in 1997

And the term and concept were not popularized until Ethereum in 2014. I never heard anyone commonly refer to bitcoin scripting as smart contracts.

>Yes I would like that ability please. What are the reasons they don't?

There are some already mentioned in other comments here so I won't repeat them. If you want a full response, you should ask them. But if you must know, a lot of existing trading platforms and payment systems do already give you this ability in some form, no blockchains are required at all.

>in its /outcome/, fundamentally different from the existing bank network. It is one where an Iranian teenager can design a financial protocol on equal terms to Goldman Sachs. This is a desirable feature.

I'm sorry but no, this also doesn't make any sense and there are no desirable features or different outcomes here. From a starting position the main difference between the teenager and Goldman Sachs is the teenager doesn't have billions of dollars in capital. Everything else is technical minutiae. If the suggestion here is that the teenager can somehow take out an unsecured billion dollar loan in ETH, that's not a desirable or even functional financial system at all.

I mean seriously here. If you want to make real investments in businesses run by teenagers and other young entrepreneurs I think that's great. You don't need to blockchains to do that. They provide no useful features. I could go into extreme detail here as to why this is the case.

>This design brings with it other consequences. It is simply part of the the nature of the thing.

No it does not and no it is not, this is more terribly wrong mythical thinking that I hear people repeating. The design is not set in stone and there is no "nature" to it. Like any money system, it is designed by humans to further a certain goal and it absolutely does not have to have any particular consequences. It doesn't have to make fraud as easy as it does, but it was purposely designed to be that way because the goal is explicitly to avoid regulations.

> From a starting position the main difference between the teenager and Goldman Sachs is the teenager doesn't have billions of dollars in capital.

We are not talking about capital; we are talking about access. It is undeniably true that access to the legacy financial network is permissioned. But your Ethereum transactions and your smart contracts are no less privileged than those of Goldman Sachs. And if you can create a protocol that generates interest on your users capital, they just might entrust your smart contracts with a billion dollars worth of assets.

This is not speculative; it's the reality today. The reason why you keep hearing about all those DeFi hacks is because random people are building financial infrastructure (interacting with financial protocols built by other random people) without having to ask for anyone's consent or approval, and anyone in the world can use these products.

You can say that this is a terrible idea, but to say that it isn't something new that blockchain has enabled is simply denial.

(Crazy but true: under the EU's "Open Banking" API initiative, you are not even able to access your own account data in read-only mode, without going through a third party provider; it's only "open" to regulated entities.)

> No it does not and no it is not, this is more terribly wrong mythical thinking that I hear people repeating. The design is not set in stone and there is no "nature" to it.

The claim is not that there is no design space; the claim is that you are bounded by what we simply might call physical reality. You can design your messenger with end to end encryption, or without it, and that decision may be influenced by your value system. However, the decision might impose restrictions on how you can approach the problem of making multiple devices work, or a chat history, or interoperability.

If you want to make it impossible for regulators to censors the financial protocols written by random teenagers (the design requirement), but you also want certain actors to be able to revert transactions, then you may find that those two goals are in tension with each other.

>We are not talking about capital; we are talking about access

They are the same thing. It's true of any proof-of-work system and proof-of-stake only makes it worse.

>without having to ask for anyone's consent or approval

No. This is absolutely and completely wrong. Realistically you need consent of several intermediaries if you're doing business on a blockchain. The bare minimum you need is consent from the miners or stakeholders to accept your transactions. It's the same as any other financial system. What you are describing is so far from reality that it's baffling to me.

>You can say that this is a terrible idea, but to say that it isn't something new that blockchain has enabled is simply denial.

No I'm sorry but there's no denial. Unregulated finance isn't new. Blockchain didn't invent it at all. It is actually the default state of any finance without the proper infrastructure around it. It's extremely frustrating that anyone tries to present this as some kind of technological advance. It's not.

>you are not even able to access your own account data in read-only mode, without going through a third party provider

Which is exactly the same as blockchains, you need to go through a large third party network of mining pools and exchanges to access your funds.

>If you want to make it impossible for regulators to censors the financial protocols written by random teenagers (the design requirement)

I don't want that. That's a terrible design requirement. There is no explanation for why that is a design requirement. I'm sorry but I don't want to make it impossible to censor random teenagers (or anybody of any age) who is engaging in fraud. And no cryptocurrency can do that anyway because none of them are immune to regulation.

>but you also want certain actors to be able to revert transactions, then you may find that those two goals are in tension with each other.

No they are not. You seem to be suggesting that from the point of view of a financial system, all teenagers are indistinguishable from scammers. I don't know where this idea comes from. It's complete and utter nonsense.

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