Comment by jancsika | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jancsika | Hacker News Reader

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So why is the current definition of "cryptocurrency" so narrow? It seems to imply either a) blockchain, or b) some decentralized alternative to blockchain that tries to fill in the basic features of blockchain and one day scale it.

But there must be dozens of other approaches to doing cryptocurrencies in a sane and safe manner. E.g., in all this crazy buzz, has anyone in this space tried to do an updated version of digicash? That was a digital payment system created by one of the grandfathers of modern crypto. I've never heard a counterargument to its fundamentals-- unlike Bitcoin, you got your cashlike properties of anonymity wrt the issuing back through the use of blinded signatures. And I'm pretty sure it could also scale much better than blockchain-based stuff. It just pre-dated ecommerce so it didn't have a market.

There must be dozens of other non-blockchain approaches that also route around all the scaling problems of trying to do a blockchain or decentralized approach.

I mean, even in the realm of anonymous messaging researchers like Len Sassman came up with remailers that could make use of some number of centralized servers without relying on them to play nice for the anonymity properties. Hell, Moxie even went full centralized and still gets what I think a lot of commenters on HN would have to admit are decent privacy properties. Or, at least better privacy options than you'd get with doing transactions through Bitcoin.

Are there equivalent non-blockchain, non-decentralization-zealotry cryptocurrency experiments going on right now in this same space? If so, I'd love to know about them.

If not, then it sure does look like a bunch of people either copy/pasted Bitcoin's hashcash hack or put an experimental stop-gap in there to surf atop this ocean of cash that seems to only chase this incredibly small niche.

Digicash was centralized and thus could shut down, and it did shut down. Major blockchains are effectively immortal, with open-access rules that have enormous momentum to remain unchanged.

This allows larger numbers of disparate parties to coordinate on them for financial and social interaction. I would not rely heavily on a token distributed on a centralized digicash like system but I would rely on a token my company issues on Ethereum, because I know any one receiving the tokens would still be able to access them years from now and that the infrastructure of compatible software, both client-side and blockchain-based, will only grow over time.

>Major blockchains are effectively immortal

No, this is extremely wrong. I would encourage you to look into the rather large graveyard of cryptocurrencies that collapsed and are now worthless. A digital cash platform will shut down when it's not profitable and nobody wants to use it anymore, the exact same thing is true of any cryptocurrency.

It also seems really bad to me that this view is becoming more common, that's it's actually a good thing that BTC and ETH are getting "too big to fail" despite the flaws in them being relatively well known at this point. It's like we've come full circle...

>>No, this is extremely wrong. I would encourage you to look into the rather large graveyard of cryptocurrencies that collapsed and are now worthless.

None of those are major cryptocurrencies, and the blockchains of many of those which are now effectively worthless continue to exist in a handful of nodes around the world, showing the resilience of this enterprise structure.

>>A digital cash platform will shut down when it's not profitable and nobody wants to use it anymore, the exact same thing is true of any cryptocurrency.

No, a blockchain is inherently far more widely distributed in its infrastructure providers and datastores, and is therefore far less likely to disappear as a trusted database for shared operations like a token ledger.

>>that's it's actually a good thing that BTC and ETH are getting "too big to fail"

In this case they are too big to fail on their own, not too big for society to allow them to fail, which is an entirely different concept, and only superficially similar. It is a good thing for the world at large when a shared ledger becomes increasingly robust to failure due to its own structure becoming more resilient. This makes for a more reliable platform for financial and social interaction.

>None of those are major cryptocurrencies

Sure, but this is circular logic. They're not major anymore because they're dead.

>and the blockchains of many of those which are now effectively worthless continue to exist in a handful of nodes around the world, showing the resilience of this enterprise structure.

Yeah and I still keep copies of old Word 95 documents around, so if we're going by only "time spent existing" then the data structure used in Word 95 documents is much better and more resilient than blockchains. Of course that's a silly way to look at things.

>a blockchain is inherently far more widely distributed in its infrastructure providers and datastores

This is not even remotely close to being true. Nothing about blockchains makes them inherently more distributed, you can very easily deploy a blockchain on only one machine and keep it that way. The communities around them might be more distributed but that's a different discussion that isn't really related to blockchains.

>In this case they are too big to fail on their own, not too big for society to allow them to fail

I'm sorry I don't understand what the difference is. The definition of success here is "society sees it as useful" so the mode of failure is the same either way.

>It is a good thing for the world at large when a shared ledger becomes increasingly robust to failure due to its own structure becoming more resilient. This makes for a more reliable platform for financial and social interaction.

Sure, I can agree with that, but these statements have nothing to do with blockchains or cryptocurrency at all. You could say the same thing about a digital cash becoming more robust.

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