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> For every technology we use today, there was a time it was laughably inadequate as a replacement for what came before.

That is just success bias. How many times did people try out perpetual motion machines? The rest of the article tries to make the converse that if something is inadequate today, it will be the replacement in the future.

When do you consider something to be not worth spending time on?

> How many times did people try out perpetual motion machines?

Or even turning lead into gold! A ton of famous scientist (i.e. Newton) were very busy with that idea but we end up only knowing them for other side projects/discoveries.

> A ton of famous scientist (i.e. Newton)

The abbreviation "i.e." stands for "id est" and means "that is". So what you have written means "A ton of famous scientist (that is, Newton)"...

Now while I'm sure Newton had gravitas (hah!), I doubt it amounted to a ton.

You want to use the abbreviation for "exempli gratia" which is "e.g." and means "for example".

It's a common mistake but easy to remember with eg-xample. :-)

I think its more a comment of how we should be open to people contributing to these efforts (while still being mindful of wild claims). While the concept of perpetual motion machines is flawed, the effort put into reducing kinetic energy loss is very useful. Flywheels are being actively studied as a method to store excess energy storage. In the long-term view I don't think you can consider anything not worth spending time on, the result just might not be applicable to the original goal.

I think perpetual motion is the wrong way to go.

Mark Twain lost all of his money on a wide variety of speculative investments, most of which I would call fairly reasonable.

Getting in on the ground floor does you no good if it's the wrong kind of ground floor, or if it's the right kind of ground floor but the one next door ends up going to the moon while yours falters, or even if it's the right exact ground floor but you go bankrupt investing too early and the person who buys it from you rides it to the moon.

My skepticism about e.g. AI and blockchain is not definitive or final, and the goal is not to end the conversation. To the contrary, for me this is a (possibly very deficient) style of reasoning about the world. You are excited about technology X, can I express my skepticism in a sufficiently annoying way to prod you into helping me understand some insight about technology X which disproves my hypothesis that technology X is a technology in search of a problem? For example, I don't see an important problem which is solved by blockchain in a way that's superior to other solutions, when taking into account their respective advantages and drawbacks. Just don't see it.

For example, I want to have a centralized authority which can override fraud or a mistake in a financial transaction. I want laws to apply, I want them to be written by elected humans.

I'm not even sold on the value of any kind of electronic voting in general elections, since trust in the process is so vital here that in my mind the horrible inefficiencies of pen and paper and a bunch of humans manually tallying up votes in a thousand school gyms until 11 pm is actually quite okay. I'll pay for that with my taxes, no problem. Now you add blockchain into the mix, and I don't know what problem it solves that does not have superior alternative solutions.

And so on. But I'm gonna stay open minded. Technology X might one day find the perfect problem to solve, or I might realize I was stupidly wrong about technology X for some time.

For now, I would simply ask that you go through the many applications here and tell me if you see smart contracts being very useful for collectively managaing high-value decisions and capital after reading: https://intercoin.org/applications

Can you instead point out the one (strongest, best) application for which the case of using blockchain solves a big problem in a way that's better than existing alternatives, given all their respective advantages and drawbacks?

I'm lazy, you see. Conveniently forgot to mention that.

Sure. How about the one where:

1. Communities around the world issue their own currencies independent of the dollar (believe it or not, this is as important for financial stability as not just relying on Facebook’s server farms in California)

2. They give their members a UBI in the local currency that they can only spend locally

3. The amount of daily UBI to give out is determined by the vendors in the community voting on it (monetary policy)

4. Have each vendor tagged with “food”, “clothing” etc. and apply taxes to make negative externalities more costly and withdraw money from the economy (fiscal policy)

5. Calculate statistics on how money flows locally in the smart economy and have economists make recommendations about the fiscal and monetary policies, while the population continuously gets to adjust them up and down based on these recommendations

6. Hooking up all such communities to a decentralized exchange called Intercoin, where the central currency is only held by real KYCed communities and isn’t easily susceptible to pumps and dumps by speculators and banks like Goldman Sachs, and also encourages recurring and sustainable value exchanges between communities

7. Allowing tourists to buy the local currency, and allowing individuals around the world to donate to the community and see stats how the money is being used

More info here for instance:

https://intercoin.org/communities.pdf

If this is too vague here is a concrete example:

https://community.intercoin.app/t/fund-for-refugees/2688

What problem does this one solve, and how does it solve it? To me, this just looks like how a normal currency works, "but on a computer". Is the (claimed) advantage that you can narrow the scope of a currency? I just don't see the benefits in doing so.

Well, that sounds exactly like what people said about all the other technologies that were "on a computer". Watch this exchange, for instance, between Bill Gates and David Letterman... about "this internet thing"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgODUgHeT5Y

Or the Today show wondering what the point is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlJku_CSyNg

Technology empowers individuals and smaller communities. That's what it does throughout history. Personal computers. Personal printers. Now you can send email instead of relying on a centralized post office. VOIP disrupted Ma Bell monopolies in our lifetimes, instead of $3 a minute phone calls you can now do full videoonferencing for free. The Web instead of gatekeepers at radio, TV, magazines, newspapers, etc.

In all of those cases, you could question why "on a computer" matters. Who needs email when there are phonecalls? Who needs the Web anyway when there is email? Who needs online dating sites when there are matchmakers?

Nathan Myrhvold at Microsoft told people at Excite that "search is not a business".

Economist Paul Krugman wrote that by 2005, it would become clear that the Internet's effect on the economy is no greater than the fax machine's.

Well, these smart contracts are programmable, and you program against one widespread platform, like JVM or in this case EVM. That's a huge benefit. You can have programmable money, programmable elections, without having to deal with thousands of APIs, or as you are saying "normal" physical currency. Governments in fact also want to phase out cash, and even bank credit, and create centrally controlled "CBDCs" so your "normal" money is also under attack by your governments. China and USA and Canada have already done it and they'd love to be able to freeze people's accounts, restrict them from getting on trains, etc. It may be preferable to incarcerating them later on for years, as we do in the USA.

I read the list of applications. All of them seem pointless, or at least inferior to what we already have. Obviously the people writing these lists are unclear on the basics and probably haven't even read the NIST blockchain technology overview.

https://www.nist.gov/publications/blockchain-technology-over...

Why does it seem pointless?

What they all have in common is cutting out an inefficient rentseeking middleman that people have been forced to trust. Yes that includes FTX, Binance, Coinbase and governments.

Here is an example… how would you do this internationally without crypto?

https://community.intercoin.app/t/fund-for-refugees

It's a stupid idea. There are plenty of good charities already helping refugees. You can just donate cash to them. Using cryptocurrency just complicates things without adding any value or solving any real problems.

Sorry, but no. You don’t seem to be very knowledgeable about what these charities actually get done and their efficiency.

The real problems are making global payments directly to the people on the ground without waste and having confidence in how they are spent.

This works with the existing infrastructure in every city — similarly to point-of-sale machines that VISA and Mastercard did a lot of work to set up over decades. Back then you would be asking why the world needs credit cards and payment systems when there were perfectly good cash based systems and charities on the ground.

Anyway, the vendors sell food, the person shows up and buys the food. We know how the money was spent. The people help people.

To try to show you by analogy… it is as if people said that there should be a decentralized and uncensorable network for uploading videos taken by people’s own dashcams, phones, etc. of rockets hitting buildings, detention campa etc. But you’d keep saying that the Associated Press and the current centralized media is perfectly adequate and reports everything we need to know, and if people wanted they could upload their videos to Telegram or some other adhoc solution that isnt designed like the news agencies. Why decentralize anything? Because the people DON’T get a good system otherwise

Actually I'm more knowledgeable about this stuff than you are, and it's still a stupid idea. It fails to account for all the tax and legal compliance issues that vendors have to deal with.

And real vendors don't want cryptocurrency magic beans anyway. They want useful currency like dollars or euros that they can use to pay their own suppliers.

I doubt that. But hey, if you're so knowledgeable, then you'd realize that the systems do in fact support taxation and make auditing for compliance with any goals far easier.

Technology empowers individuals and smaller communities. That's what it does throughout history. Personal computers. Personal printers. VOIP instead of $3 a minute phone calls. The Web instead of gatekeepers at radio, TV, magazines, newspapers, etc.

In all of those cases, you would probably say "the real vendors don't want the Internet anyway". Who needs email when there are phonecalls? Who needs the Web anyway when there is email? Who needs online dating sites when there are matchmakers?

Nathan Myrhvold at Microsoft told people at Excite that "search is not a business".

Economist Paul Krugman wrote that by 2005, it would become clear that the Internet's effect on the economy is no greater than the fax machine's.

You'd be in good company ... a lot of smug people have always said this newfangled stuff is totally useless because people are perfectly fine using the "useful" systems they've always used, not "magic beans" like this new programmable money.

I think the framing of your argument is a little bit misguided. Looking at history and possibilities doesn't really get you anywhere. Sometimes people get a tech massively wrong, sometimes they don't.

In order to have an actually good discussion, we need to look at the thing and go past the "well someone criticized the Internet too and now look at it".

So taking the idea of the blockchain. What makes the blockchain a "different thing"? The differential aspect is that it allows untrusted nodes to join in a distributed architecture. It's not the only database that exists and it's not the only distributed one either. So any claims of new features brought by blockchain should justify why they need the "untrusted distributed nodes" part. If they don't, we can assume that those new features don't really need the blockchain: either it's already been done, it's not an use case people are too interested in or it's not viable due to other reasons (economical, technical apart from storage, political...). In the case of blockchain claims, most don't actually justify the need for the untrusted distribution. For example, smart contracts: it's just a fancy word for "computer program" only that it runs on a distributed trustless architecture. But is that really needed? My bank already runs computer programs that execute loan payments, for an example of things people try to implement with smart contracts.

Compare that with personal computers or even AI. PCs allowed data manipulation, storage and calculations at a capacity that was not previously available. Of course the first computers wouldn't have enough power to do things that a wide array of people would find useful, but "low power" isn't a fundamental aspect of personal computers in the same way that "low bandwidth" isn't a fundamental aspect of blockchains.

Suppose I start a Web2 company, and end up building the next big social network. Or maybe I deploy Mastodon or Qbix and make a large community.

Now elections, roles, permissions and credit balances may hold significant total value.

Various jurisdictions now start to require you to hold surety bonds, get audits etc. Suppose you manage payments volume of $20 million a month for a teacher marketplace. One of your developers can just go into the database and change all the balances, salami-slicing money to themselves. Or someone can go and change all the votes.

How can the users trust elections, or that you won’t abscond with the money one day, or get hacked, like FTX and MtGox?

Web3 solves this with smart contracts. For the first time in history, we can guarantee (given enough nodes) that it is infeasible to take actions you are not authorized to do. The blockchain is readable by everyone - but more importantly, only authorized accounts can take individual actions that do a limited amount. It’s truly decentralized.

The alternative is to build elaborate schemes where watchers watch the watchers — and the more value is controlled by the database (in terms of votes or balances) the more risk and liability everyone has. Why have it?

Have teachers be paid by students using web3 smart contracts and tokens. Your site becomes merely an interface which contains far more low-value things.

As for data, you can store it on IPFS with similar considerations. Read this:

https://community.intercoin.app/t/who-pays-for-storage-nfts-...

As you can see, my company and I have been giving it a LOT of thought, and not distracted by ponzi schemes. I am able to articulate exactly when you need Web3 and IPFS.

Do smart contracts resolve that problem? I don’t think they do completely.

Most people won’t have the knowledge or the time to verify the contracts. They will trust your word that they can’t be used to scam them. Smart contracts can still have failures too. And as long as the blockchain doesn’t control the real world, it won’t guarantee anything there (such as people making multiple wallets to manipulate the votes).

> The alternative is to build elaborate schemes where watchers watch the watchers — and the more value is controlled by the database (in terms of votes or balances) the more risk and liability everyone has. Why have it?

Why not the alternative of a regular bank account with public records? That also eliminates the risk that any mistake or manipulation stays there forever. It’s a tradeoff, not an absolute improvement.

In any case, it seems you have indeed thought about a real use case where the blockchain at least makes some sense. But that’s precisely my point, we need to be talking about actual use cases and not empty claims about potential without actually looking at why it’s useful.

1. End-users don’t need to personally verify smart contracts or any other open source software. The key is to have each version have a hash, and on EVM thatms easy — it’s the address of the contract. Then, more and more auditors go through the code and sign off on the contract. In fact, this should be done for lots of open source ecosystems, eg composer or npm, because then we might not have stuff like this: https://blog.sonatype.com/npm-project-used-by-millions-hijac...

or this in log4j: https://theconversation.com/amp/what-is-log4j-a-cybersecurit...

In fact it happens more and more:

http://cyware.com/news/analyzing-the-deadly-rise-in-npm-pack...

2) On EVM you can just audit a smart contract FACTORY, and then people can trust all the instances made from it. This is immensely powerful.

And then there is also regular use by people who put huge amounts of value into a protocol and it is never hacked. It is why for example people trust UniSwap liquidity pools not to rugpull them, and the same with many other protocols.

Now, to be fair, you don’t need a blockchain for that. You can use merkle trees and code signing. But the current Web sucks at it — you just have to trust the server not to suddenly send you bad code, or your “user agent” to execute JS that sends your password in the clear somewhere. And App Stores are black boxes where you just have to trust Signal’s claims or Telegram’s claims. I write about that here in much more detail:

https://community.intercoin.app/t/web3-moxie-signal-telegram...

and I give an extensive talk here as to why we need to reform the current Web:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKPKuH6YCTc

And I wrote an article here on why the current technology leads to extreme centralization and what effect that has on our society:

https://cointelegraph.com/news/how-a-web-that-lost-its-way-c...

There are real societal consequences on the largest scales, from these platform choices of tech stack.

3) Sure, in the real world, things may not match the data on the blockchain. That painting could be stolen despite what the NFT says. The house up for sale may be a fake. And someone could default on a loan that you thought would bring you revenues.

Blockchain doesn’t guarantee any of those things. However, on Aave marketplace, I am guaranteed a return, or my money back in the token I had lent. So my risk is reduced now to black swan events on the token market, so if I’m using mainstream tokens the chances of getting wiped out or losing my collateral are almost totally eliminated.

People who don’t want to use it don’t have to. But if you’re building a very big community with a lot of value at stake, would you rather put votes, roles, and balances into a central database and PHP app code, or a blockchain with smart contracts?

From personal experience I can tell you it should be the latter.

4) In your example it would be the bank that would opt to use blockchain and freely offer other indepdendent entities not under their control to run nodes snd secure it. It reduces the bank’s risk and liability!

And yes thank you for recognizing that there may be a real class of use cases!

I feel like there is a tendency for technology to overpromise by offering solutions to the wrong problems. To take your example, what is the fundamental issue with elections? I would say that it is that the optimal number of people for deliberative decision making is probably around Dunbar's number, certainly not millions. When you have millions of people, it is purely a media game, so decision quality falls off a cliff. So I doubt general elections can ever yield better results than they currently do, regardless of the voting system and regardless of technology.

So my general skepticism regarding blockchain is that it presents technological solutions to social problems (so it won't work). AI is different since it's a bit all over the place. In principle, it aims to solve problems that are obviously worth solving, but as long as it will fall short of its promises, the partial solutions we do get are kind of a mixed bag: if we need to keep a human in the loop or at the wheel, it's suddenly a lot less attractive. And the path to the AI being good enough to be trusted is nebulous at best. But we'll see. As for PCs, their utility has always been obvious and the roadmap clear.

The fundamental issue is that elections are too expensive so we don’t do collective decision making that often, and usually only for our state or national governments.

People tend to elect representatives for long terms instead and then complain about them, rather than delegating their vote to experts or trying other systems like Ranked Choice Voting.

Many people complain about having to travel far to a polling booth, and disenfranchisement, whereas they could vote for their phone. Elderly and minorities in rural areas often have bad access.

If elections were cheap, people could easily engage in collective decision making of various types and choose various ways yo tally votes. None of that is possible today, we are like the people before computers, or before the industrial revolution - having a limited number of options, newspapers, etv.

We would also have more confidence in the results as we’d check using the Merkle tree that our vote was counted. It would be user friendly to do so.

And we could also implement many of the results on-chain, such as how much UBI to give out in our own community’s currency, or how much to tax transactions.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Just see https://intercoin.org/applications

My point is that general elections are intrinsically mediocre at decision making. You can make them cheaper, more efficient, make sure everyone can vote, add a delegation system, and so on, but you'd just be polishing a turd.

It's pointless to improve voting technology if people don't understand the ramifications of what they vote for, and they will never know that unless they invest hundreds of hours of careful study into it. If everyone does this, there is no way it won't be insanely expensive.

IMHO there is a very simple solution to all of these issues that could have been implemented a century ago: pick representatives at random. Send them all to the capital, lodge them and pay them to think about the issues full time, talk to experts directly, interview candidates for Prime Minister and other executive positions directly, coordinate with each other, and so on. Give people the time and the information they require in order to cast the very best votes they are capable of.

I'd say the very simple solution is to have representatives decide. Then there's a separate debate about how to the representatives are assigned. At random, based on voting, based on competitive self-appointment by means of heavy weaponry, etc.

Blockchain may or may not make it easier to bypass the concept of having representatives decide, but this assumes we'd want to in the first place, which I am in full agreement with you: this is a feature, not a bug, so I don't wanna, so I don't need blockchain.

The fundamental issue with elections is that the mob is easily swayed and because most of us are unqualified to hold opinions about most things. What is best or true is not decided by majority vote. Never in a million years would I want mob rule. I don't know where this strange doctrine of mob wisdom came from, but it is dangerous and false. The vote is open to all adult citizens only because we need a hedge against corruption in leadership, and even then, it is a vote for leadership, not a system of referenda and direct democracy. Even this "hedge" can easily enable corruption and vote the worst tyrants into power.

And the reason we localize voting, or should do so, is because of the principle of subsidiary.

Back in 2014 there were a lot of studies on wisdom of the crowds. You’d have to explain why they beat experts at many fields yet in others they would be worse. Most of the failures (FTX, MtGox, Softbank, invasions of Iraq and Ukraine, wars in general) are the result of centralization, not the regular people (who don’t want to kill others en masse). Centralizing power and decision making in a few hands leads to a lot of consequences:

https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2014/04/02/297839429/...

That's not hard. Most cases where wisdom of the crowd works fine is when the crowd does not have a personal or emotional stake in the outcome. Such gatherings attract mostly people that have an interest in that particular area, so the crowd self-selects for competence.

What is your expected outcome when you let the crowd decide how much taxes they pay, or how much to spend on road/water/electricity grid maintenance?