| ▲ | EGreg 6 hours ago |
| I know what’s going to happen. I will explain what crypto is for and then it will get downvoted just because it says anything positive about crypto. The point is to NOT have a single place with access to all the money, votes, etc. Every participant should be acting as themselves, and there should be no way to do things on behalf of others without their consent. The point of smart contracts is to have code you can actually trust. Your bank or openAI can change their website, APIs and even their models tomorrow. That’s not great for trust. Trust is what enables things to scale. The same way you trust other internet protocols to just “route around problems” and not have one single point of failure, that is the substrate for Web3. Imagine a Web2 website such as a student-teacher marketplace NOT handling millions of dollars, accepting money from students and paying them out to teachers. Imagine it being simply an interface while the actual transactions are approved by the students themselves, and instead of the central site signing payouts with some keys, the teachers get paid through smart contracts and code on the blockchain. The site can still take 10% commission from everything, it would be above board, and it can never change it without the consent of the people. The business logic is in the smart contract. (Since this comment has the keywords “crypto” and “web3”, I know what will happen in advance already.) |
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| ▲ | ebertucc 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Isn't this incident a case study in how immutable smart contracts are exactly what you don't want in a trustworthy financial system? The stolen USDT will likely be returned because Tether can do manual freezes like a traditional financial institution. Where code is law the funds are just gone. Like even in your example of the marketplace I don't see the benefits over having a central authority. Who determines who is a student or teacher? Who kicks out bad actors? Who resolves disputed transactions? |
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| ▲ | EGreg 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | You misunderstand. The very reason that this Binance hack is a huge issue is that $5B was concentrated in specific wallets under specific keys. A decentralized network of wallets and balances doesn’t present an attractive target for hackers specifically because the payoff per wallet is so small! It is exactly the centralization you are defending, which is at the root of the problem. In the decentralized case, no one has to determine who is a student or a teacher. If a teacher needs to pass KYC with a marketplace, they do it once, and from then on can permissionlessly receive their small payouts. | | |
| ▲ | ebertucc 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I'm not so sure. Centralization (on Binance) made the attack appealing, but decentralization (of crypto broadly) is the only reason it's possible, and centralization (of USDT et al) is the only path to recovery. Re: the marketplace: we'd want to be able to revoke teacher access too, and sometimes we may need to roll back transactions (Goods not delivered? Wrong goods delivered? Wrong goods purchased?), and then I have to ask... why involve a blockchain at all? The only compelling real world use case I've seen is helping people navigate hostile governments or dysfunctional economies. | |
| ▲ | owlbite 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The number of scams perpetrated against traditional bank account holders doesn't seem to support the suggestion that scammers aren't interested in regular person-sized targets. |
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| ▲ | rebolek 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| "The point of smart contracts is to have code you can actually trust." That’s very naive thing to expect from code. |
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| ▲ | wrs 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Indeed, very shortly after live smart contracts were introduced, someone exploited a bug to steal a pile of pseudo-money, and the humans in charge decided to fork the blockchain to undo it. So the whole idea of “autonomous” smart contracts was revealed as the nonsense it always was. (Actually IIRC only some of the humans agreed to do that, so the chain was duplicated, and what does that even mean from a currency perspective?) | | |
| ▲ | EGreg 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Indeed, very shortly since digital computers were invented, there was corruption. For years, until the voltage could be controlled better and until IEEE standardized things. Indeed, very shortly since modems were invented, there was need for error correction. They were slow and clunky. The only reasonable conclusion is that the Internet is a fad and not worth discussing. Same as this newfangled decentralized cryptography stuff. Indeed, very shortly after the Web came out, regular script kiddies could write php websites with blink tags. Credit card numbers were sent in the clear with http. This “e-commerce” thing was a dangerous joke, only idiots would send their credit cards over the Internet. It would never catch on! | | |
| ▲ | wrs 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | None of those invalidated the entire premise of the underlying technology, though. (That being: you can’t trust people, but you can trust code.) |
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| ▲ | dboreham 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Yes, but as someone who worked in the cryptocurrency industry for a few years: that's not how it actually works. Smart contracts have bugs, it isn't peer to peer so someone has to run and pay for big servers, humans are sometimes criminals or Faustian bargain takers. |
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| ▲ | CodingJeebus 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| I broadly understand this as the utopian vision of what crypto could theoretically be, but it's not playing out this way in the real world and I have a hard time seeing it ever succeeding this way. Being able to leverage crypto on this scale requires everyone to either A) be technical enough to understand and use smart contracts directly or B) delegate a party that handles this for you. This is where the utopian case usually falls apart, because most people are B and this requires trusting a third party, which kinda defeats the entire point of the vision. Because most people don't want to do the work of learning and managing crypto directly, a huge industry flourished to service these people, full of its own interests, corruption and various levels of criminality. And well-intentioned crypto people have no way to reign this industry in because the entire point is to operate in a deregulated way. Ironically, the piece that makes crypto fundamentally unworkable 20 years in is capitalism. |
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| ▲ | josephtrump 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Once upon a time, pancakeswap staking stole my money. The conditions under which they'd steal my money were spelled out in clear in the code but not mentioned anywhere on the web app. Specifically, you had to claim your rewards in a certain time window or they'd disappear. | |
| ▲ | whimsicalism 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I am hardly a crypto fundamentalist, but it sounds like LLMs help with a lot of the problems you identified | | |
| ▲ | CodingJeebus 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Maybe for people who have the means to afford LLMs, but then who really wants that? That's a hard pass for me and I use LLMs every day. I suspect that asking society to trust in a digital middle-man between themselves and their money will be a very hard sell. | | |
| ▲ | whimsicalism 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | > suspect that asking society to trust in a digital middle-man between themselves and their money will be a very hard sell. Very hard sell? This is effectively how the vast vast majority of people in the US have their money handled. The means to afford LLMs? These are services that cost pennies. |
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| ▲ | whoanoway 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [dead] |
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