ghosTTy posted:

I don't want anyone to fail, but you militant nocoiners just aren't going to make it

ghosTTy posted:

odiv posted:

gently caress if I can find it right now, but I was just reading something about the large intersection between crytpocurrency enthusiasts and doomsday preppers. Turns out it's more fun to imagine you're king poo poo of the wasteland than an average Joe in a pretty decent world.

Goodpancakes posted:

Where is that economist posting about idiots like Ghostyy making a gamble for status?


Found it:

ghosTTy posted:

I don't want anyone to fail, but you militant nocoiners just aren't going to make it

ghosTTy posted:

I don't want anyone to fail, but you militant nocoiners just aren't going to make it

xtal posted:

Even I have a hard time believing someone posted that

klafbang posted:

You could have people not trusting each other sending money to each other as long as they both have a bank they trust.

Pochoclo posted:

Isn't this how SWIFT already works?

ghosTTy posted:

kw0134 posted:

Fifteenth century? My friend, there is nothing in America that we haven't already tried ourselves far more recently, because we're exceptional[ly dumb].

quote:

For example, some Westerns portray wildcat bankers as leaving their vaults open for depositors to see barrels of cash therein. However, the barrels are actually full of nails, flour, or other similarly worthless items, with a layer of cash on top to fool depositors.

---

These bank locations were sometimes the only places where the bank's notes could be redeemed, thereby creating a formidable obstacle for their redemption by noteholders and providing an unfair advantage to unscrupulous bankers.

Traditionally, the currency issued by wildcat bankers has been viewed as worthless, and the securities used to back wildcat currencies have historically been questionable.

ghosTTy posted:

sitting here with my comfy investments watching all the nocoiners argue, knowing they're not going to make it

ghosTTy posted:

I don't want anyone to fail, but you militant nocoiners just aren't going to make it

Mammon Loves You posted:

I call all people who don't own shares of Tesla noTSLAers and sad as it may be I know they won't survive when Elon opens his third eye and becomes God-Emperor of Earth.

NtotheTC posted:

What are you fascinated by? Genuine question. The most useful part of "blockchain technology" has been in use in programming for decades already, there's nothing new here other than some libitarians went "imagine if we made a currency and could stick it to the fed!" which is where the incredible stupidity started and strangely, where you appear to have gotten hooked in.

Mammon Loves You posted:

I call all people who don't own shares of Tesla noTSLAers and sad as it may be I know they won't survive when Elon opens his third eye and becomes God-Emperor of Earth.

Fried Watermelon posted:

I like how the chart with decreasing acceleration is predicted to go up uP UP for some unknown reason

Fried Watermelon posted:

I like how the chart with decreasing acceleration is predicted to go up uP UP for some unknown reason

dhrusis posted:

Genuine question gets a serious answer:

I am interested in opportunities to use "code" (across platforms, whether they be decentralized or not) to disrupt middlemen and remove friction of various high cost transactions across the legal, compliance, and financial services areas. I am also interested in tokenization of assets in the real world and supply chain custody opportunities.

I dont know what type of stupidity I got hooked into in this thread, lots of folks seem to be experts -- kinda misjudged the crowd, just kind of stumbled in here after seeing "oh, SA has a bitcoin thread" ...

dhrusis posted:

Genuine question gets a serious answer:

I am interested in opportunities to use "code" (across platforms, whether they be decentralized or not) to disrupt middlemen and remove friction of various high cost transactions across the legal, compliance, and financial services areas. I am also interested in tokenization of assets in the real world and supply chain custody opportunities.

I dont know what type of stupidity I got hooked into in this thread, lots of folks seem to be experts -- kinda misjudged the crowd, just kind of stumbled in here after seeing "oh, SA has a bitcoin thread" ...

roarpower posted:

Oh! My sweet summer child.

dhrusis posted:

Genuine question gets a serious answer:

I am interested in opportunities to use "code" (across platforms, whether they be decentralized or not) to disrupt middlemen and remove friction of various high cost transactions across the legal, compliance, and financial services areas. I am also interested in tokenization of assets in the real world and supply chain custody opportunities.

dhrusis posted:

haha I'm bored, what can I say... give me something better to focus on :-)

kw0134 posted:

It falls into the classic trap of thinking that whatever the faults of "compliance" and "legal" are, these are fixable things via code and engineering, and not a purposeful part of the process, or because those parts which are not trivial are in fact really loving difficult, which is why "friction" exists.

So let's discuss this in detail. What friction in, say, legal services exist that you think will be solvable with code? You mention real estate. What specifically about real estate do you think blockchain will fix? If you say title registration I will find some way to strangle you through your computer monitor, because that's the trivially least frictional part of a real estate transaction.

kw0134 posted:

So let's discuss this in detail. What friction in, say, legal services exist that you think will be solvable with code? You mention real estate. What specifically about real estate do you think blockchain will fix? If you say title registration I will find some way to strangle you through your computer monitor, because that's the trivially least frictional part of a real estate transaction.

dhrusis posted:

What do you guys think of the ethereum platform in here?

dhrusis posted:

What do you guys think of the ethereum platform in here?

DominoKitten posted:

Not being able to correct bugs and errors in smart contract code in Ethereum is one of my favorite parts of the whole cryptocurrency boondoggle, expressed quite eloquently by someone in one of the bad with money threads:

VitalSigns posted:

Ethereum is utterly baffling to me on a fundamental level, it is an unsolvable riddle of the cosmos that it was even made.

Anyone with enough programming knowledge to actually implement it would also have enough programming knowledge to understand that while machines may be logically perfect your code will never be and thus why it's a terrible idea to design a system around code that is not allowed to be changed. Ethereum cannot exist, its conditions of creation contain the seeds of its own destruction, the knowledge necessary for one to make it demonstrates why one shouldn't. Its existence is impossible and yet, here it is.

And it gets even better when you find out that the programming language involved makes it easy to write incorrect code:

quote:

Solidity has far worse problems than not being an advanced research language. Just being a sanely designed normal language would be a big step up. Solidity is so riddled with bizarre design errors it makes PHP 4 look like a work of genius.

A small sampling of the issues:

Everything is 256 bits wide, including the "byte" type. This means that whilst byte[] is valid syntax, it will take up 32x more space than you expect. Storage space is extremely limited in Solidity programs. You should use "bytes" instead which is an actual byte array. The native 256-bit wide primitive type is called "bytes32" but the actual 8-bit wide byte type is called "int8".

Strings. What can we say about this. There is a string type. It is useless. There is no support for string manipulation at all. String concatenation must be done by hand after casting to a byte array. Basics like indexOf() must also be written by hand or implementations copied into your program. To even learn the length of a string you must cast it to a byte array, but see above. In some versions of the Solidity compiler passing an empty string to a function would cause all arguments after that string to be silently corrupted.

There is no garbage collector. Dead allocations are never reclaimed, despite the scarcity of available memory space. There is also no manual memory management.

Solidity looks superficially like an object oriented language. There is a "this" keyword. However there are actually security-critical differences between "this.setX()" and "setX()" that can cause wrong results: https://github.com/ethereum/solidity/issues/583

Numbers. Despite being intended for financial applications like insurance, floating point is not supported. Integer operations can overflow, despite the underlying operation being interpreted and not implemented in hardware. There is no way to do overflow-checked operations: you need constructs like "require((balanceOf[_to] + _value) >= balanceOf[_to]);"

You can return statically sized arrays from functions, but not variably sized arrays.

For loops are completely broken. Solidity is meant to look like JavaScript but the literal 0 type-infers to byte, not int. Therefore "for (var x = 0; x < a.length; x ++) { a[x] = x; }" will enter an infinite loop if a[] is longer than 255 elements, because it will wrap around back to zero. This is despite the underlying VM using 256 bits to store this byte. You are just supposed to know this and write "uint" instead of "var".

Arrays. Array access syntax looks like C or Java, but array declaration syntax is written backwards: int8[][5] creates 5 dynamic arrays of bytes. Dynamically sized arrays work, in theory, but you cannot create multi-dimensional dynamic arrays. Because "string" is a byte array, that means "string[]" does not work.

The compiler is riddled with mis-compilation bugs, many of them security critical. The documentation helpfully includes a list of these bugs .... in JSON. The actual contents of the JSON is of course just strings meant to be read by humans. Here are some summaries of miscompile bugs:

In some situations, the optimizer replaces certain numbers in the code with routines that compute different numbers

Types shorter than 32 bytes are packed together into the same 32 byte storage slot, but storage writes always write 32 bytes. For some types, the higher order bytes were not cleaned properly, which made it sometimes possible to overwrite a variable in storage when writing to another one.

Dynamic allocation of an empty memory array caused an infinite loop and thus an exception

Access to array elements for arrays of types with less than 32 bytes did not correctly clean the higher order bits, causing corruption in other array elements.

As you can see the decision to build a virtual machine with that is natively 256-bit wide led to a huge number of bugs whereby reads or writes randomly corrupt memory.

Solidity/EVM is by far the worst programming environment I have ever encountered. It would be impossible to write even toy programs correctly in this language, yet it is literally called "Solidity" and used to program a financial system that manages hundreds of millions of dollars.

dhrusis posted:

Yeah, tbh I'm not really interested in arguing it because I don't have a position, like I said, I'm studying the "technology" (lol) and integrating it into other aspects of my understanding.

FWIW, when I think of blockchain, I'm not just thinking bitcoin, but more about what "secure value transfer" (lol yes I know again) + liquidity + "smart contract code" + some trust can do longer term.

I figure that there is room to improve as technology improves.. thats what I'm exploring.

What do you guys think of the ethereum platform in here?

klafbang posted:

Imagine AirBnB but for legal services. Now, synergize with the blockchain in the cloud, and you get instant zero-friction user-engagement.

Just slap that on a Powerpoint with some women laughing at salads, badabing-badaboom, $2M in venture capital.

dhrusis posted:

Yeah, tbh I'm not really interested in arguing it because I don't have a position, like I said, I'm studying the "technology" (lol) and integrating it into other aspects of my understanding.

FWIW, when I think of blockchain, I'm not just thinking bitcoin, but more about what "secure value transfer" (lol yes I know again) + liquidity + "smart contract code" + some trust can do longer term.

I figure that there is room to improve as technology improves.. thats what I'm exploring.

What do you guys think of the ethereum platform in here?

The Clitoris posted:

Then read a bunch on Anthropology and Philosophy to find out the limits of is practicality.