Neither will cash. Thats what a third party escrow is for. You get that as part of what you pay for a credit card. Not trying to come down on either side of this i personally hold near zero crypto, your statement was just wrong.
Indeed, most societies ended up inventing a mandatory trusted third party escrow called a "legal system" as part of a "state". They usually issue hard-to-copy tokens, solving the double spending problem.
I see a lot of hand wringing about this; but for 99.99% of people the banking layer and bureaucracy of modern monetary systems is a feature that protects them from fraudulent transactions, people stealing their credit card number, and businesses charging them and not delivering goods. These are generally good things.
Yes it is possible for the state to inflict violence on you, and if the state wants to, it probably will do so. Putting your money into internet tokens instead of state backed money will probably just get you tortured more until you give up the keys, or die. Crypto isn't some "one weird trick" to prevent the state from taking your property and possessions.
> for 99.99% of people the banking layer and bureaucracy of modern monetary systems is a feature that protects them from fraudulent transactions, people stealing their credit card number, and businesses charging them and not delivering goods. These are generally good things.
Let's go through these. To begin with, "fraudulent transactions" is redundant because that's either someone stealing your credit card number or someone you paid not doing what they said. So let's consider those two:
> people stealing their credit card number
This is the problem caused by the existing system, which is designed with such poor security that breaching a merchant allows the attackers to make charges to their innocent customers' cards at a different merchant. They get zero credit for providing a mitigation to the problem they created themselves.
> businesses charging them and not delivering goods
This gets sold as a benefit, but it's also a cost, because then it becomes a mechanism to commit fraud. People go to a business that does deliver the goods and issue a fraudulent chargeback. The merchants then have to pass the cost of that onto everyone else, which means that it's also a fraud against every other customer.
Meanwhile we have other solutions to that problem that don't do that. Established businesses don't want to ruin their reputation. If someone rips you off you can sue them. Sometimes you're just paying someone for something they're already delivered.
And most importantly, there instances when you would trust someone to deliver the goods independent of the payment system, and other instances when you wouldn't. Which is why you want both payment systems to be available instead of just the second one, so you don't have to pay for the chargeback fraud when you don't need to buy your trust from the payment system.
Very similar arguments were made for slavery. Giving up freedom for a promise of safety rarely the right choice.
While it is possible for the state to inflict violence, it's relatively difficult to scale. The state can freeze your USD accounts with the stroke of a key (as they did for Russian accounts recently). Whereas rounding up and torturing all those account-holders is just obviously infeasible.
Putting absolute trust and surrendering too much agency to the state has been proven a mistake many times throughout history. Citizens need fallbacks when the state fails them. Concrete example where crypto achieves this: many trans people in places with an inadequate medical system or hostile government turn to buying gray-market DIY hormones online, facilitated by crypto.
Sure, but approximately zero of the actual crypto space/hype was built around facilitating this kind of thing. In fact for that use case, it would’ve been better if Bitcoin never got nearly as big as it has (since that lead to much more government scrutiny, all over the world). Ideally it would’ve gotten large enough that there were enough reputable-ish exchanges that you could move fiat in and out, and then stopped there. Like some sort of digital Hawala.
Is it necessarily the case that it isn't? Suppose you can't afford health insurance and you have a condition for which a controlled substance would be prescribed, if you had access to the healthcare system, but you don't. If you then buy it over the internet, is the system being wronged by you or are you being wronged by the system?
The war on drugs is a scam, but pretty sure if the primary goal was to oppress indigenous people in another country the US government could’ve found a cheaper way (both fiscally and politically).
I don’t think Nixon cared about indigenous people in South America. Not because he was a great guy, just because they didn’t matter to him even slightly. He definitely cared about communist militias though.
Most states still haven't created digital versions of these hard-to-copy tokens meaning that there needs to be an alternate provided by a 3rd party which is where cryptocurrency comes in.
The Fed has had a wire service (Fedwire) for banks, allowing them to transfer their balances on the Fed’s balance sheet to another bank during settlement, since before the dollar moved off the gold standard. It was initially done with literal telegraphs - not sure at what point it became digital.
It obviously has no pseudo anonymity, is literally the least democratized banking system in existence, and is subject to the government’s whims in a whole host of ways. But it is a digital ledger of massive sums of real dollars (the banks can ask for it in cash if need be), and you couldn’t really steal the money even if you managed to create an unauthorized transfer on some bank’s master account.
So why don't any businesses let me Fedwire them money? It turns out unlike the physical version of cash, this "digital version" has hefty transaction fees and a poor UI meaning no business will take it, unlike how almost all physical businesses will take cash.
That’s not a technical problem - this kind of system can scale out just fine and has in other jurisdictions. SEPA is far from perfect, but is better than Bitcoin for everything but evading governments (justified or otherwise). We’ll see what Fednow looks like in a few years - the banks are definitely dragging their feet and it’s hard to tell what the
UX will look like in the end.
They couldn’t get their whole balance in cash I’m sure. But the Fed is the one that handles retiring old paper currency and giving banks fresh currency to give to ATMs and tellers, and I doubt the inflows and outflows are perfectly even for each bank.
I think we’re talking about bank reserves, which is a fraction (in the order of 1%) of the total amount of money held in the customers’ transaction accounts. Reserves are convertible into cash. Not that any bank would suddenly want to do that, unless there’s a bank run, in which case it’s the customers who want the entirety of their accounts (100x the reserves) converted into cash, which is impossible not because the fed refuses to convert the money, but because the bank doesn’t have enough reserves.
The Fed manages printed currency - they’d be irritated, but they literally do provide the physical dollars people need now, and if they felt it was appropriate, they’d produce them as needed.
Just like those airplanes of bills shipped to Iraq, etc. in the past.
To be fair, this is because the US figured this stuff out way earlier through credit cards, and now there's a bunch of stakeholders and legacy changes which get in the way of making the services better.
Indeed, and there are some good reasons, too: US regulators want to prop up smaller regional banks and avoid large national monopolies (for what is essentially a natural monopoly).
The externalities of the crappy US banking system are so vast though. Musk, crypto, ...
Inside the same country, really? We have the aptly-named Faster Payments in the UK and it's instant. The company I work for is virtually built upon it.
SEPA is among the most stable & robust payment areas globally with a lot of interesting features which a lot of other regions are jealous about :-)
And there are additional layers built on top, so at least we have N=1, while I have to admit that convenience could & should be improved
The states (or rather the national banks of said states) are usually the ones running the central clearing system. That's the place where all the different banks report their net change in relation to all the other banks, and settle that change on their account with the central bank.
Believe it or not, banks don't ferry around cash to each other. It's all just numbers in a computer.
I love watching the HN comment hivemind speedrun the history of blockchain innovation every time this comes up. You just reinvented smart contracts on Ethereum, keep going :-)
No amount of smart contracts can solve the situation where one party says "I shipped you the widgets you ordered; pay me" and the other says "I received a box with a brick in it" -- you need some trusted third party to decide based on reasonable heuristics who is trying to commit fraud, based on e.g. is this the first or the tenth time this has happened.
The contract can hold the money in escrow such that it can only be sent either to the seller or returned to buyer.
The seller and buyer can then both walk the contract through a state machine on agreement (i.e. confirm shipping, confirm delivery, potentially also confirmation for a return process) and when the buyer and seller come to a disagreement (ex: seller attests they've shipped the product and it should be delivered but the buyer asserts they havent/the tracking on shipping is invalid) or one of the participants is non-responsive for a certain amount of time then the contract moves into arbitration.
In arbitration one or more third parties then step in to serve as arbiters/oracles that decide in the favor of one party or the other and commit those decisions to the contract and the contract then derives consensus from those decisions and proceeds to the corresponding state/action of the contract (i.e. refund vs close).
Now your arbiters/oracles/third parties have reputations and you can reason about how trustworthy they are before you enter into the contract.
This means all parties can evaluate their risk tolerance and trust levels before entering the contract/on agreement.
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TLDR: Trust is inherent to any system reliant on the physical world. The point of smart contracts, etc is to formally encode those trust assumptions and the procedures of the contract in as trustless of a way as possible and to allow distribution of that trust across parties with most of the coordination overhead being automated/abstracted away.
And importantly smart contracts provide an extremely low friction happy path. In the happy path where all parties are satisfied, it's extremely efficient and responsive. But in every other path, the conflicts, incentives, and resolution procedures are clearly defined for all parties involved.
Read Irrationality, Extortion, or Trusted Third-parties: Why it is Impossible to Buy and Sell Physical Goods Securely on the Blockchain. Or just read the title, it has the main point.
Did you read the paper? The paper is arguing the exact same point I was arguing. To quote the paper:
> Finally, assuming that the parties are rational agents and the smart contract language is Turing complete, we argue that it is impossible to implement the basic sales escrow as a smart contract without trusted third-parties or vulnerability to extortion. In other words, any escrow smart contract has one of the following three demerits:
> – Assuming irrational agents who are willing to punish the other side, even if it is not in their own interest; or
> – Relying on a third-party; or
> – Enabling at least one of the two parties to extort the other.
> In summary, we illustrate that the smart contract and Dapp community is wrong in assuming that the current implementations of two-party escrows have a well-designed mechanism that incentivizes rational actors to be truthful. More shockingly, we show that the smart contracts on programmable blockchains have inherent limitations that make it impossible to implement such a contract. In a sense, this can be considered the first incontractability result on programmable blockchains.
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This is exactly what I was arguing.
I never claimed that two party escrow is ideal. I was explicitly saying that two party escrow is an intractable problem and that you must formalise your trust assumptions instead and either accept some level of trusted third parties OR without third parties accept some level of risk of exploitation by one party or the other. Even with third parties there is still risk for exploitation but depending how it is implemented that risk is lesser.
Again this is a matter of formalising trust assumptions and explicitly outlining who you are trusting, what you are trusting them to do, and how much you trust them to do it. And in doing so up front both parties can evaluate their risk tolerance based on the agreed upon contract before progressing.
They agree with your statement in another reply under this submission. So a joke on crypto hype culture, where you either put aside problems and move to next craze or next craze is shoved to everything.
I outlined it over in another comment[1] so I'm not gonna copy it all over but the point isn't to eliminate all trust. The point of trustless architectures (of which blockchain and smart contracts are one) is that you are eliminating implicit trust.
You are taking all the implicit trust, lowering it into explicit trust assumptions, and formalising who is allowed to make what decisions when, what happens when they do, and how the other parties are permitted to respond.
You are moving all of those implicit assumptions about how a contract, interaction, or relationship work and formalising them into something explicit and upfront so that all participants can evaluate their risk tolerance and trust levels prior to agreeing to a given contract or interaction.
And of course you are also sprinkling in a heavy dose of automation to smooth out the complexities of these explicit, mechanised contracts such that the happy paths are buttery smooth and the unhappy paths are at the least bearable and correspond to the contract you signed on to at the beginning of your interaction.
Clicked the link but ctrl+f doesn't find any posts by you.
> The point of trustless architectures (of which blockchain and smart contracts are one) is that you are eliminating implicit trust.
That is also the point of laws and contracts as we have them today. How does, explicitly, blockchain improve on that?
> You are moving all of those implicit assumptions about how a contract, interaction, or relationship work and formalising them into something explicit and upfront so that all participants can evaluate their risk tolerance and trust levels prior to agreeing to a given contract or interaction.
What implicit assumptions aren't removed by laws and contracts as we have them today that are removed by blockchain and smart contracts?
> And of course you are also sprinkling in a heavy dose of automation to smooth out the complexities of these explicit, mechanised contracts such that the happy paths are buttery smooth and the unhappy paths are at the least bearable and correspond to the contract you signed on to at the beginning of your interaction.
Without any examples of what is being automated, how and what it is that is made buttery smooth... you really aren't saying anything here. Can you expound on any of those claims?
TLDR: By what you said the only thing that blockchains and smart contracts bring is a new medium to write contracts on.
> That is also the point of laws and contracts as we have them today. How does, explicitly, blockchain improve on that?
It's essentially automated tooling. The happy path (i.e. buyer and seller are in agreement) "just works" but when there's a disagreement you can rely on the contract to walk through all of the conflict resolution paths with whatever level of complexity the contract builds in for consensus from multiple third parties, etc.
i.e. It's tooling that replaces manual bureaucratic arbitration with state machines and consensus algorithms.
For two party smart contracts this means there's no third party but there's an inherent risk of exploitation by one party or the other by the design of the contract. It's inherent to two party contracts relying on any physical exchange but if you trust the party the contract is weighted in favor of, it cuts out any opportunity for arbitration and the complexity that comes with that. Now the only trust assumption is the two parties trust in each other.
For contracts with some arbitration process however things get more complicated. Who all is involved in arbitration. Who does the buyer trust. Who does the seller trust. What's the reputation of one of these arbiters? This reputation can be loosely represented as a set of markets for the arbiter with demand from sellers and demand from buyers. If those two markets are out of sync from each other that suggests an impartial arbiter and both parties can reason about that.
> What implicit assumptions aren't removed by laws and contracts as we have them today that are removed by blockchain and smart contracts?
Well. Part of it is that laws are an inherently fuzzy thing and how they are upheld is entirely dependent on a long running and constantly evolving chain of interpretations from past court decisions. And of course how they are upheld in a specific case comes down to how well lawyers are able to convince a judge or a collection of jurors who were more or less selected at random with anyone semi-literate about the law thrown out ahead of time. So it boils down to "who is best able to sway the opinions of this random collection of people who are as illiterate about the law as the lawyers could manage to get them". Which mostly just boils down to feelings.
Of course contracts often go to arbitration instead of to court proper so it's a different case there but arbiters are single authorities that almost universally side with the bigger entity (i.e. whoever is paying them to handle arbitration). So unless you are two large orgs, arbitration is inherently biased.
So an alternative is a largely automated system where multiple third parties who are selected ahead of time by the buyer and seller can be relied upon for arbitration and where their decision is for all intents and purpose final. The buyer and the seller have equal decision making power in the selection of these third parties and they can evaluate the reputations of these third parties prior to entering the contract.
i.e. you are moving away from trust in a large system with a thousand moving parts all performed by infallible people swayed by emotions and an endless process of appeals OR a single arbiter almost always paid by the larger party who will always rule in their favor. Instead putting your trust into a strict set of automated rules with a formal analysis of outcomes backing it + some optional assortment of selected third parties + a consensus mechanism for those third parties.
> TLDR: By what you said the only thing that blockchains and smart contracts bring is a new medium to write contracts on.
Yes. It is exactly that. A new medium to write contracts on. Manual bureaucratic systems and thousands upon thousands of people working in a complex legal system are replaced by a machine. Humans are still in the loop of course but only for making specific decisions at specific times in the process.
And at the time of agreeing to the contract the relevant parties can ideally rely on tooling to explicitly outline at what points each party is taking on a degree of risk, the likelihood of that risk, and the process for moving forward in those cases.
An extremely reductive TLDR is that the goal is to take a system that relies on an army of lawyers and legal analysts and reduce it down into something digestible and navigable by a single lawyer (or even a well educated layperson) with all the existing complexity abstracted away by formal methods tooling.
what's missing in the linux teams client out of curiosity? I use it every day and, besides being slightly less stable it doesn't seem to be more junk than the windows client (which in itself is pretty junky. There was so much moaning when we switched from telegram to teams at work just because message delivery was not rock solid)
Generally, people who think apple has made good os ui/experience choices like gnome, people who are used to windows or like to tinker like kde, people who are comfortable with linux and want to specialize their workflows for greater productivity go tiling window managers (I personally like hyprland but a big part of that is it's the first tiling window manager I managed to get key combos to my liking before the big change of tiling pissed me off so much that I fled back to kde. I also don't mind the drama because I too hold political beliefs that would be characterized as center right libertarian sympathizing in the 80's and 90's but were labelled fascism 2017-2024ish. There are other options, niri is interesting, sway is an old standby that I never liked the aesthetic of.)
Both being for or against DEI is a marker of specific ideologies. I would argue being against is less indicative because the position is more free and less driven by bias but thats just like my opinion man.
We dont have anything. The canadian constitution is a lesson in sounding nice while being mostly useless because there are outs for every clause to allow the government to do what it wants.canadians who think it is good are one of stupid, ignorant, or very politically aligned eith curtent government biases and too stupid, naive, or ignorant to realizes tides turn.
I can only recommend starlabs in that case, took me tons of research before discovering only starlabs has everything: repair ability, firmware, coreboot, compatibility, custom hardware.
yah, the problem is I'm pretty heavily invested in framework and already bought the newest 16" before I realized starlabs wasn't selling rebadged compal suitcase sized laptops anymore, so it'll be 3 years at least.
Yes fair enough I was on the fence between framework and starlabs since they seem to be only custom hardware Linux machines and am lucky I wasn't in a rush and could wait for the starlabs or I would have pulled the trigger on framework. Machines will hopefully only be better when the time comes!
yah, it's a small gripe really, I just really want to try out coreboot, it looks like the future. I wish windows wasn't holding back hardware development everywhere so badly.
My starbook coreboot let's me set charge limit (60%/80%/100%) as well as 3 different charging speed settings, which are incredible for a computer that remains largely docked.
It's also the best distribution for jellyfin media player because it's trivially easy to get the jellyfin client to autostart in kde and it's not that hard to get it auto updating and rebooting nightly. This distro plus an intel n150 mini pc (aoostar n1 pro is decent) and a flir dongle and the flir remote is a big win.
HDR can be a hit-or-miss even on Windows though, thanks to the myriad combinations of monitors, cable versions and standards. So hard to give a definite answer besides "YMMV".
In my case though, it works fine without any hiccups. My main setup is a 7800XT, connected to an AOC CQ32G3SE using a DisplayPort 2.1 cable. HDR works fine both in Steam game mode as well as in desktop mode (KDE).
bazzite supports it I believe but I am not sure my n150 based mini pcs that I'm using on my tvs does. This was running on six your old tvs until this month when I bought a lg g5 for the basement. It looks great but I couldn't say if it looks the greatest it could look with HDR on or not... My previous tv frontend was a custom nixos setup that was a pain to maintain over the years. bazzite just works and the setup is simple for my needs (basically autologging in to kde and autostarting jellyfin media player in full screen plus a systemd timer to ensure the system updates and reboots overnight while I'm sleeping.
I would like that as well, however I doubt it will happen because we can't even have honest conversations about blatantly obvious things like that there are pretty clearly different flavors of trans out there and some of them are concerning in some contexts (i.e. the men that get their rocks off wearing women's clothes who will only never do the surgery in the context of being allowed in women's locker rooms as one example). We need more honesty all around, it would make compassion a lot easier for those that need it.
Yah, they are losing something with the name change that they don't even understand because they apparently don't understand the intricacies of English. We would be better off changing it to "Gucci Mane" then we could tag our branches off Gucci's hit singles.It only makes slightly less sense than switching to "main"
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