Comment by feoren
16 days ago
I know this is hard for techies to hear, but the way you fight existing power structures is by organizing, petitioning, protesting, voting. Political, in other words. No technology is going to come and save us from powerful people exploiting the poor if we keep voting for the biggest assholes on the planet. Ironically, most of the people advocating for crypto to save us from powerful people are exactly the same people voting for the absolute worst people whose campaign promises are to fuck over the poor and exact revenge on their political enemies. So it's hard to take the argument "I'm pro-crypto because it rages against the machine" in good faith when 99.8% of people making that argument are fighting tool and nail to make it illegal to oppose the machine. But I'll assume you're in the 0.2% for sake of argument. The point stands: these are political problems, not technological ones.
> Because the fiat system was not designed to solve any of the problems we're talking about. It was designed to feed the Roman war machine
This is exactly why I'm saying you're comparing fiat vs. crypto completely unequally. If fiat was designed to feed the Roman war machine, then crypto was designed to buy drugs online. You're being reductionist and pessimistic when describing fiat and blindly optimistic when describing crypto.
> its primary purpose has been to ensure that power structures established by varying forms of violence remain in effect without the need to trot out that violence again.
The primary purpose of the fiat system is to allow more control and regulation over the system, mostly to avoid huge boom-bust cycles in the economy and more Great Depressions. That's genuinely it. Yes, much of the purpose of government is to enable the transfer of power without violence. If we're redesigning government, can we please keep that part? Right now, if I break into your home and hit you with a wrench until you tell me the private keys of your bitcoin wallet, I can steal all your money assuming I get away. If I break into your home at hit you with a wrench until you give me your credit card, there's very little I can actually do with that. The violence you're talking about is the violence of anarchy -- the exact same anarchy that you're touting as a benefit of crypto.
> Take credit card companies for example. There's a lot they could do to prevent fraud
Credit card companies do an enormous amount to prevent fraud, and they're incredibly good at it. And are you seriously claiming that crypto will have less fraud? Most of the ways that credit card companies deal with fraud is by immediately detecting and canceling fraudulent transactions -- something that is inherently impossible with crypto.
> --there are many ways to build a system where payments happen without leaving secrets like credit card numbers out in the open
Yes, including in a fiat system! Here you are again comparing the current, flawed fiat system with some imagined future crypto system, but you can also imagine a better fiat system! And people are working on it, e.g. with chipped cards (yes it's annoying it's only for in-person purchases).
> Or consider health insurance claims. They could absolutely provide a price to the patient within a minute or two ... [previously] I'm not proposing that anybody should have to use crypto.
But if health insurance companies don't have to use crypto, and they benefit from the current system, then they just won't use crypto. So your problem is not solved. It's a political one, not a technological one.
Look, humanity has been getting incrementally better at this "government" thing over thousands of years. Yes, it's slow, and we backslide a lot. I'm pissed at entrenched power structures too. But these are political problems, and crypto just is not inherently a fix for these problems. The people "in power" could be megacorporations and aging narcissistic asshole rapist felons, or they could be scientists, human rights lawyers, passionate nerds, doctors, and even everyday people. It's largely up to us whether it's the former or the latter, and most crypto advocates today fight tooth and nail in favor of keeping power in the hands of narcissistic assholes.
If we're imagining a better world, why are we imagining one where existing shitty power structures just get torn down, and nobody has the power to stop scams, money laundering, illegal activity (we're not talking about buying fun drugs here either, we're talking about the bad shit), billions of dollars being funneled to North Korea (thanks, crypto!), small bugs in contract logic causing billions of dollars in losses, etc.? A world where a multi-billion-dollar project to build a new children's hospital requires some party to ever actually hold multiple billions of dollars in one pot, lock it up in some crypto contract for 5 years where it can't benefit the economy, and then have absolutely no possible recourse when it gets stolen and funneled to North Korea? Why is that the world we're imagining, and not one where power is just distributed better? Fuck crypto, vote better.
> these are political problems, not technological ones
That's a false dichotomy. Social media platforms are a technology, and it's a political problem that the biggest assholes on the planet tend to use them to get elected. The solution is a technological one, which is to build and use social media which do not give special privileges to an owner.
It's all bound up together.
> You're being reductionist and pessimistic when describing fiat and blindly optimistic when describing crypto.
My purpose in this thread is not to convince anybody that crypto is better than fiat, it's that crypto's potential is greater than fiat's potential. I'm being reductionist and pessimistic about fiat not to point out problems that it has not solved, but to point out problems that it is incapable of solving.
It's a bit like The Architect's speech in whichever Matrix movie: it's fundamental to the system that it creates these anomalies. It's not "the one" but it's definitely "the few".
> The primary purpose of the fiat system is to allow more control and regulation over the system
...and it does so by giving hopefully-trustworthy people the privilege to rewrite transaction history despite the transacting parties not having explicitly consented to that person having that power over that transaction.
The argument that crypto holds no promise besides grift rests on the wobbly assumption that the benefits of regulatory control cannot be achieved without creating those privileged positions--positions which end up being occupied by grifters.
It was once a necessary evil. We have a financial system based around scarcity because it was the only readily available implementation. The laws of physics ensure that certain things are scarce, so there was no need to build anything in order to enforce that scarcity. But there was also no hope of rewriting the rules of the system towards the elimination of its systemic problems. That has changed.
> most crypto advocates today fight tooth and nail in favor of keeping power in the hands of narcissistic assholes
That's true. It's horrible. Most crypto projects today are just a reimplementation of the scarcity-based system that the laws of physics handed our ancestors re: gold and such. We moved away from the gold standard for a variety of good reasons. The idea of returning to a gold-like system appeals to grifters because they don't like being limited by the fiat system. But there's no reason we can't build something that limits the grifters even more than fiat already does--and when we do that, should we really avoid using crypto for the job just because the grifters tend to use it also?
Crypto is not about artificial scarcity and passing tokens around. That's merely a rule-set that it supports. Is promise lies in the idea that we can implement other rule-sets as well--ones which are more sensitive to the needs of their users than either the physics-imposed system re: gold, or the bureaucracy-imposed system re: fiat.
I share your objections:
> detecting and canceling fraudulent transactions -- something that is inherently impossible with crypto
> and then have absolutely no possible recourse when it gets stolen and funneled to North Korea
...but these problems are the same as they were when we were moving chests full of gold coins around. It's a shame that people have used crypto to reinvent a scarcity-only system that the rest of us largely abandoned in the 1970's. But nothing about that precludes somebody using the same primitives to implement something better. It's like you're attacking angry birds and I'm defending mobile phones. The platform has merit, despite the existence of shitty apps. Let's stop using those apps.
We also want similar things. This sounds great:
> The people in power ... could be scientists, human rights lawyers, passionate nerds, doctors, and even everyday people
The structural problem with the fiat system is that those privileged positions--the ones that I claimed end up populated by grifters--when they end up populated by an altruistic person, they end up placing too heavy of a load on that person. The only way to do some of these jobs is to be at least partially negligent. I know several people who fit the description that you've given and they're doing good work. The last thing I want to do is encourage them to stop doing what they're doing and instead go be a politician--they're needed where they are.
The bureaucratic computer which implements fiat's rules is not sensitive to which users trust which other users. Sure, in some cases you need a bureaucrat whose full time job is to be the authority over some domain. But most of the time you don't. Most of the time you can get away with explicitly indicating an authority and giving them narrowly scoped power. Some scientist, some doctor, some passionate nerd... One who knows both parties to a contract/transaction, somebody who has a track record of keeping their promises. By all means lets vote for these people if they want a permanent political role, but we shouldn't have to wait for an election to do that. With crypto it can be much more granular.
We can come up with a set of rules that lets us unambiguously grant those individuals the kind of control that the fiat system gives us, but over such a limited scope that they don't have to stop doing whatever they were doing that makes them awesome to go be a politician instead, and which doesn't give them so much power that they become a magnet for the corrupting factors that plague the fiat system.
Sometimes you need a judge and a court and a lengthy trial, but other times you just need another professional to look at the work and say "yeah, that's good work, you should be paid for it". Crypto is a more flexible medium through which both parties' trust of individual can be made explicit and through which their assessment can be made binding.
> Fuck crypto, vote better.
We can vote better while also building better things. But if those things are operated by a single corruptible party, then they'll never be as good as equivalents that aren't (that means using crypto). Fuck artificial scarcity, let's build a world without it, because it's where the biggest assholes on the planet get their power.
Thank you for the good discussion. I think we share a lot of the same vision. I'm more pessimistic than you about inherent limitations in crypto (and more optimistic that there's still room for improvement in fiat), but I hope you're right that the limitations of current crypto can be overcome. Your vision sounds a lot like an idea I've had for a more "open-source government" where laws are drafted as series of commits by experts in that topic, and debate happens over individual merge requests, etc. I don't know how crypto is supposed to help with that but maybe there are things I'm just not seeing. I hope there's a way to get the best of both systems.
Thanks to you also. I hope we see your open source government thing happen.
I'm not sure how you're going to derive consensus about which experts are trusted in which topics, or how you're going to prove to the people that this commit, and not that one, is their chosen one. Not without using crypto in some way.
I don't think you can do something as important as that behind closed doors on AWS and have the people take you at your word that somebody with root access didn't have their finger on the scale--they're going to want to see proofs, to verify the outcomes on their own hardware--but I'd love to live in a world that actually is that trusting.