Trying to think about what's going on with blockchain
I've not linked to a few things that have happened with Cryptocurrency/blockchain stuff recently. Mostly because every time I think about it, my brain slides off of the sheer stupidity and insists I think about something else instead.
The most recent idiocy is these people buying a book (for vastly more than it was valued at), with the intention of doing things with it that copyright law absolutely law will not let them do.
In discussion about this there was a mention of this presentation where *you* can pay large sums of money to live on an island with a bunch of Crypto enthusiasts. For those people who don't fancy watching 18 minutes of car-crash there's a writeup in this thread.
This also led me to "Web 3 is going great", a collection of the scams, bugs, and epic failures occurring in the wonderful world of blockchain.
I'm not as massive a sceptic about blockchain as some people are. I can see the idea of "A write-only database that isn't controlled by any one party" being one with plausible uses. But so far those uses aren't manifesting themselves beyond Bitcoin being plausibly useable to buy things when the transaction cost isn't ridiculously high (Currently about $1.67). And the idea that digital contracts enforced by "The Network" are going to work well doesn't fill me with confidence. Pretty much every non-trivial piece of software has a bug in it. Which is annoying when said software is used to write blog posts, or watch videos, but clearly hideously awful when that software is used to transfer money about.
Add on the fact that there's no legal liability most of the time, and no non-digital contract, and anyone who gets scammed is going to have a hell of a job ever getting their money back. You can quibble all you like about financial regulation, and whether there's too much, too little, and who it protects, but chances are that if someone hacks a piece of software and drains your bank account you'll be covered for it. So unless you're near-terminally naive you'll generally want an actual legal contract on top of the "digital ownership" that you have. But as very few people actually have an understanding of what that digital ownership actually entails, and what rights you actually have based on it, it's mostly ending up as a playground for scammers.
And this isn't even mentioning the scaling issues, or the environmental cost, or other issues which might be fixable by tweaking the technology. This is just thinking about the stuff which is baked in.
So, yeah, I'm not generally linking to the stupidity of the day. There's way too much of it, and I Just Can't Even.
Thank you to
danieldwilliam for prompting this, and getting me to actually write down my thoughts on it. Original post on Dreamwidth - there are
comments there.
The most recent idiocy is these people buying a book (for vastly more than it was valued at), with the intention of doing things with it that copyright law absolutely law will not let them do.
In discussion about this there was a mention of this presentation where *you* can pay large sums of money to live on an island with a bunch of Crypto enthusiasts. For those people who don't fancy watching 18 minutes of car-crash there's a writeup in this thread.
This also led me to "Web 3 is going great", a collection of the scams, bugs, and epic failures occurring in the wonderful world of blockchain.
I'm not as massive a sceptic about blockchain as some people are. I can see the idea of "A write-only database that isn't controlled by any one party" being one with plausible uses. But so far those uses aren't manifesting themselves beyond Bitcoin being plausibly useable to buy things when the transaction cost isn't ridiculously high (Currently about $1.67). And the idea that digital contracts enforced by "The Network" are going to work well doesn't fill me with confidence. Pretty much every non-trivial piece of software has a bug in it. Which is annoying when said software is used to write blog posts, or watch videos, but clearly hideously awful when that software is used to transfer money about.
Add on the fact that there's no legal liability most of the time, and no non-digital contract, and anyone who gets scammed is going to have a hell of a job ever getting their money back. You can quibble all you like about financial regulation, and whether there's too much, too little, and who it protects, but chances are that if someone hacks a piece of software and drains your bank account you'll be covered for it. So unless you're near-terminally naive you'll generally want an actual legal contract on top of the "digital ownership" that you have. But as very few people actually have an understanding of what that digital ownership actually entails, and what rights you actually have based on it, it's mostly ending up as a playground for scammers.
And this isn't even mentioning the scaling issues, or the environmental cost, or other issues which might be fixable by tweaking the technology. This is just thinking about the stuff which is baked in.
So, yeah, I'm not generally linking to the stupidity of the day. There's way too much of it, and I Just Can't Even.
Thank you to
danieldwilliam for prompting this, and getting me to actually write down my thoughts on it. Original post on Dreamwidth - there are
comments there.