This is the whole misguided overenthusiasm we have seen with BTC as well. Blockchains do change something fundamental: the ability to provide for the aforementioned services in case:
- You want to stay anonymous
- You can't trust a third party
I would argue that a functional society would not need any blockchain services as it would provide the necessary privacy defenses to do anonymous transactions and the means to enforce trust.
In the same fashion, it was argued that BTC would be useless in a correctly functioning banking ecosystem.
What these systems offer is not something impossible to do otherwise, it is a lower bound on the services a society can provide (assuming internet and computers).
If tomorrow a country has a Zimbabwe moment, people will switch to BTC. If taxis end up being to corrupt, an etherum service can take the relay.
A lot of the blockchain enthusiasts are anarchists or libertarians. They assume society is already failing or on the verge of collapse. They often fail to see that not everyone is in that mindset.
Even in a world in which taxis and other institutions are corrupt, it stretches credulity that my real concern when getting a late night taxi is that the merchant service might run away with my $25 and my credit card company might not refund me.
I've been in countries where there are major trust issues with taxis, and the very worst case I could imagine would be a service which signals to anyone watching that I'm on the street in the middle of the night, holding a smartphone which also has the ability to make irreversible transactions of a large portion of my cash holdings to an anonymous endpoint, and I'll probably get into the next vehicle to stop for me.
For a significant proportion of mooted cases where trustlessness is mooted as an advantage of blockchain technology, trustlessness doesn't actually exist and/or centralisation actually reduces problems with trust
Trustless doesn't mean reputationless. A blockchain based Uber-like service would function similarly with reviews by former passengers for individual drivers.
Sure, but my point is that the disadvantage of broadcasting to the entire world that I'm on a street corner in Quito in the early hours of a Sunday morning with a smartphone full of cryptocurrency (and for other reasons, having a public record of the details of every ride I've ever taken) is likely more of a concern than reducing the cost/trust of the dispatch/vetting service.
Reputation requirements result in higher prices for buyers, as it's hard for new entrants to come along and gain meaningful business, while the older entities suddenly have the incentive to "milk" the reputation they earned.
Meanwhile, with a credit card I can buy a product from Amazon or some joe-schmoe site nobody ever heard of, and have a guarantee that Visa will back me up if the latter is a scam.
You're paying those prices for Visa's reputation. Visa takes what, 2-3% of every transaction? Also, Visa has a record of every transaction you've ever spent. And as the Equifax case has shown, even big players aren't immune to hacking. You know what's pretty resilient to hacking? The blockchain itself.
At any rate, the advantage of Bitcoin/Ether is that sending Joe Schmoe your money doesn't mean you've exposed your credit card number and billing address (likely also your physical address) to Joe Schmoe. So there's pros and cons to either system. Refunds have existed since well before credit cards were a thing. Does it require a bit more of "buyer beware" ideology? Sure, but I don't think that's any different than a cash-based society.
I'm paying roughly 3% out of which I get back 2% through cashback on my credit card. For a net fee of 1% I get buyer protection and dispute resolution in case I and seller disagree. The higher the sum, the more likely I am to be interested in such protection.
The move to chipped credit cards (or Apple/Android Pay) also shields my real card number and makes information unusable in case of hacking. I already hide my address by having the card statements go to a PO Box and using that as my billing address, but I know that's not a widespread practice and some institutions forbid that.
We in Zimbabwe do not fully understand what you mean by "Zimbabwe moment"... please do explain. And also explain how this blockchain would change anything here.
Sorry, I mean a runaway inflation that led to trillion dollars bills to buy bread, as well as the impossibility to anticipate costs of look g projects without resorting to foreign currency.
what would a blockchain solve that any foreign currency would not do in that case? whats the benefit of a blockchain based system compared to dollar or euro cash in such a situation?
A blockchain is run algorithmically and you can't change the rules as you will. There's no way to create a lot of bitcoin out of nothing (except a hard fork, which mean creating a new blockchain), that prevent inflation.
I don't think blockchains provide any anonymity. You can try to provide as little information as possible about yourself, but there is nothing in the blockchain that facilitates anonymity.
A blockchain is like a big spreadsheet. It's not going to be anonymous if you start typing identifying information into it, but it certainly gives you the option of being anonymous if you care to do so.
In contrast, you cant make a bank transaction without linking your identity. This is what people are talking about when they say blockchains give anonymity.
It’s dangerously irresponsible to mislead people with statements which imply that blockchains provide anonymity because when someone’s identity is linked there’s a full, incontrovertible record of every transaction they’ve ever made which can never be removed from the public record.
If someone cares about anonymity, that’s a huge gamble to make that the system will never have a design or implementation flaw (in the case of things like zcash which are, unlike bitcoin, attempting to provide anonymity at all), and that everyone they ever do business with is trustworthy.
While this is correct, for that to be true a person would need to be using the same wallet address for every transaction which is contrary to default wallet behavior / best practices. I think people conflate the side effect of KYC regulation (mass identity linking) with an inherent weakness of blockchains when it's not. I can buy BTC directly from a person to a new wallet address and it is pseudonymous at that moment. My point is the blockchain doesn't provide or remove anonymity, its just a medium that does not require identity. Meanwhile, every bank transaction you make is recorded with your ID and its all sitting in a handfull of databases waiting to be hacked like equifax was. If used the way they were intended the anonymity could be miles ahead of where we are now (just ask the ransomware bitcoin hackers).
That’s only true if you posit that people actually follow those best practices at scale (is there any reason to believe that’s not false?) and that an attacker doesn’t know how to use a database. Otherwise you’re just betting that they’ll NEVER link your wallet IDs.
That last part is guaranteed to be false. Beyond the obvious capabilities of a state-level attacker, think about why Equifax has that data in the first place. People will buy things on credit and that depends on not being anonymous – churning IDs would be like only paying cash for everything, which is known not to be viable for anyone who isn’t rich. Secondly, think about how many businesses want this data for marketing purposes: you can churn wallets all you want and it won’t help when the vendors are passing that information to companies like Acxiom, Equifax, or Google.
The best practices I'm talking about are built into the client software and a user doesn't need to know about them (new address per transaction already happens in most wallets). Again, totally not claiming linking ids isn't a problem, its just being touted as an impassable blockchain problem which is the basis of this discussion. The problem exists because governments are forcing all onramps to link IDS, not because of an inherent flaw of the system. Even with that 'flaw' other proposals/experiments already exist and work really well, and will probably be integrated directly into bitcoin in the future. An equifax-like service could exist that establishes credibility based on holdings or the public history of an address you control, not necessarily an identified individual. There are some clear benefits to that, one being your identifying information is not put at risk.
Indeed - there’s no anonymity in BitCoin itself as all transactions are trackable. What anonymity there is exist because of external services like mixers/tumblers and the difficulty level of directly tying a given wallet to an individual.
Monero goes further and anonymises transactions between wallets.
> A lot of the blockchain enthusiasts are anarchists or libertarians. They assume society is already failing or on the verge of collapse.
You don't need to assume that to see obvious benefits of a blockchain. As long as there're stupid or evil people in society central authority systems like banks can fail, rob you or be hacked. Blockchain on the other hand is more reliable.
> central authority systems like banks can fail, rob you or be hacked. Blockchain on the other hand is more reliable.
The body of evidence to date suggests that you're much more likely to be robbed of your cryptocurrency through fraud or incompetence than you are to lose your traditional currency from a bank.
Furthermore, we've already seen examples of the "authorities" behind cryptocurrency executing a rollback to modify transactions they didn't like: https://www.coindesk.com/hard-fork-ethereum-dao/
I strongly dispute the notion that blockchain is more reliable. Maybe in some ideal universe where blockchain technology is not implemented and maintained by humans.
> The body of evidence to date suggests that you're much more likely to be robbed of your cryptocurrency through fraud or incompetence
Because the technology (right now? maybe we'll see cryptocurrencies built in hardware/os eventually) is for competent geeks, not that greedy people that store their bitcoins on exchange wallets (or use any central server). One has to ask oneself if the blockchain is more reliable for him, just as he does with other things like choosing doctors etc.
- You want to stay anonymous
- You can't trust a third party
I would argue that a functional society would not need any blockchain services as it would provide the necessary privacy defenses to do anonymous transactions and the means to enforce trust.
In the same fashion, it was argued that BTC would be useless in a correctly functioning banking ecosystem.
What these systems offer is not something impossible to do otherwise, it is a lower bound on the services a society can provide (assuming internet and computers).
If tomorrow a country has a Zimbabwe moment, people will switch to BTC. If taxis end up being to corrupt, an etherum service can take the relay.
A lot of the blockchain enthusiasts are anarchists or libertarians. They assume society is already failing or on the verge of collapse. They often fail to see that not everyone is in that mindset.