/biz/ - Business & Finance

>>57766516
Be sure to post the final product back to Buttcoin.
The fine folks there really enjoy a thorough rebuttal.

>>57766516
i'm waiting OP

Get on with it faggot

>>57766516
According to the author, he is tired of people using the same arguments over and over again when they are "clearly" wrong and overused. He is going to attempt to debunk them. He begins the article with the following:

>Cryptocurrency and blockchain technology has now been around for at least 15 years.

>Yet in this time, there’s been a finite number of “talking points” that continually get paraded around social and mainstream media. The vast majority of these “points” are ambiguous and misleading, as well as tired and overused. Let’s go over each and every one:

>Tired Crypto Talking Point #1
>“It’s decentralized!!!” / “Crypto gives the control of money back to the people”

>1. Just because you de-centralize something doesn’t mean it’s better. And this is especially true in the case of crypto. The case for decentralized crypto is based on a phony notion that central authorities can’t do anything right, which flies in the face of the thousands of things you use each and every day that “inept central government” does for you. Do you like electricity? Internet? Owning your own home and car? Roads and highways? Thank the government.

>>57766744
It is true that just because something is decentralized it doesn't mean it's automatically better, however to say this is "especially" true in the case of crypto is just wrong. It depends on what it is that you are doing with crypto. Maybe it doesn't make sense for a lot of projects to be decentralized, but it does make sense for things like DEXs so now I will never be at risk of losing my money because of things like Mt.Gox of FTX. Maybe BitTorrent incentivizing users to seed with crypto is a bad example since it was a decentralized protocol before the invention of Bitcoin, but you can even make a good argument for the execution of code that cannot be censored; being able to create a smart contract that is transparent and runs 24/7 is actually great for things like Uniswap, coin mixers, etc.

Then the author says that crypto is "based on a phony notion that authorities can’t do anything right" and that is just misleading. He is assuming that all crypto proponents think the government is inept which is an unfair assumption. I am not here to argue the changes that may or may not need to happen to governments. But what is UNDENIABLE is that the Great Recession/Housing bubble of 2008 was caused by banks that were corrupt and unreliable; they were giving out loans to people they should not have. Satoshi Nakamoto wrote a message in the first Bitcoin block that says: "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks". Satoshi wanted to "give the control of money back to the people" so that this could never happen again. Yes we can thank the government for a lot of good things like roads, electricity, etc. but there are also a lot bad things too that were avoidable (like 2008). If we can take human error/greed out of the system, why not? Governments have certain controls over things they don't necessarily need to have (or at least can benefit greatly from transparency).

>>57766744
I got dumber just reading that bit of NPC slobbering from the author, I'll tap out from wasting any more seconds reading it but have a bump

>>57767003
>2. Decentralizing things, especially in the context of crypto simply creates additional problems. In the de-centralized world of crypto “code is law” which means there’s nobody actually held accountable for things going wrong. And when they do, you’re fucked.

He's almost 100% right. He is correct when he says that in a world where code is law things can go horribly wrong. And when they do, you are absolutely fucked. There are plenty of examples of smart contracts being fucked up (looking at you Parity) and DEX/CEX wallets being drained. And because the code will do exactly as instructed nobody can do anything until it's too late. It is important to remember that whenever vulnerabilities are found people (hopefully) will learn from them and in the future these mistakes will not be present in the new smart contracts. Your broken bone, once healed, will never break again in the same spot.
He is wrong when he says that nobody is ever held accountable for the wrongdoings, but it is very difficult for people to be held accountable. Not only is crypto in a legal grey area a lot of the time, sometimes there is no regulation or no crypto laws in certain countries. Couple that with the fact that you can operate anonymously and it's difficult to pay for your crimes.
Most importantly, the author is very wrong when he says "especially in the context of crypto simply creates additional problems". While it is true that decentralization introduces problems that were never there before, it also has benefits like 24/7 uptime with little to no maintenance, immutability, transparency, etc. If you can eliminate/patch out the problems that decentralization introduces, you can have a new system that has qualities that the old one could never have.

>>57767166
i hate you bro i hate you i hate you so much i cant beleive you would even respond that to me brooooooooo

>>57767166
Ironically you can overcome this through consensus, such as the DAO hack and ETH fork, which only happens when the biggest players collude to unfuck themselves(which is the same problem we have with the centralized fed system where the biggest players can step in and save themselves/“the system”).
If you wire money to the wrong account, or it gets stolen by a hacker, the bank can help unfuck it. If you lose your seed phrase or send money to the transaction address of a smart contract, or any other flub, you will never be helped.
there are more trade-offs here but it’s ironic that the DAO proved how already rigged ETH was when the whales involved for a “do-over”(even though everyone throwing up their hands and moving on would have been stupid, in practice)

>>57767166
>In the real world, everybody prefers to deal with entities they know and trust – they don’t want “trustless transactions” – they want reliable authorities who are held accountable for things. Would you rather eat at a restaurant that has been regularly inspected by the health department, or some back-alley vendor selling meat from the trunk of his car?

Yes everybody prefers to deal with entities they trust until one day you realize these entities aren't as trustworthy as you may have thought. All power corrupts and there are plenty of examples of governments just going into your bank account and taking money (Greece 2013-2016) and I actually watched a video the other day about a woman that had some gold jewelry in a Chase Bank safe deposit box and one day she went to open it and it was empty so she tried to sue Chase and lost but she eventually found the jewelry on TV in an unclaimed property auction. The author claims trusted authorities are held accountable for their actions but in the case of this woman, Chase Bank would never have been held accountable if she didn't see her necklace on TV. Maybe this doesn't happen often, so just forget the woman vs Chase Bank, but remember that there is a lot of corruption you never hear about because it is often a case of David vs Goliath. At the end the author asks the reader if they would rather eat at a restaurant that has been inspected by the health department or a back-alley meat vendor. This is, again, very misleading. Of course you would rather eat at an establishment that has been inspected, but when you realize that the health department has been giving passing grades to the filthy restaurants that are owned by their families, you start to think maybe there's a better way. One day a lot of people get food poisoning from one of these restaurants that should never have passed the inspection. Maybe a few even die. Whether or not the health department is held accountable is not the issue.

>>57767352
I don't know what word 4chan thinks is spam but if someone could tell me that would be great. Here is a screenshot of what I wanted to post.

>>57767457
you want me to tell you why your spam was deleted i want you to tell me the word 4chan thinks is spam because if i can't say it then it isn't a very nice word either so why do you want to say it maybe because you are just an edgy little retard who gets off on getting a reaction from the anonymous masses maybe because you are just a giant cucktard get rekt

>>57767457
>You still aren’t avoiding “middlemen”, “authorities” or “third parties” using crypto. In fact quite the opposite: You need third parties to convert crypto into fiat and vice-versa; you depend on third parties who write and audit all the code you use to process your transactions; you depend on third parties to operate the network; you depend on “middlemen” to provide all the uilities and infrastructure upon which crypto depends.

It's obvious you will need to involve a "middleman" authority to get your hands on fiat money which is a centralized currency issued by a central bank. It should be no surprise that a bank is needed to receive the wire transfer that is often associated with selling crypto. The author sounds very arrogant when he says that it is in fact "quite the opposite". This is not a good example of avoiding third parties. The author forgets to mention that if you want to send $10 million dollars there are middlemen you need to inform and the hoops you need to jump through are sometimes ridiculous if it is international and it also depends on the laws in those countries. I can send cryptocurrency to anyone at any time and I don't have to prepare anything or look up laws or call my bank in advance to let them know that a big transaction is happening soon. This is actually a good example of avoiding third parties, unlike the one the author gave. I remember I read a story a few years ago when someone sent $10 million dollars of Litecoin and it cost them like 50 cents or something. I do want to point out that the fees for wire transfers aren't really all that bad (even international ones).

>>57767632
I forgot to mention other good examples of avoiding middlemen but I want to quickly mention the fact that the stock market stops trading at 5pm and is closed on the weekend (yes there is after hours trading but it's not the same). If you have decentralized smart contracts you can trade 24 hours a day, 7 days a week (Uniswap, etc.) and there's plenty of other good examples.

Lastly the author talks about the maintenance of the code and how it is dependent on trusted third parties. I think he is partly right here. This is probably a big reason why Satoshi wanted to remain anonymous so that it could be a community project and so no "authorized party" would be in charge of maintaining the code. I think it is undeniable that even something like Ethereum is really dependent on Consensys and I haven't read anything in a while about Fluffypony and Monero but there are plenty of examples where a project that is supposed to be decentralized does rely on the work of a small group of people. You could even make an argument for Bitcoin because Bitcoin Core is the most popular client used to create nodes. However the author's argument falls apart when you consider the fact that illegal transactions still occur on these networks. If these networks were truly under dependent "on third parties to operate the network" then illegal transactions wouldn't happen. An example of this is Tornado Cash. The US Department of the Treasury made it illegal for US citizens to use these smart contracts and guess what? They're still running right now. Maybe this is a bad example because now that ETH is proof of stake some of the largest stakers are censoring transactions for the Tornado Cash contracts.

>>57767772
Maybe a better example is Bitcoin. Think about how sometimes someone steals a large sum of money from an exchange or obtains a lot of Bitcoins through ransomware and then they have the money in a wallet that is publicly visible. So we can all see it and everybody is tracking it. What happens when they try to move the Bitcoin? Oh yeah the transaction gets uploaded to the memory pool and it gets mined into a block. Everybody knows it's stolen money but nobody stops it. Why? Because they can't stop it. You have to admit that, on some level, there is no middleman and nobody really controls the network. This can be called "decentralization" on some level.

>>57767487
What the actual fuck is wrong with you? I was just typing a few paragraphs and there was a word in there that 4chan didn't like so I was asking if anyone could tell me so I can avoid using it in the future. I assume you could type the word if you used a period between every character or something. Go take your meds.

>>57767817
>If you look into any crypto project, you will ultimately find it’s not actually decentralized at all. At the beginning/end of every blockchain, is a small group of people who wield disproportionate power and influence and have the ability to restrict who can do what on the system.

Absolutely 100% wrong. This is the worst one yet honestly. The author says that every single crypto project isn't decentralized which is an unfair generalization since not only are the projects the author has probably never heard of, there are also cryptocurrencies that haven't even been created yet. The author claims that in the beginning/end of every blockchain there is a small group of people that have disproportinate power/influence and also the ability to restrict what happens on the blockchain. This is just a blatant lie. Thankfully cryptocurrency is often open-source software and if this is true we can verify it ourselves. Sometimes the creators of a cryptocurrency do grant themselves disproportionate power and thankfully the smart contracts can be audited not just by centralized third parties (certik, etc.) but also by people like you and me. I can't even begin to comprehend how the author could have wrote this thinking it makes any sense whatsoever. We know what the code does because it is open source and we compile it ourselves. Furthermore, we can all agree that these blockchains aren't infallible and we have various ways to calculate/measure what it would take to attack these different chains. You need 51% of the hashpower of Bitcoin and we can conclude that you need a certain amount of computers or a certain amount of energy/electricity must be expended and so we conclude that it takes this much capital/effort to attack. I still can't get over the fact that the author says every single blockchain is controlled by a small group. The argument easily falls apart when you think about the fact that a lot of this is open source software.

>>57768012
Also I made the point that some of the transactions on these chains is illegal and nobody can stop it. People can freeze your funds if you have Tether or USDC or some other centralized crypto, but when it comes to Bitcoin nobody can freeze your money. It used to be the same for Ethereum but now that Tornado Cash is being censored (slowly/partly) I don't know if I trust ETH to be censorship resistant for long.

Ok so the author is wrong to say that every single blockchain has a small group of people with a lot of power, but a lot of cryptocurrencies do have this problem. What currencies don't have this problem? I think clearly Bitcoin doesn't. I think Ethereum is also one, at least for now (until the day Tornado Cash smart contracts no long work I think I'll still consider ETH decentralized enough). I think Monero is also a good example. I keep mentioning Tornado Cash because I think it's a good litmus test for crypto. I used to think AAVE was decentralized but once I heard that they do not do business with Tornado Cash funds I realized they are not. I think Maker/Dai are a good example of decentralized finance (maybe I'm wrong but as far as I know they're good). Doge? As far as I can tell the initial distribution was impartial and even though there may be a few people that made millions from a few dollars, I think they are also decentralized. Solana shut down a lot in the past and I think during the FTX trial Caroline admitted that they froze Solana's blockchain on purpose so they could liquidate their users, so that's out. Avalanche seems good but they definitely rely on those Cornell University professors especially recently when the chain stopped working for a little bit and they had to roll back an update or something. Oh I forgot about Litecoin. LTC is definitely decentralized. I could go on all day.

Nice thread op. Original as fuck

>>57768140
Alright I'm done now. Like I said before, I was going to do this by myself but I figured I would post it here. This entire thread was just for crypto talking point #1 in this guys article. He has 25 different "crypto talking points". I might do this again in the future.

>>57766597
nice

>>57766516
Bumping.
The author is obviously a government dickslurper.