Git is nice distributed tech. It's permissioned, though. Good old permissioned distributed tech. Which predates Bitcoin (obviously, as git is older than Bitcoin).

Agree. Blockchain is good for nothing but crypto (by virtue of the oracle problem, among others), and crypto is good for nothing but crime.

It's funny, people speak as if decentralisation was a good thing, but very few bother to explain why. Typically, if you dig into it, they cite advantages that you can already get from good old permissioned distributed tech. The only thing that decentralisation gets you (at enormous cost) is that it's harder to regulate.

A bitcoin transaction costs around $100 (in invisible money supply increase, paid by everyone that holds Bitcoin, but received by the miners).

There's no way a fiat transfer costs that much.

Yes. And if a country with say 200m people suffered a banking collapse, everyone could do a Bitcoin transaction every 40 days (assuming everyone else stopped using it), and would use only about 1% of the world's electricity. Great stuff.

Indeed. Bitcoin's blockchain grows with a laughable 3kB/s, yet is an unwieldy 700 GB.

A blockchain that allowed you store one song per second would be hundreds of TB before long. There are other architectures for that sort of thing for a reason.

Looks like BSV is about 7TB and grows at about 4GB a day. I have no clue what those guys are up to these days. This may be unweildy for a home PC but really is still pretty trivial for a data center.

500 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube per minute which is... If my napkin math is right, about a petabyte a day.

> spread the gospel of the blockchain immediately jumped on th AI bandwaggon

There were also a few months of super conductors, don't forget :-)

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.

http://arxiv.org/abs/2110.09857

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.

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, ...

You might have formulated things a bit unclearly, but I fundamentally agree that money, like everything else, should be under democratic control of the people. Not controlled by some crypto bros that are happy to interfere with the protocol if it suits them (The DAO hack, two 20+ block rollbacks of Bitcoin), but not if massive crime happens on it.

I guess so, although crypto proponents will anyway tell you that you don't understand how crypto works as soon as you say anything negative about their scheme.

I believe what I said is a fairly accurate summary of Proof of work / Proof of stake mechanisms and Core developer's influence on the protocol.

You don't solve the issue of authoritarian governments with crypto, though. I haven't seen China collapsing exactly since 2009.

Instead, you give criminals a tool for crime. And gamblers a new casino.