Tag: web3

Letter in Support of Responsible Fintech Policy

~ cafebedouin

“Blockchain technology cannot, and will not, have transaction reversal mechanisms because they are antithetical to its base design. Similarly, most public blockchain-based financial products are a disaster for financial privacy; the exceptions are a handful of emerging privacy-focused blockchain finance alternatives, and these are a gift to money-launderers. Financial technologies that serve the public must always have mechanisms for fraud mitigation and allow a human-in-the-loop to reverse transactions; blockchain permits neither.”

–Letter in Support of Responsible Fintech Policy

If you can dictate the premises, you can dictate the conclusion. It is possible to have transaction reversal mechanisms as part of a smart contract, which presumably these “experts” would know. They are worried about privacy, but at the same time, they are worried about too much privacy. Let me guess, only government hits that sweet spot of panopticon privacy and anything outside the panopticon must be used in service of crime.

As a counter to this document, I’d like to refer to the previously mentioned blog post on blockchains, where Tim Roughgarden says:

“An enormous number of people, including a majority of computer science researchers and academics, have yet to grok the modern vision of blockchains: a new computing paradigm that will enable the next incarnation of the Internet and the Web, along with an entirely new generation of applications.”

Which experts are being listened to and who does that benefit?

Centralization vs. Decentralization

~ cafebedouin

“Recently, a reader asked me to lay out the concerns about centralization and decentralization in relation to the internet…

…The people who own networks can change the rules at any time, and not just from a free-speech standpoint: Recently, Vimeo faced controversy over how it changed its business model to charge heavy consumers for the bandwidth their videos took up.

With centralization, the model can change at any time, and you just have to accept it—think of how Facebook would often redesign its site, disrupting the routines of millions of people.

In effect, decentralization gives you more control over the knobs, but the inconvenience of having to use them. When you hear about things like Web3, what they’re really trying to get at, beyond any financial windfalls, is the idea that a decentralized platform can be as easy to use and safe as a centralized one.”

-Ernie Smith, “The Central Question.” tedium.co. April 6, 2022.

Convenience vs. capability. There are many ways to frame this discussion. But, ultimately, like much of life, it is about trade-offs you want to make.