[tor-talk] Is there any societal use in Bitcoin?

[carlo von lynX]

On Mon, Sep 04, 2017 at 01:40:39PM +0200, Aymeric Vitte wrote:
> I think that you are mostly right except that it's not uninteresting at
> all for normal people to evade the banks dictatorship, delays and fees
> (what are you buying with this? what for? wiretransfer will take one
> week + absurd taxes not even knowing where it's coming from, etc, etc)

Indeed I entirely left out individual perspectives and legitimate
reasons to escape certain banking systems. I was focusing on the
long-term societal perspective which makes blockchain currencies
even worse than centralized banking: instead of having a certain
amount of corruption that could be addressed with better governance
or revolution where necessary, those out-of-societal-control money
systems make everyone an idiot who pays taxes - thus allowing the 
gap between rich and poor to skyrocket even faster than the 
exponential speed we are at today - because capitalism without
taxation means poverty for the masses.

But I did mention TALER, the free re-implementation of digicash,
which allows for anonymous micropayments without dismissing the
need for a redistribution system (which is broken, but removing
it entirely would not be a good repair technique). Both banking
and social services can be fixed with better governance.

> contracts, now how can normal people set contracts remains very
> mysterious and does not appear to be a priority, as well as what kind of
> contracts can be set finally, I was thinking to create some specific
> contracts but this is not possible (at least with btc)

Those ethereum contracts work with a non-social digital currency.
If programmable blockchains were combined with a taxable currency,
that could be interesting - it would cut out the networking operator
from the banking networks. Not sure if that actually changes much.

> For the part you describe you are even too nice, the blockchain
> networks, as they are today, are everything but decentralized, even
> smaller than the centralized Tor network, it's funny too see how the
> community thinks necessary each time they mention those networks to say
> "the P2P network", they are not P2P networks at all, with some
> exaggeration we could say that they are just networks controlled by a
> dozen of miners and a dozen of devs, the ensemble being surrounded by
> many conflicts of interest, until the full nodes can really be
> decentralized, which is certainly not the current trend

Which is all due to proof-of-work.

> And they are wasteful, maybe a good combination would be to create a new
> proof of something that would use the existing resources (disk space,
> cpu, etc on existing machins for example) in order to motivate people to
> host the blockchain or part of it (among others) instead of accumulating
> new hw and energy to mine with rewards and fees only going to miners,
> unfortunately a very few care about this kind of proposals

I expect if the worldwide banking network adopts a blockchain system
it will be establishing consensus among the participating banks without
anyone else in it. Transactions would be more like git commits. None
of them are anonymous, all of them are accountable to respective
authorities. Essentially it would be just using Merkle trees instead
of central brokers, and dropping all other "features" of blockchains.
I don't think it will even make a big difference to the economy,
let alone to end users. But I didn't even consider this kind of use
of financial blockchains in my post, as it has hardly anything to do
with bitcoin and co. And certainly nothing with Tor.

> Le 31/08/2017 à 13:07, carlo von lynX a écrit :
> > Let's discuss it:  http://my.pages.de/illegalblockchains

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