Was there a reason you decided to focus on a subset of consensus protocols? I.e, only blockchains v. blockchains, DAGs, hashgraphs, and any new protocols that may appear.
Your comment may be factually correct, but doesn't make clear how it applies to its parent. In combination with the dismissive tone, it's not a good contribution to the discussion. Piling on by being presumptive about the reason for downvotes doesn't help.
> But that’s because of aggressive efforts to recruit women, as well as lawsuits, in the 1980s and 1990s, to counteract the long history of discrimination (the field as 95% men in the 1960s). If people back then hadn’t done that, we wouldn’t be getting the “best person” today.
Is that not a counterfactual?
> Your comment may be factually correct, but doesn't make clear how it applies to its parent.
I didn't realise it wasn't clear. Maybe I should have defined the term & pointed out exactly where it was:
Counterfactual: 'Relating to or expressing what has not happened or is not the case.'.
Then again I expected people to be able to connect the two things together.
I guess my tone was because I'd expect someone who works in corporate law to know better. Maybe I should have outlined that as well. I could have explained that I was shocked. That's what I thought the tone conveyed. Surprise: Really?
Does that not convey surprise?
I guess it could be dismissive, but dismissing what? I'm asking a question.
I'm sorry if I was dismissive to the corporate lawyer regarding his use of a counterfactual (with the presumption that I'm correct). I probably could have pointed out I thought they were wrong in a nicer way.
You get off on the wrong foot assuming I’m trying to prove the counterfactual. This is a discussion of gender disparity in engineering, why would I be trying to prove what law would’ve been like if there hadn’t been measures to address gender disparity?
Rather, I used a counterfactual to restate an epidemiological inference. “City A introduced a sewer system in 1845, cholera rates went down. City B did not, and cholera rates stayed high. Had City A not introduced a sewer system, cholera rates in City A would have stayed high.” Obviously you can’t prove that last counterfactual—but that’s besides the point. It’s just another way of stating the inference that sewer systems reduce cholera.
City A is law, and City B is engineering. More so than engineering, law was strongly associated with men, because of the nexus to business, politics, and public performance. And both fields long maintained an uneven gender ratio by, e.g., hiring women to be secretaries rather than professionals. Law took explicit measures to make up for that discrimination. Engineering hasn’t, not to the same degree. We may draw inferences from the comparison.
You're assuming with certainty that there was a causal relationship. Given that assumption you were comfortable in proclaiming the counterfactual to be true. You "knew" it was true because you "knew" the mechanics of the world, thus could predict the counterfactual truth-value.
Did you use something like Hill's criteria for causation[0]? To establish anything? Like in epidemiology? It's how they can make such statements.
I do take your point about how one can be somewhat certain of a counterfactual. You couldn't be though; because you've got no criteria by which to judge the causality.
I understand this, but good lord people need to stop bringing this up in every damn thread that mentions Ethereum.
We all know about the DAO and what happened afterwards.
Mutable history is the problem. What's written to the blockchain is supposed to be immutable forever and independently verifiable by everyone. If an entity can rewrite history (eg drop or revert transactions), it becomes a problem. This is what happened after the DAO hack and it resulted in the Ethereum classic fork.
The chain still includes the transaction history of what happened with the DAO, but the hard fork added a special case unique state change which undoes most of the effects of the transactions that happened with the DAO.
So, the transactions still are recorded as having happened, but the state was edited?
Not that that necessarily is a particularly important distinction, but I think it is one that can reasonably be made.
The decentralized element should be more than just a software concern. Regardless of decentralized / mutable state if the control of the state of the chain (forks etc) is a centralized concern by a small group then we're just admitting the conceptual model is bullshit and this is literally just a very mediocre technical implementation of stuff we already have.
You can't just throw out or dismiss the historical failures of the model because it doesn't fit the ongoing narrative. The DAO was a glimpse at how easy the theory is corrupted, whether it started for the right reasons or not.
Just had a nasty though. Don't tell the tax office about this. They'll could tax you as income on the "New Coin" a.k.a. Ethereum you got for free, and you claim a capital loss on the drop in price of the old coin (Etherium Price - Classic Price). Yikes!
I think if you have a node running locally, metamask will work with ETC as well, so you could probably use this setup with Ethereum Classic if you wish.
I can't think of anything that is universally good other than God. & from what I've heard about the Old Testament that's not even true!
So we a situation where people can't even construct something from their imagination that is virtuous in all concerns. & people want financial technology to meet that bar? Seems unlikely to me.
Could there be some money laundering? Probably. Will there be attempts by the owners of the payment processor to stop such a thing? Probably. Will there be perfection? Probably not.
From what I understand, most money laundering occurs in the traditional financial system. Does it follow we should tear it down?
& besides, I thought crypto(assets) were a fad. A bubble. A figment of the imagination. A plaything for greater fools. If that's true, it's hardly worth worrying about.
The traditional financial system carries out trillions of transactions which are not money laundering, yet is required to jump through enormous amounts of red tape to prove its customers are not money launderers, and companies still get into trouble with regulators if they're not satisfied with their AML policies.
A new payment processor advertising the ability to accept completely anonymous transactions as a key benefit over the traditional ecosystem is going to attract a much higher ratio of money laundering to legitimate merchant accounts, and even without that, marketing Lack-of-AML-as-a-Service is sort of thing that gets regulators interested in shutting you down...
> The traditional financial system carries out trillions of transactions which are not money laundering, yet is required to jump through enormous amounts of red tape to prove its customers are not money launderers, and companies still get into trouble with regulators if they're not satisfied with their AML policies.
I'd agree the traditional system would probably have less money laundering. It also has less freedom, & could have significantly less innovation in the future.
> marketing Lack-of-AML-as-a-Service is sort of thing that gets regulators interested in shutting you down
I think they're run from South Africa, so I'm not sure if regulators could shut them down. Crypto is global & crypto is on the internet. Wherever cryptocurrencies go, human minds will follow. People will create them with their computers (mining) & transact with those who accept them.
Coming down hard on crypto assets could create a parallel economy. Untaxed & no regulation. Then what do regulators do? Nothing, because they just lost their jobs & any control over anything.
Criminal economic ecosystems have existed since long before cryptocurrency, as has AML law even in mere regional financial hubs like South Africa.
The real question is to what extent is it beneficial for non-criminal businesses to invest in the capability to handle niche currencies like Monero used by hardly anybody and attractive primarily to money launders. Because if it's predominantly criminal businesses using them, it's not really making regulators' jobs more difficult.
> Criminal economic ecosystems have existed since long before cryptocurrency, as has AML law even in mere regional financial hubs like South Africa.
Even if South Africa shut them down, I'm sure others will find a way to run such payment processors. Where there's money, there's motive.
> The real question is to what extent is it beneficial for non-criminal businesses to invest in the capability to handle niche currencies like Monero used by hardly anybody and attractive primarily to money launders.
People who launder large sums of money would likely do it through the traditional financial system. How does one launder, say, a billion dollars through a Monero today? I don't think they could. That type of money is being laundered through the banking system[0].
> The real question is to what extent is it beneficial for non-criminal businesses to invest in the capability to handle niche currencies like Monero
If it's easy to implement & their niche likes to use them, then I would say it's probable.
Crypto can win bit by bit. Country by country. There are some jurisdictions that seem to be embracing the tech (like Japan & Switzerland).
That's some people using it. If it continues to grow & you know it's going to grow faster than any other asset it makes sense to do some speculation. Then with that speculation, you start to learn about crypto. It starts to spread as people become aware of returns, & it continues to grow, & so on.
It's resilient. I like resilient assets. I think a little bit of crypto can be a good investment. If anything it's fun. That's one of the reasons I think young people like it.
Do it for fun, spend it when people accept it. People even give discounts for buying in crypto.
George Church is using Crypto tech for a new company. You're going to be able to sell your genomic data to pharma companies[0].
Selling such data may seem like a terrible idea, except they're also using a second layer network (Enigma.co) for the data processing which maintains the secrecy of the underlying data.
That's a counter-example. I don't think George Church got FOMO! I agree with you generally.
Vogons are perfectly capable of corrupting Nature without the help of humans. And even restoring Nature by wiping out humans to make way for a hyperspace bypass.
At least he didn't say it was bad as Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings's poetry about decaying swans.
The idea that death is ignoble is starting to propagate more widely. I actually think it's a more popular idea within younger cohorts. Counterintuitively.
I'm (self)-interested in learning about Enigma[0]. It's an off-chain solution for scalability & privacy with regards to systems of blockchains (blockchain agnostic).
It also has the capacity for its own dapps. The Enigma product isn't completed, yet there is a working product on top of the protocol called Catalyst[1] (I've not personally tried Catalyst, yet). Catalyst is a trading app for quants.
Enigma is supported by MIT, & has Alex Pentland as an advisor.
There's more to Enigma than what I've just outlined. 1) There's the data marketplace component. 2) It could also conceivably become a secure data processing layer for the Internet. I think it can be used with different protocols. I've yet to figure that out.
