It's even worse than that: politicians created over-reaching laws and enforcement, to demographically target political opponents and take away their right to vote.
> "The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."
– John Ehrlichman, to Dan Baum for Harper's Magazine in 1994, about President Richard Nixon's war on drugs, declared in 1971.
This is a very powerful quote. It is too bad that it was first published[1] 12 years after Erlichman told it to Baum and after Erlichman died. It sure fits with what I think Nixon was capable of, but I wonder how embellished the actual quote given by Baum so many years after Ehrlichman said it. Would have been nice to have Ehrlichman confirm it but he was already dead when this quote was published.
The most natural follow-up to currencies on a blockchain are assets, like a ticket to a concert, shares in a company, or a deed to a car.
Once more assets are represented this way, many kinds of applications would be valuable. One simple and powerful example is escrow.
Enabling one-shot, instant escrow with strangers on the Internet has real-world benefits. For example, the current safest way to exchange Burning Man tickets is to meet someone in person, inspect the tickets and cash, and trade them by hand. If they were a blockchain asset, they could be traded nearly instantly and safely across the world. With a stable dollar asset, the official escrow service could even make it more difficult to sell above face value.
> The most natural follow-up to currencies on a blockchain are assets
Natural for marketing-team maybe but not for developers. They only seem natural because they both look like 'value' transfer. But there is a huge difference. The value in-case of currency-use is inherently generated using proof-of-work whereas there is no decentralised way to map a real asset to virtual token.
So NO, none of these 'assets on the blockchain' are decentralized or even need blockchain non-trivially.
I like your idea about using blockchains to represent assets. I have been thinking about something along those lines. But a whole set of interesting problem arises. That being the legal issues surrounding transferring ownership of assets globally. Not to mention issues of fraud and recourse when an agreement falls apart. I'd be curious to to have a chat with you about it. Send me an email.
I've got a team exploring the idea of executing a smart contract that transfers assets (be it crypto-asset or real world assets) upon a specific real-world trigger event (via oracles).
But you're right, the legal issues are a dime and a dozen. It'll take some time for the law to catch up (eg. digital wills). The technology is ready for this, we just need to right confluence of factors to make this a reality.
I think it is interesting if the technology did it, but I'd want to know what incentives people would have to use it, since it would just make things more complicated.
Maybe it lowers the cost of transferring assets, and there is the flexibility transferring to anyone on the planet. Maybe the use case is having funds in an escrow until both parties can verify that the transaction is cleared. I think there are trust companies that already do this. Maybe if people are motivated to deal with the legal(or private entities would exist to fill the need to simplify it) themselves it could work itself out.
It could be that through this method less lawyers are involved. If the transfer of assets can be standardized or at least abstracted away for all/most countries in one system I could see why people could be interested in it.
Also if your looking to sell an asset, or looking to buy an asset that you expect to increase in value, it might be interesting to have a global market to purchase/sell these assets with price signals for less risky or higher return assets.
How does the blockchain help? The important issue is the dispute between humans as to whether the tickets and money are valid. You can only do that if the transaction is atomic, which requires that the tickets and money are on the same blockchain and exchanged in the same transaction.
> You can only do that if the transaction is atomic, which requires that the tickets and money are on the same blockchain and exchanged in the same transaction.
Yes, they should be on the same chain, so that the transaction is atomic. This is trivial to do in Ethereum (and other blockchains, presumably).
The best use cases for smart contracts are gambling apps (i.e., financial markets, exchanges), escrow services (collateral-based trustless loans), and perhaps some identity services
People always seem to come up with gambling. No on in the gambling industry would want to have their business on top of a public blockchain so good theory but nope.
If your processes in sum tend to
A) access many disk locations, at large total disk space
B) hold a lot of underused data in ram
This isn't totally impossible. Maybe an Ethereum node with a script doing a bunch of data reads, running side by side with hundreds of Chrome tabs, few of which are regularly accessed. (Totally hypothetical, of course...)
Swapping some rarely used ram out so the OS can buffer disk into ram seems like a reasonable approach (although maybe even more reasonable is: close some tabs).
Your point still stands that more ram is strictly as good or better performance in this scenario, but you might be able to get an equivalent performance boost much more cheaply with some swap space for the underused ram. Also, upgrading past 32 GB ram starts to veer from expensive to impossible on a laptop.
> Also, Ethereum is in a quagmire regarding scaling.
"Quagmire" is a bit provocative, but yes scaling is a serious problem that needs to be solved.
> In fact, I do believe it's cheaper to spend bitcoin now than it is ether ($0.25 in gas per transaction).
This is no longer true. Since the recent fork/upgrade, it's been consistently cheap. Specifically, an ether transfer with an $0.001 fee rarely takes more than a few minutes to confirm.
That's terrible news. I was undergrad there in mid 2000s, and perceived that some, but not all, of these issues had improved. Being a man, and less attentive to the issues at the time, it doesn't surprise me that I missed it. It could also be that the undergrad experience is better than the research staff experience.
Is there anything on the list that has improved?
Could you explain more about where your feelings come from?
>There is no way you could push down the market 10 percent today.
GDAX fell about 8% yesterday, from $96.82 to $89.07 in one hour (May 4, 9-10am) with about $2 million worth of trades. It's a little early to call this a post-volatility era.
It's volatile alright, but that's not the same thing as being able to push the market down with a retail-sized trade, let alone push it down a staggering 10%. And just because the market dropped 8%, doesn't mean the drop can be attributed to $2 million worth of Ether put up for sale on GDAX.
The daily trading volume is $300 million at last count. There's arbitrage happening across exchanges so the price on one exchange is not isolated from what's happening on others.
