Bitcoin discussion and news

[Storm Fox]

Nope. Smart contracts are enforcing a set of rules defined in code, leaving zero chance of litigation, therefore you don't need to be a lawyer to test it.

Lawyers are only ever consoluted for an opinion on the actual legallity of the project itself.

Where does the Smart Contract come from? My point is that someone will need to code it, and then that code will need to be tested, not only that it is valid code without bugs, but matches what the software engineer the original agreement between the parties signing up to the Smart Contract.

As is a well know fact Smart Contracts never have bugs: Web3 Is Going Just Great

 

[StakerOne]

The point here is that from your example you have to temporarily give up your (larger) asset in order to get the loan of some other asset (like a pawn shop). So here you've got a theoretical $2k in Ethereum v $500USD. I guess in some instances you could just about come up with a scenario where someone has enough faith in the growth of the market that they might just about see a case to not just sell a quarter of the Ethereum and use the resulting USD but it's a pretty niche case and not very relevant where loans are either unsecured or secured against an actual item that someone needs to use in the meantime (ie a car or a house).

They use the borrowed USD to buy more ETH if they believe that ETH is going to go up, thus making more money that they would have made had they just held ETH.

But it also works the other way around. If they believe the market is gonna go down, they can sell their ETH for USD, put USD up as collateral to borrow ETH and then use that ETH to buy more USD - a leveraged short.

If you think that's greedy, traders on FOREX exchanges have been doing that for ages.

The regulators are really concerned about any centralised exchange offering leverage in such a way, because no one knows what the exchange is doing behind closed doors.

Now contrast that to smart contracts that offers leveage. Everyone can see it, because it's all on the blockchain and everyone is playing on a level playing field - the smart contracts treat everyone the same! There's no scammy insider trading, unfairly liquidating people.

If you understand this, you'll understand that it's the blockchain that is transparent and above board and conventional exchanges are not.

But all we hear about in the media and from detractors of crypto, is that this is a crypto problem when it patently isn't.

And what boils my piss is that there are people out there who know they are being dishonest because of their hatred of crypto.

I have a friend who is an ex-banker. When I explain this problem to him and how the regulators should regulate crypto exchanges, he will simply reply that crypto exchanges can't be regulated because decentralised blockchains can't be regulated. I know he's not being honest at all there. Any crypto exchange can be regulated because it's normal business entity in the off chain conventional world. Whether they are dealing with crypto or deposited fiat money, doesn't make any difference, there should be mechanisms in place to force them to prove to the regulators that their leverage is above board and is not being exploited to liquidate it's customers collateral unfairly for the benefit of insiders looking for cheap crypto or fiat.

 

[NoXion]

Maybe in the world of CBDCs controlled by the government.
It's quite hard for a government to disrupt a DAO. They would actually have to get human infiltrators involved.

CBDCs are not inevitable, neither is the crypto dystopia. That's a false dichotomy you keep presenting.

Governments are better placed to employ human infiltrators than anyone else, except perhaps the biggest multinational corporations. They can certainly afford to do so.

 

[StakerOne]

Good point. So we are back to whether the government has access to the data and has a god Token.
Plus you will still need trust in it being reported and trust the landlord will action the request.

So instead of Beer let's say it's biscuits.

So Mcvities has a bad batch. Looks on their inventory and see a load went to Bookers*. Not a problem now anyway that will be noted and traced.
Now a person who owns a local store buys a carton. Do they have to have the infrastructure to receive warnings? If so that is another business cost and time checking. You can set up alerts from the Food Standards Agency now, so the time may not be more.
Plus they would still need to actually action the request.
For the end user to check then you would need to track each packet in which case there are huge privacy issues as well as computing and storage costs for McVities.


*Bookers is a business-to-business food wholesaler

Thinking out aloud, an additional QR code could represent a small number of batches - that has a loooooong and unique code and that code would be the key to unlock only the encrypted transactions that relate to those small number of batches.

So no, the govnernment wouldn't have access to all of the data.

It would be an easy problem for Unibright to solve, maybe with some help from Baseline.

Maybe they have solved it already, cooking up something beyond my limited imagination!

 

[StakerOne]

CBDCs are not inevitable, neither is the crypto dystopia. That's a false dichotomy you keep presenting.

Governments are better placed to employ human infiltrators than anyone else, except perhaps the biggest multinational corporations. They can certainly afford to do so.

Have you been on Rishi Sunak's Facebook page over the past year? I have.
Or how about the press releases coming from the UK Treasury, The Bank of England, The WEF, The IMF, The BIS & FATF?
ALL of them have been saying that CBDCs are the future.
And the BoE and the Treasury dept have sent out press releases about how they are working with the WEF & BIS to push forward with CBDCs.

 

[StakerOne]

Where does the Smart Contract come from? My point is that someone will need to code it, and then that code will need to be tested, not only that it is valid code without bugs, but matches what the software engineer the original agreement between the parties signing up to the Smart Contract.

As is a well know fact Smart Contracts never have bugs: Web3 Is Going Just Great

I've answered all of this. I even explained about smart contract insurance and then in retaliation you implied that I thought the entire insurance industry could be slung into smart contracts tomorrow!

You're not debating in good faith here.

 

[kabbes]

.Smart contracts and DAPPS don't discriminate against protected charactaristics because they aren't aware of them.

Lololololililolololol

 

[Storm Fox]

Have you been on Rishi Sunak's Facebook page over the past year? I have.
Or how about the press releases coming from the UK Treasury, The Bank of England, The WEF, The IMF, The BIS & FATF?
ALL of them have been saying that CBDCs are the future.
And the BoE and the Treasury dept have sent out press releases about how they are working with the WEF & BIS to push forward with CBDCs.

Then these will be the Crypto that is used, as they have government backing, big businesses will use them probably voluntarily if not then under a law passed by the government, small businesses will use them to access big business and Eth and bitcoin will be back to their drug buying beginnings. Well done to Vitalik Buterin for creating ultimate government control.

 

[StakerOne]

Lololololililolololol

You're not debating in good faith here.

 

[NoXion]

Have you been on Rishi Sunak's Facebook page over the past year? I have.
Or how about the press releases coming from the UK Treasury, The Bank of England, The WEF, The IMF, The BIS & FATF?
ALL of them have been saying that CBDCs are the future.
And the BoE and the Treasury dept have sent out press releases about how they are working with the WEF & BIS to push forward with CBDCs.

The Blair government was very keen on ID cards. That failed to materialise, despite the fact that plenty of other countries have ID cards as a matter of "tried and trusted" policy. Just because a particular government is keen on something (although I would challenge the depth of this supposed keenness for CBCDs), doesn't mean that it will actually happen. Same thing for the bougie talking shops like the WEF.

You need CBCDs to be inevitable, because then that means the libertarian crypto gangsters can step up and offer their "solution".

 

[Storm Fox]

I've answered all of this. I even explained about smart contract insurance and then in retaliation you implied that I thought the entire insurance industry could be slung into smart contracts tomorrow!

You're not debating in good faith here.

I didn't say anything about insurance, and if I did it wasn't intentional. I think you are confusing my with someone else.

I missed the bit where you explained who pays for testing and ensuring the Smart Contract is what was agreed by the parties.

Smart contracts and DAPPS don't discriminate against protected charactaristics because they aren't aware of them.

Surely that depends on who writes them and the Contracts Intent and purpose. They are just code, code written by humans. Depending on where they are used and what information is available it would be trivially easy to code to discriminate.

 

[Monkeygrinder's Organ]

Here's a random and not particularly unusual clause in a contract that's currently pending at work:

'If the Suppliers performance of its obligations under this agreement is prevented or
delayed by any act or omission of the Customer, its agents, subcontractors, consultants
or employees then, without prejudice to any other right or remedy it may have, the
Supplier shall be allowed an extension of time to perform its obligations equal to the
delay caused by the Customer.'

Good luck to the person trying to program that one. Just another 18 pages to go after that.

 

[Storm Fox]

Here's a random and not particularly unusual clause in a contract that's currently pending at work:

'If the Suppliers performance of its obligations under this agreement is prevented or
delayed by any act or omission of the Customer, its agents, subcontractors, consultants
or employees then, without prejudice to any other right or remedy it may have, the
Supplier shall be allowed an extension of time to perform its obligations equal to the
delay caused by the Customer.'

Good luck to the person trying to program that one. Just another 18 pages to go after that.

Firstly most of the words, if not all are English.

So the Smart Contract would need access to the customer and then all subcontractors, consultants or employees' records in some form. Then when the obligation is not met the Smart Contract would immediately kick in and do whatever.
While on a lot of real-life cases a person from each party would sit down and work out the best path forward for both parties with some kind of Change Order to formulise the changes and both would carry on in a better position than strictly following the initial agreement. But the initial agreement is there in case a change can't be agreed upon.

 

[StakerOne]

Then these will be the Crypto that is used, as they have government backing, big businesses will use them probably voluntarily if not then under a law passed by the government, small businesses will use them to access big business and Eth and bitcoin will be back to their drug buying beginnings. Well done to Vitalik Buterin for creating ultimate government control.

The government has no incentive to introduce a CBDC with parallel infrastructure and then prevent that CBDC from being bridged and tokenised into public blockchains that are already an ecomony in their own right.

Regardless of big companies, most developers won't touch a private blockchain (or centralised database) that's run by the government.

The reason being is that developers are sick to the back teeth of seeing their work destroyed because a bigger entity walks away shutting down whatever it was they built on top of, be it google, facebook or even the government departments.

If the are no smart contracts on the government blockchain (or even worse, no infranstructure to create smart contracts at all) then developers will continue to flock to public blockchains like Ethereum because that's where the action is.

Many smart contract products are actually built on top of other smart contracts a blockchain without any smart contracts, isn't going to attract many developers, when public blockchains already have loads of smart contracts.

If the government is hellbent on launching a CBDC, then the best thing it could do, is create it's own bridges to public blockchains from the Bank of England so that the CBDCs can flow onto public blockchains as a token.

It's worth pointing out, that all tokens on blockchains are just smart contracts - so in such a scenario the public will be able to check those smart contracts and trust them.

The retail banks could pick the things up directly from the BoE, while Visa + Mastercard can pick em up on the blockchain.

IIRC Visa wants to build an Ethereum compatable (EVM) blockchain on top of Ethereum. Visa proposes that such a blockchain would only deal with debit and credit card payments, with all the mechanisms that are need, such as handling refunds.

The BoE is a private company. No one knows what is going on behind that curtain. We have to take their word about how much money is going into circulation created from debt.

If the whole lot were slung onto public blockchains, then we would all know what the Wizard of Oz is up to behind that curtain in the palace, rather than be patronised by the powers that be.

It's quite sad that this is such a hard sell to people who endlessly complain about corrupt governence.

A solution is laid down, that if adopted would bring fairness and transparency to all and instead some appear to be gunning for the status quo, for it all to behind closed doors and that we shouldn't worry our pretty little heads and trust the BoE. Please.

 

[StakerOne]

Here's a random and not particularly unusual clause in a contract that's currently pending at work:

'If the Suppliers performance of its obligations under this agreement is prevented or
delayed by any act or omission of the Customer, its agents, subcontractors, consultants
or employees then, without prejudice to any other right or remedy it may have, the
Supplier shall be allowed an extension of time to perform its obligations equal to the
delay caused by the Customer.'

Good luck to the person trying to program that one. Just another 18 pages to go after that.

I have no idea what is being supplied or anyting about the business operation in question, so it would be unfair to expect me to comment on it.
Besides, I have only ever argued that one purpose among many for smart conracts is enforce an agreement.
I have never claimed that smart contracts can somehow always be used to stop the need for coventional legal compliance or oversight.
I have never said it could be used to enforce every legal agreement out there the wild, but smart contracts can prevent operation and financial errors, even if the business has to rely on lawyers to handle the legal end of things.
Down the line, as time passes, as more and more businesses have all of their financial and operational transactions on public blockchains, then there might well be a business case for a business to develop more smart contracts, DAPPs and Oracles that could fend of the need for reliance on lawyers, but it would depend on the business, the way it works and it's needs.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

The BoE is a private company.

Point of information: No it isn't. It was nationalised in 1946.

 

[BigTom]

"Even just the fact that you call them investments speaks to the way you see this as a capitalist function."

Its not free. It costs energy. Blockchain energy is ultimately bitcoin (StakerOne will disagree with me here, as all eth maxis do, but I have a feeling the merge might not be as successful as expected in the longer term)


There is philosophy and sociology all over the crypto world. So, so much of it, its not dismissed at all.


No, I dont, thats your projection. Investment is not just its time and directed attention. Money can buy other peoples time and attention, but in this case, the money is buying the time and attention of the robots, who then encourage others to invest their money. "Money" (ie tokens with a fiat value) are just proxies here.



The reason you see a contradiction here is that you are equating "government" with "nation state". Once you seperate out those two things, it becomes much clearer. Crypto is borderless, it does not recognise nation-states, it has its own internal governance, that forms a government. In bitcoin, that is the bitcoin protocol, that taxes every person transacting on the bitcoin network, other tax mechanisms are available.



Say I am in the US and want to pay $4k for an abortion, the abortion provider is sanctioned as a baby murdering terrorist, if I use a CBDC, it will be blocked and I am exposed as a person who tried to fund a terrorist entity.
If I pay with Bitcoin however, the government can see that someone has sent money to the clinics wallet, but unless that address is linked with my identity, they cannot tell who.
If I pay with Monero, the government cannot see when or if someone has sent money to the clinic's wallet.

Now, governments will want to know about all and every transaction to tax it, if it is a CBDC they can tax at source, because they own the protocol, but if it is paid with bitcoin or monero, they have to become more repressive to gain access to that, the only control they have is fiat on and off ramps. So less people off-ramp less money less frequently even if they are remaining perfectly tax complient, because the act of linking to the fiat system becomes a repressionary risk


Oracles.

Sorry I am struggling for time and you've made some fair points which I'm not responding to because I really just want to pick up the last one - how can an oracle know which of the two parties is lying? Surely all an oracle can do is check what has been recorded on blockchains?

 

[StakerOne]

The Blair government was very keen on ID cards. That failed to materialise, despite the fact that plenty of other countries have ID cards as a matter of "tried and trusted" policy. Just because a particular government is keen on something (although I would challenge the depth of this supposed keenness for CBCDs), doesn't mean that it will actually happen. Same thing for the bougie talking shops like the WEF.

You need CBCDs to be inevitable, because then that means the libertarian crypto gangsters can step up and offer their "solution".

Without cryptos CBDCs would run exclusivally on infrastructure that the government controls.
Rishi Sunak and the Treasury deptartment have aleady said what they want to do with CBDCs, which includes "financial experiments".
IIRC the BoE urged ministers to consider whether CBDCs should be used to control what people can spend their own money on.
Without cryptos and just CBDCs, it's not a stretch of the imagination to see how a government could get drunk on that kind of power.
If public blockchains exist, the BoE would have to bridge to the public blockchains to ensure their CBDC is succesful ... and then at that point, there is a balance of power between the government and the people, because we can all simply stack ETH or ANY other token that can't be seized, just on case our government pushes their luck.

 

[StakerOne]

Sorry I am struggling for time and you've made some fair points which I'm not responding to because I really just want to pick up the last one - how can an oracle know which of the two parties is lying? Surely all an oracle can do is check what has been recorded on blockchains?

Because a good oracle would have at least 3 data sources.
Each datasource get's paid to provide data - except when it's deemed wrong, because it's in a minority, in which case it would be penalised money.
Blockchain Oracles for Hybrid Smart Contracts | Chainlink

 

[StakerOne]

Point of information: No it isn't. It was nationalised in 1946.

Thanks, good debating is to establish the truth.
However, that truth doesn't negate my overarching argument, that it's behind closed doors and we have to take the government's and the BoE's word.
If it's on the blockchain, we don't have to trust the BoE or the government, we can see the money being created, along with how much is being created.

 

[NoXion]

Without cryptos CBDCs would run exclusivally on infrastructure that the government controls.
Rishi Sunak and the Treasury deptartment have aleady said what they want to do with CBDCs, which includes "financial experiments".
IIRC the BoE urged ministers to consider whether CBDCs should be used to control what people can spend their own money on.
Without cryptos and just CBDCs, it's not a stretch of the imagination to see how a government could get drunk on that kind of power.
If public blockchains exist, the BoE would have to bridge to the public blockchains to ensure their CBDC is succesful ... and then at that point, there is a balance of power between the government and the people, because we can all simply stack ETH or ANY other token that can't be seized, just on case our government pushes their luck.

You're clearly not familiar with the history of government IT projects if you think that CBCDs have a strong chance of happening.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Thanks, good debating is to establish the truth.
However, that truth doesn't negate my overarching argument, that it's behind closed doors and we have to take the government's and the BoE's word.
If it's on the blockchain, we don't have to trust the BoE or the government, we can see the money being created, along with how much is being created.

When the BoE creates money, it does so in a way that is recorded. I'm not sure how you would create money and be able to hide the fact you've done it. Whole point of money is that it circulates.

Also this misses the very important point that most money is created by commercial banks, a fact that was badly misunderstood by the monetarists who influenced early Thatcher, with disastrous results.

 

[StakerOne]

Firstly most of the words, if not all are English.

So the Smart Contract would need access to the customer and then all subcontractors, consultants or employees' records in some form. Then when the obligation is not met the Smart Contract would immediately kick in and do whatever.
While on a lot of real-life cases a person from each party would sit down and work out the best path forward for both parties with some kind of Change Order to formulise the changes and both would carry on in a better position than strictly following the initial agreement. But the initial agreement is there in case a change can't be agreed upon.

Smart contracts are modular.
So this one would only work once all of your sub-contractors have built their operations on the blockchain.
Then as a customer of theirs, you would write a smart contract that simply calls their smart contracts.

When you are developing and prototyping, you have to leave aside the legal agreements, just while you are developing, pretend they don't even exist.
Why?
Because you wrote your legal contracts AFTER you invisaged how your business whould work, then you got the lawyers in to draw up legal ageements to make that all work.

When developing and prototyping smart contracts, you would just explore what is possible with the technology, work out what you want, get it working, then try to see how much money it saves you. If it saves you money you would then run back to the lawyers and the response would be anywhere from "Fuck me, it runs itself, there is no legal agreement needed ..." or perhaps "Here is a new legal agreement, but it's a lot less complicated because swathes of it aren't needed anymore" to "Actually, we had to rework the whole thing, there's loads of legal text we have to include, to manage the customers expectations"- and you wouldn't care as long as the endeavor saves you money.

I would treat it the same way that the whole operation had been transformed through automation.

If your business were labour intensive, but automation changed everything, saving you money, you wouldn't be worried about wrapping the automation to work with the legal side of things, you would run back to the lawyers and simply pay them to redo the legalities from top to bottom. That would cost money, but you wouldn't care because you're saving shit loads through automation.

 

[StakerOne]

You're clearly not familiar with the history of government IT projects if you think that CBCDs have a strong chance of happening.

Then cryptos still has a bright future. No government in the developed world wants to be seen hindering innovation.

 

[StakerOne]

When the BoE creates money, it does so in a way that is recorded. I'm not sure how you would create money and be able to hide the fact you've done it. Whole point of money is that it circulates.

Also this misses the very important point that most money is created by commercial banks, a fact that was badly misunderstood by the monetarists who influenced early Thatcher, with disastrous results.

We still have to take the BoE on their word. There's no reason, none why the debt and the money can't be issued on the blockahin. That way, it's a level playing field. Everyone knows for sure in realtime what money is being created.
There's no one on the inside with an unfair advantage.

 

[StakerOne]

Also this misses the very important point that most money is created by commercial banks, a fact that was badly misunderstood by the monetarists who influenced early Thatcher, with disastrous results.

Cool. Let's get them onto the blockchains. Everyone seeing he money flow, means we're all equal. No insiders.

 

[StakerOne]

CBDCs are not inevitable, neither is the crypto dystopia. That's a false dichotomy you keep presenting.

Governments are better placed to employ human infiltrators than anyone else, except perhaps the biggest multinational corporations. They can certainly afford to do so.

Try infiltrating an organisation that uses many DAOs, with the money and people spread out between them.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

We still have to take the BoE on their word.

Not really, no. How would they smuggle money out into the economy without anyone noticing? Why would they want to do that?

 

[StakerOne]

The Blair government was very keen on ID cards. That failed to materialise, despite the fact that plenty of other countries have ID cards as a matter of "tried and trusted" policy.

There are a lot of different people lobbying for ID cards right now:

• People who (rightly or wrongly) want to prevent illegal immigrants from using certain services and to identify illegals.
• People who want citizens carbon emission monitored, or for citizens who want to know how many carbon credits they have used.
• People who want the government to ration certain goods to citizens.

 

[StakerOne]

Not really, no. How would they smuggle money out into the economy without anyone noticing? Why would they want to do that?

You're peddlng a strawman argument.
I just want everone to have access to the same info in realtime.
That way, there are no insiders with privilaged info they can use to their advantage to our detriment, let's have something where we are all equal.