Crypto and its problems

“Line Goes Up – The Problem With NFTs” - Folding Ideas

and

[M]arkets are distributed systems.

Even though there are, in fact, very strict regulators and regulations, I can still enter into a contract with you without ever telling anyone. I can buy something from you, in cash, and nobody needs to know. (Tax authorities merely want to know, and anyway, notifying them is asynchronous and lossy.) Prices are set through peer-to-peer negotiation and supply and demand, almost automatically, through what some call an “invisible hand.” It’s really neat.

As long as we’re in the continuous control region.

As long as the regulators are doing their job.

Here’s what everyone peddling the new trendy systems is so desperately trying to forget, that makes all of them absurdly expensive and destined to fail, even if the things we want from them are beautiful and desirable and well worth working on. Here is the very bad news:

Regulation is a centralized function.

The job of regulation is to stop distributed systems from going awry.

Because distributed systems always go awry

…

I find myself linking to this article way too much lately, but here it is again: The Tyranny of Structurelessness by Jo Freeman. You should read it. The summary is that in any system, if you don’t have an explicit hierarchy, then you have an implicit one.

Despite my ongoing best efforts, I have never seen any exception to this rule.

Even the fanciest pantsed distributed databases, with all the Rafts and Paxoses and red/greens and active/passives and Byzantine generals and dining philosophers and CAP theorems, are subject to this. You can do a bunch of math to absolutely prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that your database is completely distributed and has no single points of failure. There are papers that do this. You can do it too. Go ahead. I’ll wait.

<several PhDs later>

Okay, great. Now skip paying your AWS bill for a few months.

Whoops, there’s a hierarchy after all!

Tô Minh Sơn’s comment on apenwarr:

“Men prefer to will nothingness than to not will”

and also pointed me to chainalysis’s ranking of crypto adoption with Vietnam being on top