Can anyone point me to logical thinkers in the realm of cryptocurrency? Most people I stumble onto employ logical fallacies and leaps of faith quite regularly, mostly because they have a financial incentive to convince others to “invest” in a particular currency. I’m just looking for hard truths in the space. Crypto has become too “big” to be under-informed now, IMO.

[moved from top level, original post by @Kevin Greer] I might qualify. I'm the CTO of nanopay.net, which won the Canadian Blockchain Company of the Year award in 2019. However, we aren't actually a cryptocurrency company. We use blockchain technology to digitize fiat currencies (or other assets) so that they can be used to make payments more quickly and at a lower cost. I can certainly see the original appeal of cryptocurrencies, which was to make transactions easier. The complexity of making a fully legal and compliant payment is far greater than you probably realize, with various regional know-your-customer (KYC), anti-money-laundering (AML), terrorist, compromised persons, sanctioned industry and other watchlists. As well, as the burden of suspicious transaction reporting and fraud mitigation. A simpler way to transaction would certainly be appealing, however, most cryptocurrencies just ignore these laws, making them technically illegal, as far as I can tell (but I'm not a lawyer). However, since the initial use-case, I think the whole cryptocurrency phenomenon has changed to be more of a tool for speculation/gambling/ponzi-scheming.

Sounds about right. My only credential is seriously looking into crypto for managing large escrow in order to avoid the complexity of conventional banks.

I found this article good for a sober assessment of Bitcoin in particular, by a very smart person: https://www.lynalden.com/misconceptions-about-bitcoin/ She addresses each of my own exact concerns in turn. How well it translates to other cryptocurrencies depends on their blockchain tech choices and particularly their total market capitalisation.

Maybe I can help, I used to be pretty into crypto, worked as a core researcher & developer at a $100M+ crypto company. Now I'm working on an observability platform for crypto, so that's tangentially related as well 🙂

@Florian Cäsar — note the top line in my reply. I use that boilerplate whenever I do moderation, for lack of useful tools from Slack. (But that's a tangent for another day — last year). You want to ask @Kevin Greer.

Whoops, yes, sorry; long day. Thanks.

@Florian Cäsar If your audit logs are cryptographically signed by some kind of notarization service, then they are almost the same. The only difference is that the database would still load data from the database, so if you could corrupt the database then you might be still able to make off with the money, even if the logs were tamper resistant. In our system the audit logs are the database, so it isn't possible for the database and the audit log to get out of sync. Audit logs help figure out what happened after the fact, but often, that may be too late. Also, I'm not aware of any database which has sufficiently advanced access control mechanisms to fully implement the kinds of access controls that we have/require (not just ACLs, but also limits, structuring, AML, KYC, sanctions, risk exposure, maker/checker, compliance document expiry, etc.) We store all of these rules in the blockchain as well, so that they are as tamper resistant as the transactions themselves. When crypto-exchanges are broken into, it is never the crypto that is broken, but instead the surrounding infrastructure and meta-data, but we store everything in the blockchain, which helps to avoid that problem.

@Kevin Greer by "the" blockchain, do you mean Ethereum?

No, I mean DAGGER, our own proprietary system, which isn't actually a chain, but a directed acyclic graph (DAG). This is better for us for performance reasons because we don't need to wait for the previous block to be done being signed before we can start on the new one.

@Kevin Greer So do you think “the initial use case” is being met? Has the potential to be met? Will cryptocurrency serve well as a new monetary standard? Can Bitcoin be reasoned as the cryptocurrency with the most utility? Etc. These questions are open to the floor. I’m more looking for resources that make detailed logical arguments, than informal opinions though. I’ll refrain from stating my own opinions here because the internet has enough of those already.

I think it is a legal question, not a technical one. As I've said, I think systems like bitcoin are technically illegal. Bitcoin isn't ideal because of the high energy costs, low transaction rate, and high latency. But those issues could be addressed with a different architecture. We are still distributed for reasons of fault-tolerance and high-performance, but yes, that's not the same as something like bitcoin. We're geographically distributed, but not organizationally distributed. Our target customer is organizations like central banks or governments.

I don’t think arguments concerning legality are valid (across time) because: 1. Laws change all the time, especially to adapt to new technologies. There’s nothing fundamental about a law. 2. Laws vary geographically. Are you talking about international law?

@Nick Smith 👍🏼 I'm also interested in the same, now

@Nick Smith Laws are regional. Based on the source and destination locations of money, and possibly also on any countries the money travels through on its way. It can be more specific than country. Take for example marijuana which is legal is some US states, but still illegal federally. National banks and credit card companies are prohibited from processing transactions related to marijuana purchases, but state banks aren't. I don't see governments' desires to combat tax evasion, drug trafficking, money laundering, fraud, terrorist financing, etc. abating anytime soon, and as such, I don't see them clearing all of the related laws from their books. If anything, I see things going the other way. As an example, I saw this article in the news yesterday about cracking down on people buying expensive watches with cash: https://usa.watchpro.com/prosecutors-crack-down-on-retailers-selling-rolex-watches-for-cash/. I think that if cash had been invented today, it would be outlawed.

Holding gold was made illegal in the US for a while, of course, which is a "stronger" currency/store-of-value than fiat paper.

May also be worth looking into the work of Mark Miller and the folks at Agoric. Their work predates Bitcoin. https://agoric.com/papers/

Thanks. They do seem to be selling a blockchain product though, so how can I trust that they're not going to be wasting my time trying to convince me to buy into their tech?

Yeah, I know what you mean. Mark’s been working on this kind of stuff for a long time (http://erights.org/) but money has a corrupting influence 😄

Agoric looks interesting. I wasn't aware that Mark had left Google.

I just listened to a podcast that had Mark on, he started a company in the 90's called ‘Agorics’ to work on similar problems, ‘Agoric’ seems like take 2 (at least)

After spending an hour looking into Agoric, I can now confidently dismiss it as uninteresting to me. (The starting point for the future internet & economy is not yet-another-Javascript-engine, for starters.)

Fair enough 🙂 Sorry to waste the hour. Although I’m not sure what you mean by “yet-another-Javascript-engine”, Mark’s on the ECMAscript board and I believe the changes necessary for Agoric to function have made it into the latest version of regular JS.

Yeah sure, but if you’re building a new infrastructure for computing, you’d ideally make it language-independent. Intel doesn’t make JavaScript CPUs. I think they’ve picked the wrong level of abstraction.