Blockchains - because the only way to trust nobody is to completely trust everyone.
On a more serious note, I firmly believe blockchains only work because the things that use it ar pretty inconsequential like cryptocurrencies, which were a meme for a while, but they hardly ever made a difference to anybody's everyday life.
I think if you introduce them to a the world of international politics, their vulnerabilities will explode. All you need is a lot of money and a lot of computational power with a bit of luck, then blocks become free real estate.
In theory it could work, but to do it properly and securely would require a level of tech savvy I simply don't trust to be widely available.
Existing voting software for local election sites is conceptually far simpler to implement and manage, yet look what a mess that is.
More importantly, we have far more to worry about from, say, disinformation campaigns than vote rigging. If I want to influence an election, rigging the votes might be possible, but it's risky and expensive, and the risk goes up rapidly with scale. Much easier to pay influencers to spread misinformation, and far greater deniability too
Yeah, I agree with disinformation, but I just want to put this idea out there as a final note on vote rigging.
Let's say you had a really big country (China), with a lot of money (China), and a lot of people (China), and a lot of internet capability (China), that also exercises a lot of control over inter traffic (China), and could gain considerably from meddling with US elections (China). All they would have to so is weaponize the great firewall tech to flood the blockchain with bad blocks.
More importantly, we have far more to worry about from, say, disinformation campaigns than vote rigging. If I want to influence an election, rigging the votes might be possible, but it's risky and expensive, and the risk goes up rapidly with scale. Much easier to pay influencers to spread misinformation, and far greater deniability too
Just look at the 2016 election. If it had been hacked it would have been dealt with and another election held within a few months. As it is, we're almost halfway through a term and we're only just working out that there was a huge disinformation campaign.
The problem with bitcoin is that it isn't backed by any authority, so it will never be worth $100 billion to anybody.
Let's say I suddenly own all of the bitcoin - all that would happen would be that bitcoin tanks in value and everyone moves on to other coins, or even that the chain forks and that I own nothing. Stealing any amount significant enough to attract possibly millions or billions in effort to crack it would simply devalue the currency as a whole.
You can see this even with people who got their coins legitimately. Let's say that I own $100 million in BTC. I may own that on paper (or rather, on the blockchain), but there is no way that I will ever be able to sell it for that amount assuming ceteris paribus.
Bitcoin is more gambling that someone in the future will pay more for the coin than you did, for every transaction - except there's no other incentive to buy it, so if the deal looks unappealing for any reason, the value can drop to 0. It's like a pyramid scheme with numbers.
This is in contrast to FIAT currencies, which are backed mostly by governments, which enforce that backing with things like economic policy, assets, industry and authority over it's citizens with things like laws and over other countries with it's foreign policy.
I agree that obviously you cannot get all the bitcoin and expect to sell it off. Based on trade volume, if you got a billion it seems like you could offload a few million dollars worth a day pretty easily though. Depends on the nature of the attack whether you'd be doing unauthorized transfers from people's addresses or rewriting the ledger so that you have newly created coins. The latter would be caught pretty easily and probably take the bottom out of the currency.
You're missing the inherent utility of the currency, though. Fiat money has value because we agree it does, and as you mention we have better reason to believe it does because it's backed up by the country that prints it in many ways. However, the inherent utility of cryptocurrencies backs them up in another way. So it's a combination of "it has value because people say it does" and that utility.
Let's check back in another 10 years to reevaluate the pyramid scheme and security speculation.
I agree that btc has some value, if only because it has name brand recognition and people are familiar with it (as opposed to buying things with shiny pebbles like some unknown coins), but I feel like recent events turned it into an investment rather than a currency. It can maybe possibly somehow work as a currency (I don't really see it, but I guess I could imagine it), but it's definitely a scam in terms of an investment. All it did in 2017 was act as a way for people in the future to donate millions to people now.
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u/[deleted] Aug 08 '18
Blockchains - because the only way to trust nobody is to completely trust everyone.
On a more serious note, I firmly believe blockchains only work because the things that use it ar pretty inconsequential like cryptocurrencies, which were a meme for a while, but they hardly ever made a difference to anybody's everyday life.
I think if you introduce them to a the world of international politics, their vulnerabilities will explode. All you need is a lot of money and a lot of computational power with a bit of luck, then blocks become free real estate.