wild greens

Well-known member
I only know about this use for crypto! but would imagine similar ideas will be sat on plenty of shorts and futures right now and fucking up all kinds of people.

Any escrow or middleman type escapade is deep in the shit right now
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
If you make a purchase on a (drug) market then the crypto value is held at the time of transaction and unless the recipient makes the decision to finalise early- i.e. You trust your online dealer implicitly and pay straight away- the fee is held in escrow by the market till the recipient confirms delivery.

So- if you bought *something* on Saturday it cost you 0.0303xmr, you can receive it on Tuesday and you still release 0.0303xmr. What happens in terms of value of the coin can really fuck the shop or work in their favour

It's also why exit scams can be so profitable to the dodgy market admin or whatever- they've got thousands of transactions sitting in middleman wallets all the time

Lot of rappers on twitter moaning about bitcoin right now
Thanks for the breakdown. I wonder if decentralized exchanges would ever get mainstream traction, which may remove the opportunity for front-running. Although I also hear there are opportunities on the transaction-verifying side of things, opportunities to strategically order pending transactions to benefit... someone ("miner extractable value"?).

I was listening to this podcast about it yesterday, and the guy was saying how centralized exchanges have scalability issues when it comes to funding (assuming they don't just scale up their fees accordingly), and that there could be a market for a platform that provides non-custodial wallets (like Exodus), but also with a backdoor functionality to account for people losing private keys.

I didn't fully understand the premise being pitched, but I think it entails having a backup wallet address that serves to store the private information pertaining to the main address. Also not sure how a platform would facilitate this kind of safety net, but it doesn't seem too difficult.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Some startups looking for solutions regarding user experience and accessibility: FIO protocol, Celo, Argent (I think), Unstoppable Domains, maybe more.

One of the major hurdles. Alphanumeric strings are chunky and unwieldy. Also, haven't looked into the prevalence of clipboard malware, nor do I understand malware in general, but such things only complicate matters further.
 

catalog

Well-known member
If you make a purchase on a (drug) market then the crypto value is held at the time of transaction and unless the recipient makes the decision to finalise early- i.e. You trust your online dealer implicitly and pay straight away- the fee is held in escrow by the market till the recipient confirms delivery.

So- if you bought *something* on Saturday it cost you 0.0303xmr, you can receive it on Tuesday and you still release 0.0303xmr. What happens in terms of value of the coin can really fuck the shop or work in their favour

It's also why exit scams can be so profitable to the dodgy market admin or whatever- they've got thousands of transactions sitting in middleman wallets all the time

Lot of rappers on twitter moaning about bitcoin right now
 

wild greens

Well-known member
The problem with the decentralised holding middleman transaction and/or your trust contract is these concepts of the coins supposedly being worth rapidly increasing amounts in a varying inconsistent market. If you're constantly making gains on it and viewing it as a currency then it needs to be a lot more stable, as boring as the idea is to people who are losing money as it stabilises into realistic current worth

I think BTC will spike again after the dip but eth seems to have a lot more potential to gain back rapidly
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
I think the defi term for that is "impermanent loss" but I could be missing something. If you are providing liquidity for a trade pair, and one of the assets in the pair appreciates, you are missing out on the additional exchange value between the now-appreciated asset and the one you paired it with. Price fluctuation of trade pair assets might also have ramifications on the on the "liquidity provider tokens" you get in exchange for parking your assets in the liquidity pool.

But then, I just heard about this so-called dynamic market maker, which is like an automated market maker but also manages to account for fluctuation in the value of the trade pair assets. Not sure how its mechanics differ.

As of now, I'm with you in regards to BTC and ETH. I personally have more invested in the latter, because I believe in it, but there are downsides. One of the developers (Van Loon) claimed they were around six months away from transitioning to proof-of-stake, whereas other blockchains like Cardano are already there but don;t yet have an established ecosystem of dapps (Cardano doesn't yet support smart contracts, to my knowledge).

But we should keep a look out for what new dapps are being built (permissionlessly?) on Ethereum. We just need a killer dapp or two to help fill an otherwise largely speculative bubble. Plus, however much DeFi grows in the coming couple years.

Perhaps there can be a ride-sharing app built with smart contracts that may give drivers more per mile, and the contract would be automatically executed when the passenger arrives at the chosen location (GPS data needed, looking at you Chainlink).
 

polystyle

Well-known member
I think the defi term for that is "impermanent loss" but I could be missing something. If you are providing liquidity for a trade pair, and one of the assets in the pair appreciates, you are missing out on the additional exchange value between the now-appreciated asset and the one you paired it with. Price fluctuation of trade pair assets might also have ramifications on the on the "liquidity provider tokens" you get in exchange for parking your assets in the liquidity pool.

But then, I just heard about this so-called dynamic market maker, which is like an automated market maker but also manages to account for fluctuation in the value of the trade pair assets. Not sure how its mechanics differ.

As of now, I'm with you in regards to BTC and ETH. I personally have more invested in the latter, because I believe in it, but there are downsides. One of the developers (Van Loon) claimed they were around six months away from transitioning to proof-of-stake, whereas other blockchains like Cardano are already there but don;t yet have an established ecosystem of dapps (Cardano doesn't yet support smart contracts, to my knowledge).

But we should keep a look out for what new dapps are being built (permissionlessly?) on Ethereum. We just need a killer dapp or two to help fill an otherwise largely speculative bubble. Plus, however much DeFi grows in the coming couple years.

Perhaps there can be a ride-sharing app built with smart contracts that may give drivers more per mile, and the contract would be automatically executed when the passenger arrives at the chosen location (GPS data needed, looking at you Chainlink).
Hear you , think many ppl are looking - waiting for that killer dapp.
Have heard about their dapps for so long now ...
Like to believe it , but have to see it
Meeting those guys, i had doubts
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Hear you , think many ppl are looking - waiting for that killer dapp.
Have heard about their dapps for so long now ...
Like to believe it , but have to see it
Meeting those guys, i had doubts
I think the skepticism is perfectly warranted. The only examples of dapps that come to mind presently are either A) useful but not killer, such as Orchid, or B) promising but confined to the world of crypto/defi (much of the innovation pertaining to blockchain tech seems greatly useful... for advancing blockchain tech).

I think the whole ontology of decentralization may need to seep into the developer's collective unconscious. That said, we're over a decade into this space, no? So it could be that this process is well underway, perhaps nascent.
 

polystyle

Well-known member
From the mind(s) of the programmer to the minds of the developers.
Yes, it has been a minute !
And the more x Ethereum people i see doing their own new(er ) thing ...

Having worked w a engineer or 3 , it's one thing to show the world your ' Hey look i made something cool' ( what they think is cool ) and another then have it be adopted. Sometimes it can happen.

Decentralization ... yes, like the promise of blockchain, what is the end ?
Society / culturally was USSR's dissolution a hint of decentralization to come ?
And say, was the creation of the Euro exactly the wrong thing to do , then ?
All is being played out >>>
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Decentralization ... yes, like the promise of blockchain, what is the end ?
My best guess so far: we'll have a chimerical blockchain layer of the internet (and by extension internet of things) comprised of permissionless and permissioned networks. Seems like the banks prefer the permissioned/private blockchains (Bank of America, I believe, is working with Paxos here).

A better way of smoothing out risk in the ever more dangerous cyberwar landscape. Asymptotically instant transaction time.

Perhaps a more secure systemic handling of personal data (IDs as NFTs; having a wallet associated with your personal data, accessible to you, the government, and whomever you grant access).

Perhaps a better global infrastructure for loans and insurance, especially for those to whom the major global financial entities do not cater (edit: or gouge, if they do cater). Smart contracts hooked up to satellite or drone surveillance, monitoring construction progress, crop growth, wildfire rates, other natural disasters etc.

All such data is to be fed into smart contracts, which is itself a decentralized and competitive process thanks to Chainlink (disclosure edit: which I invest in), bringing us closer and closer to an objective metahuman arbiter of human contracts. A premise at the intersection, perhaps, of the efficient market hypothesis and artificial intelligence.

Financial exploitation will be less and less at the discretion of private actors who can get away with it, unless there is some way to game smart contracts that I am not aware of yet.

I still would like to understand if Ethereum, once it gets to Ethereum 2.0 and beyond, could support permissioned "sidechains" (a sort of fractal blockchain I suppose) to cater to the legacy incumbents who are increasingly exhibiting a demand for it.

If Ethereum can do this, then it is all the more poised to become the Web3 incumbent, in an open source fashion, unless the likes of Amazon can crank out a proprietary competitor, which to me seems implausible.

(edit: what seems more likely, however, is that the likes of Paxos will continue to cater to legacy incumbents, and there will be "inter-blockchain" protocols such as Cosmos (which I invest in) or Polkadot (which I do not invest in) to connect different, otherwise siloed blockchains. That said, I could be misunderstanding something here.)

Cardano is taking care of Africa, which, as a set of states, is quite arguably better poised to adopt this new tech given the apparent relative absence lack of financial incumbency and regulatory framework there to begin with.

The Ethereum/Cardano race is one to watch, even if one doesn't have a stake in either (but I am invested in both, so there is my bias).
 
Last edited:

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Also, just started looking into Hedera Hashgraph. Very interesting, seems to have solid leadership vision. Technically not a blockchain, but rather its own particular strain of distributed ledger technology (I may be better able to explain it once I study it some more).

One of the talks that Leemon Baird gave had him mentioning that their clientele was primarily interested in private ledger systems, which makes sense, given the control that is afforded in a permissioned/private network.

For those who could benefit from clarification: As I understand it, a permissionless network is one wherein anyone can download run a node, having downloaded the code (?), while a permissioned network is one wherein thereis either a fixed set of governing nodes, or at least requires a node to be "invited" to the inner circle.

The governance pertains to algorithm updates. In permissionless, there just needs to be some majority consensus, which I presume differs from blockchain to blockchain. In permissioned, a more centralized arrangement, the updates are less democratic. Each one presumably has its use cases.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
A working prediction, based on what information I;ve been exposed to. It would be a step up, even in terms of privacy, from the manner in which personal data is handled now, from my experience.

If I understand correctly, Atala Prism is doing this already in Ethiopia, on the Cardano blockchain.

 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
It could perhaps be structured in such a way that the citizen would be able to withdraw their personal data from the various businesses that utilize it, provided there are mechanisms in place to prevent duplication of that information.

I lack the cryptographic knowledge to elaborate the technics here, but as far as I can tell a solution is reasonably within the realm of possibilities.

And in the case of Ethiopia, the initiative is based on education credentials, but if we generalize the premise it could work for driver's license/ID, passport, other individual profile documents, degrees/credentials, etc.
 

catalog

Well-known member
I should just call you Stan like everyone else does but I feel like I've got to stick to the name I coined for you
 

polystyle

Well-known member
It could perhaps be structured in such a way that the citizen would be able to withdraw their personal data from the various businesses that utilize it, provided there are mechanisms in place to prevent duplication of that information.

I lack the cryptographic knowledge to elaborate the technics here, but as far as I can tell a solution is reasonably within the realm of possibilities.

And in the case of Ethiopia, the initiative is based on education credentials, but if we generalize the premise it could work for driver's license/ID, passport, other individual profile documents, degrees/credentials, etc.
The promise of decentralization cont.

Big picture ... One will be able to 'take your data with you', be it via a blockchain or next gen blockchain promise kept dev.
We have been working on the next gen platform ( 'Platform X' for the moment )
for the past 3 years and w the timing of this moment, just may snag backing.
Things were feeling ' well, we were too early with this' to now the feedback is more " Oh interesting, ambitious and timely".

If it pops off, invites will be sent as there will be lots of 'space, room to wander, grow, live on / in, PtP sales and No ads : )
 
Last edited:

constant escape

winter withered, warm
The promise of decentralization cont.

Big picture ... One will be able to 'take your data with you', be it via a blockchain or next gen blockchain promise kept dev.
It sure seems like more and more of the major financial institutions across the globe are considering Central Bank Digital Currencies, which doesn;t necessarily mean blockchain-based but, you know, its s step in such a direction.

Thinking specifically of the Bank for International Settlements, the central bank of central banks.

Beyond CBDC's, identification cards seem like a logical next step. I'd say you're right, that governmental and institutional adoption is looking riper and riper.
If it pops off, invites will be sent as there will be lots of 'space, room to wander, grow, live on / in : )
You mean, invites for us at Dissensus? As beta-testers? I could just be wishfully projecting here, but if I am understanding correctly, I would be honored.
 

polystyle

Well-known member
It sure seems like more and more of the major financial institutions across the globe are considering Central Bank Digital Currencies, which doesn;t necessarily mean blockchain-based but, you know, its s step in such a direction.

Thinking specifically of the Bank for International Settlements, the central bank of central banks.

Beyond CBDC's, identification cards seem like a logical next step. I'd say you're right, that governmental and institutional adoption is looking riper and riper.

You mean, invites for us at Dissensus? As beta-testers? I could just be wishfully projecting here, but if I am understanding correctly, I would be honored.
Whew , once backed, designed and into testing - you got it ce.
There would be also invites to a pre lim user group , in the mix with all kinds , global sorts.
The music friends alone would be enough !

The 4 legs of our projected chair would be Music /
Art ( including Big Art ) /
Games ( including anime, comics, figurines ++ ) /
Women's Services ( including ' women only ' +++ )
 
Top