The miners get the fees. The fed does not keep the dollars they make. They also adjust the rates to avoid things like recessions.

> Nothing except for the thing that matters: If you have something fungible instead of something with high switching costs, it makes fees go down.

The US dollar is considered fungible... Help me understand how any of this is specific to blockchain technology and not included in non-blockchain technology. Have you worked with this tech before? Also, what about things like venmo and zelle? zero fees, super fast.

> And that's why blockchains are useful! To exert the pressure needed to make that happen.

I'm not saying they are not useful. I am saying the technology behind them is irrelevant to the costs.

You usually can trust your bank, as long as you trust your government. Regulations make it difficult for banks to misbehave.

That being said, not trusting your government (which I can believe is a valid stance in some countries) is probably the only valid use case for blockchain IMO.

if bank of america does something malicious, i can prove in court very trivially through those signed receipts that they did so.

So I don't need to trust bank of america - i just need to trust the courts to charge financial institutions that provably are breaking the law.

If trust is an issue, the bank can provide cryptographically signed receipts that show they've confirmed the entire lineage of your account, in the same way a blockchain does, but they would be the only verifier. The question becomes about how the cost of the additional trust from the blockchain relates to the incentive of doing honest business. I imagine that trust cost is pretty high.

> can you have a blockchain with lower fees than payment processors currently have? And the answer appears to be yes

The transaction fee is not the only thing being paid. They are also getting mining rewards. If a blockchain has mining rewards, maybe in the form of Bitcoin Cash, then that will dilute the entire pool of Bitcoin Cash.

If something can be accomplished on the blockchain, which requires N nodes, a business can probably replicate that same objective with less than N nodes because they don't have to pay the cost of verifying that nodes are acting honestly. This business is incentivized to be honest because otherwise they lose their business. Someone has to pay those costs for the N nodes on the blockchain - who will it be? Transactions seem cheap now because funding for these blockchains is often used to subsidize costs.

You mentioned ease of use, like the use of SDKs, but blockchain technology does not enable that. All blockchain can do is that if you ask it "hey i was told the state of the world was this. is it true?" and the blockchain will tell you yes or no. If you want to provide those kinds of guarantees to customers in a reliable way, all you need is cryptography, not blockchain.

The puzzle: During the collapse, I think the biggest thing we would lose is our ability to communicate with each other in a reliable way. Like telecommunications and internet and all that. Who and what do we trust?

I imagine that before a collapse like this would happen, people would get a hint to gather as much as they can to help with their survival. Those things would include: this OS, the knowledge to load a sequence of bytes from whatever device is holding the OS to as many CPUs/controllers as possible, strategies to connect any number of arbitrary CPUs to radio devices, some knowledge of public keys and private keys. maybe all neatly organized into a handbook

The OS itself would be responsible for providing as easy an interface for any average joe to generate public/private keys, communicate with other people who have followed their same protocol, and use those public keys to build trust from communications. before the collapse happens, you may even collect a list of public keys you are likely to already trust.

The OS could maybe even have software for building communities of trust or even handling adhoc finances through (don't hate me for this) cryptocurrency.

anyways, this is all based on an assumption that the ability to communicate quickly (and build trust in a decentralized yet controllable way) is the best mitigation we have to a collapse

this answer is slightly influenced by the movie leave the world behind lol

The "New to Postgres?" link I agree has a good description and makes its exact technical features easy to grok.

Thanks for sharing, awesome examples.

Blog posts and websites that talk about web UI theory or features that demo their components natively on their site definitely stick out and is a sign of a good developer team. I understand if sites otherwise can't include them because they are using a blog or doc generating/hosting service, but they lose the opportunity of sticking out.

Though I've never used it, I think https://ziglang.org/ is a great example as it explains what makes the language unique, gives a code example right at the beginning, and makes it clear where to find more samples so I can quickly judge the features of the project without having to go through the entire docs.

Maybe this is debatable, but I feel like https://kubernetes.io/ is a counter example. It's one of my favorite tools, but the home page doesn't tell me much. I think I would have liked to see code snippets about Deployments or some sort of architecture diagram that explains what it does in terms of different well established protocols like cri-o or cgroups or something. (Honestly the k8s docs are not so bad - I'm sure there are better counter examples that are super marketing heavy).

You might disagree with my examples above, but I'm still curious to see what other people consider "good" in terms of relaying useful information.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42816585

Points: 10

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