Developer Hangout with BytemasterThis one includes a complete transcript, for quick skimming. Here's a sample:
40:10 Clip from LetsTalkBitcoin: Adam Levine on Ripple’s IOUs and black/whitelisting.
Andreas Antonopoulos concludes that with Ripple the cryptoeconomy has gone from free and decentralized to PayPal in three years. What are your thoughts on this clip?
Daniel Larimer: Adam described the situation perfectly and that the only problem people have is.. you know we need assets that can trade on a blockchain so that we don’t have centralized exchanges. Everything single time someone transfers their money to a centralized exchange they are creating Adam-bucks or Gox-bucks or Bitfinex-bucks, it’s no different. All we’re doing is having the exchange put assets on the blockchain ledger and once they’re on a blockchain that means their assets can be used in smart contracts, whereas when they’re on the ledger, there’s a lot more restrictions. If you’re on an exchange’s database you can only do what that database will allow, if you put it on the blockchain you can do anything the blockchain will allow .
It’s giving people the freedom to do both, The Bitcoin purists out there say, we’re not going to allow anything that has these features to even exist on the same protocol. It’s cutting off your network-effect, it’s cutting off your ability to integrate and is denying people a lot of value that they can have. I think that the mistake they make is to conflate User-Issued Assets with core assets – that’s the difference between BitShares and Ripple. Ripple actually froze XRP, for some users, but in BitShares you can never have your BTS frozen, and in that sense BitShares is like Bitcoin, and the User-Issued Assets are like assets issued on CounterParty; you wouldn’t blame Bitcoin for Counterparty allowing issuers to Freeze the asset. Same thing: You don’t blame BitShares, because it is perfectly usable even if you have user-issued assets, and what he didn’t mention was that BitShares offers another option which is the market-issued asset which gives you all the price stability of these IOUs without the restriction, without having an issuer having to comply with these laws or hold the funds. So BitShares gives an option, and he didn’t describe that option, so at most he was on a mission, but what he described was perfectly accurate.
45:00 Fuzzy: It does not seem fair that they put us in there with Ripple
Daniel Larimer: I thought that was perfectly fair, they are comparing a feature of BitShares to the entirety of Ripple.. which makes us much bigger than Ripple. The fact of the matter is that when I talk to major banks, and they tell me about their efforts to integrate with .. is they are not interested in Bitcoin at all – Bitcoin does not work for them, for settlement between banks, it doesn’t work for them to integrate with them, but they do want to integrate with crypto – they want to take advantages of cryptotechnology, so we can hold your Bitcoin, and not integrate, but if you want to integrate and play you need to have a more robust feature-set than Bitcoin supports.
We discussed this last week; I am about finding free market solutions to secure our life, liberty and property, and that means that we need to have free market solutions that give us price stability, privacy, identity. And those three things we need to have solutions for, we can’t just say “whups it’s impossible” we’re not going to do it, or “sorry, we don’t have any privacy, everything has to be public” or “sorry, no identity, everything has to be anonymous” because fact of the matter is, if anonymous currencies were the only option in the market then there are other problems that come about with kidnapping and ransoms and you know those scenarios – the free market needs to have a solution.
And I want solutions that do not require force, that don’t allow you to be coerced, and where there is no single person that can leverage you on your financial.. you need financial freedom and part of that freedom incorporates all of those things, so when someone rails against our platform having the option of having these features, you’re denying the need of having those features in a free market. It’s not the KYC process or the whitelisting process or the ability to freeze accounts that is the issue – and it’s not even companies or international companies that are the issue – it’s governments that can use coercion to compel these companies to do thing that they would not do in a free market. So I think a lot of companies in a free market, the market would probably settle on some reasonable Know Your Customer requirements – because that’s where all the money would be that’s where people feel most safe, but companies must also balance that with privacy; it will be like swiss banks where you don’t get to see who owns what and all that stuff. You can trust companies because they are competing with each other, but when you have governments coming in and coercing these companies, it’s a completely different ball-game, it’s no longer a free market.
In the free market you can trust people, because trust is a valuable commodity, and big companies are almost entirely in their trust. You buy from Apple, because of the brand, and the brand is all about the trust they have earned. And nobody is going to burn their trust to cheat one or two customers.
Right now governments and regulations create high barriers to entry which, the higher the barriers to entry, the higher these companies can abuse their power because they have already got it, but the lower the barrier to entry the more balanced the free market becomes. So I think it’s very bad to adopt a mindset that says, all these different things are just absolutely wrong and that we need complete privacy. People want complete privacy and anonymity because they are afraid of the government and companies doing that is not an issue, a blockchain that supports private entities doing that is not an issue, and fact of the matter is a blockchain that allows private individuals to self-organize and self-police without coercion is a tougher target for governments to attack than something like Bitcoin, where all you have to do is say “think of the children!” and now suddenly Bitcoin is outlawed or has negative PR, and you need to maintain a balance of these things to get wide acceptance and wide acceptance is necessary for us to actually have any freedom with cryptocurrency.
55:00 Daniel Larimer on Decentralization and Freedom
There’s always going to be blockchains that give you freedom. Obviously BitShares the core token is going to be that way. But I don’t think there is reason to fear or exclude others those who do the other things. I think bringing the others onto our platform gives users of our platform who want the privacy or don’t want to reveal their identity, the option to trade the free asset for the restricted asset, and this gives the free asset more value, versus one that does not have this option.
The fear that people have against Ripple is if they come dominant we are right back where we are today, with governments controlling access to funds just by having an account, they can cut you off financially by blacklisting you with the banks and if that becomes dominant a new system has to be bootstrapped and you have to acquire the network effect all over again, but I think that’s just going to be the nature of society. As one country evolves a tyranny a new country has to start up and there’s a revolution, and if eventually people lose sight of it and you have to do it over, and over and over again until we figure out a way to maintain freedom.
