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this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2023
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chapotraphouse
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You're talking about cryptocurrencies, but Zuberi is proposing making public stocks serialized and tracking trades on a public ledger. While that would prevent a lot of market abuse, its effectiveness is of course why it would never be implemented.
I understand that, but my point I perhaps didn't make very well is that the implementation on a public ledger is only as good as the legislation which forces you to use said ledger in good faith. If I can say "I'll hold a bunch of tokens in trust and you can all trade them virtually on my system, then we'll settle up later" then the tech being used to maintain the ledger doesn't matter. That's how crypto works because otherwise you'd need to pay exorbitant transaction fees for every trade because of the expense of maintaining the security of the network, I don't get how you'd stop this from being an issue with stocks.
Surely that legislation is the exact thing Zuberi is proposing? If course it would need to be free of loopholes to be effective. I think we're all agreeing
Edit lol I just saw Zuberi other comments. Zub bby this is a fantasy thought experiment that could maybe be used by some sort of far future coalition of anarchist collectives or something, it will never and could never be made into reality here
I agree, but if the anti fraud measures are legal in nature then what purpose does blockchain serve? You could take a traditional database and make it cryptographically signed and publicly verifiable and it wouldn’t need miners burning as much electricity as Ireland to maintain it because it could be maintained by organisations bound by regulations. It wouldn’t be blockchain though, or it would be a blockchain so distorted the name would cease to mean anything.
Basically if the political will existed to legislate a secure blockchain solution, the blockchain part would be necessarily redundant. That’s what I’m trying to say.
Of course it’s all academic because the political will doesn’t exist and as you allude to, capitalism will need to fall before it does.
I think this idea got started by people who don't trust the government and can see themselves being robbed from by financial institutions blatantly breaking and abusing rules, but they don't have the ideological framework to imagine something substantially different/trustworthy so they invent this technology as a bandaid fix for the specific problem of information transparency.
And the new ethereum proof of stake uses a fraction of the energy but is still considered a block chain.
Absolutely, it’s tech-fetishism (in the sense of commodity fetishism) combined with capitalist realism. They identify a very real problem, but they cannot believe that it is inherent to capitalism and can only be solved by its ending.
Edit: Proof of stake had inherent problems also, it removes the “fairness” of verification and ties the ability to do so directly to one’s investment.