Build your own custom and in house CRM that you know from top to bottom, which does precisely what your company needs. And keep it closed in your private network.
Because producing tools with php is VERY fast, and it runs almost as fast as a scripting language could. It's simple, and efficient. One of the language that requires the least amount of code to produce a given result. Plus the longevity of the project.
The question is why would anyone NOT want to use php in 2021 for non desktop developments?
I also prefer pure php, with no frameworks. I think it's best to build your own tool that suits you.
Bitcoin solved the double spending problem in a decentralized system. This has numerous consequences, among them the possibility of creating a currency that doesn't rely on a centralized authority, trust minimization, immutability, etc. To me this has the potential to automate many jobs.
Not relying on a centralized authority, trust minimalization, and immutability are all bad things for a monetary system. The ability to dispute and undo transactions and track fraud is a crucial feature of banking systems that blockchain eliminates by design.
Blockchain will not automate any jobs because it is technologically no different from a database. The fact that transactions are recorded digitally is not a new invention, banks have been doing that since the 60s.
Minimizing trust is not a good thing. I don't understand where this obsession with it comes from.
EVERY transaction requires trust. I sell you a pair of shoes, you pay in bitcoin, oops! the box is actually full of cat poop, too bad, sucks to be you, you can't get your bitcoin back, shouldn't have trusted me.
Trust in the transaction system is not a dangerous component of commerce. Sure, you can trust Paypal to do the transaction for you (and also get benefits like chargebacks, disputes, and ID verification in return, not to mention the sub-second transaction speed), and what happens if they betray that trust? Well that's what governments are for, the two-ton hammer of the law will make sure you get your money back.
Not to mention, blockchain is the least trustworthy transaction system of the modern age. Over a billion dollars in crypto has been stolen out of people's accounts via exchange hacks and smart contract exploits in the last ten years. This has never happened to any US bank since the introduction of FDIC in 1933.
Trust minimization doesn't equal no trust. Also the trust that a currency works as intended and that a transaction goes through isn't the same kind of trust than trusting a vendor, which is why there will probably always be other systems in place for that particular issue. Some people are interested in that because their trust has been abused by a centralized authority. And we're not only talking about the transaction systems, but also about currency.
All in all it's all about the choice and preferences of individuals.
When has the centralized authority, the banking system, ACH, Visa, Paypal, etc. ever "abused trust" by failing to record a transaction?
And why is that very minimal trust in the ability of your money to get from one account to another worth risking all your money by putting it in an account with a single point of failure with no recourse in the event of a breach?
In 88 years, no bank in the Untied States has ever lost a customer's money. To date, there are more bitcoin exchanges that have lost their users' money than there are that haven't.
There are a multitude of examples of PayPal closing or suspending accounts without the consent of the account holder. Banks are free to attach conditions and fees to accounts that are not necessarily easy to understand if one is not financially illiterate. Many people are "unbanked." See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unbanked
I think it's clear that the concept of a wallet or account that can be created at any time in almost any place almost instantly, that can send and receive something of value securely is a valuable contribution.
Those entities can abuse your trust if they decide to censor or cancel the transaction for some arbitrary reasons. Same can apply in the context of money, rules of said money can change, a person won't be necessarily always ok with that (we're talking about your own currency/savings), you don't have much control and much choice.
As a developer I appreciate the ability to skip the use of a third party, I just wish there were more users in this network, but the network grows.
And this is not about the united states in particular. I'm not from the US, I'm glad if you didn't had any problems with your monetary system and banks, and I hope it continues for the good of everyone.
The allegations in Choke Point were that banks were approving transactions they shouldn't have, without doing enough investigation to check for fraud, not that they were failing to move money from one account to another, the "problem" that blockchain is supposed to "solve".
In what way is blockchain supposed to prevent fraudulent transactions? It is impossible in blockchain to even check for fraud, because every transaction is automatically irrevocably approved by-design, no matter how fraudulent.
edit: unless, what you meant to imply, is that the banks weren't supposed to approve those illegal transactions and so the government stepped in to punish them, and that bitcoin is good because it will never deny an illegal transaction and is therefore useful for committing crimes? well then thanks for admitting it, I guess.
I think you are misinterpreting the placement of trust when you're positioning your responses. You're saying that there are advantages to a monetary system that relies on "objective" third parties to adjudicate disputes, combat fraud, and stifle illicit/illegal activity. You're not wrong that these are useful utilities. It's why I don't believe Bitcoin will ever replace them. It will certainly coexist though.
The trust Bitcoin removes is the central banking component. We rely on governments who have shown wanton disregard for the value of their respective dollars by printing limitless supplies and dancing with the risk of hyperinflation. When we save money in a given currency, it's because we trust that currency as a store of value or we park it in a vehicle that returns value or at least staves off depreciation of value (savings accounts, bonds, stocks etc.) Bitcoin allows you to park your savings in a space that does not require you to trust any particular government's monetary policy. Maybe you're entirely comfortable with the USD or the Euro but there are folks in less stable countries with which Bitcoin is a godsend.
What do you do if you're a billionaire in China and you said something bold online about an atrocity your government has just committed? You hear that you're about to be disappeared so you wish to defect to another country. How do you move your wealth? Can you move it via the existing banking digital network? No because the banking system is controlled by the government and that type of activity is red flagged and stopped. Can you move it all in cash or gold? Perhaps, but it's a huge undertaking logistically and very obviously shows your intentions.
Bitcoin allows you to relocate the entirety of your wealth anywhere in the globe with literally just your brain power. You can memorize your seed and leave to where ever you want. That is insanely powerful freedom which is the result of removing the "trusted" third party through decentralization.
The fact that so many people don't know that cash/fiat is losing value over time makes it somewhat of a problem. Furthermore the creation of cash/fiat creates high benefits to those that benefits from the newly created money first, before the money spreads and devalues its value due to inflation over time.
Inflation vs deflation debate is a complicated one, I don't know which is best in terms of enabling technical progress. One is more short termist, another is more long termist.
But fiat/inflated currencies won't go away. It's just that those kinds of currencies just tends to blow up at some point because of inflation and human nature. It's more than nice to have other options, especially digital. The idea to have some kind of worldwide standard that is open and won't change is also nice.
Not changing is nice conceptually but very bad in practice because the real world changes. It doesn’t map. It’s one of those software engineering tendencies to rewrite instead of understand and improve.
One side note though. Consider that inflation doesn’t affect the poor as the poor live paycheck to paycheck and wages in the US have kept pace with inflation. The wealthy don’t hold cash, they invest. Even cash tends to be held in a savings account with at least partially offsets inflationary pressure. Has it impacted anyone materially? I’d love to see some quantification.
In practice, I'd say "selected" lower level standards aren't changed but built upon. Standard tools also tends to not change much. web protocols, C, C++, php, those are not getting away despite many attempts to reinvent the wheel. Maybe someone will make a better wheel one day, or maybe not, but for me it's nice to have a starting point in the domain of p2p "exchange" that may or may not be adopted as a standard.
As for inflation, it makes it harder for the poor workers to become wealthier, but the issue is more when it stops being sustainable. Inflationary fiat has proven that it could fail. I personally don't trust those persons handling it and I feel that such sentiment is growing among people. There's reasons behind that. That is terrible for a currency. Governments may or may not start having a better monetary policy. We don't have guarantees and much control over it, that's the issue for me.
I'd rather avoid an economical disaster and keep a business running than having to deal with the failure of others.
Each of the languages you called out have changed dramatically to respond to the needs of users, which Bitcoin cannot, has not and will not do. You’re basically advocating for K&R C forever.
Re inflation again, has no impact on poor workers. The amount of value transferred to them in exchange for work is purely social policy and fiscal policy not monetary policy. You can improve workers mobility by supporting unions and minimum wage, not by changing the inflation characteristics of their medium of exchange they don’t get to hold on to anyways. None of your criticisms matter if you’ve invested your fiat.
Bitcoin can change depending on the need of the users, assuming it's something accepted by them, which sounds fair to me.
As for the inflation/fiat it just seems to me that you keep ignoring the possibility of a failure of such system. A failure of such system would for sure have terrible consequences and the poor unlike the wealthier will have harder times. Investing the fiat is a good idea, not something remotely popular in my country alas. Here, saving mostly means saving money at the bank (which devalues over time). No wonder why they feel they're losing purchasing power. People who work shall earn wealth simply put, not diminished wealth if they don't learn about financial tricks from someone they trust.
> Bitcoin can change depending on the need of the users, assuming it's something accepted by them, which sounds fair to me.
No? In what way.
> As for the inflation/fiat it just seems to me that you keep ignoring the possibility of a failure of such system. A failure of such system would for sure have terrible consequences and the poor unlike the wealthier will have harder times.
A collapse in finance would affect the people who have money and value, that'd be the rich who'd be affected. It would not affect those who don't have money. Like inflation.
The wealthier might lose more wealth overall (if we exclude the options they have to diversify and protect) but that doesn't mean it won't be harder for the poor. A poor by definition doesn't own much. They probably have no house, no easy way to eat, no way to transport if the system collapse and the merchants aren't interested in the little fiat they have. All in all I'm having a hard time to defend the idea that it would be harder for the wealthier to go through a collapse of the currency.
As for bitcoin, well, you can audit the commits on github if you want. There's plenty of things added lately. Miners or other entities like nodes can decide to fork the protocol into another chain (already happened, the protocol is then developed differently in those chains). Rules are subject to a consensus. Also if a user is not happy with a change, he's free to stop using it or to exchange his bitcoins for something else. All in all there's no reasons for participants to refuse modifying and improving the protocol over time.
When I see those kind of subjective opinions getting popular, I'm glad that projects like bitcoin exists. It's really a political topic, as much as economical or tech.
Just like today's "don't spread personal data on the internet and avoid forms", the future of that will be "don't use a brain-computer device/software that is not entirely open-source".
We're warned. Now what we have to do is to work on reducing the power of malicious individuals who would want to read our thoughts by force. That's a political/societal thing more than technical. Or is it? what if it was financially not worth it for anyone to do such things...
If you force to vote the many people that wouldn't vote otherwise, you will likely have results that are not representative of what the citizens want, due to skewed data. Don't expect forced voters to represent a normal vote.
I don't understand how people are jumping head first into a new technology that is so young. It reminds me of the different js frameworks fads.
Why would you use that in production, with no decent level of certainties about the status of the project long term?
Web is high level scripting, and lower level languages can be used by those high level languages to provide the required speed. The performance of those languages do increase over time with new hardware and discoveries. You can hardly do better than the concise syntax of php or python, depending on your preferences, in terms of performance vs code length.
To me programming has always been about obeying the KISS principle. Does using rust for the web corresponds to that principle? I'm unconvinced. Compare rust code to php code. php might be slower to process big operations, but big operations shouldn't be left to php anyway. php is a high level scripting language. Contribute to php and writing an extension would be a better way to go in my opinion. This or another scripting language.
Would you rather have an expert in Rust doing web programming in Rust, or a novice in JS doing web programming in JS?
The best language to use is the one you know how to use best. If you know all languages equally well that you're free to choose the ideal language for every project, then sure, that's the way to go.
For web dev, I would rather have an expert in rust obviously, but I would also rather have an expert in php who expressly choose php over rust for the sake of the kiss principle. Plus he would probably be satisfied with a lower starting salary :-)
But you are right, reality often goes differently than what's thought to be ideal, which is why "perfect" solutions sometimes doesn't gets adopted in favor of a less perfect solution, which leaves the old "perfect" solution forgotten by history.
Governments are important to protect freedom. I'm in favor of national currencies, but when it comes to the world wide web, and computers in general, I'm more comfortable with having a neutral currency not influenced by some people taking political decisions and deciding whether or not my savings can exist or not, or adding arbitrary technical limitations because of political reasons.
Projects like bitcoin are not a negative thing for regular citizens, the benefits outweighs the cons. You proposed earlier to make it illegal however, which means you're not okay with some persons having the option to control their currency in the digital space. Such opinions are the reason why bitcoin appeared in the first place, and why cryptography will probably be for a long time a beneficial tool to protect people, along with governments.
