You can program anything up to and including judicial oversight and interaction rescission into a smart contract. Not all existing laws make sense or have a positive effect on this ecosystem. Many have a negative effect, speaking from experience.

I will not be able to convince someone who’s stubbornly ignoring everything I’m saying. Go waste someone else’s time.

You can mimic any existing setup for tracking deeds and similar, or invent new ones, with the added quality that they can’t be doctored. Once something is recorded, it’s recorded for good.

What do they “make”? They control for the risks in social economic interaction with potentially adversarial parties. Ethereum is proof of stake, it doesn’t burn up tons of fossil fuels. And the contracts aren’t subject to human interpretation after being authored, they’re deterministic at the protocol level (save for the entire network deciding to revoke the contract).

Why are you making fundamental mischaracterizations of the technology while acting like an expert? What you’re doing is dishonest.

Yes, work. Smart contracts are designed, programmed and, if they’re done right, rigorously audited for correctness. Then you have user-facing interface and everything surrounding that as well. Look at the documentation of AAVE, for one example.

And this isn’t even getting into the protocol level (L1 or L2) work either. Bitcoin was relatively simple, Ethereum is not. They’ve spent years crafting these systems to function for PoS, L2 support, sharding, rollups, etc., at scale.

Yes, for the limited subset of ERC20s or whatever you describe as “ponzicoins”. Things that actually do nothing, particular not doing anything more than L1 cryptos but “this is yet another token”, are not really adding any value. But I would be really surprised if you can name any more complex contracts than ERC20s (or ERC721s), which is where the work in the space actually goes.

I reckon most of that already is. A real estate escrow smart contract is maybe 200-300 lines long in Solidity, depending of course on what it supports (contingencies and such). You may want to actually go look around, because there’s I don’t know how many millions of lines of Solidity already written. It doesn’t all get as much publicity as NFTs.

“Greatest fool” description relies on the precept of its utility or demand returning to zero in a near-future timeframe. If people have utility for “the thing”, that won’t be the case.

Also they have some smart contract capabilities which I suppose Ethereum people think are important. But I’ve never seen any practical use for that stuff.

Anything you need complicated multi-party interactions for that you want guarantees on. Real estate escrow comes to mind first. Depository accounts with yield. An immutable archive of records. Multi-signature corporate treasuries. Whatever. It’s programmable money. It’s not even necessarily monetary, because smart contracts can just deal with arbitrary data.

Never impressive to see a technical audience shit all over Ethereum for internet points. By far the least scammy crypto people have actually dedicated years into building something real on.

If you look at the entire span of all cultures and all history, I think there’s tons of random examples of essentially one form or another of religious or ideological thinking that caused massive atrocities. Genghis Khan comes to mind as someone responsible for millions of deaths through, as the author of your first link puts it, a kind of “mouth with a bottomless pit” mentality of devouring everything. Hitler is distinguished in part by the mechanization of his efforts, but that is true of every imperialist genocide of the 20th and 21st centuries. The people he killed in open genocide don’t even scratch a tenth of the total killed by both sides in that same war - which really begs the question, what is the distinction between war and genocide? Combatants vs. non-combatants? If someone is talked into fighting, does their life suddenly stop having any value? Is it less a crime in ethical terms, not legal terms, to kill an average soldier? It gets justified by saying the other side of a conflict had some devastatingly evil ideology, but is killing someone actually the best way to deal with them having evil ideas? I’m more inclined to take the stance uh, I think Steinbeck said, “All war is a symptom of man’s failure as a thinking animal.” The deepest evil is the people leading us to slaughter each other, not the people we’re slaughtering.

Bro… Not historical Nazis? You mean the ones that committed the most despicable evils in all of humanity’s written history?

Just reading that a few times and I think, how exactly do you determine that? The number of deaths? Because the genocide of indigenous people in the “Americas” exceeds it several times over. You think about the “Congo Free State”, it had deaths on the same order of magnitude and a system of total enslavement and mass mutilations/executions based on failing to meet work quotas. Not to trivialize one, but to make sure others aren’t ignored. When it comes to the genocide conversation, it seems like European imperialism in Africa just gets completely left out.

Had that same conversation with a coworker many years back. He pitched the “time is money” theory. Really, I’m salaried, this is off-hours work, I actually find it interesting and enjoyable, and save a fortune doing it, so that theory doesn’t apply very well.

You’re kinda stretching it there.

If you go on there concern trolling and trying to start shit, I bet you will get banned.

But, fun fact, communists actually are not a fan of fascists.

That’s the part where it gets really interesting. The right mindset when approaching those tasks means doing the research to do the job professionally, yourself. You meet that threshold, and actually start going through and reworking what was already done - you start to notice all the little shortcuts and weird decisions and bodge jobs that the professionals in the past did. And now, armed with the knowledge and basic tools to do the job - you’re not talking about $200 to pay a plumber to come out and fix one leaky elbow on your pipes - you know how to isolate it, drain it, cut it, deburr it, flux it, solder it, and clean it up, for like $3.00 in parts (and for what I said specifically, a minimum of maybe $50 in tools - cutter, blowtorch/propane, deburring tool, flux brush, emery cloth). For example. And for what could be a $5000 job, you can do it yourself for maybe $1000 in materials.

There are actual methods that the professionals have developed to be certain they did the job correctly - you just have to learn them.

It’s all doable with some basic tools and a little bit of willingness to endure suffering, that’s my point. And for the more specialized ones, wading through documentation and codes enough to do a job correctly (can’t emphasize that enough). Framing, roofing, plumbing, electric, siding, insulation. Can save a fortune and know exactly how well the job was done.

Try fixing something major, with dramatic improvements to your quality of life.

https://lemmy.world/c/world actually.

In the past week I caught a 7 day ban for “misinformation” (x3, then for reposting a link to the mod logs, “skirting the rules”, “repeated offenses” etc.) from /c/WorldNews for accusing Democrats of being complicit in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. An actual fact - tens of billions of dollars in arms sent to an ongoing genocide/ethnic cleansing by Biden. No problems like that on lemmy.ml. That really says it all for me. Lemmy’s basically just a fediverse reddit, with the same mod structure - if mods abuse their power, and admins don’t keep them in check, it’s time to ditch the instance.

By the way, Lemmy itself was created by Dessalines, the admin of lemmy.ml. Who I collaborated with briefly on building some of the UI that you’re using right now to read this. Very thorough guy.

“Essential” is your criteria? To be clear, you’re saying that anything that’s an actual human need, should be state run?