"Solving double spending" doesn't represent "the entire financial system" but it does represent the entirety of why we have miners and stakers, which seems to be the main point of contention by those who describe themselves as "anti-crypto."
I don't know how this got written without including the words "double spending." I'm shocked how many people have opinions about cryptocurrency without reading Satoshi's surprisingly accessible Bitcoin whitepaper: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
Preventing double spending is the reason for all of this hullaballoo, no more, no less. It's easy to create a distributed ledger, but hard to create one where you cannot double spend, hence mining and staking.
You can't double spend physical cash because you can't give someone else a physical object and have it too.
You can't double spend your fiat because your bank says to your counterparty "trust us bro, he didn't double spend" and your bank is pretty trustworthy.
You can't double spend your bitcoin because to do so you'd have to have more than half of the computing power in the world, which is pretty tough to do, and even if you did actually succeed at double spending it would render your investment worthless, because all transactions are public and someone might notice the double spend and the value of bitcoin would plummet.
Soon, you won't be able to double spend your Ethereum because if you did, everyone would notice, point it out to everyone in the network that you double spent, and then everyone would automatically slash your Ethereum stake to zero going forward and carry on without you.
That's all. It has nothing fundamentally to do with voting or economic distribution or proving ownership of scare resources or anything like that. It's about preventing double spending on a distributed ledger of transactions.
If you solve double spending, then yes, your cryptocurrency will work.
I'm a fan of Building a Second Brain too, and I've taken a lot of inspiration from it. In fact, the precise reason I'm working on this project is because "organizing information as a background process" feels a bit too much like navel gazing to me and things are a lot more fun when the process includes interacting and sharing with other people.
The particular way I'm attempting to encourage publishing is an editor that lets you lay out your stuff as a directed graph instead of as a linked list. The reader navigates the graph by clicking on hyperlinks that take them in tangential directions that may or may not converge with the main thread.
The inspiration for this includes those really good conversations you have with your friends where you go completely off topic but in an interesting way, and also the experience of going down a wikipedia or tvtropes rabbit hole that consumes hours of your time.
It's a tough problem because your eyes and ears are only able to process information serially, but concept-space is a complex multi-dimensional snaggle. How do we bridge that gap? The conventional answer is "good writing" but that's really tough to do. Eugene Wei didn't feel up to the task with the ideas in the OP, for example. I'm hoping that by giving people more room to play with how they structure their thoughts and ideas "writing skill" will be less of a constraint on human communication. I definitely don't think I've hit an optimal solution yet but it is a very fun problem to work on and talk about!
This comment is a slightly tangential shameless plug, but I just want to point out that I loved the structure of this essay. There were a lot of great little ideas that I don't think would have seen the light of day in a more traditional sort of blog post.
> All the points I wanted to cover seem hyperlinked in a sprawling loose tangle. This could easily have been several standalone posts. I've been stuck on how to structure it.
> This piece is long, but if you get bored in any one section, you can just scroll on the next one; they're separated by horizontal rules for easy visual scanning. You can also read them out of order. There are lots of cross-references, though, so if you skip some of the segments, others may not make complete sense. However, it’s ultimately not a big deal.
I've long wondered how many essays don't get published because the author struggles to generate a "through line." Sometimes organizing ideas is harder than coming up with them. This is certainly a problem I struggle with.
I've been working on software[1] that encourages you to publish ambitious online media even if it's a bit disjointed. Currently, only me and my friends and family are using it because it is very rough around the edges, but it is good enough that I personally use it every single day.
If this sounds interesting to any HN comment readers I'd love to give you a beta code or a live demo to hear your thoughts. Send me an email at [email protected]