Recently I noticed my posts were being downvoted by
account on Leofinance. Out of curiosity for what the reasons might be, I had to ask. The curator was kind enough to respond with a reason behind the downvotes. And the reason provided was that my programming/coding related posts were better fit for programming/dev community as opposed to Leofinance.
I strongly disagree that programming topics are not relevant to the topics of money and finance. In my opinion, they are more relevant to money than ever. Of course, not all programming topics can be relevant to money. It all depends on the functions and purpose of the code or software.
When we talk about traditional forms of money before the Bitcoin, blockchain, and crypto era we need to consider the characteristics of money. We can outline the characteristics of money as following:
- Durable
- Portable
- Divisible
- Uniform/Fungible
- Acceptable
- Stable
- Limited Supply
- Hard to counterfeit
When Bitcoin became a reality, not only it improved on all of the characteristics of money but it also introduced programability as another characteristic of money. Many even call Bitcoin a programmable money. This applies not only to Bitcoin, but also many other cryptocurrencies such as Hive and Leo. In fact, programmability is in the core of the blockchain technologies and new form of money like Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
Due to innovative thinking in programming, not only we can create more secure, trustless and efficient money and financial systems, but also we can enable individual participants of such economies to interact with these financial networks programmatically and innovate in the implementation of such technologies.
For example, once I talked to a whale who was planning to delegate large amount stake to someone. This person also had programming skills. While there were many front-end solutions available to perform such a simple operation like delegating, this stakeholder chose to write their own code just for this purpose. Yes, most used front-ends are can be trusted, but they also are third parties we rely on in interacting with the blockchains. Having an ability to write one's own code to interact with the blockchain without using third party software can add another layer of security in certain situations.
We often hear, perhaps too many times the common saying - 'not your keys, not your coins'. This suggests that we need to hold our assets in wallets we own for which we have the private keys. Do we consider how often we trust third party software with our keys?
For the most part this may not be a big issue, as we know which software and front-ends we can trust. Having an option and ability to interact with blockchain without relying on such third parties, on itself is adds great value to the blockchain technology.
This doesn't mean everybody should start writing their own code to interact with the blockchain or participate in such economies. It only mean programability feature of such money and financial systems can be useful when needed and is open and available for everybody.
Most blockchain software codes are open source. These codes being open source blockchain ledgers being public adds another feature of transparency to the new money and financial systems. Sharing experiences with programming on such topics on the public blockchain with code snippets makes them open source by default. Thanks to those who share their experiences, knowledge and skills in programming, I have been able to learn as well.
Programmable money and role of programming in the future of financial systems is an interesting topic. I hope to do more research on that in the future.
What do you think? Do you think programming topics can be part of money and finance? Or do you think they belong elsewhere?
Lastly, using a little bit of programming I was able to retrieve some data from Hive blockchain. If
This account in its lifetime downvoted only six times. Four out of six were downvotes on my posts. This account only downvoted with -100% weight four times, and they all were on my posts. Below is the screenshot of the results of a simple script that gets all downvotes by this curating account.
Above results can be achieved by using HiveSQL code below:
select author, voter, weight, permlink, timestamp
from TxVotes
where voter = 'meowcurator'
and weight < 0
order by timestamp desc