Those involved have been warning of the insecurity of smaller chains for a long time now, and they aren't representative of the entire ecosystem.
No it's not. Programming is a tool to create programs with. Block chain is a technological buzzword being used (and implemented) wildly inappropriately.
51% attacks are a fundamental vulnerability in decentralization. It would be like inventing programming when everyone pretends bugs don't exist at all. Bugs are inherent to the task, just like blockchains have a very narrow set of use cases, but everyone's too busy flying too close to the sun.
The extreme vast majority is trash, manipulative, and awful in most every way. Not to mention the charlatans and fanboys that hype it as able to do everything and anything perfectly.
But the few that use it well are doing fairly well, and innovation is happening. You shouldn't loop the entire ecosystem as one big unit making terrible choices together.
What examples of good use of blockchains are you thinking of?
* (depending on your stance on personal liberty) censorship resistant, pseudonymous e-cash/e-gold (Bitcoin)
If the whole concept is trustless decentralized (fill in the blank ???) profit, meaning that you can make currency or a timestamp or whatever else using blockchain,
and a sufficiently large force can basically fork off of an earlier block, race ahead in secret and then take over the currency or timestamps or whatever else the blockchain's about,
does this not render the replaced fork useless? As in, if it's money it doesn't count and you lost everything, if it's a timestamp it's not proof because it's not the blockchain anymore, etc?
I guess this is one way to make it so raw power is the only thing that matters, expressed as 'ability to marshal computer resources on a massive scale', which costs money and so it becomes circular. Power/money gives you power/money and so on. Given enough power/money you can simply take over Bitcoin: could be happening right now.
Nice :P
Bitcoin not only doesn’t deliver on those claims, it’s actively dangerous because it leaves an immutable public record of your activities, as numerous court cases have shown. There’s a reason why the mob doesn’t publish their ledgers.
“Censorship resistant” is also a complex claim since the network is trivially blocked as a whole, and the inability to comply with legal demands means that anyone legitimate faces risks which will encourage them to stop participating, reducing the defense for allowing it at all and removing the traffic everyone else is hoping to hide behind.
It's censorship resistant in its use. It only becomes an issue in terms of actually cashing out -- but that's not necessarily required.
That's why I said it's dangerous: telling people a word which sounds like anonymous but actually means “irrepudiable proof of identity” is setting them up to make decisions under the belief that they are closer to anonymous than they actually are. Given how proponents like to proclaim benefits for people in countries with repressive governments, that's just irresponsible.
> It's censorship resistant in its use. It only becomes an issue in terms of actually cashing out -- but that's not necessarily required.
What does that even mean? A government can block it easily because the design requires you to be on the network and the lack of anonymity means that anyone who attempts to bypass those restrictions has valid reasons to fear reprisal.
"the network" is a concept that doesn't necessarily mean "the public internet". Also, it really doesn't require everyone to be on the network -- it requires a network to exist. And pseudonymity can be "good enough".
The point was that the entire ecosystem can exist independent of cashing it out to fiat -- that point can be somewhat controlled, but it's not necessarily required.
Which is to say, it's not good enough for anything which matters, especially in any case where censorship is a relevant concern.
> "the network" is a concept that doesn't necessarily mean "the public internet". Also, it really doesn't require everyone to be on the network -- it requires a network to exist.
This is similarly meaningless: if you're talking Bitcoin, you're by definition saying you need to be on the regular internet and if you're running some private network you either have the exact same problems with trust & monitoring or you don't need a blockchain in the first place because you have some other trusted communications channel.
There are a variety of ways to have private transactions across either the public internet or other networks. There are a variety of coins that use tor, for instance.
It doesn't have to be bitcoin either.
My point was that if you can avoid cashing out to fiat using well known gateways, anonymity isn't difficult to preserve. It only becomes an anonymity problem if you are careless or if you cash out using known KYCd gateways.
This means you can't use it for currency transactions, with anyone you don't trust, or on any system which might be compromised by the authorities you're trying to evade. If you ever make a mistake, all of that not only won't help you but will be strong evidence of intention. There are very few threat models where “use cash” is not a much safer answer.
It means you need to operate inside the cryptocurrency ecosystem instead of counting on cashing out all the time, or you simply use any of the many non-regulated means to cash in and out of the ecosystem.
That's becoming more and more possible to do.
None of which has any bearing on the problems I mentioned earlier. If you're worried about a repressive government, the odds are high that other people in the system are compromised and will help reveal your identity. Those “many non-regulated means to cash in and out” are similarly not readily available and extremely likely to be compromised as well. People sometimes act like mixers solve this problem but they aren't effective against attackers who can see lots of traffic and even if they worked as well as advertised, simply using one is going to be considered proof that you were doing something illegal and attempting to hide it.
Finally, as we're already seeing you have the problem that in a repressive country simply being able to maintain software security is an unsolved problem: consider what the odds are that someone will manage to maintain perfect security of their devices and client trying to find software which is considered illegal and will attract attention simply by searching for it.
Read anything about the history of people living under regimes with black market economies and ask what a blockchain is adding other than a gift-wrapped transaction history for the authorities. It's simply irresponsible to tell people that you're not exposing them to more risk in the hope that it'll make some money for you.
Somehow, people in China still manage to get on the internet, how do you think that happens? As it happens, the internet was designed to route around censorship, and it's done a very good job so far.