It’s not still the early days of blockchain
blog.mollywhite.net
blog.mollywhite.net
1) a way to part greater fools from their money until the hype has died out
2) a hot topic to drive clicks and discussions for nerds and, increasingly, the tech press, from other more pressing issues that exist in terms of tech and culture and finance
In other words, its a bullshit scam, can we please move on already?
This recent NYTimes piece takes that approach, though none of the examples are that impressive: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/03/style/what-can-you-actual...
(Disclosure I own Bitcoin and Ethereum)
I thought about why so many centralizsed systems failed, or failed to be built, for streamlining processes in the real world. I think that it's because typically such systems would be built on SQL databases and backend servers that are prone to hacks and downtimes, and the APIs built by different developers often cannot integrate with one another.
What if, instead of databases and custom APIs, a blockchain with smart contracts is used? What if we can also sign documents such as receipts with hashes that can be verified off-chain and off-line? We'd have a fault-tolerant, always-available systems, and also a "unified" protocol in which other systems can interface to.
Instead of having different databases and APIs that are hard to integrate with one another, a blockchain could be the central storage and transactions handler that different systems interface to.
The PCR test system would be something along the line of: - Booking through a smart contract, paying the PCR test fee, and obtaining a receipt signed by the contract in the form of a hash - Upon arrival in the test center, they check the validity of this signature offline by using a public key to verify your payment. - An identification service can keep a hashed version of your personal data on-chain. You can provide your name, DOB, place of birth etc, and this can be checked against the identification service by decoding the hashed data with a one-time key you generated
There's no DB that can be hacked or go corrupt, no BE servers that can be DDOS'd.
There are of course questions to be answered. But I see many use cases in my everyday life.
It's not pretend like it's not a solved problem. It's just that you're trying to eliminate the central provider in this case and you want to replace that with a blockchain which is excruciatingly slow
There are trade offs, but having data and core business logic in an open and transparent network would allow for better interoperability imo. Not saying there aren't fundamental issues to be solved with using blockchains, but it's a new path to be explored.
The speed of the blockchain doesn't necessarily have to be slow. It depends on how decentralised and safe it needs to be. It's possible to create a "private" blockchain for some use cases. I don't see web3 as open in the sense of open to the whole world, but open to whoever the stakeholders are.
That's a common refrain that seems to associate blockchains with standards and common APIs, it doesn't resist closer inspection. To take your example, I can easily design two PCR test systems completely incompatible with each other, and leaving no way for anyone else to implement a compatibility layer between these two, even if they both use the same blockchain.
There are various ERC20 tokens that should in theory implement the same interface, but turn out to be subtly incompatible with each other because of how imprecise the specification is. Standardization is hard, even when people try, and blockchain doesn't even enforce a modicum of effort in this direction.
Another way to see it: as a software development constraint, "the system has to live in a blockchain" is akin to "it has to be written in C" or "it has to use functional programming": maybe the end result will be more alike, maybe it'll be easier for a dev to understand one system based on the knowledge of the other, but that's pretty much it.
> There's no DB that can be hacked or go corrupt, no BE servers that can be DDOS'd.
Smart contracts can be vulnerable (and ensuring they are not is very expensive, if possible at all), private keys get lost and some external system has to update the smart contract (you can never really get rid of all external systems, something lives outside the blockchain, if only the human operators), transaction fees are high enough that getting protection from a DDOS mitigation service would be cheaper than using a blockchain in the first place.
I am also not arguing that incompatible APIs will disappear with blockchain usage. But things like an EVM can be used as a template to build underlying blockchains to provide a common datastore and execution layer for multiple systems to work together. It is harder to achieve with traditional SQL databases, which shouldn't be publicly accessible.
Also an advantage I thought of is it would be harder in this case for corruption to take place in the PCR testing regime since all transactions are immutable, and transparency ensures that the public would be able to check against those if they so wish. A closed system would allow the government or participating platforms to manipulate data records for their benefit, with less chance of scrutiny.
I agree with your points about the vulnerability of smart contracts and private keys. These are challenges that I hope will continue to be addressed as we try to figure out how to make blockchains accessible for mass usage. I think that smart contracts auditing is still far from mature, but the immutable nature of contracts would allow audited contracts to remain secure, as opposed to some code running on some company's server.
In the end as with everything in life, there are trade offs. It's about picking the right tool for the right job, and to continue experimenting with potential improvements that new technologies can bring and to reduce their externalities.
Substitute EVM for JVM and you end up with a similar statement that looks just as correct, but it's still not clear what the EVM brings that the JVM doesn't.
> it would be harder in this case for corruption to take place in the PCR testing regime since all transactions are immutable
In your system, the blockchain would replace the database, not everything around it. That's also something I keep seeing in these discussions: blockchain provides some guarantees, so you assume the system you'll build on top of it will inherit from these guarantees, without questioning the composability further. But the interfaces of the blockchain component of these systems you're trying to conceive are precisely where the guarantees break down.
To take your example, you'd basically replace a database (and just a database) with a smart contract, which would ensure immutability and transparency. But:
1. you don't need a blockchain to get these guarantees (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_Transparency)[0]
2. using blockchains still imply that you're trusting the people holding the keys and interacting with the smart contract, so you haven't changed your trust model (the interface problem I mentioned above).
> the immutable nature of contracts would allow audited contracts to remain secure
The immutable nature of contracts is also what makes them unfit for evolving systems that have to be regularly updated to address new requirements.
[0]: to be clear, I'm talking about permissionless blockchains such as Ethereum
But there's a good reason things like k8 and react become overused for everything these days, because they provide a standard that works for a relatively large spectrum of cases.
The argument of "you don't need X to do Y" is not wrong, but it doesn't make X absolutely useless. Your points are not really invalid imo, but i think you're missing the point of the continuum between centralised and decentralised systems
I'm mostly missing the point in this continuum where I can start listing pros instead of just cons. There are fundamental reasons why we haven't reached this point and may never reach it, as I (and many others) highlighted before, and these haven't changed for the past 5 years.
Couldn't this be done with something like an enterprise service bus, without the blockchain?
> Booking through a smart contract [...] There's no DB that can be hacked or go corrupt
But you have moved the hacking problem to the smart contract instead, and last time I looked those seemed a lot harder to make secure.
Yes, but you're arguing that against someone -- someone whom you haven't shown is making "quick judgements and assumptions". You're just assuming that.
That is the problem GP was pointing out: Crypto-"currency" proponents always jump to that conclusion. Stop doing that.
I don't think telling someone to not jump to conclusions is itself jumping to conclusions. Otherwise we'd have infinite loops in every discussion
No, it's staying with the null hypothesis until disproven.
> we'd have infinite loops in every discussion
With you, we do.
A useful contribution would be to point out how exactly the GP is wrong.
I can imagine the current international banking system get upgraded with a blockchain like technology such that you don't need a central bank of central banks.
But the web3 guys simply want to compare detractors to luddites
my argument is for us to make our cases in an enlightened and civilised way instead of calling out names
Until somebody does, the null hypothesis remains that it is. (Use some cuter name if that makes you feel better, but it is what it is.)
I have my views on positive use cases for the blockchain and/or cryptocurrencies, and I got that by learning and building stuff with it. On whether the technology is a net good or bad to society, I don't know.
One can refuse to participate in anything without completely dismissing its merit. But that's the polarised world we live in :/
But, hey, you seem to be closer to 100-0 than to 99-1 in favour of "Utopia!".
You would be a lot more persuasive for that side if you didn't natter about meta shit like "fallacies" or "false dichotomies" but in stead presented some actual arguments.
I notice you didn't.
Between black and white there's gray.
You keep digging into that false dichotomy
I've learned enough at this point to know a scam when I see one, and I definitely don't need to go thru my history w/ software and tech bubbles and cryptocurrencies to explain why web 3.0 is full-on bullshit.
I don't follow the details of the web3 market closely, so not speaking in support or against here.
PGP did that 31 years ago though, faster and more efficient and without all the downsides?
Except for the tons of CO2 that get pumped into the atmosphere in the process, or the blackouts its causes, or the fact that there are tons of more useful applications for that energy, like heating homes, running air conditioning, charging electric vehicles ...
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Both of these payments are done through PayPal, and both exist as a way to filter spammers and trolls.
I thought the whole point of decentralisation was that you couldn't be banned though.
The exclusive communities you mention only have value because of the hype and FOMO and high dollar amounts that people see being made on sales of "exclusive" NFTs or some such. Same as many of the many crypto pumps, same as the dotcom bubble, same as tulips. Same as it ever was.
Yeah, but this actually works.
Like it or not, people are already using their wallets as their username. And they're trading cryptographic assets. And everyone can see it because it's public.
This isn't theoretical.
I've been to PGP key-signing parties. I can assure you that this is not that.
Exchanging public keys worked for decades before blorkchains were even a word.
How do we know who is behind a hash? Because there is a server (aka. a "centralized authority") that has that information.
So how exactly is that different from using my google account to login to some webservice?
Yes, and what maps that to your physical identity? How is that any different from showing someone a public key you just generated with GPG?
For what it’s worth, I recently read Moxie Marlinspike’s essay on web3, and I think he crystallised one of the most interesting insights I’ve ever heard on that topic:
> We should accept the premise that people will not run their own servers by designing systems that can distribute trust without having to distribute infrastructure. This means architecture that anticipates and accepts the inevitable outcome of relatively centralized client/server relationships, but uses cryptography (rather than infrastructure) to distribute trust.
I think he’s correct, and the cryptocurrency of the future – the one which actually takes off as a medium of exchange – will do exactly what we’re arguing about here. It will use purely cryptography as its mechanism, instead of large groups of servers acting as the gatekeeper. You’ll be able to send money to someone with purely a public key, no servers required, just you and them as peer-to-peer. And, as a corollary, you’ll be able to prove your balance with only a key and the encrypted data of your past transactions. I’ve barely stopped thinking about my envisioned implementation for the past couple of weeks.
that's a very very liberal equivalence to make. decentralized authority in practice is just a collection of servers in aggregate that come to consensus according to a certain protocol.
I can't use blockchain to pay pretty much any vendor I buy things from without an intermediary - the intermediary requires me to log in to a website and unless I'm willing to go through a lot of trouble (more trouble than dealing with PGP) an intermediary will also be storing my wallet and have "physical" control of all my "coins." Blockchain works to the extent that you aren't really using blockchain but simply a trusted intermediary.
If you're actually personally managing your wallet keys it's worse than PGP. With PGP if you lose your key you just say so and people figure it out, you have to go to some key signing parties. With Bitcoin if you lose your key you have no money, end of story, no recourse.
I assume it would make the application much simpler because there would not need to be any or very little user-account management, no sending bills or charging credit-cards. Just gimme them bitcoins. The user-state could be stored on the client-machine, unless they especially want to pay for us backing it up on the cloud. Still it could be backed up anonymously, identified by the wallet.
No more hacking, if there were no user-accounts or passwords there would be nothing to hack.
Sure, you can publish your wallet address and tell them to send you money. How do you give them access to your content after they have sent their money? How is Bitcoin helping compared to you publishing your IBAN account number and asking for money to be sent directly there?
I wouldn't need to "send bills" because I wouldn't know who my users are. Except that when they login with their crypto-id my application will do work for them, because they have crypto-paid for it.
I wouldn't need to charge credit-cards since they transfer the bitcoins to my account. I only need to know their id and that they have paid me a specific amount of crypto, and that id has used a certain amount of my application.
There needs to be the infra-structure associated with crypto-currency, but not much else. That would make things simpler, I assume. That's my point. Crypto can presumably make payments and user-accounts management simpler. The less you know about your users, the less there is to manage.
The webshop exposes some way of receiving value tokens, be that USD, EUR or BTC, and has some way to tell which user transferred how many tokens.
So technically there is no difference.
The difference is, I can be pretty sure that EUR won't lose 20% of their value overnight.
If you want to accept bitcoin, you run a piece of software and write a few lines of code.
I am okay with that.
Want to accept lightning (bitcoin over a low cost and high speed payment network)? It’s an api call to generate an invoice and another api call to see if that invoice has been paid. Again you can run everything yourself or use a managed service. Bitcoin make programmatic payment processing SO MUCH EASIER than traditional payment rails.
I do that without any involvement of a blorkchain on a daily basis. Everytime I use my ssh key to connect to a server that knows my public key.
Can someone provide me with a clear example of this being implemented? AFAIK accessing blockchain from a traditional client(website/app) still requires going through a central node.
Did something change with 'Web3'? Pardon me for not being up-to-date but it's like one day I woke up and Web3 is all over the place it seems like well-coordinated, heavily funded campaign. How else can we explain this seemingly sudden trend of Web3?
Every versioning of that idea is marketing speech.
Web2.0 might have had a silly name, but the idea of the web as something that the average user and company could contribute back to and use to communicate with in real time provided explicit value and convenience over existing alternatives (letter writing, door-to-door sales, in-person self-promotion, calling a pizza parlor, renting a physical video, long distance phone calls, physical plane tickets mailed to your house…)
I don’t see that with web3.0.
> I don’t see that with web3.0.
I do.
The strategic quoting was supposed to show that the only thing I disagreed with was that I find the name "Web 3.0" about as silly as its predecessor.
I get it, you don't like it.
So I agree with your last point: let's all please move on.
We don't do that here.
I like hashing things out but whenever there is a huge bandwagon effect, I am increasingly getting more skeptical. Happy to be wrong but we need skeptics that question mob mentality.
There are several recent examples of this: 1) Inflation 2) COVID origins (Lab leak) 3) Zero-COVID policies and lockdowns.
I always question these things - what if we are wrong?
Certainly, there are problems, but some things will live beyond the crash that is coming and change things in ways no one can be sure of. The internet started in the 1960s and was opened up commercially in 1989.[3] It feels like we are somewhere between 1995 and 2000. The energy feels similar with people trying to shove old paradigms into a new world, vaporware companies, and insane investments. I don’t think we’ve seen the top and it will likely make the crash of 2001 look small by comparison. I may be wrong, but if I’m not, it still is early.
[1] https://bitfinexed.medium.com/tether-is-setting-a-new-standa... [2] https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1457749433844568066 [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet
My conspiracy theory is that when insiders trade a distressed asset at par or better it’s often a bailout expectation that’s really being traded.
Who has unimaginable access to financing, a “stablecoin” going so/so, and a primary line of business critically dependent on Tether, like, I don’t know, a massive exchange with the highest volume pairs all sharing USDT as quote?
Your use of the word moral makes me think that you might be talking about shifting risk off onto others. Keeping the upside in some more favorable ratio to handing others the downside is (IMHO) immoral but also one of two main ways that people get rich, the other being inheritance.
It’s fractional reserve banking swapped around, with no reserve requirements. The market is the bank.
And because bitfinex is not obligated to redeems tokens for $1 they have no risk. It’s in their interest to keep the market price at $1 because the longer it runs the more money they make but if there’s a run on the currency they can just shrug and go home with their bag of dollars.
The only way this could be a reliable replacement for our existing financial systems, would be with strong oversight from.. some kind of central entity that acts on behalf of society’s collective best interests.. staffed by people chosen through popular voting..
We no longer need central authorities to create good trusted products. Centralized can suck (communism, Federal Reserve bailouts of banks they regulate). DAI decisions are decentralized and done by the DAI holders. You may want to check it out.
Could you elaborate which gatekeepers it will disrupt?
If you want returns in traditional finance, you don't stick money in a bank account. You buy bonds and/or stocks.
This not disruptive. This is just normal investing with all the risks attached
Isn't that exactly what they said about tulip bulbs too?
Ah yes. How can we forget the community-audited and vetted smart contracts that ended up draining its users' wallets of all their money. Transparency!
There never will be. For the absolute vast majority of people, programmers included, these "contracts" will be a yet another blackbox.
Moreover, it already is a blackbox even to the people who develop them, because they can't find errors in their own software and APIs.
I feel like a lot of the cryptocurrency critics commit the "fallacy fallacy". That is, they have the following reasoning: people believe crypto is good because of X, X is false, therefore crypto is not good.
Yes, there are a lot of people who are into crypto because they think it's a way to get rich quick. Yes, there are a lot of guru technical analysts who sell bullshit dreams on their Youtube channels. Yes, there are a lot of criminals who use cryptocurrency. Yes, crypto attracts a lot of charlatans and snake oil men. Yes, there are a lot unbacked stablecoins and shitcoins.
Given the above, it's easy to dismiss all cryptocurrencies as a scam. But when you dig a bit deeper, you'll find that there is true technical and financial innovation. For me, Bitcoin's potential to be a programmable money without government or central authority is a very powerful idea. The idea that you can be your own bank and do p2p electronic money transfers without an intermediary. That has never been possible before.
I could go on but my point is that even if there are many wrong reasons people like X, it doesn't necessarily mean that X is wrong/bad.
And it's debatable whether fiat will ever whither and die. The Government will ultimately have to endorse a currency for tax purposes, and they'll always seek to control the inflationary environment so they can maintain a workable budget and keep public services afloat.
Just a century ago or so, banking was only for large corporations. Commoners and small businesses all used cash and exchanging bits of valuable metal was the norm. I mean, believe it or not, we had good reasons to abandon that simpler system in the first place. Things are better now. Markets are more efficient.
Oh I don't know, everybody's carrying around an internet-connected computer in their pocket, it can't be that hard to show current prices in a variety of currencies. But if it is too hard, then stablecoins backed by on-chain assets are another option.
Fwiw, Ohio accepts tax payments in Bitcoin: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2018/11/26/ohi...
Ohio businesses can no longer use Bitcoin to pay taxes. Don’t worry, though. Sprague went on to say that in the 10 months since OhioCrypto.com launched, less than 10 businesses have chosen to pay their taxes in Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies. No one is really going to miss it. [1]
https://thenextweb.com/news/ohio-suspends-bitcoin-tax-paymen...
This is one place that there is something interesting in the crypto space, but because it's so "inside baseball"/esoteric, it doesn't usually get any mention on skeptic's forums. Given asset A and asset B, given individual A with asset A, B with asset B, and C who wants to trade their asset A for B, how do you get all three to come together and make it all work. The fact that there must be exchanges is obvious, what's less obvious is how they actually work, how individuals A and B incentivized to participate, and what sort of payment they get out of it. Well, that's one of the not-entirely-trivial usages of smart contracts I've seen, where A and B get a payout and C gets what they want, but with more than 3 individuals involved. It's not actually important to anyone outside of the crypto space but it's interesting to take a look at the implementation details for the curious.
No, everyone does not. You can easily exchange the coins you don't like for the coins you do. It's that simple.
So when I want to buy something from or sell something to you, I'm gonna say that a MyCoin is worth ten YouCoin; you'll presumably try to claim the opposite.
How "simple" is that?
The transaction processing mechanism will also have to radically change, and be detached from the mechanism for generating money (even if you believe the two should be proportional, to strictly couple them is an impracticable engineering failure).
As for Bitcoin, aside from the flaws in Satoshi’s scheme itself, the current Bitcoin system has suffered from focussing on its unexpected popularity as a store of value, which popularity has meant it’s incredibly volatile and thus useless as a medium of exchange or unit of account. Of course the slow processing as a result of the mining mechanism is also a major hurdle.
I hope something better will come about soon. I know that it won’t come from the world of people who suddenly idolise Bitcoin because of the cult around it. It’ll come from the people who were capable of reading the original paper and seeing its potential even before it was in the news - that’s a tiny subset of crypto enthusiasts, but I hope they stay motivated.
(Final thing: it’s ‘wither’, not ‘whither’. ‘Whither’ means ‘from where’.)
My main problem is similar to the original article here. In 2014 Bitcoin was "The future of micropayments" 6 years later and now the narrative is that "Layer 2 networks are the future" It would be great if the crypto people could stop talking about how great the future will be and just deliver what they are promising
Ah yes. The good old "just google it". There's literally not a single "dig deeper" resource on the internet that explains the need for blockchains/cryptocurrencies etc.
But sure, there are a lot of "innovations" with recursive circular "innovations" (like currency speculation, HFT and flash loans, all of "innovatively made available" by regurgutating the same fatasy tokens and pretending they are worth something)
I just named a rather massive one in my comment.
You named one that was envisioned by the creator(s) of Bitcoins 13 years ago and was subsequently abandoned. Today bitcoin is marketed as a store of value, not money. Also the idea that it is a P2P money without intermediaries is laughable. What are miners other than intermediaries in a transaction?
Additionally:
What is "programmable money" without programmers writing unverifiable undebuggable code in esoteric languages other than intermediaries that you have to trust?
- https://web3isgoinggreat.com?id=2021-12-04-2
- https://web3isgoinggreat.com?id=2021-12-18-0
etc.
The links you posted refer to Ethereum smart contracts which are indeed prone to programming errors. The tooling around them is improving (e.g. debuggers, verifiers) and there are a couple of multi-billion dollar smart contracts which have stood the test of time.
No, we don't
> smart contracts which are indeed prone to programming errors.
Indeed. So. In the context of "potential to be a programmable money without government or central authority" you literally have to depend on an intermediary to write a smart contract and depen on that intermediary to write this contract correctly.
> The tooling around them is improving (e.g. debuggers, verifiers) and there are a couple of multi-billion dollar smart contracts which have stood the test of time.
Either all this is "too early" or "it has stood the test of time". You can't have both.
The fact that some contract exists, and handles "multiple billions" in no way, shape, or form disprove my original statement: "Programmable money" relies on intermediaries in the form of programmers writing unverifiable undebuggable code in esoteric languages
Ah yes. The good old "you don't believe enough". There's literally no way to solve programmable money for everyone without intermediaries.
I am also skeptical of the current state of programming in autonomous cars. It's buggy and not perfect today. Even the code in anti-lock brakes is unverifiable and esoteric. /s
Maybe new technologies take time to develop?
Yes. You do trust intermediaries in the form of cart manufacturers. So what's your point exactly?
Sorry to be blunt but you are demonstrating your poor reading skills.
> Miners are not "intermediaries"
I have some bitcoin. How do I send them to you without miners?
> it is possible to send/receive Bitcoin with any regular programming language.
dmitriid was talking about, what you called, "programmable money" and not about sending/receiving bitcoin. You don't need knowledge of any programming language to do that.
And don't forget those who code the wallets, and the exchanges, and the people who will convert your tokens into actual money you can buy stuff with...
Ah, it's so good to finally get rid of these "trusted intermediaries like PayPal, Visa, a bank..."
Oh wait, my money is gone, how do I revert the transaction?...
Do you mean this one? " For me, Bitcoin's potential to be a programmable money without government or central authority is a very powerful idea."
It's really isn't a true technical and financial innovation.
So, you have a slow and inefficient VM that runs an esoteric programming language, and all this VM allows you to do is exchange fictional tokens whose primary value is derived from ... trading fictional tokens. That's all there is to this great amazing innovative idea.
> The idea that you can be your own bank and do p2p electronic money transfers without an intermediary. That has never been possible before.
Of course it has. Never on this scale, true, but "I will print my own money that you can only use in these specific circumstances, otherwise you have to convert it to actual money at severe discount/penalties" is probably as old as the world itself.
Also, there are reasons intermediaries exist.
I will give you the technical innovation, but I really have not found anything financially innovative about cryptocurrency. What does crypto do that traditional currencies or payments systems don't? The only thing I see is that it largely replaces the old financial elite with a new financial elite and maybe under the right circumstances reduces fees for transferring money. That seems to be it unless you count circumventing financial regulation as a financial innovation.
The technology enables many new tools to be developed and many old tools to be augmented. Saule Omarova (Biden’s comptroller pick who resigned) had some interesting ideas in her papers/essays. DLT-based deposit debtor accounts being offered by the government was one that I thought would be pretty great.
Cool technology has no value if all it is is cool technology. The important question is whether it enables something that wasn't possible before that technology. I have not seen a convincing example in which crypto does that.
>DLT-based deposit debtor accounts being offered by the government was one that I thought would be pretty great.
For example, how is this improved by using a distributed ledger here especially considering that this program would already be centralized by the government?
It's amazing to me how universal the "I used to be a non-believer" line is in evangelism. From the classic "I used to be an atheist but I've been born again" to all the members of political party A claiming to have been a member of party B before seeing the light to technological evangelism.
It just jumps out at you after awhile.
For another, I can't quite see what's not to get; what is it you're not understanding? saalweachter pointed out that "[i]t's amazing to [them] how universal the 'I used to be a non-believer' line is in evangelism" (Further expounded upon in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29948754 ); throwaway98700k simplified to "[i]t’s a dangerous attitude because it has a paternal edge to it"; you asked whether it is dangerous to say that you have changed your mind about something; and I tried to explain that yes, it is, and why. (You might notice that my reply, like your question, was couched in quite general terms: The danger of "conversion" claims in general, without reference to any particular "OP" in this thread.)
But, to explain it again: No, of course OP doesn't indicate that their own opinion carries danger for the audience. (Would you?) That is precisely the danger, that "OP" (assuming you mean poof131) didn't acknowledge that their "conversion" isn't an argument in favour of "conversion", while still mentioning it as if it had something to do with anything (which, as saalweachter explained, tends to carry convincing weight in people's minds even though it logically shouldn't). Sorry, I don't know how to explain it better. Except, perhaps -- did you think this discussion is about whether the "conversion" claim would be "dangerous" to OP himself? That's not it. The danger is that conversion claims tend to persuade people more than they should; the danger of people getting duped into believing things that aren't true just because someone successfully (maybe even unconsciously) uses a rhetorical tactic.
AFAIK, I never claimed OP themselves indicates that their opinion carries danger. That's precisley why I agreed with the posters who did it for them, and spelled it out to you in my GP. Is there anything else in that, that you still don't understand? Besides your misapprehension that I claimed "OP" had said that, I mean (or possibly that the danger mentioned would be to not to "OP" but to the audience)? Which I sincerely hope is (are) thoroughly dispelled by now.
(I was also against crypto/blockchains when I first learned about them last year)
It's "I didn't find any evidence for God, so I stopped believing." vs "I believe God is real but I can't prove it".
When somebody is telling me they think God is real, they're trying to sell me something, or they think it's important to tell me.
When I tell people I'm an atheist, I probably didn't want to have to tell anyone, and I genuinely don't care what you believe unless you're using it to hurt others.
just look at the OP thread that led to these discussions: the author is vocally decrying blockchains. if you view anti-crypto as the atheists in this analogy then they sure do make a lot of noise on HN (these kinds of posts routinely make the front page).
What, you mean like randomly, unprompted? For no reason? What are they trying to sell you?
Assumes facts not in evidence. Show me a "decentralized alternative" that doesn't a) reek to high heaven of Ponzi scheme evangelism or b) burns resources like there's no tomorrow, and I'll be all ears.
But that's not what's being touted here. The current Crypto-"currency" fandango has quite enough downsides as is; notice that it's usually its proponents who claim that any arguments against it are about its "decentralized alternative"-ness.
https://mattdesl.substack.com/p/hicetnunc-and-the-merits-of-...
> experiment in decentralization
Not very, AFAICS (cont. below).
> and distributed design in the ethos of “web3,” a poorly-termed yet novel paradigm
Half right, half wrong, IMO. (Guess which is which ! :-)
> This marks the death of the website, and perhaps the end of Rafael Lima’s involvement. Yet, the overall community spirit, as well as its tokenized assets and media files, appears largely unaffected. A suite of forks and competing platforms have sprung up in its wake
If the death of one particular Web site lead to "forks and competing platforms"... Then it can't have been very decentralised at all, right? Because if it were truly an "ecosystem" that shouldn't have mattered at all, AFAICS.
But then, later:
> these pillars of decentralization seem to be working.
> These tokens, cryptographically signed by me (the artist) and pointing to a particular generative artwork of mine, have been completely unaffected by the website’s shutdown. The records of ownership and provenance continue to be upheld by the distributed public ledger of the Tezos blockchain, and each token still sits comfortably in their respective owner’s wallets.
OK, so my original interpretation of your preceding paragraphs was overly pessimistic. Or perhaps you're actually underselling it in those.
But that all still leaves me with a question: WTF is this all supposed to be good for?!? What do these distributed high-tech ultra-cool über-Web-3.0 "tokens" actually do?
Is this supposed to be like, say, litography: "This is one of five identical copies signed by the artist. They're only genuine if presented in conjunction with the artist's signature"? Because they each represent only the "rights" to (display, or something?) one copy of the artwork; not the actual copyright or anything, right? But do they really even do that... I mean, OK, sure, they may "represent" that right -- but AFAICS they don't do that better (and arguably worse) than any other, non-blockchain-based, system; they sure don't protect any possible "rights" better than some (horrible) traditional DRM system. Owning a self-proving "token" only proves that you own that token, not the file that it represents. So how, exactly, does the token actually "represent" the file?
If I wanted to rip off your art I'd just take the actual art, without giving a fuck about any "tokens". I would just download the actual graphics file, for instance from the link you so graciously provided. (And, hey, spanning tree sketch 01 is really quite pretty!)
So, to sum up: You make computer art, I get that. But what's all the Web 3.0 Crypto Blorkchain Token foofaraa around the art goood for? I'm not seeing any usefulness at all, any justification for the whole opera.
Oh, and finally (back up top):
> Since it’s early beginnings in 2021
"Its".
[EDIT:] But that's just my personal wish, in the larger context. Sorry, forgot to note that you'd fully answered my original (G[G...?]P) query for something that doesn't stink of scam. [/EDIT]
Then they would have shared that, instead what we got was indistinguishable from "some charismatic people dupped me and/or I'm in on the scamming now."
The trick is that when you say "I used to believe X, but now I've realized I was wrong and believe Y", you can get away without giving evidence for why X was wrong and Y is right. You appeal to a commonality between you and your audience (your audience believes X, you used to believe X) and by presenting your change you imply that they are being left behind, that they have missed something you have seen.
It's such an effective rhetorical tactic that speakers will sometimes make up a conversion experience to use in their evangelism, even if they have always been a member of the faith.
There's nothing wrong with changing your mind, with adapting to new evidence. But you shouldn't confuse someone's declaration that they have changed their mind with evidence for the position they have adopted; that's where logic and rhetoric diverge.
(And again, I'm not trying to start something with the GP; I am fascinated by the universal utility of the rhetorical device more than this specific case.)
My attitude is very different from the evangelist’s, it says “look that was an important part of my journey and if that’s the direction you’re going, don’t let me dissuade you. I can tell you why those didn’t work for me but I can’t hold up my present consciousness as “the only correct thing, believe as I do or else you are irrational or anything like that. Heck I am sure that we are both irrational in innumerable ways and why would I pretend I’m more sane than you?”
This fatalism also infects a lot of how I teach things like physics, I tell people a lot that “learning is pain—or more precisely, learning abstractions relieves a pain and chaos and difficulty such that you can only truly absorb the abstraction when you have felt the confusion it addresses. So I can no longer pretend that ‘now that I have suffered through all of that, here is the Right Perspective so that you don't have to!!’... I’d have to take you through the suffering to get to the teaching on the other side.”
Logic, for human debates, is very nice in theory. But there is a reason humans adopted shortcut thinking and don't use logic all the time. We are not robots. We don't have infinite processing capacity, and statistics and probability save A LOT of time. For example, doing strawmen fallacies is useful. It allows you to filter through a lot of crap before investing time in digesting whether what that person said makes sense or not. If you would go into any conversation with a blank state of "Let's analyse the logic here" Good luck with that.
So we adopt shortcuts. What shortcut is he doing? "I'm like you" is indeed establishing commonality. The person is saying "I get where you're coming from, i've been there, so I understand at least some reasons why you currently think that way." This is useful if the person is being honest because it let's you know that this person might be saying something more valid than if they had no idea where you're coming from. It means they were once in your position, and something made them switch. It's different than if they never had been in your position. They never had to think anything through. So knowing this is useful. This saves time. Is it fool-proof? Not really. People can lie, or might have not thought that much about it anyway, but like I said people are not robots, and we can't analyse each argument like if we were one.
So rather, let me also help make a shortcut and your argument more clear: Don't call out this behavior, which from an honest person is good, call out what you're actually thinking that he's doing - that he's trying to manipulate readers. Why you would think that, I don't know.
Changing one's mind should be encouraged.
The article names none.
> yet seeing that there is still some truth and potential buried in there.
The article details none.
> The world is grey.
"Everything is true, even false things!"
Making fake trades to make the price look like it's going up can be called market manipulation in this case I think. This is also called painting the tape. A similar but slightly different scheme is wash trading where you basically sell an asset to yourself to make it look like that's the price and that there is trading volume going on. There's a lot of this kind of thing going on with NFTs.
1) A common "universal" transaction data source
2) A shared, readable format
So the thought occurred to me that as soon as blockchain apps/currencies became popular, people would want analytics on them. There would thus be a startup opportunity for unprecedented analytics visibility into transactional data from a third party without needing to build bespoke integrations into high security/compliance systems.
If a blockchain backed currency was widely used, a third party could easily estimate the real-time sales flow of every brick and mortar store location. You could have real-time auditing and quarterly tracking of both public and private corporations available from a third party. Asset transfers, smart contracts, and their real world equivalents could be instantly monitored - allowing the early detection of emergent supply chain bottlenecks.
The problem with all of this is that in the 5 years since I had this idea, the only use cases for BTC and other cryptos has been price speculation. The market for such analytics products is effectively zero.
You also seem to be missing a lot of interesting stuff happening with cryptos if you think it's exclusively price speculation.
Additionally, I think there is big money in selling blockchain analytics to governments for the money laundering, darknet markets, and fraud sector.
https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2019/02/19/coinbase-acquire...
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2021/04/30/coinbase-to-acq...
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/09/mastercard-to-buy-blockchain...
https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2019/12/03/binance-acquires...
If the blockchain does enable this, wouldn't that just lead either to 1) companies not adopting blockchain, or 2) some solution for hiding the data and defeating third-party analytics?
Which is to say that investors, governments, financial institutions, and small businesses unable to afford external auditing and accounting probably want this capability more than individuals. I'd argue that our current lack of financial transparency may be more of an artifact of banking technology limitations rather than an intrinsically desirable property.
The Ethereum world computer has 300,000 nodes, and yet has 1/5000 the computation power of a single Raspberry Pi 4.
Except for actual cryptocurrencies, all the "web3" applications could use boring old 1980s vintage cryptography, be just as distributed, and run ten thousand times faster and cheaper.
----
So far the only way anyone has ever made any money from cryptocurrency is to sell it to someone for more fiat currency. In fact, in real terms, it has net lost money because of the huge amounts of electricity expended.
So once people such as yourself purchase cryptocurrency, they know in their hearts that the only way they will make more is if further people buy into their Ponzi scheme.
Therefore, your comment above.
...and then returned a few decades later to be oversold and overhyped some more, this time as "Deep Learning" or "AI".
Seems the alternatives on offer are scam or scam. (Or scam, scam, scam, ham, eggs, and scam.)
It sure has. But not really that fundamentally, since 2009.
A lot has changed in the blockchain space too. Just because you don't know about it doesn't mean it isn't true. A lot of those changes are on par with some of the tech advancements mentioned before my quote in the article. In 2009, you had bitcoin, so basically a distributed consensus workaround that enables artificial scarcity of fungible digital items. Today, you have sharded blockchains, triple entry bookkeeping, proof of stake, blockchains that handle incentivized file storage, alternate name lookup systems, purchasing compute power on an automated order book, liquidity pools (a major, major fintech advancement if you're not familiar with then), arbitrary code execution with a canonical record of it.
It is absolutely still early days.
Because these are decentralized consensus networks, there's inertia. Bitcoin is never going to be cutting edge. Because there's a lot of money to be made, there will be scams. Most of the "cutting edge" isn't cutting edge at all. But there are some real developments happening, allowing novel use cases, enabling very interesting things to be done.
I'm not a fan of the whole web3 concept. I think 99% of the selling points that the charlatans hype every market cycle are nonsense. But a little digging beyond an animated JS bloat landing page (a red flag all it's own) and you can quickly figure out what projects potentially have something and what's bullshit. Or you can do what I do and assume a project is a scam until proven otherwise.
snip
weird things no one gives one hoot about outside of the crypto shill word. All of this is just buttering the cat.
I have yet to see a single enticing idea for blockchain/web3/whatever for a consumer or business not related to finance. If that requires an ever-increasing number of technical challenges to be solved for that to happen, then we're just looking at vaporware.
Why?
You might care about building businesses, mass-market appeal, blah blah, but many (most?) technologies were created because people thought they were cool or interesting or just because they could. Nobody knew what LASERs were for when they invented them.
To me the point of tech is to invent stuff and see what people do with it, not to make money or feed the economy or whatever, that’s a byproduct. Which coin is worth more money or what will gain mass market adoption is the least exciting part of the whole thing to me. We started with bitcoin having BFT consensus and proof of work to create decentralised, permissionless value (volatile or not!) but we now have multiple chains that can execute arbitrary code, sharding, performance improvements, lightweight chains, various types of proof of stake, token standards, automated market makers, DeFI, NFTs, DAOs, data availability proofs, IPFS, etc. etc.… that’s incredibly exciting! And if you read the actual academic and published research and see the advances being made, it’s even more incredible and wide ranging, and progress is very rapid.
Of course it’d be nice if _some_ of it changed the world (and maybe it already has), but there’s plenty of time for that and it may only be 1% of the interesting new tech that turns out to do so. So what? It’s incredibly cool just to learn and understand it all and think about what might be. (And sure, buy tokens or whatever if you like them or just fancy a gamble. Do your research and don’t spend what you can’t afford to lose.)
Since when do we call a Ponzi value?
The fact that YOU do not believe that future will happen doesn't make it a Ponzi, just a bad investment in your eyes. And yes, some people talking up their book and trying to manipulate it's price — a pump and dump — is still a scam on their part, but it doesn't make the underlying asset a Ponzi scheme.
At a bare minimum there are some fringe use cases (no matter how unsavoury - dark web, ransomware, etc.), so I'd argue that barring a major security flaw, even if bitcoin was banned everywhere, the floor price would be >0. (I am considerably more optimistic for long term use cases, but we're just talking about whether it's a Ponzi or not here, which doesn't require any extra optimism.)
I honestly don't know if BTC will end up above the current price in 2, 5, 10, 50 years time, but I do still think it's incredibly cool that we were able to create something with a demonstrable non-zero value and no centralised control.
The challenge now is to keep iterating the ideas, make new weird and wonderful things, throw them all at the wall, and see if anything sticks. Luckily plenty of people seem as excited about that research and exploration for the sake of it as me, so I think we're going to get to find out :)
then you have the HN holier than thou geniuses who think they have it all figured out because they can quickly scream ponzi over and over. it's fuckin weird. i always subscribed to this forum because it's full of nerds who are deeply interested in tech and can debate things neutrally. so not the case lately.
and this is coming from someone who is deeply interested in the tech and fascinated by some of the subscultures that had been created out of crypto, while also remaining extremely skeptical and very turned off by some of the scams and mindless fanatics that exist. but, i still dive deep into whitepapers, and read a lot to have a good opinion on a subject, like...you should. there is A LOT of interesting shit in this space. i've been into it for a couple of months now and have yet to scratch the surface, honestly.
...yet the comments are always the same low effort crap which makes me realize nobody knows or understands a goddamn thing about this tech on here. really reductive surface level points.
actual smart or just hustlers? It is a scam. Yes, you can make money from it. But are you ok with ripping people off? Because the only way to make a gain with any coin is to force the next bigger fool to sit on a bigger loss. They might not have realized it but it's there. All of these made up usages are just there to trick people to buy your coin at an elevated price -- but there's still no uses of coins which have a real world use case and couldn't be better done with a centralized database (or sometimes git). I just wrote up in a top comment that when tech does deliver something real it needs no explanation or these discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29951993
You also can take a very lucrative job at Facebook. It might be interesting tech too. I refused one this week.
Do not think us stupid for having a conscience.
You seem to forget that it's about interacting in the crypto economy, not selling all your coins to make more fiat. I wonder how long this fad will last of people hating on crypto because they don't understand it.. Probably forever?
Edit: I can't answer for some reason below but I can edit this one, it's miners vs everyone else.
That's what the big blockers thought, and they got their own BCH network to show for it. I can't find any adoption metrics to show that the miner-controlled BCH chain has won.
On BTC, miners just run the code and get rewarded to do that simpleton job.
> ...not related to finance.
Why place that arbitrary restriction? If all this stuff does is improve finance is that not enough? Again, I'm not a web3 evangelist, this stuff was originally created strictly to create financial tools. All I expect any of this stuff to do is change finance.
But still, the development of new cryptography, new consensus mechanisms, new routing protocols and network topologies, these are all advances that have come as a result of all this and they're not related to finance. Again, just because you don't know about an advancement doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
How many coins are actually using proof of stake?
Why haven't the biggest including Ethereum done so?
Ethereum does have proof of stake, a protocol called Casper FFG. It is currently live on the Ethereum beacon chain, waiting for consensus to move the entire network to it.
There are lots of smaller projects trying different protocols they call proof of stake too, as well as different proof of whatever they came up with for whatever reason. Most of them are veiled centralization, some of them are interesting for one reason or another. I'm not here to shill networks or coins so I won't be tossing names around.
May I clarify what that means? Does that mean a vote of the existing participants?
If so, might it never happen?
Real, decentralized proof of stake is a hard problem that has only just started to become reality.
That's running in parallel to the main network, which is still mining. Code to merge the two and eliminate mining is currently running on a public test network. Previous upgrades have all taken less than a year to go live after the launch of their public test networks.
It would be a shame if IPFS and Filecoin end up in the dustbin of history if the web3 music stops. They're the only reasonable non-financial applications of blockchain tech that I've been able to wrap my head around to date.
There was a project called Golem aiming to do the same thing with compute, it was pretty cool last time I read about it. Not sure how far along it is, and I'm sure there are other projects aiming to do the same thing.
I actually witnessed one attempt. An actual Fortune 100 built a Blockchain for their public communications. Mostly just an excuse to show off their street cred. It landed with an absolute thud. Nobody cared.
You leave the article with a certain conception and sometimes it's utterly shattered in the comments; This is one of those times.
If I heard a single use case where blockchain technology actually created real value in the world, and was better than other alternatives, I'd listen. But it has to create real value, based on the real world and not some fantastical notion of what money is or governments are for.
I think we skeptics want a grounded narrative, and we're stuck hearing a thesis statement and nothing to back it up.
The blockchain adds nothing here, and creates a layer of complexity that makes it more brittle.
And how easy do you think that is in Kenya?
You and I being able to take stable banking and government for granted says more about our own position in the world than it does about the efficacy of the technology itself.
How about uncensorable donations? For example Wikileaks got blocked by banks and payment processors when they wrote about the war crimes the US committed.
The US could block the banks, but they could never block crypto donations.
Take Nano for example: sub-second, 0-fee transactions, of any amount, to any (unbanked) person in the world. Of course, there is no way that any other (fiat) system can achieve this (due to operation costs, regulation, etc)
But the response of skeptics will always be "but I have to convert my fiat money". And at that point, it's not free and instant anymore.
But just because the new system loses its benefits because of backwards compatibility with the old system, doesn't mean that it is inferior. Maybe for some things, you don't need to pass through the old system anymore. One example is mining pool payouts, which can do payments through Nano to get the 0 fee transactions. (see https://2miners.com/blog/how-to-get-payouts-for-ethereum-min...).
You can argue that this mining is all a scam etc, but in the end real value is transferred using the most optimal network. More optimal than any central system that you can think of (remember 0-fee, instant trancations).
>But the response of skeptics will always be "but I have to convert my fiat money".
Here's a thought experiment for you. Your mother/father/neighbour's entire wealth is converted, at no cost to them, into BTC/ETH/whatever. What is their reaction?
Is it, 'thank god we didn't have to pay those conversion fees!'
I think not.
I can give you a really simple answer when using crypto: you just transfer it.
Can't wait to hear your answer for each of those countries, and the fees and delays associated with it.
edit: some people go work in a western country and send money home to their family.
But your idea that the only thing stopping sceptics from embracing it is fees is wrong. Also, your tone makes me think you've got a dog in this fight.
Keep being blind, I have absolutely no problem with that. It's nice entertainment here on HN, with all those folks frustrated of missing out on the biggest investment opportunity of their lifetime.
"I didn't miss out, it's just all a scam and I want no part of that"
But if you respond to perfectly reasonable and polite questions about its use cases by screaming “you’re just asking these mean questions because you’re jealous!”, then it doesn’t exactly help the impression that the cryptocurrency market are predominantly driven by speculators hoping they’ll get rich like a handful of early fans did.
This saddens me, because I’ve long been a fan of digital cash and its promise. I hope Bitcoin or suchlike can fix its serious flaws and become a viable means of exchange. I’ll cheer any cryptocurrency which seems to be seriously trying to do that. But, respectfully, people like you are what I hate about the modern crypto scene: tribalistic, loudmouthed, unthinking, and obsessed with the pipe dream of getting rich off the next round of buyers, rather than improving our world.
Everybody here only tries to pick apart the details. It's been like that always here on HN.
And again in your comment, no mention of the use-case, only that you don't like my tone.
Talk about tribalism.
Did you miss that people just pointed out that it wasn't much of a use case?
Oh gosh, I wish I could transfer money to <country I never had any desire to send money to>~ let’s sacrifice consumer protections, privacy and stability for that said nobody ever.
It’s just like ‘financial inclusion’ from the ilks of Peter Thiel is code for shoveling vulnerable and financially illiterate people into the gears of the pyramid machine
Using crypto is unlikely to be much cheaper or faster for me - my salary is paid in USD, so if I want to transfer cryptocurrency I will need to convert it from USD first, which is neither free nor instant. The same problem likely applies to whoever I'd be sending money to in the foreign country - if they need money to buy food or pay rent, its extremely unlikely they will be able to pay in cryptocurrency.
It’s not money. You can’t use it as money. You have to convert it to money, at a loss.
If that counts as ‘sending money’, then hell, I can send someone an email saying “I promise to pay $100 to the bearer of this note”, and just hope that they’ll be able to exchange that for money at a reasonable loss.
Sending money as quickly as sending email is not the same as putting paper checks in envelopes in the postal system. Like free speech, bitcoin can't be censored if you hold your own keys. For some people, PayPal censorship and freezing accounts still works okay for them.
I always assume that I'm wrong, so I'll keep looking for successful applications and I'm sure you can prove me wrong :)
Don’t throw the baby with the bathwater. I really don’t think generalizations of certain jaded experience and then seeing the entire world with the same broken lens does any good. Probably the opposite. We ought to try new tech and keep an open mind.
Before people go off on Boston Dynamics - there are thousands of spin-offs, pick some other charitable example. The point isn’t about BD.
I get it. People are angry about blockchain. Let’s shoot the world, not the messengers. Otherwise, we’ll be blaming the Bell Labs engineers for 4chan.
To use your example: it is like Boston Dynamics and people around will start saying invest in our IRO (Initial Robot Offering) as we will solve with robots everything. We can fix with our robots democracy flaws, we can fix with our robots inflation ... and when asked how will this actually work world wide they will say "We will just build more robots, invest more money into this and then when everybody will have one then that is how we fix those problems".
See the problem here? The problem is not the robot but the company/organisation and business model trying to sell it as a solution for everything without actually talking about the solution itself nor explaining how a robot will help with our financial system at large scale. At every critique they will just say "The solution is to build more robots and thus having robots everywhere so people will think about robots and not about other stuff".
People are annoyed by Blockchain the same way people were annoyed by Justin Bieber, it's a whole lot to do about a person who is just a kid, a cool kid maybe, and he did make some good songs when he got older, but he didn't change the world, and he probably isn't going to either.
People hate bitcoin because it appeals to people they find really annoying.
Naah, nothing to do with "self defense of their masculinity". We were just jealous that they found him so sexy and not us.
Build the technology, think of how it could help, and if you can't find a niche in the world that it fits, don't force the issue. Move onto new things: perhaps re-use some old ideas, of course, but actively get a wider experience, so that you increase your surface area of finding some way for your technology to help.
May be and may be not. OP is saying more generally that we should stop looking at tech that has no uses. I am disagreeing with that stance and it is just silly to be so wound up about Blockchain zeitgeist to not see through the fog.
On the other hand, if you're a criminal looking to launder money, crypto is the biggest advance in years.
Blockchain? The money flowing in is substantially from retail investors. And that's the problem. This is why we have regulations.
Blockchain was awesome technology in 2008, and Ethereum brought very interesting developments. But in the end there's only one thing it can do, and that's be an irrefutable ledger, and for most purposes that are of interest to the common person that is an insignificant improvement on centrally governed ledgers.
in that way, the analogy to blockchain is apt: technology focused efforts are not product (read: marketing) oriented ventures.
Incentivizing IPFS content pinning, Filecoin.
Allowing censorship-resistant / chargeback free donations, most coins.
Enabling private transactions, Monero.
Most "dapps" empower decentralization, distributed exchanges, trading, DNS, ownership contracts (DOAs), etc.
NFT's for art as silly as it is, more importantly for Handshake domain names and other cases where ownership proof comes into play.
Please feel free to go and attack all of those ideas and projects, but don't think for a second you can really gaslight people into believing they aren't worth of pursuit.
This hostility is completely unnecessary.
But if you want I can add one more to the list: funding the North Korean nuclear weapons program.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/north-korean-hackers-stole-a-r...
It's annoying to see the constant crypto bashing with tired talking points regurgitated.
Anyways, did my list meet your expectations of valid projects, is that why you started going on about NK, lol?
Configurations are infinite.
eg if the royalty goes toward a DAO, maybe that DAO’s charter is to grow awareness for the NFT project. Or the rewards could accrue toward a staked project token that all community members hold, or fees could go back to the creator to fund development for next gen.
I don’t know the best use, but my point is because someone programmed royalties, there’s now another dimension of configuration for NFT projects.
“EIP-2981 is a standard that focuses on signalling to market participants the royalty payment information for a given NFT or set of NFTs.”
Are chargebacks on donations are major issue for any legitimate non-profit organization?
Basically anything Stripe / PayPal locks your account for and considers you high risk or CC companies block.
I can also imagine political orgs having foes.
It sucks trying to run a game losing $20+ per chargeback and risking getting funds frozen entirely.
It sucks to be delisted by PayPal over political bullshit.
It sucks Mastercard and other CC companies can decide porn is essentially illegal.
- edit @ notahacker -
The point is you're at the whim of PayPal, Stripe, and credit card company policies for traditional fiat currency.
Have fun trying to sell guns (FFL be damned), porn subs (legal like you mentioned), virtual currency (legal ofc), or anything like that with traditional processors.
Crypto is the only option for those industries and a few others if you want to accept payment online.
Doesn't matter how many billions the industry is worth if you can't accept a credit card on your site for the service.
If all majors processors ban it, it's essentially blocked.
Using fraud detection technology and/or swallowing the chargeback fees would probably be cheaper than the overhead of using a crpytocurrency+exchange.
Setting a minimum donation so that you're not a good target for card testing probably has a lower barrier to entry than requiring use of a crpytocurrency.
>> Are chargebacks on donations are major issue for any legitimate non-profit organization?
> Virtual game currencies, controversial politics, porn, gambling etc.
Paying for porn is not a donation.
Paying for in-game currency is not a donation.
Gambling is not a donation.
Giving money to someone for "controversial politics" is almost never an issue, especially if you're actually donating (which is only possible if you are, e.g., giving money to a registered candidate, a PAC, or an org that files a Form 8872). I make a lot of political donations and have never had an issue.
If you're:
1. giving money to someone for political reasons, who
2. explicitly opts out of tax-advantaged status so that they don't have to use that money in a way that's congruent with donor's intent, and
3. has a huge issue with charge-backs on unrestricted non-tax-advantaged gifts...
IDK. I'd tend to consider that a massive red flag. But I guess funding scam artists who get tons of money from identity thieves and prey on controversial politics is indeed a use-case for crypto.
Paying for hosting with extremely volatile and environmental harmful tokens that only a part of population pretends has a real value, that you want to hoard rather than spend, and that might go to 0 at some point? To have basically torrents?
Sending deflationary ponzi scheme tokens to people is not helping them. Also, fees are high.
Private transactions are great if you are a criminal, I'll give you that.
Tell me one "dapp" (or "extremely wasteful programs that run on a CPU that is orders and orders of magnitude slower than an actual one) that is doing something useful. I haven't found one yet and I've been searching for some years now.
With NFTs you don't own anything, unless there's an actual contract that comes with it. Also you buy a hyperlink that points to central storage. Also money laundering and wash trading are rampant.
If the powers at be allow you to (PayPal, banks, credit card companies)
If Mastercard doesn't like you or your wares (porn or dissent) good luck!
> Private transactions are great if you are a criminal, I'll give you that.
Tired old trope. You don't have to be a criminal to enjoy privacy.
> Tell me one "dapp" (or "extremely wasteful programs that run on a CPU that is orders and orders of magnitude slower than an actual one) that is doing something useful. I haven't found one yet and I've been searching for some years now.
I have, read above. Decentralizing. Exchanges, payment processors, distributed DNS, distributed CDN, distributed royalties.
>With NFTs you don't own anything, unless there's an actual contract that comes with it. Also you buy a hyperlink that points to central storage. Also money laundering and wash trading are rampant.
Tired old trope. It's simply a non-fungible token that can represent your ownership of an asset. You can own a Handshake domain using NFTs. There are other uses other than a hyperlink pointing to artwork. Yes others can access your domain and artwork, but you own it and you can sell it. In regards to your domain that's how you prove you own it and can admin it.
I recently read about a steel maker in India executing a cross border order on blockchain. On further reading it turns out their bank used a third party company for digitizing letter of credit and that company claims to be using an enterprise blockchain R3 Corda. R3 itself is owned by a consortium of banks and on their website they don't use the word blockchain to describe Corda. They call it DLT.
My understanding is that a blockchain is supposed to be distributed, trustless, permissionless, immutable and open. At least that is what the core ideology behind it and is touted as the cornerstone features of blockchain. An enterprise blockchain is private, trustful, permissoned and everything that is a blockchain is not supposed to be. At that stage is it even a blockchain or just another propitiatory data store?
A blockchain is just a data structure. That description is more befitting of Decentralized Finance/DeFi
What would be the advantages of using a private, permissioned blockchain over a MySQL/Oracle/SQL Server database for storing data?
Why as an external user would I trust a centralized blockchain more than I would trust a centralized database? They are both private owned and controlled by a company.
As an external user? Nobody cares, it's not for you, move on.
And why couldn't a distributed SQL database be append-only, immutable, time-stamped, and implemented so each new entry has a hash of the previous state? (If you own it, just set it up to disallow updates or deletes, and allow inserts only through a trigger / stored procedure that adds the timestamp and hash.)
Yes. Those scams have been put an end to by regulations by the SEC, as unregistered ICOs are now illegal since 2017. [0]
> there is not a single product aside from trading/finance that got traction.
So what is wrong with using blockchain domain names like ENS for identity, or sign in use cases? Are we going to look back at this in 10 years time and we will see this sort of adoption? [1]
[0] https://www.investor.gov/introduction-investing/general-reso...
If nothing else, it shows that crypto has succeed in one of its goals: moving money between countries, without being detected/hindered by governments.
I mean, I don't know who buys real estate with crypto, but I am assuming that people who live in dubai and have large crypto values are bullish on crypto, and won't waste it for a low roi investment like realestate. So that leaves rich foreigners who wants realestate away from their own government and I can see them purchasing bitcoins as a way to siphon money out of their country.
Other than that, I am also out of ideas for useful uses of crypto currencies
Somehow, you've got to do a billion dollars in cash to bitcoin transactions, but what's the point of buying middle eastern real estate with the bitcoin after that? Why not just rinse the bitcoin through a tumbler and sell it on an exchange and tell the taxation ministry that you simply made a great investment? Then you have a billion dollars minus tax in your bank account that you can do anything with. Dubai real estate is completely irrelevant to the process.
I think "money laundering" is like "ponzi scheme". The more likely someone on the internet is to use it, the less likely it is that they actually understand the term.
You could take your bitcoin and sell it on an exchange as you suggest but there are two problems with this. First, it's not that easy to sell a lot of bitcoin for real USD and the transaction costs can get high. Second, and more importantly, as money launder what you really want to do is take your dirty money in one jurisdiction and take it to another. Did you ever see Blow? Based on a true story. A US guy raised incredible money selling cocaine and stored it in a shady Panama Bank. The bank steals his money. What his recourse? If you are an oligarch in a corrupt country you want to get your money somewhere your government can't seize it. So why not take your bit coin and use it to buy real estate in Dubai? If you took your bitcoin and sold it in a way that ends up in a western bank, that bank is going to do kyc and defeats the whole purpose.
Obviously I have never laundered money and I don't really know. Tell me I am crazy.
Too risky for me, but if you're a drug cartel, that's business as usual.
Furthermore, when people bring up the laundering and crime argument, I always point out that the us dollar is by far the medium of choice for laundering money, crime, ransom, extortion, drug payments, human trafficking payments, terror financing.
Accepted almost everywhere, virtually untraceable.
Cash is an infinitely better money laundering vehicle.
[1]: tools that blur the transaction chain, masking the origin of one's coins.
This was entirely legal, and I was Making My Own Financial Decisions™, but the route got shut down pretty quickly anyway.
If I am in a country from where I cannot legally buy a property in Dubai, would buying a property via BTC route be legal? Definitely not.
The only scenario in which it makes sense to buy property directly in BTC is if I had bought BTC years ago when it was cheap, it would be better to convert it into a real asset like an apartment in Burj Khalifa and convert my on paper wealth into real wealth.
Bitcoin or your blockchain of choice has no such issues though! You can prove to your seller that you have the funds, as well as even pre-commit the money in a smart contract, or a multi-sig transaction. Doing so would completely remove the need to wait on the slow and inefficient banks to do their thing.
Where are you getting that from? If the money has been earned in a legit manner and you want to spend it on a legitimate thing, who's stopping you from spending it?
Yes if your source of money isn't legal or you want to spend on something illegal, that's a different story.
A.) Transfer a part of it (for this particular bank, anything more than $5000) to pay a deposit for a house;
B.) Make a final settlement on a house, again with money I had available in my account.
There are limitations on how much you can transfer easily at once, and different kinds of approval and parties have to be involved to pay for something large.
When we bought this property, the least drawn-out bit of the overall process was the actual transferring of the funds. That was the easy part :)
It was the same with vehicles we've bought, the fastest part of the process was transferring the funds from buyer to seller, by far(!)
Are there (m)any significant transactions where the moving of money from buyer to seller is the bottleneck in terms of time and/or effort?
I spent an hour on the phone to get my limit temporarily raised, then another hour or so later in the day when the payment was flagged as suspicious and my account was locked. There was then an arbitrary waiting period of one day where the transfer sat in limbo before getting processed (more security theatre), and finally an additional two days for the funds to clear.
If I have the money and they are legal, I can spend them without anyone getting in the way.
Banks ask you the reason for transactions beyond a certain amount because they have to report it to authorities.
Large transactions like paying for a property don't happen at the drop of the hat. You won't just wake up in the middle of the night and decide to buy a property immediately right then.
How easy is it to actually buy 5M USD of bitcoin? Assuming you have legit money?
And why would you move legit money out of the banking system? Assume you have 5M USD in bitcoin, can you sell it and deposit that in your bank without lots of money laundering questions that are hard to answer?
My two cents is that if you have legit money, you will want to keep in the banking system, and avoid risks of being accused of money laundering.
I was going to say, "Can't be too hard; Musk does it with hundreds of millions" (billions?).
But then again, maybe it takes three assistants two days each time; he can afford that.
https://www.ccn.com/100-dubai-put-entire-land-registry-block...
A blockchain system using a secure database. Makes it abundantly clear, how much they understand what a blockchain is. Truly, future belongs to blockchain systems.
But, it's not possible to reasonably trust an electronic voting system - the people installing and maintaining the system have myriad ways to manipulate the vote that are almost impossible to discover or prove (at least as long as you don't accept public voting, which has different issues).
The big challenge is that it needs to be anonymous even in the case of attacks. Electronic systems offer many ways to cheat which you may have thought about in the context of making purchases but voting also needs to deal with unique problems like changing votes or coercion. If I buy a coffee, I don’t care if the owner alters their database as long as I get my coffee. I also don’t have a reason to fear that charge showing up on my statement but most proposed systems re-enable old attacks where, say, your boss/union/neighborhood crime leader/etc. could use the verification mechanism to confirm that you voted the way they told you to.
Paper ballots are the best system known because the system is easy to understand and doesn’t require huge amounts of trust. We just went through this in the United States where the leader of the country backed by a multibillion dollar propaganda machine tried to claim fraud but lost repeatedly because there was no plausible way to have altered or replaced paper ballots at scale. Electronic systems would have made it much easier to cast that doubt because the babble they tried about hacks would have been harder to disprove for the average voter and there would have been far more leeway for a partisan judge to find doubt.
Yes there are, and I've documented several of them here: https://www.attejuvonen.fi/thesis/
If you disagree, can you please be specific what exactly do you disagree about?
More importantly, however, it’s a mistake to give all of those equal weight. For example, if married couples vote together a spouse can monitor or coerce their partner’s choice but that doesn’t scale up better than linearly, whereas all electronic systems which don’t rely on voter-verified paper ballots are subject to very hard to disprove allegations of widespread fraud. This is the conceptual problem to the very clever mathematical approaches: even if they are theoretically sound, it is much harder to build public confidence in a system which a fraction of a percent of the population understands.
I doubt that. Are there voting schemes out there which prevent people from bringing mobile phones inside a voting booth? If not, then spouses can walk to a polling station together, and one spouse can walk inside the voting booth alone, take a picture of the filled-out ballot, and then drop the ballot to the box in view of their spouse. If there is no method of preventing photography inside the voting booth, and no method of invalidating a cast vote afterwards, then spouses can easily prove to each other how they voted.
> More importantly, however, it’s a mistake to give all of those equal weight.
Fully agreed.
> it is much harder to build public confidence in a system which a fraction of a percent of the population understands
I agree that more complicated systems are harder to understand than simpler systems, especially to laypersons. That said, I do not think that laypersons have a very in-depth understanding of how their paper-voting schemes currently work. There's an element of trust that goes into it, like surely some smart people have verified that the voting system in place is alright. If we had a more complicated system in place, then laypersons would need a bit more of that trust.
Laypersons have trust in things like online banking, even though it's technically a flaming garbage fire. People could just as well have trust in a cryptographically verified voting scheme.
Well, this is one reason why the last three places I’ve lived don’t allow phone usage in the polling station and have processes for getting another ballot, but also none of the electronic systems can survive that level of control either — most of them make it substantially easier for the attacker, especially at scale. That last part is important because the more people are required to pull off an attack the less likely it is to be successful.
> Laypersons have trust in things like online banking, even though it's technically a flaming garbage fire. People could just as well have trust in a cryptographically verified voting scheme.
Banking has key differences, though, which I think are significant: you can do non-anonymous audits, you don’t need deniability, and most importantly you can restore losses after the fact.
Do they kindly ask people not to use phones inside the polling station, or do they actually bodyscan people for electronic devices when they go in the booth? Because if they just ask kindly, that's not preventing anything.
Finland also has processes for getting another ballot, but only until you cast a ballot. You can't invalidate a ballot that has already been cast. So that means you can go in the voting booth, take a picture of how you voted, and then ask for another ballot. This would be sufficient to fool anyone trying to buy votes en masse, but it wouldn't fool the spouse of the voter, who could be physically present at the polling station.
> none of the electronic systems can survive that level of control either
Some of them do, actually. Some electronic voting systems craft proofs which are convincing to the voter, but only to the voter. This means that the voter can cryptographically verify that their vote has been cast correctly, but the voter wouldn't be able to convince a potential vote-buyer how they voted, because the voter could have potentially forged the proof.
> Banking has key differences, though, which I think are significant: you can do non-anonymous audits, you don’t need deniability, and most importantly you can restore losses after the fact.
Yes, online banking is a much easier problem. Despite that the actual implementation is garbage fire from 1970s. I was just trying to say that getting people to trust a complicated system is possible (e.g. people trust online banking, despite it being a complete garbage fire). Therefore, it could be possible to get people to trust a cryptographically verifiable voting system as well.
You’re positing a situation where someone can force them to vote at a specific time and place and either watch them or have them send proof of how they voted on paper. How realistic is it to think that an electronic system wouldn’t be at least as vulnerable to that same attack, even before you consider the likelihood that an attacker with that much control could use their credentials to vote or verify their history, install spyware, etc.? It’s one thing to have a game theoretical chance to deniably cast a vote and quite another to, say, be confident enough that you’ll be able to convince an abusive spouse to believe you.
Software systems make all of that possible at scale with far fewer people, and thus much more plausibly possible to keep secret.
The same thing is in no way true for electronic voting. Giving everyone access to personally inspect the electronic equipment at any level of detail is difficult logistically, and also very likely to result in damage. Even if you were able to, vanishingly few people could actually convince even themseoves that the systems are not tampered with.
Why Electronic Voting is a BAD Idea - Computerphile | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI
Why Electronic Voting Is Still A Bad Idea | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs
A basic problem with electronic & cryptographic voting systems is that it is impossible for a non-expert to convince themselves that the system is working correctly. In-person paper voting has this property by virtue of the simplicity of the system and the ability for regular people to observe it's working. This also normally includes members of all political parties participating in the vote, giving a high degree of confidence that either (a) the voting was correct, or (b) the parties you voted for are colluding, so the result is meaningless anyway.
First of all, there is more than one in-person paper voting system, and some in-person paper voting systems involve cryptography.
Secondly, layperson DO NOT by and large trust the results of paper voting elections. You don't need to look further than the previous presidential election in the U.S., in which a significant portion of votes were cast on paper ballots, and a large portion of the population STILL does not trust that those votes were counted correctly. And if you look at developing countries handling their own paper ballot elections, you will find out that many of those elections are manipulated, and people do not trust the results.
That said, I agree with your general sentiment that adding electronic and cryptographic elements to a voting scheme will make that scheme generally "less understandable" to a layperson, such that they need to defer to "expert opinion" on whether that voting scheme can be trusted. However, it's not a binary thing like you make it out to be; people do not 100% trust your chosen paper voting scheme and 0% trust your chosen electronic voting scheme.
Anyway, I feel like "how do we get people to trust the results of the election more than they currently do" is a secondary problem. The main problem is how we can actually secure the results of the election while maintaining ballot secrecy. It's more important.
That is false. Though there is some distrust in many parts of the world, the overall consensus is that the result of the vote was at least close to the real vote. Even in the USA after the recent election, many focused on accusations of fraud about voting machines (the infamous comments about "Hugo Chavez's machines").
I do agree that it's not a 100%/0% thing in practice - some people will always choose to trust or mistrust the government regardless of other facts; and some people know or are convinced by facts that others don't believe or don't have access to to trust or mistrust.
However, I would say the right response to pure electronic voting would actually be 0%. It's actually out of gullibility and misunderstanding that people put any trust in pure electronic voting *, when in fact it can be attacked in ways that not even the best expert in the world would ever notice, and this can be done by sophisticated out of state attackers (such as the USA or Chinese spy agencies). In such a high-stakes environment, you can't trust the CPU, you can't trust the RAM, you can't trust the USB controller, you can't trust the cables - everything could have been rigged to perform different computations than what was apparently programmed, and this would be often be impossible to prove.
* with the possible exception of electronic voting systems that make everyone's vote public, with obvious downsides. Though even there, I have some reservations - if I claim I voted differently than what the public ledger shows, what happens next?
If we want more democracy I think we must get some help from technology. Liquid Democracy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy ) sounds like an approach that would be hard to do without computers.
One example is sustainable (financially) open-source project is one I use now. Before that it was always impossible. You get a bunch of people all over the world, many of them are identified only by Internet handles. There's no investment to handle all the legalities of establishing a business, and anyway there's no legal framework for international businesses with psuedo-anonymous people.
But with blockchain we've been using DAOs and online voting tools etc. since 3-4 years now, and it works great. It handles the governance and the finance in a way the traditional system cannot offer.
You're saying that you wouldn't be able to perform online votes or surveys and remotely send money without a blockchain?
Could you expand more on what functionality that the blockchain provides that the other solutions in this space (online surveys and remotely send money) don't?
That's a comment for open-source in general, not about blockchains.
Accepting pull requests is also limited to a set of individuals.
Which code? Just your client code, or the code that miners and brokers and exchanges run on their servers, too? If the claim is the latter, how do you know that the published source code actually corresponds to the executables they're running?
As far as purchasing stuff, there's no central purchaser that I can think of.
Why? Can't the system keep using the same chain, or is this just convention? If any software change required a fork, you couldn't do even the most trivial of bug fixes (say, fix a typo in the UI, or whatever). But I notice you said "major change"; so who decides what's "major" and what isn't? On which grounds?
The definition of "major change" in this case is a change that changes the definition of a valid block or transaction.
Filter by hack/scam and look for all "error in contract code"
"Remotely send money" is a super hard thing to do. I literally just struggled for a month with a transfer that included 3 countries, none of them is English speaking. It required letters from banks, accountants, plenty of forms of different countries, translations, stuff which is lost in translation (the bank was unhappy with the word selection of a non-English speaker accountant, for example), different formats, different standards and navigating countless options and tricks in order to avoid ridiculous exchange and transfer fees.
This was for a "simple" action in the real world, involving me and a regular seller of something. Now take this and try to divide donations between 5 participants of your project, each from a different country and a different language. Good luck with that.
Hwoever, in my open source project we did the same thing in 20 seconds with crypto. Not because we avoid tax (we don't), but because the international mechanism is cumbersome and inaccessible if you're not an expert, and expensive probably even if you are.
We manage the donations/profits with votings, and are not familiar with a platform offering a safe way to do that in our settings.
Besides, my experience with platforms for open source projects (or in general) is bad. There is no one platform offering all the services we need, so we end up having dozens of accounts (which is actually a source of tension, because when you offer to use a new platform, an argument starts with those who "have enough accounts in their life"). Moreover, platforms eventually close, so you get stuck (migration is a hard thing to do).
Let me ask a question that maybe will look at it from a different angle. Which problems remotely sending money and online platforms solve that crypto has for managing votings and finance of an international online open source project? Seems to me it beings 100% extra problems and 0% solutions.
Technologically it is not.
Which is why anyone in the EU can instantly send money to anywhere else in the EU, for free, despite being a collection of 27 countries with dozens of different languages and legacy banking systems.
The hurdles are legal and regulatory, not technical.
Blockchain and new technology does not solve the underlying problem at all.
Even then, transferring money with SEPA from my Swedish account to friends in Germany, Poland and the Netherlands is pretty much instant, I just don't like the exchange rate of my bank.
I have no idea how you did an instant transfer from Sweden to Poland.
Wise might not had the liquidity in your currency pair, and you had to wait for a transaction to happen in the reverse direction.
(Just speculation)
Its Not true in that Description, also dont forget: SEPA!=Euro!=EU!=EER
Source: Im running a bank. In the EU.
It's a political problem not a technological one.
Free instant transfers are the direction of travel, but in the EU, that is a question of regulation, not technology. Maybe in 2030 we will be there :)
But for many transactions, I see that instant would be nicer, but I don't see the crucial need. My employer pays all Eurozone salaries from a bank account in Luxembourg, I imagine it is just a script checking "Initiate transfers on 10 AM, 1 day before last working day of month". Being able to do "Initiate transfers on 23.59 PM of last working day of month" would be slightly nicer, but I don't think it really solves a huge pain point?
Source: recently received money sent by a friend from another EU country.
E.g. my bank allows worldwide free SWIFT transfers in many many currencies. It's not hard to find out someone's name, bank account number and SWIFT code et voila... money sent. There's plenty of other solutions from Paypal to (Transfer)Wise etc.
Saying "it can be done in 20 seconds with crypto" is really only half the truth. At the end of the day we all need fiat money. So there's always a conversion step (if not two!) between fiat -> crypto -> fiat money. I can't pay my baker in Cardano nor my hair stylist in Fantom.
Fair point.
Could likely be done simpler, but then why not (there are payments solution providers that keep everything internal etc.).
But this only shows that some (many?) places are woefully behind on online banking, not that blockchain is required. I can transfer money abroad from my bank account to, probably, yours (do you have an IBAN account number?) with just a few clicks more in my online bank than a domestic transfer. If the banks in your target countries caught up to that (not incredibly advanced) standard, you could have done that too. And I'm fairly sure neither my bank nor the ones of my recipients, nor the systems in between them, use any blockchain whatsoever for this.
So not a valid example that blockchain is actually needed.
And yet just like blockchain, you allude to something without providing any substance. What is the open-source project? You’ve failed to actually tell us what the real “thing” is.
Not saying you are doing something wrong but rather that I see a lot of applications in the wild that have to do with people imagining also a different regulatory landscape - which actually is a discussion to be had.
Compliance and reporting really differ from one country to another, and I'm not familiar with the US system (which I heard is one of the most strict). But as far as I checked (I'm not a lawyer, not an accountant and not an expert), where I live in the EU, compliance is something for legal entities (like, organizations, companies) and not for individuals like me.
[E: I take the last sentence back, it's a too general statement and I don't have the knowledge to make it. Thanks @hnhg for the comment]
It hadn't hit a peak, but it was clearly _doing_ something that wasn't scams.
These ideas are best left in the academy, and then later financialized. The exception to this is internal R&D (like Bell Labs and countless other extremely productive corporate divisions.)
Maybe I'm just greedy.
I don't think so.
I used to work in blockchain tech and the main problem I was focused on was "How do we prevent internet monopolies like Facebook and Google?".
If you don't see those monopolies as a problem, then you're disagreeing with the problem space, that doesn't make it "trying to find a problem".
And decentralized storage coins for example.
Bitcoin can solve USD monopoly.
And a lot of other examples...
That's neither here nor there though.
The way you kill Facebook, Google and any Web2 company is to kill their business model. These are all 100% ad-funded businesses. Kill the advertising funded internet and these monopolies categorically die with it.
The only _attempt_ I've ever seen at addressing the issue that all the major websites are ad-funded has been within the blockchain space. Show me any other realistic alternative to ad-funding and I will happily adopt it.
If the answer to killing the ad funding business model was individuals pay directly it’s going to face a steep uphill battle because right now for most people the cost to read is free. What improved experience does it provide for the additional cost?
Indeed, we tried that and it failed, so we need something else.
Blockchain will probably fail because the narrative has been taken over by greed and NFTs.
But Web3 will fail because the tech world seemingly (as evidenced by the comments here) have no interest in solving the problems of Web2, rampant privacy violations, predatory business models and advertising. The answer to all these problems by HN is ”no one cares about privacy so it’s not worth solving”.
I think that's bullshit. It's just that most normal, sane, people think something like ”burning down the planet is no solution to the problem of privacy, and even if it were it would in itself be just as much of a problem, so it’s not worth attempting to solve it that way”.
It is frankly astounding that this isn't immediately obvious to anyone; verges on psychopathy in my book.
And cable TV.
Sure. But are those problems worth solving? How many VCs does the world need to pump cash into NFT-enabled video games before we ask the question, "why?"
https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/22/nba-top-shot-creator-dappe...
How many SaaS businesses do we need? How many todo apps do we need? How many game engines do we need?
Monopolies like Google and Facebook exist, in no small part, because the amount of computation and data they handle is vast, and they have the data centers to deal with that.
How much data gets has to be stored on the servers of such services? Per second? I'd assume its in the range of several GiB...again per second.
Okay, so how does the blockchain compare to that? Ethereum can store data, each byte requires about 600 of its "gas" computational equivalent. A block represents 30,000,000 gas, 1 block is generated every 15sec, so we can store a grand total of about 1MiB every 300 seconds...that is, if none of the gas is used for anything other than storing data, which means, no other computations running.
So how is "blockchain technology" going to solve the problems that come from such highly centralized services exactly?
The fact that they're processing a lot of data is in large part because they need to for advertising.
Still, your understanding of blockchain tech is misleading here. Ethereum is public key registry at best and is not and should not be used to store or process data.
In a blockchain world you can still have service providers, but the user is the one with the power, not the service provider. Users are free to switch service providers as they see fit because their identity and data isn't tied to a single company.
No they are not. That is, they will need just as "free" to switch in the non-blockchain world.
Why? Obvious, isn't it?
- Blockchains can't store the amounts of data required (Youtube/Instagram/TikTok on blockchain? What a nice joke)
- Even if you somehow can, companies will store data in their own proprietary ways incompatible with each other
- And, of course, this data will be on different blockchains, some of them invented specifically for the purpose
In reality though, as we're seeing it with NFTs all the data will be centrally stored with only some meaningless tokens referencing it stored on blockchains
In a distributed network? How does that handle the data loads and requirements (availability, latency, security) of services on the scale of fb or youtube?
me: data can't be stored on the bockchain, it will remain proprietary, so good luck "being free" and switching between service providers
ique: Data will never be stored on blockchains, its not what they’re for.
So, how exactly are users going to be "free to switch service providers" if their data will literally remain in a walled garden of the service provider?
Remove advertising and the amount of users for most social networks drops to oblivion, because barely anyone wants to spend money every time they post a picture of their cat.
> The fact that they're processing a lot of data is in large part because they need to for advertising.
They need large amounts of storage because millions of hours of video & audio, billions of food-pictures, tens of billions of lines of text, and a megagagazillion of references on who-like-clicked-what-when, take up a lot of storage.
> and is not and should not be used to store or process data.
Well then, what should be used? What decentralized storage solution can handle something like youtube, where 500 HOURS of video were uploaded PER MINUTE in feb. 2020?
And storing is half the deal. The solution also has to have high availability, consistency, low latency, and needs to be environmentally sound.
So, you're opposed to the internet, then?
Or is it that a global network of networks was a qualitative step beyond simple networking that didn't have a clear justification?
I'm saying that networking technologies original intended use (resilient nuclear launch capability) is a tiny irrelevant fraction of what it is used for today.
I'd argue that most transformative technologies are in fact not relegated to their original intended use. Following cool/interesting/powerful technologies to see where they lead, rather than knowing the destination in advance, is how we have gotten almost everything that we have.
The purpose of ARPANET was to implement applications like telnet, ftp, and email, so people could benefit from remote access to computers. The first network link went up in 1969 and the basic applications were implemented by 1973.
It seems to me that people knew exactly what they wanted to do from the get-go, it was useful almost immediately, and even though we have exponentially more people, computers, and applications today, the internet itself hasn't fundamentally changed.
This is not a proof that cryptocurrency is a dead end, but I think it's as clear as it can be that it has not been developed and adopted like internetworking was.
One could argue that the internet was in fact not innovative, transformative or interesting, and identify that as where it is different from cryptocurrency. Isn't connecting existing networks to each other as obvious, mundane, and utilitarian as it gets?
There is a RAND paper from the 60s that suggests the development of the internet over the next 50 years was fairly obvious:
https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P3717.html
It talks about online shopping, videoconferencing, etc. There are bound to be anachronisms, but even so.
That is a very abstract way of referring to the feature. Suppose 100 years from now the entire world runs on decentralized blockchains. You could make the same exact abstract point: "Well, leaderless consensus was the original design goal, and it was achieved immediately, so, it was useful from the very beginning".
Of course the core innovation will always be integral to the relevance of that innovation. The point though is that the specific applications envisioned for the internet were very narrow and almost completely unrelated to what we use it for today, when it was invented.
> It seems to me that people knew exactly what they wanted to do from the get-go, it was useful almost immediately, and even though we have exponentially more people, computers, and applications today, the internet itself hasn't fundamentally changed.
Again, only if you conceptualize "knew what they wanted" in a very abstract way that makes the point tautological.
Cryptocurrency as it stands today is already useful. There is no real debate about that. I personally find it useful as an alternative value store. The use cases might be narrow, and not nearly as revolutionary as some of its proponents think (yet), but they do exist. If I am the only person in the world that derives utility from it, then its utility is still non-zero.
But abstracting from crypto specifically, the idea that technologies need to have specific applications in mind before they are pursued is just not how the history of technology has ever worked. Many of the best discoveries were made entirely by accident, in the pursuit of random, interesting things. We make progress by pulling at threads, and pushing boundaries down avenues that lead to highly general, abstract, and powerful primitives. I don't know about you, but I think Byzantine fault tolerant contract execution is a profoundly powerful, abstract, and general primitive, much like the internet itself. We do not know what its specific applications will be, just like we didn't know about Uber, Amazon, or Google in 1969.
Go take a look at the history of the early internet. As recently as the early 90s (more than 20 years after ARPANet came online!) people were saying commerce would never happen on the internet. Nobody would ever feel comfortable buying things that way, it was absurd. Here's Paul Krugman, in the NYT all the way in 1998 saying as much:
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/paul-krugman-internets-eff...
It's way too easy to see where we are now with the internet as inevitable. But it was extremely far from obvious 30 years ago. Most of the world thought it was a toy. Thought business and commerce and ordinary people would never take it seriously. This was not a fringe view, it was the mainstream consensus.
Now, I don't want to fall into the trap of arguing that because the internet's future was obscure, and crypto's future is obscure, therefore crypto will be as successful as the internet. That's stupid. What I do want to argue is that the premise that technologies need to have clear-cut and specific applications before being pursued is wildly out of sync with how some of the most important technologies in human history have come about.
I don't understand what you mean.
If they wanted remote login, email, and file transfer, and those applications were up and running in a year or three, and solved an immediate purpose/problem, that existed before the first network link was running, then what is it that is abstract or tautological?
I don't know how the contrast with cryptocurrency could be clearer.
Those are very small parts of the value proposition of networking today. Similarly, cryptocurrency delivered a feature on its first day: decentralized digital scarcity. You may not find this feature useful today, but some people do, and most people did not find remote login useful for quite a while after networking was invented.
The fact that the utility of decentralized digital scarcity is not world changing yet is not surprising. Remote login wasn't world changing in 1979 (10 years after ARPANet launched) either. It took quite a while for these things to find their modern use cases, and permeate the culture.
But that's not what your GGP comment says (or at least strongly implies). ARPANET was not a solution in search of a problem; it was a solution to a pre-existing problem.
That this solution (or its progeny) was later found useful for a whole lot of other additional uses is something else entirely.
The reasoning in your progression of comments smacks if shifting the goalposts. To me, that implies an intellectual dishonesty that is all too typical of blockchain proponents.
No. We're opposed to Juicero and Enron
You're this close to understanding the whole of the crypto/web3 space
> Seems completely orthogonal to the question at hand.
It really isn't
TL;DR: You're wrong.
What did you say the difference was again?
HTH!
This alone trumps any arguments against bitcoin. Crime will exist forever and criminals will find ways to finance themselves anyway, so the use of cryptocurrencies for their operations is not really a factor.
How will they convert it into something they can use to pay rent and buy groceries?
> Crime will exist forever and criminals will find ways to finance themselves anyway, so the use of cryptocurrencies for their operations is not really a factor.
Does this make it easier for the wealthy to evade taxes? I find just signing transactions using something like gpg a much easier to reason about.
My biggest concern about cryptocurrency is fees. There is no reason why fees should be based on payload as far as I understand. Whether I’m sending one satoshi (or any other unit of money) or a trillion, the cost should be the same and ideally as close to zero as possible if not zero. This was the original reason I was drawn to bitcoin but it was obvious it would never be the case.
Exactly my question. Exchanges where you can sell the crypto for real money are still regulated and require KYC.
> My biggest concern about cryptocurrency is fees.
High fees are required to pay for the insane electricity bills and specialized hardware. PoW cryptos are expensive and inefficient by design so there will always be more transactions waiting in the queue to get on the chain than the processing power required to mine the next block.
In some other chains, like Ethereum, the accounting is ledger based. With these systems theres is no variety in input count, but it similarly scales by transaction computation so more complex contracts are more expensive.
Both networks have a fluctuating transaction cost due to congestion competition, but the “base cost” in either is totally unaffected by the value/total amount of currency.
So when I “spend” that fragmented 1 btc, it all gets eaten up by fees?
Prior to that it was absolutely the case that multiple sender addresses caused multiple fees.
Not sure about other cryptocurrency.
In no way does bitcoin being blockchain based enable you to do this better or more effectively. It's just because it's a less regulated currency.
Permissionlessness is the main killer feature, and I dare you to find another way to implement it using some other method.
Pay rent? No, because the government would notice the missing income on the landlords tax return.
Pay for food and other goods? No, because the government would not allow companies to take funds from permissionless blockchains.
Buy real estate or a car? No because those needs to be registered with the government as well and payments are regularly checked for fraud and money laundering.
A black market for all of the above? Sure but any government to weak too prevent a black market of this scale would also be unable to restrict transactions (no matter the method) in the first place.
Also, we are talking about the unbanked: people who otherwise have no other state-sanctioned way to use financial services. Bitcoin first and foremost helps such people.
No. No it doesn't.
The main reason for a large portion of the unbanked population is that they are so poor that they can't even afford to open and maintain a bank account. But sure, "we require a person to have a smartphone with always-on internet connection to do anything useful and have egregious transaction fees in most popular chains" surely does help the unbanked.
In the result buying buying bitcoin for a client for his currency, sending it to me and selling for my currency was cheaper than simply converting USD to my local currency. That's where I understood that bitcoin is a great thing and is here to stay. It is enough to shut your argument. I wasn't poor, but absurd restrictions by banks stood in my way just the same. Bitcoin liberates money.
It really isn't.
> I wasn't poor
I, I, I.
So if your personal anecdote "shuts down" my argument, then my personal anecdote of never having these problems sure as hell shuts yours.
What crypto peddlers don't understand is that:
- money transfer doesn't need blockchain in any shape or form
- restrictions and regulations exist for a reason, and these reasons are being rapidly discovered by all the people who are being scammed in the web3 space
- the moment money transfer over presents even a fraction of what banks routinely do, they will introduce same money transfers at a fraction of the cost (and they already have, in many parts of the world, but not because of blockchain)
Restrictions and regulations exist for a reason, here I agree with you. What I don't agree with it that this regulation is good. I think most of it is very very bad for people, designed to keep them under control. In my country, this control takes very draconian forms against anyone who is in opposition to the (criminal) government.
Perhaps Because they are not that interesting or useful? So far you've given me two "solutions" in search of a problem.
> What I don't agree with it that this regulation is good. I think most of it is very very bad for people, designed to keep them under control.
Go and read something on food and drug safety (like Horse Named Jim, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_(horse)), an automotive safety, on emission safety, on workplace safety, on...
There's high probability that you're alive and healthy today precisely because of regulations.
> In my country, this control takes very draconian forms against anyone who is in opposition to the (criminal) government.
Ah yes. And crypto will surely help with that because that criminal government will never ever find a way to bust you for trying to convert that "censorship resistant crypto" into, you know, actual money you have to pay for food, rent, electricity etc.
If I had to guess who is the biggest crypto-"currency" holder in Russia, I'd probably go with Putin.
The reason why you could do what you did is because you participated in a young, unregulated market. Blockchain added nothing.
Of course, this breaktrhough opens a way to zillions of shitcoins, but they should simply be ignored.
Blockchain provides integrity guarantees given a number of malicious participants. That's all it provides over any other ACID database.
This is a ridiculous claim. Just because a technology can be used for good does not mean it is beyond criticism.
Okay, let’s think about this even a little bit: receiving that Bitcoin requires them to have software and access websites which the Chinese government has restricted. Assuming they successfully get a wallet app which isn’t compromised, they then need to connect to a well-known, trivially blocked high-volume network service without the Great Firewall triggering. Having done that, they then need to pay a substantial processing fee for any transaction. Since their landlord, grocer, etc. need to be paid in real money this person will also need to find someone to convert it, again requiring a substantial payment because accepting something banned from a pariah is high-risk.
All of this is not only expensive but incredibly risky since you’re leaving a lot of electronic records of illegal activity and you’re forced to trust various third-parties who can be compromised without your ability to easily tell. Bitcoin is perfect for state authorities, too, since it leaves a signed record of intent to break the law for each transaction — if they bust a business which does a lot of cash sales, it’s a lot harder to prove where each bill came from and there’s no way to do so if they only start monitoring after the fact like there is with Bitcoin.
1. Lack of tooling and cooperation for investigating fraud
2. Lack of regulation
3. Programmatic interfaces
4. There are markets like the NFT space that are amazing for laundering
But no part of why it's good for crime has to do with blockchain.
> The thing is it's not really particularly good at that.
Sure, but apparently it sucks less at that than at anything else. Which would be why that's the only use case in which it's actually used as a "currency"; the law of comparative advantage and all that.
> But no part of why it's good for crime has to do with blockchain.
Well, the anonymity, one would have thought?
The scientific research to engineering pipeline is the backbone of our rapid technological progress. Basic research can target unexplored areas in a more organized fashion, allocating resources properly instead of industry's ad-hoc approach. Sort of like breath first instead of depth first. Industry will waste resources solving just their own individual instances of a mini-problem one by one resulting in a total resource consumption that is greater than what academia would have used in solving the overarching problem.
If we remove PoW to reduce cost and stop wasting energy, it just makes it another centralized system. PoS or FPoS is centralization in the hands of a few whale coin holders.
Many other VC backed blockchains like Solana are not even decentralized. And to talk about enterprise blockchain like Corda or Hyperleger, I don't know if it's even correct to call them blockchain.
Furthermore your analysis of PoS makes no sense as well. I guess you have a lot of BTC?
As it stands, the only blockchains that are relevant are just colossal energy sinks, and it's devastating.
> I couldn’t care less :) if you want to pretend the rest of the ecosystem doesn’t exist it’s up to you.
Eh... You're the one defending a system that doesn't give a shit about the ecosystem. You know, the real actual ecosystem, the one POW[1] blockchain so immensely contributes to destroying. It's almost as if you guys are all pretending it doesn’t exist.
___
[1]: And what an apt acronym that is, in this context.
‘’’ Powered by the Helium Blockchain, The People’s Network represents a paradigm shift for decentralized wireless infrastructure. ‘’’
They use the blockchain in combination with a proof of coverage algorithm to reward hotspots. https://docs.helium.com/blockchain/proof-of-coverage/
But if you have something that's a useful network in its own right that keeps track of its own coverage, you can use that to enforce decentralization. The higher the density of nodes in an area, the lower the reward.
/cynicism
Sending one packet costs $.00001 (100K packets for $1 according to their website). So we need to see 29,400,000,000,000 packets yearly on the Helium network for data fees to cover the gateway rewards.
Looking at data from The Things Network - who operate another LoRaWAN network - from their conference last year they mention routing 600 packets/second using 30,000 gateways => that's 630,720 packets per gateway per year.
Assuming that Helium sees the same ratio of packets, and that every packet is unique, and that every packet is meant for the Helium network (and thus paid) this yields an expected (630,720 * 490,000) 309,052,800,000 paid packets => 309,052,800,000 * 0.00001 = $3,090,528 in data fees.
So ~3 million $ in revenue (in very best case scenario) from data fees, but paying out ~294 million $ to gateway owners.
Naturally the only way this works is because they give out their own invented tokens rather than dollars. This does not make any sense, and will never make any sense. I read that the gateway manufacturers pay the Helium company 50$ per gateway (to provision a private key) which probably pays for some stuff (and to pump up their own coin), but if that's the case then it just looks like a pyramid scheme.
Also scale doesn't help if you pay out 100x more for every gateway than you can potentially earn per gateway. But that should be obvious. You're paying a gateway for 600$ and then you get >600$ in rewards per year. This does not make any sense.
There is a twitter account that publishes the DC burn rate hourly/daily/weekly: https://twitter.com/HNT_DC_Burn. Last week they burned $1,064,348 in data fees so the revenue is way higher than the 3 million per year you described, but you make a fair point for the gateway activation fee and not sure how much of the DC burned is because of this. But focusing on growth by giving out rewards for early hotspots is not a weird tactic and the question is indeed if the pricing make sense for the long run. Nowadays most priced stocks or other assets don't make any sense to me as well, so I would have agreed with you 10 years ago, nowadays I'm not so sure. They are also expanding to the decentralized 5G market and the packets send will be way more than the LoRaWan network, so I think that is priced in the helium price as well at the moment.
Your last statement I don't really understand. If you participate in a network by investing/running the hotspot you would want a compensation and nowadays a gateway would earn less than 600 dollars a year because of the increased hotspot amount. There will be an equilibrium that the market decides otherwise people would shutdown their hotspots.
The cognitive dissonance here is astounding. Surely you can see how the analogy isn't even remotely 1-1.
ELON MUSK: Yeah. Well, we started off first by offering people $20 if they opened an account. And $20 if they referred anyone. And then we dropped it to $10. And we dropped it to $5. As the network got bigger and bigger, the value of the network itself exceeded any sort of carrot that we could offer.
Helium is trying the same thing (only decentralized) with the proof of coverage algorithm and rewards (which are diminishing by a halving process every two and a half years I think) so that the network can sustain itself. Please let me know why the cognitive dissonance is astounding because their proof of coverage hotspot rewards look a bit more advanced to the growth strategy PayPal used and they hope the network will be sustained by data transfer only when the rewards are not given anymore. (https://cdn.codetober.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/1111471...)
It doesn't require a blockchain, though.
Anything that does not exist natively on the blockchain doesn't need a blockchain at all.
If a token on the blockchain would represent you as the owner of a car and one day someone steals your private key which represents your car ownership, that person is now the owner of your car. Still, the car keys are located in your house, the license plate is registered on your name and address, the insurance is on your name.
I guess I don't need to explain further how ridiculous that idea is that a token would officially represent you as the car owner.
A Blockchain without the ability to initiate (and complete) such a process is worthless for questions of real world ownership.
Of course a Blockchain could be empowered to do that....through a law.
Gets even more interesting when people can buy puts and calls on someones liquidation via options dex.
A few of the ex-mil people in a DAO i'm apart of are really interested in this space growing for services like that, for obvious reasons.
How does the blockchain know that said access has been secured? Is it up to the original requestor to confirm this? If so, what if they're malicious and don't want to do so as to not give up their collateral? If it's down to a neutral third-party acting as an oracle, what prevents said third-party from being bribed/coerced/hacked into providing false data to the blockchain?
All of this can be solved by the law (eventually escalating to people allowed to use deadly force), but at that point why do you even need a blockchain?
Blockchain only works for assets that live entirely on the blockchain, such as cryptocurrencies. Anything that lives in the real-world is a bad use-case for blockchains as you now need a centralized, trusted third-party to sync the state of the blockchain with the state of the real world, at which point you may just do away with the blockchain entirely and let the third-party run a good old database.
Auger[0] has something like this:
"Reputation (REP) and (REPv2) is a cryptocurrency, used by reporters during market dispute phases of Augur. REP and REPv2 holders must perform work, in the form of staking their REP or REPv2 on correct outcomes, to receive a portion of the markets settlement fees. If you do not report correctly, you do not get the fees. If you report incorrectly, you lose your REP or REPv2. If you don’t participate in a fork (when the network has a very large dispute over an outcome), you permanently lose your ability to migrate your REP or REPv2 to a forked universe, making it functionally useless within the used version of the Augur Protocol, and in theory making it worthless. Passive holders of Reputation (REP or REPv2) that are not using their Reputation (REP or REPv2) within the Augur protocol to stake on disputes and forks are penalized. The treatment of REP and REPv2 within the Augur protocol is governed not by the Forecast Foundation but by the protocols smart contracts as described in the Augur white paper and documentation."
Other protocols may handle things differently.
> All of this can be solved by the law (eventually escalating to people allowed to use deadly force), but at that point why do you even need a blockchain?
Assuming if the law in all jurisdictions around the world were as sufficient for all cases presently and into the future. Also this assumes that its not the enforcers of a particular law aren't also the ones that the on chain claimant wants to take action against (again, the payout would need to be high enough for those to incentivize action against a particular jurisdictions enforcers, which need not necessarily mean engaging on the property, but anything to get the enforcers to back off even going after friends and family and their property in retaliation [which is more doable in jurisdictions who databases with such sensitive information have been compromised])
> Assuming if the law in all jurisdictions around the world were as sufficient for all cases presently and into the future.
Are you saying that there should be one global jurisdiction and law? That is a completely separate can of worms.
At the moment the only law that matters is the law that can be enforced, which is generally the law of the country where you reside or have assets that can be seized, and this system appears to work well enough for everyone involved.
The law can also be changed if needed. I'm not sure how a blockchain can account for all future use-cases without changes either.
Well according to how auger has it, those people will lose their funds they had to put up as collateral to vote on a particular market dispute outcome either through proof of their wrong decision or by a network fork if many people are in disagreement on an outcome and the many people don't bother migrating over to the forks ("you permanently lose your ability to migrate your REP or REPv2 to a forked universe, making it functionally useless within the used version of the Augur Protocol, and in theory making it worthless"). Seems like those people will have to continually pay for tokens that will be worthless as the network keeps forking as other non coerced reporters do not.
> Are you saying that there should be one global jurisdiction and law? That is a completely separate can of worms.
No, many contracts may operate simultaneously, and some even over shared claims in market disputes (at least what i get from how auger describes itself as enabling). I don't dissagree that it can be of worms though, but people can be incentivized during every step of the way in a variety of different ways. I just wanted to point that it is possible now with the tools that are viable that don't need to rely on a particular jurisdictions laws.
> The law can also be changed if needed. I'm not sure how a blockchain can account for all future use-cases without changes either.
The way to change laws may or may not be compatible with someone uploading a new contract and particular protocols users agreeing to abide by it with their assets at stake on market disputes.
> many contracts may operate simultaneously, and some even over shared claims in market disputes
Potentially - I don't disagree that the tech can technically do this, but ultimately it's still down to 1) people choosing to use it (as opposed to traditional contracts enforced by judges & subsequent law enforcement personnel) and 2) that whatever outcome reached by the blockchain can successfully be enforced in the real world - you'd need a government with jurisdiction upon the disputed assets to recognize the blockchain's outcome as legitimate and enforce it. People are unlikely to do "1" if they're not confident that "2" will happen especially if the problem can be solved by existing legal contracts who unlike blockchain-based solutions have a track record of being enforced.
Ultimately I don't think we'll ever reach an agreement here so I think the best course of action is that we stick to our opinions and either of us can tell the other one "told you so" in a decade as we see how the situation evolved.
What if it's a majority that is coerced (or bribed, frightened, etc) into lying? Then it's the truth that will be left behind as "reality" forks in favour of the usurper, isn't it?
Do you think I should risk my life to enforce your property rights? I have two kids and I want to watch them grow up, I can't die because someone with a gun claimed ownership of a stranger's house.
Without an organized government of some kind, society does not scale beyond about 200 people. We just cannot keep track of relationships and trust and whatnot beyond that. I live in metropolitan area with a population of 25 million people; a distributed group of vigilantes enforcing property rights is not even remotely workable here, and this is not even the largest city in the world. My in-laws live in a suburban area with a lower population density -- their town has a population around 20 thousand, and that disorganized group is not going to work there either.
I have no expectations of you personally if you wanted to protect my property rights (if i had claims on such and had a tx posted for someone to secure such), but I cannot control if an address controlled by a multisig of psuedoanons sends a tx to a contract where they provide proof that something has been secured according the rules of decentralized AMM market settlement contract and they get their payout. I cannot also control whether people make leveraged side bets on that happening or not, and I cannot control if those making leveraged side bets try to collude with the multisig that submitted the a tx for settlement.
> I live in metropolitan area with a population of 25 million people; a distributed group of vigilantes enforcing property rights is not even remotely workable here, and this is not even the largest city in the world. My in-laws live in a suburban area with a lower population density -- their town has a population around 20 thousand, and that disorganized group is not going to work there either.
I'm pretty sure that if they pay is high enough for the people that controls the multisig, and they have the skills and resources to execute, they can get where they need to be, and be gone when its finished, while accepting some risk that who they are up against may be prepared for it.
A digital signature on a blockchain somewhere means nothing. How do you connect it with the real property? All of the other above things go some way to demonstrating a real connection to the property. A block chain does not. It's the same problem all blockchain solutions have: verifying the data at the point of entry to the block chain. If that is distributed and can not be trusted and verified remotely, then the existence of it in a block chain does not help.
I'll create PropertyBlock™ blockchain tomorrow and sign a block with your property address it over to myself. Worthless.
In the UK ownership is determined by a centralised land registry, and it must be registered if ownership is to change hands.
I'm not sold on the idea of a society without a central government, but I think the blockchain would help — or even enable — such an experiment.
Why should my band of armed thugs defer to what it says on the blockchain when they could instead hit you with a $5 wrench until you vacate the premises? https://xkcd.com/538
That feels a bit like saying that everyone will pitch in to stop mugging since we all carry physical cash in the same way. Maybe some civilians would intervene some of the time, but most will not risk their own bodily autonomy to defend another's property.
Issuing deeds and currency feels like the easy part of creating an agreed upon land registry or economy. I have a printer and know how to use SQLite, so nothing is stopping me from issuing my own physical currency or deeds today. I could even save paper and put them on my own personal blockchain. Convincing others to honor my currency or deeds sounds like the hard part.
The big thing about blockchains is that it allows people to all agree on a certain asset, without giving control of that asset to a single party. That is big news for anyone group wanting to live in a decentralized society, because it was one of the big problems.
If the local government and population is on your side, then you're fine.
If however you're a minority that's now deemed to be the enemy, then what supposedly belongs to you doesn't matter one bit. You can prove it as mathematically as you want, and you can have your neighbors on your side, but if a bigger army of goons shows up to take your stuff, they'll take it.
Ultimately this is an entirely political problem, and the blockchain will simply be completely ignored if things go to shit.
1. The developers. Somebody has to develop the software, and no matter what, this ends up being a very select group. If you have multiple groups, that's still not a lot of people and they'll have to cooperate somehow, which will result in some sort of system you're not involved with.
2. The miners. They group up into pools, and there's not that many of them that are big enough to matter.
Those two groups are the ones truly in control, and they're unelected, unaccountable, and have their own interests and agendas. If you think the banks are bad, then using a system made of a cabal distributed among the globe is hardly better.
Not in the way needed. You probably means git, which yes, allows for distributed development in that unlike previous systems it doesn't rely on a central server to exchange code.
But that doesn't mean people don't organize. I review people's code. People review mine. There's a list of people that's been agreed that are in control of a project. There's somebody who owns the domain, somebody who builds installers and makes releases, somebody who can say "no" to adding some code.
> Besides, as long as you speak the same protocol and use the same data, lots of people can roll out their own software.
Cryptocurrency is to a huge extent about the contents and management of this data. So nearly anything interesting will need cooperation. This means a small group getting together and figuring out how to change the protocol.
> But indeed, if a small enough percentage of the population control enough of the mining power things could collapse or at least degenerate back to a centralized society.
It already is centralized. The decentralization is more theory than practice.
> It is up to the members of a decentralized society to do their share of mining and be in the lookout for that not to happen.
They already failed, then. And no wonder, because 99.9% of the world is not even capable of having opinions here. Like if you show a random person a diff from the bitcoin git, they couldn't tell you what it does, let alone if it's a good or bad thing.
Even if you can, there's lock-in. If you already put a significant amount of effort and money into say, BTC, there's a cost to pulling out. So a lot of people will stick around even if things aren't exactly to their liking. This means there's a variety of changes that can be made for the worse with impunity on the part of the people in control.
> In order for a society to be decentralized and remain so, a big majority has to want that and hold it as one of their values.
Then it's an outright impossibility. It's the downfall of all libertarian schemes, the idea that everyone is passionate about governance. The vast majority of people want to lounge on the sofa, not to attend regular meetings with their neighbors to discuss a variety of issues like roads and sanitation.
Really, a democracy offers lots of ways of participating that the vast majority doesn't use. I don't see crypto changing that.
Except for when it breaks spectacularly every now and then.
Log4j and npm are bad enough as they are; who wants them in control of their home and money?
I may even be inclined to write down some rules and introduce a process to resolve conflicts without unnecessary damage to people and property.
(In this hypothetical scenario any form of land registry is only as valid as I say it is.)
Thereby reinventing the police
> I may even be inclined to write down some rules and introduce a process to resolve conflicts without unnecessary damage to people and property.
and the courts.
But maybe that was your point?
With a big enough population at least one government and a basic bureaucracy will be formed by someone.
A few people in the Blockchain space seem to think that technology can fundamentally change that.
I'm hopeful that when the Ponzi schemes fade away, we'll end up with a slightly more informed populace that has inadvertently received an introduction to political science, state-building, the origins of power, etc. Civics teachers take note! :)
What measures?
That's beside the point, though. I'm just noting that the possibility of have distributed deeds does make it possible to have some of the benefits of a centralized government: deeds and currency, without having one. That obviously only works if everyone in the society has come to the agreement that those things are valuable (just like in case of central governments too). But the point is just that you don't need a central person with all the power of issuing them.
No - it is the point.
> I'm just noting that the possibility of have distributed deeds does make it possible to have some of the benefits of a centralized government:
No, it doesn’t make anything possible unless there is an enforcement mechanism.
> No, it doesn’t make anything possible unless there is an enforcement mechanism.
I was trying to say it solves some of the problems, though I may have worded it awkwardly.
Blockchains do nothing at all to help anything about this situation. You could use a blockchain to manage ownership, but it would be far more efficient to use a central database of some kind that is held by whatever organization is responsible for enforcing property rights. In the end you are not going to care how your ownership is managed, you are only going to care that, if someone tries to violate your rights, the police will come and protect you. You need to trust that the enforcement will actually be applied, but what difference does it make if you use a blockchain?
That does require that most of the society agrees on some set of principles, but that's true of a centralized government too: most of the society has to agree they are legitimate. Going back to the decentralized society, everyone would agree that the blockchain determines ownership and currency. So, an organization that accept those is viewed as legitimate, one that doesn't is illegitimate. In that scenario, illegitimate organizations would be less stable than legitimate ones.
So, the existence of a system that allows people to all agree in things like currency and ownership without giving that power to one specific organization is a step forward into making decentralized societies possible. Is it sufficient? Most likely not.
Ah yes. Because it's a well-known fact that it's so easy for everyone to agree on something.
What, did you read Snow Crash as u- in stead of dystopian? What's to say they'll all agree?!?
The important point is what happens when two of those organisations disagree. What happens when I have Mr Chen's Robot Dog Republic saying I own a property -- because they have the blockchain to prove it -- and evicting you on my behalf, while you have the Cosa Nostra Pizza Delivery Co. saying you own it -- because they have the blockchain to prove that -- and evicting me on your behalf?
Civil war, that's what happens.
Decentralising stuff that everyone needs to agree on sucks.
Right, gotcha. But doesn't that work just as well with only a centralised government?
Once everyone agrees on anything, they can agree to have a centralised real estate ownership registry. Or a whole centralised government.
Your idea seems to be a thought experiment with weird priors. (Feels like that makes it rather meaningless.)
Why take such a naive blockchain as example? You could very well have a proof of authority blockchain so that 3 notary have to sign a car transaction.
You could also very well have revocation lists published on the blockchain by a further authority if keys are stolen.
There are hundreds of ways to make this work.
At the very least, that would allow me to know that I'm not buying a stolen car.
If one or a few, I can set up a corrupt notary (or several) to notarize my fake deal with you.
If many, I can't get rid of the corrupt notary (or notaries) you have set up to notarize your fake deal with me.
Is either of these particularly great?
I claim that blockchain solves Byzantine generals problem (BGP) in a scalable way and no other such solution exists. I also claim that this very problem (BGP) is being solved right now in multiple instances by using a trusted middleman, usually appointed, controlled and often funded by the government. I also claim that maintaining trust is not free and often paid from tax money (as in DVLA example). And my last claim that partial or full automation of a middleman function with blockchain is cheaper than running it traditional way (considering all costs involved).
Potentially unexpected corollary from the first and second claims - a software without blockchain cannot automate a trusted middleman function because of trust issues.
Feel free to attack any of the claims.
Why do you need a decentralized blockchain with tokens to solve that problem? If not for the tokens, what incentive have people to keep running and protect the blockchain against attacks? The oracle problem: how do you prevent someone from pushing false or duplicate data to the blockchain?
Then tell me, where is this wonderful centralized database that tells me who owns which car?
Blockchains are not just about decentralization, it's also about publishing the actual databases in the wild for everyone to see, because you have the guarantee that no-one can fake it.
Sure, a lot of the use cases could be done with centralized databases, but that's the model we had for decades now, and I don't see any effort to make these centralized databases accessible to everyone.
Uhm, here in UK DVLA holds it? Anyone can access it too, you can just check the entire car history including its tax payments as well as technical inspections online. No Blockchain needed.
>>because you have the guarantee that no-one can fake it
I'd like you to explain why you think that's true. If you assume an external authority is entering details into the blockchain, how is that different to the exact same authority entering details into the systems that we have currently?
Instead of this I could have pay to a smart contract and get my car ownership record in exchange. No clerks or lawyers involved. I cannot imagine how you implement this scenario as an API on top of a centralized database.
When you buy a car it's just registered online, takes 5 minutes to do. No actual in-person anything involved. You get a PDF confirming your registration, the dealership prints the plate for you right there and then, nearly every garage has a machine for priniting them. You stick it on your car, drive off, done. The registration document arrives in post 1-2 weeks later, but you don't really need it for much as it's not proof of ownership anyway, it's just for your records.
Literally nothing about buying a car involves actual people reviewing anything. It's all automated, it's all online.
So I'd still like you to explain how exactly are you going to get rid of 99% of DVLA's staff and what algorithm exactly allows for that when using NFTs/blockchain.
>>First of all I need a contract with a dealership, so there is a lawyer involved
Why? I bought several new cars in the past, you read the documents, sign them, the car is yours. Why involve a lawyer? What for?
> Literally nothing about buying a car involves actual people reviewing anything. It's all automated, it's all online.
Who gives dealer access and rights to update government database? I would not be surprised if the dealer does not have access but update their own system and then submit documents to an agency which checks them and modifies the database. DVLA API is documented online and unless they have another undocumented endpoints I don’t see any way to register a vehicle with it.
Car registration process is documented here - https://www.gov.uk/vehicle-registration/new-registrations
This source suggests registration forms have to be sent by mail! https://dvlacheck.uk/online-forms/
> Although you can download some forms online, you will still need to return them via post. This is because the forms may ask for sensitive information or require that a passport photo be affixed to the application.
Summing up - it seems what you experienced at the dealer is a sugarcoating for the same old paper based registration process that requires countless clerks.
B) So how many people would it take in your blockchain scenario -- why wouldn't there have to be just as many to enter the change of ownership with the "special road police department" etc?
C) How would you know that your "smart contract" couldn't do the exact same bullshit, transfer it to the dealer or whoever he has fencing his hot cars for him? If it did, wouldn't you have to go to the police just like I would?
D) "Lawyers"?!? Where the fuck do you live; in North Korea or something?
1) So you do live in North Korea! Or, well (Heh), Russia -- who cares, what's the diff?
2) So the weirdly-specific link to British vehicle registration procedures is... Because you're one of Kim Jong-Un's -- eh, I mean that other Über- kleotocrat, Putin's -- coterie, and keep your money and your children there?
3) Your whole argument is as stupid as that other guy's who claimed that "Bitcoin is needed to transfer money abroad". No, countries with dysfunctional systems -- be it for international money transfers or vehicle registration -- would need to uproot and rebuild their systems anyway, to base them on Bitcoin in stead of what they have now. But if they're uprooting and rebuilding anyway, then they can just rebuild to use the same systems that already work elsewhere -- without the whole blockchain mumbo-jumbo.
4) Two people who have actually used working online systems -- that British car owner and I -- have told you that such systems exist and work. But you seem to be just simply refusing to believe us, insisting that no such system could work without your blockchain mumbo-jumbo. One would think that residents of, and owners of cars registered in, Britain and Finland would know more about the car registration systems in Britain and Finland than a Russian. (Except, see #2 above?) So, besides your obvious violation of the "assume good faith" site guidelines in calling us liars, consider which of the two alternatives
a) You are right, and know more about the car registration systems in our countries than we do; we, OTOH, are either outright lying, or have deluded ourselves into thinking we got our cars registered in a much easier way than you know to be possible. (Or perhaps we both got incredibly lucky and got it done much easier than actually is possible.)
or
b) We are telling the truth, in our countries it is possible to easily get your car registered online without any blockchain mumbo-jumbo; and you, OTOH, are either misinformed, mistaken, or just plain obstinate (or deluded) --
-- which alternative would seem most reasonable under Occam's Razor?
[Edit: Tpyo.]
Weird to see privacy go completely out the window in all of these discussions.
If you've lived under the misapprehension that what you do with a multi-ton piece of lethal equipment hurtling through traffic belongs to your sphere of privacy, it's high time to snap out of it.
(Fortunately, of course, no blockchain silliness is needed for this; I can look up a license plate on the centralised car registry DB any time.)
> ... by a further authority if keys ...
As soon as your blockchain solution requires proof of authority, your trustless solution starts requiring trust in some form of central governance. At that point, what utility does your blockchain solution provide that the DMV database does not?
You could get a credit card, and then it’s not even your money that you are spending! or your money that you lost to fraud.
I can see both of these existing in the crypto world in some form, the same way they exist in the fiat world
as for the banks and institutions and companies losing all of their money? that’s a new blockchain problem for sure
No, that used to be a real-world problem for banks until laws were passed that more tightly regulated financial institutions...
e.g. in the US, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildcat_banking
You could get a credit card, too, and then it’s not even your money that you are spending! or your money that you lost to fraud.
I can see both of these existing in the crypto world in some form, the same way they exist in the fiat world
as for the banks and institutions and companies losing all of their money? that’s a new blockchain problem for sure
Replacing databases which afaik have never been manipulated anywhere in the world (despite representing legal ownership of high value assets) with tokens similar to those people lose access to or are duped out of on a daily basis is very Web3
https://news.coincu.com/56415-citydao-hacked-discord-95000-d...
It doesn’t sound like an actual problem to me.
Note: this is my current view of it. If someday it turns out it is useful, I am happy to admit that I was wrong.
This also ignores that the costs and delays associated with passports are frequently the point — you can’t have a corrupt official ask for a cash payment to “expedite” your passport / visa application if it’s fast to begin with, and doling out those kinds of patronage positions to the right people is often how you build a winning political coalition domestically.
And yet this happens. Theoretically the blockchain reduces the entry barrier more, while not compromising on compliance and security guarantees.
You're spot on that countries would have to agree, and different blocks could form. It's no different than trade and visa agreements. The blockchain doesn't solve the problem IMO,it just reduces the cost. Trust in institutions will never be replaced by the blockchain.
Politics underpins all of it — a lot of blockchain advocates look at blockchain as a way to sidestep political squabbles, when really the politics exist at a lower level of the stack upon which blockchain governance rules are built. A nation could unilaterally cease participation in any blockchain at any time, and use political pressure in other areas (trade, defense, etc) to get other nations to join them.
To echo the author’s thesis, we’re no longer in the early days of blockchain. We’re over a decade in and nobody has gained traction with a use case that isn’t purely speculative. That in and of itself should say something.
I think the author exaggerates a bit the tone. Sure, 10 years is a lot of Internet time. But the steam engine took 50 years to become viable. Then the industrial revolution was a period of 80 years. Put that into perspective.
I guess, by speculative, you mean the cryptocurrency craze.and I can agree is a speculative bubble, an MLM scheme. But then you also have https://cyber.ee/resources/news/digital-identity-and-blockch... . You'll soon have CDBCs. And when it's here, you'll barely remember what this conversation.
Your bitcoin might be worthless by then.
The technical problems are solvable. The political ones are not.
I disagree. It's off-topic so I'm not going start an endless discussion about intrinsic value.
> Decentralisation can quickly become federation. Example: a global id system where the "miners" are countries. It removes the need of physical passports and their associated costs and delays.
As long as humans submit the external data to the blockchain someone can cheat with the data. Actually, cheating is a nice feature if you need double passports for diplomats, spies or informants. The result is a blockchain with permanent records with data you can not fully trust because the data did not exist on the blockchain in the first place.
I'm all for a digital solution instead of physical passports but I do believe this can be solved with distributed systems and international standards, instead of permanent records on a decentralized blockchain.
This is all just my theoretical assessment, anyway. And I agree that other standards and toolchain is necessary to add value. Blockchains don't do KYC nor identity verification and a lot of other things.
I am glad to see someone else who realizes this point. When people were all excited about supply chain blockchains (for example, a blockchain to verify a piece of fruit is picked in a certain place at a certain time, that the transportation truck maintains a certain temperature) I kept asking what stops someone from lying and putting in bad data or tampering with any sensors along the way? There seemed to be this idea that what was on a blockchain was automatically truth just because it was on a blockchain.
In their case, they limit themselves to verifiable timestamped witness. Someone can still submit bad data, but now you have a log that at time T entity E submitted document D, and if it turns out to be fraudulent you can't backdate or put a different one for it (could be also used to detect tampering with sensors if you receive something that shouldn't pass a sensor that worked correctly yet you obviously have it)
Can I mine on this blockchain? If not, what stops me? If it's some permission I need, then what's the point of using a blockchain? Why not just have countries issue digital certificates for passports?
It sounds like you're in the "Blockchain not Bitcoin" phase that was all the rage around 2017 or so ("we're going to put cows on the blockchain!"). Most of us either moved on from that to purely on-chain financial chicanery (defi, nft) or became disillusioned with it.
I think there are problems that are suited to be solved on the blockchain - like land titles, domain names, etc. But the existing solution to those problems are adequate, and the sudden change is too costly.
It's like having access to a completely deregulated bank ran by the mafia that has an API anyone can use. I think there's use cases for that, though maybe not the ones the community usually mentions.
Same with the bank. I don't think I ever had to speak to my bank in the 8 years I've been with them, or even been to their branch for that matter. You do everything online or in the app.
By now you can also do things that benefit from the network effect of crypto enthusiasts, for example, you can sell JPEGs from a no-name artist for significant amounts of money, which would historically be difficult for outsider-art, regardless of the fact that you're not even selling the actual rights to the images. It also proved to be an interesting way to speculate on internet memes.
There's millions of people using this ecosystem, even if it ends up being overall net negative for the world and a temporary technological distraction, I think one should be able to neutrally assess what it's being used for. You may not like it but it's like saying a nuclear bomb has no use. You may not like what it's being used for, and it may be immoral or illegal, but to say there's no uses when clearly millions are engaging with it and doing "stuff", seems short-sighted for the purposes of discussion.
Even the word technophile has positive connotations as opposed to something deviant in our society. We don't even have a word for a deviant technophile , deviant over obsession with nonsense and "the next big thing".
So it's only good for circumventing crippling social phobia? How many people suffer from those? And, hey, I've been using non-Blockchain-based online banking since around the turn of the century; can't recall when I last spoke to a bank teller, but it must have been well over a decade ago[1]. So even that use case is adequately solved without Blockchain.
___
[1]: Except for buying some foreign cash before going on vacation, that may have been in 2012. Do the clerks at Forex count as bank tellers?
Put another way, the first commercial typewriter was sold in 1874 and was an immediate success. By the 1880s, typist was a booming field — especially for women seeking employment outside of the home.
Blockchains have been commercially active for 13 years at this point. If Bitcoin shut off tomorrow, the only reason anyone who isn’t involved in shilling it would know is that all of the speculators would be screaming for government bailouts.
The GP pulled one of the cryptobro rhetorical scams: X existing technology took Y years to catch on!
Besides the statements rarely actually being true they're nonsensical. A typewriter (or whatever technology they point out) has obvious utility. No honest assessment of whatever they can bring up will say that X technology is useless. Maybe at the time typewriters we're released fountain pen manufacturers or penmanship clubs said they were useless. But they have a vested interest in the status quo.
I don't think most anyone pointing out flaws in cryptocurrencies have a vested interest in the status quo. I certainly don't. I don't and doubt you have some sort of short against Bitcoin or own a bank full of fiat currency.
The cryptobros can't seem to fathom that they got sold on a bunch of useless shit. When they're not at the top of the Ponzi scheme they can't seem to conceptualize that they've been had. It's kind of sad to see. At the same time it's infuriating because their scam is literally wasting a small country worth of electricity to mint Geoffrey dollars.
I think it’s more that they can’t afford to acknowledge it: the only way cryptocurrency has meaning is if they can line up a buyer, and as soon as you allow that to be questioned those big dreams about becoming as rich as the people selling them on “web3” start to look pretty unlikely. A lot of these people have built their vision of the future on very high returns and the only way that happens is if they donate their time pro bono to the major investors backing these companies.
In my country,and I assume in most it's the same, in order for you to sign a buy contract for a house, there has to be a notary involved. The whole process costs a significant percentage of your already heavy purchase.
A blockchain won't solve all the problems here, but it may cut a few middlemen. And it doesn't have to be on ethereum or bitcoin. The Estonian (or is it the Finnish?) Government already uses a blockchain for their digital id system.
I guess I should have driven to Maine.
This is the kind of thing at first glance people say is made for the blockchain, but in reality the incumbent solution is actually pretty reasonable and the actual gains from a new system are negligible.
This is especially true when you learn about the nasty edge cases title insurance helps with. A lot of people trying to drum up buyers for their hashes talk like the value comes from recording the chain of transfers when you're really paying for things like handling cases where, say, a surveyor made a mistake in 1952 and now two landowners have legal ownership of overlapping properties or some mistake in probate three owners ago meant that someone has a claim on 10% of it.
In order to replace title insurance and make it so anybody can verify the state of a property you need to first make all liens ever live on the blockchain. That's the hard part here. If it is possible to have a lien on a home without that appearing on a blockchain then there is still a need for somebody to review the title.
Further, there is no need for decentralization! The state can simply operate a centralized append-only database where transactions are recorded and liens are created and publish that to everybody.
* https://wowa.ca/ontario-housing-market
When purchase through a lawyer, title insurance in Ontario is around $250:
* https://www.getwhatyouwant.ca/what-the-heck-is-title-insuran...
250 / 922000 = 0.000271 or 0.03%. I've had bar tabs larger that $250.
if the estonian government is operating and enforcing it, why do you even need the blockchain bit? just put the database onto mysql and and make a website for people to transfer ownership online
As for state IDs... why not just a centralized database with a public API? What does decentralization achieve for a system that is fundamentally centralized. Nobody can issue an ID except the government in this case.
if you trust the court, why not just have them store everything on some mysql database and execute all the ""smart"" contracts as regular java code? blockchains are necessarily orders of magnitude worse in terms of performance. why do you want to use an extremely slow linked list based DB?
I’m all for the central database. To enter data into it the government will appoint an agency which in turn will appoint individuals after they pass exams or get their license. The said individuals will have to fill in regular reports that had to be somehow processed and analyzed. Also each such individual required to keep records in a safe manner, sometimes this means hiring a security and a compliance officer. At this point it is not clear if the cost of maintaining the agency and all that people is less than automating the agency of the blockchain.
the only difference between centralized databases and blockchains is the property of trustlessness. everything else can be done much more efficiently by normal databases. if you dont need trustlessness then you dont need blockchains
This is just one half. The other half is blockchain and smart contracts also replace all the people involved in controlling access to a central database. I can imagine a smart contract that would allow me to transfer ownership of my car to you and get paid in return. I cannot imagine an API to a central database that can do the same. One thing you can do to defeat my point is to show how such an API can be built.
Blockchains can reduce number of middleman we have to deal with. The open question is at what cost.
As if laws and regulations just came about by a random process for no reason.
…so you still need a lawyer and nothing has actually changed?
Today the job of a middleman/clerk is to modify a centralized database in a regulated way. They got their licenses, exams, special education and so on. There is a government machinery behind every such database - agencies, controllers, educators, bookkeepers, etc. While you may be paying $4 for a notary signature you might be paying way more from your tax money to keep governing bodies running across the country.
My point is statement that a centralized database is cheap because it is easy to modify simply ignores governance cost which might be huge.
You might think this is silly, but fake selling of homes is actually thing that happens! I don't just mean that regulators would do it for gatekeeping purposes, I mean there would be a real need for this. In the bizarre circumstance that this move to the blockchain actually happened for home ownership, the HN gestalt would rapidly be screaming for legislation and regulation around blockchain changes.
Which means, once again, that blockchain is solving a problem that doesn't exist here. The problem with home ownership and the problem notaries are solving was never that the authority was too centralized into the relevant governing bodies.
That's the reason why after 11 years blockchain has exactly one use case, and even that one is dubiously solved IMHO. It brilliantly solves problems we don't actually have.
Compare the example with withdrawing money: you can go to an ATM and withdraw money for no fee, depending of the country. Do it in the bank, there I an associated fee.
The legal system would still have to adopt it though. And it's an industry less prone to digital innovation. And there is no financial incentive, as there is no narrow profit margin you need to optimize. So yes, it may never happen.
I almost paid for something with bitcoin once because they weren't taking anything else. Nothing illegal but also something I wouldn't want the world to know I paid for. I ended up choosing not to because I didn't want that transaction forever stored on the blockchain.
For supply chain issues the Oracle problem is very apparent. How does your smart contract know if the shipment has actually reached its destination?
There is no web3, nor web3 era. It is a marketing buzzword.
But you don’t have to do that. I earn BAT and donate it to creators.
It’s not perfect. Neither are the solutions we have now that don’t compensate users for their attention. Over time it will improve.
It was supposed to be relatively boring tech solving a niche problem (from the guy on the streets point of view)
"Omnichain CEO Pratik Soni speaks to Inbound Logistics about the growing number of blockchain use cases in the supply chain, including in reverse logistics, product authentication and sustainability."
Apparently this company started with the idea that they would use the blockchain to make supply chains more transparent. And they raised money from investors with that goal in mind. But they have since retreated from that goal.
I worked with a retailer that worked with Omnichains. None of Omnichains tools had anything to do with the blockchain. Certainly, we were never given access to a blockchain, nor was it mentioned after we had signed the contract. Instead, we were granted limited access to an API that I believe was run with Ruby on Rails and MySQL. So at a certain point this company retreated to traditional technologies, rather than trying to use the blockchain.
This is one example. At some point I hope to write up some of the other examples that I've seen.
I do not believe anyone will ever find a legal use for blockchains that cannot be more easily served with traditional technologies.
You’re still beholden to the whims of centralized developers and miners.
You’re still beholden to a court order. If the government wants to confiscate your crypto assets they can simply put you in jail until you provide the location of your private key.
If the government can penetrate offshore bank accounts they’ll have no trouble with your crypto wallet.
I’m happily mining ETH with gminer on flexpool.io and selling the coins as fast as I get them just like I did with BTC a decade ago. Because I know this whole thing is a temporary pyramid scheme.
The freedom to fuck your life over, forever, in record the moment you make that one transaction that connects your identity is sure worth the fact that it’s uncensorable.
Lol.
Rails and MySQL are too transitory for that - you'd buy a record in the database only to find the company hosting the database had gone broke or been bought by Yahoo who closed them.
You buy a bitcoin and you can be fairly confident in a decade or two you'll still have it.
You’ll have a copy of some hashes. That doesn’t mean anyone will want to buy them at the price you want or even that there will be an operating network around them.
This is especially important to learn when it comes to NFTs: blockchains are too inefficient to store the media so you’re still dependent on paying for outside hosting (yes, even with IPFS). Because you’re buying a link but not the rights, you would also need to make sure you have the right to even make your own mirror, too.
Wouldn't working with more robust companies (like banks) solve this?
Now you have two problems.
And it will be worthless. Most assets that NFTs point to are already gone. Because that useless hash you have in your NFT? It points to a centralised storager somewhere.
Well maybe, maybe not. It's been remarkable resilient so far. See https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoin-obituaries/
NFTs I'm less sure of.
Almost everyone at every stage in the supply chain have an interest in opacity rather than transparency. The people who may want transparency want transparency for themselves but not for others: they want the equivalent of a one-way mirror to spy through. Naturally, people tend to react with extreme negativity to the installation of such one-way mirrors. Actual transparency is desired by almost no one. This is even true at the consumer level: the consumer may want to know the supply chain information for various purposes, regulators certainly want to know it, business partners certainly want supply chain documentation, but a consumer would balk at the notion that they expose all of their credit card transactions to the entire world at all times. It's always transparency for thee and not for me.
One does not blockchain to build a product in the cleanest, most efficient manner.
One blockchains to have access to investors/speculators that control the gigantic pile of on-chain wealth that has accumulated over the past ten years, who would never sink $100k+ into a poorly drawn picture of an ape with sunglasses if it was running on Rails+MySQL.
This may sound like I'm being dismissive, so let me be clear, I am not - this is an extremely valid reason to chase this technology, and the existence of these (maybe ridiculous and shady, maybe not) massive stacks of digital cash is going to drive a lot of investment in the space, so if there is anything that can "break through" and prove real value beyond just targeting this wealth, someone is going to find it, likely as a side-effect of targeting these whales.
Web 1.0 couldn't have happened without the late 90s tech bubble, and as ridiculous as the Pets.com era hype was, when the dust settled there was much broader connectivity and a real market for the Internet companies that did live up to the hype over the next two decades.
It really feels like with the NFT backlash in the gaming world right now that crypto hasn't found its landing and it really hasn't taken off - its kind of in this weird purgatory. Im hopeful but very suspicious at this point. I wasn't suspicious of “the internet” until it was around for a long time. Crypto is past its wave of this is cool and lets build stuff phase afaik and now everyone is trying to make money off it.
Department of transport?
An example I use, is people expect bitcoin is anonymous. Yes, it is anonymous to the general layperson and corporation - but not to say NSA/FBI for "people of interest". And once bitcoin to USDollar transactions or financial institutions are more common - banks will sell your wallet information to credit bureaus, and eventually corporations will be able to de-anonymize chains for profiling just as today.
EDIT: forgot to say, this could be a complete lack of imagination on my part past what's been done with blockchain already or just my horrible indoctrination into the game-space like some kind of cult =)
"The more you think about it, the more “it’s early days!” begins to sound like the desperate protestations of people with too much money sunk into a pyramid scheme, hoping they can bag a few more suckers and get out with their cash before the whole thing comes crashing down."
Blockchain has been waiting on a useful implementation since inception.
Blockchain tech on the other hand has no pre-requisites blocking adoption, just no use cases. All this “it’s too early” talk never says why.
You’re also not really addressing the factual point made which was that Internet adoption had the pre-requisite of home computer adoption. Whereas there doesn’t seem to be such a stumbling block for blockchain tech.
40 years ago people on the cutting edge of tech had VHS video recorders to record broadcast TV. The tech grew slowly, became the dominant standard, and after 15 years in the mid-90s they were everywhere. 25 years later no one has one, or wants one, or even has an equivalent.
Don't assume too much about the future based on the present. Things can change in strange and unexpected ways.
I'm not saying Bitcoin and blockchain won't be around in 2040. They may well be. I'm saying current trends aren't a particularly good predictor of the future. They're wrong more often than they're right.
Reasonable people disagree on whether this application is actually something we need, or will need in the future. But the application is clear as day.
Specifically with blockchain my intuition is that, if its main selling points - immutability and decentralization - are already invalidated in the early days (10 years that is), the chances that it will recover are slim.
Complex tech tends to centralize to become cheaper. Also immutability is very problematic in terms of the right-to-forget and also in terms of illegal content and illegal operations.
Email's purpose and utility was super-obvious from day one, we just had to figure out how to make it more secure. Notice how email too became centralized, however.
> "somehow no one appears to have managed to find a positive use for blockchains that wouldn’t be better served by blockchainless technologies"
There is now a sovereign nation state that accepted Bitcoin as a currency, and, mark my words, no doubt more will follow this 2022.
Replacing central banks, and by extension, their grasp on the limitless money printing, is the whole reason why bitcoin and it's blockchain exist. And it is working wonderfully well.
People in countries where the central bankers and politicians are letting them down are flocking to bitcoin and other later inventions (such as stable coins).
Just check these countries:
- Lebanon: https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2020/2/25/distrust-in-leba...
- Turkey: https://etfdb.com/crypto-channel/as-turkey-lira-falls-bitcoi...
> "Rampant inflation is once again plaguing Turkey’s local currency, the lira, but one saving grace could be its citizens using bitcoin to supplant the plunging fiat currency."
- Also Turkey: https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/turkeys-inflation-is-an-exam...
- El Salvador: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/09/el-salvador-bi...
- And El Salvador again: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/bitcoin-el-salvador-geop...
Sounds like early 2000s online shopping to me.
> There is now a sovereign nation state that accepted Bitcoin as a currency, and, mark my words, no doubt more will follow this 2022.
Sure. That's true, but doesn't actually matter, imo., because the point of crypto is to:
> Replac[e] central banks, and by extension, their grasp on the limitless money printing
So approval from the government in the case of crypto is worth about as much as it is for making love. It's the losing side of a game saying "You know what, we'll be so gracious as to allow you to win". Never needed your permission to begin with.
"If something is too early to criticize it's also too early to evangelize."
Sane people interested in web3 don't evangelize and are totally aware of and agree with most of the criticisms. If you criticized Ethereum as being expensive and inefficient, you'd get head nods from people that understand the space and pointed to projects that are trying to fix those issues.
What you just said is “all these novice basketball players training the wrong techniques is a dire problem for those training effectively.” No it’s not, if anything investments in actual projects during relative, senseless mania is cheaper and easier than it ever was.
In web3, the amateurs are the majority and control the narrative. The space is dominated by people who make promises they can't deliver on and found companies that disappear in a year. When those are the people who control the narrative, it's impossible for the sane folks to prevent them from sullying the field's reputation until no one else will touch it.
From that “hard” technology perspective, it’s very early days. And the apps that run on top of these L1s are fully limited by L1 bandwidth, latency, and blockspace.
So, I think we’re in the pre-dial-up days for blockchains and will need a couple more orders of magnitude improvement to be (universally) on par with today’s app performance.
(Disclosure I own Bitcoin and Ethereum)
Yup my mental model is we’re either in Arpanet days or multiple-competing-DOS days.
Part of me has come to expect such fast development (Facebook, Uber, Yelp!), but other modern industries must have longer cycles I just am not paying attention.
JWST was conceived in 1996: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_James_Webb_S...
Btw Solana founder is ex-Qualcomm and worked on embedded distributed (multi-core) systems and Avalanche founder implemented a faster more elegant consensus algorithm. Can hear them discussing technical aspects of development: https://open.spotify.com/episode/632rPGnMZlHag7DJ1SCDUV?si=F...
Now this ridiculous claim is taken further: it's not even the internet, but "the fundamental infrastructure of the internet".
Whereas all signs point to it being a Juicero, an Enron and an AT&T ISIS Mobile Wallet rolled into one.
A lot of people missed out on Bitcoin early days… best way to cash in is to fork it and voila, the crypto Cambrian explosion where most of the forks will eventually die off.
One dichotomy I have noticed in crypto is that non-involved “tech” people seem to understand crypto and the big picture much more slowly than economically minded people (no, not just speculators). People don’t usually understand that crypto currencies are an economic innovation using cryptographic primitives, though more recently the space has started driving cryptographic innovation as well.
Well which means 3B people dont ever need crypto.
Why would I in my right mind use crypto? Im not doing anything illegal and I'm not ideologically opposed to paying my taxes.
I mean, the author is arguing as if Bitcoin, and Ethereum are the only blockchains that exist today. Hence why this is another blog-post that associates all cryptocurrencies having the same characteristics as Bitcoin, and Ethereum, which that isn't true and the author knows it.
This is all given that they 'claim' to have done 'research' even though they feel 'annoyed' by all of this. [0] If you are going to argue about cryptocurrencies and blockchains technologies in general, at least attack the current alleged 'state of the art' rather than using the same old arguments on the same old cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin, Ethereum) that everyone knows its faults already.
https://tezos.gitlab.io/active/proof_of_stake.html
Unfortunately, it's also very flawed, and nulls most of the security properties we thought we would get by switching to "Blockchain Technology": if someone captures 50% of this chain, it is quite easy and trivial to turn that into a full chain attack, since all future seed data comes from past chain data. The RNG is seeded deterministically, meaning a motivated attacker can maintain influence forever by maintaining control over the seed.
When you usually bring this up, people usually say "yeah, but it would be against the economics interests of the miners to crash their own coins". Aka, the technology isn't providing the security, we're back to the same "no banker would ever be evil enough to crash the economy for small economic gains" security that most cryptocurrency enthusiasts usually claim is evidence of corruption at work. So, no, I don't see what the blockchain is adding over a typical database.
I've tried multiple times to read through the Ethereum Proof-of-Stake FAQ [1], but I have a sneaking suspicion it's intentionally obfuscated, just so people like me bounce off of it.
"Byzantine Fault Tolerance" is a huge umbrella term that covers a lot of different tactics and approaches, so I welcome recommendations for concrete systems to investigate.
EDIT: The reference to Hotstuff was added after I posted this reply. I'll investigate it.
PoW is the fundamental breakthrough. Yet, everyone is oblivious to that fact, a decade later.
It's amazing that people on a technology forum talk about proof of stake as something new. That's what basically DNS runs on, and it's been around since 1983.
Maybe it is still early indeed.
There have been a lot of prototypes, trials, testing, and scams, but not a lot of hits.
The only major exceptions are the same old cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin and Ethereum) where the same old arguments still apply.
Part of the problem here is that, with no centralized authority, it takes much, much longer to make changes. Perhaps that's what the author is missing and that's why we're many years in without the kind of success you might expect for a web technology that's not destined for failure.
Before the dot-com bubble there was hype about anything involving the internet.
Just like today, any business plan involve blockchain is awesome.
Because of the technical nature of the underlying tech, it's hard for the average individual to recognise how and why it's different. However, it's not possible to explain away the particular applications and their properties.
Here are 2 use cases which are live and working today:
-Taking a collaterised USD loan without permission or interference from a third party.
- Creating a public digital object which lives forever and can be exchangeable and extendable without a third party involved.
The immediate response from critics then is to question the validity of the use case. But that requires to admit that the use case is there.
The digital object in your second example is just a hyperlink or a hash, because the digital object itself won’t fit on the blockchain. And there is no link between digital and meat space identity, which means it’s exchangeable but not between people.
On 1, you're somehow conveniently ignoring the "without permission or interference from a third party.". I never mentioned against a car, stock, or house. Nonetheless the functionality still exists. Using ETH or other crypto assets. It gets so much easier. Have you tried it? No talking to advisors, no documents, no discriminatory requirements. Pretty much 1 click and 30 seconds. Fully expect the next question of validity "aha! Well that's against a useless asset!".
2nd example. Yes it can be a hyper link or a hash, is there something particularly wrong with that? The use case I described has still been achieved, it's a digital object. Are you really questioning that people exchange assets using a digital identity? I'm not sure how that invalidates the use case.
By the way you're incorrect that digital objects don't fit on the Blockchain. First it depends which Blockchain. Second, there are some objects that do fit. Look at ENS. A domain name, address mapping fits on the chain. That is an NFT. That exists today.
Aren’t other nodes the third parties?
If you are talking automated loan, you should look into credit lines backed by assets. Pledge assets lines. Once open, it’s fully automated and you don’t need to interact with a third party either.
In honesty I have no experience with a pledge asset line but I can guarantee you that if the institutions involved in conducting it wanted to, they could cancel it on you anytime. With a correctly coded smart contract on Ethereum, you could ensure that never happens.
One system requires trust in third parties. One gives you the option to design a system to minimise or eliminate it.
Please note that the lack of paperwork in Ethereum just means you borrow or loan money in a way that might be not legal. I am all for removing redtape here.
And if I have a collateral in form of fungible crypto why do I need to loan against it? Specially when I could just sell it and use the money...
I'm not really here to argue about blockchains being good or not, I just don't feel great about how the article tosses out a body of technology for not keeping pace with Uber. It's a bit like saying it can't possibly be early days for reusable rocketry, mm-wave communications, or quantum tech, because all those things were being developed decades before some guy named Satoshi wrote a very popular blog post.
Nowadays things are way more stable. I’m sure someone will pop in and mention how their workplace just changed from Webpack to Vite, or how hard it is to keep track of Angular, React and Vue. To which I’d chuckle and note that when I got started in 2014 we had AngularJS, Ember, React, Backbone, Knockout, Google FOAM, Polymer, OJ.js and Aurelia (which emerged as Google announced that AngularJS 1.x would be deep-sixed and Angular 2 would essentially be a totally different framework). To build/bundle your app you would use one or more of Grunt, Gulp, Brunch, Webpack, Browserify, 6to5, Traceur Google Closure Compiler and/or RequireJS (so far we’re assuming you’re not using CoffeeScript, ClojureScript, or one of their downstream variants like IcedCoffeeScript).
https://setandbma.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/technology-ado...
This certainly happened with AI at least twice... remember the AI summers of 1970 and 2010 and the AI winters in between...before certain applications of machine learning became industrial tools.
I'm personally in agreement with the author that crypto is probably a waste of energy and a way to scam people, but I can look at the 30,000 foot view and admit there might be some applications in the future as we climb the "slope of enlightenment".
My wife recently suggested a possible one: NFTs minted by your university as proof of your diploma. Or perhaps your academic transcript. No way to forge a fake diploma again.
Covid vaccination certificates in the EU use this method. No blockchain required, just some good old public/private key cryptography.
(Disclosure I own Bitcoin and Ethereum)
Anecdotally, I have heard people applying different timescales for the hype cycle for different technologies. Makes the pattern that much easier to match.
This is once again better served by a database. Diplomas are inherently centralized and issued by a trusted authority.
Guess we gotta keep brainstorming for use cases -- that's how technology development works, right?
Unironically, yes.
In general though, I believe solving real-world problems with whatever tech is available creates the most value. (And I mean real value, not some numbers on a ledger that don't mean anything at all.) That doesn't mean tech for tech's sake isn't interesting.
No sense in diplomas being transferable though.
What happens if OpenSea shuts down?
This is already happening: https://www.5gnewsroom.com/2022/01/12/iit-kanpur-awards-bloc...
The problem with this an many similar examples is that there already exists a solution for this sort of authenticity problem: digital signatures. Basically, the university creates a public and secret key pair, makes the public key available on its website, and signs all diplomas with its secret key. This is a much more efficient solution than the one based on blockchain.
You could already do this using x509 certificates signed by a university owned CA. No need to use blockchain here.
It's 1993. We are given a tour of the university I just got admitted to. I peel off the group at the physics building where the university VAX is. Something, something Internet. What is that. I get an account. I begin to use Usenet and IRC where I can talk to people so far away. Usability of these are on par with any other application (say, WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS) at the time. My mind is immediately blown. No one needs to give a pitch how useful or how fundamentally different this is to anything we had prior.
It's 2006. I began travelling the world, settling in Canada in 2008. I can chat with family for free. Later, even do video calls. I remember the weekends when we wrote a letter to my uncle who moved to the United States in the 80s. It took months to get a reply. Phone calls were rare and short. By the time my grandfather passed in 2011, my uncle was talking to him daily for a long time for free -- thanks to the 'Net.
It's 2007. I am wintering out in Israel. Moving around is very challenging, as I don't read Hebrew and I don't drive.
It's 2015. I am again in Israel. For a week, every night I sleep in a different apartment, booked online. Moving around is trivial, my phone tells me where and when to get on and off buses.
It's 2022. This a quote from someone touting the advances in the so called crypto"currency" space:
> Today, you have sharded blockchains, triple entry bookkeeping, proof of stake, blockchains that handle incentivized file storage, alternate name lookup systems, purchasing compute power on an automated order book, liquidity pools (a major, major fintech advancement if you're not familiar with then), arbitrary code execution with a canonical record of it.
Excuse me for being skeptical about web3.
The author goes on to give examples like smartphones, Uber, and Tesla, all of which have had serious developments in terms of impact and usability in around the same time period. Then given that Bitcoin and Ethereum have not made similar progress in that time period suggests it is not "early days".
Users continue to get scammed and lose funds. So what is it instead? Middle days? End of life? Pre-early days?
Open to ideas here. The author seems to suggest that what we're seeing in blockchains is the best we're going to get out of it. If Bitcoin were middle aged, would users put up with all the warts knowing they won't go away?
(Disclosure I own Bitcoin and Ethereum)
(Disclosure I own Bitcoin and Ethereum)
It's just a value store. Debating the efficacy of the value store is fine, labeling it a ponzi scheme seems reductive to absurdity.
The real problem (unsurprisingly) is with fiat currencies. These are heavily regulated, nearly made up values. That crash, often. We put handbrakes on the systems (see gamestop, mortgage debt crisis etc) because of how unsafe they can be.
If we trade goods for fiat currency, we put handbrakes and regulations there too.
The bitcoin/fiat exchange is merely proof why we need these regulations. Until it (the crypto/fiat intersection) is regulated, it's not gonna look and feel like what we're used to.
There are good criticisms to be made of bitcoin (like how centralized most mining operations are, the community's constant in-fighting and many more). It's drowned out by daft arguments like pollution (that's a whole other economic sectors fault) and ponzi schemes.
Maybe other coins could be construed that way (again, regulations required) but not bitcoin.
I am still surprised people continue to be still so enamoured by the financial aspects, which is the all important fuel to keep the engine going. Greed is a hell of a motivating factor though.
IMHO this is just the first generation, it will evolve in ways we cannot predict, but it is revolutionary and challenges banks and financial institutions to the core.
Here's an example of what I want more of - a blockchain analysis by Institute for the Future from 2017: https://www.iftf.org/fileadmin/user_upload/downloads/blockch...
I invested a significant amount in bitcoin very early and am now retired thanks to that decision. My hunch was that it was the combination of interesting innovative tech and a vector for greed that would be unstoppable. I never talked about this publicly, very few people know. Crypto is not my identity. I honestly don’t care about whether it gets banned, disappears, or ends up replacing parts of our digital experience. I recognized from the beginning that it would be unstoppable, whether it was to be a net negative or positive contributor to humanity being completely irrelevant. You can’t stop an idea.
But since I’ve been watching this space from day 1, literally installing the bitcoin client the day Satoshi posted it here, I’ve noticed that people who criticize blockchain tech tend to be folks who could have made the same bet I did and didn’t. At the time I invested I worked in a tech company and some people were already going on and on all day about how bitcoin is a scam, etc.
These folks were aware of the tech very early, considered it a scam. And now they’re making this crypto bashing their identity. I think a lot of that drive comes from the frustration that despite the space having so many negative aspects, they missed out on a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. They personally know people like me. And now the only way to make peace with that decision is to publicly bash it constantly, to revolt against it. This becomes who they are, as much as crypto bros make it their identity too.
I don’t see people from the general public criticizing blockchain/crypto with as much passion as them. It’s only people from the tech field who go on personal vendettas against that space. People who had the tools and the information to transform their lives and even leave that space since… and didn’t.
As much as people who promote blockchain constantly probably have a vested interest in it due to the money they’ve put in it, making their opinion less interesting, the same is true for people who bash blockchain constantly because their vested interest is to make peace with the fact that they didn’t put money in it when it was really early.
When comparing the situation of crypto to the internet, I would say we are at around 1997 now. 1996 was the year when Yahoo went public and 2021 was the year when Coinbase went public.
The usability of crypto solutions also reminds me of 1997. It is still so bad that it makes them almost unusable. Reminds me of acoustic couplers where you had to manually plug your cable bound phone into some device and dial a number to connect to a bulletin box. Just that today the bad usablity looks very different. It has to do with complicated, privacy violating KYC processes, no standardized secure way to make a socially recoverable secret key, lightning network only used in very few places etc.
TCP/IP and DNS were both developed in the early 70s (1972 I think). So over 20 years before the first internet company went public.
So the adoption of the internet evolved more slowly than the adoption of crypto it seems. As the Coinbase IPO came already 13 years after the Bitcoin whitepaper.
Is that really your belief about how to define when a technology became useful?
- It is a specific point in time which is easy to look up
- To go public, a company needs a big amount of traction already
- A lot of data is published for the IPO
"Useful" is in the eye of the beholder. But how much the company is "used" can be approximated by its revenue.
Yahoo had $1.4 million in yearly revenue the year before it IPOed. Coinbase had $1.14 billion. So about a thousand times more. Even when adjusted for inflation, this should be one or two orders of magnitude more.
>TCP/IP and DNS were both developed in the early 70s (1972 I think). That is more than 40 years before the first internet company went public.
1996 - 1972 = 24.
At least you could buy a computer in the 90s.
In my country, you cannot buy crypto anywhere. You have to go through some shady KYC process of a foreign company. Me and almost none of my friends are willing to do that.
And the very few who do are not willing to sell crypto to the others "Uuhhh no, go make your own Coinbase account."
The banks are all "Yeah, we are working on it. We don't know yet when we will offer it. It will take time to figure out the legal and technical aspects.".
I am not aware of anything you can do in the new "cryptonet" as long as you have zero cryptocurrency.
But I don't understand why people get so invested in it being a scam or failure.
Maybe it is, and it'll all die. That's fine. Why do people spend so much time insisting that it's the inevitable outcome. Let it do its thing, find something better to do.
Can't speak for everyone. But from my perspective, it's because certain "applications" are being marketed very heavily to non-technical people who aren't able to reasonably assess the viability of the technology. I'm thinking of NFTs in particular. The only other popularized non-NFT applications are cryptocurrencies, which are pure speculation (i.e., gambling).
In short, that's a moral issue. People were outraged by the Madoff scandal (and others), and this doesn't look a lot different to people who understand the underlying technology. Nobody wants their mom going broke because they bought some hyped-up blockchain thing on the advice of some super-hustler internet marketing influencer out looking to make a buck.
I'd like to go back to ignoring it. But it looks like it's here to stay, and it's taken away one of the few things enjoyed about the internet. I guess I'm still moving through the anger and grief stages and am yet to reach acceptance.
Why couldn't they have just left art alone?
“Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience.”
― Mark Twain
"Don't believe the hype!"
-Flavor Flav
Replacing software or products is not the same as exchanging government-issued fiat money to a new decentralized non-governmental form of money. The transition between different forms of money depends on trust which takes time[1]. E-mail and internet (web) took of faster but these inventions did not require people to exchange their money into an alternative system.
I think that's why it's become so popular, you can actually invest in ideas just as they're being born now. The stock market is a marvel but the barrier to entry for companies is insane. It's also why there's so much money flowing through VC channels these days.
I'm just hoping the resolution to these issues that sticks, a proper market for investing in early stage startups, is created outside of the blockchain.
The "early days" of something is relative to the lifespan of the thing. If crypto lasts for the next 1000 years then yes we are very much in the early days.
Moreover, a label like "early days" is entirely irrelevant, because really the question that needs to be asked is "Is it still changing, evolving, growing?" Based on what I've seen (I'm not a crypto enthusiast) the answer seems to be yes.
At the moment there are already some successful private blockchains, some of those the end user interacts without knowing about them.
70-ish years. I'd say we just recently came out of the early days of computing around the 1990s or 2010s.
>How long do we need to wait before someone comes up with an actual application of blockchain technologies that isn’t a transparent attempt to retroactively justify a technology that is inefficient in every sense of the word?
Currency is inefficient? It's sure better than trading cows.
Smart contracts? Writing things using english and then every side involved hiring lawyers to be used as bad just-in-time compilers for what was written is way more inefficient.
"Bitcoin was the beginning of the end for the state" – geohot. And I can't imagine much more of an inefficient system than the state and central banking.
> How much pollution must we justify pumping into our atmosphere while we wait to get out of the “early days” of proof-of-work blockchains?
Energy production problem, not a blockchain problem.
> How many people must be scammed for all they’re worth while technologists talk about just beginning to think about building safeguards into their platforms?
God, devs, please don't put restrictions on your platforms under the guise of "safety". Same goes for governments. Stay out. If you have no clue how something works, it's partly on you if you gamble all your savings on it. But also, who is excusing scams? We all think scams are bad. Nobody is seeing someone who fell for BitConnect and saying "Well, it's the early days, so it's fine that you got scammed."
It seems to me that this lady really wants to dislike. In general. She enjoys disliking things.
> Smart contracts? Writing things using english and then every side involved hiring lawyers to be used as bad just-in-time compilers for what was written is way more inefficient.
If crypto is doing these things really more efficiently than current solutions, then why neither use case has any significant adoption of blockchain solutions?
We're in a situation where we need bankers to finance lawyers to work on issues that would negate some of the need for bankers and lawyers.
How so? For what value proposition specifically?
London streets will be covered in 3 feet manure if industry progresses at this pace.
You’re crazy if you think this fool contraption you’ve been wasting your time on will ever displace the horse, there is no significant adoption.
Electricity is dangerous, there is no significant adoption, gas lamps and candles work fine.
Remove trollys since we can make more money selling tires, oil, and buses.
Internet is a fad, what use case is it solving, it burns a lump of coal every time a book is ordered, there is no significant adoption.
EV1 - we will take your electric cars and crush them, there is no significant adoption.
Proof of work guaranteeing that no one can alter history unless they spend more energy than the entire network has spent already to secure property rights has no use case and no significant adoption.
At this point either you see a pattern from history, or you remain perpetually on the wrong side of a Blub paradox.
Trains and trolleys were the incumbent system before the motorcar, so this analogy is the opposite of what you're arguing.
Currency is a problem that's already solved much more efficiently in a lot of countries.
> Smart contracts? Writing things using english and then every side involved hiring lawyers to be used as bad just-in-time compilers for what was written is way more inefficient.
Writing a bulletproof smart contract is difficult, as demonstrated by endless exploits despite the contracts being written & reviewed by specialists paid lots of money.
The advantage of the legal system is that when shit hits the fan, humans (in court) can step in and determine what the intent of the contract was despite potential loopholes, whereas in code, there is no difference between "loophole" and "intended behavior". Now you can of course have an authority that has power over smart contracts and can step in and rollback exploits, but that's just the current legal system with extra steps, at which point you may as well not use a smart contract at all.
> And I can't imagine much more of an inefficient system than the state and central banking.
There are obviously edge-cases and cryptocurrency is valuable in those, but in the vast majority of the world banking is a solved problem and much more efficient than cryptocurrencies. Compare the total cost (fee + environmental impact due to energy use, etc) of a card transaction or bank transfer with a cryptocurrency transfer.
I'm not saying that cryptocurrencies are useless - there are use-cases for them including in countries where the established monetary system is broken. But outside of those edge-cases, cryptocurrency would be a very wasteful downgrade from the status-quo.
Yeah. But blockchain energy requirements are definitely a blockhain problem. That's the main problem.
Essentially, PoS makes sure that "he who has the gold makes the rules" becomes hardwired in the system, instead of only being a side effect of it.
How "green" something is, is determined by how much resources one unit of what it does uses, compared to how much resources doing the same unit of work on an alternative system uses.
eg. a petroleum lantern produces light more efficiently than a campfire. However, neither of them is "pretty green" compared to a LED.
Compare the amount of energy per transaction required with a PoS system to the amount of energy required to do it with, say, a credit card.
PoS is just a bunch of computers largely idling. Whether it's 1k or 10k, it doesn't matter - there is no energy use to speak of, at least none that society has a legitimately interest in regulating.
The Tezos Foundation, who's interest is in advertising how green they are, claims in a year they consume as much electricity as 17 individuals (https://tezos.com/carbon/).
It is up to critics to provide evidence of PoS energy use being a concern; no one has done so, because the outcome is essentially is predetermined.
So, is there evidence, as in peer-reviewed studies, that PoS blockchains can handle the volume of transactions of traditional financial systems while requiring LESS energy?
From a literal technical point of view, storing a ledger on 10k computers consumes more energy than than storing it one one. But maybe the backup and operational infrastructure of a bank to manage that one centralized ledger consumes more energy than 10k PoS nodes. But then people also build all kinds of services around those blockchains which require their own computers. In both cases, you get something unique: the blockchain gives you permissionless financial network, your bank gives you a regulated one.
Meanwhile, a single branch of McDonalds consumes many multiples more energy than any PoS blockchain.
My point is really just this: Critics can try to critique PoS blockchains as useless. They may also try to ban them using arguments around say, securities laws or AML. But the energy argument is DoA.
Oh yes? So all McDonald's branches together consume orders of magnitude more energy than the whole world produces?
Either you have a product that does something interesting or you don't. I don't think it matters at what stage you have the interesting thing at.
(Fwiw, i don't find recent blockchain interesting)
History will not be kind to @pmarca for promoting this shite.
"Bitcoin requires lots of electricity". No, nowhere near the scale human activity sans blockchain does and to provide it we burn coal. Like we've done for a looong time before bitcoin. Removing bitcoin doesn't remove the coal we burn. Genuinely daft argument.
And that's before we get into looking at the numbers from areas like the mining sector. Aluminum smelting isn't cheap from a power perspective, yet I don't see this argument leveled against coke.
The answer is renewable energy. Obviously.
Purely to represent the opinion of the critics now, aluminum smelting might be and, but at least aluminum out of it, so they don't criticize the base activity, just the energy type. From the perspective of the critics, we don't need to struggle and transition crypto to RE, we can just stop doing it.
I personally agree, but people with your perspective (presumably) don't and place Crypto in "expensive but inherently valuable activity" or at least in "entertainment" both of which also use a lot of coal power but aren't negotiable, hence people focus on the energy sources not so much the activity.
Hence talking past each other
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26097332
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26335888
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20351959
TL;DR: Bullshit.
> The answer is renewable energy.
You're talking as if the crowding out effect didn't exist: Even if we had a lot more renewable energy than we do, every kWh used for crypto-"currencies" is a kWh that can't be used for something else
So if the system in those countries could be thoroughly reformed to work totally differently than it does today... Then why couldn't it just be thoroughly reformed to work more like it does in Western or Northern Europe today, where it works with a lot less hassle even without blockchain?
Whether or not you agree with the arc of the linked article, the basic facts are correct: blockchains have been with us for a decade now and haven't done much or made anything that wasn't itself a speculation about blockchain.
(1) why is the blockchain still so inefficient?
(2) why is the blockchain still so lacking in practical use cases with widespread adoption?
I think she is totally fair in complaining about (1). Either it is impossible to have decentralization and efficiency or it's just a technical problem that will be solved given more time. I don't have the answer here - only time will tell.
For problem (2), I think it's mostly an over-exaggeration of the use case(s) where web3 that beats web2. As far as I can tell there is one and only one use case: web3 can do things while having a middle finger pointed at major governments. Web2 cannot. In that bitcoin and eth can offer people of Argentina a some reliable store of value (against their own currency which depreciates at 50% per year) it has generally achieved that. You can't even buy a Tesla in Argentina so the adoption of that wonderful technology there is zero.
To claim that it's the next web2 or mobile tech is both an exaggeration and an underestimate. Web3 will not be much of a challenge to web2 or mobile. Instead it will be a huge challenge to existing political, monetary and taxation systems. It will be the tool of the rich to evade taxes, for libertarians to evade control and for those living in high inflation countries to build wealth.
Those who complain that this is hardly revolutionary are both right and wrong.
it's the early days for smart contracts and applications like defi
once the barrier of entry drops in contract creation i suspect there will be exponential growth in exotic securities/financial-arbitration
I see the craze around crypto the same way. It is a representation of something in our limbic system. Perhaps greed?
Protocols develop slowly.
The World Wide Web was the 'killer app' for the internet (which that has been there for years before) in the early 1990s; perhaps even fuelling the dot-com boom. A decade after that, the whole market crashed.
The critics were celebrating, did the utility of the web stop? Nope. Only the scams and useless, overvalued websites died.
The same thing applies to just blockchain technology even beyond 'Bitcoin or Ethereum' where when the concept of that is not new. The regulations will come and eliminate the coins that do not comply and the useless cryptocurrencies or meme coins will be extinguished - probably will cause another crash again and eliminating more useless unregulated cryptocurrencies.
That is even before the regulatory framework has been even properly implemented. A few of these cryptocurrencies will survive all of that.
We could even agree it isn't for everyone. Some people suffer from or dislike centralization, others don't. Some even explicitly WANT centralization.
A global, government agnostic money like bitcoin that no group of insiders and early adopters have unassailable control over, seems like the only likely candidate for something that needs a truly decentralized and trustless blockchain.
The rest is hype.
Except for bitcoin's current "monetary" uses, like money laundering and tax evasion.
Better for the planet.
But what do I know? I'm just a dumb ape.
Or is the "designed for hyper consumption" a reference to inflation in fiat currencies? Sorry, perhaps I've confused myself.
Our inflationary currencies that are in vogue in the modern era are explicitly designed to psychologically encourage people to go out and consume more than they actually need to, because their money is terrible at preserving it's value long term.
Inflationary currencies might be great at keeping the economy red hot, but I'm of the opinion that they're terrible for the long term sustainability of our planet.
Money is just an exchange token.
It has no control over what it is used for.
How about the current status quo of the Internet? Do you think being mined, sold, and endlessly tracked is OK?
[0]: https://thenextweb.com/news/ethereum-nodes-cloud-services-am....
To be explicit, the reason blockchains exist is to have a globally consistent database that doesn’t require trusting the operator.
which I mean when I think of that I think - that would be really useful for crime because you don't want to trust the operator because either 1. they're a narc 2. they're a criminal.
it's also useful for currency because not trusting the operator allows you to keep them from turning into paypal.
but then I just draw a blank on what it is useful for after that.
Of course blockchains can be used for crime, almost anything can. In fact, if you want the preferred currency of criminals the world over, look no further than the US Dollar.
Most organizations, governments, businesses, etc. start with plenty of trust to go around. There's no reason to inherently distrust them, so their governance, currencies, securities, etc. work just fine. Distrust breeds over time, which is why establishing governance, currencies, securities, etc. in a way that can be cryptographically verified by anyone is a useful property to have to ensure the system remains generally trustworthy long into the future.
For example, there are many reasons to distrust stock brokers, the Depository Trust Company, the spineless SEC, and other entities who run our securities exchange. If securities were traded on a blockchain instead of an opaque database that can't be audited except by a corrupt few, everyone could strongly trust in the freedom and fairness of the securities exchange markets.
If I could own all my stocks on the blockchain, I would do it in heartbeat.
Of course, he's saying all that after pumping and dumping his personal centralized crypto crap MobileCoin into Signal.
Every time there's a bull market in cryptocurrency, the charlatans jump out of the woodwork. They build a bunch of websites and scam a lot of naive people. When the market reverses, these project disappear one after another, usually with people's money, sometimes because they don't actually solve a problem. Almost every one of these NFT grift projects are going to disappear over the next year or two.
The parent article's point is that most currently popular technologies found an application rather quickly, whereas blockchain technologies have been around for a long time (in tech terms) and still have not made ground.
> How long do we need to wait before someone comes up with an actual application of blockchain technologies that isn’t a transparent attempt to retroactively justify a technology that is inefficient in every sense of the word?
Probably the fact that, despite having been under development for > 10 years, we haven't seen any ground broken by any blockchain technologies for any reasons other than speculation or triviality. Which is what the other 95% of the article focuses on. The inefficiency of the development process, not necessarily the technology, although yes, the latter is a factor.
Remember that blockchain technologies have become legal tender, have over a trillion in market cap, have become financial instruments traded by people around the globe, is taught at Universities and part of the CFA accounting exam, is in the news daily, has resulted in large investments in research, etc…
It’s impact has hardly been non-trivial. Just the impact on finance is substantial even if people seem to gloss over a new financial asset as “just finance stuff”.
It's a Ponzi scheme. There's no inherent underlying value, its "market cap" is strictly a function of more dumb money flowing into the system. Occam's razor, this is the most likely explanation for everything in the crypto space; the model makes sense and explains a lot more than "a new financial asset" hokum.
The market can bear smart contract platforms whether that platform writes to a proof of work system, a faster distributed set of nodes, or on localhost with port forwarding.
It doesnt matter! People like to deploy that kind of code on a platform that can be accessed that kind of way.
If there isn’t a token then people DDOS it instantly, with smart contracts that take up too much processing cycles or memory. Simple. People dont want to use limited fiat payment rails to attempt to preallocate resources, it doesnt work very well at arbitrary amounts, it ceases to be permissionless and the author is agreeable here: its been 13 years of this other solution and is an international hit!
Think about developers on Shopify’s app store that try to sell to ecommerce merchants. Its the same people with the same goals! Sell tools that theoretically make someone else’s life easier. Extract value because commerce exists. Thats really valuable. Thats exactly whats going on in blockchain. Just because you and your friends are taking linear bets with your capital and cant quantify why things go up way too often really has nothing to do with the people that built that tool for you who are taking little basis points here and there.
Blockchains solve the wrong problem for a lot of the proposed applications I've seen, like handwaving about "supply chain". The biggest difficulty is not that you don't trust the database, it's that you don't trust the connection between the electronic data and reality. How do you trust a person to have packed the correct grade of meat into the box you are buying? If they've dutifully recorded something on the blockchain and you can verify that nobody has tampered with that record, it still does not help you.
And if you have regulation to ensure supply chain steps comply, then you trust the regulators, then you can have a central database.
Crypto coins are unique in that you can verify them mathematically. They have no connection to anything else out in the real world so they don't have that problem.
So aside from coins, where else is it that you would not trust a central database, but you can verify/trust the entries being added to that database?
I would not trust a central database for any application, even those where I have to trust the verifiers of the entries to that database.
E.g. I would prefer stablecoins over credit in a bank.
With a decentralized database, immutability and permissionlessness are the default, until the trusted third party actively intervenes to strip you of these privileges.
With a centralized database, access is by default denied, and requires active intervention from the trusted third party, in the form of a grant of permission, to acquire.
But when you make that blockchain private, trustful, and permissioned (only designated nodes can add blocks) you are taking away the very properties that make the blockchain immutable. And it has to be done because that is what enterprises would want. So an enterprise blockchain like Corda/Hyperledger is no different than a central database. And no serious business least of all banks would do their business on a public truly distributed open blockchain.
I don't see how that's reasonable. What am I missing, surely virtually nobody would be willing to spend the massive resources of a blockchain for that kind of risk model.
> E.g. I would prefer stablecoins over credit in a bank.
So aside from coins, what's another concrete example?
> With a decentralized database, immutability and permissionlessness are the default, until the trusted third party actively intervenes to strip you of these privileges.
> With a centralized database, access is by default denied, and requires active intervention from the trusted third party, in the form of a grant of permission, to acquire.
This sounds very much like the buzzword snake oil I've heard many times before, but I'm willing to be open minded about your non-coin example.
What you wrote earlier is:
>>Crypto coins are unique in that you can verify them mathematically. They have no connection to anything else out in the real world so they don't have that problem.
Stablecoins cannot be verified entirely mathematically, as they have a connection to real world bank notes, so my example doesn't fit your exception.
>>This sounds very much like the buzzword snake oil I've heard many times before, but I'm willing to be open minded about your non-coin example.
I'll use the coin example, because it's easy to demonstrate the principle.
I can move my stablecoins, without having to ask a third party custodian for permission. With bank credit, I need to ask the bank for permission to withdraw it, or transfer it.
A stable coin where you trust whoever is providing the backing for that asset is no different from a crypto currency in that way, the trust model still requires that you trust someone to honor the coin or value it in some way.
So it's a bad example. The interesting part about it that you can move coins between people who don't trust one another without a 3rd party is entirely due to the remotely verifiable nature of the thing, like any other coin. That is the one and only interesting thing about it, and that's common to all these kind of coins.
I'm asking for something else.
I don't follow. With a cryptocurrency you don't have to trust any one. The cryptocurrency can't be redeemed for anything, and thus there's no one to trust for honoring the claim upon redemption.
>>The interesting part about it that you can move coins between people who don't trust one another without a 3rd party is entirely due to the remotely verifiable nature of the thing, like any other coin.
Yes true. And that applies to any digital property on the blockchain.
The challenge for digital property that is a claim on a real world asset is being able trust a third party to honor the claim upon redemption of the digital property. Some parties have solved that for claims on national currency, and thus we have a few stablecoins.
Whether this model can extend to real estate, automobiles, commodities and other assets/goods remains to be seen.
Of course you do if the currency has been backed by some other asset. You can't just declare that your crypto currency is a "stablecoin" and therefore it is backed by US dollars. There has to be something actually backing it. And that's what you have to trust.
And if it's not a stable coin then you have to trust that you will be able to sell it or exchange it. If your government bans banks or merchants trading in crypto then you might have a problem.
But I specifically didn't want to talk about crypto currency because as I keep repeating, that is the one place where block chains can make sense (even though you still have the edge problem).
> Yes true. And that applies to any digital property on the blockchain.
No, no it doesn't. Not sure what you're having trouble understanding, but it specifically only applies to property that you can verify remotely without trust. I.e., coins.
> The challenge for digital property that is a claim on a real world asset is being able trust a third party to honor the claim upon redemption of the digital property. Some parties have solved that for claims on national currency, and thus we have a few stablecoins.
It's not solved. You still have the trust problem. If you have to trust the entity backing your stable coins then you don't need distributed trust.
> Whether this model can extend to real estate, automobiles, commodities and other assets/goods remains to be seen.
No they all have the same problem.
You're misunderstanding me. By cryptocurrency, I am referring to a natively digital asset, with nothing from the real world, e.g. US dollars, backing it. ETH would be an example of a cryptocurrency.
I am distinguishing cryptocurrencies from stablecoins, which do have something from the real world backing them.
That's why I wrote:
"The cryptocurrency can't be redeemed for anything, and thus there's no one to trust for honoring the claim upon redemption."
With stablecoins, you need to trust a third party - the issuer of the stablecoin - to provide USD in the event that the stablecoin is redeemed.
With a cryptocurrency, there is no third party you need to trust to honor any pledges.
Yes, governments can ban a cryptocurrency, but that is NOT a case of a trusted third party violating its commitment to you, as in the case of a stablecoin issuer in default, so it's an entirely different category of dependence on trust in a third party.
There are centralized CAs, domain/ip registrars, ISPs…shit even the libraries that comprise your entire computing stack all come from centralized databases!
Your comment is stored on a database.
USDC/Tether have private databases and their collateral is held by third parties in again their own database.
No one understands what it will be (and people involved in the space barely understand what is, as in what all exists, today).
But here’s something that is concrete to anchor to: there’s somewhere north of $1T floating around in blockchains today.
That’s an incredible amount of money and people that have problems that need technology solutions.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but cryptocurrency does not work this way. Your reasoning can be applied to any asset, for example, a shitty house in California that is now worth $1M.
I'd also imagine that crypto ownership is massively concentrated in the top 10% wealthiest people anyways.
I believe the system where a semi-independent central bank has the ability to regulate the currency of the country is a good thing on the whole. It's the best balance of compromises we have seen actualized.
Having a fixed supply of digital coins seems more like a return to the old days where there was a fixed supply of gold and silver coinage. And that era was called the dark ages. A system with fractional reserve credit is much more conducive to economic growth and prosperity.
Are you? What is it? Specifically.
Some background on Curve (and Convex): https://medium.com/coinmonks/convex-curve-curve-d7e28cd6c1d9
2010 iPhone, I was mind-blown by the Word Lens app which could do OCR on text in the camera feed, translate the words into another language, and overlay the results on the image in near-realtime. http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/mobile/12/20/word.lens.ipho...
These are tasks I had never seen any computer do in any circumstances, things which would be unthinkable on a Java MIDP Blackberry from 2005, or a Pentium II desktop from 1997. Compare this to the wearable augmented reality devices Professor Steve Mann was building through the 80s and 90s[1] and this "describing the image" is so so far ahead in so many ways - processing power, imaging quality, battery life, storage space, size, weight, convenience, reliability, it's just mindblowingly better, neural networks and fast chips and solid state storage is a step change in a way that "faster" isn't enough to really convey.
Google tells me "Derivatives have a long history in the United States, dating back to the founding of the Chicago Board of Trade in 1848.", you're telling me people are doing that but with blockchain, why is that interesting at all, why mind blowing?
It’s fully customizable and accessible to anyone with an internet connection.
But it’s permissionless in that if the financial markets don’t support a structured product you or your community needs, you can create and deploy it yourselves with instant global accessibility.
[1] https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/what-explains-the-rise...
Money obsessed people moving money around in ways that seem manipulative and gambling feels like a negative influence on the world.
What I mean is, if blockchain is going to be a revolutionary technology backing all finance, where is the evidence it can handle the kind of transaction volume that, say, major credit card networks generate?
This is a protocol that rolls up ETH transactions and executes them in batch, in an attempt to alleviate scalability concerns. I can't really speak to the side/unintended effects of transaction rollups on a blockchain, but I'm interested in learning.
This excerpt from the FAQ
> It is worth noting that anyone can become a relayer so long as they have staked the required bond in the smart contract. This incentivises the relayer not to tamper with or withhold a rollup.
kind of bothers me. It does not seem like such a small step to go from 'decentralized' to 'cartel of relayers' to 'central bank and subordinate branches'. And the fact that this protocol is unavailable to US persons is interesting, though perhaps standard for the space right now.
I think this is a problem with technological solutions (perhaps anonymous and redundant relayers, or private rollup transactions so that the relayer does not know the content of transactions in a block but can produce a valid output state) that will be worked on in the next couple years now that the base technology (rollups) exists.
It’s tough to respond when “serious financial application” or “revolutionary technology backing all finance” aren’t well-defined.
One benchmark is 1,700 tps for VISA. https://phemex.com/blogs/what-is-transactions-per-second-tps
If not, why not? Especially after 10+ years of development and intense VC funding (as is the parent article's point).
Next long term target is speed and energy efficiency of a Google search.
Edit: Avalanche says they’re around 4.5k tps: https://support.avax.network/en/articles/5325146-what-is-tra...
Ethereum 1.0 can handle 30 transactions per second.
Part of the development dubbed "Ethereum 2.0" is focused on scaling the number of transactions via sharding. Each shard will be able to handle 2,400 tps. As more shards are deployed up to 64, Ethereum 2.0 will reach 160,000 tps.
I'm concerned after reading https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/shard-chains/ that sharding is aimed at letting individual dApps roll up transactions -- i.e. the individual app would be the effective shard key -- and thus that would introduce some notion of centralization into the system.