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Comment by smt88 | Hacker News Reader

> I believe that putting the equal sign between a blockchain and a database is fundamentally wrong

In what way is a blockchain not a cryptographically-verified, distributed, append-only database? If you added a consensus protocol to git, you'd have a blockchain.

I'd say it's fundamentally right because the fundamentals are the same.

> After the dust settles we will see if blockchain is really useful or not.

Blockchain has been around for more than 10 years. If it had any valid use cases, we'd see them in use already, regardless of what crypto bros are doing.

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Focus on the distributed aspect of it. What does distributed mean to you? In fact if you look at blockchain itself it's not dostributed in the sense that you need all the blocks to verify current state.

The innovation is that 2 parties that don't know each other and don't trust each other can transact without a central authority and without trusting eachother.

Has blockchain been around for 10 years? Most of this time was spent in obscurity or making it super hard for the average joe to distinguish useful tech from scams.

Also think about neural nets. How long have neural nets been around? Did we figure interesting new ways to use them in the current AI/ML cycle?

> Blockchain has been around for more than 10 years. If it had any valid use cases, we'd see them in use already

I think modern darknet markets use smart contracts for escrow, so that you don't have to trust the escrow arbiter to not run off with your cryptocoins.

This isn’t any difference than traditional escrow SaaS companies. They’re fully automated unless you have a dispute.

In your stated case, “smart contract” means software. It can’t verify that both sides of the transaction have met their obligations unless both obligations are on-chain, in which case there’s no added value.

It is a little bit different, if you are doing it in centralised way - you have to control and secure everything - from databases to access to admin panels. It is quite complicated, requires robust processes, etc. Most of the finances are not really programmable, everything is done via simple scripts on some machine that just turns the knobs. You have to secure this part also.

It is a lot of work.

While for crypto-escrow you can just do a simple multi-sig with a hot keys that running on admin machines and they sign results there and they couldn't get the money, so no reason to try to hack the system.

Much easier setup.

But with these darknet markets everything's hidden and anonymous, so there used to be (?) something called an "exit scam" where they'd just disappear with whatever funds were currently waiting for a decision. If things are set up so that the cryptocoins can only go to one of two places (seller's or buyer's wallet) that can't happen.

That situation that it's avoiding is less of a concern with legitimate things where everyone knows who everyone is and law enforcement actually exists.

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