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Ask HN: Am I going insane or is there genuinely no value in blockchain tech?

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101–110 of 576 posts

Re: Ask HN: Am I going insane or is there genuinely no value in blockchain tech?

#101
There is a blockchain based system for doing podcast updates called PodPing.

It reduces the overhead of checking hundreds of thousands of RSS feeds, and cuts down the time it takes for notification of new episode of a show. It can currently update everyone in the system in under 40 seconds from hitting publish.

You can watch new podcasts get published live at podping.watch.

Re: Ask HN: Am I going insane or is there genuinely no value in blockchain tech?

#102
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with this sentiment, I am not calling it useless. In fact I think it makes perfect sense as an "experimentalist technology", it is just the disproportionate attention it is getting by serious people over a long period of time that I find most baffling ("blockchain to fight climate change/ improve vaccination/ ease supply chain bottlenecks/ destroy oligarchs")

Let's assume rich countries of the world (e.g. G7) set up a climate change fund in a smart contract. They could just lockup some funds there to be claimable after x months/years for any country (except the G7) proportionally to how far they managed to reduce their CO2 emissions. This assumes that we can trustlessly get the CO2 emissions for all countries (Let's just assume satellites can provide that data in a trustl…

Let's assume this is true. There are many simpler and smaller-scale coordination games out there. Why hasn't any of these adapted blockchain?

It is quite a stretch to think that you can go from 0 adaptability to 100% adaptability in one of the largest scale coordination games imaginable (tracking carbon consumption).

For example if you told me in 2002 that one day most of the world would be on Facebook I would have been very skeptical, if then you showed me all of Harvard using it like crazy, my scepticism would have decreased significantly.

It is the lack of successful use cases even at smaller scale that I think preventing many people believing in the grand vision.

Re: Ask HN: Am I going insane or is there genuinely no value in blockchain tech?

#103
post #87
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The sole purpose of blockchain is to prevent double spending without a trusted party That is most accurate description of blockchain I have read. Unfortunately, the mechanism for that (Proof-of-work) is slow, expensive and planet destroying at scale. And while we may remove a trust provider third party, we aren't getting rid of centralization with blockchain anyway.

Planet destroying is a bit extreme. The traditional finance system is no more energy efficient overall. It’s certainly not environmentally friendly, but that’s more a function of the dirty power we use for anything and everything. We just need to fix our methods of generating energy, not criticize everything that uses a lot of it.

preposterous. financial transaction processing is and always has been vastly more efficient and quick.

Re: Ask HN: Am I going insane or is there genuinely no value in blockchain tech?

#104
post #40

The sole purpose of blockchain is to prevent double spending without a trusted party Other proposed applications are mostly dumb / misguided, like immutable storage, social network posts, etc, these can be done with hashing or digital signatures alone If you have a better way to avoid double spending than blockchain folks woukd get very excited. Traditional database can’t do that (requires a trusted party)

Hard to tamper with data loggers also benefit from the Blockchain. There are lots of industries where tamper proof records are valuable and record keeping is distributed.

I get the value of having a chain of "blocks" of data, but that could also describe git. I don't see the added value of proof of work or proof of stake here.

Why isn't putting that data (or a hash of it) in a publicly available git repository just as good? You can even publish the newest branch hash in the newspaper everyday if you want.

Re: Ask HN: Am I going insane or is there genuinely no value in blockchain tech?

#105
post #60

The sole purpose of blockchain is to prevent double spending without a trusted party Other proposed applications are mostly dumb / misguided, like immutable storage, social network posts, etc, these can be done with hashing or digital signatures alone If you have a better way to avoid double spending than blockchain folks woukd get very excited. Traditional database can’t do that (requires a trusted party)

>The sole purpose of blockchain is to prevent double spending without a trusted party That is most accurate description of blockchain I have read. Unfortunately, the mechanism for that (Proof-of-work) is slow, expensive and planet destroying at scale. And while we may remove a trust provider third party, we aren't getting rid of centralization with blockchain anyway.

It's supposed to be slow. That's what secures it. The production speed comes from layer 2 solutions built on top of it (analogous to how a secure VM can go faster with a JIT while still maintaining security).

It's not expensive. Transaction fees are just fine and getting cheaper over time.

It doesn't destroy the planet. You're thinking of the fossil-fuel industry.

Re: Ask HN: Am I going insane or is there genuinely no value in blockchain tech?

#106

Blockchain reminds me a lot of peer to peer e.g. Bitorrent. At the time people thought it was also going to change the world and usher in a new era of decentralisation.

Well it very well could have if things went a little different. Bittorrent was revolutionary, but slow to adapt. Maybe if it was more user friendly, or had more browser integration earlier on, and the protocol had more development, you'd see it more widely used. Imagine if "the cloud" was just bittorrent swarms. It could have happened. As for blockchain...decentralized databases have their place, the problem is that centralized organizations are trying to make a use for them when a centralized db already did what they wanted just fine.

Re: Ask HN: Am I going insane or is there genuinely no value in blockchain tech?

#107
One of the most hyped use cases of blockchains is event ticketing.

We had a close look. It cannot solve most problems it claims to solve. The only thing it might be useful for is digital collectible tickets. This may be interesting for a tiny fraction of events and attendees.

Full detailed analysis here:

https://medium.com/@ticketpark/nft-tickets-a-realistic-look-...

Re: Ask HN: Am I going insane or is there genuinely no value in blockchain tech?

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Preventing double spending is possible even without trust. A centralised authority could publish the transactions in a signed append only log. Independent verifiers could pull the log with some frequency and verify that no one spent twice.

Good point - blockchain also prevents transaction censorship (your proposal prevents double spend but allows the central authority to block transactions) Central authorities might do wild stuff like block Folks They Don’t Like (certain truck drivers, etc). Some people think that’s really good, others feel the opposite (edited for clarity)

Can you expand on this a bit? Which element regarding censorship does Blockchain help prevent?

I ask earnestly as it feels like a forgone conclusion but depending on what you refer to I'm not sure it is.

My initial thought is about freedom of spending and transactions as a concept of the chain but I guess it's not exactly censorship in the most common sense.

Re: Ask HN: Am I going insane or is there genuinely no value in blockchain tech?

#109
post #43

Blockchain has no use other than to store tokens for speculative gambling. Take a look at this presentation - https://bit.ly/3OB5G18 Proof-of-work - the USP of blockchain makes it slow and expensive and planet destroying at scale. But it's not a bug, it's a feature. You take it out and the blockchain is neither public not permission-less. A private, trusted, permissioned blockchain is pointless. The whole blockchain,…

I’m not sure any efficient use for cheap energy is going to be less destructive than blockchain

Re: Ask HN: Am I going insane or is there genuinely no value in blockchain tech?

#110

The sole purpose of blockchain is to prevent double spending without a trusted party Other proposed applications are mostly dumb / misguided, like immutable storage, social network posts, etc, these can be done with hashing or digital signatures alone If you have a better way to avoid double spending than blockchain folks woukd get very excited. Traditional database can’t do that (requires a trusted party)

I’ve read several technical, non-fluff books on the topic, and I’ve developed smart contracts on Ethereum for decent hourly wage (paid out in fiat).

And I’ve still come to roughly the same conclusion as you. Either my reading comprehension is poor, or there is little actual value in the vast majority of blockchain applications. Digital cash, as defined in the Bitcoin whitepaper, still seems like the only real use case.

Other uses are fun for a developer to read and learn about, but that’s just about the only real value you can extract from them.

Well, and making quick developer buck, which is the equivalent of selling shovels to prospectors in a gold rush. The main difference being that it’s merely a jpeg of a shovel.

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