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

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 11:34 AM UTC

swalsh wrote: post #165

yashg wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>seamlessly send value across jurisdictions I have money. How can I get some crypto? From a middleman. Need to pay fees. Then I send it to someone. Transaction fees. The receiver wants to buy groceries or pay kid's school fees, so they need to convert the crypto to money. Again fees. So lots of middlemen and fees are involved. And most of the time, One would need to provide full KYC and need to have a bank account to…

Credit cards cost 3% + $.25 per transation (doing this from memory, but I think i'm in the ballpark here). USDC to USD costs .20% + $.50 (and that's per payout, you could aggregate transactions to pay only one fee). If you use a modern chain to do the transactions, the fees are getting increasingly more trivial (like a few cents regardless of size). As scaling solutions come online, they should be even cheaper. Avala…

Post by baby » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 11:34 AM UTC

andreskytt wrote: post #155

paulsutter wrote: post #19

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)

To be more precise, the nature of trust shifts. In case of a central database, one must trust the organization running the database. In case of blockchain you need to trust the math behind it, its implementation _and_ that the network structure preserves the assumptions the math makes. This might be preferable for some but not for others.

Post by baby » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 11:34 AM UTC

FabHK wrote: post #44

paulsutter wrote: post #19

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. Yes, and avoiding the trusted party makes it more inefficient by a factor of around 100,000,000 (-ish), if you consider that BTC uses around 23 GW and can do no more (5 transactions a second) than a single trusted PC could do. What are use cases were you actually need this and the high cost is worth it?

Post by FabHK » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 11:35 AM UTC

yashg wrote: post #131

httptoolkit wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A private, trusted, permissioned blockchain is pointless Not at all - it's a verifiable audit log. Git is an example of exactly this.

Git is not a blockchain. An audit log doesn't need to be blockchain. The whole point of blockchain is that is is decentralized, trust-less and permission-less. You take it away and what is left?

Post by Cynddl » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 11:36 AM UTC

martin_vejmelka wrote: post #181

Blockchains provide computational integrity across geographic regions and jurisdictions requiring no trusted intermediary . You can run a computation and guarantee that others running that computation are using the same inputs and will get the same result. Even if Russia or France decide that they no longer allow Ethereum (just an example), this does not affect computations anywhere else. This is a massive shift in p…