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

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

#311

Post by nivertech »

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)

Blockchain (or more correctly "hashchain"[1] data structure) doesn't solve the double spend problem, because anyone can create a new entry with a hashpointer pointing to the last entry (aka "block") with transactions.

This problem is inherent in all Nakamoto Consensus style implementations (basically Leader Election algorithms), not just Bitcoin's PoW.

Simpler: anyone can fork the blockchain and over-write the ledger with the new transactions. So in reality the double spend solved by the social consensus on the right fork, not by technological solutions.

EDIT: Leaving aside the question of transaction finality and probabilistic nature of the Nakamoto Consensus, which making it even worse.

--

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_chain

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

#312

Post by retube »

TekMol wrote: post #5

The value of blockchains seem so obvious to me, that I wonder if OP can be genuine. ask_111: How can having a public log that is extremely tamper resistant not have value? Let's look at a concrete example: Bitcoin. You can write something into the Bitcoin blockchain and be very sure that the information you wrote into it will stay there pretty much forever. Is that enough, or do we also have to discuss why having suc…

Sure it is a tamper resistant log. But what is the use of that? what problems is it solving? Please give me a concrete example!!

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

#314

Post by swalsh »

nl wrote: post #283
swalsh wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I won't attempt to enumerate the ways that crypto is useful. But i'll tell you how I want to use it. But first, it's important to understand this. The actual foundations for what crypto can enable is still being built, so if you're expecting me to show you some "killer app"... i'm not going to show you a working version today. Is that because Crypto is vaporware? No, i'm seeing important stuff deployed all the time.…

> But unlike open source development, it's not done by "good will". You can pay people for their contributions in a trustless way that allows ANYONE to contribute and earn. You can pay people for open source work now. You can even pay them in crypto. A DAO doesn't make any of the hard work of developing a system (eg, specifying what you need, arguing if it has or hasn't been developed correctly) any easier.

I hear what you're saying, and I agree given your framework of constraints its true. I'd argue the constraints are wrong on chain. If you're engineering a "system" you're thinking like a corporation.

The magic of crypto are the various protocols are like legos. I think a DAO should be a simple single capability like a unix process. It should strive to do one thing well.

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

#315

Post by GrumpyNl »

sprain wrote: post #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-...

We do ticketing, no need for blockchain. Ownership of the tickets is in a regular mysql db.

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

#316

Post by baobabKoodaa »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #50
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)

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.

You might argue this as a theoretical possibility, but it's never going to happen in practice. In practice the trusted entity is always going to selectively allow certain double-spends, and even though it will get caught doing that, people will accept its current revision of the ledger and the world goes on.

For example, the trusted entity might reverse a donation to Canadian truckers due to political reasons (allowing the donator to "double spend" by doing something else with the money later).

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

#317

Post by cburgdorf »

ak_111 wrote: post #102
cburgdorf wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

There are many smaller scale things happening. Most are financial use cases but I'm trying to stick to non-financial ones here.

There's a platform called royal (https://royal.io/) which lets you fund artists and their albums. You can essentially co-own their song rights and collect a share of the royalties when their music is played. It's getting really interesting once composability comes into play. E.g. you can make indexes of song rights for country, rock, pop, electronic etc. pp. And once you have that you might put other financial derivatives on top and can go 2x long on country music and 2x short on pop music. There interesting aspect is that big music labels always were able to go short on some genre and long on another because they effectively decide which artists to fund. It's just that with these open protocols we the regular people get to do the same directly. And as a fan we get directly rewarded for helping our favorite artist to spread there music.

There are many interesting use cases and platforms emerging in the blockchain world. It just takes time for things to go mainstream.

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

#318

Post by pclmulqdq »

FabHK wrote: post #82
yashg wrote: 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 wonder whether one can postulate an impossibility theorem (call it SEV, similar to CAP) for public blockchains (at least using PoW, and whether one can overcome it with PoS or similar is an open question): You can't have a (PoW) public blockchain that is Secure, Efficient (=not planet destroyingly wasteful), and Valuable. Pick any two.

Secure and efficient. Money should be a medium of transfer, not a store of value. The fact remains that you can't really get "efficient" with proof of work, and claims about "secure" are dubious with proof of stake.

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

#319

Post by etherael »

HWR_14 wrote: post #300
etherael wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was convinced government doesn't work and indeed that is the only reason I am interested in blockchain applications. Watching first hand how badly the entire affair has gone has been very useful into getting insight into why government doesn't work, which I still firmly believe. However I am no longer under the illusion doing away with it and replacing it with a blockchain based substitute is either cheap or easy,…

So, at no point did you consider that you were wrong in your base assumption and government does in fact work? Because it looks like you examined anarchistic alternatives to government, found them all worse than government, and then didn't do the (to me) obvious thing if updating your "government can be good" possibility.

> So, at no point did you consider that you were wrong in your base assumption and government does in fact work?

Of course, many dozens of thousands of times throughout my life, desperately wished for that to be the case. Unfortunately there is no evidence for this and immense amounts of evidence for the contrary.

> Because it looks like you examined anarchistic alternatives to government, found them all worse than government

I didn't say I found them worse than government at all, I said the first hand experience was very useful for seeing directly why government is as broken as it is, because all the same "incentive of last resort" mechanisms are typically in play in blockchains. It still turns out to be much better so far if measured by deadweight economic loss for economic coordination between a given transaction volume.

This is also why I said I would not be too surprised if it just becomes the next iteration of government. People who think that the government is desirable and its political structures are useful, parliamentary democracy, voting, departments that run projects and are accountable to elected officials, all of that kind of thing. You could clone it with a blockchain much more reliably and with much more auditability than you have with the multi-century old variations thereof running on some variant of "trust me" that we have currently.

Thus you could at least say "Yeah sure this is bad, but at least we can prove that everybody is following the rules on all elections, transactions, etc, and we have all the signed blocks to prove that from genesis" rather than the current trust-free alternative of an endless propaganda machine spinning whatever it wants people to believe at any given point in time with zero proof whatsoever.

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

#320

Post by cburgdorf »

pjc50 wrote: post #67
cburgdorf wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> This assumes that we can trustlessly get the CO2 emissions for all countries Classic blockchain advocacy: it works great provided we solve this unsolved problem of communicating "trustlessly" with the real world! > you'd have actual enforceable code that can not be gamed People keep "gaming" smart contracts all the time. Just recently there was a defi attack where someone simply flash-borrowed all the tokens, voted…

There are a lot of well proven live projects that use external oracle data and haven't suffered any serious issues. Just throwing DAI and RAI out as examples.
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