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

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

#501

Post by bornfreddy » Sun, Apr 24, 2022, 8:39 AM UTC

peoplefromibiza wrote: post #347

jph wrote: post #47

Blockchains are excellent for logging that uses trustable peer participation, distributed append, and tamper resistance. For example, each peer can add their own chain links, and also see all the chain links added by other peers, and also be sure that the log hasn't been corrupted by any of the peers. Some examples IMHO are logs of participation (e.g. voting), agreements (e.g. contracts), exchange (e.g. payments), an…

> Some examples IMHO are logs of participation (e.g. voting), agreements (e.g. contracts), exchange (e.g. payments), and auditing (e.g. compliance). many of these things require privacy (and/or secrecy), which blockchain cannot guarantee (nor offer) a private blockchain is simply a slower centralized database > which requires the participants must trust the central administrative entity to be truthful, unbiased, secu…

> many of these things require privacy (and/or secrecy), which blockchain cannot guarantee (nor offer)

Note that not everything needs to be public. One can (and in many cases should) save the transaction details in a private chain (or database for that matter) and publish only its signature publicly, so that any change can always be detected. But of course there still need to be the usual society safeguards present, otherwise no technical mean will solve anything.

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

#502

Post by ZeroGravitas » Sun, Apr 24, 2022, 9:01 AM UTC

etherael wrote: post #488

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems a bit of an unwarranted leap and very hand-wavy. Why would blockchain be better than a decentralized, non-blockchain tech, hosted in multiple jurisdictions for transaction integrity, censorship resistance, availability and so on? And why is a blockchain a better alternative? If the blockchain assumptions fall (51% control) then it's game over. Even the founding fathers were a step ahead of that and trying…

No matter where FAANG host their infrastructure, if a particular set of states want to tamper with, censor, or surveil that infrastructure, they will be able to do it. The legal structures and the ability to identify ultimate beneficiaries guarantees this for pretty much any legal corporate structure organised under a state. The only chance this has of not being true is a blockchain, the ultimate beneficiaries can't…

It was you that claimed blockchain could improve the state, now you've switched to only blockchain can destroy it? And replace it with "an organisational unit" which is apparently, not a state/government/democracy?

None of this sounds like a good idea, even in theory.

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

#503

Post by tsimionescu » Sun, Apr 24, 2022, 9:25 AM UTC

baby wrote: post #499

tsimionescu wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but those alternatives are not yet proven technologies. It's unclear for example if PoS is actually trust-worthy at scale, and we can't use Bitcoin or Ethereum's success so far to check that.

What makes you say that? PoS coins have been running without issues for almost as long as PoW coins and as far as I know there’s been no attacks. On the other hand there’s been many 51% attacks on PoW coins.

No major PoS coin (well, Ripple is PoS, but centralized in other ways) exists, so it may be that they haven't been attacked simply because they are too small.

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

#504

Post by tsimionescu » Sun, Apr 24, 2022, 9:28 AM UTC

tromp wrote: post #468

tsimionescu wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the receiver has to prove their ability to spend the received funds before being allowed to receive them If I want to send you some crypto money in exchange for you mowing my lawn, how do you prove that you can spend the received funds? And if I accidentally send it twice, why would I care that you can spend them twice, unless I have some way to compel you to send half back?

> how do you prove that you can spend the received funds? You prove it by producing a partial signature for the transaction (a transaction essentially requires a multisig by both sender and receiver). > And if I accidentally send it twice You couldn't send it twice because the transaction consumes an input utxo. Paying twice would require two different transactions with two different multisignatures.

> You prove it by producing a partial signature for the transaction (a transaction essentially requires a multisig by both sender and receiver).

Oh, ok, I misunderstood what this meant.

> You couldn't send it twice because the transaction consumes an input utxo. Paying twice would require two different transactions with two different multisignatures.

This assumes the receiver is trust-worthy, that they counter-sign the transaction if it was accidental. So if I accidentally pay twice for a single item, the seller can just sign both transactions and send me only one item, and I can't do much about it. Of course, they can also send 0 items, which is why blockchains can't secure transactions in a useful sense - you need the law and insurance and other social mechanisms for that.

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

#505

Post by icelancer » Sun, Apr 24, 2022, 9:48 AM UTC

yashg wrote: post #152

kebman wrote: post #137

> there is nothing here more than you can get with traditional database technology? Here are some questions that you can test your hypothesis with: * Can you get distributed and trust-less settlement mechanisms with a centralized database? * Can you seamlessly send value across jurisdictions and closed borders without meddlers and middlemen with traditional database technology (regulation resistance and unconfiscatab…

>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…

>> I have money. How can I get some crypto? From a middleman.

You can mine it and send to wallets, not exchanges, no KYC, no identity attached, and the fees for major coins are more than competitive with Paypal and Venmo.

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

#506

Post by kybernetikos » Sun, Apr 24, 2022, 10:17 AM UTC

myownpetard wrote: post #408

kybernetikos wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is no external trusted documentation that says what the intention of the code is. Working out what both parties intended a contract to mean and what it should mean, sometimes in contradiction of what it actually says is exactly what the legal system does. You can't evade the legal system by writing your contract in a different form. Weirdly I think this idea comes from thinking law is code when it isn't.

A judge is supposed to read the smart contract source code and determine the intent? The parties are frequently anonymous and have never interacted outside of the publication the smart contract to the blockchain and another party interacting with it. There is no basis for determining intent besides the code itself. Are you thinking that the contracts have analogs to legal contracts? Usually (exclusively?) they only m…

> A judge is supposed to read the smart contract source code and determine the intent?

If necessary, they can call on experts to provide testimony in such cases. It's probably not necessary all that often though because there's usually more relevant auxillary information to help work this stuff out. Who wrote this smart contract? Why are the parties using it? What information persuaded them to use it? Was the outcome of using the smart contract different to what a reasonable person would have expected?

This is exactly what courts are for! The fact that some of the procedure of the interaction has been mechanised does not mean the participants get to ignore the law.

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

#507

Post by kybernetikos » Sun, Apr 24, 2022, 10:23 AM UTC

myownpetard wrote: post #483

dTal wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A judge is supposed to read the smart contract source code and determine the intent? If it's hard for a judge, it's presumably also hard for anyone using the smart contract. >There is no basis for determining intent besides the code itself. I'll bet you any frequently used contract has an associated website. Basically, conducting your business on a blockchain doesn't exempt you from the law. You - the squishy human…

Does participation in a smart contract imply any kind of legal agreement? You're essentially interacting with an api/bot that's being hosted by whatever blockchain community at large. Anybody can publish anything, and any unrelated parties can interact with it. Here's a thought experiment for you. If I were to publish a public webpage where you entered a routing number into a textbox and money was immediately transfe…

> how can we do away with our existing systems for mediating disputes, determining intent etc?

I think everyone in this conversation fully agrees on this point. As I said earlier, "I'm sure there are extremists that think smart contracts make law obsolete, but they are just wrong." We absolutely shouldn't do away with our existing systems for mediating disputes and determining intent.

I think perhaps the crux of the disagreement is that I think we need to apply those systems to smart contract systems in a sensible way and I take it that you think that the fact that we won't do away with our existing systems means there's no reason to use blockchain at all.

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

#508

Post by lui8906 » Sun, Apr 24, 2022, 11:05 AM UTC

dangerwill wrote: post #301

dageshi wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speed of iteration/development/experimentation. You can't fork EUR/USD, experiment with it and see if it works better than the existing EUR/USD. You can with online currencies and people are doing just that. Most will be failures in the same way that most new businesses/startups are ultimately failures. BUT the difference is there is actual experimentation with money now in a way that there never was before.

None of these are experiments with the concept of money. You still transact in the exact same fundamental way as with traditional online payments, just 1000x worse. 99.9% of this "experimentation" is simply companies tying ownership of a token to a permission to access a web service. And the remainder of it are clueless tech brained morons finding ways to re-invent financial instruments (like residuals, profit splitt…

> None of these are experiments with the concept of money. You still transact in the exact same fundamental way as with traditional online payments, just 1000x worse.

How involved are you in the space to make this claim? Are you staying informed? What is your highly confident language based on?

Can you tease out how you come to "1000x worse"?

You are incredibly confident, it leads me to believe you have some big blind points.

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

#509

Post by mmcnl » Sun, Apr 24, 2022, 11:11 AM UTC

pcthrowaway wrote: post #477

mmcnl wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still the Git concept works using a different trust model (i.e. repository maintainer).

That's github more than git, isn't it. Anyone can maintain their own fork of a repository. Much like with blockchain, it comes down to a community decision which one to accept as "canonical". The difference is a lack of consensus at the protocol level for git. The network's only 'canonical' version of things is at the whim of the maintainer (who can also rewrite history)

Fair enough, but what I meant to say is that in practice Git is always used in combination with a centralized service such as GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket. There is no cryptographic consensus, that is true, but the model still works exceptionally well. All modern software engineering depends on it, successfully. I never heard someone ask for a more robust trust model with network protocol consensus. I don't think anyone actually needs it.

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

#510

Post by etherael » Sun, Apr 24, 2022, 12:05 PM UTC

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #502

etherael wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No matter where FAANG host their infrastructure, if a particular set of states want to tamper with, censor, or surveil that infrastructure, they will be able to do it. The legal structures and the ability to identify ultimate beneficiaries guarantees this for pretty much any legal corporate structure organised under a state. The only chance this has of not being true is a blockchain, the ultimate beneficiaries can't…

It was you that claimed blockchain could improve the state, now you've switched to only blockchain can destroy it? And replace it with "an organisational unit" which is apparently, not a state/government/democracy? None of this sounds like a good idea, even in theory.

Monarchy was an improvement on despotism, maybe constitutional republics were an improvement on democracy, etc etc etc. The organisational units could be considered destroyed, or they could be considered reconstituted, the point is that the functions handled by the OUs in question went to another ostensibly more efficient instance thereof. This is much easier if the new OU does not rely on its underlying infrastructure from the old OU.

Things should improve somewhat is a pretty hard ask for something that doesn't sound like a good idea, letalone in theory. Of course, it's an open question as to what the end result of all of this will actually be, and maybe it will indeed be the worst catastrophic case of making the largest cause of non natural death in the past century even worse, but you'll excuse me if I find that hard to believe and think clearing that particular hurdle ought to be pretty easy, especially because this would be a non violent form of revolution, and the only competition is war. In a world of weapons of mass destruction that's a horrendous problem space to be working with.