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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?

#511

Post by derangedHorse »

igorkraw wrote: post #247
pcthrowaway wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except with git repositories there's no built-in consensus mechanism, and we have the potential for a double spend. Say we're assuming the git repo includes gpg signing and users can make commits attesting that they've sent some amount of their balance to another user. John makes a commit saying he sends his entire balance to Alice. John pushes that to a central repository, and Alice gives him her house in return. Jo…

No it's not. If you run a trust based economy without clear property rights, this whole scenario doesn't exist. If you have property rights, you have a state to enforce them, so that state has a court, sues Alice (or Bob), sues John, the state punishes John, done. If you try to establish property rights without a state, then ans only then does it become interesting, but why would you do that? Establishing a democrati…

Establishing a pure democracy is never easy and when you get the centralization of power that a representative democracy (or democratic republic) brings it can create incentive structures that don't represent the electing population. When you have the power to hide something as a political representative and the general population don't have the means to provide an attestation to whether something is true or not, it starts creating room for elected actors to work against the interest of the people in scenarios where they could reliably hide malpractice. The blockchain isn't converting democratic republics outright, but it does give more power to the people by allowing them to attach their unit of account to what is now considered to be an apolitical monetary system that can be participated in by anyone.

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

#512

Post by syzygyhack »

nosianu wrote: post #39
syzygyhack wrote: post #35

It is simply trust reduction/removal through distributed consensus. Any industry or application that depends on trust could be improved through use of blockchain for trust minimization. But just as easily as a knife can cut a slice of bread, it could be used to slice a jugular. In short, don't confuse the technology with the use cases. It's just a tool, some people will misuse it.

You don't minimize trust, you greatly increase the complexity of it. There's a lot more entities and processes involved and it becomes harder to understand. You need to trust quite a lot more things now, only that it's much harder, so many don't even try and just assume trusting many through some hard to understand and changing mechanism must be easier, which I don't quite see the logic of. As far as I can see - and…

> There's a lot more entities

Yes. That's decentralization. Rather than trusting one person irrevocably, you trust cryptographic security and the rational economics that emerge from alignment of incentive. Minimal trust in all other actors in the system, rather than maximum trust in one entity.

> it becomes harder to understand

Not really.. The general principles underlying blockchain are relatively simple. I'd agree that the finer implementation details can be complex, especially when it comes to consensus, sharding, or cryptography. But that varies between protocols.

Do you have any examples of the assertions you find hard to follow?

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

#513

Post by baby »

tsimionescu wrote: post #503
baby wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Algorand, dfinity, celo, avalanche, solana, shall I go on?

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

#514

Post by baby »

baby wrote: post #500
laverya wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When the balance of every address can only be calculated by executing the total transaction graph, as in Bitcoin, then you need to store the history. If you have a solution for this that does not require trusting anyone, I'm sure that people would love to hear it.

I do. Check out Mina. It uses recursive zero knowledge proofs to give you a proof of all state transitions since genesis.

For the curious: https://minaprotocol.com/

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

#515

Post by baby »

tsimionescu wrote: post #464
baby wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kind of like taking a paper plane to prove that you can’t fly humans from point A to point B

More like pointing at Concorde to express skepticism about the claims of economic viability of some new faster-than-sound flight start-up.

Or using addictive drugs to say that all medicine is useless

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

#516

Post by baby »

angryasian wrote: post #438
baby wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trust shift to a lower layer, which is always what you want to unless this adds a huge amount of overhead or complexity that leads to security issues. In our case it looks like blockchains are solving real world problems.

you keep repeating this mantra, but this is exactly what Op is asking... what problem is it really solving. Its not solving a tech problem, because the tech exists.

It is solving a tech problem because the tech exist you mean

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

#517

Post by [deleted] »

tngranados wrote: post #201
baby wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Digital cash, as defined in the Bitcoin whitepaper, still seems like the only real use case. IMO the big breakthrough of crypto past bitcoin is that we figured out that cryptocurrencies can use money incentives to run other applications than just payments. People are doing all sorts if things, many scams but also many useful applications.

Any example of those many useful applications?

[deleted]

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

#518

Post by baby »

sirsinsalot wrote: post #363
baby wrote: post #175

I’ll paste what I wrote in https://cryptologie.net/#article_555 The simplest abstraction is to see cryptocurrency / blockchain / distributed ledger technology as a database running on a single computer. Everybody can access this database and there’s some simple logic that allows you to debit your account and credit someone else’s account. The computer has a queue to make sure transactions are processed in order. Bloc…

All that text and still not a single, solid, real world application. Idealistic waffle.

Do you have a question I can help answer perhaps?

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

#519

Post by _nalply »

yashg wrote: post #60
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 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 at scale

This has been repeated often.

I usually think everytime I read this: what if the price of electric power included the price of destroying the planet?

For me this looks like a market failure that proof of work is allowed to destroy the planet.

You consume a lot of electric power? Then you pay the full price of it!

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

#520

Post by uh-quan »

cdiddy2 wrote: post #394

Just because you come from a place of great financial privilege does not mean others have no use for a censorship resistant form of money. Afghanistan: https://theintercept.com/2022/01/19/crypto-afghanistan-sanct... Argentina: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-60912789 Russia: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/navalny-ally-urges-dono... Lebanon: https://www.reuters.com/article/lebanon-crypto-currency-yout... Niger…

Canada: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/ottawa-protests-frozen-bank...
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