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Ask HN: Why is the community so negative towards blockchain technology?

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Re: Ask HN: Why is the community so negative towards blockchain technology?

#91

Post by kneel »

ffwd wrote: post #90
kneel wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If decentralisation were more efficient than centralisation, systems aiming for efficiency would naturally centralise; this is not what we observe. I'm going to assume you mixed up your words there. I'd argue that we see lots of decentralization on the web. I don't see why it has to be one or the other, they seem to work fine in a hybrid state. >the code is controlled by just a few people, the mining is controlled b…

> I'd argue that we see lots of decentralization on the web. Youtube, Paypal, Facebook, Steam, Reddit, Medium, Github, hell even hackernews - I think the big success story of the internet in the past decade has been the centralization. Decentralization is usually popular because of illegal intents (like bittorrent). I agree with you though, they could exist in a hybrid state and there will always be markets for decen…

>Decentralization is usually popular because of illegal intents (like bittorrent).

I guess we view de/centralization in a different way. All the sites you listed are centralized under a brand/code but decentralized on cloud servers. Inspecting a page and viewing sources you can see how many places a site loads from (hackernews is pretty centralized)

>Decentralization is for the most part, an enthusiast endeavour.

I'd agree that Bitcoin is an enthusiast endeavour currently. There are several elephants in the room though, the federal reserve, unaccountable corruption, currency manipulation, SuperPACS, offshore tax havens. I'm not naive enough to claim that Bitcoin could solve these problems or even any of them, but it could be used as a tool if utilized properly.

Re: Ask HN: Why is the community so negative towards blockchain technology?

#92

Post by vacri »

kneel wrote: post #87
vacri wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bitcoin's slogan is 'be your own bank' which means you're ultimately responsible for your own security. And this gets back to my original point. Security is hard enough that it's common for seasoned security professionals to not follow best practices. Regular members of the public don't have a chance if they have to assume all the responsibility of their own security - this is why they outsource that to banks right…

>How can a person be ultimately responsible for their own security if they aren't aware of even the most basic of security issues in tech? Phone based AES hardware with fingerprint security, coupled with QR code scanning payments. Literally point and pay with biometric data. Or should we use pieces of plastic/paper?

Well, biometric data has already been proven to be worth less than a password - because once it's compromised, that's it for life. You can't change your fingerprints.

But yes, pieces of plastic/paper don't require the user to have an expensive-yet-easily-lost doo-dad that is also hard to replace. Have your phone stolen? Now you have to wait not only until the banks do their bit, but also until the phone shops reopen so you can start buying things again. Not to mention that if you forget to charge your "money", you can no longer use your "money". It's also not an option for those in poverty, or for the plenty of people who don't have a phone, let alone a smartphone. "Dollars" come in a lot of forms that you can use at any point in life and in any state except perhaps severe mental illness. High-tech electronic-only money certainly does not.

Re: Ask HN: Why is the community so negative towards blockchain technology?

#94

Post by davidgerard »

kneel wrote: post #79
davidgerard wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This follows from basic computer science. (Something I increasingly find Bitcoin advocates handwaving away.) If decentralisation were more efficient than centralisation, systems aiming for efficiency would naturally centralise; this is not what we observe. The decentralisation is stupendously inefficient, Proof of Work is 47kg of carbon per transaction literally wasted, and it all centralises anyway - the code is con…

>If decentralisation were more efficient than centralisation, systems aiming for efficiency would naturally centralise; this is not what we observe. I'm going to assume you mixed up your words there. I'd argue that we see lots of decentralization on the web. I don't see why it has to be one or the other, they seem to work fine in a hybrid state. >the code is controlled by just a few people, the mining is controlled b…

Others have pointed out that the web people actually use is centralising hugely, but I must note:

>Code is available on github and you can fork it. Mining centralization was the result of competition and some ambitious Chinese living next to dams. There is nothing preventing this from changing in the future.

There is: mining benefits from economies of scale. Increasing specialisation increases your efficiency in hashes per dollar spent, and this increases the barrier to entry. To compete in mining now, you need not just super-cheap power but to design your own ASICs.

Specialised hardware will always be more efficient on a specific task than general hardware. I'm frankly amazed whenever I have to point this out on HN of all places, and have had to do so repeatedly.

As for the code base: the protocol is ill-specified outside the code base. So you need to get the network to adopt your forked code, or you just have another altcoin. Again, this should be well-known if you claim to know how bitcoin actually works in practice.

Re: Ask HN: Why is the community so negative towards blockchain technology?

#95

Post by theamk »

wheelerwj wrote: post #34
patio11 wrote: post #12

Well since you asked. Blockchain is the world's worst database, created entirely to maintain the reputations of venture capital firms who injected hundreds of millions of dollars into a technology whose core defining insight was "You can improve on a Ponzi scam by making it self-organizing and distributed; that gets vastly more distribution, reduces the single point of failure, and makes it censorship-resistant." Tha…

Thanks for that thorough and articulate response! It seems funny to me that a person who works at stripe doesn't see the value in a fraudulent-transaction-free processing network, but hey, it's cool. I tried to pick apart the rest of your post but damn if you're not an eloquent writer. You pretty much covered every angle. My only real complaint is your point that "Bitcoin is claimed to be a global financial network a…

> fraudulent-transaction-free processing network

How so? Are you saying that when a trojan on my machine accesses my bitcoin wallet and sends all of my bitcoins somewhere, is it not "fraudulent transaction"? Because these things happen, you know.

Re: Ask HN: Why is the community so negative towards blockchain technology?

#96

Post by max_ »

jdmichal wrote: post #27
sayurichick wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

really? I read that post as "writing a ToDo app using the blockchain as your datastore versus a traditional database is bad". Well yeah, there are different tools for each job. If everything is a nail and you're only used to a hammer, then of course trying to use this new tool as a hammer will sound silly. I obviously can't predict the future use cases, but an example off the top of my head might be something like a…

As others have mentioned [0], blockchains pay a lot for working in a trustless environment. The real issue is that there's not actually a lot of trustless environments that need such a solution. And there's better solutions in trusting environments. To take your example, a country issuing identification numbers does not have a trust issue. The people generally trust the government to correctly issue and record an ID…

In my country, no one trusts the government

Re: Ask HN: Why is the community so negative towards blockchain technology?

#97

Post by alexjarvis »

trcollinson wrote: post #53
alexjarvis wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Postgres doesn't do distributed consensus though does it.

I'll assume this isn't a joke and that you just aren't well versed in computer science nor in database theory. While Postgres doesn't use distributed consensus it does use distributed transactions to maintain consistency (a major tenet of ACID compliance). In a distributed consensus environment a substantial number of proofs of work (in Bitcoins case a hash) must be performed to gradually ensure that a block in the c…

Sorry, I wasn't clear, I meant trust-less consensus (proof of work).

Distributed transactions in an RDBMS requires trusting all the hosts it runs on.

Re: Ask HN: Why is the community so negative towards blockchain technology?

#98

Post by alexjarvis »

valarauca1 wrote: post #42
alexjarvis wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No because it's cheap to produce hashes for git.

It is cheap to make GIT hashes but it remains impossible to day to generate git collisions. The cost of hashing only has to do with the creation of blocks. Which blocks are not required to be cryptographically verifiable.

How are blocks not required to be cryptographically verifiable?

Re: Ask HN: Why is the community so negative towards blockchain technology?

#99

Post by m-i-l »

twinkletwinkle wrote: post #5

To quote Matt Levine: "If you announce that you are updating the database software used by a consortium of banks to track derivatives trades, the New York Times will not write an article about it. If you say that you are blockchaining the blockchain software used by a blockchain of blockchains to blockchain blockchain blockchains, the New York Times will blockchain a blockchain about it" The whole article is fairly i…

And to quote Tracy Alloway, also Bloomberg: "you can replace the term 'distributed ledgers' with 'shared Excel sheets' in about 90 percent of talk about blockchain and finance"[0]

[0] http://www.tracy-alloway.com/?p=577

Re: Ask HN: Why is the community so negative towards blockchain technology?

#100

Post by davidgerard »

vectorpush wrote: post #80
sayurichick wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

again, the use case I made up is not important. And to argue the use case would be missing the point. However, for argument's sake. People can counterfeit drivers licenses, or passports. Good luck trying to counterfeit something on the blockchain. Edit: to expand on this, think of a poor country who doesn't have their technology up to par as a 1st world country. To build the infrastructure to even have that governmen…

> again, the use case I made up is not important. And to argue the use case would be missing the point. This is precisely the point. Blockchains are met with negativity because enthusiasts keep trying to evangelize their merits without having anything to show for it . If blockchains have uses besides cryptocurrencies, point to a practical example or build something and Show HN, but the incessant proselytizing of bloc…

>The blockchain phenomenon is akin to when a star-eyed developer writes a 10 page blog post about their FPS-RPG-RTS-MMO hybrid with a physics and chemistry simulation system that offers unlimited possibilities! Except the project usually fails after debuting a few misleading demos, and if the project ever escapes the alpha phase, the reality is hugely underwhelming and not at all resembling anything close to what was advertised. That is the blockchain in a nutshell.

I'm actually surprised nobody's brought blockchains to Star Citizen yet.

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