191–200 of 355 posts
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> make an agreement that is enforced by a smart contract Please give me an example of how an agreement can be enforced by a smart contract. > When an actor fails to live up their obligation they are refused payment It works the same way with colored pebbles. > There is no way to take off with something that is not yours Why not? I know this is an abstract question in this context which is why I asked for a practical…
Okay, I'll give you a practical example. Here is an excerpt from the book Blockchain Revolution. "bAIRBNB VERSUS AIRBNB bAirbnb is a distributed application (DApp), a set of smart contracts that stores data on a home-listings blockchain. The bAirbnb app has an elegant interface: owners can upload information and pictures of their property. The platform maintains reputation scores of both providers and renters to impr…
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They all say that they'll never roll back or retroactively make any changes. But inevitably, they always do. I thought Ethereum might have been different, but of course I had to be disappointed. The problem with blockchains is that they still fundamentally fail to solve the problem of mob rule, though, I suppose you could argue that's one thing you'll never fully get rid while the human element is still involved. Rob…
Ethereum Classic is still a thing: https://ethereumclassic.github.io/ Ethereum Classic is a fork of Ethereum that held blockchain is immutable paradigm and let DAO continue to be drained.
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They all say that they'll never roll back or retroactively make any changes. But inevitably, they always do. I thought Ethereum might have been different, but of course I had to be disappointed. The problem with blockchains is that they still fundamentally fail to solve the problem of mob rule, though, I suppose you could argue that's one thing you'll never fully get rid while the human element is still involved. Rob…
Ethereum Classic is still a thing: https://ethereumclassic.github.io/ Ethereum Classic is a fork of Ethereum that held blockchain is immutable paradigm and let DAO continue to be drained.
Ethereum Classic did a hardfork last October which removed null accounts created in the DAO attack. Now, while this didn't change account balances, these were legally created accounts and the historical ledger was changed. The hardfork was controversial at the time for this reason.
You can't say that in Classic the blockchain is an immutable paradigm - it changed history just as Ethereum did.
I agree with this article. Proponents of blockchain tech argue its revolutionary quality is its ability to act as a decentralized and trustless database. But I don't ever hear them sort through the issue of how to agree on the schema for this trustless database. For a group of people to use a decentralized DB, they have to agree as to what to store in it, and how to store it. They need to form consensus about how the…
Decentralized systems aren't attractive only to decentralized groups. One application for which I've been considering use of a (private) blockchain is user authentication, and logging of authentication attempts.
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> If you have a small community where everybody knows each other, the people can cooperate to keep track of "accounts" of who owes what. Well, those people are then the government. In small scale communities it's one and the same -- they can all join together and deal with anybody who doesn't play nice. And these punishments are the analogous of e.g. prison. So, what you say is true, but not very important in practic…
>, as we don't live in such small communities, Right, that's today's situation. My "government not required" is talking about how ancient money can arise spontaneously without a separate entity that we think of today as "government". If we think of "money" at its basic level of keeping track of "promises", "favors", and "trust" ... all those human instincts of coordination can precede old governments like the Roman E…
And what would be strange about that? I see no reason to constrain government to only mean the modern(-ish) state. Ancient Rome was also a government, Babylonians had kings, jungle tribes had rulers and elders, etc etc.
I'd say any human community had a governance structure way into prehistory.
>If we use this all-encompassing idea of "government", then I suppose it means nothing preceded government.
Yes -- but I don't find that strange. What would precede government? If there was anything, it would more like primate animals living in packs akin to animals, but with no other structure in their "communities". As soon as some structure emerges, they also need ways to decide what they do, assign responsibilities, punish bad behavior, etc.
DLTs are inefficient by design. The energy consumption is unsustainable with the technology as it stands. For example Bitcoin consumed an estimated 40 million KWh in the past 24 hours - 137KWh per transaction . Enough to power ~1.3M American homes. Many of the alt-coins are even worse. Source: http://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption
However, it only goes so far, since other consensus mechanisms could have lower energy requirements. Proof of stake, e.g., (if it ever gets off the ground) could change the game. Similarly, if the economics of proof of work were re-jigged, it isn't impossible that the energy required for mining could be dramatically lowered.
But, as it stands, Bitcoin, in particular, has a shamefully large environmental footprint.
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> The real revolution is in smart contracts and virtual machines that run on a blockchain and the ability to define ownership of a distributed organization to distribute profits accordingly. Blockchains on blockchains that having turing complete contracts that can guarantee there isn't even the ability to cheat the distributed, mainly anonymous organization participants. Sounds like something utterly complex even to…
Make it better. Programming with switches was hard. High level languages were built. Managing memory was hard. Higher level languages were built. There's this amazing lack of vision and inability to see that things can and will be innovated on. Why would it be anywhere near perfect by this iteration? Why would you expect that? Also in terms of complexity - have you ever read an actual legal contract? Do you think 99.…
Because e.g. computers despite being primitive were still very damn useful the very first time they were built. In fact their utility preceded their being built (e.g. to have them assist war efforts and research calculations), not vice versa.
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Watch this video [1] of Bill Gates explaining the value of the Internet to David Letterman, where he's just not getting it at all. Bill's telling him the things it can do relative to David's interests, but he just sees those as problems that don't really exist because they've already been solved. It took decades before the Internet was useful to "the masses." I don't think there's some conspiracy among VCs, but I do…
The Internet opened up a whole new world of applications. Distributed ledgers do not. They are a complex and horribly inefficient solution to a very niche problem that crypto currrencies like Bitcoin have. But outside of that realm, they offer next to no technical advantages that would justify the exploding costs incurred by implementing this technology.
If I had a Bitcoin for every skeptic that posts a blog on why it can't work... This may just be my general observation but I feel like Silicon Valley hegemony has a grudge against crypto currencies and I'm not sure why. For an industry that has constantly tried new things and saw potential where no one else did, I just don't see the love for the potential of smart contracts, DApps, etc. And how this is just the begin…
> I feel like Silicon Valley hegemony has a grudge against crypto currencies I have a grudge against crypt-currencies because their proponents think: + Implementations don't need specs + PL theory is below them (static typing? referential transparency?) + Repeated million dollar hacks aren't a problem + There's no shame in lying about the core purpose of your product (Etherium: The implementation is the LAW. Except w…
Come on, you can't generalize things like that on a group such as cryptocurrency users. I think this generalization tells more about you than cryptocurrency proponents.