91–100 of 150 posts
Why is there never a shred of evidence in these blockchain-related papers? It all sounds like a cool idea, so why not test it and run the numbers?
Also, on bitcointalk it seems all you need is a whitepaper and a great(!) team (of 1 developer and hundred marketing strategists, financial directors and whatnot.)
Smart contracts are being suggested as the building block of "autonomous corporations" (implying "do anything!") yet nearly anything meaningful basically has to interact with the real world through agents external to the contract for most business cases. Given this severe limitation, could someone clarify what the whole shebang is supposed to be about? I actually saw Vitalik speak last week or so here in Shenzhen cam…
The benefit over a regular database is that everyone gets to see what the data and stored procedures are, so you don't have to take someone elses word for that part.
Also, there's a built-in payment system, which is handy sometimes.
It doesn't solve interacting with the rest of the world, you still need an external system for that, just like with most databases.
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this is actually incorrect you can verify a tls connection was made to a server and a particular output was given in that tls connection with oraclize it.
Which is just an implementation of precisely the oracle scheme I talked about. Introducing precisely the problems I mentioned: blockchain bloat, additional trust anchor which can never be 100% validated and thus destroys the idea of requiring zero trust in any particular individual person or system.
Smart contracts are being suggested as the building block of "autonomous corporations" (implying "do anything!") yet nearly anything meaningful basically has to interact with the real world through agents external to the contract for most business cases. Given this severe limitation, could someone clarify what the whole shebang is supposed to be about? I actually saw Vitalik speak last week or so here in Shenzhen cam…
>Anything meaningful basically has to interact with the real world through agents external to the contract This is where people are betting to take a risk that the law will change to legalize and maybe even incorporate these contracts. Take a prenuptial agreement for example. Instead of having a lawyer, a smart contract could automatically split ether from an account into two addresses. https://www.coindesk.com/prenu…
Ignoring the oracle problem, all this would take to work is the couple storing all their wealth in an asset that has an unknown (possibly negative) rate of return and unknown (possibly very low) liquidity.
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I think it's because it is both hard to understand and hard to explain cryptocurrencies at the moment. It's like discussing email or social networks based on papers and ideas without really ever having seen it in action. We tend to get a bit aggressive or impatient when we find it hard to explain something. Also, crypto skeptics realise that the crypto fans literally have money at stake so they are not unbiased. Mayb…
"Crypto" isn't binary. There's a gold nugget in there somewhere buried under a literal mountain of (occasionally willful) disinformation, flimsy whitepapers and opportunistic ICOs that can best be described as Ponzi schemes. Spend any amount of time on bitcointalk or any of the altcoin subreddits to see what I'm talking about. That - IMO - is what "crypto skeptics" are actually skeptical of.
[0] See also the "put voting on the blockchain and give everybody an identifying number to verify their vote" people who seem to have absolutely no idea why we have a secret ballot.
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Right, LN nodes will eventually become big speciallized hubs, with great BTC capacity to attend as many channels as possible. Each channel is a source of revenue for the LN node, so LN nodes will try to become as big as possible (both technically and BTC-wise) to cope with greater audience. Think that in a LN-node the profit will be proportional to capacity of open channels, so its very probable that we will see very…
Let’s imagine an LN network with 1,000 payers all connecting to one, single LN hub, which routes all payments to a single payee (merchant). How will the on-blockchain settlement transaction look like? It needs to redeem all 1,000 outputs provided by the payers, because each payer creates a new output when it funds a channel, which creates a huge settlement transaction (1,000 inputs) with a correspondingly huge fee. H…
What is the use of the hub? You can just connect the merchant directly, even if you are just an occasional customer. You don't need the entire blockchain to use LN, so more users will be running Lightning nodes than Bitcoin nodes.
If you have an intermediary node (you call it a hub), there is no requirement for it to close its channel with the merchant, once you close your channel with that intermediary node.
Credits: Yoghurt on Bitcoin Core Slack
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What about Kickstarter? A $500 million+ company that takes a 5% vig on all transacted funds can effectively be replaced with a few lines of code. If total ETH sent to contract address by date X > Amount Y then send the ETH to the fundraiser, else return the ETH.
The part of Kickstarter you're describing isn't worth any significant fraction of these $500m. If it were, Indiegogo, Gofundme and all others in the space would need to be well on the unicorn track. A saying goes "Ideas are cheap, execution is everything". That's where this value of $500m comes in. It's in the brand reputation the company has built. In the traffic they generate by people browsing their site and disco…
Can you do so in a way that I as a funder don't need to trust you the intermediary?
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Let’s imagine an LN network with 1,000 payers all connecting to one, single LN hub, which routes all payments to a single payee (merchant). How will the on-blockchain settlement transaction look like? It needs to redeem all 1,000 outputs provided by the payers, because each payer creates a new output when it funds a channel, which creates a huge settlement transaction (1,000 inputs) with a correspondingly huge fee. H…
A channel is committed to using one unspent transaction output (UTXO), settling it consumes only that UTXO and all of the other channels a given party might have are completely unrelated. What is the use of the hub? You can just connect the merchant directly, even if you are just an occasional customer. You don't need the entire blockchain to use LN, so more users will be running Lightning nodes than Bitcoin nodes. I…
As far as I can see, merchants receiving payments over payment channels is unrealistic, because it requires:
1) the merchant to predict what its revenue will be this week/month
2) the merchant (or someone else) to lock up this entire amount for the revenue period (week/month)
So, if a merchant wants to receive payments over a payment channel, the effective supply of BTC is halved, because 1 BTC needs to be deposited in the merchant’s payment channel for every 1 BTC a customer sends.
Most merchants simply don’t have that kind of capital and, even if they did, they wouldn’t be able to compete on price with other merchants who don’t demand trustless payments (merchants receiving payments over payment channels need to adjust their prices to account for the fact that they need to borrow a week/month’s worth of revenue, and have it sit idle in a payment channel). It’s very poor use of a scarce resource (bitcoins).
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Which is just an implementation of precisely the oracle scheme I talked about. Introducing precisely the problems I mentioned: blockchain bloat, additional trust anchor which can never be 100% validated and thus destroys the idea of requiring zero trust in any particular individual person or system.
I don't see it as so black and white. Sure, zero trust is the ideal, but there are potentially benefits even there's some trust involved. For example, I saw a headline indicating that Unicef was going to experiment with block chain technology and asset management. Charity strikes me as particularly suitable domain since benefactors are understandably concerned about how their donations are being used and there's litt…