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Blockchains: How They Work and Why They’ll Change the World

spectrum.ieee.org

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Re: Blockchains: How They Work and Why They’ll Change the World

#31

Post by 0x006A »

Iv wrote: post #29
chirau wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We in Zimbabwe do not fully understand what you mean by "Zimbabwe moment"... please do explain. And also explain how this blockchain would change anything here.

Sorry, I mean a runaway inflation that led to trillion dollars bills to buy bread, as well as the impossibility to anticipate costs of look g projects without resorting to foreign currency.

what would a blockchain solve that any foreign currency would not do in that case? whats the benefit of a blockchain based system compared to dollar or euro cash in such a situation?

Re: Blockchains: How They Work and Why They’ll Change the World

#32

Post by DmitryOlkhovoi »

retox wrote: post #19

My understanding is that a blockchain is a distributed, immutable database. There must be some serious dollaroos floating around in consultancy fees for such a simple idea to be cropping up constantly and as a solution to almost every problem.

sure distributed... do you maintain your personal walled by yourself? immutable database... oh do you remember ethereum?

Re: Blockchains: How They Work and Why They’ll Change the World

#33

Post by notahacker »

Iv wrote: post #10
TheReveller wrote: post #5

From the article: Can a blockchain find people offering rides, link them up with people who are trying to go somewhere, and give the two parties a transparent platform for payment? Can a blockchain act as a repository and a replay platform for TV shows, movies, and other digital media while keeping track of royalties and paying content creators? Can a blockchain check the status of airline flights and pay travelers a…

This is the whole misguided overenthusiasm we have seen with BTC as well. Blockchains do change something fundamental: the ability to provide for the aforementioned services in case: - You want to stay anonymous - You can't trust a third party I would argue that a functional society would not need any blockchain services as it would provide the necessary privacy defenses to do anonymous transactions and the means to…

Even in a world in which taxis and other institutions are corrupt, it stretches credulity that my real concern when getting a late night taxi is that the merchant service might run away with my $25 and my credit card company might not refund me.

I've been in countries where there are major trust issues with taxis, and the very worst case I could imagine would be a service which signals to anyone watching that I'm on the street in the middle of the night, holding a smartphone which also has the ability to make irreversible transactions of a large portion of my cash holdings to an anonymous endpoint, and I'll probably get into the next vehicle to stop for me.

For a significant proportion of mooted cases where trustlessness is mooted as an advantage of blockchain technology, trustlessness doesn't actually exist and/or centralisation actually reduces problems with trust

Re: Blockchains: How They Work and Why They’ll Change the World

#34

Post by nadam »

retox wrote: post #19

My understanding is that a blockchain is a distributed, immutable database. There must be some serious dollaroos floating around in consultancy fees for such a simple idea to be cropping up constantly and as a solution to almost every problem.

I could say: "My understanding is that software is just the code you put on the Neumann architecture. There must be some serious dollaroos floating around in consultancy fees for such a simple idea to be cropping up constantly and as a solution to almost every problem."

The thing is: not every problem is completely trivial to solve even if the basic idea of the blockchain is well known for some years now. I see progress, there are innovative ideas and implementation in the industry every year. It is not about the initial idea, the cryptoindustry is evolving just like the sowtware industry evolved. There may be more hype than necessary, but this stuff and its potential impact is real.

Re: Blockchains: How They Work and Why They’ll Change the World

#35

Post by rotten »

My understanding is that blockchain truth is determined via a majority vote. What I'm really not clear on is how someone with a botnet can't simply take over a blockchain. With such large sums of cash at stake, it seems like a serious hacker would be much more interested in controlling a blockchain than doing silly DDOS attacks on some corporate website that slighted them.

Re: Blockchains: How They Work and Why They’ll Change the World

#36

Post by gbersac »

0x006A wrote: post #31
Iv wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I mean a runaway inflation that led to trillion dollars bills to buy bread, as well as the impossibility to anticipate costs of look g projects without resorting to foreign currency.

what would a blockchain solve that any foreign currency would not do in that case? whats the benefit of a blockchain based system compared to dollar or euro cash in such a situation?

A blockchain is run algorithmically and you can't change the rules as you will. There's no way to create a lot of bitcoin out of nothing (except a hard fork, which mean creating a new blockchain), that prevent inflation.

Re: Blockchains: How They Work and Why They’ll Change the World

#37

Post by wildsatchmo »

rando444 wrote: post #17
Iv wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the whole misguided overenthusiasm we have seen with BTC as well. Blockchains do change something fundamental: the ability to provide for the aforementioned services in case: - You want to stay anonymous - You can't trust a third party I would argue that a functional society would not need any blockchain services as it would provide the necessary privacy defenses to do anonymous transactions and the means to…

I don't think blockchains provide any anonymity. You can try to provide as little information as possible about yourself, but there is nothing in the blockchain that facilitates anonymity.

A blockchain is like a big spreadsheet. It's not going to be anonymous if you start typing identifying information into it, but it certainly gives you the option of being anonymous if you care to do so.

In contrast, you cant make a bank transaction without linking your identity. This is what people are talking about when they say blockchains give anonymity.

Re: Blockchains: How They Work and Why They’ll Change the World

#38

Post by gbersac »

rotten wrote: post #35

My understanding is that blockchain truth is determined via a majority vote. What I'm really not clear on is how someone with a botnet can't simply take over a blockchain. With such large sums of cash at stake, it seems like a serious hacker would be much more interested in controlling a blockchain than doing silly DDOS attacks on some corporate website that slighted them.

For that you need to have more than half of the hash power of the blockchain, which means, for bitcoin at least, billions of hardware investment. A hacker can't have such power.

Re: Blockchains: How They Work and Why They’ll Change the World

#40

Post by mmcnl »

geraldbauer wrote: post #12

FYI: I've put together a collection of blockchains (in JavaScript, Python, Ruby) and articles at Awesome Blockchains - https://github.com/openblockchains/awesome-blockchains . The idea is that to learn about blockchains build one (or two) from scratch. Not a crypto god? Or a JavaScript ninja/rockstar. No worries. Yes, you can. Happy blockchaining.

This is great, however the real strength of blockchain lies in it being a distributed database. These are all single node examples. Would love to see some examples of a simple network based blockchain
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