91–100 of 337 posts
Ethereum isn't useful for smart contracts; they are too expensive to call methods on chain and EVM is too inflexible and bug prone. The only use for ethereum is shittokens, and you could practically coingen these for free, and trade forever. No load on the shared commons, isolate activity to the specific coin. The only advantage is the ECR20 standard that aids exchange integration. SV is all a blaze about Ethereum, b…
Yet so far I still see almost nothing on the block chain (beyond its core currency use case) that is useful outside the domain of block chain stuff. The only exception is things like Sia, and that's not cost or convenience competitive with Amazon S3 or Backblaze. Where is the value here? When I visited this I was expecting to see at least something about building something useful for... something... Building what for…
I'm not sure yet steemit will end up being a winner in this field, but I find this a very smart approach for challenging the network effect of big competitors.
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This is a solved problem. All interested parties form an independent business entity and assign ownership to that. All problems related to inter-company collaboration are people and organizational problems not technical problems. Blockchain solves nothing in this space.
The main benefit of blockchain is that it is trustless and censorship-resistant. You don't need to trust any business entities. You can transact with someone in a zero trust environment on the other side of the world
People are trying to solve a lot of interesting problems with blockchain, but I fear it's become the ultimate shoehorn solution for the modern era. See also: https://tonyarcieri.com/on-the-dangers-of-a-blockchain-monoc... I've had meetings with prospective clients that opened with, "We have $problem, can we use blockchain to solve it?" where anything that doesn't qualify as a blockchain is cast to the wayside because…
A couple weeks ago a startup pitched blockchain solutions for government problems (I work at a government agency in Brazil). The presentation sounded like Scientology, lots of circular arguments and bold claims without much substance. I asked a few questions and he dodged them like a professional politician: * what do you do if you need to reverse a transaction (lets say, court order) * what if someone loses his wall…
Monegro believes that this paradigm shift affects the way that developers should think about their applications: “The combination of shared open data with an incentive system that prevents “winner-take-all” markets changes the game at the application layer and creates an entire new category of companies with fundamentally different business models at the protocol layer.” Ok, thin protocols + fat apps --> fat protocol…
It's all the same thing every year on HN. People trying to find all sorts of excuses for Bitcoin existence - blockchains, smart contracts, ICOs - as long as they don't have to accept that Bitcoin's main purpose is and always was to have an alternative to the financial system, crippling regulations, government control and taxes. In other words, everything people hate about libertarians, they try to ignore in Bitcoin.…
But yes I agree with you that it is fundamentally anarcho-capitalist. You are certainly not wrong, and this is the source of my objection to bitcoin and most other cryptocurrencies. Although I don't view anarcho-capitalism as "freedom" like you do, but that's a debate for another time.
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What I'm really looking for (and I've been asking this question in a lot of places recently) is some concrete examples of real world cases where this tech is being... you know... used as something other than just novelty or tinkering. Block chain centric use cases don't count since those just reinforce my worst case hypothesis-- that cryptocurrency is a financial MMORPG and a pure value-free bubble. What's an actual…
Hi Api. Your questions are _spot_ on! Speculative investing + skyrocketing valuations does encourage highly motivated reasoning-- a unique kind of confirmation bias: "This technology MUST be the answer to all the problems of the future because I'm getting wealthier TODAY!" Irrational exuberance is rampant. That said -- the recent New Yorker article on Estonia's digital society [1] covered that country's usage of a bl…
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Fundraising: Ethereum ICOs Store of Value: Bitcoin Loans: SALT .... This is just the beginning
I found a non-coin blockchain example: Big Pharma Seeks DLT Solution for Drug Costs https://www.coindesk.com/blockchain-day-big-pharma-seeks-dlt...
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You can solve this by using multiple oracles and a stake-based consensus algorithm to de-incentivize malicious reporting.
I am unable to find anything about using multiple oracles in Ethereum. Do you have any information about this?
A novelty of the unfolding blockchain revolution is the realisation that there is a world of interesting non-turing-complete things to be built. We all assumed that anything non-turing-complete a waste of time. Surprise!
What you want to say here is that ethereum takes a large step towards creating a flexible development platform.
EVM function like an instruction-set for this distributed computer. This may be close to the way forward. But solidity is not. A quick port of JavaScript, it is still in the old software mindset.
Ethereum has problems ahead of it. Just as C has an endless capacity to create memory leak bugs, Solidity offers opportunity for contracts that will drain people's accounts. Each time it happens, it will be reputational damage for the community.
If you wanted to learn Ethereum, it might make more sense to start with raw EVM than Solidity. Play at writing a macro assembler. Once you were tooled up, you might try your hand at becoming the Brendan Eich of the blockchain. Until you do, we are stuck with Brendan Eich.
If we do not find such an expression, general-purpose, public-access blockchain will gain permanent mistrust, and fail.
Message-driven concurrency is here to stay though. I am building a concurrency language centred around message-driven consensus-engines. (github.com/solent-eng/solent) It is designed to be host-distributed, but operated by a single party and not multi-party.