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Building for the Blockchain

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: Building for the Blockchain

#301

Post by sova »

bpicolo wrote: post #243
sova wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely right, the tokens are just a stepping stone to getting the [distributed] app off the ground. It's a great model! If you believe in the utility of something you can fund it very early on and reap great rewards, or at least root great endeavors on.

I somewhat fail to see how they could ever serve as a real payment utility. If they have some actual application utility, then you'd have to dynamically adjust costs based on the speculative cost of acquisition so your application costs aren't wild, and then it's still nothing but a speculation-driven currency. Isn't that just nuts? It's a built-in catch-22

Na you're looking at it as if you're moving currency from some valued mint to a non-valued mint and that's not the case, we're transforming capital from one ecosystem to another, just like Britain Pounds Sterling to the USD, when you move into the new token ecosystem you now are presented with new ways to use your token. MOST of these systems will not create _value innovation_ but some select systems will and those tokens will actually gain in value faster than the backbone currency [meaning the ivy of your token could grow faster than the tree of ETH/BTC because your innovation has value in addition to being a useful transaction vehicle].

Re: Building for the Blockchain

#302

Post by vehementi »

tstactplsignore wrote: post #86
snitko wrote: post #63

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.…

>Bitcoin's main purpose is and always was to have an alternative to the financial system, crippling regulations, government control and taxes. Does bitcoin really do any of those things? Right now, btc core is not an alternative to cash- a problem that maybe will be fixed in time, but currently only seems to be getting worse. If bitcoin really did take off as a global currency, the IRS would audit unreported bitcoin…

Please stop participating in the attempt of some desperate people to relabel bitcoin "bitcoin core"

Re: Building for the Blockchain

#303

Post by csomar »

pmontra wrote: post #201
hyperion2010 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Verifiable oracles are extremely hard to create. In fact I think that the creation of verifiable oracles is the single biggest challenge facing science and engineering. Full disclosure, I am quite biased about this since part of my PhD work is to create a language to specify measurement processes. How do you know whether the numbers you are getting reflect something about the real world? How do you know that your dat…

Maybe I'm just dumb, but is this a bigger problem than it is offchain? Data is forged all the time, we have fake news, people lie, people are jailed with false accusations. If the owner of the fridge in your example eventually discovers that the sensor has been tampered with, s/he can get the money back using the judicial system offchain, maybe reflected in some inchain contract. Answering to my own initial question,…

How do you recover the money if it flew into the blockchain and changed hands in the anon cryptos.

Re: Building for the Blockchain

#304

Post by vec »

CamTin wrote: post #125
vec wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. "Bitcoin as anarcho-capitalist proof of concept" does seem to be the correct framework for understanding why it exists, why it works the way it does, and what one might find valuable about it. On that front it's been at least a partial success. I can't buy a cup of coffee with Bitcoin, and I doubt I ever will, but the fact that it works at all is a lot more than I suspected we would see at this point. It's d…

Tracking ownership of some intangible set of rights is actually basically the one thing that BTC/ETH-esque tech is really useful for, so the Kodak thing is far from the craziest coin announced. A sane thing to do would be to piggyback on one the existing blockhains and their pre-existing hashing power. In this scenario, Kodak would create some kind colored-coin or side chain representing ownership of certain photogra…

> This has the advantage of /continuing to exist if Kodak goes away/, which is what you want as a rights holder.

If you mean the ecosystem can thrive without Kodak, then it sounds like you don't expect Kodak to add any significant value and I may as well use any immutable public record, of which there are already countless legally tested options.

If you mean that if Kodak goes away then the rights contained in their ledger stick around as a historical document, then it explains why they need a public and immutable ledger (and a decent third-party archival service), but it still doesn't require trustless or decentralized.

A blockchain works, in the same sense that calling a ride sharing service to take me to the coffee shop half a block from my house works. But I can just walk half a block instead. As far as I can tell, the blockchain doesn't allow Kodak to do anything that they couldn't have done 20 years ago if they had wanted, and it's much more complicated (and therefore much more expensive and error prone) than many other data persistence layers.

Re: Building for the Blockchain

#305

Post by EGreg »

CryptoPunk wrote: post #272
EGreg wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you talking about? What exactly can Ripple do on its own network that you have to trust t not to do? And anyway it's open source software! Why don't you go download the XRP consensus protocol from their github repo and try it. Ripple's servers won't even be part of the network.

If you want to be part of the Ripple network you have to trust Ripple's set of trusted validators. MySQL is open source, but that doesn't make a given MySQL server decentralized. Ripple in this case is that MySQL server.

If you want to be part of the Bitcoin network, you have to trust Bitcoin's miner du jour (actually du 10 minute).

What is there to trust? That they'll take your transaction? About the only thing they can do is refuse to include it in a block. Not much to trust really.

Re: Building for the Blockchain

#306

Post by briatx »

ThomPete wrote: post #189

The negativity in this thread reminds me of the internet in the early nineties. If someone had said that one day there will be a company that does billions by allowing people to fundamentally share their cat pictures and send each other happy birthday messages people would have laughed their asses off. The blockchain can be seen as a giant immutable feed. Make of that what you will.

That's strange. The blockchain hype reminds me instead of the late 90s dotcom bubble, and CryptoKitties reminds me instead of the Beanie Baby Mania of the same era.

I don't remember any of the early internet negativity that Bitcoin supporters do.

Re: Building for the Blockchain

#307

Post by LrnByTeach »

tehlike wrote: post #246
amalag wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes many tokens are being used as shares and trying to circumvent securities law.

Tokens are actually mostly not shares. You dont own the company that issues the tokens. Everybody likes to think that it is, though.

The term "shares" is used here in loose sense, all these are coins/tokens .

All these companies behind this coins/tokens have no "paid" employee or assets and no legal registration ( for the coin itself) so there is no meaning to "shares" . There is nothing for ownership rights in the sense of share .

Re: Building for the Blockchain

#308

Post by jhwang5 »

felipeccastro wrote: post #292
jhwang5 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a) Or... wait for it... they could ask for payment in crypto, fiat, whatever, rather than printing their own chuck-e-cheese tokens. Yes, we get it, ICO allows the DAPP to fund itself, and it's a great value prop for the founders, because they can raise capital on the strength of a 15 page paper, as opposed to having real users. b) "closed" means literally useless outside. Can you use your Cobinhood tokens at any othe…

a) what about the economic incentives for early users? That is a pretty huge deal too, even if ICO funding wasn't possible. b) it's not literally useless outside, you just have to exchange it for other coins to use it outside. Isn't that how cash in most countries work too? Besides, remember there's far less friction in exchanging app-specific tokens by another coin than there is in exchanging cash today. Even if app…

Regarding your b):

Yeah, you can trade your Cobinhood tokens for Binance coins, but this is an artifact of the fact that each built a closed ecosystem. If both platforms used the same currency (ETH, USD, whatever), then there'd be no need or the inconvenience to trade tokens around.

Also, note, not all dapp tokens have liquid secondary markets, so I'd argue that it's almost an exception that your dapp tokens can be monetized externally

Re: Building for the Blockchain

#309

Post by Goladus »

snitko wrote: post #63

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.…

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.

It has not yet succeeded in this purpose as it is not yet a viable alternative currency except in extreme cases where the government-backed currency has failed completely.

9 years is nothing when we're talking about currency. It's not even a fraction of a single lifespan. Bitcoin's rate of money supply has slowed dramatically in the last few years (as it was programmed to do), limiting its ability to expand to accommodate new markets. Instead of becoming more widely accepted, organizations such as Steam are dropping support for it, due to volatility and increased transaction fees: which is exactly what would be predicted when a currency supply is limited but the economy around it is growing (or trying to grow-- scarcity of currency cause an economy to stagnate until an alternative is found).

Re: Building for the Blockchain

#310

Post by CamTin »

vec wrote: post #304
CamTin wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tracking ownership of some intangible set of rights is actually basically the one thing that BTC/ETH-esque tech is really useful for, so the Kodak thing is far from the craziest coin announced. A sane thing to do would be to piggyback on one the existing blockhains and their pre-existing hashing power. In this scenario, Kodak would create some kind colored-coin or side chain representing ownership of certain photogra…

> This has the advantage of /continuing to exist if Kodak goes away/, which is what you want as a rights holder. If you mean the ecosystem can thrive without Kodak, then it sounds like you don't expect Kodak to add any significant value and I may as well use any immutable public record, of which there are already countless legally tested options. If you mean that if Kodak goes away then the rights contained in their…

I'm suggesting your first scenario is the sane one for consumers. Kodak's value-add would be the tools to help you get the hash onto the immutable public record (and giving you control of the private keys that let you reassign ownership of this digital asset), presumably by integrating it into its cameras and photo-processing services, or providing a friendly Kodak-branded web frontend. If they go belly-up, you still have the keys and therefore can still transfer/prove those rights using somebody else's tools. You still want things to be trustless and decentralized because the whole point of such a system is to avoid costly records-digging to prove your rights in court. Unless you can continue to re-assign rights after Kodak gets bored of running its non-distributed, non-trustless sytem, you're back in the dark ages trying to prove things with photocopies of written contracts and so on.

You're right that they wouldn't be adding much value, and therefore couldn't extract much profit. That's why they're not doing that, and are instead issuing tokens.

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