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Building for the Blockchain

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: Building for the Blockchain

#311

Post by Goladus »

vec wrote: post #83
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.…

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…

Bitcoin as anarcho-capitalist proof of concept

It's not conceptually proven, though. As a mechanism of exchange it does work, but that is a very low bar. Many things can be used as a mechanism of exchange (such as Poker chips). But Bitcoin has not yet succeeded as a currency. There's a long way to go before you can safely say the mechanisms powering Bitcoin's blockchain are sustainable and can be stabilized.

Re: Building for the Blockchain

#312

Post by Semaphor »

platz wrote: post #299
Semaphor wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More and more newer projects don't need those miners. It's still in question if they really offer the same security, but between masternode chains (security by having the "mining" done by people having to hold a large share of the coins so tanking its value would hit them hardest), dPoS (delegated Proof of Stake, every coin is a vote and you vote for a pool of "miners"), DAG where everyone has to do PoW for other txs…

If you can boil that down into an understandable statement appropriate for airing to on the radio or a finance television show, i'd be interested. Otherwise, it seems like you just tried to do a "grapeshot" with tech jargon & lacking a main point.

There are alternatives to requiring a massive amount of miners. Some alternative cryptocurrencies implement those alternatives.

Happy? ;)

Re: Building for the Blockchain

#313

Post by platz »

Semaphor wrote: post #312
platz wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can boil that down into an understandable statement appropriate for airing to on the radio or a finance television show, i'd be interested. Otherwise, it seems like you just tried to do a "grapeshot" with tech jargon & lacking a main point.

There are alternatives to requiring a massive amount of miners. Some alternative cryptocurrencies implement those alternatives. Happy? ;)

I imagine that exactly wouldn't be very convincing to those audiences now, would it?

Re: Building for the Blockchain

#314

Post by Semaphor »

platz wrote: post #313
Semaphor wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are alternatives to requiring a massive amount of miners. Some alternative cryptocurrencies implement those alternatives. Happy? ;)

I imagine that exactly wouldn't be very convincing to those audiences now, would it?

I can either give you entry points for what to search for or I can give you the gist of it. If you want neither maybe you should ignore my comment instead.

Re: Building for the Blockchain

#315

Post by platz »

Semaphor wrote: post #314
platz wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine that exactly wouldn't be very convincing to those audiences now, would it?

I can either give you entry points for what to search for or I can give you the gist of it. If you want neither maybe you should ignore my comment instead.

My point is that your point in it's current from is essentially un-communicable, to non-advanced technical users.

Re: Building for the Blockchain

#316

Post by ThomPete »

briatx wrote: post #306
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.

I do.

Re: Building for the Blockchain

#317

Post by Terr_ »

Spooky23 wrote: post #242
Terr_ wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A blockchain ensures that some sequence of agreements was made in a way that everyone can trust. [...] The rest is fairy dust and noise. Amen. "Blockchain" is today's fad just like the "nanotech" mania of yesteryear. That doesn't mean there aren't advances and opportunities, but it feels like 90% of the people promoting it can't even give a high-level explanation of why it's a good fit for their use-case. > For exa…

A friend of mine told a great story about how some Koop aid drinkers were pitching blockchain internally for internal chargeback for services. So you’d use your corpcoin to rent cubes and get pens from the facilities folks, and trade coin to get servers, etc. the idea had traction until the accountants revolted.

Oof. It's hard to know where to even start poking holes in that. Like whether everybody's OK storing the data all across the world, versus running a tiny internal network that can be taken over by a disgruntled employee.

Re: Building for the Blockchain

#318

Post by 0wing »

CryptoPunk wrote: post #255
0wing wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Distributed how? Produced how? by work? Bitcoin distributed the vast majority of its wealth to aprox less than ~1000 individuals. Best estimates are that there are about one million holders of Bitcoin; 47 individuals hold about 30 percent, another 900 hold a further 20 percent, the next 10,000 about 25% and another million about 20%, with 5% being lost. So 1/10th of one percent represent about half the holdings of Bi…

The initial windfall can only be spent once. The important difference between distributed finance and traditional finance is that the former has no gatekeepers that provide their controllers with recurring economic rent. Both mining and staking are competitive industries that require productive activity by their participants. A central bank can extract 2-10% of the money supply's worth of economic rent every year in…

Every system deserves critique and improvements.

Mining and staking algorithms have so far been measurably distributed disproportionately to a tiny minority of users. PoS is ironically manipulative in its own way, where an exchange or early adopter who controls a large sum will simply exponentially accumulate the newly minted coins.

For a algorithmic solution in software to persist beyond a fad like beanie babies or baseball cards, it necessitates a model which puts all users on equal footing for access, work, and production.

Re: Building for the Blockchain

#319

Post by CryptoPunk »

EGreg wrote: post #305
CryptoPunk wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You don't have to trust anyone. You have to only trust that over 50% of mining power is motivated by cryptoeconomic incentives, which is a much more reliable assumption than assuming someone is altruistic or a good actor.

The fact that miners do not need to be known and trusted third parties means that there is great difficulty for any network adversary to identify enough miners to make an attack effective, and that even they were able to identify pools controlling >50% mining power, they would have great difficulty sustaining this attack as the network reacts by switching to new pools.

These facts in turn make it unlikely that a network adversary would

1. target miners in an attack as a means of controlling/obstructing the network

2. succeed in causing long lasting harm to the network in the event that they attempted such an attack.

Ripple's set of known and trusted validators can very easily be stopped and controlled by any reasonably powerful set of state level adversaries, and are themselves in a position to extract rent from the network due to the potential for such a group of known parties to collude, and the coordination problem that users of the network would have in hard forking away from such a colluding set of validators.

Re: Building for the Blockchain

#320

Post by CryptoPunk »

Goladus wrote: post #295
CryptoPunk wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The initial windfall can only be spent once. The important difference between distributed finance and traditional finance is that the former has no gatekeepers that provide their controllers with recurring economic rent. Both mining and staking are competitive industries that require productive activity by their participants. A central bank can extract 2-10% of the money supply's worth of economic rent every year in…

> Both mining and staking are competitive industries that require productive activity by their participants. Validators also charge rent for their services, which especially in the case of miners, is a staggeringly inefficient use of electricity.

Of course they charge for their service, but 'economic rent' is a term used in economics to denote value generated by other economic participants and extracted by a non-producing party. Miners are producing most of the value they are capturing. The portion of their earnings that is 'economic rent' is not nearly as large as that of the beneficiaries of the traditional monetary and financial system.
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