241–250 of 487 posts
Right tool for the right job.
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It has always been the longest valid chain though. If miners were to introduce double-spending transactions in a block, full nodes would--by default--reject the blocks, regardless of how much work the chain contains. This also highlights why miners don't control the network and never had.
I'm no expert so bear with me. My understanding is that the danger of miner control is not "double-spending" but making multiple spends and being able to pick the most favorable one after the fact. As a non-controller if you try to double-spend, you can't know which one of your attempted transactions will be recorded in the ledger and which will be rejected. As a 51% controlling miner, you can choose the 'correct' tr…
If it wasn't clear, my comment was referring to a double-spend that would result in an invalid block i.e. both transactions are on the same chain. I simply used an example to argue that it's always been the case that invalid chains are rejected by honest nodes.
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No but it certifies who has entered the info, right? That might be part of the solution here
And how do you know that's the actual person, or that such a person/entity exists?
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I don't know. What about Git ? Errors happen, then you correct them, but you can see the error and its correction, and it's considered quite healthy, right?
I can go back and rewrite history pretty easily in Git.
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The delays have little to do with technology, and a lot to do with regulations and bureaucracy. Largely put in place to combat money laundering, fraud, terrorist financing, etc etc. Yes, there's some small banks that have horrible APIs and shoddy servers, but for most transfers the delays come down to things that if cryptocurrency were ever mainstreamed would be tacked onto it. That is why it takes time to get approv…
There is literally no place to tack on a middleman with nano/btc. Yes it will take some rethinking of how we combat what society conceives as improper use of funds.
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I'm not sure if you've spoken to any Bitcoin developers recently, but they'll tell you you're wrong and that it is the valid chain with the most work, not the chain with the most work. They'll then tell you what valid means. Some developers would agree with you though, like Gavin Andresen [0]. Either way, you end up with either centralized miners deciding the fate of the chain, or centralized developers deciding the…
That's the beauty of it. It does not matter what Blockstream says. The longest chain is Bitcoin.
Useless pedantry that doesn't even map into real world use. The real world has shown your definition is incorrect.
Ethereum forked. Which ethereum fork is the "correct" one? Bitcoin forked. Which one is the correct one? Depends on who you ask...
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By cryptocurrency standards, 2008 was any given Tuesday.
Trusting banks, not comparing crashes.
Bitcoin has had problems with both the investment, and the deposit arms. Most ICOs are pure fraud, and i've lost count of the number of robbed exchanges.
It is interesting that even in an article like this that they still say things like "for all its potential, blockchain is still in its early days." It is sticking with the unfounded assumption that it will be a success in the future, if only it is given more time. In technological terms, it is old. Innumerable efforts have been attempted, yielding almost no fruit. At what point are the fundamental assumptions going t…
> In technological terms, it is old. No it's not. It took double entry accounting hundreds of years to spread around the world, why would you expect triple entry accounting to take over any faster? We already know it's going to succeed because it's objectively better by a very significant margin, but that doesn't mean it's not going to take decades to do so.
Here in modern times information moves orders of magnitude faster than when double entry accounting was invented.
By modern standards, blockchain is ancient and has yet to move beyond its current use as the world's greatest platform for financial fraud ever invented.
It is interesting that even in an article like this that they still say things like "for all its potential, blockchain is still in its early days." It is sticking with the unfounded assumption that it will be a success in the future, if only it is given more time. In technological terms, it is old. Innumerable efforts have been attempted, yielding almost no fruit. At what point are the fundamental assumptions going t…
Really? This doesn't seem true at all. I feel like it takes decades for many good ideas in tech to get traction, usually going through many, many failed iterations.
> The project, which had successfully tested with startup Digital Asset Holdings (DA), was shelved because banks and other potential users believed the same results could be achieved more cheaply using current technology, he said. This is more or less the curse of the almighty blockchain; it's very hard to think of a plausible, actually useful, application which can't be accomplished far more cheaply and simply using…
It's really not hard to think of useful applications for blockchain. The problem HN has with blockchain is that a lot of HN users are the problem which decentralization solves. The basic startup monetization strategies these days revolve around centralizing user data and then collecting rent (usually in the form of ads) or centralizing transactions and then collecting a percentage. Decentralization is the antithesis…