331–340 of 487 posts
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Are there other means of distributed trustless consensus as secure as PoW? Secure being the operative word here. Lots of attempts, but none yet convincingly as or more secure.
Nakamoto consensus isn't the only protocol that exists; there's also things like Raft and Paxos with different tradeoffs.
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> In technological terms, it is old. TCP was created in the mid 70's. The internet as we know it didn't offer the average user much value until the mid 90's and even then it was a very small amount of the population capable of using it / benefiting from it. Electric cars were around in the late 1800's. In the early 1900's they were on a par with gasoline / steam powered car sales. It has taken us well over 100 years…
> The internet as we know it didn't offer the average user much value until the mid 90's The Internet was useful to academic, financial, government and military users in the 1970s [1]. It was built and iterated to solve real problems. Real users' inputs, many of whom were experts in their fields, were incorporated into its design. [1] http://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1970s/
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The idea of a neutral "third party"(!) operating a globally available transaction ledger, with standardised APIs and agreed meanings to contracts and data structures is appealing to everyone in every sector. the sizzle of blockchain is enticing, it solves huge problems that are darn well intractable without "disruption". for example in finance the global clearing system is an embarrassing hodge podge that only benefi…
I don't see how blockchain fixes any of the clearing/settlements issues in a way which is better than a trusted third party (or which doesn't involve trusted third parties). Let's take settlements. Some instruments are (still, in this day and age) ultimately issued in bearer form (ie, if you have the piece of paper, you own the bond/shares/title to the land/whatever, just like cash). This has a number of problems (yo…
i was trying to say that the sizzle was more than the reality - a trusted (neutral) third party will solve all the claimed issues - it's just that the reason this has not happened in many sectors is because the issues the third party / blockchain can solve are not the issues preventing adoption - it's like car manufacturers would like to dump their dealers and sell direct - but no one is prepared to risk a huge downside. Tesla might be "disruptive" but no one seriously thinks Tesla will replace all other car sales - and so dealer networks will remain (for a while).
i think the analogy holds :-)
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The question that no one bothers to ask is, "What problem is this technology solving that can't be solved cheaper and just as effectively with 'traditional' technology?" When you look at it this way I think the realistic use cases go way down.
People have been asking and answering these questions for almost ten years. Brief list off the top of my head: - Seamless global payments - Store of value - File storage - Decentralized exchanges - DNS lookup - Prediction markets - International contracts - Untraceable payments - e-Voting - Copyright or proof of ownership - Distributed computing It simply gets tiring for people to argue ad infinitum about this with e…
Your language is inadvertently quite revealing: “non-believer” isn’t how you talk about technical issues with well understood tradeoffs. It’s how you talk about something which you’d like to be true but isn’t.
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> 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? 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.
> Here in modern times information moves orders of magnitude faster than when double entry accounting was invented. The speed of information is about as relevant as the cost of tea in China. What matters is how fast people actually change their minds, which isn't any faster. All of the older generation basically just has to die before the new best practices can get widely adopted. If anything change likely happens mo…
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The question that no one bothers to ask is, "What problem is this technology solving that can't be solved cheaper and just as effectively with 'traditional' technology?" When you look at it this way I think the realistic use cases go way down.
People have been asking and answering these questions for almost ten years. Brief list off the top of my head: - Seamless global payments - Store of value - File storage - Decentralized exchanges - DNS lookup - Prediction markets - International contracts - Untraceable payments - e-Voting - Copyright or proof of ownership - Distributed computing It simply gets tiring for people to argue ad infinitum about this with e…
And the true believers are the ones who will be lambo rich as long as they keep buying and holding, right? Just keep hyping up all these empty promises... some rube out there will buy into it.
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People have been asking and answering these questions for almost ten years. Brief list off the top of my head: - Seamless global payments - Store of value - File storage - Decentralized exchanges - DNS lookup - Prediction markets - International contracts - Untraceable payments - e-Voting - Copyright or proof of ownership - Distributed computing It simply gets tiring for people to argue ad infinitum about this with e…
Those are commonly copy-pasted claims but the reason why it keeps coming up is that the question of what makes it better is either unanswered or, in cases like voting or storage, known to be worse. Your language is inadvertently quite revealing: “non-believer” isn’t how you talk about technical issues with well understood tradeoffs. It’s how you talk about something which you’d like to be true but isn’t.
https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/1043.pdf
Also, https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/375.pdf Section 4.4.2
>storage
https://filecoin.io/filecoin.pdf
^ Detailed analyses that explain why blockchain is an appropriate solution
But please do elaborate how they are "known to be worse." By whom and can you cite the analysis that proved so? Certainly not known by Google if they invested in a blockchain-based storage solution?
>well understood tradeoffs
That's definitely not the case if you take the time to read any blockchain-related thread on HN. But, please, feel free to tell me what are better solutions for the cases I mentioned.
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People have been asking and answering these questions for almost ten years. Brief list off the top of my head: - Seamless global payments - Store of value - File storage - Decentralized exchanges - DNS lookup - Prediction markets - International contracts - Untraceable payments - e-Voting - Copyright or proof of ownership - Distributed computing It simply gets tiring for people to argue ad infinitum about this with e…
Distributed ledgers are overengineering for most of these use cases.
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…
Linus started working on Linux in 1991.
Red Hat went public in 1999.
In technological terms, it is actually quite young.
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Chargebacks are a feature for settling disputes, not a bug. Payment is still instant unless there is a dispute.
>Payment is still instant unless there is a dispute If that was the case a merchant could withdraw cash immediately after someone paid them with a credit card. Which patently isn't the case. So no, Payment cards are not instant.