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Why “blockchain” is BS in 4 slides

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Re: Why “blockchain” is BS in 4 slides

#32

Post by cornholio »

There is some truth in the slides but it's well mixed with falsehoods and misunderstandings.

* Distributed consensus schemes are not useful only for monetary applications. When they are used as such, there exist mechanisms to commit to a certain fiat price and minimize market exposure to the point where transactions are almost free, in fiat terms.

* The disbursement of tokens and the distributed consensus rewards do not need to be tied together like in Bitcoin. A premined token like Stellar can offer very strong security guarantees without needing mining pools (but of course, any kind of imaginable database is vulnerable to majority attacks, so that means nothing by itself)

* The limited block capacity is a Bitcoin-specific problem that incidentally motivated interesting results in off-chain transactions (Lightning).

* The sorry state of the distributed financial markets says nothing about the technology and more about human greed and the slow capacity of regulators to adapt; critically, smart contracts and distributed algorithms enable control mechanism and hard guarantees that have no old world equivalent, they can eliminate counterparty risks, guarantee solvency and fair arbitration etc.

That being said, 95% of the times the word "blockcahin" is uttered these days, what follows is most likely bullshit.

Re: Why “blockchain” is BS in 4 slides

#35

Post by cglace »

fruitzome wrote: post #19
icebraining wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original Bitcoin paper is essentially a description of the blockchain.

A blockchain is just 1 of the innovations that went into the bitcoin protocol. Finally people are seeing that a blockchain without POW or censorship resistance is bullshit. This is why bitcoin (cash) is more important than ever.

Is bitcoin really important? I think most people have no practical use for it.

Re: Why “blockchain” is BS in 4 slides

#36

Post by untog »

icebraining wrote: post #7
moocowtruck wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is there a spec for block chain? i'm confused by what people mean by block chain and the only thing i can find is this loosely written white paper

The original Bitcoin paper is essentially a description of the blockchain.

> There are many uses for blockchain outside of cryptocurrency

> What is a good spec for blockchain?

> Bitcoin

Re: Why “blockchain” is BS in 4 slides

#38

Post by HappyKasper »

thriftwy wrote: post #31

So, what is that you propose instead? If nothing then disregard you.

That’s a bit of a fallacy - you can legitimately point out the shortcomings of something without needing to name an alternative (e.g. criticizing Ponzi schemes). In this case, though, you could actually have an alternative of simply not using blockchain. The world was just fine for a long time without it.

Re: Why “blockchain” is BS in 4 slides

#39

Post by bradfitz »

icebraining wrote: post #11
mjamesaustin wrote: post #2

Isn't he discussing cryptocurrencies in particular rather than blockchain in general? There are many uses for blockchain other than as a cryptocurrency. Correct me if I'm wrong - I'm not an expert in blockchain by any means.

That's what people keep saying, but I'm yet to see one that is actually a blockchain (specifically, "private blockchains" are a nonsense concept, they're just merkel trees, like git uses), or isn't better solved by some other mechanism.

Go just got native support for private blockchains today: https://twitter.com/bradfitz/status/980332627159744512 (https://go-review.googlesource.com/c/go/+/103862)
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