Live data from Hacker News

Why “blockchain” is BS in 4 slides

twitter.com

51–60 of 225 posts

Re: Why “blockchain” is BS in 4 slides

#51
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

2B+ people do not have access to banking or trade. They are poor because we do not trade with them.

I couldn't pay someone in South Africa rural area for something worth $2 without bitcoin.

Many other people are censored.

Billions more have their wealth devalued via inflation.

Bitcoin is a way for people to be free without any state taking their money (see Greece)

Re: Why “blockchain” is BS in 4 slides

#52
The slides make a number of decent points, but the general tone ends up being self-defeating, which is a shame because many of these points are actually worth debating in depth.

Specifically, on governance of blockchains (as in: trustless distributed consensus systems, and not as in: merkle chains), I do tend to agree with the tweets that devs have a huge amount of pull, and that this is both grossly under-estimated and under-discussed.

Re: Why “blockchain” is BS in 4 slides

#53
Disagree with slide three on "private blockchains". Weaver underestimates the difficulty of reaching consensus among a fixed set of participants by assuming there is just one party that signs blocks. If there is more than one party you end up in the land of BFT. Distributed systems are hard to build. Additionally a solution which is trivial to implement makes that solution good. I wish we had more trivial solutions to these problems.

Re: Why “blockchain” is BS in 4 slides

#54
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This powerfully aligns their incentives with the well-being of the ecosystem Like ensuring Bitcoin can't scale beyond the Great Firewall's limits?

What do you mean by that? By 'scale' are you referring to transaction scaling? If not I don't understand your point.

Bitcoin miners' interests don't always align with the Bitcoin community's. Miners want to keep control. If growing the system means they lose control, it can be in their interest to limit growth (which benefits everyone but hurts them). This appears to have happened with mainland Chinese miners resisting transaction scaling on the Bitcoin blockchain due to their Internet constraints (being behind China's firewall).

Re: Why “blockchain” is BS in 4 slides

#55

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.

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

There is no consensus definition of what a blockchain is. In fact the Satoshi whitepaper that introduced Bitcoin does not even use the word blockchain it talks about a hash chain of blocks a concept which predates Bitcoin by ~30 years. The real innovation of Bitcoin was to use PoW to both limit Sybil attacks and to make additions to the hash chain computationally expensive to revert. Often however when people talk about blockchains they are talking about systems which don't use PoW at all. Like end-to-end encryption or peer-to-peer networks blockchain describes a cloud of concepts and technologies. A better terminology would be DLT (Distributed Ledger Technology).

Re: Why “blockchain” is BS in 4 slides

#57
post #9

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.

> There are many uses for blockchain other than as a cryptocurrency. Well, yes, but most of them (my pet peeve being voting) are as bullshit as cryptocurrency. Do you have an example that is not a bullshit?

online poker will probably move towards blockchain and you can do things to prevent spam when people pay fees, theres virtually no adoption of blockhain tech, things move slower in an open source project so its understandable

Re: Why “blockchain” is BS in 4 slides

#58
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by that? By 'scale' are you referring to transaction scaling? If not I don't understand your point.

Bitcoin miners' interests don't always align with the Bitcoin community's. Miners want to keep control. If growing the system means they lose control, it can be in their interest to limit growth (which benefits everyone but hurts them). This appears to have happened with mainland Chinese miners resisting transaction scaling on the Bitcoin blockchain due to their Internet constraints (being behind China's firewall).

Ah, yes, that is an excellent example of that sort of misalignment. However, I think its also an excellent example of what's great about cryptocurrencies. Because in that situation, Bitcoin as an ecosystem has an out: A hardfork. If the miners and the users disagree, a new group of miners can form around a separate code-base that addresses this problem in a different way. Everyone in the ecosystem is incentivized for this not to happen, because it dilutes value. However, if the issue becomes salient enough to overcome that dilution, a fork will occur, and that has happened a few times now.

To me, this is a pretty awesome way of discovering the best way to do things. If two parties can't come to agreement, they simply go their separate ways, and organically the system comes to decide which chain is more valuable. I find this to be one of the most beautiful, elegant parts of the crypto ecosystem.

Consider the contrast to a government currency. If you disagree with how the Chinese Communist Party manages the Renminbi, or how the Federal Reserve manages the US dollar, you don't meaningfully have the option to create your own alternative, and let it be judged by the world. This is the truest sense in which crypto is decentralized.

Now, this model is not without its flaws. National currencies have done very well for a long time being managed in this way. The ability to homogenize everyone on a single national currency has real benefits. It's easy to build up lots of infrastructure around it because it's dependable, for instance. Thinking through issues like this are really what's at the root of a well thought out criticism of crypto-currencies, though, IMO.

Re: Why “blockchain” is BS in 4 slides

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By this logic so is every financial software system, though.

Most are built on reversible foundations. Mind you, Ethereum apparently was too. :P

The important question is if you think it's possible to create impervious functions of ~100 lines of code. I tend to think that with modern formal verification systems this is a feasible goal. Otherwise you have to stick with closed-source security-through-obscurity and rely on legal reversal. This seems pretty weak to me, though - ex, if a stock exchange was hacked, sure you could reverse it legally, but the market disruption would take years to recover. Regardless of the specific nature of crypto, I think formally verifiable open systems are both achievable and a worthwhile goal.

Re: Why “blockchain” is BS in 4 slides

#60
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

2B+ people do not have access to banking or trade. They are poor because we do not trade with them. I couldn't pay someone in South Africa rural area for something worth $2 without bitcoin. Many other people are censored. Billions more have their wealth devalued via inflation. Bitcoin is a way for people to be free without any state taking their money (see Greece)

So these people are essentially poor and don't have access to trade and Banking, but they are going to have access to the blockchain, hardware wallets, and the various other technologies they need, and this will all happen before banks or mobile app payment systems are able to capture the market?

Call me a skeptic.

Post reply on HN