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Why “blockchain” is BS in 4 slides

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Re: Why “blockchain” is BS in 4 slides

#71

Post by CyberDildonics »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #20
CyberDildonics wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you read through it? I don't think any amount of explanation is going to take arguments that have been thoroughly debunked for year and suddenly make them a reality. If you want to be specific about anything he or I said, feel free.

> arguments that have been thoroughly debunked Could you give one example of an argument made in the deck which has been "thoroughly debunked"?

The fee death spiral is a wild prediction seeing that throughput can easily be expanded when not blocked politically since there aren't any technical limitations (bitcoin cash) AND that even when throughput is constrained to a suffocating degree (btc), the chain still worked and never broke down or went through a 'death spiral' it just had outrageous fees.

Most of the things he says are actually false arguments that no one is trying to make or just completely irrelevant.

Re: Why “blockchain” is BS in 4 slides

#72

Post by CyberDildonics »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #26
CyberDildonics wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how that changes the fact that everything he says is either completely untrue or irrelevant. If you want to point out an inaccuracy in what I've said, feel free.

Excuse me, this is just an assertion. By your own standards you should really back up all of these claims with extensive evidence.

What do you want explained more thoroughly than I did in my parent comment?

Re: Why “blockchain” is BS in 4 slides

#73

Post by logicallee »

wellboy wrote: post #63
logicallee wrote: post #46

That's not why blockchain is bs. Let me tell you a little story you might want to remember, so you can tell your grandchildren. This is how you might tell them: "You think algorithms are hard, little children? You don't want to stay up to date? Well gather round, gather round, let gramps give you a sense of human folly and just how far we have come. Maybe that will let you appreciate how lucky you have it. "Way back…

Blockchains are moving away from PoW to PoS, which requires a millionth of the energy use, so that's not really an argument.

Kindly elaborate. Which ones? To what extent? What is the state of the art here?

This was my only issue with bitcoin when I evaluated it several years ago.

Re: Why “blockchain” is BS in 4 slides

#74

Post by kthejoker2 »

dozzie wrote: post #68
cornholio wrote: post #32

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…

> * Distributed consensus schemes are not useful only for monetary applications. OK, but blockchain is not a distributed consensus protocol. It's a document timestamping protocol.

Can you explain? My understanding is we're all working on the same hard math problem, once a certain number of us have verified the answer (ie distributed consensus) one of us is given a reward to encourage further problem solving.

Re: Why “blockchain” is BS in 4 slides

#75

Post by kthejoker2 »

dozzie wrote: post #67
ojr wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I don't know a thing about poker, so I'll take it at a face value, but the spam prevention idea is bullshit. It's not new, it wasn't new even twenty years ago, from what I remember. It wouldn't fly back then, and nothing substantial changed since then.

Can you point me to some papers, books, etc to support this claim? Trying to understand the "block chain is BS" side of the argument, I'm fairly neutral but I rarely see any technical arguments against the concept.

Re: Why “blockchain” is BS in 4 slides

#76

Post by pdpi »

School-Cotton wrote: post #30
pdpi wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the strict sense? Git histories are blockchains, so there’s definitely a use. In the loose sense? People seem to conflate “blockchain” with “decentralised concensus”. At least nakamoto consensus doesn’t work outside of currency-like applications. PoS-based systems are probably bound by the same limitations there, too.

I have never seen someone use “blockchain” to describe a structure which can be rewritten or tampered with. Git commit dags aren’t a blockchain by anyone’s definition, as far as I’m aware.

Again — people tend to talk about Blockchain as a combination of the data structure and some sort of consensus algorithm but the term only properly refers to the data structure.

The only difference between it and a git history is that git histories are dags instead of trees — The hash-of-parent-node structure is the exact same, except commits can have multiple parents. The tamper resistance of the data structure itself comes from the hashes: it serves as both a pointer and a checksum for the previous nodes.

Re: Why “blockchain” is BS in 4 slides

#77

Post by dozzie »

kthejoker2 wrote: post #74
dozzie wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * Distributed consensus schemes are not useful only for monetary applications. OK, but blockchain is not a distributed consensus protocol. It's a document timestamping protocol.

Can you explain? My understanding is we're all working on the same hard math problem, once a certain number of us have verified the answer (ie distributed consensus) one of us is given a reward to encourage further problem solving.

This is very much not what distributed consensus is. You don't "work on the same hard math problem" and you don't get "a reward to encourage further problem solving". Consensus is agreeing on a value among (almost) all protocol participants, and "distributed consensus" is proper technical term, not a vague definition by hand waving like "object oriented programming". Read about Byzantine Generals problem first.

Re: Why “blockchain” is BS in 4 slides

#79

Post by dimgl »

I'm not a fan of cryptocurrency and even these slides were horrendous. Seriously, way to make your point so poorly that not even people who agree with you want to read it.

Also, this guy didn't even discuss blockchain tech. Just cryptocurrency.

Re: Why “blockchain” is BS in 4 slides

#80

Post by ilovecars2 »

dozzie wrote: post #77
kthejoker2 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain? My understanding is we're all working on the same hard math problem, once a certain number of us have verified the answer (ie distributed consensus) one of us is given a reward to encourage further problem solving.

This is very much not what distributed consensus is. You don't "work on the same hard math problem" and you don't get "a reward to encourage further problem solving". Consensus is agreeing on a value among (almost) all protocol participants, and "distributed consensus" is proper technical term, not a vague definition by hand waving like "object oriented programming". Read about Byzantine Generals problem first.

Could one look at it more like viewstamped replication rather than traditional consensus?
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