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Systems built on trust, norms, and institutions function better than blockchain

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Re: Systems built on trust, norms, and institutions function better than blockchain

#201

Post by eridius »

l8again wrote: post #151

I honestly thought the author was trolling us (until I read the comments). There are so many holes in his example of ebook transaction. Here's just the two points he made that were the most egregious to me: >> and that the book — rather than some other file, or nothing at all — will actually arrive Really? Ever heard of checksums - its used all over the place. And if we weren't able to trust it, I guarantee you that…

How are you supposed to checksum the book before you have it? You can't do that without trust, because you need to trust someone to give you the right checksum.

Re: Systems built on trust, norms, and institutions function better than blockchain

#202

Post by eridius »

AlexCoventry wrote: post #88

> I would assert that there is no single person in existence who had a problem they wanted to solve, discovered that an available blockchain solution was the best way to solve it, and therefore became a blockchain enthusiast. He hasn't been paying attention to the space long enough: Many traders in contraband meet that description, and used to talk about it at length in r/darknetmarkets, before it was banned. (BTW, d…

Contraband traders don't care about a blockchain. They just want untraceable un-reversable monetary transactions.

Of course, it turns out bitcoin isn't exactly untraceable.

Re: Systems built on trust, norms, and institutions function better than blockchain

#203

Post by a_tractor »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #24
45h34jh53k4j wrote: post #2

No coiners. Its fine, we will listen to them protest for years and years, telling us it cant work, it isn't a real solution, etc, while we invent the future. This internet thing will never take off, you need a box that screeches, connected to your phone all day long! I can't even get faxes while im 'online'. Pointless.

The internet was consistently useful year after year, and more so over time. Bitcoin has been around for almost a decade and has pivoted from being a decentralized currency to being a quasi-decentralized store of value amidst a classic speculative investment bubble. It has actually gotten increasingly less useful over time.

This argument would maybe start to make sense if Bitcoin was the only cryptocurrency, rather than only the first.

Even then, it completely falls apart when you realize that "the internet" also was never about a single piece of technology, but an ecosystem of countless separately developed parts.

>It has actually gotten increasingly less useful over time.

Is just plain false.

Re: Systems built on trust, norms, and institutions function better than blockchain

#204

Post by tudorconstantin »

spookthesunset wrote: post #161
vageli wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bitcoin is more than 10 years old. It is a mature tech that is still in search of a problem. I don't understand how this can be said with a straight face. Aeronautics, ballistics, these are examples of mature tech. I can't think of a single example of technology that was considered mature after a mere ten years.

Bitcoin is a data structure. It isn't like the invention of flush toilets, the standardized shipping container, or sliced bread. It's been on the market for 10 years and so far its only use seems to be a great way to run pump & dump penny stock scams....

It's a medium used for transferring a few billion $ daily.

It's not the exclusive way to transfer value between people, but neither was the mechanized agriculture the sole way of growing plants in the beginning.

Re: Systems built on trust, norms, and institutions function better than blockchain

#205

Post by specialist »

eridius wrote: post #199
specialist wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or when you have a supply chain composed of various participants.

And now you're trusting each participant to enter their portion of the ledger accurately. The original articles goes into this very problem. What's to stop your mango provider from spraying pesticides all over their mangoes and then entering "organic" into the ledger?

Yup. Turtles all the way down.

I'm not saying blockchains are a cure all. I'm saying I'm keenly interested in using shared ledgers for this use case.

My experiences with election integrity, for better or worse, inform my views (optimism). There was a lot of interest in auditing elections. And it was studied extensively.

For my part, I read up on Medicare fraud and forensic accounting, because they seemed to be the most mature related domains (at the time). My conclusion was that reducing fraud is best accomplished thru simplifying the accounting.

You still need relationships and face-to-face and "trust but verify".

My ultimate hope is that something like blockchains (not talking cryptocurrency, bitcoin, PoW) will somehow make the chasm between the physical and digital worlds smaller. Thereby reducing transaction costs, waste, fraud, uncertainty and so forth.

Re: Systems built on trust, norms, and institutions function better than blockchain

#206

Post by specialist »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #179
specialist wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FFS. It's turtles all the way down, right? None of my proposed use cases rely on PoW, bitcoin. Perhaps I should have said it more clearly: I'm not interested in currency et al, because best as I can tell, bitcoin is just a better escrow, or worse a collectable (like baseball cards). And those things don't interest me. -- Have you done accounting, bookkeeping, auditing? Another way to think about blockchains is an int…

What you're describing are hashchains and logs that predate Bitcoin. They're useful. They might even be part of the solution to the problems you were talking about. Here's some old ones just to illustrate that people have been on the topic for a while. https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~ahae/papers/peerreview-tr2.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2005/002.pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.625... And here…

Thank you.

Those papers are from about the same time frame, but I don't immediately recognize them. I do remember the implementation I modeled mine after was patent encumbered.

I may have adopted "tamper evident logging" because I was talking to a lot of non-geeks at the time and they were familiar with terms like "tamper evident seals".

That MeDShare paper is kinda weird. We were very fortunate to have domain experts (nurses, doctors, admins) on staff. So what we ended up with (after a few years) didn't look much like what MeDShare proposes. For example, access control is a non-starter, because in an emergency no one cares about permission. So the best we could do is log access. Also, demographic data at rest is plaintext, because in the USA there's no GUID, so you need access to all the fields to do record matching (linking) and mitigate poor data quality.

Repeating myself: my interest in tamper evident logging was for legal liability and improving our own QA/test.

I haven't thought much about all the other areas blockchains could be used in medicine, like prescriptions.

Re: Systems built on trust, norms, and institutions function better than blockchain

#207

Post by scabarott »

gizmo686 wrote: post #147
DINKDINK wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine a few different personas, such as investment banker, retail store owner, and soccer mom. Then complete the following sentence: I need a decentralized method of sending bits to other academic computers across the country so that I can ...

I can easily imagine a persona who could complete that sentence: scientists who wanted to share data across the country. The internet was built because it satisfied an actual need at the time, and grew organically. It is even in the name. The "Internet" was not some monolithic project. It was a way of connecting the many different networks that had already been built.

The internet as we use it today is far beyond what anyone originally envisioned. No one thought we would be using it for e-commerce or social networks or in fact anything other than for a few geeky scientists to occasionally collaborate

Re: Systems built on trust, norms, and institutions function better than blockchain

#208

Post by scabarott »

jeremyjh wrote: post #50
bllguo wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there's literally a link in the comment. Show some effort please..

Imagine a few different personas, such as investment banker, retail store owner, and soccer mom. Then complete the following sentence: I need a decentralized time ordered log so that I can ...

I can think of at least 2 promising areas: 1.Micropayments- currently it's very hard to charge for anything on the internet so we get ads, which everyone hates or paywalls which people hate even more. Internet money doesn't need to be decentralized but then who will issue or build it -google, facebook? So far this is the most promising. 2. Data privacy - everyone's complaining about Facebook now. So far public decentralized blockchains have offered the most promising way to build truly decentralized apps (while still providing an incentive/payment to developers). I'm pretty sure even more uses we can't think of now will open up as the technology matures

Re: Systems built on trust, norms, and institutions function better than blockchain

#209

Post by jiveturkey »

stopped reading after the intro. this is a guy who is a self-proclaimed luddite and who likes to hear the sound of his own prophetic voice. i love how he emphasized his own words in a “callout”, immediately after the inline text. magazine style. sensible in magazine format. but in a blog? puh-leez.

his opinion is not worth debating, even if there is a kernel of truth there.

Re: Systems built on trust, norms, and institutions function better than blockchain

#210

Post by webmaven »

dnautics wrote: post #146
gtrubetskoy wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> HashCash, ECC, Merkle trees etc... Just combined together in a clever way to create something that's more than the sum of their parts. No, not really. The way proof-of-work is used is nothing like in HashCash (more generally known as a time lock puzzle ), the solution to a decentralized clock is the one piece that is new. In the paper it is referred to as "Timestamp Server". Everything else is previously known tech…

I think also important is that there are exploits that break the existing system (e.g. 50% attack) but it's not in the financial interest of any given actor to exploit it. Part of the algorithm is economic.

Not all interests are financial, so unfortunately, there IS a class of actor with an incentive to exploit it.

(ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻

That class of actor can even potentially avoid the financial sunk costs that would ordinarily be required, although that in turn would require the use of several zero-day exploits and/or the use of similarly high-value resources usually available only to state-level actors.

Still, under certain circumstances I could see something along these lines being the opening move in World War IV (not to be overly dramatic or anything). Or perhaps a much smaller conflict, should any state be foolish enough to standardize on a national cryptocurrency of their own creation for internal use.

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