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The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

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Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#171

Post by sixstringtheory »

skewart wrote: post #150

Here's the big reason I've gotten skeptical about blockchain: it seems like very few people are excited about actually using it. Almost everyone talking about it is excited about getting rich from trading currencies or starting a blockchain-based company. And plenty of people are excited about a grand vision for how it might transform society one day, or how it might solve problems they think other people might have.…

To extend your analogy to the internet, just consider that ARPANET was being developed decades before the dotcom boom. And it didn’t look anything like the AOLs/Compuserves through which I first experienced the internet. I agree that if blockchain takes off like that, it’ll probably be in a form we can’t yet imagine.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#172

Post by rspeer »

tptacek wrote: post #167
rspeer wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your argument against simple verified ledgers was "but the government of Venezuela!". The simple solution is to not put the government of Venezuela in charge of your ledger. Make it require multi-party consensus if you want, to reduce single points of failure. DNSSEC (for all its faults) runs on trusted multi-party consensus [EDIT: apparently not the way I think] and isn't a blockchain. But of course anyone or any se…

What do you mean by "trusted multi-party consensus"? The TLD zones that actually matter are operated by individual organizations.

You know a lot more about this than me, so I'll defer to you.

All I meant is that:

* there is cryptographic consensus involved

* there is no single point of failure

Therefore it's a counterexample who people who claim that everything but PoW has a single point of failure. Am I wrong?

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#173

Post by rspeer »

coralreef wrote: post #169
rspeer wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your argument against simple verified ledgers was "but the government of Venezuela!". The simple solution is to not put the government of Venezuela in charge of your ledger. Make it require multi-party consensus if you want, to reduce single points of failure. DNSSEC (for all its faults) runs on trusted multi-party consensus [EDIT: apparently not the way I think] and isn't a blockchain. But of course anyone or any se…

PoW solves this by economically incentivizing block production, and thereby creating a cost to anyone that would try to cheat the system. You don't need to trust any party, you trust the math. You said not to put the government of Venezuela in charge of the ledger. But when the government of Venezuela sends armed forces to the offices of your trusted party to confiscate its servers and equipment, what happens to your…

Yes, I know that's the argument for PoW, but PoW completely sucks in every way compared to trusting somebody.

If the government of Venezuela takes all your computers and puts you in jail, what happens to your Bitcoin?

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#174

Post by tptacek »

rspeer wrote: post #172
tptacek wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by "trusted multi-party consensus"? The TLD zones that actually matter are operated by individual organizations.

You know a lot more about this than me, so I'll defer to you. All I meant is that: * there is cryptographic consensus involved * there is no single point of failure Therefore it's a counterexample who people who claim that everything but PoW has a single point of failure. Am I wrong?

I don't mean to jump on you, but, yes: there are multiple single points of failure in DNSSEC, which is a simple tree-structured PKI, like we had in the 1990s. There's a "consensus" of a sorts between parent and child, but the parent can override it. Whoever controls .COM can, by fiat, sign Google.com records.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#175

Post by rspeer »

tptacek wrote: post #174
rspeer wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know a lot more about this than me, so I'll defer to you. All I meant is that: * there is cryptographic consensus involved * there is no single point of failure Therefore it's a counterexample who people who claim that everything but PoW has a single point of failure. Am I wrong?

I don't mean to jump on you, but, yes: there are multiple single points of failure in DNSSEC, which is a simple tree-structured PKI, like we had in the 1990s. There's a "consensus" of a sorts between parent and child, but the parent can override it. Whoever controls .COM can, by fiat, sign Google.com records.

Got it.

Would you say that cryptography can create a system where you can trust a set of people, without having to trust one single entity, and without destroying the planet with PoW? And can you give me a better example to use next time?

(For what it's worth, I picked DNSSEC because it had a memorable example of a "key-signing ceremony", perhaps the only instance of such a thing I've heard of that wasn't someone launching a blockchain. I realize that DNSSEC sucks anyway.)

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#176

Post by SubiculumCode »

malloryerik wrote: post #121
m-i-l wrote: post #7

I used to think that the blockchain bubble was like the dotcom bubble, in that the core technology was actually genuinely transformative, so that even after the bubble burst and all the over-valued companies went bust, the technology would remain and continue change our lives. However, I must admit I'm starting to have my doubts now. It was 10 years in to the dotcom era that the dotcom bubble burst, and by that time…

Maybe we should consider that the blockchain's killer app is the truth. This is the case with bitcoin, since the purpose of the blockchain is to be, for example, trustless, protecting you from someone whom you don't trust lying about your bitcoin transactions. Bitcoin will show you the truth about those transactions. The blockchain also tries to protect against fraudulent double spends and do on, and this like all fr…

If so then the ultimate application of blockchain is authentication of recorded video as actual, unadulterated video of an event.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#177

Post by sadgit »

nostrademons wrote: post #88
castlecrasher2 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The biggest problem in the world today is lack of trust and the failure of institutions. That's a pretty strong statement, one that I would disagree with, mostly because it's so vague. How did you come to that conclusion?

Because of what's happening in [government, media, science, public spaces, labor markets]. I view all of them as examples of the same underlying phenomena. In government, you have the UK voting to remove itself from the EU, and then when the referendum passed, the prime minister resigning, all of the major proponents of the referendum resigning, and Scotland threatening to secede from the UK (again). You have a U.S.…

Proof of work blockchains arent solving anything here, theyre a step further in the “do not trust” direction. However i think consortium chains may have potential.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#178

Post by cachvico »

skewart wrote: post #150

Here's the big reason I've gotten skeptical about blockchain: it seems like very few people are excited about actually using it. Almost everyone talking about it is excited about getting rich from trading currencies or starting a blockchain-based company. And plenty of people are excited about a grand vision for how it might transform society one day, or how it might solve problems they think other people might have.…

Blockchain is so much more complex than the basic internet/web. The excitement is about building the first gen of blockchain tech, and the vision is over many decades - the last Bitcoin will be mined around 2140.

Compare to the web, which brought huge change, but decentralized governance is much harder for the lay person to understand. Most people haven't even considered many of the problems it proposes to solve.

So the value of Bitcoin/crypto is held up by the excitement of the change it heralds. It's just going to take a while. (And the trading and investment is the means to the end in getting it going).

But yes, let us wait for the clowns to depart.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#179

Post by malloryerik »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #155
malloryerik wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe we should consider that the blockchain's killer app is the truth. This is the case with bitcoin, since the purpose of the blockchain is to be, for example, trustless, protecting you from someone whom you don't trust lying about your bitcoin transactions. Bitcoin will show you the truth about those transactions. The blockchain also tries to protect against fraudulent double spends and do on, and this like all fr…

Your comment is exactly why I believe many blockchain (and even cryptocurrency) technologies are useless. There seems to be this underlying pull for many crypto/blockchain enthusiasts that this technology frees us from the constraints of governments and society. "The truth is in the blockchain" and "There is no government in charge" are common refrains. The thing is, unless you want to be a true hermit, you can't esc…

I don't wish for myself or others to escape the bounds of society and government (ok, maybe some of the bounds but that's another talk). Indeed my premise is that individuals, society and government must all be bound to each other in order to have a desirable society, and the sin qua non of this is respect for the truth.

As for government, I happen to prefer democracies, and they are especially beholden to truth. When saying that the blockchain's killer app might be the truth, I'm thinking about how it could help save our democracies.

As for The Truth, as in the ultimate truth, for when you'd use quotation marks -- the "truth" -- I'm not going there. We need only concern ourselves with the notion of truth as opposed to lies.

To clarify the distinction, see how this doesn't work:

"Is it true that you were in Symphony Hall at the time of the murder?"

"Is it 'true'?... What do you mean by that slippery word, 'true'? This notion of 'truth' is simply whatever we agree on and therefore irrelevant."

Edit:

And if the truth is simply what is agreed upon, then are lies simply what is not agreed upon?

If so, perhaps we can agree together that the year is 1984.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#180

Post by Kadin »

skewart wrote: post #150

Here's the big reason I've gotten skeptical about blockchain: it seems like very few people are excited about actually using it. Almost everyone talking about it is excited about getting rich from trading currencies or starting a blockchain-based company. And plenty of people are excited about a grand vision for how it might transform society one day, or how it might solve problems they think other people might have.…

People were pretty excited about using Bitcoin to buy drugs, but it turns out you need a more stable and convenient currency even for drug dealers to be interested.

That was the high water mark of consumer interest as far as I've seen. Everything else is just intrigue driven by the get-rich-quick aspect.

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