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The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

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Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#181

Post by speedplane »

SubiculumCode wrote: post #176
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…

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

Why stop at video? Every application that creates any file should take a hash of it and upload it to a public blockchain. You could use it to identify tampering with any individual file. If deployed more broadly (e.g., on the file system level), you could easily identify if your systems have been hacked.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#182

Post by sadgit »

reilly3000 wrote: post #34

Anonymous blockchain sounds like fertile soil for the emergence of simple, autonomous AI. Howard Bloom's cosmology centers around Replication Strategy and Iteration. The medium of blockchain provides convenient and abundant opportunity for both. Imagine a smart contract that could sort of recursively fuel itself with prediction market earnings, and clone itself programmatically. A relatively simple 'mother' script co…

Blockchains will allow people to collaborate on training a shared model. At somepoint it’ll be able to predict what it should learn next better than the people training it.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#183

Post by sadgit »

bariswheel wrote: post #61

If you want some good Sunday reading from people who actually know what they are talking about, I would recommend reading essays and papers from people like John Pfeffer, Bharath Ramsundar, and Vijay Boyapati. 'Bitcoin is worse is better'is also a fun read.

Some links?

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#184

Post by coralreef »

rspeer wrote: post #173
coralreef wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If I'm in jail, my bitcoin still exists and when I get out, I could access it so long as I've memorized my seed words, or backed them up, or shared them with a family member I trust, who could use it while I'm incarcerated. It is not easily seized, and if you are careful, not easily identifiable.

Using trust to secure your ledger is like driving without insurance; sure its cheaper and more efficient, until it isn't.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#185

Post by Kadin »

SubiculumCode wrote: post #176
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…

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

Yes, that is a possible application of "blockchain technology", given a broad-enough definition of what constitutes "blockchain technology".

But the consensus-based proof-of-work (or proof of storage, or proof of memory, etc.) models aren't really necessary or even clearly desirable.

There are timestamping systems dating from long before "blockchain" (at least 1990, probably before) which involve sequential hashes, with each subsequent hash also including the previous one (in some respects this is a very simple blockchain), and then if desired you can roll them up through a directed graph to one master hash produced periodically and published immutably -- printed in a newspaper was one approach, or posted to Usenet, but you could think of others -- such that it validates all previous hashes as having been created before a particular time.

Guardtime was doing this back in 2007 or 2008 and printing the top-level daily or weekly hashes in the newspaper; I noticed they are now marketing themselves as a "blockchain" company, which is astute marketing (and I'd do the same if I were them, probably), but the ability to do secure timestamping existed in several forms without blockchain.

The reasons these systems weren't used have less to do with technical feasibility than lack of pressure to implement them.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#186

Post by rspeer »

coralreef wrote: post #184
rspeer wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If I'm in jail, my bitcoin still exists and when I get out, I could access it so long as I've memorized my seed words, or backed them up, or shared them with a family member I trust, who could use it while I'm incarcerated. It is not easily seized, and if you are careful, not easily identifiable. Using trust to secure your ledger is like driving without insurance; sure its cheaper and more efficient, until it isn't.

Your family member that you trust gave your seed words to the government, under duress.

In a world that relies on not trusting anyone, you are screwed no matter what.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#188

Post by coralreef »

rspeer wrote: post #186
coralreef wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I'm in jail, my bitcoin still exists and when I get out, I could access it so long as I've memorized my seed words, or backed them up, or shared them with a family member I trust, who could use it while I'm incarcerated. It is not easily seized, and if you are careful, not easily identifiable. Using trust to secure your ledger is like driving without insurance; sure its cheaper and more efficient, until it isn't.

Your family member that you trust gave your seed words to the government, under duress. In a world that relies on not trusting anyone, you are screwed no matter what.

Putting a gun to someone's head will always be a security problem, in any system. In this case, it is not system threatening because no entity has power over the network.

I may have relied on my family to keep a password secret, but that affects only me. The government cannot coerce the entire system unless it is prepared to put everyone in jail. Bitcoin lives on, and will not be stoppable. This is the power of a trustless system.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#189

Post by Nursie »

sixstringtheory wrote: post #171
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.

But what makes you think it's an arpanet?

Even then there were exciting, compelling use-cases.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#190

Post by dnomad »

mike_hearn wrote: post #107
Xixi wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If ownership of a house is decided by contracts, written by lawyers, then adding a blockchain will only add issues, since it can get out of sync with reality. And if the blockchain is the source of truth, it means that stealing your house-token will result in you losing your house. Do you use an intel processor vulnerable to Meltdown/Spectre, or with a vulnerable IME? Do the people you know and love know and understa…

One end goal of blockchains is indeed that they become the system of record, and that legal agreements are English translations of what the code says rather than the other way around. That might sound scary, but I'd point out a few things: 1. That future is still a long time away. The legal system is very conservative. 2. These systems don't have to be perfect, just better than what we have today. Yes, I certainly wo…

> But the idea that bank-run paper based systems are 100% secure is not true - they routinely go wrong just through basic mistakes and screwups, let alone actual fraud.

Nobody expects bank systems to be 100% secure. Banking -- and in fact the entire free market economy -- would not happen if it was required that the systems be secure. It's just the opposite: it is assumed that bank systems will fail or be abused in all sorts of strange and unexpected ways. This is why market participants will only invest if they have the right to appeal to neutral third party representative of justice.

> One end goal of blockchains is indeed that they become the system of record and that legal agreements are English translations of what the code says rather than the other way around.

It's safe to say that blockchains will never become some sort of indisputable system of record. That is, blockchains will never become sovereign. To be a sovereign and force others to obey your laws you need armies. We have already seen in cases where disputes rise on the blockchains that they get settled in real courts of the real sovereigns. In cases where crimes are committed but the blockchain hides identity you get investigations by, again, real LEOs of real sovereigns.

Blockchain enthusiasts suffer from very fundamental misunderstandings of how economic activity actually happens. This isn't surprising: the vast majority of people have absolutely no idea how the modern global economy actually works. But the blockchain crew are betting real money based off this misunderstanding and, frankly, they're going to pay for it. Nothing costs more than ignorance.

That's not to say that the underlying technology is hopeless. I expect we will see strongly permissioned and heavily regulated blockchains that build upon existing laws and institutions. Corda [1] et al have the right idea. These blockchains don't really replace anything, they're just distributed computing platforms that can greatly lower existing transaction costs. There are enormous inefficiences in global trade because buyers and sellers from different regimes don't trust each other and the cost to establish that trust is very high.

[1] http://corda.net/

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