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The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

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Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#311

Post by kalleboo »

TylerE wrote: post #299
kalleboo wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the banking situation in the US is just amazingly bad At one time I used to get paid from a US employer's Bank of America account. I also had an account in the same bank, but transferring the money between our accounts in the same bank took 3 days . I presume due to some split between business/personal banking, but still absolutely ridiculous. We switched to sending the payments to my European account through SWIFT…

No, it's not slow (for the most part) because "reasons", it's slow because they are legally allowed to be slow and they can finagle a bit more profit that way.

How does Bank of America profit off of making transfers between Bank of America accounts slower than making transfers to other banks?

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#312

Post by Nursie »

DoctorOetker wrote: post #310
Nursie wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What makes quotability from a written corpus of law not horrible, but further formalization horrible? Inflexibility. We humans are squishy and imprecise. Which is why the law is unlike mathematics, and I think efforts to make it so and to remove humans from its application are fundamentally misguided. > The society could unconditionally reward people for detecting inconsistencies in the law before we run into them…

>Inflexibility. I think the iron answer from a judge is less flexible than the possibility to start a democratic petition against a scandalous oversight in the formalized law... I was trying not to bring up mitigating circumstances, since many people don't see a good reason for their existence (I do!), but mitigating circumstances is actually one of the reasons I want formalization! The way society treats the law is…

> I think the iron answer from a judge

The judge has some flexibility in how exactly to apply the law, which an algorithm does not.

> less flexible than the possibility to start a democratic petition against a scandalous oversight in the formalized law...

You can already do such, should you wish.

> By formalizing we would start a discussion on how exactly to formalize mitigating circumstances.

I don't believe we can capture all of these, nor should we try to have an exhaustive list. Such a list would likely need frequent modification as societal mores change. Better to have humans involved in the process than trying to apply to fix it afterwards.

I'm, personally, not convinced any of this is crying out for a blockchain either, even if we were to grant that automation would be a positive.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#313

Post by Spivak »

arisAlexis wrote: post #229
purerandomness wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I should have made more clear what I mean: When Governments falsify data, in my opinion bottom-up consensus doesn't help, since governments then also could simply participate in that consensus-forming process (see 51% attack)

you think a government of Burma for example can 51% attack Ethereum? The purpose of all this is to put all their balance sheets and title deeds etc on the global blockchain not a private blockchain they control in their offices.

You think the government of Burma, for example could successfully attack an append-only public database product hosted and managed by another country where a large number of interested parites are acting as auditors?

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#314

Post by strls »

pingec wrote: post #253
ygypsy wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the most intriguing projects involving blockchain I’ve noticed is e-Estonia which I would file under useful, however it may not qualify as solely a blockchain-based product. Here the reasoning for incorporating the (KSI) blockchain is to prevent tampering. Citizens have access to a number of digital services that includes but aren’t limited to voting, banking, and healthcare. They've reported; “Since 2014, mor…

I keep hearing about this e-residency, but what can you actually do with it? What is it useful for?

Not much, really. You can setup a company remotely, only to have to come to Estonia anyway to try to open a bank account and most likely get rejected.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#315

Post by dorgo »

JustFinishedBSG wrote: post #263
healsjnr1 wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am constantly surprised by this point of view. Blockchain is a solution to a number of problems that were previously unsolvable, yet so much of the discourse is around the idea that decentralised trust doesn't really solve any useful problems. True many of the applications are hype, but we need to recognise these for what they are and move on to more interesting things. To me the best example is the travel industry…

> Blockchain is a solution to a number of problems that were previously unsolvable, Name one.

Paying for porn without revealing identity

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#316

Post by TylerE »

kalleboo wrote: post #311
TylerE wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's not slow (for the most part) because "reasons", it's slow because they are legally allowed to be slow and they can finagle a bit more profit that way.

How does Bank of America profit off of making transfers between Bank of America accounts slower than making transfers to other banks?

Because then they can float the money and put it in things that earn them interest...

E.g. debit from Bob's account on Monday, put in from Monday until Thursday, and then put it Alice's account on Friday.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#317

Post by xtracto »

zzzcpan wrote: post #49
bepotts wrote: post #17

In all seriousness, what are the advantages Blockchain has over a public SQL database with limited reads and writes that also maintains a public transaction history? Cause when I hear people talk about the problems Blockchains solves (outside of cryptocurrency which is a whole other topic), I don't see what advantages Blockchain has over that. A public SQL database isn't the most "clean" solution, but it'll save ever…

But Blockchain cannot exist outside of cryptocurrencies. It's a system where popularity of a cryptocurrency is crucial for blockchain's security. So if it can't succeed as a cryptocurrency there is no blockchain to talk about. And once it succeeds we can start solving hard peer to peer trust problems with it.

Uhh HyperLedger from IBM is used to build blockchain systems without an unerlying cryptocurrency.

The use of cryptocurrencies within blockchain is to "promote" the adoption/distribution of a system. However, there are other cases where the stimulus for the adoption is non-monetary (e.g. access to the information) and thus a crypto-currency is not needed.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#318

Post by tptacek »

rspeer wrote: post #175
tptacek wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lau…

There's ceremony and some distribution for the management of the root keys. But almost nobody is a client of the root namespace; the most important namespaces are the classic TLDs and ccTLDs. The keys for those are controlled, by and large, by the governments that control those TLDs.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#319

Post by arisAlexis »

Spivak wrote: post #313
arisAlexis wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you think a government of Burma for example can 51% attack Ethereum? The purpose of all this is to put all their balance sheets and title deeds etc on the global blockchain not a private blockchain they control in their offices.

You think the government of Burma, for example could successfully attack an append-only public database product hosted and managed by another country where a large number of interested parites are acting as auditors?

are you seriously suggesting that small countries should keep their important data on centralized servers controlled by another country? its worthless to discuss the million reasons why this will never happen and why sorry
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