Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

There's No Good Reason to Trust Blockchain Technology

wired.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 164 posts

Re: There's No Good Reason to Trust Blockchain Technology

#31

Post by DyslexicAtheist »

baxtr wrote: post #8

I hate blockchain so much and I can’t even exactly say why. Not because of the technology itself. I care about it as much as any other technology. I think it’s because of the sleazy non-tech people that suddenly turned into “experts” raising money for their BC startup, people organizing meetups, becoming “consultants” and of course the whole crypto craze... I really wish it will die soon.

I like the tech but can't stand the hype. It's become impossible to follow or engage in any discussions around the topic since the shills have taken over this space.

I also like quicksort and fibonacci numbers but would I try to start a business based on this? Probably not. I want to see legit tech being built that uses blockchains but as soon as it ends up being on a business plan or mentioned in marketing material my gagging reflex sets in.

Re: There's No Good Reason to Trust Blockchain Technology

#32

Post by baby »

taylorswift_ wrote: post #10
baby wrote: post #6

1. yes there is a trust flow when you join a network: * you need to trust the paper behind the consensus mechanism * you need to trust the people who have implemented the client, and trust them to maintain it * you need to trust the TLS connection you use when you download the client. Meaning the whole CA system * you need to trust your own machine, when running the client * you need to trust the first peers you conn…

I completely agree with this. Why would the average Joe trust the chain you describe more than a Corporation with a physical address and humans to interact with? What are your thoughts on stuff like the many blockchain real estate related projects? e.g. "tokenized real estate" "100% liquidity" etc etc.

I'm not aware of the blockchain real estate stuff. But my guess from your description is just to transform real estate into an ETF? Then you could do that without a blockchain in the first place.

Re: There's No Good Reason to Trust Blockchain Technology

#33

Post by james_s_tayler »

jondubois wrote: post #21

If you're a technical person, you don't need to trust Blockchain technology; you can verify that it works on your own. If you're not a technical person, you can find independent technical experts to verify it for you. Much of the value of a cryptocurrency can be attributed to the fact that it's difficult to coordinate a large number of people to agree on changes. Also, because most blockchains are public ledgers; it'…

Blockchain's trust model is broken anyhow because it seems whoever is managing the tokens used by the system keeps losing them. The way the tokens are handled at the edge where layer 8 is involved to some degree is the weakest link and it has proven itself not to be trustworthy.

Re: There's No Good Reason to Trust Blockchain Technology

#34

Post by baby »

jondubois wrote: post #21

If you're a technical person, you don't need to trust Blockchain technology; you can verify that it works on your own. If you're not a technical person, you can find independent technical experts to verify it for you. Much of the value of a cryptocurrency can be attributed to the fact that it's difficult to coordinate a large number of people to agree on changes. Also, because most blockchains are public ledgers; it'…

Actually, if you look at encrypted blockchains (Zcash, Monero, Dash, Quisquis, Grin, etc.) there are real and similar dangers here. It is very hard to monitor money, and see when fraud happens. Some kind of fraud, not up for ethical debate, is the creation of money out of thin air. Zcash actually just caught one such bug[1] and there has been others in the past.

[1]: https://z.cash/blog/zcash-counterfeiting-vulnerability-succe...

Re: There's No Good Reason to Trust Blockchain Technology

#35

Post by baby »

cphoover wrote: post #26
jondubois wrote: post #21

If you're a technical person, you don't need to trust Blockchain technology; you can verify that it works on your own. If you're not a technical person, you can find independent technical experts to verify it for you. Much of the value of a cryptocurrency can be attributed to the fact that it's difficult to coordinate a large number of people to agree on changes. Also, because most blockchains are public ledgers; it'…

"If you're a technical person, you don't need to trust Blockchain technology; you can verify that it works on your own. If you're not a technical person, you can find independent technical experts to verify it for you." That holds for Proof-of-work based currencies... It seems like it's trickier than that for proof-of-stake, as these have to be trustful systems.

Indeed, the proof-of-work of bitcoin is way easier to understand than the byzantine agreements used by other cryptocurrencies.

Re: There's No Good Reason to Trust Blockchain Technology

#37

Post by baby »

baxtr wrote: post #8

I hate blockchain so much and I can’t even exactly say why. Not because of the technology itself. I care about it as much as any other technology. I think it’s because of the sleazy non-tech people that suddenly turned into “experts” raising money for their BC startup, people organizing meetups, becoming “consultants” and of course the whole crypto craze... I really wish it will die soon.

I'd hope for HN to be a place where we can actually ignore the noise and discuss about the interesting research being done around blockchains.

Re: There's No Good Reason to Trust Blockchain Technology

#38

Post by companyhen »

baxtr wrote: post #8

I hate blockchain so much and I can’t even exactly say why. Not because of the technology itself. I care about it as much as any other technology. I think it’s because of the sleazy non-tech people that suddenly turned into “experts” raising money for their BC startup, people organizing meetups, becoming “consultants” and of course the whole crypto craze... I really wish it will die soon.

I don't think it will die, newer blockchain protocols like MimbleWimble are highly interesting and pure math and cryptography. The ICO shillers are disappointing, I was younger in the dot-com era so I do not remember much, but I assume there was a similar vibe around that time with everyone getting rich with any website idea.

For example, the recent BitTorrent ICO disappointed me, although it pumped 10x from ICO price in the past week which will keep the speculators interested, thanks to Binance supporting it.

Re: There's No Good Reason to Trust Blockchain Technology

#39

Post by baby »

verdverm wrote: post #19
feelingsonice wrote: post #12

"Private blockchains are completely uninteresting. (By this, I mean systems that use the blockchain data structure but don’t have the above three elements.) ... Consensus protocols have been studied in distributed systems for more than 60 years. Append-only data structures have been similarly well covered." I don't entire agree with this. Yes, distributed systems and various consensus protocols have been studied for…

Private blockchains are interesting because it causes separate business to share code and data formats. There is a better interface for integrating. Plus you still get the rule of law.

Good point. It also forces them to be accountable, and facilitates regulation from third parties. Something that should be welcomed when you look at how opaque banks are trying to be sometimes.

Re: There's No Good Reason to Trust Blockchain Technology

#40

Post by scottlocklin »

VikingCoder wrote: post #28
scottlocklin wrote: post #24

1) Schneier evidently doesn't understand alternative consensus algos to mining. That's OK; they're hard to understand. Even permissioned chains apparently hard to understand. 2) Schneier doesn't understand that some people choose to trust the cryptocurrency community more than the banking/government community. If he looked at the first block of bitcoin aka "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout…

I think it's folly to assert that the only reason someone disagrees with you is that they "don't understand". I hope you get a chance to see Schneier directly challenged on those topics.

Well, he seems to think consensus = mining; I got news for you -that's not even remotely true! He also seems to think permissioned chains are worthless; hyperledger fabric seems to have a whole lot of investment for a worthless thing. And things like EOS which blend voting/stake with permissioning seem to work reasonably well, even if an EC2 crash would probably take them down.

I'm no blockchain maximalist, and I understand the disgust at the hype around it, but it is an important tech, and Schneier obviously has done no real thinking on the subject. He doesn't even make a distinction between "coins" and ... blockchains. They're not the same!

This is only his misunderstanding of the technical aspects. As I said above, he also misunderstands the social aspects. Some people really trust the crypto community more than they trust banks/governments. It's at least a reasonable hedge, particularly in light of the events described in the bitcoin genesis block.

Post reply on HN