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There's No Good Reason to Trust Blockchain Technology

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

#71

Post by blotter_paper »

jayd16 wrote: post #52
dragontamer wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only thing different about crypto is that there's no central bank that can literally print money Satoshi's pile of ~1 Million bitcoins disagrees with you. The entire BTC economy innately trusts Satoshi to not ruin the fun for them. If Satoshi decides to liquidate his holdings of BTC, it would crash the market harder than the next 10-years worth of mining. Satoshi's pile of 1-million bitcoins acts as a centraliz…

We're saying the same thing. Satoshi is a defacto central bank. The main difference is the money is already printed but that fact is essentially irrelevant.

I don't see how that fact is irrelevant. In one case, an upper limit of how much currency can enter the marketplace is known. In the other, it can keep being printed indefinitely. That doesn't seem like a trivial difference. This is basic inflation/deflation we're talking about, and while deflation isn't popular among modern economists it certainly isn't seen as irrelevant. Satoshi has no magical powers, only a stash of coins that could have easily been mined by other early adopters.

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

#72

Post by verdverm »

mantenpanther wrote: post #66
verdverm wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I h#$@ it and I didn't miss out. A month's salary turned into 16 months of freedom and a bit of money to start a non-crypto company. Reason being the ignorant hype, even greater inequality, and the support of criminals, terrorists, and bad actors built into the very nature of public blockchain. Private blockchain is a different story, but I see that more like a choice between SQL and NoSQL. Just need to wait a decade…

Why the emotional attachment to a "thing" that just is? Do you also hate gold? Maybe vegetables? Or Javascript?

I actually don't h#$@ it, just dislike.

I'm currently in a bet with a friend.

- If you use a curse word, $1 to the other

- If you can convince someone the h#$@ should be one of the banned four letter words, $10 recoup

----------

h#$@ should be a banned for letter word! Do you agree?

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

#73

Post by optimuspaul »

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 also hate blockchain but I can say exactly why. Someone came up with a hard problem and created an overly complex and inefficient solution to it. So I have two issues with it. 1) I don't buy that the original problem it sought to solve, which I believe is currency related, but let's say it's trust in a distributed system where trust does not exist. I don't believe that is an actual problem that should be solved with a general solution like blockchain. 2) the solution doesn't scale well and is overly complex. It is overkill. I think that much simpler solutions would be sufficient and should be purpose built. I also wish it would die soon.

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

#74

Post by astrodust »

fdggdfsvscvsd wrote: post #49
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.

Did you ever go to such a meetup? What exactly annoyed you about the people?

Questions like this.

Don't sea lion.

http://wondermark.com/1k62/

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

#75

Post by astrodust »

fdggdfsvscvsd wrote: post #57

Maybe with Bitcoin I have to trust the software a little bit, but at least if it turns out to be faulty, I can switch to another app. That's much harder to do with governments controlling fiat money. Or with banks. What is a person supposed to do, who is denied financial transactions by the established financial service providers (paypal, credit cards,...)? There have now been several cases where paypal and others ha…

"If I lose all my Bitcoin because it turns out that Bitcoin was a total scam, at least I can switch my now worthless assets to...wait a second."

Fiat money rarely becomes utterly worthless. Even Zimbabwe currency, unbelievably inflated, is still worth a marginal amount as a collectible.

Blockchain currencies have gone from something to nothing in seconds.

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

#76

Post by fdggdfsvscvsd »

stcredzero wrote: post #62
fdggdfsvscvsd wrote: post #57

Maybe with Bitcoin I have to trust the software a little bit, but at least if it turns out to be faulty, I can switch to another app. That's much harder to do with governments controlling fiat money. Or with banks. What is a person supposed to do, who is denied financial transactions by the established financial service providers (paypal, credit cards,...)? There have now been several cases where paypal and others ha…

That's much harder to do with governments controlling fiat money. What about government supported fiat money implemented with blockchain? The best way to implement that would be to preserve as many of the attributes of blockchain as possible. So the government could take coins in their possession out of circulation, or change mining parameters to print more money. Perhaps they could even print money just by signing i…

"What about government supported fiat money implemented with blockchain?"

Not sure how that would supposedly work.

There is one interesting application of government, though: the distribution of the coins. That is what all the cryptocoins struggle with. A government could give every citizen an equal amount of coins, because they have a database of people.

"Is it really viable not to have safe exchanges?"

Some would say that they don't need exchanges, they want to be able to pay everything with Bitcoin. So they wouldn't need fiat money.

Apart from that, exchanges can be at least as safe as banks or traditional stock exchanges. I am mostly using one that is associated with a bank, in fact.

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

#77

Post by verdverm »

legionof7 wrote: post #53
verdverm wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or do DOAs become more like our current political conundrum, where it's a popularity contest full of opinionated misinformation with people who don't have the expertise or time to become sufficiently informed. With a DAG based voting proxy, there may be interesting applications within a business. Like putting support behind higher ups or something like support for RFCs. I'd expect anything applied to the wide populat…

Yep, that's definitely a concern. There are different voting mechanisms/design systems that help deal with this. Definitely a work in progress though.

You could totally build a DOA framework / platform without a blockchain though. (added it to the endless todo list... ;)

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

#78

Post by tcrow »

drugme wrote: post #67
tcrow wrote: post #63

The author has demonstrated a very amateurish understanding and greatly conflated Bitcoin technology with blockchain technology in general, drawing the reader to make the same poor conclusions as the author. Just a quick example > "The second element is the consensus algorithm, which is a way to ensure all the copies of the ledger are the same. This is generally called mining;" - except that is only applicable for (p…

I read the Bitcoin mentions as examples, but not conflations of the overall issues with blockchains. Except that is only applicable for (proof of work POW) consensus and does not apply to proof of stake (POS) and delegated proof of stack (DPOS) which several of the top blockchain projects are currently using (even Ethereum is moving to POS) The fact that while what you just said, in attempting to "clarify" the issue,…

Except for that fact that he proceeds to use Bitcoin as the sole example of all the inherent problems of "Blockchain Technology" while providing absolutely no information about all the ways that Blockchain Technology has improved beyond what Bitcoin is doing. Bitcoin != Blockchain (in totality)

He may be a respected analyst, but he is providing a completely biased and uninformed view of Blockchain technology as it currently exists. That is a bad analyst in my opinion.

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

#79

Post by fdggdfsvscvsd »

astrodust wrote: post #74
fdggdfsvscvsd wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you ever go to such a meetup? What exactly annoyed you about the people?

Questions like this. Don't sea lion. http://wondermark.com/1k62/

That seems rather silly. I am not going to hound you about your dislike of Bitcoin people. You are ENTITLED to dislike them.

I just note that you have no idea what you are talking about and therefore discount your opinion accordingly.

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

#80

Post by amluto »

tcrow wrote: post #63

The author has demonstrated a very amateurish understanding and greatly conflated Bitcoin technology with blockchain technology in general, drawing the reader to make the same poor conclusions as the author. Just a quick example > "The second element is the consensus algorithm, which is a way to ensure all the copies of the ledger are the same. This is generally called mining;" - except that is only applicable for (p…

> except that is only applicable for (proof of work POW) consensus and does not apply to proof of stake (POS) and delegated proof of stack (DPOS) which several of the top blockchain projects are currently using (even Ethereum is moving to POS).

For POS, you have to trust the rich people and you have to trust that the disincentives to cheating actually work the way they’re supposed to. Neither of these have very compelling arguments right now. The fact that Etherium thinks POS is ready is utterly unconvincing — Ethereum also thought that Solidity and its VM design was ready, and that has withstood the test of time very well.

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