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

81–90 of 164 posts

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

#81

Post by verdverm »

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…

Well there may be inaccuracies in the article, there are open questions and criticisms to blockchain that the echo chamber deflects rather than engages with.

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

#82

Post by Deimorz »

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…

Which blockchain(s) are currently successfully using POS or DPOS?

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

#83

Post by darawk »

> What blockchain does is shift some of the trust in people and institutions to trust in technology. You need to trust the cryptography, the protocols, the software, the computers and the network. And you need to trust them absolutely, because they’re often single points of failure.

This is wrong. You do not need to trust them, because you can verify their correctness yourself. You cannot similarly inspect the rectitude of your local bank manager's moral compass.

I find it very odd that someone like Schneier wouldn't recognize this obvious truth. Is there "no reason to trust AES" because you have to trust the implementation? What kind of silly argument is that?

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

#84

Post by verdverm »

EthanHeilman wrote: post #22
verdverm wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why public Bitcoin over a bank's own blockchain solution?

Does a bank's own blockchain require trusting that bank? If so then you probably don't need a blockchain since you already have assumed a trusted third party. If you are aiming to reduce your institutional trust assumptions to me the question is why not use Bitcoin?

That's sort of my point. I actually don't care about the technology underneath. I care about the monetary system and its adherence (and recourse) to the rules of law that humans have generally agreed upon. Like, if you steal, the societal system will correct the wrong as much as they can.

It's an open question as to whether public blockchains can provide for this trust and requirement.

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

#85

Post by tcrow »

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'm not saying that Blockchain technology doesn't have it's fair share of issues, but this article completely disregards any of the progress and real benefits that it offers outside of what we all know are the issues with Bitcoin.

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

#86

Post by mantenpanther »

verdverm wrote: post #72
mantenpanther wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Good spot here, h#$@ is a 4 letter word, starts with 'h' and you used it in a discussion in the context of the term 'hate'.

Not sure if this setup was to easy, or you taking your bet too serious scanning the interwebs for such opportunities :-)

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

#87

Post by jondubois »

jondubois wrote: post #70
joe_the_user wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Not really. Just as an example, the only people who expect to verify encryption algorithms all on their own are those incompetent at it. The competent take the "best of breed", note what other experts s…

>> but fiat money markets are many times more transparent than bitcoin markets. How so? When the Fed creates money out of nothing and engages in so-called 'open market operations': - Who brokers these deals? - Do they get a commission on those deals? What percentage? - When the Fed buys bonds/debt from the government through those brokers, who gets their hands on the credit when the government spends it? Is it the sa…

Also, there is a big difference between manipulating the apparent value of a currency by using real funds to temporarily generate artificial spikes in supply or demand versus manipulating supply by creating new funds out of thin air. The former entails risk, the latter does not.

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

#88

Post by atq2119 »

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'…

> On the other hand, fiat money is constantly being secretly manipulated.

Let's assume for a moment that this is both true and relevant.

Why should reinventing the wheel be the correct response?

I feel like this is simply yet another example of the rather common bias of tech folks (not excluding myself here) where we too easily believe that a social problem can be fixed with technology. You see this kind of logic all the time when it comes to surveillance and censorship overreach as well. We know technology, and believe we can control it, and so think that all these social issues can somehow be fixed with clever anti-censorship or surveillance-proof technology. More often than not, these attempts fail entirely or become last-resort fallbacks at best.

This has played out fairly well with Bitcoin as well. Over time, people realized that almost all the complex stuff that the fiat money system does is actually useful, and is damned hard or impossible to reproduce in a crypto currency pretty much by design. Meanwhile, the existing fiat money system could also be made transparent etc., if a political movement was formed to push for that. So now we're back where we started, with a social problem.

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

#89

Post by fdggdfsvscvsd »

astrodust wrote: post #75
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.

The value of Bitcoin is not something Bitcoin makes any promises about.

The technology is obviously not a scam. At most it could turn out that it has technical flaws, like the crypto algorithms could be broken or whatever.

People selling you Bitcoin or making you promises about Bitoin might well be scammers. But that's not the same thing.

Worthless fiat money: it seems to happen a lot, actually. I have a couple of Billion Reichsmarks I could show you. I don't think Zimbabwe $ are worth enough to support your argument.

Of course to use Bitcoin, you have to trust that it will have or keep some value. In that sense, yes, you are back to trust.

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

#90

Post by blocker »

As of today, blockchain doesn't deserve much trust. Agreed. But it's the early days of blockchain and the experimenting, particularly with certain applications such as crypto currencies, will continue for a few years or even decades. However, if Blockchain projects try hard not to make the same mistakes as today’s broken digital platforms, we might be able to trust in a trustless world... here is my post from yesterday on the topic: https://www.ankerventures.com/blog/trustless-new-world
Post reply on HN