Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing • Hacker News Board

Re: Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing

#71

Post by arkis22 » Sat, Aug 22, 2020, 5:21 AM UTC

capnorange wrote: post #63

arkis22 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

theyve changed the blockchain a couple of times so no.

blockchains are immutable for all practical purposes using social consensus/governance rules.

sure. it's immutable. they'll just fork the data and force you to choose.

a lot of people enjoy not playing by the rules.

https://www.coindesk.com/ethereum-executes-blockchain-hard-f...

Re: Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing

#72

Post by CobrastanJorji » Sat, Aug 22, 2020, 5:21 AM UTC

Sargos wrote: post #37

graeme wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you elaborate on what problems Ethereum has solve? Genuinely curious, as I shared this article’s preconceptions.

I wrote this below but copying here as it's hard to write a huge comment twice. That's a long article itself but this might be a good starting point: https://consensys.net/blockchain-use-cases/ Consensys is run by an Ethereum co-founder and one of the most prestigious organizations in this space, so that page might seem intimidating but it's good, factual information. Ethereum allows for the usage of unique and real…

> Money was obvious as it's impossible to have internet money if you can just ctrl+c and ctrl+v it to make copies.

Ah, yes, that was Amazon's mistake. Accepting Internet money has meant that I've been able to just email them photocopies of the same money over and over. Hahaha, it has been the perfect crime. I hope Amazon never embrances Ethereum and I can keep getting free merchandise forever.

Re: Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing

#73

Post by auston » Sat, Aug 22, 2020, 5:22 AM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #54

auston wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://magic.link/ also pretty cool and https://handshake.org/ also awesome

Isn't Handshake the thing premised on IANA handing over control of the DNS to a premined cryptocurrency network so they can resell it? I keep wondering if I can do that with ARP. It's like that episode of The Office with the business seminar and the guy whose business idea is just that he gets a 1c cut of every credit card transaction.

@tptacek if this is an "and":

> premised on IANA handing over control of the DNS AND that hand over is to a premined cryptocurrency network so they can resell it?

Then not as far as I can tell.

If it's or, then yes. It looks like there is a 15% pre-mine: https://handshake.org/files/handshake.txt

Re: Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing

#74

Post by onelastjob » Sat, Aug 22, 2020, 5:22 AM UTC

This author is way behind the times. Bitcoin is obsolete. Nano (nano.org) is what the author should be looking at as the future of p2p digital currency. Nano transactions are feeless and take under 1 second, fully confirmed. If you send 1 Nano the recipient receives 1 Nano. There is no mining involved so it is green and it is decentralized. These features make microtransactions possible. You could use it to pay a fraction of a sent to stream a song or read an article. Or us it to log in to websites. Npass is doing both. https://npass.dev/npass Robocash is using Nano to prevent robocalls. https://www.myrobocash.com/

Smart contract coins like Ethereum will have tons of uses, especially for digital goods. You could easily cut escrow.com (and all escrow fees) out of the process of transferring domain names (and other digital goods) with smart contracts if a domain registrar got with the times.

Re: Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing

#75

Post by danschumann » Sat, Aug 22, 2020, 5:22 AM UTC

The block chain is what? An array of objects? The real tech is deciding who gets to push to the array. So, it's just about permissions. How do you know who to trust in a crowd? Assuming the crowd is more trustworthy than a centralized authority. "Power corrupts", yadda yadda, centralized power is certainly corrupting, but so is dark money that can be used for drugs, human trafficking, etc.

I guess it depends which is the larger evil where you come from, the government or the criminals, whether to trust the central or the decentric authority.

Re: Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing

#76

Post by _fq4v » Sat, Aug 22, 2020, 5:22 AM UTC

vageli wrote: post #32

coolgod wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain why you think fiat also use a ridiculously high amount of energy?

Transporting physical currency requires a tremendous amount of infrastructure.

You are conflating fiat currency and physical dollars. The total sum value of physical currency is much less than the total amount of dollars in existence. Most dollars exist only as entries in a ledger.

Re: Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing

#77

Post by zelly » Sat, Aug 22, 2020, 5:26 AM UTC

kordlessagain wrote: post #10

The 402 response code in HTTP might be a useful thing to "hook up" to Lightning, which itself is useful because of the Bitcoin blockchain. Having fast micropayments payments running on data requests is useful for a wide variety of cloud applications, including but not limited to data transfer costs and queries to machine learning models, all without the need for "users" on the systems being accessed. The way I'd put…

For a regular user to use Lightning, they would have to run an always-online instance of lnd--a very memory-intensive Go program that also requires a Bitcoin fullnode (300GB) or the experimental Neutrino light node either of which also has to be always-online. The average internet user has never typed a bash command so this is a pipe dream. Or you could have the alternative which is to push people onto centralized Lightning-like (but better, more polished) services run by the likes of JP Morgan. (It's my suspicion that focusing hype on Lightning instead of scaling Bitcoin Core was a way to sabotage it in favor of paid services of a certain company that most Bitcoin developers are employed by but I digress.) Micropayments in general is a bad idea which the market has rejected time and time again. If you really want to do something like that, just do it the same way all billing works, add it up and notify the user with an invoice at the end of the month or year. That could be integrated into browsers without being tied to a specific payment method or forcing payment. I don't even want to imagine how rich hackers would get if every web browser had a code path that transferred real money.

Re: Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing

#78

Post by viraptor » Sat, Aug 22, 2020, 5:28 AM UTC

coolgod wrote: post #67

viraptor wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fiat also uses crazy amount of energy in absolute terms. But per-transaction costs are much lower for fiat.

Can you give some examples of ubititous systems in the real world which don't use crazy amount of energy in absolute terms? It would be helpful if you could provide an estimate for your notion of "crazy amount of energy" in terms of powers of ten kWh.

They pretty much all do, I didn't claim otherwise. This is not the argument you're looking for :)

Re: Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing

#79

Post by gonehome » Sat, Aug 22, 2020, 5:28 AM UTC

The Correspondent is such a huge disappointment.

I contributed to the start because they pitched themselves as 'unbreaking news', instead they're just another weak publication writing bad articles with catchy headlines (of which this is a good example).

Persuasion is everything The Correspondent was supposed to be and isn't: https://www.persuasion.community/

If you want to actually learn more about bitcoin, I'm part way through this and it's really good: https://www.amazon.com/Bitcoin-Cryptocurrency-Technologies-C...

Re: Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing

#80

Post by ac29 » Sat, Aug 22, 2020, 5:28 AM UTC

capnorange wrote: post #43

Skunkleton wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I looked through a few of those, and I struggle to see how those are superior to traditional solutions to the same problems. Care to enlighten me?

open source, permissionless, programmable, trustless, unstoppable.

open source: not exclusive to blockchain

permissionless: seems to be code for "lets you do things that are illegal"

programmable: not exclusive to blockchain

trustless: also attracts those that are untrustworthy (scammers, etc)

unstoppable: seems to also be code for "lets you do things that are illegal", and im sure the various people who are in prison and/or under investigation for their various blockchain related crimes would disagree with how "unstoppable" it really is