Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing • Hacker News Board

Re: Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing

#111

Post by arkis22 » Sat, Aug 22, 2020, 5:54 AM UTC

capnorange wrote: post #92

arkis22 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

agreed. Here "they'll" is not Vitalik/co, it's in control of the node validators, ofcourse you are affected by this if are in disagreement of the majority. The reason why it will be difficult to pull off a hard fork today[1]. See UASF for the success in community governance. This is good proof that the users are always in control, not miners or Vitalik. [1] https://www.coindesk.com/binance-may-consider-bitcoin-rollba…

The house has 435 members. the senate has 100. nobody thinks the 535 members are effective.

enjoy your user uncontrolled anarchy

do you have any response to > 50% attacks?

Re: Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing

#112

Post by andreskytt » Sat, Aug 22, 2020, 5:55 AM UTC

godelski wrote: post #61

Looking at all the comments here I have a single response to most of them: I'll call it a solution when it is implemented. You can talk all you want about solutions to some of the (minor) problems addressed here (ignoring the rest of the problems) but unless it is in use then the article's commentary still stands. Unless it has a ton of users, the article's commentary still stands. If you really do believe in block c…

Number mobility between Indian telecoms runs on private blockchain. AFAIK it is live and actively used. BC solves a problem there because operating a database for that scale would be very complicated. So every telco has their own copy that get synced via a consensus mechanism and signed transactions

Re: Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing

#113

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Aug 22, 2020, 5:55 AM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing

#114

Post by Acrobatic_Road » Sat, Aug 22, 2020, 5:56 AM UTC

Animats wrote: post #59

spir wrote: post #19

This article is misinformed. The past two years have seen a Cambrian explosion of apps on ethereum. financial apps on ethereum - https://defipulse.com/ - https://uniswap.info/home - https://compound.finance/ - https://nexusmutual.io/ - https://bloom.co/ - https://baseline-protocol.org - https://augur2.eth.link/ non-financial apps on ethereum - https://audius.org/ - https://ens.domains/ - https://decentraland.org/ pop…

DefiPulse - a scheme for speculating in the future price of Etherium. Uniswap - a scheme for assisting with speculating in cross rates between various cryptocurrencies. Compound - it pays interest. But who's paying the interest? It doesn't seem to make loans. Possible Ponzi. Nexus Mutual - insurance against failure of smart contracts, based on smart contracts. Bloom - "validate anything about anyone." A signing servi…

DefiPulse is just a page with information about cryptocurrency. It's like calling coinmarketcap.com a scheme. Maybe you should bother to understand what you're looking before laying down your ignorant judgement.

Uniswap solves many problems (trustless cross-asset exchange, liquid markets without market makers, decentralized orderbook problem, decentralized price feeds, etc)

>Compound - it pays interest. But who's paying the interest?

People who want loans in cryptocurrency.

Re: Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing

#115

Post by zelly » Sat, Aug 22, 2020, 5:57 AM UTC

zwirbl wrote: post #102

zelly wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My hope is that some centimillionaires and maybe billionaires will convert all their cash to BTC when a wealth tax comes. That's one possible scenario for 100k or higher.

And what would that achieve? Leave financing of national institutions to the lower classes that are already exploited by said centimillionaires?

The national institutions you speak of are the ones doing the exploitation. I wouldn't lose any sleep if they'll have to cut back on droning villages or putting poor people in prison because Bitcoin disrupted their funding.

Re: Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing

#116

Post by ASlave2Gravity » Sat, Aug 22, 2020, 5:58 AM UTC

Animats wrote: post #25

Bitcoin has lots of uses: - Getting money out of China. Buy into a mining consortium with yuan, get a fraction of the bitcoins, sell outside China for dollars or euros. You're manufacturing and exporting, which the government of China likes. - Extortion. The ransomware extortion business depends on Bitcoin. - Drugs. Delivered to your door in a plain wrapper.

Just wish I could tip my postman! He has been looking real sleepy, man.

Re: Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing

#117

Post by rudiv » Sat, Aug 22, 2020, 5:58 AM UTC

jethro_tell wrote: post #56

dylan604 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Artificial Artificial Intelligence?

We're working on the air for our start up. In the mean time the interns are matching stuff in spread sheets.

So your analysis has been created by neural nets?

Re: Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing

#118

Post by luhn » Sat, Aug 22, 2020, 5:58 AM UTC

This article really hits the nail on the head: All these problems blockchain are supposed to solve are problems of coordination. And you don't need blockchain for that, you need buy-in.

Re: Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing

#119

Post by john_moscow » Sat, Aug 22, 2020, 5:58 AM UTC

zelly wrote: post #85

Animats wrote: post #25

Bitcoin has lots of uses: - Getting money out of China. Buy into a mining consortium with yuan, get a fraction of the bitcoins, sell outside China for dollars or euros. You're manufacturing and exporting, which the government of China likes. - Extortion. The ransomware extortion business depends on Bitcoin. - Drugs. Delivered to your door in a plain wrapper.

My hope is that some centimillionaires and maybe billionaires will convert all their cash to BTC when a wealth tax comes. That's one possible scenario for 100k or higher.

Yeah, sure, buying an extremely volatile asset with ~2x price swing within recent couple of years is much less risky than paying 0.4% per year, while actively moving your assets to a different jurisdiction.

And the anonymity is guaranteed by design. You just send your billions through a couple of mixers registered to phony IDs and it they magically get obfuscated because hey, other billionaires do that every day as well.

/s

Re: Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing

#120

Post by mgraczyk » Sat, Aug 22, 2020, 5:59 AM UTC

chrisco255 wrote: post #39

mgraczyk wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah thanks to COVID there is a ton of new interest in defi as a form of unregulated gambling.

I don't know if you've seen the stock market lately... clearly the largest casino in the world is on Wall Street. But anyways, DeFi has tons of use cases including automated crop insurance based on weather events, decentralized money markets for car loans, tokenized rental real estate, synthetic derivatives, standard savings and loans utilizing stablecoins, etc etc. The notion that blockchain hasn't found product mar…

What percentage of defi assets are used for the purposes you described vs speculation? It's difficult to analyze rigorously but I could give you a lower bound on speculation by looking at interday altcoin movement on makerdao and compound. I think it's completely fair to characterize defi as "predominantly speculation", which I've editorialized into "unregulated gambling".