191–200 of 296 posts
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Blockchain is a solution in search of a problem.
From what I can tell it's a solution in search of funding. The problem is something they will fix later, often by pivoting away from the blockchain.
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.
>- Drugs. Delivered to your door in a plain wrapper. What are the transaction costs like on BTC these days? I'm surprised many people still bother with BTC given the enormous costs I've seen.
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The DeFi thing has finally pushed me to look at crypto again, which turned me on to metamask (via Brave), and after experiencing the UX, it's glaringly obvious that this is the next big thing. Nobody even talks about it, but the fact that I can "sign in" to my "brokerage account" simply by visiting dydx or unisawp and authenticating securely with my browser is pretty incredible. People are claiming to be excited abou…
> Nobody even talks about it, but the fact that I can "sign in" to my "brokerage account" simply by visiting dydx or unisawp and authenticating securely with my browser is pretty incredible. There's an experimental browser that provides this functionality for all kinds of websites, not just financial ones. You set up an account once when you install the browser, and then you can use it for one-click logins. It's made…
Seriously, go see what the process looks like. Just by not being full of A/B tested bullshit and free of regulation, you can get a glimpse of the future.
It feels powerful in a way that registering a Google account doesn't.
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They're permissionless, open source, censorship-resistant, borderless, near instant compared to legacy finance, auditable, composeable (can build protocols on top of other protocols to extend various financial services), and they enable new capabilities that current system can't do.
These technologies try to solve for a lack of trust and avoiding regulation. This use case combination is exceptionally rare (as Animats enumerates, drugs, ransoms, and money laundering). As long as you have a functioning legal framework, financial distributed ledgers and smart contracts have very little value (what happens when a judge overrides your smart contract’s evaluation and result? A fork each time? The law…
As I think you were getting at, there’s enormous systemic risk with hacks and bugs. Now the contract ecosystem is so intertwined that a bug in one can cause a cascading effect. E.g a price feed which powers a DeFi platform could be hacked/attacked. Even a bug in a simple erc20 could have massive consequences since a lot of the contracts are intertwined
I'm really surprised by how uneducated most of HN are about blockchain. This means we're still early. Few big things that are coming out of blockchain; 1) ICO - a way to raise money in a distributed manner outside the traditional financial system (think Banks and VCs). 2) Defi - a way to borrow and lend (and much more) outside the traditional financial system. One example, Banks get as much as 16-20% return on your d…
What is an ICO really - just a company minting tokens for people that they can exchange for something. They're not using any of the properties of blockchain, and no one is running nodes except for the company itself. They should just sell digital tokens via traditional ecommerce methods - nothing about ICOs depends on or takes advantage of being on a blockchain.
What you're talking about doesn't seem to be an ICO but an IBO (Initial Blockchain Offering?). Most ICOs use a token on an already-established blockchain (e.g. ETH), so then there's no need to run a new network of nodes for it.
I'm really surprised by how uneducated most of HN are about blockchain. This means we're still early. Few big things that are coming out of blockchain; 1) ICO - a way to raise money in a distributed manner outside the traditional financial system (think Banks and VCs). 2) Defi - a way to borrow and lend (and much more) outside the traditional financial system. One example, Banks get as much as 16-20% return on your d…
I'm really surprised by how uneducated you think HN readers are. My BS alarm goes 100% every time I read about how "Blockchain Technology" is going to solve world peace or whatever.
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…
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?
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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
> private blockchain So a database? > AFAIK it is live and actively used. Most things people seem to think are running on blockchain tech turn out not to be, so I'd be interested in any evidence here. Nonetheless. > operating a database for that scale would be very complicated They're already operating a database, so at most this is an argument that a traditional database tech wouldn't work, except... ...this is only…
There is no problem with performance until schema changes are made, requiring a careful migration strategy plan (this is why DBAs get the big bucks.)
Source: DBA.
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I'd like to point you to this Vice article titled "One Bitcoin Transaction Consumes As Much Energy As Your House Uses in a Week". Meanwhile swiping a credit card uses slightly more electricity than a google query. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ywbbpm/bitcoin-mining-ele...
So the first article doesn't mention Ethereum and another article doesn't mention Hydro. This is why journalism has a bad wrap. https://news.bitcoin.com/how-big-hydro-power-partners-with-b... China’s southwestern Sichuan province, a mountainous region that is estimated to have over 50% of the Bitcoin network’s total computing power https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-mining-hash-rate-rainstorms...