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Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing

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Re: Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing

#261

Post by xtracto »

tim333 wrote: post #209
dehrmann wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blockchain is a solution in search of a problem.

It was invented as a solution to the problem of making bitcoin and was good for that. Then people saw bitcoin made money so thought if you stick blockchain on something else maybe some of the money dust will rub off. Less good.

Historically, bitcoin was inspired by the 2008 crash. Same crash that inspired the 1% matches in the US and other movements over the world. Because of the centralization of wealth and power.

Once the next major depression comes in, a form of cryptocurrencies will gain traction again. People are fed up with big banks and centralized power.

Re: Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing

#262

Post by vageli »

rainbow-road wrote: post #38
vageli wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Transporting physical currency requires a tremendous amount of infrastructure.

The same physical infrastructure that is also used for transporting just about everything else? Anyway, most currency transfer these days is digital, so even that doesn't hold much water.

We use armored cars and people licensed to carry firearms for the transport of "just about everything else"?

Also, most currency transfer being digital is a non-sequitor Businesses still need to move the money from their location to the bank regardless of the volume of transfers done digitally.

Re: Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing

#263

Post by zucker42 »

quotz wrote: post #211

Millions of citizens from countries that have abusive governments would disagree with this. Its digital gold. In Yugoslavia where I am from originally, gold was banned, and that was the case too in Romania during dictatorship times. People were smuggling gold to preserve their means of survival, and being seen carrying gold would result in one being killed by a firing squad or jailed. BTC doesn’t have that problem

Can't they just ban you from making connections to known Bitcoin nodes at the network level, or use a Honeypot to detect when you access Bitcoin specific services?

Re: Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing

#264

Post by romanoderoma »

xtracto wrote: post #260
romanoderoma wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Here's a problem that blockchain solves - financial censorship. Cash is still better This argument comes up everytime blockchain are discussed, but I don't believe it is true I could theoretically pay 4chan using crypto money,but I argue this is not a solution First of all, it's not the straightforward, very few people on average can do that on their own It requires a computer with a connection, they are ubiquitous…

This comment reminds me so much of the 90s video that was posted some time ago about how the internet was useless and online commerce was not going to work. Including the stupid idea of selling books. If you were in tech before ethernet and TCp/ip (ipx/spx, netware, ring networks, etc) you wouldnt believe hos far we will get. That's my view of blockchain. Naysayers are just people not knowing better or people with in…

> w the internet was useless and online commerce was not going to work.

Except I had my first internet connection in 1994, have worked all my life to help companies transition to digital economy and I believed internet and e-commerce were going to work because they solved a problem

Bitcoin doesn't

> but there's people doing R&D on this TCP to improve its efficiency and effectiveness.

10 years after the only killer app for crypto is avoiding taxation and buying drugs online (if we exclude paying for ransomware, which I don't consider a killer app)

10 years after internet was born (some say it's 1983, some say it's 1990 when TBL release the first version of an HTTP server) had already changed the world and had many killer apps (email, FTP, NNTP, DNS, gopher among the more popular)

P.s. my first experience with networking was in high school, a 1mb token ring local net in the computer science lab filled with IBM pcs with 4MB of RAM running OS/2

P.p.s. my first programs were written in Rexx and C

Re: Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing

#265

Post by romanoderoma »

Acrobatic_Road wrote: post #243
romanoderoma wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Here's a problem that blockchain solves - financial censorship. Cash is still better This argument comes up everytime blockchain are discussed, but I don't believe it is true I could theoretically pay 4chan using crypto money,but I argue this is not a solution First of all, it's not the straightforward, very few people on average can do that on their own It requires a computer with a connection, they are ubiquitous…

Don't get me wrong. Cash is great. But how do I quickly and securely do a long distance transaction in cash? Do you except people to wait for the postal service to deliver an envelope before they receive whatever they've payed for? >It requires a computer with a connection, they are ubiquitous I understand it, but it's still a very hard requirement In your example you are paying 4chan. You already have a computer wit…

> But how do I quickly and securely do a long distance transaction in cash?

Western union and other money transfer services have been doing it for decades.

Many immigrants in my country use them to send money back home

Re: Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing

#266

Post by gonehome »

xg15 wrote: post #244
DuskStar wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I'm aware, only Backpage could be described as "illegal" instead of just "distasteful" or "unacceptable", and there's some controversy over whether Backpage was actually in the wrong there. (Supposedly they were very cooperative with the feds to track down sex traffickers and underage prostitutes)

Well, Wikipedia at least has this: " Its CEO, Carl Ferrer, pleaded guilty to charges of facilitating prostitution and money laundering, acknowledging that "the great majority” of the adult advertisements on Backpage were actually advertisements for prostitution. " So there seems to be admission that the site's main purpose was prostitution and money laundering, whether or not the other accusations are true. As for th…

Sex work between consenting independent adults is something (while illegal) many do not find unethical. The main issue with backpage was they were supposedly not taking down or helping with trafficked people and children (at least this is vaguely what I recall when they got shut down).

(As an aside, the legality and ubiquitous acceptance of pornography and the illegality of sex work is a weird inconsistency in modern culture that I really don’t understand.)

Free speech protections in the US are pretty strong, but I’d suspect the harassment from that farms site is probably illegal.

Credit card processors are within their right to refuse to support white supremacy content (which I think is reasonable). BTC enabling these people isn’t great, but it also enables people in situations where it’s the government that’s objectionable (someone taking money for a blog about banned topics in China or Saudi for example).

In many hostile countries just getting your money out without it being taken by bad actors can be hard.

This resilience is a strength of BTC which can be used for good or evil. It’s also clearly an existing use case of the blockchain.

Re: Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing

#267

Post by ghostpepper »

xg15 wrote: post #226
Acrobatic_Road wrote: post #133

Here's a problem that blockchain solves - financial censorship. If you want to buy a 4chan pass, you'll find there is no option to pay in EUR or USD. Cryptocurrency only. Is this because 4chan is operating an illegal business? No. It's because they cannot process payments using the traditional means. Controversial websites get financially censored all the time. Here are a few that come to mind: Kiwi Farms, Wikileaks,…

> Kiwi Farms, Wikileaks, Backpage, 8chan, Bitchute, American Renaissance Kiwi Farms: " Kiwi Farms, formerly known as CWCki Forums, is an American Internet forum dedicated to the discussion of online figures and communities it deems "lolcows". The targets of threads are often subject to doxing and other forms of organized group trolling such as ongoing harassment and stalking, including real-life harassment by users.…

Since when is it illegal to be (let alone accommodate) far-right conspiracy theorists?

Even if it was, shouldn't the decision to shut it down come from the courts / police, and not PayPal / VISA?

Re: Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing

#268

Post by gonehome »

BTCOG wrote: post #231
aww_dang wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. The tech is there, but gatekeepers have set up shop around the last mile. Onerous regulations like KYC surround exchanges in the first world. In regions with tight capital controls, it can be even more difficult. The people who stand to benefit the most have the biggest hurdles to adoption.

Exchanges are not a part of Bitcoin, and should not exist. Not your keys, not your money. KYC is an invention by financial systems that have nothing to do with Bitcoin and it's intended use. Nobody holds custody over Bitcoin but the privatekey owner. KYC/AML are scams. They do not exist within Bitcoin. This is simply speculators adhering to a financial system that does not control them. There is absolutely no need at…

KYC and AML exist for a reason - investigating and stopping massive amounts of financial crime.

People want to convert between fiat currency and BTC, that’s why they end up interacting with these regulations.

You can’t currently live only using BTC, but even if you could, the public ledger of every transaction would make it pretty easy to figure out your scheme and come after you anyway whenever you tried to convert the money to actually do anything.

Re: Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing

#269

Post by maxbond »

romanoderoma wrote: post #205
Acrobatic_Road wrote: post #133

Here's a problem that blockchain solves - financial censorship. If you want to buy a 4chan pass, you'll find there is no option to pay in EUR or USD. Cryptocurrency only. Is this because 4chan is operating an illegal business? No. It's because they cannot process payments using the traditional means. Controversial websites get financially censored all the time. Here are a few that come to mind: Kiwi Farms, Wikileaks,…

> Here's a problem that blockchain solves - financial censorship. Cash is still better This argument comes up everytime blockchain are discussed, but I don't believe it is true I could theoretically pay 4chan using crypto money,but I argue this is not a solution First of all, it's not the straightforward, very few people on average can do that on their own It requires a computer with a connection, they are ubiquitous…

Additionally, what kind of solution to financial censorship perpetually logs all transactions for all to see?

Re: Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing

#270

Post by joosters »

splix wrote: post #239
kls wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it is a really inefficient way to store what amounts to an immutable ledger in a traditional database. While I don't agree with a lot of the consensus that blockchain is completely useless. I pretty much agree that it is useless if it is owned by a private entity. That was one of the main points of the blockchain, how can we create a public datastore that is not owned by anyone and it tamperproof. I see publi…

It isn't owned by a single private company, most usually. But multiple companies with equal rights to update. That's what you cannot do with traditional db. Also I don't think there is any significant energy consumed. There is no mining or anything like that. You have to pay for extra network traffic and more disks, simply because you're going to have more copies of data, most likely, but it's not so large amount of…

An API doesn’t care what company the client belongs to, so it’s pretty easy to have a DB that can be updated by more than one company. There’s no technical reason to prefer a blockchain, it’s just marketing.
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