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Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing

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Re: Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's interesting tech what isn't necessarily whats great for end users. Would you trust your mission critical data to a decentralized store? I wouldn't. What's the latency and throughput of Arweave? Can I serve 100k QPS off of it? What happens in the end of a protocol hack or client, bug? We've seen many blockchains destroyed by bugs and flaws, and we've seen others just fade. I mean, we've already gone through sev…

I've been using it to host static websites for free personally. You can get free AR to try it yourself, more than enough to last you a very long time. I deploy from localhost and it's on the permaweb almost instantly. http://tokens.arweave.org/ Arweave is based on a new consensus mechanism called ‘proof of access’ (PoA). Arweave is more suitable for slow write (upload) and fast read (download). Download is more usefu…

> Arweave has developed a system for data storage which makes it economically sustainable and feasible to store data for centuries

I see no evidence that this is true. Look at their economic analysis[1]. It uses an extremely idealized view of the cost of storing data - they assume that cost of permanent storage is solely a product of the cost of a hard drive and the rate at which hard drives fail. They ignore so many real world costs - internet costs, electricity costs, paying for space to store the hard drive, maintenance cost, opportunity cost, transition costs (i.e. when the hard drive changes hands, the effort to ensure there is a new maintainer).

[1] arweave.org/yellow-paper.pdf (section 3.2.2)

Re: Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing

#62
Every jurisdiction regulates financial institutions for good reasons (yes, also some bad reasons). While a great deal of misbehavior does persist under regulation (Wells Fargo, etc), it’s a fraction of what we would see if they were not or could not be regulated.

Inspectable and freezable payments systems are one core part of the infrastructure that enables regulation. The point at which it looks like Blockchain technologies are successfully enabling an alternative financial system that’s not subject to these controls is the point at which blockchain technology gets severely constrained by law.

Intermediaries aren’t always a bad thing. Stock settlement intermediation was transformative for the securities industry, greatly increasing the liquidity of the market.

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