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My Opinion on Blockchain

vladcalin.ro

31–40 of 107 posts

Re: My Opinion on Blockchain

#31
Same tired old talking points, nothing new here. It would be nice to get an explanation of why people care so much, if it's so stupid. You don't see that many articles titled "my opinion on Tupperware", or "why I'm not a scientologist", or "why I won't buy Kanye West's new sneakers". At this point I find it hard to believe it's just hype-backlash that's triggering so many people.

Re: My Opinion on Blockchain

#33
post #11

I feel like the author here really misses what makes this movement in technology interesting, and that is evident in the title. Blockchain is not the innovation, distributed ledgers are. Blockchain is just one component in one formula that made it work. When you take DLT as the focus, you can examine how disruptive the technology CAN be on traditional ledger systems that require enormous amounts of human energy to ma…

If you ever maintain an Ethereum node, you know how hard it is.

Re: My Opinion on Blockchain

#34
post #14

> if you lose your key, you lose the access to your wallet for good and nobody can help you. Which is why Vitalik advocates social recovery wallets: https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/11/recovery.html

Is this something that's already implemented, or is this a "sure would be nice" proposal?

Two major wallets have implemented it. Look towards the end under the subhead "Existing social recovery wallets."

Re: My Opinion on Blockchain

#35

> they say that the fact that it is deflationary and can not see inflation is a good thing, when it is actually a bad thing. There is a reason the target inflation is at ~2% almost everywhere. We need inflation to keep the economy going. And what is the magical reason why we need to keep the economy going? We're burning through this planet's resources much faster than they are being replenished. The economy needs to…

If you believe that (and it's a legitimate point of view), investing in Proof of Work secured cryptocurrencies is a terrible way of putting that belief into action, as PoW burns enormous amounts of resources merely maintaining the ledger of people HODLing their hoards.

See my other reply for why PoW isn't the issue here.

But anyway, not every cryptocurrency uses PoW :)

Re: My Opinion on Blockchain

#36
post #14

> if you lose your key, you lose the access to your wallet for good and nobody can help you. Which is why Vitalik advocates social recovery wallets: https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/11/recovery.html

It is like Government seized my bank asset and the voters help me get back...

Re: My Opinion on Blockchain

#37
post #11

I feel like the author here really misses what makes this movement in technology interesting, and that is evident in the title. Blockchain is not the innovation, distributed ledgers are. Blockchain is just one component in one formula that made it work. When you take DLT as the focus, you can examine how disruptive the technology CAN be on traditional ledger systems that require enormous amounts of human energy to ma…

But do we even need a distributed ledger? Centralized ledgers are easy to maintain in the modern world, and don't require much human energy (or compute energy) to maintain. It is why transaction costs are generally extremely low. Blockchain transactions on the other hand are astronomically expensive and slow. The value of a distributed ledger derives solely from paranoia of a central authority, despite there being little evidence for said paranoia.

Re: My Opinion on Blockchain

#38

I'm definitely skeptical about crypto, but to counter some of the points: - Presumably more people will be online, and more ways to use crypto will be released. - One big benefit of crypto is that it crosses borders and is relatively anonymous. The USA might have stable money and relative safe banks, but that isn't true everywhere. - Non reversibility is a rough one, but I think we'll see software managing keys to ma…

> - Presumably more people will be online, and more ways to use crypto will be released.

Bitcoin launched in 2007. Facebook opened to the public in 2006. One of those has 3 billion users, the other can't get out of the basement. Why haven't we seen more of those ways yet?

> It's still very early days for crypto

Facebook is one year older, and it's now basically a nation state in power and scale. When will it stop being "very early days for crypto"?

Re: My Opinion on Blockchain

#39
These are all common points for people who are overly focused on blockchain per se (invented in 1991!) at the expense of distributed cryptography as a whole. If the writer were curious enough to look in, for example, BLS threshold crypto, they might get an inkling of the power here, which goes far beyond currency.

Re: My Opinion on Blockchain

#40
Bitcoin is a bubbly fad, which leads to so much crime around the globe. For example, every month in Bulgaria they catch thieves of electricity running Bitcoin mining and often leaving bills of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Even if this didn't exist, the rest of the mining happens in China where electricity is subsidized and pollutes and environment and the major exchanges are in China, too. So, we turn CO2 into money for some hodlers who wanna wake up rich one day without doing anything productive for this planet and civilization. Bitcoin did not change the world, it cannot, and most of the cryptos are just empty hopes... on a white piece paper.
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