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Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

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Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#151

Post by loceng »

scsilver wrote: post #143
loceng wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's been research done to show that multiple times just a few people manipulated the price of Bitcoin to its heights - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-14/research-... - and the Bitcoin community main mantra is "HODL" and they call themselves the "army of the HODLers" for a reason: they're waiting for enough of society to be manipulated/trick people into thinking the history of the "steady" increas…

The money transfered from late adopters to early adopters is the massive amounts of old money mad from the wealth of kingdoms and colonialization. Personally I think having an infinitely divisible, fixed asset, protected by cryptography and not statutes, is a democratic upheaval of captured financial systems. You dont need blood, legacy, heritage to capture these assets, just information. Maybe having physical wealth…

I like that you brought up money of old - and find it disturbing that people are happy to repeat the same pattern - "they did it, so why can't we;" two wrongs don't make a right.

So great, we have regulatory capture of financial systems - and you want to replace it with a system that can't protect against bad actors via financial punishment for known bad behaviour e.g. via the Magnitsky Act? Don't you think that's a problem?

You like Bitcoin because it allows you revenge - but the problem is it's not taking out revenge on the people who may deserve it, it's taking it out on all of society. That's disturbing that you, and I imagine others, aren't thinking critically of those consequences - or if you are that you don't care; in fact this is a fundamental element of Bitcoin and how the mob/"army of HODLers" grows - the price drops and the buy people who bought later, at or below the current price, have now lost money and haven't realized any - so they are now entrenched in the MLM scheme.

Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#152

Post by ausbah »

lima wrote: post #26

Here's how things are looking in 2021: (1) Scalability Issues Solved - there's a plethora of high-throughput chains in development, either based on sharding or pipelining/MVCC/optimistic concurrency. Some projects like Solana use GPUs and JIT compilation to achieve well beyond 50k tps in a distributed network. (2) Lack Of Intuitive Private Key Management Little progress. Ledger and other hardware wallets make things…

is there a good resource that you recommend that goes more in depth over advances like these? I think my opinion on cryptocurrencies and blockchain in general is severely out of date

Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#153

Post by smoll »

ffggvv wrote: post #146
jamemuraca wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a great use case is for distributed storage and control of home automation products, with an open protocol on top of it. When I have lock in to one vendor and they go bankrupt, device has lost control but also my historical data. If this was all via a distributed model, I could grant access to a new app/company to take over control. Even if they don't close up, I could still give access to other integration p…

seems like you could just do this with some sort of open source or shared standard that different providers use

Yes, but this is where politics comes into play. If you're a Google/Amazon/Samsung/any big player, why would you stick to the open standard when you could just change to a proprietary standard for more lock-in and profit?

With a blockchain-based standard, you could make vendor buy-in permanent and enforceable. The only way that one of the big players could win in this new normal is if the products on their proprietary standard are better (in merit) than the entire marketplace that implements the blockchain standard.

Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#154

Post by spopejoy »

canoebuilder wrote: post #141
ignoramous wrote: post #112

I genuinely think HN is subject to what Clay Christensen put as "disruptive innovation" when it comes to Blockchain and friends (strange to say that for a community as opposed to a company). I understand that many on HN think of the many ICOs as Ponzi schemes, and other tech (like identity, DBs, VPNs, apps, or even alternate WWW) built on top as smokes and mirrors; but the industry being built around it is very real…

> but the industry being built around it is very real even if niche. There's a lot going on (including research) What are some concrete examples? I think most of us who are critical are still interested, because we do see things that are going on, and we ask ourselves, are we missing something? But we seem to run into the same road blocks again and again. “Solutions” seem to come from people subtly or transparently “…

I think smart contracts are actually extremely novel in the form they take in Ethereum EVM, Tezos, Cardano, DAML and Pact (I'm author of the latter). TBH I'm a little frustrated with the evolution of smart contract langs post-2017, as I think Ethereum's dominance has made most engs/projects uninterested in innovating.

If you look around, it's actually very hard to find a genuinely small language you can embed in your runtime, and offer to users. Lua is a common suggestion, but Lua doesn't let you lock down IO, or code loading (that is, without writing your own interpreter and changing semantics -- what's the point?). A truly pure smart contract language gives the containing app full control over the entire runtime.

Smart contracts to me are a modern stored-procedure language that you embed directly into your app, and give you a 100% deterministic way to store long-term state, including code. "Application DBs" like sqlite don't scratch this itch (for instance sqlite doesn't have SPs). Plus, smart contracts are metered (usually), which allows for a cost-model and prevents against DOS. This plus the turing-incomplete angle makes them reasonable to open up to the world.

Erlang and lambdas come to mind, and I can argue why they're different too. But this is already too long :)

Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#155

Post by ashtonkem »

hannob wrote: post #114
jcfrei wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the typical argument on a very technical board such as HN where blockchain is synonymous with a specific implementation. But that's an outdated way to think about blockchains. Yes, Bitcoin's implementation is a huge resource hog and slow. But for most newer projects "blockchain" just means an auditable trail of state changes. Whether you implement this with the shiniest newest db paradigm or some simple SQL d…

So Blockchain is a fancy word for something like a Git repository?

We’re now in the phase where the underlying technical term is being diluted down to meaninglessness in order to dodge around the well publicized failures of specific examples.

Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#156

Post by UncleMeat »

jamemuraca wrote: post #145
nexthash wrote: post #11

I think the #1 reason blockchain doesn't work is very simple - the technology is broken beyond fixability. This article is two years old, but the same variations of these excuses always come up when the crypto ideologues are grilled on why their utopiaic vision hasn't come about, for all of blockchain's existence. Blockchain is awful for most things compared to a centralized or distributed database: it is inefficient…

I think a great use case is for distributed storage and control of home automation products, with an open protocol on top of it. When I have lock in to one vendor and they go bankrupt, device has lost control but also my historical data. If this was all via a distributed model, I could grant access to a new app/company to take over control. Even if they don't close up, I could still give access to other integration p…

Why do you need a blockchain for this? This just sounds like a shared data format.

Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#157

Post by ffggvv »

smoll wrote: post #153
ffggvv wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

seems like you could just do this with some sort of open source or shared standard that different providers use

Yes, but this is where politics comes into play. If you're a Google/Amazon/Samsung/any big player, why would you stick to the open standard when you could just change to a proprietary standard for more lock-in and profit? With a blockchain-based standard, you could make vendor buy-in permanent and enforceable. The only way that one of the big players could win in this new normal is if the products on their proprietar…

but why would they agree to that blockchain standard in the first place? it’s the same issue

Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#158

Post by UncleMeat »

bitxbitxbitcoin wrote: post #134
throw0101a wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better than, say, Transferwise or XE.com? Can you explain how?

There isn’t a list of allowed vs banned countries?

Now you are back at the "evading" use case. BTC works better if you want to send six figures to somebody in Iran. That remains a pretty small use case.

Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#159

Post by ashtonkem »

jamemuraca wrote: post #145
nexthash wrote: post #11

I think the #1 reason blockchain doesn't work is very simple - the technology is broken beyond fixability. This article is two years old, but the same variations of these excuses always come up when the crypto ideologues are grilled on why their utopiaic vision hasn't come about, for all of blockchain's existence. Blockchain is awful for most things compared to a centralized or distributed database: it is inefficient…

I think a great use case is for distributed storage and control of home automation products, with an open protocol on top of it. When I have lock in to one vendor and they go bankrupt, device has lost control but also my historical data. If this was all via a distributed model, I could grant access to a new app/company to take over control. Even if they don't close up, I could still give access to other integration p…

There is no way I’d put my home automation in a public ledger. We have enough problems as a society with cloud enabled security cameras being used as bot nets and to harass people. A permanent ledger of what happened in your home is a mind bogglingly awful idea.

Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#160

Post by mikegreenberg »

lottin wrote: post #147
mikegreenberg wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are blockchain assets, whose scarcity is defined by the protocol and agreed upon by all participating node operators, infinite in supply? Edit: Arguing in good faith... you could suggest changing the protocol, sure, however you would need follow that particular blockchain's rules for gaining consensus about changing the rules first.

Yes, but it's an artificial scarcity. Like you say, these assets are only scarce because all the participants agree that they're scarce. This is different from physical objects, which are scarce because of the laws of nature.

I'm not sure why that distinction is important. Value is realized in use of a complete product and are not represented by the sum of its parts. (Value is not zero sum. A log and a plank together can arguably provide more value as a slope than the log and the plank can provide value on their own.) Sure, you can decompose the system to remove artificial scarcity, but that's part of the product. The market has manifested it into existence because it is valuable and users trust the protocol sufficiently that it will not be changed from underneath them. And without evidence that the protocol is brittle enough to allow rules to break, that trust in the protocol is more valuable than any human's promise.
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