81–90 of 465 posts
Scam after scam, that's all blockchain is. Just another way to fleece the average consumer. There has not been a single valuable use, a single product, that actually improves anyone's day / process / life / anything. I am very open to changing my stance if someone presents evidence to the contrary.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Once the latest transaction in a coin is buried under enough blocks, the spent transactions before it can be discarded to save disk space. Everyone should have this quote ready when there's an inevitable "but there's no tampering of the log, and all transactions are kept forever and can be verified!"
This feels like a misunderstanding of how the syncing process works. You don't only download the last n blocks and assume the current state is accurate. You download the entire chain, validate it, and optionally discard the redundant information. As far as your client is concerned it still verified the entire chain end-to-end. The only difference with pruning is that you can't revalidate the chain end-to-end without…
This "blockchain" space is getting so complicated that I can't see anymore what it is about. Is it a database? Is it a p2p network? Is it a currency? Most of the "blockchains" listed on aggregators such as coinmarketcap.com are essentially clients communicating to a few nodes which, for all we know, sync up in a coordinated way to provide the illusion of a decentralized consensus system. Like maybe we need to take a…
That's why you should stick to Bitcoin, not Ethereum. While I find the problems and musings of the Ethereum crew fascinating, I have started to wonder if it is the crypto equivalent to a planning economy: they'll just add patch after patch to fix thing that are not fixable, making the system more and more complicated. I understand Bitcoin (in principle), it is not that hard to understand. I don't understand most of E…
So many reputations and projects in blockchain rest on this flawed idea that users need to run nodes. Users do nothing to extend the chain! If a group of miners wants to change the protocol, it takes another group of miners to counter it. And there always will be another group, because miners compete. From the bitcoin whitepaper: "He ought to find it more profitable to play by the rules". And let's get serious: users…
> So many reputations and projects in blockchain rest on this flawed idea that users need to run nodes. BSV obviates the idea completely. Any mistake the miners make, is forever. Without this, miners could increase the money supply by indefinitely postponing the block reward. > "He ought to find it more profitable to play by the rules" > If a group of miners wants to change the protocol, it takes another group of min…
This never happened. You are spreading lies.
"An important property of a blockchain that users really value is permanence. A digital asset stored on a server will stop existing in 10 years when the company goes bankrupt or loses interest in maintaining that ecosystem. An NFT on Ethereum, on the other hand, is forever."
This is wrong 2 times.
First, there is no general requirement of permanent storage. Its not important at all. It solely depend on the use case. Thats why it is very much inefficient to use a DLT with that property to move value (btc/eth etc.). I dont care how my coins was moved 10 years ago. The only storage that is relevant for me, now, for value transfer is the current undisputed state (aka the balances). Sure the Tx history has use cases and people who need them should store them but making that a technical requirement is only going to degrade performance and drive up Tx cost.
BTW cash does not have a recorded Tx history who thought "p2p cash" should? Its only because of the way BTC works (chain of all Tx) that this "believe" became common. Its technically not needed at all. There is absolutely no reason to recreate the whole chain to come to the current state. You either use the current state or you cant participate. If you would find an error in the chain whatcha gonna do about? Nothing. The current majority accepted state is all that matters. The "validation" is placebo it does nothing. And by running the exact same software as anyone else your validation would simply do the same error if there would be one.
Second, the "forever" is a blatant lie. There is no way to know. Its will exist for however long at least someone is willing to store it. Exactly the same is true if storing is optional. But without the downside of crippling the performance and impose cost on the people running the DLT. The cost for storage should be paid by the user of the storage. If I can impose cost on all participants of a decentral system for all eternity with a one time payment then the system is deeply flawed. The possibility for abuse can be limited by simply making it expensive at any given time. But this obviously reduces the usefulness of the whole system especially for value transfer. The idea of an internet of value is to make value move like data, dirt cheap and decentral so no one takes a cut.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was trying to summarize, for an employee who got caught in “Elon Musk shouldn’t have manipulated the BTC” (!) (obviously the employee lost 25% of his savings), I was trying to summarize the list of dangers of having savings in BTC. - Laws of any big country could change and trigger the sale for a lot of sellers of a country, - Especially given BTC is used by Iran to bypass petrol restrictions, used by ransomware an…
Bitcoin is about giving the world honest money (someday), not about getting rich. Don't put "savings" in bitcoin.
Scam after scam, that's all blockchain is. Just another way to fleece the average consumer. There has not been a single valuable use, a single product, that actually improves anyone's day / process / life / anything. I am very open to changing my stance if someone presents evidence to the contrary.
Having said that, there's plenty of projects big and small that have merit. Granted, a lot of published "case studies" are just marketing fluff to attract search traffic, that shouldn't be an indictment of the technology itself which shows a lot of potential, especially where complex transactions need to be brokered between parties with competing interests.
DHL & Accenture have investigated and prototyped uses in supply chain logistics for pharmaceuticals -
- https://supplychaindigital.com/technology-4/dhl-and-accentur...
- https://www.dhl.com/au-en/home/insights-and-innovation/insig...
- [PDF warning DHL case study] dhl.com/content/dam/dhl/global/core/documents/pdf/glo-core-blockchain-trend-report.pdf
Banks are serious about blockchain for reconciliation -
- https://australianfintech.com.au/cba-westpac-back-r3-blockch...
Use case for trading distributed power generation with power ledger smart contracts -
https://www.powerledger.io/clients/tata-power-ddl-india
You'll find most of these projects are in prototype phase or early adoption, and as I said there's loads of disinformation, but if you filter through the crud and look for serious projects with demonstrated applications or investments you should be able to see the potential.
Again if you recall the mid 90's, companies like Amazon were just an online book shop, or Google was just an idea in a statistician's thesis. Far more ideas bombed that were successful; there was a time when the internet hadn't decided what to do about advertising and settled on Google's model. There was a bubble that popped and lots of investors were left in the lurch. But eventually the ideas that worked survived and these companies are the largest in the world today and spawned entire new industries.
In light of this, my view is that it's a stretch to say "scam after scam, that's all blockchain is." at this point, although there are plenty of scams surrounding it, definitely don't write it off entirely just yet.
If Vitalik is correct that the only viable defense against the attack described in this article is users validating nodes en masse, then blockchain is doomed, because you're never going to convince more than a small percentage of users to validate blocks. Personally, I think that custodial entities such as Coinbase (or in the future, banks) can probably be relied on to not do anything too controversial.
(It might still be useful, but you can’t call it decentralized or censorship-resistant or whatever)