11–20 of 411 posts
The whole NFT craze lost me when tech founders I once highly respected started pushing and showing off their ugly gifs and trading cards on Twitter. Bad taste of the bored rich is not a new thing, but I hope NFTs won't become a noble tradition.
* Real charities, not those billionaire tax avoidance schemes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The only two known usage of blockchain that actually seem to offer a clear advantage over some other strategy (running the thing centralized, not having coordination at all, etc) are A) solving double spend (a la Bitcoin) B) solving zooko’s triangle (a la Namecoin, or the clone you mentioned from ipfs). Identity on blockchain beyond resolving zooko’s triangle (I.e. stably mapping pseudonyms to pubkeys) typically does…
Why does Bitcoin have a clear advantage in solving double spend over a centralized solution?
Bitcoin (and it's successors) are a decentralized solution to the double spend problem. If "decentralized" is a requirement, then a cryptocurrency can be an excellent solution. Other known solutions (like "just trust everyone") don't scale well (an understatement!).
If "decentralized" is not a requirement then there are other solutions to the double-spend problem.
I feel the IPFS blog post gave me a glimpse of how blockchain can be cool. In certain cases, the need for decentralization is so strong that it makes sense to build a blockchain system for it (or other secure P2P network thingy). For example, authentication/identity using blockchain technology seems interesting to me. [1] https://blog.ipfs.io/decentralizing-the-internet-s-root/
This author obviously has an axe to grind, so I didn’t get much out of his words.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The only two known usage of blockchain that actually seem to offer a clear advantage over some other strategy (running the thing centralized, not having coordination at all, etc) are A) solving double spend (a la Bitcoin) B) solving zooko’s triangle (a la Namecoin, or the clone you mentioned from ipfs). Identity on blockchain beyond resolving zooko’s triangle (I.e. stably mapping pseudonyms to pubkeys) typically does…
Why does Bitcoin have a clear advantage in solving double spend over a centralized solution?
I feel the IPFS blog post gave me a glimpse of how blockchain can be cool. In certain cases, the need for decentralization is so strong that it makes sense to build a blockchain system for it (or other secure P2P network thingy). For example, authentication/identity using blockchain technology seems interesting to me. [1] https://blog.ipfs.io/decentralizing-the-internet-s-root/
Authentication using the blockchain makes a great AI-resistant alternative to signups with captcha. The same account could be used by multiple independent services and this removes the need for a signup process altogether. It also removes the need for password management since you can use a single account/passphrase to log into various services without revealing your passphrase to any of these services; you can simpl…
I feel the IPFS blog post gave me a glimpse of how blockchain can be cool. In certain cases, the need for decentralization is so strong that it makes sense to build a blockchain system for it (or other secure P2P network thingy). For example, authentication/identity using blockchain technology seems interesting to me. [1] https://blog.ipfs.io/decentralizing-the-internet-s-root/
The only two known usage of blockchain that actually seem to offer a clear advantage over some other strategy (running the thing centralized, not having coordination at all, etc) are A) solving double spend (a la Bitcoin) B) solving zooko’s triangle (a la Namecoin, or the clone you mentioned from ipfs). Identity on blockchain beyond resolving zooko’s triangle (I.e. stably mapping pseudonyms to pubkeys) typically does…
I feel the IPFS blog post gave me a glimpse of how blockchain can be cool. In certain cases, the need for decentralization is so strong that it makes sense to build a blockchain system for it (or other secure P2P network thingy). For example, authentication/identity using blockchain technology seems interesting to me. [1] https://blog.ipfs.io/decentralizing-the-internet-s-root/
Authentication using the blockchain makes a great AI-resistant alternative to signups with captcha. The same account could be used by multiple independent services and this removes the need for a signup process altogether. It also removes the need for password management since you can use a single account/passphrase to log into various services without revealing your passphrase to any of these services; you can simpl…
This is only marginally better than SSO with Google/Apple/Facebook/whatever. It dodges the "Google closed my account" problem, which is a meaningful improvement. But I'm not fully certain why you need the public key to be part of a blockchain for this to work. Couldn't you just publish your public key identity on any number of considerably less wasteful systems? As far as I can tell, the only advantage here is the mapping between the name "UncleMeat" and my public key would be able to be reused across services... but in so many cases I don't want my identity to be consistent across services.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Authentication using the blockchain makes a great AI-resistant alternative to signups with captcha. The same account could be used by multiple independent services and this removes the need for a signup process altogether. It also removes the need for password management since you can use a single account/passphrase to log into various services without revealing your passphrase to any of these services; you can simpl…
Wouldn't that make it impossible to change your password if compromised?
Essentially yes :)
Thanks for posting that. I hadn’t seen Jack’s pro-Bitcoin tweet, and seeing it here allowed me to like and share it. This author obviously has an axe to grind, so I didn’t get much out of his words.
Did they actually get around to talking about cryptocurrency at any point?