I think the author hasn’t heard about DeFi. It’s pretty mind blowing what people are building on top of blockchains these days. But of course users who are not directly affected are oblivious to the advances and are just upset that they are not being served as users. If you think blockchain is useless: you are not the target user. The day it becomes useful to you, then you can choose to use it or not, but that day you’ll probably use it without knowing you’re using it. After all, do you have a clue what backbone your bank is using to perform wire transfers?
It’s not still the early days of blockchain
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Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
I spent some time looking into Proof-of-Stake coins. Specifically, the Proof-of-Stake system advocated by Tezos. Give it a lookover, it's actually a fairly quick read. https://tezos.gitlab.io/active/proof_of_stake.html Unfortunately, it's also very flawed, and nulls most of the security properties we thought we would get by switching to "Blockchain Technology": if someone captures 50% of this chain, it is quite easy…
You should read into BFT protocols. Hotstuff is probably the reference today.
Maybe I should! Feel free to suggest links and papers. Part of the challenge is that some of these concepts are super varied in their implementation, despite having similar names, and I can only come to understand the tradeoffs of a complete system.
"Byzantine Fault Tolerance" is a huge umbrella term that covers a lot of different tactics and approaches, so I welcome recommendations for concrete systems to investigate.
EDIT: The reference to Hotstuff was added after I posted this reply. I'll investigate it.
Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain
#13I'm not long on anything blockchain related.
But I don't understand why people get so invested in it being a scam or failure.
Maybe it is, and it'll all die. That's fine. Why do people spend so much time insisting that it's the inevitable outcome. Let it do its thing, find something better to do.
Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain
#14Blockchains exist for a reason completely other than performance. Of course a centralized database would perform better. That’s not the point. I think engineers keep getting hung up on this and don’t zoom out and see the big picture.
Except that as Moxie pointed out just recently, the way it all is set up, everything is centralized anyway. So it's not actually being used in a different way.
Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain
#15> All that to say, a lot has changed in the technology world in the past six to twelve years
It sure has. But not really that fundamentally, since 2009.
A lot has changed in the blockchain space too. Just because you don't know about it doesn't mean it isn't true. A lot of those changes are on par with some of the tech advancements mentioned before my quote in the article. In 2009, you had bitcoin, so basically a distributed consensus workaround that enables artificial scarcity of fungible digital items. Today, you have sharded blockchains, triple entry bookkeeping, proof of stake, blockchains that handle incentivized file storage, alternate name lookup systems, purchasing compute power on an automated order book, liquidity pools (a major, major fintech advancement if you're not familiar with then), arbitrary code execution with a canonical record of it.
It is absolutely still early days.
Because these are decentralized consensus networks, there's inertia. Bitcoin is never going to be cutting edge. Because there's a lot of money to be made, there will be scams. Most of the "cutting edge" isn't cutting edge at all. But there are some real developments happening, allowing novel use cases, enabling very interesting things to be done.
I'm not a fan of the whole web3 concept. I think 99% of the selling points that the charlatans hype every market cycle are nonsense. But a little digging beyond an animated JS bloat landing page (a red flag all it's own) and you can quickly figure out what projects potentially have something and what's bullshit. Or you can do what I do and assume a project is a scam until proven otherwise.
Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain
#16Blockchains exist for a reason completely other than performance. Of course a centralized database would perform better. That’s not the point. I think engineers keep getting hung up on this and don’t zoom out and see the big picture.
The parent article doesn't say anything about performance. Therefore this comment seems like a red herring. A case of not reading the article?
The parent article's point is that most currently popular technologies found an application rather quickly, whereas blockchain technologies have been around for a long time (in tech terms) and still have not made ground.
Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain
#17Blockchains exist for a reason completely other than performance. Of course a centralized database would perform better. That’s not the point. I think engineers keep getting hung up on this and don’t zoom out and see the big picture.
I feel like even after zooming out and seeing the big picture, it's hard to imagine blockchain solving real world problems. Blockchains are good when there's a lack of trust and decentralization is absolutely necessary. There are very few problems that actually need a blockchain. Anything that has the government in the loop (like buying houses or property) is a non starter and anything that runs on centralized server…
You're right. And bitcoiners have been saying this from the very beginning of the crypto madness.
A global, government agnostic money like bitcoin that no group of insiders and early adopters have unassailable control over, seems like the only likely candidate for something that needs a truly decentralized and trustless blockchain.
The rest is hype.
Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain
#18Blockchains exist for a reason completely other than performance. Of course a centralized database would perform better. That’s not the point. I think engineers keep getting hung up on this and don’t zoom out and see the big picture.
Exactly, People on all extremes of this just cant seem to understand the simple reality that “the market can bear it.”
The market can bear smart contract platforms whether that platform writes to a proof of work system, a faster distributed set of nodes, or on localhost with port forwarding.
It doesnt matter! People like to deploy that kind of code on a platform that can be accessed that kind of way.
If there isn’t a token then people DDOS it instantly, with smart contracts that take up too much processing cycles or memory. Simple. People dont want to use limited fiat payment rails to attempt to preallocate resources, it doesnt work very well at arbitrary amounts, it ceases to be permissionless and the author is agreeable here: its been 13 years of this other solution and is an international hit!
Think about developers on Shopify’s app store that try to sell to ecommerce merchants. Its the same people with the same goals! Sell tools that theoretically make someone else’s life easier. Extract value because commerce exists. Thats really valuable. Thats exactly whats going on in blockchain. Just because you and your friends are taking linear bets with your capital and cant quantify why things go up way too often really has nothing to do with the people that built that tool for you who are taking little basis points here and there.
Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain
#19I think the author hasn’t heard about DeFi. It’s pretty mind blowing what people are building on top of blockchains these days. But of course users who are not directly affected are oblivious to the advances and are just upset that they are not being served as users. If you think blockchain is useless: you are not the target user. The day it becomes useful to you, then you can choose to use it or not, but that day yo…
I'm not aware of any serious financial application running at scale and relying on blockchain under the hood.
Are you? What is it? Specifically.
Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain
#20Blockchains exist for a reason completely other than performance. Of course a centralized database would perform better. That’s not the point. I think engineers keep getting hung up on this and don’t zoom out and see the big picture.
Except that as Moxie pointed out just recently, the way it all is set up, everything is centralized anyway. So it's not actually being used in a different way.
And he was right of his critique.
Of course, he's saying all that after pumping and dumping his personal centralized crypto crap MobileCoin into Signal.