It’s not still the early days of blockchain • Hacker News Board

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#191

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 7:35 AM UTC

okwubodu wrote: post #171

ryandamm wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Centralize it and implement something like M-Pesa, or build it on top of the existing mobile networks. The solution is selling standardized contracts to small hold farmers that pay out automatically; the problem has nothing to do with decentralization or trustless transactions. The blockchain adds nothing here, and creates a layer of complexity that makes it more brittle.

> The solution is selling standardized contracts to small hold farmers that pay out automatically And how easy do you think that is in Kenya? You and I being able to take stable banking and government for granted says more about our own position in the world than it does about the efficacy of the technology itself.

[deleted]

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#192

Post by mikeg8 » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 7:36 AM UTC

Dwolb wrote: post #168

jodrellblank wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This https://youtu.be/8CAafjodkyE?t=104 is a recent thing I found mind blowing; 2020 iPhone can do on-device image processing and object recognition and speak a description of what the camera sees. Just quietly a builtin feature. 2010 iPhone, I was mind-blown by the Word Lens app which could do OCR on text in the camera feed, translate the words into another language, and overlay the results on the image in near-real…

Personally the reason it blows my mind is because it’s now permissionless to craft a unique structured product or derivatives protocol, deploy it globally, and anyone on the planet can participate in that market. It’s fully customizable and accessible to anyone with an internet connection.

Call me old fashioned my I prefer regulations in the markets I participate in. I still fail to see how “permissionless market creation”, while impressive, actually solves a problem. Where is the demand coming from, besides people in tech??

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#193

Post by obstacle1 » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 7:36 AM UTC

magicjosh wrote: post #161

obstacle1 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, thought my last paragraph covered that. Can any blockchain-backed tech handle the number of transactions per second that current major credit card/payment networks do? One benchmark is 1,700 tps for VISA. https://phemex.com/blogs/what-is-transactions-per-second-tps If not, why not? Especially after 10+ years of development and intense VC funding (as is the parent article's point).

1,700 tps for VISA is a good benchmark. I recall VISA's technical capability is 10x or 100x that number, Ethereum 1.0 can handle 30 transactions per second. Part of the development dubbed "Ethereum 2.0" is focused on scaling the number of transactions via sharding. Each shard will be able to handle 2,400 tps. As more shards are deployed up to 64, Ethereum 2.0 will reach 160,000 tps.

I am interested in learning about how "shard chains" work.

I'm concerned after reading https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/shard-chains/ that sharding is aimed at letting individual dApps roll up transactions -- i.e. the individual app would be the effective shard key -- and thus that would introduce some notion of centralization into the system.

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#194

Post by chrischen » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 7:36 AM UTC

My purely anecdotal experience so far has been that crypto bulls have tended to be more business-y/finance type people and, even among technical people, the technical people who don’t actually know how a blockchain works. Not a good sign for the technology and its applications but I don’t think all crypto is useless… but a lot of the hype is definitely by people trying to get rich quick with a hand-wavy understanding of the technology.

A lot of people missed out on Bitcoin early days… best way to cash in is to fork it and voila, the crypto Cambrian explosion where most of the forks will eventually die off.

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#195

Post by scotty79 » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 7:37 AM UTC

I guess I'm old bacause all the he things listed as exapmle how far away was 2009 and especially 2015 feel new or at least newish to me.

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#196

Post by tintor » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 7:37 AM UTC

BoiledCabbage wrote: post #187

neiman wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems you are looking for a product blockchain enables you, but there are activities the blockchain enables which are not products, and are very difficult up to impossible without. One example is sustainable (financially) open-source project is one I use now. Before that it was always impossible. You get a bunch of people all over the world, many of them are identified only by Internet handles. There's no investme…

I'm trying to understand. You're saying that you wouldn't be able to perform online votes or surveys and remotely send money without a blockchain? Could you expand more on what functionality that the blockchain provides that the other solutions in this space (online surveys and remotely send money) don't?

They don't have to trust each other. ie. No need to have a dedicated treasurer.

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#197

Post by smokey_circles » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 7:37 AM UTC

magicjosh wrote: post #69

cuteboy19 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will always be "early days". Crypto requires a constant influx of marks who genuinely believe that they are early, as a ponzi scheme only ever benefits early entrants. No crypto enthusiast is ever going to tell that you are late.

For a pyramid scheme that certainly holds up. Whoever joins last seems most incentivized to bring others in. Has anyone modeled pyramid scheme dynamics to Bitcoin perhaps at an academic level? (Disclosure I own Bitcoin and Ethereum)

I don't understand how bitcoin is a ponzi scheme. There's no pyramid shape, which is kind of crucial. "Just look at the whales" uh huh, you mean like the dollar?

It's just a value store. Debating the efficacy of the value store is fine, labeling it a ponzi scheme seems reductive to absurdity.

The real problem (unsurprisingly) is with fiat currencies. These are heavily regulated, nearly made up values. That crash, often. We put handbrakes on the systems (see gamestop, mortgage debt crisis etc) because of how unsafe they can be.

If we trade goods for fiat currency, we put handbrakes and regulations there too.

The bitcoin/fiat exchange is merely proof why we need these regulations. Until it (the crypto/fiat intersection) is regulated, it's not gonna look and feel like what we're used to.

There are good criticisms to be made of bitcoin (like how centralized most mining operations are, the community's constant in-fighting and many more). It's drowned out by daft arguments like pollution (that's a whole other economic sectors fault) and ponzi schemes.

Maybe other coins could be construed that way (again, regulations required) but not bitcoin.

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#198

Post by adgjlsfhk1 » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 7:38 AM UTC

Shish2k wrote: post #121

heurist wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a way to authenticate yourself without a centralized authority. So right now it's being used to create exclusive communities, access to which theoretically has some value. In the future, there may be application ecosystems which operate solely against your wallet information, no need for registration. Maybe that has some value too - time will tell. I don't follow the details of the web3 market closely, so not sp…

> It's a way to authenticate yourself without a centralized authority PGP did that 31 years ago though, faster and more efficient and without all the downsides?

inefficiency here can actually be useful, it's similar to password stretching. If you know someone had to burn $10 of electricity to make an authentication, it hurts more to get banned.

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#199

Post by ique » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 7:38 AM UTC

hubraumhugo wrote: post #33

I'm still very opposed to the idea of taking a technology and then searching a problem for it. Why? Back in 2017 during the first hype cycle, blockchain companies raised hundreds of millions with ICOs. I became very interested in the technology too, and some friends still work in this space. 4 years later in the web3 era, there is not a single product aside from trading/finance that got traction. Use cases like stori…

The idea that blockchain tech is somehow invented out of nothing and then we search for a problem to match couldn't be further from the truth. Talk to anyone who works in the industry and they're trying to solve a problem.

I used to work in blockchain tech and the main problem I was focused on was "How do we prevent internet monopolies like Facebook and Google?".

If you don't see those monopolies as a problem, then you're disagreeing with the problem space, that doesn't make it "trying to find a problem".

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#200

Post by mirzap » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 7:41 AM UTC

Well, 10y ago is not ages ago. Email existed for 30 years before it was ready for consumers. Same is with the internet. Certain types of technologies require decades research and development. I would argue that in 20 years it will still be "early days" of blockchain. And only in mid 40 we will figure out apps and who nows what to fully utilize underlining technology. Right now we are just coping what we have outside of blockchain and put it on the blockchain. Same as people couldn't imagine how internet could possibly transform their business and life, we now can't imagine how Bitcoin and blockchain will transform our business and life in the future. It's too early.