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It’s not still the early days of blockchain

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

#301

Post by piva00 »

neiman wrote: post #276
eterm wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Remotely send money" is a super hard thing to do. Technologically it is not. Which is why anyone in the EU can instantly send money to anywhere else in the EU, for free, despite being a collection of 27 countries with dozens of different languages and legacy banking systems. The hurdles are legal and regulatory, not technical. Blockchain and new technology does not solve the underlying problem at all.

Part of the transaction I described (which was personal) involved a bank transfer between two EU states, and it's simply not true. It's not instantly, doesn't work 24/7 (a transaction made on Friday arrived on Tuesday), and you have to find plenty of tricks to avoid high fees and super bad exchange rates (EU has more than one currency, you know).

Wise (former Transferwise) is pretty much instant in the EU, with very low fees.

Even then, transferring money with SEPA from my Swedish account to friends in Germany, Poland and the Netherlands is pretty much instant, I just don't like the exchange rate of my bank.

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

#302

Post by ulfw »

neiman wrote: post #229
BoiledCabbage wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Sure. "Remotely send money" is a super hard thing to do. I literally just struggled for a month with a transfer that included 3 countries, none of them is English speaking. It required letters from banks, accountants, plenty of forms of different countries, translations, stuff which is lost in translation (the bank was unhappy with the word selection of a non-English speaker accountant, for example), different format…

But none of that needs Blockchain as a technical solution.

E.g. my bank allows worldwide free SWIFT transfers in many many currencies. It's not hard to find out someone's name, bank account number and SWIFT code et voila... money sent. There's plenty of other solutions from Paypal to (Transfer)Wise etc.

Saying "it can be done in 20 seconds with crypto" is really only half the truth. At the end of the day we all need fiat money. So there's always a conversion step (if not two!) between fiat -> crypto -> fiat money. I can't pay my baker in Cardano nor my hair stylist in Fantom.

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

#303

Post by red_trumpet »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #268
rileyphone wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blockchain is proving a more than capable solution in the ransomware payments space, enabling a whole new class of malware.

It also enables people to finance themselves despite tyrannical restrictions imposed by bad governments. Using bitcoin I can send money to someone in Chi no a who's social rating was degraded by the CCP and who is forbidden from using banks. This alone trumps any arguments against bitcoin. Crime will exist forever and criminals will find ways to finance themselves anyway, so the use of cryptocurrencies for their oper…

And of the CCP ever finds out, he will end up in jail. And if they can link your wallet to you, you will not be able to travel to China anymore.

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

#304

Post by 3825 »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #268
rileyphone wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blockchain is proving a more than capable solution in the ransomware payments space, enabling a whole new class of malware.

It also enables people to finance themselves despite tyrannical restrictions imposed by bad governments. Using bitcoin I can send money to someone in Chi no a who's social rating was degraded by the CCP and who is forbidden from using banks. This alone trumps any arguments against bitcoin. Crime will exist forever and criminals will find ways to finance themselves anyway, so the use of cryptocurrencies for their oper…

> Using bitcoin I can send money to someone in Chi no a who's social rating was degraded by the CCP and who is forbidden from using banks

How will they convert it into something they can use to pay rent and buy groceries?

> Crime will exist forever and criminals will find ways to finance themselves anyway, so the use of cryptocurrencies for their operations is not really a factor.

Does this make it easier for the wealthy to evade taxes? I find just signing transactions using something like gpg a much easier to reason about.

My biggest concern about cryptocurrency is fees. There is no reason why fees should be based on payload as far as I understand. Whether I’m sending one satoshi (or any other unit of money) or a trillion, the cost should be the same and ideally as close to zero as possible if not zero. This was the original reason I was drawn to bitcoin but it was obvious it would never be the case.

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

#305

Post by neiman »

hnhg wrote: post #280
neiman wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I transfer all my financial actions to my accountant who's reporting it while instructing me what I need to do further. Compliance and reporting really differ from one country to another, and I'm not familiar with the US system (which I heard is one of the most strict). But as far as I checked (I'm not a lawyer, not an accountant and not an expert), where I live in the EU, compliance is something for legal entities (…

I'm not sure that's the case. I'm no expert but I believe those entities exist in part to take liability away from us as individuals. It's my understanding that, for example, in certain cases of privacy and security regulation I would be personally liable as an individual without an entity to undertake it for me. This could change by country and entity type though, even in the EU.

You're probably right. I really wrote a too general remark, but actually meant specific things about my situation. I added a part now taking this general statement back.

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

#306

Post by Uehreka »

mirzap wrote: post #234
unityByFreedom wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Email required everyone to have a computer, plus infrastructure to connect them. Blockchain has been waiting on a useful implementation since inception.

No. Email didn't have useful implementation (UI) until 30y after it was invented. Only geeks and tech savy people were able to use it because it was not so easy to use. Sending messages was really hard, sending would often fail. So you would say, 25y after email inception there was no useful implementation and no usage by consumers, so technology is worthless. And there were people who were saying that, I'm sure. Sam…

Until 1998, my middle class American family didn’t have internet. I was a rather tech-curious kid, but until we actually had a second phone line run to our house and a new Gateway computer and a modem, there was this huge barrier to what I could learn about on our airgapped Windows 3.1 machine. My Dad was able to navigate the command line because he’d needed to on our previous DOS computer, so I feel like he could’ve handled email if we’d had a connection back then. I’d argue that infrastructure was a pretty big barrier to email catching on, not just the UI.

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

#307

Post by robjan »

Galanwe wrote: post #271
tomputer wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Use cases like storing the history of a car on-chain, transparent supply chains, public voting... this all sounds interesting but never made it to product-market fit. Anything that does not exist natively on the blockchain doesn't need a blockchain at all. If a token on the blockchain would represent you as the owner of a car and one day someone steals your private key which represents your car ownership, that pers…

> one day someone steals your private key which represents your car ownership, that person is now the owner of your car. Why take such a naive blockchain as example? You could very well have a proof of authority blockchain so that 3 notary have to sign a car transaction. You could also very well have revocation lists published on the blockchain by a further authority if keys are stolen. There are hundreds of ways to…

Who appoints the notaries?

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

#308

Post by yashg »

tomc1985 wrote: post #279
yashg wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any cool stuff that doesn't involve speculative trading in some "coin" or "token"? I recently read about a steel maker in India executing a cross border order on blockchain. On further reading it turns out their bank used a third party company for digitizing letter of credit and that company claims to be using an enterprise blockchain R3 Corda. R3 itself is owned by a consortium of banks and on their website…

> My understanding is that a blockchain is supposed to be distributed, trustless, permissionless, immutable and open. A blockchain is just a data structure. That description is more befitting of Decentralized Finance/DeFi

OK so a privately owned and controlled blockchain which only allows trusted users to add blocks is still a blockchain?

What would be the advantages of using a private, permissioned blockchain over a MySQL/Oracle/SQL Server database for storing data?

Why as an external user would I trust a centralized blockchain more than I would trust a centralized database? They are both private owned and controlled by a company.

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

#309

Post by rileyphone »

Dwolb wrote: post #48

IMO L1 (Ethereum, Solana, Fantom, etc.) development is closer to building out a communications or telco network. From that “hard” technology perspective, it’s very early days. And the apps that run on top of these L1s are fully limited by L1 bandwidth, latency, and blockspace. So, I think we’re in the pre-dial-up days for blockchains and will need a couple more orders of magnitude improvement to be (universally) on p…

The information bandwidth on block based cryptocurrencies is far too low to support these deeper levels of complexity, and I doubt will ever get much better. Blockchains, despite being a distributed phenomenon, still centralize the flow of information into one stream, the chain. Ethereum, by my estimation, operates at around 7 kB/s, and Bitcoin at 2kB/s. These are clearly glacial speeds - think of how limited an internet connection at those speeds is. How will more informationally needy systems be constructed on top of so paltry a base? The problem is a blockchain's protocol must somehow coordinate the distributed actions of its participants, which are generally spread out across the world. By centralizing information in the chain, they are exhibiting the same intractable slowdown that we would see trying to emulate a brain on a CPU.

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

#310

Post by cmews »

maxfromua wrote: post #295
cmews wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Helium network is an example of a successful blockchain project/application in my opinion. They created the biggest decentralized lorawan network in the world that is used by more internet of things companies everyday. Also they are trying the same thing for creating a decentralized 5G network. It’s still early days for them because I think they started in the end of 2020 or the start of 2021, but they have grown to…

Sorry, can you please explain (or give some link) how it is related to blockchain? https://www.helium.com/lorawan doesn’t mention this word In general, I was under the impression that IoT devices are underpowered for such usage. Thank you!

It’s on their homepage (helium.com) with the following text:

‘’’ Powered by the Helium Blockchain, The People’s Network represents a paradigm shift for decentralized wireless infrastructure. ‘’’

They use the blockchain in combination with a proof of coverage algorithm to reward hotspots. https://docs.helium.com/blockchain/proof-of-coverage/

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