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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

#311

Post by [deleted] »

boppo1 wrote: post #207
malwarebytess wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is what financialization does. Finance is a parasite that will destroy all potential if given room. To force finance to be symbiotic you must never allow them to control anything. These ideas are best left in the academy, and then later financialized. The exception to this is internal R&D (like Bell Labs and countless other extremely productive corporate divisions.)

Out of curiosity: How well have significant Bell Labs contributors been compensated? It seems to me that lost of current tech, and even 'future tech' not yet adopted has come out of Bell Labs. But how many of the engineers that came up with said advances settled for relative peanuts? Getting paid $250K for something that changes the world seems... less than adequate. Maybe I'm just greedy. I don't think so.

[deleted]

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

#312

Post by darawk »

vba616 wrote: post #288
darawk wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm still very opposed to the idea of taking a technology and then searching a problem for it. So, you're opposed to the internet, then?

Maybe you could refer to some history more specifically? Are you saying networking technology was developed in advance of a concept of what it's useful for? Or is it that a global network of networks was a qualitative step beyond simple networking that didn't have a clear justification?

> Maybe you could refer to some history more specifically? Are you saying networking technology was developed in advance of a concept of what it's useful for?

I'm saying that networking technologies original intended use (resilient nuclear launch capability) is a tiny irrelevant fraction of what it is used for today.

I'd argue that most transformative technologies are in fact not relegated to their original intended use. Following cool/interesting/powerful technologies to see where they lead, rather than knowing the destination in advance, is how we have gotten almost everything that we have.

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

#313

Post by ique »

obstacle1 wrote: post #237
ique wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 y…

> Talk to anyone who works in the industry and they're trying to solve a problem. Sure. But are those problems worth solving? How many VCs does the world need to pump cash into NFT-enabled video games before we ask the question, "why?" https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/22/nba-top-shot-creator-dappe...

What makes a problem worth solving exactly?

How many SaaS businesses do we need? How many todo apps do we need? How many game engines do we need?

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

#314

Post by neiman »

piva00 wrote: post #301
neiman wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wise (Germany->Poland) is the one who took me 4 days (Friday->Tuesday)...

I have no idea how you did an instant transfer from Sweden to Poland.

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

#315

Post by throwawaylinux »

CryptoPunk wrote: post #37
throwawaylinux wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the big picture then? I've never got anything concrete that doesn't sound like the usual buzz word snake oil. Blockchains solve the wrong problem for a lot of the proposed applications I've seen, like handwaving about "supply chain". The biggest difficulty is not that you don't trust the database, it's that you don't trust the connection between the electronic data and reality. How do you trust a person to ha…

>>So aside from coins, where else is it that you would not trust a central database, but you can verify/trust the entries being added to that database? I would not trust a central database for any application, even those where I have to trust the verifiers of the entries to that database. E.g. I would prefer stablecoins over credit in a bank. With a decentralized database, immutability and permissionlessness are the…

> I would not trust a central database for any application, even those where I have to trust the verifiers of the entries to that database.

I don't see how that's reasonable. What am I missing, surely virtually nobody would be willing to spend the massive resources of a blockchain for that kind of risk model.

> E.g. I would prefer stablecoins over credit in a bank.

So aside from coins, what's another concrete example?

> With a decentralized database, immutability and permissionlessness are the default, until the trusted third party actively intervenes to strip you of these privileges.

> With a centralized database, access is by default denied, and requires active intervention from the trusted third party, in the form of a grant of permission, to acquire.

This sounds very much like the buzzword snake oil I've heard many times before, but I'm willing to be open minded about your non-coin example.

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

#316

Post by hectormalot »

andreskytt wrote: post #294
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…

That said, blockchain-like technologies (ksi, more specifically) can be used to assure the integrity of databases storing the relationship between you and your car.

Yes, but is it a problem worth solving beyond what we have today? What’s the last time we saw an database integrity failure at the DMV/… leading to cars being owned by people that shouldn’t?

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

#317

Post by leppr »

adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #186
systemvoltage wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no idea what blockchain does or not. But just because its applications have turned out to be scammy, is it possible that it still has good uses in the future? May be and may be not. OP is saying more generally that we should stop looking at tech that has no uses. I am disagreeing with that stance and it is just silly to be so wound up about Blockchain zeitgeist to not see through the fog.

the problem with Blockchain is that it is strictly less efficient than centralized databases. therefore the only reason to use it is if you can't trust a centralized database. it's like torrents in the alternate universe where torrents were slower than a download from a server.

It's not a bad analogy. Torrents have more cumbersome UX and are less data efficients than direct downloads, yet they are widely used for some types of applications.

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

#318

Post by ique »

tjs8rj wrote: post #217
ique wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 y…

How does blockchain tech prevent monopolies exactly? Any environment that respects property rights and has activities that can be done more efficiently with scale and concentration will have centralization. Cryptocurrencies themselves are centralized by almost every dimension because mining exhibits those characteristics. Nearly any interesting on chain technology is centralized in that a minority disproportionately…

You are using a very different meaning of centralisation and decentralisation than blockchain people do.

That's neither here nor there though.

The way you kill Facebook, Google and any Web2 company is to kill their business model. These are all 100% ad-funded businesses. Kill the advertising funded internet and these monopolies categorically die with it.

The only _attempt_ I've ever seen at addressing the issue that all the major websites are ad-funded has been within the blockchain space. Show me any other realistic alternative to ad-funding and I will happily adopt it.

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

#319

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!

Also the internet of things devices are not running the blockchain but can (energy) efficiently transfer data to the helium network. The hotspots are also quite efficient if you look at the power usage (more similar to a light bulb instead of a proof of work miner)

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

#320

Post by tomputer »

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…

I don't think it's a naive example. All these kind of proposed blockchain solutions raise the same questions for me:

Why do you need a decentralized blockchain with tokens to solve that problem? If not for the tokens, what incentive have people to keep running and protect the blockchain against attacks? The oracle problem: how do you prevent someone from pushing false or duplicate data to the blockchain?

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