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It’s not still the early days of blockchain

blog.mollywhite.net

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

#321

Post by Animats »

cmews wrote: post #310
maxfromua wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Now that's an interesting idea. I'd wanted to have "proof of decentralization" - require that nodes be physically distant from each other, to prevent mining farms. But I couldn't figure out a way to prevent cheating. It's easy to fake that you are far away, but hard to fake that you're close, because the speed of light limits ping time.

But if you have something that's a useful network in its own right that keeps track of its own coverage, you can use that to enforce decentralization. The higher the density of nodes in an area, the lower the reward.

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

#322

Post by ique »

x86_64Ubuntu wrote: post #216
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…

There's quite a bit of distance between blockchain tech and preventing Facebook/Google monopolies isn't there? And as long as blockchain tech has some dependency on capital investment, your better funded outfits are always going to have the terrain tilted in their favor.

If it has dependency on capital investment, it's not blockchain tech. Like almost by definition. Unless you adopt a super dumb idea of "blockchain = linked list". If you're talking about more than the data structure then what you're saying makes no sense.

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

#323

Post by delaaxe »

benreesman wrote: post #113
poof131 wrote: post #98

A few months ago I agreed with her entirely. Tether is an unbacked fraud and NFTs are being front-run [1, 2]. The mid-level marketing Ponzi vibe is crazy. The latency of applications on the blockchain is atrocious. But more recently after learning from and interacting with people building in the space my assessment changed. There is an interesting intersection between tech, communities, and economics. There exists a…

I have wondered for awhile why the crypto mega-whales in my vicinity are trading USDT at par or better over the last year or two. My conspiracy theory is that when insiders trade a distressed asset at par or better it’s often a bailout expectation that’s really being traded. Who has unimaginable access to financing, a “stablecoin” going so/so, and a primary line of business critically dependent on Tether, like, I don…

I mean Binance has BUSD no?

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

#324

Post by galaxyLogic »

tsimionescu wrote: post #219
galaxyLogic wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like to create an online application which people could use by paying for its usage in bitcoin. I assume it would make the application much simpler because there would not need to be any or very little user-account management, no sending bills or charging credit-cards. Just gimme them bitcoins. The user-state could be stored on the client-machine, unless they especially want to pay for us backing it up on the…

How do you inagine "giving you bitcoins" will work without you doing something equivalent to sending bills or charging credit cards? Sure, you can publish your wallet address and tell them to send you money. How do you give them access to your content after they have sent their money? How is Bitcoin helping compared to you publishing your IBAN account number and asking for money to be sent directly there?

I'm not very far on my project at all but I assume that a public ledger could tell me that somebody transferred money to the wallet associated with my application.

I wouldn't need to "send bills" because I wouldn't know who my users are. Except that when they login with their crypto-id my application will do work for them, because they have crypto-paid for it.

I wouldn't need to charge credit-cards since they transfer the bitcoins to my account. I only need to know their id and that they have paid me a specific amount of crypto, and that id has used a certain amount of my application.

There needs to be the infra-structure associated with crypto-currency, but not much else. That would make things simpler, I assume. That's my point. Crypto can presumably make payments and user-accounts management simpler. The less you know about your users, the less there is to manage.

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

#325

Post by shrimpx »

galaxyLogic wrote: post #149
wodenokoto wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Dubai, buying real estate with bitcoin is a real thing, and by the looks of it also a big thing. If nothing else, it shows that crypto has succeed in one of its goals: moving money between countries, without being detected/hindered by governments. I mean, I don't know who buys real estate with crypto, but I am assuming that people who live in dubai and have large crypto values are bullish on crypto, and won't wast…

Buying real estate with bit-coin, isn't that close to money laundering?

If you bought your bitcoin with legit money, and then you exchanged the bicoin for a house, and you're doing your taxes correctly, how could that be money laundering?

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

#326

Post by ique »

usrbinbash wrote: post #257
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…

And how does a distributed Ledger solve these problems? Monopolies like Google and Facebook exist, in no small part, because the amount of computation and data they handle is vast, and they have the data centers to deal with that. How much data gets has to be stored on the servers of such services? Per second? I'd assume its in the range of several GiB...again per second . Okay, so how does the blockchain compare to…

Monopolies like Google and Facebook exist because of advertising. Remove advertising and they don't exist.

The fact that they're processing a lot of data is in large part because they need to for advertising.

Still, your understanding of blockchain tech is misleading here. Ethereum is public key registry at best and is not and should not be used to store or process data.

In a blockchain world you can still have service providers, but the user is the one with the power, not the service provider. Users are free to switch service providers as they see fit because their identity and data isn't tied to a single company.

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

#327

Post by lottin »

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.

But is this blockchain-like technology better than the alternatives? What advantages does it have over a simple checksum, for example?

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

#328

Post by dmitriid »

tintor wrote: post #196
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?

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

Ah yes. Unlike that recent issue with a smart contract that was "verified by community" and then drained all wallets of money.

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

#329

Post by nathias »

eterm wrote: post #255
neiman wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> "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.

I'm from EU and this is a lie.

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

#330

Post by speedgoose »

travbrack wrote: post #177
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…

Online shopping hadn't hit product market fit in the late 80s even though the Internet had already been around for a few years.

France had online shopping in the early 80s with the Minitel.
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