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

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

#341

Post by democracy » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 8:55 AM UTC

rileyphone wrote: post #231

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…

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

That's true! At least there is one great use-case )))

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

#342

Post by meheleventyone » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 8:56 AM UTC

Uehreka wrote: post #306

mirzap wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I totally agree. We got the Internet in the mid-90s and by that point all the utility was totally obvious. Even using services like Wireplay for online gaming showed the potential very clearly. As you note adoption of the Internet is way more tied up in adoption of home computing and the exponential expansion of that. It was a pre-requisite.

Blockchain tech on the other hand has no pre-requisites blocking adoption, just no use cases. All this “it’s too early” talk never says why.

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

#343

Post by cmews » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 8:56 AM UTC

Animats wrote: post #321

cmews wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tra…

Helium network is also battling bad actors in the network and even though the have anti cheat measures in place they are currently voting on a deny list approach to target bad actors as well.

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

#344

Post by tiluha » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 8:57 AM UTC

clairity wrote: post #181

galaxyLogic wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

close to? sounds exactly like money laundering, since people who can move money legitimately wouldn’t do so through a relatively risky instrument like bitcoin. tax evasion is a likely entry-level reason, but often coupled with other sketchy illegalities.

Why would you use bitcoin for tax evasion where everyone can see the source of the money? Isn't laundering supposed to hide the origin of funds?

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

#345

Post by staticassertion » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 9:00 AM UTC

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.

Databases have been doing that for a long time. Blockchains only add additional guarantees that matter when you have hostile participants, which only matters if you're decentralizing your system, which you probably don't want to do for a lot of things (like tracking ownership of a car).

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

#346

Post by mojuba » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 9:02 AM UTC

mirzap wrote: post #200

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…

It might be that the idea is too complex to be viable or useful. The graveyard of technologies created in the past decades stretches to the horizon, so if something doesn't work after 10 years doesn't mean it will work in the future. This is kind of obvious.

Specifically with blockchain my intuition is that, if its main selling points - immutability and decentralization - are already invalidated in the early days (10 years that is), the chances that it will recover are slim.

Complex tech tends to centralize to become cheaper. Also immutability is very problematic in terms of the right-to-forget and also in terms of illegal content and illegal operations.

Email's purpose and utility was super-obvious from day one, we just had to figure out how to make it more secure. Notice how email too became centralized, however.

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

#347

Post by dmitriid » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 9:02 AM UTC

ique wrote: post #326

usrbinbash wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 servi…

> Users are free to switch service providers as they see fit

No they are not. That is, they will need just as "free" to switch in the non-blockchain world.

Why? Obvious, isn't it?

- Blockchains can't store the amounts of data required (Youtube/Instagram/TikTok on blockchain? What a nice joke)

- Even if you somehow can, companies will store data in their own proprietary ways incompatible with each other

- And, of course, this data will be on different blockchains, some of them invented specifically for the purpose

In reality though, as we're seeing it with NFTs all the data will be centrally stored with only some meaningless tokens referencing it stored on blockchains

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

#348

Post by staticassertion » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 9:03 AM UTC

rileyphone wrote: post #231

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…

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

The thing is it's not really particularly good at that. No moreso at least because of any attributes of the blockchain. It's really because of external reasons:

1. Lack of tooling and cooperation for investigating fraud

2. Lack of regulation

3. Programmatic interfaces

4. There are markets like the NFT space that are amazing for laundering

But no part of why it's good for crime has to do with blockchain.

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

#349

Post by staticassertion » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 9:04 AM UTC

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…

> 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.

In no way does bitcoin being blockchain based enable you to do this better or more effectively. It's just because it's a less regulated currency.

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

#350

Post by dmitriid » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 9:04 AM UTC

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…

> There exists a transparency in the open-source code of smart contracts that will disrupt the current gatekeepers like the internet did

Ah yes. How can we forget the community-audited and vetted smart contracts that ended up draining its users' wallets of all their money. Transparency!