Live data from Hacker News

It’s not still the early days of blockchain

blog.mollywhite.net

601–610 of 1001 posts

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

#601
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…

> 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. I feel like a lot of the cryptocurrency critics commit the "fallacy fallacy". That is, they…

Nah, it’s like this: people believe crypto is good because of X, Y, Z, A, B and C. All of them are false, except for C in some odd circumstances. Therefore, the current state of crypto is not good.

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

#602
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…

I'd say with email the application was always crystal clear: It's like sending a letter, but electronically and therefore instantly. This must have been obvious to everyone in that space even 40 years ago. Maybe it wasn't obvious how big email would be one day, but there were definitely no doubts about what it would be used for. As someone who is trying to understand the applications of "crypto", it is very frustrati…

The application of Bitcoin is also crystal clear: distributed, digital money. It’s like gold, but electronic, and therefore much faster/cheaper in certain scenarios (and slower/more expensive in others).

Reasonable people disagree on whether this application is actually something we need, or will need in the future. But the application is clear as day.

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

#603

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…

I like the idea that the chain can be used as the source of truth when other sources of truth have failed us. first 15 minutes of this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cwbbxb987vE

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

#604
post #587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been documenting this with specific companies. A recent one that I worked with was Omnichains: https://www.omnichains.com "Omnichain CEO Pratik Soni speaks to Inbound Logistics about the growing number of blockchain use cases in the supply chain, including in reverse logistics, product authentication and sustainability." Apparently this company started with the idea that they would use the blockchain to make sup…

There's selling NFTs of ape cartoons, or selling crypto coins or other imaginary assets. Rails and MySQL are too transitory for that - you'd buy a record in the database only to find the company hosting the database had gone broke or been bought by Yahoo who closed them. You buy a bitcoin and you can be fairly confident in a decade or two you'll still have it.

> You buy a bitcoin and you can be fairly confident in a decade or two you'll still have it.

You’ll have a copy of some hashes. That doesn’t mean anyone will want to buy them at the price you want or even that there will be an operating network around them.

This is especially important to learn when it comes to NFTs: blockchains are too inefficient to store the media so you’re still dependent on paying for outside hosting (yes, even with IPFS). Because you’re buying a link but not the rights, you would also need to make sure you have the right to even make your own mirror, too.

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

#605
post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are all kinds of limitations in how exactly you are allowed to use your money. Where are you getting that from? If the money has been earned in a legit manner and you want to spend it on a legitimate thing, who's stopping you from spending it? Yes if your source of money isn't legal or you want to spend on something illegal, that's a different story.

My money is completely legal, but it was a protracted process to: A.) Transfer a part of it (for this particular bank, anything more than $5000) to pay a deposit for a house; B.) Make a final settlement on a house, again with money I had available in my account. There are limitations on how much you can transfer easily at once, and different kinds of approval and parties have to be involved to pay for something large…

Those per transaction limits are for YOUR protection so in case someone hacks into your account they won't empty it and you can ask the bank to raise the limits.

Banks ask you the reason for transactions beyond a certain amount because they have to report it to authorities.

Large transactions like paying for a property don't happen at the drop of the hat. You won't just wake up in the middle of the night and decide to buy a property immediately right then.

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

#606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with USD monopoly? I am genuinely clueless, it's good to have currencies that are accepted anywhere in the world, isn't it?

The issue is that USD use imply to follow a few conditions/rules which the the U.S use to its own interest IIRC

By having USD in my pocket I need to follow certain rules? Like what?

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

#607
post #587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been documenting this with specific companies. A recent one that I worked with was Omnichains: https://www.omnichains.com "Omnichain CEO Pratik Soni speaks to Inbound Logistics about the growing number of blockchain use cases in the supply chain, including in reverse logistics, product authentication and sustainability." Apparently this company started with the idea that they would use the blockchain to make sup…

There's selling NFTs of ape cartoons, or selling crypto coins or other imaginary assets. Rails and MySQL are too transitory for that - you'd buy a record in the database only to find the company hosting the database had gone broke or been bought by Yahoo who closed them. You buy a bitcoin and you can be fairly confident in a decade or two you'll still have it.

>Rails and MySQL are too transitory for that - you'd buy a record in the database only to find the company hosting the database had gone broke or been bought by Yahoo who closed them.

Wouldn't working with more robust companies (like banks) solve this?

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

#608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the perfect example of a critic response and exactly the phenomenon I'm describing. On 1, you're somehow conveniently ignoring the "without permission or interference from a third party.". I never mentioned against a car, stock, or house. Nonetheless the functionality still exists. Using ETH or other crypto assets. It gets so much easier. Have you tried it? No talking to advisors, no documents, no discriminat…

> without permission or interference from a third party Aren’t other nodes the third parties? If you are talking automated loan, you should look into credit lines backed by assets. Pledge assets lines. Once open, it’s fully automated and you don’t need to interact with a third party either.

They can't interfere with what you want to do. They could try to prevent you from interacting for a while but it would be futile. There are heavy disencentives, and decentralised enough. Which is why this has basically never happened. Talking strictly bitcoin and Ethereum here.

In honesty I have no experience with a pledge asset line but I can guarantee you that if the institutions involved in conducting it wanted to, they could cancel it on you anytime. With a correctly coded smart contract on Ethereum, you could ensure that never happens.

One system requires trust in third parties. One gives you the option to design a system to minimise or eliminate it.

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

#609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, I think a notary signature in the US costs like $4. If verification is the only problem that blockchain solves, it's not a very cost-effective solution.

For me, a US notary signature currently involved a 2 month wait time at the US embassy. At the notary I used back in San Francisco, it cost $30, not including the cost of going there.

You can go into any bank and get a document notarized for free or a few dollars.

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

#610
post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing the forest for the trees. Bitcoin is broken and will never be more than a speculative asset with no intrinsic value. Blockchains can solve problems. Decentralisation can quickly become federation. Example: a global id system where the "miners" are countries. It removes the need of physical passports and their associated costs and delays.

> You're missing the forest for the trees. Bitcoin is broken and will never be more than a speculative asset with no intrinsic value. I disagree. It's off-topic so I'm not going start an endless discussion about intrinsic value. > Decentralisation can quickly become federation. Example: a global id system where the "miners" are countries. It removes the need of physical passports and their associated costs and delays…

I'm thinking of a blockchain where the ledger is public read (for verifications) and write-constrained. How can you verify the.legitimacy of the introduced data? Probably some other tool. But it being federated across countries would have the nice property of non-gatekeeping. There are politics in play, but if the UN is possible, só is such a system.

This is all just my theoretical assessment, anyway. And I agree that other standards and toolchain is necessary to add value. Blockchains don't do KYC nor identity verification and a lot of other things.

Post reply on HN