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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

#631

Post by acdha »

jakupovic wrote: post #456
gambiting wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But....why. What problem does it solve. How is it better than existing insurance policies that are perfectly fine being bound to my name and address

People were asking the same questions when typewriters came out, but why we know how to write already.

Typewriters had immediate value: buy one and you can produce easier to read documents faster — a very fast writer might do as much as 30 words per minute, which is like a third of a proficient typist’s throughput. Businesses bought them rapidly because it meant the same number of clerks could do more work and you reduced errors due to bad handwriting.

Put another way, the first commercial typewriter was sold in 1874 and was an immediate success. By the 1880s, typist was a booming field — especially for women seeking employment outside of the home.

Blockchains have been commercially active for 13 years at this point. If Bitcoin shut off tomorrow, the only reason anyone who isn’t involved in shilling it would know is that all of the speculators would be screaming for government bailouts.

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

#632

Post by tim333 »

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…

The price of things like USDT are effectively set by Tether rather than the free market. If Tether have billions of US$ and offer in the market to buy back USDT at 1:1 then that's what they price will be near enough.

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

#633

Post by UncleMeat »

aflag wrote: post #556
Vespasian wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, and while the government database "land registry" could, of course, be replaced with a government "HouseChain" it wouldn't actually solve any Problem but would introduce a ton of new ones.

However, if you have no government, the housechain could be a way for a decentralized society to implement the concept of a land registry. Once everyone agrees that the housechain is proof of ownership, then measures can be taken to enforce that without necessarily evoking a central government. I'm not sold on the idea of a society without a central government, but I think the blockchain would help — or even enable —…

This is only true if people with guns will show up to kick somebody else out of the house that you own the token for or if we figure out a way to completely eliminate antisocial behavior voluntarily.

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

#634

Post by FledNanders »

It's all about consensus and enforcement. The courts hold power because we all agree (actively or passively) that the decisions made by the courts are legitimate. We choose to keep our citizenships and pay taxes to enforce these decisions with coercive/violent means (police). If people lose faith in this arrangement and start disregarding the legal systems - e.g. if the police refuse to do their job - you could very well end up with blockchain officers taking their place and kicking down doors with the approval of the masses. For now, though, it doesn't really matter what you own on the blockchain because you have no shotgun to back it up (no legitimacy nor means of enforcement).

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

#635

Post by lawtalkinghuman »

conradev wrote: post #272
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…

This problem exists with cash. We teach people to not keep too much cash on them, but to keep it in a bank where it is safer. You could get a credit card, and then it’s not even your money that you are spending! or your money that you lost to fraud. I can see both of these existing in the crypto world in some form, the same way they exist in the fiat world as for the banks and institutions and companies losing all of…

> as for the banks and institutions and companies losing all of their money? that’s a new blockchain problem for sure

No, that used to be a real-world problem for banks until laws were passed that more tightly regulated financial institutions...

e.g. in the US, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildcat_banking

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

#636

Post by UncleMeat »

Galanwe wrote: post #417
gambiting wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And literally none of it, not a single step that you mentioned requires blockchain.

> And literally none of it, not a single step that you mentioned requires blockchain. Then tell me, where is this wonderful centralized database that tells me who owns which car? Blockchains are not just about decentralization, it's also about publishing the actual databases in the wild for everyone to see, because you have the guarantee that no-one can fake it. Sure, a lot of the use cases could be done with central…

> it's also about publishing the actual databases in the wild for everyone to see

Weird to see privacy go completely out the window in all of these discussions.

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

#637

Post by aflag »

betterunix2 wrote: post #599
aflag wrote: post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

However, if you have no government, the housechain could be a way for a decentralized society to implement the concept of a land registry. Once everyone agrees that the housechain is proof of ownership, then measures can be taken to enforce that without necessarily evoking a central government. I'm not sold on the idea of a society without a central government, but I think the blockchain would help — or even enable —…

The people in charge of enforcement would become a de facto government. What distinguishes a government from any other organization is the monopoly on violence (more precisely, the monopoly on deciding when and how violent measures can be employed), and enforcing property rights sometimes requires violence (e.g. if someone refuses to leave your home, eventually the police will have to physically remove them against t…

In a decentralized society, there may be multiple organizations deciding on when and how violent measures can be employed — and they could be as small as one person. If each organization thinks a different person is the owner of a property, that would be very unstable. However, if they all agree that a certain blockchain implementation of deeds is what decides ownership, then they can co-exist more peacefully. Not saying there aren't other hurdles, but that is certainly one of the big ones.

That does require that most of the society agrees on some set of principles, but that's true of a centralized government too: most of the society has to agree they are legitimate. Going back to the decentralized society, everyone would agree that the blockchain determines ownership and currency. So, an organization that accept those is viewed as legitimate, one that doesn't is illegitimate. In that scenario, illegitimate organizations would be less stable than legitimate ones.

So, the existence of a system that allows people to all agree in things like currency and ownership without giving that power to one specific organization is a step forward into making decentralized societies possible. Is it sufficient? Most likely not.

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

#638

Post by mountainb »

lkrubner wrote: post #500
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…

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…

One big issue is that the largest supply chain participants generally do not want transparency because they make their money on opacity. Transparency attracts more entrants, applicants, and competitors. It is business intelligence that provides important things like pricing advantages. When competitors can see your supply chain, they can do all kinds of stuff to make your life harder and gain an edge.

Almost everyone at every stage in the supply chain have an interest in opacity rather than transparency. The people who may want transparency want transparency for themselves but not for others: they want the equivalent of a one-way mirror to spy through. Naturally, people tend to react with extreme negativity to the installation of such one-way mirrors. Actual transparency is desired by almost no one. This is even true at the consumer level: the consumer may want to know the supply chain information for various purposes, regulators certainly want to know it, business partners certainly want supply chain documentation, but a consumer would balk at the notion that they expose all of their credit card transactions to the entire world at all times. It's always transparency for thee and not for me.

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

#639

Post by tim333 »

MaxfordAndSons wrote: post #250
betwixthewires wrote: post #15

> All that to say, a lot has changed in the technology world in the past six to twelve years It sure has. But not really that fundamentally, since 2009. A lot has changed in the blockchain space too. Just because you don't know about it doesn't mean it isn't true. A lot of those changes are on par with some of the tech advancements mentioned before my quote in the article. In 2009, you had bitcoin, so basically a dis…

> blockchains that handle incentivized file storage, alternate name lookup systems It would be a shame if IPFS and Filecoin end up in the dustbin of history if the web3 music stops. They're the only reasonable non-financial applications of blockchain tech that I've been able to wrap my head around to date.

And IPFS isn't even really a blockchain tech. It's more a variation on bittorrent which predates bitcoin by several years.

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

#640

Post by trauco »

The_rationalist wrote: post #582
lkrubner wrote: post #500

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…

Blockchain has no point versus immutable databases https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23290769 or at least database with immutable history of changes.

One point the linked article makes is that even this claim has been proven wrong.
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