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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

#641

Post by throw0101a »

UncleMeat wrote: post #629
JackFr wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mire important than a notary is title insurance. Title insurance is a form of insurance that protects lenders and homebuyers from financial loss from an improper title to a property, for instance someone selling you a property they don’t own. This is the kind of thing at first glance people say is made for the blockchain, but in reality the incumbent solution is actually pretty reasonable and the actual gains from a…

Title Insurance is indeed a racket at this point. Their payouts are a tiny percentage of their overall premiums. As you mention, this seems like a good option but in fact isn't a good one. In order to replace title insurance and make it so anybody can verify the state of a property you need to first make all liens ever live on the blockchain. That's the hard part here. If it is possible to have a lien on a home witho…

The average price of a house in Ontario, Canada is $922K:

* https://wowa.ca/ontario-housing-market

When purchase through a lawyer, title insurance in Ontario is around $250:

* https://www.getwhatyouwant.ca/what-the-heck-is-title-insuran...

250 / 922000 = 0.000271 or 0.03%. I've had bar tabs larger that $250.

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

#642

Post by acdha »

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…

> 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.

Okay, let’s think about this even a little bit: receiving that Bitcoin requires them to have software and access websites which the Chinese government has restricted. Assuming they successfully get a wallet app which isn’t compromised, they then need to connect to a well-known, trivially blocked high-volume network service without the Great Firewall triggering. Having done that, they then need to pay a substantial processing fee for any transaction. Since their landlord, grocer, etc. need to be paid in real money this person will also need to find someone to convert it, again requiring a substantial payment because accepting something banned from a pariah is high-risk.

All of this is not only expensive but incredibly risky since you’re leaving a lot of electronic records of illegal activity and you’re forced to trust various third-parties who can be compromised without your ability to easily tell. Bitcoin is perfect for state authorities, too, since it leaves a signed record of intent to break the law for each transaction — if they bust a business which does a lot of cash sales, it’s a lot harder to prove where each bill came from and there’s no way to do so if they only start monitoring after the fact like there is with Bitcoin.

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

#643

Post by lolinder »

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…

> You could very well have a proof of authority ...

> ... by a further authority if keys ...

As soon as your blockchain solution requires proof of authority, your trustless solution starts requiring trust in some form of central governance. At that point, what utility does your blockchain solution provide that the DMV database does not?

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

#644

Post by giaour »

aflag wrote: post #595
giaour wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the absence of a governing authority, property disputes would revert to being settled by violence or the threat thereof. Why should my band of armed thugs defer to what it says on the blockchain when they could instead hit you with a $5 wrench until you vacate the premises? https://xkcd.com/538

Because everyone else around them would help defend the validity of the deeds, as they all own property in the same way. Like I said before, I'm far far away from having all the answers about how to set up a decentralized society and I'm not even sure I would like to live in such a society. However, issuing deeds and currency is an important job that currently you need a central government you trust to do. With a blo…

> Because everyone else around them would help defend the validity of the deeds, as they all own property in the same way.

That feels a bit like saying that everyone will pitch in to stop mugging since we all carry physical cash in the same way. Maybe some civilians would intervene some of the time, but most will not risk their own bodily autonomy to defend another's property.

Issuing deeds and currency feels like the easy part of creating an agreed upon land registry or economy. I have a printer and know how to use SQLite, so nothing is stopping me from issuing my own physical currency or deeds today. I could even save paper and put them on my own personal blockchain. Convincing others to honor my currency or deeds sounds like the hard part.

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

#645

Post by wbl »

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…

Buying drugs on the Internet. The penetration might be low now, but the TAM is sizeable.

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

#646

Post by giaour »

Vespasian wrote: post #600
giaour wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the absence of a governing authority, property disputes would revert to being settled by violence or the threat thereof. Why should my band of armed thugs defer to what it says on the blockchain when they could instead hit you with a $5 wrench until you vacate the premises? https://xkcd.com/538

My band of thugs however would offer people the ability to buy protection from your band of thugs. I may even be inclined to write down some rules and introduce a process to resolve conflicts without unnecessary damage to people and property. (In this hypothetical scenario any form of land registry is only as valid as I say it is.)

Then in the end, we all live by the rules established by whoever has the largest band of thugs. Good thing we got rid of government and created this libertarian utopia.

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

#647

Post by ziml77 »

Grustaf wrote: post #516
chucke wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to say your completely wrong, just that the purpose of car tokens on the blockchain is to replace perhaps your insurance, but not the keys.

Unless the insurance policy is somehow decentralised, it doesn't serve any purpose to decentralise the knowledge that you are insured.

It's worse than not serving any purpose. It's information about your life that is forever stored out in the open. Except for some limited cases, it's no ones business to know whether I am insured and for how much.

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

#648

Post by lolinder »

mritchie712 wrote: post #499
larsiusprime wrote: post #38

Kelsey Hightower said it best: https://twitter.com/kelseyhightower/status/14778718907230781... "If something is too early to criticize it's also too early to evangelize."

Any sane web3 proponent would agree with this statement. Only the scammers wouldn't. Sane people interested in web3 don't evangelize and are totally aware of and agree with most of the criticisms. If you criticized Ethereum as being expensive and inefficient, you'd get head nods from people that understand the space and pointed to projects that are trying to fix those issues.

The problem is that when a space becomes dominated by the insane people, it's the insane people who drive its future. Any hope for a sane web3 depended on the hype starting after there was an actual use case. As it stands, web3's Eternal September began before the foundations were even laid, and it's going to be very difficult to retrofit them.

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

#649

Post by wbl »

JackFr wrote: post #510
chucke wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the promise of having an insurance contract publicly verified by a decentralised system is to reduce the inherent costs of the current regulated system. In my country,and I assume in most it's the same, in order for you to sign a buy contract for a house, there has to be a notary involved. The whole process costs a significant percentage of your already heavy purchase. A blockchain won't solve all the probl…

Mire important than a notary is title insurance. Title insurance is a form of insurance that protects lenders and homebuyers from financial loss from an improper title to a property, for instance someone selling you a property they don’t own. This is the kind of thing at first glance people say is made for the blockchain, but in reality the incumbent solution is actually pretty reasonable and the actual gains from a…

Torrens title is the boring have a database solution. It solves messy issues like courts having to determine if a lien is valid and recording it if so by changing the DB.

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

#650

Post by cornel_io »

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…

> I do not believe anyone will ever find a legal use for blockchains that cannot be more easily served with traditional technologies.

One does not blockchain to build a product in the cleanest, most efficient manner.

One blockchains to have access to investors/speculators that control the gigantic pile of on-chain wealth that has accumulated over the past ten years, who would never sink $100k+ into a poorly drawn picture of an ape with sunglasses if it was running on Rails+MySQL.

This may sound like I'm being dismissive, so let me be clear, I am not - this is an extremely valid reason to chase this technology, and the existence of these (maybe ridiculous and shady, maybe not) massive stacks of digital cash is going to drive a lot of investment in the space, so if there is anything that can "break through" and prove real value beyond just targeting this wealth, someone is going to find it, likely as a side-effect of targeting these whales.

Web 1.0 couldn't have happened without the late 90s tech bubble, and as ridiculous as the Pets.com era hype was, when the dust settled there was much broader connectivity and a real market for the Internet companies that did live up to the hype over the next two decades.

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