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

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

#691

Post by aflag » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 4:26 PM UTC

kikimora wrote: post #673

betterunix2 wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You cannot get your hacked bitcoins back even if you are the government with police and army. Lots of things that government does can be replaced with a smart contract. Hey, you can even have direct democracy - vote with your citizen token for a change in a smart contract and voala the law changed and immediately enforced.

You could, because the government could coerce the person who stole it to give you back.

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

#692

Post by rauljordan2020 » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 4:29 PM UTC

gizmo wrote: post #421

disruptalot wrote: post #403

It's truly incredible that people still confidently proclaim that there is "no use case" today. Because of the technical nature of the underlying tech, it's hard for the average individual to recognise how and why it's different. However, it's not possible to explain away the particular applications and their properties. Here are 2 use cases which are live and working today: -Taking a collaterised USD loan without pe…

Presumably you’re talking about a loan against an NFT or other crypto asset. But taking a loan against a financial asset is already really easy. Does loaning against a house, car or stock portfolio get any easier with crypto? I don’t see how. The digital object in your second example is just a hyperlink or a hash, because the digital object itself won’t fit on the blockchain. And there is no link between digital and…

This comment assumes that the world == the developed world. Crypto offers borderless access that does not exist in today's world for many millions of people. In my country, getting a loan is near impossible, but no one can stop people from taking a loan against their ETH or stablecoins

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

#693

Post by UnpossibleJim » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 4:31 PM UTC

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 can think of small problems that use blockchain as a solution, but they're relatively niche and only make the game-space straddle the real world, so they tend to be a bit on the vaporware side. Handy, sure, but I'm not sure they are A) 100% necessarily or B) as revolutionary as everyone seems to think blockchain is meant to be =[

EDIT: forgot to say, this could be a complete lack of imagination on my part past what's been done with blockchain already or just my horrible indoctrination into the game-space like some kind of cult =)

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

#694

Post by telxosser » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 4:34 PM UTC

jerf wrote: post #681

kikimora wrote: post #666

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The promise of blockchain is to eventually remove lawyers and all middleman. It can be done already with existing tech. I can easily imagine a smart contract managing property rights, another one managing mortgages, etc. And of course all that has a back door so a court order can rollback a transaction.

The reason why lawyers and middlemen are required is not because authority is too centralized into the relevant governing bodies. They're there for lots and lots of other reasons that blockchain can't help with.

Exactly. It is always the same naive and not well thought out argument for this stuff.

As if laws and regulations just came about by a random process for no reason.

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

#695

Post by twic » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 4:35 PM UTC

cmews wrote: post #479

janjongboom wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The math for Helium just does not make any sense. Looking at forum threads every gateway makes about $50 in rewards / month. That's $294,000,000 per year in rewards paid out to gateway owners. Sending one packet costs $.00001 (100K packets for $1 according to their website). So we need to see 29,400,000,000,000 packets yearly on the Helium network for data fees to cover the gateway rewards. Looking at data from The T…

Ok, I will bite :) The gateway rewards are becoming less and less every month because more gateways join the network. So in a certain way that feels like a pyramid scheme because the people that joined earlier have an advantage (they also took the most risk by backing this project in a early state). It is quite normal to reward the first movers to your platform (PayPal even gave away free money to grow their user bas…

If these numbers are correct, then this is a cool product and business model.

It doesn't require a blockchain, though.

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

#696

Post by che_shirecat » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 4:40 PM UTC

usrbinbash wrote: post #441

danschuller wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This depends what you mean "works", if it's meant on the technical conceptual level that yes, of course, I think no one would disagree. If it's taken to mean had widespread and growing usage at the social level, then I think that's hard to argue.

People don't exchange public keys on the blorkchain, they use username/password to access their wallets, and these have a public key. That in itself doesn't authenticate anyone to anything, the only guarantee is that it is unique. How do we know who is behind a hash? Because there is a server (aka. a "centralized authority") that has that information. So how exactly is that different from using my google account to l…

> server (aka. a "centralized authority")

that's a very very liberal equivalence to make. decentralized authority in practice is just a collection of servers in aggregate that come to consensus according to a certain protocol.

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

#697

Post by che_shirecat » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 4:43 PM UTC

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?

this is the whole point of Ethereum and smart contracts.

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

#698

Post by mahogany » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 4:48 PM UTC

saalweachter wrote: post #522

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'm sorry, I'm not trying to call you out personally, but this is itching my brain something fierce so I have to blurt it out, and hey, it's the internet. A little derailing never hurt anyone. It's amazing to me how universal the "I used to be a non-believer" line is in evangelism. From the classic "I used to be an atheist but I've been born again" to all the members of political party A claiming to have been a membe…

Alternatively, what if they simply learned something new which caused them to change their belief in something? It's better to focus on what caused their mind to be changed (it may or may not be bunk) versus focusing on the fact that their mind changed at all (which can certainly be a good thing).

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

#699

Post by telxosser » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 4:49 PM UTC

gambiting wrote: post #529

vasco wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not having to speak to anyone to do it. I don't know if blockchain is going to go anywhere but I think there's inherent advantages in not talking to anyone (and being able to do it programatically) to do banking-like things. What you get in exchange is lack of security, no recourse when things go wrong, and possibly being in the same space as criminals. But there's a palpable advantage to not having to interact with…

But like.....what kind of things can you do without interacting with people when using a blockchain? Name anything. My insurance policy I bought online and I can manage entirely online, change the address, the car, the add-ons, add and remove drivers as well as cars......what exactly is blockchain allowing me to do here that I can't do already? Same with the bank. I don't think I ever had to speak to my bank in the 8…

IMO it is because so many people have a kind of sexual fetish of technophilia. They literally get off on new technology. It doesn't matter if it doesn't solve anything. It just needs to feel new and as if progress is being made. As long as it feels new and like progress the technophile will be happy to reinvent the wheel.

Even the word technophile has positive connotations as opposed to something deviant in our society. We don't even have a word for a deviant technophile , deviant over obsession with nonsense and "the next big thing".

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

#700

Post by che_shirecat » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 4:50 PM UTC

rileyphone wrote: post #309

Dwolb wrote: post #48

IMO L1 (Ethereum, Solana, Fantom, etc.) development is closer to building out a communications or telco network. From that “hard” technology perspective, it’s very early days. And the apps that run on top of these L1s are fully limited by L1 bandwidth, latency, and blockspace. So, I think we’re in the pre-dial-up days for blockchains and will need a couple more orders of magnitude improvement to be (universally) on p…

The information bandwidth on block based cryptocurrencies is far too low to support these deeper levels of complexity, and I doubt will ever get much better. Blockchains, despite being a distributed phenomenon, still centralize the flow of information into one stream, the chain. Ethereum, by my estimation, operates at around 7 kB/s, and Bitcoin at 2kB/s. These are clearly glacial speeds - think of how limited an inte…

read up on L2 chains - both optimistic roll-up and zk-rollups. this problem you are breaking down has been the subject of study and development for years now and is nearing implementation - https://www.gemini.com/cryptopedia/layer-2-scaling-zk-rollup...