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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

#701

Post by lawtalkinghuman »

adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #198
Shish2k wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a way to authenticate yourself without a centralized authority PGP did that 31 years ago though, faster and more efficient and without all the downsides?

inefficiency here can actually be useful, it's similar to password stretching. If you know someone had to burn $10 of electricity to make an authentication, it hurts more to get banned.

> If you know someone had to burn $10 of electricity to make an authentication, it hurts more to get banned.

Metafilter charges $5 to get an account. If you can't afford the $5, you can email the mods to join for free.

SomethingAwful charges $10 (and offers a platinum account, and a paid add-on to view old threads).

Both of these payments are done through PayPal, and both exist as a way to filter spammers and trolls.

I thought the whole point of decentralisation was that you couldn't be banned though.

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

#702

Post by giantrobot »

acdha wrote: post #631
jakupovic wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Typewriters had immediate value

The GP pulled one of the cryptobro rhetorical scams: X existing technology took Y years to catch on!

Besides the statements rarely actually being true they're nonsensical. A typewriter (or whatever technology they point out) has obvious utility. No honest assessment of whatever they can bring up will say that X technology is useless. Maybe at the time typewriters we're released fountain pen manufacturers or penmanship clubs said they were useless. But they have a vested interest in the status quo.

I don't think most anyone pointing out flaws in cryptocurrencies have a vested interest in the status quo. I certainly don't. I don't and doubt you have some sort of short against Bitcoin or own a bank full of fiat currency.

The cryptobros can't seem to fathom that they got sold on a bunch of useless shit. When they're not at the top of the Ponzi scheme they can't seem to conceptualize that they've been had. It's kind of sad to see. At the same time it's infuriating because their scam is literally wasting a small country worth of electricity to mint Geoffrey dollars.

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

#703

Post by kikimora »

thinkmassive wrote: post #685
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.

> And of course all that has a back door so a court order can rollback a transaction. …so you still need a lawyer and nothing has actually changed?

You got me, lawyers can stay :) But a bunch of clerks and middleman are out.

Today the job of a middleman/clerk is to modify a centralized database in a regulated way. They got their licenses, exams, special education and so on. There is a government machinery behind every such database - agencies, controllers, educators, bookkeepers, etc. While you may be paying $4 for a notary signature you might be paying way more from your tax money to keep governing bodies running across the country.

My point is statement that a centralized database is cheap because it is easy to modify simply ignores governance cost which might be huge.

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

#704

Post by cdiddy2 »

acdha wrote: post #660
cdiddy2 wrote: post #603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is disproving the claim: once you introduce oracles, you are acknowledging that the trust of the system comes from outside the chain.

that will always be the case for anything off chain. the question is do oracles and well constructed systems provide better data than what we have access to today

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

#705

Post by che_shirecat »

TylerE wrote: post #258
Kinrany wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The university can shut down, suffer data loss or get hacked. Decentralized storage is an improvement. No sense in diplomas being transferable though.

Except NFT storage is actually highly centralized? What happens if OpenSea shuts down?

another market pops up. opensea is just reading on-chain data, just like everyone else.

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

#706

Post by tsimionescu »

baobabKoodaa wrote: post #620
tsimionescu wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, trust in voting can only be achieved with paper voting, there is no technological solution to improve it that doesn't completely remove trust as well.

Removing trust completely is a pretty high bar... but there are different voting schemes out there and some of them do a pretty good job of removing a lot of the trust. Cryptography is typically involved, but blockchain is not needed. I wrote more about this here: https://www.attejuvonen.fi/thesis/

Here by "remove trust" I didn't mean "trust-less assurance that voting is correct", I meant "you have no reason to trust that the system recorded your vote correctly".

A basic problem with electronic & cryptographic voting systems is that it is impossible for a non-expert to convince themselves that the system is working correctly. In-person paper voting has this property by virtue of the simplicity of the system and the ability for regular people to observe it's working. This also normally includes members of all political parties participating in the vote, giving a high degree of confidence that either (a) the voting was correct, or (b) the parties you voted for are colluding, so the result is meaningless anyway.

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

#707

Post by lawtalkinghuman »

qaq wrote: post #82

If there would be a legal framework in place that can tie a DAO to basically be legally binding bylaws of an actual org. and the smart contract lang. is expressive enough for this to work this would be extremely valuable. Outside of this most of web3 looks like hype.

The question is: does the legal framework override the results of the smart contracts and blockchain records? If so, you don't need the crypto. If the crypto cannot be overriden by the legal framework, you don't need the legal framework. Pure redundancy.

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

#708

Post by lawtalkinghuman »

qaq wrote: post #116
cuteboy19 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so if we are depending on a centralized legal framework, why would we need the blockchain (decentralized store)? Wasn't Code supposed to be Law?

so we do not have to go through legal process to resolve anything

That's literally how things work now. ~99.99999999% of contractual agreements are not litigated. The legal process is there as a slow debugger when it all goes wrong. But most of the time, things don't go wrong and people work out their disputes without involving courts and judges.

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

#709

Post by chucke »

jerf wrote: post #680
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…

If home ownership was on a distributed blockchain, local regulators would rapidly discover a need for something like a notary to verify that the transaction has been done correctly on the correct blockchain by the people who actually own it, so as to ensure the consumer isn't sitting on the other side of the table with someone not bamboozling them about their ownership of the house, or bamboozling them about their tr…

I believe you're downplaying the potential here (and I'm overplaying it). A particular blockchain you could immediately verify home ownership online via some sort of signature with the public key from a seller seems like providing the same type of guarantees. Is it 100% safe? Certainly not. But considering your notary might be a fraud, a scammer or just not very good at what he does...

Compare the example with withdrawing money: you can go to an ATM and withdraw money for no fee, depending of the country. Do it in the bank, there I an associated fee.

The legal system would still have to adopt it though. And it's an industry less prone to digital innovation. And there is no financial incentive, as there is no narrow profit margin you need to optimize. So yes, it may never happen.

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

#710

Post by mw888 »

lolinder wrote: post #648
mritchie712 wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That’s absolute nonsense. Scammers and grifters making vaporware projects have no significant influence on the projects who spend their budget on development rather than marketing.

What you just said is “all these novice basketball players training the wrong techniques is a dire problem for those training effectively.” No it’s not, if anything investments in actual projects during relative, senseless mania is cheaper and easier than it ever was.

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