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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

#851

Post by samhw »

saalweachter wrote: post #750
mw888 wrote: post #712

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a nice little Kafka trap you’ve constructed to disregard the people who change their minds away from what you think. So every time someone changes their mind and uses their previous opinion as informative you are going to non-committally imply it’s “evangelism?”

It's not really a trap -- it's more a rhetorical tactic. The trick is that when you say "I used to believe X, but now I've realized I was wrong and believe Y", you can get away without giving evidence for why X was wrong and Y is right . You appeal to a commonality between you and your audience (your audience believes X, you used to believe X) and by presenting your change you imply that they are being left behind, t…

Thank you for writing this: it crystallises something that’s always annoyed me about the trope-ridden evangelist shtick. You’re absolutely right.

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

#852

Post by samhw »

mrelectric wrote: post #567
mattdesl wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it goes both ways – "I used to be religious, now I am an atheist" (I was also against crypto/blockchains when I first learned about them last year)

As usual, truth is somewhere in the middle.

No post body was provided.

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

#853

Post by ziml77 »

czbond wrote: post #661
ziml77 wrote: post #647

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Agree, and once quantum comps are more readily available - re-analyzing the entire chain and profiling individuals will be so easy, an AWS quant rental will be able to decrypt and do it.

I don't even know if quantum is necessary for that. There's already blockchain analysis tools. All you have to do is slip up once and tie a wallet that you didn't want anyone to know about to your identity and then it's relatively easy for those tools to be used to see everything you've done.

I almost paid for something with bitcoin once because they weren't taking anything else. Nothing illegal but also something I wouldn't want the world to know I paid for. I ended up choosing not to because I didn't want that transaction forever stored on the blockchain.

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

#854

Post by chx »

Memorable moments from interacting with the Internet -- and web3

It's 1993. We are given a tour of the university I just got admitted to. I peel off the group at the physics building where the university VAX is. Something, something Internet. What is that. I get an account. I begin to use Usenet and IRC where I can talk to people so far away. Usability of these are on par with any other application (say, WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS) at the time. My mind is immediately blown. No one needs to give a pitch how useful or how fundamentally different this is to anything we had prior.

It's 2006. I began travelling the world, settling in Canada in 2008. I can chat with family for free. Later, even do video calls. I remember the weekends when we wrote a letter to my uncle who moved to the United States in the 80s. It took months to get a reply. Phone calls were rare and short. By the time my grandfather passed in 2011, my uncle was talking to him daily for a long time for free -- thanks to the 'Net.

It's 2007. I am wintering out in Israel. Moving around is very challenging, as I don't read Hebrew and I don't drive.

It's 2015. I am again in Israel. For a week, every night I sleep in a different apartment, booked online. Moving around is trivial, my phone tells me where and when to get on and off buses.

It's 2022. This a quote from someone touting the advances in the so called crypto"currency" space:

> Today, you have sharded blockchains, triple entry bookkeeping, proof of stake, blockchains that handle incentivized file storage, alternate name lookup systems, purchasing compute power on an automated order book, liquidity pools (a major, major fintech advancement if you're not familiar with then), arbitrary code execution with a canonical record of it.

Excuse me for being skeptical about web3.

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

#855

Post by acdha »

shrimpx wrote: post #791
tsimionescu wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, the public can mistrust a paper vote, for good or bad reasons. But, it's not possible to reasonably trust an electronic voting system - the people installing and maintaining the system have myriad ways to manipulate the vote that are almost impossible to discover or prove (at least as long as you don't accept public voting, which has different issues).

But why wouldn't ballot handlers swap out paper votes, etc.? You can rig anything with improper safeguards.

The difference is scale: if you’re doing something funny with paper ballots you need a conspiracy involving a LOT of people shipping things around, disposing of the correct ones, etc. Trying to monitor people’s votes similarly requires something like cameras in a lot of places.

Software systems make all of that possible at scale with far fewer people, and thus much more plausibly possible to keep secret.

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

#856

Post by cdiddy2 »

acdha wrote: post #719
cdiddy2 wrote: post #704

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

And the answer is no, because anything which can be done to improve the trusted third-parties can be done more efficiently without the extra overhead of a blockchain. Blockchains require expensive always-on networks whereas many operations can run with much lower data requirements and even work entirely offline.

but it adds verifiability and immutability that others can't offer

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

#857

Post by koonsolo »

wackro wrote: post #850
koonsolo wrote: post #847

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a thought experiment for you. How do you transfer money from US to: Venezuela, Mali, Lybia, Angolia, Tajikistan, Uruguay? I can give you a really simple answer when using crypto: you just transfer it. Can't wait to hear your answer for each of those countries, and the fees and delays associated with it. edit: some people go work in a western country and send money home to their family.

The fact that crypto exists without borders is great. But your idea that the only thing stopping sceptics from embracing it is fees is wrong. Also, your tone makes me think you've got a dog in this fight.

They asked for a use-case, I presented one. And to be honest, I don't give a shit what the sceptics think about it. I just wanted to prove once more that even when you present a valid use-case, "the sceptics" twist and turn to still only see the negative side of it.

Keep being blind, I have absolutely no problem with that. It's nice entertainment here on HN, with all those folks frustrated of missing out on the biggest investment opportunity of their lifetime.

"I didn't miss out, it's just all a scam and I want no part of that"

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

#858

Post by samhw »

floodyberry- wrote: post #816
lumost wrote: post #754

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know, it's funny. I've worked in and around analytics for a long time now, and I've had the thought that blockchain enables the following. 1) A common "universal" transaction data source 2) A shared, readable format So the thought occurred to me that as soon as blockchain apps/currencies became popular, people would want analytics on them. There would thus be a startup opportunity for unprecedented analytics visi…

There is no future in third party analytics because any "blockchain" that is globally adopted and used for more than shitcoin speculation will be zero knowledge

What do you mean, “will be zero knowledge”? How does that apply to a blockchain in a currency context, when validating a new transaction requires knowledge of both parties’ transaction history?

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

#859

Post by samhw »

doktorhladnjak wrote: post #820
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…

The big question in my mind: is this the internet in 1997 or expert systems in 1982? It could be the next big thing. Or it could be an interesting idea that was oversold and overhyped, that never really disappeared but became irrelevant as its real value became a commodity that found its way into the software of established companies.

The worrying thing (for me) isn’t which one it is. The worrying thing is that so many people seem incapable of even making a creditable attempt at answering that question and analysing its fundamentals. This has opened my eyes to how many people only think through the prism of “well, this has got really popular lately, and the internet did that too, so this will be the next big thing even if I don’t know why!”. Survivorship bias is very very real.

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

#860

Post by acdha »

cdiddy2 wrote: post #856
acdha wrote: post #719

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the answer is no, because anything which can be done to improve the trusted third-parties can be done more efficiently without the extra overhead of a blockchain. Blockchains require expensive always-on networks whereas many operations can run with much lower data requirements and even work entirely offline.

but it adds verifiability and immutability that others can't offer

You can do that using public-key cryptography much cheaper, without depending on a massive network and expensive processing fees. The only time a blockchain can make sense is if the parties don’t know or trust each other, and by definition you’re trusting an oracle.
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