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

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

#891

Post by bb88 » Sun, Jan 16, 2022, 9:05 AM UTC

benreesman wrote: post #380

bb88 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you've described is metastasized moral risk. We could argue that maybe some risk should be rewarded. But not all risk, such as spending billions in beanie babies as a corporate strategy.

Eh, there are some important distinctions here. Pricing risk is an activity with fairly clear value, and as a result you can make a ton of money by being good at it. Assuming risk is something that every individual and organization does to one degree or another, and to the extent that they do so in a rational way it’s because they are pricing risk well or delegating that. Your use of the word moral makes me think tha…

Oh pardon, I meant moral hazard.

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

#892

Post by mattdesl » Sun, Jan 16, 2022, 9:09 AM UTC

antifa wrote: post #861

mattdesl wrote: post #838

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it’s all relative, depends on your vantage point. just look at the OP thread that led to these discussions: the author is vocally decrying blockchains. if you view anti-crypto as the atheists in this analogy then they sure do make a lot of noise on HN (these kinds of posts routinely make the front page).

> they sure do make a lot of noise What, you mean like randomly, unprompted? For no reason? What are they trying to sell you?

basically: adherence to centralized systems of value transfer, rejection of decentralized alternatives.

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

#893

Post by JBSay » Sun, Jan 16, 2022, 9:40 AM UTC

The author admitted in her opening that she doesn't understand the point of decentralization. Reading anything beyond that point is a waste of time.

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

#894

Post by jakupovic » Sun, Jan 16, 2022, 10:12 AM UTC

giantrobot wrote: post #702

acdha wrote: post #631

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fount…

So your reasoning does not deal with anything we're discussing, rather you go on describing people as cryptobros, define their characteristics and then make a conclusion, based on what you think. So you didn't bring anything to the conversation other than your wrongly held opinions. I could go on my own exploration and conclude that you, speaking in such a way, don't know what you are talking about.

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

#895

Post by hiq » Sun, Jan 16, 2022, 10:40 AM UTC

freemanon wrote: post #872

hiq wrote: post #844

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Instead of having different databases and APIs that are hard to integrate with one another, a blockchain could be the central storage and transactions handler that different systems interface to. That's a common refrain that seems to associate blockchains with standards and common APIs, it doesn't resist closer inspection. To take your example, I can easily design two PCR test systems completely incompatible with e…

I agree with you that not everything has to be done a certain way. Programs don't have to be written in C or functional programming for it to work well. But there are places where those excel in terms of performance and/or reducing complexity. I am also not arguing that incompatible APIs will disappear with blockchain usage. But things like an EVM can be used as a template to build underlying blockchains to provide a…

> But things like an EVM can be used as a template to build underlying blockchains to provide a common datastore and execution layer for multiple systems to work together.

Substitute EVM for JVM and you end up with a similar statement that looks just as correct, but it's still not clear what the EVM brings that the JVM doesn't.

> it would be harder in this case for corruption to take place in the PCR testing regime since all transactions are immutable

In your system, the blockchain would replace the database, not everything around it. That's also something I keep seeing in these discussions: blockchain provides some guarantees, so you assume the system you'll build on top of it will inherit from these guarantees, without questioning the composability further. But the interfaces of the blockchain component of these systems you're trying to conceive are precisely where the guarantees break down.

To take your example, you'd basically replace a database (and just a database) with a smart contract, which would ensure immutability and transparency. But:

1. you don't need a blockchain to get these guarantees (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_Transparency)[0]

2. using blockchains still imply that you're trusting the people holding the keys and interacting with the smart contract, so you haven't changed your trust model (the interface problem I mentioned above).

> the immutable nature of contracts would allow audited contracts to remain secure

The immutable nature of contracts is also what makes them unfit for evolving systems that have to be regularly updated to address new requirements.

[0]: to be clear, I'm talking about permissionless blockchains such as Ethereum

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

#896

Post by int0x80 » Sun, Jan 16, 2022, 11:36 AM UTC

SanJacobs wrote: post #523

> How long can it possibly be “early days”? 70-ish years. I'd say we just recently came out of the early days of computing around the 1990s or 2010s. >How long do we need to wait before someone comes up with an actual application of blockchain technologies that isn’t a transparent attempt to retroactively justify a technology that is inefficient in every sense of the word? Currency is inefficient? It's sure better th…

> Energy production problem, not a blockchain problem

Yeah. But blockchain energy requirements are definitely a blockhain problem. That's the main problem.

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

#897

Post by tomxor » Sun, Jan 16, 2022, 12:41 PM UTC

TomSwirly wrote: post #788

tomxor wrote: post #733

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The parent's perspective does not come across as an evangelist's though. Quite the opposite. It's balanced, seeing the hype for hype, seeing the flaws, and yet seeing that there is still some truth and potential buried in there. The world is grey.

> seeing the flaws, The article names none. > yet seeing that there is still some truth and potential buried in there. The article details none. > The world is grey. "Everything is true, even false things!"

I'm commenting on the parent comment, not the article...

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

#898

Post by baobabKoodaa » Sun, Jan 16, 2022, 12:42 PM UTC

tsimionescu wrote: post #887

baobabKoodaa wrote: post #830

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You write as if there is only one voting scheme for in-person paper voting, and as if laypersons by and large trust the results of paper voting elections. Neither of these claims is true. First of all, there is more than one in-person paper voting system, and some in-person paper voting systems involve cryptography. Secondly, layperson DO NOT by and large trust the results of paper voting elections. You don't need to…

> Secondly, layperson DO NOT by and large trust the results of paper voting elections. That is false. Though there is some distrust in many parts of the world, the overall consensus is that the result of the vote was at least close to the real vote. Even in the USA after the recent election, many focused on accusations of fraud about voting machines (the infamous comments about "Hugo Chavez's machines"). I do agree t…

You're again describing one type of electronic voting, while making an argument against all forms of electronic voting. Regarding this specific type of "black box" electronic voting, yes, I agree with you, it's horrible. Now, it isn't the only type of electronic voting out there. I recommend you familiarize with other types before making sweeping arguments like that.

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

#899

Post by tomxor » Sun, Jan 16, 2022, 12:43 PM UTC

floodyberry- wrote: post #803

tomxor wrote: post #733

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The parent's perspective does not come across as an evangelist's though. Quite the opposite. It's balanced, seeing the hype for hype, seeing the flaws, and yet seeing that there is still some truth and potential buried in there. The world is grey.

There was no substantial justification given for changing their opinion. IF it was an honest post, it was entirely unconvincing

> But more recently after learning from and interacting with people building in the space my assessment changed.

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

#900

Post by tsimionescu » Sun, Jan 16, 2022, 12:53 PM UTC

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.

Outside the huge difference of scale that another commenter mentioned, there is also the difference of how easy it is to ensure this doesn't happen. For paper voting, in many countries, each party participating in the vote will have members observing every step of the process - the voting rooms, the local ballot counts, the vote transport, the regional and global vote tallies. Additionally, every citizen and even foreign independent observers has/have the right to do the same. And, since the system is dead simple, they each have the actual ability to tell if nothing was tampered.

The same thing is in no way true for electronic voting. Giving everyone access to personally inspect the electronic equipment at any level of detail is difficult logistically, and also very likely to result in damage. Even if you were able to, vanishingly few people could actually convince even themseoves that the systems are not tampered with.