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

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

#901

Post by acdha » Sun, Jan 16, 2022, 1:41 PM UTC

baobabKoodaa wrote: post #831

acdha wrote: post #658

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, there aren’t. There are systems designed to solve the problem of the inventor not getting paid by election officials but voting is an extremely hard problem once you learn about it and safe electronic voting is unsolved. The big challenge is that it needs to be anonymous even in the case of attacks. Electronic systems offer many ways to cheat which you may have thought about in the context of making purchases but…

> No, there aren’t. Yes there are, and I've documented several of them here: https://www.attejuvonen.fi/thesis/ If you disagree, can you please be specific what exactly do you disagree about?

That shows that in-person paper ballots are superior once you correct the system in Finland (P6/7 would normally be green for in person paper).

More importantly, however, it’s a mistake to give all of those equal weight. For example, if married couples vote together a spouse can monitor or coerce their partner’s choice but that doesn’t scale up better than linearly, whereas all electronic systems which don’t rely on voter-verified paper ballots are subject to very hard to disprove allegations of widespread fraud. This is the conceptual problem to the very clever mathematical approaches: even if they are theoretically sound, it is much harder to build public confidence in a system which a fraction of a percent of the population understands.

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

#902

Post by freemanon » Sun, Jan 16, 2022, 1:58 PM UTC

hiq wrote: post #895

freemanon wrote: post #872

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

First of all, let me say that I understand where you're coming from. I too try not to use the latest fad just because of it. I use systemd instead of k8 when it's enough. I use plain JS instead of react when it's enough. I run cronjobs that updates jsons served by nginx instead of building graphql APIs.

But there's a good reason things like k8 and react become overused for everything these days, because they provide a standard that works for a relatively large spectrum of cases.

The argument of "you don't need X to do Y" is not wrong, but it doesn't make X absolutely useless. Your points are not really invalid imo, but i think you're missing the point of the continuum between centralised and decentralised systems

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

#903

Post by CryptoPunk » Sun, Jan 16, 2022, 2:44 PM UTC

yashg wrote: post #284

CryptoPunk wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>So aside from coins, where else is it that you would not trust a central database, but you can verify/trust the entries being added to that database? I would not trust a central database for any application, even those where I have to trust the verifiers of the entries to that database. E.g. I would prefer stablecoins over credit in a bank. With a decentralized database, immutability and permissionlessness are the…

You can't trust a central database but you can trust a central blockchain? A proof of work blockchain which is trustless and permissionless and has many nodes can be trusted to be tamperproof and immutable, but it is also slow and inefficient (thanks to PoW). A PoW blockchain is inefficient by deaign, it's a feature not a bug beucase that is what gives it's trust without trusting. But when you make that blockchain pr…

I never suggested I would trust a centralized blockchain.

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

#904

Post by CryptoPunk » Sun, Jan 16, 2022, 2:49 PM UTC

throwawaylinux wrote: post #315

CryptoPunk wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>So aside from coins, where else is it that you would not trust a central database, but you can verify/trust the entries being added to that database? I would not trust a central database for any application, even those where I have to trust the verifiers of the entries to that database. E.g. I would prefer stablecoins over credit in a bank. With a decentralized database, immutability and permissionlessness are the…

> I would not trust a central database for any application, even those where I have to trust the verifiers of the entries to that database. I don't see how that's reasonable. What am I missing, surely virtually nobody would be willing to spend the massive resources of a blockchain for that kind of risk model. > E.g. I would prefer stablecoins over credit in a bank. So aside from coins, what's another concrete example…

>>So aside from coins, what's another concrete example?

What you wrote earlier is:

>>Crypto coins are unique in that you can verify them mathematically. They have no connection to anything else out in the real world so they don't have that problem.

Stablecoins cannot be verified entirely mathematically, as they have a connection to real world bank notes, so my example doesn't fit your exception.

>>This sounds very much like the buzzword snake oil I've heard many times before, but I'm willing to be open minded about your non-coin example.

I'll use the coin example, because it's easy to demonstrate the principle.

I can move my stablecoins, without having to ask a third party custodian for permission. With bank credit, I need to ask the bank for permission to withdraw it, or transfer it.

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

#905

Post by z3c0 » Sun, Jan 16, 2022, 3:43 PM UTC

antifa wrote: post #805

z3c0 wrote: post #727

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like a reworking of the "everybody has an agenda" retort you see so often these days. It's a slippery slope that only leads to dying a curmudgeon, as all chances for new perspectives were rebuked as agendas/evangelism/propagandist/etc.

Or, it's a slippery slope that only leads to keeping all your BTC/ETH and missing out on what getting scammed 20 times a year feels like.

Strange, I've managed to do all of that without being needlessly cynical.

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

#906

Post by dmitriid » Sun, Jan 16, 2022, 4:33 PM UTC

sabhiram wrote: post #848

dmitriid wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There exists a transparency in the open-source code of smart contracts that will disrupt the current gatekeepers like the internet did Ah yes. How can we forget the community-audited and vetted smart contracts that ended up draining its users' wallets of all their money. Transparency!

Well, as opposed to hearing "oops our black box implementation of your information got hacked", I honestly don't mind the trend of "read the contract, it is code". Sure it can be misleading, sure it can be intended to trick someone. However, code is law, and even backdoors are "code". Instead we should fix the backdoors so that code can be reasonable "law".

> Instead we should fix the backdoors so that code can be reasonable "law".

There never will be. For the absolute vast majority of people, programmers included, these "contracts" will be a yet another blackbox.

Moreover, it already is a blackbox even to the people who develop them, because they can't find errors in their own software and APIs.

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

#907

Post by CryptoPunk » Sun, Jan 16, 2022, 4:40 PM UTC

rank0 wrote: post #401

CryptoPunk wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>So aside from coins, where else is it that you would not trust a central database, but you can verify/trust the entries being added to that database? I would not trust a central database for any application, even those where I have to trust the verifiers of the entries to that database. E.g. I would prefer stablecoins over credit in a bank. With a decentralized database, immutability and permissionlessness are the…

You realize all this web3 stuff runs on top of the internet right? There are centralized CAs, domain/ip registrars, ISPs…shit even the libraries that comprise your entire computing stack all come from centralized databases! Your comment is stored on a database. USDC/Tether have private databases and their collateral is held by third parties in again their own database.

I would prefer all of the databases used within the internet infrastructure to be immutable append-only blockchains maintained without any centralized trusted third party.

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

#908

Post by floodyberry- » Sun, Jan 16, 2022, 4:58 PM UTC

samhw wrote: post #858

floodyberry- wrote: post #816

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

With zero knowledge proofs, you do have their transaction histories, and you can verify that they are consistent, you just can't tell who the parties are or the values they're transacting

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

#909

Post by oneoff786 » Sun, Jan 16, 2022, 5:05 PM UTC

landemva wrote: post #877

ricardobeat wrote: post #798

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is like giving central-bank levels of power to private entities. Which obviously follow from de-centralization. It’s insane. The only way this could be a reliable replacement for our existing financial systems, would be with strong oversight from.. some kind of central entity that acts on behalf of society’s collective best interests.. staffed by people chosen through popular voting..

I stay away from USDT. The sooner it disappears, the better. We no longer need central authorities to create good trusted products. Centralized can suck (communism, Federal Reserve bailouts of banks they regulate). DAI decisions are decentralized and done by the DAI holders. You may want to check it out.

The potential for good actors isn’t really as noteworthy as a system that enables bad ones.

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

#910

Post by vba616 » Sun, Jan 16, 2022, 5:19 PM UTC

darawk wrote: post #889

vba616 wrote: post #866

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being resilient to unreliable connections in general is a feature that was important initially and has never stopped being relevant. The purpose of ARPANET was to implement applications like telnet, ftp, and email, so people could benefit from remote access to computers. The first network link went up in 1969 and the basic applications were implemented by 1973. It seems to me that people knew exactly what they wanted…

> Being resilient to unreliable connections in general is a feature that was important initially and has never stopped being relevant. That is a very abstract way of referring to the feature. Suppose 100 years from now the entire world runs on decentralized blockchains. You could make the same exact abstract point: "Well, leaderless consensus was the original design goal, and it was achieved immediately, so, it was u…

>only if you conceptualize "knew what they wanted" in a very abstract way that makes the point tautological.

I don't understand what you mean.

If they wanted remote login, email, and file transfer, and those applications were up and running in a year or three, and solved an immediate purpose/problem, that existed before the first network link was running, then what is it that is abstract or tautological?

I don't know how the contrast with cryptocurrency could be clearer.