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Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future

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Re: Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future

#191

Post by Kbelicius »

Quindecillion wrote: post #189
Kbelicius wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Meanwhile 1.7 billion people around the world do not have a bank account. Do you know why the majority of those people don't have bank accounts? Because they have no fucking use for it! They either have no money (how does crypto help those people?) or they use banking services through their family/friends. Do you know what 3.7 billion people don't have? Access to internet.

> Do you know why the majority of those people don't have bank accounts? Because they have no fucking use for it! Everyone has use for a way to store their wealth, no matter how small. Economies that use money, in whatever form, are much more efficient than those based on barter. > Do you know what 3.7 billion people don't have? Access to internet. Yes, Bitcoin won't help people without access to the internet. There…

> Everyone has use for a way to store their wealth, no matter how small. Economies that use money, in whatever form, are much more efficient than those based on barter.

Oh ffs, what are you talking about? Do you think that the poorest people on earth are poor because they choose not to deal with money? Will they store their blanket and cup on the blockchain? My god.

> You know what governments and central banks can do to the security and issuance of Bitcoin? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

What is preventing a government from getting >51% of mining power and just wrecking havoc on the chain? Afraid of governments but can't think of the possibility of them taking over mining operations or just fucking up the internet to take it down. Is it wilful ignorance or naivety?

Re: Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future

#192

Post by hiq »

kybernetikos wrote: post #178
hiq wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sure, but smart contracts have totally different incentives and costs for creating interoperable services than e.g. mobile apps. I would say that Ethereum does help here. Why would you say that? For what reasons? To engage with your comment a bit more, regarding costs, it's very expensive to: * write secure smart contracts (if possible at all) * maintain a smart contract infrastructure (transaction fees) There's no…

It's very expensive to write secure smart contracts, true, but it's also surprisingly expensive to write secure systems using more traditional technologies too. I'm not sure exactly what you mean by it being expensive to maintain a smart contract infrastructure, because if your application suits it, you can literally deploy your smart contract and forget it, and people can use it into the future without you ever havi…

> without you ever having to pay server costs - i.e. for the person deploying the smart contract it can be much cheaper

That's just offloading the costs (or passing the costs down to the users), that's not a solution.

> it's the default way of writing blockchain applications

There's no default way of writing smart contracts, where does that come from? I've seen my share of smart contracts (tokens, stablecoins, NFTs) where one single address control everything, or where external approval is required for any interaction to happen. There's no "default" there.

Even if you manage to convince a bank or other financial institution to use a blockchain, they won't relinquish control over what they deploy there. There's just no incentive in favor of that, and so many against (regulations, complexity). But more to the point: "using blockchain" as a constraint doesn't change the incentives when it comes to interoperability.

Re: Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future

#193

Post by CryptoPunk »

defaultprimate wrote: post #181
CryptoPunk wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give me an example of a problem with blockchain, that you think is intractable, because it's inherent to the data structure?

Irreversible transactions

A reversible layer on top is possible through smart contracts.

Re: Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future

#194

Post by egeozcan »

Quindecillion wrote: post #188
egeozcan wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Meanwhile 1.7 billion people around the world do not have a bank account ...therefore we need bitcoin? Is this the new spin? People don't see it's a tech that was invented without a use case? Many people don't have electricity too, what are you talking about?

> People don't see it's a tech that was invented without a use case? Have you read a single quote from Satoshi Nakamoto? He's very clear about the use case... many times.

I just searched and read a single quote from "them"(?):

“If you don’t believe it or don’t get it, I don’t have the time to try to convince you, sorry.” — Satoshi Nakamoto

That was fun, thank you.

Re: Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future

#195

Post by Quindecillion »

kkielhofner wrote: post #190
Quindecillion wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Adoption... Bitcoin has roughly 500K transactions per day with an estimated 80% of them being trades (with an estimated 77% of those trades going through the "big three" exchanges). Source for this? Also, all of these transaction numbers are for on-chain transactions. They don't include layer 2 solutions like the Lightning Network. Given that the Lightning Network is built for micro-transactions, where sats can lit…

I understand and am aware of L2 solutions like lightning. My own startup uses Polygon (Ethereum L2) to store copies of user asset verification records. Generally speaking, L2s are interesting because they all make compromises from the principals of blockchain (as you mention - but that's for another day). It's been interesting, to say the least, to watch some of the fundamental definitions and principals such as "dec…

> why it's actually been one of the most slowly adopted technologies in the last 100 years.

That doesn't agree with the data I've seen for Bitcoin: https://twitter.com/woonomic/status/1356310219215699968?s=19

And "blockchain" is pointless outside of Bitcoin, which might explain why its adoption has been slow as a more general technology. The blockchain was created to solve a very specific problem related to Bitcoin's mission statement (as defined by Satoshi). With that problem solved by Bitcoin, what else is there to use "blockchain" as a technology on exactly? Ok, there might be some very niche use cases that are applicable, but those aren't going to see the technology widely adopted.

> If you have a reputable/reliable source for the number of transactions on the Lightning Network I'd love to see it.

I don't think it's actually possible to determine this. There's no way to see transactions that occur across the entire network. Nodes are only aware of the transactions that route through them. Maybe some clever people have determined a way to infer it, but I'm not aware of any. The metric most people use to judge growth of the Lightning Network is btc capacity i.e. how many bitcoin are "held" in channels between nodes, which is open information.

Re: Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future

#196

Post by defaultprimate »

CryptoPunk wrote: post #193
defaultprimate wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Irreversible transactions

A reversible layer on top is possible through smart contracts.

A transaction is definitionally something that has been written to the blockchain, so no it isn't.

In the case of layered solutions, you're no longer using blockchain. If we want to count uncomitted transactions on a second layer as "reversible", that comes with a host of its own issues, and points out another intrinsic flaw of blockchain: incapable of fulfilling its philosophical purpose, and requires secondary solutions that violate the very core philosophy of the data structure in hopes of overcoming just one of its many issues.

https://cryptowhale.medium.com/why-the-bitcoin-lightning-net...

https://github.com/davidshares/Lightning-Network

Re: Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future

#197

Post by kkielhofner »

Quindecillion wrote: post #195
kkielhofner wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand and am aware of L2 solutions like lightning. My own startup uses Polygon (Ethereum L2) to store copies of user asset verification records. Generally speaking, L2s are interesting because they all make compromises from the principals of blockchain (as you mention - but that's for another day). It's been interesting, to say the least, to watch some of the fundamental definitions and principals such as "dec…

> why it's actually been one of the most slowly adopted technologies in the last 100 years. That doesn't agree with the data I've seen for Bitcoin: https://twitter.com/woonomic/status/1356310219215699968?s=19 And "blockchain" is pointless outside of Bitcoin, which might explain why its adoption has been slow as a more general technology. The blockchain was created to solve a very specific problem related to Bitcoin's…

That's an interesting graph. They appear to have cherry picked data and used strange start dates for each. Based on numbers I've seen it looks more like this:

Bitcoin launched 1/2009 - as of now there are 100M users (your graph says 135M, which seems to be a very high estimate but lets go with that).

World Wide Web was released 4/1993 - 13 years later there were at least 700M users (very conservative estimate). Mind you this growth depended on everything from having a computer (22.9% of US households had a computer in 1993) to laying untold miles of fiber optics, undersea cables, building out physical datacenters, etc. Literally people digging ditches and ships circling the globe - many thousands of miles over.

By being essentially just another internet application (most people consider WWW = internet) taking advantage of all of this infrastructure Bitcoin/blockchain had/has a HUGE advantage over the WWW. To be a bitcoin user in 2009 you had to have a computer and install a program. To be a bitcoin user for the vast majority of its life you could/can hear about bitcoin at a bar, pull your phone out, and install an app on your smartphone to be a "bitcoin user" for next to nothing in under five minutes.

To be a WWW user in 1993 you had to have a computer that could handle it (Windows? Trumpet Winsock?, CPU, RAM, modem, etc) and a local ISP, etc. I remember in 1994 having to install a modem, a second phone line, and dial into an ISP that was LONG DISTANCE... It literally took weeks to get on the internet in 1994 and especially in my case, it was very expensive and very technically challenging (Hayes commands anyone? Chat scripts? PPP/SLIP?).

Then a little later America Online (still crazy expensive), maybe have it at work or university, or in the later years get lucky and have broadband in your area. I couldn't get DSL until 2004, for example (and it was still very expensive).

Even with all of these monumental challenges the WWW grew at least 5x faster than bitcoin (and it's really probably closer to 10x).

I suspected that was the case with Lightning. I'll keep digging into this because as I'm sure you can tell I'm fascinated with this. Overall I'm really trying to ask:

Why has adoption in the "cryptosphere" been so terrible (arguably the worst rate of any recent technology)? This is a question every honest blockchain advocate needs to ask themselves because there are clearly significant issues impeding mass adoption. Whatever these issues are need to be identified and rectified to the extent they can. I truly hope it's not the obvious answer - "It doesn't provide anything most people want or need".

Re: Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future

#198

Post by CryptoPunk »

defaultprimate wrote: post #196
CryptoPunk wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A reversible layer on top is possible through smart contracts.

A transaction is definitionally something that has been written to the blockchain, so no it isn't. In the case of layered solutions, you're no longer using blockchain. If we want to count uncomitted transactions on a second layer as "reversible", that comes with a host of its own issues, and points out another intrinsic flaw of blockchain: incapable of fulfilling its philosophical purpose, and requires secondary solu…

>>A transaction is definitionally something that has been written to the blockchain, so no it isn't.

You can have a smart contract that writes reversible transactions to the blockchain. This would mean that the smart contract imposes a delay for withdrawals, to allow time for any possible requests for reversals. There could optionally be an expedited wirhdrawal upon some set of authorities deeming the balance as finalized and not subject to any reversals.

>>requires secondary solutions that violate the very core philosophy of the data structure in hopes of overcoming just one of its many issues.

Even when you lose some of the benefits of blockchains, via secondary solutions like a reversible transaction smart contract, you retain some benefits, like:

* optionality, e.g. those who are fine with irreversible transactions are free to use them,

* permissionless market entry, e.g. any party is free to deploy their own 'reversible transaction' smart contract, giving payment consumers maximum choice

* stronger guarantees of the integrity of transaction processing, with transparency into any tampering, given the code that executes the transactions, along with the transaction itself, is publicly auditible

* debundling the provision of the different services that are required for transaction processing, by allowing transactions to be processed by immutably open smart contracts that no third party can later close off access to.

Re: Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future

#199

Post by defaultprimate »

CryptoPunk wrote: post #198
defaultprimate wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A transaction is definitionally something that has been written to the blockchain, so no it isn't. In the case of layered solutions, you're no longer using blockchain. If we want to count uncomitted transactions on a second layer as "reversible", that comes with a host of its own issues, and points out another intrinsic flaw of blockchain: incapable of fulfilling its philosophical purpose, and requires secondary solu…

>>A transaction is definitionally something that has been written to the blockchain, so no it isn't. You can have a smart contract that writes reversible transactions to the blockchain. This would mean that the smart contract imposes a delay for withdrawals, to allow time for any possible requests for reversals. There could optionally be an expedited wirhdrawal upon some set of authorities deeming the balance as fina…

>>You can have a smart contract that writes reversible transactions to the blockchain

No you can't. Once a smart contract is included in a block, it has finished executing and is irreversible. The transaction is irreversible, again, by definition.

>>Even when you lose some of the benefits of blockchains

So you're no longer using a blockchain.

I'm not interested in endless goalpost shifting.

Re: Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future

#200

Post by CryptoPunk »

defaultprimate wrote: post #199
CryptoPunk wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>A transaction is definitionally something that has been written to the blockchain, so no it isn't. You can have a smart contract that writes reversible transactions to the blockchain. This would mean that the smart contract imposes a delay for withdrawals, to allow time for any possible requests for reversals. There could optionally be an expedited wirhdrawal upon some set of authorities deeming the balance as fina…

>>You can have a smart contract that writes reversible transactions to the blockchain No you can't. Once a smart contract is included in a block, it has finished executing and is irreversible. The transaction is irreversible, again, by definition. >>Even when you lose some of the benefits of blockchains So you're no longer using a blockchain. I'm not interested in endless goalpost shifting.

>>Once a smart contract is included in a block, it has finished executing and is irreversible. The transaction is irreversible, again, by definition.

The transaction is irreversible, in the sense that it can't be removed from the blockchain, but the transfer from person A to person B can be made reversible, via a smart contract that doesn't allow person B to withdraw from the smart contract for a duration, during which time person A can effect a reversal transaction that would effectively undo the transfer.

>>So you're no longer using a blockchain.

In my example, you are using the blockchain in all cases. You are just using smart contracts in a way that reduces some of disadvantages of naive blockchain use (e.g. allowing a consumer to dispute a fraudulent charge) while giving up some of its advantages (e.g. reduced risk of charge backs for honest merchants).

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