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Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against blockchain technologies

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381–390 of 393 posts

Re: Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against blockchain technologies

#381
Do you also have a responsibility to speak out against redlining? Or Banking deserts? Or keeping Afghanis from starving due to sanctions both external and internal? How about 0% savings accounts? Or being denied a mortgage from the only game in town? How about being put in prison because you cannot come up with the egregious fees larded onto your account because "reasons"? Are you prepared to defend us from all of that? Or just this? The one thing that has come along in the last few decades that we can use to empower ourselves with no interference necessary "from those who know better."

Every single payment method that has been invented has suffered from frauds, scams etc. People have found ways to remove mailed checks from mailboxes, wash the ink from them and make them out to new payees. Should we stop using checks now too? Should we go back to trading rocks and shells? Corda is already doing great work in the European insurance industry at lowering costs and increasing transparency. We won't be lucky enough to get it here, likewise moving the bond market to the ledger should do the same thing. No advancement is perfect, but going by what you have written here we should all go back to living in caves and running from sabertooths. I think I'll pass. And I'm not a techie....and I still feel like this post is nonsense.

Re: Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against blockchain technologies

#382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Immutable ledgers are a godsend and are useful in many different contexts: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_Transparency - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lab_notebook - https://www.newamerica.org/digital-impact-governance-initiat... Adjustments needed for shipping, banking, or taxes are trivially accommodated; those are additional events which can be appended to the log.

None of your examples are all, at the same time, immutable, public, or ledgers. The Georgian land thingie is the most interesting, but a Georgian judge could definitely order a change in ownership due to incorrect data entered into the ledger, so it's not immutable.

> a Georgian judge could definitely order a change in ownership due to incorrect data entered into the ledger, so it's not immutable.

There seems to be a misunderstanding. The ledger is immutable. That doesn't mean the state is immutable! Immutable state is not very useful. A judge could absolutely order that the ownership of some parcel is changed, but the change will appear as a separate record and everybody will be able to see the change and nobody can credibly deny that the change happened, not even the judge.

Re: Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against blockchain technologies

#383
post #237
post #80

I don't think you realize just how much these technologies benefit people in countries with poor currencies. You need to address this before painting with such a broad brush.

I love seeing this argument. You should really visit these countries. Crypto does not help these countries whatsoever.

It does help me, living in Argentina

Re: Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against blockchain technologies

#384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is blockchain inherently bad? Asking a tangential question, is a data store like Oracle DB, Postgres, or MongoDB inherently bad? If you answered yes to one and NOT the other, please rethink about how you view blockchain or any data store. Because perhaps your intention was to be extremely polarizing, which is fair, but I also think your wording is dishonest. > the entire scope of these technologies is promoting fraud…

Technically, Blockchain is an inefficient (bad) data structure that is supposed to control transfer of assets (an important infrastructure). So yes, it is objectively bad just like O(n) is objectively better than O(e^n).

"Blockchain" is basically just a Merkle tree with a branching factor extremely close to 1. That is, in and of itself, neithre inefficient nor bad.

However, pairing that with a proof-of-work consensus mechanism is incredibly inefficient, energy-consuming (requires at least 50% of all available compute to be engaged with the blockchain or risk bad actors taking over).

Re: Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against blockchain technologies

#385
post #360
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Tether is and then completely ignores USDC. He also claims that none of the popular blockchains can scale, but Solana is frequently in the top 5 most popular cryptocurrencies. This is very frequent tone on many subreddits, whether you used it intentionally or not, you became part of the problem: none blockchains can scale and all are bad for planet, but have you seen how good solana actually is? This week Solana had…

>none blockchains can scale and all are bad for planet >I didn't say anything bad about solana or PoS Isn't this a contradiction?

Yes, if you remove two compatible lines from their carefully positioned contexts then they risk becoming contradictions. This is the exact point that the comment you are replying to is making.

Re: Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against blockchain technologies

#386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically, Blockchain is an inefficient (bad) data structure that is supposed to control transfer of assets (an important infrastructure). So yes, it is objectively bad just like O(n) is objectively better than O(e^n).

"Blockchain" is basically just a Merkle tree with a branching factor extremely close to 1. That is, in and of itself, neithre inefficient nor bad. However, pairing that with a proof-of-work consensus mechanism is incredibly inefficient, energy-consuming (requires at least 50% of all available compute to be engaged with the blockchain or risk bad actors taking over).

AFAIK There is no application of Blockchain other than consensus. Do you know of any to justify this distinction? (also why merkle tree? looks like a plain old list to me, with very few exceptions while it is being distributed)

Re: Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against blockchain technologies

#387
post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool! How would you like to open a private company and manage that, including accounts and taxes, for every song?

NFTs don’t do that for you. The company linked still has to do that.

NFTs can absolutely do that. They're programmable tokens that can be coded to do anything.

When people purchase songs though the smart contract, part of the value can be automatically sent to the wallet of the person who owns the NFT that corresponds to that song.

The problem is most people, even on here still think NFTs are just some dumb pointer.

Re: Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against blockchain technologies

#388
post #32

Like many people back then, I also found the whole proof-of-work / blockchain concept to be interesting from a theoretical computer science / distributed systems perspective. But these days, I can't help but think that we've inadvertently created a paperclip maximizer without even bothering to create an AGI first. Humans are the AGI, and we're going to happily use more and more energy to play this stupid game for as…

> "we need to find a way to change the incentives globally"

Shameless plug: basex.com

> BaseX measures "triple bottom line" - People Planet Prosperity - new definition of value - accounting for environmental impact and wellbeing.

It's is all about incentives.

Re: Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against blockchain technologies

#389
Blockchain is the most impactful technology since the internet.

It changes everything - foundation of trust. New economy. New incentives.

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

I'm pretty sure some people were angry at the internet 30 years ago.

Re: Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against blockchain technologies

#390
I don't know wheere the ponzi scheme is in Smart contracts, decentralized identities, arbitrary data communication across and decentralized network, ZK-rollups, SK-Snarks, Automatic liquidation, leverage, and minting using other assets as an algorithmic backing, liquid staking, no loss lottery's, loaned crowdloans, algorithmic stablecoins, arbitrage based enabled trading platforms, decentralized incentived storage networks and a million other things.

Seems like we are going into another crypto winter :)

Every-time this happens, i slowly invest in all the projects i think are promising, then the next bitcoin halving us crypto nerds have 5-10 things to add to the list of 'Interesting things crypto can do', no one understands them so they are easily dismissed and people say "Well i still can't buy an apple with my btc' so thus all crypto has failed.

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