Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against blockchain technologies • Hacker News Board

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

#391

Post by scott_s » Wed, Feb 02, 2022, 9:02 PM UTC

TimJRobinson wrote: post #387

scott_s wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're begging the question; you are assuming all transactions will happen on chain. That's not reasonable. Most transactions will happen with normal currency, using normal means. This company then needs to track all of that and do the distribution on chain.

And if they only allow people to compensate artists through cryptocurrency, then it's not viable for artists.

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

#392

Post by randomswede » Thu, Feb 03, 2022, 8:18 AM UTC

nurettin wrote: post #386

randomswede wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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)

Well, a degenerate Merkle tree is a list (any degenerate tree is a list). As a consensus mechanism, I could potentially think of many ways of getting that, but none that are both efficient and trustless.

As-is, the cryptocurrencies we've seen have all been incredibly wasteful and inefficient. Any that would be efficient, both energy-wise and for speed-of-transactions would most probably require ditching complete decentralisation and thus be unacceptable to hard-core ideologues in the "crypto space".

For a rough estimate of the "transactions per second" you'd need to be a global, practical, "we handle all transactions", we can do a rough estimate. There are, what, 6 * 10^9 people on the planet. At a conservative guess, each person does about one exconomic transaction per day. Let's assume that is approximately evenly distributed through each day. A day is 86400 seconds, that's close enough to 10^5 that we might as well use that. That gives us at a minimum 6k transactions per second to be viable for a single global electronic currency.

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

#393

Post by quadrangle » Mon, Feb 07, 2022, 12:27 AM UTC

koonsolo wrote: post #341

invaliduser wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

«We're in the early phases of it» I've been hearing this for years now. How long can something stay in early phases ?

Here's Bill Gates defending "internet" in 1995: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gipL_CEw-fk . He gets totally annihilated by Letterman. Bill can't even say a single use-case that is better than what already exists.

Gosh, either you read too much clickbait or you write it. That's not what "totally annihilated" means.

Bill mentioned email, and that's better in some ways, they just didn't get into it.

There wasn't in 1995 much that was dramatically valuable for regular folks. The conversation doesn't get into what the potential would be.

This is Bill being reasonable. He comes across as a fair-minded person, not a delusional zealot. He's about the opposite of what crypto-enthusiasts sound like. He doesn't come across as someone making outrageous claims and thus undermining his credibility.