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Ask HN: Am I going insane or is there genuinely no value in blockchain tech?

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Re: Ask HN: Am I going insane or is there genuinely no value in blockchain tech?

#191

Post by baby »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #50
paulsutter wrote: post #19

The sole purpose of blockchain is to prevent double spending without a trusted party Other proposed applications are mostly dumb / misguided, like immutable storage, social network posts, etc, these can be done with hashing or digital signatures alone If you have a better way to avoid double spending than blockchain folks woukd get very excited. Traditional database can’t do that (requires a trusted party)

Preventing double spending is possible even without trust. A centralised authority could publish the transactions in a signed append only log. Independent verifiers could pull the log with some frequency and verify that no one spent twice.

Your example is implemented in Certificate Transparency to monitor certificate authorities on the web. It does not help you prevent attacks, it merely helps you detect them after the fact.

Re: Ask HN: Am I going insane or is there genuinely no value in blockchain tech?

#192

Post by tigershark »

reeeeeeee wrote: post #116
FabHK wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The sole purpose of blockchain is to prevent double spending without a trusted party. Yes, and avoiding the trusted party makes it more inefficient by a factor of around 100,000,000 (-ish), if you consider that BTC uses around 23 GW and can do no more (5 transactions a second) than a single trusted PC could do. What are use cases were you actually need this and the high cost is worth it?

Cardano is a cryptocurrency that offers ~250 transactions per second but should soon scale without a layer 2 solution. I mention this as I run a validator on a 8gb raspberry pi with ZRAM swap enabled with no issues consuming ~5W the whole network could run this way if needed. This is lower power due to a mechanism called proof of stake. BTC uses proof of work. Ethereum has been 'trying' to migrate to POS for some tim…

Proof of stake is useless. It just give all the powers to the current stakeholders. So it’s not trustless by definition since you need to trust the stakeholders.

Re: Ask HN: Am I going insane or is there genuinely no value in blockchain tech?

#193

Post by sho »

cynusx wrote: post #138

It's 100% deregulated finance and even if regulators want to regulate it, they basically can't because unlike regulators, crypto is global. All the activities that regulators are designed to prevent are very successful in the crypto world. I don't think crypto will fail or go bust; but I do think retail investors are completely abandoned by regulators who have a democratic mandate to protect them. I suppose they don'…

You don't need global regulation, you need regulation in your local market and currency or you can't actually spend any of the theoretical value you may possess. What's the point of being a crypto millionaire in theory if you can't actually cash out? It is already very hard to, eg., secretly cash out BTC to AUD to spend on something you actually want. It will be reported and it will be taxed. It may as well be actual dollars.

Re: Ask HN: Am I going insane or is there genuinely no value in blockchain tech?

#194

Post by petesergeant »

stkdump wrote: post #153
paulsutter wrote: post #19

The sole purpose of blockchain is to prevent double spending without a trusted party Other proposed applications are mostly dumb / misguided, like immutable storage, social network posts, etc, these can be done with hashing or digital signatures alone If you have a better way to avoid double spending than blockchain folks woukd get very excited. Traditional database can’t do that (requires a trusted party)

A database does this. The trusted party isn't eliminated by blockchain, because someone has to code the implementation of the software. Unless you checked the software for bugs or backdoors camouflaged as bugs and compile it yourself, you trust someone else. The trust 'problem' is overrated, because nothing in this world works without trust.

I'm blockchain skeptical, but I think you're slightly throwing out the baby with the bathwater here.

> the trusted party isn't eliminated by blockchain, because someone has to code the implementation of the software

I don't think is relevant in practice, and I think the blockchain does solve this problem regarding double-spending. Yes, there's a centralized set of developers, but that does not seem to be a problem in practice, 13 years in

> The trust 'problem' is overrated, because nothing in this world works without trust.

Bingo, this is the real problem. The world has very few problems where a trusted authority / arbitrator isn't a massive benefit.

Re: Ask HN: Am I going insane or is there genuinely no value in blockchain tech?

#195

Post by FabHK »

baby wrote: post #175

I’ll paste what I wrote in https://cryptologie.net/#article_555 The simplest abstraction is to see cryptocurrency / blockchain / distributed ledger technology as a database running on a single computer. Everybody can access this database and there’s some simple logic that allows you to debit your account and credit someone else’s account. The computer has a queue to make sure transactions are processed in order. Bloc…

Yes, it is a slow computer that uses the resources of about a billion modern computers. (Note that you could achieve basically any desired fault tolerance with a minuscule fraction of that with a trusted central authority.)

Re: Ask HN: Am I going insane or is there genuinely no value in blockchain tech?

#196

Post by baby »

yashg wrote: post #43

Blockchain has no use other than to store tokens for speculative gambling. Take a look at this presentation - https://bit.ly/3OB5G18 Proof-of-work - the USP of blockchain makes it slow and expensive and planet destroying at scale. But it's not a bug, it's a feature. You take it out and the blockchain is neither public not permission-less. A private, trusted, permissioned blockchain is pointless. The whole blockchain,…

Your comment goes in all directions so it’s hard to answer. Perhaps it’s useful to point that proof of work is not ubiquitously used in blockchains and much greener alternatives have been preferred in pretty much any crypto that’s been released in the past 5 years

Re: Ask HN: Am I going insane or is there genuinely no value in blockchain tech?

#197

Post by kimi »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #84
Niksko wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without a single trusted party. You're trading trust for one entity for trust for many entities.

> Without a single trusted party. You're trading trust for one entity for trust for many entities. The notion of “single” entities in society is, I think, flawed. A bank is not a single entity, for instance—they are not just a single actor—they are governed by a board and bylaws and shareholders and government regulations and judges, etc. If something goes wrong, which is expected and built into the system process ,t…

> I think that much of the philosophy around blockchain comes from the lack of faith in human governance—which is to say, a certain kind of misanthropy.

So the blockchain gets two things right: avoiding double-spending and an honest assessment on human nature.

Re: Ask HN: Am I going insane or is there genuinely no value in blockchain tech?

#198

Post by FabHK »

dageshi wrote: post #75

You're missing the fact that it enabled purely online/digital money people will actually use. You could build an online currency with a database much more easily than blockchain but people won't use it because it relies on a central authority to maintain the database and not enough people will trust that central authority not to misuse their power. It was tried a bunch of times in the past and never worked. Fundament…

> It was tried a bunch of times in the past and never worked.

Sorry, EUR and USD and KES (Kenyan shilling, uses a great cheap payment system on mobile phones called M-Pesa) and XRP (Ripple, a "crypto currency" with a central authority) don't work? I hadn't noticed.

Re: Ask HN: Am I going insane or is there genuinely no value in blockchain tech?

#199

Post by antihero »

mypastself wrote: post #110
paulsutter wrote: post #19

The sole purpose of blockchain is to prevent double spending without a trusted party Other proposed applications are mostly dumb / misguided, like immutable storage, social network posts, etc, these can be done with hashing or digital signatures alone If you have a better way to avoid double spending than blockchain folks woukd get very excited. Traditional database can’t do that (requires a trusted party)

I’ve read several technical, non-fluff books on the topic, and I’ve developed smart contracts on Ethereum for decent hourly wage (paid out in fiat). And I’ve still come to roughly the same conclusion as you. Either my reading comprehension is poor, or there is little actual value in the vast majority of blockchain applications. Digital cash, as defined in the Bitcoin whitepaper, still seems like the only real use cas…

When I first heard about Ethereum I figured the value it would bring was incentivising everyone to create a worldwide supercomputer of the sorts we've never even seen before that can do really amazing computational work as opposed to bitcoin which just seems to crunch numbers entirely pointlessly. Any ideas why that never happened?

Re: Ask HN: Am I going insane or is there genuinely no value in blockchain tech?

#200

Post by orwin »

thowaway_420_69 wrote: post #173
lmohseni wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’ve ever written code, and if you’ve ever written a bug, then you will understand that code as law is terrible idea, especially when it comes to finance.

^ you will understand that code as law is terrible idea, especially when it comes to finance. Why are we relying on code for controlling Safety-critical system? e.g. Nuclear Reactors, Autopilot of aircrafts, docking of two separate free-flying space vehicles, and weapon of mass destruction launch and control machines. All of them use "code", is finance more critcal than systems which are kill capable.

Well, nuclear reactor use dumb electronics overrides, and each time an operation is done inside, each operation is done with human supervision. Override mechanisms are regularly tested and used. If your override is not dumb/simple enough, and you rely on code, you have the 380 max.

What are the override, who are the supervisors for cryptocurrency?

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