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

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

#221

Post by CJefferson » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 11:48 AM UTC

anotherhue wrote: post #17

Public writable block chains seem to be a dead end due to the cost of 'proof of x' in any Sibyl safe way. Private blockchains, such as for cross company account clearances, complex asset exchanges (planes, land) may help dislodge the rent seeking lawyers. They can be publically readable also which could be useful, e.g. For querying a land registry.

Under land ownership, a lawyer might decide someone else owned land for the past 2 years, and history must be re-written. Also, that patch must be applied regardless of what the current land-owner wants.

At this point, it feels like you just have a git repository with a single controller. That's probably useful, but feels a long way from a blockchain.

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

#222

Post by roland35 » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 11:50 AM UTC

davidguetta wrote: post #142

There's two value for me: - the possibility to hide some transactions out of the traditional system (monero / zcash). I mean you may disagree, it's mostly ideological for some honest people and practical to some dishonest / drug dealers / evaders. - the fact they are decentralised currencies that are now an actual alternative to people's national currency. this may look silly to you if you live in europe / usa, but a…

I understand the appeal of a currency not controlled by a bad government, but could we honestly expect third world residents to be able to understand and use the technology required for crypto? I have been writing software for a decade and I still can barely keep up with what is going on.

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

#223

Post by igorkraw » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 11:50 AM UTC

No, you aren't going insane. Cryptocurrency (block Chain ledger+distributed consensus) so far has no use case that is not covered by better technology. The one thing it facilitates (an online, permissionless, trustless, decentralised,ledger) has no real use case in human society, because in order to run the infrastructure to go online you already need to solve a lot of not-on-chain problems, and we have solved them with the technology of trust facilitation: the rule of law, legitimate authority, checks and balances etc. are all social technologies which are not perfect but have been honed over centuries and when combined with the internet to augment human discussion and decision making are incredibly efficient and low cost. It is pure insanity to try and replace this with cryptocurrency.

What makes sense is for governments and other societal trust anchors to run federated ledgers with cheap APIs, that everyone involved take local backups of and can verify, but go through specialised adapted write APIs (i.e. consensus through regulations, governance, checks and balances etc). Because that is useful and can automate notaries for example.

Everything else so far is either a decentralised Ponzi scheme (no clear owner/central figure, everyone can profit by luring in more suckers, but unlike the trust based economy no actual value is produced and the system would collapse if the trust based economy shut down the inflow of new capital - while even Venezuela and north Korea still produce things under heavy sanctions and could maybe be fine if they got rid of their cleptocrats and went back to an agrarian society, albeit with a lower QOL than the rest of the world) and/or derives it's value from using the Ponzi driven price of the currencies to launder money or provide tools to speculate/keep the game going. It's all recursive and contingent on going to the moon, with no there there. The epitome of default dead.

The market can stay irrational longer than we can bet against it. It is fully possible (and I'm afraid of it happening) that crypto bros get enough lobbying power to regulatory capture and insert themselves as "decentralised middlemen" into governmental processes. If this happens, they might point to the "value added" by Cryptos in the same way TurboTax in the US currently claims its usefulness. Bug we should not believe these lies, cryptocurrency is pure rent seeking.

That's why you're not going insane, nor missing something. There is simply no there there, just a bubble big enough to capture the very state it claims to dislike while it uses energy and IT infrastructure only that state and its society enabled

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

#224

Post by ZeroGravitas » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 11:50 AM UTC

antihero wrote: post #204

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure this is convincing. If there's some actual benefit, then crappy code that can be iterated is fine. Anything you do today with computer code was likely done worse in the past with worse code. So what is the actual benefit of "peer-to-peer lending and pooled lending" that blockchain technology provides that makes it worth iterating through these early mistakes? I'd guess the answer usually involves dodging…

The whole point of the legal system is that whilst it's defined as clearly as possible, there is always going to be some flexibility and interpretation, and a human element, so if someone finds a technical loophole but is clearly defrauding everyone they can still be put in jail. Of course, it isn't perfect, but the idea of law being absolute (as in code is law) is absurd as we lack the capability to consider every e…

Yeah, but it's the absolutism that's the issue, not the buggy code.

When designing automated replacments for any business process you have to deal with the same 'exceptions'. You could just accept "computer says no" as the desired outcome in exchange for the efficiency, and let hackers take your money because "hey, they beat the system! It's theirs now" but that's a choice, not a limitation of the tech itself. Unless the tech's only benefit is that "computer says no" or "hacker took your money" is final, which doesn't actually sound like a benefit.

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

#225

Post by martin_vejmelka » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 11:52 AM UTC

Cynddl wrote: post #190

martin_vejmelka wrote: post #181

Blockchains provide computational integrity across geographic regions and jurisdictions requiring no trusted intermediary . You can run a computation and guarantee that others running that computation are using the same inputs and will get the same result. Even if Russia or France decide that they no longer allow Ethereum (just an example), this does not affect computations anywhere else. This is a massive shift in p…

> No other computational platform before the blockchain has provided all these features at the same time. What about PGP/GPG?

PGP/GPG provides primitives for managing some sort of PKI but beyond that, I don't follow your argument.

For the sake of concreteness, here's for example how an auction can run on the blockchain:

At time T an asset A owned by an anonymous seller is locked into a smart contract for H hours at minimum price M. Participants are free to enter their bids until time T+H. At the end of the period, the smart contracts examines all bids - if all bids are less than M, no-one gets asset A and ONLY then is asset A released back to original seller. If at least one bid is above M, the highest bid is picked and the asset is automatically transferred to the bidder's address. Everyone else is re-funded automatically. The seller is the only one able to extract the cash from the contract.

Anyone can check the contract code and ascertain:

- the seller can't withdraw their asset and run away with it before auction ends

- the seller cannot reject a valid bid (>M) if the auction is already started

- everyone but the winner will be re-funded their money back

- winner (if any) is the only one who can retrieve the asset after auction is over

... and any other interesting properties. Regardless of whether Alice is from Argentina or from Zimbabwe.

How would you do this on top of PGP/GPG?

Note that source code bugs and hacks happen and are part of the process of working out how to do this stuff safely. There's a recent example of someone messing up a contract and $36M is stuck* forever because the refund functionality had a bug.

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

#226

Post by hocuspocus » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 11:52 AM UTC

swalsh wrote: post #165

yashg wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>seamlessly send value across jurisdictions I have money. How can I get some crypto? From a middleman. Need to pay fees. Then I send it to someone. Transaction fees. The receiver wants to buy groceries or pay kid's school fees, so they need to convert the crypto to money. Again fees. So lots of middlemen and fees are involved. And most of the time, One would need to provide full KYC and need to have a bank account to…

Credit cards cost 3% + $.25 per transation (doing this from memory, but I think i'm in the ballpark here). USDC to USD costs .20% + $.50 (and that's per payout, you could aggregate transactions to pay only one fee). If you use a modern chain to do the transactions, the fees are getting increasingly more trivial (like a few cents regardless of size). As scaling solutions come online, they should be even cheaper. Avala…

Card payments solve a different issue (for starters the transaction is not irreversible), and no they don't cost that much in properly regulated markets.

If I want to send money from Europe to the US, many traditional banks and fintechs are cheaper than cryptocurrency exchanges, and if that's still too expensive, for large amounts forex brokers will be under 0.1%.

The fact stablecoins exist and have become so prevalent is really telling. People speculating with cryptocurrencies want to onboard and offboard USD... So now we have these coins, some are even replicating fractional banking, only illegally.

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

#227

Post by denton-scratch » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 11:53 AM UTC

vasco wrote: post #132

soulofmischief wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That is most accurate description of blockchain I have read. It might interest you to know then that the short, digestible 8 page whitepaper on Bitcoin, which originally described the blockchain, specifically used this definition. It's the most accurate because it is what a blockchain was designed for. I recommend giving it a read and ignoring any project which doesn't follow its core tenants. https://bitcoin.org/b…

Tenets! Tenants pay rent.

Latin "He holds"; imported to English, if refers to a belief (which is something you hold), e.g. tenets of the Catholic Church.

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

#228

Post by nlitened » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 11:53 AM UTC

funklute wrote: post #56

nlitened wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By the way, as far as I understand, git is an example of a private blockchain.

How so? With git, you have to manually resolve merge conflicts. With blockchain, the general point is to use PoW (or something equivalent) to automatically do a vote on which is the correct version. Isn't that also the case in a private blockchain?

I think git has:

1. A chain of blocks referencing its parents by hash, thus verifying their validity and immutability

2. A rules for consensus on choosing what blocks can be appended (both technically and organizationally through each company’s PR review process)

That makes git a blockchain.

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

#229

Post by Zerverus » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 11:54 AM UTC

danieltanfh95 wrote: post #159

I was skeptical for many years until it sort of clicked. Blockchain is important because it allows us to solve the issue when a company providing a service goes bankrupt or closes off the service, the service stops being available. This is especially horrible when said service requires a social network to work. We can't just say "let the users run the servers" because most users can't do that, thats why they trust ce…

Nice theory. In practice intellectual property goes to someone and that’s it.

See many real world examples such as the recently discontinued F1 game.

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

#230

Post by ahtihn » Sat, Apr 23, 2022, 11:54 AM UTC

hypertele-Xii wrote: post #189

throwawayh878 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think I have to trust anyone when I run my own Bitcoin node and sign transactions. What entities do you mean?

You have to trust the people who figured out the math, when they say "this math is secure". Then you have to trust the people who programmed that math, when they say "this code implements this math correctly". And then you have to trust the binary, unless you compiled it yourself, when it says "this binary compiles this code correctly", and finally you have to trust the machines when they say "this computer executes…

> You have to trust the people who figured out the math, when they say "this math is secure".

Not really. I'm convinced the math is secure given the current knowledge, because there's a massive financial incentive to break it. I don't have to trust anyone.