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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?

#261

Post by swalsh »

dropnerd wrote: post #241
swalsh wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I won't attempt to enumerate the ways that crypto is useful. But i'll tell you how I want to use it. But first, it's important to understand this. The actual foundations for what crypto can enable is still being built, so if you're expecting me to show you some "killer app"... i'm not going to show you a working version today. Is that because Crypto is vaporware? No, i'm seeing important stuff deployed all the time.…

in my experience volunteering at a dao, daos increase coordination effort required and have yet to yield additional productivity. i wonder which pieces we are missing to get to your theoretical world of increased efficiency.

Frankly I haven't seen a DAO that operates the way I'd assume a DAO should operate. Today they seem like little developer collectives. It doesn't surprise me that it's less effecient. I think I explained in my previous post what I think needs to be built.

There does exist gitcoin today, but that is not a repository attached to a smart contract. The idea of smart contracts governing a repository is POWERFUL and critical to making it work IMO.

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

#262

Post by throw0101a »

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)

> The sole purpose of blockchain is to prevent double spending without a trusted party

NIST's Blockchain Technology Overview is really good explainer:

* https://csrc.nist.gov/publications/detail/nistir/8202/final

See especially Figure 6 ("p. 42", 53 of the PDF), which is a flow chart to help you decide on whether blockchain matches one's use case. Extracted:

* https://imgur.com/a/RlUj9Ed

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

#263

Post by zzonk »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #224
antihero wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 problem is that if you allow overrides in the computer absolutism, corrupt governments will use these overrides to their benefit. And you’re back to the square one.

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

#264

Post by dangerwill »

hamilyon2 wrote: post #244

I can share my perspective on it. It might not be correct or very popular or even coherent. But here you go. I want few things from future technology. I want permissionless payments, including robotic payments, just so I can run several companies worldwide, accepting and reinvesting money with, like, no accounting besides internal, no taxes besides blockchain rewards, no corporations. You can think of it as of HFT, b…

No post body was provided.

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

#265

Post by roonyh »

petesergeant wrote: post #194
stkdump wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why the set of developers is considered centralised? I can write an implementation according to the specification and have no relationship with developers of another implementation.

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

#266

Post by etherael »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #160
mypastself wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But even 'digital cash' doesn't need this, for most definitions and use cases. Even if we're talking about smuggling money out of authoritarian regimes, or buying soft drugs, or hiring hitmen online, I'm not sure it makes any actual sense compared with alternatives. Feels like a way for people who've been convinced that government doesn't work to feel like they're re-inventing government with extra steps, mixed with…

I was convinced government doesn't work and indeed that is the only reason I am interested in blockchain applications. Watching first hand how badly the entire affair has gone has been very useful into getting insight into why government doesn't work, which I still firmly believe. However I am no longer under the illusion doing away with it and replacing it with a blockchain based substitute is either cheap or easy, and if we skipped a hundred years into the future and it turned out that the end result looked almost indistinguishable from what is presently described as government I would not be altogether shocked. I would however consider that amongst the worst possible outcomes.

It may well be that there is a necessary deadweight economic loss to pay based on the nature of human social interaction at scale and this loss cannot be avoided entirely, only minimised to a certain extent.

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

#267

Post by TekMol »

boplicity wrote: post #209
TekMol wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can only create "tamper proofness" aka security with social coordination. Your bankaccount is somewhat secure due to layers and layers of agreements and interdependencies of people. Bitcoin works the same way, but in a much more modern way and achieves much better security. The git repo you mention elsewhere is something completely different. There is no security baked into git. A git repo is just a bunch of file…

> Bitcoin works the same way, but in a much more modern way and achieves much better security. Is this true in practice? Haven't there been multiple massive bitcoin thefts? If these happened to a bank, you'd have a chance to get your money back. With Bitcoin -- it's just gone.

That is not the type of log level security we are discussing.

"Security" here means that a piece of data that was written to the log stays there unaltered.

"Theft" is on a much higher abstraction level. A "Bitcoin theft" is that someone steals your key and then appends a message to the log "Boplicity pays 17 BTC to Joe. Signed: Boblicity". Stealing your private key does not take place on the blockchain. And all previous entries to the log are still there.

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

#268

Post by deebosong »

lmohseni wrote: post #140
pcthrowaway wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you've developed smart contracts, I'm surprised you don't consider the capability of trustless financial instruments (peer-to-peer lending and pooled lending, for example) to be pretty useful as well

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.

I am a laymen who is skeptical of cryptocurrency tech, mostly because of what I'm seeing (hype, greed, fomo, and apparently no real use-cases).

If... crypto were to be able to reverse transactions... would that completely undermine the whole point of it and make it look absolutely stupid?

Do you think the solution to irreversible transactions would be to then have some kind of algo that would then send back a mistaken transaction after getting checked by some intermediary checkpoint? Would that then make the whole point of cryptocurrency also completely pointless?

What on earth are people dumping resources into all this as digital currency or even investment/ speculation vehicles if they don't address the irreversible transaction part, or try to compensate for it somehow? It seems utterly anxiety inducing otherwise, where you'd have to quadruple check, then quadruple check again, and then sleep on it and then quadruple check 4 more times before you do any kind of sizable transaction.

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

#269

Post by blablabla123 »

gravitycorn wrote: post #208
xupybd wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh in this instance it's not about having a public record. It's about every transaction having a hash of the previous. Then it gets hard to forge old data without altering all records after the forgery. It's still possible but takes more work and can make the tampering easier to discover. And for data loggers not connected to the internet this helps. It would be just as good to put it in a central repo if there was a…

Wait, you never did a git rebase? How does a consensus algorithm help when the nodes are not connected to the p2p network?

It's transactional anyway so it's possible to make the file/dir structure as merge friendly as possible. In the simplest case just 1 file per operation with unique filenames.

Speaking of trusted parties, (multiple) of those could be set up using a chain of trust in every network segment that do as much cross-signing/-verification as deemed necessary. Once it goes online again, the performed operations could go on-chain.

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

#270

Post by nl »

There is a second use-case (outside the "digital cash") that actually makes some technical sense.

It's possible to use a blockchain as a distributed identity store, where people prove their ownership of an address by signing with the private key.

This is an interesting application because it's an ownerless identity system that works because of the distributed consensus mechanism.

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