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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?

#341

Post by etherael »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #335
etherael wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So, at no point did you consider that you were wrong in your base assumption and government does in fact work? Of course, many dozens of thousands of times throughout my life, desperately wished for that to be the case. Unfortunately there is no evidence for this and immense amounts of evidence for the contrary. > Because it looks like you examined anarchistic alternatives to government, found them all worse than g…

I believe audits and transparency are amongst the tools that can and do improve 'government' / 'democracy'. I can see ways that crypto (in it's old generic sense) can help but I don't particularly see any way that blockchain tech can help though?

Probably much the same way you can see that crypto in its old generic sense could do these things, with the additional security of the applications running on a blockchain, and the assurances about transaction integrity, censorship resistance, availability etc.

You can have a cryptographically secure platform for whatever governance platform you like, but if it's running on a traditional centralised server infrastructure within a political jurisdiction, it's completely vulnerable to tampering of government agencies within that political jurisdiction. This is a well acknowledged issue referred to as "data sovereignty" with the limitation that the way to ensure it's handled is to pick a reliable jurisdiction.

If we acknowledge that no jurisdiction is reliable, however, blockchains are the only choice.

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

#342

Post by LightG »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #127
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…

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

Nice theory you have there. It'd be a shame if real world legal issues got in the way.

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

#343

Post by dangerwill »

mritchie712 wrote: post #333
dangerwill wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, BTC is not functionally a currency and hasn't been since the silk road era. Effectively no one is buying goods and services with BTC, it is a speculative asset. Even Musk stopped taking BTC payments for Tesla because of the astronomical fees and incredible long settle times. "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…

1. 2% is not low. 2. Crypto is mostly open source software. Most open source software gets better quickly. Writing off crypto completely because of its current state is a bit short sighted. 3. Could you say more about proof of stake? Vitalik[1] supports it and so do most eth devs. Seems to be a matter of time and implementation. 1 - https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/06/pos2020.html

1. At current fees, if you were to attempt to send less than ~$85 worth of btc then you are paying more than 2%. A year ago, fees skyrocketed such that you would need to transfer ~$3000 to have the fees amount to less than 2%. Not to mention the implicit potential fee of how much the price of BTC may change from when the transaction is started to when it is completed.

2. BTC, created in 2009. Eth, created in 2013. The projects have made little meaningful technical improvements and no actually-useful-outside-of-the-crypto-sphere projects have been launched on top of them. Open source software that is attempting to solve real problems move so much faster than crypto. This attempted justification is simply embarrassing

3. What more is there to say about POS? It isn't actually happening. It has been talked about forever, put on the official roadmap for eth in 2020 and has had been delayed every couple of months since then, including literally last week https://coingeek.com/ethereum-forever-new-protocol-launch-de....

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

#344

Post by LightG »

pirate787 wrote: post #252
giantg2 wrote: post #202

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." If your argument is that there could be bugs in the code, then how is this different from the law today? The legal system is rife with abuses and injustices. It most certainly has bugs as-is.

Indeed, bugs are a feature

LOL

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

#347

Post by peoplefromibiza »

jph wrote: post #47

Blockchains are excellent for logging that uses trustable peer participation, distributed append, and tamper resistance. For example, each peer can add their own chain links, and also see all the chain links added by other peers, and also be sure that the log hasn't been corrupted by any of the peers. Some examples IMHO are logs of participation (e.g. voting), agreements (e.g. contracts), exchange (e.g. payments), an…

> Some examples IMHO are logs of participation (e.g. voting), agreements (e.g. contracts), exchange (e.g. payments), and auditing (e.g. compliance).

many of these things require privacy (and/or secrecy), which blockchain cannot guarantee (nor offer)

a private blockchain is simply a slower centralized database

> which requires the participants must trust the central administrative entity to be truthful, unbiased, secure, and with sufficient high availability and disaster recoverability.

that is exactly how voting, agreements (e.g. contracts), exchange (e.g. payments), and auditing (e.g. compliance) work.

You trust the regulator/intermediator/notary/government/bank etc.

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

#348

Post by mmcnl »

Blockchain is a decentralized database. I think very little use cases actually require decentralization. Also, decentralization is not better per se than centralization or the other way around. It's different. Imo there are very little use cases that actually require blockchain technology.

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

#349

Post by netsharc »

etherael wrote: post #266
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Government is formed as a way to manage a society/community of people, if blockchain/crypto gets big enough to have hundreds of thousands of adherents, you'll also need a way to manage that "society". Some people think "the algorithm rules all", but as we've seen the algorithm is messy and has bugs and allow for thefts where you lose everything in a split second. It'd be like joining a society where muggers are free to roam and mug you, and to mug them back you have to find a cleverer exploit as your knife.

A blogger I read once laughed that an exchange/crypto-coin who suffered such a hack decided, to get their money back, they would contact... the police/FBI. Yeah, so much for that "We can't trust the government!" mentality.

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

#350

Post by unholiness »

Helitioo wrote: post #289
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

Your smart contract is only smart inside your Blockchain. As soon as you use it for anything outside of it, you have the same issue. How do I proof to someone else that I did what I should have done to get paid? By trust. Your smart contract can't verify that I did my part of the contract if it is outside of the Blockchain. So what did you win? Nothing. Now you can work up a network of trust but you know this concept…

The current state is, roughly: Government-backed contracts are ultimately enforced by litigation, which is judged by a judge, who is appointed and judged by the state government, who are appointed and judged by the governor, who is appointed and judged by democratic elections.

A couple factors make the current system powerful: - Each decision-maker is roughly motivated to seek truth and behave honestly by the judgement of the next level up, so i.e. impeachment of judges should be rare - The hierarchical structure makes enforcement exponentially cheaper than every human voting on every contract outcome.

Neither government contracts nor smart contracts can offer 100% correct validation of every contract. All they can do is attempt to set up a structure which tries to motivate the right thing and tries to make litigation somewhat cheap.

It seems a bit silly, though, to think there's no room for improvement there, both in performance and correctness. 1) By making all decisions public, you can make judging those decisions easier 2) By making all decisions public, you can easily reuse a single judgement in many decisions 3) By using machines instead of humans, there is dramatically more bandwidth for a much broader range of contracts 4) The topology of this network only really lets people vote at a single point – where a governor is elected every n years, which is hardly robust feedback. etc.

I mostly agree with your conclusion on most parts of crypto but we shouldn't thing that "government is a solved problem" is a sweeping rebuttal of all smart contracts.

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