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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?

#411

Post by zach_garwood »

TekMol wrote: post #267
boplicity wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 previ…

And those goalposts just fly by!

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

#412

Post by davidguetta »

gravitycorn wrote: post #288
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…

But do you really access them in a decentralised fashion? Imagine a pariah state where you want to evade heavy inflation by acquiring some trusted and agreed upon “store of value”, let’s say btc. Assuming you don’t want to run massive covert mining rigs converting your local energy to btc you need an exchange, which can be regulated in the same way the dollar exchanges are regulated. You could argue that you can onbo…

Mm what ? As far as i know you dont' need a "exchange" but simply a wallet (which is a key and a bunch of passphrase) and an internet connection, and another person with the same thing willing to exchange.

You may be in a pariah state but the system works because of mining all around the world, not just in your state.

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

#413

Post by davidguetta »

roland35 wrote: post #222
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.

What ? exchanging bitcoin in the street seemed pretty simple last time I checked on localbitcoins. you dont need to know the tech at all.

Plus, you'd be surprised how moder and tech-saavy young people in developing countries are (at least in the major cities).

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

#414

Post by dangerwill »

bitxbitxbitcoin wrote: post #405
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…

The “Silk Road era” is not over. It never has been and it never will. Speculation may have become the reason for a large portion of blockchain transaction volume but don’t for a second doubt that the actual velocity of money on dark net markets has been steadily growing. Put in an extreme way, if all the speculators left tomorrow, Bitcoin isn’t going to 0 because people are actually using it.

Haha so that was never my game but if crypto crashes and all the web3 and speculator people leave and it just reverts to a means to get research chemicals in the mail, fine by me :)

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

#416

Post by specialist »

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…

Yes and: tamper evident.

> Some examples are logs of participation

Yes and: Medical records.

While working in healthcare IT, mid-2000s, our records would be used to show who knew what when. There was a general uneasiness that our source of truth was just database entries and log files. I had somehow heard about using rolling hashes in log files. As you well know, then if any entries had errors (bad code, tampering, whatever), we'd be more likely to spot them. I managed to implement a prototype, before our startup was acquihired and our products shutdown (sniff). Sadly, none of the new PHBs understood or were interested in all the cool tech we had created.

Then some time later people started talking about slapping RFID and QR onto everything. Because hospitals are like a fight pit, with belligerents from different orgs and corps, coming and going, we thought to use a shared (tamper evident) audit log. aka blockchain. Sadly, that too didn't come to pass on our watch.

Beyond shared audit logs -- stuff like PoW/PoS, currency, whatever -- doesn't made any sense to me. I eventually decided it's all grift, though I'd be happy to proven wrong.

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

#417

Post by laverya »

baby wrote: post #186
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?

Why use bitcoin, the slowest blockchain and most inefficient blockchain, as an example? Blockchains like Sui offer basically unlimited transactions/s

Fundamentally the transaction rate is limited by how much data you're willing to store. Bitcoin's 5tx/sec translates to ~5gb/month added to the blockchain - improving upon this requires either making the data stored per transaction smaller, increasing the blockchain growth rate, or moving transactions off-chain.

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

#419

Post by arcticbull »

boopmaster wrote: post #386
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…

The latest trillion $peso$ spending "package" has less of a direct impact on $globalrupee$. Hurricane $Chucky$ in $greentown$ does not as directly impact the $globalrupee$. If that is starting to sound more like an insurance policy, and less like a bunch of tin-foil hat wearing conspiracy theorists talking about "muh freedoms", well maybe that's because it is.

That sounds an awful lot like a bunch of tin-foil hat conspiracy talk.

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

#420

Post by arcticbull »

etherael wrote: post #319
HWR_14 wrote: post #300

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? Because it looks like you examined anarchistic alternatives to government, found them all worse than government, and then didn't do the (to me) obvious thing if updating your "government can be good" possibility.

> 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…

> 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.

I think the fact that 7 billion people live overwhelmingly under a multi-hundred-year improving standard of living [1], leveraging low-friction global trade, commerce and communication in among the most peaceful period in human history [2] is a pretty clear indication that government does in fact work.

Is it perfect? No, nobody will say that. But of course the solution to problems in any overwhelmingly complex system with a long track record is not re-invention but continued optimization. [3] Takes a long time to turn a big boat, and anyone promising you otherwise is selling you a crock.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty-in-brief

[2] https://towardsdatascience.com/has-global-violence-declined-...

[3] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

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