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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?

#421

Post by ak_111 »

ryanobjc wrote: post #55
ak_111 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but there is a long list of "smart" intellectuals/academics/investors who are believers in the space, which is where "am I going insane?" part comes in.

So, how much do you trust your own intelligence? When has it failed you? I think you have too much hubris. What do these people know that you do not? What non technical things do they know that you do not, that totally change the context and the reasoning behind these solutions?

I am not sure if you are trolling, but this is exactly why I posted this... Far from being hubristic, I feel I am missing something and want to figure out what it is.

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

#422

Post by TomSwirly »

rzz3 wrote: post #87
yashg wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The sole purpose of blockchain is to prevent double spending without a trusted party That is most accurate description of blockchain I have read. Unfortunately, the mechanism for that (Proof-of-work) is slow, expensive and planet destroying at scale. And while we may remove a trust provider third party, we aren't getting rid of centralization with blockchain anyway.

Planet destroying is a bit extreme. The traditional finance system is no more energy efficient overall. It’s certainly not environmentally friendly, but that’s more a function of the dirty power we use for anything and everything. We just need to fix our methods of generating energy, not criticize everything that uses a lot of it.

> The traditional finance system is no more energy efficient overall.

The traditional finance system easily does tens of thousands of times more transactions than cryptocurrencies. Visa alone does a thousand times more transactions than Bitcoin.

Cryptocurrency uses over 0.5% of the world's electricity to do less than 0.01% of the world's transactions.

So, no, your statement is wildly wrong. I have zero problem calling it a lie, because you made it up out of your head and made no attempt to justify it with facts.

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

#423

Post by tern »

hyperman1 wrote: post #57
tern wrote: post #31

It's all in Timothy May's email signature from the cypherpunks mailing list: Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero knowledge, reputations, information markets, black markets, collapse of governments. The key concept is: sovereignty. In the end, this will reshape the nation state.

Expecting the nation state to just sit there and watch seems naive. When it becomes a big enough threat to make them notice, the nation state will regulate it stone dead.

I doubt it, because it's global. The frog will heat slowly enough that it won't notice until it becomes necessary for global competitiveness—and for the United States, ongoing dominance. It will also be a game of whack-a-mole. We're only 10 years in. In another 10 years, many things we can't imagine now will happen.

But we shall see!

Another possibility is that current cryptos are regulated and more state-compliant ones emerge (see: China).

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

#424

Post by arcticbull »

etherael wrote: post #341
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 infrastruc…

You don't want a national system to be truly decentralized because if it is, adversaries can simply co-opt and control it. If you have to look out for that and roll off onto a different system (and have a mechanism to do so) then its by definition centralized and you can skip the whole blockchain chicanery.

You can just throw up a tamper-evident log based system. [1]

[1] https://transparency.dev

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

#425

Post by occamrazor »

hocuspocus wrote: post #380
occamrazor wrote: post #345

Currency exchange. In the banking system it’s hard to exchange currencies for a fee lowe than ~0.5%, even for amounts in the tens of thousands USD.

I regularly exchange currencies using Wise or Revolut for a lot less than that. If adding another layer was somehow more efficient, then all the companies in this space would do it under the hood. Yet almost none of them do.

I use Wise regularly and pay about 0.5% for EUR/GBP/CHF transactions.

The reason why DeFi exchanges offer low fees is that they are not “companies”, they are fully automated and have no overhead. For a company offering forex services the main expense are salaries, not fees (that on wholesale markets are on the order of 0.01%), therefore they would not benefit from using a blockchain as an underlying layer.

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

#426

Post by arcticbull »

unholiness wrote: post #350
Helitioo wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 judgeme…

Of course there's room for improvement, what's silly is thinking a coal-powered linked list is an improvement :)

You don't want true decentralization for state level activities such as voting. If it's truly decentralized and permission less, allowing anyone to control the ledger, your adversaries will take control. If you have to build a system that accounts for that, you rely on a central authority to switch you over, which invalidates the permissionless and decentralized premise.

There's a reason we've been talking about killer applications of the blockchain for 14 years and zero of them have taken hold - they're all fundamentally flawed. Like concert tickets! Should be easy, everyone hates Ticketmaster. Killer NFT use case right? Of course not, because the venues are owned by LiveNation, the performers are managed by LiveNation and TicketMaster is owned by, wait for it, LiveNation. You can throw up a ticketing system on AWS in like 5 minutes flat, that's not the reason TicketMaster has been successful.

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

#427

Post by kikimora »

FabHK wrote: post #198
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.

And then US government prints trillions of dollars and inflate your savings. Or Russian government locks you USDs while Visa, Mastercard and sanctions make it impossible to move money out of the country. Or ask Belorussians and Argentinians how much they like double digit inflation that goes year after year after year while government limits ability to buy a more stable currency.

Above is just about money but there is another perspective. Think about a car sale and how would you automate it. To date most car sales require some paperwork to register the right transfer. This happens behind the scenes and you may not know but it happens and occupies some people. You simply cannot automate a car same with just a database. There must be a trust component in the system and a way to maintain it. Trust maintenance typically means audits, licensees, etc and they do not come for free.

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

#428

Post by arcticbull »

cableshaft wrote: post #375
kingkool68 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exhibit A https://twitter.com/0xfoobar/status/1517680400142716929?s=21...

Yikes. Wasn't aware of that one. Thanks for sharing it. I like smart contracts but you really have to be super careful with them, and ideally they should all be audited by a third party before launch, to help catch stuff like this. But even that's not a guarantee crap like this won't happen sometimes.

Smart contracts have two modes of operation:

1) Upgradeable - where an authority has the right to replace the live contact at any time and rug-pull everyone. That's not trustless, and it's no better than running an app in AWS.

2) Non-upgradeable - where you simply have a self-funding bug bounty waiting to get popped. Even if they're audited.

They're not smart, and they're not interesting, to me anyways.

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

#429

Post by endominus »

D13Fd wrote: post #392
jeegsy wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont think its much of a selling point in favor of government that the considered so far "anarchistic alternatives" are worse. That is by no means a recommendation

“I don’t think something is good just because every alternative is worse.”

"What is a lose-lose situation?" Seriously, the idea that every option available is a bad one is not that difficult. Hell, even voting in the US is sometimes described as picking the lesser of two evils by those who don't feel well represented by the de facto realistic candidates.

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

#430

Post by _5uxp »

yashg wrote: post #410
_5uxp wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exactly is fiat based financial system to you? Can you say it's abs. not a ponzi scheme for baby boomers and corporate America? Because I can't. It's wealth oppur. destrying system only to create wealth for certain age group with assets and their friends. Millennials and newer gener. are out of most of the "real "financial oppr. by design. So they create their system. It's that simple.

I suggest you read about history of money. How it came to be, why humans needed money and what all things have been used as money and why eventually we ended up with money being issued by a sovereign (by a fiat). Then read up on the history of banking. The idea of cryptocurrency and its underlying ideology goes against the fundamental principles of finance and economics that have evolved naturally over past thousands…

Yes but "crypto" is also can be put under entire new asset class. It's slowly growing along with fiat based financial system.
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