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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?

#441

Post by xboxnolifes »

zach_garwood wrote: post #411
TekMol wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

These are the unmoved goalposts from this comment chain.

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

#442

Post by tsimionescu »

roonyh wrote: post #265
petesergeant wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe you can, but have you? Has anyone? Are there any nodes on the bitcoin network not running the same code written by the same handful of people?

Also, saying that "all you have to do to participate in this new trustless economy is to read the spec and implement your own validation node and client, and maintain it as the protocol changes" is a pretty different promise than "just download this app".

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

#443

Post by crnkofe »

I see a lot of value in blockchain tech that cannot be replaced by any DB. In fact a DB is incomparable with a blockchain. Whatever you can do today with an average blockchain requires a lot of upfront work to make a system that works to replicate any of the value that a blockchain brings.

First of all it functions as a currency which inherently brings with it a lot of value. You can exchange and hold virtual currency with minimal fees. This applies primarily to proof-of-stake blockchains (Algorand, Tezos, Cardano). Ethereum/Bitcoin have due to proof-of-work become less a currency and more an investment. There's more value just holding them than actually converting them.

Blockchain tech is trustless and decentralized both of which is very valuable to me personally. I've lost trust in the modern banking system. I guess the turning point at which I became more attent to what the financial salarymen are doing was the 2008 financial crisis. But I'd say that's just the tip of the iceberg. Between all the tax havens hiding billions in plain sight, various scandals such as Wirecard, disappearing money balance on my bank accounts, evaporating loans for large defunct companies, there is just so much crime based around hidden centralized systems. I see blockchain as having the potential to level the field in a system where (centralized) banks are just trying to ripoff the average Joe.

Then we have the stablecoins which work as a safe haven for hyperinflation. While I'm not affected I find this a very serious use case. There's a constant set of countries that are failing to stabilize their local currency and who knows when this is going to hit the reader. Being able to keep value to your monthly wage is a use case in a failing economy. Stablecoins have been found to be an essential part for decentralized finance and pretty much every smart contract-capable cryptocurrency is/has added them.

Also note that having a wallet for a cryptocurrency does not incur monthly charge. Banks charge you for just keeping a balance if you have more than X amount of currency on you account. There's also no maintenance costs which are common for some types of accounts. And plenty of crypto currencies allow you to stake and get a passive income that is higher than what you get on any bank account.

Then there's the DeFI loans. You can basically take a loan as long as you lock a collateral. That's the only condition. Now feel free to go read any of the contracts you signed for a leasing/loan and compare the user experience. DeFI loans are risky due to possibility of liquidation but I see this tech improving and maturing moving on.

While this may sound like I'm the greatest fan I'm more of realist. Blockchain does have a lot of issues. Account recovery is a impossible. Scams are rampant. Transaction speeds are a lot slower than non-blockchain tech can do. Also the immature community praying for a 10x is a pain to follow. But saying it's just a bad DB is plain false.

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

#444

Post by tsimionescu »

baby wrote: post #196
yashg wrote: post #43

Blockchain has no use other than to store tokens for speculative gambling. Take a look at this presentation - https://bit.ly/3OB5G18 Proof-of-work - the USP of blockchain makes it slow and expensive and planet destroying at scale. But it's not a bug, it's a feature. You take it out and the blockchain is neither public not permission-less. A private, trusted, permissioned blockchain is pointless. The whole blockchain,…

Your comment goes in all directions so it’s hard to answer. Perhaps it’s useful to point that proof of work is not ubiquitously used in blockchains and much greener alternatives have been preferred in pretty much any crypto that’s been released in the past 5 years

Proof of work is still what powers the vast majority of block chains by value. Perhaps if ETH goes to PoS in some future this will change, but until then, all of the big permission-less crypto curencies are proof of work.

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

#445

Post by tromp »

paulsutter wrote: post #61
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?

The power is used to secure the system, not to perform transactions. The transaction rate has always been the same, the power use has gone up with the value of the contents (to resist a 51% attack) Some people feel strongly this security is worth it. Some feel strongly that it isn’t (but one suspects their objection is really to the lack of central control)

> The power is used to secure the system, not to perform transactions.

This looks to be the case now, with block reward being dominated by the block subsidy. But by design, the latter reduces exponentially over time, so that within a few decades, the security will have to come predominantly from transaction fees.

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

#446

Post by Atlas667 »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #318
FabHK wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder whether one can postulate an impossibility theorem (call it SEV, similar to CAP) for public blockchains (at least using PoW, and whether one can overcome it with PoS or similar is an open question): You can't have a (PoW) public blockchain that is Secure, Efficient (=not planet destroyingly wasteful), and Valuable. Pick any two.

Secure and efficient. Money should be a medium of transfer, not a store of value. The fact remains that you can't really get "efficient" with proof of work, and claims about "secure" are dubious with proof of stake.

Someone forgot to read Marx.

Money is both a means of transfer and a store of value. The reason for those conditional properties in crypto (secure and efficient but not valuable) is because currencies have value embedded in them, it is an abstract presentation of value, it abstracts work. In this case, hash power.

Real paper money and its digital representation, like the USD, is also proof of work currency, in this casw, human power. And it's distribution evidences exploitation, not effort.

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

#447

Post by tsimionescu »

davidguetta wrote: post #412
gravitycorn wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Say you have 100 million Turkish lira, and suspect that Erdogan's terrible policies will reduce the value of that, so you want to buy bitcoin with it. How are you going to acquire BTC without access to an exchange (or some equivalent) that agrees to buy your lira? You could buy mining equipment and electricity of course, but then the state may crack down on your operation before you have a chance to recoup your investment.

And even if they don't, if you then want to buy tomatoes at your local market, how are you going to buy lira for your BTC without an exchange (or equivalent)?

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

#448

Post by tromp »

tigershark wrote: post #192
reeeeeeee wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cardano is a cryptocurrency that offers ~250 transactions per second but should soon scale without a layer 2 solution. I mention this as I run a validator on a 8gb raspberry pi with ZRAM swap enabled with no issues consuming ~5W the whole network could run this way if needed. This is lower power due to a mechanism called proof of stake. BTC uses proof of work. Ethereum has been 'trying' to migrate to POS for some tim…

Proof of stake is useless. It just give all the powers to the current stakeholders. So it’s not trustless by definition since you need to trust the stakeholders.

Well, PoW needs to assume that 51% of miners is honest, while PoS needs to assume that 51% of stakers is honest. The bigger downsides of PoS to me are that

1) a pure PoS system starts with the creators holding all supply and can keep an arbitrary portion for themselves while selling the rest as they please

2) the truth in PoS is subjective (nodes need to rely on other nodes to determine what is the current state of the system).

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

#449

Post by buchmanster »

Blockchains are the natural evolution of fault tolerant database systems into the multi-stakeholder domain. Databases that are not just architecturally fault tolerant (eg. using Paxos or Raft), but politically fault-tolerant (using BFT). Money is an obvious and natural use case for such multi-stakeholder database systems, but conceivably much other critical infrastructure is as well. Though of course, since we are talking about multi-stakeholder, uptake in commercially meaningful areas will inevitably be slower and riddled with political conflict.

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

#450

Post by tromp »

mytherin wrote: post #128
paulsutter wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point - blockchain also prevents transaction censorship (your proposal prevents double spend but allows the central authority to block transactions) Central authorities might do wild stuff like block Folks They Don’t Like (certain truck drivers, etc). Some people think that’s really good, others feel the opposite (edited for clarity)

If the miners don’t like you what stops them from not including your transactions in the chain? It is my understanding that if a large enough pool of miners decides they don’t like you (>50%) they can completely prevent your ability to spend money.

> what stops them from not including your transactions in the chain

The only thing that could stop them is being unable to identify what outputs belong to you. Which generally requires a more privacy focussed design than what Bitcoin offers.

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