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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?

#461

Post by akrymski »

tromp wrote: post #448
tigershark wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

In PoS systems validators can vote for both chains in case of a fork, as there is nothing at stake. It's not about honesty. It's about resources being committed.

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

#462

Post by baby »

ninkendo wrote: post #151
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)

It tracks double spends of cryptocurrency on the blockchain, which is only as useful as the currency itself is. Since BTC/ETH/etc is only “valuable” because of wild speculation and greater fools, the “value” part kind of collapses, leaving the “currency” aspect moot. Which brings us back to “no value”.

Stablecoins

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

#463

Post by tsimionescu »

baby wrote: post #454
tsimionescu wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We’re talking about what the technology can do, not what the bottom of the tech is not doing

Sure, but those alternatives are not yet proven technologies. It's unclear for example if PoS is actually trust-worthy at scale, and we can't use Bitcoin or Ethereum's success so far to check that.

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

#464

Post by tsimionescu »

baby wrote: post #457
tsimionescu wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Why use the most popular and most well-known and most used and most heavily-invested-in example of this technology, when I know of this obscure one that promises something that it certainly hasn't demonstrated yet?"

Kind of like taking a paper plane to prove that you can’t fly humans from point A to point B

More like pointing at Concorde to express skepticism about the claims of economic viability of some new faster-than-sound flight start-up.

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

#465

Post by emmes »

I'm also a blockchain skeptic when it comes to building the best technological solution.

However, I've worked for a successful startup in the blockchain space. Blockchain was instrumental in generating interest and securing funding for the first rounds of financing. If blockchain had not been part of the company elevator pitch, it worked never have gotten off the ground.

If adding shiny object Y to solution X is what causes your product to succeed at having the largest market share of X, then Y has value. Many companies have succeeded by having the most customers, not the best technology.

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

#466

Post by pcthrowaway »

arcticbull wrote: post #428
cableshaft wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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: Upgradeable contracts, there is often some governance method that removes the power from just one person, but there's usually also a time-delay, so that in theory at least, users of the contract can see that an upgrade has happened and remove their interaction with it if they don't like the new contract.

This is quite different from having money in a bank where policy changes and government seizures or freezes may happen without warning.

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

#467

Post by xupybd »

elsjaako wrote: post #210
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…

That's why I mentioned git, not just putting it in a text file. Every git commit contains a hash of all the previous commits, and is itself referred to by a hash. So if you change an old commit, all commits descending from that get a new hash, and so a new identity. If you publish the latest hash in the newspaper, you've locked down all the previous commits also.

Sorry my mistake. I missed that. I was only thinking of the utility of publishing to an external source as a means of verifying history.

You are correct.

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

#468

Post by tromp »

tsimionescu wrote: post #437
tromp wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. That's mostly due to transactions being non-interactive. If the receiver has to prove their ability to spend the received funds before being allowed to receive them, then most of this anxiety disappears…

> If the receiver has to prove their ability to spend the received funds before being allowed to receive them If I want to send you some crypto money in exchange for you mowing my lawn, how do you prove that you can spend the received funds? And if I accidentally send it twice, why would I care that you can spend them twice, unless I have some way to compel you to send half back?

> how do you prove that you can spend the received funds?

You prove it by producing a partial signature for the transaction (a transaction essentially requires a multisig by both sender and receiver).

> And if I accidentally send it twice

You couldn't send it twice because the transaction consumes an input utxo. Paying twice would require two different transactions with two different multisignatures.

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

#469

Post by pclmulqdq »

bitxbitxbitcoin wrote: post #401
pclmulqdq wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

From my economics training, Money needs to have all 3 of the following characteristics. 1. A medium of transfer 2. A unit of account 3. A store of value Cryptocurrency generally does well on the first and not at the others.

Modern monetary theory disagrees with the third one, and so do I. I don't think a currency needs to be a store of value, just a medium of exchange. In practice, we store value in a lot of things that are not money (stocks, bonds, commodities, real estate, etc).

For example, if you had a system of money with guaranteed inflation at a certain level, you could produce a synthetic store of value that is not the money.

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

#470

Post by pclmulqdq »

FabHK wrote: post #374
derbOac wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think maybe "valuable" meant "scalable" or something? I can't speak for the OP though. I think there's something to the idea of some proof of an efficiency-security tradeoff or lack thereof though. Seems like something that should be out there in the literature.

With “Valuable” I meant that a lot of value is on-chain (in terms of market cap or transactions - basically whatever makes it worth stealing it). Nobody would bother mounting an attack on some random shitcoin, so it can be secure (for all practical purposes) without wasting massive amounts of energy. A public blockchain that carries a lot of value must burn a significant proportion of available hash power to guard ag…

That makes sense, but I still don't think you want "valuable." In practice, most of the value of real economic systems is not held in money, but in assets. In the crypto universe, Bitcoin is more of an asset than a currency (although a valueless one if you don't consider it a currency). All you need now is a good currency.
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