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Blockchain Is Dangerous Nonsense

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Re: Blockchain Is Dangerous Nonsense

#171

Post by Grustaf »

themacguffinman wrote: post #132
Grustaf wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it should be part of the discussion, but the article seems to think that crypto people are unaware of it. They're not, they just think it's worth it.

It doesn't matter if crypto advocates are aware of it, these arguments are for other people to understand. The argument is well-known because it's incredibly valid and common for people to want protection against those problems of fraud. When people point out that you're not wearing any pants, "uh I know I'm not wearing any pants" doesn't really address the relevant concern.

Of course it does. It's like saying "but Uber doesn't own any cars, they can't run a taxi service". There are pros and cons with their approach, and you might prefer the traditional way, but they purposely chose another way.

Re: Blockchain Is Dangerous Nonsense

#172

Post by HWR_14 »

magicalhippo wrote: post #138
tirpen wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My suggestion is: "grow up". All of human society is based on trust, and it works just fine and has for centuries. Who would even want to live in a trust less society? That sounds like hell.

I might trust someone enough to give them $20. I might not trust someone enough to enter my credit card details on their webpage.

The technical solution to that is temporary CC numbers, not a giant crypto chain.

Re: Blockchain Is Dangerous Nonsense

#173

Post by CaptainZapp »

dijit wrote: post #37
onebot wrote: post #3

It amazes me how polarizing blockchain and cryptocurrency is. It is to black/white, love/hate. I really don't ever remember a technology that has created such a visceral reaction from people. I personally, believe there is a quite novel concept behind the trust-less consensus mechanisms. It amazes me that computers can come to an agreement in a hostile environment--fully decentralized. How that is put to use in pract…

I’ll bite. My friends and I were into bitcoin in mid-2009. We mined some coins on our 8800 GT. At the time, I read the papers and the wiki and understood that the technology will not scale so greatly, in a way it wasn’t even designed to; it felt like an interesting proof of concept, the ability to actually buy things with bitcoins felt largely like a novelty, I remember buying a coffee in Prague a few years later for…

> I remember buying a coffee in Prague a few years later for like 16 bitcoins or something.

Was that a coffee shop in the Holesovice area? I remember a café where you could only pay in Bitcoin, which I thought was a rather dumb idea.

Re: Blockchain Is Dangerous Nonsense

#174

Post by knorker »

z3c0 wrote: post #114

Blockchains are cool. Very, very cool. Merkle trees on their own are pretty cool, and blockchains are just a Merkle tree hashed into a chain-like structure to create work for decentralized verification. This is a very clever concept, and it is the only known solution to the Byzantine Generals problem that doesn't involve a centralized authority (that I'm aware of). What about this is intrinsically "dangerous nonsense…

> I can see all the challenges faced by cryptocurrency and understand the skepticism, but these takes that write off blockchain due to cryptocurrencies' problems exhibit a sort of surface-level perspective that I can't take very seriously

I would agree, if there were any use for the blockchain or PoW.

It's dangerous nonsense because it's an industry consisting entirely of producing scams, with huge impact to the environment, availability of graphics cards, hard drives (thanks Bram Cohen), and free tiers of everything[1].

Even bandwidth has been turned into a get-rich-quick scheme! Waste bandwidth for coins! (Obvious result: increase in use of ISP transfer caps, and/or just a congested Internet for us all)

It's one stop short of "mine my new cryptocurrency by throwing away food". People will start stealing your food deliveries in order to throw them in the trash, for money.

That's the equivalent of what's happening whenever some blockchain-buzzword new scam is created, but in internet form.

So the fact that it ruins everything is why it's dangerous. It only creates problems, and only "solves" problems by the definition of "when I want to break the law then it's a problem that I'm not allowed to". That's why it's nonsense.

[1] You can't launch a free tier turing complete anything today without having ALL your resources be taken by freeloading cryptojerks. Like if your free online puzzle game was accidentally turing complete (or less, since that's not even a hard requirement) then someone somewhere will start burning all your quota and money calculating hashes.

Like if you make "the game of life" processed server side I'm sure someone will turn it into a bitcoin miner.

Re: Blockchain Is Dangerous Nonsense

#175

Post by virgildotcodes »

Please run this article through a spellcheck. There are just about 1-2 typos per paragraph through the piece, and it's extremely distracting.

Example of two typos in two consecutive sentences:

>Blinded by the shine of the *enrmous* revenues of the crypto bubble, a lot of companies and government organizations look over that. *Everbody* wants a piece of the tasty blockchain cake and tries to shove a little blockchain into something, anything.

Re: Blockchain Is Dangerous Nonsense

#176

Post by 5h »

jedimind wrote: post #163
5h wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've set yourself up for a question: Please give an example, with a deeper-lever perspective, of a real-world use-case for (non-crypto) blockchain that isn't better solved with non-blockchain technology. Edit to answer this question: > What about this is intrinsically "dangerous nonsense"? The article isn't about the tech itself, it's about the interfaces of the tech and the real world. The problems there are shame…

"it is the only known solution to the Byzantine Generals problem that doesn't involve a centralized authority" Did you skip that one on purpose? How do non-blockchain technologies solve the the Byzantine General's problem without relying on a (corrupt) central authority? Address this before you make more demands.

Good attempt at a deflection, I won't casually solve the very thing that is a great example of blockchain being a solution looking for a problem.

But, given the 'real world' context I tried to stress, do you think blockchain is a good solution to the variations of that problem in real world contexts?

Re: Blockchain Is Dangerous Nonsense

#178

Post by mattdesl »

hiq wrote: post #146
mattdesl wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I gave an example here[1]. The typical answer is "just trust a third-party service" which side-steps the constraints in the question. FWIW there is a variety of reasons you may not want to use a service like escrow.com — they take a cut of the exchange, operate as a for-profit business in a particular US-based jurisdictions, only operate on a limited set of currencies, request personal/private data sharing, and tend…

Your example only works because you're considering an asset that lives in the blockchain itself. So it doesn't apply to anything physical, as in this case, you need a trusted channel to transfer the asset anyway, and a blockchain doesn't solve that. Even considering only these digital assets, you have an implicit notion of trust. The xyz.eth representation on the Ethereum blockchain is considered valuable because mos…

The whole point is peer to peer transfer of digital assets and digital state that is recorded on-chain. The goal is not “how to transfer a physical asset.”

These assets do have market value (despite your own personal feeling on what they “should” be worth) and so users do wish to find ways of interacting with and trading them without an intermediary.

The TLD/ICANN is irrelevant, as “.eth” is a construct for Ethereum clients, not HTTPS clients.

And yes, we build trust of, say, an immutable contract address originated by a human, and continue to trust in it years later because (a) the ledger is incredibly expensive to dismantle and (b) we can cryptographically verify this on our own local node.

Re: Blockchain Is Dangerous Nonsense

#179

Post by syrgian »

mattdesl wrote: post #78
mightyRodri wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no baby. The technology does not solve technical problems that havent been solved better. The only thing bchains does is give ppl with a lot of money to become stakeholders, the possibility to comodify even more parts of the internet. Thats the only upside of the technology, scam ppl for their money. https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/against-crypto.html https://web3isgoinggreat.com/

> technology does not solve technical problems that havent been solved better Critics like Diehl repeat this often, but without ever referencing the solutions. What non-blockchain solution solves the double spend problem when transferring digital assets in a peer-to-peer network? Or, in the case of Ethereum, providing solutions to general-purpose decentralized computation and state (rather than only peer-to-peer paym…

Wait, are you saying that scenario has been solved (or is solvable in the future) by blockchain? Where can I learn more? Is eth even a real TLD?

Re: Blockchain Is Dangerous Nonsense

#180

Post by 10amxn10 »

They are absolutely not nonsense. As a citizen living in a thirld-world country, with a very authoritarian government that seizes property and confiscates goods, I can tell you that Bitcoin is the ONLY method I have to transfer value in and out of the country. I don't save money or treat it like stocks, I just transfer money.

Bitcoin works, in the real world. It has worked flawlessly for over 10 years. Whether people speculate on its value, whether there are unrelated scams that use the word 'blockchain', whether people mistakenly write the address and lose money, or whether transactions have 'no refunds', that doesn't take any of the value. It was a known danger from the very beginning.

This article, on the other hand, is complete nonsense. Same as most takes that conflate Bitcoin with blockchain with NFTs with pyramid schemes and throwing them all into one big bag.

PS: I can only speak for the Bitcoin (proof of work) blockchain. It's innovative, it passed the test of time, and it's secure due to how strengthened it is.

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