Blockchain Is Dangerous Nonsense • Hacker News Board

Re: Blockchain Is Dangerous Nonsense

#211

Post by Veen » Thu, Apr 28, 2022, 10:17 AM UTC

sakopov wrote: post #137

okintheory wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems a bit off to assert that "people feel it is a price worth paying" when almost all purchases online are made with credit cards which have some protections against fraud, and almost none are made with blockchains in comparison. It seems like so far, most people don't think it's a price worth paying?

Blockchain is just a decentralized ledger of transactions. A cryptocurrency is an implementation of digital currency using a blockchain. Blaming blockchain for not having fraud prevention tech is like blaming TCP/IP stack for delivering a scam email to your inbox. This is a problem to be solved in a higher layer, which we're seemingly nowhere near as we're still just trying to get blockchain to scale efficiently.

Yes, and if it was promoted as a "decentralized ledger of transactions" it would be fine and almost no one would have heard of it. But it's often aggressively promoted as a replacement for traditional currencies and banking with many benefits over the old-fashioned models, ignoring the fact that those models account for many issues that blockchain does not. There's a reason banks and economies evolved in the way they did.

Re: Blockchain Is Dangerous Nonsense

#212

Post by mattdesl » Thu, Apr 28, 2022, 10:18 AM UTC

tsimionescu wrote: post #185

mattdesl wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> User A holds digital asset X (such as a valuable domain name "xyz.eth") and User B holds digital asset Y (such as a valuable sum of stablecoin tokens) and these users wish to exchange them in a single public + cryptographically verifiable transaction (i.e. atomic swap), without relying on the trust (and for-profit services) of a third-party escrow agent. OK, how do they do this? Let's say X has 1M gold in World of…

If both assets are defined by the same blockchain protocol, a contract can be written that provides both users the ability to deposit the two assets into it. Only once both assets have been deposited will the atomic swap occur. And at any point before this, a deposit could be safely withdrawn (ie: if other party backs out of deal).

Edit: if your question is “how does this technically look in practice”, here is an example: [1]

[1] https://github.com/niftyhorde/swap.kiwi/blob/master/contract...

Re: Blockchain Is Dangerous Nonsense

#213

Post by lakomen » Thu, Apr 28, 2022, 10:19 AM UTC

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #120

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/

For me, bitcoin solves very real problems that I wouldn't be able to solve without it: getting paid circumventing Putin's banking system.

What does the Russian president have to do with anything in that context?

Re: Blockchain Is Dangerous Nonsense

#214

Post by plaguepilled » Thu, Apr 28, 2022, 10:19 AM UTC

rgallagher27 wrote: post #166

plaguepilled wrote: post #108

>The idea to get rid of having to trust centralized organizations might sound tempting, but it doesn’t work: Blockchains don’t get rid of “trust”, they just change, who has to be trusted. More people need to read this. Developers can betray trust too, and I'm a little tired of reading "In a shocking turn of events, new cryptocurrency previously supported by Seemingly Trustworthy Source is actually a pump-and-dump. Mo…

The classic crypto phrase "choose the team". When the team consists of one person with a monkey as their profile picture and no other details other than he's rich, another is a 20year old 10x dev who's been creating smart contracts "for years", one's the cool looking marketing genius who posts on twitter a 1000 times per hour and the rest is made up of stock imagery of middle age white men who are the "advisory board…

Not sure that holds. By that logic, Bitcoin (based on the idea of an anonymous dude no longer contactable) and Ethereum (which has split into Ethereum and Ethereum classic and has a documented history of going back on things that have been promised) are out.

Can you be a bit more specific about what it means to "choose the team" according to best practices?

Re: Blockchain Is Dangerous Nonsense

#215

Post by q3k » Thu, Apr 28, 2022, 10:20 AM UTC

ohthehugemanate wrote: post #186

pja wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re transacting with a bunch of people that you do not trust then the payment rails are the least of your problems. Your comment just feels like typical crypto-booster vague handwaving to me - can you give an actual example of such a situation where the existing third parties that alreayd exist to solve these kind of problems cannot be used? Be concrete.

I always thought the grocery supply chain was a good example use case. Multiple parties (seed origin, farmer, fertilizer manufacturer and/or dispenser, pesticide manufacturer and/or crop duster, harvester, transporter(s), grocery association, grocer) who all handle any given tomato, all with incentive and opportunity to lie to some other members along the chain, but not to their immediate neighbors. Plus, even who th…

How do you tie real world tomatoes to NFT tomatoes? Who verifies this? How do you tie an NFT of a grassfed chicken to a real world grassfed chicken? Who verifies these chickens are actually grass fed?

Re: Blockchain Is Dangerous Nonsense

#216

Post by jomjomv » Thu, Apr 28, 2022, 10:20 AM UTC

tkfu wrote: post #170

mattdesl wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

You're being willfully obtuse here. > What non-blockchain solution solves the double spend problem when transferring digital assets in a peer-to-peer network? Literally any trusted central authority or database. > Or, in the case of Ethereum, providing solutions to general-purpose decentralized computation and state (rather than only peer-to-peer payments) with such strong public consensus? You haven't actually state…

> Literally any trusted central authority or database.

But they said peer-to-peer network.

Re: Blockchain Is Dangerous Nonsense

#217

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Apr 28, 2022, 10:20 AM UTC

mightyRodri wrote: post #21

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…

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/

[deleted]

Re: Blockchain Is Dangerous Nonsense

#218

Post by dmitriid » Thu, Apr 28, 2022, 10:21 AM UTC

Grustaf wrote: post #127

dmitriid wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think most coiners, who skew strongly libertarian, would argue that it's up to you to make sure your smart contracts work. Ah yes, it's up to the user to review and debug code written in an esoteric programming language to make sure that it works... When even creators of said contracts can't find bugs in their code and fall prey to mistakes (sometimes after multiple audits)

Yes exactly.

"This is not necessarily a flaw in technology".

When is the last time you needed to debug the contract when you buy coffee?

Re: Blockchain Is Dangerous Nonsense

#219

Post by snorkel » Thu, Apr 28, 2022, 10:21 AM UTC

> “trust in institutions controlled by humans and bound by established laws and rules is instead replaced — by unconditional trust in the infallibility of code“

No, it’s not just trust in code, you’re also trusting the people that wrote the crypto coin client apps and operate the crypto exchanges. Sketchy crypto apps and exchanges already have made off with clients’ coins. That’s not a blockchain vulnerability, rather that’s a vulnerability in every market where you transact through brokers - you’re implicitly trusting your brokers.

A Blockchain is just a linked list of records with accumulative crypto signatures, which gives a you a crypto-verifiable indelible ledger. To make it a trusted financial ledger you just need to have trust in everyone involved between the finance clients and the ledger.

Re: Blockchain Is Dangerous Nonsense

#220

Post by coldtea » Thu, Apr 28, 2022, 10:21 AM UTC

sakopov wrote: post #137

okintheory wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems a bit off to assert that "people feel it is a price worth paying" when almost all purchases online are made with credit cards which have some protections against fraud, and almost none are made with blockchains in comparison. It seems like so far, most people don't think it's a price worth paying?

Blockchain is just a decentralized ledger of transactions. A cryptocurrency is an implementation of digital currency using a blockchain. Blaming blockchain for not having fraud prevention tech is like blaming TCP/IP stack for delivering a scam email to your inbox. This is a problem to be solved in a higher layer, which we're seemingly nowhere near as we're still just trying to get blockchain to scale efficiently.

>Blockchain is just a decentralized ledger of transactions. A cryptocurrency is an implementation of digital currency using a blockchain. Blaming blockchain for not having fraud prevention tech is like blaming TCP/IP stack for delivering a scam email to your inbox.

It's more like blaming a water utility company that doesn't give potable water, and its supporters tell you "but you can always buy a bottle of water from the store. Or maybe dig for water yourself!".

Yes, one can build the "fraud prevention" and other measures on top of blockchain. But then you have a financial institution just like a bank, and you can drop the blockchain part - anything it "solves" can be solved much simpler and with 1000x less energy once you have the other trappings of a financial institution.