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Blockchain Is Dangerous Nonsense

eisfunke.com

271–280 of 392 posts

Re: Blockchain Is Dangerous Nonsense

#271

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…

And believers always pull of this subtle shift in frame: you bring in trust-less peer to peer decentralised networks, and of course there's no other solution, because it's a setting invented by the same people who came up with cryptocurrency. The rest of the world relaxes the trust-less assumption and talks about Web of Trust, about decentralised roots of trust, federation etc.

And this is a rhetorical technique: When we talk about economics, we talk about business or human problems. But the trustless-online-decentralised-ledger problem is a technical one. So the GP was saying "there is no business problem that crypto solves that hasn't been solved in a better way already. And then the crypto-bros come in and say "nuh-uh! If you for whatever reason want to run digital assets on physical infrastructure that needs to be maintained off chain without trusting anyone (say, the person the network depends on for maintaining the power infrastructure) then this is the only solution!".

YES! Well done. This is even useful, in a horrible hellscape where dog eats dog, everyone carries their own portable nuclear reactor and uses unstoppable point to point laser communication to run the internet and we forego all of the efficiency gains offered by using social consensus and democratic decision making to build webs of trust and centralised infrastructure with checks and balances (for example, by having the root certificates expire and be re-legitimised by some social ceremony repeatedly...say in an election). But in the real world, at some point everyone wants to build a society, put some basic trust down and improve living standards. And while people like Putin and the Kims and warlords still alive can fuck this up

1. They generally only survive because they are leeching of the more functional parts of society which uses trust (not unlike crypto with its Ponzi structure)

2. Crypto won't save you from them because they'll physically take away your electricity and/or torture you to get your keys

So what problems that aren't technical toy problems but real business and coordination problems in realistic settings (remember, if you have a state you trust to protect your private property rights, you can probably also use that to run the root certificate and organise the ledger) does crypto solve again?

Re: Blockchain Is Dangerous Nonsense

#272
post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.” Yes I understood where you were going. Just pointing out that the scope of the problem you're solving is way smaller than that of a generic transaction, to the point that it has very little relevance for pretty much anything real. > The TLD/ICANN is irrelevant,…

The assets are “real” in the same way domain names are “real.” These are social constructs, maintained by social consensus.

It is very easy to come to a shared consensus about what address “mattdesl.eth” points to, because the history is recorded on-chain, and can be verified locally. I’m sure the exact valuation of this domain will go up and down, but as long as the the chain and network continues to exist, the asset holds value within the network, regardless of what occurs with ICANN/TLDs.

Re: Blockchain Is Dangerous Nonsense

#273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could always use the crypto currency as the store of value there, just as people did with MPesa. You don't necessarily ever have to convert it to a local currency.

MPesa doesn't store your money in some kind of private currency with a fluctuating value. If you're thinking of it as storing "minutes" as some American cellphone providers would, that's not right. You deposit and withdraw Kenyan Shillings, or your local equivalent, just as if it were a shilling-denominated bank account.

Yes, and you could make this hypothetical Kenyan cryptocurrency work the same way. One KCoin is one shilling, redeemable for minutes.

Re: Blockchain Is Dangerous Nonsense

#274
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

double spending problem, anyone ?

Every banking system ever? At vastly lower energy waste, at higher transaction rates, and with all the legal protection of centuries of well developed needs.

> trust-less

Trusting a central authority (bank) is not a solution to trust-less prevention of double spending.

Re: Blockchain Is Dangerous Nonsense

#275
post #221
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…

And you've set yourself up for an answer;) I think any adversarial system has something to gain from blockchain. When participants of a system are naturally pitted against one another due to being competitors (a la engaging in a zero-sum game), the solution is usually to agree to auditing by a third-party. However, this method is easily corruptible by replacing the auditors with biased parties[1]. This is not an unco…

1. How do you solve the oracle problem? Blockchain can only deal with things that are on the blockchain already. Any interface to the real world suffers the trust and bias issues you described. You're just shifting the problem ever so slightly. (That's why the only real application is crypto currencies so far, because those can be realised wholly within the blockchain.)

2. How do you incentivise expending the PoW work without cryptocurrencies?

3. Why not have one central/permissioned authority issue chains of blocks, and everyone that wants can verify them cheaply? That is millions of times more efficient than PoW.

Re: Blockchain Is Dangerous Nonsense

#276
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does turn it into dangerous nonsense is the "solution looking for a problem" phenomenon, fueled by techno-libertarians and more so plain greedy people, looking for a way to justify and entrench the mostly useless technology that makes them rich.

Quoted post unavailable.

By that logic, would you say that Bernie Madoff's enterprise was useful, as it made him rich?

Re: Blockchain Is Dangerous Nonsense

#277
post #69

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?

I'd go one step further: the few legal purchases done with crypto currencies are mostly done by people unaware they're paying that price

I am one of those people that uses cash and bitcoin for privacy and reliability and for 100% legal use cases.

I have experienced bank accounts of mine and those I know be frozen, emptied without warning due to identity theft, a false criminal accusation, forgotten debts, etc. I also know very well that banks have data sharing relationships with Visa, etc, that form a full map of where and when you spend money to aid data brokers in selling changes in your behavior to advertisers. Do you really want metadata on every purchase you make at a sex shop or a pharmacy stored in databases and sold to the highest bidder?

Cash has limits though. It is impractical and unsafe to put cash in the mail when paying friends back for dinner after we all go our separate ways or if I am buying something online I wish to be anonymous like a VPN subscription. In those cases Bitcoin solves a problem and I have legitimately used it on a regular basis for many years. I never use venmo etc and friends and I regularly settle debts with Bitcoin.

I would prefer not to have to carry around cash all the time so when possible to use Bitcoin in retail, I do. I have used bitcoin to buy drinks at bars in Germany, electronics at big box stores in Japan, meals at various restaurants, and coffee hundreds of times. I can also get cash from Bitcoin ATMs worldwide without having to deal with a bank denying me my own money because I am in an unexpected country.

Bitcoin, when purchased with cash, gives me all the privacy of cash with all the portability of a visa card.

Re: Blockchain Is Dangerous Nonsense

#278
post #4

The first argument boils down to "I need a central entity to fix mistakes". That does not necessarily apply to everything. An immutable ledger sounds like something that could be useful. Myself I can't think of any uses besides crypto, but the fact that I can't find any use for a technology myself doesn't turn it into "dangerous nonsense"

Oh, you're about to enter the world of wonders: https://ethereum.org/en/dapps/#explore

Re: Blockchain Is Dangerous Nonsense

#279
post #203
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For most people it isn't. Maybe at some point it will, if governments let the money printer brr even more, or if we see more of what Canada did. If that is amplified by say 10x, I think a lot of people would start to reconsider.

At no point will people deliberately give up consumer protections they have today. If an economy is undergoing extreme hyperinflation, the consumer protections would have likely already been gone at that point.

No post body was provided.

Re: Blockchain Is Dangerous Nonsense

#280

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…

And believers always pull of this subtle shift in frame: you bring in trust-less peer to peer decentralised networks, and of course there's no other solution, because it's a setting invented by the same people who came up with cryptocurrency. The rest of the world relaxes the trust-less assumption and talks about Web of Trust, about decentralised roots of trust, federation etc. And this is a rhetorical technique: Whe…

Consider a simple answer: my ENS domain is one of the few digital assets I own (and have “digital ownership” over) that is not inextricably linked to a single corporately-owned user account (that ultimately has full control over the asset).

Perhaps you do not see a value in that, or do not feel the risks outweigh this benefit, which is fine. We are acting on a different set of interests.

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