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Blockchain Is Dangerous Nonsense

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Re: Blockchain Is Dangerous Nonsense

#331

Post by JeremyNT »

Grustaf wrote: post #18

I'm very sceptical of blockchain (though I've been in crypto off and on since 2013) but most of the arguments in this article are non-sensical. For example: > But even if all code was without mistakes, blockchains can’t do anything against threats like scams, fraud, hacking of devices with keys for the blochain or just plain old typos in a coin transfer. I don't think protection against human-factor scams and frauds…

> I don't think protection against human-factor scams and frauds was ever a goal, you certainly never hear it as an argument.

And there's a reason you never hear it as an argument - the lack of such fundamental protection is a massive weakness of these blockchain currencies. The extremely technical savvy early adopters do not care, because evading authorities is actually an objective and they profit regardless as long as the value of their holdings goes up, but protecting normies from scams is actually kind of important if you want to be used as a "normal" currency rather than a speculative asset.

A central authority with the ability to deal with bad actors is a fundamental aspect of making fiat currency actually work in the real world.

Re: Blockchain Is Dangerous Nonsense

#332

Post by JohnFen »

fho wrote: post #329
Grustaf wrote: post #18

I'm very sceptical of blockchain (though I've been in crypto off and on since 2013) but most of the arguments in this article are non-sensical. For example: > But even if all code was without mistakes, blockchains can’t do anything against threats like scams, fraud, hacking of devices with keys for the blochain or just plain old typos in a coin transfer. I don't think protection against human-factor scams and frauds…

One thing people forget, or just plain do not know, is that Bitcoin has "smart contracts" (at least it had them when one BTC was around 0.2€ ... haven't checked in much after that). One example of those smart contracts was involving a trusted third party into a payment. The smart contract in that payment would only clear if two parties signed off on the payment. That's definitely a way to avoid fraud.

Assuming that you can trust the "smart contracts". And I think there's a lot of reasons why such trust is not warranted.

Re: Blockchain Is Dangerous Nonsense

#333

Post by dijit »

ooaa wrote: post #267
dijit wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> When alls said and done, the initial promise isn’t even kept, there’s very few “super miners” who if they worked together would be able to control the entire bitcoin economy, which is the situation with central banks. There is no way to actually proof that. > You can see exactly what I mean when you look at Monero. Objectively Monero solves the problems with bitcoin, but because it’s very difficult to trade with (d…

>> When alls said and done, the initial promise isn’t even kept, there’s very few “super miners” who if they worked together would be able to control the entire bitcoin economy, which is the situation with central banks.

> There is no way to actually proof that.

Every day it becomes more and more true; even if you can't prove that it's true now (which, it probably is true now) it will eventually be true, economic effects cause centralisation: https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/how-centralized-is-bitcoin-m...

Re: Blockchain Is Dangerous Nonsense

#334

Post by D13Fd »

swalsh wrote: post #325
tsimionescu wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, if I'm allowed to change the games, I can link them even without a block chain. Transacting digital assets on a particular market (be it a single blockchain or Steam or the WoW Auction House) is a solved problem, and is not helped in any clear way by adding a blockchain in the middle.

"Sure, if I'm allowed to change the games, I can link them even without a block chain." The game should be integrated with the blockchain directly, if I was unclear I apologize. That means, when you open the game, you need to use your wallet to connect to the game. You don't have a "Steam" account or whatever, you have your Web3 identity. "Transacting digital assets on a particular market (be it a single blockchain o…

> The game should be integrated with the blockchain directly, if I was unclear I apologize.

But it could just as easily be integrated with a non-blockchain central authority.

And you are still trusting their code to integrate it, so you haven't solved any trust issue. Nothing stops their code from saying "asset transferred" when the asset wasn't actually transferred.

Blockchain solves nothing here. All of this could be accomplished just as well or better without it.

Re: Blockchain Is Dangerous Nonsense

#335

Post by sWW26 »

lrvick wrote: post #277
y4mi wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How does it give you privacy when all your transactions are visible to all on chain?

Re: Blockchain Is Dangerous Nonsense

#336

Post by Marazan »

mattdesl wrote: post #318
Marazan wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, Blockchain does indeed solve the problem it creates.

These problems (the desire to find peer-to-peer systems to transfer and record digital assets) predate blockchain/crypto.

And they were trivially solved by trust.

Re: Blockchain Is Dangerous Nonsense

#337

Post by dmitriid »

Grustaf wrote: post #294
dmitriid wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, you keep coming up with "smart contracts are not a good fit for anything". Which really doesn't invalidate my original point.

I mean I'm not a smart contract evangelist, I'm just replying to your point that they are risky, that you need to understand them before using them. You do, that's why most people shouldn't. As to use cases, you only proposed two things, coffee and real estate. Those examples are both silly, for different reasons. I think in general it very seldom would make sense to use smart contracts for real assets. The only real…

> Then you need a centralised institution that people trust, which mostly defeats the purpose.

However, even with "purely digital assets" you will end up needing to trust people and exactly for the reason I outlined: unless you're able to read and debug code written in esoteric programming languages, you trust the creator of the contract not to screw you over. And even creators of contracts themselves can't find mistakes in their own code and have all their money drained or locked [1]

[1] Just this week, https://web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=akudreams-earns-34-million-...

"The contract suffered from several flaws, however. The first allowed an exploiter to stop all refunds and withdrawals from the contract... not so lucky with the second issue. A bug in the code failed to account for users minting multiple NFTs in a single transaction... the team can never withdraw the 11,539 ETH ($34 million) earned from the NFT sales—it is stuck there forever"

Re: Blockchain Is Dangerous Nonsense

#338

Post by dmitriid »

mattdesl wrote: post #178
hiq wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

Even with "purely digital assets" you have the trouble with oracles that provide you with data and whom you must explicitly trust, and with trust in general (when someone sells you NFTs that may or not be stolen from someone else).

The sum total of "p2p transfer of digital assets and digital state that is recorded on-chain between parties [without intermediaries - d.] that don't trust each other" is a very minuscule part of a very minuscule subset of a very minuscule number of activities that people engage in.

Re: Blockchain Is Dangerous Nonsense

#339

Post by dmitriid »

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…

> all with incentive and opportunity to lie to some other members along the chain, but not to their immediate neighbors

And how does blockchain prevent them from lying?

> you need to sign up and authenticate literally all the farm organizations in Europe, and all the competing grocers and transport companies. They all need to sign that they trust the third party service to be a fair and neutral record keeper

Instead they all need to sign up onto the blockchain and lie directly on the blockchain

> Each tomato can have its own blockchain with attested entries from each fertilization, spray, and transporter, all added and attested at the point where lying is hard

Fertilizer put on the record that tomatos are fertilized.

Sprayer put on the blockchain that tomatos were sprayed.

Transporter put on the record that tomatos were transported.

You arrive at the shop to find rotten potatoes instead.

How did blockchain help?

Also note that in this current world that is so horrible according to you you arrive at a shop to find tomatos that have passed all inspections and have been delivered to you. What eaxctly does blockchain intend to solve?

Re: Blockchain Is Dangerous Nonsense

#340

Post by swalsh »

cedilla wrote: post #262
ohthehugemanate wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is a very good example of the typical argument that shows the critical flaw. The flaw is that there is never any way to actually tie the real world to the Blockchain. It's literally impossible. You can have all the fancy mathematically proven Blockchain records you like, but it's just impossible to tie that to an actual tomato or actual pesticide. We have track and trace system already for crops and they have th…

I'm a huge blockchain advocate, but I 100% think this is an important point people need to understand. The blockchain is a great solution for pure digital assets. Its an awful solution for physical stuff.

I think this is a holdover of thought from bitcoin. Bitcoin wanted to be a currency for our real world economy. It never became more than that for many reasons. ETH (and now more modern chains) have become more than currencies. They are digital economies. Physical items are foreign goods in a foreign jurisdiction the local economy has little control over.

Even within crypto, different L1's are like foreign economies, and moving assets cross chain is complicated.

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