151–160 of 515 posts
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The killer app of crypto is... a wallet app to put your crypto in. Okay.
This is “decentralized Venmo”. Yes, the “killer app” of internet currency is going to be money transfers. That is not surprising, non-trivial, and quite valuable.
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As I always do when someone pops off with a phrase like “blockchain junk” I’ll remind everyone that Barbara Liskov, who is the second female recipient of the Turing Award (and narrowly missed being the first, Frances Allen received the honor in 2006, Professor Liskov did in 2008), the John von Neumann Medal, an honors doctorate from ETH Zurich (received alongside Donald Knuth), countless other honors, and was the doc…
"the consensus mechanism used in," where "used in" is the key part. Not "developed for."
It’s also why I gave the example of Dr. Wadler FRS FRSE as someone who even more explicitly did extremely sophisticated research well-received by the academic community unambiguously in this context.
I just do not understand what it is about this topic that turns a normally very thoughtful community of people with a generally very high regard for the research agendas of noted computer scientists into spinal-reflex, knee-jerk critics on a dime.
You hear all kinds of arguments but they generally boil down to some version of “blockchain is for cryptocurrency, cryptocurrency is for financial fraud and financial fraud has no place in our society”.
But every link in that chain is either incorrect or selectively tolerant of wrongdoing.
Tamper-resistant ledgers have applications outside of finance.
“Everyone knows I mean crypto.”
Ok, cryptocurrencies have complex outcomes attached to them, some positive, some negative.
“I’m talking about the fraud which is rampant and the main/only use case.”
Eh, not really, speculation isn’t by itself fraud, although it is true that markets (say, OTC derivatives markets) with a high ratio of speculation to other non-speculative activities generally have more fraud in them, so more or less rampant than conventional digital finance?
“More both relatively and absolutely.”
No. Neither. Trivially false. You think that because you have no fucking clue how much fraud happens either relatively or absolutely in conventional financial markets. Furthermore, the fraud that does happen is dramatically more likely to be investigated and prosecuted, and the victims of that fraud are dramatically more likely to be recognized as victims (unlike for example victims of predatory lending in 2005-2007 who lost their homes and got called criminals into the bargain”.
I don’t want to believe that it’s just the banal fact that we all know someone who got stinking rich speculating in crypto markets and we didn’t (I’ve never speculated in crypto markets and am not in the same galaxy as well-off: I went into debt when the tech job market collapsed last year, with uh, a little help).
But I’m really struggling here to find a more charitable conclusion.
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This must be the weirdest call to authority I've ever seen. Consens algorithms are important in both safety and distributed (High Availibility) scenarios. There's no necessary link from research into that, and blockchain in general, and the Proof of X style crypto blockchains specifically. Can you point to some research of Waller? I've tried to find it to see if it's more directly related, but the only somewhat famou…
I made a typographical error because I typed that with my thumb: the gentleman’s name is Dr. Philip Wadler FRS FRSE ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Wadler ), I also forgot his proper title as a Fellow of the Royal Society. The contributions that merited his inclusion in a group that includes (in computing alone) people like Charles Babbage KH FRS and Alan Turing OBE FRS are too numerous for any HN comment: h…
Wait, isn't git more of a merkle-DAG? I thought one of the defining features of blockchains was effectively branchless global state. My understanding is that DAGs are a superset of blockchains. Is this a wrong?
My comment about "blockchain junk" is mainly in response to the fact that it's nearly impossible to find any investment/involvement in the space without running into complete fraudsters and starry-eyed "entrepreneurs" who view blockchain as some sort of god technology that will lift us out of poverty and/or upend the corporate control mechanisms. AKA a bandaid fix by people who don't understand its actual limitations or the dynamics of the systems they supposedly oppose.
As a system for maintaining auditable global state/knowledge in the face of sybil attacks, yes, it's impressive. However 99% of the projects people reach for it do not require it, hence the term "junk." It's more a condemnation of the space surrounding the technology than the technology itself. I figured that would be somewhat obvious.
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So, Ethereum "has blobs" now that "are provable," by an implementation that doesn't appear to contain tests [0]. Crypto, stay winning. https://github.com/search?q=test+repo%3AOffchainLabs%2Fnitro...
What are you saying? There's a "test-cases" folder in the "prover" folder you linked to a search of. Not sure why it doesn't show up in GitHub's search, but it's right there in front of both of our faces.
As far as I can tell, the only cryptocurrency that actually delivers on its name (i.e. being used as a currency) is Monero. Sure, it's all drugs and stolen credit cards, but it does undeniably solve a real world problem for its users instead of just being used as a vehicle for speculative investment. With that said, I think if anyone comes up with a "killer-app" for crypto, then it'll be on the Ethereum chain. They s…
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This is “decentralized Venmo”. Yes, the “killer app” of internet currency is going to be money transfers. That is not surprising, non-trivial, and quite valuable.
That's not a killer app. We already have money transfers.
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When setting up my DWS on the chain I performed a fresh implementation of the flex spanning system so that sharded stakes were accordingly modulated when dilution factors are on the rise. Retro validators should never rely on the sole consideration of performative liquidity, and that's why in most use-cases, distributive-non-passing underfitted categorization of assets is preferable. Every DNP-uca implementation has…
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Some days ago ICP showed it can run ML on a blockchain. While this is nice and does show that distributed computing is a real possibility I also don't think that anyone is going to switch from Amazon/Azure to ICP any time soon. But I must say the idea is really nice. It's very easy to develop Actor model based software and deploy it on ICP.
> ML on a blockchain I would actually love it if you had a link with more info on that. Don't take this the wrong way, but my first guess would be that that basically isn't true; either it's not actually machine learning (as is understood today) or it isn't actually a blockchain but rather normal distributed computing being "verified" via blockchain somehow? Would love to be proven wrong though.
zkML can be done using general-purpose ZK libraries (since they support arbitrary computations), or there are some specialized tools for proving ML inference, such as https://github.com/ddkang/zkml. It's currently pretty expensive to prove huge models like LLMs, but there's a lot of work being done to make it more practical.
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5 cents per transaction is high for many parts of the world, and exceptionally high if every interaction in normal life is turned into a financial transaction.
If their vision is "applications" it feels like any price is too high. Would you sign up for hn if it cost 5 cents? Even though that is nothing in terms of money (for most of us), the friction of money actually being involved in and of itself probably makes it not worth it. Especially when its just a silly internet thing.
> the friction of money actually being involved ... makes it not worth it
This is it. There are very few people who live for this level of financialisation.