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Why “blockchain” is BS in 4 slides

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Re: Why “blockchain” is BS in 4 slides

#101

Post by ebbv »

Steeeve wrote: post #100

The whole cryptocurrency market is surreal to me for these reasons and many more. But I did think the same thing about Twitter, especially early on when it was constantly broken. And yet, while it was broken people were still talking about it and it was gaining mommentum. That's the parallel I see here. Enough of the right people are talking about it that it's going to be a thing for at least the near-term future. Th…

Except the thing that kept twitter around through the problems was celebrities. People following celebrities like Ashton Kutcher and Kim Kardashian and comedians kept it relevant until it became used in the Arab Spring and then it became “legitimate.”

I don’t see a parallel there for cryotocurencies. It’s just a bubble and I don’t see any Arab Spring type of event to legitimize it.

Re: Why “blockchain” is BS in 4 slides

#102

Post by ricardobeat »

augbog wrote: post #91

Totally off topic but for his bio says for secure messages use Signal/iMessage. Signal is great but iMessage?

iMessage is end-to-end encrypted, and a good bet that the app publisher is safe. Apple has a strong record of strict security and anti-government-snooping policy.

Re: Why “blockchain” is BS in 4 slides

#105

Post by xiphias »

Bitcoin network is with us for the last 9 years and more stable than any other internet service (except maybe internet itself). The slides don't have any prediction (price going to $0 in 3 months after a 9 year climb?). Without that it's a totally unuseful waste of time to listen to it.

Maybe Bitcoin ,,shouldn't'' work on paper, but it IS working in practice.

Re: Why “blockchain” is BS in 4 slides

#107

Post by KirinDave »

asfgjadfgionoin wrote: post #87
dozzie wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * Distributed consensus schemes are not useful only for monetary applications. OK, but blockchain is not a distributed consensus protocol. It's a document timestamping protocol.

True, but in practice "blockchain" implies some sort of distributed consensus. Except for private blockchains, which are totally brain-dead.

Github does pretty damn well selling private blockchains and whitelabel private blockchain services.

Re: Why “blockchain” is BS in 4 slides

#108

Post by KirinDave »

TTPrograms wrote: post #45
kbenson wrote: post #16

Ethereum smart contracts are million dollar bug bounties? That sounds about right to me, and seems historically accurate.

By this logic so is every financial software system, though.

But that's almost definitely true, and every bank in the world loses millions of whatever currency they hold every year to fraud.

The primary difference is that banks are encouraged to cooperate to recover these. In the blockchain world, it's incredibly difficult to recover losses and people suggest "no-takesies-backsies" is an ethical method of doing business while wracked by fraud.

Re: Why “blockchain” is BS in 4 slides

#109

Post by KirinDave »

fruitzome wrote: post #51
cglace wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is bitcoin really important? I think most people have no practical use for it.

2B+ people do not have access to banking or trade. They are poor because we do not trade with them. I couldn't pay someone in South Africa rural area for something worth $2 without bitcoin. Many other people are censored. Billions more have their wealth devalued via inflation. Bitcoin is a way for people to be free without any state taking their money (see Greece)

Bitcoin is sooooo important that everyone has devised an alternative off-chain protocol that actually does peer-to-peer scaling and in no way actually needs bitcoin except as a reconciliation strategy.

Yeah wow, we're all impressed.

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