Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

as1ndu.xyz

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 330 posts

Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#101

Post by davidgerard »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #2

4. Consensus Algorithms Are Wack The popular blockchains only don’t offer transaction finality i.e you will never be 100% sure that you have gotten funds. You can only be probabilistically to a high degree (but with zero guarantee) that you have received your funds. This is because in major consensus algorithm called Nakamoto Consensus, the miners elect the chain with the most computational work that are with in the…

>WARNING

>Before you proceed, please understand that the Lightning Network is still in the experimental stage. Do not put the money you can't afford to lose. There is a high risk of you losing the money.

https://docs.btcpayserver.org/LightningNetwork/ and a pile of other places - and particularly when someone points out that LN doesn't work very well, and that money gets lost to bugs way too often to trust.

The purpose of the Lightning Network is to serve as an excuse for Bitcoin's dismal performance. It is not a production-ready payment system, even to the degree that Bitcoin is.

Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#102

Post by fractionalhare »

Melting_Harps wrote: post #98
scsilver wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are core competencies for moving into blockchain work?

> What are core competencies for moving into blockchain work? That's too broad a question, and really depends on the ecosystem, but I'll narrow it down for you if you want just want one obvious use case and I can expand as I go: verifiable proof of ownership. Something like Melvin Capital shorting 138% of GMS's stock would be impossible in a properly regulated Market, one that prohibits endless speculation and the wa…

> Something like Melvin Capital shorting 138% of GMS's stock

It didn't short 138% of GME stock. GME short interest increased to 138% while Melvin and many other hedge funds were shorting it. Melvin didn't do that singlehandedly.

> Naked Short selling maybe technically illegal, but that is in name only and in continues unabated to this day, hell the SEC refused to look into this obvious collusion between various hedge funds (citadel/melvin/Steve Cohen)

There is no evidence these firms colluded or engaged in naked short selling. Naked short selling is when you sell short a security without first entering into a contract to borrow the security. Short interest is orthogonal to naked short selling.

Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#103

Post by Melting_Harps »

fractionalhare wrote: post #102
Melting_Harps wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What are core competencies for moving into blockchain work? That's too broad a question, and really depends on the ecosystem, but I'll narrow it down for you if you want just want one obvious use case and I can expand as I go: verifiable proof of ownership. Something like Melvin Capital shorting 138% of GMS's stock would be impossible in a properly regulated Market, one that prohibits endless speculation and the wa…

> Something like Melvin Capital shorting 138% of GMS's stock It didn't short 138% of GME stock. GME short interest increased to 138% while Melvin and many other hedge funds were shorting it. Melvin didn't do that singlehandedly. > Naked Short selling maybe technically illegal, but that is in name only and in continues unabated to this day, hell the SEC refused to look into this obvious collusion between various hedge…

> It didn't short 138% of GME stock. GME short interest increased to 138% while Melvin and many other hedge funds were shorting it.

You corrected yourself to include that they weren't alone, but whatever... but that still doesn't change the fact that this would be impossible to do if it were a blockchain based system with these parameters built in, you cannot fictitiously create more of something that exists in order to benefit you or your industry and then suspend trading when things get out hand in that blockchain environment, as its completely out of your hand and the fraud in impossible to forge. And clearly with a trillion dollar market cap, and growing, we proved that it pays to play by the rules.

> There is no evidence these firms colluded or engaged in naked short selling. Naked short selling is when you sell short a security without first entering into a contract to borrow the security. Short interest is orthogonal to naked short selling.

Ok... we're done. This is going no where, keep downvoting as that seems to be your only recourse but you being blind to this obvious reality that SEC is selectively applying the Law (which also happens to apply to OTHER Naked short selling) isn't changing the fact of how obvious this collusion was and nothing I say will change that.

You want to pretend these markets are fair, go ahead, and I'm not going to waste my time... But my points for Blockchain based tech solutions that exist are already there and your make believe arguments notwithstanding will not make them go away.

Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#104

Post by Tomte »

RurouniK wrote: post #29

Bitcoin has been running non-stop for the past 12 years, used by tens of millions of people,has a market cap of 1 Trillion and all that while protecting the human rights around the world: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/ldyy7s/bitcoin_is_... But even if you are clueless enough to think that Bitcoin and blockchain isn't working at least you should appreciate all the breakthroughs in cryptography like Zero Kn…

> all the breakthroughs in cryptography like Zero Knowledge proofs, […] that emerged from the evolution of cryptocurrency tech.

Zero knowledge proofs date back to the mid-eighties.

Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#105

Post by hahahahe »

RurouniK wrote: post #29

Bitcoin has been running non-stop for the past 12 years, used by tens of millions of people,has a market cap of 1 Trillion and all that while protecting the human rights around the world: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/ldyy7s/bitcoin_is_... But even if you are clueless enough to think that Bitcoin and blockchain isn't working at least you should appreciate all the breakthroughs in cryptography like Zero Kn…

Yeah they sure have. Running GPUs endlessly to execute thousands of transactions per day. Do you realize how ridiculous that sounds? You can literally run a pub-sub equivalent of BTC for 1/1,000,000,000 of the cost involved in crypto and a million times more performant while preserving all the benefits touted in cryptos. The reason why we don’t have this isn’t because we can’t. It’s because the financial institutions are too entrenched. And the same institutions have taken over the cryptocurrency space. Do you not see what’s happening?

Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#106

Post by ItsMonkk »

EGreg wrote: post #74

No, blockchains are not the future, they are really the reason why one transaction can happen at a time in the whole world. Even Ethereum 2.0 will have shards which will do away with this anomaly. The only reason flash loans even work with no collateral is because you can be sure nothing else is running on the “world computer” while your transaction runs, so you can roll it back with no risk except gas fees. Vitalik…

You touched on something that I have been trying to work out but don't nearly have the expertise to create.

Bitcoin requires PoW because it's implemented as back-pointers, where the global software states that everyone coalesces behind the tallest chain.

But why not just implement a linked list, where the next link is written into the current block, and whomever writes to that next block wins? You would end up with endless blocks, but we can use what we learned with ext2 fs, where we have a circular queue. Once the data has been consumed by the main datastore, it is consumed and is available to be written to again.

You can still store the entire chain in some cheap s3, and anyone who wants to ensure that every command was executed could do so, but most would not.

I would love to see this implemented with torrent technology, such that I could host a website database solely by paying a seedbox company.

Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#107

Post by fractionalhare »

Melting_Harps wrote: post #103
fractionalhare wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Something like Melvin Capital shorting 138% of GMS's stock It didn't short 138% of GME stock. GME short interest increased to 138% while Melvin and many other hedge funds were shorting it. Melvin didn't do that singlehandedly. > Naked Short selling maybe technically illegal, but that is in name only and in continues unabated to this day, hell the SEC refused to look into this obvious collusion between various hedge…

> It didn't short 138% of GME stock. GME short interest increased to 138% while Melvin and many other hedge funds were shorting it. You corrected yourself to include that they weren't alone, but whatever... but that still doesn't change the fact that this would be impossible to do if it were a blockchain based system with these parameters built in, you cannot fictitiously create more of something that exists in order…

I'm not making normative statements about what's fair or not fair. There are legitimate and reasonable grounds for criticism of capital markets. I'm correcting your specific positive statements, which I quoted, because they're incorrect. I don't have anything to say about blockchain or the rest of your comment.

Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#108

Post by tsimionescu »

Melting_Harps wrote: post #63
logifail wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Banks are not just managing money. They are distributors of newly minted money via loans. They are not distributors of crypto and the Fed are not involved (or at least necessary) for the creation of new crypto. So in the brave new post-Fiat world we're thinking of, how does getting a mortgage work, exactly? The house I'm in was financed by my wife and I purchasing a plot of land, for cash, then offering that land a…

> The house I'm in was financed by my wife and I purchasing a plot of land, for cash, then offering that land as security to a bank, who then created a loan for a fairly sizable chunk of cash with which we paid a builder to construct the house. This begs the obvious question: contract law is all about enforcement. Clearly no one would be right to dispute you own this land and home, you have the deeds and the tax hist…

> help create an automated arbitration system, divorced entirely from the whims of Mankind

No. That is simply not possible with anything resembling today's technology. We'll have flying cars on a Mars city before automated arbitration on real world matters.

> help build the future we all want and maybe have a chance of creating a post-scarce World.

Except fixed supply currency is going back in the other direction. And the hard parts about eliminating scarcity have nothing to do with the monetary system.

Besides, you still haven't explained how lending works with bitcoin but without banks making up extra bitcoin.

Note: using bitcoin to refer to any fixed supply currency, whether it's bitcoin, Eth, gold or anything else.

Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#109

Post by mtrycz2 »

Scalability: While it can't do 25k transactions per second, my Raspberry Pi can validate 600tps with still some headroom. (ie 150x current maximum of BTC; it could actually do 2,2k but I wasn't able to reliably generate blocks because of the stochastic nature of it)

The barriers described in the article are very real, but there is also real work being done to remove them.

Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#110

Post by ezoe »

I think price volatility is the only reason it's not working as a normal currency.

Right now, these blockchain currencies are traded just like expensive wine, art or gold bar. It's a speculative money game. We can't use wine or art to buy some food for today. Most people don't even run the full node themselves. They relies on somebody else's node. In good term, they are investing, in other words, they are gambling.

It's just sad seeing a lot of resources and some brains are wasted on these gamble.

How could this be happened? When bitcoin was announced and it's first implementation was actively developed by someone or some group known as Satoshi Nakamoto, it was just a technically interesting non practical piece of attempt. But now... it's just a mess. Had I mined bitcoin in early days, I could be a billionaire. But the same thing can be said on buying the gold bar. It's not that technically interesting.

The first P2P boom invented a lot of practical services. File sharing, web hosting, audio and video streaming, video chat and all. They are all pivoted to central system for efficiency, but some services gained a few years of early head start experience thanks to the P2P. What blockchain achieved so far? Nothing. It just invented another gold bar. Totally useless but some people believes value in it.

I really wish people wake up and spend precious time and resources on something that introduce real value to the world. Blockchain? Wake me up if proof of storage space become practical.

Post reply on HN