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Why “blockchain” is BS in 4 slides

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Re: Why “blockchain” is BS in 4 slides

#111

Post by KirinDave »

fruitzome wrote: post #88
dlp211 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So these people are essentially poor and don't have access to trade and Banking, but they are going to have access to the blockchain, hardware wallets, and the various other technologies they need, and this will all happen before banks or mobile app payment systems are able to capture the market? Call me a skeptic.

A lot of the world lives on less than $2 a day. You can buy a cheap refurbished Android phone for $5. And you have SMS cointext.io to transact for instance. You do not need a hardware wallet, only to memorize the 12 word seed phrase. Just look at the set of users who have phones without adequate banking. You will see this is measured in the billions of people. The best hope to lift people out of poverty is for us to…

The amount of your transactions doesn't matter. If chains can't give people individual transactions in a trustless environment WITHOUT just recreating a new set of banking networks to bridge you onto the lightning network, all we've done is rotate the moneyhandlers.

Maybe that's great for your pocketbook. To me it seems pointless and worthy of scorn.

Re: Why “blockchain” is BS in 4 slides

#112

Post by jacques_chester »

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.

Bugs in financial software can typically be unwound by the parties involved, or by courts, or both. This is less true for a scheme designed to be irreversible in itself.

Re: Why “blockchain” is BS in 4 slides

#114

Post by KirinDave »

dimgl wrote: post #79

I'm not a fan of cryptocurrency and even these slides were horrendous. Seriously, way to make your point so poorly that not even people who agree with you want to read it. Also, this guy didn't even discuss blockchain tech. Just cryptocurrency.

Because without cryptocurrency, as he says, it's a merkle tree and THAT IS NOT NEW. Github already did it. It works. Revolutionary? No.

Re: Why “blockchain” is BS in 4 slides

#115

Post by kerng »

I read some of the slides, but they are authored from an emotional standpoint, which makes it difficult to follow ideas and conclusions. Statements like "public blockchain security is a lie", are just not useful. If this content is used at Berkley I'm worried for peoples tuition. I'd expect more depth and logical statements for a presentation at a university.

Re: Why “blockchain” is BS in 4 slides

#117

Post by rmrfrmrf »

KirinDave wrote: post #107
asfgjadfgionoin wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Clever. I like it.

Re: Why “blockchain” is BS in 4 slides

#118

Post by KirinDave »

Donzo wrote: post #95

"Every tradeable ICO is really an unregulated security." I disagree with this claim. It depends on whether the token constitutes an investment contract. If the token has utility, was sold as a utility bearing token (rather than an investment opportunity), and if the project possesses an open codebase which token holders can theoretically modify, then I don't believe said token is an unregulated security. Yet, the vas…

If it's a utility then why ICO? Strictly as a fundraising method? To enable resale? None of that requires a centralized consensus chain even in a trustless world.

No, you ICO a utility token because you hope it'll go superluminal by interacting with an ecosystem full of unregulated securities.

Re: Why “blockchain” is BS in 4 slides

#119

Post by paulgb »

kthejoker2 wrote: post #75
dozzie wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know a thing about poker, so I'll take it at a face value, but the spam prevention idea is bullshit. It's not new, it wasn't new even twenty years ago, from what I remember. It wouldn't fly back then, and nothing substantial changed since then.

Can you point me to some papers, books, etc to support this claim? Trying to understand the "block chain is BS" side of the argument, I'm fairly neutral but I rarely see any technical arguments against the concept.

See Hashcash, which long predates the blockchain.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash

Re: Why “blockchain” is BS in 4 slides

#120

Post by euske »

cornholio wrote: post #32

There is some truth in the slides but it's well mixed with falsehoods and misunderstandings. * Distributed consensus schemes are not useful only for monetary applications. When they are used as such, there exist mechanisms to commit to a certain fiat price and minimize market exposure to the point where transactions are almost free, in fiat terms. * The disbursement of tokens and the distributed consensus rewards do…

If something is 95% of the times X, can't we just label the whole thing as X? Just making life simpler. (Actually, my threshold goes even as low as 50% for the case of BS.)
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