Blockchains: How They Work and Why They’ll Change the World • Hacker News Board

Re: Blockchains: How They Work and Why They’ll Change the World

#121

Post by prostoalex » Fri, Oct 06, 2017, 4:10 AM UTC

zilian wrote: post #45

wildsatchmo wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking at all these pessimistic comments I can't help but wonder if this is what the op eds in the newspaper looked like while the internet was being built. "its too slow, and even with our best compression transferring a movie would take a month. Not gonna happen. Computers are too expensive for most households." etc. If you want to keep middle men in between most things that we could potentially do programmaticall…

Thank you for your comment. Looking at all the doubt and hate about blockchain & cryptocurrencies on HN lately, I personally can't help but wonder where have all innovators gone.

Blockchain is only innovative if you ignore the decades of DBMS development. There are very few cases where distributed consensus is needed (versus master/slave relationship), and even those cases can be served by a variety of consensus protocols with better throughput and performance characteristics.

Re: Blockchains: How They Work and Why They’ll Change the World

#122

Post by prostoalex » Fri, Oct 06, 2017, 4:18 AM UTC

sergiosgc wrote: post #69

endymi0n wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Confirmation Bias at work. You're invested, so you want it to take off. Yet none of those blockchain enthusiasts could tell me a single USP that blockchains had over storage in a normal database on any concrete use case, with the sole exception of cryptocurrencies. And the reason is simple: all those applications have none of the properties and problems the blockchain solves - which is an elegant niche solution tailo…

> Yet none of those blockchain enthusiasts could tell me a single USP that blockchains had over storage in a normal database on any concrete use case, with the sole exception of cryptocurrencies. > And the reason is simple: all those applications have none of the properties and problems the blockchain solves - which is an elegant niche solution tailor made for mutually mistrusting entities working together on a distr…

> the huge unrealized upsides of blockchain tech

We also miss the upside of emailing everybody a huge Excel file, which would also accomplish distributed replication. It doesn't necessarily mean that most people fail to grasp the concept and enormous potential for sending a large Excel file, it's just that for their use case they have access to more performant tools.

> Blockchain allows you to eschew the need for a single central trusted party. This allows for fluid ecosystems, removing the need for a monopoly/oligopoly in scenarios that today require one.

Except that the system is designed for centralization towards the entity that has access to the cheapest and most subsidized electricity. While most popular cryptocurrencies have escaped that route, you can look into the variety of lower-league shitcoins, that are generally limited to a handful of miners - the rewards are just not there to compete with a giant centralized GPU farm.

Re: Blockchains: How They Work and Why They’ll Change the World

#123

Post by prostoalex » Fri, Oct 06, 2017, 4:20 AM UTC

HillRat wrote: post #99

bpicolo wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you want to be able to roll back transactions under certain conditions Yup, refunds are the basis of customer service.

To be fair -- and I'm no blockchain booster -- transactional rollbacks should be modeled as separate operations and replacement transactions on an immutable log (or loggish thing, anyway). You can use bitemporal tracking to model invalid belief states, but your system should never be allowed to drop transactions.

Yep, they generally are in modern payment systems. A chargeback is a separate transaction that has to be initiated, submitted and paid for.

Re: Blockchains: How They Work and Why They’ll Change the World

#124

Post by prostoalex » Fri, Oct 06, 2017, 4:26 AM UTC

chrisco255 wrote: post #66

notahacker wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even in a world in which taxis and other institutions are corrupt, it stretches credulity that my real concern when getting a late night taxi is that the merchant service might run away with my $25 and my credit card company might not refund me. I've been in countries where there are major trust issues with taxis, and the very worst case I could imagine would be a service which signals to anyone watching that I'm on…

Trustless doesn't mean reputationless. A blockchain based Uber-like service would function similarly with reviews by former passengers for individual drivers.

Reputation requirements result in higher prices for buyers, as it's hard for new entrants to come along and gain meaningful business, while the older entities suddenly have the incentive to "milk" the reputation they earned.

Meanwhile, with a credit card I can buy a product from Amazon or some joe-schmoe site nobody ever heard of, and have a guarantee that Visa will back me up if the latter is a scam.

Re: Blockchains: How They Work and Why They’ll Change the World

#125

Post by davidgerard » Fri, Oct 06, 2017, 7:10 AM UTC

Lon7 wrote: post #85

davidgerard wrote: post #9

All the good bits of blockchain, we already had in git: a transaction ledger with hashes for tamper-proofing. Git came out in 2005, based on work going back a few decades. What we're seeing in practice is a lot of "Blockchain(tm)" products that are just this, and not actually a blockchain. Remember how Estonia has blockchains in everything and talks them up at every opportunity? Their local "KSI Blockchain" is just a…

> All the good bits of blockchain, we already had in git This is not true at all and shows a common misunderstanding of why the blockchain is useful. The big breakthrough with blockchains and crypto currencies has very little to do with it it being a ledger with signed hashes. There are two main "good bits" of the blockchain: - it provides a consensus algorithm to agree on a set of updates to the ledger. Not in git.…

And, as I said, this consistently turns out not to be the useful bit for applications other than cryptocurrencies. And the stuff that is actually used - and marketed as "Blockchain" - is pretty much git.

It's been eight years, "where's the beef" is a reasonable question by now.

Re: Blockchains: How They Work and Why They’ll Change the World

#126

Post by davidgerard » Fri, Oct 06, 2017, 7:46 AM UTC

lazerpants wrote: post #105

acdha wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe this is your blind spot? You assume it has to be legal to be useful. I'm looking at what it takes to go mainstream — if it's predominately used for illegal activity, that'll deter normal people and legitimate businesses from adopting it and increases the likelihood of government regulation. As a simple example, how many people would use a tumbler if that started being seen as probable cause for a money launde…

You're overlooking the millions (perhaps billions) of people on the planet who do not currently have access to Western banking infrastructure.

This is a common Bitcoin talking point, but it's not a good one.

There are over two billion people in the world who have no bank account or access to even basic financial services; “banking the unbanked” is much discussed in international development circles. Around 2013, Bitcoin advocates started claiming that Bitcoin could help with this problem.

Unfortunately:

* The actual problems that leave people unbanked are the bank being too far away, or bureaucratic barriers to setting up an account when you get there.

* Unless they use an exchange (which would functionally be a bank), they’d need an expensive computer and a reliable Internet connection to hold and update 120 gigabytes of blockchain.

* Bitcoin is way too volatile to be a reliable store of value.

* How do they convert it into local money they can spend?

* 7 transactions per second worldwide total means Bitcoin couldn’t cope with just the banked, let alone the unbanked as well.

* A centralised service similar to M-Pesa (a very popular Kenyan money transfer and finance service for mobile phones) might work, but M-Pesa exists, works and is trusted by its users – and goes a long way toward solving the problems with access to banking that Bitcoin claims to.

Advocates will nevertheless say “but what about the unbanked?” as if Bitcoin is an obvious slam-dunk answer to the problem and nothing else needs to be said. But no viable mechanism to achieve this has ever been put forward.

Re: Blockchains: How They Work and Why They’ll Change the World

#127

Post by davidgerard » Fri, Oct 06, 2017, 7:49 AM UTC

wildsatchmo wrote: post #91

volkk wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bitcoin attracts the perfect intersection of people who don't understand economics, math, computer science, finance, business, or politics. Bitcoin is deeply flawed in all those areas. i can somewhat +1 this just based on anecdotal evidence. a bunch of guys released an ICO and gathered about 15 mil in funding who ive met. i expected them to be extremely smart but i've found that they lucked out and simply wrote up…

This one makes me a little sad. I was very into bitcoin and blockchain ideas early on and the ICO fever has poisoned the well a bit. The money is attracting the types you're describing but IMO the only people who knew anything about BTC in the early days were exactly the kinds of people who knew a lot about about economics, cryptography, finance, business, government, politics, and philosophy. It seems obvious to me…

> IMO the only people who knew anything about BTC in the early days were exactly the kinds of people who knew a lot about about economics, cryptography, finance, business, government, politics, and philosophy.

No, it was founded by, and primarily attracted, weird conspiracy theory spouting goldbugs whose motivation was that (a) they thought a gold standard was still workable (b) they had a pathological aversion to the concept of credit in a banking system. Literally, conspiracy theory. https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/the-conspiracist-gold-b...

The scammers didn't come along just this year with ICOs. Scammers have been endemic in Bitcoin as soon as they were tradeable for anything else at all. Bitcoin was founded by starry eyed naifs and this always attracts predators. Sometimes, e.g. pirateat40, the naifs are also the predators.

Re: Blockchains: How They Work and Why They’ll Change the World

#128

Post by acdha » Fri, Oct 06, 2017, 9:18 AM UTC

CryptoPunk wrote: post #100

Jasper_ wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If so, then blockchain technology could get rid of Uber, Netflix, and every flight-insurance provider on the market. No, it can't. The hard part of Uber isn't the app and the architecture that gets cars to meet together, it's pulling all the shady under-belly moves to avoid taxi regulation or lobby it in your favor, all while being profitable. I've seen quite a few "how I made an Uber clone in a day" posts on here.…

>No, it can't. The hard part of Uber isn't the app and the architecture that gets cars to meet together, it's pulling all the shady under-belly moves to avoid taxi regulation or lobby it in your favor, all while being profitable. This is where the blockchain shines. You're not going to be able to sue a Dapp, or order it to be taken down. The only enforcement mechanism becomes going after end-users, which is much more…

> This is where the blockchain shines. You're not going to be able to sue a Dapp, or order it to be taken down

Why not? If someone makes an app, which has to happen for a service to get users, that’s an endpoint which can be sued. The point where actual money is converted is similarly exposed, and attempts at obfuscation run into existing money laundering laws. Finally, a blockchain protocol which cannot comply with legal requirements can be banned entirely — and since they require public access, non-trivial data volumes, and regular updates blockchains are less resistant to filtering attempts.

Re: Blockchains: How They Work and Why They’ll Change the World

#129

Post by wildsatchmo » Fri, Oct 06, 2017, 11:13 AM UTC

davidgerard wrote: post #127

wildsatchmo wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This one makes me a little sad. I was very into bitcoin and blockchain ideas early on and the ICO fever has poisoned the well a bit. The money is attracting the types you're describing but IMO the only people who knew anything about BTC in the early days were exactly the kinds of people who knew a lot about about economics, cryptography, finance, business, government, politics, and philosophy. It seems obvious to me…

> IMO the only people who knew anything about BTC in the early days were exactly the kinds of people who knew a lot about about economics, cryptography, finance, business, government, politics, and philosophy. No, it was founded by, and primarily attracted, weird conspiracy theory spouting goldbugs whose motivation was that (a) they thought a gold standard was still workable (b) they had a pathological aversion to th…

If you think the desire for sound money is weird you'll never understand why we need bitcoin. The hard core gold bugs in the Libertarian forums circa 2008 STILL don't trust bitcoin because they can't hold it in their hand. You think these are the folks that invented it? They're typically not computer savvy in the least and would rather invest in canned food with a 90 year shelf life. In that diverse group there were a small subset of cryptography nerds who had worked on several digital money theories and iterations before actually inventing bitcoin. Those people knew a lot about finance, economics, politics, etc. People like to flatten groups into one personality and call them weird or fringe to auto-win an argument when the reality is a bit more complicated than that. I'll remind you that the early days of the internet attracted some weird characters too. Doesn't mean they were wrong to be excited, and it doesn't mean the people who actually invented it wore spiked collars and combat boots either.

Re: Blockchains: How They Work and Why They’ll Change the World

#130

Post by ace_of_spades » Fri, Oct 06, 2017, 11:14 AM UTC

TheReveller wrote: post #5

From the article: Can a blockchain find people offering rides, link them up with people who are trying to go somewhere, and give the two parties a transparent platform for payment? Can a blockchain act as a repository and a replay platform for TV shows, movies, and other digital media while keeping track of royalties and paying content creators? Can a blockchain check the status of airline flights and pay travelers a…

With blockchains or distributed ledger technology in general you can replace an organization of people with code and logic. You need not dependent on people/organizations doing the right thing anymore. If you look at equifax or uber (e.g., god mode stalking) that can be a huge plus.

The biggest problem I see is that developers might want to seek rents from their contracts as organizations do from their activities. That would perpetuate the problems of inequity and simply update the technology underlying our society. If contracts were all free public goods on the other hand, things could change dramatically. There would be other problems to be solved (e.g., distribution of crypto currencies, move away from centralized mining to better alternatives, etc.) but there would be hope!