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Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

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Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#141

Post by canoebuilder »

ignoramous wrote: post #112

I genuinely think HN is subject to what Clay Christensen put as "disruptive innovation" when it comes to Blockchain and friends (strange to say that for a community as opposed to a company). I understand that many on HN think of the many ICOs as Ponzi schemes, and other tech (like identity, DBs, VPNs, apps, or even alternate WWW) built on top as smokes and mirrors; but the industry being built around it is very real…

>but the industry being built around it is very real even if niche. There's a lot going on (including research)

What are some concrete examples?

I think most of us who are critical are still interested, because we do see things that are going on, and we ask ourselves, are we missing something?

But we seem to run into the same road blocks again and again.

“Solutions” seem to come from people subtly or transparently “talking their book,” that is, they have an undisclosed vested interest in you not thinking too much about those roadblocks.

What is some fruitful research being done in the areas of well known roadblocks? What are some application areas with a genuine pathway to viability and no better non-blockchain alternative?

Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#142

Post by rrrazdan »

mrharrison wrote: post #136
nexthash wrote: post #11

I think the #1 reason blockchain doesn't work is very simple - the technology is broken beyond fixability. This article is two years old, but the same variations of these excuses always come up when the crypto ideologues are grilled on why their utopiaic vision hasn't come about, for all of blockchain's existence. Blockchain is awful for most things compared to a centralized or distributed database: it is inefficient…

I have been in the blockchain space for about three years, and there is an explosion in tech and innovation in the last six months. Visa, Mastercard etc... are integrating, bank regulators now allow banks to connect to public networks. It just astounds me sometimes how people can be so confident in a review of a platform type and done so little research. I urge you to take a second look. Blockchain is primed to disru…

Disrupt but how? Can you point to a specific example or use case?

Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#143

Post by scsilver »

loceng wrote: post #83
gjulianm wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much of that usage and market cap is actual usage and how much is financial speculation?

There's been research done to show that multiple times just a few people manipulated the price of Bitcoin to its heights - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-14/research-... - and the Bitcoin community main mantra is "HODL" and they call themselves the "army of the HODLers" for a reason: they're waiting for enough of society to be manipulated/trick people into thinking the history of the "steady" increas…

The money transfered from late adopters to early adopters is the massive amounts of old money mad from the wealth of kingdoms and colonialization. Personally I think having an infinitely divisible, fixed asset, protected by cryptography and not statutes, is a democratic upheaval of captured financial systems. You dont need blood, legacy, heritage to capture these assets, just information.

Maybe having physical wealth ripped from my family multiple times in the past 150 years makes me feel this, this asset is a bit more useful than gold or jewelry when dealing with an uncertain future.

Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#144

Post by kgin »

prof-dr-ir wrote: post #6

The "lack of intuitive private key management" is worth expanding on. Would it not be nice if you could, maybe for a small fee, have some trusted entity store your private key for you? One could perhaps imagine storing a printout of the private key in some kind of physical "safe deposit" box, to be maintained by such an entity? But maybe that is to cumbersome and we can do so entirely digitally? In that case I guess…

Too many people are missing the dry humor in this post

Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#145

Post by jamemuraca »

nexthash wrote: post #11

I think the #1 reason blockchain doesn't work is very simple - the technology is broken beyond fixability. This article is two years old, but the same variations of these excuses always come up when the crypto ideologues are grilled on why their utopiaic vision hasn't come about, for all of blockchain's existence. Blockchain is awful for most things compared to a centralized or distributed database: it is inefficient…

I think a great use case is for distributed storage and control of home automation products, with an open protocol on top of it. When I have lock in to one vendor and they go bankrupt, device has lost control but also my historical data. If this was all via a distributed model, I could grant access to a new app/company to take over control. Even if they don't close up, I could still give access to other integration partners to gain see my historical data for some kind of processing.

Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#146

Post by ffggvv »

jamemuraca wrote: post #145
nexthash wrote: post #11

I think the #1 reason blockchain doesn't work is very simple - the technology is broken beyond fixability. This article is two years old, but the same variations of these excuses always come up when the crypto ideologues are grilled on why their utopiaic vision hasn't come about, for all of blockchain's existence. Blockchain is awful for most things compared to a centralized or distributed database: it is inefficient…

I think a great use case is for distributed storage and control of home automation products, with an open protocol on top of it. When I have lock in to one vendor and they go bankrupt, device has lost control but also my historical data. If this was all via a distributed model, I could grant access to a new app/company to take over control. Even if they don't close up, I could still give access to other integration p…

seems like you could just do this with some sort of open source or shared standard that different providers use

Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#147

Post by lottin »

mikegreenberg wrote: post #116
lottin wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ownership of digital assets that's something new and valuable Doubtful, because ownership only makes sense in a context of scarcity whereas digital assets are in infinite supply.

How are blockchain assets, whose scarcity is defined by the protocol and agreed upon by all participating node operators, infinite in supply? Edit: Arguing in good faith... you could suggest changing the protocol, sure, however you would need follow that particular blockchain's rules for gaining consensus about changing the rules first.

Yes, but it's an artificial scarcity. Like you say, these assets are only scarce because all the participants agree that they're scarce. This is different from physical objects, which are scarce because of the laws of nature.

Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#148

Post by ffggvv »

ironically the biggest issue with crypto as an actual currency is stability, which could easily be solved via a stable coin or something tethered. but there’s zero excitement about that and all the excitement is around bitcoin, because all people really care about is that it goes up up in price

Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#149

Post by mrharrison »

rrrazdan wrote: post #142
mrharrison wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been in the blockchain space for about three years, and there is an explosion in tech and innovation in the last six months. Visa, Mastercard etc... are integrating, bank regulators now allow banks to connect to public networks. It just astounds me sometimes how people can be so confident in a review of a platform type and done so little research. I urge you to take a second look. Blockchain is primed to disru…

Disrupt but how? Can you point to a specific example or use case?

More transparent than the opaque financial industry. You as a user completely own your assets, with your public key. Yes blockchain wallets/public keys are bad UX, but at the same time they give you actual ownership of your securities/index funds. A person can have access to the same financial products that banks have access to, because they cost a fraction of a price to run then they normally do on CEX and instead of waiting for 3 days for a transaction to complete, it completes in 5 minutes. I could go on and on... Essentially blockchain makes financial products faster, cheaper and more accessible. No middlemen involved and a transparent audit trail.

Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#150

Post by space_rock »

ignoramous wrote: post #112

I genuinely think HN is subject to what Clay Christensen put as "disruptive innovation" when it comes to Blockchain and friends (strange to say that for a community as opposed to a company). I understand that many on HN think of the many ICOs as Ponzi schemes, and other tech (like identity, DBs, VPNs, apps, or even alternate WWW) built on top as smokes and mirrors; but the industry being built around it is very real…

An ICO is a framework for a criminal conspiracy to defraud. As outlined in the evidence gathered by the SEC on Ripple.

Make some outrageous sales pitch that experts in technology would describe as vaporware

Sell your utility tokens. A worthless type of token

Buy some fake articles and pump the price. Dump on the suckers that bought your tokens

Pay for a exchange listing on a junk exchange. Pump the token and dump on the suckers that bought it

Exits, rinse and repeat

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