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Why “blockchain” is BS in 4 slides

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Re: Why “blockchain” is BS in 4 slides

#161

Post by kalleboo »

jwilliams wrote: post #136
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…

> That being said, 95% of the times the word "blockcahin" is uttered these days, what follows is most likely bullshit. This is true -- it's also true the 5% is pretty damn interesting. There are plenty of interesting tokens out there. Some of them are tackling real problems. That's pretty exciting. I don't begrudge someone who's trying to solve something. The historical analogs are lazy in my view. The financial and…

The 5% are interesting in the same way that Communism and hardcore Libertarianism are interesting. "Would be very cool if it could work (there's no way in hell it would work)"

Re: Why “blockchain” is BS in 4 slides

#162

Post by mannykannot »

CryptoPunk wrote: post #141
mannykannot wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure what your position here is: that you can do whatever you want, or at least a lot of useful things, in ~100 lines of code? That if your software is broken down into functions no bigger that ~100 lines of code, and they have each been individually verified, then their composition has also been verified? Or something else? There is also the matter of verifying the platform itself.

Regarding your last point, the platform itself can be fixed if it has any malfunctions. The issue is only with an application built on top of the platform malfunctioning while the platform operates exactly as it's supposed to. In that case there is no redress as the platform is for all intents and purposes immutable when it's working correctly.

You are seriously underestimating what it would take to verify the platform. We are not talking about just a few hundreds of lines of code here.

Re: Why “blockchain” is BS in 4 slides

#163

Post by a-dub »

The financial side is weird, but there are some clever implementations of cryptographic protocols in the crypto currency space that could be used for the design of semi-decentralized services that could make the internet better.

This stuff could be the makings of /etc/passwd for the internet.

Re: Why “blockchain” is BS in 4 slides

#164

Post by _betty_ »

cozicoolmail wrote: post #158
gjmacd wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except you wouldn't use the blockchain to have control over their data", you'd use it for identity and verification. Facebook' #1 issue is fake news and Bot's. You can eliminate those problems entirely with a blockchain and smart contract that requires identity and proof of such.

How would you prove identity on a blockchain? You'd be worse equipped than Facebook. Are you suggesting some entity verify folks who sign up for this distributed social network? Make an Ehtereum contract to do it? Either way, this sounds dubious at best.

I think the idea is:

* Website gives person a unique code to broadcast on the blockchain to prove they have control over that identity

* 'Approved' services claim things publically about identities (eg age, allowed to drive) which others can use to verify claims

What I don't get is:

* how you know which 'approved' services to trust in the first place

* why you'd want all of that information public

* how it'd fix the original issue

Re: Why “blockchain” is BS in 4 slides

#165

Post by KirinDave »

zodiac wrote: post #157
KirinDave wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing, unless you have an agenda to make the blockchain relevant. I don't, so I do all my scaling off-chain.

I'm confused by this, as well as by your parent comment. Could you make your claims more directly so I can understand them?

What's the point of having a chain at all? It's not a unqiue or prigiledged BFT solution. It has some nice but not essential properties.

If you end up scaling off-chain, then one asks why you have the PoW chain and it's phenomenal cost at all.

Re: Why “blockchain” is BS in 4 slides

#166

Post by jmeyer2k »

adventured wrote: post #154
jmeyer2k wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the coolest things about cryptocurrency right now is the insane amount of money being invested in decentralization. With all of the Facebook privacy issues in the news right now, decentralization offers an interesting alternative where users control their data.

Recording something permanently into a blockchain is the opposite of users having control over their data. Blockchain does not appear to be the best way to build a decentralized system for user controlled data (such as a decentralized social network). We already figured that system out: local software, local storage, open source, local permissions & controls. Billions of people have personal computing devices now. No…

I didn't necessarily say blockchain. Cryptocurrency and the blockchain is the incentivization structure, not necessarily the end product.

I agree. Blockchain only makes sense for things that require immutability which many applications do not. OpenBazaar is a good example of one of the applications I was thinking of.

Re: Why “blockchain” is BS in 4 slides

#167

Post by topmonk »

Fnoord wrote: post #129
wellboy wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much all the newer ones, Nano, Iota and Eth probably soon to. There is also a debate to use delegated PoS or a hybrid of PoS and PoW to get both of their upsides with none of tbeir downsides.

> There is also a debate to use delegated PoS or a hybrid of PoS and PoW to get both of their upsides with none of tbeir downsides. Read: PoS has downsides.

So does cash

Re: Why “blockchain” is BS in 4 slides

#168

Post by zodiac »

KirinDave wrote: post #165
zodiac wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confused by this, as well as by your parent comment. Could you make your claims more directly so I can understand them?

What's the point of having a chain at all? It's not a unqiue or prigiledged BFT solution. It has some nice but not essential properties. If you end up scaling off-chain, then one asks why you have the PoW chain and it's phenomenal cost at all.

> What's the point of having a chain at all?

Different people answer differently, but many would give censorship-resistant currency as a use case. My personal answer is more complicated.

> If you end up scaling off-chain, then one asks why you have the PoW chain

Let me generalise slightly to include PoS, which I greatly prefer but which is also pretty expensive, and suffers from the same fundamental inefficiency problems. Obviously, you need on chain consensus and guarantees so that the payoff matrix for the offchain game is setup correctly so that honest behaviour in the offchain game is a Nash equilibrium. So that when I "pay" you some money in a payment channel you really have received it in a certain sense, and offchain payments are basically as secure as on chain ones.

Re: Why “blockchain” is BS in 4 slides

#169

Post by wruza »

gjmacd wrote: post #156
adventured wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recording something permanently into a blockchain is the opposite of users having control over their data. Blockchain does not appear to be the best way to build a decentralized system for user controlled data (such as a decentralized social network). We already figured that system out: local software, local storage, open source, local permissions & controls. Billions of people have personal computing devices now. No…

Except you wouldn't use the blockchain to have control over their data", you'd use it for identity and verification. Facebook' #1 issue is fake news and Bot's. You can eliminate those problems entirely with a blockchain and smart contract that requires identity and proof of such.

In other news, smart contracts eliminated cancer.

Re: Why “blockchain” is BS in 4 slides

#170

Post by jwilliams »

kalleboo wrote: post #161
jwilliams wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That being said, 95% of the times the word "blockcahin" is uttered these days, what follows is most likely bullshit. This is true -- it's also true the 5% is pretty damn interesting. There are plenty of interesting tokens out there. Some of them are tackling real problems. That's pretty exciting. I don't begrudge someone who's trying to solve something. The historical analogs are lazy in my view. The financial and…

The 5% are interesting in the same way that Communism and hardcore Libertarianism are interesting. "Would be very cool if it could work (there's no way in hell it would work)"

The political overlay is valid - I do see that blockchain can get pretty political. That said, I can't think of any modern political system that couldn't do with improvement.

Even with that remark -- I wasn't thinking particularly politically. There are plenty of markets I think blockchain has a decent swing at.

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