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

161–170 of 330 posts

Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#161

Post by UncleMeat »

mrharrison wrote: post #149
rrrazdan wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

> You as a user completely own your assets, with your public key.

Cool. Why is this a thing tons of people want?

> 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.

Which financial products? How many people want those things?

For BTC to disrupt the financial industry I'd expect there to be a huge number of people who want its features over the alternative. But where are they? Where are the billions of people who want to manage the storage of their own wealth or trade derivatives daily?

Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#162

Post by UncleMeat »

jnwatson wrote: post #132
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…

Key escrow is already a thing. I recently helped a friend recover his wallet, and luckily he had his private key escrowed.

Is it already a thing my grandmother can use? She has a working bank account but doesn't understand that minimizing gmail doesn't delete here emails.

Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#163

Post by ashtonkem »

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…

I find it very entertaining how suddenly Visa is a good thing, the moment they wanted to offer a crypto card. All this after how many articles decrying Visa and other “legacy” financial institutions?

Also, the idea that Visa is going to help the Blockchain finally scale is ... well, let’s just say that you’re not supposed to enthusiastically endorse what the detractors have been saying for years.

Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#164

Post by dmitriid »

mrharrison wrote: post #149
rrrazdan wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

> A person can have access to the same financial products that banks have access to

Like reverting transactions? Handling of disputes? Fraud detection?

> Essentially blockchain makes financial products faster, cheaper and more accessible.

You literally mentioned bad UX just a few sentences ago? How that makes it more accessible than existing systems?

Cheaper? What's the transaction cost at any given moment in time?

Faster? Credit card transactions are instant these days, have no fluctuating costs, and carry an added benefit of, you know, customer and seller protections.

Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#165

Post by jcfrei »

hannob wrote: post #114
jcfrei wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the typical argument on a very technical board such as HN where blockchain is synonymous with a specific implementation. But that's an outdated way to think about blockchains. Yes, Bitcoin's implementation is a huge resource hog and slow. But for most newer projects "blockchain" just means an auditable trail of state changes. Whether you implement this with the shiniest newest db paradigm or some simple SQL d…

So Blockchain is a fancy word for something like a Git repository?

No, I see blockchain as a social technology. The current, trusted system for tracking ownership is a state-governed system. The account balances we have, share registers of companies, residential property registries, etc.

Blockchains offer an alternative system (outside of government run systems) to keep track of ownership. Now, in my opinion there's little to gain of replacing those existing systems - they are working just fine. But for a new asset class (notably digital assets) blockchains will work very well.

Again, the important change is the change in social consensus. If you told someone 5 years ago that you hold a certain token on the Ethereum blockchain nobody would have cared. If you today ran a registry of tokens on your github repository nobody would care. But if you hold a token today on the Ethereum blockchain then people are willing to pay for it.

Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#166

Post by UncleMeat »

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…

> 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

Why? Shorting above 100% doesn't "create more of something". Why would a blockchain based trading system prevent me from short selling a stock based on what other people are doing? I've got the stock in my wallet. It was loaned to me by Bob. I can sell it to you right now. Why can't I sell it?

Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#167

Post by kergonath »

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?

Anytime now. We’ve been told the revolution was around the corner for years.

Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#168

Post by hanniabu »

m3kw9 wrote: post #97
pjkundert wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until you need international remittances or business payments. Then, Crypto at its worst is far better than international Wire Transfers, etc.

There was once I transferred money from Bitcoin to a Bitcoin cash address accidentally. The money was lost forever. It was a weird reason due to being syncing , but yeah you could lose money just like that while most people wouldn’t be able to explain it or understand it.

That has been solved with more user friendly wallets. If you're using a Qt wallet you'd think you knew what you were doing. The Qt wallet actually even tells you not to do anything until it's done syncing so you must have closed that overlay and ignored that warning. User error, that's your fault.

Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#169

Post by hanniabu »

pavlov wrote: post #90
pjkundert wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until you need international remittances or business payments. Then, Crypto at its worst is far better than international Wire Transfers, etc.

This claim is often made and it just makes no sense to me. Let’s say I’m invoicing someone abroad for $100k USD. Today they send me a wire transfer. It costs about 25 USD (fixed fee, but in this case 0.025% of the transaction, i.e. negligible) and normally completes the same day. The payment is made in the currency of my invoice, so I’m guaranteed to receive the right amount. (Any currency exchange is the sender’s re…

If it wasn't an issue then this wouldn't be happening:

https://news.bitcoin.com/central-bank-of-nigeria-orders-bank...

Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#170

Post by hanniabu »

ashtonkem wrote: post #163
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…

I find it very entertaining how suddenly Visa is a good thing, the moment they wanted to offer a crypto card. All this after how many articles decrying Visa and other “legacy” financial institutions? Also, the idea that Visa is going to help the Blockchain finally scale is ... well, let’s just say that you’re not supposed to enthusiastically endorse what the detractors have been saying for years.

It's a stepping stone to create adoption.
Post reply on HN