171–180 of 225 posts
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That's what people keep saying, but I'm yet to see one that is actually a blockchain (specifically, "private blockchains" are a nonsense concept, they're just merkel trees, like git uses), or isn't better solved by some other mechanism.
Go just got native support for private blockchains today: https://twitter.com/bradfitz/status/980332627159744512 ( https://go-review.googlesource.com/c/go/+/103862 )
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Yes. The implication is that the 2B unbanked will get access to a cheap Android, and therefore ability to trade instantly with anyone anywhere with no fees, before the banana state fixes their massively corrupt government.
> ability to trade instantly with anyone anywhere with no fees Neither of those statements has ever been true and in recent years they've been ludicrously untrue — affluent people in developed countries were complaining about the transaction costs and they're supposed to be transformative for people in a developing country?
There will likely be a trade-off or balance of trust against transaction speed and cost. We're still working out how to build it and so we're not there yet, but my belief holds; the banana governments are not going to disappear anytime soon.
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…
I agree that human greed and corruption is a big problem. It is a problem for any system out there.
But, blockchain was supposed to solve this by introducing trustless and decentralized applications. If there is now a need for regulators, how is blockchain supposed to solve other problems? The world is already complex, we don't need another layer.
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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.
You don't think if the problem were that easy to solve, it would be solved already? Throwing blockchain in the mix gets Facebook nothing that it couldn't get today by just partnering with organizations can verify identities.
Not to mention, the "fake news" issue isn't largely an identity issue — there are plenty of people and organizations willing to lie on their real accounts to further their sociopolitical agenda, and plenty more people who don't care if something's true so long as it confirms their existing viewpoints.
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I'm sort of thinking out loud here, but the nexus will have to consist of third-party auditors who operate based on reputation. Right now, we have the government operating as both the "miners" and the auditors. A middle-ground, then, might be one in which there is a general-purpose public blockchain where the government takes the role of the trusted third-party on-chain , thereby lowering the overall societal costs o…
This is called the Federal Reserve Bank and it is indeed separate from the tax and fraud portions of the federal government in the US. But the rest of your post is pretty silly. How does a secure digital exchange protect against fraud? It doesn't.
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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 prob…
Nothing about blockchains prevents censorship.
> 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.
Most literature I've read suggests potentially a hundredfold increase in throughput with Proof of Stake when executed correctly.
The only fundamental inefficiency problem PoS shares, by my reading, is the broadcast mode limitation where every node needs the full chain to be broadcast before it can move forward. However, PoW systems are nowhere near that rate limit.
I'm certainly happy to be shown this is wrong. Got resources?
> 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.
You're right, the offchain game needs to be set up so that honest behavior is the optimal behavior. But this is where the cart is firmly planted in front of the horse. What you need is not a blockchain, what you need is trust that controls are in place to resolve a dispute equitably. The blockchain is a methodology not for eschewing trust, but contracting it out in a novel way. A blockchain, folks with guns, an escrow service with a good API, international banking: they all serve the same purpose here.
We should use these tools when they serve us. But what I've seen is that for an actual daily-use currency all that's going to happen is a million little token vendors which can negotiate lightning channels to one another will show up and we'll just have new banks that are like the old banks, but with the threat of a chain resolution which may or may not occur. The practical outcome will be indistinguishable from a healthy banking system, won't actually stop fraud, will be subject to the exact same controls that other physically rooted banks are subject to, and also be a lot more confusing.
I think lightning is solid; in that it will work. I also think it reduces a play at fundamentally restructuring commerce into a flashy buzzword pitch to reshuffle the existing players on the board somewhat.
Having been deeply in the (somewhat broken) American banking system, I can tell you that the system desperately needs to be reworked from the ground up and that can only happen with a truly distributed, truly transparent (an often undersold or ignored aspect of Bitcoin but a truly phenomenal property), truly and fundamentally new way of performing commerce.
We don't have that.
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Because without cryptocurrency, as he says, it's a merkle tree and THAT IS NOT NEW. Github already did it. It works. Revolutionary? No.
*Git already did it. GitHub is just a site running a Git server for people to use.
Say what you will about their ethics, their structure, their politics, that company did this thing and they're now more important to the world of software products than any prior company in that role ever has been.
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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.
Iota is not a blockchain. It's also not a cryptocurrency. It's about 98% scam and 1% insane. and 1% Bosch.