Live data from Hacker News

Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

as1ndu.xyz

221–230 of 330 posts

Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#221
post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you claim that a blockchain is just an auditable trail of state changes (i.e. a Merkle tree) Then the proponents of blockchain technology chime in on how it's more than just that. It's also a matter of consensus for that technology. And in point of fact the consensus mechanisms of most blockchains are terrible. Highly inefficient, vulnerable to majority attacks for different types. The "idea" of a globally consist…

Of course its inefficient. Thats the tradeoff. I guess servers are terrible computers too because you can’t carry them in your pocket? Or phones are terrible computers because they can only stay powered for a day or two? Blockchain is horribly inefficient in almost every regard. But thats the trade off.

Neither of your examples are tradeoffs. Both my computer and my phone are excellent at their jobs with little in the way of downsides. Bitcoin is bad at it's job with lots of downsides.

It only looks better than the alternatives if you live in a place where the economy is heavily mismanaged. If you're currency is only better than the absolute worst economies in the world don't expect all the people in better economies to look favorably on it. Except perhaps as a way to further exploit those in terrible economies by speculating in that currency and driving high volatility in it's value.

Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#222
post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin decentralisation sounds great but must people don't need it. You just need a less evil and less corrupt government and better fintech. your second sentence inadvertently convinced me I need bitcoin

That less corrupt government will provide 1000% gains for everyone. Bitcoin will give that only to those who buy it aka rich people.

I can’t tell if this comment is disingenuous or just naive.

We’ve been trying to create less corrupt governments for hundreds of years.

Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't know they want it, till they know what it means. It means independence from central exchanges, it means the money in your savings account of .01% interest account can now be directly leveraged by loans on Aave, which return 5-9% interest. No middleman managing your money. Your assets can be directly accessed by people who need it.

Defi loans are not actually useful though. You overcollateralize 150% of your ETH or whatever, to get say 100% back in some stablecoin. But you could have just sold the ETH in the first place...? If it truly is a "currency" then why are you taking a currency loan on your currency? That's like putting up $150 of collateral to get a $100 loan, it makes no sense. Unless it's not a currency, in which case this is just a…

Web3 is definitely the new wild west of the internet. I agree there will be wild price swings, but it will stabilize as more people are onboarded.

Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#224

4. Consensus Algorithms Are Wack The popular blockchains only don’t offer transaction finality i.e you will never be 100% sure that you have gotten funds. You can only be probabilistically to a high degree (but with zero guarantee) that you have received your funds. This is because in major consensus algorithm called Nakamoto Consensus, the miners elect the chain with the most computational work that are with in the…

>WARNING >Before you proceed, please understand that the Lightning Network is still in the experimental stage. Do not put the money you can't afford to lose. There is a high risk of you losing the money. https://docs.btcpayserver.org/LightningNetwork/ and a pile of other places - and particularly when someone points out that LN doesn't work very well, and that money gets lost to bugs way too often to trust. The purpo…

Thanks! I've wondered how the lightning network fared over the years. Judging by the still-experimental state, the answer is "not well."

Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But calling specific implementations (like Bitcoin or Ethereum) a failure when people are paying thousands of dollars each block to use it is pretty bold. And people were willing to pay hundreds of dollars for plush toys with the appropriate tags preserved in plastic. Bubbles are a thing, and the crowd can be wrong. To pretend otherwise is silly. More fundamentally, the original promise of Bitcoin was that it would…

And there are cryptos like Nano that fulfill this original promise. Technology evolves over time. Just because its not perfect at the first go, doesn’t mean it should go in the trash.

> Just because it’s not perfect at the first go, doesn’t mean it should go in the trash

The converse is also true; just because it’s an improvement over past failures doesn’t mean that it’ll actually work.

My issue with crypto has always been fundamental; I don’t think crypto fans really have a good grasp on what motivates the average person, because most crypto fans[0] are ideologues, and like many ideologues they struggle to recognize that not everyone shares their values. Decentralized and trust-less speaks to engineers, but your average person has no idea what that means and doesn’t really care either. Plus a lot of the consequences of crypto currency design are absolute anti-features from a consumer perspective; nobody wants to find out that losing their password means that they’re broke, or that they can’t reverse a fraudulent charge. Your average consumer wants those features, and is willing to give up decentralization, something they didn’t value, to get it.

0 - At least those fans of crypto that want to see it used as currency. As compared to those crypto fans that want to do whatever it takes to make the number go up.

Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#226
post #110

I think price volatility is the only reason it's not working as a normal currency. Right now, these blockchain currencies are traded just like expensive wine, art or gold bar. It's a speculative money game. We can't use wine or art to buy some food for today. Most people don't even run the full node themselves. They relies on somebody else's node. In good term, they are investing, in other words, they are gambling. I…

The other main reason it is not a currency is that it only processes 5 transactions per second and they cost a ridiculous amount of money ($60 at the peak in 2017). Which makes it only usable for large transfers of speculative value, not like, buying your daily coffee. It's not a currency.

This is only true for Bitcoin, there are many others without the transaction bottleneck and the ridiculous fees.

Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#227
post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course its inefficient. Thats the tradeoff. I guess servers are terrible computers too because you can’t carry them in your pocket? Or phones are terrible computers because they can only stay powered for a day or two? Blockchain is horribly inefficient in almost every regard. But thats the trade off.

Neither of your examples are tradeoffs. Both my computer and my phone are excellent at their jobs with little in the way of downsides. Bitcoin is bad at it's job with lots of downsides. It only looks better than the alternatives if you live in a place where the economy is heavily mismanaged. If you're currency is only better than the absolute worst economies in the world don't expect all the people in better economie…

You keep moving the goalposts between "blockchain the technology" and "Bitcoin the currency". If you want a trustless auditable log, your best option is a blockchain. What's a better alternative?

Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#228
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…

Then we, as engineers, have failed in explaining things. A blockchain is a linked list where each element of the list contains the hash of the previous element. It's basically a degenerate Merkle tree. That is all that it is. It isn't a metaphor. It isn't throwing off the shackles of an overreaching government, nor is it a takeover of our society by militant right-wing conspiracy theorists. It's a data structure.

A Merkle tree is just one component of a blockchain. It also requires: a byzantine consensus mechanism, a p2p network stack, public key crypto, and a set of economic incentives to keep it going.

You can't build a public database on a Merckle tree without being able to agree on what goes into it.

Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#229
post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course its inefficient. Thats the tradeoff. I guess servers are terrible computers too because you can’t carry them in your pocket? Or phones are terrible computers because they can only stay powered for a day or two? Blockchain is horribly inefficient in almost every regard. But thats the trade off.

Neither of your examples are tradeoffs. Both my computer and my phone are excellent at their jobs with little in the way of downsides. Bitcoin is bad at it's job with lots of downsides. It only looks better than the alternatives if you live in a place where the economy is heavily mismanaged. If you're currency is only better than the absolute worst economies in the world don't expect all the people in better economie…

I think you've misinterpreted what Bitcoin's "job" is. Although the initial impetus was definitely to set up a new type of currency (something I'd agree it fails at) it has long since moved to behaving as a store of value, or a commodity. At this it excels.

The tradeoff GP is referring to is efficiency for security. If you have a distributed, "trustless" network you unfortunately have to trade your efficiency for more security.

Re: Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

#230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> help create an automated arbitration system, divorced entirely from the whims of Mankind No. That is simply not possible with anything resembling today's technology. We'll have flying cars on a Mars city before automated arbitration on real world matters. > help build the future we all want and maybe have a chance of creating a post-scarce World. Except fixed supply currency is going back in the other direction. An…

> No. That is simply not possible with anything resembling today's technology. We'll have flying cars on a Mars city before automated arbitration on real world matters. I don't disagree about its current feasibility, but I think that's mainly so because of a distortion of incentives and that so many are invested in this model (the few) despite how horrible it is (to the detriment of the many) as so many people are in…

For the first part, I'll just say that you vastly overestimate our technical abilities if you think we could even specify the problem of arbitration in such a way that a computer could solve it, nevermind actually implement the solver. You've chosen a relatively simple case (proof of property) but arbitration in general is much more complex.

For hyperinflation, I have been born and continue to live in Romania, a country that went exactly through that in the 90s, to the extent that a loaf of bread that was initially maybe 10-20 ROL would cost 10k ROL. I remember as a child not being able to afford popcorn when going to the park with my grandparents, or my grandfather selling his old car and buying the family's first color TV with the money. I remember living as a family of four in a 2 bedroom apartment (my parents had their bedroom, while my brother and I shared the livingroom until we were in our twenties).

But that wasn't the problem of our economy, it was just what kept it (barely) working! If we couldn't go to hyperinflation, we would have simply not payed salaries or other debts.

The problem of the economy was that we had sold most of our communist-era industry for parts in a quest for 'privatization' and a 'free market', and were left not being able to produce locally or export almost anything. Even today, we are a temperate, extremely water-rich plains country that imports a good segment of its food - to the absurd degree that we are importing fruit from Holland and Israel among others.

Of course, poor governance and corruption played a huge role as well. The government promising ever higher pensions and salaries for state employees, the works. But those problems would not have gone away if people were getting bitcoin instead of Lei.

Scarcity is a problem of production, not of money. Money itself is almost immaterial. If we could produce enough food, water, energy, cars, fridges, computers, furniture etc. for every single person on Earth, and all of their children, to have all they need at the same time, we could renounce money entirely, Star Trek style.

You have a terrible understanding of economics (and of the plight of people who lived through hyperinflation, like myself) if you think that people in a country experiencing hyperinflation would fare any better if they could trade in BTC instead of the de-valued fiat. The only ones who would be better off are the rich, whose reserves of cash would not suddenly lose their value. But people who live off wages would see pay cuts and eventually just stop getting payed if the currency were forced to a global standard instead of suffering inflation.

Note: there may be cases where a country, often a dictatorship, simply prints money out of stupidity, and also forces the population not to trade in foreign money. This is not the most common cause of hyperinflation, and it is significantly better fixed by BTC, since that is more or less as easy or hard to outlaw as the ownership of dollars.

Oh, and guess what - the country got richer and better without the currency having to go through deflation! In fact, bread still costs 10-20k ROL, and a PC still costs 40-50 million ROL, we just 're-branded' our currency to RON at a fixed 1:10k RON:ROL exchange rate to make the numbers more manageable. We started having productive industries with products that others wanted to buy, and governance got better (we still have huge problems and some of the poorest regions in the EU, but that is besides the point).

Post reply on HN