Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I Looked into 34 Top Real-World Blockchain Projects So You Don’t Have To

weh.wtf

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 359 posts

Re: I Looked into 34 Top Real-World Blockchain Projects So You Don’t Have To

#281

Post by GauntletWizard »

pvg wrote: post #280
GauntletWizard wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then ban positive promotion of crypto, as a whole. You can't, because you want a site that values free speech. But any site that values free speech is going to have to repeatedly answer the same basic questions on Crypto and Communism. It's going to have to repeatedly say "No, we're not trying to censor you because of chosen group X that claims to be innate , we're banning you because of actual crimes you have commit…

If you think a submission is bad you can flag it. You can also mail the mods if you think it needs more than that. That can actually reduce the incidence of bad submissions, railing against them repetitively in every thread just feeds them.

I agree. It has been flagged. It has been marked flagged. It has been re-added to the front page. If Dang wants people to stop arguing about it, then the flag moderation framework needs to stop putting crypto back on the front page. That may well involve banning people who are otherwise good commenters, like when China issues come up.

Re: I Looked into 34 Top Real-World Blockchain Projects So You Don’t Have To

#282

Post by cmsj »

tremarley wrote: post #190
Group_B wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crypto does not bypass in any way the ability for a company to charge me a subscription instead of offering me an option to buy something outright.

If you keep money in the bank. You don't own it, the bank does. You need permission to access it and are limited on what you are allowed to use it for. If you keep cash or gold in a safe place. You are only allowed to keep a certain amount. It can be seized at will. Your will that declares what assets go to your children. The deed to your home. The lease for your car. Certificates. Art. Tickets. Contracts. Money. We…

All of those things you list ultimately do require trust.

A trustless ledger documenting that I own the land my house is on, doesn't make me any safer against a government determined to steal my land.

A car lease ultimately requires me to trust that the leasing company is going to abide by their contractual obligations, just as they are trusting that I will abide by mine, and the contract enumerates what happens if either party fails to uphold their obligations, which is ultimately enforced by the court system. A ledger doesn't really change any of that.

etc.

Re: I Looked into 34 Top Real-World Blockchain Projects So You Don’t Have To

#283

Post by t6jvcereio »

dang wrote: post #202
rzwitserloot wrote: post #38

I keep saying this, but: Bitcoin is well over 10 years old by now. In 10 years, the internet was already clearly adding a ton of value all over the place. Bitcoin is not really a 'young technology' anymore, and the only thing it has enabled so far is risky, unregulated investment strategies, and an staggering amount of crime.

> I keep saying this, but: Please don't do this. We want curious conversation, not repetitive talking points. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... I don't mean to pick on you personally—it's a serious problem with all threads on this topic.

I've never seen you make such a comment on an account that repeats pro crypto nonsense.

Re: I Looked into 34 Top Real-World Blockchain Projects So You Don’t Have To

#284

Post by cmsj »

cowtools wrote: post #50
rzwitserloot wrote: post #38

I keep saying this, but: Bitcoin is well over 10 years old by now. In 10 years, the internet was already clearly adding a ton of value all over the place. Bitcoin is not really a 'young technology' anymore, and the only thing it has enabled so far is risky, unregulated investment strategies, and an staggering amount of crime.

The internet did not have to overcome network effects in the same way that cryptocurrency has. If there was a "super-centralized" network that already had major success (for example, imagine a world in which teletext or something was dominant before the internet) then the internet/web may have had a serious competitor. Instead, the internet was largely reverse-compatible with previous networks such as the phone netwo…

> The internet did not have to overcome network effects in the same way that cryptocurrency has.

It's hard to imagine how one could define the growth of the Internet as anything other than network effects - its value to end users has always been a function of how many end users there are, which is literally the definition of a network effect.

Edit: To expand a little, considering I don't know if you were aware of the early/mid 1990s, but in those days most people didn't have a computer at home, and in many places phone calls were charged per-minute. It was a significant thing to buy a PC and learn how to use it and pay a lot to go online.

Re: I Looked into 34 Top Real-World Blockchain Projects So You Don’t Have To

#285

Post by cmsj »

upsidesinclude wrote: post #274

What a waste of time to read. Blogger randomly selects other bloggers garbage article to hand select a comprehensive list of projects no one has ever heard of and rightly bashes them. Of course, ostensibly this is representative of all projects (even those that actually have a following) Beyond a bore. A ledger is the oldest (Sumer) recorded instrument used in organized society. We now have an immutable ledger that r…

> We now have an immutable ledger that requires zero intermediaries. > How is it possible for people to fail in understanding that value?

Because so far nobody has shown me a way in which an immutable ledger can let me do something desirable that I can't already do, or transform a thing I currently do into a more desirable version of it.

Re: I Looked into 34 Top Real-World Blockchain Projects So You Don’t Have To

#286

Post by jiggawatts »

notRobot wrote: post #8

Extremely relevant simple chart: NIST's answer to "Do you need a blockchain?" : https://m.imgur.com/a/RlUj9Ed

A combination of a cryptographically-chained ledger such as this: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/se...

... together with a trusted third party covers something like 90-95% of the supposed applications if blockchain. It's insufficient for typical mass-adopted, international currency, but for damned near everything else it is "more than good enough".

In the real world, before blockchain, what mutually distrusting corporations or people would do is set up a distinct third party organisation to keep the "ledger" (or whatever).

For example, banks use non-bank companies like Experian to do cross-bank fraud analysis. Similarly, many industries send their sales stats to a third-party non-competitor org that aggregates the data, and then sells back industry-wide anonymised sales stat reports. This lets companies that don't trust each other exchange data, etc...

This was a solved problem centuries ago, and technologies like Azure SQL Database Ledger make it nearly as robust as blockchain, with none of the downsides.

In other words, the NIST flow chart needs more steps towards the bottom pointing to both existing and new non-blockchain solutions.

Re: I Looked into 34 Top Real-World Blockchain Projects So You Don’t Have To

#287

Post by SergeAx »

rzwitserloot wrote: post #38

I keep saying this, but: Bitcoin is well over 10 years old by now. In 10 years, the internet was already clearly adding a ton of value all over the place. Bitcoin is not really a 'young technology' anymore, and the only thing it has enabled so far is risky, unregulated investment strategies, and an staggering amount of crime.

I am not a big blockchain proponent, quite contrary. But you forgot the function of (more or less) unregulated money movement. It is used that way by laypeople from China, Russia, Iran and other authoritarian/sanctioned countries.

Re: I Looked into 34 Top Real-World Blockchain Projects So You Don’t Have To

#288

Post by glerk »

pirate787 wrote: post #153
glerk wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's unfortunate to hear, I haven't followed these projects in a while. Looks like their competitor PolyMarket is now the most popular prediction market: https://polymarket.com/

Polymarket looks interesting but crypto/blockchain isn't necessary for prediction markets-- with Polymarket you still need a trusted entity to record whether the event happened. There are much more legitimate non-crypto prediction markets -- this new one is actually federally regulated in the US https://kalshi.com/

Some of these prediction contracts can be resolved using a decentralized oracle (I know this is the model Omen was trying to implement).

But even if there is a trusted entity involved, a smart contract I can interact with directly using blockchain transactions is better than having to provide my picture, passport and SSN to some company that builds a database of all my trades. This problem is even worse if I move to a jurisdiction where you need to be accredited to play, or where prediction markets are illegal.

For many of these financial applications, crypto/blockchain isn't strictly necessary, but it can be very useful.

Re: I Looked into 34 Top Real-World Blockchain Projects So You Don’t Have To

#289

Post by hestefisk »

civilized wrote: post #32
hestefisk wrote: post #20

I’m surprised there’s no mention of R3/Corda. There’s a lot of good real-world application of blockchain in their portfolio, which us effectively a consortium of banks working together. Documentary trade finance is where blockchain finds decent uses.

I tried to Google this and all I was able to learn is it's backed by big banks and it lets you transact without disclosing information to your competitors. Still can't quite understand if there's anything to it beyond hype and FOMO.

Good example is Contour (formerly Voltron), a DLT based system for trade finance.

https://contour.network/

Re: I Looked into 34 Top Real-World Blockchain Projects So You Don’t Have To

#290

Post by upsidesinclude »

cmsj wrote: post #285
upsidesinclude wrote: post #274

What a waste of time to read. Blogger randomly selects other bloggers garbage article to hand select a comprehensive list of projects no one has ever heard of and rightly bashes them. Of course, ostensibly this is representative of all projects (even those that actually have a following) Beyond a bore. A ledger is the oldest (Sumer) recorded instrument used in organized society. We now have an immutable ledger that r…

> We now have an immutable ledger that requires zero intermediaries. > How is it possible for people to fail in understanding that value? Because so far nobody has shown me a way in which an immutable ledger can let me do something desirable that I can't already do, or transform a thing I currently do into a more desirable version of it.

Eh, false.

The point is that you cannot do those things without an intermediary. That's it. That's the difference. I'm showing you.

Try, really think, to see yourself in another country, one where the currency isn't guaranteed.

How about having your home shelled after you have been evacuated? You have a safe deposit box? Not any more, confiscated.

There are countries around the world where people lack basic security. They cannot store wealth.

It's not just about the first world

Post reply on HN