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Ask HN: Am I going insane or is there genuinely no value in blockchain tech?

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Re: Ask HN: Am I going insane or is there genuinely no value in blockchain tech?

#31

Post by tern »

It's all in Timothy May's email signature from the cypherpunks mailing list:

  Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
  anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
  knowledge, reputations, information markets,
  black markets, collapse of governments.
The key concept is: sovereignty. In the end, this will reshape the nation state.

Re: Ask HN: Am I going insane or is there genuinely no value in blockchain tech?

#32

Post by alkonaut »

ryanobjc wrote: post #15

A centralized database of fungible and useful assets is going to eventually be hacked. Just ask OKTA about that. Whereas there is no central point of hack for a well designed and tested blockchain. Distributed custody in an adversarial environment with mutual trust and dis-trust. Yes it's not everything, but tradfi solutions are not 150% bulletproof either - they may only seem that way to the outside, but there are m…

Does anyone want or need “bulletproof” anything? The one feature of any transaction or contractual framework that I’d be most reluctant to give up is the one where they are fungible and reversible e.g in courts. Features luge secrecy, resistance to hacking, corruption, and so on seem to be second to this in nearly every case in the regular/legal economy of open democracy (I.e the part of the economy that matters).

Re: Ask HN: Am I going insane or is there genuinely no value in blockchain tech?

#33

Post by Niksko »

paulsutter wrote: post #19

The sole purpose of blockchain is to prevent double spending without a trusted party Other proposed applications are mostly dumb / misguided, like immutable storage, social network posts, etc, these can be done with hashing or digital signatures alone If you have a better way to avoid double spending than blockchain folks woukd get very excited. Traditional database can’t do that (requires a trusted party)

Without a single trusted party. You're trading trust for one entity for trust for many entities.

Re: Ask HN: Am I going insane or is there genuinely no value in blockchain tech?

#34

Post by swores »

TekMol wrote: post #5

The value of blockchains seem so obvious to me, that I wonder if OP can be genuine. ask_111: How can having a public log that is extremely tamper resistant not have value? Let's look at a concrete example: Bitcoin. You can write something into the Bitcoin blockchain and be very sure that the information you wrote into it will stay there pretty much forever. Is that enough, or do we also have to discuss why having suc…

Personally I've not yet had any value from knowing that I can make a financial transaction logged on Bitcoin's chain and I don't know anyone who has used Bitcoin for that reason, so... I guess you do need to discuss why that log has value if you want more people to use it.

I find the tech interesting, but that's not the same as useful to me.

Re: Ask HN: Am I going insane or is there genuinely no value in blockchain tech?

#35

Post by syzygyhack »

It is simply trust reduction/removal through distributed consensus. Any industry or application that depends on trust could be improved through use of blockchain for trust minimization.

But just as easily as a knife can cut a slice of bread, it could be used to slice a jugular. In short, don't confuse the technology with the use cases. It's just a tool, some people will misuse it.

Re: Ask HN: Am I going insane or is there genuinely no value in blockchain tech?

#37

Post by beowulfey »

TekMol wrote: post #5

The value of blockchains seem so obvious to me, that I wonder if OP can be genuine. ask_111: How can having a public log that is extremely tamper resistant not have value? Let's look at a concrete example: Bitcoin. You can write something into the Bitcoin blockchain and be very sure that the information you wrote into it will stay there pretty much forever. Is that enough, or do we also have to discuss why having suc…

Honestly? To me it sounds like a solution looking for a problem.

How would this affect me in daily applications?

Re: Ask HN: Am I going insane or is there genuinely no value in blockchain tech?

#39

Post by nosianu »

syzygyhack wrote: post #35

It is simply trust reduction/removal through distributed consensus. Any industry or application that depends on trust could be improved through use of blockchain for trust minimization. But just as easily as a knife can cut a slice of bread, it could be used to slice a jugular. In short, don't confuse the technology with the use cases. It's just a tool, some people will misuse it.

You don't minimize trust, you greatly increase the complexity of it. There's a lot more entities and processes involved and it becomes harder to understand. You need to trust quite a lot more things now, only that it's much harder, so many don't even try and just assume trusting many through some hard to understand and changing mechanism must be easier, which I don't quite see the logic of.

As far as I can see - and when the blockchain hype started I made an effort and even took courses and did some programming with the new tech - many proposed benefits rely on them being hard to refute without quite a bit of effort for this reason, it's a lot of assertions that are hard to follow, to understand and to prove or disprove. The effort made for an assertion of some alleged benefit always is very low, but trying to disprove the claim without equally resorting to just making the statement is a lot of effort.

I must say though I'm skeptical this discussion, especially with the stated question, is useful on this site and at this point, after it has already been discussed so many times, and now with that kind of question I doubt this leads to any better discussion than what we already had.

Re: Ask HN: Am I going insane or is there genuinely no value in blockchain tech?

#40

Post by xupybd »

paulsutter wrote: post #19

The sole purpose of blockchain is to prevent double spending without a trusted party Other proposed applications are mostly dumb / misguided, like immutable storage, social network posts, etc, these can be done with hashing or digital signatures alone If you have a better way to avoid double spending than blockchain folks woukd get very excited. Traditional database can’t do that (requires a trusted party)

Hard to tamper with data loggers also benefit from the Blockchain.

There are lots of industries where tamper proof records are valuable and record keeping is distributed.

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