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

The blockchain paradox: Why DLTs may do little to transform the economy

oii.ox.ac.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 355 posts

Re: The blockchain paradox: Why DLTs may do little to transform the economy

#331

Post by BaronSamedi »

subway wrote: post #251
scient wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So why use blockchain? Whats the benefit? The only thing I can think of is proof of authentication attempts, a kind of a irrefutable log of some sort. But whats the benefit its providing, that we are lacking today?

That irrefutable log is highly valuable in environments where there is a need to audit who has requested access to what resources, and when.

I think this is a really good idea. Would it be worthwhile to have a neutral party also maintain a node? Would that give the evidence more weight in court for example?

Re: The blockchain paradox: Why DLTs may do little to transform the economy

#332

Post by BaronSamedi »

lawrenceyan wrote: post #165
rockmeamedee wrote: post #85

I agree with this article. Proponents of blockchain tech argue its revolutionary quality is its ability to act as a decentralized and trustless database. But I don't ever hear them sort through the issue of how to agree on the schema for this trustless database. For a group of people to use a decentralized DB, they have to agree as to what to store in it, and how to store it. They need to form consensus about how the…

They all say that they'll never roll back or retroactively make any changes. But inevitably, they always do. I thought Ethereum might have been different, but of course I had to be disappointed. The problem with blockchains is that they still fundamentally fail to solve the problem of mob rule, though, I suppose you could argue that's one thing you'll never fully get rid while the human element is still involved. Rob…

I think concentration of power is a bigger problem than "mob rule". If certain people or groups are able to acquire the majority of the power in the system, then the egalitarian ideals of decentralization are lost. You have just traded one power (e.g. banks) for another (e.g. the big miners).

Re: The blockchain paradox: Why DLTs may do little to transform the economy

#333

Post by girvo »

BaronSamedi wrote: post #331
subway wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That irrefutable log is highly valuable in environments where there is a need to audit who has requested access to what resources, and when.

I think this is a really good idea. Would it be worthwhile to have a neutral party also maintain a node? Would that give the evidence more weight in court for example?

While I am not allowed to talk too much about it, this is exactly what I'm currently working on for certain high profile companies that wish to share information (query results) between themselves, without ever actually sharing the data itself, in a way that the country-wide regulator can verify and check for anticompetitive behaviour.

I'm currently having fun experimenting with homomorphic encryption, to see if I can't add another layer of "trustlessness"

Re: The blockchain paradox: Why DLTs may do little to transform the economy

#334

Post by Chaebixi »

nemo44x wrote: post #98

If I had a Bitcoin for every skeptic that posts a blog on why it can't work... This may just be my general observation but I feel like Silicon Valley hegemony has a grudge against crypto currencies and I'm not sure why. For an industry that has constantly tried new things and saw potential where no one else did, I just don't see the love for the potential of smart contracts, DApps, etc. And how this is just the begin…

> This may just be my general observation but I feel like Silicon Valley hegemony has a grudge against crypto currencies and I'm not sure why. For an industry that has constantly tried new things...

There seems to be a pretty strong trend in Silicon Valley away from decentralization and towards centralized and controlled platforms. You can see this with IoT (e.g. your alarm clock bricks when the company's proprietary server is shut down), Social Networks, and "the Cloud" in general.

Re: The blockchain paradox: Why DLTs may do little to transform the economy

#335

Post by anothercomment »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #313
anothercomment wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe true, but in a way, classical investments are even more complicated. Some of them are even deliberately complicated to obfuscate their risky nature to naive investors.

If by classical investments you mean vanilla stocks and bonds, those are heavily regulated with strict disclosure and transparency requirements, heavy penalties for cheating (insider trading), and standardized reporting for de-obfuscation as much as possible. If you're referring to more exotic instruments, those are off limits to mainstream folks, only available (in the US at least) to accredited investors with enoug…

What about those things that produced the last financial crisis? Reselling bad credits b mixing it with good credit and so on. Maybe it was only accessible to the pros, but then if they got it wrong, and they probably bundled it up with other things that they were then able to sell to the public.

Re: The blockchain paradox: Why DLTs may do little to transform the economy

#336

Post by anothercomment »

rosser wrote: post #267
anothercomment wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe true, but in a way, classical investments are even more complicated. Some of them are even deliberately complicated to obfuscate their risky nature to naive investors.

I don't think the predatory complexities found in some shady securities are a very prudent way of "excusing" the technical complexities and consequences of BTC, or any other cryptocurrency. "Not as bad as" is broadly fallacious, anyway.

OK then, explain to me: what is money?

Re: The blockchain paradox: Why DLTs may do little to transform the economy

#337

Post by kahnpro »

Taek wrote: post #301
linkregister wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only way a bad actor can manipulate the ledger is if they own enough nodes to gain a majority, which is virtually impossible. At times the leading BTC mining pool has controlled greater than 50% of the nodes. Would this not be enough to alter the ledger?

Notably, 'altering the ledger' here has a very restricted meaning. You can spend money, then reverse the spend back into your wallet. Or you can commit to a piece of information, then delete it. But you can't alter the core protocol or fundamental network rules. If you do, the other nodes will ignore you.

But this is the fundamental question it's all about... the expectation that the other nodes will ignore you.

Somehow "the other nodes" have reached consensus about what protocols or rules to follow, and this is where we end up back at human governance.

Re: The blockchain paradox: Why DLTs may do little to transform the economy

#338

Post by MarkPNeyer »

Taek wrote: post #303
lawrenceyan wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. So reputation would act as a mediator for decision making then? Those with greater reputation would have more influence, and theoretically this should work because reputation would be gained only when other people notice that the person has done something beneficial/helpful in their eyes. Overall that should result in high reputation values being directly correlated to those who are altruistic and good.…

How would such a reputation system defeat the Sybil attack?

There isn't an absolute reputation score. Reputation is computed pairwise. Rep(a,b) means "What is the implied reputation of person b, given the persons a trusts"

So a bunch of fake accounts aren't going to influence a's perception of b,unless a has trusted someone who'se created those fake accounts. IN that case, the mistake a made was trusting someone (directly or indirectly) who'se created a bunch of fake accounts.

Because the input weight of a person decreases with their distance on the graph from a, the only sybil attacks that would screw you up would be ones conducted by people who you've said you trust.

Re: The blockchain paradox: Why DLTs may do little to transform the economy

#339

Post by MarkPNeyer »

nosuchthing wrote: post #282
MarkPNeyer wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is a proposed solution to mob rule: https://github.com/neyer/dewdrop With a much simpler version of the same concept here https://github.com/neyer/respect I think it's doable.

Filtering out everything but the users you have established relationships with will just push you into a filter bubble echo chamber.

There are mechansims (see 'soundness') which reward people on the edge between filter bubbles for combining those bubbles. Maintaining a soundness core means resolving disputes between bubbles.

My goal is to gradually expand filter bubbles, rather than try to pop them.

Re: The blockchain paradox: Why DLTs may do little to transform the economy

#340

Post by cortesoft »

snowwrestler wrote: post #310
cortesoft wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your dismissal of the problem with forks is missing a big danger to users. You say that market forces will control it, and people should just use what works best for them. The problem is that you might guess wrong; you might look at the two forks, make your best guess as to which side is going to win out via the network effect, and put your money there. If you are wrong, and your fork dies out, there goes all your mo…

You have to put your faith in something. I suppose it's not surprising that people with strong affinities for computing systems would rather put their trust in a computing system than a government of people. They understand computing, and so they feel more confident they can understand and mitigate its risks. They might not feel that way about the solvency of the Federal Reserve, or the fiscal health of the U.S. fede…

The entire point of the article is that it might FEEL like you are putting faith in a computing system when you use bitcoin, but really you are still putting your faith in a group of people. It doesn't matter how well you understand the mechanics of how bitcoin works, what really matters is the mechanics of how the people involved with bitcoin works, and that is the same as people everywhere.

You just can't escape human social politics.

Post reply on HN