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Blockchains: How They Work and Why They’ll Change the World

spectrum.ieee.org

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Re: Blockchains: How They Work and Why They’ll Change the World

#41

Post by notahacker »

gbersac wrote: post #38
rotten wrote: post #35

My understanding is that blockchain truth is determined via a majority vote. What I'm really not clear on is how someone with a botnet can't simply take over a blockchain. With such large sums of cash at stake, it seems like a serious hacker would be much more interested in controlling a blockchain than doing silly DDOS attacks on some corporate website that slighted them.

For that you need to have more than half of the hash power of the blockchain, which means, for bitcoin at least, billions of hardware investment. A hacker can't have such power.

On the other hand someone with significant influence over a small group of Chinese people still can, and not every blockchain is going to be anywhere near as distributed as BTC

Re: Blockchains: How They Work and Why They’ll Change the World

#42

Post by neonnoodle »

gbersac wrote: post #38
rotten wrote: post #35

My understanding is that blockchain truth is determined via a majority vote. What I'm really not clear on is how someone with a botnet can't simply take over a blockchain. With such large sums of cash at stake, it seems like a serious hacker would be much more interested in controlling a blockchain than doing silly DDOS attacks on some corporate website that slighted them.

For that you need to have more than half of the hash power of the blockchain, which means, for bitcoin at least, billions of hardware investment. A hacker can't have such power.

No, but a state actor might...

Re: Blockchains: How They Work and Why They’ll Change the World

#43

Post by acdha »

wildsatchmo wrote: post #37
rando444 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think blockchains provide any anonymity. You can try to provide as little information as possible about yourself, but there is nothing in the blockchain that facilitates anonymity.

A blockchain is like a big spreadsheet. It's not going to be anonymous if you start typing identifying information into it, but it certainly gives you the option of being anonymous if you care to do so. In contrast, you cant make a bank transaction without linking your identity. This is what people are talking about when they say blockchains give anonymity.

It’s dangerously irresponsible to mislead people with statements which imply that blockchains provide anonymity because when someone’s identity is linked there’s a full, incontrovertible record of every transaction they’ve ever made which can never be removed from the public record.

If someone cares about anonymity, that’s a huge gamble to make that the system will never have a design or implementation flaw (in the case of things like zcash which are, unlike bitcoin, attempting to provide anonymity at all), and that everyone they ever do business with is trustworthy.

Re: Blockchains: How They Work and Why They’ll Change the World

#44

Post by wildsatchmo »

TheReveller wrote: post #5

From the article: Can a blockchain find people offering rides, link them up with people who are trying to go somewhere, and give the two parties a transparent platform for payment? Can a blockchain act as a repository and a replay platform for TV shows, movies, and other digital media while keeping track of royalties and paying content creators? Can a blockchain check the status of airline flights and pay travelers a…

Looking at all these pessimistic comments I can't help but wonder if this is what the op eds in the newspaper looked like while the internet was being built. "its too slow, and even with our best compression transferring a movie would take a month. Not gonna happen. Computers are too expensive for most households." etc.

If you want to keep middle men in between most things that we could potentially do programmatically, thats cool. I'm on the hype train.

- low tx rate? not for long - high computational cost? Security feature. Makes fraud/hacks very expensive. If you think energy conservation is more important, other chains don't have this cost (proof of stake). - high node storage cost? mining fees & block reward more than outweigh this. not everyone needs to run a full node (but anyone can). - no way to reverse transactions? feature. you can always add arbitration / escrow. openbazaar does this very nicely

If you go the traditional route, you will always have a company in the middle, taking their cut or selling you out behind the scenes.

Re: Blockchains: How They Work and Why They’ll Change the World

#45

Post by zilian »

wildsatchmo wrote: post #44
TheReveller wrote: post #5

From the article: Can a blockchain find people offering rides, link them up with people who are trying to go somewhere, and give the two parties a transparent platform for payment? Can a blockchain act as a repository and a replay platform for TV shows, movies, and other digital media while keeping track of royalties and paying content creators? Can a blockchain check the status of airline flights and pay travelers a…

Looking at all these pessimistic comments I can't help but wonder if this is what the op eds in the newspaper looked like while the internet was being built. "its too slow, and even with our best compression transferring a movie would take a month. Not gonna happen. Computers are too expensive for most households." etc. If you want to keep middle men in between most things that we could potentially do programmaticall…

Thank you for your comment. Looking at all the doubt and hate about blockchain & cryptocurrencies on HN lately, I personally can't help but wonder where have all innovators gone.

Re: Blockchains: How They Work and Why They’ll Change the World

#46

Post by TeMPOraL »

flowctrl wrote: post #6
TheReveller wrote: post #5

From the article: Can a blockchain find people offering rides, link them up with people who are trying to go somewhere, and give the two parties a transparent platform for payment? Can a blockchain act as a repository and a replay platform for TV shows, movies, and other digital media while keeping track of royalties and paying content creators? Can a blockchain check the status of airline flights and pay travelers a…

- There are newer blockchain dApp platforms that are WAY faster than Ethereum (i.e. EOS, Quantum...) - Proof of Work isn't the only consensus algorithm, there are ones with lower computational costs, such as Proof of Stake - See IPFS, and there are other distributed storage solutions - One can add new ledger entries that refer to previous ones, to correct them Aside from transparency (and note that privacy is also an…

> Proof of Work isn't the only consensus algorithm, there are ones with lower computational costs, such as Proof of Stake

PoS still doesn't exist in the real world, as far as I know.

> See IPFS, and there are other distributed storage solutions

IPFS has nothing to do with blockchains per se, though for better or worse (IMO for worse), the team working on it is also heavily involved with the cryptocurrency world. You might be thinking of Filecoin, which looks reasonable and had probably the only ICO so far that isn't total bullshit, but while I'm hopeful, we still need to see if and when it actually gets deployed.

> the main benefit is that smart contracts can eliminate the need for 3rd parties, but still provide trustworthy transaction settlements

Let's not forget about the most important drawback of "trustless" systems - machines know no mercy. You'd better be sure you've covered all potential problems in the present and the future, because if you make a single mistake in the code and lose all your money, there will be - by design - literally no one to help you.

(There's this idea of replacing laws with smart contracts that occasionally pops up on the Internet; it's a stupid and dangerous idea precisely because of that.)

Re: Blockchains: How They Work and Why They’ll Change the World

#47

Post by arethuza »

acdha wrote: post #43
wildsatchmo wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A blockchain is like a big spreadsheet. It's not going to be anonymous if you start typing identifying information into it, but it certainly gives you the option of being anonymous if you care to do so. In contrast, you cant make a bank transaction without linking your identity. This is what people are talking about when they say blockchains give anonymity.

It’s dangerously irresponsible to mislead people with statements which imply that blockchains provide anonymity because when someone’s identity is linked there’s a full, incontrovertible record of every transaction they’ve ever made which can never be removed from the public record. If someone cares about anonymity, that’s a huge gamble to make that the system will never have a design or implementation flaw (in the c…

It'll be interesting to see what happens when the EU GDPR and Bitcoin (and other blockchain based systems) collide...

Re: Blockchains: How They Work and Why They’ll Change the World

#48

Post by endymi0n »

zilian wrote: post #45
wildsatchmo wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking at all these pessimistic comments I can't help but wonder if this is what the op eds in the newspaper looked like while the internet was being built. "its too slow, and even with our best compression transferring a movie would take a month. Not gonna happen. Computers are too expensive for most households." etc. If you want to keep middle men in between most things that we could potentially do programmaticall…

Thank you for your comment. Looking at all the doubt and hate about blockchain & cryptocurrencies on HN lately, I personally can't help but wonder where have all innovators gone.

Confirmation Bias at work. You're invested, so you want it to take off.

Yet none of those blockchain enthusiasts could tell me a single USP that blockchains had over storage in a normal database on any concrete use case, with the sole exception of cryptocurrencies.

And the reason is simple: all those applications have none of the properties and problems the blockchain solves - which is an elegant niche solution tailor made for mutually mistrusting entities working together on a distributed ledger. That barely exists in real life.

Centralized systems are what you want in 99% of cases. They're more reliable, better controlled, have infinitely more throughput and usually, you want to be able to roll back transactions under certain conditions (fraud, mistakes, etc.)

Sure, you could store anything in a blockchain. Sure, something yada yada blockchain could "replace Netflix". It's just that apparently nobody can tell me _why_.

My only concern right now is that I can't short Blockchain technology because the relation of hype to actual usefulness and potential is so incredibly large that it will drag a big chunk of the tech sector down the drain.

In stark contrast to AI which is just as hyped, but isn't just supposed to "change everything" since years - it's actually starting to do so on a spectacular timeline.

Re: Blockchains: How They Work and Why They’ll Change the World

#49

Post by TeMPOraL »

wildsatchmo wrote: post #44
TheReveller wrote: post #5

From the article: Can a blockchain find people offering rides, link them up with people who are trying to go somewhere, and give the two parties a transparent platform for payment? Can a blockchain act as a repository and a replay platform for TV shows, movies, and other digital media while keeping track of royalties and paying content creators? Can a blockchain check the status of airline flights and pay travelers a…

Looking at all these pessimistic comments I can't help but wonder if this is what the op eds in the newspaper looked like while the internet was being built. "its too slow, and even with our best compression transferring a movie would take a month. Not gonna happen. Computers are too expensive for most households." etc. If you want to keep middle men in between most things that we could potentially do programmaticall…

> If you think energy conservation is more important, other chains don't have this cost (proof of stake).

Those chains don't exist yet in any meaningful sense; at this point, AFAIK, it's not been proven that an energy-efficient PoS system even can be created theoretically. If it turned out it could be done and then if it was done, I'm sure lot of the negativity would disappear.

The underlying sentiment behind pessimism, at least for me, is that it seems that in the blockchain ecosystem, all the incentives are aligned in such a way to have the market push us into stupidly wasting huge amounts of electricity, storage and bandwidth for no tangible benefit. No need to wait for energy-efficient PoS or other things - you can earn your money right now.

Re: Blockchains: How They Work and Why They’ll Change the World

#50

Post by TeMPOraL »

zilian wrote: post #45
wildsatchmo wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking at all these pessimistic comments I can't help but wonder if this is what the op eds in the newspaper looked like while the internet was being built. "its too slow, and even with our best compression transferring a movie would take a month. Not gonna happen. Computers are too expensive for most households." etc. If you want to keep middle men in between most things that we could potentially do programmaticall…

Thank you for your comment. Looking at all the doubt and hate about blockchain & cryptocurrencies on HN lately, I personally can't help but wonder where have all innovators gone.

> where have all innovators gone

They have enough sense to see that blockchain ecosystem is 1% innovation, 99% hype.

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