You're not going insane but you are wrong.
Ask HN: Am I going insane or is there genuinely no value in blockchain tech?
41–50 of 576 posts
Re: Ask HN: Am I going insane or is there genuinely no value in blockchain tech?
#42Blockchain reminds me a lot of peer to peer e.g. Bitorrent.
At the time people thought it was also going to change the world and usher in a new era of decentralisation.
Re: Ask HN: Am I going insane or is there genuinely no value in blockchain tech?
#43Blockchain has no use other than to store tokens for speculative gambling.
Take a look at this presentation - https://bit.ly/3OB5G18
Proof-of-work - the USP of blockchain makes it slow and expensive and planet destroying at scale. But it's not a bug, it's a feature. You take it out and the blockchain is neither public not permission-less. A private, trusted, permissioned blockchain is pointless.
The whole blockchain, web3, crypto, NFT, DeFi, DAO ecosystem is a massive ponzi scheme. The proponents keep cooking up new buzzwords to keep the pot boiling and to attract new starry eyed idiots who will bring in real money into the system to keep the ponzi going.
Blockchain is a hammer in search of nail. A solution for problems that do not exist.
Re: Ask HN: Am I going insane or is there genuinely no value in blockchain tech?
#44The 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)
> The sole purpose of blockchain is to prevent double spending without a trusted party.
Yes, and avoiding the trusted party makes it more inefficient by a factor of around 100,000,000 (-ish), if you consider that BTC uses around 23 GW and can do no more (5 transactions a second) than a single trusted PC could do.
What are use cases were you actually need this and the high cost is worth it?
Re: Ask HN: Am I going insane or is there genuinely no value in blockchain tech?
#45> I am talking committees formed in parliaments and central banks around the world to discuss its benefits, serious universities dedicating whole programs on the subject, elite investors pouring money into its potential, and the list goes on. This worries me too. These people don't understand much beyond a 3 minute sales pitch
Agreed.. It's seems like an answer to a question no-one asked. It solves a problem no-one had.
> It solves a problem no-one had
Actually it solves the problem of a lot of money given to VCs by LPs that is just sitting around unspent.
Re: Ask HN: Am I going insane or is there genuinely no value in blockchain tech?
#46The 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…
I do agree that tamper proof log is very useful, but I don't believe that it is something you can't achieve using traditional database tech. I have a question for you that can short-circuit our discussion. You claim that the value is "so obvious" to you, why then one decade in there isn't one serious application of blockchain in the real world (not even in the dark web with early adpaters)? I mean a workflow that has…
Please provide an example of any database that is tamper resistant. As a DevOps engineer I have setup and configured many different databases, I have yet to come across any that someone with admin credentials (which you always need at one least of), didn’t have the ultimate ability to tamper and do anything they will to database.
Re: Ask HN: Am I going insane or is there genuinely no value in blockchain tech?
#47Blockchains are excellent for logging that uses trustable peer participation, distributed append, and tamper resistance. For example, each peer can add their own chain links, and also see all the chain links added by other peers, and also be sure that the log hasn't been corrupted by any of the peers.
Some examples IMHO are logs of participation (e.g. voting), agreements (e.g. contracts), exchange (e.g. payments), and auditing (e.g. compliance).
A blockchain can be public or protected i.e. private just to the participants. A blockchain can store plain text information or access-controlled information i.e. encrypted information or links to sign in systems.
All of these capabilities provide massive trust advantages over a traditional database as managed by a central administrative entity, which requires the participants must trust the central administrative entity to be truthful, unbiased, secure, and with sufficient high availability and disaster recoverability.
Re: Ask HN: Am I going insane or is there genuinely no value in blockchain tech?
#48As with most things, I think the answer isn’t black or white. DLT has some use. It’s not useless. It’s not here to revolutionise computing or banking. But it has some value such as with trust-less computation tasks.
I agree with this sentiment, I am not calling it useless. In fact I think it makes perfect sense as an "experimentalist technology", it is just the disproportionate attention it is getting by serious people over a long period of time that I find most baffling ("blockchain to fight climate change/ improve vaccination/ ease supply chain bottlenecks/ destroy oligarchs")
Let's assume rich countries of the world (e.g. G7) set up a climate change fund in a smart contract. They could just lockup some funds there to be claimable after x months/years for any country (except the G7) proportionally to how far they managed to reduce their CO2 emissions. This assumes that we can trustlessly get the CO2 emissions for all countries (Let's just assume satellites can provide that data in a trustless way to the blockchain via some clever oracle mechanism).
Instead of having a handwritten weak contract like the Paris climate act, you'd have actual enforceable code that can not be gamed. I'm obviously oversimplifying things here but this is just to give an idea how blockchain tech can improve coordination games in the future.
Re: Ask HN: Am I going insane or is there genuinely no value in blockchain tech?
#49The 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.
I dunno, the good thing about single entities is that it’s fairly easy to determine if you should trust them.
A web of entities of varying integrity, not so much.
Re: Ask HN: Am I going insane or is there genuinely no value in blockchain tech?
#50The 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)
Preventing double spending is possible even without trust. A centralised authority could publish the transactions in a signed append only log. Independent verifiers could pull the log with some frequency and verify that no one spent twice.