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Is Blockchain Really the Killer App?

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Re: Is Blockchain Really the Killer App?

#41

Post by baddox »

amirmc wrote: post #15
Smerity wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Bitcoin wiki gives full details[1], but tldr, 51% attack breaks most elements of the blockchain (reverse attacker's transactions => double spending, prevent transactions from getting confirmation, prevent valid blocks originating elsewhere) but doesn't allow the attacker to arbitrarily rewrite history. As far as "hasn't this already happened", some of the mining pools in aggregate have had or presently could comb…

Thanks for the clarification. > "...so is economically not a good idea for them." This would imply that the trust model itself would have to undergo a fundamental shift (and likely has done). There are now entities you have to trust, rather than the system itself -- at which point the decentralised aspect is less of a defining feature.

Having to trust knowledgeable people to act in their own interest is hardly a violation of trustlessness.

Re: Is Blockchain Really the Killer App?

#42

Post by TheDong »

hellbanner wrote: post #14
CHY872 wrote: post #9

I kinda get the author's point here - to run a proof of work based system you need an incentive to actually do the work. Bitcoin has such incentives, and so it will succeed for any tool that people try to run on it. If you try to create a new system, you have to convince people to do the work in the first place. So it makes much more sense to use bitcoin as your distributed consensus system, for whatever application…

an attempt at answering this: fact: people working on useful tools benefit us all problem: incentive is only big-picture, feel good. money is, by design, ridiculously hard to come by for helpful projects. teachers, farmers, babysitters, soldiers and many other professions provide valuable service to society yet make only a fraction of what money-manipulators (bankers who specialize in generating $$ from $) or cross-c…

'FarmerCoin', as you describe it, sounds utterly pointless.

What farmercoin measures:

1) A farmer takes a picture of good produce (whether or not they sell said produce)

2) Verifiers / customers claim the produce looks good from only video evidence (did you know that you pinch the ends of cucumbers to check it? You knock on watermelons to judge their quality?).

3) The farmer gets a coin that is somehow more useful for trading than USD and the verifier gets discounts

What you want to measure: "Does the Farmer sell good produce"?

The market forces already gravitate towards the solving this problem. If I go to a farmer's market and one seller consistently gives me amazing tomatos and a second consistently gives me one rotten one per bunch, you can bet I'll "vote with my wallet" so to speak. Similarly, the farmer who sells better produce will be rewarded by people choosing his produce.

There's no need to try and force "Yet Another Crypto Crap" into something where it's not solving any problem.

As an added bonus, farmers are possibly one of the worst markets I could imagine to try and impose some meaningless techno mumbo-jumbo on. Many a farmer still refuses to use credit cards, preferring only cash, because cards are too complicated.

Today, we already have online reviews which people give out and consume for free on many sites, and that MUCH better fits this problem then some crazy akt-coin meant to proxy reviews.

Re: Is Blockchain Really the Killer App?

#43

Post by TylerE »

baddox wrote: post #40
TylerE wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know what would save a lot more space, time, data, cpu power, hardware, and energy? Not using cryptocurrency.

Perhaps. And perhaps not using a computer or any electronic devices at all would further "save" those things. I don't see your point.

Cryptocurrency is astoundingly bad at converting non-renewable natural resources into nothing of absolute value at all.

Even (real) strip mining at least produces industrially useful ore.

Blockchain technology as implemented in bitcoin is incredibly wasteful. The power used alone is in the tera-watt hours per year.

All of those massive farms of custom miners...all to process an astounding ~90k transactions a day.

The relative energy cost is astounding, considering that volume could easily be handled by a single server in a traditional architecture.

Re: Is Blockchain Really the Killer App?

#44

Post by prawn »

codexon wrote: post #36
drcode wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree- The value of something is "what you can get someone to pay for it." That is the only concrete, objective, and rational way to determine value. > Ask anyone that has been in a ponzi scheme/stock that went to 0 Well, given that you're stipulating a value of zero then clearly you are unable to get someone to pay for it and it's value is zero, by definition.

A ponzi scheme has a net value of 0 or less at any point in time. Just because some people can get out more than they put in doesn't mean a ponzi scheme has created any value for the economy as a whole.

"value for the economy as a whole"

You've shifted the goalposts there from "has value" to "value for the economy as a whole".

If I have money in a ponzi and can exit at that point in time, my stake has value. Later it might not, but at that point it does.

Re: Is Blockchain Really the Killer App?

#45

Post by bildung »

drcode wrote: post #32
codexon wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because something is bought for money doesn't mean it actually has value. Ask anyone that has been in a ponzi scheme or stocks that went to 0.

I disagree- The value of something is "what you can get someone to pay for it." That is the only concrete, objective, and rational way to determine value. > Ask anyone that has been in a ponzi scheme/stock that went to 0 Well, given that you're stipulating a value of zero then clearly you are unable to get someone to pay for it and it's value is zero, by definition.

> I disagree- The value of something is "what you can get someone to pay for it." That is the only concrete, objective, and rational way to determine value.

That's perfectly fine, after all value, whatever definition we use, is just a model, nothing that exists outside of humankind. The problem with the definition you prefer, though, is the substantial subset of the economy that will not be available on a market. An economy consists of significantly more production and consumption than what gets sold on a market and therefore gets a price. Examples: Producing free software in your free time, creating music, training kids in a sports club, raising your own kids, teaching for free via youtube channels or moogs or locally etc. All these thing create, well, value, I'd say. They boost both wealth and efficiency of the economy.

Re: Is Blockchain Really the Killer App?

#46

Post by colordrops »

na85 wrote: post #16
wanderingstan wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A friend of mine joined chain.com and, as I understand it, their value proposition is to handle the load of blockchain while providing trusted access to whatever needs to be known. I'm no expert, but this seems like the right sort of solution for the problem you pose. Blockchain management is handled in the cloud, and clients (including embedded devices) talk securely to a trusted cloud service to get the relevant de…

That seems self defeating. None of the advantages of a decentralized system are realized by centralizing the blockchain

As long as the hashing power is distributed so that no single group has more than 50%, then it doesn't matter if some people trust someone else to manage the blockchain for them. Bitcoin's benefits still exist. If everyone trusted one entity to manage the blockchain, then you'd be right, but that's not what is being suggested here.

Re: Is Blockchain Really the Killer App?

#47

Post by kens »

TylerE wrote: post #43
baddox wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps. And perhaps not using a computer or any electronic devices at all would further "save" those things. I don't see your point.

Cryptocurrency is astoundingly bad at converting non-renewable natural resources into nothing of absolute value at all. Even (real) strip mining at least produces industrially useful ore. Blockchain technology as implemented in bitcoin is incredibly wasteful. The power used alone is in the tera-watt hours per year. All of those massive farms of custom miners...all to process an astounding ~90k transactions a day. The…

A Raspberry Pi running a Postgres database can handle about 10 times the transaction rate of the Bitcoin network. (Obviously this isn't exactly apples-to-apples, but it gives a rough idea of how totally out of balance the resources consumed vs the transaction rate is.)

(10 TPS for TPC-B: http://raspberrypg.org/2013/11/raspberry-pg-server-some-benc...)

Re: Is Blockchain Really the Killer App?

#48

Post by Terr_ »

drcode wrote: post #23

> I am presently incapable of seeing how any token other than Bitcoin will be the one that wins. In some sense, Bitcoin has already "won" in that it currently has a non-zero value. Anyone who says "Bitcoin can't possibly exist or hold value" already is known to be wrong, simply by Bitcoin's existence. In the same way, I don't understand people like OP who say "No other cryptocurrency but Bitcoin can have value" becau…

The way you're defining "value" makes for a pretty meaningless "victory", unless you believe Dutch Tulips were a true benefit to mankind.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania

Re: Is Blockchain Really the Killer App?

#49

Post by roasbeef »

na85 wrote: post #2

The common adage seems to be "storage is cheap", meaning "multi-TB blockchains won't be a problem because you can buy that much storage for a few hundred dollars". But I think the stupidly-large size of the blockchain is a major hurdle, given the concurrent trend of miniaturization. Embedded devices like one might find in the much-vaunted "internet of things" (eyeball roll) can't really afford to be toting six SSDs j…

Some embedded "internet of things" like device wouldn't be a full-node. Rather it would be a lite-node relying on the SPV[1] model of security.

Storing some type of "working set" is totally feasible. Technically you don't even need to keep around all blocks, simply the resultant state that you arrive at after processing all blocks in order. This is called the Unspent Transaction Output set or UTXO set.

It's also possible to only keep around XGB of blocks, or the last 500 blocks, etc (a pruned log)[3]. The purpose of keeping around all blocks is to bootstrap the syncing of new nodes to the network, or optionally to full-chain wallets for re-scanning. Before pruned nodes are widely deployed, a system needs to be developed to allow a syncing node to efficiently identify and retrieve the relevant blockchain shards it needs so it can validate everything and arrive at the current state.

Also, with BitcoinCore 0.10, syncing takes about 4 hours if you don't have shitty a hardware or internet connection [2].

[1]: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Thin_Client_Security [2]: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/4468 [3]: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/4701

Re: Is Blockchain Really the Killer App?

#50

Post by hueving »

Terr_ wrote: post #48
drcode wrote: post #23

> I am presently incapable of seeing how any token other than Bitcoin will be the one that wins. In some sense, Bitcoin has already "won" in that it currently has a non-zero value. Anyone who says "Bitcoin can't possibly exist or hold value" already is known to be wrong, simply by Bitcoin's existence. In the same way, I don't understand people like OP who say "No other cryptocurrency but Bitcoin can have value" becau…

The way you're defining "value" makes for a pretty meaningless "victory", unless you believe Dutch Tulips were a true benefit to mankind. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania

The way you're defining value is meaningless if you think the tulip bulbs didn't have value during that time. You could trade one for a house during their peak, sounds pretty valuable to me.
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