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It’s not still the early days of blockchain

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Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#541

Post by throwaway98700k »

saalweachter wrote: post #522
poof131 wrote: post #98

A few months ago I agreed with her entirely. Tether is an unbacked fraud and NFTs are being front-run [1, 2]. The mid-level marketing Ponzi vibe is crazy. The latency of applications on the blockchain is atrocious. But more recently after learning from and interacting with people building in the space my assessment changed. There is an interesting intersection between tech, communities, and economics. There exists a…

I'm sorry, I'm not trying to call you out personally, but this is itching my brain something fierce so I have to blurt it out, and hey, it's the internet. A little derailing never hurt anyone. It's amazing to me how universal the "I used to be a non-believer" line is in evangelism. From the classic "I used to be an atheist but I've been born again" to all the members of political party A claiming to have been a membe…

It’s a dangerous attitude because it has a paternal edge to it. Any “enlightenment” naturally leads to seeing others as unenlightened.

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#542

Post by V__ »

tsimionescu wrote: post #190
galaxyLogic wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Public voting' is not a technological problem but political one. There's a lot of opposition to making voting more accessible to everyone. Voting should be easy, and you don't need blockchain for that but maybe it could help. The question is who wants "voting rights".

Unfortunately, trust in voting can only be achieved with paper voting, there is no technological solution to improve it that doesn't completely remove trust as well.

Obligatory Tom Scott videos:

Why Electronic Voting is a BAD Idea - Computerphile | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI

Why Electronic Voting Is Still A Bad Idea | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#543

Post by Nextgrid »

cinquemb wrote: post #517
Vespasian wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well the law and the fact that (eventually) someone will come and physically remove whoever claims to own your house. A Blockchain without the ability to initiate (and complete) such a process is worthless for questions of real world ownership. Of course a Blockchain could be empowered to do that....through a law.

A blockchain (or the contracts that run upon any particular one) could also incentivize a distributed group of participants to take it upon themselves to temporarily and physically enforce some ones else's real world claims (a signed tx from the same addr with the on chain claim putting their owner ship up as collateral to be liquidated at a discount conditional if the buyer can secure the premises by any means neces…

> if the buyer can secure the premises by any means necessarily

How does the blockchain know that said access has been secured? Is it up to the original requestor to confirm this? If so, what if they're malicious and don't want to do so as to not give up their collateral? If it's down to a neutral third-party acting as an oracle, what prevents said third-party from being bribed/coerced/hacked into providing false data to the blockchain?

All of this can be solved by the law (eventually escalating to people allowed to use deadly force), but at that point why do you even need a blockchain?

Blockchain only works for assets that live entirely on the blockchain, such as cryptocurrencies. Anything that lives in the real-world is a bad use-case for blockchains as you now need a centralized, trusted third-party to sync the state of the blockchain with the state of the real world, at which point you may just do away with the blockchain entirely and let the third-party run a good old database.

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#544

Post by gitfan86 »

olalonde wrote: post #353
poof131 wrote: post #98

A few months ago I agreed with her entirely. Tether is an unbacked fraud and NFTs are being front-run [1, 2]. The mid-level marketing Ponzi vibe is crazy. The latency of applications on the blockchain is atrocious. But more recently after learning from and interacting with people building in the space my assessment changed. There is an interesting intersection between tech, communities, and economics. There exists a…

> A few months ago I agreed with her entirely. Tether is an unbacked fraud and NFTs are being front-run [1, 2]. The mid-level marketing Ponzi vibe is crazy. The latency of applications on the blockchain is atrocious. But more recently after learning from and interacting with people building in the space my assessment changed. I feel like a lot of the cryptocurrency critics commit the "fallacy fallacy". That is, they…

No one should be suggesting that 100% of crypto is a scam and that there will never be anything useful in the crypto space. Vitalik seems the be operating with best of intentions and IMO the threat of decentralized money has already effected the central banks in their thoughts around inflation.

My main problem is similar to the original article here. In 2014 Bitcoin was "The future of micropayments" 6 years later and now the narrative is that "Layer 2 networks are the future" It would be great if the crypto people could stop talking about how great the future will be and just deliver what they are promising

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#545

Post by tsimionescu »

shrimpx wrote: post #364
tsimionescu wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, trust in voting can only be achieved with paper voting, there is no technological solution to improve it that doesn't completely remove trust as well.

Trust as in the public trusting the vote? I'm afraid you can put political spin on and create distrust in pretty much anything.

Of course, the public can mistrust a paper vote, for good or bad reasons.

But, it's not possible to reasonably trust an electronic voting system - the people installing and maintaining the system have myriad ways to manipulate the vote that are almost impossible to discover or prove (at least as long as you don't accept public voting, which has different issues).

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#547

Post by chx »

barnabee wrote: post #496
Daishiman wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because technical minutiae are completely irrelevant if they don't eventually convert into useful features for products with at least some level of mass-market appeal. I have yet to see a single enticing idea for blockchain/web3/whatever for a consumer or business not related to finance. If that requires an ever-increasing number of technical challenges to be solved for that to happen, then we're just looking at vapo…

> Because technical minutiae are completely irrelevant if they don't eventually convert into useful features for products with at least some level of mass-market appeal. Why? You might care about building businesses, mass-market appeal, blah blah, but many (most?) technologies were created because people thought they were cool or interesting or just because they could. Nobody knew what LASERs were for when they inven…

> to create decentralised, permissionless value

Since when do we call a Ponzi value?

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#548

Post by plebianRube »

MoSattler wrote: post #528
SanJacobs wrote: post #523

> How long can it possibly be “early days”? 70-ish years. I'd say we just recently came out of the early days of computing around the 1990s or 2010s. >How long do we need to wait before someone comes up with an actual application of blockchain technologies that isn’t a transparent attempt to retroactively justify a technology that is inefficient in every sense of the word? Currency is inefficient? It's sure better th…

> Currency is inefficient? It's sure better than trading cows. > Smart contracts? Writing things using english and then every side involved hiring lawyers to be used as bad just-in-time compilers for what was written is way more inefficient. If crypto is doing these things really more efficiently than current solutions, then why neither use case has any significant adoption of blockchain solutions?

Every technological revolution is held back as long as possible by those making the most money using the current system.

London streets will be covered in 3 feet manure if industry progresses at this pace.

You’re crazy if you think this fool contraption you’ve been wasting your time on will ever displace the horse, there is no significant adoption.

Electricity is dangerous, there is no significant adoption, gas lamps and candles work fine.

Remove trollys since we can make more money selling tires, oil, and buses.

Internet is a fad, what use case is it solving, it burns a lump of coal every time a book is ordered, there is no significant adoption.

EV1 - we will take your electric cars and crush them, there is no significant adoption.

Proof of work guaranteeing that no one can alter history unless they spend more energy than the entire network has spent already to secure property rights has no use case and no significant adoption.

At this point either you see a pattern from history, or you remain perpetually on the wrong side of a Blub paradox.

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#549

Post by ir123 »

baby wrote: post #402
stupidworld wrote: post #39

In the same time, India & China got mobile payment revolution. 4b+ transcations per month are done in India. Well which means 3B people dont ever need crypto.

Ah they can send money abroad easily?

I send money abroad using Wise though I'd be happier with a publicish API.

Why would I in my right mind use crypto? Im not doing anything illegal and I'm not ideologically opposed to paying my taxes.

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#550

Post by democracy »

ulfw wrote: post #302
neiman wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. "Remotely send money" is a super hard thing to do. I literally just struggled for a month with a transfer that included 3 countries, none of them is English speaking. It required letters from banks, accountants, plenty of forms of different countries, translations, stuff which is lost in translation (the bank was unhappy with the word selection of a non-English speaker accountant, for example), different format…

But none of that needs Blockchain as a technical solution. E.g. my bank allows worldwide free SWIFT transfers in many many currencies. It's not hard to find out someone's name, bank account number and SWIFT code et voila... money sent. There's plenty of other solutions from Paypal to (Transfer)Wise etc. Saying "it can be done in 20 seconds with crypto" is really only half the truth. At the end of the day we all need…

I think the crypto shills for the "bank the unbanked" and "international money transfers" never really did any international money transfers
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