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It’s not still the early days of blockchain

blog.mollywhite.net

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

#671

Post by mohanmcgeek »

freemanon wrote: post #439
magicjosh wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also want a writeup covering some examples of Bitcoin or Ethereum use that are relatable. This recent NYTimes piece takes that approach, though none of the examples are that impressive: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/03/style/what-can-you-actual... (Disclosure I own Bitcoin and Ethereum)

Blockchain and crypto are related yet distinct concepts. I was lining up for a PCR test in Thailand the other day, and it was a huge mess. The lack of streamlined systems between invoicing, identity verification, etc means very long queues, people running back and forth to get their documents printed. The testing scheme is private run but I assume it needs to interface with governmental departments (i.e. Immigration…

Or, the provider, namely the government, can write the code to orchestrate these API calls even if these APIs are managed by disparate entities.

It's not pretend like it's not a solved problem. It's just that you're trying to eliminate the central provider in this case and you want to replace that with a blockchain which is excruciatingly slow

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

#672

Post by dmitriid »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #576
Vespasian wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alright, how does a potential recipient use those funds? Pay rent? No, because the government would notice the missing income on the landlords tax return. Pay for food and other goods? No, because the government would not allow companies to take funds from permissionless blockchains. Buy real estate or a car? No because those needs to be registered with the government as well and payments are regularly checked for fr…

Conversion of bitcoin to whatever currency is hard to block. USSR had death penalty (!) for buying or selling things using foreigh currency. Yet, the black was persistent. Also, we are talking about the unbanked: people who otherwise have no other state-sanctioned way to use financial services. Bitcoin first and foremost helps such people.

> Also, we are talking about the unbanked: people who otherwise have no other state-sanctioned way to use financial services. Bitcoin first and foremost helps such people.

No. No it doesn't.

The main reason for a large portion of the unbanked population is that they are so poor that they can't even afford to open and maintain a bank account. But sure, "we require a person to have a smartphone with always-on internet connection to do anything useful and have egregious transaction fees in most popular chains" surely does help the unbanked.

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

#673

Post by kikimora »

betterunix2 wrote: post #599
aflag wrote: post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

However, if you have no government, the housechain could be a way for a decentralized society to implement the concept of a land registry. Once everyone agrees that the housechain is proof of ownership, then measures can be taken to enforce that without necessarily evoking a central government. I'm not sold on the idea of a society without a central government, but I think the blockchain would help — or even enable —…

The people in charge of enforcement would become a de facto government. What distinguishes a government from any other organization is the monopoly on violence (more precisely, the monopoly on deciding when and how violent measures can be employed), and enforcing property rights sometimes requires violence (e.g. if someone refuses to leave your home, eventually the police will have to physically remove them against t…

You cannot get your hacked bitcoins back even if you are the government with police and army. Lots of things that government does can be replaced with a smart contract. Hey, you can even have direct democracy - vote with your citizen token for a change in a smart contract and voala the law changed and immediately enforced.

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

#674

Post by twelve40 »

hubraumhugo wrote: post #33

I'm still very opposed to the idea of taking a technology and then searching a problem for it. Why? Back in 2017 during the first hype cycle, blockchain companies raised hundreds of millions with ICOs. I became very interested in the technology too, and some friends still work in this space. 4 years later in the web3 era, there is not a single product aside from trading/finance that got traction. Use cases like stori…

I'm glad someone remembers the (2-year) history. NFTs=ICOs, just another scam to keep "crypto" afloat. Neither ICO nor NFT resulted in anything useful, wait, maybe Bored Ape??

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

#675

Post by kikimora »

gambiting wrote: post #468
Galanwe wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And literally none of it, not a single step that you mentioned requires blockchain. Then tell me, where is this wonderful centralized database that tells me who owns which car? Blockchains are not just about decentralization, it's also about publishing the actual databases in the wild for everyone to see, because you have the guarantee that no-one can fake it. Sure, a lot of the use cases could be done with central…

>>Then tell me, where is this wonderful centralized database that tells me who owns which car? Uhm, here in UK DVLA holds it? Anyone can access it too, you can just check the entire car history including its tax payments as well as technical inspections online. No Blockchain needed. >>because you have the guarantee that no-one can fake it I'd like you to explain why you think that's true. If you assume an external au…

How much taxpayers money goes into maintaining this database? Not sayin blockchain is a better solution but it can replace 99% of UK DVLA staff with an algorithm.

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

#676

Post by kikimora »

beertoagunfight wrote: post #338
robjan wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who appoints the notaries?

This. I have never gotten a satisfactory answer to how centralization is prevented in such cases.

Vote with your (imaginary) citizen token to appoint a notary. And have a right to vote against it at any time. With blockchain you can elect new notaries every day if this is how you want to manage it.

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

#677

Post by danaris »

pmlnr wrote: post #464
faeyanpiraat wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can I buy math?

By pouring money into universities who do math.

...Just be aware that when you're investing in math, it's not an "investment" that pays out for you personally. It's an investment in all of humanity.

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

#679

Post by cuteboy19 »

kikimora wrote: post #666
UncleMeat wrote: post #625

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The notary is a teeny-tiny portion of the expense in the homebuying process. And you'd still need a lawyer involved if your transaction involves mortgages (and likely you'd still want one anyway to construct the transaction). Putting deeds on the blockchain changes the homebuying process almost not at all. As for state IDs... why not just a centralized database with a public API? What does decentralization achieve fo…

The promise of blockchain is to eventually remove lawyers and all middleman. It can be done already with existing tech. I can easily imagine a smart contract managing property rights, another one managing mortgages, etc. And of course all that has a back door so a court order can rollback a transaction.

if we are trusting courts to have backdoors, does it not completely negate the purpose of blockchains, i.e. trustlessness

if you trust the court, why not just have them store everything on some mysql database and execute all the ""smart"" contracts as regular java code? blockchains are necessarily orders of magnitude worse in terms of performance. why do you want to use an extremely slow linked list based DB?

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

#680

Post by jerf »

chucke wrote: post #472
gambiting wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But....why. What problem does it solve. How is it better than existing insurance policies that are perfectly fine being bound to my name and address

I believe the promise of having an insurance contract publicly verified by a decentralised system is to reduce the inherent costs of the current regulated system. In my country,and I assume in most it's the same, in order for you to sign a buy contract for a house, there has to be a notary involved. The whole process costs a significant percentage of your already heavy purchase. A blockchain won't solve all the probl…

If home ownership was on a distributed blockchain, local regulators would rapidly discover a need for something like a notary to verify that the transaction has been done correctly on the correct blockchain by the people who actually own it, so as to ensure the consumer isn't sitting on the other side of the table with someone not bamboozling them about their ownership of the house, or bamboozling them about their transfer of ownership, or so and so forth. The notary would also validate that the transfer has successfully been completed on the blockchain respected by the local governing authorities, and has been filled out completely correctly.

You might think this is silly, but fake selling of homes is actually thing that happens! I don't just mean that regulators would do it for gatekeeping purposes, I mean there would be a real need for this. In the bizarre circumstance that this move to the blockchain actually happened for home ownership, the HN gestalt would rapidly be screaming for legislation and regulation around blockchain changes.

Which means, once again, that blockchain is solving a problem that doesn't exist here. The problem with home ownership and the problem notaries are solving was never that the authority was too centralized into the relevant governing bodies.

That's the reason why after 11 years blockchain has exactly one use case, and even that one is dubiously solved IMHO. It brilliantly solves problems we don't actually have.

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