Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

It’s not still the early days of blockchain

blog.mollywhite.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

681–690 of 1001 posts

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

#681

Post by jerf »

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.

The reason why lawyers and middlemen are required is not because authority is too centralized into the relevant governing bodies. They're there for lots and lots of other reasons that blockchain can't help with.

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

#682

Post by dmitriid »

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…

> But when you dig a bit deeper, you'll find that there is true technical and financial innovation.

Ah yes. The good old "just google it". There's literally not a single "dig deeper" resource on the internet that explains the need for blockchains/cryptocurrencies etc.

But sure, there are a lot of "innovations" with recursive circular "innovations" (like currency speculation, HFT and flash loans, all of "innovatively made available" by regurgutating the same fatasy tokens and pretending they are worth something)

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

#683

Post by FledNanders »

Vespasian wrote: post #600
giaour wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the absence of a governing authority, property disputes would revert to being settled by violence or the threat thereof. Why should my band of armed thugs defer to what it says on the blockchain when they could instead hit you with a $5 wrench until you vacate the premises? https://xkcd.com/538

My band of thugs however would offer people the ability to buy protection from your band of thugs. I may even be inclined to write down some rules and introduce a process to resolve conflicts without unnecessary damage to people and property. (In this hypothetical scenario any form of land registry is only as valid as I say it is.)

> My band of thugs however would offer people the ability to buy protection from your band of thugs.

Thereby reinventing the police

> I may even be inclined to write down some rules and introduce a process to resolve conflicts without unnecessary damage to people and property.

and the courts.

But maybe that was your point?

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

#684

Post by MoSattler »

DaltonCoffee wrote: post #539
MoSattler wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Some of our current financial systems are deeply embedded and difficult to replace. We're in a situation where we need bankers to finance lawyers to work on issues that would negate some of the need for bankers and lawyers.

> We're in a situation where we need bankers to finance lawyers to work on issues that would negate some of the need for bankers and lawyers.

How so? For what value proposition specifically?

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

#685

Post by thinkmassive »

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.

> And of course all that has a back door so a court order can rollback a transaction.

…so you still need a lawyer and nothing has actually changed?

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

#686

Post by Passthepeas »

throwaway98700k wrote: post #533
janandonly wrote: post #484

I never understand critiques like these. > "somehow no one appears to have managed to find a positive use for blockchains that wouldn’t be better served by blockchainless technologies" There is now a sovereign nation state that accepted Bitcoin as a currency, and, mark my words, no doubt more will follow this 2022. Replacing central banks, and by extension, their grasp on the limitless money printing, is the whole re…

By all accounts the adoption of that tech in El Salvador has been a disaster, the app is slow, buggy, not everyone has access and it’s easily exploitable for crime. Protests against it. Etc. I anticipate a reversal of this by the next government. Current governments cannot admit mistakes, so it’ll take a new term for it to be dismantled.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayib_Bukele#Presidential_appr... I keep hearing this line, and yet Bukele's approval rating is over 80%

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

#687

Post by kikimora »

jerf wrote: post #681
kikimora wrote: post #666

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The reason why lawyers and middlemen are required is not because authority is too centralized into the relevant governing bodies. They're there for lots and lots of other reasons that blockchain can't help with.

The only reason why we have trusted middleman is because before bitcoin there was no scalable solution to Byzantine generals problem. Now we have it. Whenever this solution is better than having a central entity appointing middleman is remains to be seen.

Blockchains can reduce number of middleman we have to deal with. The open question is at what cost.

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

#688

Post by yashg »

lkrubner wrote: post #500
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've been documenting this with specific companies. A recent one that I worked with was Omnichains: https://www.omnichains.com "Omnichain CEO Pratik Soni speaks to Inbound Logistics about the growing number of blockchain use cases in the supply chain, including in reverse logistics, product authentication and sustainability." Apparently this company started with the idea that they would use the blockchain to make sup…

Most of the companies that tout blockchain seem to be doing so to attract free marketing and VC funding. Once they have that the real products seem to use the same old reliable tech that runs the entire internet.

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

#689

Post by kikimora »

cuteboy19 wrote: post #679
kikimora wrote: post #666

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No, because courts can be elected by voting on the blockchain which gives society a way to control them. And voting on the chain (if implemented right) cannot be controlled that easily by a government.

I’m all for the central database. To enter data into it the government will appoint an agency which in turn will appoint individuals after they pass exams or get their license. The said individuals will have to fill in regular reports that had to be somehow processed and analyzed. Also each such individual required to keep records in a safe manner, sometimes this means hiring a security and a compliance officer. At this point it is not clear if the cost of maintaining the agency and all that people is less than automating the agency of the blockchain.

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

#690

Post by bratwurst3000 »

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…

Dude you are freaking me out. If someone feels somehow mistreated by me they could send an army of cryptobros to my house to lynch me … that sounds like the worst scenario possible.
Post reply on HN