Drug trade, tax avoidance, banking for the unbanked and sanctioned. I'm currently living from airbnb to airbnb, with all my Russian banks banned from SWIFT, and crypto is the only way I'm abe to access my money.
Ask HN: Am I going insane or is there genuinely no value in blockchain tech?
71–80 of 576 posts
Re: Ask HN: Am I going insane or is there genuinely no value in blockchain tech?
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
even simpler than database technology. A git repository is tamper resistant.
Re: Ask HN: Am I going insane or is there genuinely no value in blockchain tech?
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I agree that databases on their own are never tamper resistant. But you can certainly set up a process around the database that guarantees tamper resistance. You'll still have to trust said process, and with blockchain you still have to trust the code. You'll never get away from having to trust _something_, but at least it is in theory feasible to have tamper resistance both with a centralised database and with a blockchain.
Re: Ask HN: Am I going insane or is there genuinely no value in blockchain tech?
#74I recently watched this video (Line Goes Up) and it covers a lot of ground, from crypto to NFTs to DAOs.
Re: Ask HN: Am I going insane or is there genuinely no value in blockchain tech?
#75You're missing the fact that it enabled purely online/digital money people will actually use.
You could build an online currency with a database much more easily than blockchain but people won't use it because it relies on a central authority to maintain the database and not enough people will trust that central authority not to misuse their power. It was tried a bunch of times in the past and never worked.
Fundamentally though it isn't about the technology it's about the transition. It's about money transitioning to a purely digital form which people will use.
In the past entire industries have been revolutionised multiple times by such transitions. Music moved to digital via mp3. TV, Movies via efficient video codecs and streaming. In both cases those shifts caused massive and unpredictable changes to how we consume and buy music/tv.
Now that money is making the same transition, people are jumping on it hoping to profit from it and money is much much more important a technology than music or tv/movies, it's the fundamental technology of society.
Re: Ask HN: Am I going insane or is there genuinely no value in blockchain tech?
#76Blockchain 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,…
> A private, trusted, permissioned blockchain is pointless
Not at all - it's a verifiable audit log. Git is an example of exactly this.
Re: Ask HN: Am I going insane or is there genuinely no value in blockchain tech?
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
even simpler than database technology. A git repository is tamper resistant.
No it's not. You can rewrite history.
Re: Ask HN: Am I going insane or is there genuinely no value in blockchain tech?
#78It's all in Timothy May's email signature from the cypherpunks mailing list: Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero knowledge, reputations, information markets, black markets, collapse of governments. The key concept is: sovereignty. In the end, this will reshape the nation state.
> collapse of governments
If this were true, it would be a reason to sanction bitcoin. As it is, we've yet to see how it pans out as a means of Russia evading the sanctions.
Re: Ask HN: Am I going insane or is there genuinely no value in blockchain tech?
#79So one of YC's finest and most valuable startup, Stripe that needs no introduction here, also thinks there is 'no value' in using it for payments then? Right then why did they announce this then? [0]
Also just yesterday, a very low turn out in discussion about it [1], even less when they announced their Stripe Crypto post [2]. Why? Where is the scam? How exactly is Stripe scamming? Or is it because Stripe is spared somehow?
Or most likely, they waited for regulations to be clearer first and then re-entered back in with their crypto payouts products. Perhaps they still see some value in it.
So when it is Stripe that actually releases something, there is zero instant extreme outrage of predictable 'crypto is scam', 'snake oil' comments to be found like the ones I see here.
[0] https://stripe.com/blog/expanding-global-payouts-with-crypto
Re: Ask HN: Am I going insane or is there genuinely no value in blockchain tech?
#80The 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.
Good point - blockchain also prevents transaction censorship (your proposal prevents double spend but allows the central authority to block transactions)
Central authorities might do wild stuff like block Folks They Don’t Like (certain truck drivers, etc). Some people think that’s really good, others feel the opposite
(edited for clarity)