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Cryptocurrencies, and especially Ethereum, are truly novel innovations in computer science that cross many academic disciplines. The linked example is a great write-up. It’s sad that there is a vocal group, especially on HN, that knee-jerk hates everything blockchain related and wishes with their entire being for it to fail. However, I think smart contracts are fascinating and wish more people would keep an open mind…
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It's exhausting arguing with the same bogus "use cases" every other week but here goes in short: - In your scenario you're not decentralized, you have a clear authority: the news agency - The news agency can broadcast a signed merkle tree of the articles it publishes alongside the normal newspaper/news program etc... For instance through their website. - Anybody who cares about it could maintain a copy of this signed…
Or, instead of paying to implement, operate and maintain that system forever, and also hoping that someone independent will store copies forever (because without that independent third party, the news agency's whole system is irrelevant)... maybe they could permanently store a hash of published revisions on a public blockchain for $0.05 each. It's just another option that might turn out to be useful for some. Althoug…
The fact that storing data on the blockchain is expensive is also not an optimization problem that can be solved easily with incremental optimizations, it stems from the fact that the data is transferred and mirrored forever on thousands of nodes. If storing data on the blockchain was cheap you'd quickly run into scalability problem. People who run Blockchain nodes don't want to mirror Wikipedia, the output of all the world's newspaper and child porn archives on their servers.
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It's exhausting arguing with the same bogus "use cases" every other week but here goes in short: - In your scenario you're not decentralized, you have a clear authority: the news agency - The news agency can broadcast a signed merkle tree of the articles it publishes alongside the normal newspaper/news program etc... For instance through their website. - Anybody who cares about it could maintain a copy of this signed…
Just because I feel like arguing a bit, here goes: >- In your scenario you're not decentralized, you have a clear authority: the news agency Only due to current technical limitations. Shift to Blockchain, get distributed news agencies, with reporters[1] residing all over the world. Think of the time and costs saved by not having to send reporter out of a central office > - The news agency can broadcast a signed merkl…
You'll have to break that one down for me. Can the blockchain also cure male pattern baldness? Asking for a friend.
>and there's a well known tool for distributing that in a verified & timestamped format - Blockchain.
News agencies typically already have a way to distribute information since that's literally their job. Even if they don't they could just tweet it or whatever. That's not really a problem.
>Introduces a 'he-said, she-said' problem. Which the Blockchain neatly avoids.
No it doesn't, if you can provide a valid signature from the "News Org" public key that doesn't match the article's checksum then it proves that "News Org" at some point signed conflicting data, proving that something has been tempered with. It doesn't matter if the person pointing that out is some anonymous user on 8chan, as long as the signature is valid it can only mean that the news organization did something shady or that their key got compromised.
That's the whole principle behind public key cryptography. I signed this comment before posting it, which means that if tomorrow I delete this message and you kept a copy you could show that I in fact authored it (or at least endorsed it somehow): https://pastebin.com/XKnQSFew
Cryptocurrencies, and especially Ethereum, are truly novel innovations in computer science that cross many academic disciplines. The linked example is a great write-up. It’s sad that there is a vocal group, especially on HN, that knee-jerk hates everything blockchain related and wishes with their entire being for it to fail. However, I think smart contracts are fascinating and wish more people would keep an open mind…
1) I don't think smart contracts should be programmed in JavaScript,
2) it would be better if smart contracts were actually treated as law,
3) most problems that are currently being hyped/solved with blockchain would better be solved with a public signed git repository, and
4) blockchains, as currently implemented, are immensely wasteful (I'm hoping this changes with more research).
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> Proving I had certain information at certain time point The blockchain solves the problem of proving ownership of a transferable asset. If you just want to prove that you have certain information at a certain time point there are much simpler solutions: Publicly release the hash of a message (let's say: "I created this using the licence key XXX-XXX-XXX" + signature from your private key) on Twitter/Facebook/Github/…
an interesting way of describing a crypto blockchain like bitcoin or ethereum is that it's a way of incentivizing the storage and preservation of information. In particular, the information of a transaction from one address to another is attached with it a fee for storing it. Your "much simpler solutions" require a trusted third party that has no financial incentive to keep your information around, and depending on t…
This has been true for the last 30+ years yet almost never happens because it's not actually that useful.
Cryptocurrencies, and especially Ethereum, are truly novel innovations in computer science that cross many academic disciplines. The linked example is a great write-up. It’s sad that there is a vocal group, especially on HN, that knee-jerk hates everything blockchain related and wishes with their entire being for it to fail. However, I think smart contracts are fascinating and wish more people would keep an open mind…
Given the generally high level of comments here at HN, I wonder if it has ever crossed your mind that it might, just might, not actually be knee-jerk hate but you simply being wrong in the novelty and general awesomeness of cryptocurrencies?
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I don’t understand why you would be anti- something so new at all. To me it’s preposterous that you would evaluate a new technology based on how many problems it and only it can solve. Don’t you get that new technology has an incubation period where its fundamental challenges must be overcome? What problem could early steam powered cars solve that horses couldn’t solve better? I doubt the earliest ones performed bett…
You're praising innovation blindly. Not all innovation is good, and many supposed innovators are crocks. I understand blockchains enough to where I could build one of my own (note that I say blockchain, and not cryptocurrency) and I really don't see much use for this particular datastructure outside certain niche applications. What are these truly innovative uses for a nested chain of data blobs whose contents includ…
He isn't praising anything. He is simply saying not being anti-something that early. The world isn't all black and white, there's nuance, not being anti-something doesn't means praising it.
> I don’t understand why you would be anti- something so new at all. >[...] > why write it off at this early stage?
What if there's actually nothing good that we can do out of it but you aren't there to talk against it? Well it will die naturally. What if there's actually something good that we can do with it but there's a bunch of anti-something people? Well that add unnecessary friction to something good being made and that just make you a jerk adding it.
You see how it's better?
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It's not new, BTC is a full decade old. At this point the internet had a billion users.
The web wasn't invented until the internet was more than a decade old. This narrative that "Internet time" transforms the world every other year should have died in the 90s. Real work takes time. Building the infrastructure for the Internet took decades. Even after it won, most people used modems over badly insulated copper wire for the better part of ten years.
I wonder if investors are pushing developers away from infrastructure plays, towards consumer apps and sub-platforms.
I imagine that's happening in VR. I hear a lot about headsets, games, medical applications, etc, but I haven't heard anyone get excited about research into better Fresnel lens production.
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Like what? Everyone seems to hand-wave this, but nobody in the full decade long history of bitcoin and blockchain has come up with a single good use case that isn't better solved by MySQL.
Illegal gambling and illegal transactions tend to be good Bitcoin usecases that are trickier to solve with MySQL due to trust issues. Now, you may not be particularly enamored with illegal activity, but it is the one use case where Bitcoin really excels.
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Further we've no idea if other such bugs have been discovered and exploited already without responsible disclosure.
You also don't know if your brick and mortar bank has been hacked. It's a silly argument.