It’s not still the early days of blockchain • Hacker News Board

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

#911

Post by lawfulSteadfast » Sun, Jan 16, 2022, 5:55 PM UTC

conradev wrote: post #275

tomputer wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Use cases like storing the history of a car on-chain, transparent supply chains, public voting... this all sounds interesting but never made it to product-market fit. Anything that does not exist natively on the blockchain doesn't need a blockchain at all. If a token on the blockchain would represent you as the owner of a car and one day someone steals your private key which represents your car ownership, that pers…

This problem exists with cash. We teach people to not keep too much cash on them, but to keep it in a bank where it is safer. You could get a credit card, too, and then it’s not even your money that you are spending! or your money that you lost to fraud. I can see both of these existing in the crypto world in some form, the same way they exist in the fiat world as for the banks and institutions and companies losing a…

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

#912

Post by tata71 » Sun, Jan 16, 2022, 5:57 PM UTC

usrbinbash wrote: post #274

adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

inefficiency here can actually be useful, it's similar to password stretching. If you know someone had to burn $10 of electricity to make an authentication, it hurts more to get banned.

> inefficiency here can actually be useful Except for the tons of CO2 that get pumped into the atmosphere in the process, or the blackouts its causes, or the fact that there are tons of more useful applications for that energy, like heating homes, running air conditioning, charging electric vehicles ...

Fine when MasterCard and Visa do it (poorly) though!

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

#913

Post by betwixthewires » Sun, Jan 16, 2022, 6:51 PM UTC

deanCommie wrote: post #882

betwixthewires wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same reason Bitcoin doesn't implement every tom dick and Harry's supposed solution to every technical problem. The big boys have to get it right the first time. Again, inertia. Ethereum does have proof of stake, a protocol called Casper FFG. It is currently live on the Ethereum beacon chain, waiting for consensus to move the entire network to it. There are lots of smaller projects trying different protocols they…

> waiting for consensus to move the entire network to it. May I clarify what that means? Does that mean a vote of the existing participants? If so, might it never happen?

Here's some info on it, I believe your question is answered near the top where they talk about the transition mechanism.

https://ethmerge.com/

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

#914

Post by ptx » Sun, Jan 16, 2022, 7:11 PM UTC

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…

> Instead of having different databases and APIs that are hard to integrate with one another, a blockchain could be the central storage and transactions handler that different systems interface to.

Couldn't this be done with something like an enterprise service bus, without the blockchain?

> Booking through a smart contract [...] There's no DB that can be hacked or go corrupt

But you have moved the hacking problem to the smart contract instead, and last time I looked those seemed a lot harder to make secure.

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

#915

Post by tootie » Sun, Jan 16, 2022, 7:38 PM UTC

samhw wrote: post #868

tootie wrote: post #759

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Changes in the implementations are not the question. It's application that she's skeptical of. Who has found a reason to use Blockchain for anything other than cryptocurrency? I actually witnessed one attempt. An actual Fortune 100 built a Blockchain for their public communications. Mostly just an excuse to show off their street cred. It landed with an absolute thud. Nobody cared.

I’m not a crypto fan, but I’m not sure what that example demonstrates. A company made an overengineered gimmick just to show off their street cred; nothing came of it, just as they expected, and it was a waste of the engineering. I’m lost as to how this reflects poorly on the engineering technique.

My point is that big companies are pouring resources into finding something to do with Blockchain and just can't.

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

#916

Post by SZJX » Sun, Jan 16, 2022, 7:59 PM UTC

samhw wrote: post #859

doktorhladnjak wrote: post #820

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big question in my mind: is this the internet in 1997 or expert systems in 1982? It could be the next big thing. Or it could be an interesting idea that was oversold and overhyped, that never really disappeared but became irrelevant as its real value became a commodity that found its way into the software of established companies.

The worrying thing (for me) isn’t which one it is. The worrying thing is that so many people seem incapable of even making a creditable attempt at answering that question and analysing its fundamentals. This has opened my eyes to how many people only think through the prism of “well, this has got really popular lately, and the internet did that too, so this will be the next big thing even if I don’t know why!”. Survi…

Or I guess many people are not dumb at all, they just simply want in and profit as long as the hype is still going and they (hope that they) are not left as the last people holding the bag. They might find all sorts of excuses to try to convince the others, even to some extent themselves, when they’re just fundamentally doing the above.

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

#917

Post by lumost » Sun, Jan 16, 2022, 8:57 PM UTC

ptx wrote: post #840

lumost wrote: post #754

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know, it's funny. I've worked in and around analytics for a long time now, and I've had the thought that blockchain enables the following. 1) A common "universal" transaction data source 2) A shared, readable format So the thought occurred to me that as soon as blockchain apps/currencies became popular, people would want analytics on them. There would thus be a startup opportunity for unprecedented analytics visi…

Making all their real-time sales data public, and thus available to their competitors, doesn't seem like something most companies would want. If the blockchain does enable this, wouldn't that just lead either to 1) companies not adopting blockchain, or 2) some solution for hiding the data and defeating third-party analytics?

Possible, however having this data available makes accounting, and taxation trivial. Money laundering, fraud, theft, and other illegal activities also become extremely difficult to hide.

Which is to say that investors, governments, financial institutions, and small businesses unable to afford external auditing and accounting probably want this capability more than individuals. I'd argue that our current lack of financial transparency may be more of an artifact of banking technology limitations rather than an intrinsically desirable property.

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

#918

Post by antifa » Sun, Jan 16, 2022, 9:04 PM UTC

z3c0 wrote: post #905

antifa wrote: post #805

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, it's a slippery slope that only leads to keeping all your BTC/ETH and missing out on what getting scammed 20 times a year feels like.

Strange, I've managed to do all of that without being needlessly cynical.

99% of random new cryptos have been scams or useless, so if anything the user was too generous with their politeness.

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

#919

Post by darawk » Sun, Jan 16, 2022, 10:57 PM UTC

vba616 wrote: post #910

darawk wrote: post #889

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Being resilient to unreliable connections in general is a feature that was important initially and has never stopped being relevant. That is a very abstract way of referring to the feature. Suppose 100 years from now the entire world runs on decentralized blockchains. You could make the same exact abstract point: "Well, leaderless consensus was the original design goal, and it was achieved immediately, so, it was u…

>only if you conceptualize "knew what they wanted" in a very abstract way that makes the point tautological. I don't understand what you mean. If they wanted remote login, email, and file transfer, and those applications were up and running in a year or three, and solved an immediate purpose/problem, that existed before the first network link was running, then what is it that is abstract or tautological? I don't know…

> If they wanted remote login, email, and file transfer, and those applications were up and running in a year or three, and solved an immediate purpose/problem, that existed before the first network link was running, then what is it that is abstract or tautological?

Those are very small parts of the value proposition of networking today. Similarly, cryptocurrency delivered a feature on its first day: decentralized digital scarcity. You may not find this feature useful today, but some people do, and most people did not find remote login useful for quite a while after networking was invented.

The fact that the utility of decentralized digital scarcity is not world changing yet is not surprising. Remote login wasn't world changing in 1979 (10 years after ARPANet launched) either. It took quite a while for these things to find their modern use cases, and permeate the culture.

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

#920

Post by crdrost » Mon, Jan 17, 2022, 12:02 AM UTC

samhw wrote: post #851

saalweachter wrote: post #750

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not really a trap -- it's more a rhetorical tactic. The trick is that when you say "I used to believe X, but now I've realized I was wrong and believe Y", you can get away without giving evidence for why X was wrong and Y is right . You appeal to a commonality between you and your audience (your audience believes X, you used to believe X) and by presenting your change you imply that they are being left behind, t…

Thank you for writing this: it crystallises something that’s always annoyed me about the trope-ridden evangelist shtick. You’re absolutely right.

Late to the party but FWIW I used to be an atheist and then a Buddhist and am now a Christian...

My attitude is very different from the evangelist’s, it says “look that was an important part of my journey and if that’s the direction you’re going, don’t let me dissuade you. I can tell you why those didn’t work for me but I can’t hold up my present consciousness as “the only correct thing, believe as I do or else you are irrational or anything like that. Heck I am sure that we are both irrational in innumerable ways and why would I pretend I’m more sane than you?”

This fatalism also infects a lot of how I teach things like physics, I tell people a lot that “learning is pain—or more precisely, learning abstractions relieves a pain and chaos and difficulty such that you can only truly absorb the abstraction when you have felt the confusion it addresses. So I can no longer pretend that ‘now that I have suffered through all of that, here is the Right Perspective so that you don't have to!!’... I’d have to take you through the suffering to get to the teaching on the other side.”