[HN Gopher] The Truth on the Blockchain
___________________________________________________________________
The Truth on the Blockchain
Author : p4bl0
Score : 18 points
Date : 2022-01-24 18:12 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (p4bl0.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (p4bl0.net)
| aeternum wrote:
| The author gets it wrong with this quote:
|
| >The only truth that is guaranteed by the recording of a given
| information on a given blockchain, is that this particular
| information is written on this particular blockchain.
|
| The second part is that $X worth of real-world resources have
| been consumed in building this blockchain, so this one blockchain
| and the particular information inside is worth paying attention
| to. Whether or not you feel that this resource consumption is
| worthwhile, it is at least an objective way to stack-rank the
| proof-of-work blockchains.
| tromp wrote:
| I feel that the best blockchains are those that do not allow
| for any publicly visible data, just random curve points and
| cryptographic signatures.
| p4bl0 wrote:
| So I have this factory that builds objects. Building an object
| requires $X of energy. Because of a temporary malfunction in
| the factory, a few of them required 10 times that amount of
| energy.
|
| Are you saying that these selected objects that were built
| during the malfunction, and which are otherwise identical to
| all other objects produced in this factory, are more valuable
| because of that?
|
| I must admit that it makes no sense to me.
| ffwacom wrote:
| It's a market. Anyone that spends more than the value of the
| information they are recording on the blockchain, will
| eventually be unable to do so, because they're bankrupt. On a
| short timeline garbage can be written, but at the limit it
| should be flushed out.
| p4bl0 wrote:
| Believing this necessitate to blindly trust market economy.
| Market economy is what makes NFT works. It always needs new
| places to expand to, even if those are entirely virtual.
| What makes mining profitable for some is not the value of
| the information stored on the blockchain they're mining
| for, it purely is speculation.
| ffwacom wrote:
| If the information has no value then surely the market
| will eventually price the whole chain at $0. The short
| term is just noise, 'price discovery', whatever.
| p4bl0 wrote:
| Again, this is true only if you have a complete trust in
| market economy to make reasonable decisions. I don't. And
| evidence support that it doesn't always do that (I'm
| sorry I only have French ressources on this subject).
| ffwacom wrote:
| What's the alternative? Centrally planned economies lead
| to people dying, messing with them via regulation hasn't
| seemed to help at all, just leads to some financial
| crisis.
| p4bl0 wrote:
| Here too you are asserting things that are highly
| ideologically biased, or at least influenced.
| aeternum wrote:
| This isn't the best analogy since PoW was declared beforehand
| that more work = more trust.
|
| In the manufacturing example though, there are many examples
| of collectables that trade at a huge premium due to a very
| subtle manufacturing defect.
| p4bl0 wrote:
| > more work = more trust
|
| This is not true. The trust you are talking about is the
| "solidity" of the blockchain, i.e., it's immutability
| feature, what (supposedly) makes it a trustable source.
|
| But it is not PoW that makes the blockchain immutable. A
| lot of people are saying that, but they're wrong, I'm
| sorry.
|
| What actually makes the blockchain immutable is that it is
| distributed and that it cannot be done to rewrite it's
| history _discretely_. People will notice because the hash
| of the blocks would change.
|
| The same is true for a Git repository. If you have a Git
| repository that everyone mirrors regularly (so that it is
| distributed, just like a blockchain), then you can't
| rewrite it's history without having people notice: the new
| log will be incompatible with the history they already have
| all the commits hash will be different.
|
| The only solution would be, in both case, to find _entire_
| collision for each block /commit. This is _waaaaay more_
| expansive than mining to find new _valid_ hashes for a
| given blockchain.
| selestify wrote:
| You're talking about the problem after the network has
| already reached consensus on a block.
|
| Problem is, if you're downloading new blocks from the
| blockchain, and you're getting two sets of history, which
| one do you pick? With Git, it's trivial to recreate
| history differently, albeit with different hashes. With
| crypto, you pick the chain with more resources put into
| its creation.
|
| Otherwise, any random person can spin up a hundred
| Bitcoin nodes and start spoofing the latest transactions
| pretty easily.
| p4bl0 wrote:
| Yes, this is true in a decentralized and adversarial
| environment. This is exactly the problem that blockchains
| have been invented for! In such an environment, we do not
| have solutions to reach "consensus" apart from
| blockchains.
|
| My point is that apart from cryptocurrencies (where the
| blockchain is enough because it _defines_ the truth),
| since you _need_ some form of trusted third-party to make
| what 's written on the blockchain relevant, then you're
| _not_ in a decentralized and adversarial setting. So you
| can do things more efficiently, you don 't need a
| blockchain. You don't have to solve the distributed
| consensus problem.
| selestify wrote:
| Ah I see what you mean. Good point!
| abss wrote:
| Well.. this articole has some points but is not 100% fair or
| correct. The value of distributed ledger (aka blockchain) is
| given by the fact that you can find the latest version of a
| record in a decentralised way. This is usefull outside
| cryptocurencies (even for university diplomas you need a good
| mecanism for revocation). You can do revocation with a
| centralised system but a decentralised version could actualy
| imprive security and privacy (not with blockchains alone you need
| encryption and other cryprographic tools)
| p4bl0 wrote:
| There are other ways of having a distributed immutable ledger
| than a blockchain, if you don't have the constraints of a
| decentralized adversarial context. You don't have this context
| for diplomas.
|
| Also, neither revocation nor security and privacy does seem
| like good examples of what a blockchain would allow that a non-
| blockchain based approach wouldn't.
| galaxyyy wrote:
| Imo the point of the blockchain is that it can do many things
| (such as payments, storage, immutable records) all in one place
| which will lead to an overall increase in societal productivity.
|
| In the case of your diploma, it's true that there are other ways
| to have a distributed immutable ledger that contains a signature
| leading to the diploma. However, by having one agreed upon global
| ledger for any university to upload to with a proven statement of
| authenticity for the degree, you then have the ability to build
| technologies on top of that massive ledger that would have been
| much, much harder if each university decided to host their own
| distributed ledger.
|
| A simple example would be a hiring company (like lever.co) being
| able to verify degrees instantaneously on-chain instead of
| requesting a proof of degree from the university. This request
| for a proof already happens in real-life and requires a
| relationship between the university and the hiring company. The
| blockchain can then come in and allow companies to verify degrees
| in seconds, rather than days, leading to an overall increase in
| productivity.
| p4bl0 wrote:
| I don't see why saying "we don't need a blockchain" would imply
| that we can't have one agreed upon global distributed immutable
| ledger. To problem to achieve that is probably more political
| than technical. But then if HE institutions come to an
| agreement, we can totally have what you suggest without a
| blockchain :).
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-01-24 23:20 UTC)