[HN Gopher] AWS and Blockchain
___________________________________________________________________
AWS and Blockchain
Author : TangerineDream
Score : 559 points
Date : 2022-11-20 22:30 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.tbray.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.tbray.org)
| smt88 wrote:
| I had a real experience that perfectly reflects the research
| presented here (safer ledgers useful, blockchains are not).
|
| I accidentally got wrapped up in a project to automate some HR
| functions, and the product manager demanded that it must be
| blockchain because blockchains are the future.
|
| It turns out that append-only databases are well-suited for HR
| records, and (especially when dealing with things like background
| checks, immigration papers, etc.) it doesn't hurt to have a
| history with cryptographically-verifiable date stamps.
|
| We used an existing database that did all of the above, told
| everyone it was blockchain, and released the product.
|
| That was a great strategy for a few years until everyone realized
| blockchain was a boondoggle, and now you never need to work with
| anyone who still believes in it. You can just understand their
| mention of blockchain to be a sign that you need to avoid doing
| business with them.
| v-erne wrote:
| >>It turns out that append-only databases are well-suited for
| HR records
|
| It may seem so, bu then You find out what are Your governments
| limit's for storing workers data, and Your company lawyers
| forces You to make it possible to delete everything that past
| that limit to limit legal risk and be gdpr compliant. And at
| this moment You find out that world is not constant and far
| from Your ideal model of spherical cow.
| function_seven wrote:
| Can we design an append-only database that also allows for
| deletions if you replace those deletions with a direct
| reference to the hash that was once computed at that point in
| the chain?
|
| Yes, I know this isn't strictly "append only", but it still
| gives the ability to prevent silent updates and silent
| deletes. Any record that's deleted must be replaced with
| something that indicates that it was deleted.
| inkyoto wrote:
| Such a database already exists, and it is called AWS QLDB.
|
| Deleting a document revision in QLDB does not actually
| delete it, but rather moves the last known revision into a
| shadow history table that accompanies every table in QLDB.
| The full document change history lookup has to accommodate
| in the code path a fallback to the history table when a
| document revision can't be located in the main data entity
| table. If no document revision exists in either table, it
| has never existed in the database.
| Drakim wrote:
| If the database is distributed you have no way of enforcing
| that the other peers don't keep shadow copies of the data
| that is supposed to be deleted.
|
| If you know you can trust all your peers to act in good
| faith, then you might as well just use a regular database
| as none of your peers will edit old records due to being
| good actors.
| function_seven wrote:
| Yeah, what I'm describing is more like a journaled
| database, not bLoCkChaIn tEcHnOloGy.
|
| There's a chain for sure, but nothing that allows it to
| be decentralized, or 100% immutable, etc.
| some_furry wrote:
| Use envelope encryption and wipe the key after the fact.
|
| Bonus: use a committing AEAD mode and use the previous
| record as AEAD when writing the record.
|
| You can keep the ciphertext in the ledger forever. Zeroing
| out the wrapped key makes it unretrievable.
| oblio wrote:
| Small nitpick: "You" and "Your" don't need to be capitalized.
| It makes reading the text a bit weird.
| v-erne wrote:
| Thank you [see what I did here :)] for pointing this out -
| I'm not native and on top of that used to learn german
| (never went anywhere with it, but the capitalization of
| every noun somehow stayed with me longer than necessary).
|
| Add english oddities such as capitalizing first person
| pronoun (which I do, as you probably noticed) and it's
| kinda easy to be oblivious that I do this.
| WrtCdEvrydy wrote:
| Blockchains are great for one-thing... guarantee that data is
| being appended and never modified.
|
| When you want to display a record, you can aggregate the data
| historically and allow people to see changes and attribute them
| to users and time but you can always see what was originally
| added.
|
| However that's kinda risky for HR because anything committed to
| that DB will be there... forever!
| kenniskrag wrote:
| Can be removed/rewinded if you are in a shorter chain of the
| fork while the block was mined.
| mnd999 wrote:
| That's an event sourcing architecture, and something like
| Kafka will do it much better than a blockchain.
|
| The forever problem can be, ironically, resolved with crypto.
| If you encrypt each employer record with an employee key
| then, if the employee data needs to be deleted you just
| delete the key and the data is gone.
| tokamak-teapot wrote:
| How about for sharing data between semi-co-operating
| companies?
|
| One problem with sharing data between multiple parties is
| that you need somewhere central to store it, somewhere
| that's ultimately trusted. If you decide to trust one
| party, they could still make mistakes, have downtime, stop
| supporting the project that requires the shared data, or go
| rogue.
|
| I'm perhaps too ignorant of blockchain, but could it help
| with this scenario? Does it give a better promise of
| availability and more trust in its consistency and
| integrity?
|
| edit: I'm thinking here of a blockchain whose only users
| are this group of companies, not a public system. I don't
| know if a blockchain becomes useless when it is only used
| by a small group.
| kenniskrag wrote:
| Not really with crypto, if you use a a not forever secure
| crypto algo.
| mnd999 wrote:
| The usual reason for doing this is to convince auditors
| or lawyers that the system is in compliance with GDPR or
| similar legislation, not to resist the attention of three
| letter agencies. If you can say you're using industry
| standard / government approved crypto it should be fine.
| newswasboring wrote:
| This argument is equivalent to saying a data center isn't
| secure because a nuclear bomb can fall on it.
| andreareina wrote:
| That's not the full story, certificate transparency logs (and
| many other applications) achieve that without using a
| blockchain.
| yokem55 wrote:
| This is true as long as you trust the issuer of the
| transparency log to not go back and re-write the history of
| the log. That's a trust assumption that most folks are fine
| with, but it should be explicitly be understood to be
| there.
|
| A blockchain takes that trust assumption and spreads it out
| amongst the social consensus of the chain, so re-witing of
| history could only occur if there is a consensus to do so.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Who is both internal enough to get a copy of your HR
| database but external enough that their logs can't be
| changed as easily as a non-blockchain system's?
| WrtCdEvrydy wrote:
| Honestly, it might be possible to do this magic by having
| the third party issue a signing certificate based on a
| hash.
|
| Send me a hash as new data is added to your DB and I cut
| you a cert... the next cert includes hash of the last
| cert plus the new hash you just gave me...
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| An external service that signs and dates [a hash of] your
| database is very viable! But at that point there's no
| longer a distributed ledger.
| ulrikrasmussen wrote:
| Isn't the whole idea of certificate transparency to
| detect that situation? That's why the system also has
| auditors which would detect such tampering.
| acdha wrote:
| CT doesn't require anonymity: the trust in CT comes from
| the tamper-evident design creating a risk to your
| reputation if you cheat. Once you have third-party trust
| relationships you no longer benefit from the expensive
| blockchain mechanism designed to work without them.
| yokem55 wrote:
| The challenge is that if a discrepency is shown, how do
| you know who is lying? The whistleblowers or the CT log
| vendor? A consensus mechanism built on top of the log
| would be able to show the 'history of the history' to
| enable folks to make better determinations on who to
| trust or not.
| Nursie wrote:
| > Blockchains are great for one-thing... guarantee that data
| is being appended and never modified.
|
| _in a distributed, trustless fashion_
|
| If it's not distributed or trustless, you can do the same
| without the blockchain.
| namdnay wrote:
| Yeah, a git repo covers 99% of these pseudo-blockchain
| usecases
| chaxor wrote:
| A git repo _is_ a blockchain...
|
| Git is why people like blockchains so much - the value is
| clear, since it's what we interact with all day.
| ZiiS wrote:
| Git is a Merkle tree but to be a full blockchain it would
| need a consensus algorithm. Clones can add diffrent
| commits; nothing ensures they agree.
| jasmer wrote:
| " it must be blockchain because blockchains are the future."
|
| Wow, that's next level PM cringe.
|
| I'm glad you were able to jujitsu your way around it.
| namdnay wrote:
| Kind of off-topic: in what kind of weird organisation is a
| product manager dictating engineering decisions?!
| smt88 wrote:
| It was a small startup, so "product manager" wasn't a narrow
| role with clear boundaries. Their job was to bridge the
| clients and the software team, and they insisted that clients
| would jump at the chance to have a blockchain vendor.
| isolli wrote:
| They're not wrong. When a prospective client asks us if we
| do AI, we have to say yes, otherwise we will lose them on
| the spot. At least in this case it's not really wrong (we
| do machine learning).
| deanCommie wrote:
| In most of them.
|
| It's not difficult: You simply dictate requirements that can
| be only solved by one engineering solution.
|
| But that, in essence, is part of the challenge with
| blockchain. People treat it as a self-describing requirement.
| ("This must be on the blockchain") rather than a technical
| solution for a dubious set of problems most people don't
| have.
| ak_111 wrote:
| reminds me of my post where i tried to understand blockchain in
| good faith:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31132610
| underdeserver wrote:
| > [Andy Jassey] said something like this: "All these leaders
| [CIOs and CTOs of huge enterprises] are asking me what our
| blockchain strategy is. They tell me that everyone's saying it's
| the future, the platform that's going to obsolete everything
| else. I need to have a good answer for them. I'll be honest, when
| they explain why it's wonderful I just don't get it. You guys got
| to go figure it out for us."
|
| To me the tell is not just that Andy didn't understand.
|
| It's that all of these leaders said "everyone says it's the
| future", but not one of them said "I have this problem and here's
| how blockchain solves it for me."
| TrackerFF wrote:
| I recently attended a trade show, which mostly revolved around
| emerging ML/AI and other "hot" tech products in the market.
|
| So it actually seems that in the logistics line of things like
| manufacturing / production / etc. there is a place for
| blockchain, mainly due to the immutability and decentralized
| distribution properties. What could take a whole week to track
| down using older methods, takes seconds if all the data is
| recorded on the blockchain...for example, food production. You
| want to find out exactly which animal your food comes from, and
| all the things involved (use of antibiotics? which factory? how
| did the product travel before ending up at your grocery store?
| etc.).
|
| Some researchers working on these products repeated that they
| often get approached by directors and CxO level people
| regarding this - wondering if blockchain can "solve problems".
| And every time, they have to reply: Using the blockchain can
| solve _some_ specialized problems, but there 's no magic fairy
| dust involved, and it's not some general structure which will
| solve all their problems.
|
| Unfortunately, it's kind of like AI. High-level directors dream
| of General AI, but you need to explain to them that it's all ML
| models which aid (replace if you're lucky) workers, and
| automate some tasks.
|
| I think any CTO worth their salt should know these things, and
| manage the expectations of the other C-suite executives.
| Chico75 wrote:
| I'm not sure I see why or how would blockchain solve this
| information centralization problem better than other
| "classic" tools?
| masklinn wrote:
| > So it actually seems that in the logistics line of things
| like manufacturing / production / etc. there is a place for
| blockchain, mainly due to the immutability and decentralized
| distribution properties. What could take a whole week to
| track down using older methods, takes seconds if all the data
| is recorded on the blockchain...for example, food production.
| You want to find out exactly which animal your food comes
| from, and all the things involved (use of antibiotics? which
| factory? how did the product travel before ending up at your
| grocery store? etc.).
|
| Literally none of that should involve (let alone requires) a
| blockchain.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| I'm no expert on that, but we had a bunch of senior
| researchers (NGO) advocate blockchain for that exact task.
|
| I'm not going to argue against people with combined decades
| and decades of research and development experience in the
| food logistics community.
| foobiekr wrote:
| Such people latch onto trends to look smart.
|
| Then they scrub history, as most investors are doing wrt
| blockchain, when trends change.
| masklinn wrote:
| > Such people latch onto trends to look smart.
|
| Or because they figure the hype will allow them to
| finally sell (launder) the project they need to
| management.
|
| smt88's top-level comment
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33688576) is a
| thing I've seen multiple people mention.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| Using the definition of blockchain as: "A blockchain is a
| type of distributed ledger technology (DLT) that consists
| of growing list of records, called blocks, that are
| securely linked together using cryptography."
|
| Then, no, you don't need "blockchain" for that. You don't
| need it to be distributed. You don't need them to be
| linked using cryptography. In fact there are good reasons
| not to use blockchain, such as "I don't want my
| competitors seeing the exact details of my business
| transactions". I've heard, "oh but we can fix that with
| encryption", and then silence when asked "so how are you
| going to distribute those keys?" etc.
|
| Looked into this for large medical supply chain company.
| Blockchain isn't merely no use, it's actively unfit for
| purpose.
| throwoutway wrote:
| they've been talking about that agtech solution for over 5
| years and no one has built it? They could do the same with a
| database
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| A friend of mine is an economist that did a similar project
| (sans blockchain) in grad school. He set up a program to
| label fish with information about where it was caught, who
| caught it, when, how it was processed etc. Some of it on
| the package including a smiling photo of the boat owner,
| more details on the web behind a QR code/URL. He worked
| with a local chain roughly equivalent to Whole foods and
| had a cold case full of product like this in several of
| their stores.
|
| People seemed to like it when asked, but when given the
| choice to pay a premium for it vs the unlabeled fish, the
| majority declined. And this is at a store that caters to
| the whole hippies with money crowd.
|
| I think the people hawking this idea for consumers utterly
| fail to take into account that most consumers simply do not
| care about this. A non trivial portion actually do NOT want
| to know this information, similar to how some people are
| fine eating chicken but can't touch a raw one to cook it.
| masklinn wrote:
| > people hawking this idea for consumers
|
| Do people actually... do that?
|
| I struggle to think of traceability as a massive consumer
| boon, as far as I could think the primary customers of
| such would be:
|
| 1. states (regulatory agencies)
|
| 2. consumer advocacy groups
|
| 3. the corporations themselves
| diseasedyak wrote:
| I'm still trying to wrap my head around how a blockchain
| would be helpful, even in your example. How is tracking say,
| a cow, from farm to lot to slaughterhouse, and knowing what
| all was done to said cow, not simply something that could be
| done easily and fast with a database?
|
| Is the portability of the blockchain the thing? I could see
| maybe how that would help, if there wasn't a standard across
| the databases involved or something.
|
| Honestly just trying to understand, thanks!
| TrackerFF wrote:
| The problem with traceability systems comes down to
| interfacing between the various nodes. Interoperability is
| probably the largest obstacle on the road to provide a full
| farm-to-table product tracking.
|
| _Probably_ not so much of a problem for the fully
| vertically integrated companies - especially those that
| also build or control their electronic systems, but large
| parts of agriculture still consists of independent actors
| on each node.
|
| IIRC, the argument was that blockchain does not explicitly
| "solve" the problem, but rather that interoperability
| between blockchain-based systems will be easier than
| between those using completely different standards.
|
| And of course, then you have the problem that food can
| travel around the globe many times before ending up on the
| table. Which again means more trust.
| coredog64 wrote:
| A database works if you have a central authority that
| manages it and accepts inputs. I'm going to switch to a
| different animal for a better perspective.
|
| In the Pacific, tuna is caught within the EEZ of a number
| of (mostly) poor island nations. Some boats are part of the
| national fleet, but most are foreign flagged. The privilege
| to fish in an EEZ is costly, so there are a number of
| measures used to ensure that there is no cheating. The boat
| owners keep records, there are third party observers on
| board, and vessels broadcast positions. You need to cross
| check all these records, and do it in an environment
| without broadband.
|
| To make things more complicated, there are incentives
| between countries. Fishing days are a finite resource
| governed by treaties. Poor countries have an incentive to
| oversell, and it's possible to look the other way within an
| EEZ sometimes. Not only that, but countries have legitimate
| reasons for not broadcasting anything but gross yields from
| their EEZ.
|
| All of this means that there's not one central authority
| that can provide a single database.
| Karunamon wrote:
| >So it actually seems that in the logistics line of things
| like manufacturing / production / etc. there is a place for
| blockchain, mainly due to the immutability and decentralized
| distribution properties. What could take a whole week to
| track down using older methods, takes seconds if all the data
| is recorded on the blockchain...for example, food production.
| You want to find out exactly which animal your food comes
| from, and all the things involved (use of antibiotics? which
| factory? how did the product travel before ending up at your
| grocery store? etc.).
|
| The usual shitty dismissive HN response to this would be
| something like "but that doesn't require a block chain it
| could just be a database".
|
| To those people I would ask who is running that database?
| What are their incentives?
|
| Forget about the currency uses of block chains for a moment.
| The fact that you have this distributed network, controlled
| by nobody in particular but with their incentives aligned to
| keep it running and keep it secure, means that you have a
| platform you can build other stuff on top of.
|
| An Ethereum smart contract is a type of append only database,
| the code of which is strongly open source and very battle
| tested (basically everyone is using openzeppelin), where you
| do not have to care about where or by who it is being hosted,
| with an uptime that puts every hosting provider in existence
| today to shame.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Published transparency records work without blockchains.
| Certificate Transparency is an example of a project that does
| this without all the mess of blockchains. And that also works
| well because it operates on purely digital things - once you
| start having to unify a physical object with a digital record
| all the usual supply-chain-management problems re-emerge.
| FlacoJones wrote:
| most of the problems blockchain attempts to solve are public
| coordination problems in adversarial environments rather than
| corporate problems the CTOs/CIOs are likely to have.
| time_to_smile wrote:
| I think one of the hardest parts of becoming an expert in a
| technical area is the transition from "I don't understand so
| _I_ must be wrong " to "I don't understand so _something_ must
| be wrong or I 'm not seeing something".
|
| When you're more junior you often make the mistake of wrongly
| dismissing ideas because you think you are very clever. I find
| that by the time you unlearn this, you typically should reverse
| direction.
|
| Early in my career, every time something didn't make sense,
| it's because _I_ had a misunderstanding of how things really
| worked.
|
| Much later in my career I started to realize more and more
| often when I said "this doesn't make sense" I would start
| assuming I was the one missing something, only to time and time
| again uncover some one else had messed up or that something
| else was fundamentally wrong.
|
| Obviously even the most expert in their field should reserve
| some probability that they are misunderstanding, but learning
| to recognize that you are an expert and that you not
| understanding something is in fact _smoke_ is an important late
| career skill.
| vl wrote:
| Everyone uses Git by day and then moans how blockchain in not
| useful by night.
|
| Specific technologies have specific applications. Blockchains in
| general - immutable history. Crypto blockchains - consensus in
| untrusted environment. Just use given technology for what it's
| designed for, and stop being full of yourself.
| simonw wrote:
| We understand the difference between a proof-of-
| work/stake/waste blockchain and a merkel tree.
|
| Do you?
| Nursie wrote:
| If we're including git in 'blockchain' now then that changes
| the nature of the discussion. But we both know that systems
| like git are not what's being talked about here.
|
| > Just use given technology for what it's designed for, and
| stop being full of yourself.
|
| The point is that there has been hype after hype after hype
| about "blockchain" revolutionising damn near everything for
| years and so far it has failed to deliver on this. It's not
| wrong to call the phenomenon out for what it is.
| pabe wrote:
| People saying a database is as good as a blockchain are taking a
| look from the wrong perspective.
|
| Blockchains are more like always available, immutable logs for
| interfacing parties that don't trust each other or an
| intermediary.
|
| Blockchains are more like an API than a database.
| j0hnM1st wrote:
| Blockchains normally has a database and then an API. Many of
| the newer chains uses Rocksdb.
| matai_kolila wrote:
| So is the fundamental problem with blockchain, as described here
| anyway, that you can basically do all of the cool parts of
| blockchain that people get excited about, but using a central
| service instead?
|
| I feel like I don't really understand that, because wouldn't that
| mean you'd have to re-solve a lot of problems on your own, with
| your own team? Wouldn't it be easier to figure out how to plug
| blockchain into this central service instead?
| aniijbod wrote:
| Ironic that CBDC systems are being built on a technology
| exclusively aimed at eliminating the C in that acronym.
| pjkundert wrote:
| How so?
|
| Central Bank Digital Currencies are being implemented
| _exclusively_ on systems that allow the "Central" authority to
| absolutely ensure that _nobody except_ that central authority
| can control every transaction in those ledgers.
|
| And I don't think you meant the "C" in "Currency".
| aniijbod wrote:
| > Ironic that CBDC systems are being built on a technology
| exclusively aimed at eliminating the C in that acronym.
|
| Thanks Pjkundert, you're correct I should have said 'first
| C".
|
| What I meant was that it was ironic that CBDCs are being
| constructed using systems that use blockchain, i.e.,
| centralised systems, designed to deliver centralised
| currencies, based upon technology exclusively designed to
| deliver decentralised currencies.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| from a developer perspective, "smart contract" platforms are very
| unique and cheap
|
| pay to write once and never pay again at any level of traffic,
| customers pay. no SaaS service offers this
|
| developers bring their whole communities to that platform and
| this keeps happening
|
| you know whats most important? _I don't care what the underlying
| consensus model or blockchain is, or whether there is one at all_
| , but there is no [meaningful] smart contract platform operating
| any other way, and I don't care about that being the case either.
| but the equilibrium in consensus mechanisms are why it is this
| way.
|
| its cheaper for developers and as far as customer acquisition and
| convincing a customer to pay, it is a highly optimized version of
| the web 2.0 funnel, as every call-to-action _is_ a payment
|
| the development stack is dead simple - frontend website with a
| single call-to-action (possible even a static site), and a few
| variables stored in a smart contract - and the customers already
| want to pay
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| Proof-of-Waste :)
|
| Anyone got a good one for Proof-of-Stake.
| rank0 wrote:
| Plutocracy
| hanniabu wrote:
| If it's Ethereum's Proof of Stake then the word is perfection
| ex3ndr wrote:
| Very big article that basically buried the core difference: zero
| trust or some "trusted transaction manager".
|
| Moving from the second to the first is very trivial - just make
| it based on distributed consensus of nodes that are run by
| separate entities, may be even several different cloud vendors.
|
| AWS also doesn't have some interesting things from crypto-world -
| smart contracts, that are just like lambda functions that
| couldn't be altered in any way and could be trusted by third-
| party. They have Nitro Enclaves, this is close, but quite hard to
| use.
| runeks wrote:
| Blockchain was invented to solve one particular problem:
| distributed consensus on a sequence of transactions, where the
| choice of which transaction to include from a set of conflicting
| transactions is irrelevant.
|
| The latter property here is key to understanding where blockchain
| is useful. It was created to solve the "double spend problem",
| ie. two transitions that spend the same coin but send it to
| different recipients (and so they conflict and cannot both be
| included in the canonical list of transactions). A double spend
| is the result of the sender either (a) making a mistake, or (b)
| attempting fraud. In both cases the important property is that as
| long as only a single of these conflicting transactions is
| included, the systems works.
|
| Only if your problem exhibits the above property ( _and_ it 's a
| distributed system) does using a blockchain make sense.
| louwrentius wrote:
| What real life use case - that resonates with regular people -
| would this solve?
|
| Isn't Blockchain just a convoluted solution to a problem nobody
| has?
|
| (Which is the conclusion of the article)
| oblio wrote:
| > What real life use case - that resonates with regular
| people - would this solve?
|
| The problem that some people really, really hate authority,
| and frankly, really hate other people, and would like a
| magical machine to do away with all that messiness.
|
| So they put a million barriers between themselves and that
| messiness and hope it all works out in the end.
|
| It's like a sort of niche religion.
|
| After the first believers announced their faith, a much, much
| larger group of grifters realized that they could shout:
| "FREEDOM! PROFIT! FREEDOM! PROFIT!" and make a ton of money.
|
| Like a real religion, basically, just read up about incense
| and Christianity to see the real believer versus grifter
| dichotomy happen in another case.
|
| Anyway, so here we are now :-)
| louwrentius wrote:
| Oh that's totally what I observe.
|
| Crypto really incentivizes terrible, predatory behavior. A
| lot of scamming or other criminal behavior. But that's not
| the kind of use case I'm looking for.
|
| Obviously I want something beneficial and legal. I don't
| believe there is any.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Assuming people who think differently to you must be mostly
| motivated by hatred works well for a Taylor Swift song, but
| it's just about the worst way to think of other
| perspectives and ideas.
| oblio wrote:
| Replace hate with "are mildly inconvenienced by", if it
| makes you feel better :-)
|
| It doesn't change the fact that the whole idea here is to
| replace human judgment with algorithms, with little
| thought into how the technology will actually be used by
| humans.
|
| Trick question.
|
| Let's say I'm not tech savvy. I can barely use my iPhone,
| I'm frequently confused by Instagram UI updates.
|
| > Bitcoin
|
| > Initial release 0.1.0 / 9 January 2009 (13 years ago)
|
| How can I buy Bitcoin, sell it, use it to buy things with
| it, 13 years after the fact, in a decentralized fashion,
| just as Satoshi Nakamoto-sama originally intended?
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > if it makes you feel better
|
| Just to be completely clear, it's not about how I'm
| feeling, just as people disagreeing with you not meaning
| they feel hatred.
| oblio wrote:
| This is an internet forum, I'm just commenting, I reserve
| my right to make over the top comments loaded with
| scandalous language :-)
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| You can just solve this with locking or a (self referencing)
| unique foreign key constraint on any mainstream SQL db though.
| If we include programming langues as well, the possible amount
| of solutions multiplies.
| Vespasian wrote:
| As the article's author says at some point society is always
| built on trust in another entity.
|
| Crypto fully shifts this from the database operator to the
| software developer and is willing to accept significant trade
| offs to do so.
|
| Most of the unique complexity and challenges in blockchain
| technology originates from this.
| bredren wrote:
| The author also says all of the implementations he
| witnessed were reliant on databases and did not require the
| unique complexity and challenges of the blockchain.
| delaaxe wrote:
| Whether or not the underlying storage mechanism uses a
| database is not the point.
|
| The point is who can edit that database and under which
| rules (imagine that database holds a lot of your money
| and you live in an oppressive regime).
| dmitriid wrote:
| > imagine that database holds a lot of your money and you
| live in an oppressive regime
|
| That opressive regime holds:
|
| - your access to the internet (crypto requires continuous
| access to internet to function)
|
| - your access to exchange offices because crypto is
| useless if it cannot be converted to fiat
|
| So, what exactly have you solved?
| Karunamon wrote:
| Point 2 is strictly false, crypto can be exchanged for
| goods or services on its own.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > Point 2 is strictly false, crypto can be exchanged for
| goods or services on its own.
|
| In dreams, maybe. In _reality_ there are vanishingly few
| goods or services that can be exchanged for crypto. For
| obvious reasons immediately obvious to anyone who could
| care to think about the supply chain for more than 30
| seconds [2].
|
| This is especially true for oppressive governments where
| the use of crypto is grounds for criminal persecution [1]
|
| [1] E.g. https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-
| journalists-alexei...
|
| [2] Let's say you buy bread from a shop. That shop has to
| pay salaries, rent, pay suppliers of flour, spice, herbs.
| Those suppliers have to pay their salaries and their
| suppliers. The owner of the place who rents out to the
| shop needs to pay for his stuff.
|
| Almost no one in this chain accepts payments in crypto.
| So even if the shop accepts payments in crypto, they need
| to convert it to fiat. So the shop's question becomes: is
| it worth the hassle? in the absolute vast majority of
| cases the answer is "no".
| Karunamon wrote:
| https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoin/who-accepts/
|
| Apparently, I must be dreaming this entire list. Now, to
| head off what will certainly be a response absolutely
| loaded with special pleading and/or strawmen, the claim
| was "crypto can be exchanged for goods and services on
| its own". Provided was a rather substantial, yet not
| exhaustive, list of merchants of various sizes which
| accept one kind of crypto in exchange for goods and
| services. QED.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > Apparently, I must be dreaming this entire list.
|
| I'll say this again: "In reality there are vanishingly
| few goods or services that can be exchanged for crypto."
|
| > Provided was a rather substantial, yet not exhaustive,
| list of merchants
|
| So. What started with "money in oppressive regimes"
| became:
|
| here's a list of companies in first-world countries many
| which at one point played with crypto, but now:
|
| - don't accept crypto anymore due to its volatility or
| for other reasons (many links no longer work or don't
| list crypto as payment: Wikipedia, Microsoft etc.)
|
| - actually accept payments in fiat provided by an
| external exchange because the need actual fiat (AT&T,
| everyone else who uses BitPay)
|
| - don't accept crypto because it was a limited time
| marketing gimmick (KFC in Canada, and this is written
| directly in the list)
|
| - don't exist as a company anymore if they existed at all
| (do not search, or open, Lumfile the cloud-based service
| at work)
|
| This leaves us with, again, "vanishingly few goods or
| services that can be exchanged for crypto" because
| reality doesn't care for your dreams.
|
| > QED.
|
| QED indeed
| Karunamon wrote:
| An even cursory reading of the list does not disqualify
| all, or even most of them, so not sure what you're
| getting at. This is childish nit picking at this point,
| anyone who wants to actually spend bitcoin will have no
| trouble finding a place to do so.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > An even cursory reading of the list does not disqualify
| all
|
| Did i ever say _all_. Read what I write, not what you
| _think_ I write.
|
| For the fourth time: vanishingly few goods or services
| that can be exchanged for crypto
|
| > anyone who wants to actually spend bitcoin will have no
| trouble finding a place to do so.
|
| A very small amount of services catering mostly to first
| world. Since you're incapable of following context or
| understanding what your opponent writes, i will not
| engage in this conversation further.
|
| Adieu.
| miracle2k wrote:
| > So, what exactly have you solved?
|
| _Ownership_ of your funds, which is the primary
| requirement from which all others stem. You will still
| have those when you regain access to the internet, or the
| ability to spend them.
|
| The reality is that a government having the ability to
| confiscate the funds in your bank account, and attempting
| to restrict you and your neighbours peer to peer actions,
| personal mobility or internet access are totally
| different things. This sort black and white thinking
| provides lacks a valuable analysis of actual power
| structures. No one claims your crypto currency will
| protect you from a bullet.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > > So, what exactly have you solved?
|
| > _Ownership_ of your funds
|
| Nope, ownership is law. The problem you've mitigated (but
| not solved) is _the ability to retain possession of your
| funds_.
|
| > The reality is that a government having the ability to
| confiscate the funds in your bank account, and attempting
| to restrict you and your neighbours peer to peer actions,
| personal mobility or internet access are totally
| different things.
|
| They are motivated on rely on very much the same social
| conditions, they are not "totally different things", and
| they are even less different the more it becomes
| necessary for the government to do the latter in order to
| achieve the effect of the former.
|
| > No one claims your crypto currency will protect you
| from a bullet.
|
| The capacity and willingness to use a bullet to
| effectuate their will for that end is what enables a
| government to drain your money from a bank; it may be
| masked and may not be immediately evident in the
| mechanics they use to do it in practice, because the time
| and repetition and institutionalization has routinized
| and streamlined the process. But, at root, its _all_ the
| bullet.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > Ownership of your funds,
|
| Which ends the moment that oppressive government makes
| you give up your keys.
|
| > This sort black and white thinking provides lacks a
| valuable analysis of actual power structures.
|
| The "blockchain is godsend for oppressive governments" is
| the sort of non-thinking that is currently unsurprising
| for most crypto enthusiasts pushing it while completely
| ignoring (or plain not knowing) the realities.
| netfortius wrote:
| I am sorry, but I think I am missing something here: isn't the
| "double spend problem" actually needing to be resolved by the
| choice of including one specific transaction (and no others),
| from a set of conflicting ones, truly relevant (vs.
| irrelevant)?
| nosianu wrote:
| The point is that it does not matter which one is included,
| only that it's only one of the choices that all agree on.
| Which one that is is not relevant, there is no part of the
| algorithm that determines one transaction to be "more valid"
| than another one. There is no ranking of transactions, one of
| them has to be picked but which one it is can be random, as
| long as there is agreement.
|
| Also see the response from and sub-thread from _uncletammy_.
| mhluongo wrote:
| There are certainly tx validity rules, though, and when
| presented with a set of equally valid txs, miners will
| likely choose the one that is best for them (called "MEV",
| miner extractable value).
| nosianu wrote:
| Neither the OP or me said there are no rules and they
| have to use an RNG to make a decision, only that it does
| not matter. That they then go and use an algorithm that
| maximizes their profits is only to be expected and the
| rational outcome from the fact that there is no other
| constraint from the technical algorithm.
| mhluongo wrote:
| Just sharing for general interest / awareness, not as a
| "gotcha".
|
| Though I will point out...
|
| > only that it does not matter
|
| ... that this isn't true! MEV can destabilize consensus.
| There's been research around this in the
| Bitcoin/Lightning ecosystem, and it's been an active
| discussion in Ethereum for quite a while.
| paulgb wrote:
| Yes, a specific transaction needs to be chosen as the
| consensus transaction. But if there are multiple to choose
| from (e.g. in the case of an attempted double spend), the
| miner can choose either one.
|
| The blockchain doesn't guarantee, for example, that the
| transaction which appeared earlier will always be chosen (in
| practice, it's likely the one with the highest transaction
| fee)
| Nursie wrote:
| IIRC there were some hacks on bitcoin ATMs using this sort
| of knowledge.
|
| The attacker would set up a withdrawal of (IIRC) CAD on the
| ATM, then transfer the bitcoin. The ATM would see the
| transaction, and dispense the cash. However the attacker
| would immediately, before the next block was generated,
| send the same BTC to another address which they controlled,
| with a higher fee. The miner would discard the first one
| and roll the update into a new block.
|
| I may have one or two of the details wrong (is there an
| explicit way in the bitcoin protocol to mark a transaction
| as superseding a previous one?), but anyway, like many
| things, it worked until they got caught.
| FabHK wrote:
| ATMs would dispense actual cash when a transaction enters
| the mempool without waiting for (say) 6 confirmations?
| That seems like a pretty egregious design choice even a
| decade ago. If that story is true, the ATM designers
| merited the loss.
| Nursie wrote:
| https://thenextweb.com/news/double-spenders-
| scam-150000-bitc...
|
| 2018, and yes, it seems like the Bitcoin arms were
| dispensing cache as soon as a valid transaction but the
| mempool.
| uncletammy wrote:
| Although I take slight issue with how you've worded it, I think
| I'm in agreement. I'll attempt to add clarification to the
| parts I find difficult to parse.
|
| Blockchains only ensure that coins are never spent twice. They
| make no attempts to ensure that coins are sent to the correct
| recipients. At the end of the block, they only care that debits
| are equal to credits.
|
| This can be confusing because the term "double spend" is also
| frequently used in cryptocurrency in the context of fraud
| prevention. In this context, you definitely do care that the
| coins get to the correct recipients but this concern is outside
| of the functional scope of the blockchain mechanism.
|
| Instead, fraud prevention is typically satisfied through
| additional code, adjacent to the "blockchain stuff", which
| establishes signaling networks and transaction inclusion
| criteria.
|
| They're very different mechanisms inside blockchain clients
| but, confusingly, they both make frequent use of the term
| "double spend".
| bongobingo1 wrote:
| > Blockchains only ensure that coins are never spent twice.
| They make no attempts to ensure that coins are sent to the
| correct recipients. At the end of the block, they only care
| that debits are equal to credits.
|
| I know the origin is tightly linked to bitcoin, but I feel
| like even this muddies the definition.
|
| Blockchains are not implicitly related to "coins", more
| facts? contracts? Maybe that's a useless nit to pick, or only
| useful in this thread where the GP was trying to layout where
| blockchains are useful (eg: distributed facts - that happen
| to often be wealth transfer).
|
| Or do I have it all wrong? I admit to not having much
| experience with them, but from the few random (non-btc) meet
| up groups talks I saw a decade ago, it was all about
| consensus more than anything. Ironically before the current
| NFT craze, the talk I remember most was one about using NFTs
| to authenticate stuff like (non-programatically-generated)
| album/artwork ownership and allowing users to resell in a
| second hand digital market.
|
| I assume you could build a mastodon like that distributes and
| "authenticates" posts via a blockchain - perhaps with
| terrible performance though.
| andrewaylett wrote:
| The novelty of Blockchain is that it's a way for everyone
| to agree about which blocks are _in_ the chain, such that
| we 're confident everyone won't change their minds later.
| The content of the blocks is irrelevant to the consensus,
| in which every participant will independently pick the
| longest valid chain it can see.
|
| (In other words: yes, you've got it exactly right, but
| there _are_ some details around incentives that tie
| creation of blocks to receiving some kind of benefit which
| mean that in practice _someone_ will reduce things to money
| at some point)
| uncletammy wrote:
| > Blockchains are not implicitly related to "coins" ...
|
| That was definitely an oversimplification, and a slightly
| wrong one at that. In bitcoin, there isn't actually a
| concept of "coins". Just transactions which spend numbered
| UTXOs.
|
| If I'm remembering correctly, the term "block chain" came
| from a conversation between Hal Finney and Satoshi Nakamoto
| about Bitcoin. If so, one could argue that it IS implicitly
| related to cryptocurrency.
|
| That being said, the underlying "block chain" data
| structure is just an alteration of a previously existing
| data structure called a Merkle Tree which has data blocks
| that can be used for things that are not transaction data.
|
| Blocks in a blockchain have a payload section reserved for
| transaction data. Theoretically you could put anything in
| the payload section but if you're calling the data
| structure a blockchain, people are probably going to expect
| transactions in it.
|
| > I assume you could build a mastodon like that distributes
| and "authenticates" posts via a blockchain - perhaps with
| terrible performance though.
|
| This has already been done many times actually and it's
| quite impressive. Basically, a cryptocurrency full node is
| modified to serve as a social client and an appropriate
| user interface is built on top. The mechanism by which
| cryptocurrency transactions are shared with other
| validating nodes is the very thing that keeps user's
| "streams" updated and in sync.
|
| It has some major drawbacks but performance doesn't have to
| be one of them. With UTXO based blockchains like bitcoin,
| the "mempool" portion of the client code receives
| transactions containing social data embedded within. This
| means they are able to show the social media content
| immediately upon it being sent, even if the transactions
| containing that data have yet to be included in a block.
| One problem though, is that like transaction data, the
| social data doesn't get "finalized" until it's included
| then mined in a block. So you'd be able to see the messages
| in your feed but the content might change ten minutes later
| after it's finalized.
|
| In my opinion, the Achilles heel of blockchain based social
| media is the Achilles heel of so many otherwise brilliant
| technologies: "What is someone uses it for child porn?"
|
| Otherwise, most of the other drawbacks can be dealt with.
| atypeoferror wrote:
| Maybe I am a confused luddite, but it seems telling that this
| argument immediately launches into the solution space of a
| problem that is itself created by the presence of a blockchain.
|
| Double-spend has been solved by the financial sector quite some
| time ago. The distributed system part - I guess this is the
| problem that I think the article is claiming is yet to be
| found.
| politician wrote:
| > Double-spend has been solved by the financial sector.
|
| Traditional finance offers "at-most-one spend"while
| blockchain protocols offer "one spend up to 1/3 malicious
| nodes".
|
| The limit on the former is government, and Byzantine Fault
| Tolerance sets the limit on the latter.
|
| Government can unilaterally seize "your" funds in traditional
| banking, while a substantial computational attack is required
| to cause a loss of confidence event (double spend) on a
| particular blockchain.
| arethuza wrote:
| Can't governments force people to hand over control of
| their keys?
| Karunamon wrote:
| They can't guarantee that there is only one set of keys.
| They are just files after all.
| arethuza wrote:
| Doesn't seem to stop organisations like the FBI from
| "seizing" Bitcoins?
|
| e.g.
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/07/feds-
| seize-3point36-billion-...
| Karunamon wrote:
| Yep, this is called poor opsec. Had this person had
| someone else with a copy of that wallet's keys, they
| could have been moved before this happened.
| arethuza wrote:
| If you have to rely on someone else with a copy of your
| keys then isn't _that_ poor opsec?
| Karunamon wrote:
| If you are in a position where losing access to a
| significant amount of money due to the actions of the
| state are likely, would it not make sense to have a
| backup plan?
| yourabstraction wrote:
| I think the confusion is the parent is talking about an
| implementation detail (blockchain), rather than the main
| problem cryptocurrency actually solves. Cryptocurrency solves
| for internet based financial sovereignty. Whether or not you
| think that's important to the world is a different
| discussion.
| api wrote:
| There is one other case where a structure like a block chain
| can make sense. It's an easy way to build an unalterable log.
| If you give me hash 200000 in the chain I know that log entries
| 0-200000 are all unaltered.
|
| This is perhaps the simplest easiest use case for a hash based
| linked list. Of course this is not the complete picture of what
| cryptocurrencies are; the hash list is just part of the system.
| iterateofen wrote:
| That tech exists without blockchain in a distributed way.
| Look at Git or GitHub.
|
| Saying that is a unique feature or reason to use blockchain
| is similar to saying blockchain can add two numbers together
| so we should use it to build a calculator.
| humanizersequel wrote:
| Then you're just trusting Github, and they don't have a
| perfect track record on neutrality:
|
| https://www.jessesquires.com/blog/2022/04/19/github-
| suspendi...
| TimJRobinson wrote:
| I used to think this, but working with DeFi on Ethereum for a
| while I've realized the killer feature is actually
| permissionless composability. Which is why enterprise block
| chains make little sense.
|
| Having one neutral platform, controlled by no one, with
| standardized API's and immutable open programs that anyone can
| permissionlessly build on - is amazing.
|
| We've never had this before, and it's incredible how fast the
| DeFi space is moving because of it. I work for a platform
| (Balancer) that has had over 20 different companies (Aave,
| Element, CopperLaunch, Gyro, Aura, Hidden Hand) build financial
| applications on top of our tech stack in the last 2 years.
|
| Then there are different wallets (Metamask, Rainbow, Ledger),
| aggregators (1inch, Matcha, 0x), portfolio management tools
| (Zapper, Zerion, DeFi Saver).
|
| All of these work with each other mostly out of the box and
| without any formal partnerships between anyone. This is a
| radical new way of building finance and it's the fastest paced
| industry I've ever been a part of.
|
| It's similar to AWS where it got exponentially more valuable as
| each new service was added - but the entire world can
| contribute to it. Like AWS people didn't understand the value
| initially, but over time they realized how big of a deal it was
| as more and more components were added.
| [deleted]
| pjkundert wrote:
| You're dead on. It's staggering in its power --
| permissionless composability, even if most of the data is not
| on-chain, and the programs are very limited in
| size/complexity due to the expense of running them.
|
| Now, imagine a system where all of the data is also on-chain,
| and the programs you can compose are full-complexity
| applications... All while maintaining every independent
| program's data invariant in a completely decentralized
| manner, with transaction rates that grow linearly with the
| DHT size.
|
| Such a system is now in public beta. It could be world-
| changing (at least for programmers).
| daveguy wrote:
| How is permissionless composability different from the MIT
| license? I'm confused what you're composing now that you
| couldn't before and the benefit of that permissionless
| composability. Ecosystems of programming libraries and
| compostable abstractions don't require a blockchain as far
| as I can tell.
| pjkundert wrote:
| It's like the MIT license, plus AWS with an unlimited
| account and auto-scaling.
|
| In the case of self-hosted Apps (ie. where you need to
| "install" something on your phone or computer), each peer
| provides their own compute/storage/networking to host
| their own usage of the App, plus a small fragment of
| everyone else's usage (proportional to a few average
| user's worth).
|
| So, the cost to each user is a small constant C times the
| average user's utilization. And the benefit is that the
| application persists, in its entirety, as long as any
| number of users >= 1 continue to use the App.
| hestefisk wrote:
| It's not really an unlimited account. Execution on eth is
| expensive...
| pjkundert wrote:
| Yes, in the case of Ethereum "DeFi", the end user is
| expected to pay the (significant) cost of executing
| functionality.
|
| For next-gen "DeFi" systems like Holochain -- the
| incremental cost of executing functionality is
| vanishingly small, and can be distributed across a DHT
| substrate hosted by _all_ users of the App.
|
| A self hosted Holochain "DeFi" app costs a small constant
| factor C times the average agent's memory / network /
| storage cost, to each client.
|
| In other words, you gain the benefit of the "DeFi"
| version of App for yourself, by investing a small C x
| your own cost to run the App for yourself, alone.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| It's like AWS serverless compute with inefficiency built-
| in as a feature and a jacked-up billing rate.
| daveguy wrote:
| This concept is very interesting. Is there an existing
| framework that implements this? It would seem there would
| need to be some baseline tools for development on such a
| system.
|
| I feel like the tools available for this purpose would
| need to be more powerful than existing IDE systems in
| order for it to be adopted on a wide scale.
|
| Is it possible to design such a system without a
| blockchain?
| scyclow wrote:
| The big difference is that a smart contract is a running,
| stateful, immutable piece of software. Alternatively, I
| can run software with an MIT license by myself, but I can
| always modify the data or API without any approval of the
| users.
| daveguy wrote:
| This is interesting. Essentially a reference piece of
| software where anyone on the network can run the exact
| same bits (assuming they have compatible hardware). But
| also the ability to extend or compose where the new
| system will also have a reference identity.
|
| This may have use in defining standards. You could have a
| standards authority without any actual standards body.
| Free but standard.
| meltedcapacitor wrote:
| In practice almost every vaguely live protocol has god
| mode where some "Sam" can upgrade the contract to
| whatever they want, because bug risk in immutable
| contracts is too high (VCs who fund the projects don't
| want to be sued for bugs). So this becomes functionally
| equivalent to a SQL server just slow and taking 100x the
| server capacity.
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| What's the use case for this? I'm not seeing it.
| pjkundert wrote:
| OK, I've always considered these types of questions as
| disingenuous. But, enough people seem to disagree.
|
| So, at risk of stating the obvious:
|
| - Avoid risk of accidental/malicious deplatforming
|
| - Personal control of all data, avoiding
| incompetence/malfeasance presenting faulty data
|
| - Deploying enhanced presentation of existing
| functionality and data cannot be restricted
|
| - Reuse of existing functionality in private environments
| can't be prevented
|
| - Guarantee that results based on trees of publicly
| committed data are themselves valid, without personally
| traversing the tree and recomputing results
|
| - ...
|
| As I write this, I'm struggling to comprehend how these
| benefits aren't obvious.
|
| Maybe it's because I've been searching for solutions to
| these problems since the early 90's for distributed
| industrial control and monitoring. But seriously, I'm
| certain lots of developers run into these constraints and
| are seeking solutions.
| duped wrote:
| Absolutely none of this is obvious.
| pjkundert wrote:
| What does "permissionless composability" in DeFi mean, if
| not this?
|
| Sure, its very expensive presently under the Ethereum
| version of "DeFi". Just like the original motorcar was
| expensive and fragile, and would break your arm
| occasionally while you crank-started it.
|
| Now, if the cost basis of each "DeFi" transaction is
| reduced by 5 orders of magnitude (see: Ethereum vs.
| Holochain) -- what are the potential outcomes of that?
| duped wrote:
| I have no idea what "permissionless composability" means.
| "Permissionless" isn't even a word (without permission or
| permission-less to be pedantic), and I can think of
| several overlapping contexts that those words could be
| meaningful in finance and/or software.
|
| The problem is the language you're using sounds like
| bullshit.
| pjkundert wrote:
| Ah, sorry! Mea culpa. Permissioned vs. permissionless
| systems has been used for so long in my circles that I
| thought it was a thing...
|
| Even "DeFi" systems may not be permissionless, though.
| It's just that the permissions are visible constraints
| (ie. in the code) -- not just randos deciding to
| deplatform you because, you know, "reasons".
|
| This is an emerging risk to eg. Ethereum. Now, most
| "Staking" validators are "OFAC compliant". Does this mean
| that eventually the Ethereum blockchain will orphan any
| wallet that contains any Eth that went through the
| Tornado Cash mixer?
|
| What if you decided to compose the Tornado Cash mixer
| into your payment app, to maintain some anonymity in the
| face of a repressive regime say throwing gay people off
| roof tops? Would you consider a permissionless system
| bad, in that case? Because, OFAC decrees that you are
| currently a criminal (and guilty without charge or trial)
| if you do so. What if they decide, next week, that
| whatever you _do_ presently use is now _verboten_?
|
| So, these concepts aren't "bullshit"; they are a present,
| serious concern to free peoples around the globe.
| duped wrote:
| Just a meta note, what I'm saying is that you need to
| work on your communication. This reply is logically
| disjoint and succumbs to the problem that I was
| mentioning - the use of imprecise and confusing language
| or jargon. If you combine that with jumps to conclusions
| and pretend certain things are self-evident, it sounds
| like bullshit. It's how hucksters talk.
|
| I didn't say that what you were talking about was
| bullshit. I said the language you used made it sound like
| it.
| pjkundert wrote:
| A specific application I'm working on right now involves
| using Crypto for direct payments between software
| Licensees (end users) and the App developer.
|
| Presently, there is a high risk of loss of income (see:
| every small individual Russian or Iranian software
| developer. Their families are now suffering because their
| income has been shut off, even though this is a textbook
| example of "Group Punishment" under the Geneva
| Convention. If I had decided to send some of my company's
| income to the Canadian "Freedom Convoy", my family's
| income would also have also been summarily cut off,
| without trial or conviction in a court of law).
|
| So, like it or not: there are innocent individual who,
| due to no fault of their own, cannot use "TradFi" --
| "DeFi" is their only alternative to achieve an income to
| care for their families.
|
| Using a trivial Ethereum Smart Contract, a single-use
| Ethereum wallet address is generated for a set of payees
| (eg. the software author(s) and any number of other
| license fee recipients) designated to receive a
| proportion of an Ethereum fee payment. When the payment
| is received at the designated address -- the software
| License is generated, and _any_ one of the payees can
| trigger the "smart contract" executing distribution of
| the fees to each of the payees' accounts, without being
| able to change the proportional distribution.
|
| _None_ of this is possible under "TradFi". All of it
| (except for the automatic generation of the License) is
| possible under Ethereum "DeFi". _The entire application_
| (including automatic, atomic generation of the License
| and distribution of fees) is possible under Holochain.
|
| In all honesty -- whenever I hear "Crypto is a solution
| in search of a problem", I really have trouble not
| rolling my eyes. Perhaps that's not nice. But seriously;
| if you're here on HN, I have higher expectations of you.
| If you're enraged by this; perhaps there may be other
| forums more appropriate for you?
|
| :)
| Erikun wrote:
| In my opinion, removing the last paragraph would improve
| your post immensely. It would be a shame if the post got
| downvoted to oblivion because of it.
| pjkundert wrote:
| I agree.
|
| But, my last 30 years of _laissez faire_ has resulted in
| forums like HN becoming toxic with smug "Crypto is a
| solution in search of a problem" and "told ya Crypto was
| all a scam, yer dumb" Bros, yelling low-research insults
| without _anyone_ pushing back on them...
|
| So, I'll leave it. If only the "Eternal September" crowd
| is allowed to be comfortable here (because we all just
| "let them have their opinion", as usual), we know what
| happens.
| boredtofears wrote:
| > In all honesty -- whenever I hear "Crypto is a solution
| in search of a problem", I really have trouble not
| rolling my eyes.
|
| ..and some of us can't help but roll our eyes when we
| hear yet another crypto use case being skirting
| government laws / regulations.
| kristjansson wrote:
| So ... circumventing sanctions?
| elysian-breeze wrote:
| Defi doesn't solve this at all. It is currently illegal
| for me and a lot of the world to buy software from Iran
| and Russia. Using blockchain to circumvent the law is the
| only use case people can scrape together.
|
| It doesn't matter if blockchain allows you to break the
| law. You are still breaking the law and punishments
| exists outside of the chain.
|
| Blockchain enthusiasts get confused between "a solution"
| and a "better solution". A car with an airplane propeller
| engine is technically a solution that solves a use case
| of getting a person from point a to point b, but is it
| the best solution when compared to current cars? Right
| now the crypto industry is slapping all sorts of stuff on
| and then just because their car makes it down the street,
| suddenly they think somebody in africa who never had a
| car before will want it.
|
| The use case you describe has been beaten over and over
| in crypto over the past 5-7 years. DRM. Its old news. But
| no major company wants anything to do with it. Its a
| social problem not a technical one.
|
| Blockchain is an engineers wet dream. Infinite solutions
| that make theoretical sense and the math works, but lack
| any way to solve the current problems better.
| pjkundert wrote:
| Unfortunately, while many people believe this to be true
| -- there is nothing legally or morally wrong with you
| purchasing software from a small Russian or Iranian
| software developer. How do we know this, you ask?
|
| In fact, the entire Open Source (and most Closed Source)
| stacks depend on this fact, including the stacks
| underlying the entire US Government's (and its
| Military's) operations. Which functions on large amounts
| of software (free and paid) from Russian individual
| developers.
|
| So, any demand by them (or any other government) that
| _you_ personally cannot pay Yegor the Russian for his
| little Python package is morally, logically, legally and
| practically ridiculous.
|
| And "DeFi" absolutely _does_ solve this problem.
|
| The fact that "all the baaaad people" can _also_ use
| "DeFi" is immaterial. Just like you, too, can buy and use
| a windowless white van.
| elysian-breeze wrote:
| > morally, logically, legally and practically ridiculous.
|
| Well i mean thats your opinion not the facts. There is a
| whole web of regulations when dealing with those
| countries and if they are allowed to buy from you.
|
| There are even more laws around money movement and debt
| and financing.
|
| Just declaring "it shouldnt be that way. it is unfair"
| doesn't change the laws.
| mosdl wrote:
| Someone still has to convert the Eth to local currency
| for the person to have an income no? The dev has to find
| someone willing to exchange local currency for the eth -
| same as if someone had gifted a video game skin and now
| has to find someone to exchange it to local currency.
| habinero wrote:
| None of those are things people care about, though,
| outside of a tiny niche.
|
| Most people find it pretty easy to avoid getting kicked
| off social media, and even if they do, it doesn't affect
| them.
|
| Likewise, "personal control of data" is meaningless. It's
| not like you can prevent people from taking the data and
| doing things with it.
|
| I struggle to think of any actual use cases for your last
| three points that don't boil down to FUD.
|
| Blockchain is neat, but it has no real use outside of
| extracting money from other people involuntarily.
| pjkundert wrote:
| At this very moment, reasonable people are debating the
| very real possibility that Twitter could be removed from
| both the Apple and Google app stores.
|
| So, doesn't that astonishing fact deny pretty much every
| claim in your post?
|
| Crazies (the least perjorative term I could think of)
| that have the power to eject an App used by hundreds of
| millions of people, from those people's _own_ platform,
| _are_ dangerous -- to our liberty.
|
| And, when people are starving, and are forced to use only
| their oppressive regime's worthless money: these issues
| put citizens' lives at risk.
|
| So, yes: these _are_ things people care about. Many just
| don 't yet realize they could be the victims of these
| dangerous bullies forcing these sub-standard tools on
| them.
| habinero wrote:
| No, and saying it's "astonishing" and "it's a threat to
| liberty" is ridiculous and incredibly overdramatic.
|
| It's just an app. Companies rise and fall, it's how it
| works. We lived just fine before it, we will be just fine
| after.
|
| Something will replace Twitter just like something
| replaced Friendster and MySpace.
| pjkundert wrote:
| You see no benefit in Apps that cannot be "disappeared"
| by anyone (even the person who deployed it), and which
| scales without bound and can be composed (re-skinned or
| extended) without restriction? Or, forked and restricted
| to your own cryptographically identified and secured set
| of users?
| ctvo wrote:
| Can you answer the question with use cases and examples
| instead of this rhetorical question? It doesn't help your
| credibility when you can't list off 10-20 use cases and
| examples for your groundbreaking technology without
| contorting yourself.
| pjkundert wrote:
| I'm sorry; but isn't this sort of like demanding an
| answer to the question "I can't see a use for the
| motorcar; horses work just fine"?
| Tesl wrote:
| no
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| What is the value proposition of "can't be disappeared by
| anyone" exactly? Reversibility and deletability are
| actually features of most systems.
|
| Scales without bound is cool, but generally lacks use and
| is expensive. I would rather scale to my actual usage
| bounds rather than paying for infinite scalability.
|
| Composed without restriction is cool, but I got that with
| the MIT and BSD licenses. Forked and restricted has
| already been possible using traditional open-source
| computer infrastructure.
| rapind wrote:
| > It could be world-changing (at least for programmers).
|
| If you don't mind, could you give an example for a
| programmer who isn't building finance or crypto related
| applications? I think that would help me understand what
| we're talking about.
| pjkundert wrote:
| https://twitter.com/pjkundert/status/1590009435619217413
|
| The clutter.social App is a decentralized Twitter-like
| app implemented on Holochain. This one is hosted on
| https://holo.host (only in public Beta, so it doesn't
| scale automatically), but illustrates a full-complexity
| app that is deployed. You can compose this (eg. re-skin
| it, or build it into another app as a commenting back-
| end), without having to copy the implementation or host
| the data.
|
| You can also "clone" such an app (with or without any
| functional changes) and host that fork yourself (eg. on a
| company's or family's computers), and nobody can stop
| you.
| dnissley wrote:
| Who pays the hosting bills for the app? If whoever is
| responsible fails to pay the hosting bills, presumably
| the app will cease to function and perhaps even
| disappear? When I fork it, do I maintain my ability to
| communicate with users who live on the "source" app?
| pjkundert wrote:
| The App's current owner(s) pay, of course. For
| traditional "installed" Apps, this could easily be the
| current (and new) end-users of the App. For a purely
| hosted app (eg. an App that serves web clients), hosting
| must be arranged.
|
| If the App has no revenue model to pay for hosting,
| perhaps don't use it (embed it) within your app? That
| would be a risk.
|
| If you "fork" it, then you're responsible to host it --
| if it isn't hosted by each client App installation
| already. The "forked" version of the App hosts its own
| DHT, so its data is completely distinct from the
| original.
|
| So, yes: there are decisions to be made, but they revolve
| around long-term viability of the encapsulated/forked App
| -- not the fundamental possibility of doing so.
| niklasd wrote:
| It is somehow telling that you link to a Twitter post
| instead to a post on clutter.social.
| pjkundert wrote:
| Yup. This is a web app (so, hosting is required), and it
| was built in a few days by a newbie and is hosted on a
| few machines by some randos.
|
| But, isn't that ... interesting? That something like this
| could be built and deployed and -- theoretically scale
| globally?
|
| Just think of what could be done with a bit of planning
| and a (tiny) revenue model?
| kitified wrote:
| > Yup. This is a web app (so, hosting is required), and
| it was built in a few days by a newbie and is hosted on a
| few machines by some randos. But, isn't that ...
| interesting? That something like this could be built and
| deployed and -- theoretically scale globally?
|
| Sure. It is interesting that someone can build a web app,
| host it on temporary machines, and then one day scale it
| into a major business model.
|
| That's not new to blockchain. That's how the internet
| works at a fundamental level. What specifically drives
| blockchain to be useful or novel or interesting in this
| model? How is this application better for being on chain?
| pjkundert wrote:
| Because: this _specific_ App (not "something like" it,
| but _this_ one written in a few days by a newbie), could
| potentially scale to 1B users -- and nobody could stop
| it. Some static assets would need to be tuned in a real
| App, to be hosted by a CDN like Cloudflare (or, possibly
| provided by the App 's hosting nodes themselves if no CDN
| is desired), but the App itself would scale.
|
| If a certain fraction of those users decided to install
| it (instead of use it via the Web interface), this
| scaling would be "free" -- paid for by the eg. 10% who
| installed it.
|
| I've been doing this professionally for 40 years, 30 of
| which I've spend searching for solutions to specific
| problems in this domain. I was there in '09 and
| downloaded Satoshi's reference implementation, and again
| in '15 for Ethereum; that's "blockchain"; what you call
| "being on chain". They didn't solve the problems I was
| trying to find solutions for (scalable consistency in
| occasionally connected systems).
|
| This is new.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > could potentially scale to 1B users -- and nobody could
| stop it. Some static assets would need to be tuned in a
| real App, to be hosted by a CDN like Cloudflare
|
| You've just show at least one way how it would be
| stopped. Who exactly is going to pay for static assets
| delivered to 1B users via Cloudflare?
|
| > but the App itself would scale.
|
| Of course it wouldn't. None of the blockchains have the
| required throughput. Yes, they want you to believe they
| have it, but they don't.
|
| > that's "blockchain"; what you call "being on chain".
| They didn't solve the problems
|
| > This is new.
|
| So they didn't solve the problems, but somehow this "app
| by a newbie" is suddenly solving all these problems and
| "scales to 1B users" because blockchain?
|
| Oh. And it doesn't scale because you can't even link to a
| post on it because "someone needs to pay for hosting". So
| it couldn't scale beyond a single user?
| pjkundert wrote:
| Hmm, okay. For others that come later in search of
| information, I'll address some of these.
|
| > ... one way it can be stopped.
|
| Yes, this newbie developer made some decisions that
| couldn't scale to 1B users. Alternatively, each node can
| serve static assets, thus scaling linearly w/o CDNs. This
| isn't required for most apps, as they aren't targets for
| state-level actors seeking to deplatform them from CDNs.
| But, if a totally free client self-hosted app is desired,
| this is possible.
|
| > ... None of the blockchains have the required
| throughput.
|
| Obviously. That's why "this is new." Blockchains
| enforcing global consensus on a "total order" of
| unrelated events cannot: the laws of physics forbid it,
| besides it being wasteful and unnecessary. Holochain does
| not enforce such unnecessary "total order" consensus; it
| is not necessary, as it turns out, for maintaining state
| consistency in distributed systems. That is the
| breakthrough. This is a low-research "Bro" comment.
|
| > ... can't even link to ... it because "someone needs to
| pay for hosting"
|
| Ya, I was just being considerate. It's a newbie's app,
| hosted by a few people.
|
| The point is, there is something _new_ going on here;
| something that some hackers on HN might be interested in.
| I _know_ the 2018 "Me" would have been interested!
|
| If you're not, that's fine - carry on! However, no more
| low-research "Bro" comments, okay? ... Ah, I see that you
| are rabidly anti-Crypto, and that's fine: fill your
| boots! But, for those visitors who _are_ interested in
| amazing things, don 't be discouraged! There are indeed
| new things happening here that are worth investigating.
| kranke155 wrote:
| Thank you. I feel like the tide is finally turning on this.
| The Ethereum VM (and its derivatives) is one of the biggest
| innovations in recent history.
|
| I've been yelling at the top of my lungs why NFTs have
| revolutionized digital art and happy to see the top comment
| nails it - a zero trust verification environment makes it
| possible to sell it on an open global market. This just
| wasn't there before.
|
| Blockchains are useless takes are _already out of date._
| adammarples wrote:
| Have nfts revolutionised digital art? I haven't seen it.
| Stable diffusion is potentially revolutionary, but nfts
| seem like last years fad.
| kranke155 wrote:
| You guys are never going to get it, its hilarious.
| dtoma wrote:
| > Having one neutral platform, controlled by no one, with
| standardized API's and immutable open programs that anyone
| can permissionlessly build on - is amazing.
|
| Isn't that also an open door to bad actors?
| djbebs wrote:
| Define bad actor.
| mhluongo wrote:
| Freedom always is.
| TimJRobinson wrote:
| For sure, it's the same principles as the internet, and
| that unfortunately is why there are so many bad actors in
| the space.
|
| There are companies and technologies being created to
| mitigate them just like how the internet spawned
| anti-(virus/spam/malware) companies. On the early internet
| with ActiveX, Flash, and few firewalls it was so easy to
| get exploited and this is the phase of DeFi we're in now,
| but it will get better over time.
| yourabstraction wrote:
| > the killer feature is actually permissionless composability
|
| This right here is it! Everyone is always focused on the main
| feature being decentralization, but decentralization isn't a
| feature, it's an implementation detail. Decentralization is
| certainly a requirement for these goals, but
| permissionlessness is the goal. I'll note that permisionless
| for users, in the ability to create accounts and send
| transactions is every bit as import as permisionless
| building.
|
| This is why I think the term DeFi misses the mark a bit,
| because it's a nod to the implementation (decentralized)
| rather than the features (open and permissionless). But at
| the end of the day I think it's catchier than something like
| OpenFi, and the terminology is set at this point.
| rightttttt wrote:
| RandomLensman wrote:
| My best guess is that unless the rules around large-scale
| finance change, in the end permissionless composability will
| go away and the platforms will get controls of some sort,
| e.g, who can do what, reporting requirements, KYC, ... And
| that also does not have to come just from direct rules, but
| could come via capital requirements when touching such
| systems or users of such systems.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| What is the benefit of deploying something on a platform
| controlled by no one? Why not just run all of those things on
| a server you own?
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| One benefit is that you can more credibly offer to keep
| your promises. I haven't audited Uniswap's smart contract
| code, but if I did I feel I could be pretty confident they
| won't steal my money. Meanwhile, users of FTX depended on
| government regulation and pinky-swears to keep their money
| safe, but since SBF owned the platform he could do whatever
| he wanted.
|
| disclosure: I work for a crypto company
| markdestouches wrote:
| > One benefit is that you can more credibly offer to keep
| your promises.
|
| We are yet to see a working example of that.
|
| > Meanwhile, users of FTX depended on government
| regulation and pinky-swears to keep their money safe, but
| since SBF owned the platform he could do whatever he
| wanted.
|
| These two sentences contradict each other. And no, there
| was no government regulation that insured FTX deposits.
| There was so little regulation, they didn't even keep
| their transaction history.
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| > We are yet to see a working example of that.
|
| I referenced Uniswap, which seems like it works to me
|
| > These two sentences contradict each other. And no,
| there was no government regulation that insured FTX
| deposits. There was so little regulation, they didn't
| even keep their transaction history.
|
| There's no public insurance for it, but if there were no
| regulations against doing what FTX did I'm not sure why
| their executives are fleeing the country
| habinero wrote:
| Because "there are no regulations" is not permission to
| defraud others.
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| The fact that fraud is a crime is a form of regulation,
| although it's clearly not sufficient on its own (just
| like how smart contract code being auditable isn't
| sufficient on its own)
| habinero wrote:
| Sure, but it's not specific. I'm thinking more along the
| lines of requiring public SEC filings or prospectuses.
| anonymousDan wrote:
| Good comment. While a lot of the complaints about blockchain
| are valid issues, the argument that it is useless and could
| be replaced with a database always makes me roll my eyes
| given the fundamental benefit is the open nature of the
| platform. Nonetheless, I think the key issue is
| scalability/performance.
| kranke155 wrote:
| "It could just be a database" is my litmus test now for an
| engineer who thinks he's really smart but really isn't.
| super256 wrote:
| > It's similar to AWS where it got exponentially more
| valuable as each new service was added
|
| But... I have yet to see a service which really _adds value_.
| All I 've seen so far are:
|
| A) collection games, which are not different from collecting
| Pokemon for real money.
|
| B) liquidity PvP, where users open leveraged bets to hunt
| other market participants' stops/liquidations, so the hunter
| can reduce their position for cheap, which the hunted takes a
| loss (this is not different from tradfi).
|
| I am looking at Aave right now, and all I see is a
| speculation platform with tokens instead of currencies. So
| basically, you guys are re-inventing what tradfi had years
| ago, just with worthless(?) tokens instead of debt backed
| assets. I am assuming they are worthless because every
| project you have mentioned is optimized for USD cash inflow,
| as you have "buy crypto with fiat"-buttons on almost every
| project[1][2][3], but no way to cash out to fiat.
| Furthermore, the staking feature from AAVE seems to only
| artificially decrease supply, so prices rise. What's the
| value proposition here?
|
| Anyway, I don't really think that this stuff is even remotely
| comparable to AWS.
|
| [1] https://app.aave.com/ (press "more" on the nav bar)
|
| [2] https://zerion.io/ (FAQ > "just tap the blue button in
| the center of your screen, select 'Buy', and you will be
| taken to the dialogue window where you can buy crypto with a
| credit or debit card.")
|
| [3] https://blog.1inch.io/transak-fiat-on-ramp-provider-is-
| integ...
| themihai wrote:
| I think there would be value but we neeed a real
| currency(i.e usd) on the blockchain. It's obvious that all
| those pegged currencies are prone to "bank run" scenarios.
| Not to mention the fiat conversion ruines the whole
| experience.
|
| With a real currency we could have at least real open and
| standards based p2p payments which would be great! Just
| like with cash offline we would no longer need visa, paypal
| or banks to transact online.
| markdestouches wrote:
| It's not the type of currency you have that prevents bank
| runs. There were plenty of bank runs with very real
| dollars in the beginning of the century. What stopped it
| was proper regulation. EDIT: I mean the beginning the
| 20th century, of course.
| throwoutway wrote:
| > I think there would be value but we neeed a real
| currency(i.e usd) on the blockchain.
|
| So making sure I understand, there's no value today?
| themihai wrote:
| I fail to see any value other than fliping "worthless"
| coins. The coins fliping is not working great either
| which is the reason we have binance and ftx. The real
| value seems to be for money launderying and scam payments
| though so there is indeed some value. Crypto payments for
| real businesses is not feasible. I've tried that and the
| volatility and transaction fees makes them unusuable.
| TimJRobinson wrote:
| There is already USDC, USDT, DAI that are all US dollars.
|
| I use Argent wallet for payments between friends using
| them and it is a nice experience (especially because
| Venmo and Cash both aren't available outside the USA),
| the friction is sending them to and from a traditional
| bank account, you currently have to use an exchange - but
| this will change soon.
| eropple wrote:
| _> There is already USDC, USDT, DAI that are all US
| dollars._
|
| They would dearly like you to _believe_ that they are
| dollars.
|
| To date the dollar-backing of USDT at least has not been
| substantiated and I don't think I know anyone in the
| cryptocurrency space who thinks any of those are actually
| real and responsible--they're just trying not to be the
| ones caught with the bag when the music stops and actual
| money is called in.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| And there will be a huge amount of friction there:
|
| - ACH is reversible
|
| - wires are expensive
| cguess wrote:
| Reversable transactions are a feature, not a bug.
| hailwren wrote:
| > So basically, you guys are re-inventing what tradfi had
| years ago, just with worthless(?) tokens instead of debt
| backed assets.
|
| Crypto has debt backed primitives as well. You've linked
| one. AAVE is a lending protocol. If you don't like AAVE,
| maybe you're looking for DAI.
|
| > but no way to cash out to fiat.
|
| This is just a result of US KYC regulation. Like it or not,
| this isn't a choice made by crypto.
|
| > What's the value proposition here?
|
| The value prop is, as the gp said, trustless composability.
| Crypto (post eth) is to money as the internet is to a
| mainframe. A kid in a garage can build a financial
| primitive on top of a "blue chip" and the "blue chip"
| builder doesn't have to worry (vis a vis bugs, which have
| been a big problem but a lot of progress has been made in
| that area).
|
| I'm not claiming crypto(I wish there was a word for crypto
| minus btc) has achieved its end state, but the goal and
| road map seem very clear. Composable, trust-less finance is
| a strong use case.
|
| Aside -- you really have to decide whether the price is
| important in crypto or not. Opponents often use phrases
| like "worthless tokens" and then claim they don't care ab
| the price.
| chao- wrote:
| I do not know much about sophisticated finance. Can you
| explain the meaning of this phrase, or sketch out an
| example, or provide links to assist my understanding?
|
| _> A kid in a garage can build a financial primitive on
| top of a "blue chip" and the "blue chip" builder doesn't
| have to worry (vis a vis bugs)._
|
| I get that a "blue chip" is supposed to be a big brand
| (at least that's how I hear the term often used?) but
| what does it mean to "build a financial primitive" and
| how does it relate to this (presumably third-party) blue
| chip brand?
| hailwren wrote:
| Right, so it turns out that there are a fair amount of
| operations you can perform on financial objects to change
| their properties. You can buy, sell, combine, or split
| their risk profiles in different manners to get
| properties that are useful in different scenarios.
|
| Mortgage tranches played a big role in 2008, Black-
| Scholes helps us describe the behavior of options
| contracts, and maybe the most accessible for someone not
| familiar w/ finance is the Ray Dalio McNugget story -
| https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/03/how-ray-dalio-helped-
| launch-...
|
| The EVM specifically gives you a Turing complete
| financial system and, hence, probably a complete
| expression of operations on financial structures.
| this_user wrote:
| > The EVM specifically gives you a Turing complete
| financial system and, hence, probably a complete
| expression of operations on financial structures.
|
| Which is nice, but doesn't solve any problems that
| actually exist. That is the running theme with all of
| these crypto/blockchain/"defi" projects, because they are
| created by tech people who don't understand the domain.
| They just start building all of these things that seem
| useful to tech people, but completely miss what is
| actually important.
| splix wrote:
| Can you clarify what is "solving a problem that actually
| exist" means?
|
| I just looked around and I'm not sure I have anything
| that solves an actual problem. Like the HN right now, it
| doesn't solve anything, right. In the morning I bought
| stuff on Amazon, but it also doesn't solve any real
| problem. Not sure AWS is solving anything since we can
| rent servers directly. I used Zoom for a call, but it
| solves nothing, I guess. Also used Github, but it's just
| a useless service because we can use plain Git. I can't
| really find a tech product I use that clearly "solves a
| problem". The only problem solver I can recall is my
| coffee maker, but it's an analog device.
|
| So I'm wondering, what it's the criteria to decided if
| something solves an actual problem or not?
| notamy wrote:
| Not the original commenter, but here's my stab at it:
|
| > In the morning I bought stuff on Amazon, but it also
| doesn't solve any real problem.
|
| Sure it does. It solves the problem of "I need something,
| I have money, and I don't have the time/ability/car/...
| to go to a physical location to buy it."
|
| > Not sure AWS is solving anything since we can rent
| servers directly.
|
| AWS gives you you
|
| - The ability to spin up MANY classes of servers
| instantly, whereas traditional server renting is more
| limited ime.
|
| - A host of extra services on top of it that all
| integrate fairly well with each other
|
| - Paid support if you want/need
|
| - ...
|
| > I used Zoom for a call, but it solves nothing, I guess.
|
| People like to see each other, phone calls can have
| quality issues and dead zones, ...
|
| ---
|
| Now, when I read the parent comments, I see:
|
| > The EVM specifically gives you a Turing complete
| financial system and, hence, probably a complete
| expression of operations on financial structures.
|
| And while that *sounds* interesting, I have absolutely no
| IDEA what the utility of this is. With AWS, Zoom, Amazon,
| ... I can point to things that very very directly benefit
| both technical and non-technical users day-to-day. That's
| not to say that there ISN'T use to the EVM -- I'm sure
| there probably is! -- just that imo it's less-obvious.
| splix wrote:
| I would disagree with all the reasons. I understand that
| it's some real problems the mentioned services solve for
| you, but I can easily point to a person who has none of
| those problems. Like my grandma. She doesn't see any
| point in any of the mentioned products. Even the coffee
| maker. So we must agree that it depends on the person and
| is not an objective criterion. Same for
| blockchan/defi/evm/etc. Some people argue that it solves
| some of their problems, and you may disagree with them,
| but it doesn't make their point invalid.
|
| I can go with refusing the points you said about the
| mentioned products. Not because I want to argue, but
| because it's really not the reason and problems it solved
| for _me_. I just question myself why I use them and have
| no answer.
|
| 1) Rel. Amazon. I can go to the seller's website
| directly. I guess I used Amazon because they are so good
| at marketing, so they are the first to go. But I kind of
| agree that it solves the problem of simplicity/easier
| access because a seller's website may have a clumsy
| website. Some people say that something similar is solved
| for them by Defi.
|
| 2) For AWS, I don't use anything you mentioned. It sounds
| interesting, like spinning many instances, but I never
| witnessed it being used like that. Except for instances
| where someone was playing with the tech (and you can
| apply it the exact same way to EMV). Also, recently I
| played with Kubespray, a tool to easily roll out a
| Kubernetes cluster on a bare metal, and now I don't see a
| reason to use AWS or another cloud provider. Bare servers
| + Kubernetes is a way to go imho. Maybe the real reason
| people use AWS is b/c they simply don't know
| alternatives?
|
| 3) For Zoom, I disagree because I am not even sure we
| always needed to call, honestly. I mean, we have an email
| and slack, so what's the point of wasting everyone's time
| on a call. It's just a routine now.
|
| Again, not arguing. Just trying to say that there could
| be multiple points of view. And if something works one
| way for someone, it may be completely useless and even
| stupid for others.
| piva00 wrote:
| > I would disagree with all the reasons. I understand
| that it's some real problems the mentioned services solve
| for you, but I can easily point to a person who has none
| of those problems. Like my grandma. She doesn't see any
| point in any of the mentioned products.
|
| This doesn't make any sense, there's nothing in the world
| except food, water and shelter that's actually needed for
| _every living human being_.
|
| You're grossly mischaracterising or misinterpreting the
| meaning of "solving a real problem".
|
| What exactly is all this crypto-technobabble solving that
| isn't just feeding the system to make it work? Where is
| the end where a person is going to use all this bumbling
| infrastructure of finance primitives to actually solve a
| problem they face? Again, not a problem created or caused
| by the other mumbo-jumbo lying around, piling solutions
| on top of solutions still looking for a problem is
| ultimately not solving any problem. If the fundamental
| piece of technology you are working on doesn't have any
| applicable uses in the end, all the other pieces
| supporting this fundamental are not solving anything of
| value.
|
| I really, really don't follow your line of argumentation,
| I keep looking for the base argument and there's none
| except for "if some people believe this has value, then
| it has value". No, like Matt Levine said to SBF, the
| fundamental economical value of this thing is _zero_.
| piva00 wrote:
| > Like the HN right now, it doesn't solve anything,
| right.
|
| What do you mean? It definitely solves a problem of
| information sharing, spreading, foster discussion, and
| creates some networking which definitely do add value, it
| might not be instant but there are various stories on HN
| about how HN affected their lives. Be with founders
| meeting, people getting ideas for starting products and
| so on. That's tangible value, even if a little abstract.
|
| > In the morning I bought stuff on Amazon, but it also
| doesn't solve any real problem.
|
| Again, I don't understand, you bought something expecting
| it to do something for you, solving an actual problem. If
| not it's just pure consumerism in a way that might even
| be pathological, buying stuff for no reason at all is
| extremely bizarre.
|
| Solving something means to actually provide an economical
| value, an outcome with tangible impact in the real world.
| People sharing knowledge and information provides
| tangible value in the real world. People buying stuff
| they want to use for a hobby, profession, entertainment,
| etc., have a tangible impact in the real world.
|
| You are going full post-modernism on what "value" or
| "solving a problem" means without directing the
| conversation to your point, you are almost completely
| paraphrasing SBF's words from this interview [1]:
|
| > Let me give you sort of like a really toy model of it,
| which I actually think has a surprising amount of
| legitimacy for what farming could mean. You know, where
| do you start? You start with a company that builds a box
| and in practice this box, they probably dress it up to
| look like a life-changing, you know, world-altering
| protocol that's gonna replace all the big banks in 38
| days or whatever. Maybe for now actually ignore what it
| does or pretend it does literally nothing. It's just a
| box. So what this protocol is, it's called 'Protocol X,'
| it's a box, and you take a token. You can take ethereum,
| you can put it in the box and you take it out of the box.
| Alright so, you put it into the box and you get like, you
| know, an IOU for having put it in the box and then you
| can redeem that IOU back out for the token.
|
| > So far what we've described is the world's dumbest ETF
| or ADR or something like that. It doesn't do anything but
| let you put things in it if you so choose. And then this
| protocol issues a token, we'll call it whatever, 'X
| token.' And X token promises that anything cool that
| happens because of this box is going to ultimately be
| usable by, you know, governance vote of holders of the X
| tokens. They can vote on what to do with any proceeds or
| other cool things that happen from this box. And of
| course, so far, we haven't exactly given a compelling
| reason for why there ever would be any proceeds from this
| box, but I don't know, you know, maybe there will be, so
| that's sort of where you start.
|
| > And then you say, alright, well, you've got this box
| and you've got X token and the box protocol declares, or
| maybe votes by on-chain governance, or, you know,
| something like that, that what they're gonna do is they
| are going to take half of all the X tokens that were re-
| minted. Maybe two thirds will, two thirds will offer X
| tokens, and they're going to give them away for free to
| whoever uses the box. So anyone who goes, takes some
| money, puts in the box, each day they're gonna airdrop,
| you know, 1% of the X token pro rata amongst everyone
| who's put money in the box. That's for now, what X token
| does, it gets given away to the box people. And now what
| happens? Well, X token has some market cap, right? It's
| probably not zero. Let say it's, you know, a $20 million
| market ...
|
| [1]
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-25/sam-
| bankm...
| hailwren wrote:
| > because they are created by tech people who don't
| understand the domain. They just start building all of
| these things that seem useful to tech people, but
| completely miss what is actually important.
|
| This is just false. idk what to tell you, but there are
| plenty of major builders in the crypto space who are
| highly regarded in tradfi. See ie jump
|
| Even if it were true (it's not), it's also a thing that
| could be said about any product built by tech people and
| hasn't really seemed to play out that way in most other
| places.
| dvt wrote:
| > You can buy, sell, combine, or split their risk
| profiles in different manners to get properties that are
| useful in different scenarios.
|
| I would contend that the only reason things like options,
| futures, etc. are actually _useful_ in markets like,
| e.g., the stock market, is, in no small part, due to the
| highly liquid nature of the underlying. Since the
| _underlying_ is highly liquid, these derivatives are
| highly liquid, and therefore we can actually use them for
| things like de-risking. Of course, people on WSB still
| gamble using options, but basically they 're meant as a
| hedging mechanism.
|
| Even though these "financial primitives" on the
| blockchain are neat from a technical standpoint, they
| tend to blow up precisely because the markets are not
| liquid enough (so second-order effects are amplified).
| hailwren wrote:
| > Even though these "financial primitives" on the
| blockchain are neat from a technical standpoint, they
| tend to blow up precisely because the markets are not
| liquid enough (so second-order effects are amplified).
|
| I would rephrase this to say that the less liquid state
| of blockchain markets limits the available set of
| financial primitives which are resistant to manipulation.
|
| It's true, but if liquidity is the only hurdle -- I think
| you've more or less ceded that blockchain provides value.
| It just needs wider adoption. (Probably a stronger
| support of blockchain than I would personally offer.)
| dvt wrote:
| > I think you've more or less ceded that blockchain
| provides value. It just needs wider adoption
|
| This is a vacuous non-sequitur. It's like saying "my new
| social network provides value, it just needs wider
| adoption"--uh, yeah, that's how social networks (or
| markets) _work_. If no one is using it, by definition, it
| has no value. Markets are _social_ games (not merely
| "financial" ones).
|
| And exceedingly few people are using crypto in _general_
| , but even fewer are using it as a store of value, or as
| a way to transfer money, or as any kind of hedge. And
| even if we look at the people using it, most use it
| merely as a casino.
|
| I mean think about it: not even 100 million people have a
| BTC wallet. It took Snapchat 4 years to reach 100 million
| _daily active_ users. We 're now in year 14 of Bitcoin.
| TimJRobinson wrote:
| You're still missing the forest for the trees. All of this
| was created in the last 2-3 years and already it's
| replicated most of what's in traditional finance. It's the
| rate of innovation that is important, not the current
| y-intercept.
|
| Furthermore this is a global system that anyone can
| contribute to. How hard do you think it is for I as an
| Australian to build a financial firm that interfaces with
| Bank of America or the NYSE? It's almost impossible. In
| DeFi I can spin up my own app in days.
|
| Aave is used for being able to borrow against your crypto
| assets, so if you need a loan you don't have to sell, this
| isn't a service any bank offers. You can also just deposit
| your assets and earn interest on them.
|
| In 2009 most of my colleagues similarly dismissed AWS "Oh
| it's just some easy storage with a way to spin up servers,
| big deal. Bare metal is cheaper and easier". It wasn't
| until most business components were automated that it
| became an obvious choice.
|
| Now imagine you're starting a new financial firm and want
| to offer an exchange, options, perpetuals, savings
| accounts, loans etc. You _could_ build all these pieces
| yourself for a few million dollars and a few years work. Or
| you could use DeFi protocols, build a nice easy to use
| front-end and be up and running in a few months.
| msworddebugger wrote:
| Permissionless means hizbulla or the Syrian regime can
| make revenue generating financial products just as easily
| as an Australian. As long as there is conflict (forever),
| permissionless systems will not be embraced by the global
| powers. There is potential for lower permissions within
| some sort of financial sandbox where there's strong
| controls at the entrance to the system and strong
| auditing and logging within the system, but there's no
| potential for a global permissionless system.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _if you need a loan you don 't have to sell, this isn't
| a service any bank offers_
|
| I mean, the bank will make sure you aren't North Korea
| first. Which crypto will not. So that's a plus, if you're
| North Korea. (Collateralised lending is incredibly
| commonplace in finance, including against crypto.)
| noelsusman wrote:
| This just reinforces my view that the only value crypto
| provides is evading government financial regulations. Is
| it actually good that anybody can spin up a new financial
| firm in a few months with little oversight or regulation?
|
| >Aave is used for being able to borrow against your
| crypto assets, so if you need a loan you don't have to
| sell, this isn't a service any bank offers.
|
| Every bank offers this service, unless you're just
| talking about getting a loan with crypto as collateral.
| splix wrote:
| On regulations: FTX and SBF were the main proponents of
| regulations. Not because it solves anything, but because
| it eliminates a competition and for them it gave more
| freedom to do a fraud. So I'm not sure it's always a good
| thing.
|
| On loans: Give me a bank that can loan me $100M without
| even asking for an ID? Without a collateral, of course.
| Like Aave Flashloan provides on blockchain.
| halpmeh wrote:
| Have you ever implemented a smart contract? If not, I
| highly recommend you do so before holding an opinion on
| blockchains. I've never owned crypto, and I've
| recommended others to stay away from investing in crypto.
| Yet, I think the computing platform has a lot of promise.
| Implementing a smart contract for fun helped me see why.
|
| The block-chain can be thought of as cryptographically
| secure state. That is, everyone agrees on the state of
| the blockchain and no one can modify it save for
| modifications in accordance with the "rules". A smart
| contract can be thought of as a cryptographically secure
| program, i.e. it cannot be modified. So you have
| cryptographically secure inputs (the blockchain), and a
| cryptographically secure program (the smart contract),
| which means the output is also guaranteed to be
| cryptographically secure. That is quite a strong premise.
| You can give your program to anyone and they can execute
| it for you without you needing to worry about nefarious
| modifications. This level of trust allows for the
| creation of a global computing platform. Software authors
| need only to bring their program and can have it executed
| on-demand without needing to maintain their own
| infrastructure. That is quite an innovation.
|
| Of course, in its current form, this "global computing
| platform" is actually pretty shitty. It is prohibitively
| expensive to store / operate on a lot of data. However,
| crypto-currencies are there first viable "apps" built on
| this platform. If you think about it a crypto-currency is
| basically a very primitive program that stores a series
| of transactions as two addresses and an amount. The total
| amount of data per transaction is tiny. And yet, just by
| operating on this tiny amount of data you can basically
| implement the entire financial system: currency, stocks,
| bonds, options, etc.
|
| We're basically in the dot-com bubble for crypto. People
| are starting to realize that this new computing platform
| is cool and has a lot of potential, just as many realized
| the computers and the internet were cool in the late 90s.
| Yet, just like in the 90s, the tech sucks and isn't good
| enough to bring much of anything valuable to the market.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| In my experience, virtually all kinds of substantially
| useful smart contracts depend on observing or modifying
| the world outside of the blockchain, which means you have
| the oracle problem, or you have the side effect problem.
|
| Not entirely coincidentally, aside from plain faulty
| implementations and operational security failings, these
| two problems represent the ways most successful attacks
| on smart contracts are accomplished.
| habinero wrote:
| Smart contracts are useless and will always be useless
| for two reasons:
|
| 1. It is impossible to write code that always works
| exactly how you want, all of the time, forever.
|
| 2. Law exists. The legal system exists. The moment you
| have a problem with a smart contract, it's going to
| court.
|
| You might as well save yourselves the time, expense,
| hassle and potential embarrassment by just going to a
| lawyer in the first place and having them draft a
| contract.
| fishtoaster wrote:
| I feel like I've heard this argument a lot over the last
| decade or so: it's early days, the valuable stuff is yet
| to come.
|
| I've gone through about three phases of opinions on
| crypto:
|
| 1. "Blockchain is an interesting primitive that you could
| probably build something neat (besides a cryptocurrency)
| out of! I can't think of anything good off the top of my
| head, but I look forward to seeing what valuable thing
| people come up with."
|
| 2. Smart Contracts are an interesting primitive that you
| could probably build something neat (besides rebuilding
| existing finance tools without regulation) out of! I
| can't think of anything good off the top of my head, but
| I look forward to seeing what valuable thing people come
| up with.
|
| 3. NFTs are an interesting primitive that you could
| probably build something neat (besides speculative
| digital assets) out of! I can't think of anything good
| off the top of my head, but I look forward to seeing what
| valuable thing people come up with.
|
| In each case, the tech looks like a neat idea, but I
| continue to wait for the actually valuable use-case to
| emerge. At this point, I'm starting to just pattern-match
| all crypto to "unlikely to provide real value ever."
| worik wrote:
| > Have you ever implemented a smart contract?
|
| No
|
| > A smart contract can be thought of as a
| cryptographically secure program, i.e. it cannot be
| modified. So you have cryptographically secure inputs
| (the blockchain), and a cryptographically secure program
| (the smart contract), which means the output is also
| guaranteed to be cryptographically secure.
|
| The output is not guaranteed to be correct, what you
| intended, or even what you agreed to. Even the most
| trivial computer programme can have unexpected
| properties.
|
| Why would I have to explain that here?
| habinero wrote:
| Agreed. I've never understood why people think this.
| [deleted]
| halpmeh wrote:
| No, the output is guaranteed to be correct. Correct, as
| in what you specified in the contract, which may not be
| what you had intended, but that's besides the point. Can
| you explain how the output would differ from the contract
| specification?
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| "The code does what it does" is not a useful statement;
| insisting that a smart contract is an executable
| specification is not helpful unless there's a really very
| small semantic step from how the user intentions are
| formed - which again is not the case here.
| markdestouches wrote:
| >> You're still missing the forest for the trees. All of
| this was created in the last 2-3 years and already it's
| replicated most of what's in traditional finance.
|
| Making a copy of an existing technology while repeating
| every historical mistake on the way is not innovation but
| rather poor learning ability. It's been 13 years since
| the advent of blockchain and we are yet to see anything
| actually useful. Yet all we see is smuggling, money
| laundering and fraud. With stories like FTX we also see
| incredible ineptitude, incompetence and ignorance. I am
| so tired of seeing these same groundless arguments over
| and over again, especially now, once money got dear and
| all of the crypto started crashing down.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| I've been making more than a few jokes lately that Games
| Done Quick should have pre-banned categories like "Great
| Depression-era Wall Street Finance Speed Run ANY%".
| timmytokyo wrote:
| It's almost as if the "anyone can do it without
| permission" argument is one of the reasons traditional
| finance evolved into the regulated system it is today.
| pjkundert wrote:
| TradFi - Anyone can do it without permissions and lie,
| except regulations force accounting practices, revealing
| malfeasance.
|
| DeFi - Anyone can do it without permissions, and everyone
| can see they didn't lie.
|
| Crap-coin FTX Crypto Bros - Let's lie, do "TradFi" and
| call it "DeFi", comply with no regulations or accounting
| practices, and steal the Crypto. What could go wrong?
|
| HN low-research "Eternal September" Bros: Told ya Crypto
| was all a scam, yer dumb!
| sangnoir wrote:
| You're No-true-Scottsman'ing DeFi by excluding FTX after
| the fact.
|
| I posit there is no way to tell apart the "real" DeFi
| from the Crap-coins. If you can tell them apart, which
| tokens and/or exchanges will fail next, and when?
|
| There's a pervasive aura of "secret knowledge" in crypto,
| where the in-group think of themselves as superior
| operators who scoff as the noobs get fleeced[1]; yet
| these suave traders continually fail to recognize peaks
| and troughs and trade accordingly.
|
| 1. Sometimes while trying to scam the noobs themselves.
| The whole "to the moon"/HODL/meme-stock episode was naked
| preying on unsophisticated traders/bag-holders
| RestlessMind wrote:
| > You're No-true-Scottsman'ing DeFi by excluding FTX
| after the fact.
|
| You are trying to fit the square peg of scam otherwise
| known as FTX into the round hole of DeFi. It was apparent
| since the day of its founding that FTX is not DeFi nor
| trustless.
| pjkundert wrote:
| Pretty much everyone credible has been warning people to
| get off _all_ exchanges, since well, forever. Because you
| can 't (and shouldn't) "trust" someone. If you want to
| trust someone, go to a bank. This isn't really too much a
| matter of "secret knowledge", but historical fact. But,
| hope springs eternal.
|
| And, self-referential Crap Coins (like Luna) are just,
| well, _insane_ at first glance. Trust-based "Staking"
| for returns w/ no revenue model? Nuts! But, I've been
| modelling the behavior of wealth-backed currency systems
| for 15 years, so maybe it seemed obvious to me. I've been
| boring people to death with warnings about these for as
| long as they've existed. Again, this time it's different!
|
| And, the risks to all but the absolutely largest PoW and
| PoS networks are well known (relatively trivial 51%
| attack, see OFAC "compliance" disaster). And to
| "permissioned" networks (XRP, etc.); perfect for CBDCs,
| for liberty not so much. And the list goes on...
|
| So, spare me the "No True Scottsman" whitewash.
|
| The signs were all there, and the warnings were blaring.
| Dedicated, competent and highly-funded attackers are at
| work. Central/commercial banks, Treasuries, etc. _cannot_
| abide any fire-exit that is not chained shut, for what 's
| coming.
|
| So, the stakes for attackers are high. The stakes for
| liberty-valuing citizens: even higher.
|
| Buckle up.
| habinero wrote:
| > Central/commercial banks, Treasuries, etc. cannot abide
| any fire-exit that is not chained shut
|
| Ok, then call it what it actually is: tax evasion, fraud,
| and laundering money.
|
| You're getting caught up in an anti-government agenda and
| forgetting that's not a good thing to most people.
| pjkundert wrote:
| I think most reasonable people would agree that desiring
| the freedom to invest your personal wealth in non-
| government approved investments isn't "tax evasion, fraud
| and laundering money".
|
| Isn't such a claim a bit ... bizarre?
| habinero wrote:
| No? "Non-government approved" either means "unregulated"
| or "illegal".
|
| Unregulated financial speculation has a lot of issues.
| See: FTX and NFTs
| pjkundert wrote:
| So, no:
|
| - savings in gold/silver bullion
|
| - your sister's small business, back in the home country
|
| I'm sorry; if your position basically makes ever free
| person a criminal, then perhaps it isn't them that are
| the problem?
| habinero wrote:
| Owning gold/silver is legal. It's also regulated - it's
| not legal tender.
|
| Investing in a business is legal. It also means sending
| money, which is regulated by KYC/AML and you're still
| responsible for taxes.
| likeabbas wrote:
| > How hard do you think it is for I as an Australian to
| build a financial firm that interfaces with Bank of
| America or the NYSE? It's almost impossible. In DeFi I
| can spin up my own app in days
|
| This sounds nice in theory, but aren't most of the guard
| rails of the financial institutions for complying with
| government regulation? If anyone could interface with
| these companies then it would be too easy for abuse. USG
| is not going to let that happen, which is why these DeFi
| applications will be limited to unregulated
| cryptocurrencies where the user will have to trust the
| "bank" that has no Federal Reserve backing.
|
| > Aave is used for being able to borrow against your
| crypto assets... You can also just deposit your assets
| and earn interest on them.
|
| Why would any crypto supporter want to hold their
| decentralized currency in a centralized exchange after
| the FTX fiasco
| RandomLensman wrote:
| How do you see current regulations change to make this
| all fit, i.e., what's your roadmap there?
| TimJRobinson wrote:
| That's unclear. From a game theory perspective you don't
| want to be the government that stifles your country by
| restricting access to a financial system everyone else
| adopts, so I think many are waiting to see how that plays
| out.
| [deleted]
| Nursie wrote:
| This sort of nonsense thinking is exactly why governments
| have been such a soft touch and allowed scam after fraud
| after Ponzi after rug-pull to bloom.
|
| Fingers crossed that sort of time is over and the
| cryptocurrency space can be made to comply with
| regulations or be cut off from on-ramps.
| RandomLensman wrote:
| I fear, if the DeFi community doesn't engage with policy
| makers and regulators it will not magically fall into
| place.
| la64710 wrote:
| I think there are still legalities to follow when you are
| offering anything to public with financial implications.
| cactus2093 wrote:
| It is a neat property but lines like this trip me up: "it's
| incredible how fast the DeFi space is moving because of it".
|
| The crypto/dapp/defi/etc spaces have supposedly been "moving
| incredibly fast" and "all the smartest people are working on
| it" for ~5 years now. That's a long time to be moving really
| fast without really getting anywhere. Where's the payoff?
|
| To me this space feels like a solution without a real
| problem. The decentralized part is a neat trick, but on the
| margin a centralized authority to mediate financial platforms
| is more good than bad.
| timmytokyo wrote:
| And these arguments are being made just as the crypto
| industry is imploding all around us. Gives new meaning to
| the motto "move fast and break things".
| bombcar wrote:
| I feel the "value" of DeFi only appears once all the scams
| have broken - and then only if there is actual value in
| trading crypto _beyond_ just buying drugs or whatever
| people used to do with bitcoin before it was "popular".
| delaaxe wrote:
| Completely agree
| primax wrote:
| The main problem is when weighing these things is not
| blockchain advocate honestly asks the question: "why is this
| better than using a simple relational database, in a way that
| makes all the extra complexity worthwhile?"
| dsco wrote:
| See this is where HN has fallen off a cliff, the top
| commented Runeks supplies a highly theoretical and nonchalant
| answer to what blockchains _can_ be. That's been the majority
| of HNs take on the technology. But the Internet was made for
| text communication and here we are decades later with social
| media and streaming video.
|
| TimJRobinson at least states something which is rare on HN, a
| take on blockchain technology with experimental instead of
| theoretical knowledge on the subject matter.
| sbf501 wrote:
| TimJ lists simply enumerates a bunch of software names with
| almost no content to move the discussion along.
|
| I could have said, "Well blockchain is important because I
| used Schmaltz, Goober, and Cookie deployed on Flanders,
| Homer and Kearney, the open API just works out of the box,"
| and by your logic I'd be some wizened mage on the subject.
|
| There is a cliff on HN, but you might want to invest in a
| parachute.
| threeseed wrote:
| > But the Internet was made for text communication
|
| No it wasn't.
|
| ARPANET [1] was made for transferring software and allowing
| remote access into the large mainframes on the network.
| Email came in 1971 and then 6 years later audio was being
| transferred. So it was always intended to support binary
| transmission and streaming video was being demoed by the
| BBC not soon after.
|
| The reason to be nitpicking is that the original protocols
| were flexible and efficient enough from day one to support
| a myriad of use cases. Where as platforms like Ethereum are
| already struggling with a lack of flexibility and a lack of
| efficient and cheap data transfer.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET
| gatewaynode wrote:
| This. It's not like all innovation that has occurred in the
| crypto-currency space is useless, there are some real
| valuable innovations there. Blockchain as a whole is just
| too tainted to see the forest for the trees in all the
| greed, specifically the word "blockchain" has become
| magical and deceptive.
|
| "Having one neutral platform, controlled by no one, with
| standardized API's and immutable open programs that anyone
| can permissionlessly build on - is amazing."
|
| Tim is dead on with this observation, this is amazing. And
| it's not a magic bullet statement either.
| bartread wrote:
| > Tim is dead on with this observation, this is amazing.
|
| I'm not saying Tim's wrong, but one of the problems that
| Ive seen a lot - to the point of being tempted to use the
| word "constantly" - with blockchain is this sort of
| gushing rhetoric that actually does a really poor job of
| explaining _why_ it 's amazing, and especially of
| explaining _why_ it 's amazing in a few short paragraphs
| of jargon-free plain English that anyone with technical
| background can understand.
|
| Again, Tim's post may be right, but it really falls short
| here and that's a big problem for the perception of
| blockchain. Until you can get people to understand why
| it's valuable, without the answer being to go and spend
| hours reading when there's perhaps no certainty of what
| you learn being valuable, it's always going to face this
| scepticism.
|
| It's not helped by the fact that the scammers and the
| non-scammers talk about it in the same kind of way, so
| you end up unable to distinguish the real information
| from the "blockchain doublespeak" - again, certainly
| without a lot of research. If you're busy you end up
| developing a heuristic where you file all of this in the
| mental waste basket.
| TimJRobinson wrote:
| You're right, it is hard to explain. That's why I believe
| long term it's going to be more like AWS - it will be
| financial plumbing that firms build upon and most end
| users won't even know they're using it.
|
| I think a lot of HN doesn't get it because they don't
| work in finance, but everyone I've talked to who works in
| finance (or has to deal with their archaic systems) is
| really excited about the possibilities.
|
| Then again, a lot of people didn't understand the
| internet or it's jargon in the 90's, so we'll see how it
| plays out.
| likeabbas wrote:
| > I think a lot of HN doesn't get it because they don't
| work in finance, but everyone I've talked to who works in
| finance (or has to deal with their archaic systems) is
| really excited about the possibilities.
|
| The people I've talked to in finance are really excited
| about Blockchain/DeFi because it's an opportunity for
| arbitrage in a completely unregulated market.
| threeseed wrote:
| > Having one neutral platform, controlled by no one, with
| standardized API's and immutable open programs that
| anyone can permissionlessly build on - is amazing
|
| It is unquestionably amazing. But it's not the reality.
|
| Most data is not stored on the blockchain but instead in
| proprietary databases due to the prohibitive cost. And
| even if it was free the VCs are pushing hard for a
| defensible moat i.e. lock your users in with proprietary
| data and features.
|
| We've seen this play out with OpenSea and how its view of
| NFTs is different from what's on chain.
| miracle2k wrote:
| The data that matters is all on-chain: the smart
| contracts and the balances. This is _why_ what Tim talks
| about has actually played out, and we have seen
| incredible composability between different protocols.
|
| > We've seen this play out with OpenSea and how its view
| of NFTs is different from what's on chain.
|
| If anything, the NFT ecosystem proofs this point. It
| consists of a dizzying array of aggregators, lending
| platforms, fractionalization platforms, alternative
| marketplaces, curation tools, API providers, all
| interacting with another. The fact that OpenSea retains a
| large marketshare among marketplaces is true (though now
| down to 60% - https://dune.com/sealaunch/NFT), but hasn't
| stopped this interoperability at all. Because in fact,
| what matters is on-chain, not what OpenSea exposes.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Yeah. You can also argue that Git and IPFS aren't
| _really_ blockchain, but at some point that 's just
| splitting hairs...
|
| The big question is of course how best to deal with all
| the scammers in specifically the cryptocurrency space ?
| iterateofen wrote:
| the examples he gave of 20 companies building on defi on
| his platform are all varying examples of a liquidity pools
| that if you go to their websites need yet another layer of
| companies to use their platforms to build the exciting
| products on.
| bnralt wrote:
| Are the comments different, though? "Permissionless
| composability" - basically blockchain jargon for financial
| transactions that have no oversight - are made possible by
| the things runeks mentions. It's like someone saying "this
| solves the double spending problem," and someone else going
| "no, this allows me to buy contraband."
|
| It's not exactly a surprise that crypto allows transactions
| without oversight. The issue is whether or not that's
| something actually useful, and for the vast majority of
| people it clearly isn't.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| It _is_ a surprise, since all accounts and transactions
| are teansparent to all.
|
| And if you say that it was "obvious" that working mixers
| would exist, we are going to have to disagree. (Also I am
| willing to bet that if you put a significant amount of
| computing power into it, you can untangle that ball of
| yarn, and the US intelligence agencies did, like for
| Tor.)
| dmitriid wrote:
| > controlled by no one, with standardized API's
|
| Controlled by no one, but suddenly standardized APIs exist.
| Who standardized them?
|
| Controlled by no one, but suddenly everyone is going to use
| those standardized APIs that appeared by magic. And even
| those entities that never ever used open or standardized APIs
| will rush to use them because blockchain.
|
| > We've never had this before, and it's incredible how fast
| the DeFi space is moving because of it
|
| Theres nothing amazing about companies busy reinventing flash
| loans and currency speculation.
|
| > This is a radical new way of building finance and it's the
| fastest paced industry I've ever been a part of.
|
| It's only fast because it deals in fantasy tokens in a very
| limited scope with zero oversight or regulation. And this
| space is busy re-discovering why these regulations exist in
| the first place.
|
| > Like AWS people didn't understand the value initially
|
| Most people understood AWS value initially. 2-3 years after
| launch _everyone_ understood AWS. Now everyone uses it.
|
| AWS provided, and still provides, a multitude of services
| that are actually useful. Where as the "fast moving space"
| offers nothing outside the "buy low sell high flash loan"
| hamster wheel that is "defi"?
|
| > I think a lot of HN doesn't get it because they don't work
| in finance, but everyone I've talked to who works in finance
| (or has to deal with their archaic systems) is really excited
| about the possibilities.
|
| There are very _very_ few people in finance who are excited
| about it. For many, many, _many_ reasons.
|
| Those who are excited are excited for all the wrong reasons:
| scams, speculations, unlimited investor money. The last one
| will probably go away soon. Speculations are only valuable as
| long as the fictional tokens are valuable for some definition
| of value. There's almost nothing else in the crypto space.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > Only if your problem exhibits the above property (and it's a
| distributed system) does using a blockchain make sense.
|
| I think we also need to specify that it's also an extremely
| distinct and rare _type_ of "distributed": When you _must_
| support unrestricted and unlimited creation of new participant
| nodes.
|
| That's the fundamental requirement that drives an entire
| cascade of other blockchain design choices, such as proof-of-
| work to prevent a takeover by sockpuppet-nodes, and mining to
| incentivize regular consistent participation by a presumed-
| benign majority. Without that requirement and workarounds,
| we're left with a kind of regular distributed database, pre-
| hype technology that already featured hashes and linked-lists.
|
| This requirement ("anybody can become part of the network
| anonymously") also makes for a great litmus-test for whether
| you need blockchain.
|
| For example, in national elections we probably _don 't_
| want/need literally any number of computers anywhere in the
| world to jump in and deciding what happens based on their CPU
| power. It would be dramatically faster/easier/safer to simply
| define a fixed list of nodes, where each state runs a couple
| plus the federal government, and then rely on the fact that
| evildoers would have to compromise too many different systems
| and agencies.
| akrymski wrote:
| I think the word is "decentralised" rather than distributed:
| no single authority that controls membership of a distributed
| system, in a P2P style
| pid-1 wrote:
| I think Byzantine Fault Tolerance is the name of such
| propriety (being resilient to a limited number of adversarial
| nodes).
| adolph wrote:
| People don't use that term anymore because the generals of
| many countries present the same problem, not just those of
| the Eastern Roman Empire.
|
| https://www.microsoft.com/en-
| us/research/publication/byzanti...
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| This seems like another case of deprecating language
| based on an individual or cohort realizing something that
| a reasonable person would have already assumed.
| nathias wrote:
| the original purpose of an invention does not limit the scope
| of its application
| crypot wrote:
| The book How Innovation Works by Matt Ridley changed my
| perspective on this. Originally I thought all innovation was
| like the dotcom era. Ridley attempts to show that there are
| times when it is not always clear what the final innovation
| will be.
| nathias wrote:
| I recommend Mumford's Technics and Civilization.
| paulgb wrote:
| No, but ignoring the design criteria that an invention solves
| for is a recipe for using the wrong tool for the job.
| nathias wrote:
| 'right tools for the right job' seems like just re-stating
| the original point in different terms, how right a tool is
| depends on the actual context a big part of that context is
| culture, preferences, politics etc. not just engineering
| concerns
| paulgb wrote:
| If "right tool for the job" is too hand-wavey, maybe
| "optimal tool given the problem constraints" is a better
| phrase.
|
| E.g. I've seen proposals for "credentials on the
| blockchain", but if you assume that a credential issuer
| has a known public key (as these proposals do), the
| issuer can just sign a credential, no public ledger is
| needed. The complexity of using a blockchain for this is
| just waste.
| nathias wrote:
| sure, but the problem contraints arent reducible to
| engineering, so in the example you're giving an
| established centralized authority can profit from selling
| credentials using only a key signature, but a new
| decentralized bottom-up credential system needs a
| blockchain and smart-contracts to do it ...
| simiones wrote:
| The problem is that most such schemes end up requiring
| _both_ a blockchain _and_ an established centralized
| authority, because the blockchain doesn 't actually solve
| the problem its meant to solve (since the only problem it
| solves is distributed consensus on the order of events in
| the blockchain - no more, no less).
| nathias wrote:
| I think it does, because of its complexity, it's more of
| a set of technologies than just a software solution.
| Preventing double-spend is just the main use, however in
| order to do this a whole game-theoretical
| economic/technological system is required and that also
| solves and/or creates other problems. For
| cryptocurrencies, DAOs and similar systems economics is a
| security concern (wrong incentives will make it possible
| for an someone to game and/or break the system).
| simiones wrote:
| The point is that blockchains don't provide you with
| anything other than that "main use". For any other kind
| of feature you need to add something else - and if you're
| adding a centralized trusted authority (which is by far
| the easiest way to do anything), then you can get rid of
| the blockchain altogether.
| QuantumGood wrote:
| "Absolute power corrupts absolutely", and blockchain has
| activated absolute greed in most, hence blockchain not really
| being developed for anything that is not Ponzi-like.
| BatteryMountain wrote:
| What you are referring to is a distributed ledger, built on top
| of a blockchain data structure.
|
| The word Blockchain is so overloaded, people forget you can
| build a "blockchain" in 50 lines of code if not less. "Mining"
| new blocks is added on top of that, it's not a hard requirement
| - you can just create new blocks and link them up. You can
| choose to "mine" on CPU (slow) or on the GPU, if you want
| "mining" at all. You can then choose to persist it (file or sql
| or whatever) or only run it in memory. After that you can get
| into the concept of ledgers and currencies, and after that into
| making it distributed via some gossip-y protocols.
|
| So a cleaner definition of a block chain would be, a tamper-
| proof daisy-chained data structure, similar to a linked list.
| All the stuff about ledgers, currencies, mining and consensus
| are separate concerns, stacked on top of a blockchain.
|
| Also checkout: Merkle trees, linked lists, Chain of
| Responsibility.
|
| Anyone agree/disagree?
| Nursie wrote:
| Yeah, basically everyone. "Blockchain" as commonly understood
| was brought into being by Bitcoin, and encapsulates far more
| than just a linked list with a cryptographic component.
|
| If it doesn't contain a mechanism for trustless, distributed
| consensus, then it's not really a blockchain in the sense
| that HN or the wider industry understands it.
|
| Your definition is wide enough to cover a lot of things that
| are well outside of normal discussion of blockchains. I'm not
| insinuating this is your goal, but it is a common
| argumentation tactic of people desperately trying to defend
| the sector, to widen the definition until they can include
| within it things like git, and then say "so of course
| blockchain tech is useful! You're using it!"
| hiq wrote:
| https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2019/02/theres_no_g.
| .. explains why talking about "blockchain" for anything but a
| public blockchain (including consensus etc.) is
| uninteresting.
| cmckn wrote:
| I think you're just describing merkle trees; and "blockchain"
| in popular usage includes the consensus mechanism (mining or
| otherwise).
| iterateofen wrote:
| Git has nothing to do with blockchain and is essentially what
| you are describing.
|
| There's already a word for that: distributed version control.
| We don't need to move the goal posts on what blockchain is to
| make it have an interesting use case.
|
| Blockchain is more specific to the consensus part not really
| about the self proving data structure part.
| jonhohle wrote:
| The consensus part is the piece that that vast majority of
| businesses (potentially all businesses) don't need. There
| are other mechanisms for trusting nodes and having a shared
| coordination mechanism is solved many times over.
| onetrickwolf wrote:
| A reason I have been interested in blockchain is that it seems
| like a good way to make a decentralized application that could
| exist beyond the life of the company or person that creates it.
|
| I work in a hobby industry where a lot of community run ledgers
| are suddenly lost forever due to the death of someone in the
| fandom (or rarely intentional sabotage or hacking).
|
| Would this be a good use for blockchain or are there maybe
| other solutions I'm not considering or aware of?
| constantcrying wrote:
| A blockchain requires significant, persistent and consistent
| community effort.
|
| If you can not have one guy taking up the mantle and doing
| the hosting, how can you get hundreds to do the same?
|
| >A reason I have been interested in blockchain is that it
| seems like a good way to make a decentralized application
| that could exist beyond the life of the company or person
| that creates it.
|
| Community run projects have existed for decades on the
| internet. They never needed a blockchain to persist. If they
| died, they died due to lack of interest and effort by their
| communities. A blockchain can not prevent that.
|
| >maybe other solutions I'm not considering or aware of? IPFS
| potentially.
| onetrickwolf wrote:
| > If you can not have one guy taking up the mantle and
| doing the hosting, how can you get hundreds to do the same?
|
| Well I mean if you were to use a public blockchain like
| Ethereum it's likely the Ethereum community wouldn't be
| going away. I am not thinking about rolling out our own
| chain.
|
| > Community run projects have existed for decades on the
| internet. They never needed a blockchain to persist
|
| Unfortunately my experience hasn't really been the same.
| Community data controlled by a single user can go away
| pretty easily. If you open up the data and let people host
| their own database then you don't have a single source of
| truth.
|
| Our data is largely just a ledger of who owns what with
| minimal meta data.
|
| > IPFS potentially
|
| Thanks will look into it!
| miracle2k wrote:
| This is really interesting, and I'd love to learn more
| about it. One thing to look into is rollups - they will
| soon enable custom application with cheap transaction
| fees, but with the full security of Ethereum. See e.g.:
| https://docs.celestia.org/category/recipe-book/
| badrabbit wrote:
| A lot of applications have that problem though.
|
| Take a text editor, it would be improved if edits or saves
| which are just transactions are stores on a blockchain if the
| text is being stored and shared synchronously and live between
| devices.
|
| Basically, people have more devices, want to collaborate and
| add redundancies to important systems which means changes to
| data (transaction) where the historical sequence of changes is
| important to someone can use blockchain, but of course it isn't
| neccesarily the best solution, especially if there is trust
| between nodes or out of sync nodes causing a mess can be solves
| by simpler solutions.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Blockchains wouldn't fix anything here, though. The last-
| connected device doesn't necessarily have the canonical file,
| and the blockchain doesn't have any way to resolve syncing
| conflicts. Git is a much better choice for transactional
| history, and it didn't need a blockchain to implement this
| concept.
| badrabbit wrote:
| Git requires a human to resolve conflicts, a blockchain
| comes to a majority consensus. But yeah, I would use git
| and try to automate conflict resolution but it stands to
| reason blockchain can also solve the problem. If you have
| 10 people live-editing a text content git will be messy for
| example but you can come to a consensus on agreeing who
| made what changes and when between participants (assume p2p
| connection).
| smoldesu wrote:
| > but you can come to a consensus on agreeing who made
| what changes and when between participants
|
| How is this different from Git's model of development?
| badrabbit wrote:
| Git is too slow for the use case I mentioned you resolve
| conflicts when you merge to your repo but you don't
| establish a consensus allowing everyone to accept your
| conflict resolution without centralizing.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Establishing consensus is more difficult than a single
| person deciding what to merge, if you _need_ a trustless
| system then you can add consensus on top of Git.
| badrabbit wrote:
| Yeah and speed up git to commit/push/merge very fast. Or
| use a blockchain. I feel like there is stigma against the
| term, shall we call it distributed leger instead?
| smoldesu wrote:
| You can call it a BitTorrent magnet for all I care, it
| doesn't change the fact that a distributed ledger only
| has so many uses. Git already has consensus mechanisms
| baked into it's architecture, and immutability is
| provided with GPG signing if you care enough about it.
|
| Both of those features have been available in Git since
| the 90s. You're not revolutionizing anything by proposing
| a migration to an _even less_ ubiquitous protocol than
| HTTP or SSH.
| badrabbit wrote:
| > You're not revolutionizing anything by proposing a
| migration to an even less ubiquitous protocol than HTTP
| or SSH.
|
| I did not propose that. I didn't know git had a consensus
| mechanism built into it other than manual resolution of
| merge conflicts. A simple blockhain over https is easier
| for me than trying to get git to do something it wasn't
| designed to do (it works with files and repos, can you
| imagine having a commit+push+merge for every word edit in
| my example?) there are ready made libraries for this. The
| path of least resistance to acheive desires goals is what
| I would take. To each his own, blockhain can solve these
| problems outside of crypto.
|
| Another big problem area is PKI as well. I'm sure you've
| seen stories about suspicious CAs, a distributed ledger
| of CA issuance and in the wild certificate observations
| is one legitimate goal that can be solved by blockhain
| (better than centralized CT logs that don't take ITW
| observations).
| smoldesu wrote:
| > I didn't know git had a consensus mechanism built into
| it other than manual resolution of merge conflicts
|
| Git has cryptographic identity baked-in, so people can
| assert authority over their own contributions. That
| enabled mailing groups and IRC channels which encouraged
| discussion before arriving at a consensus and merging
| relevant files to the master branch. It's not
| decentralized, but it could just as easily be hosted as a
| torrent if that was something people cared about.
| However, decentralized development has historically been
| a farce, so most people use something like Github to
| control and moderate their repos. You're right, this is a
| "to each his own" situation, and there's literally no one
| on the "hosting Git via BitTorrent" side of the room.
| Moving to a less-efficient, more-convoluted process does
| not fix this. I've been following decentralized
| technology and the likes of Bitcoin for almost a decade,
| and the successes and failures of the space are self-
| evident.
|
| > Another big problem area is PKI as well.
|
| To who?
|
| To the scary boogyman white-supremacist KiwiFarms NBC
| fearmonger types? Yeah, have fun getting anyone to rule
| in favor of them. To the rest of society, centralized CAs
| are a boon. Not only are they wicked-fast (good luck
| querying a blockchain faster than a DNS request), they go
| out of their way to prevent systemic abuse and domain-
| squatting in ways that crypto can't. You want to apply
| PKI to this space? Convince me that it wouldn't start
| another FTX-like situation, with powerful individual
| exerting economic power to centralize the market a-la
| crypto exchanges.
| danbruc wrote:
| No, that its not the problem that bitcoin solves. You can do
| distributed consensus just fine without a block chain - if you
| have to make a choice between two options, everyone broadcasts
| a vote for one of the options and the option with the most
| votes is the accepted option.
|
| The problem that bitcoin solves is that you can not prevent me
| from casting a million votes because the system is anonymous -
| or pseudonymous if you want - and therefore there is no list of
| participants that would prevent casting more than one vote.
| This is called a Sybil attack.
|
| Bitcoin's solution - and similarly that of other block chains -
| is to make casting a vote expensive, either in terms of
| computational resources or owned tokens or whatever.
| CPLX wrote:
| Compared to paper ballots it makes casting a ballot cheaper,
| more opaque, and less accountable.
| kayamon wrote:
| But immune to fraud. Conservation of energy proves the vote
| happened without manipulation.
| CPLX wrote:
| That's a ludicrous argument I am not even sure where to
| start.
|
| What exactly is the mechanism that proves that each vote
| registered by the system is in fact an accurate recording
| of the registered voting preference of an eligible voter?
| ninepoints wrote:
| This is such a narrow view on the problem because you also have
| to restrict the "make sense" part to the set of problems where
| it's ok to have the entire ledger in public view, not to
| mention that there are other mechanisms to accomplish the
| double spend issue
| la64710 wrote:
| This problem has been solved in numerous prior computer
| architecture most notably in the algorithms around leader
| selection in clusters or very wide distributed systems. The
| implementation varies from one use case to another but the
| point is the problem or solution is not new at all and
| blockchain is certainly not the earliest and most elegant
| solution for this.
| avereveard wrote:
| Out of curiosity which solution operate in a zero trust
| environment?
| la64710 wrote:
| All the solutions start with the premise of a zero trust
| environment where trust is established by a key exchange
| based on some sort of key management infrastructure.
| fareesh wrote:
| From an Indian pov my take is the boundary markers use-case
| sounds pretty good. I don't expect an American flying around from
| EWR to Seattle to ever understand this intuitively without being
| exposed to the realities in this part of the world, but having
| thought about it for all of 20 seconds it sounds like a very good
| idea.
|
| Yes - it is a solution to the problem of power and corruption. In
| India there is corruption at all levels of government. The
| wealthy and powerful could absolutely influence some levels and
| steal land. Even petty regional criminals are able to do it. It
| has happened to my own family - imagine the odds. 1 billion
| people here, and I read this article and even I can personally
| relate to the issue of stolen land.
|
| A blockchain that stored GPS coordinates and could realistically
| withstand a 51% attack, would solve the problem in my view. Are
| there other architectures that can also solve this problem? No
| doubt. Is the blockchain solution perfect? No it isn't.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > Yes - it is a solution to the problem of power and
| corruption.
|
| It's not.
|
| Question: who is the rightful owner of the marked land? See my
| comments in this discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27212564
|
| > The wealthy and powerful could absolutely influence some
| levels and steal land. Even petty regional criminals are able
| to do it.
|
| So the wealthy and the powerful get the person entering data on
| the blockchain to enter that the land belongs to them. What
| exactly has blockchain solved?
| Kwpolska wrote:
| A petty criminal visits your farm with a gun in his hands. You
| tell him that the blockchain says this land belongs to you.
| What happens then? Does he say "oh, sorry to bother you, have a
| nice day" and go away? Or does he just shoot you and take over
| the land?
| [deleted]
| grey-area wrote:
| Or worse, steal your only phone and take over the land, as
| ownership of the keys is now ownership of the land.
|
| Blockchain would actually make property theft easier in a
| poor area where people only have a phone.
| deanCommie wrote:
| As we've learned from the "They've stolen my apes" scenarios,
| the very nature of blockchain as the central authority of trust
| means that there is no such thing as theft on the blockchain.
|
| Today, corrupt powerful people use violence and intimidation to
| go move physical markers to change landownership.
|
| If land ownership was on the blockchain, the same corrupt
| powerful people will use violence and intimidation to force
| digital transfer of ownership.
|
| The same threats to the safety and wellbeing of family members
| works equally well to induce the desired actions in the
| physical word or the digital one.
|
| This is why Tim wrote to be wary of technical solutions for
| political problems.
| EFreethought wrote:
| Also: Couldn't the wealthy and the powerful influence the
| creation of the blockchain and the first data set put on the
| blockchain as well?
| brabel wrote:
| I imagine the rich, corrupt land lords in India would be able
| to steal your land even easier on the blokchain by sending a
| gang of armed bandits to your farm, torture you until you
| transfer everything to their wallet... and when you go to the
| police to denounce the harassment, you get arrested because
| the police is on the land lord's pocket. The blockchain
| cannot and will not stop violence in the real world from
| working around all the cryptography in the world, and it's
| shocking to me that anyone actually believes that to be
| somehow the case.
| alexjurkiewicz wrote:
| But how will poor people own enough computation to ensure rich
| people can't mount a 51% attack?
|
| If the database relies on trusted nodes run by eg, the
| government, why can't the government use MySQL and periodically
| publish a dump?
| fareesh wrote:
| It would have to be a mix of government and non government
| nodes for it to work.
| giaour wrote:
| In the US, property records are maintained by a local
| government authority. That alone doesn't stop squatters or
| unauthorized encroachment on your property. Normally, the
| boundaries of a parcel of land are not a mystery, but enforcing
| them requires more than just knowing their location
| Renevith wrote:
| Can you help me understand how this would help? The way I see
| it: if the government were on board with recording property
| boundaries in a public ledger, it could do it without a
| blockchain. And if it's not on board, then I don't see how a
| random third-party ledger would help, since the government
| wouldn't defer to it.
| PeterisP wrote:
| Not the parent post, but a reasonable implication would be
| that the government-as-a-whole could be forced to enforce the
| property boundaries as long as it is difficult for individual
| government officials to make undetected illegitimate changes
| to the ledger; such a mechanism would be disempowering the
| specific officials and force them to follow the rules
| enforced by the system.
| fareesh wrote:
| It would have to be a solution that involves the government
| jgreen10 wrote:
| When I was in university around 15 years ago, the idea of peer-
| to-peer currency was floating around as an evolution of the tit-
| for-tat idea in BitTorrent, which was still popular at the time.
|
| The expectation back then was that peer-to-peer would continue to
| evolve, especially in the area of distributed computing. Clouds
| did not exist yet, but projects like SETI@Home were having some
| success in terms of sharing compute resources. A peer-to-peer
| network could meter you for your consumption of compute resources
| through a lot of microtransactions in a virtual currency that
| avoided traditional banks or credit card providers.
|
| Then came the first and least efficient implementation of peer-
| to-peer currency: Bitcoin, which did not sell the distributed
| computing capacity, but used it to do meaningless computations.
| It was clever, since up until that point the problem of zero-cost
| identity had been unaddressed, but appears to have few practical
| applications. It is surprising to me that people view it as some
| kind of alternative currency or store of value and send real
| currency to "trusted" exchanges. You deposit money just for the
| pleasure of doing a transaction? Yeh, sure, you don't need to
| agree on a global, trusted intermediary, but you still need to
| trust your exchange not to screw you over.
|
| Ethereum is closer to the original ideas behind distributed
| computing and peer-to-peer currency, but the Internet has largely
| moved on from peer-to-peer networks. Today I can instantly get
| all the compute resources I need in a trustworthy, secure
| environment, and only pay for what I use. BitTorrent has also
| lost a lot much of its relevance with streaming services
| providing a greater level of convenience.
| roenxi wrote:
| This situation could be contrasted with the other (successful)
| distributed consensus policy - democratic governance.
|
| - No applications in commercial environments.
|
| - I've seen 10-20 people in my life who can explain the details
| of why Democracy is a good choice. Most people, for example, fail
| to identify that the typical democracy is much better at fighting
| then winning wars than any alternative.
|
| Blockchains could turn out to be similar technology. It is still
| too early to write them off. There just needs to be one big
| application, and it'll be something simple but also something
| that hasn't been done before because it was impossible to
| organise.
| pavlov wrote:
| The events described here took place in 2016, over six years ago.
| That's a long time in technology!
|
| Since then additional billions of investment dollars have flowed
| into the space (a "VC crypto spasm" as the author calls it). Yet
| zero meaningful products have emerged. But we've witnessed many
| giant scams and endless crypto startups that happily spun their
| wheels producing nothing, just minting tokens so that insiders
| and investors can dump them onto retail investors.
|
| How long will this have to go on? There are real things to build
| in software. This nonsense is both an embarrassment to the
| profession as well as a giant distraction. Time spent thinking
| about cryptocurrency mindgames is time you'll never get back to
| use on something productive.
| rglover wrote:
| > How long will this have to go on?
|
| As long as money flows into it (which seems to be ending) and
| people accept that Bitcoin was the "killer app," as the kids
| say.
|
| Everything else was just slower database apps jazzed up with
| buzzwords front-run by narcissists who realized they needed a
| new grift beyond Uber for Cats.
| matai_kolila wrote:
| I was able to circumvent my state's betting laws using
| Litecoin, so that feels meaningful, heh...
| arcturus17 wrote:
| Any moment now...
|
| I think in any other space, if you had millions of people (some
| of them wicked smart) m looking for applications of a
| technology without results, you'd see the space dwindle into
| irrelevance quickly...
|
| Crypto is very special in this sense. Despite massive failures
| and frauds at scale, people keep flocking to it. Is it the
| promise of unlimited riches, the romantic aspects of it
| ("decentralization", etc.), something else altogether?
|
| I don't know, but to answer your question: I get the feeling
| that despite the FTX case crypto still has many years ahead of
| it, regardless of whether it ever produces positive outcomes.
| markdestouches wrote:
| > Crypto is very special in this sense.
|
| I noticed crypto's quality of being special is in reverse
| proportion to the Fed's interest rates. Just an observation.
|
| In all seriousness, the are two real drivers here: 1)
| speculation 2) money laundering and avoiding regulation in
| general. These are the things that keep crypto afloat and
| cryptomaniacs repeating promises of the next big thing that's
| gonna change everything tomorrow. The real question is what's
| gonna happen sooner, Tesla's fool self-driving to Mars or
| blockchains taking over the world.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| Blockchain in itself is nothing else, just a chain of blocks
| (linked list of bunch of data with cryptographic hash of the
| previous block stored in the blocks).
|
| It's an amazing data structure, but putting money in it is no
| different than putting money into hash maps (which is another
| great data structure): it doesn't make sense in itself.
|
| What some companies and VCs really want to do (and are doing) is
| reputation laundering: invest a bit of money in some crypto
| tokens, and sell them to retail investors for much higher price.
|
| Of course after FTX collapsed they have to wait a few years to do
| it again.
| imglorp wrote:
| Tim didn't mention a contemporary sibling tech at AWS which
| should not be thrown out with the bathwater: private
| (centralized), immutable, signed ledgers. Their version is called
| QLDB and does have concrete applications where you need an
| provable audit trail of a stream of transactions with search and
| index on top. I was on a team at a fintech closely engaged with
| AWS to prototype a money movement system using that as a central
| ledger. There's an open source one with similar properties on GH
| somewhere, also.
|
| It's not sexy like blockchain so it seems marketing had to slip
| in some Quantum to bump the buzzword sex count.
|
| If financial industry regulators were serious about catching
| laundering or book cooking, they would demand this kind of tech
| as a foundation of compliance reporting.
| Terretta wrote:
| Read tbray's article looking for QLDB. There were keywords
| along the way suggesting the possibility, but it didn't get
| there.
|
| As a NYC financial services CTO, a few years back I spoke to
| Jassy personally, asking him to please not make 'traditional'
| blockchain nonsense, but to please productize and release a
| distributed ledger primitive. A few weeks later, AWS got back
| to us and said they were willing to work on such a thing, and a
| few groups (perhaps such as yours) jumped on as well. In our
| case, we were looking to use it to help manage multiparty
| contracts where we as a bank were trusted by the multiple
| parties who didn't need to trust each other.
|
| When AWS did eventually* announce AWS Blockchain at re:Invent,
| they announced QLDB alongside. One was what everyone was
| begging for, one was useful. I'll leave which is which as an
| exercise for the reader. :-)
|
| TL;DR:
|
| I encourage anyone serious about solving financial services
| problems where blockchain comes up to look at QLDB instead, but
| also anyone looking at security, compliance attestation, or
| other multi-party trust or regtech related problems.
|
| * _Note: "eventually" as in, quite late to the blockchain hype
| party, and dragged kicking and screaming by the sales org, as
| tbray describes, so that at least they'd stay in the room with
| "big IT" signing up for IBMs hyperledger and other failed
| experiments._
| fulafel wrote:
| The analogy to git comes to mind. To match the above you'd need
| to be using it with signed commits. In the Git world there's
| the debate about rewriting vs preserving history. The
| similarities might be actually interesting.
|
| In Git users there are two schools of thought, one which
| advocates preservign history (even if it is messy / involves
| fixes) because preserving a record of what actually happened is
| useful [1]. The other insists that a curated version of the
| history is more important because it is easier to understand in
| retrospect.
|
| [1] There are other downsides in Git history rewriting, such as
| the blow up you get when attempting to merge / join branches
| where one has rewritten history and the other not... and the
| blow up you get when two people attempt to collaborate on a
| branch in presence of rewriting. These might have accounting
| analogies too
| inkyoto wrote:
| > [...] compliance [...].
|
| This is the crux of the matter. In a prevailing number of
| cases, when people ask about a blockchain, they actually want a
| ledger database with the following properties:
|
| - an immutable, tamper proof, append-only transaction log;
|
| - cryptographically verifiable datasets;
|
| - certification and/or compliance validation by externally
| accredited auditing bodies for SOC, PCI-DSS, ISO, HIPPA etc.
|
| Use cases for ledger databases go beyond finance, and have been
| becoming a commonplace in health, education, supply change and
| inventory management, archive record management and similar.
| Anywhere, where compliance, strict record keeping and/or audit
| requirements are in place, the ledger databases provide the
| answer. AWS has QLDB, and Azure will soon have the Azure SQL
| Ledger Database (built on top of their SQL Server product).
|
| Fully fledged blockchains are not required in most cases.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Ledgers are quite easy to build. Git is a ledger. It doesn't
| use a block chain but it does link commits via their hashes;
| which makes it an audit proof ledger. Unless you can break
| the hashes, you can't modify its history.
|
| And git is used between many different developers and
| companies working on the same projects. It was actually
| designed for this use case. The reason git doesn't need
| blockchains for this is because it funnels all the commits
| and pull requests through trusted code owners: people. The
| consensus model is very simple: a mutually respected
| developer has looked at the thing and gave their thumbs up.
|
| Banks, insurers, etc. use ledgers. But mostly they lack
| cryptographic safety. And they use a similar reputation based
| consensus model. Auditors, regulators, accountants, etc. It's
| good enough but the failure modes can be somewhat expensive.
| And of course the flaky nature of the whole system actually
| represents a business opportunity in it self. Banking is a
| very lucrative business.
|
| Blockchains are potentially a nicer/cheaper technical
| alternative for all this. But so far not an essential or very
| practical one. And of course most block chains have scaling
| challenges. Ethereum is a non starter for running anything at
| scale. Transactions are too slow, too costly and the
| throughput sucks. Even with the new version it's still
| nowhere good enough to run even a small bank. Highly
| unsuitable for running millions of accounts on where the cost
| of each transaction would far exceed the value of that
| transaction.
| inkyoto wrote:
| > Ledgers are quite easy to build. Git is a ledger. It
| doesn't use a block chain but it does link commits via
| their hashes; which makes it an audit proof ledger. Unless
| you can break the hashes, you can't modify its history.
|
| Easy as an arm chair theory, impossible in practice without
| a complete rewrite of git from scratch. You are also
| disregarding the immutability of the data and the append-
| only property of stored datasets in ledger DB's: the entire
| temporal history of changes to a document (or a table) must
| be available in a ledger database. Changes are linked by
| virtue a Merkle tree, and the content of each node (i.e.
| revision) can be cryptographically proven to be untampered
| with. QLDB documentation provides a visualisation of the
| cryptographic verification process and of a sequence of
| steps: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/qldb/latest/developergui
| de/verif...
|
| Git is absolutely the wrong tool for the job as hashes in
| git are used as identifiers to identify a specific change,
| but not to cyrptographically checksum the document/the
| change to the data. Git commits can also merged, rewritten,
| squashed or deleted - something is absolutely unacceptable
| in the compliance space.
|
| So no, Git it is not easy to build a ledger database out of
| git if there are strict _compliance_ requirements as I can
| pull out a revision M out of N revisions of my documents
| stored in a ledger database, run the revision N through the
| proof interface and use it in a court hearing as evidence
| or turn it over to external auditors. And no external
| auditing body will ever certify a git based solution.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| > Git is absolutely the wrong tool for the job as hashes
| in git are used as identifiers to identify a specific
| change, but not to cyrptographically checksum the
| document/the change to the data. Git commits can also
| merged, rewritten, squashed or deleted - something is
| absolutely unacceptable in the compliance space.
|
| Read up on git internals, it's a very elegant and simple
| design and you seem to assume a few things about it that
| are flat out wrong. A git repository is in fact a Merkle
| tree. Every commit is chained to the previous commit via
| a hash that includes the commit content and the hash of
| the previous commit. So, git history is immutable. You
| can't modify commits without breaking the chain of
| hashes. It's by definition append only.
|
| You can of course modify your local copy of a git
| repository and rewrite history (i.e. change all the
| hashes). But that makes it incompatible with upstream
| history. People tend to use this to clean up their local
| change history before they send it upstream. With the
| exception of force push (i.e. just overwrite the remote
| repository), there is no way to merge a rewritten
| history. In order to merge changes, there MUST be a
| shared commit with the same history. It's not optional.
| inkyoto wrote:
| > Read up on git internals, it's a very elegant and
| simple design and you seem to assume a few things about
| it that are flat out wrong.
|
| I am well acquainted with git internals and object types,
| which include blobs, trees, commits, and tags. But I do
| acknowledge that I was wrong about git not hashing the
| object's contents - it does.
|
| > A git repository is in fact a Merkle tree. Every commit
| is chained to the previous commit via a hash that
| includes the commit content and the hash of the previous
| commit.
|
| Commits in git are grouped into commit trees that form a
| single atomic commit, and git allow manipulations of the
| commit trees, which is fundamentally unacceptable for an
| immutable, verifiable ledger. That is why I am asserting
| that git is not an acceptable technology for a ledger.
|
| > You can of course modify your local copy of a git
| repository and rewrite history (i.e. change all the
| hashes). But that makes it incompatible with upstream
| history.
|
| I have personally squashed commits in my local project
| copy and force pushed such a squashed commit into a
| upstream repository thereby completely decimating the
| commit history in the upstream repository. Previous
| commit history was completely gone every single time. It
| is an occasionally useful feature (i.e. fixing mistakes
| of young developers), but the commit history rewrite is
| absolutely unacceptable in the compliance world. Just the
| fact that there is direct, unabridged write access to the
| history or to the storage where the history is recorded
| makes such a solution untenable as a ledger database.
|
| I do concede that there are _some_ conceptual
| similarities between git and ledger databases at the
| architectural level; I do, however, vociferously dispute
| the suitability of git as a foundation for building a
| ledger database without a substantial rewrite of the git
| foundation.
| unionpivo wrote:
| You can do the same things with ledger databases, it's
| just no so convenient, as just typing --force
|
| If you have permission to replace database with with your
| new one (or spin up new instance of DB, adn redirect app
| to use that, depending on how you are set up), it's just
| not as convenient (by design).
|
| I used centera WORM disks at my previous jobs, for added
| guarantees. (not by choice, stay away of you have a
| choice)
|
| And once the GDPR came out, and we had to remove some
| content, that's what we did, made a copy, with bad data
| removed, nuked centera clean, (created new partition, and
| disabled old one) and restored now clean data on. As far
| as our applications were concerned nothing happened.
| inkyoto wrote:
| You are not incorrect. Ledger databases, as a technology,
| do not eliminate a possibility of spinning up a shadow
| ledger and rebuilding the change history in the new
| ledger that is purged of inconvenient records.
|
| Managed ledger database services in the cloud (e.g. QLDB
| in AWS) offer a partial solution to the problem such as
| platform generated timestamps in the delete/change
| history table (hard to forge), delete operations not
| actually deleting the data but moving it into a separate
| history table, the separation of access to the ledger
| (app vs account administrator), disallowing direct access
| to the storage, setting up anomaly detection alarms in
| the monitoring layer etc etc.
|
| But none of that precludes the possibility of a ledger
| being nuked or rebuilt (and later nuked).
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| You were arguing it's not a proper merkle tree and it is.
| You are not a little bit wrong there but flat out barking
| up the wrong tree. It's a merkle tree with full
| immutability and append only behavior. This is not an
| accidental/conceptual similarity. It's the single most
| important design decision that Git is based on.
|
| Force push only allows you to wipe out repositories that
| you control. The whole point of git is that you do not
| need write access at all to share commits. That's why
| it's called a pull request and not a push demand. You
| invite others to look at and maybe merge your changes.
| There is no way to force the other side to do that and
| force push rewriting their commit history is not going to
| help your case for obvious reasons.
| inkyoto wrote:
| I am not arguing the case of git having or not having
| Merkle trees (git has a <<weak>> implementation of the
| Merkle trees, for in a ledger database every block's
| cryptographic signature derives from the contents of the
| preceding block - a property that git does not possess as
| it does not support the concept of blocks and operates of
| commit trees instead that are allowed to be moved
| around). I am arguing two points, specifically:
|
| Point no. 1: > Ledgers are quite easy to build.
|
| Cryptographically provable, tamper-proof ledgers that
| will sustain a 3rd party compliance certification are not
| easy to build, they are expensive to build, test and
| certify (very expensive!), and are very expensive to
| operate, especially in large scale environments.
|
| Point no. 2: > Git is a ledger.
|
| git is not a proper ledger due to the lack of two
| fundamental properties of a ledger, as originally stated:
|
| _1. an immutable, tamper proof, append-only transaction
| log;_
|
| git does not satisfy this requirement by virtue of
| allowing one to tamper with the commit history. Write
| access to commits is the major offender here as it is
| there, and it opens the door for the commit history
| abuse. An append-only transaction log also offers a
| linear, _entirely immutable_ , history (a very important
| quality from the compliance perspective!), whereas git
| (by virtue of allowing branches) allows for a non-linear,
| _mutable_ , temporal history that breaks the linear
| progression of revisions of valuable documents/assets
| being stored in it.
|
| _2. cryptographically verifiable datasets;_
|
| git offers a limited facility into the verification due
| to allowing one to modify the commit trees, and, by
| extension, to rewrite the commit history. A git commit
| history can't be trusted to from the compliance
| perspective.
|
| What I am sensing is a misconstruction of the purpose of
| git. git is designed to _track_ changes but _not to
| provide the evidence of changes having not been tampered
| with_. Both purposes have their own places and their own
| use cases, and the git design is sound and solid, yet it
| serves an entirely different purpose altogether, and - no
| - it can 't be repurposed as a ledger. That is the case I
| am arguing.
| ProblemFactory wrote:
| Git provides all of those things, as long as everyone
| agrees on what the current HEAD commit id (hash) is. You
| could publish that hash in a printed newspaper or with a
| government regulator. After publishing it is impossible
| to rewrite commit history without evidence of tampering.
|
| Rewriting history and amending commits forces the
| recalculation of all commit hashes that follow it, and
| you end up with a completely different final hash.
|
| AWS QLDB does the same thing with Amazon holding the
| final hash.
| speleding wrote:
| > Easy as an arm chair theory, impossible in practice
| without a complete rewrite of git from scratch. > Git is
| absolutely the wrong tool for the job
|
| Our company uses ledger.cli on top of git as a
| bookkeeping ledger [https://www.ledger-cli.org]. Works
| brilliantly, so much easier to use the text wrangling
| tools we know and love instead of some brain dead GUI of
| an accounting program.
| hanniabu wrote:
| We want permissionless, which requires decentralization,
| which requires blockchain
| LilBytes wrote:
| For what purpose or enabler does permissionless benefit
| this use case you have in mind? Or in another way, what
| does requiring permissions block your use case?
| mariusor wrote:
| Do you have any other clues for finding that open source
| project?
|
| It sounds very interesting to me.
| imglorp wrote:
| Here's one https://github.com/codenotary/immudb/
| inkyoto wrote:
| Hyperledger is one such project: https://www.hyperledger.org/
| (mostly the marketing fluff) and
| https://github.com/hyperledger/fabric
| marcell wrote:
| Blockchain skeptics are all defending the tech of the current
| financial system, and implicitly arguing it can't be improved.
| They are wrong. The tech underlying the current system is really
| bad. For example:
|
| (1) How can I perform an atomic transaction across two stock
| exchanges?
|
| (2) How can I take stock held on one exchange, and use it as
| collateral on an unaffiliated lending platform?
|
| (3) How can I launch a new financial app, as a small startup, and
| open it to assets held on ETrade.
|
| All of these are impossible in the current system. In contrast
| they are all trivial using Ethereum's blockchain.
|
| https://ortutay.substack.com/p/the-computer-science-case-for...
| Nursie wrote:
| > Blockchain skeptics are all defending the tech of the current
| financial system, and implicitly arguing it can't be improved.
|
| Homeopathy skeptics are all defending the mainstream medical
| system and big pharma, and implicitly arguing it can't be
| improved.
| philliphaydon wrote:
| I opened the site thinking it would be serious but got a popup
| for web3. So I closed it.
| autotune wrote:
| The underlying system is mostly written in COBOL and
| desperately needs a replacement before all the COBOL engineers
| die out with many large bags of money going to their
| descendants. Blockchain, no matter how good it might be or
| might have been, is clearly not that system due to its now
| tarnished reputation at this point in time.
| everfree wrote:
| > Blockchain, no matter how good it might be or might have
| been, is clearly not that system due to its now tarnished
| reputation at this point in time.
|
| I never understand how people can consider the reputation of
| glorified timestamped linked lists to be "tarnished". This
| isn't a company or even a particular piece of software, it's
| a class of data structures. You're trying to tell me that a
| particular way of structuring data has a reputation that can
| be tarnished?
| autotune wrote:
| Someone comes out with a new database called "BigBucksDB"
| that uses a previously unknown technology called
| "blockchain." Suddenly every scammer and grifter decides to
| pump up this new "BigBucksDB" and emphasizes how safe and
| secure it is, thanks to blockchain, because all
| transactions are public and the ledger or whatever can't be
| modified in any way except to append new data. Then the
| companies using "BigBucksDB" decide to transfer all of
| their customers funds into their own accounts at a real
| bank and declare bankruptcy. What was the point of
| implementing "blockchain" in the first place? What use case
| can it possibly have for future services that would be
| worth taking a risk on it to implement when its primary use
| case for crypto transactions just fell apart? I know
| practically nothing about blockchain except how it was
| touted in the media as something that was supposed to make
| it difficult to modify crypto transactions and commit
| fraud. That fraud has still managed to be committed. What
| was even the point?
| everfree wrote:
| > Then the companies using "BigBucksDB" decide to
| transfer all of their customers funds into their own
| accounts at a real bank and declare bankruptcy.
|
| Not your keys, not your coins. If some random company
| that you don't trust has permission on the chain to
| transfer your funds, you're not doing it right.
|
| > That fraud has still managed to be committed.
|
| FTX was plain old fashioned fraud, the fraud wasn't
| committed on a blockchain. Ironically, blockchains (in
| particular decentralized exchanges and "DeFi") are a
| solution to the type of fraud FTX committed. They
| purported to be in custody of their customer's funds,
| while in reality they frittered them away, because there
| was no transparency. From the perspective of people who
| had Bitcoin and Ether in their own custody, the chain has
| been chugging along as normal.
| autotune wrote:
| > Not your keys, not your coins. If some random company
| that you don't trust has permission on the chain to
| transfer your funds, you're not doing it right.
|
| 0 caution about this was offered in the MSM. Everyone
| agrees that the average crypto investor was clueless
| about how it all worked behind the scenes, but that
| didn't stop them from FOMO and wanting to jump on the
| fail whale anyway because investment firms like Sequoia
| Capital pumped it up.
|
| > FTX was plain old fashioned fraud, the fraud wasn't
| committed on a blockchain.
|
| Whether it was legitimately committed on a blockchain or
| not is not really relevant here. It was marketed as being
| a way to prevent fraud for all these exchanges who
| claimed they were using it for its intended purpose. How
| is the average investor, who got shafted thinking
| everything was safe thanks to this emerging new
| technology, supposed to keep thinking that any exchanges
| existing presently are going to implement it the way it
| was intended if they got so duped by what was supposed to
| be the one exchange that legitimized the whole industry?
| everfree wrote:
| I believe that average investors (without domain-specific
| knowledge) should not be investing in crypto at this
| point in time because the tech is too immature and there
| are too many pitfalls, so everything you said is
| consistent with my beliefs.
|
| Another ten years from now we'll have social recovery
| wallets, better regulatory frameworks and bulletproof
| ETFs - and that's the point where average investors might
| consider some sort of nontrivial allocation in their
| retirement accounts. Then again, people still get screwed
| left and right nowadays through traditional investment
| means such as shady financial advisors peddling high
| expense ratio active funds, so perhaps the answer is that
| safe investing will always require some minimum amount of
| domain-specific knowledge.
|
| But in the mean time, companies will consider building on
| its APIs and data structure ideas regardless of whether
| the general public sees it as "tarnished" as an
| investment option.
| qeternity wrote:
| > (1) How can I perform an atomic transaction across two stock
| exchanges?
|
| I'm not sure why you're mandating across two stock exchanges?
| If you want to swap two assets in a single transaction, there
| is a very mature market for this. This has more to do with
| CPAMM vs. CLOB than it does anything else.
|
| > (2) How can I take stock held on one exchange, and use it as
| collateral on an unaffiliated lending platform?
|
| Well, assets aren't held on exchanges...but again, there is a
| huge industry that facilitates this.
|
| > (3) How can I launch a new financial app, as a small startup,
| and open it to assets held on ETrade.
|
| This has more to do with ETrade than anything else. It's like
| saying how can I launch a startup and get my product in every
| Walmart store...well you need their cooperation.
|
| > All of these are impossible in the current system.
|
| Absolutely not even remotely true. Just because you don't know,
| doesn't mean it's not possible.
| marcell wrote:
| > I'm not sure why you're mandating across two stock
| exchanges? If you want to swap two assets in a single
| transaction, there is a very mature market for this. This has
| more to do with CPAMM vs. CLOB than it does anything else.
|
| If you want to do arbitrage across two exchanges, it is
| helpful to have an atomic transaction that's all or nothing
| across them.
|
| > This has more to do with ETrade than anything else. It's
| like saying how can I launch a startup and get my product in
| every Walmart store...well you need their cooperation.
|
| In web3/defi, I can do this without even talking to the defi
| equivalent of ETrade. It makes it a lot easier to start a
| startup.
| adrr wrote:
| Never once as a retail investor have i needed any of those
| features. Blockchain a solution looking for a problem.
| [deleted]
| tiffanyh wrote:
| Off topic: isn't Amazon know for forcing people to be better
| writers due to how they conduct meetings with written memos.
|
| I bring this up because that post could have been 1/2 the length,
| if not shorter, without losing any content or messaging.
| acdha wrote:
| Different styles for different audiences. Busy executives want
| concise pitches because they receive a ton of them, people
| reading a long-running blog are looking more for the color and
| background of a personal blog.
| autotune wrote:
| >A huge, almost incomprehensible, volume of venture capital was
| flowing into the sector, and that money was localized in the
| Finance sector, specifically in Manhattan.
|
| I think the worst part about this whole thing is there are _still
| millions if not billions of dollars_ being pumped into it. I
| literally just got a job interview request for a crypto exchange
| with hundreds of millions supposedly in the bank. It 's absurd.
| csomar wrote:
| It is a shame that we are ending up here with "Blockchain
| technology". Beyond the financial aspect (Bitcoin/Stablecoins),
| here are a few use cases where a Blockchain will _shine_ :
|
| - Tracking shipments across countries. This is an append-only
| operation, across multiple
| jurisdictions/languages/infrastructures. A blockchain ledger can
| play the role of standardizing operations for the tracking of
| shipments.
|
| - Healthcare records.
|
| - Company registry records. Once submitted, they are publicly
| available and immutable.
|
| - Title deeds. You wouldn't own the NFT yourself. The government
| could assign it to you and be the only one able to transfer it
| across its "subjects".
|
| - Stocks/Assets. For this one I'll blame ASE for failing to
| deliver. They have picked the wrong company to build such a thing
| while spending a gigantic sum of money in the process.
|
| - Digital Identities. There was never enough investment in this
| area, especially for key retrieval in the case of loss.
|
| - Decentralized DNS. The tech is there (Namecoin) and roughly
| functional. There was never any investment in this comparing to
| the billions thrown in NFTs and other crap projects.
|
| Instead of addressing any of the above points, Blockchain and
| Crypto degenerated into fancy websites and gifs aimed to drill
| money from everyone who can be influenced. We are here 5-6 years
| later after the Defi/Smart Contracts fever and all we have to
| show for it is some apes NFT. This could have been done a lot
| earlier with Namecoin which has a much more native support of
| NFT. But Namecoin never took off because the founders were never
| interested to make money out of this.
|
| It does seem that governments might be more fundamental than we
| thought. They might be protecting us more from ourselves than we
| see them as an imposition on our freedom. Here we have a
| worldwide experiment of a government-less operation at wild.
| runeks wrote:
| No. Blockchain was invented to solve one particular problem:
| distributed consensus on a sequence of transactions, where the
| choice of which transaction to include from a set of
| conflicting transactions is irrelevant.
|
| The latter property here is key to understanding where
| blockchain is useful. It was created to solve the "double spend
| problem", ie. two transitions that spend the same coin but send
| it to different recipients (and so they conflict and cannot
| both be included in the canonical list of transactions). A
| double spend is the result of the sender either (a) making a
| mistake, or (b) attempting fraud. In both cases the important
| property is that as long as only a single of these conflicting
| transactions is included, the systems works.
|
| For all the applications you list above, this property is not
| present. If I create a transaction in your "shipping
| blockchain" that says "shipment A moved to location X" and
| another, conflicting transaction that says "shipment A moved to
| location Y", then it's obviously important which transaction we
| include, since it must reflect the actual, physical location of
| "shipment A".
| EFreethought wrote:
| Is there a double spend problem in fiat currencies? Honestly,
| I do not think there is. So what is the point of
| cryptocurrency?
| fabianfabian wrote:
| yes, the entire reason a bank is needed in all online
| transactions is because nobody trusts YOU to not double
| spend, but they do trust the bank to make sure they don't
| let you spend your money twice.
| EFreethought wrote:
| Then the banks have solved the double-spending problem,
| so in effect there isn't one.
|
| I was asking the question because if double-spending has
| been solved, then why do we need crypto/blockchain?
| fabianfabian wrote:
| Sure, if double-spending has been solved for you, you
| don't need a blockchain. It hasn't been solved for
| everyone yet though. A great book to learn about this is:
| Check Your Financial Privilege
| (https://www.amazon.com/Check-Your-Financial-Privilege-
| Gladst...)
| kilburn wrote:
| What I see missing in most of those is that decentralized
| immutable storage is the only part solved by blockchain
| technologies, and:
|
| - Storage is not the hard part of all those proposals. Standard
| formats and a shared ontology between all players is the actual
| hard part. Medical records are useless if you can't read them.
|
| - Immutable storage is not hard to do in a centralized fashion
| and can be made much more efficient. Do blockchain-based
| systems offer the bandwidth to ingest _all_ medical records
| produced worldwide? I'd say the required amount of records-per-
| second would surprise you (as well as the potential size of
| those records, where some are high resolution scans and stuff
| like that).
|
| - Usually you _don't_ want immutable records, even when it
| seems like you do. What happens when you want to advance the
| formats stored in the blockchain? You can't edit old records
| (to update them to the new format), so your only options
| become: create a new blockchain and/or keep the cruft forever.
|
| - Storing anything private via encryption poses problems in
| many domains: sometimes you want certain third-parties to be
| able to access that information (e.g.: the hospital should have
| access to your medical records if you get there unconscious in
| an ambulance). I've seen no real solution to the kind of issues
| that arise there.
|
| These are very serious limitations against blockchains
| _shining_ if you ask me. Of all your proposed use-cases the
| only one that I can't see hitting those issues is the company
| registry records one (and maybe that's because I'm not
| acquainted enough with that domain).
| fabianfabian wrote:
| This guy is exactly what's wrong with the crypto space. It's a
| fundamental misunderstanding of the strengths and weaknesses of
| blockchains.
|
| Putting all those things he listed on a blockchain is the
| perfect example of "That's not a blockchain, that's a sequence
| of poor engineering decisions!"
|
| Everything he listed can already be done with basic software
| engineering. Add a blockchain to these things makes it slow,
| adds unnecessary complexity and fake decentralization where its
| not even needed.
|
| Crypto is full of Ape NFTs and casino gambling because there is
| nothing useful in blockchains other than removing trusted third
| parties.
|
| Bitcoin added something new, crypto asked what more can we do
| with this? The answer is not much.
| throw827474737 wrote:
| Total disagree and not sure why you believe why any of those
| woukd have value added if on blockchain. Especially, health
| care records, wtf??
| csomar wrote:
| Standardized and encrypted healthcare records. It means
| wherever you travel you can: 1. Access your health records at
| your discretion; and 2. Make sure these records are never
| lost and 3. These records are immutable.
|
| Encrypted records can be easily added by any doctor/clinic as
| your public key is publicly available.
| orobinson wrote:
| I would imagine the complexities of building and rolling
| out such a system would not be technical. Imagine trying to
| get 200+ countries to agree and implement a standard to
| store healthcare records, blockchain or no blockchain.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Healthcare records frequently need to be modified (e.g. a
| test was done incorrectly and needs to be voided). Sure,
| you can stick another entry in there saying "modify this
| other entry", but then any operations involve
| canonicalizing the state by scanning the entire subsequent
| chain. All the caching/indexing optimizations I can think
| of to make this not a complete nightmare also break all the
| data privacy and RTBF protections patients have.
|
| There's also a _lot_ of healthcare data. Is there any
| blockchain that scales to literally petabytes of data a
| year per facility /organization?
| everfree wrote:
| > then any operations involve canonicalizing the state by
| scanning the entire subsequent chain
|
| Sounds exactly like what blockchain node software does
| when you first start it up and it syncs the chain?
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| The scales are completely different orders of magnitude.
| Crypto chains are miniscule, a few hundred GB max and
| even that's problematic for a lot of devices. A single CT
| scan is something like 20+ GB. There are ~220,000 of
| those in the US every single day and probably billions or
| trillions of other little things being logged. You can
| store offchain, but then you're a. Centralizing things
| again and b. Probably violating patient data privacy.
| everfree wrote:
| Decentralized data stores exist. IPFS is perhaps the most
| widely known. But if you discount imaging and store only
| medical summaries (which if we're being honest is often
| the only thing doctors look at after the fact anyways),
| it would definitely be technically feasible.
| fulafel wrote:
| There are lots of p2p distributed data store designs around
| that fit this better.
| KronisLV wrote:
| > Standardized and encrypted healthcare records.
|
| This is probably a non-starter in many cases. In my
| country, we had an e-health system that had millions
| invested in its development (we're a small country) and yet
| didn't work, nor was it really compatible with the systems
| already in place: https://www-delfi-
| lv.translate.goog/news/national/politics/e... (translated
| link)
|
| > Title: E-health is written off: those responsible for the
| "fraud" worth millions went unpunished, will create a new
| system
|
| > Excerpt: Its unpredictable operation has caused quite a
| lot of worries not only for doctors, but also for patients,
| who may go to the pharmacy for the medicine prescribed by
| the doctor and not get it, because e-health has rebelled.
| Likewise, e-health tends to be incompatible with the local
| systems of some large medical institutions, so there are
| situations when the electronic referral of a family doctor
| to a medical institution must be printed anyway.
|
| > On the other hand, doctor Nicmane-Aispure remembers a
| case when she visited a patient during a home visit,
| concluded that the condition was serious, wrote an
| electronic referral to call an ambulance, but "the
| ambulance is unhappy because the electronic referral cannot
| be opened".
|
| > The eHealth system also still requires users to perform
| many manual steps. "It is a manual system, where at best
| you can extract some Excel files," says Solvita Olsen, a
| sworn lawyer and associate professor at the University of
| Latvia, who has been following the e-health saga since its
| inception.
|
| And that was a system that didn't even try anything new,
| how do you imagine most mediocre countries out there will
| manage to deal with the technical complexity of blockchain
| based systems? Why even bother at that point, wouldn't they
| be better off with an XML or JSON schema or whatever other
| lowest common denominator one can come up with, to have
| some base data about the person and then additional bits
| that might be dependent on each country's laws?
|
| It's not like there aren't people that enter the data in
| these systems anyways, in your example of shipment
| tracking, someone could enter whatever data they want
| regardless. Want to make it appear that a package has left
| the country, even when you haven't bothered to send it out?
| Sure, just bribe whoever is running the system, very much
| like: https://xkcd.com/538/
| throw827474737 wrote:
| See the other responses for more, but would be curious how
| that discretion is completely lost when you want to proove
| something?
|
| Geberally surprised about the false beliefs around
| anonimity on block chains, as soon as you have the right
| anchors they are the most tracable.
|
| Or do you mean you sit at the doctor on your vacation, pull
| out an app to access your CT scan and hand it him over
| somehow or what is the use case here really? Seems so
| unrealistic on manu levels and much more easily realized
| with more solid tech, sorry?!
|
| > Encrypted records can be easily added by any
| doctor/clinic as your public key is publicly available.
|
| Yes, crypto101, which works fine without any blockchain?
| dilyevsky wrote:
| > Distributed DNS
|
| As opposed to normal DNS?
| csomar wrote:
| Edited to decentralized.
| fabianfabian wrote:
| DNS is already decentralized, it's one of the most
| decentralized projects on the internet.
|
| And while domains (not DNS) are less decentralized, it's
| all standardised and protocol based. If you want
| decentralized domains you need to champion for alternative
| DNS roots because all the technology is already there, just
| change the config file and get the people to do the same.
| Which is less effort than creating a whole new "blockchain"
| based system that does the same but slower.
| everfree wrote:
| > And while domains (not DNS) are less decentralized,
| it's all standardised and protocol based.
|
| For what it's worth as an example, Ethereum's name system
| (ENS) is also standardized and protocol based. And it
| eliminates the requirement of centralized registry
| corporations.
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| >Tracking shipments across countries.
|
| This has been a failed use case from the start because there's
| no effective way to control the entry point from the real world
| onto the blockchain. Farmer in South Carolina imports a
| boatload of tomatoes from China, enters them onto the
| blockchain as his own during harvest season, now you have a
| permanent indelible record of those tomatoes as they make every
| stop along the way to the consumer, with a completely
| fraudulent point of origin.
| GauntletWizard wrote:
| Garbage in, garbage out. Tracking shipments only works if you
| have proof that the shipment wasn't tampered with. Tracking
| shipments is only as reliable as the carrier not mucking with
| it, and we already have tamper-proof tape for solving that one.
| It doesn't prove anything, though. It's merely a tool in our
| arsenal of confirming trust, that makes it easier to tell where
| the problem lies if someone along the chain is lying. If
| someone along the chain is lying, their blockchain record is no
| more meaningful than any other document they'd produce.
|
| Registry records and title deeds and stock assets are already
| solved problems, and there's an important problem that
| blockchain is trying to solve: It is possible for the
| centralized services to transfer ownership without the owner's
| permission. This is an important feature. It is used in things
| like bankruptcy proceedings [1] and other law enforcement
| action all the time. The people trying to create the "feature"
| of not having that feature are called anarchists, and decent
| societies lock them up, shortly before or after their crimes
| cause actual damage.
|
| All of these are reasons for actual cryptography - Signatures
| and Merkel Trees. Blockchains have no advantages in any of
| them.
|
| [1] https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/18/investing/ftx-bahamas-
| seizure - Whether the governments doing the seizure are
| trustworthy is an entirely different problem with an entirely
| different scope of solutions, but the places that have actual
| anarchy going on are not typically nice places to live[2] and
| other governments typically do their best to insulate their
| population from them. [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piracy_off_the_coast_of_Somali...
| everfree wrote:
| > It's merely a tool in our arsenal of confirming trust, that
| makes it easier to tell where the problem lies if someone
| along the chain is lying.
|
| That makes it a useful tool, no?
|
| > people trying to create the "feature" of not having that
| feature are called anarchists
|
| Smart contracts are partial to neither law nor anarchy. It's
| trivial to write token code that allows a centralized service
| to transfer said token without the owner's permission. And
| that token still enjoys the benefits of being interoperable
| by default with other tokens and contracts that may not be
| under that same centralized service's control, yet are
| written to the same protocol standard.
|
| > All of these are reasons for actual cryptography -
| Signatures and Merkel Trees. Blockchains have no advantages
| in any of them.
|
| Blockchains provide reliable ordering and timestamping,
| something that cryptography itself cannot provide.
| Cryptographic shipment signing/tracking isn't very useful if
| the company can retroactively create a conflicting chain of
| backdated signatures and purport it to be the canonical one.
| GauntletWizard wrote:
| No, much cheaper and easier solutions to that already
| exist, in the form of "Every postal tracking app"
| everfree wrote:
| > the company can retroactively create a conflicting
| chain of backdated signatures and purport it to be the
| canonical one
| GauntletWizard wrote:
| Again, that can be incredibly easily solved with
| signatures stored in a separate system of record -
| Effectively, publishing a git sha somewhere else on a
| regular basis. This is not a blockchain, this is a merkle
| tree, which _is_ a good idea and _is_ currently
| unimplemented.
|
| The immense fraud and criminal behavior associated with
| the "Blockchain" ecosystem is the biggest inhibitor to
| actually good crypto being used for system-of-record. It
| sucks all the air out of the room and that's a bad thing.
| everfree wrote:
| Git does not guarantee the validity of timestamps stored
| within it, nor does it explicitly provide a single
| canonical tip. Those two guarantees are what prevent
| history from being forged.
|
| > The immense fraud and criminal behavior associated with
| the "Blockchain" ecosystem is the biggest inhibitor to
| actually good crypto being used for system-of-record.
|
| You could say the same thing about internet scams in the
| 90s. Eventually, everyone got over themselves and picked
| out the good parts.
| chinathrow wrote:
| > Tracking shipments across countries. This is an append-only
| operation, across multiple
| jurisdictions/languages/infrastructures. A blockchain ledger
| can play the role of standardizing operations for the tracking
| of shipments.
|
| People seem to forget that you still have to trust the people
| and/or hardware doing data entry while tracking shipments. If
| you can't solve that first, there's no need to have a
| blockchain as a storage medium.
| fabian2k wrote:
| From the blog post:
|
| > They presented some of the systems they'd built and yep, we
| were impressed. Then, with the startup CTO in the room, one of
| my fellow engineers asked the key question: "All these systems,
| are there any that wouldn't work without blockchain?" The guy
| didn't even hesitate: "No, not really."
|
| > And that was about that.
| obblekk wrote:
| It's interesting to read how much research tbray did on crypto
| back then. Definitely doesn't seem like new entrants today were
| doing the same level of diligence, on average.
| yumraj wrote:
| dang wrote:
| Ruh roh. Please don't do that here.
|
| " _Please don 't comment on whether someone read an article.
| "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be
| shortened to "The article mentions that."_"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| yumraj wrote:
| Apologies. My mistake.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Clearly not
| jollofricepeas wrote:
| I'm lost.
|
| I think @grogenaut is actually saying he agrees with OP and
| that super bowl ads and stadium deals are precursors to
| busts, no?
|
| The big question is whether there's any utility left. The
| dotcom bust wasn't an indictment of the internet and maybe
| the web3/exchanges busts don't spell doom for blockchain
| and related tech either.
| grogenaut wrote:
| Yes I didn't see a single .com name a stadium or bowl game or
| have most of the super bowl ads in 1999 at all, none at all. Oh
| wait yes I did, literally every superbowl ad was a dot com
| right before the .com bust.
| https://www.cnbc.com/2010/01/20/The-Stadium-Curse:-Naming-De...
| puts a nice writeup of all the comapnies that went under after
| naming stadiums, there's quite a few from the .com bust. Aah
| WorldCom how I miss thee. Pets.com as well.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Good point. Most of the B2B sites that died in 1999 are valid
| ideas that were too early. Intel tried cloud computing.
| Online grocery is a thing now, etc.
| Ancapistani wrote:
| Playing Devil's Advocate here a bit: what's the size of the
| tech industry today, compared to the heights just before the
| ".com bust"?
|
| Maybe there _is_ room for one more boom cycle.
| harryf wrote:
| The notion of smart contracts might have a perfect use-case when
| it comes to setting up and maintaining infrastructure on AWS.
| E.g. something like "I want an Amazon RDS PostgreSQL instance
| with such and such specs. full daily backups and 99.999% uptime
| and I'm will to pay $xxxx for it". From there solution providers
| "bid" on the contract and are paid automatically on the basis of
| meeting the requirements of the contract, the determination of
| whether requirements were met also being automated.
|
| The idea is something that grew out of blockchain platforms -
| Decentralized autonomous organizations -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_autonomous_organ... -
| this doesn't actually require a crypto currency backing it but
| some kind of smart contract would be required.
| jasonhansel wrote:
| > the determination of whether requirements were met also being
| automated.
|
| That seems like the sticking point. Most likely, someone
| "fulfilling" the contract would try to fool the (publicly
| available) verification code, rather than actually providing a
| PostgreSQL instance. It would be hard to create a bulletproof,
| automated way of verifying that something is a fully
| functioning PostgreSQL instance with working backups. If
| verification code was shared across many contracts, any bug
| discovered in that code could allow someone to wipe out the
| entire market.
| jacknews wrote:
| I think the cost of trust is underestimated.
|
| All those shiny skyscrapers that the banks build? It's for trust,
| along with a good deal of banking licensing requirements and
| regulation.
|
| The example with the farmers' fields is quite valid. We forget in
| our relatively well-governed western nations that some
| governments really can't be trusted to simply keep records
| straight and not 'lose' vital documents, in cases where bribes
| abound.
|
| Another example is foreign exchange trading settlements; I can't
| trust that if I send you $500mn in swiss francs, you'll actually
| send me the equivalent settlement in USD. You might go bankrupt
| half way through the transaction. And so there exists an
| expensive jointly owned escrow bank for exactly this purpose, CLS
| bank.
|
| I'm sure there are many other examples, but the point is, trust
| is actually quite expensive.
| dale_glass wrote:
| Trust is expensive, lack of trust is even more so.
|
| Say, how would you build a skyscraper without trust? Are you
| going to set up an on-premises laboratory to test the quality
| of the concrete and steel? Are you going to personally verify
| the entire building's plans? Check whether the geological study
| was accurate? Follow every worker around to make sure they
| don't cut corners anywhere?
|
| The less you can trust that the many people involved did their
| job, the harder and more expensive it gets to actually get the
| work done, until it turns out it just can't be practically
| done.
|
| A lack of trust gets you a place like Afghanistan -- where the
| moment you stop looking stuff starts disappearing.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| _" you going to set up an on-premises laboratory to test the
| quality of the concrete and steel?"_
|
| This isn't a good example because there are whole
| infrastructures to verify that buildings are being made "to
| code" and quality of materials is a part of that. E.g. this
| lab that tests steel: https://www.leica-
| microsystems.com/science-lab/steel-the-all...
|
| Now what you're getting at is, OK, now you have to trust the
| lab. But that's OK because the incentives are better aligned.
| Trust is a thing with complex shapes. Maybe you develop trust
| in a single lab because being trusted is their whole
| business, and now you can easily switch between steel
| suppliers depending on who can sell the cheapest with peace
| of mind, so you've moved the trust problem around and
| reshaped it.
|
| A lot of trust problems in the business world are like this.
| You can't eliminate it entirely everywhere, but reducing the
| amount you need and reshaping it/moving it around is still
| useful.
| dale_glass wrote:
| Yes, but even that is potentially troublesome. If you're in
| a low trust environment, then probably nobody trusts the
| labs either.
|
| Like, why do the labs exist? Because the building companies
| really, really wants to build a solid building but the
| concrete industry is oddly shady? Or because there's an
| official/unofficial requirement for it? If the second, you
| easily end up with labs that rubber stamp whatever you want
| them to.
|
| Trust in this sense is something that needs to be
| encouraged society-wide. You can patch imperfections, but
| there's a very real limit to how practical that is.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| There's not really such a thing as low trust/high trust
| society. That's an abstraction that sounds good but hides
| too much detail to be useful when discussing specific
| projects.
|
| You can't just encourage everyone to trust everyone else.
| To the extent developed countries can be described as
| "high trust", it's not because they are just magically
| more trusting. They get that way because there are
| extensive and mostly working mechanisms to find and
| penalize betrayals of trust. Corruption is low in the
| west because corrupt people get caught and punished, and
| because once the problem gets small enough people won't
| just blindly accept it but will make an effort to report
| it and ensure it's resolved (vs when it's endemic).
|
| Stuff like concrete mixing is commodity, lots of small
| firms scattered around the world. They compete on price
| and delivery time so there's a temptation to cut corners.
| Delivery time is easily understood and measured, so is
| price, if you can properly measure quality then you can
| switch between providers easily. The alternative is that
| someone fixes the trust issue another way, like a big
| centralized mega-brand or having to in-source everything,
| but that comes with bigger downsides.
| bloopernova wrote:
| This comment helped me to put into words something I've
| been thinking about recently.
|
| Propaganda that erodes the concept of truth in a society
| also destroys trust. While a dictator may benefit in the
| short term from confused opposition, their erosion of
| truth deeply damages the society on which their power
| depends.
|
| That being said, I don't know how long a truth-optional
| trust-destroyed society can last. For instance North
| Korea, but I know nothing about how much corruption
| exists there.
|
| (Apologies for being off topic)
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Perfectly put. Needed a comment as well as an upvote.
| jacknews wrote:
| I think what you mean by trust here is just a thin layer over
| a vast system of enforced checks and balances.
|
| Materials standards, building codes, fair contract law, etc,
| etc, etc, and the courts and police to back it all up.
| intrasight wrote:
| >Trust is expensive
|
| Trust is free. Trust plus verification plus enforcement is
| expensive. If all we needed was trust, we could save
| ourselves trillions per year. When our machine overlords
| arrive, we'll be able to get buy on trust alone ;)
| buttersbrian wrote:
| Trust is arguably the most expensive thing in society.
|
| For those looking for a fun read about trust read some Francis
| Fukuyama.
| asah wrote:
| Yes, and #include cost of military, courts and police ("guys
| with guns")
| mike_hearn wrote:
| You actually know something about the finance industry, not
| sure this is the thread for you ;) You're absolutely right
| about the core problem.
|
| I worked for several years on an 'enterprise blockchain'
| system. We often called it distributed ledger technology
| because our platform didn't actually use chains of blocks or
| proof of work, and it didn't have a token or anything like
| that. It was essentially a type of database but it had a lot of
| ideas from Bitcoin in it and was blockchainy enough that
| customers accepted it as such.
|
| I have to admit, at the very start I was skeptical about why so
| many large companies seemed to want this stuff. Like Tim, I
| also spent a lot of time talking to staff at these large
| institutions to understand where they were coming from. Unlike
| him I didn't work for AWS which is pretty much the exemplar of
| centralised infrastructure, so maybe it was easier to pick up
| on some of the more subtle issues involved.
|
| There are a few things to understand about businesses that
| decided they wanted blockchain:
|
| 1. They have complicated inter-firm communication and
| synchronization needs.
|
| 2. They solve those needs today via creating centralized
| trusted intermediaries (like CLS). This comes with a world of
| pain and problems like the obvious "too big to fail" issue that
| was exposed in 2008, but there's also a lot of less obvious
| problems, like these institutions immediately becoming stagnant
| rent seekers who don't innovate.
|
| 3. They exist in markets that lack obviously dominant players
| who can push things forward. Many people in the tech world
| don't understand this because we rely so heavily on a handful
| of ultra-profitable, ultra-huge tech firms that spend lots of
| treasure on giving out freebies and standards setting, but
| that's abnormal.
|
| So they heard about how Bitcoin can synchronize different
| companies view of a real financial object like a ledger
| _without_ a SWIFT-like organization sitting in the middle, and
| thought "yes that sounds like what we need". And they're kind
| of right, as long as you think in terms of business problems
| rather than technology!
|
| "Blockchain" is a concept that works for them speaking _in the
| purely abstract social sense_ because it acts as a neutral
| rallying point. If one company in a market observes that maybe
| having a giant specialized too-big-to-fail clearing house like
| CLS isn 't the ideal way to solve atomic transactions, and they
| go to their partners saying "hey let's use this cool thing we
| designed" the answer will always be no because their partners
| will say, why should we empower our competitor? Blockchain as a
| concept is owned by nobody, and the core idea is that it
| empowers nobody, so it acted as an enabler for conversations
| that would otherwise never have happened. Whether the final
| result actually uses proof of work or even has blocks at all
| actually isn't so relevant except in the sense that business
| owners don't want to get ripped off by people lying to them
| about what they built.
|
| Tim Bray should really understand this dynamic better than most
| people because he created XML, which crops up in the enterprise
| space all over the place, often in ways that aren't really
| appropriate. Something like protobufs would have been a far
| better fit but they use XML. Why is that? Well, XML went
| through a massive hype wave ~20 years ago thanks to the W3C
| relentlessly pushing this vapourware "semantic web" concept, so
| for a brief period XML was the future of everything. Again,
| this created a socially acceptable rallying point at which
| complex inter-firm business problems could be solved in a
| relatively decentralized way. The tech got used regardless of
| merit simply because it was something everyone could agree on
| and unlike ASN.1 the protocols/tooling was free.
|
| Back to blockchain. The platform I designed for this use case
| (Corda) was a competitor of the DA platform used in ASX and has
| done relatively well in the market - it reached number 1 by
| number of projects using it and unlike the ASX case actually
| has real deployments that are actually decentralized. Over 90%
| of Italian banks are using it for inter-bank reconciliation!
| [1] There are other projects that use it too which seem to be
| working (I'm not involved in any of them directly and haven't
| worked on Corda for several years now). You never hear about
| them on HN because they're too Starship Enterprise to be
| interesting to the crowd here, but the idea that there are no
| working blockchain projects isn't actually true.
|
| We managed this partly by walking the tightrope between what
| people said they wanted (blockchain!) and what they were
| telling us they actually wanted in customer interviews (what we
| came to call distributed ledger technology). There was
| definitely a fair bit of overlap but not enough to just throw
| Ethereum at a problem and call it solved. What they really
| needed was a combination of better inter-firm messaging,
| signing/cryptography, atomic financial transactions without a
| CLS-style intermediary that actually takes custody of the
| assets, a robust identity framework, good developer support and
| training materials etc. Some of this can be found in blockchain
| related research like BFT algos, others were somewhat solved
| already, but blending them together into a coherent platform
| was hard.
|
| There's lots more that can be said about this - some customer
| projects failed, but the reasons ran the gamut from tech to
| social/political/business reasons. It wasn't as simple as
| "blockchain is a scam", which is what Bray seems trying to
| imply here. There actually is a there, there. It's just really,
| really hard to solve these problems without a hype wave to
| coordinate and synchronize intent.
|
| [1] https://www.r3.com/case-studies/spunta/
| piaste wrote:
| Haha, this beginning was eerie to read:
|
| > We often called it distributed ledger technology because
| our platform didn't actually use chains of blocks or proof of
| work, and it didn't have a token or anything like that. It
| was essentially a type of database but it had a lot of ideas
| from Bitcoin in it and was blockchainy enough that customers
| accepted it as such.
|
| because it was actually how I selected Corda as the
| infrastructure for a project a few years ago. The customers
| and managers wanted Blockchain(r), and I wanted to deliver
| something that actually added some kind of value, and I found
| Corda which - as I told my CEO - was "close enough to a
| blockchain that our marketing splash wasn't lying".
|
| (Whereas to my fellow devs, I said more or less "look, it's
| Spring Boot with a replicated event-sourced database and a
| funny CLI admin panel")
|
| Unfortunately the project never got past the test stage
| because - this is gonna shock you - the very first, extremely
| basic smart contract we encoded in Corda was immediately
| violated by the customer's processes, and they absolutely
| refused to change.
|
| Still, I want to thank you because your platform enabled me
| to retain my dignity without pissing off my boss for a half
| year or so.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| By funny CLI admin panel you mean the banking jokes, right?
| ;)
|
| Glad you liked the design, thanks for the kind words!
| gendal wrote:
| Hi everybody... Richard Brown, CTO of R3, the firm behind
| Corda, here.
|
| As Mike says, we're somewhat unusual in that there are many
| live, successful Corda deployments around the world. Mike's
| comment about how Corda is blockchain-like but not, strictly
| speaking, a chain of blocks is at the heart of this I think.
| Here's what I mean:
|
| How many 'introductory' presentations have you been to (or,
| worse, _given_ ) to semi-technical people, where Bitcoin and
| other public blockchains are 'explained' by describing the
| components? You probably know the sort of pitch I mean: they
| laboriously build up the concepts - transactions, signatures,
| hashes, blocks, chains of blocks, mining, etc, etc. Such
| presentation are usually _correct_. But they impart almost no
| intuition. It 's little wonder that so many 'business people'
| come away from them thinking that a blockchain is some sort
| of mysterious and magical technology.
|
| There's a presentation I like to give where I go the other
| way. I give a one-line description of the problem Bitcoin
| solves [1] and then I help the audience 'invent' Bitcoin for
| themselves from first principles. There's an old blog post of
| mine that gives the rough idea [2]. The point is that
| successful architectures solve well-stated problems. Cargo
| culting never works.
|
| Where I think many corporate deployments of blockchain went
| wrong was that they saw the huge enthusiasm for 'blockchain
| tech', had a vague intuition that 'inter-firm' or 'market-
| level' problems were ripe to be solved, but they never fully
| internalised that Bitcoin's (or Ethereum's) architecture
| isn't some sort of inviolable, handed-down-from-high
| blueprint... it's merely a very elegant engineering solution
| to a well-stated 'business problem'.
|
| Yet many 'enterprise blockchain' platforms seemed to _begin_
| with the architecture of a public blockchain, and then
| tweaked it to make it palatable to businesses (eg engineering
| cumbersome privacy solutions on top to work around the
| inherently broadcast nature of the public chains). This
| always felt a bit weird to me.
|
| With Corda, we were fortunate to have been given the time and
| space by our backers to write down our equivalent of the
| Bitcoin problem statement, and then to engineer a solution to
| that problem. Yes - of course, we knew we were in the 'inter-
| firm business process' space, and we knew the problem we were
| trying to solve was in some way 'blockchainy' But we did try
| really quite hard to write down the problem statement [3] and
| then go forward from there, rather than starting with a pre-
| existing architecture and then modifying it.
|
| Yes - as Mike says, architecturally it looks a lot like
| Bitcoin (eg it has an unspent-transaction output data model).
| But it also has a bunch of other things that, to this day, no
| other Blockchain has... eg the Flow Framework that allows
| decentralised inter-firm workflows to be modelled (think
| temporal.io but without any centralised infrastructure). And,
| like Mike says, Corda passes data point-to-point and confirms
| each transaction one at a time - no blocks, no broadcast.
|
| You would not believe HOW MUCH GRIEF we got from the
| blockchain community for that design in the early days. Yet -
| several years on, it seems to be working.
|
| [1] I claim that the 'requirement' for which Bitcoin is the
| solution is: "build me a system of un-censorable digital
| cash."
|
| [2] https://gendal.me/2014/05/21/bitcoin-mining-the-first-
| techno...
|
| [3] Our problem statement? "Build me a platform that enables
| multiple firms to record and manage the lifecycle of the
| business contracts they have with each other, minimising the
| need for any new third parties." At least, that's what I
| thought I was building. Mike might disagree, however... I
| know he likes the "decentralised database" interpretation of
| Corda.
| loudmax wrote:
| Rather than saying trust is expensive, I would express it as
| trust is precious.
|
| By analogy, sunlight and air are cheap, not expensive, even
| though we can't live without them. If either of these were in
| short supply they would become extremely expensive. But since
| they're abundant we don't normally dwell on their value.
|
| In a civilized society with a stable government, we take trust
| for granted. That's how society is able to build skyscrapers
| and shipping terminals and air travel. If society collectively
| loses trust in itself, we will lose these nice things. Trust is
| a feature of living in a liberal democracy. Autocracies may
| manage it too, but their historical record is questionable.
|
| So trust is precious, but I wouldn't express it as trust is
| expensive because it creates far more value than it costs.
| arduinomancer wrote:
| For the older devs, has there been anything in the past like
| this?
|
| As in some new hyped tech that people kept trying to insert into
| their business?
| muglug wrote:
| NoSQL!
|
| Rep from <NoSQL company> comes along, shows a CTO some graphs
| about how well it performs vs <BoringButReliableSQL>. If
| developers are unlucky CTO mandates a migration to NoSQL.
| hanniabu wrote:
| serverless
| wmf wrote:
| Speaking of Tim Bray, in the 1990s people kept using XML in
| places where it wasn't appropriate.
|
| There have been so many tech fads. Distributed objects (e.g.
| CORBA), mobile code, object databases, micropayments, push,
| WAP, and I want to give a special lifetime achievement award to
| VR which is now on its third hype wave.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| The last hype cycle, from about 10 years ago, I remember is
| that of BigData and associated technologies such as MapReduce,
| Hadoop, NoSQL DBs, data pipelines and so on. That lasted for
| about 4 years I guess? Then ML took over.
| dilyevsky wrote:
| * Certain aspects of social networks (I remember leadership at
| google being convinced everyone will do online stuff on social
| networks in around 2011)
|
| * To much smaller extent some core tech like NoSQL, SOA
|
| * More recently - AR/VR bubble
| sbochins wrote:
| I used to follow the conventional wisdom (there won't be wide
| base adoption of cryptocurrencies, but blockchain tech will be
| useful in a variety of other technologies). I never really looked
| to hard into blockchain or the work being done in the industry.
| But based on the various crypto firms collapsing and the fact
| that there is no place that is making any meaningful progress
| with blockchain at this point, I'm at the point where I'll
| dismiss any crypto / blockchain project reflexively. Seems like
| it's been a great way to get funding for those clued in and
| taking advantage of the hype.
| davide_v wrote:
| In Italy a famous news website is using blockchain since 2020 to,
| I quote literally: "help readers check source of news",
| "strengthen bonds of trust between its organization and its
| readers and customers", "trace the history and source of each
| news item."
|
| News (EN):
| https://www.ansa.it/english/news/science_tecnology/2020/04/0...
|
| Example of news in the blockchain:
| https://blockchain.check.ansa.it/landing/b150aff9f028f7339f0...
|
| The first time I saw it I was quite surprised. I'd like to hear
| opinions about it here. Eg: it's blockchain stricly necessary
| here?
| Arkhaine_kupo wrote:
| If they add every revision on it, it could be interesting, but
| i doubt they do that.
|
| One interesting thing I have been seeing recently is newspapers
| quickly changing news a few hours after they posted it, in
| reaction to public opinion of said news (or maybe some
| editorial "request").
|
| In th BBC its quite egregious, they have been posting some
| news, and a few hours later changing the headline and the
| photo, to either something meaner and an uglier photo of the
| same person, or the opposite, a much more neutral/flaterring
| headline and a PR photo of the person.
|
| If those changes were on the blockchain, UK citizens could
| demand their money back for what they pay for the BBC as it is
| a ridiculous practice that should not be paid by taxes. But
| again, I doubt the Italian newspapers saves their own slanted
| coverage for their own users to see.
| hiq wrote:
| What does that bring on top of TLS?
|
| If you want to check whether an article ever appeared (even if
| it's no longer there), then something like
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_Transparency would be
| enough.
|
| No that's not a blockchain, at least not for a useful
| definition of blockchain (see https://www.schneier.com/essays/a
| rchives/2019/02/theres_no_g...).
| leifg wrote:
| I always wonder with these things: what is the deadline after
| which you are allowed to say "There is no value".
|
| It has been almost 14 years since the inception of Bitcoin. There
| is nuance to this timeline that's why I usually use the launch of
| Ethereum as a starting point (~7 years If I recall correctly).
| Nevertheless so far nothing substantial running in production has
| come out of it Blockchain technology.
|
| The typical response then is "well it takes time there is a lot
| of potential". I mean yeah but if you compare it to something
| like contactless payments or ride sharing apps these products
| have moved a lot faster and now have high user adoption.
|
| So again: At what point can we just ignore all these Blockchain
| prophets that say "just wait the innovation is around the
| corner". 10 years, 20 years?
| jonathan-adly wrote:
| Something arbitrary with no value went from a random Internet
| forum to $300b market cap and a legal currency for a nation-
| state. That's something!
|
| I don't know what's would be a better outcome.
|
| Did you expect it to be world reserve currency in a decade?
| Replace the 5000 years gold? Upend the global banking system?
| Render the IMF obsolete? Make nation-states think twice about
| waging war without taxation?
|
| I mean - surely you aren't comparing these world-shattering
| outcomes to a mobile app that doesn't make money after that
| long!
| leifg wrote:
| I should have said "Blockchain applications outside of
| cryptocurrency" but as you seem to equate the two let's talk
| about that.
|
| A good metric is: "people are using it".
|
| That is not the case for any cryptocurrency (yes and that
| includes El Salvador). I frequently wire money across borders
| and cryptocurrencies are still completely useless for it
| despite it being the number one use case that is shouted from
| the crypto rooftops.
|
| So you're left with: "It made a ton of money for rich and a
| few lucky middle class people" and "some quasi dictator
| implemented it as an additional currency without a mandate".
| VHRanger wrote:
| Moving the goalposts to something vague and further in the
| future wont help you convince anyone about usefulness
| nonameiguess wrote:
| Technically 25 years since Hashcash was first proposed. I'd
| argue it could have had value sticking to that original
| application in preventing network spam, but instead it turns
| out people are more interested in storing the proof-of-work
| tokens on a blockchain and selling them, as if collecting and
| trading postage stamps had become more widespread than actually
| sending mail with them, to the extent that at least some people
| and a few entire countries proposed replacing currency with
| postage stamps.
| culi wrote:
| Blockchain needs a good "winter" imo. Stuff like hashgraph and
| some other non-proof of work protocols have a lot of potential
| but there's way too much hype in the industry and way too much
| investment ensuring BTC's dominance for them to ever really
| emerge
| gilbetron wrote:
| Bundle up because winter seems to be here ;)
| alex440440 wrote:
| TL;DR anyone? I couldn't care less about communication skills of
| Andy and whether some meeting was in person, before even getting
| a hint of what is the point of that post.
| starkd wrote:
| Amid all this sudden blockchain skepticism, one question remains
| prominent in my mind: where were all these skeptics when
| blockchain enthusiasm was on the rise?
|
| Sure, hindsight is 20/20, but you have to wonder if this chorus
| of I-toldya-so's were genuinely right, or if they are merely
| rewriting history to boost their own credibility.
|
| Blockchain was always experimental. The chance of success on any
| given project was always slim, but the potential payoff huge. So,
| putting anything more than what you are willing to lose is
| reckless.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| As others have pointed out, there was always debate. But I
| think what's changed is that the down-shouters have backed off.
| When we'd say _" there's nothing here, and what is here is
| likely semi-criminal"_ there was almost always a vigorous
| thread of people who would argue back.
|
| Especially so because a large part of the HN community have
| this libertarian tinge which brought them philosophically close
| to web3/crypto generally.
|
| Many of those people have gone quite quiet recently. And I
| don't want to turn this into a _" told you so"_ moment; I think
| this is good. Let's try to let the hype cycle end without
| knives coming out.
|
| The question is what the long-term shake-out from all of this
| will be for tech more broadly. Many legitimate technologies and
| projects have gotten themselves caught up in this hype cycle,
| and there could be fall-outs for people and projects that
| associated themselves this way -- what I'm calling "crypto-
| taint." I'm thinking everything from the Rust PL community
| (where the bulk of employers are web3 companies, it seems)
| through to a lot of recent novel database tech generally.
|
| I recently quit a job in part for this reason. The product
| itself was not crypto, but was associating itself with the
| language and community around ETH. I personally don't want the
| taint on my resume, even if it's merely marketing.
|
| Where VCs put their money can be fickle. And the consequences
| for business entities emphasizing in the wrong place can be
| brutal. This is the third "down cycle" I've been through in my
| 25ish year software career, and I have some sense of how it
| could shake out.
|
| Right now, people need to focus on fundamentals.
| _whiteCaps_ wrote:
| https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2013/04/09/I-bought-...
| https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2017/05/13/Not-Belie...
| thinkharderdev wrote:
| I don't know if I accept the premise. I've been hearing that
| "blockchain is a solution in search of a problem" critique as
| long as I've heard about blockchains. I think that during a
| hype cycle, the hype is what gets signal boosted so you see a
| lot more "here's how blockchains are going to solve X" content
| than you do content repeating for the millionth time that the
| blockchain doesn't actually solve the problem any better than a
| database would.
| atwebb wrote:
| >where were all these skeptics when blockchain enthusiasm was
| on the rise?
|
| Everywhere? I can't think of a single (or at least memorable)
| time I've heard blockchain and there wasn't at least someone
| who was skeptical.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| > where were all these skeptics when blockchain enthusiasm was
| on the rise?
|
| Literally here, in every single thread to the chagrin of the
| enthusiasts whose defining identity became "you just don't get
| it, man". Blockchain stuff, by anyone who didn't have a vested
| financial interest in it has always been called out for what it
| is.
|
| Now when the AI hype eventually dies down then you'll have a
| point.
| arcturus17 wrote:
| > where were all these skeptics when blockchain enthusiasm was
| on the rise
|
| You might need to define the exact period when it was "on the
| rise", but as far as I've seen, in the last six or seven years
| they (we) have been very vocal and all over the place -
| including on this very site.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| All true. Source: I was there.
| x86x87 wrote:
| I believe that putting the equal sign between a blockchain and a
| database is fundamentally wrong. I also think that a lot of
| "cryptos" were just get rich quick schemes. After the dust
| settles we will see if blockchain is really useful or not.
| Nursie wrote:
| We're 14 years in. I think the dust settled some years ago,
| personally.
|
| But (and this is an honest question) how long _should_ we give
| this? What is the appropriate amount of time before we can say
| "This was basically a bust"?
|
| Because AFAICT the blockchain revolution never came. It's been
| talked about endlessly for over a decade, it's been hyped to
| hell and back, it's been oh-my-god-so-full-of-amazing-
| potential-just-think-of-the-uses for all this time and the only
| thing that ever seems to come out of it is a variety of schemes
| that reward early entrants and then crash into the dust,
| without delivering the utility that was so vaguely promised for
| so long.
| x86x87 wrote:
| If the dust settled why are we still talking about this?
|
| If you want my personal opinion: blockchain had/has great
| potential but once bitcoin exploded the whole crypto world
| was hijacked by snake oil salesmen whose only goal was to get
| rich. People have been scammed (and continue to be scammed)
| by these techno babble and the dream of getting rich.
| yumraj wrote:
| In your opinion how long is it before the dust will settle?
|
| IMHO, the dust has already settled and been washed away by the
| rain water..
| x86x87 wrote:
| I think there are 2 scenarios really: 1) btc and eth go to
| zero or 2) we have btc and eth gaining the full recognition
| and regulation
|
| Blockchain as a technology is revolutionary and will be used
| in niche problems outside of crypto.
|
| One thing that most people seem to miss is that money is only
| as good as our faith in it. No matter what instrument you use
| this has to apply.
| l33t233372 wrote:
| In what sense is blockchain revolutionary? Merkle trees are
| many decades old.
| x86x87 wrote:
| Distributed consensus with zero trust.
| dale_glass wrote:
| Only in an extremely limited sense. You have to trust the
| developers, for one.
|
| Also it's only trustworthy as far as everything happens
| on the blockchain. Once you step off it for even a
| second, it doesn't help. Eg, witness the absolutely
| amazing number of scams happening in the area, and the
| number of well known, and supposedly trustworthy services
| suddenly crashing and burning.
| x86x87 wrote:
| There are a set of rules that applies to everyone and are
| enforced by everyone.
|
| Re: trust the devs: do you trust the electricity in your
| house? What about the wires in the wall? Do you trust
| others to follow traffic rules?
| dale_glass wrote:
| The point is that blockchains have different incentives
| for different parties, and the interests of the most
| influential people don't necessarily align with those of
| the users. So the vast majority (users) are just really
| switching to a different master.
|
| Eg, I had a passing interest in BTC, but I my interest
| was in the very old school "buy pizza with it" kind of
| use. That usage is of no interest or importance to the
| current BTC system, and it doesn't matter one bit how
| many of me there are.
|
| The people who matter are the people who commit to the
| repo, the people who run miners, and the people who run
| exchanges. The desires of the 99.9% who aren't any of
| these are nearly irrelevant.
| yumraj wrote:
| I, personally, don't think we'll get to either of those two
| scenarios for a really really long time.
|
| Reason, too much money has been invested into them. I
| believe it'll trickle to zero slowly, but very slowly, over
| a long period marked by lot of volatility.
| acdha wrote:
| Note that he wasn't saying that it was identical to a classic
| database but rather that the applications being built were
| treating it like one. I've seen a number of hypotheticals
| batted around and it was clear that most of them could have
| been a database, perhaps with signatures on certain records,
| because they didn't need any of the anonymous aspects.
|
| That could be a sign that developers don't know how to
| architect blockchain apps but that's probably the same as
| saying most people don't need blockchains. It seems unlikely
| that there's sone widespread benefit still to be discovered
| rather than maybe some niche applications.
| x86x87 wrote:
| Imho blockchain == distributed consensus in a low trust
| environment. When you are talking about a database and
| managing it you are by default outside of the low trust zone
| (or there exists an authority that everyone trusts)
| acdha wrote:
| Yes, that's the anonymity part. You only need that if the
| parties don't have some kind of relationship and
| reputations to maintain.
|
| This distinction matters because almost no real world
| situation is like that: people need to know that what
| they're buying is what they were promised, sellers want to
| avoid doing business with anyone who fraudulently claims
| damages, etc. If you need to add reputations and/or trusted
| third parties, you get no value from a blockchain to make
| up for all of the negatives unavoidably added by using one.
| x86x87 wrote:
| Is it anonymity? Afaik, everything is available on the
| blockchain (except for maybe some cryptos like Monero).
| smt88 wrote:
| > _I believe that putting the equal sign between a blockchain
| and a database is fundamentally wrong_
|
| In what way is a blockchain not a cryptographically-verified,
| distributed, append-only database? If you added a consensus
| protocol to git, you'd have a blockchain.
|
| I'd say it's fundamentally right because the fundamentals are
| the same.
|
| > _After the dust settles we will see if blockchain is really
| useful or not._
|
| Blockchain has been around for more than 10 years. If it had
| any valid use cases, we'd see them in use already, regardless
| of what crypto bros are doing.
| gjs278 wrote:
| x86x87 wrote:
| Focus on the distributed aspect of it. What does distributed
| mean to you? In fact if you look at blockchain itself it's
| not dostributed in the sense that you need all the blocks to
| verify current state.
|
| The innovation is that 2 parties that don't know each other
| and don't trust each other can transact without a central
| authority and without trusting eachother.
|
| Has blockchain been around for 10 years? Most of this time
| was spent in obscurity or making it super hard for the
| average joe to distinguish useful tech from scams.
|
| Also think about neural nets. How long have neural nets been
| around? Did we figure interesting new ways to use them in the
| current AI/ML cycle?
| tbrownaw wrote:
| > _Blockchain has been around for more than 10 years. If it
| had any valid use cases, we 'd see them in use already_
|
| I think modern darknet markets use smart contracts for
| escrow, so that you don't have to trust the escrow arbiter to
| not run off with your cryptocoins.
| smt88 wrote:
| This isn't any difference than traditional escrow SaaS
| companies. They're fully automated unless you have a
| dispute.
|
| In your stated case, "smart contract" means software. It
| can't verify that both sides of the transaction have met
| their obligations unless both obligations are on-chain, in
| which case there's no added value.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| But with these darknet markets everything's hidden and
| anonymous, so there used to be (?) something called an
| "exit scam" where they'd just disappear with whatever
| funds were currently waiting for a decision. If things
| are set up so that the cryptocoins can only go to one of
| two places (seller's or buyer's wallet) that can't
| happen.
|
| That situation that it's avoiding is less of a concern
| with legitimate things where everyone knows who everyone
| is and law enforcement actually exists.
| ex3ndr wrote:
| It is a little bit different, if you are doing it in
| centralised way - you have to control and secure
| everything - from databases to access to admin panels. It
| is quite complicated, requires robust processes, etc.
| Most of the finances are not really programmable,
| everything is done via simple scripts on some machine
| that just turns the knobs. You have to secure this part
| also.
|
| It is a lot of work.
|
| While for crypto-escrow you can just do a simple multi-
| sig with a hot keys that running on admin machines and
| they sign results there and they couldn't get the money,
| so no reason to try to hack the system.
|
| Much easier setup.
| hahnchen wrote:
| Unrelated, but
|
| > Which was pretty nice, except for it was stinking hot that
| August and we were on multiple steamy subway trips every day; got
| back to our hotel rooms pretty well emptied out.
|
| Upper level amazon engineers can't take ubers through new york?
| nixgeek wrote:
| In 2016? It was probably going to take 2-3x longer to Uber
| around Manhattan. Traffic sucks.
| TheDong wrote:
| Some people would rather ride a train or subway over an uber in
| principal, even if the cost is charged to their employer and no
| different to them personally.
|
| I'm not claiming with certainty that that is the case here, but
| I know it is for some people.
|
| Also, subways/trains are quicker for some routes, YMMV
| abiro wrote:
| The new thing with blockchain tech is that we can now enforce
| invariants on state transitions in a decentralized manner. Paired
| with non-interactive zero-knowledge cryptography, we can also
| enforce those invariants while keeping the confidentiality of
| transactions.
|
| The tech is rapidly improving and it's pretty easy to see where
| things are going from here: soon we'll have general purpose
| decentralized databases where data is open as open source code is
| open. In fact, state-of-the-art smart chains can be viewed as
| special (financial) purpose decentralized databases.
|
| As to why decentralized databases are desirable: imagine if you
| could fork databases like you can fork code in a completely
| permission-less manner. This is how web development would look
| like:
|
| You, the programmer, take a look at a public data schema (eg. a
| smart contract that implements the ERC-721 interface) and decide
| to build on top of it. Then, a user, who has already interacted
| with what you built on, decides that they like what you built and
| lets your app use their data. You, the programmer, can be sure
| that the data you built on remains available, and the user can be
| sure that they'll be able to port the data produced by your app
| into new apps.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| This somewhat assumes blockchain can also deliver on privacy.
| Perhaps full encryption of the data is enough. But who is
| paying for all the nodes?
|
| Another way to do this without the blockchain is open standards
| (think... HTML for example!) and software that lets you export.
| Where possible run this software open source on the desktop or
| as an open source web app. Think Photopea as the pinnacle here.
|
| The blockchain or no blockchain approachable both suffer when
| you have a data format per app locking you into that app
| anyway.
| abiro wrote:
| Re costs: it's decreasing rapidly. Solana is within 100x of
| DynamoDB prices so costs are soon becoming negligible. At
| that point costs can be taken over by the app developer or
| paid by users on a subscription basis. There are also
| decentralized consensus mechanisms that don't rely on paying
| fees (FBA, delay functions). Idk which will succeed.
|
| Re open standards and "software that lets you export": we've
| had this for the past 30 years and see how it turned out.
|
| Re lock in: no, in a decentralized database, the data schema
| is public which means it's trivial to write an app that works
| with another app's data.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Thanks. Keeping an open mind! This is the best blockchain
| argument I have heard. At least in terms of what I value.
| [deleted]
| amluto wrote:
| > But the Eth folk managed to get proof-of-stake to work at
| scale; good on 'em. That's a bit charitable IMO. It works with at
| least two major caveats:
|
| 1. You can't unstake staked ETH. (This seems to have all manner
| of strange effects.). Fixing this is apparently a big deal, and,
| if nothing else, could enable attacks in which one unstakes and
| then uses knowledge of old staked private keys to attack other
| parties.
|
| 2. It hasn't actually been that long, and the major validators
| likely have a strong interest in making Ethereum work well. Just
| working at scale does not mean it's secure at scale.
| ricochet11 wrote:
| One little clarifier: You can unstake and stop running your
| validator, the exit-validator process already exists as it is
| necessary for slashing. What you cant do is withdraw exited
| ether until withdrawals are enabled.
| wmf wrote:
| _You can't unstake staked ETH._
|
| This is temporary and AFAIK all the other PoS systems allow
| unstaking.
|
| _attacks in which one unstakes and then uses knowledge of old
| staked private keys to attack other parties._
|
| These "long-range attacks" are not real. They're impossible to
| pull off in reality.
| timbray wrote:
| Well, they did manage to cut their energy usage by like 100x.
| Gotta respect that. Not that I think Eth is currently used for
| anything but scams.
| seu wrote:
| > Dear Reader: I think that at some point, in a civilization,
| there has to be trust. I think that's maybe the main reason we
| have civilizations. Call me crazy.
|
| Dead on
| jcbrand wrote:
| Disclaimer: speaking only of Bitcoin, the utility of the larger
| crypto space is somewhat questionable.
|
| Yes, there will always be a need for trust, and Bitcoin doesn't
| change that. What it does is actually facilitate more, rather
| than less, trust.
|
| By having a rock-solid form of money with a well-known,
| immutable monetary policy and issuance rate, that doesn't rely
| on any single entity and is very difficult to corrupt, all
| kinds of trust-related issues (moral hazard, Cantillon effect,
| theft of purchasing power) are resolved.
|
| In addition, commerce and exchange between strangers can more
| easily be facilitated based on such a system rather than one
| that relies on multiple intermediaries.
|
| If I can have cryptographic proof of escrow in a multi-sig
| wallet (2 of 3, where there is a trusted (!) 3rd party), I
| might be willing to do a transaction with someone I might
| otherwise not (e.g. due to a lack of trust that they have the
| funds available).
| yourabstraction wrote:
| Spot on. I think part of the problem is in the common framing
| of cryptocurrencies as trustless. At the end of the day there
| is trust in every human made system, blockchain or not. With
| Bitcoin, you're still trusting that all of the developers,
| miners, and users won't decided to increase the block reward
| at any point in the future.
|
| So what's the point of Bitcoin (and other cryptos) from a
| risk management perspective if it's not actually trustless.
| It gives you exposure to a significantly different risk
| profile, and one that can be better reasoned about. You're no
| longer at the whim of governments and corporations, but
| instead a loosely "organized" set of developers, miners, and
| users. And we can reason about what those actors will do,
| based on human psychology and the fact that people tend to
| act in their financial best interest. And Bitcoin is setup in
| such a way that the system operates correctly when the
| participants behave this way.
| andirk wrote:
| Pure freedom is what we came from and what we don't want to go
| back to.
| legutierr wrote:
| > He named a region in Asia and explained that the small farmers
| there mark their landholdings carefully, but then the annual
| floods sometimes wash the markers away. Then unscrupulous larger
| landowners use the absence of markers to cut away at the
| smallholdings of the poorest. "But if the boundary markers were
| on the blockchain," he said, "they wouldn't be able to do that,
| would they?"
|
| The developed world is distinguished from the developing world
| often by the strength of its institutions, by the general
| accessibility of legal recourse, by the prevalence of trust
| within the society at large.
|
| Many places in the world have none of those things. Weak
| institutions, corrupt legal systems, and low levels of trust
| undermine development and prevent people from building and
| maintaining wealth for themselves and their families.
|
| For me, the promise of the blockchain is that it can provide a
| technological framework upon which to build new kinds of
| institutions--institutions that function as alternatives to the
| institutions that we all take for granted here in the first
| world.
|
| Is a smart contract better than a written contract? Maybe it is,
| if there is no well-functioning judiciary to adjudicate
| contractual disputes. Is a cryptocurrency better than a national
| currency? Perhaps, if your national currency is subject to
| hyperinflation. Is an NFT representing property ownership better
| than property title registered with a state agency? Yes it is, if
| the state agency can be bribed to alter or lose records that are
| inconvenient to large land owners.
|
| It's important to remember that what might seem redundant or
| useless to those of us who reside in the first world may not be
| redundant or useless to those who live elsewhere.
| rippercushions wrote:
| The technology here is the _least_ of that small shareholder 's
| problems.
|
| To register that land, they need to convince a corruptible
| human to accept their application, get another corruptible
| human to enter the data correctly in the database and get a
| third corruptible human to give them an authentic certificate
| proving that their land holding has been registered. You can
| already see three points where this can be trivially subverted,
| but it gets worse.
|
| The hard part, you see, is _defending_ their property rights.
| Local bigwig casually stomps on their land, now they need to
| convince the corruptible police to investigate (good luck with
| that when they 're on the bigwig's payroll), find a lawyer
| willing to take this on (in exchange for what?), get the
| corruptible land rights registry to verify their claim, get a
| corruptible judge to give a true verdict, and then convince
| that corruptible police to carry out the verdict. If you're a
| poor subsistence farmer, it's nearly impossible to navigate
| this morass, and blockchain solves precisely zero of these
| problems.
|
| Finally and most fundamentally, a land registry is by nature a
| _centralized_ registry of holdings with a legal monopoly. Why
| on earth would you need to use a blockchain here, when an
| append-only database does the same job?
| legutierr wrote:
| > Finally and most fundamentally, a land registry is by
| nature a centralized registry of holdings with a legal
| monopoly. Why on earth would you need to use a blockchain
| here, when an append-only database does the same job?
|
| Records within an append-only database running on a central
| server can be altered or deleted by whomever has the root
| password to that server.
|
| The only way to guard against that risk is to replicate and
| publicize the data, make sure all data modifications are
| cryptographically signed and valid according the logic of the
| application, and incorporate into each new version of the
| data a hash of prior versions of the data, in order to guard
| against data deletions. In other words, to implement a
| blockchain.
|
| > The hard part, you see, is defending their property rights.
| Local bigwig casually stomps on their land, now they need to
| convince the corruptible police to investigate (good luck
| with that when they're on the bigwig's payroll), find a
| lawyer willing to take this on (in exchange for what?), get
| the corruptible land rights registry to verify their claim,
| get a corruptible judge to give a true verdict, and then
| convince that corruptible police to carry out the verdict. If
| you're a poor subsistence farmer, it's nearly impossible to
| navigate this morass, and blockchain solves precisely zero of
| these problems.
|
| You have described a horribly corrupt and oppressive society.
| It's not what most of the developing world looks like. You
| are right that there is unlikely to be a technical solution
| to this level of oppression, except that it would be harder
| to implement in the first place in a society where property
| records were managed via a blockchain.
| dastbe wrote:
| > The only way to guard against that risk is to replicate
| and publicize the data, make sure all data modifications
| are cryptographically signed and valid according the logic
| of the application, and incorporate into each new version
| of the data a hash of prior versions of the data, in order
| to guard against data deletions. In other words, to
| implement a blockchain.
|
| nothing you've described here requires the decentralized
| parts of a blockchain. there exist centralized databases
| that have all of these properties, and people have
| mentioned them in the comments.
| legutierr wrote:
| You are quibbling with semantics. What you have quoted is
| the definition of a blockchain. Any "centralized"
| database with these properties is a blockchain, for all
| intents and purposes.
| TheDong wrote:
| A system with all those properties is a git repository
| containing all this data. Which would also scale to more
| operations per second than a block chain, is much more
| battle-hardened than any blockchain...
|
| And decidedly isn't a blockchain. It's just a merkle tree
| that can easily be replicated / updated via "git clone" /
| "git fetch".
|
| Your definition of a blockchain seems to be different
| than what most people use, though I admit a lot of
| blockchain advocates seem to make the definition tighter
| or looser depending on which is more convenient for the
| current argument.
| legutierr wrote:
| Your comment makes me believe that you don't think very
| highly of "blockchain advocates". But you don't seem to
| have much of a problem with using a replicated git
| repository in this manner.
|
| So what is the specific problem that you have? You just
| don't like the fact that blockchain data mutations are
| bundled into periodically-generated blocks that
| incorporate changes from multiple users, rather than
| being pushed by individual users on an ad hoc basis? Is
| it a problem for you that blockchain nodes maintain
| network connections with each other, and have a protocol
| for ensuring that they all remain in sync, rather than
| relying on individual users to pull and manually merge
| changes explicitly?
|
| A typical feature of religious disputes is that the
| smallest distinction takes on the most momentous
| significance. Is that not what's going on here?
| TheDong wrote:
| You're right that this level of pedantry isn't actually
| that useful. However, we're both on hacker news and thus
| presumably steeped in technology, which seems to turn
| people into pedants quite easily. I'm making the pedantic
| point because you're already talking specifically about
| tiny semantic points in this thread, and if you're going
| to quibble semantics, pedantry seems open.
|
| This distinction is not the one that actually matters and
| does not have huge significance in my frustration with
| blockchain advocates.
|
| To me, the large issue seems to be that people advocating
| for blockchain _stuff_ usually seem to be ignoring
| reality and trying to paint a libertarian dream that is
| simply entirely divorced from how real governments and
| societies currently function.
|
| The exact definition of blockchain doesn't matter. The
| use of a blockchain technology also doesn't matter (like,
| I don't care if my doctor is saving my records in Oracle
| SQL, some private blockchain, or whatever, never have
| cared, as long as the data is still there next time my
| doctor needs it, and it's compliant with legal privacy
| requirements).
|
| What matters is that "blockchain" always seems to be
| coupled with "and by using it, it will fix this social
| problem somehow" when that problem is inevitably social
| or political, not technical.
|
| I'm all for fixing these problems, but switching
| databases ain't it when the problem is several layers
| off, so it seems like at best a distraction from useful
| action, and at worst a grift to extract money from
| various entities by promising an easy solution to a
| difficult problem, which cannot realistically be
| delivered on.
| dastbe wrote:
| surveying definitions of blockchain, decentralized
| consensus is consistently a part of the definition. a
| blockchain without distributed consensus is something
| less specific.
|
| i also don't know why you put "centralized in quotes".
| amazon qldb has all of the qualities you describe and is
| 100% centralized.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| This.
|
| A friend of mine moved down to Mexico and bought land on a
| beach to build his dream off grid eco airbnb.
|
| After he'd been there a while and had completed some
| construction, a bunch of police came walking up his drive
| armed with assault rifles. They were with a local
| politician's sister that's known in the area for various land
| scams. They tried to kick him off his land under some
| pretext. My friend stood his ground despite them threatening
| to shoot him. After a standoff they left.
|
| Now in my friend's case he's a remote tech worker with plenty
| of income as well as a bunch of social/professional
| connections to a bunch of wealthy business owners in Mexico
| city. So he was able to get connected up with the right kind
| of lawyer to go intimidate the captain of the police office
| the goons came from.
|
| What was recorded on the deed in the county office mattered
| not one bit in this scenario.
| inkyoto wrote:
| > The developed world is distinguished from the developing
| world often by the strength of its institutions, by the general
| accessibility of legal recourse, by the prevalence of trust
| within the society at large.
|
| The developed world is not immune to some of the problems,
| namely: genuine human errors, negligence and a great uneasiness
| to accept the personal responsibility for making mistakes,
| inadvertent or out of sheer incompetence (rampant in the
| British culture). The latter two somewhat step into a gray
| area, but I digress.
|
| Ledger databases/blockchains provide a technological solution
| to the problem in multiple areas where a full immutable
| temporal history of changes is necessary even in the developed
| world where the governance is strong and corruption is less
| frequent.
| acdha wrote:
| > Is a smart contract better than a written contract? Maybe it
| is, if there is no functioning judiciary to adjudicate
| contractual disputes.
|
| This doesn't seem like it could possibly be true without
| something like an outside force requiring use of the
| blockchain. For example, if my neighbor uses some of my land,
| who cares if I say it's not valid according to someone's
| computer? If the local legal system is inept or corrupt, who's
| going to do something about it? In almost all cases the local
| control of state power wins.
|
| This is especially relevant when you think about the long
| history of how lane has historically been stolen by tricking or
| threatening people, bribing surveyors, or by making promises
| which aren't kept. Blockchains not only improve none of those
| situations but also add new ones like tricking people into
| using exploitable smart contracts or phishing their transfer
| approvals.
| BackBlast wrote:
| Currency is the only one of those that actually works within
| the corrupt legal system because it doesn't require any action
| on the part of the corrupt system. You can use it directly with
| other parties.
|
| (smart) Contracts? Without institutional enforcement, doesn't
| matter. Maybe being all on-chain, but that hasn't really
| functioned.
|
| Ownership (NFT)? Doesn't work at all without some level of
| institutional enforcement.
|
| Blockchain does only one thing well.
| dkokelley wrote:
| Why would a corrupt state agree to use a system resistant to
| their influence? And if they did, why wouldn't they use
| violence to force the owner to transfer the property?
| dmitriid wrote:
| > Why would a corrupt state agree to use a system resistant
| to their influence?
|
| Blockchain isn't resistant to their influence. Case in point:
| _courts_ still exist. What 's to stop me to get a court order
| showing I'm the rightful owner of something? How can
| blockchain prevent that?
|
| Moreover, what if I actually _am_ the rightful owner, and the
| original record was incorrect?
| LawTalkingGuy wrote:
| They simply need to record the location of the property
| markers. They could even use paper. The problem is that they
| don't have surveying equipment and the training to use it so
| all they have is the sticks.
|
| As others have said, you can't (usefully) represent ownership
| in the blockchain because ownership can change or be made
| irrelevant outside of the blockchain.
|
| While blockchain wouldn't be useful for this, a host of
| cryptographic tools would be.
|
| If a country used signed survey data they could prevent a host
| of crimes and bugs changing boundaries, and if they issued
| signed land titled you could check their validity offline -
| helpful for remote areas. They could be tied together entry to
| entry, like a blockchain, to assure that no records "go
| missing". There could be a single-core proof of work stored
| regularly, checkpointing the data, to prevent the country's IT
| team from rewriting the whole database. It just doesn't need to
| be "a blockchain" because there is a centralized authority who
| we all follow, if not trust, so the decentralized thing isn't
| that important. And we don't need to limit publishing so we
| don't need a currency.
| Finbarr wrote:
| Arguments like this one strike me as extremely condescending.
|
| Have you directly spoken to developing world farmers who have
| experienced these problems?
|
| Do you think people with these problems are just clamoring for
| the first world to come in and solve this for them with
| blockchain technology?
|
| Do you think all of the participants in the situation you
| described would even adopt blockchain (the small farmer, the
| larger farmer who wants to steal land, the corrupt central
| government officials open to bribes)? If so, why? It seems the
| only person with an incentive for change is the one least
| likely to have strong influence for that change.
| acdha wrote:
| > Do you think people with these problems are just clamoring
| for the first world to come in and solve this for them with
| blockchain technology?
|
| Especially in this case where the pitch is "commit now to
| paying me and friends first world transaction fees on
| everything you do, and maybe we'll figure out how to help
| with the actual hard problems in the future". If the real
| goal is helping small farmers I'd expect the answer to
| involve things like paying for accurate surveying and working
| with big agricultural buyers so the calculation changes from
| "bribe local official to ignore this small farmer's deed;
| profit!" to include things like major buyers not buying from
| any of your farms.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > Weak institutions, corrupt legal systems, and low levels of
| trust undermine development and prevent people from building
| and maintaining wealth for themselves and their families.
|
| > For me, the promise of the blockchain is that it can provide
| a technological framework upon which to build new kinds of
| institutions
|
| You're trying to solve social and political problems with tech.
| And you cannot. You could spend 30 seconds thinking abuout the
| problem and realised why it can't.
|
| Question: who is the rightful owner of the marked land? See my
| comments in this discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27212564
|
| > Is a smart contract better than a written contract? Maybe it
| is, if there is no well-functioning judiciary to adjudicate
| contractual disputes.
|
| And who is going to enforce this smart contract?
|
| > It's important to remember that what might seem redundant or
| useless to those of us who reside in the first world may not be
| redundant or useless to those who live elsewhere.
|
| It's also important to remember that people who claim this (and
| claim blockchains are solutions to problems) also reside in the
| first world and have literally no clue about the problems
| outside their cushy bubbles.
| philliphaydon wrote:
| This a solved problem that isn't solved using blockchain.
|
| In Thailand when you get out into the rural areas, there's no
| central database you can go and argue to in regards to land
| ownership. You have chiefs. He mediates sales between people
| and ensures who owns what land. If a land dispute happens it
| gets resolved by the chief.
|
| In cities it's all controlled by local governments and paper
| records.
|
| It works in the city with government and paper. It works less
| in rural areas where people can be bought.
|
| Blockchain is not solving any problems here. The problem is no
| one managing any records.
|
| Paper records and up to date gps records are enough.
| wmf wrote:
| _The real promise of blockchains is that they can provide a
| technological framework upon which to build new institutions
| that are alternatives to the types of institutions that are
| foundational to developed economies._
|
| There's no evidence that this is true. People have been saying
| this for years and there's nothing to show for it.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| You cannot replace illegitimate or suboptimal institutions with
| systems of record or value storage and transfer they don't have
| to respect or acknowledge, just as a court who cannot enforce
| their ruling has no authority. The systems are simply tools, it
| is the execution layer (ie government very broadly) that
| determines the outcome.
|
| If your property record is on a blockchain but those whose
| recognize such rights ignore it, it's not a property record,
| for example. It's an internet comment or public expression of
| opinion. Similarly, what makes your name typed on a Docusign a
| legally binding signature? Federal statute recognizing it as
| such.
| legutierr wrote:
| I don't disagree with you. My point is that blockchains can
| reduce the cost and complexity of enforcing property rights
| and adjudicating contractual disputes to a meaningful extent
| such that many of the institutional deficiencies that exist
| in the developing world in this regard can be overcome.
|
| You couldn't realize such a reform, however, without buy-in
| from the government itself.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > can reduce the cost and complexity of enforcing property
| rights and adjudicating contractual disputes to a
| meaningful extent
|
| No, they can't. A blockchain is, at best, a database. A
| database cannot do anything.
| legutierr wrote:
| So you would assert that the use of centralized
| relational databases would would not reduce the cost and
| complexity of enforcing property rights, in comparison to
| the use of paper records? A database cannot do anything?
| dmitriid wrote:
| > So you would assert that the use of centralized
| relational databases would would not reduce the cost and
| complexity of enforcing property rights, in comparison to
| the use of paper records?
|
| 1. No, I wouldn't assert that
|
| 2. It depends entirely on implementation (there are
| numerous examples around the world where transferring
| paper records to digital records mad a lot of things
| _less_ efficient due to bad implementations)
|
| 3. You have to show that blockchain as a store of record
| is significantly better than a traditional relational
| database (given e.g.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33691566 and other
| like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33688603 and
| other issues that you dismiss or ignore)
| jasonhansel wrote:
| > it can provide a technological framework upon which to build
| new kinds of institutions
|
| But will those institutions be democratic or respect human
| rights? Proof-of-work blockchains are effectively plutocracies,
| controlled by those with the most computing power.
| l33t233372 wrote:
| I have some serious problems believing your argument. For
| example, this:
|
| > Is a smart contract better than a written contract? Maybe it
| is, if there is no functioning judiciary to adjudicate
| contractual disputes.
|
| If there's no functioning judiciary, then who will enforce the
| contract? Who will decide if one side is not acting in good
| faith, or if there was coercion, or deception? I claim that
| smart contracts solve none of the issues actually caused by
| having weak institutions.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| They're public in a way that written contracts usually
| aren't. I can at least imagine scenarios where that might
| matter (even if I'm not at all certain they're realistic).
| x86x87 wrote:
| You cannot enforce the physical world through virtual means.
| It does not work.
|
| What you can enforce is digital goods via virtual means.
| Depending of what you want to enforce the presence of a
| central authority in the physical world may still be needed
| acdha wrote:
| Even digital goods are pretty limited because you need a
| situation where both parties honor the system. If that
| doesn't fall naturally out of the model you need something
| like a government enforcement to prevent cheating.
| amluto wrote:
| An NFT representing ownership of farmland is, frankly, absurd.
|
| If I own farmland and lose my private key (or screw up a smart
| contract and lock it away forever, etc), should that land never
| be farmed again?
|
| If a river moves and boundaries must change but the NFT isn't
| aware of this, what happens?
|
| If someone with guns takes my land, who cares about my NFT?
|
| _Maybe_ technology can help create a system where transactions
| really happen on a common-carrier basis and can't be censored
| without censorship being documentable and illegal. But at the
| end of the day, ownership of real things isn't something on
| chain and is enforced by centralized institutions, and a
| blockchain won't change that.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| Not to mention that the only thing that _actually matters_ is
| what 's in the government's land title ledger. They're the
| ones with the guns that enforce (or don't enforce) ownership.
|
| These crypto crazies absolutely crack me up. Can you imagine
| some dirt poor farmer in the arse end of nowhere confronting
| the local constabulary that were bribed by their rich
| neighbour?
|
| "You see here in my wallet how my Landz Titles NFT _clearly_
| states that this parcel of land is mine? "
|
| Cue: a bunch of uniformed thugs glance at each other and
| smirk before proceeding to pummel the life out of the farmer
| that paid in Bitcoin for a few thousand bits that won't
| protect him from fists, batons, or bullets.
|
| Some people are so naive and clueless that it's a parody of
| entitlement.
| deanCommie wrote:
| To augment this slightly: It doesn't even matter if the
| uninformed thugs completely understand, embrace, and accept
| the technology of the ledger.
|
| They then just simply glance, smirk, and pummel the farmer
| until they initiate the transfer of the digital ownership
| record to them.
| Vespasian wrote:
| > Some people are so naive and clueless that it's a parody
| of entitlement
|
| It's nice to think that one can stand his/her ground and
| not have to rely on others especially in societies were
| rugged individualism is a concept.
|
| Reality disagrees with that and has proven throughout
| history that organized and coordinated groups of people are
| much more powerful than the sum of their parts.
|
| It's the same with prepers (the crazy political kind), who
| think that in an apocalyptical world of madness and
| warlords their 1 family home will not just be sieged down
| immediately with them either bending the knee or getting
| killed.
| felixgallo wrote:
| If there's no functioning judiciary to adjudicate contractual
| disputes, then who is going to effectively and durably tell
| someone who won and enforce that with the threat of state-level
| punishment? If a state agency can be bribed, what's claiming to
| have an NFT going to do for the holder, besides radically
| increase their property ownership risk if they actually rely on
| that to be true?
|
| The problem with all of these cockamamie blockchain arguments
| is that they talk about a problem, and then they talk about a
| (bad, expensive, difficult to use) database that might form
| part of that problem, but in fact the problem is always far
| bigger and way more complicated than the choice of the database
| vendor.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| One of the interesting aspects of blockchain for many
| scenarios is that it makes the ledger of ownership or
| whatever universally available.
|
| Hopefully with some of the charlatans going bust this will
| transform back into a technology instead of some bizarre
| religion.
| XorNot wrote:
| What are you even talking about? Who owns what has always
| been available to everyone, that's how land title deeds
| _work_.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| If you read upthread, the example given was that of Asian
| farmers who struggle with markers being damaged by
| floods.
|
| A cheap device that was able to locate reference points
| with GPS to some sort of online land registry would
| potentially avoid these disputes. Blockchain could be a
| tool to mitigate the limited connectivity available.
|
| It's potentially a way to make information more available
| and maybe facilitate certain transactions.
|
| Again, it's just a technology. It may make sense as a
| solution or not.
| deanCommie wrote:
| So what happens when a rich baron approaches a farmer
| who's exact GPS ownership record is registered on the
| blockchain and says "transfer digital ownership of your
| land to me, or i kill your sister"?
|
| Exactly the same thing as what happens without a
| blockchain.
|
| Weak institutions are absolutely a problem in human
| society, but they are not solved by decentralization
| technology.
| Vespasian wrote:
| Even better for the land owner, they (or more likely a
| "subcontractor") can force the transfer once and even if
| courts get involved and decide in favor of the farmer,
| the records can't be corrected if they are based on
| blockchain technology.
|
| A less violent example would be a fraud based on social
| engineering.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| It sounds like you're throwing hands up and stating that
| no change is possible.
|
| Land records are by definition ledgers. A distributed
| ledger is also a ledger. Does it protect you from a
| physical harm? Of course not.
|
| Weak institutions are a problem, but technolgy can be
| used to strengthen them. If you can make facts more
| available and easier to access, perhaps you can push
| disputes to local magistrates and improve access to
| justice.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > It sounds like you're throwing hands up and stating
| that no change is possible.
|
| No, they're saying there must be a _point_ to the change.
| If adding blockchain doesn 't help in any way, why add it
| to the mix?
| lelanthran wrote:
| > A cheap device that was able to locate reference points
| with GPS to some sort of online land registry would
| potentially avoid these disputes.
|
| Okay, and why would you use a blockchain over a state-
| held database?
|
| Because it doesn't matter what your blockchain says about
| ownership, the state that issued the title deeds are the
| ones who decide where the boundaries are.
|
| If the state is not recording it, recording it in a
| blockchain doesn't help.
| legutierr wrote:
| Do they work that way in rural Africa?
| XorNot wrote:
| If no one knows if you own something, then _you don 't
| own it_. Literally the entire concept of "ownership" it
| based on socialized distribution of that information.
|
| Which means anyone within range of an item for ownership
| rights to matter, by definition, is either aware of your
| claim by some means and respecting it, or unaware and you
| now get to see how good your legal or kinetic protections
| of it are.
|
| EDIT: The parent poster is possibly referring to an
| entirely different problem - many underdeveloped nations
| have antiquated automation for their land title systems,
| which makes proving ownership difficult due to a lack of
| computerization. This is a problem for the owners
| occupying the land, because they can't prove to third
| parties this claim is legal and thus use it as collateral
| for seeking lines of credit.
|
| One of the interesting things the Bush Jr. admin of all
| things spearheaded was a project which looked at funding
| and helping update these systems in some nations as a
| means of economic development.
|
| But of course, blockchain here is still useless. The
| problem isn't that the ledger of ownership is "secret"
| (which doesn't make any sense) it's that it can't be
| verified because the record keeping is manual. Once
| again, "blockchain" fixes nothing that a central database
| wouldn't do faster, cheaper and better.
| legutierr wrote:
| > Once again, "blockchain" fixes nothing that a central
| database wouldn't do faster, cheaper and better.
|
| Some things that blockchains would do better than
| centralized databases in your example:
|
| * Blockchains are natively replicated on a massive basis,
| so you wouldn't have to worry about data loss due to
| disruption, inaccessibility or incompetent management of
| the centralized system.
|
| * Blockchains cannot be corrupted by bad actors managing
| the central system. As I've noted in another comment, a
| Postgres DBA can be bribed to modify a property record
| and wipe the backups. That can't happen to a blockchain
| record.
|
| * Blockchains can streamline the availability of credit,
| making it easier for a property owner to leverage their
| property to grow their business.
|
| * Blockchains can increase the liquidity of the property
| market by providing via smart contract services that
| might not otherwise be available. For instance: escrow,
| auction, and mortgage lending.
| [deleted]
| EFreethought wrote:
| When you say "blockchain", are you referring to something
| like bitcoin? In other words, a proof of work blockchain?
| If we put all the world's data on a POW blockchain, we
| will cook the planet very quickly, and we won't have any
| energy for anything else.
| TheDong wrote:
| Many of these seem like downsides.
|
| > Blockchains cannot be corrupted by bad actors managing
| the central system. As I've noted in another comment, a
| Postgres DBA can be bribed to modify a property record
| and wipe the backups. That can't happen to a blockchain
| record.
|
| What is to happen if a land-owner drops their cell-phone
| with their private keys, and now needs to re-gain
| ownership of their land? Well, either the
| government/admins can update the blockchain to have a new
| private key as an owner (in which case they could be
| bribed to do the same), OR the blockchain will be
| inaccurate, it will have an old address owning some land
| even though no one can use that address. See also, a
| farmer dies and has no beneficiary.
|
| Also, how is new land added to the blockchain and old
| land removed? If the government needs to exercise eminent
| domain to build a railway, the farm's boundaries are
| changed. Perhaps the farmer does not want to make the
| update... so how does the land get updated to align with
| reality?
|
| Natural disasters can also make land change drastically.
|
| > Blockchains can streamline the availability of credit,
| making it easier for a property owner to leverage their
| property to grow their business
|
| This just seems bad. Easier access to credit has not been
| great.
|
| > Blockchains are natively replicated on a massive basis
|
| They are if you have a lot of nodes. Which you do if you
| use bitcoin/eth/whatever (but then the cost of doing
| anything is incredibly expensive for those in the global
| south, so it's unusable). If each town builds their own
| to manage their land, it would be just as replicated as a
| .json file in s3 people can mirror if they want, which is
| to say archive.org might save a copy, a few farmers and
| companies in the area might, but most people would not
| care. Heck, people mirroring a json dump of a database
| would be more likely to happen than people figuring out
| how to spin up weird blockchain software I bet.
| Gigachad wrote:
| There is also a problem of what happens when the farmers
| computer gets hacked and their land NFT stolen. Are the
| police meant to roll in and kick out the farmer who clearly
| still owns the land? Or do they just ignore the blockchain
| record as it's obviously wrong but not fixable.
| legutierr wrote:
| The effectiveness of institutions cannot be measured in black
| and white. There is a continuum of effectiveness. It is very
| rare in the developing world that the courts are completely
| ineffective--it's often just that they are slow, expensive,
| subject to corrupt influence, etc. They function, to an
| extent--but they function poorly. How poorly depends on where
| you are.
|
| In addition, bribery and corruption themselves also operate
| on a continuum. In the example cited in the article, the rich
| landowners don't just remove the property markers--they wait
| for flooding to wash them away before illegally expanding
| their claims. In other words, even in a society where
| official corruption is rampant, there are still societal
| limits within which corruption is possible.
|
| The impact that blockchains can have is to simplify the tasks
| that systems of adjudication must undertake in order to
| enforce property rights and contracts. They also remove
| individual judgement from most decisions, and make it
| impossible to alter or destroy records.
|
| I'm not saying that blockchains can entirely replace all
| human governance systems. Rather, blockchains can make it
| cheaper and easier to maintain functioning and accessible
| systems for adjudication. They reduce the surface area for
| the use of individual judgement, and thereby reduce costs and
| opportunities for the injection of corrupt influence.
|
| Yes, many of the things that blockchains can do can also be
| done by centralized database applications--maintaining
| property records, for example. Those centralized databases
| still need to be maintained by trusted parties, however--
| trusted parties who themselves may be subject to corrupt
| influence.
|
| By moving title records from paper to a centralized database
| all you are doing is changing who becomes the bribery target
| --the Postgres DBA instead of the clerk at the records
| office. With a public blockchain, there is no one you can
| bribe.
| jasonhansel wrote:
| Why not just make the records public? In the US, you can
| usually just look up who owns the parcels of land in your
| area. If the records are public, it will be pretty obvious
| if they've been tampered with; you can just compare the
| current data against a copy archived earlier.
| stephen_g wrote:
| Yeah, but these kind of ideas don't really work in the
| complexity of the real world. If somebody hacks a computer
| and steals my land title token, we need off-chain ways of
| adjudicating that and fixing the database. So we have
| exactly the same kind of problems, can't rely on the
| blockchain for actually saying somebody definitely owns
| something, and may as well just not have bothered with the
| blockchain...
|
| Unless you want to change it so 'code is law' and if you
| can hack someone and transfer ownership to yourself, then
| you legally own it. But I think few want to live in that
| kind of society...
| franklampard wrote:
| > But if the boundary markers were on the blockchain," he said,
| "they wouldn't be able to do that, would they?
|
| Or they could store the makers are stored in a free-tier
| dynomodb instance...
| bo1024 wrote:
| Very nice article. As others have alluded to, I think Tim does
| miss an important point about trust. He writes:
|
| _> we just couldn't convince ourselves that the real world
| wanted zero-trust; so there was a transaction manager you had to
| trust._
|
| And then later:
|
| _> It seems a good idea to have a land-registry database but,
| blockchain or no, I wonder if the large landowners might be able
| to find another way to fiddle the records and still steal the
| land? Perhaps this is more about power than boundary markers?_
|
| Yes. Blockchain is about decentralization of power. It's exactly
| the most interesting in situations with no trusted third party
| (i.e. weak rule of law) and an imbalance of power. I think Tim
| missed that aspect of this discussion (which is no knock on him
| in 2016, but should be reevaluated now). The rest I found
| insightful and very interesting.
| jasonhansel wrote:
| Here's the issue.
|
| In a country with a stable, effective government, you don't
| need a blockchain for this: you can just have a centralized
| database.
|
| In a country without such a government, a blockchain wouldn't
| help: the government will care more about the large landholders
| than about the blockchain records, and will have little
| incentive to enforce the latter.
|
| (Also: I won't look forward to the day when some hacker figures
| out how to get into a bunch of farmers' crypto wallets and
| takes all their land. If the government doesn't respect the
| hackers' claims, then the blockchain isn't really the source of
| truth; if it does, then a bunch of people's lives are
| destroyed.)
| vault_ wrote:
| How does being able to point at a database prevent land being
| stolen in the absence of a trusted third party? It's not like
| the land itself can authenticate the farmer. For the database
| to have any weight, there'd need to be an authority that can
| enforce what it says (and won't take bribes to ignore it, or
| collude in extorting "voluntary" transfers). If you do have
| such an agency, well, there's your trusted third party.
| thwayunion wrote:
| No. Tim did not miss an important point about trust.
|
| You missed an important point about power.
|
| Those large land owners do not give a fuck about your
| blockchain. They'll take the land and farm it anyways. You can
| "own" the virtual stake; they're happy to cede you cyber
| nonsense as long as they get to control who touches the actual
| grass.
|
| The large land owners, who have local authorities in their
| pocket, would simply quote President Andrew Jackson's
| apocryphal opinion on blockchain: "The blockchain has made its
| decision; now let the blockchain's army and police enforce it!"
| [1]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worcester_v._Georgia
| bo1024 wrote:
| A central part of the quote I was responding to is "fiddle
| the records". I agree with what you said otherwise.
| sebo2000 wrote:
| You guys have issues with elections and vote couting. I think
| Blockchain would solve this problem once and for all, but I'm
| afraid it is not a problem anyone wants to solve...
| pjkundert wrote:
| Just like CBDCs. The only problem they are designed to "solve"
| is the problem of you having liberty.
|
| But that's a PR disaster, so the authorities proposing these
| things have to convince you that they're solving some more
| important problem -- like "all the baaad people" using money.
| Hopefully, you'll soon forget you used to have that liberty.
| PeterisP wrote:
| Specifically for election security, the key problem that's not
| easy to solve via blockchain is ensuring a hidden ballot -
| namely, that after voting there must be no way for you to
| verify how your specific vote was counted to someone who might
| be coercing or bribing you, but you still want to verify that
| the votes were counted properly. A physical ballot box mixing
| up envelopes under supervision of representatives of all the
| parties trivially solves that, a block chain does not.
|
| You also need a mechanism for preventing (or invalidating
| afterwards) votes made remotely under coercion/bribery -
| current mechanisms for handling mail-in votes implement
| mitigations for that, but a fully digital remote voting makes
| it tricky.
|
| Also, one of the major discussion points regarding USA voting
| is the eligibility of voters, ensuring that certain people are
| prevented from voting, but that eligible people can vote
| without requiring a centralized ID. Again, blockchain only
| makes this problem more difficult.
|
| And finally, by far the most important factor of vote counting
| is having the losing voters trust that the votes were counted
| fairly - and a formal mathematical proof is bad at that (for
| the majority of voters) compared to a relatively simpler,
| clearer physical system.
| drdrek wrote:
| Only thing annoying the the flood of negative articles only pop
| up after a crash. All that VC money made a lot of people afraid
| to look like fools by speaking up against the tech. Where was he
| (not personally, as a symbol of tech bloggers) at the height of
| the bubble?
| acdha wrote:
| Speaking up?
|
| https://mobile.twitter.com/timbray/status/963115533825527808
|
| https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2021/06/26/Shorting-...
| unboxingelf wrote:
| _Well known tech guy thinks blockchain is dumb because he can't
| see its value for a private company._
|
| There's nothing new here. No, a blockchain isn't a good
| replacement for a traditional database. It's a distributed append
| only database built on zero trust. It's extremely inefficient.
| Very few problems require that solution, especially one where a
| single party would be running all the nodes.
| aserafini wrote:
| Indeed, I expect the ONLY application where this combination of
| requirements makes sense is.. a global currency.
| dynjo wrote:
| I've lost count of how many product owners have interchanged the
| word Database with Blockchain to try and score some PR points
| with their customers/bosses.
| BenoitP wrote:
| In case anyone needs a thorough source to explain why you don't
| need a Blockchain, I found the NIST paper (esp the flowchart on
| page 42) quite helpful:
|
| https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/ir/2018/nist.ir.8202.pdf
|
| It worked wonderfully to cut the BS coming from a greedy manager,
| in a non confrontational way ("so, what do you actually need?" ,
| "you say 'security', but which aspect do you need? immutability ?
| non-repudiability? confidentiality??"). I think NIST's clout
| helped, along that they'd have to fully understand a 65 page
| report. I'm sure the content of the report would have been quite
| eye-opening, but that wasn't needed. Greed is a feeling, not a
| rational process.
| dandanua wrote:
| That's an excellent flowchart. BTW, there is a real example of
| meaningful blockchain use for auditing single source data (the
| "caveat" in the flowchart). It's the hypercore protocol
| https://hypercore-protocol.org/
| darawk wrote:
| The utility of decentralized blockchains is that they facilitate
| permissionless financial innovation. Yes, that means "regulatory
| arbitrage". But not just circumventing the law, more importantly,
| circumventing the _de facto law_ of corporate gatekeepers.
|
| A substantial amount of de facto financial regulation comes not
| from democratically elected governments, but from companies that
| gate-keep access to the databases where financial truth resides.
| A great example of this is Visa and Mastercard dropping PornHub
| as a client. But there are many others. Building software that
| interfaces with money is extremely difficult, what you can and
| cannot do is extremely limited, and you may only do so at the
| pleasure of the major financial institutions that sit between
| your code and the traditional financial system.
|
| Right now, if you want to write code that manipulate's someone's
| money, you have to ask the permission of both the owner of the
| funds, and several intermediaries along the way. What those
| intermediaries choose to allow you to do can be arbitrary,
| capricious, and certainly is not democratic.
|
| It is true that decentralized blockchains _also_ facilitate the
| flouting of the law, and that can be good or bad, depending on
| your point of view. But fundamentally, having an open fabric for
| finance, in which anyone can build any kind of application they
| wish, seems like a pretty cool thing to me.
| jasonhansel wrote:
| > What those intermediaries choose to allow you to do can be
| arbitrary, capricious, and certainly is not democratic.
|
| In practice, to adopt crypto you usually also need to rely on
| intermediaries to handle parts of the process for you.
| Fortunately, in the crypto space, you can use trusted, non-
| capricious, democratic intermediaries like FTX.
| tootie wrote:
| Pornhub was cut off for failing to police child pornography.
| Why would you want to participate in a financial system that
| was incapable of excluding evildoers?
| dangero wrote:
| why would you want to participate in an internet that is
| incapable of excluding evildoers?
| tootie wrote:
| The pipes of the internet are essentially a public utility.
| Anyone operating above the level of an ISP should be able
| to police their usage.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| because internet is not the mechanism that allows
| distributors and producers of CSAM to get paid?
|
| But good point, with cryptocurrency the internet would
| obviously have to become capable of excluding evildoers.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Look, I dislike crypto as much as the next guy, but I must
| have missed the memo. Are evildoers not perfectly capable of
| participating in the current financial system?
|
| https://www.thelocal.ch/20150208/hsbc-swiss-bank-helped-
| terr...
|
| https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/business/how-the--war-on-
| terror...
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/apr/03/us-bank-
| mexico...
|
| Let's also ignore all the shadiness that the Russian
| Oligarchs, oil shieks, Bibi, Berlosconi all seem to engage in
| and yet seemingly have no limit to the financial systems. The
| belief that our financial system excludes evildoers is a nice
| fantasy that I haven't seen be rooted in reality.
| cypress66 wrote:
| That should be dealt with by the justice system, not some
| corporations.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| Payment processors saw the writing on the wall. The reason
| they did what they did and PH made a 180 and disposed of
| incriminating content all in one month _is_ because justice
| system has teeth and they did not want to find themselves
| liable.
|
| And justice system has teeth because PH is a proper company
| participating in a financial system. Good luck stopping a
| criminal in another country profiting from crime by
| accepting bitcoin
| acdha wrote:
| > Good luck stopping a criminal in another country
| profiting from crime by accepting bitcoin
|
| Interesting choice of examples: the FBI found bitcoin to
| be very helpful in exactly that context since it gave
| hard evidence linking criminals together.
|
| https://www.wired.com/story/tracers-in-the-dark-welcome-
| to-v...
|
| This idea that police agencies haven't figured out how to
| talk with their colleagues in other countries is oddly
| anachronistic given that we have examples going back to
| before the turn of the previous century.
| miracle2k wrote:
| There is no reason for payment processors to be liable.
| If you have a problem with Bitcoin, you need to support a
| general, unrestricted right be all persons and orgs to be
| served by the financial system, except maybe for a narrow
| and limited set of injunctions through the courts.
|
| No other position is cohesive.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| Sorry, I do not support your right to be serviced by
| financial system if it supports your wrongdoing. Your
| freedom stops where mine begins. My position seems pretty
| cohesive to me.
|
| If you do not do evil, then you have nothing to fear. If
| you have something to fear despite doing no evil, let's
| fix the government. This is a human problem and won't be
| solved with tech.
|
| (And again, it was pretty clear to anyone that there was
| wrongdoing in this case and PH was going to get sued. I
| do think it should have been sued anyway, that it was not
| may have to do with victims not willing to come forward
| given sensitive nature of the crime, general
| disinclination of people to deal with dirt, or a good
| content cleanup job.)
| miracle2k wrote:
| > If you do not do evil, then you have nothing to fear.
| If you have something to fear despite doing no evil,
| let's fix the government.
|
| So - if I have to fear being being shutoff from the
| financial system by private actors who dislike me,
| despite not having been convicted of a crime, a law to
| ensure my right to be served.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| My understanding is they policed it a _lot_ better than
| facebook does.
|
| And the solution they were pushed into was extreme overkill.
|
| Either way, I don't want a financial system to punish a
| Canadian company for breaking the law, I want the government
| to do it.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| Your understanding is wrong.
|
| In fact, Facebook has been consistently reporting millions
| of videos even before PH got heat. Any platform that hosts
| images or videos has this problem, but with all its
| shenanigans FB has been among the best at identifying and
| removing the content. It is ridiculous to blame them for
| actually doing the right thing, which includes reporting
| found CSAM. Microsoft with Bing done markedly worse. PH
| pre-2021, obviously, too (and the bar is higher since it
| distributed this content for actual profit).
|
| This is all public information.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Reporting millions of videos is a good thing, but having
| millions is pretty crazy too.
|
| And Bing doesn't host things.
| remram wrote:
| But that's not even true. You can always get people's money and
| turn them into some tokens. You can run whatever code you want
| to manipulate those tokens, then at the end of each day you
| tell them their new balance of tokens. The whole proof-of-work,
| decentralization, ledger, ... are in no way necessary steps in
| this.
|
| As long as you go through creepy, deregulated, fallible
| exchanges to obtain/trade/redeem those tokens, you are not
| permissionless or cryptographically secure or free from gate-
| keepers or anything of the sort.
| siftrics wrote:
| > The whole proof-of-work, decentralization, ledger, ... are
| in no way necessary steps in this.
|
| If you know of a ledger that's
|
| (1) permissionless and
|
| (2) avoids the double-spending problem and
|
| (3) _does not_ involve those things you mentioned
|
| ...then please, do tell me about it. I'd love to know your
| breakthrough solution.
| remram wrote:
| What I'm saying is that you don't need a decentralized
| ledger to enable the "financial innovation" we've been
| seeing, and that it's not permissionless if every
| meaningful action (buy/sell/trade) happens on good ol'
| central exchanges.
| siftrics wrote:
| Truly decentralized exchanges exist and clear tens of
| billions of dollars in volume every single day.
| remram wrote:
| Within an ecosystem, yes. You can trade Ethereum currency
| for Ethereum-based tokens.
|
| As for "billions of dollars in volume every single day",
| I find that hard to believe.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| Ethereum's Proof of Stake?
| trifurcate wrote:
| Which involves decentralization and a ledger.
| chemmail wrote:
| They are not talking about the consensus mechanism but
| the overall raison d'etre of blockchain.
| darawk wrote:
| What, precisely, are you saying is not true? You need a
| decentralized consensus mechanism in order to solve the
| double-spend problem, unless you've come up with something
| novel.
| ShamelessC wrote:
| Trivially lying to the ledger makes that irrelevant.
| hanniabu wrote:
| And those transactions will fail. Please learn about a
| subject before speaking about it.
| Nursie wrote:
| > fundamentally, having an open fabric for finance, in which
| anyone can build any kind of application they wish, seems like
| a pretty cool thing to me.
|
| Where money is concerned, no.
|
| Having gatekeepers, boundaries, approvals, registers,
| participants and authorities is onerous, but it keeps things
| more honest and it makes them much more traceable in cases of
| negligence or fraud. We have ... well pretty much all of
| recorded history to show us how very many people will use any
| and every means available to remove money from others and
| disappear.
|
| So no, this idea of an open fabric, in which _anyone_ can build
| _anything_ is a recipe for disaster by its very nature.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| I was going to simply paste a list of notable crypto scams,
| but... heh... other people have already put together _annual_
| "top-10" lists of scams:
|
| https://mashable.com/article/biggest-crypto-scams-2022
|
| https://mashable.com/article/biggest-cryptocurrency-
| scams-20...
|
| https://www.zdnet.com/article/2020s-worst-cryptocurrency-
| bre...
|
| https://www.zdnet.com/article/bitcoin-battered-the-worst-
| cry...
| darawk wrote:
| That's certainly a valid point on the trade-off curve to
| choose. But you could make a similarly reductionist argument
| about free speech, guns, home chemistry sets, etc. I think
| the position that "money is too important to be open" is a
| potentially reasonable one!
|
| But what I don't think is particularly defensible is the
| position that the gatekeepers of our monetary system should
| be the corporations who happen to occupy the current choke
| points. And I think if you wanted to build a democratically
| controlled financial system that doesn't have corporate
| gatekeepers, you'd actually want to start with something very
| much like a decentralized open blockchain. That is, if you
| want to build a democratically controlled permissioned
| system, you need to start with an open fabric, and place the
| gatekeepers and choke points with intention.
|
| Personally I prefer an open fabric, but I do understand the
| appeal of walled gardens.
| Nursie wrote:
| Yeah don't get me wrong, I think there's loads of stuff
| that can change and be improved about the current system,
| including getting rid of various entrenched interests.
|
| But yes, finance is a walled garden, especially where
| retail is involved, and I think it should continue to be
| one. It's not just that money is too important, it's that
| we know it attracts people who will do _anything_ to part
| joe public from his dollar, and we know that without
| sufficient regulation, said people can and do concoct all
| sorts of shonky, magical schemes to do it. We can see it
| happening in the cryptocurrency space at the moment. These
| schemes not only rip off their own marks but can, without
| oversight, create systemic risks on entire economies.
|
| So there _should_ be oversight, licensing, monitoring and
| democratically accountable authorities that can correct and
| direct actions. As such I don 't think any improvement here
| resembles a blockchain _at all_ , because blockchain
| systems are designed specifically for (and really only
| provide benefit in) situations where these are not present.
|
| And the alternative is a world in which people are having
| to constantly be on guard over every little thing. I don't
| want to have to do due diligence on how I store my money,
| or whether somewhere I choose to deposit it might evaporate
| next week despite being assured by 'the community' that
| it's legit and 100% SAFU. Just like I don't want to have to
| be my own food standards inspector at a restaurant...
| saimiam wrote:
| For whatever reason, SMS operators in India rely on blockchain to
| validate SMS templates and customer's do-not-disturb settings.
|
| For a sense of scale, SMS is a 12.5 billion dollar business in
| India.
| petesergeant wrote:
| Do you have a link to more information about this?
|
| EDIT: So doing some googling finds that Telecom Regulatory
| Authority of India implemented "Distributed Ledger Technology"
| for fighting spam, but roll-out seems to have lasted not long
| (a week? A month?) because it didn't work (didn't scale?) and
| every so often tech vendors suggest they're going to re-do it?
| Honestly there's a lot of promo articles and conflicting
| information that I'm struggling to understand what's going on
| there, my take-away is that it's not currently being used
| because it didn't work?
| ricochet11 wrote:
| couldnt find this, but given the india connection at a guess
| probably something on polygon. there are other india anti-
| corruption uses on polygon too e.g. police complaints records
| https://twitter.com/firozabadpolice/status/15794707131234058.
| ..
| timbray wrote:
| _crickets_
| saimiam wrote:
| https://www.fast2sms.com/help/dlt-sms-faq/
|
| _Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) is a blockchain based
| online panel where the record of entities, sender ID and
| message templates will be maintained in a safe and secure
| manner. The whole panel entities will be interlinked with
| each other thereby regulating the fraudulent practices and
| creating a transparent SMS sending mechanism._
| saimiam wrote:
| I work (well, serving out my notice period) for an SMS
| aggregator in India. All SMS operators in India use
| blockchain to manage SMS marketing campaigns
|
| https://dltconnect.airtel.in - for context, Airtel is India's
| largest GSM provider. https://www.tanla.com - the best known
| DLT-as-a-service provider in India.
|
| DLT (branded as being built on blockchain) is alive and well
| in India.
| nickstinemates wrote:
| I am always torn when it comes to blockchain.
|
| (As an aside, I was an advisor to Storj.io, a web3 storage
| company. Largely because of my relationship with the CEO and less
| because of my enthusiasm with the space.)
|
| The leveraged, financial engineering side of Crypto as a get rich
| scheme never really appealed to me. I see this like any other
| risky investment, blurring the lines between lawful and not.
| Borrowing a ton of money and staking it on crypto seemed like a
| path to glory to many, and I am saddened by all of the people
| that lost their shirt in the process.
|
| There's another side of me, however, that sees web3 as an
| evolution of the traditional technology marketplace. A lot like
| early days of the internet, or of open source.. web3 seemed to be
| the continuation of the hacker spirit, where builders met to
| build cool stuff.
|
| Some of the coolest websites and communities these days are
| related to NFT's and minting them. Some cool thinking about
| persistent storage, or cloud, or storage with blockchain/coins as
| an incentive structure for micropayments. How to directly
| monetize content on the web without having to prop up the ad
| industry. Interesting, worthy goals.
|
| It's hard to reconcile this spectrum of thoughts and come up with
| a clear, personal, answer on the value of blockchain technology
| as a whole.
| thwayunion wrote:
| _> Some of the coolest websites and communities these days are
| related to NFT 's and minting them._
|
| Can you give a few examples? Everything I've seen in this space
| are transparent scams.
| dilyevsky wrote:
| I think the farmers use case can totally work as long as those
| land parcels are also on the blockchain.
| tootie wrote:
| That whole story sounds a bit apocryphal but even if it's true
| this is some sort of semi-literate culture. If they're making
| marks in mud, how are they supposed to encode geographic
| positions with enough accuracy and write them to a computer
| system of any kind. And then have everyone understand and agree
| to what it means. Why it would it be superior to taking a
| picture and posting it to Whatsapp or Facebook?
| stephen_g wrote:
| Armed mobs probably don't care about the blockchain though. And
| shall I lose the ability to sell my land if I or somebody else
| loses a private key? Shall my land be taken from me if a
| criminal is able to hack a computer and transfer it to
| themselves?
| dilyevsky wrote:
| The worst part is cryptocow's milk tastes like shit
| andreareina wrote:
| The government would have to cede control of transfers, which
| good luck with that. If you require the government to sign the
| transaction you now effectively have a permissioned database
| which doesn't require a blockchain to implement.
| subradios wrote:
| Blockchains are an incredible technology. It is obvious that
| their first attempted uses are contractual and monetary, because
| blockchain guarantees can make things better fastest in those
| arenas. The unfortunate part is it doesn't seem like anyone has
| really figured out the how yet.
|
| I am reminded of the Web, Amazon was the first company to really
| "get" e-commerce and made all the money - there will likely be a
| similar story with blockchains 10 years from now.
| Nursie wrote:
| We're already 14 years in. Where is the evidence it can make
| anything better? Why hasn't the amazon thing happened in the
| last ten years of blockchain?
| subradios wrote:
| The biggest reason is social, or occasionally legal. There
| are tons of barriers in place to getting the legal system to
| agree that smart contracts are legitimate - which creates a
| barrier to real world, because regulators of real world
| business want to see contracts and legal language. (And you
| can't get away from if if you're operating a physical store
| with physical employees)
|
| The only group that has managed to beat this was early Uber,
| and their political lobbying arm was legendary.
| everfree wrote:
| To be fair, Amazon didn't hit their stride as a retailer
| until the 2000s, roughly 20 years after the internet's "big
| bang" date.
|
| And while we're 14 years into distributed ledger technology,
| we're only 7 years into turing-complete distributed ledger
| technology, which I would argue is the actual innovation.
| acdha wrote:
| Amazon's book unit was profitable within a couple of years
| (say by the time Clinton was re-elected), and that pattern
| continued for each business line. They invested all of the
| profits in expansion so "analysts" would say they were
| doomed but anyone who looked at the numbers could see they
| could report a profit any time they wanted by halting
| expansion.
|
| Comparisons to the internet timeframes are hard to make
| because there's a key difference: computers were expensive
| and slow, and network connectivity was very limited. The
| Apple II was a major advance in accessibility and that
| brought the price down to roughly the equivalent of $6k
| today - and you still needed to buy a monitor and modem to
| get online! This is a huge contrast to the way blockchains
| have been basically globally available since day one.
|
| It's also worth noting that the internet and the web are
| not the same. While the latter's popularity depended on
| things which weren't available earlier like GUIs, better
| displays, etc. that doesn't mean that there weren't plenty
| of people paying for network access before then. There were
| clear uses of value to many people - people loved email,
| software downloads beat shipping floppies by mail and led
| to the shareware business model, services provided access
| to information like real-time stock quotes, etc. - and
| profitable businesses existed before the web came along. If
| memory serves, the first wedding from an online
| relationship happened in the late 70s, too, so it's not
| like people were only paying for business reasons.
|
| The contrast with cryptocurrencies is substantial: many
| people saw the value, it was just a question of whether
| they could afford it and as soon as prices dropped waves of
| people came online and never left. Blockchain apps have had
| enormous investment but there hasn't been anything like
| that other than speculation on whether a number will go up.
| It's been quite noticeable that none of the people who've
| asked me for tech advice for years have ever asked about a
| blockchain tech or mentioned using one except the guy who
| likes trading penny stocks instead of going to casinos.
| everfree wrote:
| > computers were expensive and slow, and network
| connectivity was very limited
|
| Blockchains have been expensive and slow, and
| functionality was very limited. When Bitcoin launched,
| you couldn't run turing-complete scripts, it only
| supported balance transfers. It had a hard-coded 1
| Megabyte per 10 minutes throughput limit (slower than
| dial-up). There were no transaction privacy tools.
|
| That has been changing. The first turing-complete chain,
| Ethereum, was launched in 2015. It launched a sustainable
| consensus model in 2020, and switched over to it
| ("merged") in 2022. Private smart contract support came
| in 2020-2021, with projects like SCRT and Aztec. Layer-2
| scaling technology is just beginning to hit its stride
| this year, with several competing companies. Still on the
| base layer roadmap is single-slot finality, data
| availability sampling to expand the chain's storage
| capacity, zero-knowledge-proof based VMs to expand its
| execution throughput, and state and history expiry to
| automatically prune it.
|
| Once all of those technologies are complete and have had
| a chance to mature (much like dial-up matured into
| broadband), I expect blockchains to look more attractive
| for certain applications.
| acdha wrote:
| I was responding specifically the implicit assumption
| that the timeframes can be directly compared -- since
| things happened on different scales, that doesn't make
| sense especially when you're comparing different things.
| The number of people using the internet changed as a
| function of reasonable speed/price connectivity becoming
| available where they lived so the process was a lot
| slower than shipping an update to a blockchain network
| because it involved things like getting permits and
| deploying crews to install cables.
|
| That said, even if you want to ignore Bitcoin, things
| like Ethereum still are lagging far behind -- if that
| network shut off tomorrow, nobody not involved in selling
| tokens would notice. The same would not have been true of
| the web 7 years, or even 2 years, after it launched
| because tons of people were using it for things unrelated
| to selling web services.
|
| It's certainly possible that at some point some level of
| functionality will make it more attractive but I suspect
| that this will involve rolling back parts of the current
| sales pitch and that will unfavorably affect the cost
| relative to other models like distributed ledgers or
| standard APIs.
| everfree wrote:
| > the process was a lot slower than shipping an update to
| a blockchain network
|
| The process of creating a system for private, energy
| efficient smart contract transactions took 12 years. To
| make them scalable and foolproof for the general public
| will likely take another 5-10 years.
|
| Blockchain updates are less like the process of laying
| physical cable, more like the process of building up a
| very large piece of software with lots of moving parts,
| like an operating system. They both require a lot of
| effort, but with laying cables the effort is physical and
| legal whereas with operating systems (and blockchain
| platforms) the effort is heady and research-oriented.
|
| We've seen that shipping an update to a blockchain
| network can be extremely slow indeed, if that update
| requires a lot of R&D.
| subradios wrote:
| Many people see the value of decentralized ledgers,
| including. the head of the SEC:
| https://news.bitcoin.com/sec-chairman-satoshi-nakamotos-
| inno...
|
| My home state passed a law allowing me to pay taxes in
| bitcoin as well, there was the Ecuador thing.
|
| The hydraulics behind financial movements take decades to
| really shift, and I still regularly use crypto when
| sending or receiving money from international friends
| because international payments are a cartelized mess.
|
| Investment dollars cannot make regulatory and social
| shifts happen sooner.
| acdha wrote:
| Decentralized ledgers are very different because they
| reuse existing trust relationships - that's why they're
| so much more efficient and safe to use.
|
| This is an important point to understand because when
| cryptocurrency salespeople use those experiments as
| examples of real-world adoption they don't spell out the
| connection -- fully aware that if the Fed sets up a
| distributed ledger, it won't have a step which involves
| making Bitcoin holders wealthy.
|
| > My home state passed a law allowing me to pay taxes in
| bitcoin as well,
|
| Do they actually accept bitcoin or do they just convert
| it into hard currency first? For example, when Colorado
| did this they implemented it by using PayPal and
| converting to USD at the time of the transaction so it's
| like paying with a credit card including the single
| vendor charging a processing fee.
|
| > there was the Ecuador thing.
|
| Yes. Specifically the one where people protested against
| it, most people never use it, and the country has lost
| most of the money it put in? You were going to mention
| that, right?
|
| https://nayibtracker.com/
| kkielhofner wrote:
| I don't understand setting the internet "big bang" date
| somewhere in the 80s.
|
| The big bang was the web which was at least 1990-1993 (CERN
| says 1993). In 1990-1993 and beyond for the next few years
| a tiny portion of US households even had a computer that
| was capable (modem, etc) of getting on the internet/web.
| Arguably until AOL it was also extremely expensive. When I
| got on the internet it was with an inflation adjusted $5000
| computer, per minute long distance toll charges, and paying
| an ISP (also by the minute).
|
| For the entirety of the existence of blockchain we've had
| ubiquitous broadband, social media, smartphones with always
| available data, etc. The conditions for the first 14 years
| of the web were vastly different and disadvantaged compared
| to the last 14 years in which blockchain has had plenty of
| time, audience, etc for widespread adoption and yet it
| still hasn't happened.
| everfree wrote:
| > blockchain has had plenty of time, audience, etc for
| widespread adoption
|
| Blockchains have been in a dial-up era. Bitcoin only
| supports balance transfers and has a hard-coded
| throughput limit of 1 Megabyte every 10 minutes (1990s
| modem speeds), and that effectively represented the state
| of the art of blockchain technology for 6 years. Until
| 2015, you couldn't even run a simple script on a
| blockchain (I don't count Bitcoin's extremely limited
| stack-based language).
|
| The official 1983 birthday of the internet is very much
| analogous to the 2009 birthday of the blockchain. It was
| the "spark moment" where the tech was there but extremely
| limited, and thereafter was a long "dead period" where it
| didn't do much for a long time as it waited for the world
| to catch on. Then 10 years later in 1993, the underlying
| internet technology saw its first really useful framework
| built on top, the web. 7 years later in 2015, the
| underlying blockchain technology saw its first really
| useful framework built on top, a turing-complete
| programming language. It would take the web another 20
| years until the 2000s to build its first true killer
| apps, and I predict that blockchain's true killer apps
| (e.g. an Uber killer) won't be seen until the late 2020s
| to early 2030s.
|
| > Arguably until AOL it was also extremely expensive.
| When I got on the internet it was with an inflation
| adjusted $5000 computer, per minute long distance toll
| charges, and paying an ISP (also by the minute).
|
| Until layer-2 technologies (conceived ~2017 and still
| maturing), blockchains were also extremely expensive,
| peaking at tens of dollars for a simple transaction or
| hundreds for a more complex one. When I first interacted
| with a blockchain it was through a heavy client that
| downloaded tens of gigabytes of data to my computer,
| extremely low network bandwidth for transactions, zero
| hardware support for key management, one shady exchange
| that required international money transfers, and
| effectively zero support for publishing code on the
| blockchain. That's all changed now.
|
| > For the entirety of the existence of blockchain we've
| had ubiquitous broadband, social media, smartphones with
| always available data, etc. The conditions for the first
| 14 years of the web were vastly different and
| disadvantaged compared to the last 14 years in which
| blockchain has had plenty of time, audience, etc for
| widespread adoption and yet it still hasn't happened.
|
| The internet was a technology built on the progression of
| hardware and software tech; blockchains are built much
| more on progression of software tech. Blockchains as a
| framework need to get good enough to be able to support
| killer apps; they are not good enough today, but they are
| in intensive development along straightforward roadmaps
| to alleviate a lot of the pain points.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| With regards to the land markers.
|
| You could have a database at the government land authority. If
| markers in the field don't match up with records, the land
| authority will ask police to correct the issue.
|
| If neither police nor land authority can be trusted to keep
| records and uphold the law, who is going to help you when a
| marker in the field doesn't match up to some distributed
| database?
|
| Big land owner will say "I don't know anything about that record
| in the sky. But look at this land marker on the ground. That's
| reality!" and with no police, who is going to help you?
| jeremyjh wrote:
| Well suppose you nominally have the support of local government
| and police, but in practice they can bought cheaply, and
| suddenly the records match what the large landholder says
| instead of the markers you used to have. An immutable record
| would help solve this, but the point stands that it is not
| convincing that you need a blockchain or that it would solve
| the problem. How would you get local government to buy into it
| in the first place? If the national government is willing to
| force them, they could just manage a database with immutable
| records.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| An immutable record adds problems.
|
| What do you do when a river moves? https://en.wikipedia.org/w
| iki/Croatia%E2%80%93Serbia_border_...
|
| Who owns new land in Hawaii when the volcano meets the sea?
| https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/who-owns-the-land-
| created-...
|
| What happens when someone makes a surveying mistake and
| enters that permanently into the blockchain?
| jeremyjh wrote:
| Sorry, by immutable records I do not mean that data is
| never changed, only that the records of such changes are
| immutable. The current state can always be computed by
| applying a log of changes, and when you make a change you'd
| be recording who made the change and why. Invalid changes
| could still be made, but you'd have a record to expedite
| appeal processes or litigation. This is why I don't think
| blockchain helps, because government authorities still have
| to be trusted to do their job when the facts are clear. So
| any kind of centralized cryptographic ledger (such as AWS
| QLDB) would work.
| jasonhansel wrote:
| You don't even need a database with immutable records. You
| just need to make the contents of the database public, so
| that people can archive a copy and thus easily tell when the
| data has been altered.
| aaron695 wrote:
| pornel wrote:
| Imagine that the govt and the police actually treated the
| blockchain record as the infallible final source of truth,
| without any ifs and buts, without any traditional database on
| the side overriding what the blockchain says.
|
| If an attacker came to your house, kicked your ass until you
| give your private key, and then transferred the land to
| themselves on the blockchain -- the land would be fully legally
| theirs now! It's a valid transaction, and the courts can't
| reverse it -- there's one source of truth, and it's
| cryptographically unchangeable without the private key. That's
| what the blockchain says, and the police will evict you from
| your own house.
|
| (and then to prevent that you build enough off-chain trust
| systems, escrows, and side databases on top, and courts gain
| ability to dictate changes, and the actual blockchain becomes
| an irrelevant implementation detail).
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