this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2024
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Crypto =/= blockchain.
If you can't see the utility of blockchain with regards to things like actual, verifiable digital ownership, then I don't know what to tell you.
I want to see what you mean in practical terms, because the only other example that I know besides questionable crypto currencies is NFTs and that was an epic lesson on what not to do. 😅
An NFT is a deed. Do you see any uses for a deed that is not in control of a central authority?
Not really, no. Who's going to honor the deed? There's your central authority that can control it.
No, NFTs do have good uses, but things like image NFTs are just a misappropriation, like SPAM is to email.
One use case, is clear, independently verifiable ownership of non-tangible things, like Intellectual Property rights. Movie rights for a book adaptation for instance moving between companies in IP sales and mergers/acquisitions.
IP rights is not a problem that needs solving. In fact, the existing legal system has ways of punishing copyright violations whereas the Blockchain does not.
Supply chain validation is also an example of the block chain "in action". But the people that are entering the data on the Blockchain are the same people that were typing it in an email yesterday.
I used to be a fan of the technology as well but so far it hasn't show itself to be useful. A solution in search of a problem.
And it's ALWAYS the same problem. You can have all the lists you want. A central authority has to recognize and enforce that list. At which point, the structure of your list is completely irrelevant. It could be ANY list. What matters is that it's chosen to be enforced. And currently, most power structures are happy with plain old databases. Or pen and paper.
A plain old database also has ways of dealing with theft.
If someone steals your crypto keys and sends your assets to themselves, they have no legal ownership over those assets but they're listed as the owner in the blockchain, so blockchain isn't even any good at being an accurate, verifiable record of ownership.
Yes, you can't make changes to the blockchain, but that also means you can never fix anything. So you actually can't rely on the blockchain to be accurate.
I hear that now since 12 Years. Its not going to happen.
Without really having an opinion on the matter - I think there's a difference in having a use and being adopted.
Something can be absolutely awesome in theory but useless if no one is using it.
Yeah I think a lot of people don’t understand that “good for x problem”, “better than existing solution”, and “switching to this solution is better than staying with the existing solution” are three vastly different things
Blockchain fails because switching to it is consistently worse than sticking with current solutions, and often it fails at being better than current solutions in the abstract
That just sounds like you're describing me.
I don't know the value in a decentralized IP rights system. If the key holder gets phished, you can lose your rights to a TV series you've been working on. (Like Seth Greene)
He wouldn't have lost it and had to pay back the ransom in a traditional contract. Having a contract centralized and enforced by the legal system has many perks and I can't ever see how a decentralized rights platform can enforce itself.
"Intellectual Property[sic]" is dishonest loaded language, but yes, I agree with you that blockchain could be a good way for a copyright holder to prove their monopoly. 'Course, that's also what registering your copyright with the Library of Congress is for, so...
How about first we see a version that isn't a scam? We've seen plenty of scam versions so far.
IMO, blockchain technology is good for one use case: illegal transactions.
I think all else can be achieved more efficiently by using a trusted third party write-only database, such as the ones available on AWS, and you’d also have the benefit of being able to go to court to seek relief. Some blockchain markets are basically reinventing banking systems and preexisting financial law - systems that have been built over centuries and have quite a bit of knowledge baked in.
I do like the shift to proof of stake from proof of work, but this tech is silly to me.
Proof of stake, while better for the environment compared to electricity-guzzling proof of work, actually shift the power of consensus to capital owners. In proof of work, any bloke with some computing power can participate in the swarm even if they don't own any crypto. In proof of stake, only those who own some crypto can participate in the swarm, and those who own more have more say.
You can say that proof of works also requires capital to buy computing power, but with the shift to proof of stake, the bar to participate has been raised. If can't just use a spare computer to join now, you actually need some capital to buy some stake before you can participate. It's a big boy club now, a tool to help the rich get richer.
To add: mining profits are minimized with difficulty adjustment, but there's no such mechanism with staking - profits are maximized instead.
YES!!!!!
The only thing you're not getting quite right is what it means to be "illegal" and whether the groups making this decision have anyone's interest in mind except their own.
When doing right is or becomes illegal because our country is run by a fascist, that "illegal" money will save lives.
I know of one use case that seems viable, there is a digital housing market service in my country (called Dias). It uses blockchain to verify transactions related to selling and buying houses. That includes proof of sales, ownership, bank transaction status etc. The blockchain is operated by all the major banks. Their incentive is that it increases the security of the transactions thanks to the immutable digital trail, and also the fact that no single entity owns the "database" so no entity can alter it, or skim service fees etc from the others.
But if you have any conflict with it, you have to get a lawyer involved right? It doesn't seem like it provides value to a real estate transaction, just seems like a use case for block chain
If the friction of translating your fiat money into cryptocurrencies and back is low enough it can be a very good method for collecting digital donations. Potentially no fees to send/receive money, no real national restrictions to speak of and then its stored as a value that the recipient can use however they want, plus donors can trace where the money goes if the person they donated to then turns around and donates a portion to another person receiving donations on the blockchain.
Basically the exact same benefits as the use case of illegal transactions, but at least for good rather than usually-not-good
In which cases is this actually useful, as opposed to having a centralized database? Blockchain doesn't provide the enforcement of ownership, which is the real problem.
A blockchain is only as secure as the amount of work (= processing power) that goes into it. Anyone with 51% of the processing power invested in a blockchain can attack it and essentially steal from other people. For cryptocurrencies it’s a problem that solves itself, because every person that possesses some of the cryptocurrency is incentivized to mine to keep it secure (and to earn some at the same time). The more your cryptocurrency is valuable, the more people will want to mine it and the more secure it will be.
For anything other than cryptocurrencies, you can’t incentivize a huge number of people to commit computing power to secure your blockchain. So you have to protect it some other way, for example only allowing you and some trusted people to write on it. But then it doesn’t really need to be a blockchain anymore, just a write-only database (which will perform better and occupy less space).
If it requires no work to generate a block at the end of your blockchain, any attacker can generate malicious ones.
actual, verifiable digital ownership... using a distributed database technology that is designed to require a massive amount of computing resources to update.
I think where some of us who work in spaces using databases to verify something in critical business processes get stuck in accepting that blockchain has value is that our jobs have always been to verify "ownership" as quickly and efficiently as possible. We typically do this by defining a canonical source of truth and our success is judged on how many milliseconds transactions take and the datacener or cloud costs.
Saying that everything about blockchain is "dumb" isn't a very nuanced analysis... but it's a understandable reaction to hearing the hype that blockchain is going to change everything for years.
I've never seen anyone argue that the massively distributed nature or the public read access of blockchain technologies aren't interesting. It's the tradeoff that has to be made in speed and costs that make it hard for many of us to see any value in the approach for most applications.
Digital ownership on one (1) blockchain. Not really that great when you put it like that. What makes one Blockchain more authoritative than another? Even in a closed system, if you think the admins of these chains don't keep a kill switch in their back pocket specifically for their advantage in ownership conflicts then you should probably read about Ethereum Classic. Even if they don't want to hard fork, if a chain is controlled entirely by a company, then they can edit it however they want regardless since it's not really decentralized. The idea that Blockchains will empower the customer with digital ownership is silly to me.
Who do you think controls ETC? IOHK? It's an open-source project.
It had some 51% attacks a few years ago, is that what you are referring to?
I'm honestly just curious what you mean
No, I'm referring to how ETC came about as the result of a huge scam that caused the whole Ethereum project to be forked. The original Ethereum was supposed to be immutable, but this conflict clearly showed that wasn't true, and there were still people pulling the strings who were too big to fail.
Not anything new to someone who's very familiar with the project, but emblematic of the promise of crypto vs the actual product.
Then I guess you misunderstand that the hard fork resulting from the DAO hack was the result of consensus of the network participants, not a unilateral action taken by the Ethereum foundation. Indeed, the protocol facilitated that's the only way it could happen.
The historic source code is still hosted, if you think ETH devs have the ability to 'edit whatever they want' then you should be able to point to the lines of code where that ability is afforded to them. Or someone should, 8 years should have been enough time to have a flick through.
Your anti-ETH comment came across as an anti-ETC comment to me, that's why I responded. I stand with you in disagreement with the 2016 hard fork. Mostly because many people would lose money anyway, and did. ETH corrected 50+%.
ETC is literally the original chain, sans Ethereum foundation's branding (which is why your reference to it confused me). Founding members left and continued to support ETC, and went on to found other foundations with a basis in academic rigor, which formed the fundamental basis of the ideological disagreement between participants.
You said this showed ETH/ETC devs have a 'kill switch in their back pocket', but the part of Ethereum that was 'killed' is alive and much larger than it was in 2016.
My point wasn't for or against any particular chain. It was just pointing out that crypto isn't really immutable when applied to real use cases, and is only as decentralized and democratic as power brokers in the space want it to be.
I'm pointing out that the DAO hack transactions are not muted on ETC, they still exist as transactions in a validated block on that chain. Whether its state of mutability exists in binary or on a spectrum, ETC is shown to be immutable using your criteria, further showing that it's not as simple as "crypto isn't really immutable". Different chains, even directly originating from the same project, have different characteristics with respect to mutability. It's not to say that ETH is worse and/or better than ETC, or that either of them are good, it's just what's been observed as a matter of record, contrary to your depiction
My point is that in a mass-adoption scenario where blockchains are controlled by large entities, they will absolutely use these characteristics to their advantage, and because of how crypto is structured it will be much more oppressive and favored towards existing powers than more traditional methods that allow for greater flexibility and a more diverse set of use cases. That's why some of the biggest holders of crypto are the same corporations that caused the '08 subprime loan crash.
Agreed, but consider this: centralisation in this context is intended to refer to the distribution of power and control toward any authority or party, including entrenchment of VC. It's definitely a valid point for something like Solana, less so for Ethereum I feel. At a certain point, the sum of involved interests are simply too disparate to be utilised together toward some nefarious end. Of course, robust on-chain community governance is critical for anything that wants to push beyond the microcap experiment stage that Ethereum was in during 2016.
Is a chain is controlled by a single entity then it’s not a blockchain, it’s a linked list with extra steps.
The whole point of a blockchain is that it’s independently verifiable/validated by all its users. Anything else is a literal scam.
Well, a blockchain is a linked list with extra steps. Only having 1 entity just means it is centralized, not decentralized.
You've almost put all the pieces together. A decentralised linked list is ... ? oh wait
A decentrailized linked list.
You were supposed to have the eureka moment where you realise that's not a thing, oh well.
A Blockchain is already just a linked list with extra steps.
the problem that bitcoin "solves" is mathematically unsolvable. The only reason it kind of works is because participants are human, and therefore are able to assign arbitrary value to the currency, and therefore can act greedily to try to maximize (and protect) their coins. Participants are only incentivized to participate in mining because the thing they're rewarded with is a "currency" (something they value, as humans).
For anything but a currency, what is the incentive of miners using their resources to handle your transactions?
It's no surprise you don't know what to tell us. It's hard to get a mark to buy into a scam once they've realized what is was.
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