It’s one of those things where scientists discovered something interesting and novel, and then a bunch of dumb grifters came in to try and make it their new snake oil.
A very, very long time ago, back when Bitcoin was viewed as a currency instead of an “investment” platform, Bitcoin kinda fulfilled the ideal use case for the blockchain. I think now the general public is just too soured on them for that to ever be the case, unless Elon makes Bitcoin the new currency of the U.S…
Blockchain is a solution in search of a problem. A way to establish trust while not trusting any party is a cool concept, but in the real world it’s far easier to establish a source of trust.
It is a bad solution though, because it revolves around wasting tons of energy in solving made up problems no one actually needs the solution to. I know there’s alternative cryptocurrency that use better methods or solve actual problems but 90% of it is bitcoin.
Congratulations, now your trust relies on your subject never becoming important enough that someone bothers to run 50%+1 of the nodes in your network which means only very, very large subjects (or ones where trust wasn’t very important in the first place) ever even have a chance of that not happening. What do you say? Your technology doesn’t scale to very, very large subjects because of abysmal transaction rates?
now your trust relies on your subject never becoming important enough that someone bothers to run 50%+1 of the nodes in your network
Yup. Very well said. People don’t realize the extent of wealth inequality (and how ridiculously resource intensive blockchain tech is). If anything important were to be decide by a blockchain, the top 1% would control the network.
I have a friend who works at a major bank and they use Blockchain technology to keep track of something or other internally, though I don’t remember exactly what. In this case at keast we can bet that it has found a problem wirth using it to sokve. Banks are nothing if not efficient.
I find it funny that it was touted as an alternative to the current banking system and ended up being absorved into it though
Banks are businesses made up of people. If a manager thought he could get a promotion by supporting a blockchain project at the height of blockchain mania, that’s what he would do. Whether if fails or not is of no consequence, the manager is already on another project.
My experience working in banking is that they’re extremely conservative. They don’t take big risks on new technologies or processes and don’t modernize their technology too quickly to be certain that everything works as expected and doesn’t surprise anyone
If it’s used internally, then I question whether it made sense to use blockchain. At the end of the day, it’s probably the trust in the bank that matters and not blockchain.
Nah. the commenter above is just wrong. It’s just that anyone who isn’t selling bullshit uses their real name- Merkel trees
- which are fundamental to modern software development (git, zfs, nix, nosql).
That’s a similar but different concept. Blockchain adds a way to determine consensus of the correct tree. While git is distributed, it’s generally not trustless, there’s generally a trusted version of the repository.
what? Git is very much distributed and while you can have a main branch, you can set as many up streams as you want and merge things sideways.
It’s trust less in the sense that commits can’t be easily forged and are signed with cryptographic keys and identities-- as in, I don’t have to trust that the source code is genuine since I can verify the commit history myself.
Consensus is just a pull request.
That wiki article literally lists Bitcoin and Ethereum as implementations of Merkel trees.
How is it any different than verifying that a transaction occurred?
With a centralized trust source (bank), you ask for the records.
How is a trusted repository different from a hard fork?
Because you check who owns and maintains it. A notable example was with Simple Apps for Android, earlier this year the main repo was sold to a company. Trust was lost, thus a fork was created to keep the original stuff.
We define “blockchain” and “blockchain network”, and then discuss two very different, well known classes of blockchain networks: cryptocurrencies and Git repositories.
Is it easier to establish a source of trust?
With blockchain trust lies in the protocol and in the node operators who make decisions about how to operate their nodes. Running a node isn’t extremely difficult. Running a financial institution is difficult.
Well, sure, now you have a currency that doesn’t rely on trust
…now what? How are you going to spend that currency if you don’t trust anyone? How will you ensure you get what you bought? How will your property get protected? Hell, how do you get others to agree that your crypto is the one they should use?
It’s trust all the way down. Removing it from one small part of the chain isn’t going to fundamentally change things
Apparently, it can be very secure. If “pieces” of a secure key are stored in multiple places, for example, only changing one link in the “chain” means it won’t match with the others. They ALL have to be changed at the same time, which is virtually impossible to do in secret.
Please note that I am far from an expert on the subject. I’m paraphrasing an article I read months ago.
Yes which is part of why the major chains are owned and controlled by companies, but then that makes the whole thing pointless. IMO, a company controlled blockchain may as well just be a DB cluster, it would be faster and more efficient.
If you had 51% of the world’s computing power (to blockchains using proof of work) yes you could forge records, from what I could wrap my head around about blockchains.
You don’t need 51% of the world’s power though, just 51% of the power of people who care about how the system works. Most people using block chain cryptos don’t care at all, so the threshold is a tiny percentage of the user base.
It works more like loaning money and then receiving interest, except you are loaning crypto to the network and then you get it back, plus some, after a certain period of time
This would just create a fork in the blockchain where 51% of the network doesn’t match the correct state of the blockchain that the 49% have. The 49% would effectively stop working because they could never validate the transactions that the 51% takeover has falsely created. The node operators of the 49% of the network would need to reach consensus for how to deal with the problem, but essentially they would just adopt code that ignores the 51% data, so they could continue to process blocks of transactions. Without manual intervention the 49% would be frozen. The 51% is just fake, they haven’t really changed anything because every real node operator would know it’s false data.
Essentially, verifiability (the token exists on the blockchain), de-duplication (each token can only exist once on the blockchain), and proof of ownership (only one account number can be associated with each token on the blockchain). There’s nothing wrong with this idea in a technical sense and it could be useful for some things.
But… the transaction process is computationally expensive. For the transaction to be trustworthy, many nodes on the blockchain network must process the same transaction, which creates a whole bunch of issues around network scaling and majority control and real-world resource usage (electricity, computer hardware, network infrastructure, cooling, etc).
And beyond that, the nature of society and economics created a community around this unregulated financial market that was filled with… well, exactly the kind of people you’d expect would be most interested in an unregulated financial market - scammers, speculative investors, thieves, illegal bankers, exploitatitive gambling operators, money launderers, and criminals looking to get paid without the government noticing.
The technology can solve some interesting problems around verifying that a particular digital file is unique/original (which can be useful, because it’s extremely easy to make copies of digital information) but it creates a long list of other problems as a side effect.
Almost every single non-theoretical problem that blockchains solve is something we’ve already solved. And most of the problems you could solve with a blockchains are severely limited by data-size limitations.
It would be amazing if I could decentrally store, say, a movie or videogame on a blockchain. Then, I could sell access tokens, would the owners could resell as they wanted. That’s a GREAT way to use blockchain tech, because people would always have access, and they could use or sell the keys as they wanted. It doens’t work though, because in the real world, that movie doesn’t fit on the blockchain, it’ll just be a link the a secondary source, and the whole thing falls apart.
And that’s really the problem. Blockchains have a lot of nifty uses, but it almost always immediately falls apart around the edges, where it touches on non-blockchain tech, or, even worse, physical objects.
I am pretty sure you just turn your money over to a scammer who just disappears with it. Since it is stateless and a libertarian dream, nothing can be done. So, congratulations!
Honestly I don’t know. I’m just pointing out the only thing that kind of sort of sounded like a good idea for it I’ve ever heard. For pictures it’s stupid that’s for sure
No, they are right. What they are saying is that even though pretty much all NFTs contain a link to a picture on the blockchain, theoretically you could write a really, really small image in the space where you would normally write the URL. From a quick google, that’s 100 bytes. For a black and white image, that’s 100 pixels. For color, that’s around 30 pixels
Yea the idea there is that with it being decentralized, it has an unedited history. So if each block added to the chain is a new transaction, you can see previous agreements. Being decentralized also means that it’s public record and everyone can see the contract/agreement/transaction.
There’s a lot of neat stuff that can be done, but as the other guy stated, it’s a solution looking for a problem.
Its just that anyone who isn’t selling bullshit uses their real name- Merkel trees
- which are fundamental to modern software development (git, zfs, nix, nosql).
Merkel is the previous chancelor of Germany, Merkle is a computer scientist ;)
Hash trees are a part of blockchains, but not the entire thing. This is kinda like saying acupuncture isn’t bullshit because needles are useful in real medicine as well.
It’s a solution that allows two parties, who are so paranoid they don’t trust banks, let alone one another, to send funds and maintain a record of transactions with one another.
No, it requires a lot more than two parties, because the resulting “funds” from the transaction still have to be valued by everyone else that provide goods and services. So it becomes a social issue if it is to be a currency, and then you just end up re-discovering all the lessons that lead to how currencies already work.
Once again, we are talking about blockchain, not Bitcoin
You realize blockchain is used by many large companies for practical purposes, not just by hobbyists swapping magical internet money, right?
Many large retailers (e.g. Walmart) and pharmaceutical companies use managed blockchain solutions (e.g. IBMs supply chain software) to track end to end process flow and see the pedigree of products at their end destination, because it means the end user doesn’t need to request unfettered access to 6 different companies ERP systems to know when the hell their purchase order is getting delivered
They really, truly don’t. There are a few “pilot projects” so that the companies can tell investors that they have a “blockchain strategy” but the world runs off of normal databases.
The poster above asked for a use case. I gave one.
Frankly I don’t give a shit if the market penetration of said use case doesn’t meet whatever arbitrary cutoff you have deemed sufficient for something to “exist” or not - the QR code on the back of every north american bag of Starbucks beans is proof enough. Whether its more or efficient than a traditional RDBMS is irrelevant
Blockchain / NFTs do not solve proof of ownership. Just ask all the people who had their NFTs or crypto stolen or lost in scams.
In your example, technically title fraud is more difficult because it needs to be done in two places. In reality it becomes far, far easier because you’ve now opened up a gigantic attack surface that you have no control over, and made both systems of verification worth less. If someone manages to compromise either one, there goes your proof of validity. Which one of them is real and which one is fraudulent?
It’s a way of guaranteeing behavior when you shouldn’t have to trust any individual to review it. It’s a great tool for currency, but most people seem to prefer the system where we treat the companies behind the 2008 financial crisis as the trusted party.
blockchain as a core technology isn’t user-friendly… it should be hidden, and you’ll never know when it’s doing interesting things. it was never going to revolutionise the world, but that doesn’t invalidate its usefulness in niche situations
… it shouldn’t be used for 95% of the garbage people have built with it - and for NFTs that’s more like 99%
I’ve read that blockchain itself is a good technology. NFTs are a laughably absurd attempt to exploit that technology for profit.
Xitter op needs to shut up.
It’s one of those things where scientists discovered something interesting and novel, and then a bunch of dumb grifters came in to try and make it their new snake oil.
A very, very long time ago, back when Bitcoin was viewed as a currency instead of an “investment” platform, Bitcoin kinda fulfilled the ideal use case for the blockchain. I think now the general public is just too soured on them for that to ever be the case, unless Elon makes Bitcoin the new currency of the U.S…
I seriously think his plan is fuck up the US economy so bad that the dollar hyperinflates.
Don’t worry, other countries won’t let it happen because their economies are held hostage by US.
Blockchain is a solution in search of a problem. A way to establish trust while not trusting any party is a cool concept, but in the real world it’s far easier to establish a source of trust.
It is a bad solution though, because it revolves around wasting tons of energy in solving made up problems no one actually needs the solution to. I know there’s alternative cryptocurrency that use better methods or solve actual problems but 90% of it is bitcoin.
Congratulations, now your trust relies on your subject never becoming important enough that someone bothers to run 50%+1 of the nodes in your network which means only very, very large subjects (or ones where trust wasn’t very important in the first place) ever even have a chance of that not happening. What do you say? Your technology doesn’t scale to very, very large subjects because of abysmal transaction rates?
Yup. Very well said. People don’t realize the extent of wealth inequality (and how ridiculously resource intensive blockchain tech is). If anything important were to be decide by a blockchain, the top 1% would control the network.
More on wealth inequality here.
Today’s inequality was created by the Cantillon effect.
What happened in 1972?
Soviet Union launched Venus-8
I have a friend who works at a major bank and they use Blockchain technology to keep track of something or other internally, though I don’t remember exactly what. In this case at keast we can bet that it has found a problem wirth using it to sokve. Banks are nothing if not efficient.
I find it funny that it was touted as an alternative to the current banking system and ended up being absorved into it though
I envy your trust in the efficiency of banks
Banks are businesses made up of people. If a manager thought he could get a promotion by supporting a blockchain project at the height of blockchain mania, that’s what he would do. Whether if fails or not is of no consequence, the manager is already on another project.
My experience working in banking is that they’re extremely conservative. They don’t take big risks on new technologies or processes and don’t modernize their technology too quickly to be certain that everything works as expected and doesn’t surprise anyone
If it’s used internally, then I question whether it made sense to use blockchain. At the end of the day, it’s probably the trust in the bank that matters and not blockchain.
Interesting. Good to know. Thanks!
Blockchain is effectively a distributed database. Almost always a good centralized database functions better.
Nah. the commenter above is just wrong. It’s just that anyone who isn’t selling bullshit uses their real name- Merkel trees - which are fundamental to modern software development (git, zfs, nix, nosql).
That’s a similar but different concept. Blockchain adds a way to determine consensus of the correct tree. While git is distributed, it’s generally not trustless, there’s generally a trusted version of the repository.
what? Git is very much distributed and while you can have a main branch, you can set as many up streams as you want and merge things sideways.
It’s trust less in the sense that commits can’t be easily forged and are signed with cryptographic keys and identities-- as in, I don’t have to trust that the source code is genuine since I can verify the commit history myself.
Consensus is just a pull request.
That wiki article literally lists Bitcoin and Ethereum as implementations of Merkel trees.
I’m pretty sure being able to verify that the person responsible for a push is an actual maintainer is the opposite of trustless.
How is it any different than verifying that a transaction occurred?
How is a trusted repository different from a hard fork?
Isn’t “proving someone is a maintainer” just an IRL proof of stake?
With a centralized trust source (bank), you ask for the records.
Because you check who owns and maintains it. A notable example was with Simple Apps for Android, earlier this year the main repo was sold to a company. Trust was lost, thus a fork was created to keep the original stuff.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.00892
Is it easier to establish a source of trust? With blockchain trust lies in the protocol and in the node operators who make decisions about how to operate their nodes. Running a node isn’t extremely difficult. Running a financial institution is difficult.
Well, sure, now you have a currency that doesn’t rely on trust
…now what? How are you going to spend that currency if you don’t trust anyone? How will you ensure you get what you bought? How will your property get protected? Hell, how do you get others to agree that your crypto is the one they should use?
It’s trust all the way down. Removing it from one small part of the chain isn’t going to fundamentally change things
What problem does blockchain solve?
Having too much electricity and not enough CO2.
We recently developed AI for that purpose though which does the same thing but is useless in occasionally funny ways.
Apparently, it can be very secure. If “pieces” of a secure key are stored in multiple places, for example, only changing one link in the “chain” means it won’t match with the others. They ALL have to be changed at the same time, which is virtually impossible to do in secret.
Please note that I am far from an expert on the subject. I’m paraphrasing an article I read months ago.
Can’t you takeover a blockchain by owning the majority of a block chain, or by having a majority of the processing power to compute hashes?
Yes which is part of why the major chains are owned and controlled by companies, but then that makes the whole thing pointless. IMO, a company controlled blockchain may as well just be a DB cluster, it would be faster and more efficient.
Are you saying that they “solve” that by never giving up more than 49% stake?
That… seems like a bad solution
Those things sound possible, but I’m not knowledgeable enough to speculate. Sorry.
If you had 51% of the world’s computing power (to blockchains using proof of work) yes you could forge records, from what I could wrap my head around about blockchains.
You don’t need 51% of the world’s power though, just 51% of the power of people who care about how the system works. Most people using block chain cryptos don’t care at all, so the threshold is a tiny percentage of the user base.
Yeah you’re right. I was thinking specifically Bitcoin and the astronomical amount of compute power that’s behind it.
That’s proof of work. Proof of stake is you just need more than everyone else, right?
It works more like loaning money and then receiving interest, except you are loaning crypto to the network and then you get it back, plus some, after a certain period of time
Is the network not considered a third party
This would just create a fork in the blockchain where 51% of the network doesn’t match the correct state of the blockchain that the 49% have. The 49% would effectively stop working because they could never validate the transactions that the 51% takeover has falsely created. The node operators of the 49% of the network would need to reach consensus for how to deal with the problem, but essentially they would just adopt code that ignores the 51% data, so they could continue to process blocks of transactions. Without manual intervention the 49% would be frozen. The 51% is just fake, they haven’t really changed anything because every real node operator would know it’s false data.
What if the 51% have already completed the consensus process?
Essentially, verifiability (the token exists on the blockchain), de-duplication (each token can only exist once on the blockchain), and proof of ownership (only one account number can be associated with each token on the blockchain). There’s nothing wrong with this idea in a technical sense and it could be useful for some things.
But… the transaction process is computationally expensive. For the transaction to be trustworthy, many nodes on the blockchain network must process the same transaction, which creates a whole bunch of issues around network scaling and majority control and real-world resource usage (electricity, computer hardware, network infrastructure, cooling, etc).
And beyond that, the nature of society and economics created a community around this unregulated financial market that was filled with… well, exactly the kind of people you’d expect would be most interested in an unregulated financial market - scammers, speculative investors, thieves, illegal bankers, exploitatitive gambling operators, money launderers, and criminals looking to get paid without the government noticing.
The technology can solve some interesting problems around verifying that a particular digital file is unique/original (which can be useful, because it’s extremely easy to make copies of digital information) but it creates a long list of other problems as a side effect.
Almost every single non-theoretical problem that blockchains solve is something we’ve already solved. And most of the problems you could solve with a blockchains are severely limited by data-size limitations.
It would be amazing if I could decentrally store, say, a movie or videogame on a blockchain. Then, I could sell access tokens, would the owners could resell as they wanted. That’s a GREAT way to use blockchain tech, because people would always have access, and they could use or sell the keys as they wanted. It doens’t work though, because in the real world, that movie doesn’t fit on the blockchain, it’ll just be a link the a secondary source, and the whole thing falls apart.
And that’s really the problem. Blockchains have a lot of nifty uses, but it almost always immediately falls apart around the edges, where it touches on non-blockchain tech, or, even worse, physical objects.
Intermediary free monetary transfer, lack of trust, transparency
It does only the last one and only partially.
How do you transfer money without an intermediary through blockchain?
I am pretty sure you just turn your money over to a scammer who just disappears with it. Since it is stateless and a libertarian dream, nothing can be done. So, congratulations!
You don’t need blockchain for that either. #theranos
I’ve heard of using them as parts of like contracts?
What does blockchain solve that existing contracts don’t do? Blockchain has takeover possibility
Honestly I don’t know. I’m just pointing out the only thing that kind of sort of sounded like a good idea for it I’ve ever heard. For pictures it’s stupid that’s for sure
It’s not a picture though. It’s a link to a picture on a server somewhere. If the host goes down, you own nothing.
Isn’t it just a small amount of data? If the picture is small enough you could put it directly on the blockchain.
Dunno why you would though. It’s very limiting for no particular gain.
But in NFTs the picture is not on the Blockchain. Only a link to the picture is on the Blockchain and the picture itself is still just on the web.
No, they are right. What they are saying is that even though pretty much all NFTs contain a link to a picture on the blockchain, theoretically you could write a really, really small image in the space where you would normally write the URL. From a quick google, that’s 100 bytes. For a black and white image, that’s 100 pixels. For color, that’s around 30 pixels
The technology behind it can be used for things other than pictures. That’s kind of the point people are making
Right, and my original question was what does the technology solve? And so far the answer appears to be nothing
Yea the idea there is that with it being decentralized, it has an unedited history. So if each block added to the chain is a new transaction, you can see previous agreements. Being decentralized also means that it’s public record and everyone can see the contract/agreement/transaction.
There’s a lot of neat stuff that can be done, but as the other guy stated, it’s a solution looking for a problem.
Nah. the other commenters are wrong.
They’re super useful.
Its just that anyone who isn’t selling bullshit uses their real name- Merkel trees - which are fundamental to modern software development (git, zfs, nix, nosql).
Merkel is the previous chancelor of Germany, Merkle is a computer scientist ;)
Hash trees are a part of blockchains, but not the entire thing. This is kinda like saying acupuncture isn’t bullshit because needles are useful in real medicine as well.
https://hms.harvard.edu/news/exploring-science-acupuncture
Acupuncture actual does have clinical significant effects though.
I added an arxiv link and a stack overflow link that show that I’m not alone in this assertion of equivalence.
I blame autocorrect for the Merkle typos.
It’s a solution that allows two parties, who are so paranoid they don’t trust banks, let alone one another, to send funds and maintain a record of transactions with one another.
No, it requires a lot more than two parties, because the resulting “funds” from the transaction still have to be valued by everyone else that provide goods and services. So it becomes a social issue if it is to be a currency, and then you just end up re-discovering all the lessons that lead to how currencies already work.
The valuation of Bitcoin is a completely separate topic than practical use cases of blockchain.
Incorrect. The transaction is not practically useful unless the currency has real value.
Once again, we are talking about blockchain, not Bitcoin
You realize blockchain is used by many large companies for practical purposes, not just by hobbyists swapping magical internet money, right?
Many large retailers (e.g. Walmart) and pharmaceutical companies use managed blockchain solutions (e.g. IBMs supply chain software) to track end to end process flow and see the pedigree of products at their end destination, because it means the end user doesn’t need to request unfettered access to 6 different companies ERP systems to know when the hell their purchase order is getting delivered
They really, truly don’t. There are a few “pilot projects” so that the companies can tell investors that they have a “blockchain strategy” but the world runs off of normal databases.
The poster above asked for a use case. I gave one.
Frankly I don’t give a shit if the market penetration of said use case doesn’t meet whatever arbitrary cutoff you have deemed sufficient for something to “exist” or not - the QR code on the back of every north american bag of Starbucks beans is proof enough. Whether its more or efficient than a traditional RDBMS is irrelevant
deleted by creator
Blockchain / NFTs do not solve proof of ownership. Just ask all the people who had their NFTs or crypto stolen or lost in scams.
In your example, technically title fraud is more difficult because it needs to be done in two places. In reality it becomes far, far easier because you’ve now opened up a gigantic attack surface that you have no control over, and made both systems of verification worth less. If someone manages to compromise either one, there goes your proof of validity. Which one of them is real and which one is fraudulent?
deleted by creator
Don’t we already have systems for that? What about the vulnerabilities of blockchain takeover?
Exactly. Ryathal said it very well: https://sh.itjust.works/comment/15029423
deleted by creator
It’s a way of guaranteeing behavior when you shouldn’t have to trust any individual to review it. It’s a great tool for currency, but most people seem to prefer the system where we treat the companies behind the 2008 financial crisis as the trusted party.
the way people use NFTs with art are certainly absurd, but even the core technology of NFTs is actually excellent
We’re quite a few years into “the blockchain will revolutionise the world” now and we still don’t really have anything but bitcoin and scams
blockchain as a core technology isn’t user-friendly… it should be hidden, and you’ll never know when it’s doing interesting things. it was never going to revolutionise the world, but that doesn’t invalidate its usefulness in niche situations
… it shouldn’t be used for 95% of the garbage people have built with it - and for NFTs that’s more like 99%
I agree completely!