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One of the bigger problems with blockchain is that there aren't many field experts working in the space. For example if you look at a voting blockchain you will

One of the bigger problems with blockchain is that there aren't many field experts working in the space. For example if you look at a voting blockchain you will be hard pressed to find an experienced psephologist working with the team. Without experience most of the team is made of people who might have read up on the topic and thought - "Well! This can be changed via blockchain". What they don't realize is academic exhortations are vastly different from practical implementations. For example, if everyone could implement that amazing trading system from that trading book, everyone would be millionaire. But that is never true. Another good example of this is the mistaken understanding of banking and especially Visa: https://www.forbes.com/sites/francescoppola/2018/04/21/bitcoin-banks-and-a-whole-lot-of-fud/#2b2335bd21f1 https://www.forbes.com/sites/francescoppola/2018/04/21/bitco... What this means blockchain solutions either run into issues during build or work in a very specific circumstances. For example, the building block of most cryptocurrency is game theory - if someone takes over 51% then rational economical thing to do is continue the chain. But what if we have an irrational actor who doesn't care? Or what if people can manipulate the change even below 51%. A good example is the F2Pool's manipulation of Status ICO with 25% hash rate: https://themerkle.com/f2pool-allegedly-prevented-users-from-investing-in-status-ico/ https://themerkle.com/f2pool-allegedly-prevented-users-from-...

asasidh 8y ago
- getting to 51% is no easy task. - if an irrational actor can get to 51% and decide to wreck havoc, the current transactions are impacted. The community will come together to hardfork away. The last transactions preserved in the blockchain are not. - if the above happens, then the particular blockchain does not deserve the position it holds and deserves to go down. It is no longer censorship resistant.
- walterstucco 8y ago
  And that's the problem Everything is still theoretically working, but in practice they are not There are a lot of FIAT currencies out there that are based on an irrational actor controlling all the nodes and still people owning those currencies can use them for their needs, even if they suffer some loss, without having to go through an hard fork that voids the last transactions Blockchain should be about trust without trust, but their main drawback is being unreliable
richsherwood 8y ago
Rationality only works if you’re true motivation is financial. I suspect that anyone with the means to achieve a 51% majority is playing a different game than you or I. At that level power becomes the motivation and the power to crash it all on a whims notice is infinitely more valuable than any profit obtained. That scenario is heaps more frightening to me as bitcoin (and other blockchain coins who make it through the inevitable great cryptocurrency filter) become more popular, we may see a power struggle between nations and individual high level players. Who knows though, it’s all fascinating to watch either way. There are smarter people than me studying this every day and it really does feel like we are on the dawn of some societal breakthroughs.

asasidh 8y ago

- getting to 51% is no easy task. - if an irrational actor can get to 51% and decide to wreck havoc, the current transactions are impacted. The community will come together to hardfork away. The last transactions preserved in the blockchain are not. - if the above happens, then the particular blockchain does not deserve the position it holds and deserves to go down. It is no longer censorship resistant.

walterstucco 8y ago
And that's the problem Everything is still theoretically working, but in practice they are not There are a lot of FIAT currencies out there that are based on an irrational actor controlling all the nodes and still people owning those currencies can use them for their needs, even if they suffer some loss, without having to go through an hard fork that voids the last transactions Blockchain should be about trust without trust, but their main drawback is being unreliable

richsherwood 8y ago

Rationality only works if you’re true motivation is financial. I suspect that anyone with the means to achieve a 51% majority is playing a different game than you or I. At that level power becomes the motivation and the power to crash it all on a whims notice is infinitely more valuable than any profit obtained. That scenario is heaps more frightening to me as bitcoin (and other blockchain coins who make it through the inevitable great cryptocurrency filter) become more popular, we may see a power struggle between nations and individual high level players. Who knows though, it’s all fascinating to watch either way. There are smarter people than me studying this every day and it really does feel like we are on the dawn of some societal breakthroughs.