8 ms·

You're right, I pointed to the solution instead of the problem. I'm still an engineer at heart, it seems! What should I have said instead? Centralization of da

You're right, I pointed to the solution instead of the problem. I'm still an engineer at heart, it seems! What should I have said instead? Centralization of data? Unreliability of single-points-of-failure?

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
caust1c 8y ago
It provides distributed trust for the class of problems wherein you have multiple competitive parties trying to achieve consensus on a sequence of transactions (or contracts, if you will). I believe a massive number of social and societal problems are solved by distributed trust models in the same ways free market economies generally lead to more equality and democracy leads to more freedoms.
- endlessvoid94 8y ago
  Can you give me an example?
  - mhluongo 8y ago
    Anything involving a clearing house.
    - madeofpalk 8y ago
      What about all the existing clearing houses we have today? How have they managed to survive without Blockchain? Again. What specific problem does Blockchain solve?
    - endlessvoid94 8y ago
      Such as?
      - vntok 8y ago
        I gave you a few specific examples earlier in the thread: - Art transactions: registry of origin and property transfers for any object (with authenticated certificate), currently done by lawyers & auction houses (costly, inefficient, painful, near-impossible in some cases involving war/expropriation because records were destroyed at some point) - International shipping: INCOTERMS, currently handled through various specialized intermediaries (costly, inefficient, painful) - Registry of operations over the life of a company (creation/address change/acquisitions/foreclosure), currently done by national commerce courts & accredited local newspapers (costly, inefficient, painful) - Wills: self-authentication of one's will preventing repudiation attempts by third parties, currently done by lawyers and witnesses (costly, inefficient, painful) - Escrow accounts for service providers (ex freelancers) through multisig wallets, currently done by intermediary platforms (costly, inefficient)
        0x006A 8y ago
        how would any of those problems be solved with a blockchain? you are taking about real world things and actors that need to be matched to something on a blockchain. don't see how you get around that part and that is the costly, inefficient and painful one. not the ledger.
pjc50 8y ago
The original bitcoin whitepaper is focused on avoiding double-spend of digital cash, facilitating non-reversible transactions in a way that's not vulnerable to collapse or suborning of the central counterparty. It has the following statement in its introduction: "Completely non-reversible transactions are not really possible, since financial institutions cannot avoid mediating disputes. The cost of mediation increases transaction costs, limiting the minimum practical transaction size and cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions, and there is a broader cost in the loss of ability to make non-reversible payments for nonreversible services. With the possibility of reversal, the need for trust spreads. Merchants must be wary of their customers, hassling them for more information than they would otherwise need. A certain percentage of fraud is accepted as unavoidable." (No solution is offered for the merchant defrauding the customer, which is the business that ebay was built on solving)
- s73v3r_ 8y ago
  But with non-reversable transactions, you still have the trust issue. Now it's that the customer has to trust the merchant, that they're not going to completely rip them off.
madeofpalk 8y ago
Solve an actual, real life problem. All I see are Long Island Ice Tea Blockchain Corp. and Walmat saying that they're using blockchain to help their supply chain (whatever that means). The reality is is that Blockchain is no longer new. Compare it to iPhone - they both roughly came out at the same time, yet we're still having the same conversations - "What problem does Blockchain solve" - while the iPhone found its place in the market. The reality is is that if Blockchain had a 'killer app' beyond tech bros speculating, we would have found it by now.
- bsparker 8y ago
  I believe the actual problem this solves, the "killer application," is already out there.
  - wool_gather 8y ago
    Can you specify what that is?
    - kirillseva 8y ago
      Blockchain conferences.
    - Trundle 8y ago
      Buying drugs off the internet.
  - torpfactory 8y ago
    Murder for hire?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- abritinthebay 8y ago
  The sad thing about the Walmart usecase is all they really mean is hashing. Just hashing. That’s it.
- 8y ago
wpietri 8y ago
No, those aren't real problems either. Problems are experienced by humans. Humans willing to pay money for solutions. Actual problems are things like "I want to buy this candy bar," or "I want to fly to New York in August and I need to pay for the ticket." Those are problems Bitcoin, as "a purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash" [1], was intended to solve. It didn't. As far as I can tell, the main problems blockchains "solve" are things like, "I would like to run a Ponzi scheme and not go to jail." Or, "I would like to hype something and make a lot of money off people." Or, "I would like my consulting company to bill a lot of hours." Or, "I would like to gamble on price fluctuations, and gold isn't volatile enough for me." But I wouldn't call any of those real problems in the sense of being things where solving them is positive sum for the society as a whole. I would be happy to be proven wrong, of course. Blockchains are a cool technology. But I've spent nearly a decade asking for actual customer problems that are demonstrably solved better by a blockchain. I haven't found one yet. [1] https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
- sjeohp 8y ago
  "I would like to pay/donate to an organization even though no major credit card will let me."
  - wpietri 8y ago
    Thanks. That's a plausible hypothetical. Could you name an organization like that? One that you are eager to donate to? How many people would like to donate to it? What's the total payment volume per year? The only organization I can think of that might be in that category is Wikileaks. But they take both credit cards and Paypal, so they don't qualify. Maybe Hamas or Al Qaeda? Except that those are illegal to donate to, so the market is not going to be large.
    - TJSomething 8y ago
      I once backed crowdfunded hardware before crowdfunding services like Kickstarter were really a thing and they couldn't really get their credit card provider to accept the risk, so I had to use an international wire transfer for it. I guess cryptocurrency would be decent for that. That really just boils down to cryptocurrency being good for business models that are so new that they sound really risky. I'm not really sure that enabling such models is really a net good to society.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

caust1c 8y ago

It provides distributed trust for the class of problems wherein you have multiple competitive parties trying to achieve consensus on a sequence of transactions (or contracts, if you will). I believe a massive number of social and societal problems are solved by distributed trust models in the same ways free market economies generally lead to more equality and democracy leads to more freedoms.

endlessvoid94 8y ago
Can you give me an example?
- mhluongo 8y ago
  Anything involving a clearing house.
  - madeofpalk 8y ago
    What about all the existing clearing houses we have today? How have they managed to survive without Blockchain? Again. What specific problem does Blockchain solve?
  - endlessvoid94 8y ago
    Such as?
    - vntok 8y ago
      I gave you a few specific examples earlier in the thread: - Art transactions: registry of origin and property transfers for any object (with authenticated certificate), currently done by lawyers & auction houses (costly, inefficient, painful, near-impossible in some cases involving war/expropriation because records were destroyed at some point) - International shipping: INCOTERMS, currently handled through various specialized intermediaries (costly, inefficient, painful) - Registry of operations over the life of a company (creation/address change/acquisitions/foreclosure), currently done by national commerce courts & accredited local newspapers (costly, inefficient, painful) - Wills: self-authentication of one's will preventing repudiation attempts by third parties, currently done by lawyers and witnesses (costly, inefficient, painful) - Escrow accounts for service providers (ex freelancers) through multisig wallets, currently done by intermediary platforms (costly, inefficient)
      - 0x006A 8y ago
        how would any of those problems be solved with a blockchain? you are taking about real world things and actors that need to be matched to something on a blockchain. don't see how you get around that part and that is the costly, inefficient and painful one. not the ledger.

pjc50 8y ago

The original bitcoin whitepaper is focused on avoiding double-spend of digital cash, facilitating non-reversible transactions in a way that's not vulnerable to collapse or suborning of the central counterparty. It has the following statement in its introduction: "Completely non-reversible transactions are not really possible, since financial institutions cannot avoid mediating disputes. The cost of mediation increases transaction costs, limiting the minimum practical transaction size and cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions, and there is a broader cost in the loss of ability to make non-reversible payments for nonreversible services. With the possibility of reversal, the need for trust spreads. Merchants must be wary of their customers, hassling them for more information than they would otherwise need. A certain percentage of fraud is accepted as unavoidable." (No solution is offered for the merchant defrauding the customer, which is the business that ebay was built on solving)

s73v3r_ 8y ago
But with non-reversable transactions, you still have the trust issue. Now it's that the customer has to trust the merchant, that they're not going to completely rip them off.

madeofpalk 8y ago

Solve an actual, real life problem. All I see are Long Island Ice Tea Blockchain Corp. and Walmat saying that they're using blockchain to help their supply chain (whatever that means). The reality is is that Blockchain is no longer new. Compare it to iPhone - they both roughly came out at the same time, yet we're still having the same conversations - "What problem does Blockchain solve" - while the iPhone found its place in the market. The reality is is that if Blockchain had a 'killer app' beyond tech bros speculating, we would have found it by now.

bsparker 8y ago
I believe the actual problem this solves, the "killer application," is already out there.
- wool_gather 8y ago
  Can you specify what that is?
  - kirillseva 8y ago
    Blockchain conferences.
  - Trundle 8y ago
    Buying drugs off the internet.
- torpfactory 8y ago
  Murder for hire?
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
abritinthebay 8y ago
The sad thing about the Walmart usecase is all they really mean is hashing. Just hashing. That’s it.
8y ago

wpietri 8y ago

No, those aren't real problems either. Problems are experienced by humans. Humans willing to pay money for solutions. Actual problems are things like "I want to buy this candy bar," or "I want to fly to New York in August and I need to pay for the ticket." Those are problems Bitcoin, as "a purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash" [1], was intended to solve. It didn't. As far as I can tell, the main problems blockchains "solve" are things like, "I would like to run a Ponzi scheme and not go to jail." Or, "I would like to hype something and make a lot of money off people." Or, "I would like my consulting company to bill a lot of hours." Or, "I would like to gamble on price fluctuations, and gold isn't volatile enough for me." But I wouldn't call any of those real problems in the sense of being things where solving them is positive sum for the society as a whole. I would be happy to be proven wrong, of course. Blockchains are a cool technology. But I've spent nearly a decade asking for actual customer problems that are demonstrably solved better by a blockchain. I haven't found one yet. [1] https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

sjeohp 8y ago
"I would like to pay/donate to an organization even though no major credit card will let me."
- wpietri 8y ago
  Thanks. That's a plausible hypothetical. Could you name an organization like that? One that you are eager to donate to? How many people would like to donate to it? What's the total payment volume per year? The only organization I can think of that might be in that category is Wikileaks. But they take both credit cards and Paypal, so they don't qualify. Maybe Hamas or Al Qaeda? Except that those are illegal to donate to, so the market is not going to be large.
  - TJSomething 8y ago
    I once backed crowdfunded hardware before crowdfunding services like Kickstarter were really a thing and they couldn't really get their credit card provider to accept the risk, so I had to use an international wire transfer for it. I guess cryptocurrency would be decent for that. That really just boils down to cryptocurrency being good for business models that are so new that they sound really risky. I'm not really sure that enabling such models is really a net good to society.