3 ms·

Someone has to feel sorry for Btc. Many people are going to lose money. Bitcoin has value. It is only Btc people that took a very nice technology and crippled i

Someone has to feel sorry for Btc. Many people are going to lose money. Bitcoin has value. It is only Btc people that took a very nice technology and crippled it. The put a cap in it's block size, and they removed instructions of the Bitcoin Script language. Bitcoin's usage lies in it's use as an immutable ledger, that no one can change the past. We can put other information inside it,alongside with the money transactions, and we can be absolutely sure that no one messed with that information. An infinite number of use cases. For example say a cop makes an arrest. How can we be sure that the arrest was legitimate? A random person with a video camera may record the arrest, go to his home, edit it however he likes, upload it to the internet, and boom huge civil unrest! The solution lies with the cop recording the arrest by himself, uploading the information right away to the blockchain, and no person on the planet, no state, no goverment, can mess up with that information. The timestamp of the arrest is important too!

wait_a_minute 6y ago
I don't understand how "uploading the information right away to the blockchain" changes anything in this situation. Arrest information is already logged somewhere, and even if it was logged in an immutable public ledger that doesn't mean that people wouldn't immediately distrust arrests depending on the circumstances regardless of a blockchain being involved. It really seems like this post is just another example of vaunting the all-powerful all-knowing blockchain without it being clear and specific as to what the blockchain actually DOES for us in this situation.
- phoinix 6y ago
  If a person distrusts always anything, from anyone, from anywhere then it is true that blockchain doesn't provide any solution. However blockchain can make it more difficult, for a corrupt official to change some official documents, or in some cases to make them disappear completely. The timestamp of the arrest is of the utterly most importance. When a cop that may be corrupt or not, we don't know, upload the arrest after 10 hours, then something fishy might going on, the video might be edited. People around usually witness the arrest, and they know around what time it took place. If the data is uploaded 10 minutes after the arrest, then we are more sure of the legitimace, than after 10 hours. That's all.
  - polytely 6y ago
    But how do you know that the thing that is uploaded is legitimate? You can move information into the blockchain but the actual use of that information still happens in the real world so I don't see blockchain changing things that much.
    - phoinix 6y ago
      Well, when there are some official documents that spawn huge controversy, in a big company or a nation or whatever, and no one ever does destroy some evidence, or distort them in some way beneficial to him, then indeed blockchain isn't much of a use.
  - jcranmer 6y ago
    From what I've seen of police misconduct, the general form of misconduct is that the police officers generally just blatantly lie. The problem isn't that they're editing records of things that happened, the problem is that they're lying about the records in the first place--and I think the George Floyd protests make perfectly clear that they are more than willing to lie even when they know that hard evidence (in the form of other people recording the scene) contradicting them will exist. That's the basic problem with blockchain: it only really provides nonrepudiation (someone can't back away from a statement they made previously). It doesn't have a solution for people willing to commit perjury, and when you look at all of the social situations where official records are distrusted, the main reason for that is that officials are known to be committing perjury and face no repercussions for it.
    - phoinix 6y ago
      Yeah, i confess there is a tiny little probability that blockchain doesn't solve all of the worlds problems. But when we can have documents that absolutely no human can alter, then that human doesn't have absolute power, so it means, this less than absolute power, corrupts less than absolutely. A step to the right direction maybe?
spurgu 6y ago
Easier and more effective to just store the hash of the video on a blockchain.
- phoinix 6y ago
  Of course.
- fidelramos 6y ago
  Yes, and this is what blockchain notaries like notary.bitcoin.com do.

wait_a_minute 6y ago

I don't understand how "uploading the information right away to the blockchain" changes anything in this situation. Arrest information is already logged somewhere, and even if it was logged in an immutable public ledger that doesn't mean that people wouldn't immediately distrust arrests depending on the circumstances regardless of a blockchain being involved. It really seems like this post is just another example of vaunting the all-powerful all-knowing blockchain without it being clear and specific as to what the blockchain actually DOES for us in this situation.

phoinix 6y ago
If a person distrusts always anything, from anyone, from anywhere then it is true that blockchain doesn't provide any solution. However blockchain can make it more difficult, for a corrupt official to change some official documents, or in some cases to make them disappear completely. The timestamp of the arrest is of the utterly most importance. When a cop that may be corrupt or not, we don't know, upload the arrest after 10 hours, then something fishy might going on, the video might be edited. People around usually witness the arrest, and they know around what time it took place. If the data is uploaded 10 minutes after the arrest, then we are more sure of the legitimace, than after 10 hours. That's all.
- polytely 6y ago
  But how do you know that the thing that is uploaded is legitimate? You can move information into the blockchain but the actual use of that information still happens in the real world so I don't see blockchain changing things that much.
  - phoinix 6y ago
    Well, when there are some official documents that spawn huge controversy, in a big company or a nation or whatever, and no one ever does destroy some evidence, or distort them in some way beneficial to him, then indeed blockchain isn't much of a use.
- jcranmer 6y ago
  From what I've seen of police misconduct, the general form of misconduct is that the police officers generally just blatantly lie. The problem isn't that they're editing records of things that happened, the problem is that they're lying about the records in the first place--and I think the George Floyd protests make perfectly clear that they are more than willing to lie even when they know that hard evidence (in the form of other people recording the scene) contradicting them will exist. That's the basic problem with blockchain: it only really provides nonrepudiation (someone can't back away from a statement they made previously). It doesn't have a solution for people willing to commit perjury, and when you look at all of the social situations where official records are distrusted, the main reason for that is that officials are known to be committing perjury and face no repercussions for it.
  - phoinix 6y ago
    Yeah, i confess there is a tiny little probability that blockchain doesn't solve all of the worlds problems. But when we can have documents that absolutely no human can alter, then that human doesn't have absolute power, so it means, this less than absolute power, corrupts less than absolutely. A step to the right direction maybe?

spurgu 6y ago

Easier and more effective to just store the hash of the video on a blockchain.

phoinix 6y ago
Of course.
fidelramos 6y ago
Yes, and this is what blockchain notaries like notary.bitcoin.com do.