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It is really sad to me to see a comment so naive and uninformed get upvoted on this site. Besides just flat out false information such as being a shortage of us

by mrits 5y ago

It is really sad to me to see a comment so naive and uninformed get upvoted on this site. Besides just flat out false information such as being a shortage of use cases for incentivized distributed consensus you go on to assume we have even begun to work out the areas we can now apply to blockchain. It's fine to think cryptocurrency is a hustle. It's not ok to dismiss a large future corner of tech because of it.

TomSwirly 5y ago
Some concrete examples which aren't cryptocurrency would be helpful here to evaluate your statement.
- pragmar 5y ago
  Here are a couple. Identity. Once you log into a website a MetaMask address, a lot of things begin to come into focus. Create as many as you want, move contents around, etc. It's a lot more empowered than google/fb oauth feudalism. Physical and intellectual property registries. Could be far more efficient, accurate, and resilient to bad actors.
  - iudqnolq 5y ago
    So a bad actor gets a fraudulent invention registered. In the current system some people think really hard and then consider deleting it. This has many flaws, but the flaws are in the human bits. Where they write down their decisions is an implementation derail. How will blockchain make it better? Unless you've figured out how to have a computer figure out what inventions should qualify for protection and what infringes on them, I don't see it.
    - pragmar 5y ago
      >>> How will blockchain make it better? You're focusing on patents. Countries operate copyright offices--clerks, submission fees, red tape, human error. With blockchain, I can produce and store an md5 of a audio file, pdf, or video for next to nothing. You now have cryptographic signed proof of generation at a particular time, and a system that stores the data perpetually. Yes, you still need courts and judges to adjudicate conflicts, I never said it was a 100% solution.
      - iudqnolq 5y ago
        But if I trust the courts they could just have md5s.sqlite?
  - simonw 5y ago
    Physical property registries: if you guess my password (or extort it from me with a crowbar) you get to keep my house.
    - pragmar 5y ago
      I'd prefer my deed committed to blockchain (by a government registrar) than held in a local instance of filemaker pro, or in a paper file cabinet, is where I was going.
  - pornel 5y ago
    Property registries are one of those stupid ideas for blockchain. If someone was going to steal your property, they're not going to care what some blockchain says about it. If you only need an informational registry for well-behaved cooperating parties, you don't need it to be completely trustless. There are many other ways to decentralize storage and ensure consensus when you don't require mexican-standoff level of distrust.
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      >Property registries are one of those stupid ideas for blockchain. Specifically, the thing that is essential for most property registries is recognition and enforcement by a meat-space government. So, while a digital ledger is a good idea compared to, well, lots of existing property registries, decentralization/trustlessness isn’t important, adoption by a trustworthy and capable enforcer is.
- lstamour 5y ago
  I personally agree that Blockchain or distributed ledgers are overhyped for use cases where simple, centralized approaches to trust would go a lot farther. The one example I can point to where maybe existing systems were improved through blockchain-like technology would be Certificate Transparency https://certificate.transparency.dev/howctworks/ https://certificate.transparency.dev/howctworks/ yet even then there's a lot of trust in browsers run by centralized actors to ensure the system works as expected. The system is further documented in https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/refs/heads/main/net/docs/certificate-transparency.md https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/refs/heads/... and https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6962.html https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6962.html Also, https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-certificate-transparency-and-nimbus/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-certificate-transpar... is a good read.

by mrits 5y ago

TomSwirly 5y ago

Some concrete examples which aren't cryptocurrency would be helpful here to evaluate your statement.

pragmar 5y ago
Here are a couple. Identity. Once you log into a website a MetaMask address, a lot of things begin to come into focus. Create as many as you want, move contents around, etc. It's a lot more empowered than google/fb oauth feudalism. Physical and intellectual property registries. Could be far more efficient, accurate, and resilient to bad actors.
- iudqnolq 5y ago
  So a bad actor gets a fraudulent invention registered. In the current system some people think really hard and then consider deleting it. This has many flaws, but the flaws are in the human bits. Where they write down their decisions is an implementation derail. How will blockchain make it better? Unless you've figured out how to have a computer figure out what inventions should qualify for protection and what infringes on them, I don't see it.
  - pragmar 5y ago
    >>> How will blockchain make it better? You're focusing on patents. Countries operate copyright offices--clerks, submission fees, red tape, human error. With blockchain, I can produce and store an md5 of a audio file, pdf, or video for next to nothing. You now have cryptographic signed proof of generation at a particular time, and a system that stores the data perpetually. Yes, you still need courts and judges to adjudicate conflicts, I never said it was a 100% solution.
    - iudqnolq 5y ago
      But if I trust the courts they could just have md5s.sqlite?
- simonw 5y ago
  Physical property registries: if you guess my password (or extort it from me with a crowbar) you get to keep my house.
  - pragmar 5y ago
    I'd prefer my deed committed to blockchain (by a government registrar) than held in a local instance of filemaker pro, or in a paper file cabinet, is where I was going.
- pornel 5y ago
  Property registries are one of those stupid ideas for blockchain. If someone was going to steal your property, they're not going to care what some blockchain says about it. If you only need an informational registry for well-behaved cooperating parties, you don't need it to be completely trustless. There are many other ways to decentralize storage and ensure consensus when you don't require mexican-standoff level of distrust.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    >Property registries are one of those stupid ideas for blockchain. Specifically, the thing that is essential for most property registries is recognition and enforcement by a meat-space government. So, while a digital ledger is a good idea compared to, well, lots of existing property registries, decentralization/trustlessness isn’t important, adoption by a trustworthy and capable enforcer is.
lstamour 5y ago
I personally agree that Blockchain or distributed ledgers are overhyped for use cases where simple, centralized approaches to trust would go a lot farther. The one example I can point to where maybe existing systems were improved through blockchain-like technology would be Certificate Transparency https://certificate.transparency.dev/howctworks/ https://certificate.transparency.dev/howctworks/ yet even then there's a lot of trust in browsers run by centralized actors to ensure the system works as expected. The system is further documented in https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/refs/heads/main/net/docs/certificate-transparency.md https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/refs/heads/... and https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6962.html https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6962.html Also, https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-certificate-transparency-and-nimbus/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-certificate-transpar... is a good read.