10 ms·
Ask HN: How aware are you about building decentralised software on blockchain?
The HN attitude about blockchain is overwhelmingly negative.
Yet what I see with smart contracts on blockchain, such as the Ethereum Virtual Machine, is a huge potential for change and opportunity.
If you don't know what that is:
You can run code on the Ethereum blockchain.
The user pays to run your code, instead of you paying to run the server that serves them the code.
This is because everyone who's running an Ethereum node actually has a copy of your code in the blockchain.
This is called a "smart contract" but enough people have experimented with it that they've actually built decentralised applications - dApps for short.
There are now real world examples of decentralised applications in Finance - DeFi - which includes a Decentralised exchange - uniswap - and decentralised finance like Compound, Balancer and Yield Finance. So there are apps. You can get a loan from a DeFi app today.
This seems like it has huge disruptive potential. Mark Cuban has talked about how he could sell tickets as NFTs on the blockchain, and get a percentage of resell, forever.
You could in theory build something similar for Airbnb or Uber on the blockchain - just NFT a house/day and then sell it on the blockchain. Same thing with Uber - drivers could auction off their time in a blockchain dApp.
Because devs don't pay to keep their code in the ETH blockchain, you can just build software and it will "run" forever, at no cost to the developer. You can also set up the smart contract to give you a percentage every time it runs - see uniswap. Thus user - pays the dev + network on usage.
This is a radical change and imo a huge avenue for new innovation.
But this is hardly talked about here in HN.
Let's ignore, if possible, the whole "proof of work is bad for the environment" question (all I'll say about that is proof of stake is real and in production with DOT/ALGO and that's a 99% reduction in energy consumption). I know it's tempting to go in this direction but again - let's assume all crypto is proof of stake for the sake of argument.
- wepple 5y agoUntil someone unambiguously shows real-world (not a proof-of-concept) value of blockchain beyond crypto currencies, I’d be happy to never hear the word blockchain ever again. I don’t care what Mark Cuban thinks, I hardly know who he is beyond being wealthy and liking limelight.
- afpx 5y agoHe put Radio on the Internet, man! Rad.
- dehrmann 5y agoFor those who missed it, this is a reference to Russ Hanneman from Silicon Valley. There are some good best-of clips on Youtube, but the summary is he's flashy with no substance. He's at least partially based on Mark Cuban.
- basch 5y agoThe million dollar application is accounting systems like SAP etc. Where you have shares issued, the books, all incoming and outgoing transactions. And then every one of your partners is using a compatible system. In construction, a new building being built would be its own project that each firm interacts with. AP/AR/Inventory/Labor/Progress/ChangeManagement all in sync between all parties. Autodesk will probably get there first, and everyone will pay to use a centralized system instead and then have to export the data to their legacy accounting system. But, a group of collaborating firms, that still dont quite trust each other, or want to hide certain amounts of profit, are a use case.
- hluska 5y agoAccounting has already solved this problem. It’s based on double entries, separation of duties and audit. If there are still problems despite those controls, blockchain won’t solve them - those are human problems.
- basch 5y agoA blockchain is triple entry accounting, which has advantages over double. http://www.warrenhenke.com/writing/essays/triple-entry-accounting http://www.warrenhenke.com/writing/essays/triple-entry-accou... https://iang.org/papers/triple_entry.html https://iang.org/papers/triple_entry.html I find it odd to say "thats a human problem" as if technical invention over centuries isnt specifically to abstract away human inefficiency. A group of somewhat trusting firms doesnt need crazy PoW/PoS. The idea of companies sharing a collaborative ledger when working together shouldnt be dismissed so flippantly. Everyone keeping their own (unreconciled automatically with each others) book may be the status quo, but it doesnt make it optimal.
- amelius 5y ago> The user pays to run your code, instead of you paying to run the server that serves them the code. This is because everyone who's running an Ethereum node actually has a copy of your code in the blockchain. So if the user runs an Ethereum node, they have your code too, and then they can run it for free. What am I missing?
- sprafa 5y agoYou can get a percentage every time the user runs your code. That’s part of the smart contract. So a. You have no server costs and b. You get paid.
- amelius 5y agoBut how do you prevent the user from obtaining the code? E.g. (1) a bad actor runs an Ethereum node, (2) you ask them to run your code, and (3) instead of running your code, they sell it.
- sprafa 5y agoi dont even understand the question you're making tbh.
- rfd4sgmk8u 5y agoThe problem is that efficient systems are built to remove middle men or processes from transactions -- this 'get paid whenever someone sells / uses / blah' is just rent seeking. everyone wants a passive wealth generation system without work, but the universe shuns this idea. the emergent, more efficient systems will remove the rent seeking behavior, and allow capital to flow more easily. Everything significant in this space is open and infinitely clone-able in many contexts. The only thing that isn't clone-able is value -- we have digital scarcity now in a world of efficiency maximizing code and systems. something about passive rentseeking as damage and routing around it.
- 987234 5y agoIt's not talked about because it's a dumb idea?
- devoutsalsa 5y agoCan I use other people's computation to mine Bitcoins?!
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- asadlionpk 5y agoI would think HN is smart enough to see through the BS. Mark Cuban has vested interest in feeding that BS. All the use-cases you listed can be done without a Blockchain and in much much more efficient way, even if decentralized.
- tracedddd 5y agoI believe in cryptocurrency/blockchain, but your examples illuminate why speculation is far ahead of application. Why would an Uber driver want to auction their time on a blockchain? How would making Airbnb houses NFTs have any advantage to a consumer versus a centralized approach? Needlessly complicated, less quality control, less safety. Centralized is truly better for these in every way. The fact is that 99% of the perceived uses are simply riding the hype train for investment. The 1% is really changing things, despite all the haters, but it’s typically finance, currency, settlement, etc.
- chrisco255 5y agoBecause Uber and Lyft extract much of the value from each ride. If Uber or Lyft were a blockchain-based peer-to-peer protocol with its own utility token, the users and the drivers could easily benefit from the value capture. For what it's worth I think the decentralized Uber example is a bit contrived and that these applications are more complex than people realize. However, ultimately that's what I see in Decentralized Finance (DeFi) apps: I see loans being made via a smart contract that automates away much of the middle man infrastructure of the banking system. And therefore I as a depositor can get a higher yield than I can at a regular bank because the only thing between me and the borrower is code. I'm not convinced that centralized is better in every way for the more complex examples, however. I just think the tooling and distribution aren't quite there yet. And sometimes it will take a rethink of the existing application. For example, Uniswap is a great decentralized exchange, but the constant product architecture it used to achieve its result is much different than the standard order book architecture that centralized exchanges use.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- sprafa 5y agoYep I think it's tooling, tech. Ubercoin and Airbnbcoin type apps are inevitable I think. There's no reason for all drivers to give away their time at a fixed cost for Uber, and auctions would allow 5 star drivers to gain a lot more than 4 star drivers, even 4.8 star drivers. Uber doesn't allow for this, but that's the thing with permission-less innovation - you will be allowed to do stuff people can't even imagine right now.
- brighton36 5y agoFar more aware than any blockchain advocate, apparently. even the "What is blockchain" incantation, would appear to halt most of these advocates in their tracks.
- BugsJustFindMe 5y ago> you can just build software and it will "run" forever, at no cost to the developer. We already have software that runs at no cost to the developer. It's called software.
- bombcar 5y agoThat's the main problem with many of the "blockchain" solutions - is that they're just reimplementations of already-existing solutions to problems. You can run someone else's software and pay for the actual running thereof, it's called installing it on a virtual machine (and things like the AWS Marketplace exist for turn-key solutions). Maybe something "microtransactiony" could happen here - but why would you need a blockchain when AWS can just make "Marketplace for normal people"? And many of the other solutions provided end up having a central authority, in which case why not just have ... a database? Amusingly enough most crypto exchanges are internally run not on a blockchain but on a database, even though in theory one entirely on a blockchain might be a workable use case.
- sprafa 5y agoHuh? Are you not familiar with uniswap? That’s a fully decentralised exchange running on blockchain.
- bombcar 5y agoInteresting - I expected there to be one, but I've never heard of it compared to the big-names.
- sprafa 5y agoUniswap is relatively new - started really working last year. There are large numbers of decentralised exchanges now.
- DennisP 5y agoYou might not have heard of it but it does significant volume. For example, if you look at the USDC markets and sort by 24-hour volume, you'll see that Uniswap is at the top. https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/usd-coin#markets https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/usd-coin#markets
- base698 5y agoTBF, I'm bullish on Defi and crypto in general. A good argument against eth and dapps comes from "The Bitcoin Standard". > As will become apparent from this exposition, the notion that a “blockchain technology” exists and can be deployed to solve any specific problems is highly dubious. > It is unworkable for third‐party intermediaries to imagine they could improve their performance by employing a technology that sacrifices efficiency and speed precisely to remove third‐party intermediaries. > Ethereum can be rolled back means that all blockchains smaller than Bitcoin's are effectively centralized databases under the control of their operators. It turns out code is not really law, because the operators of these contracts can override what the contract executes. Smart contracts have not replaced courts with code, but they have replaced courts with software developers with little experience, knowledge, or accountability in arbitrating.
- rawtxapp 5y agoLike every engineering project, it boils down to pros and cons, it doesn't make sense to shoehorn blockchain into everything. Do you need a decentralized, trustless, transparent and uncensorable system with adversarial participants and you can boil down your logic to a bunch of if/else conditions and some for-loops? Then blockchain probably makes sense and finance is the best use case so far. But decentralization comes at a great cost, both in efficiency and actual costs. So do I want to train a ML model in a decentralized way? Probably not. Do I want to put my game on the blockchain where I relinquish any control? Probably not. The hype means that people are trying to put blockchain into everything which in turn turns off a bunch of people because it doesn't make sense.
- sprafa 5y agoThere are tons of things blockchain doesn't make any sense. However dApps are real and there are real-world use cases being used right now by millions of users. HN seems to be ignorant of that, weirdly.
- BrissyCoder 5y agoAre these users doing anything more than essentially just shuffling more crypto around? No.
- hluska 5y agoI have two issues with blockchain. First, whenever I work with blockchain, I reach a point where I realize all my technical issues are because I chose that data structure. The second is that outside of hype, your examples are remarkably poor uses for blockchain. Each can be solved more efficiently and effectively through better technology choices.
- bombcar 5y agoBlockchain's best use case is selling blockchain.
- smt88 5y agoHN is a highly concentrated community of future-focused computing experts. You're right that it is also bearish about blockchain. Which is more likely? A) That thousands of progress-minded professional technologists are all wrong and ignorant, as you've suggested above... Or... B) That you are wrong, and there are people with huge financial incentives to pump up crypto platforms by misleading people about their capabilities I'll ask you the same question I've been asking for 5 years without getting a good response: What is a real pain that a dApp can solve better today than non-blockchain software? Uber drivers auctioning their time is not one of them, because Uber drivers do want a benefit that's only possible with centralization: vetting/banning of passengers.
- tuesdayrain 5y ago>HN is a highly concentrated community of future-focused computing experts. Cryptocurrency is a perfect example of how computing experts can also have little to no understanding of finance and economics :). HN has been bearish on cryptocurrency for years, meanwhile the industry is continuously expanding into the territory of trillions of dollars.
- sprafa 5y agoPretty much. It's amazing to me that so many developers are en masse choosing to not get rich in the biggest opportunity for startups in the last decade or more.
- chrisco255 5y agoHN has had many bad consensus calls on a lot of successful ideas. One of the most famous examples is Dropbox, when the original founder posted his idea here 13 years ago or so and people just didn't get it or get what value add there was there. And he was heavily criticized. Ultimately, you gotta take the peanut gallery with a grain of salt. And use the criticism as fuel for innovation. HN's take on crypto will be one of the most comical examples in a few years. Decentralized finance alone is already a 100 billion plus dollar industry and growing at 5-10x a year.
- 5y ago
- sprafa 5y agoFor anyone who’s saying - where’s real world - real world exists in Decentralised Finance applications. You can now get a loan through DeFi - look into Compound, Balancer and Yield Finance.
- BrissyCoder 5y agoAre you telling me I can get a loan - say for a car - using DeFi right now?
- sprafa 5y agonot for anything specific, but you can get a loan of X amount of money for Y amount of collateral, yes. You can do this using cryptocurrency that's being loaned out to you under the protocols of a decentralised application. No centralised control, everything is automatic, and there are no central servers - you can do all this just by running code as smart contracts on a blockchain.
- BrissyCoder 5y agoMan... you have to be taking the p%$s for sure!? And you mean "I can get a loan of X amount of money for X amount of collateral, yes." What use is that to me!? Total horsesh*%t. This whole thing is the biggest financial joke of our generation.
- tombh 5y agoGenerally I would say that for the average HN'er software is our life, it's not just a field in which exciting things happen (the internet, ML and blockchains etc) but also, indeed perhaps more so, a "boring", day-in day-out livelihood. Personally, I feel the trouble with the blockchain is that it has attracted a lot of "fair weather" supporters, people that have only become geeky due to the allure of money, not because of an inherent love of software. Yes blockchains are indeed an exciting development and present a lot of potential, but "true" hackers are probably as excited by blockchains as they are by say Rust. The thing is that generally speaking we can have informed conversations about Rust, because those that understand the novelty of Rust have come to that understanding through a genuine interest in the technology, not because of how Rust can make them rich. So yes, blockchains are indeed very interesting, but unfortunately the conversations around them are overwhelmingly distorted by the superficialities of what I would cynically describe as dilettantes. Of course there are indeed serious hackers doing game-changing work in the blockchain space and I believe blockchain does have a future, but right now it's almost impossible to hear the signal from the noise :/
- sprafa 5y agoThis is 100% true and the reason why made this post. I think people are missing the signal for the noise - the noise being all the absurd people and ideas the space has indeed attracted. The signal being - dApps are huge.
- rawtxapp 5y ago> Of course there are indeed serious hackers doing game-changing work in the blockchain space and I believe blockchain does have a future, but right now it's almost impossible to hear the signal from the noise. 100%, seeing people who just learned the word blockchain explain to me how I can make 100x my money on crypto is pretty annoying. My recommendation would be to stick to github, the technical parts of bitcointalk.org and whitepapers at most. Those tend to have better signal to noise ratios.
- sprafa 5y agoDecrypt is pretty good too.
- danpalmer 5y agoI'm aware enough to know that it's not the computing platform that I want. Some reasons that come to mind include: - UX of interacting with/running code. This isn't users going to a website or downloading an app from an app store. Until it is, it's a non-starter. - Unsolved side-effects/data input. While "blockchains" are good at reducing the amount of trust needed in a system, for smart contracts to interact with the real world, they still need trust for data input/output. This all seems like it's in very early development. - Inflexibility of contracts. "Paper" contracts, T&Cs, etc, have an advantage that they work 99% of the time, but that when you hit an edge case that no one has figured out before you can email someone and come to a resolution, or at worst, go to court to have a (hopefully unbiased) third party decide. This is often better for both parties, but is not an option with smart contracts. - Development risks. Last time I checked smart contracts were written in a language that seemed to be inspired by a combination of C and Javascript. I'm not sure there's a worse way to write code that is so critical. Software engineering is decades ahead of this, safety-critical software engineering is many more decades ahead of that, and contract law is centuries ahead.
- rawtxapp 5y ago> - UX of interacting with/running code. This isn't users going to a website or downloading an app from an app store. Until it is, it's a non-starter. I don't know which projects you've used, but in my experience, the DeFi projects I've used have much better UX than any bank I've ever had. Most of them just have a simple "Connect wallet" button you click and you're in, no need for a password, whatsoever [1]. There are some easy to use wallets like MetaMask, just have to set it up once. 1: For example, https://oasis.app/borrow https://oasis.app/borrow.
- danpalmer 5y agoSo I click "connect a wallet", and I'm given a list of 7 options, none of which a typical user will have heard of, let alone understand what a wallet is. Compared to going to my bank's website and clicking "get a quote for a loan", filling in some personal details, and getting an email? I understand why this feels exciting to tech-minded people but this essentially proves my point.
- throwaway4good 5y agoGood software starts and ends with the people who are using it. Concrete technologies, software architecture and design, algorithms, cryptography etc. are all means to an end. Start with what you want to achieve, what real world problem you want to solve and the people you want to solve it for. And then work backwards from there.
- rfd4sgmk8u 5y agocontext: bitcoiner. it is the hardest money and every other attempt to build a digital store of value pales in comparison to it. Smart contracts! Its all absolutely revolutionary -- but also kinda sketchy. I have been playing with various defi protocols on various EVM based chains, and while it makes money (ideally, you are gaining more value by locking up funds in farms, vaults and pools.) The reality is you are probably either holding a decreasing in value position in a liquidity pool (impermanent loss -- your apples and oranges are worth less in a month, but you end up with more apples and oranges with you withdraw), being issued inflation reward points from a vault (they are printed out of nothing as a reward for locking up funds) or being screwed on deposit, withdraw or 'performance' fees in a pool/farm. Dont get me wrong, there is actual value being created, the trade fees on the Automated Market Making contracts is actually good (eg: ~0.2% per trade * many trades!) It can be much higher than centralized finance can provide at a much highest risk. While the savvy can use this system to buy more bitcoin (which is happily tokenized on EVM chains and convertible back to good ol' [bitcoin] UTXOs), most will probably just lose fiat value equivalency while increasing their holdings in shittokens, all the while thinking they are growing value. The most promising value extract routine at the moment looks to be: * Borrow fiat at low interest rates from cefi (banks) * Convert fiat into stablecoins * Deposit stablecoins into lending platforms * Use stablecoin collateral to borrow at a slightly higher rate (but lower than the bank in step 1) * Deposit borrowed funds as collateral in more lending platforms * Repeat borrow until all collateral is consumed (to your own leverage/risk level). * Deposit in pool/vault and collect 'interest', ideally higher than you are borrowing at. * Last step probably earns the most of all, and will pay for the rest of the steps * Profit! My take on this is that this is just more Wall street fiat money shenanigans, reinvented on public blockchains. Or we could just have hard money -- 21 million coins. No yield, No interest, No inflation of the monetary base, No bs.
- Grimm1 5y agoMost of those situations you listed can be solved, and solved better, in a normal centralized way with often the same experience to the end user. And they don’t really care if you’re using block chain or AI or magic as long as it’s solving their problem so why would you choose Blockchain for the heck of it? I see blockchain being useful in two areas, finance and transport/delivery logistics. Environments where no one trusts each other outside of financial contracts and you need to share information publicly to address faults and concerns without other parties being able to change anything.
- astoor 5y agoPart of the problem is that they're slow and expensive to use. Although Cryptokitties had (in web terms) a miniscule number of users performing tiny transactions, that was enough to essentially break Ethereum in 2017[0]. There are other blockchains now that try to resolve these issues though. The other fundamental problem is connecting the blockchains to the outside world. There are various libraries to help with this, e.g. web3.js for Ethereum, but this typically means most DApps are inward-looking (exchanges, DeFi, token-based games etc.) rather than providing any non-crypto-related functionality. That of course makes it look to many people (rightly or wrongly) that DApps, DeFi, etc. all just serve two functions: (i) "plausible deniability" (look, my cryptocurrency does all this, so it can't just be a pyramid scheme), and (ii) sustain the pyramid schemes (i.e. keep them going for longer, draw more people in etc.). Relating this to your example of selling a house as an NFT, there was an attempt to do so earlier in the year[1], but the key point is "Whoever purchases the NFT will be able to contact the seller and organize the sale of the house through standard legal means." So if you buy the NFT, you are not buying the house, but buying a brochure with the particulars you'd need to try to actually buy the house. That is the fundamental issue: to do anything useful you still need to interact with the real world. And personally, when it comes to something like buying a house, I'd much rather deal with real people, than hope I don't irreversably lose all my money due to an unfixable bug in the immutable smart contract or someone typing in the wrong address or something. Anyway, take a look at https://dappradar.com/ https://dappradar.com/ for DApp listings. [0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-42237162 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-42237162 [1] https://decrypt.co/66173/a-house-in-germany-is-being-sold-as-an-nft https://decrypt.co/66173/a-house-in-germany-is-being-sold-as...
- chrisco255 5y agoEthereum has long since moved past Crypto kitties and now regularly transacts tens of billions of dollars a day in volume on-chain in DeFi apps like Aave, Compound, Sushi and Uniswap. And there is a whole ecosystem of gaming cropping up including Axie Infinity (which is more popular now than Kitties ever was), Aavegotchi, Gods Unchained, Dark Forest, Illuvium and more.
- DennisP 5y ago
- chrisco255 5y agoFor the life of me I can't understand the full negativity on HN. Crypto is the wild west. It may even be the last frontier of the internet. It's a corner of the web that hasn't been fully co-opted and dominated by centralized trillion-dollar monopolies hell bent on quantifying your ad preferences while beating all divergent thinking out of you. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile. Unlike the Web2 revolution, retail users get to participate and benefit from the value creation. Between social tokens, NFTs, decentralized finance protocols, and DAOs (decentralized organizations), there is now a burgeoning ecosystem of tooling for organizing human capital around a cause or a goal. This goes beyond centralized tooling. It's all open source, it's all forkable, it's creative, it is fresh and reminds me of the early promising days of the internet. It's a chance to get a redo on the promise of the web. I'm spending my time learning several things in the Ethereum ecosystem. One is using Ethereum for authentication, by using the wallet as a public key login and ENS domains as a user-friendly user name service (effectively acting as a decentralized auth/identity solution). I'm also learning about IPFS and decentralized data storage through solutions like Filecoin and Arweave. I'm exploring a peer to peer database called ThreadDB. And I'm studying Solidity and all the tooling for creating and interacting with EVM based smart contracts. It's a very fascinating space and HN is doing a disservice to itself and its users by not featuring the positive side of it more.
- xemdetia 5y ago> It's a corner of the web that hasn't been fully co-opted and dominated by centralized trillion-dollar monopolies hell bent on quantifying your ad preferences while beating all divergent thinking out of you. Yes, but in the view of an outsider who at least has some knowledge of what it's trying to accomplish it seems mostly dominated by people running pump and dump schemes, scams, and other activities of ill repute. As such it is hard to see it in a positive light, and in the solution spaces of most businesses blockchain doesn't really fit and is the worst kind of vapourware instead. Worse, a lot of the applications seem to assume a perpetuity of things where there's no clear path of stewardship (decentralized or otherwise) of what happens when people get bored of it or the network stops being able to meet it's intended goals. Most applications of blockchain require people to not be bad actors and exploit the system, unfortunately it seems to have attracted a lot of bad actors. The only use I've seen that makes any sense is CT (certificate transparency), where it actually fits the model provided by the blockchain concept well. It's my only example of a relatively 'clean' blockchain tied to something useful and practical and helps even people that don't understand it. People excited around blockchain seem to be excited with the community they created and I don't think that's wrong. However, it is hard for me to see that community worth personally joining when a lot of what you see discussed around blockchain ends up being bots, salespeople, scammers, astroturfers, or the misinformed. It's not inducing the same medium of creativity as lot of other web inventions like forums, flash, mobile apps, etc. It just ends up being about itself which is fine but nets limited interest which makes the negative actors stand out that much more. I'm sure there's pockets of genuine good here and there, but it's hard to see past the dark vile ichor that surrounds everything.
- dehrmann 5y ago> ...sell tickets as NFTs on the blockchain You need to host an app or a website that facilitates that. Same for the Airbnb scenario. You'll quickly find that how that transaction works is a relatively small part of operating the platform. You need search, customer support, reviews, recommendations, marketing, analytics. Paying Visa and friends 3% to process payments isn't where your costs or complexity are.
- sprafa 5y agoYou can tokenise most of those pieces of the app as separate blockchains. This is what’s happening right now - stuff like - customer support - can just be externalised from the application onto a separate crypto platform that rewards people for providing good support. That’s a radical example. But piece by piece blockchains can abstract layers out of the application until you only have your own part of the smart contract.
- billytetrud 5y agoIt's honestly so strange to hear person after person replying in comments here "why would i want to cut out costly middleman x or y?" Presumably all smart developers. Do people just not realize that credit cards extract like 5% from purchases? That all these middlemen extract that much or more from every interaction you do with them? That some middle men (ahem, robinhood) are straight up fraudulent and will cheat you when they can get away with it? Have they not gotten BS charges from their bank they had to call in to complain about or just eat and bite their tongue? So many reasons to cut out these middlemen where possible. It's now possible where it wasn't before because of cryptocurrencies
- sprafa 5y agoBasically. There's quite a bit of cargo cult behavior.
- nonameiguess 5y agoThis doesn't get rid of middlemen, though. Blockchain is not truly peer to peer. It relies on blockchain nodes, which you can run yourself, but mostly people don't do that, and it isn't free to do. The reason users of the blockchain don't currently have to pay anything to use it is that owners of blockchain nodes earn money by holding coins that appreciate relative to their local legal currency at a sufficiently fast rate that they don't need to charge their users. That doesn't seem like a permanently sustainable business model. Coin values can't keep shooting up forever, and at some point blockchain node owners are going to need to either shut down or directly charge blockchain users, and then you're back to the same situation as normal payment processors.
- billytetrud 5y ago> Blockchain is not truly peer to peer. "Blockchain" isnt a single thing. Bitcoin is definitely peer to peer. Most cryptocurrencies are operated in a peer to peer way. > It relies on blockchain nodes, which you can run yourself, but mostly people don't do that Most people not doing it is irrelevant. They can if they want. They can get rid of more middle men if they want. Even using custodial cryptocurrency services get rid of some layers of middlemen and so is still a win. > and it isn't free to do Yes it is. There is no substantial cost in running a bitcoin node for example. > The reason users of the blockchain There is no such thing as "the blockchain" > the reason.. users .. don't currently have to pay anything to use ["the blockchain"] is that owners of blockchain nodes earn money by holding coins that appreciate relative to their local legal currency at a sufficiently fast rate that they don't need to charge their users. You're wrong on many many levels, as I told you in my other comment to you. Please stop trying to explain things that you clearly don't understand.
- smlss_sftwr 5y agoGoing with your proposal for a decentralized Airbnb/Uber -- how would you handle dispute resolution and trust mediation without a centralized authority in an IRL setting, off-chain? If you have a bad actor in the system, how would you screen/remove them and conversely, how would you prevent abuse of the screening mechanism you propose? Relying on the blockchain as a decentralized database/audit record is one thing, but I think IRL enforcement and mediation of off-chain matters are critical prerequisite matters that need to be addressed before these types of marketplace businesses can even be considered feasible as dApps
- sprafa 5y agoAll of this will be tokenised piece by piece, until the application will just be blockchain running top of blockchain. Look at something like Hypersign which is trying to solve identity and reputation for crypto. There are already hints of how this will happen in DeFi. Protocols interact with protocols, smart contracts with smart contracts, until suddenly you get a full stack and the application layer becomes inevitable.
- bananapub 5y agosure, smart contracts are interesting but the entire field of blockchains has been poisoned by grifters, criminals and the social and environmental disaster that is proof of work cryptocurrencies. fundamentally in such an environment there's just very little practical use for "decentralised finance" - we have spent millenia creating regulation and trusted (of varying degrees) parties to manage all this stuff and it works well enough compared to any of the "defi" stuff, where almost the entire ecosystem is fraud and pump and dump. and normal people fundamentally seem to like the system where they can't just be frauded without recourse. if you can provide a way to do the smart contract bit without the toxic hangers-on then I'm sure there's niche uses for it all, but no one ever proposes any compelling argument other than, fundamentally, the proposer will make more money out of it that way.
- Glench 5y agoFor those interested, Chia has a really awesome functional on-chain language called Chialisp. It's secure, auditable (meaning large organizations would be more interested), and the recursive nature allows colored coins released on the chain to have the same functionality as Chia. They have a $500k hackathon coming up this month: https://cointelegraph.com/press-releases/sirius-labs-launches-chia-hackathon-in-partnership-with-chia-network https://cointelegraph.com/press-releases/sirius-labs-launche...
- throw149102 5y agoMy biggest concern is security - that smart contract lives forever on the blockchain, secure or not. It's a pretty huge downside for very minimal gain.
- BrissyCoder 5y agoThis is clearly satire guys. Stop responding earnestly.
- sprafa 5y agoIt’s a trillion dollar piece of satire.
- lamontcg 5y ago> just NFT a house/day and then sell it on the blockchain. And there's nobody there to enforce any rules or regulations. So you fly down to Mexico and your Airbnb simply doesn't exist, meanwhile your money is irreversibly transferred. If you try to prevent that by holding the funds in escrow until after the stay then the reverse scam and nonpayment of funds can happen by staying in the house and then claiming fraud. Shifting the window around just shifts the window from favoring the renter or the client. There's flaws with having a company acting as the dispute resolver, but the centralized reputational authority means that people have an incentive to not trash the place or fail to pay and cannot list houses that don't exist, and don't rape or rob the clients, etc. It also helps to have dispute resolution via credit cards, and to have court systems. Those centralized third parties also should have taken some time to validate the information of the parties on both sides (Airbnb made me scan my passport to validate my identity, which raises the bar somewhat over creating a thousand different random identities on the blockchain). Making it all decentralized with no trusted third parties has very significant downsides. (And that is before we start to consider the fact that contracts as code is limited by our ability to write bug free code, which as it currently stands is incredibly poor)
- sprafa 5y agoAirbnbCoin is potentially one of the hardest of these to implement. Some of this would be fixed by something like hypersign which will tokenise ID/reputation. Some other parts of this could be fixed, let’s speculate - with a token that rewards people for verifying that houses around the world that are up for rent are real and match the photos. The point is - having a centralised company doing something can be replaced with 10 000 individuals doing the same thing with the right crypto token that rewards the right kind of activity. Hard ? Yes. Impossible? No way. Get a lot of smart people on the problem and they will figure out the Best incentive structure. Figure out enough incentives and you abstract away a layer of the software stack - customer support, verification ID, verification of real-world items. That’s what we’re seeing now - layer by layer of applications will become tokenised until the application layer becomes obvious.