5 ms·

So I have this factory that builds objects. Building an object requires $X of energy. Because of a temporary malfunction in the factory, a few of them required

by p4bl0 5y ago

So I have this factory that builds objects. Building an object requires $X of energy. Because of a temporary malfunction in the factory, a few of them required 10 times that amount of energy. Are you saying that these selected objects that were built during the malfunction, and which are otherwise identical to all other objects produced in this factory, are more valuable because of that? I must admit that it makes no sense to me.

ffwacom 5y ago
It’s a market. Anyone that spends more than the value of the information they are recording on the blockchain, will eventually be unable to do so, because they’re bankrupt. On a short timeline garbage can be written, but at the limit it should be flushed out.
- p4bl0 5y ago
  Believing this necessitate to blindly trust market economy. Market economy is what makes NFT works. It always needs new places to expand to, even if those are entirely virtual. What makes mining profitable for some is not the value of the information stored on the blockchain they're mining for, it purely is speculation.
  - ffwacom 5y ago
    If the information has no value then surely the market will eventually price the whole chain at $0. The short term is just noise, ‘price discovery’, whatever.
    - p4bl0 5y ago
      Again, this is true only if you have a complete trust in market economy to make reasonable decisions. I don't. And evidence support that it doesn't always do that (I'm sorry I only have French ressources on this subject).
      - ffwacom 5y ago
        What’s the alternative? Centrally planned economies lead to people dying, messing with them via regulation hasn’t seemed to help at all, just leads to some financial crisis.
        p4bl0 5y ago
        Here too you are asserting things that are highly ideologically biased, or at least influenced.
        ffwacom 5y ago
        Sigh.
aeternum 5y ago
This isn't the best analogy since PoW was declared beforehand that more work = more trust. In the manufacturing example though, there are many examples of collectables that trade at a huge premium due to a very subtle manufacturing defect.
- p4bl0 5y ago
  > more work = more trust This is not true. The trust you are talking about is the "solidity" of the blockchain, i.e., it's immutability feature, what (supposedly) makes it a trustable source. But it is not PoW that makes the blockchain immutable. A lot of people are saying that, but they're wrong, I'm sorry. What actually makes the blockchain immutable is that it is distributed and that it cannot be done to rewrite it's history discretely. People will notice because the hash of the blocks would change. The same is true for a Git repository. If you have a Git repository that everyone mirrors regularly (so that it is distributed, just like a blockchain), then you can't rewrite it's history without having people notice: the new log will be incompatible with the history they already have all the commits hash will be different. The only solution would be, in both case, to find entire collision for each block/commit. This is waaaaay more expansive than mining to find new valid hashes for a given blockchain.
  - selestify 5y ago
    You’re talking about the problem after the network has already reached consensus on a block. Problem is, if you’re downloading new blocks from the blockchain, and you’re getting two sets of history, which one do you pick? With Git, it’s trivial to recreate history differently, albeit with different hashes. With crypto, you pick the chain with more resources put into its creation. Otherwise, any random person can spin up a hundred Bitcoin nodes and start spoofing the latest transactions pretty easily.
    - p4bl0 5y ago
      Yes, this is true in a decentralized and adversarial environment. This is exactly the problem that blockchains have been invented for! In such an environment, we do not have solutions to reach "consensus" apart from blockchains. My point is that apart from cryptocurrencies (where the blockchain is enough because it defines the truth), since you need some form of trusted third-party to make what's written on the blockchain relevant, then you're not in a decentralized and adversarial setting. So you can do things more efficiently, you don't need a blockchain. You don't have to solve the distributed consensus problem.

by p4bl0 5y ago

ffwacom 5y ago

It’s a market. Anyone that spends more than the value of the information they are recording on the blockchain, will eventually be unable to do so, because they’re bankrupt. On a short timeline garbage can be written, but at the limit it should be flushed out.

p4bl0 5y ago
Believing this necessitate to blindly trust market economy. Market economy is what makes NFT works. It always needs new places to expand to, even if those are entirely virtual. What makes mining profitable for some is not the value of the information stored on the blockchain they're mining for, it purely is speculation.
- ffwacom 5y ago
  If the information has no value then surely the market will eventually price the whole chain at $0. The short term is just noise, ‘price discovery’, whatever.
  - p4bl0 5y ago
    Again, this is true only if you have a complete trust in market economy to make reasonable decisions. I don't. And evidence support that it doesn't always do that (I'm sorry I only have French ressources on this subject).
    - ffwacom 5y ago
      What’s the alternative? Centrally planned economies lead to people dying, messing with them via regulation hasn’t seemed to help at all, just leads to some financial crisis.
      - p4bl0 5y ago
        Here too you are asserting things that are highly ideologically biased, or at least influenced.
        ffwacom 5y ago
        Sigh.

aeternum 5y ago

This isn't the best analogy since PoW was declared beforehand that more work = more trust. In the manufacturing example though, there are many examples of collectables that trade at a huge premium due to a very subtle manufacturing defect.

p4bl0 5y ago
> more work = more trust This is not true. The trust you are talking about is the "solidity" of the blockchain, i.e., it's immutability feature, what (supposedly) makes it a trustable source. But it is not PoW that makes the blockchain immutable. A lot of people are saying that, but they're wrong, I'm sorry. What actually makes the blockchain immutable is that it is distributed and that it cannot be done to rewrite it's history discretely. People will notice because the hash of the blocks would change. The same is true for a Git repository. If you have a Git repository that everyone mirrors regularly (so that it is distributed, just like a blockchain), then you can't rewrite it's history without having people notice: the new log will be incompatible with the history they already have all the commits hash will be different. The only solution would be, in both case, to find entire collision for each block/commit. This is waaaaay more expansive than mining to find new valid hashes for a given blockchain.
- selestify 5y ago
  You’re talking about the problem after the network has already reached consensus on a block. Problem is, if you’re downloading new blocks from the blockchain, and you’re getting two sets of history, which one do you pick? With Git, it’s trivial to recreate history differently, albeit with different hashes. With crypto, you pick the chain with more resources put into its creation. Otherwise, any random person can spin up a hundred Bitcoin nodes and start spoofing the latest transactions pretty easily.
  - p4bl0 5y ago
    Yes, this is true in a decentralized and adversarial environment. This is exactly the problem that blockchains have been invented for! In such an environment, we do not have solutions to reach "consensus" apart from blockchains. My point is that apart from cryptocurrencies (where the blockchain is enough because it defines the truth), since you need some form of trusted third-party to make what's written on the blockchain relevant, then you're not in a decentralized and adversarial setting. So you can do things more efficiently, you don't need a blockchain. You don't have to solve the distributed consensus problem.