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Blockchain is an immutable ledger. Sure there are scams, just like there are on the regular internet, however, I think there is a lot of potential for blockchai

Blockchain is an immutable ledger. Sure there are scams, just like there are on the regular internet, however, I think there is a lot of potential for blockchain. We're in the early phases of it, but there is more to blockchain that just the currency aspect of it.

invaliduser 5y ago
«We're in the early phases of it» I've been hearing this for years now. How long can something stay in early phases ?
- rschachte 5y ago
  Some things take time to develop, be adopted and optimized. Not everything in tech is a Javascript framework.
  - kkielhofner 5y ago
    Not being snarky, but was anyone still saying this about the web in 2006 when it was 13 years old? Going from Mosaic to what we had in 2006 was quite a bit more effort than a JavaScript framework - multiple browser engines and JS frameworks themselves were created in that time. Not to mention JavaScript itself.
- pcthrowaway 5y ago
  Defi is roughly 2-3 years old, and smart contracts are less than 7. To put it in perspective, when the internet was 7 years old, the world wide web didn't even really exist beyond a concept yet.
  - runarberg 5y ago
    Yeah, but wen the World Wide Web was 7 years old we already had MSN, Google, imdb, geocities, the Space Jam website, etc. Nobody was pushing the internet to the general public in the 1970s, and hardly anyone saw it as a technology to be used by them anyway. When the technology became cheap enough for the general public in the late 80s, then first did we see experiments aimed at the general users and we got stuff like IRC, email, etc. soon after. Blockchain technology—in contrast—has been available to the public from day 1 and and so far the record is far poorer then that of the Internet in terms of usefulness.
  - kkielhofner 5y ago
    Using the internet is a terrible comparison because of the physical and hardware issues at play. The web is an appropriate comparison. The web is a network application on the internet. Blockchain is a network application on the internet. After 13 years the total number of blockchain users is likely less than 100 million worldwide. From 1993-2006 the web grew to a billion users. In 1993 only 8% of US households had a computer with a modem… Considering the web, mobile, and social media that blockchain has been able to leverage over the past 13 years it should have at least 20X the number of users. Blockchain user adoption has been a complete failure up to this point. I wrote a rant about this earlier this week: https://blog.cryptostars.is/blockchain-the-most-poorly-adopted-platform-in-recent-history-6f5d97f7d51f https://blog.cryptostars.is/blockchain-the-most-poorly-adopt...
    - koonsolo 5y ago
      You think it's that easy to replace the existing financial system?
      - kkielhofner 5y ago
        I'm not talking about the financial system - I'm talking about blockchain as a technology platform to do /something/ people actually want or need. The Web, Facebook, Android, etc were all platforms that people embraced (for obvious reasons) - at the rate of 10-35x that of blockchain. Where is the killer app/functionality built on blockchain where the average person walking down the street sees it and says "I NEED THAT"? After 13 years it does not exist and the user adoption numbers very clearly reflect that. In terms of replacing the financial system - I've been active in this space for a while now. I've been to meetups, events, large confs, etc in addition to the usual online hangouts. The overwhelmingly majority of users interacting with the blockchain don't know or care about "replacing the financial system". You can tell because they can't go 10 seconds without referencing their investment in dollars (how much they made or lost) or "I 100x'd it" or whatever. There are a few true believers who think in terms of "replacing the financial system" but out the 13% of US households that have anything to do with crypto the vast majority of usage is speculative trading. The blockchain to them is just another ticker symbol someone told them about and they click around in a web interface to buy/sell/trade. We have a historical example of a new and "innovative" consumer financial product - the credit card. The Diners Club Card was introduced in 1950. By 1970 51% of US households had one. I don't have to tell you that is pretty good adoption for a completely different time and era but when something is immediately and obviously useful people adopt it. Always have, always will.
  - throw_me_up 5y ago
    The internet and world wide web were both useful immediately since they were both a solution to a problem. Blockchain seems like a solution searching for a problem.
- brian_cloutier 5y ago
  The first steam engine was invented in, well, it really depends on your definition of steam engine, but let's use Newcomen's engine and say 1712. That engine was HUGE, and the idea it would ever be made portable is comical. The first usable steam engine doesn't seem to have come along until 1769. The first transatlantic telegraph cable was laid in the 1850s, and how many decades did it take for international phone calls to be essentially free? The first road vehicles were unreliable and suffered from poor roads, it took decades for the Model T to arrive. The first mobile phone was invented in 1973, how long did it take for there to be cell service across most of the world? So, to answer your question, technologies can be in their "early phases" for quite a long time before they have any meaningful impact.
- koonsolo 5y ago
  Here's Bill Gates defending "internet" in 1995: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gipL_CEw-fk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gipL_CEw-fk. He gets totally annihilated by Letterman. Bill can't even say a single use-case that is better than what already exists.
  - quadrangle 5y ago
    Gosh, either you read too much clickbait or you write it. That's not what "totally annihilated" means. Bill mentioned email, and that's better in some ways, they just didn't get into it. There wasn't in 1995 much that was dramatically valuable for regular folks. The conversation doesn't get into what the potential would be. This is Bill being reasonable. He comes across as a fair-minded person, not a delusional zealot. He's about the opposite of what crypto-enthusiasts sound like. He doesn't come across as someone making outrageous claims and thus undermining his credibility.
300bps 5y ago
The word immutable has a meaning. Blockchain does not fit that meaning. Immutable doesn’t mean, “as long as 51% of miners want it to not change”. Immutable doesn’t mean, “doesn’t change unless we get hacked and then we’ll change it”. I could give more examples. Blockchains are not immutable.
- rschachte 5y ago
  The statistical likelihood of a 51% attack happening on the blockchain seems statistically way less likely than a hack targeting our existing financial system. I mean, it's pretty easy why blockchains are considered immutable, you can even code one from scratch in Python in less than 200 lines of code. To control 51% of all those hashing power, an entity would need to power computers that works as much as that, along with paying for the equipment and energy consumption and whatever costs needed for the operation. Current estimates of Bitcoin mining energy usage stands at 71 TeraWatthour, enough to power the whole country of Austria.
  - Eddy_Viscosity2 5y ago
    The OP's point was that 51% of miners could agree to a change, and in a system where there are very large players that might not involve that many people.
    - philistine 5y ago
      And it already happened a bunch of times. Bitcoin has been forked a bunch of times, and one could argue the fork that gave birth to Bitcoin Cash was a successful 51% attack on Bitcoin itself.
  - CamperBob2 5y ago
    To control 51% of all those hashing power, an entity would need to power computers that works as much as that, along with paying for the equipment and energy consumption and whatever costs needed for the operation. Current estimates of Bitcoin mining energy usage stands at 71 TeraWatthour, enough to power the whole country of Austria. Or they'd need to find a way to break SHA256. That's a risk you don't hear much about.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
People keep saying that and yet when pressed for some hypothetical application that might make sense to do with a Blockchain they just put forth ideas that don't stand up to scrutiny like deed management or transferable game assets.
- CiPHPerCoder 5y ago
  I took things a different direction: https://paragonie.com/blog/2017/07/chronicle-will-make-you-question-need-for-blockchain-technology https://paragonie.com/blog/2017/07/chronicle-will-make-you-q...

invaliduser 5y ago

«We're in the early phases of it» I've been hearing this for years now. How long can something stay in early phases ?

rschachte 5y ago
Some things take time to develop, be adopted and optimized. Not everything in tech is a Javascript framework.
- kkielhofner 5y ago
  Not being snarky, but was anyone still saying this about the web in 2006 when it was 13 years old? Going from Mosaic to what we had in 2006 was quite a bit more effort than a JavaScript framework - multiple browser engines and JS frameworks themselves were created in that time. Not to mention JavaScript itself.
pcthrowaway 5y ago
Defi is roughly 2-3 years old, and smart contracts are less than 7. To put it in perspective, when the internet was 7 years old, the world wide web didn't even really exist beyond a concept yet.
- runarberg 5y ago
  Yeah, but wen the World Wide Web was 7 years old we already had MSN, Google, imdb, geocities, the Space Jam website, etc. Nobody was pushing the internet to the general public in the 1970s, and hardly anyone saw it as a technology to be used by them anyway. When the technology became cheap enough for the general public in the late 80s, then first did we see experiments aimed at the general users and we got stuff like IRC, email, etc. soon after. Blockchain technology—in contrast—has been available to the public from day 1 and and so far the record is far poorer then that of the Internet in terms of usefulness.
- kkielhofner 5y ago
  Using the internet is a terrible comparison because of the physical and hardware issues at play. The web is an appropriate comparison. The web is a network application on the internet. Blockchain is a network application on the internet. After 13 years the total number of blockchain users is likely less than 100 million worldwide. From 1993-2006 the web grew to a billion users. In 1993 only 8% of US households had a computer with a modem… Considering the web, mobile, and social media that blockchain has been able to leverage over the past 13 years it should have at least 20X the number of users. Blockchain user adoption has been a complete failure up to this point. I wrote a rant about this earlier this week: https://blog.cryptostars.is/blockchain-the-most-poorly-adopted-platform-in-recent-history-6f5d97f7d51f https://blog.cryptostars.is/blockchain-the-most-poorly-adopt...
  - koonsolo 5y ago
    You think it's that easy to replace the existing financial system?
    - kkielhofner 5y ago
      I'm not talking about the financial system - I'm talking about blockchain as a technology platform to do /something/ people actually want or need. The Web, Facebook, Android, etc were all platforms that people embraced (for obvious reasons) - at the rate of 10-35x that of blockchain. Where is the killer app/functionality built on blockchain where the average person walking down the street sees it and says "I NEED THAT"? After 13 years it does not exist and the user adoption numbers very clearly reflect that. In terms of replacing the financial system - I've been active in this space for a while now. I've been to meetups, events, large confs, etc in addition to the usual online hangouts. The overwhelmingly majority of users interacting with the blockchain don't know or care about "replacing the financial system". You can tell because they can't go 10 seconds without referencing their investment in dollars (how much they made or lost) or "I 100x'd it" or whatever. There are a few true believers who think in terms of "replacing the financial system" but out the 13% of US households that have anything to do with crypto the vast majority of usage is speculative trading. The blockchain to them is just another ticker symbol someone told them about and they click around in a web interface to buy/sell/trade. We have a historical example of a new and "innovative" consumer financial product - the credit card. The Diners Club Card was introduced in 1950. By 1970 51% of US households had one. I don't have to tell you that is pretty good adoption for a completely different time and era but when something is immediately and obviously useful people adopt it. Always have, always will.
- throw_me_up 5y ago
  The internet and world wide web were both useful immediately since they were both a solution to a problem. Blockchain seems like a solution searching for a problem.
brian_cloutier 5y ago
The first steam engine was invented in, well, it really depends on your definition of steam engine, but let's use Newcomen's engine and say 1712. That engine was HUGE, and the idea it would ever be made portable is comical. The first usable steam engine doesn't seem to have come along until 1769. The first transatlantic telegraph cable was laid in the 1850s, and how many decades did it take for international phone calls to be essentially free? The first road vehicles were unreliable and suffered from poor roads, it took decades for the Model T to arrive. The first mobile phone was invented in 1973, how long did it take for there to be cell service across most of the world? So, to answer your question, technologies can be in their "early phases" for quite a long time before they have any meaningful impact.
koonsolo 5y ago
Here's Bill Gates defending "internet" in 1995: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gipL_CEw-fk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gipL_CEw-fk. He gets totally annihilated by Letterman. Bill can't even say a single use-case that is better than what already exists.
- quadrangle 5y ago
  Gosh, either you read too much clickbait or you write it. That's not what "totally annihilated" means. Bill mentioned email, and that's better in some ways, they just didn't get into it. There wasn't in 1995 much that was dramatically valuable for regular folks. The conversation doesn't get into what the potential would be. This is Bill being reasonable. He comes across as a fair-minded person, not a delusional zealot. He's about the opposite of what crypto-enthusiasts sound like. He doesn't come across as someone making outrageous claims and thus undermining his credibility.

300bps 5y ago

The word immutable has a meaning. Blockchain does not fit that meaning. Immutable doesn’t mean, “as long as 51% of miners want it to not change”. Immutable doesn’t mean, “doesn’t change unless we get hacked and then we’ll change it”. I could give more examples. Blockchains are not immutable.

rschachte 5y ago
The statistical likelihood of a 51% attack happening on the blockchain seems statistically way less likely than a hack targeting our existing financial system. I mean, it's pretty easy why blockchains are considered immutable, you can even code one from scratch in Python in less than 200 lines of code. To control 51% of all those hashing power, an entity would need to power computers that works as much as that, along with paying for the equipment and energy consumption and whatever costs needed for the operation. Current estimates of Bitcoin mining energy usage stands at 71 TeraWatthour, enough to power the whole country of Austria.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 5y ago
  The OP's point was that 51% of miners could agree to a change, and in a system where there are very large players that might not involve that many people.
  - philistine 5y ago
    And it already happened a bunch of times. Bitcoin has been forked a bunch of times, and one could argue the fork that gave birth to Bitcoin Cash was a successful 51% attack on Bitcoin itself.
- CamperBob2 5y ago
  To control 51% of all those hashing power, an entity would need to power computers that works as much as that, along with paying for the equipment and energy consumption and whatever costs needed for the operation. Current estimates of Bitcoin mining energy usage stands at 71 TeraWatthour, enough to power the whole country of Austria. Or they'd need to find a way to break SHA256. That's a risk you don't hear much about.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago

People keep saying that and yet when pressed for some hypothetical application that might make sense to do with a Blockchain they just put forth ideas that don't stand up to scrutiny like deed management or transferable game assets.

CiPHPerCoder 5y ago
I took things a different direction: https://paragonie.com/blog/2017/07/chronicle-will-make-you-question-need-for-blockchain-technology https://paragonie.com/blog/2017/07/chronicle-will-make-you-q...