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I know exactly one legitimate use case for blockchain: a public ledger like bitcoin. The thing is that you don’t need more than this one online currency though

I know exactly one legitimate use case for blockchain: a public ledger like bitcoin. The thing is that you don’t need more than this one online currency though, right? It’s also the safest in terms of PoW [1]. I don’t see any reason for all other altcoins to exist other than charting and trading on exchanges (which is certainly fun, but does not provide value). [1] https://howmanyconfs.com/ https://howmanyconfs.com/

hunterb123 5y ago
Coins have different attributes and use cases. Who is to say who can make what. The best of the niche needed will win out, just like every other sector of all industries. Ethereum has it's EVM. Monero has it's RandomX algo to prevent ASICs, and it's Ring signatures to prevent tracing. Some coins are pure Proof of Stake and try to solve scaling differently, see Algorand and Cardano. There are altcoins that are just clones, referred to generally as shitcoins.
- mccorrinall 5y ago
  Just because you can’t buy an ASIC Ant miner doesn’t mean that they have not developed one internally and are running a monopoly. (Spoiler: Bitmain already developed several ASIC miners for Cryptonight in the past)
hannasanarion 5y ago
A public ledger is not inherently valuable. A trusted ledger is valuable, but a ledger doesn't have to be public to be trusted. When I swipe my card at the grocery store, I'm not shaking in my boots with my fingers crossed, doubting whether the transaction will be recorded as transmitted or not. If for some looney toons secret agent reason you need a transaction to be public, you can tweet a picture of the receipt. Or, even better, you can mail it to yourself, the postmark is legally binding. Bitcoin uses almost as much energy as the entire global banking system, with its associated costs in capital, emissions, and e-waste, to process less than 0.001% the transaction volume of Visa alone, while providing no additional benefit.
- hunterb123 5y ago
  Blockchains can be public or private, the key is they are distributed ledgers.
  - hannasanarion 5y ago
    A distributed ledger is also not inherently valuable. A trusted ledger is valuable, but a ledger does not need to be distributed to be trusted. See above. If, for some looney toons secret agent reason you need a transaction to be in a lot of places, you can ship out usb sticks, put copies of it on different data centers. Or, just use a regular-ass bank. They already have distributed ledger systems for redundancy and responsiveness. What, you think that out of all of Chase's data centers there's only one server that has any transaction data on it? Blockchain adds nothing that existing database and data transfer solutions don't have, but it always comes with cost and immutability (which is not the same as correctness- the >1 billion dollars stolen out of people's crypto wallets per year since 2018 is testament to that).
  - cuteboy19 5y ago
    Private blockchains are entirely useless. If you already have a permissioned system, there is not point in using a trustless and permission less database
  - yashg 5y ago
    A private blockchain is pointless.
- mccorrinall 5y ago
  When I use $payment_processor/card_network then I need to trust a corporation again. I don’t want to do that due to bad experiences. Yes, unfortunately mining is too profitable with the current prices, we need it to go back to a much lower price. Probably won’t happen for a long time (bubbles can exist for decades). Bitcoin can in theory transact more volume than VISA while using the same energy as it is now since the block time is always 10 minutes.
  - 5y ago

hunterb123 5y ago

Coins have different attributes and use cases. Who is to say who can make what. The best of the niche needed will win out, just like every other sector of all industries. Ethereum has it's EVM. Monero has it's RandomX algo to prevent ASICs, and it's Ring signatures to prevent tracing. Some coins are pure Proof of Stake and try to solve scaling differently, see Algorand and Cardano. There are altcoins that are just clones, referred to generally as shitcoins.

mccorrinall 5y ago
Just because you can’t buy an ASIC Ant miner doesn’t mean that they have not developed one internally and are running a monopoly. (Spoiler: Bitmain already developed several ASIC miners for Cryptonight in the past)

hannasanarion 5y ago

A public ledger is not inherently valuable. A trusted ledger is valuable, but a ledger doesn't have to be public to be trusted. When I swipe my card at the grocery store, I'm not shaking in my boots with my fingers crossed, doubting whether the transaction will be recorded as transmitted or not. If for some looney toons secret agent reason you need a transaction to be public, you can tweet a picture of the receipt. Or, even better, you can mail it to yourself, the postmark is legally binding. Bitcoin uses almost as much energy as the entire global banking system, with its associated costs in capital, emissions, and e-waste, to process less than 0.001% the transaction volume of Visa alone, while providing no additional benefit.

hunterb123 5y ago
Blockchains can be public or private, the key is they are distributed ledgers.
- hannasanarion 5y ago
  A distributed ledger is also not inherently valuable. A trusted ledger is valuable, but a ledger does not need to be distributed to be trusted. See above. If, for some looney toons secret agent reason you need a transaction to be in a lot of places, you can ship out usb sticks, put copies of it on different data centers. Or, just use a regular-ass bank. They already have distributed ledger systems for redundancy and responsiveness. What, you think that out of all of Chase's data centers there's only one server that has any transaction data on it? Blockchain adds nothing that existing database and data transfer solutions don't have, but it always comes with cost and immutability (which is not the same as correctness- the >1 billion dollars stolen out of people's crypto wallets per year since 2018 is testament to that).
- cuteboy19 5y ago
  Private blockchains are entirely useless. If you already have a permissioned system, there is not point in using a trustless and permission less database
- yashg 5y ago
  A private blockchain is pointless.
mccorrinall 5y ago
When I use $payment_processor/card_network then I need to trust a corporation again. I don’t want to do that due to bad experiences. Yes, unfortunately mining is too profitable with the current prices, we need it to go back to a much lower price. Probably won’t happen for a long time (bubbles can exist for decades). Bitcoin can in theory transact more volume than VISA while using the same energy as it is now since the block time is always 10 minutes.
- 5y ago