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It wouldn't be better "in every way", though. A blockchain is much more resilient; the equivalent would be to have hundreds or thousands of redundant SQL datab

It wouldn't be better "in every way", though. A blockchain is much more resilient; the equivalent would be to have hundreds or thousands of redundant SQL databases around the world and somehow keep them all in sync. By the time you've done that, you've very likely reinvented a blockchain, at many times the cost of just using an already-existing public blockchain. > monitoring and reversing payment transactions I disagree with the article on this point. No reasonable person expects to be able to reverse a cash transaction; that the same applies to an electronic equivalent ain't the fatal flaw that critics seem to regularly insist without real basis. Transaction reversal is indeed outright harmful to honest vendors, and is only really necessary for the legacy systems because the legacy systems have borderline zero protection against dishonest vendors retaining customers' payment information and pulling money from it (and/or giving it to others who will do so, be it voluntarily through some shady dealmaking or involuntarily through card skimmers and database breaches and what have you). > interacting with government agencies to execute real estate transaction You wouldn't need a central authority for this. Local governments are fully capable of putting real estate NFTs or whatever on something like Ethereum or Cardano and publishing public keys such that people can verify their authenticity. They're much more likely to do that than to try to run an equivalently fault-tolerant and accessible-to-the-public SQL database themselves (and absolutely more likely to do even that than to trust some entity outside their legal jurisdiction to do that, barring outright state/federal mandates to do so).

westhom 4y ago
>Transaction reversal is indeed outright harmful to honest vendors, and is only really necessary for the legacy systems because the legacy systems have borderline zero protection against dishonest vendors retaining customers' payment information and pulling money from it This isn’t the only form of dishonesty. There’s cases where you initiate an honest transaction, the vendor ships you something you didn’t ask for because they are trying to clear inventory, and then refuses to refund or exchange. Then you file a claim with Amex and get your transaction reversed in about a week.
- IanCal 4y ago
  You can simply opt in to those kinds of setups. The flipside is there are times I've been unable to pay with cards because the processors deem it to be too large of a risk, despite me being happy risking my own money. Or, see the risks people take running businesses on PayPal - large companies able to reverse transactions / hold your money solves some issues but raises others.
sime2009 4y ago
> It wouldn't be better "in every way", though. A blockchain is much more resilient; the equivalent would be to have hundreds or thousands of redundant SQL databases around the world and somehow keep them all in sync. Technically true, but also completely pointless. An organisation running an SQL database doesn't need hundreds or thousands of redundant SQL nodes/copies to reach the level of robustness required.
- yellowapple 4y ago
  Indeed they don't, but even running two database servers (let alone more for e.g. geographic redundancy) is already more resource intensive than running a full node for a proof-of-stake blockchain. You might as well just run that node and get that resiliency basically for free. Not every usecase requires that sort of resiliency, of course, nor does every use case prioritize it above latency and throughput; nobody except the truly deranged are asserting that a blockchain could or should replace every SQL database out there. For those who do need that sort of resiliency, though, a public blockchain is much more cost-effective.
  - nicoburns 4y ago
    > running a full node for a proof-of-stake blockchain Are there any extant proof-of-stake blockchains that achieve the security guarantees necessary to make a currency viable? Last I heard proof-of-stake was still a hypothetical idea, not something that someone had actually managed to make a working currency with, and that all of the cryptocurrencies in common use were still using proof-of-work (which is of course much more resource intensive).
    - danuker 4y ago
      Proof-of-stake is possible, but requires an honest majority of stakers continuously online. If you want to eliminate Sybil attacks in PoS, there is no way of externally validating which branch of a split chain is legitimate. Each of them has a majority of stake backing it. As for PoW however, you can just look at the total work proven.
tsimionescu 4y ago
> I disagree with the article on this point. No reasonable person expects to be able to reverse a cash transaction; What gave you this idea? If I have proof that I paid you cash for a service, and then proof you didn't provide that service, I absolutely expect to be able to reverse that transaction, via the legal system. > A blockchain is much more resilient; the equivalent would be to have hundreds or thousands of redundant SQL databases around the world and somehow keep them all in sync. That level of resilience is completely unnecessary and is part of why blockchain is such an extraordinarily wasteful technology. > Local governments are fully capable of putting real estate NFTs or whatever on something like Ethereum or Cardano and publishing public keys such that people can verify their authenticity. And who will hold these NFTs? And where will the data the NFTs sign be stored? If the government holds the NFTs, then nothing will change for you: you will have to bring the exact same kind of proof after you bought a house to the government so that they can update the blockchain record. If they want to distribute the NFTs to the current owners of the houses, than they now need to establish an Ethereum/Cardano/[...] wallet for each person who owns a house in their district - a decade-long project in the best case, involving a level of bureaucracy to ascertain that no house NFT was incorrectly transferred to the wrong owner that will blow your mind (or, more likely, a process which will cause massive fraud and property disputes for decades to come). And of course, the NFTs don't solve the problem of actually storing the data (physical scans of the documents that were used before the move to digital, at the very least, since the chain of ownership of each piece of property is an extremely important part of how you can settle disputes). Who will hold these records, and update them as needed? If it's still the county clerk, the problem of bureaucracy flies back in. If they want to make them part of the NFTs and store them on-chain, then minting the NFTs will be exorbitant, and it's doubtful the Ethereum blockchain would survive having the entire archives of home ownership in the USA on-chain.
- yellowapple 4y ago
  > If I have proof that I paid you cash for a service, and then proof you didn't provide that service, I absolutely expect to be able to reverse that transaction, via the legal system. That's very different from what's meant by "reversible transactions" in the context of other payment systems. If the legal system can dictate the reversal of a cash transaction, then it can do so for a crypto transaction - without either needing to have some explicit protocol to do so. > That level of resilience is completely unnecessary That's just, like, your opinion, man. > And who will hold these NFTs? The owners of the properties they represent. > And where will the data the NFTs sign be stored? NFTs can store arbitrary data. > If they want to distribute the NFTs to the current owners of the houses, than they now need to establish an Ethereum/Cardano/[...] wallet for each person who owns a house in their district Which is many orders of magnitude easier than the current system. Besides, it doesn't have to be all or nothing; a gradual opt-in transition would be perfectly doable. > If they want to make them part of the NFTs and store them on-chain, then minting the NFTs will be exorbitant On just about anything noteworthy that's not Ethereum, the cost is on the scale of cents. Wow, such unaffordable, many expensive. And no, you don't need physical scans of the original documents. A transcription will do fine.
ufo 4y ago
Making backups of a centralized database is not reinventing a blockchain, it is much cheaper than the wasteful process of crypto mining.
- yellowapple 4y ago
  > Making backups of a centralized database is not reinventing a blockchain Maintaining read replicas and coordinating writes across all of them starts to look a lot like one after a certain point. > it is much cheaper than the wasteful process of crypto mining. It almost as if not all blockchains involve mining.
Olreich 4y ago
> They're much more likely to do that than to try to run an equivalently fault-tolerant and accessible-to-the-public SQL database themselves (and absolutely more likely to do even that than to trust some entity outside their legal jurisdiction to do that, barring outright state/federal mandates to do so). No they aren't. They are already running public SQL databases (with limited query access) for managing property changes. And they already have a set of processes and employees to manage real estate transactions and taxes. If a blockchain startup wants to try to get a local government office to let them run it on a blockchain, they will need to prove that the taxes always settle, and that fraud can be reversed. These are both important parts of the system for the local government. I suspect that there is a granule of use in the idea, and that's that you can farm off the infrastructure for your real-estate management onto third parties and ensure they give you your taxes and respect your authority. But that's not really what people think of when they say "blockchain" with dollar signs in their eyes. The incentives for the people running the infrastructure go out the window too, because the profits are modulated by the government, and it's way easier to just sell them software directly that only has to claim to be effective, and rarely has to deliver on it.
- yellowapple 4y ago
  > They are already running public SQL databases (with limited query access) Not a single county I've lived in has offered that, to my knowledge. If they did, then if other online county services are any indication, the uptime would be horrendous and the interface would be 90's era garbage. > If a blockchain startup wants to try to get a local government office to let them run it on a blockchain, they will need to prove that the taxes always settle, and that fraud can be reversed. The former is baked into any cryptocurrency worth its salt, and the latter can be done by minting a new record of ownership invalidating the previous one. Better yet, time-limiting parcel NFTs and issuing them in exchange for tax payments would directly tackle both rather cleanly and would work just as well for land leases as it would for traditional real estate.

westhom 4y ago

>Transaction reversal is indeed outright harmful to honest vendors, and is only really necessary for the legacy systems because the legacy systems have borderline zero protection against dishonest vendors retaining customers' payment information and pulling money from it This isn’t the only form of dishonesty. There’s cases where you initiate an honest transaction, the vendor ships you something you didn’t ask for because they are trying to clear inventory, and then refuses to refund or exchange. Then you file a claim with Amex and get your transaction reversed in about a week.

IanCal 4y ago
You can simply opt in to those kinds of setups. The flipside is there are times I've been unable to pay with cards because the processors deem it to be too large of a risk, despite me being happy risking my own money. Or, see the risks people take running businesses on PayPal - large companies able to reverse transactions / hold your money solves some issues but raises others.

sime2009 4y ago

> It wouldn't be better "in every way", though. A blockchain is much more resilient; the equivalent would be to have hundreds or thousands of redundant SQL databases around the world and somehow keep them all in sync. Technically true, but also completely pointless. An organisation running an SQL database doesn't need hundreds or thousands of redundant SQL nodes/copies to reach the level of robustness required.

yellowapple 4y ago
Indeed they don't, but even running two database servers (let alone more for e.g. geographic redundancy) is already more resource intensive than running a full node for a proof-of-stake blockchain. You might as well just run that node and get that resiliency basically for free. Not every usecase requires that sort of resiliency, of course, nor does every use case prioritize it above latency and throughput; nobody except the truly deranged are asserting that a blockchain could or should replace every SQL database out there. For those who do need that sort of resiliency, though, a public blockchain is much more cost-effective.
- nicoburns 4y ago
  > running a full node for a proof-of-stake blockchain Are there any extant proof-of-stake blockchains that achieve the security guarantees necessary to make a currency viable? Last I heard proof-of-stake was still a hypothetical idea, not something that someone had actually managed to make a working currency with, and that all of the cryptocurrencies in common use were still using proof-of-work (which is of course much more resource intensive).
  - danuker 4y ago
    Proof-of-stake is possible, but requires an honest majority of stakers continuously online. If you want to eliminate Sybil attacks in PoS, there is no way of externally validating which branch of a split chain is legitimate. Each of them has a majority of stake backing it. As for PoW however, you can just look at the total work proven.

tsimionescu 4y ago

> I disagree with the article on this point. No reasonable person expects to be able to reverse a cash transaction; What gave you this idea? If I have proof that I paid you cash for a service, and then proof you didn't provide that service, I absolutely expect to be able to reverse that transaction, via the legal system. > A blockchain is much more resilient; the equivalent would be to have hundreds or thousands of redundant SQL databases around the world and somehow keep them all in sync. That level of resilience is completely unnecessary and is part of why blockchain is such an extraordinarily wasteful technology. > Local governments are fully capable of putting real estate NFTs or whatever on something like Ethereum or Cardano and publishing public keys such that people can verify their authenticity. And who will hold these NFTs? And where will the data the NFTs sign be stored? If the government holds the NFTs, then nothing will change for you: you will have to bring the exact same kind of proof after you bought a house to the government so that they can update the blockchain record. If they want to distribute the NFTs to the current owners of the houses, than they now need to establish an Ethereum/Cardano/[...] wallet for each person who owns a house in their district - a decade-long project in the best case, involving a level of bureaucracy to ascertain that no house NFT was incorrectly transferred to the wrong owner that will blow your mind (or, more likely, a process which will cause massive fraud and property disputes for decades to come). And of course, the NFTs don't solve the problem of actually storing the data (physical scans of the documents that were used before the move to digital, at the very least, since the chain of ownership of each piece of property is an extremely important part of how you can settle disputes). Who will hold these records, and update them as needed? If it's still the county clerk, the problem of bureaucracy flies back in. If they want to make them part of the NFTs and store them on-chain, then minting the NFTs will be exorbitant, and it's doubtful the Ethereum blockchain would survive having the entire archives of home ownership in the USA on-chain.

yellowapple 4y ago
> If I have proof that I paid you cash for a service, and then proof you didn't provide that service, I absolutely expect to be able to reverse that transaction, via the legal system. That's very different from what's meant by "reversible transactions" in the context of other payment systems. If the legal system can dictate the reversal of a cash transaction, then it can do so for a crypto transaction - without either needing to have some explicit protocol to do so. > That level of resilience is completely unnecessary That's just, like, your opinion, man. > And who will hold these NFTs? The owners of the properties they represent. > And where will the data the NFTs sign be stored? NFTs can store arbitrary data. > If they want to distribute the NFTs to the current owners of the houses, than they now need to establish an Ethereum/Cardano/[...] wallet for each person who owns a house in their district Which is many orders of magnitude easier than the current system. Besides, it doesn't have to be all or nothing; a gradual opt-in transition would be perfectly doable. > If they want to make them part of the NFTs and store them on-chain, then minting the NFTs will be exorbitant On just about anything noteworthy that's not Ethereum, the cost is on the scale of cents. Wow, such unaffordable, many expensive. And no, you don't need physical scans of the original documents. A transcription will do fine.

ufo 4y ago

Making backups of a centralized database is not reinventing a blockchain, it is much cheaper than the wasteful process of crypto mining.

yellowapple 4y ago
> Making backups of a centralized database is not reinventing a blockchain Maintaining read replicas and coordinating writes across all of them starts to look a lot like one after a certain point. > it is much cheaper than the wasteful process of crypto mining. It almost as if not all blockchains involve mining.

Olreich 4y ago

> They're much more likely to do that than to try to run an equivalently fault-tolerant and accessible-to-the-public SQL database themselves (and absolutely more likely to do even that than to trust some entity outside their legal jurisdiction to do that, barring outright state/federal mandates to do so). No they aren't. They are already running public SQL databases (with limited query access) for managing property changes. And they already have a set of processes and employees to manage real estate transactions and taxes. If a blockchain startup wants to try to get a local government office to let them run it on a blockchain, they will need to prove that the taxes always settle, and that fraud can be reversed. These are both important parts of the system for the local government. I suspect that there is a granule of use in the idea, and that's that you can farm off the infrastructure for your real-estate management onto third parties and ensure they give you your taxes and respect your authority. But that's not really what people think of when they say "blockchain" with dollar signs in their eyes. The incentives for the people running the infrastructure go out the window too, because the profits are modulated by the government, and it's way easier to just sell them software directly that only has to claim to be effective, and rarely has to deliver on it.

yellowapple 4y ago
> They are already running public SQL databases (with limited query access) Not a single county I've lived in has offered that, to my knowledge. If they did, then if other online county services are any indication, the uptime would be horrendous and the interface would be 90's era garbage. > If a blockchain startup wants to try to get a local government office to let them run it on a blockchain, they will need to prove that the taxes always settle, and that fraud can be reversed. The former is baked into any cryptocurrency worth its salt, and the latter can be done by minting a new record of ownership invalidating the previous one. Better yet, time-limiting parcel NFTs and issuing them in exchange for tax payments would directly tackle both rather cleanly and would work just as well for land leases as it would for traditional real estate.