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Nah. The whole Eth blockchain has as much compute power as 1/5,000th of a raspberry pi. It’s an insanely inefficient non-scalable tech. To sacrifice many orde

Nah. The whole Eth blockchain has as much compute power as 1/5,000th of a raspberry pi. It’s an insanely inefficient non-scalable tech. To sacrifice many orders of magnitude of performance, while pumping a whole countries worth of C02 into the atmosphere, just to have a system that is “decentralised” makes no sense. None of the applications can be properly decentralised. Your house deed stuff needs to be enshrined in law, enforced by police etc., your NFT tickets need the venue to validate. Just stop it. It’s junk. The planets future is perilous enough already.

derefr 4y ago
> inefficient ... pumping a whole countries worth of C02 Proof-of-Work blockchains are a strawman. Nobody in or out of the ecosystem thinks they should exist. They're a legacy technology sticking around on inertia; the mainframes to Proof-of-Stake's microcomputers. > None of the applications can be properly decentralised. Your house deed stuff needs to be enshrined in law, enforced by police etc. So? I didn't say anything about decentralization. I believe that these distributed-compute platforms that use signed append-only ledgers as shared storage ("blockchains") are a better way to do regular old centralized fin-tech. (Like I said above: security tokens. Those are embedded in a specific nation's regulatory environment!) (See also: https://www.bankofcanada.ca/research/digital-currencies-and-fintech/projects/central-bank-digital-currency/ https://www.bankofcanada.ca/research/digital-currencies-and-...) However, there is a very specific case that blockchains enable that traditional finance doesn't — and that's "multilateral agreement with no shared legal framework." E.g. a person in the US making a contract with a citizen of North Korea. If these two people get into a dispute, there's nothing their governments will do to arbitrate that agreement. But they can at least rely on technological mechanisms to enforce certain rules about what they can and cannot do to screw one-another over (e.g. requiring 2-of-3 multi-signature validation to remove value from an escrow holding account.) > your NFT tickets need the venue to validate They need a venue to validate. If one supplier is willing to take another supplier's "tickets", so to speak, then you now have an economy. Let's say these NFTs are game licenses — if the Epic Games Store went under, Steam could say "we'll accept Epic Game Store licenses to download+activate games on Steam" as a PR move. Do that a couple of times, and now you have an economy of transferrable game licenses, maybe with an industry body that governs their issuance acceptance. I'm not saying that this happens by default; but rather that this end-state is the point of the technology; and anything else people do with it is basically noise.
- lxgr 4y ago
  Most of the real complexity in this scenario lies in finding a trusted escrow party and adjudicating disputes. If you have a trusted counter- or third party, the rest can be done and is literally often done by email (sometimes even signed!) and spreadsheets.
  - derefr 4y ago
    > the rest can be done and is literally often done by email (sometimes even signed!) and spreadsheets Well, yes; signed email sent through anonymous remailers hosted by a network of peers (e.g. Mixmaster) is the direct ancestor of blockchains. Designed by the same group of people (the "cypherpunks"), even! Blockchains just add to Mixmaster-like networks a shared reputational-currency ledger with some inherent means of acquiring a balance on it, to facilitate the feature that spam-email-solution-proposers call "eStamps" — which prevents blockchain networks from being flooded with spam transactions, while also not requiring per-account identity verification. (Remailer networks had to deal with a lot of spam in their pursuit of anonymity.) Essentially, blockchains are a formalization of "signed emails and spreadsheets." However, there's a specific thing you get from blockchains' peer-to-peer distribution, that you don't get from "signed emails and spreadsheets" in this example use-case. The problem is reconciling the state when the person in the US doesn't trust any computer hosted/set up by the North Korean, and vice-versa. They can pick a third party, but how do they collaborate to set up the escrow system to enable the third party to reliably send their third signature; when the future two of them now disagree and are actively trying to trick one-another into thinking that e.g. the third party cannot be reached? Even if the third party hosts the escrow system themselves in some neutral country — the two of them probably would just DoS-attack that centralized system to prevent the third party from issuing their judgement. Presuming a big-enough blockchain, and anonymity for the arbitrator (enabled by the "eStamp" ledger property), you can't effectively silence the third party from publishing to it.
    - lxgr 4y ago
      > Blockchains just add to Mixmaster-like networks a shared reputational-currency ledger They absolutely do not, at least not successfully so far. Which blockchain has solved the Sybil attack (a precondition for establishing any kind of reputation/rating system)? Which blockchain has successfully bridged physical and digital trust? Proponents keep coming up with the wildest use cases, like "decentralized carbon emission tracking" or "trustless logistics". I absolutely agree that these would be really nice things to have, but so far I've seen absolutely nothing that would convince me that there is a solution somewhere in there.
davidgerard 4y ago
> It’s an insanely inefficient non-scalable tech. To sacrifice many orders of magnitude of performance, while pumping a whole countries worth of C02 into the atmosphere, just to have a system that is “decentralised” makes no sense. especially when you have to go via Infura to get any work done on Ethereum - that's a glaring hard dependency that everyone pretends isn't one, as if anyone's going to telnet to port 30303. Approximately everyone just uses Infura, and Infura outages and sanctions enforcement affects the whole Ethereum ecosystem.

derefr 4y ago

> inefficient ... pumping a whole countries worth of C02 Proof-of-Work blockchains are a strawman. Nobody in or out of the ecosystem thinks they should exist. They're a legacy technology sticking around on inertia; the mainframes to Proof-of-Stake's microcomputers. > None of the applications can be properly decentralised. Your house deed stuff needs to be enshrined in law, enforced by police etc. So? I didn't say anything about decentralization. I believe that these distributed-compute platforms that use signed append-only ledgers as shared storage ("blockchains") are a better way to do regular old centralized fin-tech. (Like I said above: security tokens. Those are embedded in a specific nation's regulatory environment!) (See also: https://www.bankofcanada.ca/research/digital-currencies-and-fintech/projects/central-bank-digital-currency/ https://www.bankofcanada.ca/research/digital-currencies-and-...) However, there is a very specific case that blockchains enable that traditional finance doesn't — and that's "multilateral agreement with no shared legal framework." E.g. a person in the US making a contract with a citizen of North Korea. If these two people get into a dispute, there's nothing their governments will do to arbitrate that agreement. But they can at least rely on technological mechanisms to enforce certain rules about what they can and cannot do to screw one-another over (e.g. requiring 2-of-3 multi-signature validation to remove value from an escrow holding account.) > your NFT tickets need the venue to validate They need a venue to validate. If one supplier is willing to take another supplier's "tickets", so to speak, then you now have an economy. Let's say these NFTs are game licenses — if the Epic Games Store went under, Steam could say "we'll accept Epic Game Store licenses to download+activate games on Steam" as a PR move. Do that a couple of times, and now you have an economy of transferrable game licenses, maybe with an industry body that governs their issuance acceptance. I'm not saying that this happens by default; but rather that this end-state is the point of the technology; and anything else people do with it is basically noise.

lxgr 4y ago
Most of the real complexity in this scenario lies in finding a trusted escrow party and adjudicating disputes. If you have a trusted counter- or third party, the rest can be done and is literally often done by email (sometimes even signed!) and spreadsheets.
- derefr 4y ago
  > the rest can be done and is literally often done by email (sometimes even signed!) and spreadsheets Well, yes; signed email sent through anonymous remailers hosted by a network of peers (e.g. Mixmaster) is the direct ancestor of blockchains. Designed by the same group of people (the "cypherpunks"), even! Blockchains just add to Mixmaster-like networks a shared reputational-currency ledger with some inherent means of acquiring a balance on it, to facilitate the feature that spam-email-solution-proposers call "eStamps" — which prevents blockchain networks from being flooded with spam transactions, while also not requiring per-account identity verification. (Remailer networks had to deal with a lot of spam in their pursuit of anonymity.) Essentially, blockchains are a formalization of "signed emails and spreadsheets." However, there's a specific thing you get from blockchains' peer-to-peer distribution, that you don't get from "signed emails and spreadsheets" in this example use-case. The problem is reconciling the state when the person in the US doesn't trust any computer hosted/set up by the North Korean, and vice-versa. They can pick a third party, but how do they collaborate to set up the escrow system to enable the third party to reliably send their third signature; when the future two of them now disagree and are actively trying to trick one-another into thinking that e.g. the third party cannot be reached? Even if the third party hosts the escrow system themselves in some neutral country — the two of them probably would just DoS-attack that centralized system to prevent the third party from issuing their judgement. Presuming a big-enough blockchain, and anonymity for the arbitrator (enabled by the "eStamp" ledger property), you can't effectively silence the third party from publishing to it.
  - lxgr 4y ago
    > Blockchains just add to Mixmaster-like networks a shared reputational-currency ledger They absolutely do not, at least not successfully so far. Which blockchain has solved the Sybil attack (a precondition for establishing any kind of reputation/rating system)? Which blockchain has successfully bridged physical and digital trust? Proponents keep coming up with the wildest use cases, like "decentralized carbon emission tracking" or "trustless logistics". I absolutely agree that these would be really nice things to have, but so far I've seen absolutely nothing that would convince me that there is a solution somewhere in there.

davidgerard 4y ago

> It’s an insanely inefficient non-scalable tech. To sacrifice many orders of magnitude of performance, while pumping a whole countries worth of C02 into the atmosphere, just to have a system that is “decentralised” makes no sense. especially when you have to go via Infura to get any work done on Ethereum - that's a glaring hard dependency that everyone pretends isn't one, as if anyone's going to telnet to port 30303. Approximately everyone just uses Infura, and Infura outages and sanctions enforcement affects the whole Ethereum ecosystem.