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> 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.

by 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.
valdiorn 4y ago
You game nft example absolutely does not need nfts to work. Heck even old school serial codes would work just fine for this scenario (steam accepting serial keys to allow access in their system). It also does nothing to solve the fact that NFTs hold no legal power and do nothing to resolve the issue of IP ownership (steam can't just start giving away access to Epic games because they feel like it, they need to negotiate and buy the rights or permissions from epic and their partners). For the North Korea / US businessman case - I literally cannot come up with any scenario where legal jurisdiction or some external force (police, lawyers, asset seizure) is not needed to enforce the contract. How will the computer know the contract has been breached? Who's going to tell the system what the breach is? Give me an example and I'm happy to reconsider. Meanwhile, in reality we have a system for this, where judges and lawyers make those calls, and enforce them with the help of police. There's a reason why cross-border deals are risky (enforcement), and no computer is going to solve that.

by derefr 4y ago

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.

valdiorn 4y ago

You game nft example absolutely does not need nfts to work. Heck even old school serial codes would work just fine for this scenario (steam accepting serial keys to allow access in their system). It also does nothing to solve the fact that NFTs hold no legal power and do nothing to resolve the issue of IP ownership (steam can't just start giving away access to Epic games because they feel like it, they need to negotiate and buy the rights or permissions from epic and their partners). For the North Korea / US businessman case - I literally cannot come up with any scenario where legal jurisdiction or some external force (police, lawyers, asset seizure) is not needed to enforce the contract. How will the computer know the contract has been breached? Who's going to tell the system what the breach is? Give me an example and I'm happy to reconsider. Meanwhile, in reality we have a system for this, where judges and lawyers make those calls, and enforce them with the help of police. There's a reason why cross-border deals are risky (enforcement), and no computer is going to solve that.