4 ms·

Relatively few people are against the blockchain as an interesting technology for creating distributed truth in areas that can actually benefit from that. I th

by d_watt 4y ago

Relatively few people are against the blockchain as an interesting technology for creating distributed truth in areas that can actually benefit from that. I think if we're extending your age of sail metaphor, I think people are against it being used for the modern version of tulip mania. Personally, I'm now more excited now about blockchain than I have been in the past. I think the the rush to extract money from people via btc, nfts, etc. is what has overshadowed it's ability for interesting/novel use cases.

988747 4y ago
So far the only real use of blockchain technology is Git. Cryptocurrencies are misuse of it :-D
- layer8 4y ago
  If you count Git, then “blockchain technology” is also used for Evidence Records: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4998 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4998 There’s probably a number of further Merkle-tree-based technologies in current use.
pcdoodle 4y ago
Tulip mania is the best stress test we could ask for. You are right though, the greedy will use it to exploit the uninformed. Not the best PR for Bitcoin in general.
dogma1138 4y ago
There aren’t many applications if any in which a blockchain can’t be replaced by a simpler and more efficient solution.
- d_watt 4y ago
  I'll agree that there are many situations where blockchain is being misapplied. I think it's very unfair to say there aren't any applications though. Blockchain solves the problem of "everyone has an agreed upon history of the entries in a ledger, and that ledger can't be edited by a bad actor, and there's a consensus algorithm to ensure new entries to that ledger are maintained." That's exciting for situations where trusting a central actor to be well intentioned forever is not wise. Publishing "news" on a blockchain, so you don't have to worry about a future actor trying to whitewash what history is, as an example.
  - kllrnohj 4y ago
    You can just solve the news issue, if indeed it is an "issue" at all, with just torrents for distribution and signatures for authentication. You don't need to solve transactions, so you don't need wasteful blockchain technology. Which really gets back to blockchain as used by crypto (vs Merkle trees) is really a quite useless technology, in addition to one that's the least efficient computer system so far created.
  - dogma1138 4y ago
    There aren’t that many situations where that it actually useful. A blockchain where everyone is equal also means that any mistake requires far more effort to correct and nearly any system we have still needs some sort of centralized governance. In your example publishing news well corrections and retractions can and do happen all the time and sure you’ll say well then just assume that the updates have to have the same key but that still doesn’t solve the problem you are worried about since the bad actor in this case would either have direct control or influence over the news organization so they can still force them to push a “malicious” update. Then we get to the issue that a blockchain isn’t suitable for storing large pieces of information so in this case what would be published to the blockchain is just a link you can still either edit or remove the content that is referenced by the blockchain since the content itself isn’t on it. A blockchain is a classical example of a solution in search of a problem. In fact it might be the most technically correct example of that term I ever encountered. Other examples I often hear about such as health records and land or vehicle registrars etc also don’t benefit from being on the blockchain as those are all heavily regulated and complex processes which are prone to mistakes and using a blockchain won’t solve those issues. The only remotely plausible situation where a blockchain could work is voting however like with all electronic voting the moment you need a PhD or multiple ones to be able to understand how the system works and even then you won’t trust it completely the overall trust in the result would be completely eroded which defeats the whole purpose of having a more reliable system on paper in the first place.
  - agubelu 4y ago
    > That's exciting for situations where trusting a central actor to be well intentioned forever is not wise. Publishing "news" on a blockchain, so you don't have to worry about a future actor trying to whitewash what history is, as an example. That is fundamentally a contradiction. Sure, the published news can't be changed later, but you have to trust the actor publishing the news to be trustworthy forever. Just because something is immutable it doesn't mean it's true.

by d_watt 4y ago

988747 4y ago

So far the only real use of blockchain technology is Git. Cryptocurrencies are misuse of it :-D

layer8 4y ago
If you count Git, then “blockchain technology” is also used for Evidence Records: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4998 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4998 There’s probably a number of further Merkle-tree-based technologies in current use.

pcdoodle 4y ago

Tulip mania is the best stress test we could ask for. You are right though, the greedy will use it to exploit the uninformed. Not the best PR for Bitcoin in general.

dogma1138 4y ago

There aren’t many applications if any in which a blockchain can’t be replaced by a simpler and more efficient solution.

d_watt 4y ago
I'll agree that there are many situations where blockchain is being misapplied. I think it's very unfair to say there aren't any applications though. Blockchain solves the problem of "everyone has an agreed upon history of the entries in a ledger, and that ledger can't be edited by a bad actor, and there's a consensus algorithm to ensure new entries to that ledger are maintained." That's exciting for situations where trusting a central actor to be well intentioned forever is not wise. Publishing "news" on a blockchain, so you don't have to worry about a future actor trying to whitewash what history is, as an example.
- kllrnohj 4y ago
  You can just solve the news issue, if indeed it is an "issue" at all, with just torrents for distribution and signatures for authentication. You don't need to solve transactions, so you don't need wasteful blockchain technology. Which really gets back to blockchain as used by crypto (vs Merkle trees) is really a quite useless technology, in addition to one that's the least efficient computer system so far created.
- dogma1138 4y ago
  There aren’t that many situations where that it actually useful. A blockchain where everyone is equal also means that any mistake requires far more effort to correct and nearly any system we have still needs some sort of centralized governance. In your example publishing news well corrections and retractions can and do happen all the time and sure you’ll say well then just assume that the updates have to have the same key but that still doesn’t solve the problem you are worried about since the bad actor in this case would either have direct control or influence over the news organization so they can still force them to push a “malicious” update. Then we get to the issue that a blockchain isn’t suitable for storing large pieces of information so in this case what would be published to the blockchain is just a link you can still either edit or remove the content that is referenced by the blockchain since the content itself isn’t on it. A blockchain is a classical example of a solution in search of a problem. In fact it might be the most technically correct example of that term I ever encountered. Other examples I often hear about such as health records and land or vehicle registrars etc also don’t benefit from being on the blockchain as those are all heavily regulated and complex processes which are prone to mistakes and using a blockchain won’t solve those issues. The only remotely plausible situation where a blockchain could work is voting however like with all electronic voting the moment you need a PhD or multiple ones to be able to understand how the system works and even then you won’t trust it completely the overall trust in the result would be completely eroded which defeats the whole purpose of having a more reliable system on paper in the first place.
- agubelu 4y ago
  > That's exciting for situations where trusting a central actor to be well intentioned forever is not wise. Publishing "news" on a blockchain, so you don't have to worry about a future actor trying to whitewash what history is, as an example. That is fundamentally a contradiction. Sure, the published news can't be changed later, but you have to trust the actor publishing the news to be trustworthy forever. Just because something is immutable it doesn't mean it's true.