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People should really try to understand what’s happening in blockchain. Eventually the computational capacity will reach the levels that virtually any app can be

People should really try to understand what’s happening in blockchain. Eventually the computational capacity will reach the levels that virtually any app can be replicated inside of it, with a much lower fee for the developers/owners/users and often having full open source code for the components. The blockchain development environment is fundamentally less terrible than the centralised database world, and eventually the computational differences between the two will be so low that centralised databases will be less desirable just because do the warp in the social contract. Databases encourage centralisation of power to developer/owners, with aggressive bent towards monopoly. Blockchain encouraged opennesss and portability. It’s simply a better social contract.

jameskilton 4y ago
- kranke155 4y ago
  Feel free to do a point by point rebuttal.
  - thedufer 4y ago
    > Eventually the computational capacity will reach the levels that virtually any app can be replicated inside of it This only makes sense if blockchains can catch up to traditional methods, because applications in the real world will just continue to get more complex as compute power allows. A defining feature of blockchain computation models is that the same calculation must be run many, many times to verify it. Given that each individual one must run on the hardware that blockchain is competing with direct usage of, there's no plausible story for blockchain to close the gap. > with a much lower fee for the developers/owners/users and often having full open source code for the components. See above - how could running the same calculation many, many times, plus the networking costs to communicate, ever compete on price with just running it once? At least one, and more likely all, of the parties must lose in the blockchain model. > The blockchain development environment is fundamentally less terrible than the centralised database world Terrible in what way? It can't compute on price or compute power/latency/etc. > eventually the computational differences between the two will be so low Again - how? See above. > that centralised databases will be less desirable just because do the warp in the social contract. I can't come up with a way to parse this that has any meaning, so I'm not sure what to say about it. > Databases encourage centralisation of power to developer/owners, with aggressive bent towards monopoly. Blockchain encouraged opennesss and portability. It’s simply a better social contract. This seems to be your only real argument - some vague social benefit. But how do we get there? See above - blockchains are far, far more expensive to run, so why would anyone migrate real applications to them? Even if this benefit were real, which I doubt, you don't seem to have any mechanism for making it work in the face of the very real costs of doing so. Regulation seems like the only plausible way, but anti-regulation and anti-government is a pretty explicit goal of most blockchain folks.
    - garbanz0 4y ago
      > A defining feature of blockchain computation models is that the same calculation must be run many, many times to verify it. Given that each individual one must run on the hardware that blockchain is competing with direct usage of, there's no plausible story for blockchain to close the gap. This is not true - zero knowledge proofs allow you to verify work much more cheaply than the original computation, and they're used heavily in upcoming ethereum L2s.
      - thedufer 4y ago
        That doesn't materially change the situation, though. It can't be cheaper to a) do the computation, b) generate a proof, and c) validate the proof many, many times than to just do the computation. You can cut down the number of orders of magnitude worse it is, but it'll still never be as inexpensive (let alone cheaper, as the original comment suggested).
boh 4y ago
People do understand. Please stop telling us how hypothetically, possibly, sometime in the future things may one day be somehow better and more amazing than it is today for some yet to be understood reason. You must not be paying attention to say something like "The blockchain development environment is fundamentally less terrible than the centralised database world" given the perpetual controversy in the developer communities of every major cryptocurrency.
- kranke155 4y ago
  NFTs work and they allow artists to - make money off digital art in a global permissionless market (didn’t exist before) - easily charge royalties in perpetuity for resale of their art Some aspects of DeFi - the ones that were properly audited and whose function is not a ponzi derivative - work absolutely fine. Compound, AAVE, Uniswap, Curve Finance.
  - foepys 4y ago
    > - easily charge royalties in perpetuity for resale of their art Can they really? The art itself is not recorded on any blockchain. Just the link and/or hash can be stored there because of costs. Both can change without noticeably modifying the art. Thus a working legal system is still required and blockchain does not provide any meaningful benefit over a standard contract.
    - kranke155 4y ago
      Those two things don’t cancel each other out. The art being recorded on a blockchain or not doesn’t matter - what you’re selling in an NFT is a signature not the art. An NFT is a decoupling of the art and the signature, because digital art is infinitely reproducible. The NFT introduces scarcity - but only for an authentic signature (which can’t be faked) not the digital art itself. And want you’re saying is not necessarily true - my understanding is that some markets do place the art on IPFS, but I’d have to look into it’s exact working to know for sure. But I believe for the old Hic et Nunc that was the case. In this particular case - it is better than a standard contract because the previous method of authenticating work is hugely expensive for the artist and has immense gatekeeping. Minting an NFT takes 30 seconds. Getting you work into an art gallery takes months if not years of battling and requires other people to make the decision whether they want your art in their sales space or not. In crypto you can just do it yourself and figure out your own personal authentication method (usually twitter).
0xcde4c3db 4y ago
> Eventually the computational capacity will reach the levels that virtually any app can be replicated inside of it, with a much lower fee for the developers/owners and having full open source code. How do you figure? Skilled developers have struggled to efficiently scale an application from one to two rack servers connected with Infiniband, never mind a hodgepodge of heterogeneous hardware and WAN interconnects running a distributed VM. There is nothing in blockchain (nor immutability generally) that actually addresses the underlying issues here, and if anything I would expect the requirement to cryptographically validate all data committed to the chain to make inefficiencies related to synchronization orders of magnitude worse, not better.
- kranke155 4y ago
  I assume something like Moore’s Law applies tbh. I agree of course it makes order of magnitude slower. The point is - how long until this slow is good enough to perform immensely useful things, with a better distribution of wealth generation than the current datacenter model? I would say in the next 5 years we’ll start seeing breakthrough apps. Like I said above I don’t expect everything ever to go on chain in the near future, you can have very useful apps that only touch on chain for the truly necessary. Even doing the “truly necessary” was painful until very recently, but now with Ethereum Layer 2 solutions, Algorand, Polkadot and Solana, it’s becoming more and more accessible over time.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - dale_glass 4y ago
    > I assume something like Moore’s Law applies tbh. We're nearing the limits of physics already. I do expect hardware to get much faster still, but not forever and not as fast as now. > I agree of course it makes order of magnitude slower. The point is - how long until this slow is good enough to perform immensely useful things, with a better distribution of wealth generation than the current datacenter model? I think really never. Because the rest of the world doesn't sit idle, and most anything can be done the traditional way. You could pay huge $$$ to create a smart contract on ETH, or you could get more power than any normal person could afford on the Ethereum blockchain on the AWS EC2 free tier. If you think paying amounts with a few zeroes in them is a sensible thing, then you have far more computing power available. I think the only reason to use the blockchain is if you really need the blockchain. And the vast majority of computing doesn't. And as we're seeing, the blockchain is very much vulnerable if the world wants to push it around badly enough.
rglover 4y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAVImvzFhXI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAVImvzFhXI

jameskilton 4y ago

kranke155 4y ago
Feel free to do a point by point rebuttal.
- thedufer 4y ago
  > Eventually the computational capacity will reach the levels that virtually any app can be replicated inside of it This only makes sense if blockchains can catch up to traditional methods, because applications in the real world will just continue to get more complex as compute power allows. A defining feature of blockchain computation models is that the same calculation must be run many, many times to verify it. Given that each individual one must run on the hardware that blockchain is competing with direct usage of, there's no plausible story for blockchain to close the gap. > with a much lower fee for the developers/owners/users and often having full open source code for the components. See above - how could running the same calculation many, many times, plus the networking costs to communicate, ever compete on price with just running it once? At least one, and more likely all, of the parties must lose in the blockchain model. > The blockchain development environment is fundamentally less terrible than the centralised database world Terrible in what way? It can't compute on price or compute power/latency/etc. > eventually the computational differences between the two will be so low Again - how? See above. > that centralised databases will be less desirable just because do the warp in the social contract. I can't come up with a way to parse this that has any meaning, so I'm not sure what to say about it. > Databases encourage centralisation of power to developer/owners, with aggressive bent towards monopoly. Blockchain encouraged opennesss and portability. It’s simply a better social contract. This seems to be your only real argument - some vague social benefit. But how do we get there? See above - blockchains are far, far more expensive to run, so why would anyone migrate real applications to them? Even if this benefit were real, which I doubt, you don't seem to have any mechanism for making it work in the face of the very real costs of doing so. Regulation seems like the only plausible way, but anti-regulation and anti-government is a pretty explicit goal of most blockchain folks.
  - garbanz0 4y ago
    > A defining feature of blockchain computation models is that the same calculation must be run many, many times to verify it. Given that each individual one must run on the hardware that blockchain is competing with direct usage of, there's no plausible story for blockchain to close the gap. This is not true - zero knowledge proofs allow you to verify work much more cheaply than the original computation, and they're used heavily in upcoming ethereum L2s.
    - thedufer 4y ago
      That doesn't materially change the situation, though. It can't be cheaper to a) do the computation, b) generate a proof, and c) validate the proof many, many times than to just do the computation. You can cut down the number of orders of magnitude worse it is, but it'll still never be as inexpensive (let alone cheaper, as the original comment suggested).

boh 4y ago

People do understand. Please stop telling us how hypothetically, possibly, sometime in the future things may one day be somehow better and more amazing than it is today for some yet to be understood reason. You must not be paying attention to say something like "The blockchain development environment is fundamentally less terrible than the centralised database world" given the perpetual controversy in the developer communities of every major cryptocurrency.

kranke155 4y ago
NFTs work and they allow artists to - make money off digital art in a global permissionless market (didn’t exist before) - easily charge royalties in perpetuity for resale of their art Some aspects of DeFi - the ones that were properly audited and whose function is not a ponzi derivative - work absolutely fine. Compound, AAVE, Uniswap, Curve Finance.
- foepys 4y ago
  > - easily charge royalties in perpetuity for resale of their art Can they really? The art itself is not recorded on any blockchain. Just the link and/or hash can be stored there because of costs. Both can change without noticeably modifying the art. Thus a working legal system is still required and blockchain does not provide any meaningful benefit over a standard contract.
  - kranke155 4y ago
    Those two things don’t cancel each other out. The art being recorded on a blockchain or not doesn’t matter - what you’re selling in an NFT is a signature not the art. An NFT is a decoupling of the art and the signature, because digital art is infinitely reproducible. The NFT introduces scarcity - but only for an authentic signature (which can’t be faked) not the digital art itself. And want you’re saying is not necessarily true - my understanding is that some markets do place the art on IPFS, but I’d have to look into it’s exact working to know for sure. But I believe for the old Hic et Nunc that was the case. In this particular case - it is better than a standard contract because the previous method of authenticating work is hugely expensive for the artist and has immense gatekeeping. Minting an NFT takes 30 seconds. Getting you work into an art gallery takes months if not years of battling and requires other people to make the decision whether they want your art in their sales space or not. In crypto you can just do it yourself and figure out your own personal authentication method (usually twitter).

0xcde4c3db 4y ago

> Eventually the computational capacity will reach the levels that virtually any app can be replicated inside of it, with a much lower fee for the developers/owners and having full open source code. How do you figure? Skilled developers have struggled to efficiently scale an application from one to two rack servers connected with Infiniband, never mind a hodgepodge of heterogeneous hardware and WAN interconnects running a distributed VM. There is nothing in blockchain (nor immutability generally) that actually addresses the underlying issues here, and if anything I would expect the requirement to cryptographically validate all data committed to the chain to make inefficiencies related to synchronization orders of magnitude worse, not better.

kranke155 4y ago
I assume something like Moore’s Law applies tbh. I agree of course it makes order of magnitude slower. The point is - how long until this slow is good enough to perform immensely useful things, with a better distribution of wealth generation than the current datacenter model? I would say in the next 5 years we’ll start seeing breakthrough apps. Like I said above I don’t expect everything ever to go on chain in the near future, you can have very useful apps that only touch on chain for the truly necessary. Even doing the “truly necessary” was painful until very recently, but now with Ethereum Layer 2 solutions, Algorand, Polkadot and Solana, it’s becoming more and more accessible over time.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- dale_glass 4y ago
  > I assume something like Moore’s Law applies tbh. We're nearing the limits of physics already. I do expect hardware to get much faster still, but not forever and not as fast as now. > I agree of course it makes order of magnitude slower. The point is - how long until this slow is good enough to perform immensely useful things, with a better distribution of wealth generation than the current datacenter model? I think really never. Because the rest of the world doesn't sit idle, and most anything can be done the traditional way. You could pay huge $$$ to create a smart contract on ETH, or you could get more power than any normal person could afford on the Ethereum blockchain on the AWS EC2 free tier. If you think paying amounts with a few zeroes in them is a sensible thing, then you have far more computing power available. I think the only reason to use the blockchain is if you really need the blockchain. And the vast majority of computing doesn't. And as we're seeing, the blockchain is very much vulnerable if the world wants to push it around badly enough.

rglover 4y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAVImvzFhXI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAVImvzFhXI