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I believe that putting the equal sign between a blockchain and a database is fundamentally wrong. I also think that a lot of "cryptos" were just get rich quick

by x86x87 4y ago

I believe that putting the equal sign between a blockchain and a database is fundamentally wrong. I also think that a lot of "cryptos" were just get rich quick schemes. After the dust settles we will see if blockchain is really useful or not.

yumraj 4y ago
In your opinion how long is it before the dust will settle? IMHO, the dust has already settled and been washed away by the rain water..
- x86x87 4y ago
  I think there are 2 scenarios really: 1) btc and eth go to zero or 2) we have btc and eth gaining the full recognition and regulation Blockchain as a technology is revolutionary and will be used in niche problems outside of crypto. One thing that most people seem to miss is that money is only as good as our faith in it. No matter what instrument you use this has to apply.
  - l33t233372 4y ago
    In what sense is blockchain revolutionary? Merkle trees are many decades old.
    - x86x87 4y ago
      Distributed consensus with zero trust.
      - dale_glass 4y ago
        Only in an extremely limited sense. You have to trust the developers, for one. Also it's only trustworthy as far as everything happens on the blockchain. Once you step off it for even a second, it doesn't help. Eg, witness the absolutely amazing number of scams happening in the area, and the number of well known, and supposedly trustworthy services suddenly crashing and burning.
        x86x87 4y ago
        There are a set of rules that applies to everyone and are enforced by everyone. Re: trust the devs: do you trust the electricity in your house? What about the wires in the wall? Do you trust others to follow traffic rules?
        dale_glass 4y ago
        The point is that blockchains have different incentives for different parties, and the interests of the most influential people don't necessarily align with those of the users. So the vast majority (users) are just really switching to a different master. Eg, I had a passing interest in BTC, but I my interest was in the very old school "buy pizza with it" kind of use. That usage is of no interest or importance to the current BTC system, and it doesn't matter one bit how many of me there are. The people who matter are the people who commit to the repo, the people who run miners, and the people who run exchanges. The desires of the 99.9% who aren't any of these are nearly irrelevant.
  - yumraj 4y ago
    I, personally, don’t think we’ll get to either of those two scenarios for a really really long time. Reason, too much money has been invested into them. I believe it’ll trickle to zero slowly, but very slowly, over a long period marked by lot of volatility.
acdha 4y ago
Note that he wasn’t saying that it was identical to a classic database but rather that the applications being built were treating it like one. I’ve seen a number of hypotheticals batted around and it was clear that most of them could have been a database, perhaps with signatures on certain records, because they didn’t need any of the anonymous aspects. That could be a sign that developers don’t know how to architect blockchain apps but that’s probably the same as saying most people don’t need blockchains. It seems unlikely that there’s sone widespread benefit still to be discovered rather than maybe some niche applications.
- x86x87 4y ago
  Imho blockchain == distributed consensus in a low trust environment. When you are talking about a database and managing it you are by default outside of the low trust zone (or there exists an authority that everyone trusts)
  - acdha 4y ago
    Yes, that’s the anonymity part. You only need that if the parties don’t have some kind of relationship and reputations to maintain. This distinction matters because almost no real world situation is like that: people need to know that what they’re buying is what they were promised, sellers want to avoid doing business with anyone who fraudulently claims damages, etc. If you need to add reputations and/or trusted third parties, you get no value from a blockchain to make up for all of the negatives unavoidably added by using one.
    - x86x87 4y ago
      Is it anonymity? Afaik, everything is available on the blockchain (except for maybe some cryptos like Monero).
      - MrMan 4y ago
        anonymous doesn't mean private it just means no names.
smt88 4y ago
> I believe that putting the equal sign between a blockchain and a database is fundamentally wrong In what way is a blockchain not a cryptographically-verified, distributed, append-only database? If you added a consensus protocol to git, you'd have a blockchain. I'd say it's fundamentally right because the fundamentals are the same. > After the dust settles we will see if blockchain is really useful or not. Blockchain has been around for more than 10 years. If it had any valid use cases, we'd see them in use already, regardless of what crypto bros are doing.
- gjs278 4y ago
- x86x87 4y ago
  Focus on the distributed aspect of it. What does distributed mean to you? In fact if you look at blockchain itself it's not dostributed in the sense that you need all the blocks to verify current state. The innovation is that 2 parties that don't know each other and don't trust each other can transact without a central authority and without trusting eachother. Has blockchain been around for 10 years? Most of this time was spent in obscurity or making it super hard for the average joe to distinguish useful tech from scams. Also think about neural nets. How long have neural nets been around? Did we figure interesting new ways to use them in the current AI/ML cycle?
- tbrownaw 4y ago
  > Blockchain has been around for more than 10 years. If it had any valid use cases, we'd see them in use already I think modern darknet markets use smart contracts for escrow, so that you don't have to trust the escrow arbiter to not run off with your cryptocoins.
  - smt88 4y ago
    This isn’t any difference than traditional escrow SaaS companies. They’re fully automated unless you have a dispute. In your stated case, “smart contract” means software. It can’t verify that both sides of the transaction have met their obligations unless both obligations are on-chain, in which case there’s no added value.
Nursie 4y ago
We're 14 years in. I think the dust settled some years ago, personally. But (and this is an honest question) how long should we give this? What is the appropriate amount of time before we can say "This was basically a bust"? Because AFAICT the blockchain revolution never came. It's been talked about endlessly for over a decade, it's been hyped to hell and back, it's been oh-my-god-so-full-of-amazing-potential-just-think-of-the-uses for all this time and the only thing that ever seems to come out of it is a variety of schemes that reward early entrants and then crash into the dust, without delivering the utility that was so vaguely promised for so long.
- x86x87 4y ago
  If the dust settled why are we still talking about this? If you want my personal opinion: blockchain had/has great potential but once bitcoin exploded the whole crypto world was hijacked by snake oil salesmen whose only goal was to get rich. People have been scammed (and continue to be scammed) by these techno babble and the dream of getting rich.

by x86x87 4y ago

yumraj 4y ago

In your opinion how long is it before the dust will settle? IMHO, the dust has already settled and been washed away by the rain water..

x86x87 4y ago
I think there are 2 scenarios really: 1) btc and eth go to zero or 2) we have btc and eth gaining the full recognition and regulation Blockchain as a technology is revolutionary and will be used in niche problems outside of crypto. One thing that most people seem to miss is that money is only as good as our faith in it. No matter what instrument you use this has to apply.
- l33t233372 4y ago
  In what sense is blockchain revolutionary? Merkle trees are many decades old.
  - x86x87 4y ago
    Distributed consensus with zero trust.
    - dale_glass 4y ago
      Only in an extremely limited sense. You have to trust the developers, for one. Also it's only trustworthy as far as everything happens on the blockchain. Once you step off it for even a second, it doesn't help. Eg, witness the absolutely amazing number of scams happening in the area, and the number of well known, and supposedly trustworthy services suddenly crashing and burning.
      - x86x87 4y ago
        There are a set of rules that applies to everyone and are enforced by everyone. Re: trust the devs: do you trust the electricity in your house? What about the wires in the wall? Do you trust others to follow traffic rules?
        dale_glass 4y ago
        The point is that blockchains have different incentives for different parties, and the interests of the most influential people don't necessarily align with those of the users. So the vast majority (users) are just really switching to a different master. Eg, I had a passing interest in BTC, but I my interest was in the very old school "buy pizza with it" kind of use. That usage is of no interest or importance to the current BTC system, and it doesn't matter one bit how many of me there are. The people who matter are the people who commit to the repo, the people who run miners, and the people who run exchanges. The desires of the 99.9% who aren't any of these are nearly irrelevant.
- yumraj 4y ago
  I, personally, don’t think we’ll get to either of those two scenarios for a really really long time. Reason, too much money has been invested into them. I believe it’ll trickle to zero slowly, but very slowly, over a long period marked by lot of volatility.

acdha 4y ago

Note that he wasn’t saying that it was identical to a classic database but rather that the applications being built were treating it like one. I’ve seen a number of hypotheticals batted around and it was clear that most of them could have been a database, perhaps with signatures on certain records, because they didn’t need any of the anonymous aspects. That could be a sign that developers don’t know how to architect blockchain apps but that’s probably the same as saying most people don’t need blockchains. It seems unlikely that there’s sone widespread benefit still to be discovered rather than maybe some niche applications.

x86x87 4y ago
Imho blockchain == distributed consensus in a low trust environment. When you are talking about a database and managing it you are by default outside of the low trust zone (or there exists an authority that everyone trusts)
- acdha 4y ago
  Yes, that’s the anonymity part. You only need that if the parties don’t have some kind of relationship and reputations to maintain. This distinction matters because almost no real world situation is like that: people need to know that what they’re buying is what they were promised, sellers want to avoid doing business with anyone who fraudulently claims damages, etc. If you need to add reputations and/or trusted third parties, you get no value from a blockchain to make up for all of the negatives unavoidably added by using one.
  - x86x87 4y ago
    Is it anonymity? Afaik, everything is available on the blockchain (except for maybe some cryptos like Monero).
    - MrMan 4y ago
      anonymous doesn't mean private it just means no names.

smt88 4y ago

> I believe that putting the equal sign between a blockchain and a database is fundamentally wrong In what way is a blockchain not a cryptographically-verified, distributed, append-only database? If you added a consensus protocol to git, you'd have a blockchain. I'd say it's fundamentally right because the fundamentals are the same. > After the dust settles we will see if blockchain is really useful or not. Blockchain has been around for more than 10 years. If it had any valid use cases, we'd see them in use already, regardless of what crypto bros are doing.

gjs278 4y ago
x86x87 4y ago
Focus on the distributed aspect of it. What does distributed mean to you? In fact if you look at blockchain itself it's not dostributed in the sense that you need all the blocks to verify current state. The innovation is that 2 parties that don't know each other and don't trust each other can transact without a central authority and without trusting eachother. Has blockchain been around for 10 years? Most of this time was spent in obscurity or making it super hard for the average joe to distinguish useful tech from scams. Also think about neural nets. How long have neural nets been around? Did we figure interesting new ways to use them in the current AI/ML cycle?
tbrownaw 4y ago
> Blockchain has been around for more than 10 years. If it had any valid use cases, we'd see them in use already I think modern darknet markets use smart contracts for escrow, so that you don't have to trust the escrow arbiter to not run off with your cryptocoins.
- smt88 4y ago
  This isn’t any difference than traditional escrow SaaS companies. They’re fully automated unless you have a dispute. In your stated case, “smart contract” means software. It can’t verify that both sides of the transaction have met their obligations unless both obligations are on-chain, in which case there’s no added value.

Nursie 4y ago

We're 14 years in. I think the dust settled some years ago, personally. But (and this is an honest question) how long should we give this? What is the appropriate amount of time before we can say "This was basically a bust"? Because AFAICT the blockchain revolution never came. It's been talked about endlessly for over a decade, it's been hyped to hell and back, it's been oh-my-god-so-full-of-amazing-potential-just-think-of-the-uses for all this time and the only thing that ever seems to come out of it is a variety of schemes that reward early entrants and then crash into the dust, without delivering the utility that was so vaguely promised for so long.

x86x87 4y ago
If the dust settled why are we still talking about this? If you want my personal opinion: blockchain had/has great potential but once bitcoin exploded the whole crypto world was hijacked by snake oil salesmen whose only goal was to get rich. People have been scammed (and continue to be scammed) by these techno babble and the dream of getting rich.