this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2024
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Crypto =/= blockchain.
If you can't see the utility of blockchain with regards to things like actual, verifiable digital ownership, then I don't know what to tell you.
I want to see what you mean in practical terms, because the only other example that I know besides questionable crypto currencies is NFTs and that was an epic lesson on what not to do. 😅
Maybe it would be a good thing for the digital world to be free from the concept of ownership.
”Digital property is theft, comrade”
Reminds me of a device I heard about that just copies a music file and then deletes the copy and counts how many times that file has been copied as a commentary on the dialogue surrounding piracy
How about first we see a version that isn't a scam? We've seen plenty of scam versions so far.
IMO, blockchain technology is good for one use case: illegal transactions.
I think all else can be achieved more efficiently by using a trusted third party write-only database, such as the ones available on AWS, and you’d also have the benefit of being able to go to court to seek relief. Some blockchain markets are basically reinventing banking systems and preexisting financial law - systems that have been built over centuries and have quite a bit of knowledge baked in.
I do like the shift to proof of stake from proof of work, but this tech is silly to me.
Proof of stake, while better for the environment compared to electricity-guzzling proof of work, actually shift the power of consensus to capital owners. In proof of work, any bloke with some computing power can participate in the swarm even if they don't own any crypto. In proof of stake, only those who own some crypto can participate in the swarm, and those who own more have more say.
You can say that proof of works also requires capital to buy computing power, but with the shift to proof of stake, the bar to participate has been raised. If can't just use a spare computer to join now, you actually need some capital to buy some stake before you can participate. It's a big boy club now, a tool to help the rich get richer.
To add: mining profits are minimized with difficulty adjustment, but there's no such mechanism with staking - profits are maximized instead.
In which cases is this actually useful, as opposed to having a centralized database? Blockchain doesn't provide the enforcement of ownership, which is the real problem.
A blockchain is only as secure as the amount of work (= processing power) that goes into it. Anyone with 51% of the processing power invested in a blockchain can attack it and essentially steal from other people. For cryptocurrencies it’s a problem that solves itself, because every person that possesses some of the cryptocurrency is incentivized to mine to keep it secure (and to earn some at the same time). The more your cryptocurrency is valuable, the more people will want to mine it and the more secure it will be.
For anything other than cryptocurrencies, you can’t incentivize a huge number of people to commit computing power to secure your blockchain. So you have to protect it some other way, for example only allowing you and some trusted people to write on it. But then it doesn’t really need to be a blockchain anymore, just a write-only database (which will perform better and occupy less space).
If it requires no work to generate a block at the end of your blockchain, any attacker can generate malicious ones.
actual, verifiable digital ownership... using a distributed database technology that is designed to require a massive amount of computing resources to update.
I think where some of us who work in spaces using databases to verify something in critical business processes get stuck in accepting that blockchain has value is that our jobs have always been to verify "ownership" as quickly and efficiently as possible. We typically do this by defining a canonical source of truth and our success is judged on how many milliseconds transactions take and the datacener or cloud costs.
Saying that everything about blockchain is "dumb" isn't a very nuanced analysis... but it's a understandable reaction to hearing the hype that blockchain is going to change everything for years.
I've never seen anyone argue that the massively distributed nature or the public read access of blockchain technologies aren't interesting. It's the tradeoff that has to be made in speed and costs that make it hard for many of us to see any value in the approach for most applications.
Digital ownership on one (1) blockchain. Not really that great when you put it like that. What makes one Blockchain more authoritative than another? Even in a closed system, if you think the admins of these chains don't keep a kill switch in their back pocket specifically for their advantage in ownership conflicts then you should probably read about Ethereum Classic. Even if they don't want to hard fork, if a chain is controlled entirely by a company, then they can edit it however they want regardless since it's not really decentralized. The idea that Blockchains will empower the customer with digital ownership is silly to me.
the problem that bitcoin "solves" is mathematically unsolvable. The only reason it kind of works is because participants are human, and therefore are able to assign arbitrary value to the currency, and therefore can act greedily to try to maximize (and protect) their coins. Participants are only incentivized to participate in mining because the thing they're rewarded with is a "currency" (something they value, as humans).
For anything but a currency, what is the incentive of miners using their resources to handle your transactions?