Bad research based on subjective opinion? I dont see how anyone would see blockchain in itself as useless. It provides a verification method without the use of a centralized system. Are all peer-to-peer systems useless now? Its not to be used as a tool for everything. It will not fix everything. I'd be more interested in research of what happens when reactionary practices are used. Such as using blockchain just because it's the hot new trend without thoroughly thinking about the consequences of such actions. blockchain = bad / blockchain = good is not good enough, each implementation needs to be studied independently and answers derived from that. Replace blockchain with AI and it's the same.
It’s a way of verification and trust in a system where no one trusts any central authority, but does trust an algorithm. That seems too specific to ever actually be useful. People will end up relying on services or instructions that make the system digestible and usable for them, but as long as they still rely on those giving the instructions, the same problem arises.
And when an example case is brought up, it’s always one central authority that is pushing the idea - and could achieve the same more easily and without power waste using a central server.
I mean, if one party pushes for use of blockchain, you'd just need to trust that specific system (algorithm, network..) and not explicitly the party pushing for it.
I also wouldn't call it power 'waste' since it does useful work - confirmation. It may be more inefficient compared to a centralized authority though. There are other ways of doing confirmations than proof-of-work as well, though each have their own drawbacks - just like a centralized system does,
HA! you think the pentagon is in control? You think the people responsible for this debacle are actually following orders? These are all absconders and expats who are doing all this garbage. Pentagon is seemingly powerless to stop them.
The Blockchain is amazingly useful, that's why the establishment did their best to make sure people associate with incels and little monkey pictures to ruin its credibility. A banking system running on Blockchain is one where the Pentagon can't lose trillions of dollars annually.
All your points are about an obsolete idea of Bitcoin, a PoW public blockchain. A PoS private blockchain with private keys not handled by the users would invalidate your entire list.
You mean PoS, which feature is literally that the more you have, the more you can stake, and the more you can earn in return? So basically the system that has built-in wealth concentration?
Yes, but if we are talking about a private
permissioned blockchain, there's no need to obtain returns from staking. It can be even a Proof of Authority tokenless network for what banking care.
Banks are already paying for servers to process and store information. A few validators or collators (quite cheap for a private network) provided by several banks would cost a fraction of what they pay now and they'll keep owning the data, they could reverse transactions, be covered by several layers of public encryption, guard the user's wallet/login, etc.
Don't mix blockchain with the speculative world built on top of it. That's only an unfortunate use of the technology.
Banks are already paying for servers to process and store information.
Yes
A few validators or collators (quite cheap for a private network) provided by several banks would cost a fraction of what they pay now
How? They'd be doing extra compute work for no reason (validating already valid transactions), and storing extra data (lots of hashes) for no reason, so it can only make infra costs more expensive. Plus the added complexity meaning you have to hire an extra team just to understand it.
Don't mix blockchain with the speculative world built on top of it. That's only an unfortunate use of the technology.
That speculative world as shitty as it is, is the only proven use case of the technology, if you take that away then blockchains are even less useful
The PoS option was to highlight that power consumption doesn't have to be an issue. Of course, PoS has its own issues.
The network can use any other type of proof, like Proof of Authority where only a buch of validators owned by the banking system can process the transactions. The network can be even tokenless, no profit or incentives from it, just the secure architecture.
You make a good point that PoS would solve one of the issues I raised which is electricity usage.
In theory it could also increase throughput and reduce costs, but: a) in practice that hasn't happened yet despite years of development, b) it's never going to be as efficient as a centralised system because of the extra overheads necessary to decentralise it, so that point still stands
All my other points still stand as well, plus the additional problems PoS creates to do with centralisation of power
The keyword is "private." The redundant system all the banks maintain can be reduced to a private, permissioned blockchain, creating a network for the banking system to handle their own transactions in addition to a seamless inter-bank communication.
I doubt a network for just one bank can be that useful compared to the current situation.
Also, I'd say that every bank has (had?) a team researching the blockchain.
payments/transfers would be both much slower AND much more expensive than via a bank
Not necessarily. You could have a federated system, where only big players like banks participate in larger blockchain, like banks already do with forex and wire transfers and pay ridiculous fees to clearing agencies, and clear out local transfers locally, possibly inside their own smaller and much faster blockchain.
Just to elaborate here. You are describing one implementation of a blockchain that provides a cryptocurrency. Blockchain is literally just another form of a database. It’s just that it can contain traits that would allow the database to be shared and distributed unlike typical databases. Currently there are some companies that are utilizing blockchain for their inventory systems. They aren’t using any more energy than they would with a typical system. They are just doing it to keep an unchanging record of past transactions which helps with fraud and loss prevention.
P.S.
Money laundering using a system that is publicly distributed and has every transaction involving usd paired with an ID, social security number and enough pictures of your face to make a 3D model is genuinely idiotic.
Bitcoin only consumes the energy people put in it. It literaly would adjust to only consume 20W if that's what was available. But that also means it can absord an infinite amount of excess energy if necessary
which Blockchain are we talking here? How does it compare to the current banking infrastructure?
again, which one? How does it compare to the current pricing?
escrow is a thing, someone can build up a PayPal equivalent on top of a Blockchain, the list goes on
the current system doesn't do great here, some Blockchains makes it way more traceable, in fact
skill issue, but also solvable with a PayPal equivalent
not a fact, what does this even mean?
does it?
You could say the Linux kernel is an astronomically terrible idea because it doesn't do anything...but it is just the platform, the good comes from what people build on top of it that add all these quality of life features you miss
You seem to have conflated blockchain technology with cryptocurrency. Most cryptocurrencies use blockchain technology, but that's not it's only use case. Literally every problem you have listed relates to crypto and not blockchain itself. Blockchain is just a ledger of transactions. A private company using it to say, keep track of their inventory, or track their payments, or use it for document control, can implement it however they want.
Ok so firstly you're not the OP I was replying to, so neither of us know for certain whether they were talking about replacing the banking system with a decentralised currency vs keeping the existing centralised private banks and just having them use a blockchain as their database. I assumed the former because of their wording ("replace the banking system"), and because the latter offers no advantages that I know of.
Secondly if you think a blockchain would offer some advantages over other more efficient write only databases, I'd be interested to know what those are, because to me if you're not running a decentralised system then you're only getting the downsides of blockchain (such as it being single threaded, slow, and space inefficient) without any of the upsides.
For some background, I'm well aware of how both blockchains and crypto work, having been obsessed with them for a little while in 5 or 6 years ago like many of us were before becoming disillusioned. I've also got professional experience as a developer on both immutable databases and banking ledgers.
I love it when people define porn as "just some titties", and ignore all the violent hardcore shit that's defining a generation of men who don't understand sex or women.
Let's pair it with proper sex ed. Destigmatise sex work, break the taboos, but also teach people what is and isn't okay or healthy, how arousal works for different sexes and why their dick isn't God's gift to womankind.
Until your daughter comes home with a boyfriend with a fucked up sense of what sex is and ruins her day/week/month/year/life.
I'm certainly not pro government tracking anything I do, let alone porn watching, but if I see how my own kids get exposed to it through friends. No matter how much I try to educate them, friends still show them absolute vile stuff...
Well the idea is to raise my kids not to be sexually repressed so they don't latch on to the first thing which shows them the smallest modicum of sexual attention.
They are free to make their own mistakes. Hopefully they learn from them. If they don't then it is what it is. I'm not here to dismantle the western framework of individual liberty for the misguided idea that it will prevent kids from having bad sex.
Fair enough. I'm raising my kids in a similar fashion. I dislike the sexual repression in the west (from which I unconsciously still suffer). But I'm still worried about other boys :)
There is this famous spanish porn actor. Nacho vidal, who says that we would have a better world is kids would play around with plastic dildos instead of plastic guns.
I don't know the playing with plastic dildos, but it is true how wild is the normalization of giving kids a replica of a human killing instrument to play with.
If some company made a plastic dick that squirts water, kids would be enthralled. They wouldn't even think it was anything sexual; as far as they're concerned they'd all just be shooting pee at each other.
You can downvote this because you're mad that blockchain exists, for those who don't know the actual real life use case: Bitcoin has been around for 15 years, it is a blockchain. It has a real life use case.
I can send money, with my android phone, from my couch, in my underwear, to anybody else on planet earth who also has a phone and a halfway reliable internet connection. The transaction is not only sent, but actually settles, in under a second with Bitcoin lightning. And I pay pennies in fees. No going to the bank, no bank holidays, no paying wire fees or making sure their bank can talk to my bank. It's just simple and instant and it works. It doesn't matter if they are a dissident or if their country doesn't allow women to own bank accounts, the transaction goes through anyways. In many countries, their app can also instantly convert that BTC into the currency of their choice and deposit it to their bank account. That's assuming they have access to stable banking infrastructure, which billions of people do not.
Bitcoin has delivered on its promise of being a currency with a capped supply (21 million coins) and transaction system consistently for 15 years without a single hack, without a single hour of downtime, without a single hiccup. It just works.
You can argue that Bitcoin isn't better than <insert local currency and transmission system>. You can argue that there are "better" solutions. But it has a clear use case. I use it on a daily basis and it has a fifteen year trend of continued growth whether you are looking at total market cap (bigger than Sweden's GDP), number of nodes, number of transactions, whatever.
Most everything negative you've heard about Bitcoin is either hyperbolic or about other crypto. FTX wasn't Bitcoin. Crypto coins collapsing or people being rugged? Not Bitcoin. For more information, FAQs, and myth-busting, check out http://bitcoin.rocks
Not even sure why I'm bothering replying to this bot, but guess misinformation should not be left alone
It's not instant it takes a long time until enough confirmations have been done. It's not even clear how many confirmations are enough.
It's only instant if you use the lightning network. Lightning network is literally a traditional bank transaction mechanism on top of bitcoin. If you are arguing for using lightning transactions, what is the point of bitcoin in the first place?
fees are huge and will only increase in the future.
It’s not instant it takes a long time until enough confirmations have been done. It’s not even clear how many confirmations are enough.
You're thinking of main chain (which takes 10 minutes for the next block), though I would take a zero-conf transaction in any situation that isn't moving more money than a day's labor. A single confirmation means it made it into the next block which should be plenty for 99% of situations. If you're selling your house, maybe a wait a 2-3 blocks to be sure. Lightning is instant and uses main chain for security but does settlement/transaction data off-chain.
Lightning network is literally a traditional bank transaction mechanism on top of bitcoin.
It's not, you don't need a bank to use it. Banks don't settle instantly, banks have chargebacks, banks required six forms of ID, banks can't reach some places, banks may discriminate. Lightning is Bitcoin. You lock up BTC in a lightning channel, you can then send that BTC to anybody via lightning, and when you close your channel, you get the appropriate amount of BTC back. You can run a lightning node on a phone, a "routing" node on a raspberry pi, it's just as decentralized and trustless as the main chain is. You can open a channel directly w the person you're transacting with or you can forward the transaction through other channels/nodes, all trustlessly, all instantly, all automatically. Nobody ever has custody of the funds aside from you and your intended recipient. There's no central custodian (like a bank) you have to trust.
If you are arguing for using lightning transactions, what is the point of bitcoin in the first place?
Main chain and lightning have different use cases. Use main chain for long-term storage of funds or large transactions. Use lightning for everyday spending. Main chain secures lightning transactions. Main chain is layer one, lightning is layer two, it's possible there will be more layers, just like SMTP is built on TCP which is built on Ethernet or whatever.
fees are huge and will only increase in the future.
Main chain fees are around $1.50 for the next block, which is still cheaper than a bank wire or other equivalent payment methods in many situations. You're right though, they are expected to increase as adoption increases, but lightning has scaled that available blockspace several orders of magnitude. Lightning fees are <1% in almost all instances and aren't expected to increase since they are not tied directly to main chain fees and no mining is required. A lightning transaction uses about as much CPU power as sending an e-mail. A single main chain transaction can open a lightning channel. You can have billions of transactions inside a lightning channel.
You lock up BTC in a lightning channel, you can then send that BTC to anybody via lightning,
You can not send the BTC to just about anybody. Only to people with whom you have a channel open. If you want to send to anybody you need to hop through other channels using middlemen. That sounds very similar to the function of a bank.
It's fair, I assume a lot of people are bots too, but I like lemmy because it's mostly not bots :).
You can not send the BTC to just about anybody. Only to people with whom you have a channel open. If you want to send to anybody you need to hop through other channels using middlemen. That sounds very similar to the function of a bank.
You are right, if you want to send directly from your wallet to another user's wallet with no middlemen, you need to have a channel open with that user, which you totally can and will save you on fees in the long-term if you transact with that person frequently. But I don't do this because it's un-necessary, you can also send funds to any other person on lightning via these middlemen. The middlemen don't have custody of the funds, they can't block/reverse/do anything with the transaction aside from just forward it along. You can choose who those "middlemen" are, they are usually selected based on the lowest expected fee. They route data around, if they are banks, then so are other Bitcoin nodes you connect to on main chain. But we don't think of them as banks right? They just relay data around and they're decentralized. You are right that they share a similar function of routing payments, the difference is in how they do that and who controls what parts of that process. Banks have immense power over your funds. Lightning nodes you route a payment through have none and anybody can run one.
The last time I had to send 30 Euro to someone, I had to pay 5 Euro for gas fees. It used to be even worse. Your statements are bullshit, we all know what the usual use cases are (other than speculation)
5 Euros seems like a pretty standard fee for a Bitcoin transfer, which is insanely cheap for large transfers. Your 30 Euro transaction is more suitable for the lightning network, which handles off-chain transactions for much lower fees. The person you were responding to was specifically talking about the lightning network.
it would be nice if the price of bitcoin was stable enough that when I sent $100 to somebody it wouldn't be a gamble whether what they actually received was double or half that
It is. Lightning transactions confirm in under a second, you can sell those instantly via an exchange. The price is not that unstable and already more stable than many national currencies. You can guarantee that they receive the same amount of BTC.
I don't care about amount of BTC, I care about amount of dollars. It may also surprise you to learn that I don't care about countries where the currency is so unstable that a currency that can double in value in the space of a few months has it beat.
If bitcoin is going to become usable as a currency, even in niche circles, it has two problems to solve: energy use (three quarters of a megawatt hour per transaction, according to Forbes!) and conversion stability. I don't want keeping money in my wallet to be a high risk investment.
Bitcoin has collapsed like three times in the last like 7 years dawg.
If you bought 1 BTC 15 years ago, you still have 1 BTC. It has not collapsed. The price relative to USD has collapsed a few times, but the average trend is growth. Bitcoin does not guarantee any price relative to any other currency, because it can't, all it can guarantee is a stable supply of currency. The USD, in that time period, has lost >20% of its purchasing power as well, so the USD also "crashed".
Yeah, I was just looking through some documentation on it. It says it uses a "digital wallet". Maybe people are seeing that and thinking that means it's blockchain-based? I'm not seeing anything more solid claiming there's any blockchain involved, though. (I'm not 100% certain there isn't any blockchain involved, though.)
It's BS either way. Extra super plus plus BS if it's blockchain-based. But still BS even if there's no blockchain involved.
Git is not a blockchain. Most importantly, it's not distributed. There's a singular git server that all git clients for that repository connect to and use as a source of truth.
That's not a git thing though. You can totally have multiple remotes and the remotes are just git repositories themselves. Git is 100% decentralized. There is technically nothing stopping you from having multiple remotes.
In contrast with Centralized Version Control Systems (CVCSs), the distributed nature of Git allows you to be far more flexible in how developers collaborate on projects. In centralized systems, every developer is a node working more or less equally with a central hub. In Git, however, every developer is potentially both a node and a hub; that is, every developer can both contribute code to other repositories and maintain a public repository on which others can base their work and which they can contribute to.
I agree it's not a blockchain, (although it has chain properties) but it is kinda decentralized. By convention projects almost exclusively have a single remote, and by convention that single remote is treated as an ultimate source-of-truth... But you can absolutely have the same repo with multiple remotes defined, and one could establish different schemes to determine which branches on which remotes represent what in terms of "truth".
I've pulled code branches between my computers without publishing to an external server plenty of times. It's a really useful feature to be able to keep stuff in sync with a version history.
That is patently false. It was developed to help develop the Linux kernel, which famously has multiple decentralized repositories managed by different maintainers.
The fact that most companies use it in a way you describe, with only one central repository, does not mean that git is not distributed.
One of the crucial differences between blockchain and Git is that Git is fully subserviant to humans and anything can be undone by humans.
If your blockchain house title is stolen by a hacker, either the courts (rightfully) aren't going to put any significance on the state of the blockchain and are going to say "yeah, you still own your house" (in which case what was the point of using blockchain in the first place rather than a SQL database or some such where mistakes and problems and fraud can be undone without cryptographically-hard obstacles in the way) or if in this hypothetical the Libertarian dystopia has progressed to cartoonish extremes, you're just SOL and lost your house, which just isn't even remotely realistic.
No. This won't work any better, either. Keeping anonymous porn off the internet is like trying to prevent kids from fooling around with sex by not telling them about sex.
Unless you're removing their genitals, they're GOING to figure it out. The situation only gets worse with more ignorance and more control.
True dat. I had a reasonable family safe network, and certain things blocked. My daughter was watching some regular movies on a shady website. Me: how did you access that, and doesn't that need an IP in the US? Her yep, I wanted to catch up on episodes so I setup a proxy server. Me: blink blink OK.
I was too glad she learned proxy server setup on her own, to suggest she not access that site.
One of the things blockchain could do is become a digital proof of ownership, augmenting or replacing things like property deeds and car titles. We already agree that a written record of ownership of such things is legally binding (even if the writing is stored digitally), but transfer of that ownership to another person is still a very manual process. Imagine an NFT that represents ownership of your house, and when you want to sell your house, you transfer that NFT to someone else's custody - adding their ownership information to it. It would record the entire chain of ownership, and specific details about the piece of property involved.
And who would the largest nodes on that blockchain be? The banks? Who could say and do whatever they conspired since they command >50% of the computing power and/or value?
The average person isn’t going to build a fucking blockchain node just to keep the deed to their house.
“Grandma, please you need to fill your basement with these ASICs or else script kiddies will steal your house”
NFT is issued determining ownership to a property. Property sells, another NFT is issued, tied to the original one to maintain a chain of ownership. Issuance of a second NFT for a sale to a new owner would depend on authorization by the previous NFT holder. Lienholder information could also be stored, and linked to a mortgage NFT with payment history.
The "NF" part of that stands for "non-fungible." As in, once created, cannot be changed.
They're not making a technical argument but a practical one.
Who ever owns the chain is the ACTUAL owner of the NFTs. Who ever owns the physical hardware is the ACTUAL controller of the chain.
The problem with NFTs is ... they only solve theoretical problems, not problems in the real world, where it ALWAYS takes agreement and cooperation for anything to ACTUALLY function and serve a purpose.
Blockchains have already proven to be no more secure than a properly designed normal database, and are ALWAYS going to take more electricity, so...they continue to be nothing but a toy and a canary for the gullible tech bro.
Nah, movement is a ton of energy be it gas or electric. Electric vehicles are still the future for the simple fact that they replace something even less economical or long term.
NFTs replace nothing. Not with an improved version, anyways.
I mean, you can use other systems besides cryptographic proof-of-work to determine legitimacy of stakeholders of a blockchain. It doesn’t necessarily have to waste power.
That being said, none of the other alternatives are really viable either. Proof-of-stake? So the “richest” people on the chain control all the money? Sounds like we just reinvented the late-stage-capitalism we already have.
What happens if a mistake was made and an NFT is erroneously issued (for example to the wrong person)?
What happens if the owner dies? How is the NFT transferred then?
Who checks that the original NFT was issued correctly?
What about properties that are split? What happens if the split isn't represented in the NFT correctly (e.g. due to an error)?
The whole non-fungible part can be a problem, not a solution. It very, very rarely happens that ownership of a property is contested. It happens quite often that a mistake is made during a property transfer/sale that needs to be corrected. How do NFTs deal with this, and are they a solution to a non-issue?
See that's the thing. Not being able to correct transaction errors is a feature of blockchain. I'd go as far as saying it's the #1 feature of the majority of crypto that brings in all the scammers.
Personally I prefer my money being insured and controlled by the government.
What happens if a mistake was made and an NFT is erroneously issued (for example to the wrong person)?
That person has it now. They mjght volountarily be willing to send it back with another transactions or the courts could force them to do so (as in give fines, request keys, send to prison, or just have the government own and ooerate all the wallet keys and simulate transactions eith blockchain just as the technology used in a very janky way)
What happens if the owner dies? How is the NFT transferred then?
Similarily, either the government does all the transactions with 'your' keys for you, or you write down the keys in your will and have someone of trust (e.g. a lawyer) do the partitioning/transactions part in your stead.
Who checks that the original NFT was issued correctly?
The seller and buyer beforehand, mostly
What about properties that are split? What happens if the split isn't represented in the NFT correctly (e.g. due to an error)?
Rebalance by having everone affected send their portions for redistribution to a trusted entity
As you've said yourself, NFTs seem wholly unsuited for keeping track of general ownership on a large scale. All the problems do have solutions, but they're either complicated for the owners or it's someone else controlling people's keys, defeating the entire point.
Without law enforcement, which is centralized anyway, your documented ownership is worthless. So if the state or a similar centralized real life organization, whiches existence people agree on, is needed to grant and enforce that ownership, blockchain is unnecessary. They can instead just store that shit in a database.
It could. It may or may not. I agree decentralization is a good thing, but do governments agree as well? First of all, governments are very resistant to change if that doesn't play into their interests (real or percieved like this privacy violation). Using a traditional database to keep track of ownership seems cheaper (since they already do it) but most of all simpler. I'm not too familiar with the way blockchain functions so I may be wrong, but say someone wants to sell a car. In the current state of most countries you just draw up a paper or fill out a form, maybe get it notarized and pay taxes. A database seems flexible enough that if your sale didn't get logged and the buyer got pulled over and questioned, they could provide the contract and clear up any questions about ownership. Or say the ownership was stripped as part of a court order. If it was a database, then changing the records is simple, but with blockchain the court would either have to get you to transfer the ownership volountarily, force you to disclose your keys or have some mechnism of forcing a transaction from the requester account (which as I understand it seems what blockchain is here to stop abd a core part of the specification). Alternatively the government just uses blockchain instead of a database, managing all the keys, wallets and identities (as in they have everyone's keys and do all the transactions) which is the same level of centralization as a database, but with extra steps.
Ownership was (and is) a social contract, and a flexible one at that. Things get gifted volountarily, sold, taken away lawfully and inherited in a single jurisdiction by the thousands daily, and not all of these are well documented. Blockchain seems very limited in what it can do flexibility-wise which makes it unsuitable for keeping track of ownership, and that's not taking into account that either everyone would have to actively use the blockchain for their sales and be familiar with the technology (decentralized) or having all the wallet keys operated by the government (defeating any useful feature of the blockchain for citizens). Adding blockchain into the mix will just complicate the transfer process and centralize it (as in we either do all validation on the blockchain or none), and with the fact that all the transfer history is centralised in the blockchain (despite it being decentralised in storage, it's still explicitly stored and accessible) it would serve as just another venue of privacy violation and opression.
Maybe blockchain could be useful for things like, say carbon credits, or similar government-issued 'currency', but I don't see it applicable to validating general ownership on a large scale for the general population, ever. The 'digital Euro' proposal, also being blessed by the buzzword Blockchain seems very distopian to me as well. Here, with currency being used I can see how it would be applicable in the real world (instead of heavily unstandardised land deeds, sales contracts and other proofs of ownership you have strictly defined currency units), but this also seems like a gross privacy violation as the government (and maybe anyone) can see where you got your money and where you're spending it down to the cent.
I wonder how many sites will bother checking for Spanish pornpasses. Seems they're just playing people and waiting for the inevitable, "Turns out the Internet isn't respecting our kids, we need to ratchet up the control. We tried to give you a good deal though, right?"
That's the insidious part of all this - the government will set up captive portals which require you to verify yourself to get outside the federal network. It will start with porn, then it will be VPNs, and so on. This is just a very convenient excuse to establish the infrastructure and process framework which will eventually be used to kill the open internet by a million cuts.
