
What's Blockchain Good For, Anyway? For Now, Not Much - maddogfog
https://www.wired.com/story/whats-blockchain-good-for-not-much/
======
cl0wnshoes
Perfect timing as I sat through a 'for the first time ever blockchain is
changing the coffee world' presentation in a room full of poverty stricken
farmers and coffee buyers.

Stereotypical sales guy telling these farmers how blockchain is going to make
sure coffee is traceable from seed to cup and revolutionize the industry.
Everything is immutable, no one in the world is using blockchain for coffee,
we are the first and announcing it here today! (just don't google it)

I'm out of the loop on how blockchain would actually help or be truly
immutable in a case like coffee. I doubt independent associations are running
nodes to prevent data tampering for this private company, and the process from
seed to cup has long periods of time between each step. At what point do you
enter all the immutable data? If you enter it little by little how do you 100%
guarantee the association is correct and you're not mixing up plants, bags of
beans, who shipped it, or the 30 other blocks of data we quickly scrolled
through?

~~~
austhrow743
I sat through a similar presentation that was just crops in general rather
than coffee specific last year. At no point did they address why you would
want to do that or why it's not possible with non-blockchain technology. Just
like all of the other presentations.

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anongraddebt
I've always been agnostic on blockchain stuff. One of those 'flip-a-coin to
determine its future' type of mentalities. On that note, my humble,
unsubstantiated hypothesis is that IF it ends up not being a dud technology,
then a couple of potential things that make that so might be...

(1) Something to do with the growing number of people not participating in the
current traditional financial system (the unbanked etc) together with some
sort of negative event in current traditional system (recession/depression
etc).

(2) Something to do with future A.I. systems and processes requiring a
historical snapshot of everything that happened within the system or process
and blockchain somehow ending up being more reliable, secure, and accurate
than a traditional database in recording the history of an A.I. system or
process.

(3) Something to do with the ability to monetize certain things at scale that
either could not be monetizable at scale before or could have been but no tech
existed that could have made the project/business profitable.

~~~
RealityVoid
I am honestly surprised you did not put up there self-sustainable economic
systems. Systems where people would exchange real goods and services but would
not necesitate a central arbiter.

Think of things like Uber or Airbnb. I could theoretically imagine a system
with the proper incentives between users, providers and a incentivised system
of decentralized arbiters or oracles that could be self-sustainable. You would
lack a central authority but they would all work within a framework. But the
fact that you lack this authority could potentially make it un-bannable. It
would effectively be a system of peer to peer transactions that could offer
come form of settlement in case of conflicts.

Hard to pin down, but not impossible, I think.

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pjkundert
Decentralized consensus between untrusted parties is a world-changing concept.

The fact that Central Banks / Governments have "chained the fire exits shut"
to keep people in their explosively bankrupt monetary systems is _not_ a long-
term viable situation.

There are a multitude of problems with global consensus systems as monetary
systems. But, something to consider is this:

Two-thirds of the global population are _not_ served by the present system.
Focusing on how cryptocurrencies are "used by criminals" is astonishingly
wrong-headed. Once the world's population has uniform access to viable, stable
and useful money -- _then_ I might start to consider how to help keep "bad
people" off of cryptocurrencies.

However, I think that the Gold Standard in international malfeasance will
continue to be "suitcases full of USD or EUR $100 bills". As it is today. But,
you don't see governments or central banks falling over themselves to fix that
problem. Yet, they are actively preventing the unbanked from having access to
viable money substitutes.

~~~
ChrisLomont
>The fact that Central Banks / Governments have "chained the fire exits shut"
to keep people in their explosively bankrupt monetary systems is not a long-
term viable situation.

The systems before them, where each local region, each business, each actor,
could coin money via IOUs or other forms and trade was much more costly and
corrupt than the current system. Local failures, actors running off with
capital, low liquidity were rampant.

There are decent empirical reasons the entire world moved off systems tied to
how fast they could dig up metal - such systems have an impedance mismatch
with productivity, for example, hindering growth when useful and flooding the
markets with new gold finds when the markets don't have matching growth. These
led to boom and bust cycles.

With the introduction of the US Fed, recessions became less frequent, less
damaging, so much so that the period called the Great Moderation still has
economists working on exactly how come the previous boom and bust cycle got so
smoothed.

After the Great Depression and the resulting solid evidence that non-fiat
exacerbated the problem across dozens of countries, every economy in the world
move off them. The evidence was that solid.

>Focusing on how cryptocurrencies are "used by criminals" is astonishingly
wrong-headed.

Yet it's backed up by factual behavior.

>Two-thirds of the global population are not served by the present system.

Citation? I can find nothing near this claim to be supported by any evidence I
can find. From what I can find, a large majority of the world's population has
access to and uses bank accounts, and the vast majority of the rest use cash
to transact wages and purchases. If pretty much every person on the planet
uses some form of govt issues money, how is that not being served? They're
pretty much all capable of local barter, yet choose this other system. Maybe
it's better for them? At least they're choosing it.

It is true that a decent chunk of the world has no access to a cell phone or
internet. How will cryptocurrencies serve such people?

>Once the world's population has uniform access to viable, stable and useful
money

Which cryptocurrencies are anywhere near as stable as a modern first world
currency? By stable, I mean the usual financial measure of price volatility
against a reasonable basket of goods. Last I checked, BTC, for example, was
about the least stable investment one could make. Volatility has serious costs
throughout the economy - predictability is vastly better for making contracts
like employment or rent or mortgage.

~~~
tuberelay
> With the introduction of the US Fed, recessions became less frequent, less
> damaging, so much so that the period called the Great Moderation still has
> economists working on exactly how come the previous boom and bust cycle got
> so smoothed.

Well, this was the narrative up until 2008.

> From what I can find, a large majority of the world's population has access
> to and uses bank accounts, and the vast majority of the rest use cash to
> transact wages and purchases.

All of which are at the mercy of whoever is in power at the time. In the past
few years: \- 80 million turks have lost 80% of the value of their cash
savings \- 40 million argentines have lost 90% of the value of their cash
savings \- 30 million venezuelans have lost 99% of the value of their cash
savings

Many other countries have high single digit or double digit true rates of
inflation. Even the US rate of inflation is likely double what the official
measures are.

You think this is good?

~~~
ChrisLomont
>Well, this was the narrative up until 2008.

It's still the narrative. 2008 was the biggest since the GD in 1929. Here's a
list [1] of all US recessions. There's no question volatility has been reduced
since the introduction of the Fed. And the same has been demonstrated in
dozens countries.

>80 million turks have lost 80% of the value of their cash savings - 40
million argentines have lost 90% of the value of their cash savings - 30
million venezuelans have lost 99% of the value of their cash savings

And billions of people have not lost their savings, and billions have been
removed from poverty. Cherry picking outliers does not make your case very
persuasive.

There's 7+B people on the planet. Demonstrate that your tiny number is worse
than before central banking then you will have some room to complain.

The vast literature on this shows the evidence to be otherwise.

>Even the US rate of inflation is likely double what the official measures
are.

Yeah, this is nonsense, propagated by places like ShadowStats. There are ample
other groups measuring inflation, such as the Billion Prices Project [2], and
they obtain the same numbers. If inflation were lied about, there would be
ample ways to game various commodities and make a pretty hefty profit. Yet no
one I've known in trading has ever heard of such a thing, despite many people
trying to do so.

And the most compelling way is you can check it yourself. Take BLS reported
inflation for the past few decades. Pick a basket of goods similar to theirs.
Measure local prices in a spreadsheet. Now go to your local library or the web
and find old ads from decades ago, which is easy to do now. Compute the basket
value then.

Even a percent off over a few decades would vastly skew prices. I've done this
legwork out of debunking ShadowStats to someone I know that believes their
nonsense. You can do it, and disabuse yourself of such unsubstantiated
conspiracy nonsense.

>Many other countries have high single digit or double digit true rates of
inflation. ... You think this is good?

Yes, it's better than a deflationary spiral. Single digit inflation, if
somewhat stable, is vastly better than previous boom bust cycles.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_Unit...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_United_States)

[2]
[http://www.thebillionpricesproject.com/](http://www.thebillionpricesproject.com/)

~~~
tuberelay
I disagree with almost all of this. I doubt there's any point arguing the
individual points with you though.

Time will tell who is correct.

------
jeffreyleefunk
Blockchain is 12 years old and yet few if any great applications have been
implemented. It only took a few years before PCs had great killer apps, what's
the deal with blockchain? The deal is hype, a hype that has become very common
for new technologies in today's world. [https://issues.org/behind-
technological-hype/](https://issues.org/behind-technological-hype/)

------
vearwhershuh
Seems like it would be good for elections, where you need to verify the
identity of voters and then be able to verify that your vote was counted
properly.

~~~
nooron
Working in elections I am very skeptical of this. The reason is that electoral
systems support the transition of power by creating a publicly trusted
mechanism to measure support. People have to believe their votes are being
accurately tabulated for such a system to work. Introducing software to the
electoral process-- any software -- undermines public trust in the system
because most people are not software engineers and are not personally capable
of verifying code.

Most computer scientists who study elections are personally opposed to even
electronic voting and prefer paper ballots, which I do too. That's because
they can be physically counted and intuitively understood in a way that
software cannot be by most of the population. That simplicity is a strength in
building trust.

~~~
vearwhershuh
Seems like a verifiable, open voting ledger is a lot more transparent and
obvious, regardless of the code and method of vote collection, which are
orthogonal issues. No reason you couldn't use paper inputs and an ID into a
public ledger. In fact, it should be much more consistent.

But a simple search on the internet shows that there are a lot of folks who
don't want something like this.

~~~
Canada
Well, I'm the head of this family and this family supports the republicrats,
so I'm going to be looking at your phone honey, to make sure you don't make a
mistake.

Or, I'm offering $10 to you, junkie, to support my party. But if you want to
be paid I'm going to use your device/private key/one time code to do it
myself. Or maybe you're my employee and we'll have a voting party where I can
see you all wisely agree with me.

The privacy of a voting booth where neutral officials who are supervised by
all candidates doesn't allow either of these scenarios work.

~~~
vearwhershuh
couldn't they issue you a secure private key when you vote?

~~~
creato
If you can verify your own vote, you can be forced to divulge that
information. There's no technical solution to this problem.

~~~
Canada
That is not true. See work by Andrew Neff on verifiable shuffles of secrets.
It is practical to produce a proof that can be verified by the voter but not
useful in proving which way the ballot has been cast to anyone else.

~~~
ac29
I skimmed through the paper here
([http://web.cs.elte.hu/~rfid/p116-neff.pdf](http://web.cs.elte.hu/~rfid/p116-neff.pdf))
and it doesn't appear to solve the problem. Any time you can see your vote, so
can anyone looking over your shoulder.

The described method seems to prevent voting authorities from seeing specific
voter's votes, which is useful, but it doesn't solve the "show me you voted
for X, or I break your legs" problem.

~~~
Canada
Yeah it makes the use of electronic voting less vulnerable to tampering, but
obviously the voting still needs to he done in a private booth.

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tonixie
When implemented properly, the main use case for me is to resist censorship.

