
Ask HN: What was impossible earlier that is easy in the BTC and ETH blockchains? - noloblo
What was impossible to build a few years ago has become incredibly easy if not simple in bitcoin&#x2F;ethereum blockchain?<p>If you were to rebuild any of the consumer facing web apps&#x2F;web infrastructure technologies which would you rebuild on top of the ethereum blockchain
======
Meekro
Despite the blockchain hype, "money" is the killer app for bitcoin and
ethereum.

Before bitcoin, an online business would be taking a huge risk if it accepted
a credit card payment from someone in Latvia. The fraud rate on such payments
is probably 50%. With bitcoin, it's safe and fast. I own such a business (a
VPS hosting company) and Bitcoin really has been a great solution for us.

Before bitcoin, a legal pot shop would have to deal with cash because no bank
would give it an account. Having all this cash around creates a danger for the
employees, not to mention the armored car drivers. Bitcoin is a tool that can
be used to solve the problem.

~~~
hudon
I definitely wouldn't say "fast". I can tap my phone with apple pay or insert
my VISA chip card and it takes <5 seconds.

I agree though that for payments where the merchant can't be banked or VISA
doesn't want to support them, Bitcoin or cash are the only other options.

~~~
sayurichick
the <5 seconds is not settlement. It's a 3rd party signalling to another 3rd
party.

Bitcoin confirmations are just that, confirmations of transaction being
approved by the network.

-blockchain is immutable -only gets written if valid -takes 10~60min to be confident of the reality -no chargebacks

~~~
hudon
As a user, <5 seconds is much faster than 10~60 minutes. And I have never had
VISA mutate my transaction... that would be fraud.

Once every 200 transactions let's say, my card will be denied and I'll need to
swipe it a second time. This is significantly less of an ordeal than having to
rely on the inefficiency of the blockchain _every single transaction_.

~~~
sayurichick
physical mail through the post office still exists alongside e-mail.

Just like credit cards will exist alongside cryptocurrency. There already
exists merchant processors like BitPay that allow for 0-conf transactions. I'm
not saying that's ideal or the permanent solution, but because bitcoin/crypto
is software, it will continue to be improved upon over time.

~~~
hudon
Is your argument that the VISA network is not software that is being improved
over time?

Did you know that VISA has been able to process up to 56,000 transactions _per
second_ in 2014? It also sounds like they improved 20% from 2013 to 2014 [1]

If the past 8 years are of any indication, bitcoin is more like physical mail
than VISA is in your analogy, in terms of performance, ease of use, and how
fast it is improving.

[1] [http://www.digitaltransactions.net/news/story/Visa_s-Test-
Re...](http://www.digitaltransactions.net/news/story/Visa_s-Test-Results_-
Record-Peak-Volume-And-Expected-Smooth-Sailing-for-Tokens)

------
udsloiwdaa
Investing in crypto-currency is investing in blackhats, password lists,
botnets, spam servers, click farms and M(alware)aaS. in currency collapse of
struggling small countries and tax evasion in larger ones. it's investing in
money laundering, corruption, opinion manipulation, corporate and political
espionage and election tampering. in ransomware and plain-old ransom. in child
pornography and drug, weapon and organ sales. investing in CC is investing in
the ugliest side of humanity, and business.is.booming. investing in human
misery used to be elite exclusive, but now even you can do it!

~~~
tho9Ohx1eo
Right. This all started with the first bitcoin. We had a paradise before.

------
vosper
By no means impossible before, but now much easier: Dark net markets, money
laundering, unregulated securities offerings, ponzi schemes, scams,
ransomware, and, to a lesser extent, gambling.

Since you asked about rebuilding web apps, I'll link you to patio11's comment,
which leads with "Blockchain is the world's worst database"

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13420777](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13420777)

~~~
blusterXY
patio11 was entirely wrong about bitcoin.

~~~
vosper
I don't see that anything has changed since his comment

------
z3usH44mr
It is a very common mistake to look at btc and other cryptocurrencies through
the lense of what you know money is right now, in the context of the
infrastructure that exists around it. The real possibilities lie in the
infrastructures that can emerge around this new technologies. Consider the
fact that crypto is inherently agnostic about who or what holds it. You can be
a person, an institution, a script, or an object (think self-driving, self-
owning, self repairing cars), or think trafficlights you can pay to turn green
for you :).

then there is the possibility of true microtransactions. What are the
fundamental parameters of internet commerce in our day and age. I would argue
that there is roughly three kinds of dominant transaction. One of purchases of
goods/services (Amazon etc), software as a service (Spotify), and then there
is the vast space of businesses that basically live of the advertising they
sell through brokers such as facebook and google. There is really no
alternative for this lower limit of transactions. With bitcoin you can imagine
a world where people offer content online (say music) and offer consumers the
choice of a microtransaction/listen or to consume the same content with ads,
without having to give up control over their content to third parties such as
spotify. The possibilities are really quite endless.

~~~
theamk
Today's bitcoin confirmation fee is 88140 satoshis (~$2) according to
[https://bitcoinfees.21.co/](https://bitcoinfees.21.co/)

Does not sound like a good idea for microtransactions.

------
jamespitts
If I had the resources, I would rebuild all of the consumer-facing web apps
using blockchain-based smart contracts. I expect that all web apps will be
rebuilt in this way to an extent, either from within or by way of competition.

So "impossible" is a charged word, as is "easy". I would say that it was
previously far more costly and difficult to implement the following:

\- programmable, highly-reliable, do-it-yourself financial instruments

\- services that cannot feasibly be shut down

\- verifiably revocable authentication

\- data that cannot be modified or deleted

\- functionality that cannot be modified or deleted

\- complex business interactions involving numerous parties that can be
verifiably traced, from start to finish

Disclaimer, because everyone loves to bring up The DAO incident: the above
capabilities hold true unless the community decides otherwise after a
ridiculously onerous debate. Even then, the unaltered data/code can still live
on.

------
klodolph
This is not a judgment of BTC/ethereum, but any service which wants to
transmit value and protect against repudiation but avoid government scrutiny
is vastly easier with BTC/ethereum. This includes Silk Road and most modern
ransomware.

------
gitpusher
Previously it would've been very difficult to convince complete strangers to
hand over millions of dollars in a matter of minutes.

------
Pilfer
It wasn't impossible before, but with BTC/ETH it's far easier to launder
money. With a Cryptocurrency tumbler [1] it's almost untraceable.

Previously, you had to carry the cash yourself, or use a service to transfer
the wealth for you (through falsified business transfers, casinos, diplomats,
flight attendants, etc.) Now you don't need all that, you can practically do
it yourself. There are less people involved and it's harder to trace.

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

~~~
wheelerwj
no, this is just plain wrong. the amount of controls in place, banking
hosyility, and the market liquidity make digital currency terrible options for
laundering.

~~~
Pilfer
When compared to previous methods, laundering through BTC/ETH is far easier.
With a tumbler, or better, several tumblers, it's nearly untraceable too.

~~~
wheelerwj
until you cash in or out... which is a key part of money laundering...

------
cjbprime
Decentralized naming -- Bitcoin solves Zooko's triangle.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooko%27s_triangle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooko%27s_triangle)

Hrr, I see the Wikipedia page says that Bitcoin doesn't provide "human-
readable". But I think it does. You can register names on the blockchain and
assign them to bitcoin addresses using OP_RETURN comments, with every party
agreeing on who knows which human-readable name, despite having no
centralization.

~~~
ajarmst
I'm not sure what you mean by "Solves Zooko's Triangle", as the Triangle is an
assertion of a problem (trilemma) that can't be solved. If you mean "refutes",
I disagree. Besides the problem with names, bitcoin is, of course, vulnerable
on the security side---to 50% or more of computing power being used
maliciously (or being fraudulently converted to hidden malicious use). While
the distributed nature of bitcoin strongly mitigates this once the network is
big enough, the point of Zooko's Triangle is that you have to accept no better
than mitigation of risk on at least one leg, not its elimination. The
possibility of Sybil attacks also point out issues associated with the
anonymity of other network participants and the possibility of hidden
collusion.

~~~
diggan
I think "Claim to solve" would be correct. There are other systems that claims
to solve Zooko's Triangle as well, PetNames is one of them:
[http://www.skyhunter.com/marcs/petnames/IntroPetNames.html](http://www.skyhunter.com/marcs/petnames/IntroPetNames.html)

~~~
ajarmst
That's a good point. I was being overly pedantic.

------
KaiserPro
>"When inflation is at the target rate of 3% that means that the central bank
will default on 3% of the amount of debt it guarantees within a year."

Thats patently false. Government debt is sold in the form of bonds. They make
up the bed rock of the whole economy. Precisely because they can "print money"
they don't default on debt. Government bonds are considered "zero risk"

Yes, a central bank can default on foreign debt, or if they can't print their
own money (see greek banking problem.)

however this underscored the fundemental misunderstanding of how money works.

>"By offering short term credit to each other market participants will be able
to engage in economic exchange without having to pay the cost of money.

>Because market participants will effectively be creating new money with every
transaction they will be expanding the money supply and increasing economic
growth with every transaction."

Thats litrally how the entire banking system works now. Thats how credit cards
work too. Thats how B2B credit works. What is not tackled here is risk. Sure
free credit is great, but how do you know if someone can settle the debt? In
this (unrealistic) world, the credit ratings agency becomes the dominant
force.

Speaking of which, there is no reason why a small buisness can't offer its own
line of credit, without using a bank. However the reason why credit cost money
is because there is risk. Interest is a function of risk and supply. Sure a
coffee shop _could_ settle bills at the end of the week, but the cost of
administering that system is non trivial. The risk of loss is also non
trivial.

Bitcoin or Etherium does nothing to stop that.

In short, this article is flawed.

~~~
KaiserPro
post script:

> "As decentralized digital exchange replaces central banks the effective
> money supply will increase dramatically."

this is also known as hyper inflation.

------
hustlechris
ICO.

ICO is Ethereum's killer app - and that's ok for now.

------
lubujackson
I think it is less about what you can do and more about what it prevents.
Blockchains are really an example of triple entry accounting. A transaction is
local to you, local to the party you deal with, and public and (more or less)
immutable to the public. If we used, for instance, a government-run blockchain
to record all business transactions making "cooking the books" much less
possible (no Enron).

So it is useful for no fraud payments (guaranteed payment) and no trickery
transaction/accounting, which is literally all blockchains are when you get
down to it. The downside is that the transactions are all public knowledge to
anyone contributing transactions. But it could immediately be used to track
government spending (yeah right) or non-profit spending which should both be
more or less open books.

~~~
hudon
Using a distributed ledger like R3's Corda
([https://www.corda.net](https://www.corda.net)) will do what you say: prevent
"cooking the books" and make transactions public and audit-able.

What the blockchain does that Corda does not is: the ability for _anyone_ to
be a transaction validator. What this ability gives the network is censorship
resistance. Basically because anyone can validate transactions, no central
body can say what should and should not go in the ledger.

------
norswap
Excellent question, I'd really like to know as well, to see what's beneath the
hype.

What I do know: anonymous money transactions. Of course, you'll still have the
anonymity loss when converting to/from dollars. While the parties are
anonymous, all transactions are visible. In many cases that means that people
can end up associating your bitcoin address with your identity (assuming they
manage to puzzle out the patterns of your transactions and cross-check that
with known addresses). Mechanisms like CoinJoin allow you to mix your
transactions with those of others, in order to obscure them, but then the
CoinJoin provider still sees your transactions.

~~~
diggan
Look into zkSNARKs which is what for example Zcash uses for completely
anonymous transactions without any mixers or such.

------
pmyymgf
Escrow with shared programmable ownership, global value transfers completed in
less than a hour, immutable public timestamps, self-owned online identity etc
All impossible pre-blockchain

~~~
TheDong
> self-owned online identity

gnu-social existed long before blockchains, as did many other federated
systems.

> shared programmable ownership

What does that mean?

> global value transfers completed in less than a hour

Customers of the same bank can do the same globally usually. It happens
they're transferring "internal bank numbers" instead of real money, but all
cryptocurrencies are also just proxies for money and both sender/receiver must
be using the same crypto-currency. Not very different.

Also, paypal, snapcash, etc seem to work just fine without a blockchain.

> immutable public timestamps

The library of congress begs to differ. So does gnusocial
(federated/distributed timestamp). Mailing lists were used for this purpose at
some point too.

Things like freenet exist just fine without blockchains.

------
maesho
Bitcoin demonstrated that is is possible to dis-intermediate the storage and
transmission of value, an area that is the mainstay of the banking industry.

Ethereum allows for open experimentation, and has brought about the emergence
of arbitrary tokens.

Decred has demonstrated that is it possible to dis-intermediate the process of
political decision-making for a cryptocurrency.

------
tinkerrr
Does Bitcoin's simple use case of a scarce digital commodity count? It's not
that useful in the US/Western Europe but is genuinely useful in certain
countries like Venezuela where inflation is in the triple-digit percent a
year.

~~~
rhino369
Is there actually a healthy bitcoin economy in the meatspace of Venezuela. Can
you trade it for things? Can you buy milk with it? If not, it's really not
much of a currency.

If you are just looking to hedge against inflation, you can convert to any
other currency or asset just as easily, if not more easily. I assume you can
buy gold ETFs in Venezuela.

~~~
marcosdumay
You will certainly get much farther there with Brazilian Reals or Peruvian
Pesos.

------
wheelerwj
tokenization of assets of any variety. some people will say ICO but its bigger
than that.

People tend to miss the bigger picture when it comes to digital currencies.
Bitcoin and the blockchain are communication protocols. They allow anyone and
everyone to communicate and transact in a single unified language, making it
easy for people to put something out into the world. Wether its a purchase or
a remittance or a smart contract executed ICO. the currency themselves are
just tools for make global statements.

------
Mc_Big_G
[https://www.openbazaar.org/](https://www.openbazaar.org/)

An online store with:

No Transaction Fees

No Monthly Fees

No Listing Fees

No Bank / CC Required

Live Chat with Customers

Store Customization

Peer to Peer (no middleman)

~~~
theamk
.. no protection against dishonest sellers

.. no protection against dishonest buyers

.. no protection against dishonest website operators

------
phaser
proving that some data existed prior to some point in time using blockchain
timestamps.

[https://opentimestamps.org/](https://opentimestamps.org/)

------
djbraski
The problem it solves is offering both anonymity and security.

