The question that no one bothers to ask is, "What problem is this technology solving that can't be solved cheaper and just as effectively with 'traditional' technology?" When you look at it this way I think the realistic use cases go way down.
Those are commonly copy-pasted claims but the reason why it keeps coming up is that the question of what makes it better is either unanswered or, in cases like voting or storage, known to be worse.
Your language is inadvertently quite revealing: “non-believer” isn’t how you talk about technical issues with well understood tradeoffs. It’s how you talk about something which you’d like to be true but isn’t.
^ Detailed analyses that explain why blockchain is an appropriate solution
But please do elaborate how they are "known to be worse." By whom and can you cite the analysis that proved so? Certainly not known by Google if they invested in a blockchain-based storage solution?
>well understood tradeoffs
That's definitely not the case if you take the time to read any blockchain-related thread on HN. But, please, feel free to tell me what are better solutions for the cases I mentioned.
Your second link discusses the problems with voting and correctly votes that they are unsolved, which was the entire point. Every solution proposed so far is a huge regression for privacy or coercion, so it’s dishonest to claim that as anything other than an area which could become not-worse if future fundamental breakthroughs occur.
File storage is similar: lots of people want you to buy their pet project but if you want reliable, secure, and cost effective it’s all “maybe sometime in the future when we have something different”. Talk about it as an advantage when it’s competitive for most people.
I thought the point was that "they are known to be worse."
>Every solution proposed so far is a huge regression for privacy or coercion
Can you please elaborate how is the solution proposed in the paper linked in the first URL a regression over non-blockchain solutions?
>it’s dishonest to claim that
I replied to the question of "what problem is this technology solving," and the paper you mentioned claims that "it seems reasonable that blockchain technology can help to achieve some of the desired properties." What exactly am I being dishonest with? I cited a paper where a protocol is proposed to help solving the eVoting problem. It directly answers the question I was aiming to answer--I never said my list was about already working, deployed, tested solutions.
>File storage is similar: lots of people want you to buy their pet project but if you want reliable, secure, and cost effective it’s all “maybe sometime in the future when we have something different”. Talk about it as an advantage when it’s competitive for most people.
Right... so your counter-argument is that "it's not yet ready" despite claiming that "they are known to be worse." No one said they're ready. They're using experimental technology and they're small teams. They already have beta implementations out if you want to test them. Yes, they're not polished and ready for consumers, is this your entire point?
> I thought the point was that "they are known to be worse."
Yes, for example, here's the full quote about voting including the sentence immediately after the one you quoted:
> Due to the requirements, it seems reasonable that blockchain technology can help to achieve some of the desired properties. However, to the best of our knowledge, so far no solution has been proposed that has been shown to be secure, verifiable, and private and there are still many open challenges.
There's simply no proposed system which is not worse than the status quo, and that's ignoring the additional challenge that even in the event of a major academic advance you'd have the additional concerns of having to be cost-competitive and establishing public trustworthiness before you could call it better. That kind of work is measured in decades.
The situation is less severe for file storage since you don't have as many attacks but, again, there just isn't something which is comparable on cost, performance, or reliability. I'm comfortable saying that's “known to be worse”.
> It simply gets tiring for people to argue ad infinitum about this with every non-believer.
And the true believers are the ones who will be lambo rich as long as they keep buying and holding, right? Just keep hyping up all these empty promises... some rube out there will buy into it.
- Brendan Eich was purged for being found to have donated to anti-gay marriage campaigns. Therefore, donating anonymously is obviously desirable for many people as your current beliefs may affect your career when the general rhetoric changes. Similarly, anonymous donations, which are very common, may be your preferred choice simply because you don't want the receiver or anyone else to know
- You were diagnosed with a mental disorder in your home country, and you move to a different country. In the new country, the medication you were prescribed is not available for pharmacies to sell. All the alternative medications you tried do not work, and it's illegal to buy your medication that was legal in the other country. With non-anonymous payments, buying the medication through financial services would put you at a high risk, so you would be forced to sacrifice your wellbeing/mental health.
- Your government is aggressively hyperinflating your national currency or capital controls limit the amount that you can cash out daily to $X. Use of credit or debit to pay out of the country is banned. You want to use a decentralized currency that need not be approved by the government or any other third party that you need to trust. Anonymity is optional, but perhaps you don't want to risk having your digital wealth traced back to your real ID.
- You value your privacy. Maybe because you don't want companies to sell your data for machine learning algorithms to track your payment behavior and apply "price discrimination" algorithms to you. Maybe you believe that it is only your business who you pay and what you pay for, and you don't trust that any of these will not be used against you in the future if used via a centralized entity.
All based on real events.
>I think that's where we disagree
We disagree that situations that are not relevant to you may be relevant to others?
"Brendan Eich was purged for being found to have donated to anti-gay marriage campaigns. "
I love how the takeaway from this is always, "We need more private ways to exchange money!" rather than, "You know, maybe you should have opinions that respect the human rights of others."
At the time, neither Hillary or Obama supported gay marriage. No political view can stand the wind of time. Should Hillary have been a viable candidate in 2016, given that she "didn't respect the human rights of others" in her 2008 run for the dem nomination?
A mere 10 years later you are insulting someone you likely don't know for 'not respecting human rights'!
Example 1: It's possible that eating non-labgrown meat will be considered a crime within fifty years. Who knows? Are you sure you want all of your current actions judged by some unknown future values?
Example 2: How sure are you that future society will agree with the current 'clump of cells' argument? Would you want to be on the record forever donating to abortion clinics? Your political ideology may not always be in charge either (Mike Pence).
Example 3: Society in a decade might consider us brutes for driving cars manually. How do we accept ~1/X000 high school students dying in car crashes, mostly by preventable causes (drinking, distractions, speeding, seat belt, etc).
We have not reached moral perfection as a society. Future society practicing moral relativism is not guaranteed. So, protect your future self, and protect your privacy.
It was an example. Change it to pro civil rights in the south in the 60s or something you agree with that becomes unpopular when political opinions change.
