I'm still very opposed to the idea of taking a technology and then searching a problem for it. Why? Back in 2017 during the first hype cycle, blockchain companies raised hundreds of millions with ICOs. I became very interested in the technology too, and some friends still work in this space. 4 years later in the web3 era, there is not a single product aside from trading/finance that got traction. Use cases like storing the history of a car on-chain, transparent supply chains, public voting... this all sounds interesting but never made it to product-market fit.
I always assume that I'm wrong, so I'll keep looking for successful applications and I'm sure you can prove me wrong :)
"Omnichain CEO Pratik Soni speaks to Inbound Logistics about the growing number of blockchain use cases in the supply chain, including in reverse logistics, product authentication and sustainability."
Apparently this company started with the idea that they would use the blockchain to make supply chains more transparent. And they raised money from investors with that goal in mind. But they have since retreated from that goal.
I worked with a retailer that worked with Omnichains. None of Omnichains tools had anything to do with the blockchain. Certainly, we were never given access to a blockchain, nor was it mentioned after we had signed the contract. Instead, we were granted limited access to an API that I believe was run with Ruby on Rails and MySQL. So at a certain point this company retreated to traditional technologies, rather than trying to use the blockchain.
This is one example. At some point I hope to write up some of the other examples that I've seen.
I do not believe anyone will ever find a legal use for blockchains that cannot be more easily served with traditional technologies.
> I do not believe anyone will ever find a legal use for blockchains that cannot be more easily served with traditional technologies.
One does not blockchain to build a product in the cleanest, most efficient manner.
One blockchains to have access to investors/speculators that control the gigantic pile of on-chain wealth that has accumulated over the past ten years, who would never sink $100k+ into a poorly drawn picture of an ape with sunglasses if it was running on Rails+MySQL.
This may sound like I'm being dismissive, so let me be clear, I am not - this is an extremely valid reason to chase this technology, and the existence of these (maybe ridiculous and shady, maybe not) massive stacks of digital cash is going to drive a lot of investment in the space, so if there is anything that can "break through" and prove real value beyond just targeting this wealth, someone is going to find it, likely as a side-effect of targeting these whales.
Web 1.0 couldn't have happened without the late 90s tech bubble, and as ridiculous as the Pets.com era hype was, when the dust settled there was much broader connectivity and a real market for the Internet companies that did live up to the hype over the next two decades.
One big issue is that the largest supply chain participants generally do not want transparency because they make their money on opacity. Transparency attracts more entrants, applicants, and competitors. It is business intelligence that provides important things like pricing advantages. When competitors can see your supply chain, they can do all kinds of stuff to make your life harder and gain an edge.
Almost everyone at every stage in the supply chain have an interest in opacity rather than transparency. The people who may want transparency want transparency for themselves but not for others: they want the equivalent of a one-way mirror to spy through. Naturally, people tend to react with extreme negativity to the installation of such one-way mirrors. Actual transparency is desired by almost no one. This is even true at the consumer level: the consumer may want to know the supply chain information for various purposes, regulators certainly want to know it, business partners certainly want supply chain documentation, but a consumer would balk at the notion that they expose all of their credit card transactions to the entire world at all times. It's always transparency for thee and not for me.
Most of the companies that tout blockchain seem to be doing so to attract free marketing and VC funding. Once they have that the real products seem to use the same old reliable tech that runs the entire internet.
There's selling NFTs of ape cartoons, or selling crypto coins or other imaginary assets.
Rails and MySQL are too transitory for that - you'd buy a record in the database only to find the company hosting the database had gone broke or been bought by Yahoo who closed them.
You buy a bitcoin and you can be fairly confident in a decade or two you'll still have it.
> You buy a bitcoin and you can be fairly confident in a decade or two you'll still have it.
You’ll have a copy of some hashes. That doesn’t mean anyone will want to buy them at the price you want or even that there will be an operating network around them.
This is especially important to learn when it comes to NFTs: blockchains are too inefficient to store the media so you’re still dependent on paying for outside hosting (yes, even with IPFS). Because you’re buying a link but not the rights, you would also need to make sure you have the right to even make your own mirror, too.
> You buy a bitcoin and you can be fairly confident in a decade or two you'll still have it.
And it will be worthless. Most assets that NFTs point to are already gone. Because that useless hash you have in your NFT? It points to a centralised storager somewhere.
>Rails and MySQL are too transitory for that - you'd buy a record in the database only to find the company hosting the database had gone broke or been bought by Yahoo who closed them.
Wouldn't working with more robust companies (like banks) solve this?
I guess it does to an extent with things like share ownership. Although there are ongoing costs for the various peoples salaries at the institutions involved.
You're missing the point. The goal when you use blockchain is not to more easily serve. It is all the things that don't matter to you until it is too late, like censorship resistance.
Censorship compared to what? What can’t you post on the internet? Specifically that the government would stop you from, not private companies like Twitter booting people.
There is no censorship resistance with blockchain.
You’re still beholden to the whims of centralized developers and miners.
You’re still beholden to a court order. If the government wants to confiscate your crypto assets they can simply put you in jail until you provide the location of your private key.
If the government can penetrate offshore bank accounts they’ll have no trouble with your crypto wallet.
I’m happily mining ETH with gminer on flexpool.io and selling the coins as fast as I get them just like I did with BTC a decade ago. Because I know this whole thing is a temporary pyramid scheme.
Because when there is an immutable record of all transactions you ever did in perpetuity, you’ll be so much better off in a fascist run country.
The freedom to fuck your life over, forever, in record the moment you make that one transaction that connects your identity is sure worth the fact that it’s uncensorable.
> Use cases like storing the history of a car on-chain, transparent supply chains, public voting... this all sounds interesting but never made it to product-market fit.
Anything that does not exist natively on the blockchain doesn't need a blockchain at all.
If a token on the blockchain would represent you as the owner of a car and one day someone steals your private key which represents your car ownership, that person is now the owner of your car. Still, the car keys are located in your house, the license plate is registered on your name and address, the insurance is on your name.
I guess I don't need to explain further how ridiculous that idea is that a token would officially represent you as the car owner.
I don't see why something like insurance needs a token on a decentralized blockchain. The Bitcoin blockchain needs a token because the token itself represents the value (BTC) inside the network. The token is also needed because it adds an incentive for nodes (miners) to support the network.
Note: this is my current view of it. If someday it turns out it is useful, I am happy to admit that I was wrong.
You're missing the forest for the trees. Bitcoin is broken and will never be more than a speculative asset with no intrinsic value. Blockchains can solve problems. Decentralisation can quickly become federation. Example: a global id system where the "miners" are countries. It removes the need of physical passports and their associated costs and delays.
> You're missing the forest for the trees. Bitcoin is broken and will never be more than a speculative asset with no intrinsic value.
I disagree. It's off-topic so I'm not going start an endless discussion about intrinsic value.
> Decentralisation can quickly become federation. Example: a global id system where the "miners" are countries. It removes the need of physical passports and their associated costs and delays.
As long as humans submit the external data to the blockchain someone can cheat with the data. Actually, cheating is a nice feature if you need double passports for diplomats, spies or informants. The result is a blockchain with permanent records with data you can not fully trust because the data did not exist on the blockchain in the first place.
I'm all for a digital solution instead of physical passports but I do believe this can be solved with distributed systems and international standards, instead of permanent records on a decentralized blockchain.
> As long as humans submit the external data to the blockchain someone can cheat with the data.
I am glad to see someone else who realizes this point. When people were all excited about supply chain blockchains (for example, a blockchain to verify a piece of fruit is picked in a certain place at a certain time, that the transportation truck maintains a certain temperature) I kept asking what stops someone from lying and putting in bad data or tampering with any sensors along the way? There seemed to be this idea that what was on a blockchain was automatically truth just because it was on a blockchain.
I think the only good case is with KSI, but that's not actually a blockchain even if they use the name in marketing.
In their case, they limit themselves to verifiable timestamped witness. Someone can still submit bad data, but now you have a log that at time T entity E submitted document D, and if it turns out to be fraudulent you can't backdate or put a different one for it (could be also used to detect tampering with sensors if you receive something that shouldn't pass a sensor that worked correctly yet you obviously have it)
I'm thinking of a blockchain where the ledger is public read (for verifications) and write-constrained. How can you verify the.legitimacy of the introduced data? Probably some other tool. But it being federated across countries would have the nice property of non-gatekeeping. There are politics in play, but if the UN is possible, só is such a system.
This is all just my theoretical assessment, anyway. And I agree that other standards and toolchain is necessary to add value. Blockchains don't do KYC nor identity verification and a lot of other things.
You’d have to get those countries to agree on a common set of governance rules, and inevitably some bloc of countries would eventually fork and go it on their own because they want a different set of rules (e.g. mandatory biometric data, inability to update passport data like gender, etc). I’m not sure it solves any problems that the diplomatic system doesn’t already solve.
This also ignores that the costs and delays associated with passports are frequently the point — you can’t have a corrupt official ask for a cash payment to “expedite” your passport / visa application if it’s fast to begin with, and doling out those kinds of patronage positions to the right people is often how you build a winning political coalition domestically.
> you can’t have a corrupt official ask for a cash payment to “expedite” your passport / visa application if it’s fast to begin with
And yet this happens. Theoretically the blockchain reduces the entry barrier more, while not compromising on compliance and security guarantees.
You're spot on that countries would have to agree, and different blocks could form. It's no different than trade and visa agreements. The blockchain doesn't solve the problem IMO,it just reduces the cost. Trust in institutions will never be replaced by the blockchain.
I’m not convinced that blockchains would actually reduce the cost or provide any benefit over a federated system where each nation (or group of nations like the EU) controls the data of its own citizens. I run into this problem with nearly every potential blockchain application I hear: it’s usually faster / cheaper / less disruptive to use a centralized or federated system governed by legal agreements that are hashed out in negotiations.
Politics underpins all of it — a lot of blockchain advocates look at blockchain as a way to sidestep political squabbles, when really the politics exist at a lower level of the stack upon which blockchain governance rules are built. A nation could unilaterally cease participation in any blockchain at any time, and use political pressure in other areas (trade, defense, etc) to get other nations to join them.
Blockchains can, and most likely will, be federated. Legal agreements can be managed via such a system. Bear in mind that the blockchain does not solve politics, and all the problems you mention are a problem of the currently most common implementation of a blockchain, which is cryptocurrencies.
But like, why? Sure, blockchain can do a lot of things, but it’s not clear that it’s better than an API for the vast majority of applications while being worse in a number of ways. You can put similar governance rules on an API without the complexity. The flexibility inherent in human interpretation of legal agreements is a key feature of a common law system like we have in the US.
To echo the author’s thesis, we’re no longer in the early days of blockchain. We’re over a decade in and nobody has gained traction with a use case that isn’t purely speculative. That in and of itself should say something.
Blockhains can be as simple as an API. See the 7 layer stack in the Nexus blockchain (you definitely don't need to go smart contract all the time).
I think the author exaggerates a bit the tone. Sure, 10 years is a lot of Internet time. But the steam engine took 50 years to become viable. Then the industrial revolution was a period of 80 years. Put that into perspective.
I guess, by speculative, you mean the cryptocurrency craze.and I can agree is a speculative bubble, an MLM scheme. But then you also have https://cyber.ee/resources/news/digital-identity-and-blockch... . You'll soon have CDBCs. And when it's here, you'll barely remember what this conversation.
I’ve done some work in the supply chain space around blockchain; the problem is that in many industries there is already an oligopoly of 2 or 3 companies that control things. They have no incentive to give up any amount of control; instead preferring to lock their customers in to their products and platforms. Governments are the same in an international sense.
The technical problems are solvable. The political ones are not.
> a global id system where the "miners" are countries.
Can I mine on this blockchain? If not, what stops me? If it's some permission I need, then what's the point of using a blockchain? Why not just have countries issue digital certificates for passports?
It sounds like you're in the "Blockchain not Bitcoin" phase that was all the rage around 2017 or so ("we're going to put cows on the blockchain!"). Most of us either moved on from that to purely on-chain financial chicanery (defi, nft) or became disillusioned with it.
I believe the promise of having an insurance contract publicly verified by a decentralised system is to reduce the inherent costs of the current regulated system.
In my country,and I assume in most it's the same, in order for you to sign a buy contract for a house, there has to be a notary involved. The whole process costs a significant percentage of your already heavy purchase.
A blockchain won't solve all the problems here, but it may cut a few middlemen. And it doesn't have to be on ethereum or bitcoin. The Estonian (or is it the Finnish?) Government already uses a blockchain for their digital id system.
The notary is a teeny-tiny portion of the expense in the homebuying process. And you'd still need a lawyer involved if your transaction involves mortgages (and likely you'd still want one anyway to construct the transaction). Putting deeds on the blockchain changes the homebuying process almost not at all.
As for state IDs... why not just a centralized database with a public API? What does decentralization achieve for a system that is fundamentally centralized. Nobody can issue an ID except the government in this case.
The promise of blockchain is to eventually remove lawyers and all middleman. It can be done already with existing tech. I can easily imagine a smart contract managing property rights, another one managing mortgages, etc. And of course all that has a back door so a court order can rollback a transaction.
if we are trusting courts to have backdoors, does it not completely negate the purpose of blockchains, i.e. trustlessness
if you trust the court, why not just have them store everything on some mysql database and execute all the ""smart"" contracts as regular java code? blockchains are necessarily orders of magnitude worse in terms of performance. why do you want to use an extremely slow linked list based DB?
No, because courts can be elected by voting on the blockchain which gives society a way to control them. And voting on the chain (if implemented right) cannot be controlled that easily by a government.
I’m all for the central database. To enter data into it the government will appoint an agency which in turn will appoint individuals after they pass exams or get their license. The said individuals will have to fill in regular reports that had to be somehow processed and analyzed. Also each such individual required to keep records in a safe manner, sometimes this means hiring a security and a compliance officer. At this point it is not clear if the cost of maintaining the agency and all that people is less than automating the agency of the blockchain.
i dont know how to explain this to you but the only thing that blockchains replace are databases like mysql. if, for whatever reason you needed a security and a compliance officer, then you would still need them even if you switch to blockchains. if you needed to file reports using a centralized db, then you would still need them with blockchains.
the only difference between centralized databases and blockchains is the property of trustlessness. everything else can be done much more efficiently by normal databases. if you dont need trustlessness then you dont need blockchains
> i dont know how to explain this to you but the only thing that blockchains replace are databases like mysql.
This is just one half. The other half is blockchain and smart contracts also replace all the people involved in controlling access to a central database. I can imagine a smart contract that would allow me to transfer ownership of my car to you and get paid in return. I cannot imagine an API to a central database that can do the same. One thing you can do to defeat my point is to show how such an API can be built.
You got me, lawyers can stay :) But a bunch of clerks and middleman are out.
Today the job of a middleman/clerk is to modify a centralized database in a regulated way. They got their licenses, exams, special education and so on. There is a government machinery behind every such database - agencies, controllers, educators, bookkeepers, etc. While you may be paying $4 for a notary signature you might be paying way more from your tax money to keep governing bodies running across the country.
My point is statement that a centralized database is cheap because it is easy to modify simply ignores governance cost which might be huge.
The reason why lawyers and middlemen are required is not because authority is too centralized into the relevant governing bodies. They're there for lots and lots of other reasons that blockchain can't help with.
The only reason why we have trusted middleman is because before bitcoin there was no scalable solution to Byzantine generals problem. Now we have it. Whenever this solution is better than having a central entity appointing middleman is remains to be seen.
Blockchains can reduce number of middleman we have to deal with. The open question is at what cost.
Mire important than a notary is title insurance. Title insurance is a form of insurance that protects lenders and homebuyers from financial loss from an improper title to a property, for instance someone selling you a property they don’t own.
This is the kind of thing at first glance people say is made for the blockchain, but in reality the incumbent solution is actually pretty reasonable and the actual gains from a new system are negligible.
> the incumbent solution is actually pretty reasonable and the actual gains from a new system are negligible.
This is especially true when you learn about the nasty edge cases title insurance helps with. A lot of people trying to drum up buyers for their hashes talk like the value comes from recording the chain of transfers when you're really paying for things like handling cases where, say, a surveyor made a mistake in 1952 and now two landowners have legal ownership of overlapping properties or some mistake in probate three owners ago meant that someone has a claim on 10% of it.
Title Insurance is indeed a racket at this point. Their payouts are a tiny percentage of their overall premiums. As you mention, this seems like a good option but in fact isn't a good one.
In order to replace title insurance and make it so anybody can verify the state of a property you need to first make all liens ever live on the blockchain. That's the hard part here. If it is possible to have a lien on a home without that appearing on a blockchain then there is still a need for somebody to review the title.
Further, there is no need for decentralization! The state can simply operate a centralized append-only database where transactions are recorded and liens are created and publish that to everybody.
It is true that the price of title insurance is very small compared to the price of the house. But their expected payouts are still a smaller percentage of their premiums than other insurance.
Torrens title is the boring have a database solution. It solves messy issues like courts having to determine if a lien is valid and recording it if so by changing the DB.
FWIW, I think a notary signature in the US costs like $4. If verification is the only problem that blockchain solves, it's not a very cost-effective solution.
For me, a US notary signature currently involved a 2 month wait time at the US embassy. At the notary I used back in San Francisco, it cost $30, not including the cost of going there.
> The Estonian (or is it the Finnish?) Government already uses a blockchain for their digital id system.
if the estonian government is operating and enforcing it, why do you even need the blockchain bit? just put the database onto mysql and and make a website for people to transfer ownership online
If home ownership was on a distributed blockchain, local regulators would rapidly discover a need for something like a notary to verify that the transaction has been done correctly on the correct blockchain by the people who actually own it, so as to ensure the consumer isn't sitting on the other side of the table with someone not bamboozling them about their ownership of the house, or bamboozling them about their transfer of ownership, or so and so forth. The notary would also validate that the transfer has successfully been completed on the blockchain respected by the local governing authorities, and has been filled out completely correctly.
You might think this is silly, but fake selling of homes is actually thing that happens! I don't just mean that regulators would do it for gatekeeping purposes, I mean there would be a real need for this. In the bizarre circumstance that this move to the blockchain actually happened for home ownership, the HN gestalt would rapidly be screaming for legislation and regulation around blockchain changes.
Which means, once again, that blockchain is solving a problem that doesn't exist here. The problem with home ownership and the problem notaries are solving was never that the authority was too centralized into the relevant governing bodies.
That's the reason why after 11 years blockchain has exactly one use case, and even that one is dubiously solved IMHO. It brilliantly solves problems we don't actually have.
I believe you're downplaying the potential here (and I'm overplaying it). A particular blockchain you could immediately verify home ownership online via some sort of signature with the public key from a seller seems like providing the same type of guarantees. Is it 100% safe? Certainly not. But considering your notary might be a fraud, a scammer or just not very good at what he does...
Compare the example with withdrawing money: you can go to an ATM and withdraw money for no fee, depending of the country. Do it in the bank, there I an associated fee.
The legal system would still have to adopt it though. And it's an industry less prone to digital innovation. And there is no financial incentive, as there is no narrow profit margin you need to optimize. So yes, it may never happen.
Typewriters had immediate value: buy one and you can produce easier to read documents faster — a very fast writer might do as much as 30 words per minute, which is like a third of a proficient typist’s throughput. Businesses bought them rapidly because it meant the same number of clerks could do more work and you reduced errors due to bad handwriting.
Put another way, the first commercial typewriter was sold in 1874 and was an immediate success. By the 1880s, typist was a booming field — especially for women seeking employment outside of the home.
Blockchains have been commercially active for 13 years at this point. If Bitcoin shut off tomorrow, the only reason anyone who isn’t involved in shilling it would know is that all of the speculators would be screaming for government bailouts.
The GP pulled one of the cryptobro rhetorical scams: X existing technology took Y years to catch on!
Besides the statements rarely actually being true they're nonsensical. A typewriter (or whatever technology they point out) has obvious utility. No honest assessment of whatever they can bring up will say that X technology is useless. Maybe at the time typewriters we're released fountain pen manufacturers or penmanship clubs said they were useless. But they have a vested interest in the status quo.
I don't think most anyone pointing out flaws in cryptocurrencies have a vested interest in the status quo. I certainly don't. I don't and doubt you have some sort of short against Bitcoin or own a bank full of fiat currency.
The cryptobros can't seem to fathom that they got sold on a bunch of useless shit. When they're not at the top of the Ponzi scheme they can't seem to conceptualize that they've been had. It's kind of sad to see. At the same time it's infuriating because their scam is literally wasting a small country worth of electricity to mint Geoffrey dollars.
> The cryptobros can't seem to fathom that they got sold on a bunch of useless shit.
I think it’s more that they can’t afford to acknowledge it: the only way cryptocurrency has meaning is if they can line up a buyer, and as soon as you allow that to be questioned those big dreams about becoming as rich as the people selling them on “web3” start to look pretty unlikely. A lot of these people have built their vision of the future on very high returns and the only way that happens is if they donate their time pro bono to the major investors backing these companies.
So your reasoning does not deal with anything we're discussing, rather you go on describing people as cryptobros, define their characteristics and then make a conclusion, based on what you think. So you didn't bring anything to the conversation other than your wrongly held opinions. I could go on my own exploration and conclude that you, speaking in such a way, don't know what you are talking about.
Not having to speak to anyone to do it. I don't know if blockchain is going to go anywhere but I think there's inherent advantages in not talking to anyone (and being able to do it programatically) to do banking-like things. What you get in exchange is lack of security, no recourse when things go wrong, and possibly being in the same space as criminals. But there's a palpable advantage to not having to interact with any humans in order to do things that historically require a lot of meat space interactions that now can be automated by anyone in their home.
It's like having access to a completely deregulated bank ran by the mafia that has an API anyone can use. I think there's use cases for that, though maybe not the ones the community usually mentions.
But like.....what kind of things can you do without interacting with people when using a blockchain? Name anything. My insurance policy I bought online and I can manage entirely online, change the address, the car, the add-ons, add and remove drivers as well as cars......what exactly is blockchain allowing me to do here that I can't do already?
Same with the bank. I don't think I ever had to speak to my bank in the 8 years I've been with them, or even been to their branch for that matter. You do everything online or in the app.
IMO it is because so many people have a kind of sexual fetish of technophilia.
They literally get off on new technology. It doesn't matter if it doesn't solve anything. It just needs to feel new and as if progress is being made. As long as it feels new and like progress the technophile will be happy to reinvent the wheel.
Even the word technophile has positive connotations as opposed to something deviant in our society. We don't even have a word for a deviant technophile , deviant over obsession with nonsense and "the next big thing".
With this attitude, nothing. I've compared it to an unregulated banking API. So for example you can launder money, do transfers that don't go through KYC, among other things.
By now you can also do things that benefit from the network effect of crypto enthusiasts, for example, you can sell JPEGs from a no-name artist for significant amounts of money, which would historically be difficult for outsider-art, regardless of the fact that you're not even selling the actual rights to the images. It also proved to be an interesting way to speculate on internet memes.
There's millions of people using this ecosystem, even if it ends up being overall net negative for the world and a temporary technological distraction, I think one should be able to neutrally assess what it's being used for. You may not like it but it's like saying a nuclear bomb has no use. You may not like what it's being used for, and it may be immoral or illegal, but to say there's no uses when clearly millions are engaging with it and doing "stuff", seems short-sighted for the purposes of discussion.
So it's only good for circumventing crippling social phobia? How many people suffer from those? And, hey, I've been using non-Blockchain-based online banking since around the turn of the century; can't recall when I last spoke to a bank teller, but it must have been well over a decade ago[1]. So even that use case is adequately solved without Blockchain.
___
[1]: Except for buying some foreign cash before going on vacation, that may have been in 2012. Do the clerks at Forex count as bank tellers?
no they didn't ask the same question, because the electronic keyboard had solved some problems better than a typewriter.
I think there are problems that are suited to be solved on the blockchain - like land titles, domain names, etc. But the existing solution to those problems are adequate, and the sudden change is too costly.
It's worse than not serving any purpose. It's information about your life that is forever stored out in the open. Except for some limited cases, it's no ones business to know whether I am insured and for how much.
Agree, and once quantum comps are more readily available - re-analyzing the entire chain and profiling individuals will be so easy, an AWS quant rental will be able to decrypt and do it.
I don't even know if quantum is necessary for that. There's already blockchain analysis tools. All you have to do is slip up once and tie a wallet that you didn't want anyone to know about to your identity and then it's relatively easy for those tools to be used to see everything you've done.
I almost paid for something with bitcoin once because they weren't taking anything else. Nothing illegal but also something I wouldn't want the world to know I paid for. I ended up choosing not to because I didn't want that transaction forever stored on the blockchain.
You're totally off. All those things you said _can_ go on the blockchain including the private key that they could use to start the car. Of course they can sell it for parts...if the parts didn't have private key protection too...
Someone has to do the data entry into the blockchain. You end up having to trust this person, which completely negates the purpose of the blockchain: trustlessness.
For supply chain issues the Oracle problem is very apparent. How does your smart contract know if the shipment has actually reached its destination?
The government enforces property rights though, so it's not a matter of distributed consensus, it's a matter of who the government views as the rightful owner. In a property dispute, a court might look at a number of factors: occupation and use, maintenance and upkeep of the property, paying bills associated with the property, registration of a deed with a title office, etc.
A digital signature on a blockchain somewhere means nothing. How do you connect it with the real property? All of the other above things go some way to demonstrating a real connection to the property. A block chain does not. It's the same problem all blockchain solutions have: verifying the data at the point of entry to the block chain. If that is distributed and can not be trusted and verified remotely, then the existence of it in a block chain does not help.
I'll create PropertyBlock™ blockchain tomorrow and sign a block with your property address it over to myself. Worthless.
Exactly, and while the government database "land registry" could, of course, be replaced with a government "HouseChain" it wouldn't actually solve any Problem but would introduce a ton of new ones.
However, if you have no government, the housechain could be a way for a decentralized society to implement the concept of a land registry. Once everyone agrees that the housechain is proof of ownership, then measures can be taken to enforce that without necessarily evoking a central government.
I'm not sold on the idea of a society without a central government, but I think the blockchain would help — or even enable — such an experiment.
The people in charge of enforcement would become a de facto government. What distinguishes a government from any other organization is the monopoly on violence (more precisely, the monopoly on deciding when and how violent measures can be employed), and enforcing property rights sometimes requires violence (e.g. if someone refuses to leave your home, eventually the police will have to physically remove them against their will).
Blockchains do nothing at all to help anything about this situation. You could use a blockchain to manage ownership, but it would be far more efficient to use a central database of some kind that is held by whatever organization is responsible for enforcing property rights. In the end you are not going to care how your ownership is managed, you are only going to care that, if someone tries to violate your rights, the police will come and protect you. You need to trust that the enforcement will actually be applied, but what difference does it make if you use a blockchain?
In a decentralized society, there may be multiple organizations deciding on when and how violent measures can be employed — and they could be as small as one person. If each organization thinks a different person is the owner of a property, that would be very unstable. However, if they all agree that a certain blockchain implementation of deeds is what decides ownership, then they can co-exist more peacefully. Not saying there aren't other hurdles, but that is certainly one of the big ones.
That does require that most of the society agrees on some set of principles, but that's true of a centralized government too: most of the society has to agree they are legitimate. Going back to the decentralized society, everyone would agree that the blockchain determines ownership and currency. So, an organization that accept those is viewed as legitimate, one that doesn't is illegitimate. In that scenario, illegitimate organizations would be less stable than legitimate ones.
So, the existence of a system that allows people to all agree in things like currency and ownership without giving that power to one specific organization is a step forward into making decentralized societies possible. Is it sufficient? Most likely not.
It is indeed not. I'm not claiming that all problems are solved and that decentralized governments are easy or even possible. Just that blockchains solves some of the problems in that area.
> In a decentralized society, there may be multiple organizations deciding on when and how violent measures can be employed [...] a system that allows people to all agree in things like currency and ownership without giving that power to one specific organization
What, did you read Snow Crash as u- in stead of dystopian? What's to say they'll all agree?!?
The important point is what happens when two of those organisations disagree. What happens when I have Mr Chen's Robot Dog Republic saying I own a property -- because they have the blockchain to prove it -- and evicting you on my behalf, while you have the Cosa Nostra Pizza Delivery Co. saying you own it -- because they have the blockchain to prove that -- and evicting me on your behalf?
Civil war, that's what happens.
Decentralising stuff that everyone needs to agree on sucks.
You cannot get your hacked bitcoins back even if you are the government with police and army. Lots of things that government does can be replaced with a smart contract. Hey, you can even have direct democracy - vote with your citizen token for a change in a smart contract and voala the law changed and immediately enforced.
It could be the norm. It all depends on how the society is organized. If there is a system of law and a court and you prove someone stole something from you, the government will coerce that person to give you back or pay some sort of fine. For instance, even if the system says you own those bitcoins, a court can rule that you give it back to the person you hacked and also pay for the costs of the case. The same goes for smart contracts. A court may rule that the contract is invalid and require one of the parties to pay the other, regardless of the smart contract. So, that technology doesn't, in and on itself, revolutionize any of that. However, it could be made into law that a court cannot revert a smart contract or that the contents of a digital wallet belongs to whoever has it, regardless of how it was obtained.
In the absence of a governing authority, property disputes would revert to being settled by violence or the threat thereof.
Why should my band of armed thugs defer to what it says on the blockchain when they could instead hit you with a $5 wrench until you vacate the premises? https://xkcd.com/538
I'm hopeful that when the Ponzi schemes fade away, we'll end up with a slightly more informed populace that has inadvertently received an introduction to political science, state-building, the origins of power, etc. Civics teachers take note! :)
Almost the entire populace will be more informed -- except for the Ponzi-"coin" proponents, because they're busy innoculating themselves against reason by... Well, being Ponzi-"coin" proponents; strengthening their own biases by debating in favour of these ludicrous schemes. Like, right here on this page.
Then in the end, we all live by the rules established by whoever has the largest band of thugs. Good thing we got rid of government and created this libertarian utopia.
Because everyone else around them would help defend the validity of the deeds, as they all own property in the same way. Like I said before, I'm far far away from having all the answers about how to set up a decentralized society and I'm not even sure I would like to live in such a society. However, issuing deeds and currency is an important job that currently you need a central government you trust to do. With a blockchain that problem is solved. There are plenty of other problems besides that. But it is one less item in the checklist.
> Because everyone else around them would help defend the validity of the deeds, as they all own property in the same way.
That feels a bit like saying that everyone will pitch in to stop mugging since we all carry physical cash in the same way. Maybe some civilians would intervene some of the time, but most will not risk their own bodily autonomy to defend another's property.
Issuing deeds and currency feels like the easy part of creating an agreed upon land registry or economy. I have a printer and know how to use SQLite, so nothing is stopping me from issuing my own physical currency or deeds today. I could even save paper and put them on my own personal blockchain. Convincing others to honor my currency or deeds sounds like the hard part.
It is not the easy part if you want a decentralized government because no one person can be tasked with issuing and governing over those, otherwise that person will have power over everyone and kind of defeat the purpose. That doesn't mean that there aren't other equally or even harder challenges. I was not claiming that blockchains was the last problem stopping us from becoming decentralized. Anyway, like you said, nothing prevents you from issuing your currency and deeds today. And, before blockchains, the only way to have a decentralized government would be for many people to do that. However, that system is more fragile than a system built on a single blockchain everyone agrees on.
The big thing about blockchains is that it allows people to all agree on a certain asset, without giving control of that asset to a single party. That is big news for anyone group wanting to live in a decentralized society, because it was one of the big problems.
Reality (eg, Jews in Nazi germany) shows that this is bullshit.
If the local government and population is on your side, then you're fine.
If however you're a minority that's now deemed to be the enemy, then what supposedly belongs to you doesn't matter one bit. You can prove it as mathematically as you want, and you can have your neighbors on your side, but if a bigger army of goons shows up to take your stuff, they'll take it.
Ultimately this is an entirely political problem, and the blockchain will simply be completely ignored if things go to shit.
I think you're missing the point. I agree with everything you said. The validity of everything comes from the people (the majority at least) agreeing on the legitimacy of something. Everyone agrees on the legitimacy of the dollar, so that's why it has value. However, by agreeing on that, we give USA's central bank a lot of control over it and, therefore, power. If everyone agrees that dollars are worthless, but bitcoins have value instead, then the central bank has a lot less control. Moreover, a society without a central government would never be able to agree on any fiat money without the blockchain. Now, such society could do so. Also, that society would have a hard time evaluating the legitimacy of deeds without the blockchain. So that is yet another feature that can help building such society if one so inclines.
Things like BTC are even worse. BTC has two main sources of control:
1. The developers. Somebody has to develop the software, and no matter what, this ends up being a very select group. If you have multiple groups, that's still not a lot of people and they'll have to cooperate somehow, which will result in some sort of system you're not involved with.
2. The miners. They group up into pools, and there's not that many of them that are big enough to matter.
Those two groups are the ones truly in control, and they're unelected, unaccountable, and have their own interests and agendas. If you think the banks are bad, then using a system made of a cabal distributed among the globe is hardly better.
Decentralized software development already exists, we trust it and it works. Besides, as long as you speak the same protocol and use the same data, lots of people can roll out their own software. But indeed, if a small enough percentage of the population control enough of the mining power things could collapse or at least degenerate back to a centralized society. It is up to the members of a decentralized society to do their share of mining and be in the lookout for that not to happen. In order for a society to be decentralized and remain so, a big majority has to want that and hold it as one of their values. It has to be something embedded in the culture. It is the opposite problem of trying to build a decentralized society over fiat money. In that case, you want the fewest people possible printing money. That's the reason BTC can work for a decentralized society, but the regular currency we use today would not.
> Decentralized software development already exists, we trust it and it works.
Not in the way needed. You probably means git, which yes, allows for distributed development in that unlike previous systems it doesn't rely on a central server to exchange code.
But that doesn't mean people don't organize. I review people's code. People review mine. There's a list of people that's been agreed that are in control of a project. There's somebody who owns the domain, somebody who builds installers and makes releases, somebody who can say "no" to adding some code.
> Besides, as long as you speak the same protocol and use the same data, lots of people can roll out their own software.
Cryptocurrency is to a huge extent about the contents and management of this data. So nearly anything interesting will need cooperation. This means a small group getting together and figuring out how to change the protocol.
> But indeed, if a small enough percentage of the population control enough of the mining power things could collapse or at least degenerate back to a centralized society.
It already is centralized. The decentralization is more theory than practice.
> It is up to the members of a decentralized society to do their share of mining and be in the lookout for that not to happen.
They already failed, then. And no wonder, because 99.9% of the world is not even capable of having opinions here. Like if you show a random person a diff from the bitcoin git, they couldn't tell you what it does, let alone if it's a good or bad thing.
Even if you can, there's lock-in. If you already put a significant amount of effort and money into say, BTC, there's a cost to pulling out. So a lot of people will stick around even if things aren't exactly to their liking. This means there's a variety of changes that can be made for the worse with impunity on the part of the people in control.
> In order for a society to be decentralized and remain so, a big majority has to want that and hold it as one of their values.
Then it's an outright impossibility. It's the downfall of all libertarian schemes, the idea that everyone is passionate about governance. The vast majority of people want to lounge on the sofa, not to attend regular meetings with their neighbors to discuss a variety of issues like roads and sanitation.
Really, a democracy offers lots of ways of participating that the vast majority doesn't use. I don't see crypto changing that.
> if you have no government, the housechain could be a way for a decentralized society to implement the concept of a land registry. Once everyone agrees that the housechain is proof of ownership, then measures can be taken
Once everyone agrees on anything, they can agree to have a centralised real estate ownership registry. Or a whole centralised government.
Your idea seems to be a thought experiment with weird priors. (Feels like that makes it rather meaningless.)
I don't have the answers, but I'm easily drawn to such thought experiments: all the neighbors would agree with you that you're the owner and not the person who sold you the deed but wants to remain inside of it or some intruder or whatever. So, when you knock on their door and try to remove them, you'll get support from the local people who will try to respect what's in the "housechain". It is in their interest that the deeds are respected, because they also own their houses that way.
That's beside the point, though. I'm just noting that the possibility of have distributed deeds does make it possible to have some of the benefits of a centralized government: deeds and currency, without having one. That obviously only works if everyone in the society has come to the agreement that those things are valuable (just like in case of central governments too). But the point is just that you don't need a central person with all the power of issuing them.
This is only true if people with guns will show up to kick somebody else out of the house that you own the token for or if we figure out a way to completely eliminate antisocial behavior voluntarily.
A blockchain (or the contracts that run upon any particular one) could also incentivize a distributed group of participants to take it upon themselves to temporarily and physically enforce some ones else's real world claims (a signed tx from the same addr with the on chain claim putting their owner ship up as collateral to be liquidated at a discount conditional if the buyer can secure the premises by any means necessarily, some onchain decentralized AMM prediction markets already have alot of this functionality and more), esp if those up for the task already have the means to do so and the potential payout is enough… irrespective of a particular jurisdiction laws.
Gets even more interesting when people can buy puts and calls on someones liquidation via options dex.
A few of the ex-mil people in a DAO i'm apart of are really interested in this space growing for services like that, for obvious reasons.
> if the buyer can secure the premises by any means necessarily
How does the blockchain know that said access has been secured? Is it up to the original requestor to confirm this? If so, what if they're malicious and don't want to do so as to not give up their collateral? If it's down to a neutral third-party acting as an oracle, what prevents said third-party from being bribed/coerced/hacked into providing false data to the blockchain?
All of this can be solved by the law (eventually escalating to people allowed to use deadly force), but at that point why do you even need a blockchain?
Blockchain only works for assets that live entirely on the blockchain, such as cryptocurrencies. Anything that lives in the real-world is a bad use-case for blockchains as you now need a centralized, trusted third-party to sync the state of the blockchain with the state of the real world, at which point you may just do away with the blockchain entirely and let the third-party run a good old database.
> How does the blockchain know that said access has been secured? Is it up to the original requestor to confirm this? If so, what if they're malicious and don't want to do so as to not give up their collateral? If it's down to a neutral third-party acting as an oracle, what prevents said third-party from being bribed/coerced/hacked into providing false data to the blockchain?
Auger[0] has something like this:
"Reputation (REP) and (REPv2) is a cryptocurrency, used by reporters during market dispute phases of Augur. REP and REPv2 holders must perform work, in the form of staking their REP or REPv2 on correct outcomes, to receive a portion of the markets settlement fees. If you do not report correctly, you do not get the fees. If you report incorrectly, you lose your REP or REPv2. If you don’t participate in a fork (when the network has a very large dispute over an outcome), you permanently lose your ability to migrate your REP or REPv2 to a forked universe, making it functionally useless within the used version of the Augur Protocol, and in theory making it worthless. Passive holders of Reputation (REP or REPv2) that are not using their Reputation (REP or REPv2) within the Augur protocol to stake on disputes and forks are penalized. The treatment of REP and REPv2 within the Augur protocol is governed not by the Forecast Foundation but by the protocols smart contracts as described in the Augur white paper and documentation."
Other protocols may handle things differently.
> All of this can be solved by the law (eventually escalating to people allowed to use deadly force), but at that point why do you even need a blockchain?
Assuming if the law in all jurisdictions around the world were as sufficient for all cases presently and into the future. Also this assumes that its not the enforcers of a particular law aren't also the ones that the on chain claimant wants to take action against (again, the payout would need to be high enough for those to incentivize action against a particular jurisdictions enforcers, which need not necessarily mean engaging on the property, but anything to get the enforcers to back off even going after friends and family and their property in retaliation [which is more doable in jurisdictions who databases with such sensitive information have been compromised])
What if many people collude so that the general consensus is wrong? What if many people are coerced (by their government/etc) to report wrongly?
> Assuming if the law in all jurisdictions around the world were as sufficient for all cases presently and into the future.
Are you saying that there should be one global jurisdiction and law? That is a completely separate can of worms.
At the moment the only law that matters is the law that can be enforced, which is generally the law of the country where you reside or have assets that can be seized, and this system appears to work well enough for everyone involved.
The law can also be changed if needed. I'm not sure how a blockchain can account for all future use-cases without changes either.
> What if many people collude so that the general consensus is wrong? What if many people are coerced (by their government/etc) to report wrongly?
Well according to how auger has it, those people will lose their funds they had to put up as collateral to vote on a particular market dispute outcome either through proof of their wrong decision or by a network fork if many people are in disagreement on an outcome and the many people don't bother migrating over to the forks ("you permanently lose your ability to migrate your REP or REPv2 to a forked universe, making it functionally useless within the used version of the Augur Protocol, and in theory making it worthless"). Seems like those people will have to continually pay for tokens that will be worthless as the network keeps forking as other non coerced reporters do not.
> Are you saying that there should be one global jurisdiction and law? That is a completely separate can of worms.
No, many contracts may operate simultaneously, and some even over shared claims in market disputes (at least what i get from how auger describes itself as enabling). I don't dissagree that it can be of worms though, but people can be incentivized during every step of the way in a variety of different ways. I just wanted to point that it is possible now with the tools that are viable that don't need to rely on a particular jurisdictions laws.
> The law can also be changed if needed. I'm not sure how a blockchain can account for all future use-cases without changes either.
The way to change laws may or may not be compatible with someone uploading a new contract and particular protocols users agreeing to abide by it with their assets at stake on market disputes.
It seems to be that for the blockchain to have an understanding of the real world it needs an oracle. That oracle can be made of many different actors each staking some funds and the "correct" value is determined by the value with the most funds staked against it. This still doesn't prevent coercion of a large majority or just a very rich whale betting on achieving what is essentially a 51% attack on the network.
> many contracts may operate simultaneously, and some even over shared claims in market disputes
Potentially - I don't disagree that the tech can technically do this, but ultimately it's still down to 1) people choosing to use it (as opposed to traditional contracts enforced by judges & subsequent law enforcement personnel) and 2) that whatever outcome reached by the blockchain can successfully be enforced in the real world - you'd need a government with jurisdiction upon the disputed assets to recognize the blockchain's outcome as legitimate and enforce it. People are unlikely to do "1" if they're not confident that "2" will happen especially if the problem can be solved by existing legal contracts who unlike blockchain-based solutions have a track record of being enforced.
Ultimately I don't think we'll ever reach an agreement here so I think the best course of action is that we stick to our opinions and either of us can tell the other one "told you so" in a decade as we see how the situation evolved.
> Seems like those people will have to continually pay for tokens that will be worthless as the network keeps forking as other non coerced reporters do not.
What if it's a majority that is coerced (or bribed, frightened, etc) into lying? Then it's the truth that will be left behind as "reality" forks in favour of the usurper, isn't it?
If the entire chain state was only this decision and nothing else in the future and that majority could be coerced without major contention (which is not really possible off chain either) then that might work, but the problem is that all the other decisions that need to be made by the validators will require those people to be coerced to vote accurately in the present and in the future on the forked chain states.
"distributed group of participants to take it upon themselves to temporarily and physically enforce"
Do you think I should risk my life to enforce your property rights? I have two kids and I want to watch them grow up, I can't die because someone with a gun claimed ownership of a stranger's house.
Without an organized government of some kind, society does not scale beyond about 200 people. We just cannot keep track of relationships and trust and whatnot beyond that. I live in metropolitan area with a population of 25 million people; a distributed group of vigilantes enforcing property rights is not even remotely workable here, and this is not even the largest city in the world. My in-laws live in a suburban area with a lower population density -- their town has a population around 20 thousand, and that disorganized group is not going to work there either.
> Do you think I should risk my life to enforce your property rights?
I have no expectations of you personally if you wanted to protect my property rights (if i had claims on such and had a tx posted for someone to secure such), but I cannot control if an address controlled by a multisig of psuedoanons sends a tx to a contract where they provide proof that something has been secured according the rules of decentralized AMM market settlement contract and they get their payout. I cannot also control whether people make leveraged side bets on that happening or not, and I cannot control if those making leveraged side bets try to collude with the multisig that submitted the a tx for settlement.
> I live in metropolitan area with a population of 25 million people; a distributed group of vigilantes enforcing property rights is not even remotely workable here, and this is not even the largest city in the world. My in-laws live in a suburban area with a lower population density -- their town has a population around 20 thousand, and that disorganized group is not going to work there either.
I'm pretty sure that if they pay is high enough for the people that controls the multisig, and they have the skills and resources to execute, they can get where they need to be, and be gone when its finished, while accepting some risk that who they are up against may be prepared for it.
Dude you are freaking me out. If someone feels somehow mistreated by me they could send an army of cryptobros to my house to lynch me … that sounds like the worst scenario possible.
That said, blockchain-like technologies (ksi, more specifically) can be used to assure the integrity of databases storing the relationship between you and your car.
Yes, but is it a problem worth solving beyond what we have today? What’s the last time we saw an database integrity failure at the DMV/… leading to cars being owned by people that shouldn’t?
I'm pretty sure it wasn't more recently than the last time people lost control of assets on a blockchain!
Replacing databases which afaik have never been manipulated anywhere in the world (despite representing legal ownership of high value assets) with tokens similar to those people lose access to or are duped out of on a daily basis is very Web3
when you start to coin terms like rug pull and web3, it sure does feel like a systematic problem. There are people who specialize in asserting if you can trust a new token or not - why would i invest in something so janky?
Databases have been doing that for a long time. Blockchains only add additional guarantees that matter when you have hostile participants, which only matters if you're decentralizing your system, which you probably don't want to do for a lot of things (like tracking ownership of a car).
I don't think it's a naive example. All these kind of proposed blockchain solutions raise the same questions for me:
Why do you need a decentralized blockchain with tokens to solve that problem? If not for the tokens, what incentive have people to keep running and protect the blockchain against attacks? The oracle problem: how do you prevent someone from pushing false or duplicate data to the blockchain?
> And literally none of it, not a single step that you mentioned requires blockchain.
Then tell me, where is this wonderful centralized database that tells me who owns which car?
Blockchains are not just about decentralization, it's also about publishing the actual databases in the wild for everyone to see, because you have the guarantee that no-one can fake it.
Sure, a lot of the use cases could be done with centralized databases, but that's the model we had for decades now, and I don't see any effort to make these centralized databases accessible to everyone.
>>Then tell me, where is this wonderful centralized database that tells me who owns which car?
Uhm, here in UK DVLA holds it? Anyone can access it too, you can just check the entire car history including its tax payments as well as technical inspections online. No Blockchain needed.
>>because you have the guarantee that no-one can fake it
I'd like you to explain why you think that's true. If you assume an external authority is entering details into the blockchain, how is that different to the exact same authority entering details into the systems that we have currently?
How much taxpayers money goes into maintaining this database? Not sayin blockchain is a better solution but it can replace 99% of UK DVLA staff with an algorithm.
How exactly? Please explain. In particular how would using blockchain instead of a regular database replace 99% of the staff? What algorithm do you mean? What kind?
Last time I bought a car the process involved multiple people that was there only because of a centralized database. First of all I need a contract with a dealership, so there is a lawyer involved. Then I pay for a car (cashier) take my contract and go to a special road police department that exists only to register car ownership transfers. There I have one guy that takes my contract, another who will check it and fill-in data into the centralized database. So we are looking at least 3-4 people who are there only to review documents and authorize update to a centralized database.
Instead of this I could have pay to a smart contract and get my car ownership record in exchange. No clerks or lawyers involved. I cannot imagine how you implement this scenario as an API on top of a centralized database.
A) Last time I bought a car, the guy at the dealership filled out the entries in the car registration DB (probably using the centralised car registry database's dealership API...). The guy I was negotiating with anyway. So one guy (or less, considering he was mainly doing the job of, you know, actually selling me the car), not three or four. And don't worry -- I didn't -- he could probably have filled in some bullshit, like transferring ownership to himself or something, but then I'd have set the police on him.
B) So how many people would it take in your blockchain scenario -- why wouldn't there have to be just as many to enter the change of ownership with the "special road police department" etc?
C) How would you know that your "smart contract" couldn't do the exact same bullshit, transfer it to the dealer or whoever he has fencing his hot cars for him? If it did, wouldn't you have to go to the police just like I would?
D) "Lawyers"?!? Where the fuck do you live; in North Korea or something?
Please see here, I dug some nice links specifically about how DVLA works. I think you don’t understand the process and how much manual
work might be involved.
So all those problems could be solved by the "DVLA" (whatever and wherever that is) simply adopting the same system we have here. No wasted energy, neither in the form of "manual work" nor in the form of blockchain involved.
1) So you do live in North Korea! Or, well (Heh), Russia -- who cares, what's the diff?
2) So the weirdly-specific link to British vehicle registration procedures is... Because you're one of Kim Jong-Un's -- eh, I mean that other Über- kleotocrat, Putin's -- coterie, and keep your money and your children there?
3) Your whole argument is as stupid as that other guy's who claimed that "Bitcoin is needed to transfer money abroad". No, countries with dysfunctional systems -- be it for international money transfers or vehicle registration -- would need to uproot and rebuild their systems anyway, to base them on Bitcoin in stead of what they have now. But if they're uprooting and rebuilding anyway, then they can just rebuild to use the same systems that already work elsewhere -- without the whole blockchain mumbo-jumbo.
4) Two people who have actually used working online systems -- that British car owner and I -- have told you that such systems exist and work. But you seem to be just simply refusing to believe us, insisting that no such system could work without your blockchain mumbo-jumbo. One would think that residents of, and owners of cars registered in, Britain and Finland would know more about the car registration systems in Britain and Finland than a Russian. (Except, see #2 above?) So, besides your obvious violation of the "assume good faith" site guidelines in calling us liars, consider which of the two alternatives
a) You are right, and know more about the car registration systems in our countries than we do; we, OTOH, are either outright lying, or have deluded ourselves into thinking we got our cars registered in a much easier way than you know to be possible. (Or perhaps we both got incredibly lucky and got it done much easier than actually is possible.)
or
b) We are telling the truth, in our countries it is possible to easily get your car registered online without any blockchain mumbo-jumbo; and you, OTOH, are either misinformed, mistaken, or just plain obstinate (or deluded) --
-- which alternative would seem most reasonable under Occam's Razor?
I don't know where you live, but in UK it's even easier than what you described.
When you buy a car it's just registered online, takes 5 minutes to do. No actual in-person anything involved. You get a PDF confirming your registration, the dealership prints the plate for you right there and then, nearly every garage has a machine for priniting them. You stick it on your car, drive off, done. The registration document arrives in post 1-2 weeks later, but you don't really need it for much as it's not proof of ownership anyway, it's just for your records.
Literally nothing about buying a car involves actual people reviewing anything. It's all automated, it's all online.
So I'd still like you to explain how exactly are you going to get rid of 99% of DVLA's staff and what algorithm exactly allows for that when using NFTs/blockchain.
>>First of all I need a contract with a dealership, so there is a lawyer involved
Why? I bought several new cars in the past, you read the documents, sign them, the car is yours. Why involve a lawyer? What for?
What you describe seems way more automated than what we have today in Russia. Still…
> Literally nothing about buying a car involves actual people reviewing anything. It's all automated, it's all online.
Who gives dealer access and rights to update government database? I would not be surprised if the dealer does not have access but update their own system and then submit documents to an agency which checks them and modifies the database. DVLA API is documented online and unless they have another undocumented endpoints I don’t see any way to register a vehicle with it.
> Although you can download some forms online, you will still need to return them via post. This is because the forms may ask for sensitive information or require that a passport photo be affixed to the application.
Summing up - it seems what you experienced at the dealer is a sugarcoating for the same old paper based registration process that requires countless clerks.
I'm don't know where you live, but I have purchased cars in both Australia and the UK and both involved verifying via a centralised database that the car was not stolen or financially encumbered.
Don't know about the US but in most countries you do have those databases. And them not being in the Blockchain makes it easier to solve hard problems such as inheritance disputes, or illegally purchased goods.
When some fuckwit runs me over and speeds away, you betcha I'm gonna want to know whom XYZ-123 belongs to. What did you think license plates are for in the first place?
If you've lived under the misapprehension that what you do with a multi-ton piece of lethal equipment hurtling through traffic belongs to your sphere of privacy, it's high time to snap out of it.
(Fortunately, of course, no blockchain silliness is needed for this; I can look up a license plate on the centralised car registry DB any time.)
> You could very well have a proof of authority ...
> ... by a further authority if keys ...
As soon as your blockchain solution requires proof of authority, your trustless solution starts requiring trust in some form of central governance. At that point, what utility does your blockchain solution provide that the DMV database does not?
Vote with your (imaginary) citizen token to appoint a notary. And have a right to vote against it at any time. With blockchain you can elect new notaries every day if this is how you want to manage it.
I don't see your point. You attack an outline of a system. Fun system will be complex and I won't describe it here in full. In the same way as today notary appointment procedure is complex and involve multiple organisations.
I claim that blockchain solves Byzantine generals problem (BGP) in a scalable way and no other such solution exists. I also claim that this very problem (BGP) is being solved right now in multiple instances by using a trusted middleman, usually appointed, controlled and often funded by the government. I also claim that maintaining trust is not free and often paid from tax money (as in DVLA example). And my last claim that partial or full automation of a middleman function with blockchain is cheaper than running it traditional way (considering all costs involved).
Potentially unexpected corollary from the first and second claims - a software without blockchain cannot automate a trusted middleman function because of trust issues.
Why would I need to attack any of your claims, when one of them is that the "problem" you cryptards are getting your panties in a bunch about is already solved?
The thing is it's not really particularly good at that. No moreso at least because of any attributes of the blockchain. It's really because of external reasons:
1. Lack of tooling and cooperation for investigating fraud
2. Lack of regulation
3. Programmatic interfaces
4. There are markets like the NFT space that are amazing for laundering
But no part of why it's good for crime has to do with blockchain.
"Censorship resistance" was the original use case for blockchain, and demanding money with menaces remotely is the one area where it's unquestionably superior to being discreet about where your money is stored
Reason 2) does seem to be due to an attribute of the Blockchain, as there is no central organization that the government can force to establish the real-world identity of all participants. (Although this is now happening at the point of conversion to/from fiat currency.)
>> Blockchain is proving a more than capable solution in the ransomware payments space
> The thing is it's not really particularly good at that.
Sure, but apparently it sucks less at that than at anything else. Which would be why that's the only use case in which it's actually used as a "currency"; the law of comparative advantage and all that.
> But no part of why it's good for crime has to do with blockchain.
It also enables people to finance themselves despite tyrannical restrictions imposed by bad governments. Using bitcoin I can send money to someone in Chi no a who's social rating was degraded by the CCP and who is forbidden from using banks.
This alone trumps any arguments against bitcoin. Crime will exist forever and criminals will find ways to finance themselves anyway, so the use of cryptocurrencies for their operations is not really a factor.
> Using bitcoin I can send money to someone in Chi no a who's social rating was degraded by the CCP and who is forbidden from using banks
How will they convert it into something they can use to pay rent and buy groceries?
> Crime will exist forever and criminals will find ways to finance themselves anyway, so the use of cryptocurrencies for their operations is not really a factor.
Does this make it easier for the wealthy to evade taxes? I find just signing transactions using something like gpg a much easier to reason about.
My biggest concern about cryptocurrency is fees. There is no reason why fees should be based on payload as far as I understand. Whether I’m sending one satoshi (or any other unit of money) or a trillion, the cost should be the same and ideally as close to zero as possible if not zero. This was the original reason I was drawn to bitcoin but it was obvious it would never be the case.
> How will they convert it into something they can use to pay rent and buy groceries?
Exactly my question. Exchanges where you can sell the crypto for real money are still regulated and require KYC.
> My biggest concern about cryptocurrency is fees.
High fees are required to pay for the insane electricity bills and specialized hardware. PoW cryptos are expensive and inefficient by design so there will always be more transactions waiting in the queue to get on the chain than the processing power required to mine the next block.
You don't even need black market. On one the largest crypto exchanges in India (WazirX), P2P is the only viable option left to get money into exchange because most banks have stopped dealing with them.
Fees are based on resource usage. In Bitcoin this is usually the total data size of inputs and outputs that are used to make the sum. This is where the issue of dust arises, when an address holds a mass quantity of low value inputs, but combing them yields a very large and therefore costly transaction.
In some other chains, like Ethereum, the accounting is ledger based. With these systems theres is no variety in input count, but it similarly scales by transaction computation so more complex contracts are more expensive.
Both networks have a fluctuating transaction cost due to congestion competition, but the “base cost” in either is totally unaffected by the value/total amount of currency.
> Using bitcoin I can send money to someone in Chi no a who's social rating was degraded by the CCP and who is forbidden from using banks.
Okay, let’s think about this even a little bit: receiving that Bitcoin requires them to have software and access websites which the Chinese government has restricted. Assuming they successfully get a wallet app which isn’t compromised, they then need to connect to a well-known, trivially blocked high-volume network service without the Great Firewall triggering. Having done that, they then need to pay a substantial processing fee for any transaction. Since their landlord, grocer, etc. need to be paid in real money this person will also need to find someone to convert it, again requiring a substantial payment because accepting something banned from a pariah is high-risk.
All of this is not only expensive but incredibly risky since you’re leaving a lot of electronic records of illegal activity and you’re forced to trust various third-parties who can be compromised without your ability to easily tell. Bitcoin is perfect for state authorities, too, since it leaves a signed record of intent to break the law for each transaction — if they bust a business which does a lot of cash sales, it’s a lot harder to prove where each bill came from and there’s no way to do so if they only start monitoring after the fact like there is with Bitcoin.
> It also enables people to finance themselves despite tyrannical restrictions imposed by bad governments. Using bitcoin I can send money to someone in Chi no a who's social rating was degraded by the CCP and who is forbidden from using banks.
In no way does bitcoin being blockchain based enable you to do this better or more effectively. It's just because it's a less regulated currency.
Alright, how does a potential recipient use those funds?
Pay rent? No, because the government would notice the missing income on the landlords tax return.
Pay for food and other goods? No, because the government would not allow companies to take funds from permissionless blockchains.
Buy real estate or a car? No because those needs to be registered with the government as well and payments are regularly checked for fraud and money laundering.
A black market for all of the above? Sure but any government to weak too prevent a black market of this scale would also be unable to restrict transactions (no matter the method) in the first place.
Conversion of bitcoin to whatever currency is hard to block. USSR had death penalty (!) for buying or selling things using foreigh currency. Yet, the black was persistent.
Also, we are talking about the unbanked: people who otherwise have no other state-sanctioned way to use financial services. Bitcoin first and foremost helps such people.
> Also, we are talking about the unbanked: people who otherwise have no other state-sanctioned way to use financial services. Bitcoin first and foremost helps such people.
No. No it doesn't.
The main reason for a large portion of the unbanked population is that they are so poor that they can't even afford to open and maintain a bank account. But sure, "we require a person to have a smartphone with always-on internet connection to do anything useful and have egregious transaction fees in most popular chains" surely does help the unbanked.
I got into bitcoin when i could receive payment from a client that normally was declined to process by banks in our respective countries, and options like Paypal were too expensive.
In the result buying buying bitcoin for a client for his currency, sending it to me and selling for my currency was cheaper than simply converting USD to my local currency. That's where I understood that bitcoin is a great thing and is here to stay. It is enough to shut your argument. I wasn't poor, but absurd restrictions by banks stood in my way just the same. Bitcoin liberates money.
So if your personal anecdote "shuts down" my argument, then my personal anecdote of never having these problems sure as hell shuts yours.
What crypto peddlers don't understand is that:
- money transfer doesn't need blockchain in any shape or form
- restrictions and regulations exist for a reason, and these reasons are being rapidly discovered by all the people who are being scammed in the web3 space
- the moment money transfer over presents even a fraction of what banks routinely do, they will introduce same money transfers at a fraction of the cost (and they already have, in many parts of the world, but not because of blockchain)
What YOU don't understand that bitcoin has 2 key properties: permissionless and artificial scarcity. I haven't heard of any successful implementation of both without the use of Blockchain. Have you? Whatever else you'd offer would have a CA at the core which can censor and block people under duress or at will.
Restrictions and regulations exist for a reason, here I agree with you. What I don't agree with it that this regulation is good. I think most of it is veryverybad for people, designed to keep them under control. In my country, this control takes very draconian forms against anyone who is in opposition to the (criminal) government.
> 2 key properties: permissionless and artificial scarcity. I haven't heard of any successful implementation of both without the use of Blockchain. Have you?
Perhaps Because they are not that interesting or useful? So far you've given me two "solutions" in search of a problem.
> What I don't agree with it that this regulation is good. I think most of it is very very bad for people, designed to keep them under control.
Go and read something on food and drug safety (like Horse Named Jim, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_(horse)), an automotive safety, on emission safety, on workplace safety, on...
There's high probability that you're alive and healthy today precisely because of regulations.
> In my country, this control takes very draconian forms against anyone who is in opposition to the (criminal) government.
Ah yes. And crypto will surely help with that because that criminal government will never ever find a way to bust you for trying to convert that "censorship resistant crypto" into, you know, actual money you have to pay for food, rent, electricity etc.
I think it's important to note that what you're talking about is bitcoin, not the blockchain or even cryptocurrency. No aspect of cryptocurrency or blockchain plays any part at all in your story.
The reason why you could do what you did is because you participated in a young, unregulated market. Blockchain added nothing.
Bitcoin is not possible without blockchain or 'cryptocurrency'. Thanks to these properties, it can't be truly regulated, which is a good thing in my book.
Of course, this breaktrhough opens a way to zillions of shitcoins, but they should simply be ignored.
Of course it can be regulated. Countries are working towards that already. It's already a taxable asset. Nothing about the blockchain makes bitcoin harder to regulate.
Permissionless has nothing to do with blockchain. As an example if you want to exchange currency without blockchain you can do that by buying gift cards and exchanging them for cash on any number of online markets.
Blockchain provides integrity guarantees given a number of malicious participants. That's all it provides over any other ACID database.
I had the same experience. The thing that gets me as well is that normally with the rise of new technology you get an excitement that is tangible. Like when the internet first xame around there were emails, multiplayer games via modem, websites. A whole plethora of new wonderful experiences. So far all I've really gotten after doing a lot of research is some good projects and a long tail of terrible projects/websites and a lot of scammers.
It really feels like with the NFT backlash in the gaming world right now that crypto hasn't found its landing and it really hasn't taken off - its kind of in this weird purgatory. Im hopeful but very suspicious at this point. I wasn't suspicious of “the internet” until it was around for a long time. Crypto is past its wave of this is cool and lets build stuff phase afaik and now everyone is trying to make money off it.
In Dubai, buying real estate with bitcoin is a real thing, and by the looks of it also a big thing.
If nothing else, it shows that crypto has succeed in one of its goals: moving money between countries, without being detected/hindered by governments.
I mean, I don't know who buys real estate with crypto, but I am assuming that people who live in dubai and have large crypto values are bullish on crypto, and won't waste it for a low roi investment like realestate. So that leaves rich foreigners who wants realestate away from their own government and I can see them purchasing bitcoins as a way to siphon money out of their country.
Other than that, I am also out of ideas for useful uses of crypto currencies
close to? sounds exactly like money laundering, since people who can move money legitimately wouldn’t do so through a relatively risky instrument like bitcoin. tax evasion is a likely entry-level reason, but often coupled with other sketchy illegalities.
The pseudo-anonymous nature of Bitcoin makes it easier to hide transactions. It’s for example why online games that let you cash money out (or have rampant RMT) have issues with money laundering and credit card fraud.
If you bought your bitcoin with legit money, and then you exchanged the bicoin for a house, and you're doing your taxes correctly, how could that be money laundering?
Why shouldn't I buy the house directly with legit money then? Why add one more layer and pay some amount in commission and also deal with volatility in BTC prices?
There are all kinds of limitations in how exactly you are allowed to use your money. And settlement of such a large amount of funds between two parties is not simple and fraught with danger if you "do it alone".
Bitcoin or your blockchain of choice has no such issues though! You can prove to your seller that you have the funds, as well as even pre-commit the money in a smart contract, or a multi-sig transaction. Doing so would completely remove the need to wait on the slow and inefficient banks to do their thing.
> There are all kinds of limitations in how exactly you are allowed to use your money.
Where are you getting that from? If the money has been earned in a legit manner and you want to spend it on a legitimate thing, who's stopping you from spending it?
Yes if your source of money isn't legal or you want to spend on something illegal, that's a different story.
My money is completely legal, but it was a protracted process to:
A.) Transfer a part of it (for this particular bank, anything more than $5000) to pay a deposit for a house;
B.) Make a final settlement on a house, again with money I had available in my account.
There are limitations on how much you can transfer easily at once, and different kinds of approval and parties have to be involved to pay for something large.
Those per transaction limits are for YOUR protection so in case someone hacks into your account they won't empty it and you can ask the bank to raise the limits.
Banks ask you the reason for transactions beyond a certain amount because they have to report it to authorities.
Large transactions like paying for a property don't happen at the drop of the hat. You won't just wake up in the middle of the night and decide to buy a property immediately right then.
You asked who is stopping you from spending your money as you want. I listed who and provided some examples. The reason why they make it difficult is beside the point.
It took me the better part of a morning I would have ideally spent on more productive tasks.
I spent an hour on the phone to get my limit temporarily raised, then another hour or so later in the day when the payment was flagged as suspicious and my account was locked. There was then an arbitrary waiting period of one day where the transfer sat in limbo before getting processed (more security theatre), and finally an additional two days for the funds to clear.
There really isn't.. I can pay 1 million EUR with my debit card if there's enough money in the account. That's the default limit, and can be raised anytime if needed.
If I have the money and they are legal, I can spend them without anyone getting in the way.
If I am in a country from where I can legally send money to Dubai to buy property, should I still convert money to BTC for buying property? Common sense says no. It may be legal but I don't need to add another layer of complexity.
If I am in a country from where I cannot legally buy a property in Dubai, would buying a property via BTC route be legal? Definitely not.
The only scenario in which it makes sense to buy property directly in BTC is if I had bought BTC years ago when it was cheap, it would be better to convert it into a real asset like an apartment in Burj Khalifa and convert my on paper wealth into real wealth.
The core scenario in which it makes sense to buy property in bitcoin is if you already hold a ton of bitcoin. Then, selling the bitcoin in order to pay fiat for a house is the more cumbersome route to take.
A few years ago I was earning a fair chunk of loyalty points (and hence air miles) by buying gift cards in supermarkets, then immediately depositing the full value of the gift cards into a savings account of mine.
This was entirely legal, and I was Making My Own Financial Decisions™, but the route got shut down pretty quickly anyway.
How easy is it to actually buy 5M USD of bitcoin? Assuming you have legit money?
And why would you move legit money out of the banking system? Assume you have 5M USD in bitcoin, can you sell it and deposit that in your bank without lots of money laundering questions that are hard to answer?
My two cents is that if you have legit money, you will want to keep in the banking system, and avoid risks of being accused of money laundering.
That would be a stupid thing to do, as Bitcoin transaction chains are public and permanent, and the use of mixers[1] close to a deal will set off alarm bells.
Cash is an infinitely better money laundering vehicle.
[1]: tools that blur the transaction chain, masking the origin of one's coins.
Cash is not so easy to move internationally. It is not so easy to move around internationally at all with flight-delays and cancellations and what have you covidis
You have cash (like a ton of cash in bank notes). The cash has unsavory origins. You go to a shady local dealer who will take your cash and give you crypto in an offshore exchange. That is cross border money laundering. You then use that crypto to buy property or NFT "art". Some months later you sell the asset, either for money in bank or crypto which you convert to money on a KYC exchange like Coinbase. Voila, you have washed your dirty money into perfectly clean money in bank. Best, you do it in a jurisdiction which doesn't have personal income tax. Like Dubai.
Yeah it's difficult to see how this facilitates money laundering. Say you're a drug kingpin who has a billion in literal paper cash that you need to make appear legitimate.
Somehow, you've got to do a billion dollars in cash to bitcoin transactions, but what's the point of buying middle eastern real estate with the bitcoin after that? Why not just rinse the bitcoin through a tumbler and sell it on an exchange and tell the taxation ministry that you simply made a great investment? Then you have a billion dollars minus tax in your bank account that you can do anything with. Dubai real estate is completely irrelevant to the process.
I think "money laundering" is like "ponzi scheme". The more likely someone on the internet is to use it, the less likely it is that they actually understand the term.
You may be right but let me explain why I think Bitcoin actually works well in this example for money laundering. You have cash and you buy bitcoin. US bitcoin exchanges probably do kyc (know your customer = laws / forms you file saying you know where the money comes from) but many offshore exchanges supposedly do not.
You could take your bitcoin and sell it on an exchange as you suggest but there are two problems with this. First, it's not that easy to sell a lot of bitcoin for real USD and the transaction costs can get high. Second, and more importantly, as money launder what you really want to do is take your dirty money in one jurisdiction and take it to another. Did you ever see Blow? Based on a true story. A US guy raised incredible money selling cocaine and stored it in a shady Panama Bank. The bank steals his money. What his recourse? If you are an oligarch in a corrupt country you want to get your money somewhere your government can't seize it. So why not take your bit coin and use it to buy real estate in Dubai? If you took your bitcoin and sold it in a way that ends up in a western bank, that bank is going to do kyc and defeats the whole purpose.
Obviously I have never laundered money and I don't really know. Tell me I am crazy.
But to buy bitcoin on an exchange, even if it doesn't have KYC laws, you'd need to have the money in a bank account first to do the wire transfer to fund your crypto exchange account. The problem of money laundering is how do you get it into the bank account in the first place. What I'm saying is that you'd have to do actual cash transactions, meaning giving someone paper money and getting bitcoin into your wallet. That's quite a problem, especially as the numbers get larger.
There are plenty of HNW individuals who want to buy or sell crytpo for cash no questions asked. Just last week a Swiss guy wanted to buy 1.5 million EUR of bitcoin from me for cash at a 10% premium. He'd supposedly have the cash delivered anywhere in Europe.
Too risky for me, but if you're a drug cartel, that's business as usual.
I think it's easier if we think about it with concrete people. How exactly would someone like El Chapo be using bitcoin for laundering activities?
Furthermore, when people bring up the laundering and crime argument, I always point out that the us dollar is by far the medium of choice for laundering money, crime, ransom, extortion, drug payments, human trafficking payments, terror financing.
Accepted almost everywhere, virtually untraceable.
Plenty of countries don't. I was just asking a friend if it would be difficult for an American to open a bank account in Thailand or Vietnam because of the reporting requirements. He said that with the proper introduction, there would no problem at all. Doesn't matter if you want to deposit $500 or $5 million. There might be an extra "service charge" for the larger amounts, but there will be no questions about its origin.
"DLD has created the blockchain system using a smart and secure database"
A blockchain system using a secure database. Makes it abundantly clear, how much they understand what a blockchain is. Truly, future belongs to blockchain systems.
That is what financialization does. Finance is a parasite that will destroy all potential if given room. To force finance to be symbiotic you must never allow them to control anything.
These ideas are best left in the academy, and then later financialized. The exception to this is internal R&D (like Bell Labs and countless other extremely productive corporate divisions.)
Out of curiosity: How well have significant Bell Labs contributors been compensated? It seems to me that lost of current tech, and even 'future tech' not yet adopted has come out of Bell Labs. But how many of the engineers that came up with said advances settled for relative peanuts? Getting paid $250K for something that changes the world seems... less than adequate.
'Public voting' is not a technological problem but political one. There's a lot of opposition to making voting more accessible to everyone. Voting should be easy, and you don't need blockchain for that but maybe it could help. The question is who wants "voting rights".
Unfortunately, trust in voting can only be achieved with paper voting, there is no technological solution to improve it that doesn't completely remove trust as well.
Removing trust completely is a pretty high bar... but there are different voting schemes out there and some of them do a pretty good job of removing a lot of the trust. Cryptography is typically involved, but blockchain is not needed. I wrote more about this here: https://www.attejuvonen.fi/thesis/
Here by "remove trust" I didn't mean "trust-less assurance that voting is correct", I meant "you have no reason to trust that the system recorded your vote correctly".
A basic problem with electronic & cryptographic voting systems is that it is impossible for a non-expert to convince themselves that the system is working correctly. In-person paper voting has this property by virtue of the simplicity of the system and the ability for regular people to observe it's working. This also normally includes members of all political parties participating in the vote, giving a high degree of confidence that either (a) the voting was correct, or (b) the parties you voted for are colluding, so the result is meaningless anyway.
You write as if there is only one voting scheme for in-person paper voting, and as if laypersons by and large trust the results of paper voting elections. Neither of these claims is true.
First of all, there is more than one in-person paper voting system, and some in-person paper voting systems involve cryptography.
Secondly, layperson DO NOT by and large trust the results of paper voting elections. You don't need to look further than the previous presidential election in the U.S., in which a significant portion of votes were cast on paper ballots, and a large portion of the population STILL does not trust that those votes were counted correctly. And if you look at developing countries handling their own paper ballot elections, you will find out that many of those elections are manipulated, and people do not trust the results.
That said, I agree with your general sentiment that adding electronic and cryptographic elements to a voting scheme will make that scheme generally "less understandable" to a layperson, such that they need to defer to "expert opinion" on whether that voting scheme can be trusted. However, it's not a binary thing like you make it out to be; people do not 100% trust your chosen paper voting scheme and 0% trust your chosen electronic voting scheme.
Anyway, I feel like "how do we get people to trust the results of the election more than they currently do" is a secondary problem. The main problem is how we can actually secure the results of the election while maintaining ballot secrecy. It's more important.
> Secondly, layperson DO NOT by and large trust the results of paper voting elections.
That is false. Though there is some distrust in many parts of the world, the overall consensus is that the result of the vote was at least close to the real vote. Even in the USA after the recent election, many focused on accusations of fraud about voting machines (the infamous comments about "Hugo Chavez's machines").
I do agree that it's not a 100%/0% thing in practice - some people will always choose to trust or mistrust the government regardless of other facts; and some people know or are convinced by facts that others don't believe or don't have access to to trust or mistrust.
However, I would say the right response to pure electronic voting would actually be 0%. It's actually out of gullibility and misunderstanding that people put any trust in pure electronic voting *, when in fact it can be attacked in ways that not even the best expert in the world would ever notice, and this can be done by sophisticated out of state attackers (such as the USA or Chinese spy agencies). In such a high-stakes environment, you can't trust the CPU, you can't trust the RAM, you can't trust the USB controller, you can't trust the cables - everything could have been rigged to perform different computations than what was apparently programmed, and this would be often be impossible to prove.
* with the possible exception of electronic voting systems that make everyone's vote public, with obvious downsides. Though even there, I have some reservations - if I claim I voted differently than what the public ledger shows, what happens next?
You're again describing one type of electronic voting, while making an argument against all forms of electronic voting. Regarding this specific type of "black box" electronic voting, yes, I agree with you, it's horrible. Now, it isn't the only type of electronic voting out there. I recommend you familiarize with other types before making sweeping arguments like that.
If we want more democracy I think we must get some help from technology. Liquid Democracy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy ) sounds like an approach that would be hard to do without computers.
Of course, the public can mistrust a paper vote, for good or bad reasons.
But, it's not possible to reasonably trust an electronic voting system - the people installing and maintaining the system have myriad ways to manipulate the vote that are almost impossible to discover or prove (at least as long as you don't accept public voting, which has different issues).
The difference is scale: if you’re doing something funny with paper ballots you need a conspiracy involving a LOT of people shipping things around, disposing of the correct ones, etc. Trying to monitor people’s votes similarly requires something like cameras in a lot of places.
Software systems make all of that possible at scale with far fewer people, and thus much more plausibly possible to keep secret.
Outside the huge difference of scale that another commenter mentioned, there is also the difference of how easy it is to ensure this doesn't happen. For paper voting, in many countries, each party participating in the vote will have members observing every step of the process - the voting rooms, the local ballot counts, the vote transport, the regional and global vote tallies. Additionally, every citizen and even foreign independent observers has/have the right to do the same. And, since the system is dead simple, they each have the actual ability to tell if nothing was tampered.
The same thing is in no way true for electronic voting. Giving everyone access to personally inspect the electronic equipment at any level of detail is difficult logistically, and also very likely to result in damage. Even if you were able to, vanishingly few people could actually convince even themseoves that the systems are not tampered with.
There are many different ways to construct an electronic voting system. What you are describing is a traditional, centralized electronic voting system. There are electronic voting systems out there that provide certain guarantees without the need to trust.
No, there aren’t. There are systems designed to solve the problem of the inventor not getting paid by election officials but voting is an extremely hard problem once you learn about it and safe electronic voting is unsolved.
The big challenge is that it needs to be anonymous even in the case of attacks. Electronic systems offer many ways to cheat which you may have thought about in the context of making purchases but voting also needs to deal with unique problems like changing votes or coercion. If I buy a coffee, I don’t care if the owner alters their database as long as I get my coffee. I also don’t have a reason to fear that charge showing up on my statement but most proposed systems re-enable old attacks where, say, your boss/union/neighborhood crime leader/etc. could use the verification mechanism to confirm that you voted the way they told you to.
Paper ballots are the best system known because the system is easy to understand and doesn’t require huge amounts of trust. We just went through this in the United States where the leader of the country backed by a multibillion dollar propaganda machine tried to claim fraud but lost repeatedly because there was no plausible way to have altered or replaced paper ballots at scale. Electronic systems would have made it much easier to cast that doubt because the babble they tried about hacks would have been harder to disprove for the average voter and there would have been far more leeway for a partisan judge to find doubt.
That shows that in-person paper ballots are superior once you correct the system in Finland (P6/7 would normally be green for in person paper).
More importantly, however, it’s a mistake to give all of those equal weight. For example, if married couples vote together a spouse can monitor or coerce their partner’s choice but that doesn’t scale up better than linearly, whereas all electronic systems which don’t rely on voter-verified paper ballots are subject to very hard to disprove allegations of widespread fraud. This is the conceptual problem to the very clever mathematical approaches: even if they are theoretically sound, it is much harder to build public confidence in a system which a fraction of a percent of the population understands.
> P6/7 would normally be green for in person paper
I doubt that. Are there voting schemes out there which prevent people from bringing mobile phones inside a voting booth? If not, then spouses can walk to a polling station together, and one spouse can walk inside the voting booth alone, take a picture of the filled-out ballot, and then drop the ballot to the box in view of their spouse. If there is no method of preventing photography inside the voting booth, and no method of invalidating a cast vote afterwards, then spouses can easily prove to each other how they voted.
> More importantly, however, it’s a mistake to give all of those equal weight.
Fully agreed.
> it is much harder to build public confidence in a system which a fraction of a percent of the population understands
I agree that more complicated systems are harder to understand than simpler systems, especially to laypersons. That said, I do not think that laypersons have a very in-depth understanding of how their paper-voting schemes currently work. There's an element of trust that goes into it, like surely some smart people have verified that the voting system in place is alright. If we had a more complicated system in place, then laypersons would need a bit more of that trust.
Laypersons have trust in things like online banking, even though it's technically a flaming garbage fire. People could just as well have trust in a cryptographically verified voting scheme.
> I doubt that. Are there voting schemes out there which prevent people from bringing mobile phones inside a voting booth?
Well, this is one reason why the last three places I’ve lived don’t allow phone usage in the polling station and have processes for getting another ballot, but also none of the electronic systems can survive that level of control either — most of them make it substantially easier for the attacker, especially at scale. That last part is important because the more people are required to pull off an attack the less likely it is to be successful.
> Laypersons have trust in things like online banking, even though it's technically a flaming garbage fire. People could just as well have trust in a cryptographically verified voting scheme.
Banking has key differences, though, which I think are significant: you can do non-anonymous audits, you don’t need deniability, and most importantly you can restore losses after the fact.
> Well, this is one reason why the last three places I’ve lived don’t allow phone usage in the polling station and have processes for getting another ballot
Do they kindly ask people not to use phones inside the polling station, or do they actually bodyscan people for electronic devices when they go in the booth? Because if they just ask kindly, that's not preventing anything.
Finland also has processes for getting another ballot, but only until you cast a ballot. You can't invalidate a ballot that has already been cast. So that means you can go in the voting booth, take a picture of how you voted, and then ask for another ballot. This would be sufficient to fool anyone trying to buy votes en masse, but it wouldn't fool the spouse of the voter, who could be physically present at the polling station.
> none of the electronic systems can survive that level of control either
Some of them do, actually. Some electronic voting systems craft proofs which are convincing to the voter, but only to the voter. This means that the voter can cryptographically verify that their vote has been cast correctly, but the voter wouldn't be able to convince a potential vote-buyer how they voted, because the voter could have potentially forged the proof.
> Banking has key differences, though, which I think are significant: you can do non-anonymous audits, you don’t need deniability, and most importantly you can restore losses after the fact.
Yes, online banking is a much easier problem. Despite that the actual implementation is garbage fire from 1970s. I was just trying to say that getting people to trust a complicated system is possible (e.g. people trust online banking, despite it being a complete garbage fire). Therefore, it could be possible to get people to trust a cryptographically verifiable voting system as well.
> Some of them do, actually. Some electronic voting systems craft proofs which are convincing to the voter, but only to the voter. This means that the voter can cryptographically verify that their vote has been cast correctly, but the voter wouldn't be able to convince a potential vote-buyer how they voted, because the voter could have potentially forged the proof.
You’re positing a situation where someone can force them to vote at a specific time and place and either watch them or have them send proof of how they voted on paper. How realistic is it to think that an electronic system wouldn’t be at least as vulnerable to that same attack, even before you consider the likelihood that an attacker with that much control could use their credentials to vote or verify their history, install spyware, etc.? It’s one thing to have a game theoretical chance to deniably cast a vote and quite another to, say, be confident enough that you’ll be able to convince an abusive spouse to believe you.
Let's take Civitas as an example. In Civitas, a voter has both "real credentials" and "fake credentials" that they can use to vote. Let's say that the spouse of the voter forces them to vote on a malware-infested machine, at a specific time and and place, while physically watching them vote, and also capturing any forensic evidence available on the machine. In this hypothetical the voter can simply use their fake credentials to cast a fake vote, and later use their real credentials to cast a real vote in secrecy. Will an abusive spouse be convinced that the coercion worked? No, but there is nothing the voter can do to convince the spouse in this case anyway. Even if the voter uses their real credentials to vote, they still have the same problem: they have no ability to convince their spouse that they voted as requested.
It was also designed as a pyramid scheme though to drive adoption. This was an unfortunate mistake and that and the inefficiency at scale doomed it as a currency.
Decentralized, anonymized identity is one application. It sounds amazing in theory - and can work for the general use cases of sharing information with corporations. But, I believe it won't really be anonymized, as "data exhaust", "identity touch points revealing identity in aggregate" can help identify.
An example I use, is people expect bitcoin is anonymous. Yes, it is anonymous to the general layperson and corporation - but not to say NSA/FBI for "people of interest". And once bitcoin to USDollar transactions or financial institutions are more common - banks will sell your wallet information to credit bureaus, and eventually corporations will be able to de-anonymize chains for profiling just as today.
I can think of small problems that use blockchain as a solution, but they're relatively niche and only make the game-space straddle the real world, so they tend to be a bit on the vaporware side. Handy, sure, but I'm not sure they are A) 100% necessarily or B) as revolutionary as everyone seems to think blockchain is meant to be =[
EDIT: forgot to say, this could be a complete lack of imagination on my part past what's been done with blockchain already or just my horrible indoctrination into the game-space like some kind of cult =)
It seems you are looking for a product blockchain enables you, but there are activities the blockchain enables which are not products, and are very difficult up to impossible without.
One example is sustainable (financially) open-source project is one I use now. Before that it was always impossible. You get a bunch of people all over the world, many of them are identified only by Internet handles. There's no investment to handle all the legalities of establishing a business, and anyway there's no legal framework for international businesses with psuedo-anonymous people.
But with blockchain we've been using DAOs and online voting tools etc. since 3-4 years now, and it works great. It handles the governance and the finance in a way the traditional system cannot offer.
> One example is sustainable (financially) open-source project is one I use now. Before that it was always impossible.
And yet just like blockchain, you allude to something without providing any substance. What is the open-source project? You’ve failed to actually tell us what the real “thing” is.
You're saying that you wouldn't be able to perform online votes or surveys and remotely send money without a blockchain?
Could you expand more on what functionality that the blockchain provides that the other solutions in this space (online surveys and remotely send money) don't?
"Remotely send money" is a super hard thing to do. I literally just struggled for a month with a transfer that included 3 countries, none of them is English speaking. It required letters from banks, accountants, plenty of forms of different countries, translations, stuff which is lost in translation (the bank was unhappy with the word selection of a non-English speaker accountant, for example), different formats, different standards and navigating countless options and tricks in order to avoid ridiculous exchange and transfer fees.
This was for a "simple" action in the real world, involving me and a regular seller of something. Now take this and try to divide donations between 5 participants of your project, each from a different country and a different language. Good luck with that.
Hwoever, in my open source project we did the same thing in 20 seconds with crypto. Not because we avoid tax (we don't), but because the international mechanism is cumbersome and inaccessible if you're not an expert, and expensive probably even if you are.
We manage the donations/profits with votings, and are not familiar with a platform offering a safe way to do that in our settings.
Besides, my experience with platforms for open source projects (or in general) is bad. There is no one platform offering all the services we need, so we end up having dozens of accounts (which is actually a source of tension, because when you offer to use a new platform, an argument starts with those who "have enough accounts in their life"). Moreover, platforms eventually close, so you get stuck (migration is a hard thing to do).
Let me ask a question that maybe will look at it from a different angle. Which problems remotely sending money and online platforms solve that crypto has for managing votings and finance of an international online open source project? Seems to me it beings 100% extra problems and 0% solutions.
> "Remotely send money" is a super hard thing to do.
Technologically it is not.
Which is why anyone in the EU can instantly send money to anywhere else in the EU, for free, despite being a collection of 27 countries with dozens of different languages and legacy banking systems.
The hurdles are legal and regulatory, not technical.
Blockchain and new technology does not solve the underlying problem at all.
Part of the transaction I described (which was personal) involved a bank transfer between two EU states, and it's simply not true. It's not instantly, doesn't work 24/7 (a transaction made on Friday arrived on Tuesday), and you have to find plenty of tricks to avoid high fees and super bad exchange rates (EU has more than one currency, you know).
Free instant transfers are the direction of travel, but in the EU, that is a question of regulation, not technology. Maybe in 2030 we will be there :)
But for many transactions, I see that instant would be nicer, but I don't see the crucial need. My employer pays all Eurozone salaries from a bank account in Luxembourg, I imagine it is just a script checking "Initiate transfers on 10 AM, 1 day before last working day of month". Being able to do "Initiate transfers on 23.59 PM of last working day of month" would be slightly nicer, but I don't think it really solves a huge pain point?
Wise (former Transferwise) is pretty much instant in the EU, with very low fees.
Even then, transferring money with SEPA from my Swedish account to friends in Germany, Poland and the Netherlands is pretty much instant, I just don't like the exchange rate of my bank.
It's a technological problem. The SEPA system relies on MANY providers giving a many services. Replaces it with a technology that doesn't rely on any providers but instead allowing direct transfer of money from one person to another, and by almost by definition it'll be faster.
It doesn't matter what I believe, it's what I experienced and observed. For example, I knew a couple who lost their money via fraudulent debit card transactions and bank did piss all to investigate - and I understand its hard and bank is not motivated much. By using a credit card for example fraudsters would've spent bank's money and my friends would not be responsible for such transactions. Now if they used crypto they would be in the same position and there wouldn't even be an authority to ask to investigate (how convenient). I am not saying that people are not getting ripped by corp - just by probability many people are. But I don't see "crypto" as the answer to the problems I know about. What specific problem crypto solves in payments?
But none of that needs Blockchain as a technical solution.
E.g. my bank allows worldwide free SWIFT transfers in many many currencies. It's not hard to find out someone's name, bank account number and SWIFT code et voila... money sent. There's plenty of other solutions from Paypal to (Transfer)Wise etc.
Saying "it can be done in 20 seconds with crypto" is really only half the truth. At the end of the day we all need fiat money. So there's always a conversion step (if not two!) between fiat -> crypto -> fiat money. I can't pay my baker in Cardano nor my hair stylist in Fantom.
Using some kind of crypto as a more internal transfer and accounting unit seems like a fair use case. And then on/off ramps to traditional when needed.
Could likely be done simpler, but then why not (there are payments solution providers that keep everything internal etc.).
> "Remotely send money" is a super hard thing to do. I literally just struggled for a month with a transfer that included 3 countries, none of them is English speaking. It required...
But this only shows that some (many?) places are woefully behind on online banking, not that blockchain is required. I can transfer money abroad from my bank account to, probably, yours (do you have an IBAN account number?) with just a few clicks more in my online bank than a domestic transfer. If the banks in your target countries caught up to that (not incredibly advanced) standard, you could have done that too. And I'm fairly sure neither my bank nor the ones of my recipients, nor the systems in between them, use any blockchain whatsoever for this.
So not a valid example that blockchain is actually needed.
In the end, someone has power over the things in the real world, like releasing a version of the software or purchasing stuff. So everyone involved has to trust that someone at the least.
If the developer introduces a major change, it'll fork the chain. Everyone on the old version of the software will see one chain, everyone on the new version will see the new chain. If not many people switch, the old chain will be the valuable one. So it's kind of a voting system where the community as a whole votes. If the vote isn't decisive, both chains have value.
As far as purchasing stuff, there's no central purchaser that I can think of.
> If the developer introduces a major change, it'll fork the chain. Everyone on the old version of the software will see one chain, everyone on the new version will see the new chain.
Why? Can't the system keep using the same chain, or is this just convention? If any software change required a fork, you couldn't do even the most trivial of bug fixes (say, fix a typo in the UI, or whatever). But I notice you said "major change"; so who decides what's "major" and what isn't? On which grounds?
It's not convention. If it's possible to create a transaction that one version thinks is valid, and the other doesn't, someone will create such a transaction, it will be included in the chain that accepts it if that side has the majority of the hash power, and the other one will reject it. Thus you will have 2 chains (not to be confused with 2 Chainz).
The definition of "major change" in this case is a change that changes the definition of a valid block or transaction.
> Auditable in the sense that the code is there to read
Which code? Just your client code, or the code that miners and brokers and exchanges run on their servers, too? If the claim is the latter, how do you know that the published source code actually corresponds to the executables they're running?
How do you comply with compliance and reporting requirements? I would naively imagine that interacting with the financial system/fullfilling requirements for cross border payments etc. are still difficult when everyone is anonymous
Not saying you are doing something wrong but rather that I see a lot of applications in the wild that have to do with people imagining also a different regulatory landscape - which actually is a discussion to be had.
I transfer all my financial actions to my accountant who's reporting it while instructing me what I need to do further.
Compliance and reporting really differ from one country to another, and I'm not familiar with the US system (which I heard is one of the most strict). But as far as I checked (I'm not a lawyer, not an accountant and not an expert), where I live in the EU, compliance is something for legal entities (like, organizations, companies) and not for individuals like me.
[E: I take the last sentence back, it's a too general statement and I don't have the knowledge to make it. Thanks @hnhg for the comment]
I'm not sure that's the case. I'm no expert but I believe those entities exist in part to take liability away from us as individuals. It's my understanding that, for example, in certain cases of privacy and security regulation I would be personally liable as an individual without an entity to undertake it for me. This could change by country and entity type though, even in the EU.
You're probably right. I really wrote a too general remark, but actually meant specific things about my situation. I added a part now taking this general statement back.
Thanks. So pretty traditional in that respect - sounds like a nice example of getting both worlds to work. In my work I also see this kind of "non-maximalist" use cases as the more successful at the moment.
I like the idea that the chain can be used as the source of truth when other sources of truth have failed us. first 15 minutes of this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cwbbxb987vE
that will always be the case for anything off chain. the question is do oracles and well constructed systems provide better data than what we have access to today
And the answer is no, because anything which can be done to improve the trusted third-parties can be done more efficiently without the extra overhead of a blockchain. Blockchains require expensive always-on networks whereas many operations can run with much lower data requirements and even work entirely offline.
You can do that using public-key cryptography much cheaper, without depending on a massive network and expensive processing fees. The only time a blockchain can make sense is if the parties don’t know or trust each other, and by definition you’re trusting an oracle.
Issuing tokens is still probably illegal in both countries I live/work in. Regulatory and tax compliance immaturity are holding back a lot of people besides at the wild frontier or offshore operations with the resources to navigate that
> Back in 2017 during the first hype cycle, blockchain companies raised hundreds of millions with ICOs.
Yes. Those scams have been put an end to by regulations by the SEC, as unregistered ICOs are now illegal since 2017. [0]
> there is not a single product aside from trading/finance that got traction.
So what is wrong with using blockchain domain names like ENS for identity, or sign in use cases? Are we going to look back at this in 10 years time and we will see this sort of adoption? [1]
It's muddy waters. I just heard some guy from a public office saying they used DOT for some specific need (related to managing bonds somehow). And it was before last year boom. It's all very fuzzy
I'm glad someone remembers the (2-year) history. NFTs=ICOs, just another scam to keep "crypto" afloat. Neither ICO nor NFT resulted in anything useful, wait, maybe Bored Ape??
Helium network is an example of a successful blockchain project/application in my opinion. They created the biggest decentralized lorawan network in the world that is used by more internet of things companies everyday. Also they are trying the same thing for creating a decentralized 5G network. It’s still early days for them because I think they started in the end of 2020 or the start of 2021, but they have grown to 490000 lorawan hotspots already. The network usage could be better, but is increasing (saw increased sensor data activity for my hotspot in 2021).
The math for Helium just does not make any sense. Looking at forum threads every gateway makes about $50 in rewards / month. That's $294,000,000 per year in rewards paid out to gateway owners.
Sending one packet costs $.00001 (100K packets for $1 according to their website). So we need to see 29,400,000,000,000 packets yearly on the Helium network for data fees to cover the gateway rewards.
Looking at data from The Things Network - who operate another LoRaWAN network - from their conference last year they mention routing 600 packets/second using 30,000 gateways => that's 630,720 packets per gateway per year.
Assuming that Helium sees the same ratio of packets, and that every packet is unique, and that every packet is meant for the Helium network (and thus paid) this yields an expected (630,720 * 490,000) 309,052,800,000 paid packets => 309,052,800,000 * 0.00001 = $3,090,528 in data fees.
So ~3 million $ in revenue (in very best case scenario) from data fees, but paying out ~294 million $ to gateway owners.
Naturally the only way this works is because they give out their own invented tokens rather than dollars. This does not make any sense, and will never make any sense. I read that the gateway manufacturers pay the Helium company 50$ per gateway (to provision a private key) which probably pays for some stuff (and to pump up their own coin), but if that's the case then it just looks like a pyramid scheme.
Also scale doesn't help if you pay out 100x more for every gateway than you can potentially earn per gateway. But that should be obvious. You're paying a gateway for 600$ and then you get >600$ in rewards per year. This does not make any sense.
Ok, I will bite :) The gateway rewards are becoming less and less every month because more gateways join the network. So in a certain way that feels like a pyramid scheme because the people that joined earlier have an advantage (they also took the most risk by backing this project in a early state). It is quite normal to reward the first movers to your platform (PayPal even gave away free money to grow their user base)
There is a twitter account that publishes the DC burn rate hourly/daily/weekly: https://twitter.com/HNT_DC_Burn. Last week they burned $1,064,348 in data fees so the revenue is way higher than the 3 million per year you described, but you make a fair point for the gateway activation fee and not sure how much of the DC burned is because of this. But focusing on growth by giving out rewards for early hotspots is not a weird tactic and the question is indeed if the pricing make sense for the long run. Nowadays most priced stocks or other assets don't make any sense to me as well, so I would have agreed with you 10 years ago, nowadays I'm not so sure. They are also expanding to the decentralized 5G market and the packets send will be way more than the LoRaWan network, so I think that is priced in the helium price as well at the moment.
Your last statement I don't really understand. If you participate in a network by investing/running the hotspot you would want a compensation and nowadays a gateway would earn less than 600 dollars a year because of the increased hotspot amount. There will be an equilibrium that the market decides otherwise people would shutdown their hotspots.
This is what Elon said about PayPal growth strategy:
ELON MUSK: Yeah. Well, we started off first by offering people $20 if they opened an account. And $20 if they referred anyone. And then we dropped it to $10. And we dropped it to $5. As the network got bigger and bigger, the value of the network itself exceeded any sort of carrot that we could offer.
Helium is trying the same thing (only decentralized) with the proof of coverage algorithm and rewards (which are diminishing by a halving process every two and a half years I think) so that the network can sustain itself. Please let me know why the cognitive dissonance is astounding because their proof of coverage hotspot rewards look a bit more advanced to the growth strategy PayPal used and they hope the network will be sustained by data transfer only when the rewards are not given anymore. (https://cdn.codetober.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/1111471...)
Sorry, can you please explain (or give some link) how it is related to blockchain? https://www.helium.com/lorawan doesn’t mention this word
In general, I was under the impression that IoT devices are underpowered for such usage.
Thank you!
Also the internet of things devices are not running the blockchain but can (energy) efficiently transfer data to the helium network. The hotspots are also quite efficient if you look at the power usage (more similar to a light bulb instead of a proof of work miner)
So the devices probably go across the WiFi networks they're on and hack into the owners' PCs (or phones?) to mine Crypto-"currency"... At least that's the one way I can see for it to make financial sense for the manufacturer.
The manufacturer earns money by selling the hotspots, so not sure what you mean tbh. I think wat you are describing is a anti virus scheme like Norton 360 and Avira are doing by install/hack into PCs with hidden PoW mining code which is unethical/horrible . Bit weird to claim this for a hotspot that hasn’t a connection to your PC and trying to slander something without investigating it properly. I get the blockchain hate (especially PoW), but unfair to accuse every project of unethical behavior if there is no proof whatsoever.
Now that's an interesting idea. I'd wanted to have "proof of decentralization" - require that nodes be physically distant from each other, to prevent mining farms. But I couldn't figure out a way to prevent cheating. It's easy to fake that you are far away, but hard to fake that you're close, because the speed of light limits ping time.
But if you have something that's a useful network in its own right that keeps track of its own coverage, you can use that to enforce decentralization. The higher the density of nodes in an area, the lower the reward.
Helium network is also battling bad actors in the network and even though the have anti cheat measures in place they are currently voting on a deny list approach to target bad actors as well.
I am very curious about these actual users of Helium you refer to. I know there are a lot of nodes (where if you dump money at people--whether by direct subsidy or via circular incentive engineering--to run them that isn't surprising); but I hadn't heard of actual users. Is there any documentation of such, charts of actual usage over time, or articles covering "we adopted this and it was great"?
I got some airly (https://airly.org/en/products/airly-sensor/) air quality sensors in my neighborhood that are using Helium and you can see other solutions that are using https://www.helium.com/ecosystem. Not sure about the actual usage over time from sensors vs new hotspots joining the network and paying the DC fee, but I'm following https://twitter.com/HNT_DC_Burn and this should increase if the Helium network will be adopted more by sensors/IoT companies. Also the 5G hotspots they are providing in the US will probably add some value as well. You can check the helium twitter feed for companies they partner with or are using the helium network.
Do you know of any logistics company that actually uses it? What exactly do they store on blockchain? Who gets to add blocks to the chain? Are those permissioned blockchains? Can a private permissioned blockchain even be called blockchain? How does a private blockchain differ from a centralized database?
That's a very energy-inefficient way of rewarding content creators. Given that most users are going to go through Coinbase et al, it's no different from any of the other similar schemes (anyone remember Flatr?) except that you have a volatile wallet and a payment mechanism that somehow manages to be even more expensive than Amex!
Plus, it was clear that online shopping could work and offered certain advantages (and disadvantages). It was also pretty clear that online access was only going to expand, which would make online shopping more attractive.
It hadn't hit a peak, but it was clearly _doing_ something that wasn't scams.
Maybe you could refer to some history more specifically? Are you saying networking technology was developed in advance of a concept of what it's useful for?
Or is it that a global network of networks was a qualitative step beyond simple networking that didn't have a clear justification?
> Maybe you could refer to some history more specifically? Are you saying networking technology was developed in advance of a concept of what it's useful for?
I'm saying that networking technologies original intended use (resilient nuclear launch capability) is a tiny irrelevant fraction of what it is used for today.
I'd argue that most transformative technologies are in fact not relegated to their original intended use. Following cool/interesting/powerful technologies to see where they lead, rather than knowing the destination in advance, is how we have gotten almost everything that we have.
Being resilient to unreliable connections in general is a feature that was important initially and has never stopped being relevant.
The purpose of ARPANET was to implement applications like telnet, ftp, and email, so people could benefit from remote access to computers. The first network link went up in 1969 and the basic applications were implemented by 1973.
It seems to me that people knew exactly what they wanted to do from the get-go, it was useful almost immediately, and even though we have exponentially more people, computers, and applications today, the internet itself hasn't fundamentally changed.
This is not a proof that cryptocurrency is a dead end, but I think it's as clear as it can be that it has not been developed and adopted like internetworking was.
One could argue that the internet was in fact not innovative, transformative or interesting, and identify that as where it is different from cryptocurrency. Isn't connecting existing networks to each other as obvious, mundane, and utilitarian as it gets?
There is a RAND paper from the 60s that suggests the development of the internet over the next 50 years was fairly obvious:
> Being resilient to unreliable connections in general is a feature that was important initially and has never stopped being relevant.
That is a very abstract way of referring to the feature. Suppose 100 years from now the entire world runs on decentralized blockchains. You could make the same exact abstract point: "Well, leaderless consensus was the original design goal, and it was achieved immediately, so, it was useful from the very beginning".
Of course the core innovation will always be integral to the relevance of that innovation. The point though is that the specific applications envisioned for the internet were very narrow and almost completely unrelated to what we use it for today, when it was invented.
> It seems to me that people knew exactly what they wanted to do from the get-go, it was useful almost immediately, and even though we have exponentially more people, computers, and applications today, the internet itself hasn't fundamentally changed.
Again, only if you conceptualize "knew what they wanted" in a very abstract way that makes the point tautological.
Cryptocurrency as it stands today is already useful. There is no real debate about that. I personally find it useful as an alternative value store. The use cases might be narrow, and not nearly as revolutionary as some of its proponents think (yet), but they do exist. If I am the only person in the world that derives utility from it, then its utility is still non-zero.
But abstracting from crypto specifically, the idea that technologies need to have specific applications in mind before they are pursued is just not how the history of technology has ever worked. Many of the best discoveries were made entirely by accident, in the pursuit of random, interesting things. We make progress by pulling at threads, and pushing boundaries down avenues that lead to highly general, abstract, and powerful primitives. I don't know about you, but I think Byzantine fault tolerant contract execution is a profoundly powerful, abstract, and general primitive, much like the internet itself. We do not know what its specific applications will be, just like we didn't know about Uber, Amazon, or Google in 1969.
Go take a look at the history of the early internet. As recently as the early 90s (more than 20 years after ARPANet came online!) people were saying commerce would never happen on the internet. Nobody would ever feel comfortable buying things that way, it was absurd. Here's Paul Krugman, in the NYT all the way in 1998 saying as much:
It's way too easy to see where we are now with the internet as inevitable. But it was extremely far from obvious 30 years ago. Most of the world thought it was a toy. Thought business and commerce and ordinary people would never take it seriously. This was not a fringe view, it was the mainstream consensus.
Now, I don't want to fall into the trap of arguing that because the internet's future was obscure, and crypto's future is obscure, therefore crypto will be as successful as the internet. That's stupid. What I do want to argue is that the premise that technologies need to have clear-cut and specific applications before being pursued is wildly out of sync with how some of the most important technologies in human history have come about.
>only if you conceptualize "knew what they wanted" in a very abstract way that makes the point tautological.
I don't understand what you mean.
If they wanted remote login, email, and file transfer, and those applications were up and running in a year or three, and solved an immediate purpose/problem, that existed before the first network link was running, then what is it that is abstract or tautological?
I don't know how the contrast with cryptocurrency could be clearer.
> If they wanted remote login, email, and file transfer, and those applications were up and running in a year or three, and solved an immediate purpose/problem, that existed before the first network link was running, then what is it that is abstract or tautological?
Those are very small parts of the value proposition of networking today. Similarly, cryptocurrency delivered a feature on its first day: decentralized digital scarcity. You may not find this feature useful today, but some people do, and most people did not find remote login useful for quite a while after networking was invented.
The fact that the utility of decentralized digital scarcity is not world changing yet is not surprising. Remote login wasn't world changing in 1979 (10 years after ARPANet launched) either. It took quite a while for these things to find their modern use cases, and permeate the culture.
> I'm saying that networking technologies original intended use (resilient nuclear launch capability) is a tiny irrelevant fraction of what it is used for today.
But that's not what your GGP comment says (or at least strongly implies). ARPANET was not a solution in search of a problem; it was a solution to a pre-existing problem.
That this solution (or its progeny) was later found useful for a whole lot of other additional uses is something else entirely.
The reasoning in your progression of comments smacks if shifting the goalposts. To me, that implies an intellectual dishonesty that is all too typical of blockchain proponents.
A resilient decentralised computer network -- first realised as ARPANET, which later grew into the Internet -- was a solution to the (at least perceived) pre-existing problem of a military (nuclear) threat to the USA from the Soviet Union.
The difference was that the nuclear-war threat was somewhere between at least plausible and imminent, whereas the "problem" of centralized control over the money supply never actually existed; it's a delusion based on a fundamental misapprehension of what money is.
This is literally how research in the Universities makes it to the world. Spin-offs like Boston Dynamics are essential to building things that may not have immediate use but payoff can potentially be huge. We need to do more of this.
Don’t throw the baby with the bathwater. I really don’t think generalizations of certain jaded experience and then seeing the entire world with the same broken lens does any good. Probably the opposite. We ought to try new tech and keep an open mind.
Before people go off on Boston Dynamics - there are thousands of spin-offs, pick some other charitable example. The point isn’t about BD.
Boston Dynamics is and always has been on a trajectory to build useful products based on technology that is promising. Whether they're going to be successful or not is dependent on financing and time and luck of technology.
Blockchain was awesome technology in 2008, and Ethereum brought very interesting developments. But in the end there's only one thing it can do, and that's be an irrefutable ledger, and for most purposes that are of interest to the common person that is an insignificant improvement on centrally governed ledgers.
boston dynamics has never even been close to being on a trajectory to build useful products. they’re a grant-harvesting company first and foremost. they simply do not know how to build efficient and useful locomotors despite at least 3 decades of practice and millions of years of evolutionary precedents literally living right outside its doors.
in that way, the analogy to blockchain is apt: technology focused efforts are not product (read: marketing) oriented ventures.
They literally have a product for sale now. You make it sound like they're somehow worse at making locomotors than other companies are. Do you have any competitors in mind that achieved more with less practice?
the difference is that boston dynamics does not advertise get rich quick schemes to poor people. for example, 70% of the ads on the london tube are blockchain related. if blockchain was just something industry and academia poured money into, no one would have cared so much about it
Except that university research does not tend to produce that many charlatans and snake oil salesmen. I'll keep my skepticism until this technology gives us at least one useful mainstream thing.
I don’t understand your point. So if University research makes it out to the world - but the world decides to create scams from it, is it University’s fault?
I get it. People are angry about blockchain. Let’s shoot the world, not the messengers. Otherwise, we’ll be blaming the Bell Labs engineers for 4chan.
I don't think people are angry about blockchain (the technology) but about promises people make that with this technology will solve almost any society or world problem and then attracting people to invest and then if it does not work make the promise larger and atrract more money.
To use your example: it is like Boston Dynamics and people around will start saying invest in our IRO (Initial Robot Offering) as we will solve with robots everything. We can fix with our robots democracy flaws, we can fix with our robots inflation ... and when asked how will this actually work world wide they will say "We will just build more robots, invest more money into this and then when everybody will have one then that is how we fix those problems".
See the problem here? The problem is not the robot but the company/organisation and business model trying to sell it as a solution for everything without actually talking about the solution itself nor explaining how a robot will help with our financial system at large scale. At every critique they will just say "The solution is to build more robots and thus having robots everywhere so people will think about robots and not about other stuff".
There's no big problem, science and technology are progressing at a great pace. The whole marketing of snake oil solutions is just a nuisance, they're not really affecting anything of value significantly.
People are annoyed by Blockchain the same way people were annoyed by Justin Bieber, it's a whole lot to do about a person who is just a kid, a cool kid maybe, and he did make some good songs when he got older, but he didn't change the world, and he probably isn't going to either.
People hated Justin Bieber because he appealed to young girls, and tons of men automatically hate everything young girls like as some kind of twisted self defense of their masculinity.
People hate bitcoin because it appeals to people they find really annoying.
> People hated Justin Bieber because he appealed to young girls, and tons of men automatically hate everything young girls like as some kind of twisted self defense of their masculinity.
Naah, nothing to do with "self defense of their masculinity". We were just jealous that they found him so sexy and not us.
The primary difference is that basic research is conducted with everyone's money -- mostly via grants, and a lot of it in the US underwritten by the federal government -- for everyone's benefit. Even the venture capital industry is largely averse to basic research; they want more Ubers, or companies that can bring University tech to market.
Blockchain? The money flowing in is substantially from retail investors. And that's the problem. This is why we have regulations.
If Bitcoin is like gold, then there's really not much money going into it, into how to make better bit-coin, how to make better gold. All the money just goes into buying the bit-gold itself, or perhaps buying more mining equipment. But Bitcoin is not a replenishable resource so mining it will have diminishing returns, and like with every mining industry the nature is at risk.
From my very (admittedly very inexperienced) perspective, both views here are valid: it's foolish to scour the world for nails, but it doesn't hurt to make a hammer.
Build the technology, think of how it could help, and if you can't find a niche in the world that it fits, don't force the issue. Move onto new things: perhaps re-use some old ideas, of course, but actively get a wider experience, so that you increase your surface area of finding some way for your technology to help.
I have no idea what blockchain does or not. But just because its applications have turned out to be scammy, is it possible that it still has good uses in the future?
May be and may be not. OP is saying more generally that we should stop looking at tech that has no uses. I am disagreeing with that stance and it is just silly to be so wound up about Blockchain zeitgeist to not see through the fog.
the problem with Blockchain is that it is strictly less efficient than centralized databases. therefore the only reason to use it is if you can't trust a centralized database. it's like torrents in the alternate universe where torrents were slower than a download from a server.
It's not a bad analogy. Torrents have more cumbersome UX and are less data efficients than direct downloads, yet they are widely used for some types of applications.
This is waste to keep throwing resources at something because maybe someday something good will come out of it.
There’s many more areas like sequencing genomes and fighting cancer that these programmers could be spending their time on.
Is there any cool stuff that doesn't involve speculative trading in some "coin" or "token"?
I recently read about a steel maker in India executing a cross border order on blockchain. On further reading it turns out their bank used a third party company for digitizing letter of credit and that company claims to be using an enterprise blockchain R3 Corda. R3 itself is owned by a consortium of banks and on their website they don't use the word blockchain to describe Corda. They call it DLT.
My understanding is that a blockchain is supposed to be distributed, trustless, permissionless, immutable and open. At least that is what the core ideology behind it and is touted as the cornerstone features of blockchain. An enterprise blockchain is private, trustful, permissoned and everything that is a blockchain is not supposed to be. At that stage is it even a blockchain or just another propitiatory data store?
OK so a privately owned and controlled blockchain which only allows trusted users to add blocks is still a blockchain?
What would be the advantages of using a private, permissioned blockchain over a MySQL/Oracle/SQL Server database for storing data?
Why as an external user would I trust a centralized blockchain more than I would trust a centralized database? They are both private owned and controlled by a company.
You'd use a private, permissioned blockchain over federated SQL databases due to the technical difficulties of synchronizing audit tables across organizational boundaries -- since an enterprise blockchain is append-only, immutable, time-stamped, and each new entry has a hash of the previous view, it overcomes a lot of data integrity issues inherent to a distributed SQL database. None of the companies here will fully trust each other to hold an exclusive copy of the data, so the blockchain here replaces an expensive manual reconciliation step in the event local accounting databases don't match up.
As an external user? Nobody cares, it's not for you, move on.
> since an enterprise blockchain is append-only, immutable, time-stamped, and each new entry has a hash of the previous view, it overcomes a lot of data integrity issues inherent to a distributed SQL database.
And why couldn't a distributed SQL database be append-only, immutable, time-stamped, and implemented so each new entry has a hash of the previous state? (If you own it, just set it up to disallow updates or deletes, and allow inserts only through a trigger / stored procedure that adds the timestamp and hash.)
Talking of R3, their recruiters reached out to me. I wish they'd mentioned Blockchain or crypto hype up front, it would have saved me a few minutes browsing their website.
Allowing censorship-resistant / chargeback free donations, most coins.
Enabling private transactions, Monero.
Most "dapps" empower decentralization, distributed exchanges, trading, DNS, ownership contracts (DOAs), etc.
NFT's for art as silly as it is, more importantly for Handshake domain names and other cases where ownership proof comes into play.
Please feel free to go and attack all of those ideas and projects, but don't think for a second you can really gaslight people into believing they aren't worth of pursuit.
Paying for hosting with extremely volatile and environmental harmful tokens that only a part of population pretends has a real value, that you want to hoard rather than spend, and that might go to 0 at some point?
To have basically torrents?
Sending deflationary ponzi scheme tokens to people is not helping them. Also, fees are high.
Private transactions are great if you are a criminal, I'll give you that.
Tell me one "dapp" (or "extremely wasteful programs that run on a CPU that is orders and orders of magnitude slower than an actual one) that is doing something useful. I haven't found one yet and I've been searching for some years now.
With NFTs you don't own anything, unless there's an actual contract that comes with it. Also you buy a hyperlink that points to central storage. Also money laundering and wash trading are rampant.
If the powers at be allow you to (PayPal, banks, credit card companies)
If Mastercard doesn't like you or your wares (porn or dissent) good luck!
> Private transactions are great if you are a criminal, I'll give you that.
Tired old trope. You don't have to be a criminal to enjoy privacy.
> Tell me one "dapp" (or "extremely wasteful programs that run on a CPU that is orders and orders of magnitude slower than an actual one) that is doing something useful. I haven't found one yet and I've been searching for some years now.
>With NFTs you don't own anything, unless there's an actual contract that comes with it. Also you buy a hyperlink that points to central storage. Also money laundering and wash trading are rampant.
Tired old trope. It's simply a non-fungible token that can represent your ownership of an asset. You can own a Handshake domain using NFTs. There are other uses other than a hyperlink pointing to artwork. Yes others can access your domain and artwork, but you own it and you can sell it. In regards to your domain that's how you prove you own it and can admin it.
> Please feel free to go and attack all of those ideas and projects, but don't think for a second you can really gaslight people into believing they aren't worth of pursuit.
This hostility is completely unnecessary.
But if you want I can add one more to the list: funding the North Korean nuclear weapons program.
I'm confused. Are you being facetious about crypto having adverse uses too, or are you saying we should ban rocketry (another technology with good & bad uses), or something else entirely?
>> Are chargebacks on donations are major issue for any legitimate non-profit organization?
> Virtual game currencies, controversial politics, porn, gambling etc.
Paying for porn is not a donation.
Paying for in-game currency is not a donation.
Gambling is not a donation.
Giving money to someone for "controversial politics" is almost never an issue, especially if you're actually donating (which is only possible if you are, e.g., giving money to a registered candidate, a PAC, or an org that files a Form 8872). I make a lot of political donations and have never had an issue.
If you're:
1. giving money to someone for political reasons, who
2. explicitly opts out of tax-advantaged status so that they don't have to use that money in a way that's congruent with donor's intent, and
3. has a huge issue with charge-backs on unrestricted non-tax-advantaged gifts...
IDK. I'd tend to consider that a massive red flag. But I guess funding scam artists who get tons of money from identity thieves and prey on controversial politics is indeed a use-case for crypto.
That's interesting, but I don't see how it's related to OP's point. (Which was ostensibly about legitimate donations to legitimate non-profits, but was apparently actually about gambling, porn, and politics...)
Using fraud detection technology and/or swallowing the chargeback fees would probably be cheaper than the overhead of using a crpytocurrency+exchange.
Setting a minimum donation so that you're not a good target for card testing probably has a lower barrier to entry than requiring use of a crpytocurrency.
Yup, and crypto nips that in the bud. If you get a confirmed transaction, it's not going to be reversed by some unfair arbitration, you can trust it.
It sucks trying to run a game losing $20+ per chargeback and risking getting funds frozen entirely.
It sucks to be delisted by PayPal over political bullshit.
It sucks Mastercard and other CC companies can decide porn is essentially illegal.
- edit @ notahacker -
The point is you're at the whim of PayPal, Stripe, and credit card company policies for traditional fiat currency.
Have fun trying to sell guns (FFL be damned), porn subs (legal like you mentioned), virtual currency (legal ofc), or anything like that with traditional processors.
Crypto is the only option for those industries and a few others if you want to accept payment online.
Doesn't matter how many billions the industry is worth if you can't accept a credit card on your site for the service.
If all majors processors ban it, it's essentially blocked.
If I'm understanding what you're referring to, this is one of the worst part of NFTs. How is it any different than me having to pay Ford a royalty when I sell my used car on Craigslist? It's such a toxic feature for consumers. Sure, when used correctly it could be cool to help creators or whatever. It will absolutely be abused. It already is being abused by scammers who create NFTs that can't be sold.
It can be abused, but it allows the creator or developer to align incentives in different ways.
eg if the royalty goes toward a DAO, maybe that DAO’s charter is to grow awareness for the NFT project. Or the rewards could accrue toward a staked project token that all community members hold, or fees could go back to the creator to fund development for next gen.
I don’t know the best use, but my point is because someone programmed royalties, there’s now another dimension of configuration for NFT projects.
That's not example of something NFTs can do, is it? Royalty fees are not programmable. How does the NFT know whether someone has to pay royalties? And how on earth is an NFT going to make people pay royalties? An NFT can't use coercive force.
I don't know what this means. Let's say I own the copyright of a musical composition, and I sell a license to a film producer. How does this standard help me collect royalty fees?
Then you should be opposed to most basic (theoretical computer) science and mathematics research too that doesn't have any immediately apparent application.
The scientific research to engineering pipeline is the backbone of our rapid technological progress. Basic research can target unexplored areas in a more organized fashion, allocating resources properly instead of industry's ad-hoc approach. Sort of like breath first instead of depth first. Industry will waste resources solving just their own individual instances of a mini-problem one by one resulting in a total resource consumption that is greater than what academia would have used in solving the overarching problem.
I couldn’t care less :) if you want to pretend the rest of the ecosystem doesn’t exist it’s up to you. But it’s a bit like China looking at democracies in the west and only looking at the US and being “democracies don’t have universal healthcare, what’s the point lol”.
>> the only blockchains that are relevant are just colossal energy sinks
> I couldn’t care less :) if you want to pretend the rest of the ecosystem doesn’t exist it’s up to you.
Eh... You're the one defending a system that doesn't give a shit about the ecosystem. You know, the real actual ecosystem, the one POW[1] blockchain so immensely contributes to destroying. It's almost as if you guys are all pretending it doesn’t exist.
___
[1]: And what an apt acronym that is, in this context.
PoW is what makes Blockchains of BTC truly permissionless and decentralized. It's a solution to the 51% attack. Yes PoW is resource hungry and expensive but it's a feature not a bug.
If we remove PoW to reduce cost and stop wasting energy, it just makes it another centralized system. PoS or FPoS is centralization in the hands of a few whale coin holders.
Many other VC backed blockchains like Solana are not even decentralized. And to talk about enterprise blockchain like Corda or Hyperleger, I don't know if it's even correct to call them blockchain.
The idea that blockchain tech is somehow invented out of nothing and then we search for a problem to match couldn't be further from the truth. Talk to anyone who works in the industry and they're trying to solve a problem.
I used to work in blockchain tech and the main problem I was focused on was "How do we prevent internet monopolies like Facebook and Google?".
If you don't see those monopolies as a problem, then you're disagreeing with the problem space, that doesn't make it "trying to find a problem".
How does blockchain tech prevent monopolies exactly? Any environment that respects property rights and has activities that can be done more efficiently with scale and concentration will have centralization. Cryptocurrencies themselves are centralized by almost every dimension because mining exhibits those characteristics. Nearly any interesting on chain technology is centralized in that a minority disproportionately receives the vast majority of the upside. None of this kills monopolies
You are using a very different meaning of centralisation and decentralisation than blockchain people do.
That's neither here nor there though.
The way you kill Facebook, Google and any Web2 company is to kill their business model. These are all 100% ad-funded businesses. Kill the advertising funded internet and these monopolies categorically die with it.
The only _attempt_ I've ever seen at addressing the issue that all the major websites are ad-funded has been within the blockchain space. Show me any other realistic alternative to ad-funding and I will happily adopt it.
The question is how does additional fund sources prevent people from also using advertising or collecting data? For example subscription services for newspapers often still show ads. Usually additional revenue streams are used to capture more revenue.
If the answer to killing the ad funding business model was individuals pay directly it’s going to face a steep uphill battle because right now for most people the cost to read is free. What improved experience does it provide for the additional cost?
> If the answer to killing the ad funding business model was individuals pay directly it’s going to face a steep uphill
Indeed, we tried that and it failed, so we need something else.
Blockchain will probably fail because the narrative has been taken over by greed and NFTs.
But Web3 will fail because the tech world seemingly (as evidenced by the comments here) have no interest in solving the problems of Web2, rampant privacy violations, predatory business models and advertising. The answer to all these problems by HN is ”no one cares about privacy so it’s not worth solving”.
Then we're all doomed. Regulation has proven they have neither the interest nor capability to do anything about it, GDPR being the perfect example which have achieved nothing more than make Web2 more annoying to use.
> The answer to all these problems by HN is ”no one cares about privacy so it’s not worth solving”.
I think that's bullshit. It's just that most normal, sane, people think something like ”burning down the planet is no solution to the problem of privacy, and even if it were it would in itself be just as much of a problem, so it’s not worth attempting to solve it that way”.
It is frankly astounding that this isn't immediately obvious to anyone; verges on psychopathy in my book.
And how does a distributed Ledger solve these problems?
Monopolies like Google and Facebook exist, in no small part, because the amount of computation and data they handle is vast, and they have the data centers to deal with that.
How much data gets has to be stored on the servers of such services? Per second? I'd assume its in the range of several GiB...again per second.
Okay, so how does the blockchain compare to that? Ethereum can store data, each byte requires about 600 of its "gas" computational equivalent. A block represents 30,000,000 gas, 1 block is generated every 15sec, so we can store a grand total of about 1MiB every 300 seconds...that is, if none of the gas is used for anything other than storing data, which means, no other computations running.
So how is "blockchain technology" going to solve the problems that come from such highly centralized services exactly?
Monopolies like Google and Facebook exist because of advertising. Remove advertising and they don't exist.
The fact that they're processing a lot of data is in large part because they need to for advertising.
Still, your understanding of blockchain tech is misleading here. Ethereum is public key registry at best and is not and should not be used to store or process data.
In a blockchain world you can still have service providers, but the user is the one with the power, not the service provider. Users are free to switch service providers as they see fit because their identity and data isn't tied to a single company.
Remove advertising and the amount of users for most social networks drops to oblivion, because barely anyone wants to spend money every time they post a picture of their cat.
> The fact that they're processing a lot of data is in large part because they need to for advertising.
They need large amounts of storage because millions of hours of video & audio, billions of food-pictures, tens of billions of lines of text, and a megagagazillion of references on who-like-clicked-what-when, take up a lot of storage.
> and is not and should not be used to store or process data.
Well then, what should be used? What decentralized storage solution can handle something like youtube, where 500 HOURS of video were uploaded PER MINUTE in feb. 2020?
And storing is half the deal. The solution also has to have high availability, consistency, low latency, and needs to be environmentally sound.
> Users are free to switch service providers as they see fit
No they are not. That is, they will need just as "free" to switch in the non-blockchain world.
Why? Obvious, isn't it?
- Blockchains can't store the amounts of data required (Youtube/Instagram/TikTok on blockchain? What a nice joke)
- Even if you somehow can, companies will store data in their own proprietary ways incompatible with each other
- And, of course, this data will be on different blockchains, some of them invented specifically for the purpose
In reality though, as we're seeing it with NFTs all the data will be centrally stored with only some meaningless tokens referencing it stored on blockchains
So if its not stored on the chain, where will it be stored, if not on central servers, where its ultimately under control of whoever owns them?
In a distributed network? How does that handle the data loads and requirements (availability, latency, security) of services on the scale of fb or youtube?
ique: Users are free to switch service providers as they see fit because their identity and data isn't tied to a single company.
me: data can't be stored on the bockchain, it will remain proprietary, so good luck "being free" and switching between service providers
ique: Data will never be stored on blockchains, its not what they’re for.
So, how exactly are users going to be "free to switch service providers" if their data will literally remain in a walled garden of the service provider?
> Talk to anyone who works in the industry and they're trying to solve a problem.
Sure. But are those problems worth solving? How many VCs does the world need to pump cash into NFT-enabled video games before we ask the question, "why?"
There's quite a bit of distance between blockchain tech and preventing Facebook/Google monopolies isn't there? And as long as blockchain tech has some dependency on capital investment, your better funded outfits are always going to have the terrain tilted in their favor.
If it has dependency on capital investment, it's not blockchain tech. Like almost by definition. Unless you adopt a super dumb idea of "blockchain = linked list". If you're talking about more than the data structure then what you're saying makes no sense.
I always assume that I'm wrong, so I'll keep looking for successful applications and I'm sure you can prove me wrong :)