this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2024
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Blockchain is a solution in search of a problem. A way to establish trust while not trusting any party is a cool concept, but in the real world it's far easier to establish a source of trust.
It is a bad solution though, because it revolves around wasting tons of energy in solving made up problems no one actually needs the solution to. I know there's alternative cryptocurrency that use better methods or solve actual problems but 90% of it is bitcoin.
Congratulations, now your trust relies on your subject never becoming important enough that someone bothers to run 50%+1 of the nodes in your network which means only very, very large subjects (or ones where trust wasn't very important in the first place) ever even have a chance of that not happening. What do you say? Your technology doesn't scale to very, very large subjects because of abysmal transaction rates?
Yup. Very well said. People don't realize the extent of wealth inequality (and how ridiculously resource intensive blockchain tech is). If anything important were to be decide by a blockchain, the top 1% would control the network.
More on wealth inequality here.
Today's inequality was created by the Cantillon effect.
What happened in 1972?
Soviet Union launched Venus-8
I have a friend who works at a major bank and they use Blockchain technology to keep track of something or other internally, though I don't remember exactly what. In this case at keast we can bet that it has found a problem wirth using it to sokve. Banks are nothing if not efficient.
I find it funny that it was touted as an alternative to the current banking system and ended up being absorved into it though
I envy your trust in the efficiency of banks
Banks are businesses made up of people. If a manager thought he could get a promotion by supporting a blockchain project at the height of blockchain mania, that's what he would do. Whether if fails or not is of no consequence, the manager is already on another project.
My experience working in banking is that they're extremely conservative. They don't take big risks on new technologies or processes and don't modernize their technology too quickly to be certain that everything works as expected and doesn't surprise anyone
If it's used internally, then I question whether it made sense to use blockchain. At the end of the day, it's probably the trust in the bank that matters and not blockchain.
Interesting. Good to know. Thanks!
Blockchain is effectively a distributed database. Almost always a good centralized database functions better.
Nah. the commenter above is just wrong. It's just that anyone who isn't selling bullshit uses their real name- Merkel trees - which are fundamental to modern software development (git, zfs, nix, nosql).
That's a similar but different concept. Blockchain adds a way to determine consensus of the correct tree. While git is distributed, it's generally not trustless, there's generally a trusted version of the repository.
what? Git is very much distributed and while you can have a main branch, you can set as many up streams as you want and merge things sideways.
It's trust less in the sense that commits can't be easily forged and are signed with cryptographic keys and identities-- as in, I don't have to trust that the source code is genuine since I can verify the commit history myself.
Consensus is just a pull request.
That wiki article literally lists Bitcoin and Ethereum as implementations of Merkel trees.
I'm pretty sure being able to verify that the person responsible for a push is an actual maintainer is the opposite of trustless.
How is it any different than verifying that a transaction occurred?
How is a trusted repository different from a hard fork?
Isn't "proving someone is a maintainer" just an IRL proof of stake?
With a centralized trust source (bank), you ask for the records.
Because you check who owns and maintains it. A notable example was with Simple Apps for Android, earlier this year the main repo was sold to a company. Trust was lost, thus a fork was created to keep the original stuff.
Right, but isn't the "main chain" of Ethereum based on a similar principle wherein it's the main chain because it's the one the devs use?
What about BTC vs BTC lightning.
I'm genuinely failing to see a distinction here, and, again, the wiki article says that blockchains are special cases of Merkle trees.
No clue, I don't keep an eye on that, I'm partially aware that there are several similar forks (and eth classic was a result of scammy shenanigans) but, afaict, none try to pretend they're the "real" ethereum.
A distinction between trust and trustless? Because my initial point was that git isn't trustless, because it works just like any other online system that requires a login, where a central server/database checks if the user sending inputs was properly identified by some mean (password, cryptographic key, something else). Implementing a Merkle or any other hash tree doesn't make something trustless
does git require authentication with a central server? I know that's common practice and true of github, but my recollection was that it was meant to fix the problem of distributed kernel development via an email listserv in the early 2000s. This stack exchange post discusses how it's not really centralized
Not being centralized has nothing to do with being trustless. The fediverse is also decentralized, yet you, me and everyone else has to log in to a specific server. If I try to login via lemmy.world, it'll fail. I have to login via programming.dev. Does that make lemmy and the fediverse trustless? No.
Even the top answer on that SO question explains that the use case of hash trees for git is different from that of blockchain
yeah, but this SO post has many up voted comments supporting my points as well.
You're completely ignoring the point that being decentralized and/or implementing hash trees does not make a system trustless
no, no. I'm conceding that-- not ignoring that.
183 votes for your "similar but not the same" and 103 votes for "they are the same". At the very least, I'd say this is far from settled fact
https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.00892
Is it easier to establish a source of trust? With blockchain trust lies in the protocol and in the node operators who make decisions about how to operate their nodes. Running a node isn't extremely difficult. Running a financial institution is difficult.
Well, sure, now you have a currency that doesn't rely on trust
...now what? How are you going to spend that currency if you don't trust anyone? How will you ensure you get what you bought? How will your property get protected? Hell, how do you get others to agree that your crypto is the one they should use?
It's trust all the way down. Removing it from one small part of the chain isn't going to fundamentally change things