OK but there are actually great uses for blockchain that are completely disconnected from anything you typically see
For example, banks may begin using blockchain for maintaining their internal ledgers. It will help solve a ton of issues around reconciling the transactions from all over the globe
Blockchain has reasonable uses. Really good ones. Crypto and nft bros just completely ruined the image of it
EDIT: I love all the comments demonstrating how little people understand about blockchain. Bitcoin was not the first blockchain, nor is its design the only type of blockchain. Assuming that all blockchain looks like the crypto/nft paradigm is just showing your ignorance.
It’s distributed so no single entity can take it down. Among many other possible benefits depending on architecture and infrastructure.
It’s far more complex than coins and NFTs. Blockchain is like a new internet. Coins and NFTs are like those shitty GIFs you used to see everywhere. Evocative of old internet, but not the internet itself.
Distributed databases have existed for decades. It’s how large healthcare systems maintain electronic health records for their patients across dozens of hospitals in real time.
Simple, it’s not. If it were, they’d have been using them for decades (blockchains were invented in the 70s).
The consensus algorithm, which is not the blockchain itself, was invented later. But banks don’t need to reach concensus with themselves. They all maintain their own data, and heavily guard it. So the only bad actor they could have is themselves. And they banks all keep watch each other.
This isn’t true: there are not-distributed blockchains.
The definition of a blockchain is a ledger where every entry is cryptographically signed with a hash of the current entry plus a previous entry. There’s no requirement that this be at all distributed. In fact, QLDB uses a non-distributed blockchain as its audit log.
Blockchain are often used in distributed systems because of the verifiability of the records; its a way of providing security of history in a fundamentally insecure environment. But there’s no requirement that they be distributed, and they add value in non-distributed environments as well - in any case you want to be able to review a history of changes and know that someone hasn’t been cooking the books, for instance.
I’ll give a real-world example. One place I worked we had databases that had data constantly streaming in from many different sources. Something that would frequently happen would be some data issue that would break applications; often, this was bad data from sources outside of our control. Ops*, who’s only priority was to get the applications back up and running, would often track down and directly modify records and fix the data. The issue was that some time later, sometime days later, a customer would call and complain about data being incorrect. By then, it was impossible to figure out what had happened: did we get the wrong data from the source? Did one of the import processes mangle the data? Did someone poke around in the database and change the data? We had no way of telling, and investigations would take many hours, often from several senior people, who would frequently in the end have to shrug and say, “we don’t know.” There were lots of things that could have improved this, with varying levels of success, but a global audit log would have been the first step. A verifiable audit log would have been better, because often it’d come down to us being convinced the data a third party was giving us was bad, and it became an our word vs. their word since we shared the same client. If we’d had a blockchain layer through which every transaction was recorded, we could have rolled back in time and figure out exactly how a record came to be what it was and been able to prove it to the client.
Blockchains are awesome. People who say otherwise have their heads up their asses, and are unable to differentiate between blockchain the technology, and the sometimes questionable uses they’re put to. Iron is used to make guns and bombs; that doesn’t make iron bad.
Thank you for being in this thread. I felt like I was taking crazy pills with all these other replies. So many people think bitcoin was the first blockchain. And that the paradigm used by crypto is the only type of blockchain there is.
I will never forgive tech bros for making blockchain a buzzword tied exclusively to crypto and NFTs. The amount of lost potential is infuriating
How can you trust that the database is really append only? Blockchain provides a way to verify the state of the database and the ordering of the transactions. Beyond that, not much benefit to be had. However, for certain situations, that is a very big benefit!
Sure! So some students of mine were working on a multiplayer video game that was started by a different group of students the previous semester. The first group of students made a design choice that, to over-simplify, basically tracked achievements and milestones on the client side and then synchronized those achievements to the server. Players could cheat the system by sending malicious packets of achievements to the server. Some achievements could only be completed by a single person in the game, so this was a big problem for the 2nd group of students to overcome. Faced with the choice of rearchitecting the game to be more authoritative on the server and less resilient to frequent disconnections, which affected some aspects of the game, or creating a logical and verifiable sequence of in-game events on the server side. The students went with the latter, and implemented a Lamport clock using a blockchain to verify the authenticity of the events, and prevent a rogue student from updating the game later to give themself a bonus. Basically, along with needing an authoritative sequence of events that is protected from user interference, it also needed to be protected from developer interference.
It was kinda similar to that situation a few years back of the EVE online developers playing the game and giving their guild members certain bonuses and special in-game items. The solution there was to fire the malicious developers, but I can’t exactly fire an entire class of students from an educational project.
EDIT: What seems to be the problem here? I was asked to name a situation where a blockchain would be useful and I did? It’s a computer data structure, there are pros and cons that are context dependent like any other data structure. It I so weird to me to receive downvotes because of the politics surrounding a data structure.
To your edit; it was a great example, but if you say anything positive about blockchain (or Apple, or capitalism, etc) you’ll likely be heavily downvoted on Lemmy.
But yeah, like others have said in this post, it had a bad light cast on it due to the jpg and gif NFTs. Folks started to realize: “wait… this token just contains a link to a web server hosting a jpg file??”
Well, yes. But also the rights.
“The heck you mean ‘the rights’??”
I mean, your Drunk Monkey in Teal Color Theme artwork is yours to use, you’ve purchased the license in the form of an NFT.
“But it’s just a link that anyone could just copy!”
Well, that would be stealing.
So NFTs in that regard are like any movie or TV show, or video game you rent or purchase. That utility may or may not seem to have any value to any one person, but it is a utility, and a pretty cool one if you ask me. But the usage, its implementation, is what matters. Whatever that usage requirement is for the individual or business, blockchain will do it well. Even if it is used to license junk.
Dude, my name literally contains “coding” you made the assumption I didn’t understand it…
Yeah banking needs to be controlled because what if something goes wrong, you can’t be this dense, stolen credit cards, stolen identity wring transaction, what if the validators disagree what is the truth ala bitcoin split?
Blockchain is woefully inadequate to manage finances…
I have literally explained to you what I meant, there is nothing to admit, lmao.
This is the issue with cryptobros you just think you are so much smarter than everyone else, and everyone else must be stupid and just not understand how crypto works.
Meanwhile you cant even see the huge flaws with the technology, you think " just wait and don’t be dishonest" while there is a disagreement and unrecoverable split in the network is a viable solution… fucking hell that’s such a childish take
When was last time a fork caused an unforseen problem in a popular blockchain?
There are plenty of things about blockchain technology you could have mentioned that are not yet perfect (privacy, scalability, accessibility, governance, regulation, interoperability etc.) but the best attack you have is that cryptography is meaningless.
Meaning, in a DB, the admin could change roles and modify anything.
Database triggers can have bugs, and we generally don’t let third parties log into the database directly because it’s a huge attack surface
In blockchain, without a key you’re cryptographically locked out. The only way around that is if the network as a whole changes their code to a version that allows something like that
It’s just a ledger where every entry is signed by a private key. That’s a fantastic structure for certain specific use cases…
i for one would have liked a media licensing system that operates agnostic of any centralized authority
for instance, irrefutable and independently verifiable proof that you own a valid software, music, or visual art license and are therefore immune to prosecution for piracy.
A registry of licenses like this could shield creators from copyright claims on social media applications such as youtube. Could also automate revenue sharing and royalties for artists whose works are used in derivative media so the people who actually perform the work get paid. Would be nice to cut the publisher middleman out. And there is absolutely no reason there has to be anything like a “proof of work” system burning down entire fucking rainforests’ worth of energy to verify every single gods damned transaction because this sort of system isn’t for trading shit, it’s strictly for proving a valid chain of custody between producers and consumers and you don’t need megawatt-hours to just fucking LOOK SOMETHING UP.
imagine if, for instance, fucking warner brothers couldn’t “takes backsies” content that they SOLD to end users through a distribution network; the license is yours, and anyone can look up the fact that the license was sold to the user id you happen to control.
imagine if, for instance, you buy a video game through a digital distributor like steam but then the store goes out of business and no longer exists to serve you a copy or recognize the sale, but on this massively distributed and decentralized database you can prove that you did indeed compensate the developers of that software and thereby legally acquire entitlement to access it in accordance with the end user license agreement.
imagine if ownership of stuff you bought fair and square can never be taken away from you
Well, if those licenses are entries on the blockchain, they could be transferred on the blockchain. You could sell your game used when you’re bored of playing it. You can’t play it after you sell it but someone else can. Publishers hate resale markets though, when people buy used games they don’t make any money. So they’ll probably never go for this.
Not really. You backup you keys like a normal human. Or create any of those new account abstraction keys that are tied to another account, or anything else.
Not really. You backup you keys like a normal human. Or create any of those new account abstraction keys that are tied to another account, or anything else.
You can lose access to regular accounts as easily as to a blockchain. In fact, losing database of your password manager is even worse, because even if you have backups, they're not going to be complete.
With a blockchain all you have to worry is your private key. And you can write it down on a piece of paper, if you want, and put it away in a safe or a bank vault or something. Then, if you use it to restore your access years later, nothing will be lost.
"There are 2 types of people in the world: those who make backups, and those who don't make backups yet."
As people said, you can backup your private keys to a flash drive. You can put them in a safe deposit box. You can give them to your lawyer or other fiduciary with a legal responsibility to act in your best interests (who also knows how to protect digital property if they keep digital copy). You could write it with lemon juice onto the back of the Declaration of Independence at the National Archives. You could have a laser thingie that displays it on a wall surgically implanted into your arm. Pretty much all the ways people protect gold or cash in the real world you can do with a piece of paper with your private key.
I feel like here you get to the NFT problem of having proof of ownership of something doesn’t mean much when that thing is being hosted on servers you don’t control
so if you have an entry with a licence for a steam game, and steam gets closed, you are out of luck
it’s that holding a license for a game entitles you to operating a copy of it regardless of where you bought it.
it’s the whole basis for why emulation and ROM images were LEGAL
because you had a right to retain a backup of the software you own through the license.
with an independent licensing infrastructure, if GoG closes you can take your licenses with you, download the game from anywhere, and if anyone tries to charge you for stealing it, you can just present your license: “See, i bought it fair and square.”
if i bought a dryer from SEARS, it didn’t stop being mine when SEARS closed.
NFT’s don’t show you have proof of ownership of anything other than the NFT. Think of all the people who got their metamask account hacked and lost all their apes with zero recourse.
Why would anyone want anything required for daily life attached to something so insecure and irreversible as that?
imagine if, for instance, you buy a video game through a digital distributor like steam but then the store goes out of business and no longer exists to serve you a copy or recognize the sale, but on this massively distributed and decentralized database you can prove that you did indeed compensate the developers of that software and thereby legally acquire entitlement to access it in accordance with the end user license agreement.
What you’re arguing for is forcing the distributor to distribute in perpetuity, which has nothing to do with how you show ownership of your license.
Right now, I can show steam I’ve purchased, say Delistopolis, and they will agree I am indeed perfectly allowed to have and play it. But they are not required to provide me with a copy.
Only the keys need to be stored cryptographically, really, because the game files themselves are nigh inevitably available on torrenting networks. it’s inevitable that people are going to rip backups of all game files for the delicious delights of datamining and as long as enough of them will seed them (which shouldn’t be a problem as long as there’s any INTEREST in a game existing…) that availability never arises as an issue. And if it’s not popular enough to put there, it’ll probably end up on The Internet Archive.
Would be nice if there were an infrastructural ‘backup of last resort’ such as the library of congress, which is something the LoC already does for other audiovisual media. It’d just be nice if that service were extended to software.
So more of a blockchain KMS then? I don’t see how you could construct such a thing.
The requirements of allowing a publisher control of their game for some time (for example, allowing them to retract some keys when violating the EULA, but not all keys when “unpublishing” a game), but also allowing people to resell keys, which are somehow publically accesible but only for the legit owner, and the owner has to allow third-party acces without publically sharing a private key.
This is the age-old identity problem with blockchain. It’s all well and good that Bob’s name is written on a smart contract, but that doesn’t remove the issue with how to identify Bob.
All such copyright licenses are rooted in local jurisdictional law, so your country’s copyright office should be the authority because anything else means the courts can tell you that your on-chain transactions are invalid
Blockchain is only potentially useful if there’s no single entity that can be trusted. If banks can’t even trust themselves to manage their own internal ledgers, they have much bigger problems to deal with.
Trustless systems aren’t a bad thing that has to step in when the good thing fails. Trustless systems are inherently better because you don’t have to trust a bank (or anyone for that matter).
Additionally, ledgers can be gamed/corrupted/falsified. This is significantly more complex (bordering on impossible) on the blockchain.
There are often easier, more reliable, and far cheaper ways to achieve the same things without using a blockchain. Some of the principles are even used in normal web browsing to ensure secure untampered connections.
Blockchain just solves a subproblem that only arises when there’s no appointed central entity.
I was hedging against a particularly snarky commenter showing up. You can do a 51% attack and theoretically corrupt it. In practice, that’s much more difficult.
You dont need 51% attack to corrupt a ledger. Just enter incorrect info and the ledger is wrong. Not a damn thing a blockchain can do about that. Same issue is with any trustless system where you have to trust someone to input the correct info/do the agreed thing/ship the ordered physical item.
Just enter incorrect info and the ledger is wrong.
The concept behind cryptocurrency is that the ledger is the info, because you’re right, a half-assed blockchain ledger used for external (e.g. cash) transactions doesn’t really solve the root problem. Proof of work is fucking stupid though, and it has (rightfully) ruined the perception of blockchain technology among those who can see past their own crypto wallet.
You can implement public or semi public ledgers without Blockchain. That’s what banks are doing already by sending huge CSV files internally and externally. Blockchain is not a technology of zero trust. It’s close to the opposite. You trust a few peers and blindly trust everyone they trust. That way you trust a network that you know nothing about and if the network decides on a common truth that you are convinced is incorrect, there is nothing you can do about it. The consensus always wins and there is no single entity to complain to and get it fixed. This is great for making sure that many actors need to be bad actors in order to have the whole system fail. It’s bad if you don’t trust anyone and want to make sure that your standards are always observed. From a technology standpoint I love the concept of Blockchain. But use cases that are not forced are few and far apart. Too few for the amount of hype it receives.
so I put my trust in software instead. And by extension its developers. You’re saying of all people, we should trust some programmers above all else. You know, the “move fast and break things” guys.
As a programmer myself, this thought is both terrifying and hilarious.
As a fellow programmer: what kind of doomer take is this? I don’t have any opinion on the efficacy of blockchain technology, but all of us put an immeasurable amount of trust in software every single day. And it’s not like current banking practices are different in this regard, either: blockchain tech requires faith in the software implementation, while contemporary banking requires faith in banks and the software they use (including a borderline unmaintainable COBOL stack, from what I’ve heard).
Agreed, audits are beneficial in virtually every situation. I just think that, of all the well-formed arguments to be made against cryptocurrencies (especially PoW coins), the fact that it is software isn’t one of them. In my opinion, fueling distrust of software in general is ill-advised.
The distruss to software is not against all software. Blockchains are usually advertised as trustless, so the argument against that has to be made as you have to trust the devs. The trustless argument is weak on other fronts also, but this is one side of the issue.
because problems in the bank’s software are the bank’s responsibility. If they lose my money, it’s their responsibility to get it back. Cryptocurrencies are the exact opposite, by design. If you’re fucked, you’ee fucked. unless of course half the participants decide to fork, half don’t and you end up with two “currencies” out of thin air.
Blockchain has been around as a technology for nearly two decades. If financial institutions thought it could help them you can bet they would be all-in on it by now. As it is, blockchain has no significant advantages over traditional financial ledger systems, so what incentive is there for them to use it.
It’s not something new or cutting edge any more, just waiting for a bright spark to discover the technology and put it to use.
Well, why would banks replace the system which allows them to charge fees for every other interaction with their services? A blockain solution would allow multiple different banks (and, possibly, even regular people) to access the data with no middlemen, and, therefore, no fees. Or, well, no fees that directly end up in the bank's pockets as profit, that is.
Getting rid of that is bad for business. So, unless something magical happens and the EU, for example, pass a law requiring the banks to switch to a more de-centralized, more fair system, it's not going to happen.
That’s kind of my point. Blockchain evangelists have been banging the drum for many years saying “This is a perfect fit for the financial industry. Why won’t fintech wake up and recognise that?”
When in fact fintech took a long, hard look at blockchain a long time ago and decided “nope, there’s nothing here that would tempt us” outside of a few very niche applications.
Rather than resorting to that age-old cry of the cult member “do your own research!” can I respectfully suggest that if you’re aiming to change somebody’s mind, the onus is on you to provide the evidence, not on them. By all means take hours out of your day to search google and compile a list of things that you think will convince me. Me, personally, I have better things to do with my life.
I didn’t ask them to do their own research. I asked that, if they are skeptical of a claim I made, either do a simple Google search to check if it’s very easily verifiable, or ask me directly instead of immediately saying “you’re wrong because I would have heard of it”
Like, I’m happy to provide citations when requested, but lemmy isn’t a scientific journal where I’m expected to provide every source for my information up front
How do you see memes like this? Because I see them as lame and sad, especially since we have been seeing them for 10+ years now and they are still the same. But apparently you think blockchain has reasonable uses.
I think he is most certainly right. People that think otherwise should go back to their bar order another one and keep ranting about it to their half dead drunkard friends.
No, it’s shitting on blockchain too. The only options are “don’t use blockchain” and “stop making crypto” which is misguided. I agree with the sentiment about crypto, not about blockchain
If you nitpick sure. But in practice crypto is the part that makes blockchain work.
There was a trend to try to separate them many years ago, because some people believed that was the way to push the technology forward - to focus on the blockchain part and try to hide the crypto part that has a bad rep after it was abused in the media as what only criminals use. But it failed. We shouldn’t hide the crypto part, but push it forward. That strategy worked! Today we have approved bitcoin etfs which is crazy amazing! And when eth ETF is approved, then all of them will have to be. This is the way.
I have no idea why you are going to the failed arguments from almost 10 years ago.
You are just simply wrong and I don’t have the energy left to keep digging up the resources to prove it. Go read my other replies elsewhere. There are even people in this thread who have written long comments detailing the same things I’m saying. You do not understand the history of blockchain, only crypto. You do not understand the underlying technology, nor what differentiates the concept of a blockchain from the type of blockchain used in crypto. So I’m done. Too tired of showing people the truth when they refuse to entertain anything but their existing position.
You think you are right because you found some niche situations in where your opinion is valid. But you don’t realize, your opinion is still just an opinion and this opinion is weak af.
You don’t need to imagine what I understand and what I don’t understand after our brief exchange. You have no clue who I am, so don’t try.
You are completely missing the point. Which is normal if you had to pull stuff from Google to find a small example where in some abstract sense you might be right. Attacking me, a person you know nothing about, is weak.
Using a blockchain to maintain their internal ledgers means they have complete control over that blockchain, so they can manipulate it all they want. Blockchains aren’t magic.
A blockchain won’t solve incorrect transaction information any more than an audit log in this case. This is an entirely internal process controlled by the bank and access would be restricted, so they couldn’t just edit audit logs. How do you think a blockchain would be used to improve this?
The actions that an employee could perform would be limited by their private key’s abilities. Blockchain can be preventative. It’s not only for retrospective analysis.
The actions that an employee could perform in any database would be limited by their account permissions. Blockchain doesn’t change this. I pointed out a retrospective mechanism because a completely internal blockchain wouldn’t prevent tampering either.
It’s not complicated at all. It’s basic database access management and it’s been a thing for decades without issue. If external access is required then those parties are given restricted access appropriate for their job and their actions are logged in the audit log in case any inappropriate actions were taken by them and need to be reviewed/reversed. These are solved problems and blockchain adds nothing there. The only case that blockchain helps is in a system where you have a large number of random participants and you want transactions to be enforced by work done/computing power or stake. This is why cryptocurrency has been the only practical use case for blockchain, with the word “practical” doing a lot of work, hence the diagram in the post we’re all discussing.
A human only needs to get involved for manual database changes. The vast majority of database transactions are carried out by code. The same would be true for blockchain. Again, it’s not magical. I will ask you once again: how do you think a blockchain would be used to improve this? The blockchain as used by bitcoin allows everyone the same access, but uses compute power as a consensus mechanism in the hopes that statistically most participants would be running the same code to keep things legitimate.
How do you propose a bank does this internally? You’ve yet to answer this question I asked a few posts before and instead opted to list proposed use cases like a brochure advertising blockchain. This is what I usually see with blockchain evangelists, repeating talking points that they themselves don’t understand. Like seriously, what is “renewable energy tracking” supposed to mean?
“Security is self-administered” through magic, huh? No central authority chooses who can join, which is an aspect that I’m sure a bank would love for their private internal database (this is sarcasm by the way)… “the power of public-private key cryptography” is something you clearly don’t understand. Are you aware that you used “the power of public-private key cryptography” to visit this site over HTTPS and that it had nothing to do with blockchain? Public/private key cryptography is a tool used for many different purposes and by itself has nothing to do with access.
Compute power is what bitcoin still uses and how it regulates transactions. I didn’t say it’s required by blockchain, I gave it as an example of how consensus is reached. The other common method is proof of stake, but that still doesn’t make sense in the context of a completely internal database. Who is staking, what are they staking, and how does that prevent fraudulent transactions in a bank’s internal database?
I looked at the energyweb site and it’s marketing fluff. When it comes to tracking things on blockchain, once you cross the physical-digital barrier, you end up having to use trust. So you want to verify that the electricity you got is renewable? Well you have to trust the entity that gave you that electricity because the blockchain will only verify that you made a transaction with them and that they made transactions with others (e.g. suppliers), but it will not verify the good/service itself (in this case, electricity). I can send electricity your way which was generated by a gas generator, but how could you tell this from the blockchain? The answer is that you can’t, you can only tell that I have made a transaction with you. The smart contract will include a trusted entity which tracked the electricity being sent which the smart contract can look up that the value matches the agreed-upon value. Again, none of this verifies that the electricity is renewable, you are relying on plain old trust.
No central authority chooses who can join, which is an aspect that I’m sure a bank would love for their private internal database (this is sarcasm by the way)…
Anyone can join the blockchain, not anyone can join the Bank. I’m assume you are being deliberately obtuse rather than the alternative.
Public/private key cryptography is a tool used for many different purposes and by itself has nothing to do with access.
Yes, but combined with blockchain it is used for access.
proof of stake, doesn’t make sense in the context of a completely internal database.
Yes it does. You can use a public blockchain protocol for completely internal data, then interface at a later time with that public protocol.
Who is staking,
The validators
what are they staking,
Usually the network token
and how does that prevent fraudulent transactions in a bank’s internal database?
Because internal transactions are validated and can be confirmed by external stakeholders (investors, depositors, regulators etc.) on a real time basis. No more Lehman Brothers.
I looked at the energyweb site and it’s marketing fluff.
When it comes to tracking things on blockchain, once you cross the physical-digital barrier, you end up having to use trust.
Energy Certificates are about transparency more than trust.
So you want to verify that the electricity you got is renewable?
More that you want to prove to everyone that you are buying renewable.
blockchain will only verify that you made a transaction
IoT devices provide trust in the data. TSOs confirm the official values at a later date.
I can send electricity your way which was generated by a gas generator, but how could you tell this from the blockchain?
Because the IoT device reporting to the blockchain is built into a solar panel, not a gad generator.
Also neighboring sources of energy will display similar data. Anyone running a gas generator to replicate a solar profile will be losing money hand over fist.
I love how you can’t provide even a single example of useful Blockchain functionality. Doesn’t mean it *doesn’t exist, but says something… And no, “banking” and “internal ledgers” is not detailed enough to be a sufficient example.
I linked you to my other comment where I provide FIVE links to the thing you said I “can’t provide”. I had literally already provided it elsewhere. So that’s where I sent you. Excuse me for not retyping the same thing for every single person.
I don’t owe you my time. I provided a one-click path to what you asked for but you couldn’t even be assed to ponder why I linked you that comment.
I think it’s funny how most lemmy users are pro open source, pro privacy, pro digital rights; but once it comes to money all that is thrown out of the window and they happily get on their knees for paypal and the few other large players.
Yes, the current state of crypto is a mess. People are attracted by the promise of the big payout, rather then seeking an alternative payment system, making them ripe for scammers that promise the world, but in the end only rug “investors”. Even “functional” cryptos are often highly centralized, making them as bad as banks in terms of reliability. Almost none implement any privacy features, and if they do, its typically a tacked on afterthought.
But this does not make the original idea invalid. Will it ever live up to the promise of alternative money? Maybe. Maybe not. Only time will tell if the issues that exist right now will be fixed.
This is what I learnt on Lemmy. Not all people who agree with your position have arrived there logically. (In my case, this position would be leftist ideals). People who you share the same values with are not exempt from being illogical.
New tech leads to scammers pouncing on it to make a quick buck. However, just because scammers pounce on it doesn’t make the tech bad inherently.
See Lemmy’s hate for AI for instance. The advancements in the field of machine learning are mind boggling. Lemmings unfortunately fail to disassociate the tech from the scammers who talk about this tech. It’s disappointing, but oh well… ¯\(ツ)/¯
AI has the potential to become a tool which strongly favors and benefits the ruling class. Us peasants get the locked down version, while government agencies get to use the full power for cyber warfare and disinformation campaigns, and large corpos get to manipulate (“advertise”) to you in most manipulative way to act in their best interest.
The way I see it good people shy away form using AI, leaving only the assholes wielding their new would powers. Those with ill intentions will find ways to use it, no matter how many laws you put up to prevent it. To defend yourself the best approach would be to learn how to use AI yourself, so that you can detect and react when AI is used against your best interests.
Does this make me pro or con AI? I honestly don’t know. Maybe complex things are never that black and white to begin with.
Agreed completely. Usage of AI is a political issue. The tech can be used both for the good and bad. However, just because it can be used for the bad doesn’t make the tech bad.
Development in nuclear science made a bomb that could end civilisation. It also gave us a pathway to solve climate change. How we use the tech should be an issue. The tech itself shouldn’t be.
You’re either arguing in bad faith or just ignorant if you think those are the actual issues with crypto and AI.
Most people dislike crypto due to the severe negative environmental impact it has on the world. We are literally on the precipice of global warming fucking everything up for us and some greedy motherfuckers decide they need to reinvent something that isn’t broken, and has yet to show a single viable use case that can’t be matched with traditional methods.
As for AI, are you defending the plagiarism machine or the art theft machine? I just fail to see how stealing writer’s and artist’s livelihoods to create a dystopian society where creative expression is replaced by soulless machines is a good thing. There is a world where this isn’t a negative, however in this late-stage capitalism world we live in, artists and writers are being layed off in exchange for AI.
Most people dislike crypto due to the severe negative environmental impact it has on the world.
I dislike cryptocurrencies for the same reason. I never said I support them. However, I like the tech behind blockchains. I believe that there are legitimate use cases for blockchains. There are many different implementations of blockchains that circumvent proof of work (the environment damaging thing).
As for AI, are you defending the plagiarism machine or the art theft machine? I just fail to see how stealing writer’s and artist’s livelihoods to create a dystopian society where creative expression is replaced by soulless machines is a good thing. There is a world where this isn’t a negative, however in this late-stage capitalism world we live in, artists and writers are being layed off in exchange for AI.
Again, I agree with you. Capitalism sucks. AI and capitalism combined suck even more. However, this does not make the tech behind AI inherently bad. As you said, there is a world where this isn’t bad. There is a world where advancements in AI can be put to very very good use. I want to see that world. This is why I support (and have contributed to) the development of open sourced AI models. I want public ownership over models. While open sourced doesn’t exactly mean this, it’s the closest that we can get to it.
Honestly the real disappointment here is you.
Sick burn brah… I need some ice for that burn brah
I don’t use AI to copy other peoples work. I use AI as a better search engine for obscure topics where I don’t know the right keywords. Describe your issue in cleartext, and out comes enough info to migrate to a better search. I’ve also used AI to modify my own works, ie. “blur out the background of this image” or “remove object from image”.
When people argue in favor of traditional banking because they are more “environmental friendly”, I really have to ask who is arguing ion bad faith. Aren’t credit cards a thing because banks know that given the chance people will consume more then they can afford? They are the one complicit in our consumerist culture, which arguably places a much higher burden on the environment. But the calculation is much broader then comparing the power consumption of ATMs with crypto networks, so it’s easy to sweep that part under the rug.
Well their can not be uncapped fractional lending as it is right now. The bank could offer a credit card equivalent, but it would need an equal amount of deposits. The current system works by essentially crediting the merchant an IOU, whose value does not have to be real. With crypto merchants get to choose, would they rather have native crypto, or an IOU with strings and contracts attached? Obviously the latter is more risky, and therefor the seller has to factor it into the price/ transaction fee.
Maybe that can be somehow circumvented too. But it certainly is more difficult then the meddling that happens right now.
Yeah I guess u’r right. Fractional lending rn is very important for monetary policy. And monetary policy is VERY IMPORTANT. But I could see a completely digital currency having good monetary policies without interest rates and fractional reserves. Perhaps, a simple gas fee increase/decrease could work. I dunno, I’m too tired rn lol
If making payments in crypto back to FIAT was free it would be more popular. For me it’s mostly useless since the fee to spend crypto is more than the (often free) fee for using my credit card.
New needs to be better and cheaper to be picked up.
In my experience it works extremely well for everything online and digital content. The instance I’m on? 100% crowd funded with microdonations and the hoster directly accepts it without conversion back to fiat. I pay my email and VPN also like this, and on mullvad you even get a 10% discount.
But yes, for everything physical it’s a long way ahead to become widely accepted.
There’s attempts at having payments with 0 fees, that is, if you don’t involve exchanges or payment service providers, who obviously charge a fee for fiat conversion.
Using Nano you have 0 fees for the transaction and ideally as little as 0.25% fee at an exchange for fiat conversion.
It’s not only without fees, it’s very fast (ideallly sub-second confirmation) and eco-friendly (requiring no special hardware, because there is no mining and using very little energy overall).
What’s lacking is places where you can actually pay for things with Nano, but that’s the classic chicken and egg problem.
Currency is a pretty sound idea, whether it will ever get (back?) to a usable place is it’s own discussion.
A lot of the conversation about blockchain as a technology though involves the ones that store additional information as a distributed database, which comes with problems.
It’s also ‘neat’, but they all depend on trusting the validation method for putting info into the database, which largely defeats the point of having a “trustless” database once the data is in there. There’s the occasional proposed use case that seems vaguely useful, but they mostly boil down to replacing legal contracts with a database that’s distributed “somewhere”.
Crypto is not anonymous. Even monero, the most private cryptocurrency, has a feature called “view only wallets”, so 3rd party auditing is possible, if not easier then auditing today. Will individuals use it to avoid some taxes? Sure, it gets easier for them. Will corporations avoid more taxes then they already do? Doubtful.
A view only wallet doesn’t trace anything that doesn’t get received directly by that view only wallet. If we had two wallets that didn’t interact with that wallet, it couldn’t do shit to trace or audit my transactions.
If you are a company and run a webstore, it could be mandatory that all funds must go through a wallet where the tax authorities have a view key. This would be trivial to enforce with penalties whenever for publicly using addresses that point to other wallets. Peer to peer transactions (for eg. used goods or produce from your garden) are already except from taxes in my jurisdiction, so these transactions can be private.
Fixing issues like energy consumption, confirmation time, fees?
Just in case you haven’t heard of Nano, allow me to tell you it’s an attempt at creating a peer-to-peer digital currency with minimal energy consumption, 0 fees, 0 minimum account balance, very fast confirmation (ideally sub-second, sometimes a bit slower) and 0 supply inflation.
It focuses on doing one thing and doing it well: transferring value efficiently, sustsinably and without middlemen.
It’s around since 2015 and still kicking, getting better and better with each release, ironing kinks out.
It might sound too good to be true, but it’s worth a look; make up your own mind.
but once it comes to money all that is thrown out of the window and they happily get on their knees for paypal and the few other large players.
I don’t think anybody likes paypal, Visa, Mastercard or any of the other major players. It’s just that blockchain “currencies” are much, much worse.
The idea of “Alternative Money” is a silly idea. Money has always been, and will always be connected to a state. The taxing and spending of the state is what gives money its value.
With cryptocurrencies, the “value” is only “greater fool” value. Someone is willing to pay 70k in dollars for a bitcoin because they think someone else is going to be willing to buy it from them for $71k at some point in the future. If it were a legitimate currency people wouldn’t bother checking its value in dollars because it would be useful in its own right. The only legitimate demand for cryptocurrencies is to pay ransom, and even then, the people who get the ransom immediately transform it back to a useful “fiat” currency.
Lemmy users are knowledgeable about open source, privacy, digital rights and knowledgeable enough to know that cryptocurrencies are a scam.
The idea that money is tied to the state is silly. Many things have been used as money, way before the concept of a “state” existed. Undeniably the money that lasted best across the passage of time is gold. Up until very recently it was the standard to settle cross country currency exchanges with. The value does not come from the state, but from people willing to exchange it for goods and services. Todays fiat money is created at will by a few select people that are not democratically elected. They get to decide how much they debase your savings for the “greater good”, while the ones that profit the most are those who control the source.
Most people do not care about their open source, privacy and digital rights, so they only hear and care about crypto when the price jumps or when it is used for crime. Everything else is simply not newsworthy. So you end up with a bunch of “investors” looking to make a quick buck and people who believe to solve crime with more laws (requesting ransoms is already illegal, has existed before crypto and currently gift cards are scammers favorite form of payment).
I never mentioned the price nor suggested investing, because quite frankly, I don’t care. What I do care about is giving the few big companies that control the internet as little data and influence as possible, and not processing payments through them is a really important step. So I keep about as much crypto as I keep cash in my wallet, and use it preferably when buying or selling.
The idea that money is tied to the state is silly.
No, it’s not. It’s historically accurate. All money is state money, always has been, always will be.
Many things have been used as money, way before the concept of a “state” existed.
Nope. Sorry, that’s wrong.
Undeniably the money that lasted best across the passage of time is gold.
Gold isn’t money. Gold is a commodity. Gold was used for jewelry, and as a bright shiny thing that didn’t tarnish had value because of that. People would sometimes exchange gold or things made of gold, but not gold coins. But, they’d also exchange other useful things: food, tools, cloth, etc. Gold coins were created by various states.
people willing to exchange it for goods and services
Never happened. Sure, there were gifts or donations, but it wasn’t X amount of gold for Y amount of grain. There were debts, but debts weren’t listed as a certain amount of gold, or a certain amount of money. Debts are old, money is new. Trading one thing for a certain “price” didn’t happen until coins existed, and coins didn’t exist until there was a state.
Todays fiat money is created at will by a few select people that are not democratically elected
Oh, blah blah blah. “Fiat money” is the only kind of money that has ever existed or will ever exist. It doesn’t much matter whether the government is “democratically elected” or not, currencies are created by and backed by a state and their ability to obtain a monopoly on the use of force within their area of influence. Most states with currencies are currently democratic, even if the structure of the US federal reserve is confusing to you.
They get to decide how much they debase your savings for the “greater good”, while the ones that profit the most are those who control the source.
More blah blah blah crypto nonsense.
Look, do some research on this stuff. Debt is a good place to start.
people willing to exchange it for goods and services Never happened.
This is literally what you do every day. You exchange something for goods and services. This something is money based on it’s functional role, not some obscure definitions. To be money, it must be used as money. To be used as money, a group of people must agree that the item is worth exchanging for. This something does need to fulfill additional properties to be useful, notably it must be fungible, durable, portable, recognizable, divisible and have a stable supply. Gold does fit this description, but so does fiat.
What you are describing is a government issued currency, which has some overlap with money, but is not the same thing. Maybe you should research on this stuff.
This is literally what you do every day. You exchange something for goods and services
Yes, now that there’s money it’s what happens. Prior to money there were debts, but no exchange of “X” for a set amount of goods or services.
To be money, it must be used as money.
To be money it must meet all the definitions of money. It must be a store of value, it must be a unit of account and a medium of exchange. There was no real money until there were states.
What you are describing is a government issued currency
Government issued currencies are the only real currencies. Everything else is valued by what someone will pay for it in government issued currency.
Gold being a commodity because its shiny and therefore has value is no different than “I want to use this coin to better protect my data and privacy”. Both are values attributed to a commodity. Also, “It may have intrinsic value (commodity money), or be legally exchangeable for something with intrinsic value (representative money), or only have nominal value (fiat money).”
Gold being a commodity because its shiny and therefore has value is no different than “I want to use this coin to better protect my data and privacy”.
It’s completely different. Gold is a commodity because it is inherently useful in itself. If someone invented a way to create gold out of thin air, people would continue to want gold because it’s pretty and shiny, and because it’s a very good electrical conductor that doesn’t tarnish. Crypto coins are only useful because everyone thinks that a greater fool will come along and pay as much or more. Everyone knows they have no inherent value, but so far there has always been a greater fool.
You are wrong that money has always existed as state issued. That isn’t true
Hey by the way, after we had that discussion bitcoin surpassed silver to become the 8th most valuable asset by market cap on the entire planet More than coca cola and Pepsi combined.
Also no, money has existed outside of States and Countries before you should look into the Theory of Money and the history behind it
Just because it’s open source doesn’t mean it’s good. Also not every situation is the same. Using Linux instead of windows has advantages/disadvantages very different than using crypto instead of fiat.
I can think of thousands of reasons to pick Linux, thousands to pick windows and thousands to pick fiat. I’d have to think real hard to even think of a single reason to pick crypto over fiat.
I prefer free software not for its price, but for the freedom it gives me. Naturally I donate to these causes roughly what I’d have spend on a commercial one. They however do not need to know who I am, so I exclusively use crypto for that. I made one exception for an organization using paypal, and promptly they pulled address and name from that, gave it to a 3rd party which then send a postcard to me. You could see it as a nice gesture, but I think it’s just rude to use data in ways I did not explicitly consented to. Just take your money and leave me in peace.
In a similar manner I like to use it to pay for email, vpn, hosting and other online stuff. In fact this lemmy instance is 100% paid for by microdonations from its users, and because the provider accepts it directly no conversion was needed.
Open source has nothing to do with it. All the things you’ve mentioned is made for the good of the people. Crypto is not. Crypto is for the rich to get richer and exploit the poor.
Anonymous payments is not a good thing and throws any sort of fraud protection out the window. It’s just for libertarians trying to avoid taxes, and criminals trying to launder money. It’s not beneficial to hide from the government that you bought a extra fatty pizza.
Also nothing about Crypto is grass roots whatsoever unlike what you listed before. Crypto took off because it was inorganically and heavily pushed by very rich people knowing they can make a large profit.
Your instance is literally an archaic PoW token that causes a tremendous amount of harm to the environment and wastes energy so you can hide buying drugs. That’s not including the fact either that you have to go through exchanges who require identifying information to withdraw into non monopoly money.
Centralization is not always bad, this is libertarian logic.
Do you what to know the best part about xmr? You can kick and scream and bitch about me using it, but you can’t do jack shit about it. Maybe you can lobby at the side of paypal for more regulations, until the enshittification eventually catches up with you. glhf
It’s too late for you. As soon as you want to turn that monero into cash, you’re going to be asked a lot of questions by the exchanges and the tax man.
as hostile as people are to block chain due to NFT’s and bad implementations, the technology itself has its use cases. It’s a great solution for information exchange that requires verification and Immutation. This makes them perfect for ledgers or transaction networks.
It’s just there is so much bad PR regarding it everyone just discredits it. Not all of the block chain technologies are massively energy intensive per transaction, it’s just many of the cryptocurrencies use the most intensive one because it’s also arguably the most secure
I find the actual technology very interesting. At one point I wanted to create a distributed research journal, and I spent some time trying to develop a trustless, immutable ledger that didn’t have the high overhead that most blockchains have for proof of work. It was extremely cool, but nobody gives a shit unless it has coins lol
I look forward to 20 years from now when it gets resurrected and used for interesting things that don’t involve cryptocurrency.
I remember reading a few years ago that the US postal service was looking into using it for voting. I haven’t seen anything about it since, but it did peak my interest. I’d love to see it used for research if possible, too, but then I can barely understand these decentralized social media platforms so my opinion isn’t worth much with tech
That, to me, seems like an ideal use case. My only reservation is that I think it would be bungled in implementation, then pushed without enough testing and validation, then hacked due to the bungled implementation, and then rejected forever because it was hacked once lol
Monero actually has very good uses. It does use POW but their algorithm is made to encourage using CPUs instead of GPUs and slower, power efficient devices, which makes it a lot less energy intensive than other POW cryptocurrencies.
That’s kind of epic, though, I’m pretty sure HRT is cheaper on the black market instead of going through your medical provider, and I need steroids in bulk so I can hulk out and become jacked.
I mean… I know there are some backwards countries like the US where you don’t have access to safe HRT, but would you really roll the dice and get some random injectable shit from the dark web…? I mean…
Provided you’re willing to learn enough to verify and test it yourself, I suppose. That being foisted onto the consumer is kind of problematic, but it’s not really the fault of the dark web provider I would say as much as the corrupt medical industry driving people to do that in the first place. In any case I still think it’s kind of a good band-aid that’s risen up to fill the gap, even if the situation as a whole is shitty.
Privacy is a crime? I pay for several online services with XMR (or BTC swapped from XMR): Jmp.chat (mobile service), EteSync (E2EE contact sync), Proton Mail, Mullvad VPN, Usenet (might have an argument there).
Why can’t I access Google’s individual transactions but they should have access to mine?
Why can’t I access Google’s individual transactions but they should have access to mine?
why are you giving google access to your transactions to begin with? all my credit card transactions are between me and visa and my credit union and the federal government, but not google.
I’m not, it was just an example data broker. You are 100% sure that data is not getting sold?
I picked Google because back in my days of ignorance, their rewards app would ask if I made X purchase at Y store down to the penny. I wasn’t using GPay/GWallet, just my a debit or credit card. The Y I get with location services. Them having the transaction amount leads me to assume credit card companies/payment processors/etc are sharing this data in near real time. Probably anonymously but with enough data points to trace it back to an individual with a degree of confidence.
So I use XMR when I can. Locations services are also off.
lol no, im 100% sure its being sold in some way, no matter how many things I opt out of. while i do have a lot of privacy focused things in my life, from email to chat to phone, i just can’t find myself caring that much about someone tracking my gasoline consumption or knowing that I go to the same bar every week for game night.
the obvious downside to something like XMR is that its a ticking time bomb from a privacy perspective. at some point the security will fail as all security does, and then the data is totally public.
Absolute immutability is kind of a terrible property for a financial system though, cos it completely ignores the fact that mistakes and fraud happen and you need a way to forcefully recover funds other than “lol sucks to be you I guess”.
The one actually genuinely useful application for this kind of technology that anyone has come up with is Certificate Transparency, but crypto people don’t get excited about it cos it’s not possible to make money from it.
Yes. Clawback might be executed by having some entity or system of trust that is able to reverse a transaction by creating and posting the opposite of the faulty transaction. This is not built in to the current BTC.
Its a good concept, but it violates other concepts of the blockchain and would mean implementing a central authority with the power to force a transaction. Try telling a cryptobro to use a coin with a central bank and imagine the reaction you’d get.
At least with the way the regular banking system is set up, you can get a court order to enforce a correction without needing the consent of all parties, which is useful for fraud, theft, and even probate cases when one party is deceased and can no longer consent to a transaction. There are enough problems with our system to write an entire library of books ON TOP OF the library that already exists, but this feature is one of the few benefits.
Reverts work because users have equal write access to all the data. You can mess things up in the codebase, and even if you die of a heart attack 10m later, my revert is just as valid as your commit.
It’s not really the same when every user has “sovereignty” over their address in the ledger. A bad actor has to consent to pushing a revert transaction onto the chain, or they have to consent to using a blockchain system where 3rd-party reversion is possible (which exists on some systems, but also defeats the concept of true sovereignty over your address).
You can implement clawback while still having an immutable blockchain. The transaction will always stay on the blockchain, but the funds can be recovered
this is how it should be anyway, you do not want any ledger or database to be mutable because it allows for integrity violations and will cause you to lose the ability to trust it. Even non-blockchain styles follow that principle.
Does it though? Because to me the fact that the largest cryptos have had several forks is proof that no, in fact, the magic of crypto can’t coordinate people. People coordinate people and then decide what to do with the technology.
I mean, it’s been, what, 15 years of hype? Surely there must be a successful deployment of a commercially viable and useful blockchain that isn’t just a speculative cryptocurrency or derivative thereof, right?
i think its the part where he said banks, the same collection of people who supported enron and coached them on how to effectively get away with extracting billions from several states and the stock market while killing people…dont want his money.
when a bank doesnt want your money you reallll shady
Blockchain never promised anything related to economic viability or stability. Only that it would ensure a P2P network would remain practically safe from malicious transactions by utilizing a system that rewards verification.
By that standard, every other crypto that people use happens to be a pretty successful blockchain use case.
If you want something stable and not a straight cryptocurrency then I’m pretty XRP qualifies because it also handles fiat and other commodities.
Otherwise, most DDBSs don’t use blockchain because they don’t need verification requirements relating to transactions and ownership. DHTs are way more common like IPFS.
Matter Distributed Client Ledger. In use by Apple, Amazon, Google, Samsung, and many more.
Contains all the attestation information for on boarding Matter devices. Where once it was Google Home vs Apple HomeKit vs Amazon Echo / Alexa, supporting devices can now work cross ecosystem.
Since many of these companies are competitors working together. A distributed ledger makes sense to keep everyone honest and provide a level of tech supported governance.
All I can say is that this protects companies from homebrew “infractions” on their software copyright by making it difficult to install un-attested firmware updates.
I’m not even confident in that summary. What does this do?
Company A submits a new device for certification signed by their private key.
Company B certifies the device signed by their private key.
Company C on boards a device for an end-user and is confident it came from Company A and has been verified by Company B since the device has a certificate that can be verified from Companies A and B.
Yes it prevents home brew (though you can do home brew by replacing Company C with your own controller), but it also prevents knock offs.
When this information is distributed (like Lemmy federation), between instances, one has a degree of assurances all these records originated from the signer.
While the ledger part is not required, it provides a nice audit trail for the companies who do not trust each other enough without the transparency. Sure a central authority like the ESRB could do the same, but we could also all be on Reddit and not Lemmy…
I can’t find the case study, but this blockchain project by IBM was implemented in Singapore and was shown to reduce customs processing times from several weeks to just several hours.
The general idea was that with a successful blockchain implementation, the Singapore government was able to expedite parts of their customs process which normally require intensive human labor, and the use of smart contracts removed the need for having documents sent and resent when all parties had access to the smart contract directly.
There are specific use cases where it can benefit existing processes, but people just think blockchain = crypto.
The only selling point of blockchain is that it’s trustless. This becomes a less-useful property when it comes to things in the real world, as you tend to need to trust at least one party.
For example, anything they achieved there with blockchain, they could have achieved with a simple government-run web service and a traditional database.
Except it’s not though. Because you have to trust the majority, hence why you’ve had forks like Bitcoin Cash. Because those people wanted to trust someone else. “trustless” is just a buzzword, like everything else with Bitcoin
I can’t find the case study, but this blockchain project by IBM was implemented in Singapore and was shown to reduce customs processing times from several weeks to just several hours.
the real question is what part of this was specific to blockchain, something that would be difficult or impossible to do without it. if you want to put forward this argument you need to at least provide a simple, clear, coherent answer to that.
in this case, i could easily argue a sqlite db hosted on gitea would work better and theres no way to prove im wrong.
This makes them perfect for ledgers or transaction networks.
It doesn’t scale well, so it generally works best for ledgers of relatively small scale. Anything that might need to go beyond that small scale will run into technical/performance issues.
Just responding that I did see this, The video has peaked my curiosity and I plan on watching it later when I have more free time outside of midterm’s season
We don’t need blockchain to stop problems from happening because we have a [super efficient, cheap, accessible, well constructed] legal system to correct those problems when they occur.
We don’t need distributed ledgers to store the data because we can just trust Amazon Web services.
Man, I remember how back in 2009 we were hyped about this possible chance for a fairer world that a independent currency might bring. Guess we were quite wrong. :)
The independent currency was still worth standard currency… So the ones already hoarding all of that existing make-believe-number money just bought up and schemed us out of new make-believe-number money.
No one expected that dozens of crypto currencies would pop up. Most of us actually expected it to just fail and dissolve. But there was the naive, little glimpse of hope that this might destroy the petro dollar (which was much stronger in 2009 than today).
I’ve read through this whole thread, and I still haven’t really come to any solid conclusions on it. I’m skeptical of crypto as a kind of idiotic speculative market, but that’s also every market ever. But then, the blockchain is apparently different from crypto, even though they’re both hype-laden marketing terms that have been completely fucked up. I think doing [redacted] with crypto is still potentially cool, though I think it still has limited anonymity, from what I’ve heard, and the speculative market also fucks it up.
Is “the blockchain” just like some nerd shit that’s for internal hospital ledgers, and beyond that it’s all kind of moot garbage, or what? Someone spoonfeed me.
I’m stupid, can you give me a like, more clear practical example of a good use of blockchain? Cause I get the sense that a good amount of this conflict, going off that flowchart, is going to be due to the evaluation of these situations as like, not needing to arise in the first place, or maybe like, a philosophical objection to the necessity of the technology, maybe. But I think a clearer example could help with this.
Blockchains are also great for the verification of digital goods as tangible assets. While I’m not sure we reach this level of meme, people could 100% mint their own house’s deed and trade that as a legit way to buy/sell their house.
I am very carefully avoiding the words “NFT” because they are another horrible use-case of a blockchain (and a prime example of how capitalists turn a good tech into something stupid for a quick buck), but this would theoretically be a tokenized-security with a 1:1 to the actual deed to the house.
Is that more secure than the normal process of buying a house? Do you really need it to be external to a 3rd party when the transfer of homes already exists? No not really lol, hence why we probably see it the most in highly regulated industries like biotech and finance first.
HIPPA/Securities-laws (or lack-thereof) will require a tough regulatory framework that “could” realistically be done via a 3rd party, but you have to ask yourself if you trust big-pharma and wallstreet enough to regulate themselves like that.
Edit: Looked up and saw c/lemmyshitpost, maybe I’m spending too much time elucidating a response on a meme thread but this is my take on the tech.
I understand blockchain as a concept, and kind of hownit plays into cryptocurrency, but understanding a true example of blockchain use outside of finances is something I needed more info on, thank you
The big improvement is the removal of the need to trust some 3rd party but also to add the precision and complexity of computer language to some domain. For example health care data, a block chain system would make one standard for how the records are stored, it would make it so the data in encrypted by the patient and they alone could grant access. When a new provider wants access there is one standard way that is automated and secure. None of which is dependent on a 3rd party who can be compromised or become corrupt and no longer act in good faith. Obviously there is a lot of details here dependent on making the block chain work flawlessly.
Imo block chains have 2 core issues to over come in order to really solve problems. First is being constructed so that they are bug free. Software is not a mature enough discipline for that as of yet. Second, is what happens when you loose you key or it gets stolen. If someone steals you Bitcoin private key, you can’t get them back after they transfer them out. Or if you just loose the key your up a creek. What is required is a way to prove you are you to the system that can’t be stolen and can’t be lost. That is a far harder question.
I just wrote out another comment, and I think I kinda figured out my core question, but, is there a way to save my medical information without doxxing myself, if this is supposed to be like, a public database, you know, if that’s kinda the point, is that everyone can look at everyone else’s stuff? I got the impression that a lot of the current blockchain stuff wasn’t capable of the necessary levels of storage that would be required for like, health records, on their own.
I dunno, maybe you could have some situation where you have a key, that opens up some cryptography on the blockchain, and that blockchain piece when unlocked gives you another key that lets you access your medical records, or something like that, and that might be able to fit. But, then, I don’t really see how that’s any different from just having like, the key to the person’s medical records be contingent on person. Like biometric security, or government ID, or something.
Point out wherever I’ve made wrong assumptions here, I’m just kind of talking out my ass, and hoping that I’m correct inso that the conversation can continue and I can scrape more out of it, I don’t really expect to be right.
The blockchain is essentially a ledger that tracks transactions (including the creation of currency). One thing that is not always clear is how important it is for a blockchain to be decentralized. When I say “decentralized,” I mean that many different people are operating a server that performs transactions on a larger network. These people are rewarded in currency for their efforts, and are sometimes referred to as “miners,” though this term is changing somewhat.
There are thousands of these servers in a network that are operating on and tracking the ledger for blockchains like Bitcoin or Ethereum. Any updates to the ledger are verified by all of these nodes. As long as 51% of nodes can verify a transaction, it will be added to the ledger. This means that as long as someone doesn’t own 51% of the network, they can’t just inject whatever transactions they want (i.e., fraudulent activity). In practice, this makes these networks very resilient to fraud.
I think this paves the way for a lot of the practical examples you’re looking for. For example, there’s no way for the network to decide to just give tons of money to a single entity for some “economic policy” like Too Big to Fail (i.e., corporate bailouts). This means you don’t have to wake up one morning worrying about whether or not your currency will rapidly inflate because of things like corruption. Another example is the true ownership of digital assets. NFTs have (rightly) gotten a lot of flack for being overpriced JPEGs, but there are real use cases here. A random middleman can’t just decide to price gouge because they own all the tickets first (Ticketmaster). Instead, artists can mint tickets on the blockchain (very important: this ensures authenticity) and then fans can buy them on the blockchain - no middle man required. You still show a QR code at the door for verification like you would now.
As long as 51% of nodes can verify a transaction, it will be added to the ledger. This means that as long as someone doesn’t own 51% of the network, they can’t just inject whatever transactions they want (i.e., fraudulent activity). In practice, this makes these networks very resilient to fraud.
Could like, 51% of the owners just coordinate to kind of, do a fraud? I mean it sounds like an inherently democratic system, but from what I’ve understood of, say, miners, right (dunno how this works for proof of stake, but I imagine it has similar problems), those rigs are gonna be bought by people who disproportionately have higher earnings and can afford more GPUs in finland or wherever, and then that’s going to just kinda recreate the same power dynamic that we see in the real world already. Which ends up in the same kind of speculative market garbage we have with stock ownership in companies already.
I also don’t really understand how a ticketing system would really work on the blockchain. I probably don’t know enough about cryptography to know how it might work, but I got the sense that nfts weren’t even overpriced jpegs, they were overpriced links with pseudo-legal contracts, that were still prone to link rot, and didn’t really indicate any IP ownership. If you had a code on the ticket instead that could only be verified as real, rather than fake, by a ticketing person, instead of like, a link, that would probably be the use case, right? am I getting that correct, is that something cryptography can do? probably, right?
Also, can someone just like, steal your ticket still? Or like impersonate you as the ticket guy, or what? Like from the others have told me and also just from what I know already, you can’t really change the chain unless, like you said, you have 51% of the owners, so how would you be able to like, put something in the chain that identifies the owner as being the owner? Wouldn’t it be more secure to have just like, a verifiable code or something, that you can delete, that isn’t public, between the artist and the buyer? Then you could ensure anonymity between the buyer and the venue and stuff, you could work in establishing characteristics like oh here’s my driver’s license, here’s my government ID, without putting that stuff on the blockchain, which seems like a bad idea.
In practice, this makes these networks very resilient to fraud.
Could like, 51% of the owners just coordinate to kind of, do a fraud?
Sybil attacks sound like the kind of thing you’re talking about. I don’t have the expertise to go into it, but one person (or a group) creates lots of nodes and uses that influence to do bad things to the network, potentially including fraud. Or as you suggest, legitimate users can just coordinate to do whatever they wanted (see ethereum vs ethereum classic if you want a chuckle).
I want to make a note that the networks are only resilient to a specific type of fraud - people trying to enter data in a way that doesn’t meet the criteria of the system. That’s all well and good for wallet to wallet transactions, but when you have transactions going off chain (like buying something, trading for other kinds of coins, doing anything with crypto exchanges), there are still plenty of other kinds of fraud that are possible and happen all the time, because while the chain is fairly trustworthy, nothing else about the system is. Most kinds of fraud involve doing things that technically you have permission to do, because you lied to people to access their password or promised them bigger returns in the future or missold a product or service etc and all of that is still possible under crypto. In some cases crypto is more vulnerable to these things because of having no central authority or regulator or laws or whatever.
A blockchain can provide an irrevocable record, and it can provide a mechanism for uncooperating parties to agree that the record should be created. This is usually used for financial transactions involving coins of dubious value, but it can also be used for recording transactions of real world assets as long as those transactions can be faithfully linked to the event on the blockchain. Therefore the blockchain doesn’t really prove that a transaction is fraudulent or not, all it proves is that a sufficient number of parties believe it is not.
as long as those transactions can be faithfully linked to the event on the blockchain.
That kind of seems like the big glaring video game boss style weak point, to me. I feel like you’d still need some external third party to verify that everything is properly linked up to the blockchain, or like, someone could just impersonate someone else through whatever things are used to link something to the blockchain, and then it’s just kinda back to square one, I would think. I dunno, I think also maybe I just don’t really quite get it.
can you give me a like, more clear practical example of a good use of blockchain?
Do you see how all the answers are generic, tend to be long and read like a sales pitch? That’s because the actual answer is: no, there is no practical legal application that isn’t better solved with conventional tech.
The only application that is successfully used in practice is paying for organized crime: buying goods and services on the dark web and paying for extortion like ransomware attacks.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_ledger no need to talk automatically, only distribution necessary without single point of failure. say „synchronized“, if you mean realtime synchronized then not in git, but synchronized manually.
…m.wikipedia.org/…/Consensus_(computer_science) only need to determine which block to commit to database, access key do that. if meant in term of „which repo is real one“, signed commit optional feature, maybe that speak against it being blockchain because not by default.
Distributed ledger data is typically spread across multiple nodes (computational devices) on a P2P network, where each replicates and saves an identical copy of the ledger data and updates itself independently of other nodes. The primary advantage of this distributed processing pattern is the lack of a central authority, which would constitute a single point of failure. When a ledger update transaction is broadcast to the P2P network, each distributed node processes a new update transaction independently, and then collectively all working nodes use a consensus algorithm to determine the correct copy of the updated ledger. Once a consensus has been determined, all the other nodes update themselves with the latest, correct copy of the updated ledger.
From your first link. This does not describe how git functions. Did you actually read the page?
The consensus problem requires agreement among a number of processes (or agents) for a single data value. Some of the processes (agents) may fail or be unreliable in other ways, so consensus protocols must be fault tolerant or resilient. The processes must somehow put forth their candidate values, communicate with one another, and agree on a single consensus value.
From your second this. Again this description does not match with git.
You’re right in that automation is not technically required; you can build a blockchain using git by having people perform the distribution and consensus algorithms themselves. Obviously that doesn’t make git itself a blockchain in the same way it doesn’t make IP a blockchain.
I like this flowchart but honestly most third party data handling solutions are just asking for a major breach: stoking vulnerable people over the coals.
Now add that trustlessness is impossible and you can scratch the blockchain box for good.
You cannot get rid of trust in some form. You need entry to the system, so you need to trust its gateway. You need to trust the network to not have some vulnerability like a 50% attack. And eventually you need to trust the developers not to add critical bugs (that alone is virtually impossible) or pull off some scam.
So, since you need to trust someone, might as well choose some government regulated party like a bank or a lawyer and choose conventional and efficient tech.
The solution to the requirement of minimal trust is not to just give up on and trust few peopme with everything. 50% attacks in large networks are next to impossible.
It’s the whole web 3 concept of the community powers the infrastructure to run the community. It’s an enticing concept, The people using the service pay with their CPU and internet connection to use the service. It makes what would be a rather expensive infrastructure almost free.
With blockchain they’re doing some smart things, you can wrap code around the ledgers, in the end it’s just varying fancy levels of receipts verified and secured by the community. It’s verifiable but anonymous.
But then you’ve got cryptocurrency doing complex math burning through tons of electricity looking for unicorns to add to the ledger, in a massive pyramid scheme. Okay, it’s not exactly a pyramid scheme. Whoever starts a given currency makes the vast majority of the money off of it when the coins are easy to find, but at some point it is pretty close to any other given financial system, with the benefits of being anonymous and verifiable.
The bitcoins are just entries on the ledgers. But then s*** like NFTs are on ledgers. Someone sells you a receipt for a JPEG on a URL. It’s all only worth what someone will pay you for it. And without a whole bunch of regulation, it’s not exactly a safe market.
A blockchain is just an verifiable chain of transactions using cryptography and some agreed upon protocol. Each “block” in the chain is a block of data that follows a format specified by the protocol. The protocol also decides who can push blocks and how to verify a block is valid. The advantages it has comes from the fact the protocol can describe a method of giving authority across a pool of untrusted third parties, while still making sure none of them can cheat. Currently the most popular forms are Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Stake (PoS).
Bitcoin for example is just an outgoing transaction to a specific crypto key (which is similar to a checking account) as a reward for “mining” the block, followed by a list of transactions going from a specific account to another account. These are verified by needing a special chunk of data that turns the overall hash of the entire block to a binary chunk containing a number of 0 bits in front, which makes it hard to compute and a race to get the right input data. This way of establishing an authority is called Proof of Work, and whoever is first and gets their block across the network faster wins. Other cryptocurrencies like Ethereum use Proof of Stake where you “stake” currency you’ve already acquired as a promise that you won’t cheat, and if someone can prove you cheated your stake is lost.
The problem it solves is not needing a trusted third party to handle this process, such as a government agency or an organization. Everyone can verify the integrity of a blockchain by using the protocol and going over each block, making sure the data follows the rules. This blockchain is distributed so everyone can make sure they are on the same chain, else it’s considered a “forked” chain and will migrate back to the point of consensus. This can be useful for situations where the incentive to cheat the system for monetary or political gain outweigh the cost of running a distributed ledger. It can also be useful when you don’t want anyone selectively removing past data as the chain of verifiability will be broken. The only issue with this is you need some way to reach a consensus of who gets to make each block in the chain, as someone need to be the authority for that instant in time. This is where the requirement of Proof of Work (PoS) or Proof of Stake (PoS) come in. Without these or another system that distributes the authority to create blocks, you lose the power of the blockchain.
Examples I’ve heard of are tracking shipments or parts (similar to how the FAA already mandates part traceability) and medical records. This way lots of organizations can publish records relating to these to a central system that isn’t under any single entities control, and can’t change their records to suit their needs.
These systems are not fool proof though, PoW has the ability to be abused using a 51% attack and PoS requires some form of punishment for trying to cheat the system (in cryptocurrency you “stake” currency and lose it if you try to cheat the system). Both of these run into issues when there is no incentive to invest resources into the system, a lack of distribution across independent parties, or one party has sufficient power to gain a majority control of the network.
Overall you are right to be skeptical of cryptocurrency, it’s been a long time since I participated due to the waves of scam coins and general focus on illegal activities such as gambling. The lack of central authorities also perpetuates the problem of cryptoscams, as anyone can start one and there are limited controls over stopping such scams. This is not dissimilar to previous investment scams though, it’s just the modern iteration of such scams. The real question is does it solve a real problem, as Bitcoin did in the sense it helps facilitate transactions outside of government controls. You might not agree with that but it does give it an intrinsic value to a large number of people looking to move currency without as much paperwork. Now if it makes it worth $68.5k USD (at current prices) is a different story, different people have different use cases and I only highlighted one of those.
I read all the replies in kind of, an order going from simplest to what looked to be like the more complicated ones, and this seems like the least charged and best explanation of the sort of, externalities, and it seems like a pretty good overview of it. The other guy did a good summary of how the technology works for a dumbass like me but I’m still not sure I got all of it.
So, like, you could kind of conceive of a use for these technologies generally, right, but it would seem like, even from your explanation and also from what I kind of passively know already, this is kind of, reliant on a libertarian conception of society, which isn’t necessarily bad. I think more concerningly it also seems like both of the basic technologies, there, PoW and PoS, are vulnerable to abuse from the powerful, or from those who have more resources, with maybe PoS being less so, I dunno, still don’t really get how that one works specifically which might change it. Which is sort of, antithetical to a libertarian conception of society. I mean unless you’re an ancap but those guys are dumbasses.
So I dunno. It seems like a kind of inherently conflicted technology to me, like, paradoxical. I kinda hope someone can conceivably work out the problems of power abuse, but that would seem to be what I define as a “whole enchilada” style of issue, there.
Still, I do like the ability to freely buy drugs and circumvent the government, that’s kind of epic. Well, most of the time, anyways. Maybe not when the CIA does it, or when narcos and cartels do it, but I dunno how much either of them have tied up in crypto, it’d probably make more sense for both of them just to deal in fiat currency or trade resources or something.
So data stores tend to present interfaces which allow the CRUD operations on each record: Create, Read, Update, and Destroy.
Create: You hit submit on a comment form Read: Your client app shows the content of the comment Update: You hit submit on the comment editing form Destroy: You delete the comment
Well, in some cases it’s very handy to make a data store with only two operations: Create, and Read.
This is called a “log”. A log is an append-only data structure.
One of the benefits of using a log is that two different processes can operate on the data, at different times, and can be confident they’re operating on the same context despite not being in communication with each other.
This “log” structure could be useful for instance in recording the moves of a chess game. Then, a hundred years later, someone can read each move out of a book and deterministically re-create the board state.
Now they know that they are looking at the same chess game that Ben Franklin was in 1775, despite not being in touch with Ben at all.
Really big, distributed systems benefit from this “synchronization without communication” feature of logs.
Relying on a log requires you to trust that nobody else has Update or Destroy access. For it to work correctly and everyone be on the same page, Updates and Destroys need to never happen.
With a coordinated system like people trying to understand historical chess games, or a corporation like LinkedIn seeking its own self interest, there’s no trust issue.
But with other things, like “who’s got how much money”, people don’t want to have to trust that some centralized log owner is modifying the data on the sly.
That’s where blockchain goes beyond a regular log. It’s a log designed to resist tampering, because each “block” in the chain goes through a distributed checking process where many copies of the log are used, and everyone checks each other’s copies to ensure nobody is cheating.
The cryptography has much simpler algebraic analogues - what we are looking for is a “one-way function”. This means a mathematical symbol that only works on the left side of the equals. The simplest one is the remainder of a division. For example if I told you that I had a remainder of 5 after dividing by 20, you wouldn’t know if the original numerator was 25, 45, 65, 85, and so on. This operator is called mod (modulus). Even if you don’t know what value I started with, It’s not hard to guess what possible numerators could be with modulus. That’s where the cryptography comes into play: a cryptographic hash is designed so that it’s practically impossible to guess the original numerator. We’ll stick with the modulus for explanatory purposes, but imagine that you can’t list off possible numerators like I did.
Now we can invent a puzzle for a computer to solve. We’ll start off with the same values as before, but - again - we are disallowing easy guesses. This forces us to check 1 mod 20, 2 mod 20, 3 mod 20, 4 mod 20, 5 mod 20 and so on. Eventually we’ll hit 25 mod 20 giving us the solution to X mod 20 = 25. Now you can go back to the person that gave you the puzzle and prove that you’ve done 25 steps of work to arrive at a solution (or have made a lucky 1/25 guess). This is called “proof of work”. A cryptographic has consists of a certain number of bits, such as 256 bits - this means a series of 1’ s and 0’s 256 long. The puzzle presented to the computer is “find the numerator that results in the first 50 bits being zero” (the more bits are required to be zero, the longer it will take to find the answer). Because of the incredibly slim chance of guessing the correct numerator, it doesn’t really matter if the computer counts up (like we did with modulus) or guesses. So, in practice, everybody trying to find the solution starts at a random number and starts counting, or trying other random numbers, until someone wins the jackpot. It’s basically a lottery, but the correct numbers have to be discovered instead of being dropped out of a glass ball at the end of the week. Once a computer finds a solution, everybody else playing the game can check their numerator as [probabilistic] proof that they have done work.
Now we can use this lottery to create a blockchain. We start with 5 things: a globally agreed on solution we are looking for (789), an initial block (which is just a number - lets say 12345), Bob’s account #5 of $100, and Sally’s account #6 of $200, and a huge amount of players of the above game. Sally wants to transfer $20 to Bob, so she says to all the players: “I’m #6 and want to give #5 $20. There’s a $1 prize for finding a new block for me.” All the players make a new denominator, by placing the numbers next to eachother - so 12345 6 200 5 100 20 1 - or just 1234562005100201. All the players start trying to find the number that will result in 789. Eventually someone finds 1234562005100990 after a lot of work/guesses. Everybody checks their work 1234562005100990 mod 1234562005100201 = 789. The winning player receives their prize, and now everybody has a new block to start from: 1234562005100201 1234562005100990. Next time someone wants to send some money they will use 12345620051002011234562005100990 as the initial block instead of 12345. Hence, we have set up a chain starting with:
12345 -> 12345620051002011234562005100990 -> …
There’s your block…chain. Anybody can independently verify that the work has been done by checking the answers. It’s incredibly elegant but, as we’ve seen, incredibly destructive.
Good explanation. I am extremely bad at math, I never made it past kind of, high school algebra, and I still can’t do basic math very well, but this explained it pretty well, thank you. So, someone has to start a transaction before mining can start, if that’s how it works?
Blockchain is often described as a solution in search for a problem. It’s a clever technology, but people don’t really know what it can be used for besides storing cryptocurrency transactions.
People have thought about storing other kinds of data in the blockchain, like health records, but no one can really point out to why this would be better than other solutions.
To achieve something similar with health records without blockchain, all that is needed is just a cryptographic signature. The hospital cryptographically signs a digital health document and email it to you. The hospital in turn stores it in some shared database accessible by other hospitals. Done.
If the health record is somehow lost from the shared database, then you got your own copy of it as backup. They can’t modify the health record either, because then it would diverge from your own copy.
The worst thing they can do is to add falsified health records without your approval, but that’s a problem with blockchain as well. Blockchain cannot verify that the input data is truthful (garbage in, garbage out).
The cryptographic signature step is a part of blockchain either way, so there’s no extra technical overhead in the non-blockchain way.
Can someone tell me how decentralized money became the enemy? It is decentralized currency that is like everything we stand for literally using mastodon protocol here.
it’s not the creators fault that the first thing the userbase did was centralize it onto these marketplaces lol. I’m reminding people that this is conceptually great but terrible implementation, across the board.
I’ll likely get downvoted but Polestar, the EV automaker that used to build performance variants for Volvo, uses blockchain to track minerals used in their EV’s.
Circulor Circulor’s blockchain technology enables tracing of extracted raw materials, particularly those with significant impact to communities and the environment.
I like that they use blockchain to ensure the minerals they use aren’t coming from negative sources but I’m sure someone will argue and say it’s stupid or that SQL can do the same.
You could do literally the same thing with a series of private key signed envelopes containing the prior chain of signed content. Boom, verifiable chain of custody without any rainforests being burned down.
I’m hoping you’re being hyperbolic about burning rainforests because not every blockchain is power hungry like Bitcoin or the old the POW Ethereum.
Besides, the rainforest is being burned down to make way for more cattle to provide more beef. Not sure why you chose the rainforest as example of intense computational power.
It’s somewhat hyperbolic, but in relative terms, it is pretty wasteful to implement it with a blockchain over what I just suggested. Cryptographic consensus doesn’t solve anything for the given example that the verifiable chain of custody in my proposed alternative does not and there’s zero way it’s less expensive than a bunch of asymmetric signatures that can be verified offline on demand. If anything, it’s better than a blockchain since it would only require a majority of parties to be complicit in a lie to rewrite history in a blockchain full of parties that have no business with any given transaction other than to enforce immutability whereas it would require every single node in the chain of custody before you to be complicit in my proposal.
And I’m surprised that the rainforest thing confuses you. It and burning tires are the go-to colloquialisms for complaining about things that are unnecessarily environmentally hostile, particularly when talking about crypto crap. But yeah, blockchains are a solution in search of a problem, so the derision is intentional. There’s no legitimate problem that can be solved with blockchain that can’t be solved in a better way. Cryptocurrency only in theory and this supply chain problem are the closest it gets to blockchain making sense and it still fails to be better than non-blockchain alternatives.
It’s not a blockchain. It’s closer to a series of forwarded emails with certificate signing. Who gets to add the next record? How about the party that is doing that step of processing in the supply chain. And I have a great idea for protecting the keys. It’s called asymmetric key pairs. You can verify a signature using a public key without having the private key required to be able to generate that signature.
It’s not a blockchain. It’s closer to a series of forwarded emails with certificate signing.
You’ve got hash linked data, signatures, verification procedures, distributed storage. It’s not very sophisticated, but you are definitely on the path to reinventing the blockchain.
Who gets to add the next record? How about the party that is doing that step of processing in the supply chain.
Oh, so you want a new database for every item. Let’s have one database handling lots of items and validated in sequence.
And I have a great idea for protecting the keys. It’s called asymmetric key pairs.
Brilliant. And how is your invention different from a private permissioned blockchain?
Blockchain is the shitty reinvention of PGP, my dude. I don’t agree to this silly retronym for nearly 50 year old cryptographic methods. Yes, if you remove all the supposed advancements and advantages of blockchain, you’re left with the cryptographic foundation which was the only thing that had merit. Congratulations.
Polestar uses contracts and audits to ethically source materials, not blockchain. It uses blockchain as a shitty append-only SQL database to (apparently) tell you where the materials came from. Let me quote from Circulor’s website:
data can be fed seamlessly to the blockchain via system integration using RESTful Web Service APIs with security and authentication protocols
So the chain is private and accessible only through a centralized, authenticated REST API. This is a traditional web application. A centralized append-only ledger is not even a blockchain.
Well, I’m saying Circulor is most likely lying about their “blockchain” actually being a blockchain, or that they’ve pointlessly set up extra nodes to perform redundant work in order to avoid technically lying.
Blockchain is completely pointless without 3rd parties being part of the network. It’s like me saying I run a personal social network for just myself.
@itsmect mentioned this too but it is wild how this community just hates cryptpo. There’s a good chance the instance you’re on accepts it for donations. Why would they do that if it is so unusable and bad? Open source everything except the money. Makes no sense.
Lol after this comment Bitcoin surpassed silvers market cap making it the 8th most valuable asset in the world. So glad people who don’t understand it and hate it don’t get to ruin it for the rest of us.
There is a lot of propaganda pushing the price down. It’s funny that they think the cryptobros have half a trillion dollars and still keep pushing the price up.
There is value in having core functions of society like social medla and money decentralized and running on open source software even though it will not fix wealth inequality.
Like the rest of society, some people get ridiculous wealth by luck of being at the right place at the right time. That is no reason to not have open source money.
There are many issues with bitcoin but that one I do not buy.
It is similar to open source social media. No single entity is in control. No single company or government that can use that power to control the users. For the end user the result is that bitcoin is more like paper cash than other digital money. You and only you are in control. It is extremely hard to stop you from sending or receiving money.
Just like with the fediverse, there is no Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg to kick you out. With bitcoin there will be no Putin or Trump to freeze your bank account.
The big difference between bitcoin and cash is: When my employer pays me in bitcoin, they can see which wallets I give it to. If all stores and online shops use bitcoin, they’ll publish their bitcoin adresses on their website etc. like they already do with bank account numbers. That means my employer could see where I’m shopping at.
Bitcoins indeed have much worse privacy than cash.
As you outline, if people use the worst possible privacy choices the privacy is ridiculously bad. It does not have to be that bad.
The current best practice for on-chain transactions (as in not all the layer 2 stuff needed to scale) is to use a new address for every incoming transaction. That way a shop would not have one address but thousands, none of which your employer can easily know about.
This type of privacy is still not anywhere near cash. To get that type of privacy you would need to mix your coins with others. Essentially putting all the coins into a sack, shaking it, then handing out coins to everyone. It is not perfekt but we are getting to cash like levels of privacy. Cash is not perfekt either, bills have serial numbers, etc.
The elefant in the room is that for most people what will really matter is the layer 2/3 solutions and what properties they have. On chain transactions does not scale to planet level. The thinking these days is that the bitcoin blockchain should be used more like a court and less like the ledger it was initially intended to be.
thats federation, not open source. reddit was open source for a while, but not federated – and now we are here. whatsapp uses an open source protocol, but isnt federated – some asshole hawaiian (resident of hawaii, not the other option) controls it. Signal is open source, but won’t federate, its controlled by people who are way more into crypto than helping their users (moxie was actively against federation, using such examples as email to prove how federation is a failure)
Like the rest of society, some people get ridiculous wealth by luck of being at the right place at the right time. That is no reason to not have open source money.
thats not the point, there have been studies that show bitcoin is fairly vulnerable to 50% control due to early adopters and other wHaLeS controlling the currency. and the studies can show this because bitcoin isnt private.
don’t recall, it covered both bitcoin and etherium and investigated who owned what. ill see if i can’t find it. edit: this seems to be the academic version of it, but theres a prettier journalism version with more stories and pictures: arxiv.org/abs/2206.02871
in this case i seem to have misremembered owners vs miners, but I’ll keep poking around. this one is also older than i remember.
That is super interesting! But yeah, that was really early days. Hash rate centralisation could of course still be a problem today but it was most likely 100 times worse in 2011.
Stocks are not bad for the environment the way crypto is bad for the environment. I’m not defending companies or the ethics of stock trading, but generating stocks doesn’t consume massive amounts of electricity. That’s like blaming money itself for environmental damage that spending it could theoretically cause.
There are so many legitimate arguments against publicly traded companies and capitalism in general, but this one just isn’t it.
Crypto isn’t traded via electricity burning computers? That’s news to me. I guess after coins are done burning electricity being minted people just trade them on paper.
Seriously though, all the examples you can think of apply equally to crypto, stocks and fiat currency. The only outlier is crypto, which wastes massive amounts of electricity to generate that it doesn’t need to.
But you knew all that already, you’re just arguing in bad faith so you can “be right”.
But you knew all that already, you’re just arguing in bad faith so you can “be right”.
“Bad Faith”? You think I don’t believe the things I say?
I like Crypto currency because there isn’t any government that can actually control it or monitor it. It’s like gold. Better than any stock or cash or credit of any “legit” currency in any account.
Of course, the majority of crypto is worthless and will always be worthless, but Bitcoin and Monero are worth A LOT, then there’s Dogecoin which is worth almost nothing, but it’s value goes up and down so drastically every time it changes that it’s still worth investing in.
I’m kinda amazed I haven’t seen anyone mention the biggest upcoming use case for block chain here. In a world where anyone can create any media with Ai we are going to need robust systems of cryptographic proof of origin and history that anyone can access and that is not controlled by anyone who may wish to manipulate information. The exact strength of block chain.
As for cryptocurrency I’m seeing a lot of confusion here in how people think it works. While scaling has been an issue its not an insolvable one and multiple solutions exist. The issue with crypto is its image not the tech in general. And thats a combination of people using it to scam and governments/banks doing their best to discredit it.
It failed because owning digital collectables is dumb or because block chain failed to create immutable cryptographic proofs and history that could be read by anyone? I think your missing the forest for the trees. Confusing a demo case for the tech that made it possible.
It failed because an “immutable cryptographic proof” that the information being represented is valid is about as useful as a handwritten certificate that says you own Sagittarius.
Cryptography cannot verify your ownership of Sagittarius; it is not an authority. It cannot prevent you from claiming you do, either: anybody can enter whatever they want into the system.
And funny enough, this cryptographic lock and key isn’t even undisputable. If you have a dated record from 2020, and someone else wants it, they can just verify theirs on a different chain. Who is to say which chain is “more correct”? The dates? Dates don’t matter. If you were unlucky enough not to publish your work before someone else does, you don’t cryptographically own your work. If you were lucky and you had published, someone else can just lie that they weren’t ready and you stole it from them. So, even with all of our fancy math, we’re still back to he-said, she-said.
Worse, most blockchain records I know of are way too small for images, let alone video, so all they do is cryptographically “verify” URLs to the work. What exactly is the point of this? Can the files served by these URLs not simply be… changed?
I know they can be changed because C2PA has this very same, exact problem.
The blockchain is, at best, a database. The fact that it’s public doesn’t mean anything—it might be worse, even.
Why bother reinventing all of this? We have institutions already that keep records. What social good is bought from having the most public of all records?
Great response on why NFTs are lame for what most are being used for.
I play some blockchain games where the NFT represents digital items, and the only real use case for it being on blockchain is having the marketplace to trade in game items for money. And that doesn’t even need to be blockchain, it’s like an overengineered steam marketplace.
The way NFTs are currently impliented is just down right dumb haha. And their stupidity hurts blockchain’s image and puts so much mud in the water when it comes to people understanding the tech. Add all the greedy people who try to exploit that confusion and the whole thing gets really ugly really fast.
Sadly this all then becomes the focus and its all people seem to see when they try and understand the tech.
Blockchain is a synchronization and consensus mechanism that provides an authoritative record. None of your issues are unique to blockchains if multi possible authorities exist they way have conflicting rules and records. Blockchains just allow the addition of new entities and users without the traditional costs and scaling issues of existing organization is.
The use case here is proof of origin and history not ownership of a hosted file. You can’t directly apply NFTs to this.
The verification of hashes of files is the point. You want to be able to say “this video I’m watching was unaltered and signed by source X who has a verifiable reputation of providing data which has been verified by other entities who also have been verified”. You don’t store the media on the block chain.
Again the key here is that its a reputation system. Everything in life comes down to he said she said. But having perminant history of what they said and the evidence used is what allows you to weight the claims. Or yes, you could just pick one entity to tell you want to believe…
I would argue public records are a utility in their own right. But the point is that if you allow an institution to hold all the records they decide which ones can be seen and have ability to manipulate the truth. I realize that many Lemmy users seem to be fine with that but IMO your just picking and agreeing with your chosen leader at that point. A free open and transparent system of reputation that is not controlled by anyone ensures access to information for everyone while hindering the ability of bad actors to manipulate the " truth".
I find the “we already have people who keep history for us” argument odd. Sure, we do. But then is it really an issue to have another open system along side them? What cost is it to you? Why be opposed to multiple ways to try and achieve a goal? I’m not saying traditional organizations should not exist. I’m saying this tech provides a pretty rubust solution and should be taken seriously.
Anyways I know we arnt going to agree. But I wanted to put my argument here for anyone reading.
Its always worth exploring multiple solutions to a problem.
Say I want to say that I created an image. I could post that image’s hash to a block chain, and point to it as something anyone can check.
But you already have to trust me for that to be valuable. So I can just host that hash in any of a myriad of conventional methods that are simpler, more performant, and less wasteful.
Your missing the history part. Obviously any signature in isolation is only as good as your knowlage of that person. Thats how cryptography has worked classically. A block chain is not just a hosting service. Of course that could be done cheaper. The point is to have imutable history of what information is provided. This allows a reputation system as well as the ability for parties to endorce or rebuke information in a way that can not be covered up later.
Trust requires reputation. No anonymous person in isolation can be trusted. The point is to allow collaborative verification with proof. And that can not be done by a centralized host or authority without giving that authority control over what is “true”.
The only thing a malicious host can do is to omit information, which can be mitigated simply by using more than one host, which is still cheaper than using a blockchain. You could have each signature include the previous one, which will allow anybody to verify that they have a complete prefix of the history. Host them on, say Imgur and Imgchest, and it would even be free, whereas hosting it on say the ethereum blockchain would cost about 10$ per image (Based on this: etherscan.io/gastracker#costTxAction. I’m lowballing my estimate. If its too high, please tell me by how much, and how you arrived at your number.)
In other words, even in the best case scenario, using the blockchain would only provide negligible benefits compared to much cheaper alternatives.
Omitting information is a pretty serious attack in a reputation based system. It would be like if all 1 star reviews on a product are omitted. You can have multiple hosts but then its on the viewer to find and verify on other hosts. And there is no garentee a history will continue to be hosted long term. Likley many histories will be lost over time. Especially considering these hosts then need a profit motive or some other motive to continue hosting them. You can have chains of signatures together similar to how SSL certs work but you will still need an authority at the end of that chain and it would result in many versions of the chain as multiple entities interact with it.
The cost of using a block chain is what keeps the motives in line. Hosting costs money. And if hosting costs are not covered then it leaves the door open for loss of data or malicious motives. Tho I agree base chain transactions are often too expensive. This is solved by any one of the many scaling solutions that exists. Tho I admit they are all still pretty early tech. With such solutions costs should be at least 10x smaller.
I would argue the ability to have a single distributed ledger and its forever history, colloraboration tools and inability to have information left out is considerably more then a marginal improvement.
This is how tech people often think because they don’t understand economics and the value bitcoin provides. Bitcoin was distributed fairly, is stable, is scarce, and most importantly, is decentralized. Probably all “programmable” shitcoins have zero of those properties and the market reflects that.
I don’t even know where to begin. Btc was distrubuted as fairly as anything else, it’s not as stable as since we have stablecoins, scarcity means nothing, it’s decentralised as much as anything else.
Must I repeat that it just exists? You can’t do anything with it. It’s like comparing a pretty rock to a computer. Today all what btc does is pollute.
So you decide what is fair and what not? Its so fairly distributed now, isn’t it?
Its stable because it’s issued on a schedule? Lol? Wtf? And why would this be a benefit? This is a joke!
You don’t understand bitcoin and crypto. Especially the incentive part needed to run it.
Is vitalik the boss of eth? Give me a break. You arguments are weak af.
Pollution baby. Btc is like there just because it was first. There is nothing there.
Usd is not programmable. You are completely missing the point, you don’t understand what it’s about. Which is not surprising. Btc is boring polluted. Yeah ok it exists. Nobody that works in crypto cares about btc. It’s for investment companies, hedge funds and people in suits. And most of it will end up locked in smart contracts on other chains lol.
Blockchain is a nebulous buzzword with a vague meaning. But I have yet to see a sensible definition of a blockchain that doesn’t include git. At the end of the day they are both just Merkle trees.
Who decides to commit changes though? A human. A human who can be corrupt
I’m not entirely sure what your getting at here, but git can be run as democratically as a crypto currency where the canonical version of the project is the one with the longest chain. Seems like a bad idea to me though. I think you may be assuming the way most people rely on github/gitlab etc as an inherent part of the system, when it’s really just the most convenient way of doing things.
The best use case for blockchains in my opinion is elections.
I’ll believe it when I see a real implementation. I think the problem is anonymity, I don’t see how we can set a system up such that the results are auditable but also impossible for anyone to tie a specific vote to a specific person.
I’m not entirely sure what your getting at here, but git can be run as democratically as a crypto currency where the canonical version of the project is the one with the longest chain.
Which means elections. Which means a dude/committee in charge of a server. See the problem?
I’ll believe it when I see a real implementation. I think the problem is anonymity, I don’t see how we can set a system up such that the results are auditable but also impossible for anyone to tie a specific vote to a specific person.
This is a very very interesting topic that I’ve spent a rlly long time thinking about. I wish I had more energy to go in depth for this. The gist is this:
There will be a tradeoff between anonymity and “vote buying”.
You can have absolute anonymity by implementing a monero like blockchain. Each registered voter address gets one token. The thing that you can cast a vote for is also an address. The voter sends this token to an unknown address (that theoretically belongs to the voter themselves). Then, the voter votes from this address. This way, absolute anonymity is maintained as noone knows who sent the token to the address in the middle. BUT. I could buy votes like this too. I could bribe a voter to send their token to the middle address, which I control.
To prevent voter buying, you can have an open blockchain where all transactions are visible to everyone. However, you get pseudo anonymity here. Every registered voter address gets one token like above. No one except for the election commission knows which address belongs to whom. So while the election commission cannot manipulate votes, it can leak who voted for whom.
Now that being said, normal elections aren’t as theoretically anonymous as well. For ballots, your name is on the envelope. A compromised election commission could leak this info as well. For EVMs, one line of code could leak who you are. The person granting you entry can note down your information. The EVM can ping this person as to which vote was cast while you were in there.
Hence, in my opinion, the second option of the open blockchain is the best one provided that the election commission is under strict regulation (which it generally is in any case).
You said you could democratically manage git, hence bypassing blockchains. Democracy means elections (unless you mean some exotic form of democracy like Athenian democracy). But elections need to be conducted.
I said you would need a central authority (like an election commission) to conduct elections. You said that there was no need for that. So I asked for your method of conducting elections.
The dude who owns the election server won’t be able to manipulate results in any way.
Sure he will. He can just ignore votes for one candidate and not add them to the chain. Blockchains are only resistant to manipulation if they’re distributed and people agree on the canonical version. Even then if enough people agree to manipulate them they can, like they did with Ethereum.
The integrity of blockchains isn’t immune from malicious activity. It is just way way harder to be manipulated. No blockchain means 1 server needs to be manipulated. Blockchain means more than 1 servers need to be manipulated.
Even when it becomes smarter than humans in the future, I would still oppose this idea. We humans have seemingly benevolent leaders who become malevolent. At least we can replace them as they are around as smart as us. A malevolent creature that is waaay smarter than us that rules over us? No thanks.
Please share a source! I can’t find anything as robust as a whitepaper (the bitcoin whitepaper doesn’t use the term).
NIST informally defines it as:
A distributed digital ledger of cryptographically-signed transactions that are grouped into blocks. Each block is cryptographically linked to the previous one (making it tamper evident) after validation and undergoing a consensus decision. As new blocks are added, older blocks become more difficult to modify (creating tamper resistance). New blocks are replicated across copies of the ledger within the network, and any conflicts are resolved automatically using established rules.
Which git certainly meets this.
IBM informally defines it as:
Blockchain is a shared, immutable ledger that facilitates the process of recording transactions and tracking assets in a business network. An asset can be tangible (a house, car, cash, land) or intangible (intellectual property, patents, copyrights, branding).
Again, find the difference. Each block(commit object) has its content(blobs and trees) and metadata like parent blocks(commit objects), time(and message). So one commit corresponds only to one history.
Still haven’t found it. You suddenly started talking about consensus protocol. Bitcoin blockchain branches too, but consensus protocol sets last block(HEAD in git) to block with longest history.
Ive not suddenly started talking about consensus protocols. Yes, selecting the next (not necessarily longest) block is part of that consensus, but so is checking that the data contained in a block is cryptographicly sound and is following the rules of that specific blockchain. That second part is not native to GIT.
If you like, you can think of blockchain as a subset of GIT that includes additional constraints.
Oh a 3rd definition, that definitely hurts the case that blockchain is vague ill defined term. If it were a well-defined term, there would be whitepapers defining it like merkle trees or bitcoin. Blockchain is just a marketing term defined by businesses, not scientists or engineers and thus is vague and variable.
I also don’t think your definition is a very good definition. Do you think git fundamentally changes when it moves from sha1 to sha256? Or are you referring to the fact that the payloads of cryptocurrency’s blockchain is required to be signed (just like you can optionally require git commits to be signed)? I don’t think that’s fundamental to blockchain either.
Only cryptographicly valid changes are allowed to blockchain state. All data can be modified in git.
No. You can’t modify the chain in git. Each commit is an immutable snapshot of the repository. To change history you have to create a new hash and then broadcast that to everyone that they should stop using the old one. Depending in how your network is setup you may onky have to convince a centralized server, or you might have to convince 51% of the actors on your network or you may just choose to only form a network that agrees with you. You could alter bitcoin’s blockchain too, but you’d need 51% of the network to agree with you.
Oh a 3rd definition, that definitely hurts the case that blockchain is vague ill defined term.
The phrases used to describe the technology to the public may change, but the technolgical approach doesn’t
If it were a well-defined term, there would be whitepapers defining it like merkle trees or bitcoin.
There are hundreds of blockchain whitepapers, all of which link blocks of data via hash functions and only accept state changes if they are valid and cryptographicaly signed.
Blockchain is just a marketing term defined by businesses, not scientists or engineers and thus is vague and variable.
If we were discussing web3 or Metaverse then you may have a point. But no-one in tech is confused about what blockchain is anymore.
Do you think git fundamentally changes when it moves from sha1 to sha256?
No.
Or are you referring to the fact that the payloads of cryptocurrency’s blockchain is required to be signed
Yes. Exactly this.
(just like you can optionally require git commits to be signed)?
Optionally is the key word. Blockchain transactions must be signed, and they must be accepted as following the blockchain rules by validators.
I don’t think that’s fundamental to blockchain either.
Find me a blockchain that doesn’t require signed transactions to make state changes.
No. You can’t modify the chain in git.
I didn’t say anything about modify the chain.
Each commit is an immutable snapshot of the repository.
A commit can contain any data it likes. A commit to a blockchain is highly restricted. Only cryptographicly valid rule following changes are allowed to blockchain state.
Optionally is the key word. Blockchain transactions must be signed, and they must be accepted as following the blockchain rules by validators.
But this is just a policy decision, not a property of the technology. You can easily implement a script that checks if every commit from remotes are signed, accepts them if they are and drops them if they aren’t or the signature is invalid.
If you contribute to a project where the majority require signed commits, then you need to sign commits in order for your change to be integrated into the consensus.
That has nothing to do with the technology itself, just with the application.
So if you state that signatures are required to be a blockchain, then you can use git to create a blockchain, by just having that policy.
(IMO I wouldn’t say that signatures are required, just that blockchains usually have them.)
You can easily implement a script that checks if every commit from remotes are signed, accepts them if they are and drops them if they aren’t or the signature is invalid.
Now add some logic to check whether the actual data is valid (i.e. bob has enough coins in his account to send to Charlie).
Make some incentive to ensure only the main branch survives and forks are either eliminated or merged.
Automate
Now git replicates blockchain’s functionality.
So if you state that signatures are required to be a blockchain, then you can use git to create a blockchain, by just having that policy.
Yes, but add automatically processing the content of the commit for validity and incentives to reduce the number of forks.
(IMO I wouldn’t say that signatures are required, just that blockchains usually have them.)
Without public key cryptography you just have a hash linked list (like Git).
How does it “certainly meet it”? There is no consensus mechanism in git, new blocks are not replicated across the network, there is no network at all, git works offline. You can replicate changes with remotes but there is no “git network” in any similar sense. And conflicts are definitely not resolved automatically. And the git hashes are certainly not cryptographic.
That’s 4 ways it doesn’t meet the definition. You could maybe stretch the meaning of a network to make it 3.
While blockchain is well defined, it in itself is not a product but a technology. I think what the other commenter is getting at is that simply saying something “is blockchain” means very little because what the blockchain does depends on the implementation, so when used in marketing it’s just a nebulous buzzword in that it doesn’t actually give you much information about what the product is. Same with terms like cloud, AI, virtual reality, etc.
It’s a brand new shitcoin that uses PoG or Proof of Gullibility. Throw money at the “miners” who do… something then issue you a token that proves you were gullible enough to believe you would make money.
Omg yes, poor mentally handicapped people of crypto lol! With all their money and mathematical equations, inventions, memes,… You really shouldn’t make fun of them or they will cry so much because of you! Oh no! Please don’t make any more jpegs that uncover the worms in your brain. Please no!
Yes, those poor mentally handicapped, whom have such poor social understanding that they do not care about any other being except themselves and their money.
Just read an article that said that restrictions in windows 11 will send an estimated 240million PCs to the landfill this year. I bet a lot of people are quick to comment on their Windows PC about how energy intensive and bad bitcoin and other crypto is, though. At least one is doing something that’s never been done before (crypto). I also wonder how much energy it took us to get to the moon? I guess we should have never done that because of the energy it took to accomplish. I wonder if people were like this about vehicles when they were first mass produced and available to everyone.
I don’t even care if someone doesn’t like crypto, I have friends that don’t care for it, but they don’t try to rationalize it with some lame ass arguments that can be debunked by a child. I don’t understand why lemmy is full of these folks.
No! It’s all scams and it’s a pyramid scheme! It’s pointless and bad for environment and cryptobros and it can’t work because it’s getting more expensive (literally an argument I heard).
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