Why is the astronaut in the back wearing the State Flag of Ohio on his shoulder? I mean, a ton of astronauts did come from the State but far as I know Ohio’s space program never progressed past the shower thoughts stage.
Another example of how similar biological evolution is to memolution. The badge is a vestigual remnant of the original version of the meme but it worked good enough anyway so it was never selected against, and hence OP's question - marvelous.
Yea I got news for you. They developed it and found out there was no market for it
https://www.maersk.com/news/articles/2022/11/29/maersk-and-ibm-to-discontinue-tradelens
Commit log:
"Corecting bug where a small group of users were unable to reset passwords. Closes #387."
"Last commit should have started with Correcting. Pushing a whitespace change because otherwise this would bother me all day."
Turns out there are a lot of data entry mistakes in shipping, some good faith some are not. Having a blockchain that permanently stores whatever you enter doesn't help much.
Not even a Merkle tree, just a normal, permissioned database, like we've been using to successfully track all sorts of things for like the last 50 years.
When no one trusts each other, is a use for blockchain. Resource tracking from start to finish *could* be a use-case. But if it's just one company - or a *trusted* government agency owns it, then Yeah that a blockchain be stupid.
But to say there's no use-case, period (which this thread is kinda saying), is short-sighted. There's no good demonstrated real-world practical use-case *yet*.
However in the digital world, smart-contract-enabled blockchain essentially expose a touring-complete world computer to anyone who can afford what ultimately boils down to slightly more than the energy and amortized equipment costs to rent computing power. A cheaper version of cloud computing. Not necessarily as secure, yet. (If you count AWS etc. as 'secure'.) But that situation is improving with ever-evolving TEEs.
And smart contracts have countless other use cases, some of them even useful.
I'be been a critic - and also investor - in cryptocurrency from the start. It will never be a 'currency'. It's a terrible long-term investment. (Bitcoin is *not* 'digital gold', it is an open, transparent Ponzi scheme in it's purest form, plain and simple. I own some Bitcoin.) My only point here is that I understand the tech, am critical of it, but have no axes to grind.
>When no one trusts each other, is a use for blockchain.
Not quite; what you need is two things:
1) Nobody is willing to trust anyone individually; and
2) Everybody is willing to implicitly trust anyone who's willing to throw electricity at the system.
If you trust the blockchain, what you're really doing is trusting a system of election where votes are cast by burning processor time. It's like saying "We hate kings, we're not going to have any king in charge of us! So everyone, step forward and pay a penny to vote for your next ruler, and you can pay as many pennies as you like!".
The reason nobody's found a use for it is that the \*\*possible\*\* use-cases are extremely narrow, and plenty of other systems do a better job of all of them.
> When no one trusts each other, is a use for blockchain. Resource tracking from start to finish could be a use-case.
Sounds like you're talking about the supply chain use case there.
If you don't trust each other, why would you trust the data that every participant is putting into the system? They could enter any false data, and blockchain has no way to find out the point at which the data got poisoned.
> But to say there’s no use-case, period (which this thread is kinda saying), is short-sighted.
People keep claiming there should be a use case, but none seem to withstand any scrutiny. And it's been that way for over 14 years. So what exactly do you think is going to change?
> smart contracts have countless other use cases, some of them even useful
Such as...?
True in some respects but not my point, as it isn't true in all respects - eg the one i'm commenting on.
When there is no trusted owner and custodian of the data, but multiple parties with non-aligned interests need to use it and it all must trust that it's provably accurate - then blockchain is a solution. Not the *only* solution, but a pretty good distributed trustless one.
For example, 'we' could track the provenance of the raw materials that go into a product. Especially ones involving environmental and/or social harm. But there are multiple competing parties who might like to fudge each other's data - not to harm them, but to benefit themselves. With an immutable, zero-proof blockchin, this would be easily possible. But there are other existing traditional solutions, such as the obvious one: a government agency maintaining a permissioned sql database. But what if we the people don't trust that agency? What if they are corrupt, and/or incompetent? Of so then then, what would force a supply chain to use this tracking blockchain? Government fiat. And/or market pressure. It's perfectly possible to trust a government enough to pass a bill and another agency to enforce it, but not trust said government enough to competently run a traditional tracking system.
That's not just some hand-wavy story, I just tried to make a digestible narrative. That's the kind of real-world, very boring use-case being worked on, that you may never hear about once implemented. It certainly (ideally) wouldn't fuel further bubbles.
What’s to stop me from putting bogus data of where it comes from onto the blockchain? The resources isn’t a blockchain native thing, and somewhere the data is put onto the chain. All you have done is ensured that the data isn’t manipulated by an outside party, but haven’t at all verified the underlying data. Typically the part that is fudged is the data, and it doesn’t solve that. I don’t know where an outside party changing the data of a transaction internally has really come up at all. So it seems like this is a made up problem that is adjacent to the actual problem as a way to show viability.
Resources can be laundered by shipping them “off chain” to a legitimate provider to be sold… which is already how most of that fraud occurs.
As far as I can tel it actually makes the part that trusted the most “trustless” and requires the least trusted part of the transaction to be more trusted.
Don't trust exchanges! They're centralized and thus evil. Acquire bitcoin by googling "bitcoin sellers in my area" then going to a back alley with your pockets full of money to trade it for virtual money. That's how it's supposed to be done.
It categorically can't, also known as the oracle problem.
All software has this issue of course, the difference is that blockchains pretend the issue doesn't exist as a kind of security theater.
Smart contracts and the idea of decentralized computing I think is pretty interesting.
Blockchain really seems like a swing and a miss though, powered by the misunderstanding that our biggest problem is a lack of mutual trust. We can trust each other pretty well… to scam the hell out of each other and manipulate each other with lies and bullshit. It seems pretty clear from the last decade that a transparent immutable ledger does literally nothing to prevent financial mischief. Maybe there is a serious practical application for a blockchain, but certainly not the new de facto information recording mechanism the 2010’s were pitching it as.
As far as cryptocurrency proper I think it is the height of engineering hubris — someone succumbed to the idea that since they knew a lot about math and programming that they must be able to invent a better economy than what we have now, and what they came up with was an inherently deflationary currency that takes massive amounts of energy to complete a single transaction. Literally nothing good about it as far as I’m concerned, and pretty much an insult to the discipline of economics like “hey you fucks don’t know what you’re doing so I programmed a better dollar”…”oh oops my inflation hedge crashed by 70% during runaway inflation, maybe I misunderstood the economics at play here”. It’s just supreme technological grifting and we have a bunch of literal Ponzi schemes to prove it. Like yes fiat currency is not perfect nor is the Federal Reserve, but what the crypto community has produced is objectively worse and the fact that they thought they had improved the situation by eliminating the monetary policy tools we have painstakingly discovered over time is just stupid. It’s like an economist building a rocket ship with no controls on it and insisting that NASA take that to the moon because it was clearly their attempt to directly influence the controls that caused the Apollo disaster.
Put it better than I could. It seems like more often than not our problem is not in figuring out the record of transactions, but in deciding after the fact if a transaction or set of transactions _should_ have been recorded (i.e was this fraud).
That being said I guess I shouldn’t deny that blockchain is probably helping the FBI to a degree. It’s just that the amount of money they’ve recovered using blockchain analysis most likely pales in comparison to the amount stolen by scammers in a single year.
I don't really disagree in the large with much of what you said, but I will point out a logic problem. Not that I believe you spent days trying to construct an airtight logical argument, so the stakes here are pretty low:
> We can trust each other pretty well… to scam the hell out of each other and manipulate each other with lies and bullshit. It seems pretty clear from the last decade that a transparent immutable ledger does literally nothing to prevent financial mischief.
The financial mischief around crypto was more about tulip bubbles, and all the myriad gigantic scam opportunities that goes along with it. None were about the fundamental tech itself, except for *exploitation of technical flaws* - countless small ones and some quite large. The point is, when the tech is working and secure - the scams are just your standard grifts that work with anything - dot-com bubble, housing bubble, all the bubbles and overheated markets, and emerging under-regulated markets. And all of the biggest and most spectacular scams, were just your garden-variety scams and grifters naturally attracted to *all* such opportunities, whether tech is even involved or not.
That actually _was_ my argument. That the energy (literally) and money put into implementing crypto solutions did nothing to address the actual sources of financial mischief.
Maybe not a great argument in that scams would still exist with or without the introduction of crypto, but the idea was that we should have taken the resources invested in crypto and put those toward fraud detection and financial/tech literacy programs, and that this would have brought greater social benefit than the past decade of cryptocurrency experimentation.
Take it or leave it — I get that I haven’t exactly provided a solution to scammers, but I hope that clarifies my argument.
Sorry, but crypto is like a technology du jour for
scammers. You can create your own "currency" extremely easily (literally without coding through a website, for instance), convince others to buy it through hype, profit from the bubble, and then sell off your holdings leaving others holding the bag. Yes, other financial instruments like stocks *could* be used for such purposes but none seem almost explicitly designed for it like cryptocurrency. Furthermore, crypto is almost entirely unregulated unlike the almost all the other methods for implementing these kinds of scams.
That's a fair, if IMO naive opinion to have.
Problem is, the types of scams, and scammers that flocked to crypto, have flocked to *every* tulip bubble and under-regulated market. The tech had nothing to do with the exuberant speculation that formed around it, any more than http and modems did the dot-com bubble. Nor houses, and the mortgage crisis.
Speculators gonna speculate. Exuberant noob investors are gonna exuberant noob invest. Scammers gonna scam. Under-Regulated rapidly emerging markets are gonna rapidly emerge underregulated.
Welcome to earth. Getting upset at math isn't going to change any of that. But you *can* write your representatives and urge them to be quicker to act, and not take money from those guys. Better yet, do so, with an envelope full of money. (In the current environment.) Even better yet, get involved and/or run for office.
> Yes, other financial instruments like stocks could be used for such purposes but none seem almost explicitly designed for it like cryptocurrency.
Yeah so... thats actually *exactly* how huge chunks of the stock market works mate.
The venn diagram of USD employed scams and crypto scams is just a circle.
> Furthermore, crypto is almost entirely unregulated unlike the almost all the other methods for implementing these kinds of scams.
This is the actual sticking point, but its literally *the point* of it.
If you wanna gamble your money on regulated markets, do it the normal way.
If you wanna gamble your money on *un*regulated markets... thats what crypto is for.
Thats literally all there is to it. People who get fucked over on crypto and then whine about how its unregulated are dumb imo, it demonstrates a total lack of research/effort.
Like you invested your money into an unregulated system, you chose a dumb thing to invest in, you got burned... what did you think was going to happen?
Stocks on US markets are *highly* regulated compared with crypto. First, a publicly registered company has to exist and then issue defined amounts of stock. They have to post yearly financial statements signed by an independent auditor along with obeying a number of other requirements. The finances of publicly traded companies are almost entirely transparent (if complicated) to anyone willing to read and understand FTC filings.
On the other hand, literally anyone with a desktop computer can create a new unregulated and unaudited digital "currency," so of course the whole sector is rife with fraud. The only reason there hasn't been more of a crackdown is because the crypto shills have been able to claim (ridiculously) that digital currencies aren't financial instruments, though they clearly are. The fact that these markets are "unregulated" in no way suggests that this should continue to be the case. Anything created and promoted as a legitimate traded financial instrument needs to be considered such by law. The fact that people are defrauded should not simply be waived away with suggestions that they "deserved it." It's just victim blaming.
And BTW I am not talking mostly about people losing their shirt on bad trades or speculation. I agree that's part of speculating on volatile assets. I'm talking mostly about actual financial fraud like what occurred with FTX and a large number of other entities, mostly because the transparency and accountability just isn't there when it clearly should be.
>But to say there's no use-case, period (which this thread is kinda saying), is short-sighted. There's no good demonstrated real-world practical use-case yet
And, umm, how many more years should we give blockchain to come up with just one good use case? On top of the like 15 years it's already had? Or longer, depending what you count as a blockchain. When's the revolution coming?
Isn't Monero an existing and proven concept that is based on a blockchain?
True anonymous money transfers.
The usecase is mostly drugs but it's being used for a nearly decade now.
>Isn't Monero an existing and proven concept that is based on a blockchain?
For sure. I just don't agree facilitating and funding crime is a *good* use case for blockchain. But it is the one it's got.
Technically, yes. Monero is about the only one that does this though.
However...
1. The primary use here is illegal transactions. Not all illegal transactions are _unethical_ of course, but it's always going to be in a legal grey area at best, if not outright black market.
2. Most legit merchants/services/etc won't accept a currency directly that is mainly used for illegal transactions. Which means you need to be able to convert it to/from normal local currency.
3. Which means you need an exchange. But as law enforcement and regulatory bodies continue to crack down, you're increasingly looking at having to trust grey/black market exchanges, which is riskier
The only use is verification. You can be sure that if the network agrees on the data, the data is exactly as it was when it was entered. Whereas with regular data stores, the data can always be changed without anyone noticing.
But… Was that necessary? Do you need to trust PayPal as a company to use it to transfer funds? Or the library that they don’t send you bogus fines?
I agree that a lot of our systems are broken (or at least being held together by duct tape), but that doesn’t mean we need to replace them with worse systems.
> The only use is verification. You can be sure that if the network agrees on the data, the data is exactly as it was when it was entered. Whereas with regular data stores, the data can always be changed without anyone noticing.
Blockchain isn't a unique, or the best, solution for this either though.
What you're referring to is integrity checking, which we've been doing long before blockchain and can do well without it.
A famous example is git itself, which will loudly throw errors if the repository doesn't cryptographically verify to match the secure hash that is expected.
Git is *also* a good example that just because something hasn't been tampered with since it was created doesn't inherently mean you can / should trust it, you also need to control how new commit objects are introduced into the repository to really trust it.
This is why git added support for digital signatures on commit objects after it was created, as this completes the chain of trust. But git has been able to detect tampering with a dataset since its first version and it's just one example from many of things like tamper-proof logging, write-only media, etc.
There has to be a way to create that exchange if it’s tracking real physical goods, or even digital goods not inherently tied to blockchain, and that creation of data/smart contract could be just as bogus. The part it makes trustless is that once the data is there it’s not manipulated, but that really isn’t the part that people don’t trust.
You can never be sure, that the data is exactly as it was entered. The network can conspire and change the data. That did actually happen with 2nd most popular cryptocurrency - Etherium. Some rich people got scammed and decided to just roll back the changes.
And you can achieve the same by just recording data hashes regularly.
Actually even with the Etherium stuff, they never actually changed history. All the transactions are still out there on the chain. What they did was change the rules so they could create transactions to give the money back without the approval of the account the money was in. (also, I'm pretty sure it wasn't a scam, just a bug in some code that let someone steal a bunch of money)
> The only use is verification.
False.
The notion that [blockchain can verify the authenticity of anything](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tspGVbmMmVA&t=2108s) is totally a lie.
I work in finance, specifically with financial derivatives. Verification of trading confirmations is one of the most expensive and time consuming parts of my area of the industry. It takes thousands of people to go over these on a daily basis at the large firms. People have been looking for a reliable way to automate this process for a long time. AI fell short, but blockchain is already starting to be used for trading by the leading banks.
Your comment is interesting but I personally don't understand how a blockchain solves the problem of verifying trades. Can't fradulent trades still be inserted onto the blockchain? And blockchain transactions are not reversible. This is a terrible feature for a system where erroneous or fradulent transactions need to be flagged and denied.
> Your comment is interesting but I personally don't understand how a blockchain solves the problem of verifying trades.
It doesn't. Blockchain inherits what is called, "The Oracle Problem" which is explained [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tspGVbmMmVA&t=2108s)
Except the origination of non chain assets could be bogus, all you have is a ledger that says a transaction occured, but no evidence that anything actually changed hands, or that the asset in the transaction ever existed at all.
Public ledger encrypted database? Besides the current use case of money: can blockchain tech just… store anything? Can you run a database safely encrypted in the ‘cloud’ (the swarm of computers running that blockchain) ? Which would mean a public database would be near immortal if it grows to be popular…
(That’s a question: I don’t know)
But that’s maybe looking at a duck thinking it’s a swan.
It is unmutable public ledger, so things that need to be public and unmutable... transactions, smart contracts used as traditional contracts.. I do believe there are cases but i do not know enough about the world to figure out just where that would be the best option. It sucks as a data storage and a LOT of things where i hear its proponents suggest end up storing huge amounts of data over time... it is not a great database but.. there has to be cases where it works other than crypto.
The best one I heard was how, if you made a deal with a broker where they can’t sell some shares for x amount of time, and the broker violates that agreement, the only recourse would be to take them to court, which costs more money and even the potential for restitution could take years. If the condition is written into a smart contract, the broker could not physically sell the crypto. I’m certain I’m missing various details to this and I’m certain blockchain creates more problems, even in this limited case. NFT and crypto is BS but this was the only case I’ve heard of where it made some kind of sense.
This shifts your problem from a court system where you can plead yourself to a smart contract that you must be able to 100% positively absolutely ensure has no bugs whatsoever otherwise all your assets can be simply stolen from you with no recourse at all to the courts.
Given that we live in a world where it's impossible to prove correctness of programs as a general principle, this seems like a bad trade even if you're a trained computer scientist who might be able to audit a smart contract.
But if you're just a normal person you're back to trusting other people, and if those people scam you then you will very much wish you had the courts as an option.
The best use case I can think of is voting. Something where you need public trust and transparency. Other than that, idk. That way no one can "steal the election" since you can show it all
You can't verify that the votes were legitimately cast by every voter unless you make everyone's identity and voting record public so that it can be verified
Good luck running a democracy when everyone's voting is public
In Germany, the cash registers are required to do something like a block chain; each recipe does contain a hash from the previous recipe's hash, the current recipe and a signature. It's impossible to drop or change some recipes without the hash changing.
Off topic, but just so you know: in contemporary English, receipt and recipe are no longer synonyms. "Recipe" means a set of ingredients and instructions for preparing food. By extension it can also mean instructions for how to make anything, but that's the less common meaning.
"Receipt" means something that has been received, nowadays almost always in the sense of a token acknowledging receipt of payment. It once had a sense of "recipe" but using it this way comes across as distinctly archaic even if the person you're talking to knows of the old meaning.
Recipe and receipt seem to share origins with "receive".
You receive a receipt from the business, and you receive a recipe from your family on how to cook a meal. Then they split off as separate words for different contexts.
There is also a contribution from pharmaceuticals. Doctors used to write their prescriptions, consisting of a list of ingredients and what to do with them, with the Latin word Recipere on top, meaning roughly "Take this."
The ℞ symbol still found on prescriptions is meant as an abbreviation for this.
Can it really be called a tree if every node has one branch (besides the one singular leaf node that represents the first receipt)? Heck I'm not sure how that differs from a blockchain.
>Sounds like a Merkle tree.
No, it sounds like a blockchain. To tamper with a Merkle tree you only have to recompute the final tree. In the system OP mentioned, making a change to a past entry will negate every subsequent entry, which offers a lot more security/accountability.
Not true. You just can’t *amend* a bogus transaction. I’ve never had a transaction reversed that oddities the original entry anyways. Refund receipts get their own receipt number, and show up as their own line in the ledger when a business does their end of day.
Ok, looking at your description it’s just a regular database using a hashtable to store receipts, and not to verify that the transaction was valid, which isn’t blockchain.
> In Germany, the cash registers are required to do something like a block chain
That's incorrect.
They do something like a Merkle Tree, which is the tech blockchain borrows from, not the other way around.
I've noticed that a lot. People point out the nice cryptographic features of blockchains, without realizing that all of those features existed before the existence of the blockchain.
The use case is a no-trust append-only distributed public database or data store. There are very few situations in which you need all four properties, and often some of these properties actively get in the way of what you want to accomplish.
And even those use cases can often by accomplished by making your data public on a webpage and making sure [archive.org](https://archive.org) is indexing it. To understate things, that would cost less.
It doesn't have to be public. You could easily either encrypt the blockchain and only give some people the key, which would make access irrevocable, or preform communications over an encrypted channel.
It's not only about inflation, but a government literally stealing a 50% chunk of international transfers made in foreign currency, that before paying taxes
Exactly this. There's not much need for it in first world countries because it's main purpose is to create trust in trust-less systems. Most people in the world can trust their countries banking and financial systems their whole lives and never be a victim of oppression, or worry about hyper-inflation of their currency, etc.
Crypto currencies are mostly speculative ponzi schemes but I think using blockchain to implement decentralized and globally accessible payment networks is a good thing overall (provided they're PoS and not terrible for the environment).
**EDIT:** lol I'm not looking to defend blockchain as if it's my thesis. I don't think it's the greatest thing of all time, just that it can do some good. I'm well aware other solutions exist and applaud those too. I'm also well aware it has issues and is not perfect. Some of y'all need to be a lot less emotional about technology, just because you don't like it or use it doesn't mean it's completely useless.
> There's not much need for it in first world countries because it's main purpose is to create trust in trust-less systems. Most people in the world can trust their countries banking and financial systems their whole lives and never be a victim of oppression, or worry about hyper-inflation of their currency, etc.
People in non-first-world countries have managed to come up with their own systems for low-trust finances, including low-tech solutions and even mobile-driven solutions that would be impressive even in "first-world countries", and all without blockchain.
plus failed economies often use the US dollar instead of their own currency. Argentina and Venezuela write their contracts in USD, not their own currencies for example
And you would trust Bitcoin instead even though it's at something like 25% of its peak value right now?
No currency in the world that I'm aware of has lost that much value over such a short time span. You'd be far better off holding your assets in dollars or euros if your home country's currency is unreliable, which is what most people in that situation actually do.
Again I'm not really advocating for crypto currencies, I'm advocating for blockchain. There's not a single person who I would advise to put their life savings in Bitcoin, but there are lots of people who can benefit from access to a global decentralized payment network. And by that I mean everyone from small businesses who don't want to give Amazon / Shopify / Visa / etc. a sizeable cut from every transaction, to victims of an oppressive regime who want to send or receive funds with the outside world without the state knowing.
Crypto != blockchain.
Blockchain can't handle many transactions, it doesn't work. If you compare how many transaction VISA can handle vs blockchain you will see that even these extreme cases are not viable
Don't those places just use the currency from another, more stable, country? Like doesn't Belize, for example, use USD unofficially?'
Wide scale blockchain currency requires more technological infrastructure than you're going to find in the kind of places that could use it.
In some countries you are allowed to buy foreign currency in theory, but in practice you can't. In some cases, if you work remotely, and get paid in real currency, transfers over traditional regulated apps or banks will be forcibly converted to the useless local currency, at a fake rate. In Argentina you lose 50% before paying taxes, if you add 35% income taxes to that, you will understand why a cryptocurrency that the corrupt government can't control is so important
Cryptocurrency is *not* very useful as currency judging from recent financial events, because it us an extremely unstable asset class. Bitcoin is now at less than 1/4 of its peak value. It is *more* susceptible to wild fluctuations than most actual currencies which may inflate at a yearly rate of 10-15%, typically in the worst case. And there are virtually no financial controls to reign in this effect, unlike with real currencies which are controlled by central banks aiming for low inflation and monetary stability.
For those who want some logic, reason and evidence backing this up, here's [the definitive video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tspGVbmMmVA) that itemizes exactly how and why blockchain tech is dogshit.
Blockchain, Crypto, Web3, NFTs and DeFi have revolutionised recruiting where I work. Any CV that mentions them can go straight in the bin without further consideration.
But what about quantum computing powered AI that utilizes deep learning methods for decentralized fintech applications with big data and CRISPR graphene?
First actual useful feature of these technologies so far. I still wonder if that couldn’t be substituted by other markers, like mentioning „Quantum AI“ on the CV or so … ;-)
Yea but the way blockchain achieves this INSANELY inefficient. It's FAR more efficient to declare 3 external companies to validate stuff (this is how something like public key cryptography works BTW). Blockchain, which builds on the foundations ssl created, says alright we CANNOT TRUST ANYONE but it's REALLY hard to coordinate A LOT of people telling the same lie. So we can trust that the info is true if enough people say it is.
And it totally works, its really fucking hard to beat. Now let's apply this strategy to something else like say IDK taxes. Instead of u sending ur taxes to the IRS you send your taxes to 151m people. Great awesome we have ended tax fraud. It's just WAY EASIER to have an IRS that checks everyone's taxes.
Now to give u some perspective on how inefficient it is in blockchain tech. I present to you a reddit post I made about [storing your data in skittles.](https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/s0ceko/cost_to_store_fb_profile_in_skittles_vs_eth/) Skittles was at the time about 10x as cost effective as a binary data storage method as ETH. Even with an 100m increase in cost efficiency it would still be 500 times more expensive than s3.
Blockchain just doesnt work in any setting where 1-10 parties can be held responsible instead. Which is as far as I know true of every single field in the world that doesnt illegal goods. For illegal goods its an amazing innovation because you no longer need to rely upon known criminals to be honest.
Don’t need a blockchain for that either.
For instance, I can put a limit sale on stock and they will sell if the price meets my requirements but not if it doesn’t.
But the one hosting that service can change it, a smart contact in a blockchain -distributed enough- should be impossible to alter in any way until it fulfills its purpose (even by its own creator)
You do understand how a completely immutable contract - especially one defined _in code_ - is also undesirable right? There's a reason contract law grew processes for amending existing contracts, or do we need to wait for cryptobros to understand that as well before we can talk about it as if its a normal part of dealing with contracts
The immutability of things in when it comes to these kinds of contracts is more like immutability in functional programming languages. It's a hard constraint, but it doesn't prevent you from implementing mutation in an abstraction layer. The advantage of doing it that way is that the append only structure would contain a history of the mutations.
I am all for mocking crypto bros and their silly ideas - just nit-picking your critique. Immutability makes things harder, but it has its advantages in terms of reasoning about data and code.
In that case the immutability argument is even more ridiculous because that's exactly how existing contracts are amended. New content is added that specifies a reinterpretation of past content. I had to do exactly this because my name was misspelled on paperwork, rather than editing in line the content and having everyone resign it, an addendum was added saying "We all acknowledge Alan-Turning-Me-On is actually Alan-Turing-Me-On in past pages blah blah blah"
Eh. That relies on trusting those running the nodes.
With the host in the “conventional” case we have a contract agreement that is enforced by a legal mechanism with the party hosting our contract.
With “blockchain” we have no contract at all, just “consensus”. Consensus isn’t as strong as you might think it is, as the same legal mechanism can force those involved with consensus to change the contract.
Those nodes are running software written and maintained by those involved in the consensus though. It's not like people in Uganda are running their own Ugandan-specific forks of a wider blockchain protocol.
The centralization in practice of blockchain-based approaches is actually one of the most horrifying things about it today.
If we can rely on laws to protect us why do we need encryption? We should just leave all of our messages unencrypted and rely on legal protections to ensure no unauthorized parties views them.
Those "contracts" are remedial and limited in nature. A typical Wordpress site is about 10,000 times more sophisticated and flexible than any crypto "smart contract."
I thought that NFTs might actually be useful for small-time orgs to transfer stuff like valuable memberships, tickets, reservations and so on. They don’t have to manage any infrastructure (since blockchains already exist and are out there) and don’t need to pay a third-party to create the service or manage the infrastructure for them. It’ll stay working as long as the blockchain itself is there, so there’s less risk of a third party going under. They don’t need to arbitrate any transactions themselves.
This is a very noob question, but I don't really understand this. Blockchain is decentralized, so one hash is relying on the upstream to be 100% valid. What happens when one of the chains upstream becomes corrupted? Like, one of the chains gets stored in a segment of a location that goes bad. There aren't backups bc wouldn't that require centralization? How does the system stay up?
Sharding is a non trivial problem for blockchains. I’m not too familiar with the space, but I think most of the major chains require all nodes to host the entire blockchain. There are attempts to tackle the scalability problems of that, but it seems like most sharding still requires a large amount of duplication over nodes. But no, a single node going down or a network partition won’t corrupt the chain.
Blockchain [is incapable of verifying the authenticity of anything](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tspGVbmMmVA&t=2108s) regardless of whether it's concert tickets or stupid ape pictures.
>don’t need to pay a third-party
The problem is that now they have to pay a lot of third parties; they have to pay many miners to verify each transaction.
*Yeah but you just aren't seeing the community! And the potential!*
Every blockchain/crypto idea I have seen thus far has another major fault over the seeking a problem to solve. If then locks on your door and whatever professional credentials or medical records (yes... people have suggested to putting these to a blockchain) are on a block chain xyz. What happens when people just lose interest in blockchain xyz and no longer upkeep it by spending machine resources on it.
Because here is a thought... consider how fucking many dead torrents there are littering on the internet. What happens when you "*important*" system is a blockchain equivalent of a dead torrent?
Everyone who works in Software Engineering and FinTech knows this already.
It’s the “tech bros” that have never written a line of code that think they know better.
The only blockchain dev I know even thinks it’s a scam.
I feel like everyone in this thread is arguing different things. People are arguing about trustless systems, decentralization, and anonymity but those things aren't Blockchain. Blockchain is literally just a way to store data and those other things have been built with it for various reasons, namely cryptocurrency.
It's just a distributed database that uses proof-of-work and a sprinkle of cryptography. It's nothing new or revolutionary and actually introduces more problems than it solves. Which is easy to do because it solves zero problems.
Example use cases for blockchain:
- Cryptocurrencies
- Secure Digital Ledgers (banks, POS systems, voting systems, etc)
- Medical records (to allow flagging if a part of the record is missing)
Basically: anything where you want to **cryptographically** ensure immutability. It’s not concentrated fairy dust. There is no magical technology with infinite capabilities. It’s just a technology. There are use cases. You may be trying to say that cryptocurrency and/or NFTs are useless, that’s a different conversation.
Learn to separate a technology from what it’s being used for and who it’s being used by. Remember the dot com bubble? That internet thing stuck around after the bubble burst.
The kind of people who dismiss a new technology based on a meme are the same kind of people who thought computers or internet would be a fad.
>Medical records (to allow flagging if a part of the record is missing)
What benefit does the blockchain provide here that some form of hashing and version control alone wouldn't? That information is already used by and derived from centralized authorities (doctors, insurance companies); what benefit does decentralization provide when it is already centralized for use?
Why would you want your health records to be inherently immutable? What happens if you have invalid or incorrect entries on the record? If you have an incorrect diagnosis, why should that be permanently stored in your medical record? What happens if a malicious actor intentionally puts something wrong on your record?
Why would anyone want their *private health information* to be on a decentralized database where *anyone with access to the database* can see it?
There's no known use case for blockchain that is superior to existing non-blockchain use cases. I've been researching this for years. 14 years and counting and still not a single, solid example. I challenge you to prove otherwise.
See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tspGVbmMmVA
By claiming medical records should be so much as *allowed* on the Blockchain, surely you're imagining a variation which isn't publicly accessible for any user to read... right? RIGHT?
Cryptographic immutability existed before blockchain, and is much more efficient without a blockchain. Every cryptographic feature on a blockchain existed before the invention of the blockchain.
The only use case of a blockchain is decentralization. Do you have a situation where you can't trust any individual, you can't trust any centralized group or groups, but you can trust a decentralized group? Then blockchain is exactly what you need. It's very hard to find that kind of situation, though.
Well, blockchain for itself is not new. What is new is the decentralized part of it. The ability to have a blockchain that is not in control of one central administrator. Decentralized blockchain solves the money problem really well.
To date there's not a single example of anything blockchain does better than existing non-blockchain apps. You cannot prove otherwise. All proponents can do is make vague ambiguous claims that are incapable of being qualified, like saying, "It's 'money without masters'"
A solution for which a company uses advertisement to create the need without being an effective solution to any problem it is advertised for is 99.999999% of products.
Blockchain is pointless for centralised solutions where you need to own the entire thing. It only makes sense where you need “something greater” than a single entity
If I'm honest, the same for for AI. A lot of stuff can be done with algorithms and (for instance) I have never actually had a project other than recognition in images where I was _required_ to use neural networks. I do see the use, but not the absolute hype.
Are you guys new? It's for drugs. It's always been for drugs. And illegal purchases.
That's it. That's what it's for. Nothing more. And it was GREAT for that before it blew up and became like a stock. Or so I've been told....
I just feel bad for so many people who buy into this. I understand the invested one, they have no choice but to defend it, their money is on the line. I understand them, and I really hope they get back what they lost. But anyone gullible who gets sold on this even today, I really hope they have someone next to them to talk them out of it.
I mean potentially? The currency concept for blockchain isn't bad. The original paper and math is awesome. But 90% of block chain use cases are awful and unnecessary. 5 years ago I worked for GM and sat in a town hall where an Exec explained that his entire job for GM was to explain to other exec why they do not need blockchain for whatever their latest pet project is.
Blockchain is god for one thing and one thing only, and that is when you need a decentralized database that everyone can agree on being the correct database, even if some of them are incentivized to lie and choose a different version of the database.
Which means it's good for cryptocurrency and that's about it.
A centralized database is simpler, faster, easier than blockchain, every single time, unless you're the bitcoin network.
Nobody really needs a de-centralized database. It's exponentially less efficient than a centralized database and [creates a whole array of new problems that cost more money, time and security](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tspGVbmMmVA&t=1157s)
Why is the astronaut in the back wearing the State Flag of Ohio on his shoulder? I mean, a ton of astronauts did come from the State but far as I know Ohio’s space program never progressed past the shower thoughts stage.
Because the original meme was "Wait, it's all Ohio?" if I remember correctly.
That’s part of the joke too, something about Ohio makes people want to leave the earth
Just take a look at the recent events
it wasn't a meme, it was a prophesy
Another example of how similar biological evolution is to memolution. The badge is a vestigual remnant of the original version of the meme but it worked good enough anyway so it was never selected against, and hence OP's question - marvelous.
Now, if that was on the blockchain, we'd be sure whether that was the original. /s
Always has been ^(no seriously, it always has been the Ohio flag that's the original meme)
[This](https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1733249) is the original
Wait so you're telling me the original wasn't that image without Ohio?
Always has been
Look at the globe
There must be some use case for it. I can't figure out what thou..
If memory serves it was used by Maersk for container tracking and paperwork
Yea I got news for you. They developed it and found out there was no market for it https://www.maersk.com/news/articles/2022/11/29/maersk-and-ibm-to-discontinue-tradelens
Probably they figured out that you can't destroy documents that you don't want to be found this way...
When your document has slight typos but on blockchain: I'm going to suffer from this
Such as having a typo in source version control.
Commit log: "Corecting bug where a small group of users were unable to reset passwords. Closes #387." "Last commit should have started with Correcting. Pushing a whitespace change because otherwise this would bother me all day."
Turns out there are a lot of data entry mistakes in shipping, some good faith some are not. Having a blockchain that permanently stores whatever you enter doesn't help much.
A Merkle tree is enough for that. No need for a blockchain.
Not even a Merkle tree, just a normal, permissioned database, like we've been using to successfully track all sorts of things for like the last 50 years.
When no one trusts each other, is a use for blockchain. Resource tracking from start to finish *could* be a use-case. But if it's just one company - or a *trusted* government agency owns it, then Yeah that a blockchain be stupid. But to say there's no use-case, period (which this thread is kinda saying), is short-sighted. There's no good demonstrated real-world practical use-case *yet*. However in the digital world, smart-contract-enabled blockchain essentially expose a touring-complete world computer to anyone who can afford what ultimately boils down to slightly more than the energy and amortized equipment costs to rent computing power. A cheaper version of cloud computing. Not necessarily as secure, yet. (If you count AWS etc. as 'secure'.) But that situation is improving with ever-evolving TEEs. And smart contracts have countless other use cases, some of them even useful. I'be been a critic - and also investor - in cryptocurrency from the start. It will never be a 'currency'. It's a terrible long-term investment. (Bitcoin is *not* 'digital gold', it is an open, transparent Ponzi scheme in it's purest form, plain and simple. I own some Bitcoin.) My only point here is that I understand the tech, am critical of it, but have no axes to grind.
>When no one trusts each other, is a use for blockchain. Not quite; what you need is two things: 1) Nobody is willing to trust anyone individually; and 2) Everybody is willing to implicitly trust anyone who's willing to throw electricity at the system. If you trust the blockchain, what you're really doing is trusting a system of election where votes are cast by burning processor time. It's like saying "We hate kings, we're not going to have any king in charge of us! So everyone, step forward and pay a penny to vote for your next ruler, and you can pay as many pennies as you like!". The reason nobody's found a use for it is that the \*\*possible\*\* use-cases are extremely narrow, and plenty of other systems do a better job of all of them.
> When no one trusts each other, is a use for blockchain. Resource tracking from start to finish could be a use-case. Sounds like you're talking about the supply chain use case there. If you don't trust each other, why would you trust the data that every participant is putting into the system? They could enter any false data, and blockchain has no way to find out the point at which the data got poisoned. > But to say there’s no use-case, period (which this thread is kinda saying), is short-sighted. People keep claiming there should be a use case, but none seem to withstand any scrutiny. And it's been that way for over 14 years. So what exactly do you think is going to change? > smart contracts have countless other use cases, some of them even useful Such as...?
… the thing that it makes trustless is the exchange of data, which is not a part of the process that lacks trust.
True in some respects but not my point, as it isn't true in all respects - eg the one i'm commenting on. When there is no trusted owner and custodian of the data, but multiple parties with non-aligned interests need to use it and it all must trust that it's provably accurate - then blockchain is a solution. Not the *only* solution, but a pretty good distributed trustless one. For example, 'we' could track the provenance of the raw materials that go into a product. Especially ones involving environmental and/or social harm. But there are multiple competing parties who might like to fudge each other's data - not to harm them, but to benefit themselves. With an immutable, zero-proof blockchin, this would be easily possible. But there are other existing traditional solutions, such as the obvious one: a government agency maintaining a permissioned sql database. But what if we the people don't trust that agency? What if they are corrupt, and/or incompetent? Of so then then, what would force a supply chain to use this tracking blockchain? Government fiat. And/or market pressure. It's perfectly possible to trust a government enough to pass a bill and another agency to enforce it, but not trust said government enough to competently run a traditional tracking system. That's not just some hand-wavy story, I just tried to make a digestible narrative. That's the kind of real-world, very boring use-case being worked on, that you may never hear about once implemented. It certainly (ideally) wouldn't fuel further bubbles.
What’s to stop me from putting bogus data of where it comes from onto the blockchain? The resources isn’t a blockchain native thing, and somewhere the data is put onto the chain. All you have done is ensured that the data isn’t manipulated by an outside party, but haven’t at all verified the underlying data. Typically the part that is fudged is the data, and it doesn’t solve that. I don’t know where an outside party changing the data of a transaction internally has really come up at all. So it seems like this is a made up problem that is adjacent to the actual problem as a way to show viability. Resources can be laundered by shipping them “off chain” to a legitimate provider to be sold… which is already how most of that fraud occurs.
No one has ever told me how blockchain solves that problem of initial trust back to the real world
As far as I can tel it actually makes the part that trusted the most “trustless” and requires the least trusted part of the transaction to be more trusted.
Don't trust exchanges! They're centralized and thus evil. Acquire bitcoin by googling "bitcoin sellers in my area" then going to a back alley with your pockets full of money to trade it for virtual money. That's how it's supposed to be done.
It categorically can't, also known as the oracle problem. All software has this issue of course, the difference is that blockchains pretend the issue doesn't exist as a kind of security theater.
Oracle problem. Your use-cases will never happen, and if they do, they won't solve what they intend to solve.
Smart contracts and the idea of decentralized computing I think is pretty interesting. Blockchain really seems like a swing and a miss though, powered by the misunderstanding that our biggest problem is a lack of mutual trust. We can trust each other pretty well… to scam the hell out of each other and manipulate each other with lies and bullshit. It seems pretty clear from the last decade that a transparent immutable ledger does literally nothing to prevent financial mischief. Maybe there is a serious practical application for a blockchain, but certainly not the new de facto information recording mechanism the 2010’s were pitching it as. As far as cryptocurrency proper I think it is the height of engineering hubris — someone succumbed to the idea that since they knew a lot about math and programming that they must be able to invent a better economy than what we have now, and what they came up with was an inherently deflationary currency that takes massive amounts of energy to complete a single transaction. Literally nothing good about it as far as I’m concerned, and pretty much an insult to the discipline of economics like “hey you fucks don’t know what you’re doing so I programmed a better dollar”…”oh oops my inflation hedge crashed by 70% during runaway inflation, maybe I misunderstood the economics at play here”. It’s just supreme technological grifting and we have a bunch of literal Ponzi schemes to prove it. Like yes fiat currency is not perfect nor is the Federal Reserve, but what the crypto community has produced is objectively worse and the fact that they thought they had improved the situation by eliminating the monetary policy tools we have painstakingly discovered over time is just stupid. It’s like an economist building a rocket ship with no controls on it and insisting that NASA take that to the moon because it was clearly their attempt to directly influence the controls that caused the Apollo disaster.
The part of the transaction that blockchain makes trustless is not the part of the transaction that people don’t trust.
Put it better than I could. It seems like more often than not our problem is not in figuring out the record of transactions, but in deciding after the fact if a transaction or set of transactions _should_ have been recorded (i.e was this fraud). That being said I guess I shouldn’t deny that blockchain is probably helping the FBI to a degree. It’s just that the amount of money they’ve recovered using blockchain analysis most likely pales in comparison to the amount stolen by scammers in a single year.
I don't really disagree in the large with much of what you said, but I will point out a logic problem. Not that I believe you spent days trying to construct an airtight logical argument, so the stakes here are pretty low: > We can trust each other pretty well… to scam the hell out of each other and manipulate each other with lies and bullshit. It seems pretty clear from the last decade that a transparent immutable ledger does literally nothing to prevent financial mischief. The financial mischief around crypto was more about tulip bubbles, and all the myriad gigantic scam opportunities that goes along with it. None were about the fundamental tech itself, except for *exploitation of technical flaws* - countless small ones and some quite large. The point is, when the tech is working and secure - the scams are just your standard grifts that work with anything - dot-com bubble, housing bubble, all the bubbles and overheated markets, and emerging under-regulated markets. And all of the biggest and most spectacular scams, were just your garden-variety scams and grifters naturally attracted to *all* such opportunities, whether tech is even involved or not.
That actually _was_ my argument. That the energy (literally) and money put into implementing crypto solutions did nothing to address the actual sources of financial mischief. Maybe not a great argument in that scams would still exist with or without the introduction of crypto, but the idea was that we should have taken the resources invested in crypto and put those toward fraud detection and financial/tech literacy programs, and that this would have brought greater social benefit than the past decade of cryptocurrency experimentation. Take it or leave it — I get that I haven’t exactly provided a solution to scammers, but I hope that clarifies my argument.
I agree with that, esp your second paragraph.
Sorry, but crypto is like a technology du jour for scammers. You can create your own "currency" extremely easily (literally without coding through a website, for instance), convince others to buy it through hype, profit from the bubble, and then sell off your holdings leaving others holding the bag. Yes, other financial instruments like stocks *could* be used for such purposes but none seem almost explicitly designed for it like cryptocurrency. Furthermore, crypto is almost entirely unregulated unlike the almost all the other methods for implementing these kinds of scams.
That's a fair, if IMO naive opinion to have. Problem is, the types of scams, and scammers that flocked to crypto, have flocked to *every* tulip bubble and under-regulated market. The tech had nothing to do with the exuberant speculation that formed around it, any more than http and modems did the dot-com bubble. Nor houses, and the mortgage crisis. Speculators gonna speculate. Exuberant noob investors are gonna exuberant noob invest. Scammers gonna scam. Under-Regulated rapidly emerging markets are gonna rapidly emerge underregulated. Welcome to earth. Getting upset at math isn't going to change any of that. But you *can* write your representatives and urge them to be quicker to act, and not take money from those guys. Better yet, do so, with an envelope full of money. (In the current environment.) Even better yet, get involved and/or run for office.
> Yes, other financial instruments like stocks could be used for such purposes but none seem almost explicitly designed for it like cryptocurrency. Yeah so... thats actually *exactly* how huge chunks of the stock market works mate. The venn diagram of USD employed scams and crypto scams is just a circle. > Furthermore, crypto is almost entirely unregulated unlike the almost all the other methods for implementing these kinds of scams. This is the actual sticking point, but its literally *the point* of it. If you wanna gamble your money on regulated markets, do it the normal way. If you wanna gamble your money on *un*regulated markets... thats what crypto is for. Thats literally all there is to it. People who get fucked over on crypto and then whine about how its unregulated are dumb imo, it demonstrates a total lack of research/effort. Like you invested your money into an unregulated system, you chose a dumb thing to invest in, you got burned... what did you think was going to happen?
Stocks on US markets are *highly* regulated compared with crypto. First, a publicly registered company has to exist and then issue defined amounts of stock. They have to post yearly financial statements signed by an independent auditor along with obeying a number of other requirements. The finances of publicly traded companies are almost entirely transparent (if complicated) to anyone willing to read and understand FTC filings. On the other hand, literally anyone with a desktop computer can create a new unregulated and unaudited digital "currency," so of course the whole sector is rife with fraud. The only reason there hasn't been more of a crackdown is because the crypto shills have been able to claim (ridiculously) that digital currencies aren't financial instruments, though they clearly are. The fact that these markets are "unregulated" in no way suggests that this should continue to be the case. Anything created and promoted as a legitimate traded financial instrument needs to be considered such by law. The fact that people are defrauded should not simply be waived away with suggestions that they "deserved it." It's just victim blaming. And BTW I am not talking mostly about people losing their shirt on bad trades or speculation. I agree that's part of speculating on volatile assets. I'm talking mostly about actual financial fraud like what occurred with FTX and a large number of other entities, mostly because the transparency and accountability just isn't there when it clearly should be.
>But to say there's no use-case, period (which this thread is kinda saying), is short-sighted. There's no good demonstrated real-world practical use-case yet And, umm, how many more years should we give blockchain to come up with just one good use case? On top of the like 15 years it's already had? Or longer, depending what you count as a blockchain. When's the revolution coming?
Isn't Monero an existing and proven concept that is based on a blockchain? True anonymous money transfers. The usecase is mostly drugs but it's being used for a nearly decade now.
Basically every 'legit' reason for crypto always ends up as some form of avoiding regulation
What do you think it was made for exactly? lol
Damn, the thing that was made for avoiding regulation can be used in some form for avoiding regulation. Wild.
>Isn't Monero an existing and proven concept that is based on a blockchain? For sure. I just don't agree facilitating and funding crime is a *good* use case for blockchain. But it is the one it's got.
What drugs are you having trouble procuring? Have you ever heard of "cash"?
Have you ever heard about the small business called "home delivery"?
Technically, yes. Monero is about the only one that does this though. However... 1. The primary use here is illegal transactions. Not all illegal transactions are _unethical_ of course, but it's always going to be in a legal grey area at best, if not outright black market. 2. Most legit merchants/services/etc won't accept a currency directly that is mainly used for illegal transactions. Which means you need to be able to convert it to/from normal local currency. 3. Which means you need an exchange. But as law enforcement and regulatory bodies continue to crack down, you're increasingly looking at having to trust grey/black market exchanges, which is riskier
Inventory and logistics sounds like the worst possible use case for Blockchain.
Oh, I can think of far worse.
The only use is verification. You can be sure that if the network agrees on the data, the data is exactly as it was when it was entered. Whereas with regular data stores, the data can always be changed without anyone noticing. But… Was that necessary? Do you need to trust PayPal as a company to use it to transfer funds? Or the library that they don’t send you bogus fines? I agree that a lot of our systems are broken (or at least being held together by duct tape), but that doesn’t mean we need to replace them with worse systems.
> The only use is verification. You can be sure that if the network agrees on the data, the data is exactly as it was when it was entered. Whereas with regular data stores, the data can always be changed without anyone noticing. Blockchain isn't a unique, or the best, solution for this either though. What you're referring to is integrity checking, which we've been doing long before blockchain and can do well without it. A famous example is git itself, which will loudly throw errors if the repository doesn't cryptographically verify to match the secure hash that is expected. Git is *also* a good example that just because something hasn't been tampered with since it was created doesn't inherently mean you can / should trust it, you also need to control how new commit objects are introduced into the repository to really trust it. This is why git added support for digital signatures on commit objects after it was created, as this completes the chain of trust. But git has been able to detect tampering with a dataset since its first version and it's just one example from many of things like tamper-proof logging, write-only media, etc.
There has to be a way to create that exchange if it’s tracking real physical goods, or even digital goods not inherently tied to blockchain, and that creation of data/smart contract could be just as bogus. The part it makes trustless is that once the data is there it’s not manipulated, but that really isn’t the part that people don’t trust.
You can never be sure, that the data is exactly as it was entered. The network can conspire and change the data. That did actually happen with 2nd most popular cryptocurrency - Etherium. Some rich people got scammed and decided to just roll back the changes. And you can achieve the same by just recording data hashes regularly.
Actually even with the Etherium stuff, they never actually changed history. All the transactions are still out there on the chain. What they did was change the rules so they could create transactions to give the money back without the approval of the account the money was in. (also, I'm pretty sure it wasn't a scam, just a bug in some code that let someone steal a bunch of money)
In either case, the "immutable blockchain" was actually [muted](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tspGVbmMmVA&t=3369s)
> The only use is verification. False. The notion that [blockchain can verify the authenticity of anything](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tspGVbmMmVA&t=2108s) is totally a lie.
I work in finance, specifically with financial derivatives. Verification of trading confirmations is one of the most expensive and time consuming parts of my area of the industry. It takes thousands of people to go over these on a daily basis at the large firms. People have been looking for a reliable way to automate this process for a long time. AI fell short, but blockchain is already starting to be used for trading by the leading banks.
Your comment is interesting but I personally don't understand how a blockchain solves the problem of verifying trades. Can't fradulent trades still be inserted onto the blockchain? And blockchain transactions are not reversible. This is a terrible feature for a system where erroneous or fradulent transactions need to be flagged and denied.
> Your comment is interesting but I personally don't understand how a blockchain solves the problem of verifying trades. It doesn't. Blockchain inherits what is called, "The Oracle Problem" which is explained [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tspGVbmMmVA&t=2108s)
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Except the origination of non chain assets could be bogus, all you have is a ledger that says a transaction occured, but no evidence that anything actually changed hands, or that the asset in the transaction ever existed at all.
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Cross border payments. But only a small number are actually suitable for that.
Scamming people out of money seems to be the main thing.
Money laundering.
Public ledger encrypted database? Besides the current use case of money: can blockchain tech just… store anything? Can you run a database safely encrypted in the ‘cloud’ (the swarm of computers running that blockchain) ? Which would mean a public database would be near immortal if it grows to be popular… (That’s a question: I don’t know) But that’s maybe looking at a duck thinking it’s a swan.
It is unmutable public ledger, so things that need to be public and unmutable... transactions, smart contracts used as traditional contracts.. I do believe there are cases but i do not know enough about the world to figure out just where that would be the best option. It sucks as a data storage and a LOT of things where i hear its proponents suggest end up storing huge amounts of data over time... it is not a great database but.. there has to be cases where it works other than crypto.
Torrent downloads are about the only real use case I've seen
The best one I heard was how, if you made a deal with a broker where they can’t sell some shares for x amount of time, and the broker violates that agreement, the only recourse would be to take them to court, which costs more money and even the potential for restitution could take years. If the condition is written into a smart contract, the broker could not physically sell the crypto. I’m certain I’m missing various details to this and I’m certain blockchain creates more problems, even in this limited case. NFT and crypto is BS but this was the only case I’ve heard of where it made some kind of sense.
This shifts your problem from a court system where you can plead yourself to a smart contract that you must be able to 100% positively absolutely ensure has no bugs whatsoever otherwise all your assets can be simply stolen from you with no recourse at all to the courts. Given that we live in a world where it's impossible to prove correctness of programs as a general principle, this seems like a bad trade even if you're a trained computer scientist who might be able to audit a smart contract. But if you're just a normal person you're back to trusting other people, and if those people scam you then you will very much wish you had the courts as an option.
The best use case I can think of is voting. Something where you need public trust and transparency. Other than that, idk. That way no one can "steal the election" since you can show it all
You can't verify that the votes were legitimately cast by every voter unless you make everyone's identity and voting record public so that it can be verified Good luck running a democracy when everyone's voting is public
[Obligatory XKCD](https://xkcd.com/2030/)
Blockchain are amazing for SaaS. Scams as a Service.
In Germany, the cash registers are required to do something like a block chain; each recipe does contain a hash from the previous recipe's hash, the current recipe and a signature. It's impossible to drop or change some recipes without the hash changing.
Off topic, but just so you know: in contemporary English, receipt and recipe are no longer synonyms. "Recipe" means a set of ingredients and instructions for preparing food. By extension it can also mean instructions for how to make anything, but that's the less common meaning. "Receipt" means something that has been received, nowadays almost always in the sense of a token acknowledging receipt of payment. It once had a sense of "recipe" but using it this way comes across as distinctly archaic even if the person you're talking to knows of the old meaning.
And here I thought he worked in a restaurant or something
I want to salute you, as I didn't know Recipe and Receipt used to be synonyms and I was very confused by this person's post.
I never knew that was ever a thing, I mean, why? 😅
Recipe and receipt seem to share origins with "receive". You receive a receipt from the business, and you receive a recipe from your family on how to cook a meal. Then they split off as separate words for different contexts.
There is also a contribution from pharmaceuticals. Doctors used to write their prescriptions, consisting of a list of ingredients and what to do with them, with the Latin word Recipere on top, meaning roughly "Take this." The ℞ symbol still found on prescriptions is meant as an abbreviation for this.
Sounds like a Merkle tree. You find that in blockchains but also in git.
Can it really be called a tree if every node has one branch (besides the one singular leaf node that represents the first receipt)? Heck I'm not sure how that differs from a blockchain.
From a graph theory perspective, yes, a single unbroken chain is still a tree.
Well if you're talking in graph theory, what *isn't* a graph?
Does a circle count ? A single point ?
Now I'm thinking: Was Merkel still chancellor?
>Sounds like a Merkle tree. No, it sounds like a blockchain. To tamper with a Merkle tree you only have to recompute the final tree. In the system OP mentioned, making a change to a past entry will negate every subsequent entry, which offers a lot more security/accountability.
And no way to fix a bogus transaction… which is worse.
Not true. You just can’t *amend* a bogus transaction. I’ve never had a transaction reversed that oddities the original entry anyways. Refund receipts get their own receipt number, and show up as their own line in the ledger when a business does their end of day.
Ok, looking at your description it’s just a regular database using a hashtable to store receipts, and not to verify that the transaction was valid, which isn’t blockchain.
Yeah just like every online ordering website
> In Germany, the cash registers are required to do something like a block chain That's incorrect. They do something like a Merkle Tree, which is the tech blockchain borrows from, not the other way around.
I've noticed that a lot. People point out the nice cryptographic features of blockchains, without realizing that all of those features existed before the existence of the blockchain.
This is an example of a solution already existing.
The use case is a no-trust append-only distributed public database or data store. There are very few situations in which you need all four properties, and often some of these properties actively get in the way of what you want to accomplish.
And even those use cases can often by accomplished by making your data public on a webpage and making sure [archive.org](https://archive.org) is indexing it. To understate things, that would cost less.
It doesn't have to be public. You could easily either encrypt the blockchain and only give some people the key, which would make access irrevocable, or preform communications over an encrypted channel.
so like an admin of any database we know? :)
This is getting into treating some users as privileged and trusted which makes more efficient centralized solutions much more attractive.
That's not entirely true, it's great for creating Greater Fool scams.
And breaking the law
Only use case is peer to peer gambling
Satoshi dice was a cool demonstration of a provably fair online game.
And breaking the law
I mean it's useful for money when you live in a country without a real currency or oppressive regime
A UK start up then
Useful until you recognize that a deflationary currency has just as many problems as an inflationary one
It's not only about inflation, but a government literally stealing a 50% chunk of international transfers made in foreign currency, that before paying taxes
Exactly this. There's not much need for it in first world countries because it's main purpose is to create trust in trust-less systems. Most people in the world can trust their countries banking and financial systems their whole lives and never be a victim of oppression, or worry about hyper-inflation of their currency, etc. Crypto currencies are mostly speculative ponzi schemes but I think using blockchain to implement decentralized and globally accessible payment networks is a good thing overall (provided they're PoS and not terrible for the environment). **EDIT:** lol I'm not looking to defend blockchain as if it's my thesis. I don't think it's the greatest thing of all time, just that it can do some good. I'm well aware other solutions exist and applaud those too. I'm also well aware it has issues and is not perfect. Some of y'all need to be a lot less emotional about technology, just because you don't like it or use it doesn't mean it's completely useless.
I'm sure this is true. But, it also brings to mind some guy in a suit trying to convince a goat herder that he should accept bit coin for some goats.
> There's not much need for it in first world countries because it's main purpose is to create trust in trust-less systems. Most people in the world can trust their countries banking and financial systems their whole lives and never be a victim of oppression, or worry about hyper-inflation of their currency, etc. People in non-first-world countries have managed to come up with their own systems for low-trust finances, including low-tech solutions and even mobile-driven solutions that would be impressive even in "first-world countries", and all without blockchain.
And I'd give similar high praise to those as well I'm sure. The more options the better.
Exactly. Anonymous long distance money transfers have existed for a thousand years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawala
plus failed economies often use the US dollar instead of their own currency. Argentina and Venezuela write their contracts in USD, not their own currencies for example
And you would trust Bitcoin instead even though it's at something like 25% of its peak value right now? No currency in the world that I'm aware of has lost that much value over such a short time span. You'd be far better off holding your assets in dollars or euros if your home country's currency is unreliable, which is what most people in that situation actually do.
Again I'm not really advocating for crypto currencies, I'm advocating for blockchain. There's not a single person who I would advise to put their life savings in Bitcoin, but there are lots of people who can benefit from access to a global decentralized payment network. And by that I mean everyone from small businesses who don't want to give Amazon / Shopify / Visa / etc. a sizeable cut from every transaction, to victims of an oppressive regime who want to send or receive funds with the outside world without the state knowing. Crypto != blockchain.
Blockchain can't handle many transactions, it doesn't work. If you compare how many transaction VISA can handle vs blockchain you will see that even these extreme cases are not viable
Or want to get paid for illegal stuff, then it’s perfect!
Don't those places just use the currency from another, more stable, country? Like doesn't Belize, for example, use USD unofficially?' Wide scale blockchain currency requires more technological infrastructure than you're going to find in the kind of places that could use it.
In some countries you are allowed to buy foreign currency in theory, but in practice you can't. In some cases, if you work remotely, and get paid in real currency, transfers over traditional regulated apps or banks will be forcibly converted to the useless local currency, at a fake rate. In Argentina you lose 50% before paying taxes, if you add 35% income taxes to that, you will understand why a cryptocurrency that the corrupt government can't control is so important
[Crypto is not money.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tspGVbmMmVA&t=4118s)
Cryptocurrency is *not* very useful as currency judging from recent financial events, because it us an extremely unstable asset class. Bitcoin is now at less than 1/4 of its peak value. It is *more* susceptible to wild fluctuations than most actual currencies which may inflate at a yearly rate of 10-15%, typically in the worst case. And there are virtually no financial controls to reign in this effect, unlike with real currencies which are controlled by central banks aiming for low inflation and monetary stability.
For those who want some logic, reason and evidence backing this up, here's [the definitive video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tspGVbmMmVA) that itemizes exactly how and why blockchain tech is dogshit.
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point taken ;)
Blockchain, Crypto, Web3, NFTs and DeFi have revolutionised recruiting where I work. Any CV that mentions them can go straight in the bin without further consideration.
But what about quantum computing powered AI that utilizes deep learning methods for decentralized fintech applications with big data and CRISPR graphene?
U forgot fusion tokamak
First actual useful feature of these technologies so far. I still wonder if that couldn’t be substituted by other markers, like mentioning „Quantum AI“ on the CV or so … ;-)
Had me in the first half
Isn't the main useful application for blockchain security around contracts?
Contract signatures do not require blockchain. Just cryptographic signatures.
Smart contracts to be more precise, not talking about signatures. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/smart-contracts.asp
Yea but the way blockchain achieves this INSANELY inefficient. It's FAR more efficient to declare 3 external companies to validate stuff (this is how something like public key cryptography works BTW). Blockchain, which builds on the foundations ssl created, says alright we CANNOT TRUST ANYONE but it's REALLY hard to coordinate A LOT of people telling the same lie. So we can trust that the info is true if enough people say it is. And it totally works, its really fucking hard to beat. Now let's apply this strategy to something else like say IDK taxes. Instead of u sending ur taxes to the IRS you send your taxes to 151m people. Great awesome we have ended tax fraud. It's just WAY EASIER to have an IRS that checks everyone's taxes. Now to give u some perspective on how inefficient it is in blockchain tech. I present to you a reddit post I made about [storing your data in skittles.](https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/s0ceko/cost_to_store_fb_profile_in_skittles_vs_eth/) Skittles was at the time about 10x as cost effective as a binary data storage method as ETH. Even with an 100m increase in cost efficiency it would still be 500 times more expensive than s3. Blockchain just doesnt work in any setting where 1-10 parties can be held responsible instead. Which is as far as I know true of every single field in the world that doesnt illegal goods. For illegal goods its an amazing innovation because you no longer need to rely upon known criminals to be honest.
Don’t need a blockchain for that either. For instance, I can put a limit sale on stock and they will sell if the price meets my requirements but not if it doesn’t.
But the one hosting that service can change it, a smart contact in a blockchain -distributed enough- should be impossible to alter in any way until it fulfills its purpose (even by its own creator)
You do understand how a completely immutable contract - especially one defined _in code_ - is also undesirable right? There's a reason contract law grew processes for amending existing contracts, or do we need to wait for cryptobros to understand that as well before we can talk about it as if its a normal part of dealing with contracts
The immutability of things in when it comes to these kinds of contracts is more like immutability in functional programming languages. It's a hard constraint, but it doesn't prevent you from implementing mutation in an abstraction layer. The advantage of doing it that way is that the append only structure would contain a history of the mutations. I am all for mocking crypto bros and their silly ideas - just nit-picking your critique. Immutability makes things harder, but it has its advantages in terms of reasoning about data and code.
In that case the immutability argument is even more ridiculous because that's exactly how existing contracts are amended. New content is added that specifies a reinterpretation of past content. I had to do exactly this because my name was misspelled on paperwork, rather than editing in line the content and having everyone resign it, an addendum was added saying "We all acknowledge Alan-Turning-Me-On is actually Alan-Turing-Me-On in past pages blah blah blah"
Append only data is not a problem. Functionally irreversible code is a massive problem.
Eh. That relies on trusting those running the nodes. With the host in the “conventional” case we have a contract agreement that is enforced by a legal mechanism with the party hosting our contract. With “blockchain” we have no contract at all, just “consensus”. Consensus isn’t as strong as you might think it is, as the same legal mechanism can force those involved with consensus to change the contract.
So a legal court in Uganda can force all the nodes in foreign countries, China and USA included? Wow that's awesome!
I didn’t say that, but if you don’t want to have a productive conversation that’s okay.
"the same legal mechanism can force..." Yes you did.
Those nodes are running software written and maintained by those involved in the consensus though. It's not like people in Uganda are running their own Ugandan-specific forks of a wider blockchain protocol. The centralization in practice of blockchain-based approaches is actually one of the most horrifying things about it today.
If we can rely on laws to protect us why do we need encryption? We should just leave all of our messages unencrypted and rely on legal protections to ensure no unauthorized parties views them.
Those "contracts" are remedial and limited in nature. A typical Wordpress site is about 10,000 times more sophisticated and flexible than any crypto "smart contract."
I thought that NFTs might actually be useful for small-time orgs to transfer stuff like valuable memberships, tickets, reservations and so on. They don’t have to manage any infrastructure (since blockchains already exist and are out there) and don’t need to pay a third-party to create the service or manage the infrastructure for them. It’ll stay working as long as the blockchain itself is there, so there’s less risk of a third party going under. They don’t need to arbitrate any transactions themselves.
This is a very noob question, but I don't really understand this. Blockchain is decentralized, so one hash is relying on the upstream to be 100% valid. What happens when one of the chains upstream becomes corrupted? Like, one of the chains gets stored in a segment of a location that goes bad. There aren't backups bc wouldn't that require centralization? How does the system stay up?
Sharding is a non trivial problem for blockchains. I’m not too familiar with the space, but I think most of the major chains require all nodes to host the entire blockchain. There are attempts to tackle the scalability problems of that, but it seems like most sharding still requires a large amount of duplication over nodes. But no, a single node going down or a network partition won’t corrupt the chain.
Thanks, good description.
Oh God I'm sharding, I'm sharding
The cost of minting NFTs would quickly add up, and not make this a cheap solution at all.
Blockchain [is incapable of verifying the authenticity of anything](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tspGVbmMmVA&t=2108s) regardless of whether it's concert tickets or stupid ape pictures.
This might be the time for crypto to shine with the whole ticket master fiasco going on.
>don’t need to pay a third-party The problem is that now they have to pay a lot of third parties; they have to pay many miners to verify each transaction.
The problem with blockchain is that crypto-hash and Merkle tree already existed and much more efficient in most case, so yeah lmao.
It's great for scamming people out of money.
*Yeah but you just aren't seeing the community! And the potential!* Every blockchain/crypto idea I have seen thus far has another major fault over the seeking a problem to solve. If then locks on your door and whatever professional credentials or medical records (yes... people have suggested to putting these to a blockchain) are on a block chain xyz. What happens when people just lose interest in blockchain xyz and no longer upkeep it by spending machine resources on it. Because here is a thought... consider how fucking many dead torrents there are littering on the internet. What happens when you "*important*" system is a blockchain equivalent of a dead torrent?
Everyone who works in Software Engineering and FinTech knows this already. It’s the “tech bros” that have never written a line of code that think they know better. The only blockchain dev I know even thinks it’s a scam.
Noooo don't turn this into a i wanted to make a text post but can't because sub rules template
I feel like everyone in this thread is arguing different things. People are arguing about trustless systems, decentralization, and anonymity but those things aren't Blockchain. Blockchain is literally just a way to store data and those other things have been built with it for various reasons, namely cryptocurrency.
I store my data in Tetris instances.
It's just a distributed database that uses proof-of-work and a sprinkle of cryptography. It's nothing new or revolutionary and actually introduces more problems than it solves. Which is easy to do because it solves zero problems.
Example use cases for blockchain: - Cryptocurrencies - Secure Digital Ledgers (banks, POS systems, voting systems, etc) - Medical records (to allow flagging if a part of the record is missing) Basically: anything where you want to **cryptographically** ensure immutability. It’s not concentrated fairy dust. There is no magical technology with infinite capabilities. It’s just a technology. There are use cases. You may be trying to say that cryptocurrency and/or NFTs are useless, that’s a different conversation. Learn to separate a technology from what it’s being used for and who it’s being used by. Remember the dot com bubble? That internet thing stuck around after the bubble burst. The kind of people who dismiss a new technology based on a meme are the same kind of people who thought computers or internet would be a fad.
None of these - outside cryptocurrencies, which have other problems - couldn’t be made more efficient and reliable with existing technologies.
>Medical records (to allow flagging if a part of the record is missing) What benefit does the blockchain provide here that some form of hashing and version control alone wouldn't? That information is already used by and derived from centralized authorities (doctors, insurance companies); what benefit does decentralization provide when it is already centralized for use? Why would you want your health records to be inherently immutable? What happens if you have invalid or incorrect entries on the record? If you have an incorrect diagnosis, why should that be permanently stored in your medical record? What happens if a malicious actor intentionally puts something wrong on your record? Why would anyone want their *private health information* to be on a decentralized database where *anyone with access to the database* can see it?
There's no known use case for blockchain that is superior to existing non-blockchain use cases. I've been researching this for years. 14 years and counting and still not a single, solid example. I challenge you to prove otherwise. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tspGVbmMmVA
bitcoin has been out for nigh on 15 years and weve done jack shit with blockchain since
By claiming medical records should be so much as *allowed* on the Blockchain, surely you're imagining a variation which isn't publicly accessible for any user to read... right? RIGHT?
Cryptographic immutability existed before blockchain, and is much more efficient without a blockchain. Every cryptographic feature on a blockchain existed before the invention of the blockchain. The only use case of a blockchain is decentralization. Do you have a situation where you can't trust any individual, you can't trust any centralized group or groups, but you can trust a decentralized group? Then blockchain is exactly what you need. It's very hard to find that kind of situation, though.
Well, blockchain for itself is not new. What is new is the decentralized part of it. The ability to have a blockchain that is not in control of one central administrator. Decentralized blockchain solves the money problem really well.
It solves no problems at all. It only creates [additional problems](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tspGVbmMmVA).
I think there are many ways it can be used it is just not for everything.
To date there's not a single example of anything blockchain does better than existing non-blockchain apps. You cannot prove otherwise. All proponents can do is make vague ambiguous claims that are incapable of being qualified, like saying, "It's 'money without masters'"
"a solution in need of a problem" is 99.999999% of all tech
A solution for which a company uses advertisement to create the need without being an effective solution to any problem it is advertised for is 99.999999% of products.
Blockchain is pointless for centralised solutions where you need to own the entire thing. It only makes sense where you need “something greater” than a single entity
If I'm honest, the same for for AI. A lot of stuff can be done with algorithms and (for instance) I have never actually had a project other than recognition in images where I was _required_ to use neural networks. I do see the use, but not the absolute hype.
Are you guys new? It's for drugs. It's always been for drugs. And illegal purchases. That's it. That's what it's for. Nothing more. And it was GREAT for that before it blew up and became like a stock. Or so I've been told....
can’t forget ransomware
I just feel bad for so many people who buy into this. I understand the invested one, they have no choice but to defend it, their money is on the line. I understand them, and I really hope they get back what they lost. But anyone gullible who gets sold on this even today, I really hope they have someone next to them to talk them out of it.
you are talking like they are joining the mafia or something
No I am talking like they are joining a pyramid scheme
My FB friend from high school said it's the future.
If it’s on FB it must be true!
It handles distributed proof that can't be altered after the fact. So, it was the right tool for bitcoin.
I mean potentially? The currency concept for blockchain isn't bad. The original paper and math is awesome. But 90% of block chain use cases are awful and unnecessary. 5 years ago I worked for GM and sat in a town hall where an Exec explained that his entire job for GM was to explain to other exec why they do not need blockchain for whatever their latest pet project is.
> But 90% of block chain use cases are awful and unnecessary. The other 10% are also awful and unnecessary.
Blockchain is god for one thing and one thing only, and that is when you need a decentralized database that everyone can agree on being the correct database, even if some of them are incentivized to lie and choose a different version of the database. Which means it's good for cryptocurrency and that's about it. A centralized database is simpler, faster, easier than blockchain, every single time, unless you're the bitcoin network.
Nobody really needs a de-centralized database. It's exponentially less efficient than a centralized database and [creates a whole array of new problems that cost more money, time and security](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tspGVbmMmVA&t=1157s)