For a long time, I thought of the blockchain as almost synonymous with cryptocurrencies, so as I saw stuff like “Odyssey” and “lbry” appearing and being “based on the blockchain”, my first thought was that it was another crypto scam. Then, I just got reminded of it and started looking more into it, and it just seemed like regular torrenting. For example, what’s the big innovation separating Odyssey from Peertube, which is also decentralized and also uses P2P? And what part of it does the blockchain really play, that couldn’t be done with regular P2P? More generally, and looking at the futur, does the blockchain offer new possibilities that the fediverse or pre-existing protocols don’t have?
Merkel Trees are fine, and are how things like “Git” keep track of different files (and how distributed hash tables and file-sharing often work).
Merkel Trees are trees-of-hashes, which the cryptocoin world wants us to believe go by the new name of ‘Blockchain’, but people familiar with comp. sci history know that they’re just flailing about making shit up.
Blockchain is an application of Merkel Trees. Merkel Trees have lots of good uses, but Blockchain doesn’t seem to have much use after 10+ years of experimentation.
ETH has DNS. I would think the fediverse would like to see adoption of DNS that governments and big companies can’t mess with or take over with lots of cash.
As fast as money talks, you’ll be losing.
IMO. We should make global random networks and base our connections on top of them instead of clinging onto the hope of niceties because someone have the site google.com for example.
That kind of thing is actually possible with Ethereum DNS and hosting. It’s not mature enough to be viable yet, but the possibility is there.
A good start, but using crypto to just have a website seems overkill.
I have built a shared hosting protocol (and implementation) where you use link-files instead of website+DNS (nor crypto). Simple and lightweight, but with my communication skills it isn’t really taking off 😅
That’s cool. Got a link you’d be willing to share?
Here is the ‘official’ website : Tenfingers
There are versions for Linux and Windows and also the python source code.
Any feedback greatly appreciated!
ETH staking is looking like its literally illegal in the USA, you know that right?
Coinbase Earn is quite possibly trading in unsecured, unregulated securities and is being sued over it.
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That’s FUD. Lots of US based companies promote ETH staking and there’s no sign that the SEC is going to declare it a security.
Yo!
You seems to know what you’re talking about, have you heard of Juliana trees? Like trees based only on the keys, so searching for a key takes len(key) time.
Bet there is an other name for it but I so remember like that and no web search says anything about it so I’m trying my luck here :-)
Same for robin hood hash trees :-D
Cheers
This sounds similar to a trie - maybe that’s what you were thinking of?
I mean look at big corpo/government servers. They’re running an OS from 1980 and software that hasn’t been updated since 1960’s.
We’ll get there. Eventually. Maybe.
My Android phone’s marketplace, Google Play, is literally newer than Bitcoin and I have government services + banking applications on it.
I think you’re blind to how slow and inconsequential cryptocoin’s entire world is at innovation. They’ve wasted 15 years. Literally wasted, the world has changed and they haven’t noticed.
I thought it sounded interesting when it was new but the more I’ve learned, the more convinced I am that it’s completely useless. I’ve never seen anything done on a blockchain that couldn’t be done faster, cheaper, and more securely in a SQL database. Even the not-a-scam applications are ridiculous and fall apart upon examination. Blockchain as a definitive record of ownership? Absolutely not. There’s no way to force a person to update a record. Lose your house in a bankruptcy? The sheriff on his way to evict you isn’t going to care that you’ve got some NFT saying you still own the house. Anything involving contracts at all? If a court can’t unilaterally update the blockchain record, then the record is unreliable. But if the government can unilaterally update a record, then you’re not relying on community consensus and immutability in the first place.
Blockchain isn’t useful for anything important, and it’s not a logical choice for anything trivial aside from literally just playing with blockchain stuff for the sake of playing with blockchains. I think it’s a dead-end technology.
Blockchain as a definitive record of ownership? Absolutely not.
Oh, its worse than you think.
https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/publications/mining_CCS.pdf
Once BTC hits enough halvening-cycles, the entire protocol doesn’t work anymore. Its more beneficial to fork the blockchain (and collect ~50 transaction fees), rather than work on the head (and only collect ~5 transaction fees).
So if the last block confirmed 100-transactions (aka: collected 100 transaction fees), its more beneficial to undo that block and “steal” ~50 transactions, knowing that you’re leaving ~50 transactions for another miner to follow onto your block. (Ex: there are now two blocks: one with ~5 transactions available, the truth… and ~55 transactions available. The lie / false block you created. The lie is more economically beneficial to the next miner, so they’ll switch to your block).
It turns out that BTC forgot how to handle ties after the end of the “Free reward”, and there’s a good chance that “definitive record” is not so definitive.
What’s wrong with that though? BTC handles forks just fine. Eventually one fork will win out and life will continue on as usual.
The bigger issue this paper presents is that miners become incentivized to mine empty blocks. But can’t you just enforce a minimum transaction count on blocks?
But can’t you just enforce a minimum transaction count on blocks?
Miners can just create their own nonsense transactions.
The “blockchain” I use on a daily basis is git, where the sha of the previous commit affects the next.
Given that git was invented before the word “blockchain” started being used, shouldn’t we call blockchain applications “git-like” rather than retroactively calling Git a blockchain?
A commitchain
I find it to be an interesting solution looking for a problem. There could be many applications but I’ve yet to see one that blockchain could solve better than anything else that we already have, outside of crypto currencies.
Web3 is an interesting though experiment but I don’t see how it would work in real life. It would be extremely slow, data loss would be a daily occurrence and it would be a privacy/security nightmare.
NFTs could have a useful case of keeping online records of ownership. Being cars, homes and even cattle. Which coulld also make it easier and cheaper to sell or buy these things.
Ignoring privacy concerns of course.
But you would still need an authority that can unilaterally make changes to these ownership records. People die, things get lost, stuff happens. So it can’t all be based on signing with private keys of individual persons. At that point: Why not run a central database of it all. It’s cheaper, more efficient and you could still publish a public record for traceability.
I really don’t see any problem that Blockchain could solve better than other solutions. Except Cryptocurrency.
A simple database has trust issues – the blockchain IS this database with trust issues resolved.
Yeah right. It’s that easy :D
Blockchain (simplified) is a giant excel spreadsheet that you can never edit, only add to. I struggle to think of any applications that is a benefit for, and even then append only databases would already do it better.
One of the benefits is supposed to be decentralization, but people tout that as a benefit for things like house deeds, or identification, or whatever. Imagine how massive an append only excel file of every house with every owner change etc etc included in it would be. Then we once again only have the people who can afford to store that much data storing it, and we are back to where we are now.
It doesn’t really solve any problems, it just is a worse version of what already exists.
Something about this comment didn’t seem right to me, so I did some quick math:
There are approx 144,000,000 homes (incl apartments, etc) in the US. https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/VET605221
Assuming every home is sold 5 times on average, that’s 720,000,000 sale records/deeds.
Existing blockchain implementations use IDs that are around 32 bits, or 4 bytes.
A “home sales record” or deed on the blockchain needs to include the buyer and the time/date of sale (8 bytes), along with a cryptographic signature (4-16 bytes). The seller’s identity doesn’t need to be included because it’s always doing to be the previous owner.
So each record is 16-28 bytes, and there are 720,000,000 records. If we go with 28bytes, it would take about 20GB to store all of the deeds for the US. A 500GB hard drive costs $20.
You forget that the blockchain is all about not trusting some middle-man/site, so you need to stock that blockchain yourself, everyone needs to stock that blockchain.
So multiply not only the cost, but also the ecological impact just buying all those drives.
And that’s only for *US" housing (I didn’t get the timeframe you used to calculate it, is it for like year 2050? Old data stays forever.).
BTW found the guy buying 0.5TB Hard drives ;-)
Yes, everyone would need a copy of the 10s-of-GB blockchain. That’s a fraction of the amount of space a single computer game would use, does that seem unreasonable/impractical to you?
And I buy used enterprise 2-3TB drives on eBay :) . I was going to use a 32GB flash drive for my example, but a 500GB HDD is the same price
Fair enough about the size.
Checked out eBay, there are some cheap 2-3Tb drives there! How does it pan out quality wise? I guess they sell them off like after 5 years of usage right?
Yeah, that’s my understanding. Tbh I don’t have a lot of experience with them yet, but I’m building an 8 disk RAID6 array and I decided to go with those used drives. 10 matching disks will be around $120, and I’ll have 2 extra drives so I can rebuild the array asap if a drive fails.
Edit: I also backup all of my important files, so it wouldn’t be the end of the world if the entire array fails. And a little downtime isn’t that big of a deal for my home server, unlike a commercial data center.
…and 20G that needs to be replicated to tons of nodes if it should be really decentralized.
16-28 bytes seems extremely understated, I think it could easily be off by orders of magnitude.
What do you think I’m missing in my estimate? Do you have any experience in CS?
You’re just talking about ownership of a title right?
A deed contains a lot more information than the owner. Mine is 4 pages long. Contains a map of the street, various easements, et cetera.
Yeah, but that kind of data would be better in an auxiliary database. There’s no reason to include it in the blockchain.
well but doesn’t that beat the purpose of using the blockchain in the first place? why not just store everything in the auxiliary database?
Depends on why you want to use the blockchain, I guess. If you want a system to allows anyone to verify ownership of property without 3rd parties (government, etc) being involved then the auxiliary database should work fine.
What purpose were you thinking of, that would be defeated by an aux DB?
Would a git repo count as a blockchain? It kinda fits your simplified description
No because you can do a git revert and remove the addition to the git tree.
Set all branches to fast forward only!!
So Google, Amazon, Apple, and many other large companies in the IoT space are using a blockchain as a federated data store: https://github.com/zigbee-alliance/distributed-compliance-ledger
It stores the data needed for Matter [ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter_(standard) ] device attestation.
I think its an interesting use case on how entities that don’t particularly trust each other can operate a federated system. Accounts are linked to an identity out-of-band in order to have write permissions to the chain. When an account writes, all the readers of the chain have reasonable assurances of the author of that write. No company can inject false state as another company without that company’s guarded private key. All transactions are also auditable as an additional assurance the data isn’t undergoing a malicious act.
tl;dr; interesting use cases for tamper proof federated ledgers.
IMHO technically speaking the concpt of a Blockchain and decentralized zero trust computing like in Ethereum are indeed “interesting” as concepts.
But in practice there are a ton of issues with current implementations and it’s likely not going to be used on a large scale because zero-trust doesn’t scale well.
It was “interesting” 15 fucking years ago when it came out and we didn’t know what it could (or couldn’t) do.
15 years later, no one has come up with an application, so I think we can stop pretending that there’s a solution here. We’re now into “just 5 more years” to figure out a good use of this thing, and no one is any closer to an answer.
15 Years Ago, the Wii U hadn’t come out yet and iPhone App store wasn’t used yet. Think about how much life has changed, and how little the cryptocoin people moved forward with their tech. Its mind-boggling how much money they’ve been given and how little progress has been made.
15 years ago when Bitcoin was invented was roughly the launch of Super Smash Bros Brawl and Halo 3, to put this into video-game terms.
The value is in the forward signed, immutable ledger written by neutral consensus. This can take a lot of form and be the backbone of many types of applications (and already is used by large firms), the current market for direct public ledgers is a mess and I don’t generally agree with much of the last craze beyond the fundamentals needed to manage transfers, ownership and executions. The applications that will use these kinds of networks haven’t really been built yet.
Any sources in large firms using it? I haven’t seen anything other than generic marketing talk.
I can say of the top of my head the JPM and AMEX are running internal ledgers but there are many more, IBM and Accenture co-developed a system called Hyperledger which was given to the Linux Foundation. Its a tool kit for developing and deploying ledger applications primarily targeted at internal corps.
One of the cases these are good for is an easier to manage rights and asset control systems than many products you would pay more for and with less futzing with IAM, LADP or AD.
You don’t need a distributed untrusted consensus algo for internal ledgers. That’s trusted parties only.
for the most part yes, there are interesting regulatory scenarios that are on idea boards, mostly they want the secure write and a form of DiD being provided. these system provide some interesting legal scenarios with regards to accounting for assets in escrow on behalf of clients. In one form they are liabilities, in another, they are technically under the customers control.
But what value does Blockchain bring to the table here that other technologies wouldn’t?
Hyperledger is a private “blockchain”. I write blockchain in quotes because it’s not really a blockchain. There’s not really a distributed consensus in a private “blockchain”. It’s like taking the concept blockchain, and strips not only down the bad parts but also all the good parts.
Sure, there are multiple actors signing each entry, but who has elected these actors? A central authority of course!
It’s decentralised in the same way a git repo is decentralised. Mostly because Hyperledger is basically a git repo.
Most of the times when a company says they’re using blockchain, they’re either:
- using a private “blockchain”, which is not really a blockchain.
- not actually using blockchain, but say they do for marketing reasons.
- a Ponzi scheme.
I think we are grasping for new words here really, its only been in the last few years orgs have been exploring actual deployments internally.
I do have a very reductive definition of “blockchain” as I believe it is what it says. what is considered “satoshi’s vision” includes a blockchain system but it does not define the word.
HL is a blank canvas that allows you to deploy whatever consensus you want including those commonly found in public chains, it is entirely possible to run a hyperledger instance that is compatible with any network you would like, presuming you would want that effort.
A private blockchain is no more than a spicy linked list
These sound more like publicity stunts than anything else. There isn’t really much value in running a private Blockchain. At that point it lost all value a Blockchain would provide. Who are you protecting yourself against?
The value is in the forward signed, immutable ledger written by neutral consensus.
I have Excel spreadsheets at home though and you can be assured that they haven’t changed if you take a hash of them.
In fact, taking cryptographic hashes and signatures of people is automatic with Adobe signature products, and is how I signed for my house mortgage. You know, things that people really don’t want changing or someone doing shenanigans with. Just a click here and a send the .pdf over and… yeah, its not that hard in practice.
Signed, immutable proof of the transaction that nobody can manipulate. It also doesn’t require a legion of ASICs hashing numbers until the end of time. Because your “blockchain” is vulnerable to the 51% attack if the hashrate ever declines precipitously.
This is true, the fundamental of a blockchain is simply signed blocks of binary data. We can get into the debates on weather this can work in a public system like many groups are trying now, though I presume that that is not really what the poster is talking about since most public chains fundamentally rely on thier cryptocurrencies to to function, which for some is an argument as to why they can’t work.
My cryptographically signed .pdf for my mortgage document requires no cryptocoin or “blockchain” to function.
Its just simple hashing and signatures. You know, standard cryptography. The thing that allows “HTTPS” connections? The thing that signs your credit-card each time you enter it into Amazon? The thing that signs your password as you type it into the password field?
Yeah, that’s cryptography. Not “cryptocoins” or “blockchain”, its just a cryptographic hash, signature, or encryption.
if you just keep your document on your machine and only use it for personal encryption sure. its a key exchange network, this is for when bob and alice want to talk, not look at something in the safe and put it back. distributed PKI has been a challenge for decades, im not sure about this current incarnation of public systems but I find a lot of promise in many other applications.
I’m not sure if you fully understand what I’m talking about.
https://www.docusign.com/solutions/industries/mortgage
I’m talking about real world business. I’m not getting a $300,000 mortgage leaving a pdf on my personal computer. I’m talking about real world applications here.
distributed PKI has been a challenge for decades
Yeahhhh… no. Its point-and-click these days. Most people don’t even realize they’re utilizing PKI to handle typical business transactions. It literally “just works”, click click boom. It happened, and is legally binding, happens hundreds-of-thousands of times a day across this country and is perfectly functioning cryptography.
so if you are looking at this its a question to trust scopes, at least in public systems. here you are trusting:
- the bank
- the broker
- docusign
- you govt
- your courts
the proposal for a decentralized ledger with neutral execution is that the only “trust” needed is that in the contracts function, however this is not entirely true, in reality you are shifting trust to:
- genesis ceremony
- your ability/resources to asses the contracts function and your counterparties.
some people feel this is a better way of doing things, ive found it interesting to work in the space technically but I dont necessarily agree with the wildwest nature of the public systems and am more an advocate of regulated channels if these are going to be done at all. There is also the idea that a large enough network makes it possible for the network to handle larger loads than any individual processor could handle, this has borne out in some cases though its not perfect since we know P2P network instability tends to ripple through a network.
Finally if an application has been built with web3 practices enshrined its entirely possible to ensure service continuity even in the event of the provider failing financially and being unable to serve the users. Important to note this is RARELY done properly and I have only seen a couple cases where it worked so far.
If we are talking the internal org, like docusign itself, an org like might adopt a ledger based system for the in-built capabilities of some chains, you find quickly that enterprise grade cryptographic tracking of large scales of assets or process gets VERY expensive. Ledgers can be very helpful in these cases though are more a consideration when validating a new system rather than it being an impetus to upgrade in and of itself.
I often refer to it as a specialized app-server stack to clients.
And… where does FTX and Celsius come into the mix? Because in practice, that’s where people lose $8 Billion overnight.
Cryptocoin folk pretend they got this “trust” issue figured out, when in actuality, they just technobabble fake words and pretend that I haven’t taken a cryptography class in college. Guess what? I know what a hash is, I know how PKI works and I can implement BTC or Monero.
Just because Cryptocoin community is ignorant of very trivial hacks (ex: a hardware wallet using a shitty RNG which would leak the private-key), and is ignorant of how they are unable to trust even the most basic of operations in their house of cards doesn’t mean anything. (Are you sure that your hardware wallet generates real, random numbers? And not a pre-made list of ~1-billion, easily hacked wallets?)
Cryptocoin fans can’t even solve the hardware wallet trust problem, let alone any other trust issue going on in their little world.
Explain like I’m five?
sorry, gpt said i could do better
A blockchain is like a special notebook that many people can write in. Once something is written, it cannot be changed, and everyone can check that it was written correctly. This notebook help different people or companies work together by writing down and sharing important information in a safe and secure way.
Some people use these special notebooks to make digital money like Bitcoin. But it’s just way to use them. Companies also use these notebooks for other things, like making sure their business runs smoothly and securely.
So, the blockchain is not just about digital money, but also a to help people and businesses work together safely and fairly.
Thank you very much!
https://lemmy.intai.tech/comment/578972
You can also look in my post history, ask away, I’m no fan of where public systems have gone and understand the anger, point is, these techs ARE being used already in corp systems and even if you dont use this crop of chains, you will likely be using a system like this in the future, even if you dont know it.
So, if I get it, it’s like torrent, except instead of you manually verifying the hash code, each computer your file passes pay automatically checks and says “yup, the file I received and transmitted is the file I was supposed to receive and transmit” ?
pretty much, think of the files like what you would see in your .git folder for a code project. they are all linked together in a history graph. so you are validating the data, its position in history along with its entire history, you also know who changed the data and what systems were responsible for writing those changes. really solid tooling for provenance and chain-of-evidence scenarios.
I see, but if I’m not mistaken, git is anterior to the blockchain. What I’m asking here is what new things the blockchain brings to the table, that preexisting protocols like Git or P2P couldn’t do. Or is the blockchain just another application of the same principles (the Merkle chain, as a previous commenter was saying)? If so, what sets it appart ?
I’ll refer to one of my earlier responses someone asked about this in context of a process like docusigns’
so if you are looking at this its a question to trust scopes, at least in public systems. here you are trusting:
- the bank
- the broker
- docusign
- you govt
- your courts
the proposal for a decentralized ledger with neutral execution is that the only “trust” needed is that in the contracts function, however this is not entirely true, in reality you are shifting trust to:
- genesis ceremony
your ability/resources to asses the contracts function and your counterparties.
some people feel this is a better way of doing things, ive found it interesting to work in the space technically but I dont necessarily agree with the wildwest nature of the public systems and am more an advocate of regulated channels if these are going to be done at all. There is also the idea that a large enough network makes it possible for the network to handle larger loads than any individual processor could handle, this has borne out in some cases though its not perfect since we know P2P network instability tends to ripple through a network.
Finally if an application has been built with web3 practices enshrined its entirely possible to ensure service continuity even in the event of the provider failing financially and being unable to serve the users. Important to note this is RARELY done properly and I have only seen a couple cases where it worked so far. However personally this is one of the most impressive features, I am biased however as I was involved in the recovery of a commons that has turned into a defacto standard. Didn’t make anything from it other than consulting feed, just really cool to help a non-profit
If we are talking the internal org, like docusign itself, an org like might adopt a ledger based system for the in-built capabilities of some chains, you find quickly that enterprise grade cryptographic tracking of large scales of assets or process gets VERY expensive. Ledgers can be very helpful in these cases though are more a consideration when validating a new system rather than it being an impetus to upgrade in and of itself.
I often refer to it as a specialized app-server stack to clients.
That’s a lot of words to say nothing. Like, you literally aren’t saying anything of substance.
The value is in the forward signed, immutable ledger written by neutral consensus. This can take a lot of form and be the backbone of many types of applications (and already is used by large firms), the current market for direct public ledgers is a mess and I don’t generally agree with much of the last craze beyond the fundamentals needed to manage transfers, ownership and executions.
All of that is word salad. Blockchain is 100% redundant technology that uses obscene amounts of electricity. Why do I need a network of computers around the globe to make sure a contract and checks get signed? Why does it require a global network of computers constantly refreshing themselves and checking for inconsistencies to implement new business? If the smartest minds on Earth actually can’t come up with a use case, then it’s trash.
Grifters love it.
Blockchains don’t inherently need obscene amount of erlectriciy
Proof of work mechanism does. There’s lots of other consensus mechanism that don’t.
Forward signed, immutable ledger - a dataset that is written and logged at time of write and validated using cryptographic signatures of the creator of that data and the node of the network responsible for the data. public systems use incentive systems to ensure unbiased writes, private systems work more like your typical app server.
neutral consensus - this is the p2p aspect, this is a bunch of unrelated actors promising to work toward an unrelated goal, in public systems this is done via some form of game theory, in private systems orgs working together have contract law and are more interested in the the controlled writing.
How it can take a lot of forms. Most people are just familiar with what the general public refers to as cryptocurrency. These are ledgers managed on p2p networks with the aforementioned game theory based consensus system. However ledgers are not required to do this, a ledger and even a blockchain can work without fees or even energy wasting miners, in these cases its usually the cryptographic write and channel messaging they want (some of these are a step up from AWS’s messaging stack).
Ledgers like this are used in many ways and used in large orgs around the world, what the public is angry at and what the technology is are very different things.
I hope I have “unsaladed things” for you
Blockchains come in many forms, the ones you are thinking of are what are called Proof of Work chains, these uses a kind of cryptographic race to secure thier data and use a TON of waste energy as a result. Def not a fan either.
The growing popularity and interest in chains is around forms of Proof Of Stake, these use other internal protocol mechanisms to secure the network and work to run the cryptographic functions as efficiently as possible. Unsurprisingly the fastest blockchains are proof of stake and power wise are similar to traditional applications in utilization.
You don’t need any of these networks if you don’t want to use them, fundamentally, they arent even networks, they are cryptographic messaging systems. How the data is sent and processed is incidental, you could work out a bitcoin block on pen and paper if you wanted. This concept has extended to a cryptographic tool called Zero Knowledge Proofs, these will be part of next generation identity verification systems and is a fundamental of the W3C standard around DiD, the whole point is for disconnected attestation.
Maybe this is my “too old for this shit” moment, but this all just sounds like convoluted non-sense that’s never going to go anywhere. We still have SMS and ATMs that run XP.
surprisingly small hardware is needed to sign a message. though I do agree that we are still a bit early for workable end-user use cases. People really dont care what the database or app server is, they just want it to work and raw dogging some public node is just a bit much for people, i dont blame them.
more packaged solutions are under development, these will be more like a proper application with the differences of a chain being abstracted by the provider
things like sms, what if i told you SMS would be fine with this, so would smoke signals
I think the problem I have with it is the online enthusiasm for it is acting like it’s already going to change my life yet it’s been more than a decade and no one has shown tangible and understandable utility, just marketing bs and grifting.
But we’re still early lol
Yea I’ve been hearing that for a decade. Aside from missing out on bitcoin at $300, I’m still waiting. 🤷♂️
As we see here on the Fediverse, decentralization works fine without monetization using an actively anti-scaling append only database that emits the pollution of a medium sized country.
The only other good thing that came out of it is it increased the prevalence of digital payment system in the world, but I struggle to think of anything that would actually directly benefit from blockchain.
I’ve heard of a couple interesting applications (interesting doesn’t necessarily mean good)
-
I’ve been out of the industry for a couple years, but at the time I left both the US’s NAR and CA’s CREA were looking to create blockchains that would eventually hold an immutable history of every salable property in North America. The sales pitch is that no one will ever be able to hide things like flood damage or zoning changes if they’re all those events are in a trusted database. Carfax, but for buildings.
-
Several US states with legalized Marijuana have what are known as Seed To Sale laws. One company was trying to move into this space and eventually into all of agriculture. The idea being that if you buy pot scanning a QR code would tell you what clone# the seeds were from, where and when it was planted, what pesticides/herbicides were used on/near it, when it was harvested, any tests it had gone through, etc.
So I have two questions about this:
- Why use blockchain for that? Both of these sound like they will be centralized databases and blockchains just add a bunch of overhead for no benefit.
- How does a database prevent me from … just lying to it? The blockchain won’t magically detect if I paid off some guy to claim he inspected my house or weed and just hand out a certificate.
Probably transparency. It’s a public ledger. That’s one of the benefits I’m aware of.
-
zero knowledge proofs, like those being deployed on blockchains recently, have the potential to be the killer app for this tech. Imagine you want a library card which requires proof of residence. With a zero-proof identity system, you could get your library card without revealing any personal info, like your name or address. Your wallets would simply prove to the library that you are a resident as credentialed by some local/state authority.
This also could have profound implications for the web like universal logins to web services, online privacy while still providing attribution, ownership and rights to digital content, copyright, etc.
You don’t need blockchain to do ZKP.
You don’t even need ZKP to do these things. Obviously (as you said) there’s a local/state authority who knows this. The library could just ask them about it.
You need a blockchain to revoke proofs. Also, I would like to be able to prove something without notifying an authority of some sort
deleted by creator
Could be used for coordinating large scale decentralized projects. Say we want to organize logistics of food so that everyone gets some. After calculating need for each locale independently, Blockchain could be used for people to commit to, for example, bringing 4 crates of carrots to a location for shipping. Additional blockchain ledgers might keep track of space on the transportation vehicles etc. The ledger’s main job here would be to ensure that a given task (or a given cubic foot for the space example) is not double booked, and to allow interested parties to see where there needs to be more commitment in order to feed everyone (or fill up the ship in the space example).
What value does Blockchain provide here? It feels like none whatsoever.
I see blockchain technology and it’s potential as analogous to a globally shared spreadsheet where nobody can go back and change history.
Now, just imagine what billions of humans could do if they could all work on the same spreadsheets without needing to trust each other.
- Many financial institutions would be unnecessary
- Ownership can be verified without need of paper and it’s risks of destruction, or trusting corporate computer networks. This applies to houses and boats just as much to movies and songs. Imagine commodity/utility music streaming validating your ownership of music via NFT ownership, not locked down by Apple, Amazon, or anyone else?
What?
I just wrote in Cell A5441 that you owe me 354000,- EUR.
Ownership has to be calculated by all participants, making a Blockchain unneccesary environmental load. You should revisit more reliable sources about the technology.
Cryptocurrency does work. It wasn’t so good at scaling or maintaining a stable price. Or converting between other currencies. Really, it was more of a speculative gambling or money laundering vehicle than a currency, but it can handle transactions. Both sides have to cryptographically sign the transaction (using their wallet’s private key); one side can’t just unilaterally decide that transactions happened and now it’s rich.
Edit: I realize I just addressed part of your comment. For the other part: the high environmental load was a choice, intended to be used to control how new currency is issued. There is a computational cost for maintaining the ledger, but it doesn’t have to be as ridiculous as Bitcoin/ether mining got.
Sure, point me to one.
You would need to start with a literature research. https://scholar.google.com
I understand your point but that is the worst attempt at discussion I’ve ever seen lmao
“Too lazy to formulate an argument, look one up yourself”
You are right and I did think about it and the comment wasn’t written easily. I did open scholar.google.com but I didn’t wanted to put energy into an argument online about a topic I have no passion about.
I once wanted to get an overview about Blockchains because I wanted to see if the hype was real. There was no citable literature I could make use of in order to link it to my own understanding. A literature research can’t ne done by somebody else.
This topic is too hard for me. I just felt some medium-knowledge vibes, so I did post a rude comment. But I did attempt to do good and point one to building his own opinion.
Sorry to be not helpful.
I haven’t been able to quite figure it out. But I keep having this idea that blockchain would be really good for journaling and validating elections. I haven’t been able to solve how you handle both anonymity and spam bots simultaneously because you can only give each person one vote. But the concept of peer 2 peer journaling sounds perfect for handling trust
That’d probably be a component. The problem with digital elections is that they’re EXTREMELY complicated. Complexity means risk of error and you don’t want to fuck up an election. We’ve already seen the fuss people make when an election is generally successful.
Many have devoted a lot of thought about how to make digital election systems. So far, no one has figured out a better alternative than paper ballots.
Blockchain doesn’t bring any closer to a solution.
A Blockchain is part of a solution but not the whole solution. A Blockchain is for all intents and purposes a digital paper trail, something that high can be audited and cannot be modified later.
The problem is how do you use that system with a sceptical public that doesn’t understand or trust it. A technical enough person night understands it, but to the vast majority of people it may as well be “trust me, bro”. It’s a lot easier to trust a physicial piece of paper.
Not to mention that an important part of voting is anonymity, which a Blockchain doesn’t really give you. How do you validate that a vote on the chain is legitimate without some kind of trail back to an actual human?
The only thing you need to emulate blockchain voting is just a list of all votes everybody can download. Then people can verify that their own votes have been counted, and that the total count matches the election results. You don’t need a blockchain to do this.
The reason why this is rarely done is because the vote is no longer secret. If you can verify your own vote, you open up the possibility for vote buying/blackmailing, which prevents a fair election. Blockchain does nothing to solve this.
Another reason why paper ballot is still used is that it’s robust against large scale attacks (if done correctly). With digital voting (including blockchain based), if someone finds a loophole, they can probably pull off a large scale attack.
One such attack on a blockchain based voting system could be that the government issues millions of voting tokens just for themselves. Blockchain allows this. You need to rely on the government to distribute the voting tokens either way, because they’re the only ones who knows who are eligible to vote.
So I don’t think blockchain brings any closer to a solution. You still need to rely on a central authority, there are potential for large scale attacks, and votes can be bought.
I have wet dreams about a new text based mesh internet powered by the gemini protocol. Imagine, if you will, instead of paying monthly to your ISP/cell service provider to acess the internet, that instead you bought an ‘internet box’ once. Where each router/gateway acts both as a self-hosting site for the user, and transmits this site text data to other local routers through LoRaWAN. There are many technical challenges to this kind of networks, one being “how do I check that all other routers have an up-to-date version of any one site?” and blockchain technology seems to fit nicely for that particular issue.
