OK but there are actually great uses for blockchain that are completely disconnected from anything you typically see
For example, banks may begin using blockchain for maintaining their internal ledgers. It will help solve a ton of issues around reconciling the transactions from all over the globe
Blockchain has reasonable uses. Really good ones. Crypto and nft bros just completely ruined the image of it
EDIT: I love all the comments demonstrating how little people understand about blockchain. Bitcoin was not the first blockchain, nor is its design the only type of blockchain. Assuming that all blockchain looks like the crypto/nft paradigm is just showing your ignorance.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/j5nzx4/what-was-the-first-blockchain
Blockchain is only potentially useful if there’s no single entity that can be trusted. If banks can’t even trust themselves to manage their own internal ledgers, they have much bigger problems to deal with.
Trustless systems aren’t a bad thing that has to step in when the good thing fails. Trustless systems are inherently better because you don’t have to trust a bank (or anyone for that matter).
Additionally, ledgers can be gamed/corrupted/falsified. This is significantly more complex (bordering on impossible) on the blockchain.
There are often easier, more reliable, and far cheaper ways to achieve the same things without using a blockchain. Some of the principles are even used in normal web browsing to ensure secure untampered connections.
Blockchain just solves a subproblem that only arises when there’s no appointed central entity.
Blockchains aren’t hard, unreliable or expensive
Cryptocurrency Ledgers can be corrupted?
I was hedging against a particularly snarky commenter showing up. You can do a 51% attack and theoretically corrupt it. In practice, that’s much more difficult.
You dont need 51% attack to corrupt a ledger. Just enter incorrect info and the ledger is wrong. Not a damn thing a blockchain can do about that. Same issue is with any trustless system where you have to trust someone to input the correct info/do the agreed thing/ship the ordered physical item.
Just enter incorrect info and the ledger is wrong.
The concept behind cryptocurrency is that the ledger is the info, because you’re right, a half-assed blockchain ledger used for external (e.g. cash) transactions doesn’t really solve the root problem. Proof of work is fucking stupid though, and it has (rightfully) ruined the perception of blockchain technology among those who can see past their own crypto wallet.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/bBC-nXj3Ng4
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
guys they are putting micro chips in the cheese and using block chains to track the micro chips https://www.businessinsider.com/edible-microchips-on-parmigiano-reggiano-used-to-fight-counterfeiters-2023-8
That’s the thing, they shouldn’t trust a single source of assumed truth. If the single source is tampered with, there’s nothing to compare to.
Removing the need to trust a single entity is just a great security feature
You can implement public or semi public ledgers without Blockchain. That’s what banks are doing already by sending huge CSV files internally and externally. Blockchain is not a technology of zero trust. It’s close to the opposite. You trust a few peers and blindly trust everyone they trust. That way you trust a network that you know nothing about and if the network decides on a common truth that you are convinced is incorrect, there is nothing you can do about it. The consensus always wins and there is no single entity to complain to and get it fixed. This is great for making sure that many actors need to be bad actors in order to have the whole system fail. It’s bad if you don’t trust anyone and want to make sure that your standards are always observed. From a technology standpoint I love the concept of Blockchain. But use cases that are not forced are few and far apart. Too few for the amount of hype it receives.
If the bank can’t even trust themselves then there’s no point in having the bank at all.
You really don’t get it? Trust is a problem. Anyone, or anything, can and will fail or be compromised.
so I put my trust in software instead. And by extension its developers. You’re saying of all people, we should trust some programmers above all else. You know, the “move fast and break things” guys.
As a programmer myself, this thought is both terrifying and hilarious.
As a fellow programmer: what kind of doomer take is this? I don’t have any opinion on the efficacy of blockchain technology, but all of us put an immeasurable amount of trust in software every single day. And it’s not like current banking practices are different in this regard, either: blockchain tech requires faith in the software implementation, while contemporary banking requires faith in banks and the software they use (including a borderline unmaintainable COBOL stack, from what I’ve heard).
because problems in the bank’s software are the bank’s responsibility. If they lose my money, it’s their responsibility to get it back. Cryptocurrencies are the exact opposite, by design. If you’re fucked, you’ee fucked. unless of course half the participants decide to fork, half don’t and you end up with two “currencies” out of thin air.
Banks and firms that uses their services are audited thoug. It is not blind trust. And regadress the tech used there would sitll be audits.
Blockchains is a tool for moving trust around in a decentralized network, not a tool for removing it.
Security starts with trust.
Blockchain has been around as a technology for nearly two decades. If financial institutions thought it could help them you can bet they would be all-in on it by now. As it is, blockchain has no significant advantages over traditional financial ledger systems, so what incentive is there for them to use it.
It’s not something new or cutting edge any more, just waiting for a bright spark to discover the technology and put it to use.
If financial institutions thought it could help them you can bet they would be all-in on it by now.
Well, why would banks replace the system which allows them to charge fees for every other interaction with their services? A blockain solution would allow multiple different banks (and, possibly, even regular people) to access the data with no middlemen, and, therefore, no fees. Or, well, no fees that directly end up in the bank’s pockets as profit, that is.
Getting rid of that is bad for business. So, unless something magical happens and the EU, for example, pass a law requiring the banks to switch to a more de-centralized, more fair system, it’s not going to happen.
That’s kind of my point. Blockchain evangelists have been banging the drum for many years saying “This is a perfect fit for the financial industry. Why won’t fintech wake up and recognise that?”
When in fact fintech took a long, hard look at blockchain a long time ago and decided “nope, there’s nothing here that would tempt us” outside of a few very niche applications.
Maybe do a simple Google search next time?
Rather than resorting to that age-old cry of the cult member “do your own research!” can I respectfully suggest that if you’re aiming to change somebody’s mind, the onus is on you to provide the evidence, not on them. By all means take hours out of your day to search google and compile a list of things that you think will convince me. Me, personally, I have better things to do with my life.
I didn’t ask them to do their own research. I asked that, if they are skeptical of a claim I made, either do a simple Google search to check if it’s very easily verifiable, or ask me directly instead of immediately saying “you’re wrong because I would have heard of it”
Like, I’m happy to provide citations when requested, but lemmy isn’t a scientific journal where I’m expected to provide every source for my information up front
How is the blockchain different from a read only ( write only once to be specific) DB that follows ACID?
Blockchains add cryptographic signing and limit actions based on those signatures.
Big words that mean nothing
To you maybe. Maybe other lemmings reading this understand them.
They mean nothing in the sense its nothing you cant do with DBs, so like I said, big words that mean nothing
Cryptography - means that only you can make changes. No database administrator. No hacker. No-one but you.
Limited actions - means the changes you make must follow rules that cannot be altered by anyone.
Both impossible to implement on a normal DB, which is why bitcoin was revolutionary.
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thats not what cryptography means, and is a huge fucking downside especially for banking which us centrally controlled
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It’s called triggers, user roles etc, once again you dont want this to be unalterabale for banking because what if regulations change…
Only thing bitcoin revolutionized was the speed with which scammers can dupe people out of their money.
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How can you trust that the database is really append only? Blockchain provides a way to verify the state of the database and the ordering of the transactions. Beyond that, not much benefit to be had. However, for certain situations, that is a very big benefit!
Name fucking one situation
Sure! So some students of mine were working on a multiplayer video game that was started by a different group of students the previous semester. The first group of students made a design choice that, to over-simplify, basically tracked achievements and milestones on the client side and then synchronized those achievements to the server. Players could cheat the system by sending malicious packets of achievements to the server. Some achievements could only be completed by a single person in the game, so this was a big problem for the 2nd group of students to overcome. Faced with the choice of rearchitecting the game to be more authoritative on the server and less resilient to frequent disconnections, which affected some aspects of the game, or creating a logical and verifiable sequence of in-game events on the server side. The students went with the latter, and implemented a Lamport clock using a blockchain to verify the authenticity of the events, and prevent a rogue student from updating the game later to give themself a bonus. Basically, along with needing an authoritative sequence of events that is protected from user interference, it also needed to be protected from developer interference.
It was kinda similar to that situation a few years back of the EVE online developers playing the game and giving their guild members certain bonuses and special in-game items. The solution there was to fire the malicious developers, but I can’t exactly fire an entire class of students from an educational project.
EDIT: What seems to be the problem here? I was asked to name a situation where a blockchain would be useful and I did? It’s a computer data structure, there are pros and cons that are context dependent like any other data structure. It I so weird to me to receive downvotes because of the politics surrounding a data structure.
To your edit; it was a great example, but if you say anything positive about blockchain (or Apple, or capitalism, etc) you’ll likely be heavily downvoted on Lemmy.
Yeah, I think that seems to be the case here. It just feels so weird to me to have a politicized data structure.
“Remember kids, only coke-fiends and meth-heads use Binomial Heaps.”
Ha!
But yeah, like others have said in this post, it had a bad light cast on it due to the jpg and gif NFTs. Folks started to realize: “wait… this token just contains a link to a web server hosting a jpg file??”
Well, yes. But also the rights.
“The heck you mean ‘the rights’??”
I mean, your Drunk Monkey in Teal Color Theme artwork is yours to use, you’ve purchased the license in the form of an NFT.
“But it’s just a link that anyone could just copy!”
Well, that would be stealing.
So NFTs in that regard are like any movie or TV show, or video game you rent or purchase. That utility may or may not seem to have any value to any one person, but it is a utility, and a pretty cool one if you ask me. But the usage, its implementation, is what matters. Whatever that usage requirement is for the individual or business, blockchain will do it well. Even if it is used to license junk.
Replication and verifiable timestamps, which you can add to regular databases too BTW
It’s distributed so no single entity can take it down. Among many other possible benefits depending on architecture and infrastructure.
It’s far more complex than coins and NFTs. Blockchain is like a new internet. Coins and NFTs are like those shitty GIFs you used to see everywhere. Evocative of old internet, but not the internet itself.
Distributed databases have existed for decades. It’s how large healthcare systems maintain electronic health records for their patients across dozens of hospitals in real time.
How is that useful in a bank ledger?
Simple, it’s not. If it were, they’d have been using them for decades (blockchains were invented in the 70s).
The consensus algorithm, which is not the blockchain itself, was invented later. But banks don’t need to reach concensus with themselves. They all maintain their own data, and heavily guard it. So the only bad actor they could have is themselves. And they banks all keep watch each other.
Preaching to the choir here.
This isn’t true: there are not-distributed blockchains.
The definition of a blockchain is a ledger where every entry is cryptographically signed with a hash of the current entry plus a previous entry. There’s no requirement that this be at all distributed. In fact, QLDB uses a non-distributed blockchain as its audit log.
Blockchain are often used in distributed systems because of the verifiability of the records; its a way of providing security of history in a fundamentally insecure environment. But there’s no requirement that they be distributed, and they add value in non-distributed environments as well - in any case you want to be able to review a history of changes and know that someone hasn’t been cooking the books, for instance.
I’ll give a real-world example. One place I worked we had databases that had data constantly streaming in from many different sources. Something that would frequently happen would be some data issue that would break applications; often, this was bad data from sources outside of our control. Ops*, who’s only priority was to get the applications back up and running, would often track down and directly modify records and fix the data. The issue was that some time later, sometime days later, a customer would call and complain about data being incorrect. By then, it was impossible to figure out what had happened: did we get the wrong data from the source? Did one of the import processes mangle the data? Did someone poke around in the database and change the data? We had no way of telling, and investigations would take many hours, often from several senior people, who would frequently in the end have to shrug and say, “we don’t know.” There were lots of things that could have improved this, with varying levels of success, but a global audit log would have been the first step. A verifiable audit log would have been better, because often it’d come down to us being convinced the data a third party was giving us was bad, and it became an our word vs. their word since we shared the same client. If we’d had a blockchain layer through which every transaction was recorded, we could have rolled back in time and figure out exactly how a record came to be what it was and been able to prove it to the client.
Blockchains are awesome. People who say otherwise have their heads up their asses, and are unable to differentiate between blockchain the technology, and the sometimes questionable uses they’re put to. Iron is used to make guns and bombs; that doesn’t make iron bad.
Edit clarification
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- “Ops” as in “operations”
Thank you for being in this thread. I felt like I was taking crazy pills with all these other replies. So many people think bitcoin was the first blockchain. And that the paradigm used by crypto is the only type of blockchain there is.
I will never forgive tech bros for making blockchain a buzzword tied exclusively to crypto and NFTs. The amount of lost potential is infuriating
It’s become one of my pet peeves.
I have a conspiracy theory that a lot of the anti-cryptocoin stuff that gets posted is an organized disinformation campaign run by some governments and central banks who are particularly threatened by crypto, and that it extends to bad-mouthing any technology related to cryptocoins. I also believe that there are a fair number of secondary internet users who read “crypto bad” and have picked up the messaging because (a) they’re kinda pissed they didn’t get in on the ground floor, (b) they lost money playing in the markets, © because, whether they’re self-aware enough to know it or not, people love a good mob mentality, and/or_ © because crypto farms really are shitty wastes of resources and are easily villified. I guarantee, however, that not a single one of those people could describe - in even then most general terms - how a blockchain works. Not even at a programmer level, although the programmers who do this are the worst, because they should know better. And this is what infuriates me: “Blockchain is bad!” “Why?” “Because I read it on the interwebs that it causes global warming and is a pyramid scheme!”
Pet peeve.
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Why would you want the computational power of a bank system have anything to do with whether it’s ledger is correct?
Banks/hackers can manipulate data if they want to. Manipulating data on blockchains is way waaaaay harder.
Using a blockchain to maintain their internal ledgers means they have complete control over that blockchain, so they can manipulate it all they want. Blockchains aren’t magic.
Oh, didn’t see the “internal”. Yea, that’s stupid then.
deleted by creator
Who are “they” in the above message?
If you trust all your employees then an internal blockchain is useless, but do banks really totally trust their employees?
A blockchain won’t solve incorrect transaction information any more than an audit log in this case. This is an entirely internal process controlled by the bank and access would be restricted, so they couldn’t just edit audit logs. How do you think a blockchain would be used to improve this?
The actions that an employee could perform would be limited by their private key’s abilities. Blockchain can be preventative. It’s not only for retrospective analysis.
The actions that an employee could perform in any database would be limited by their account permissions. Blockchain doesn’t change this. I pointed out a retrospective mechanism because a completely internal blockchain wouldn’t prevent tampering either.
Yeah let’s use the computing power of an entire country to pay for a small coffee.
While that is an inherent component of how proof-of-work cryptos work, and utterly stupid, it’s not an inherent part of how to do blockchains.
You can have a blockchain without consuming stupid amounts of energy.
Yeah it’s called a database…
There aren’t a lot of distributed databases with no single owner and all writes are signed.
Yeah, but not having an owner is actually a fucking terrible thing for a banking system, how do you not grasp this?
No owner is great for a banking system. It stops the owner printing money whenever they feel like it.
Bruh
I do grasp it.
I don’t really know what situation it makes sense for. It seems like a tool for cases where nobody can agree who should own the records of something so now everyone should.
exactly, you have others methods of proof-of-work
you’ve just demonstrated your lack of depth of understanding of blockchains. congratulations, your opinion was correct about 15 years ago. the technology has moved on
and the “solutions” are all objectively worse security wise. And by thinking blockchains need proof of anything, you too misunderstand what a blockchain even is. Proof of whatever is needed by the concensus algorithm, not the blockchain.
no; they all have trade-offs and that’s different… you can have trust less proof amongst semi-trusted parties like a consortium of banks: they don’t entirely trust each other, but trust each other enough to keep an eye on the other members of the consortium
there are plenty of situations like this that are non-public
they are objectively, mathematically weaker.
Joining ethereum now implies trusting a complete stranger to get you up to speed. It is objectively subjective.
i wasn’t talking about ethereum, and i don’t think anyone was saying they don’t have TRADE OFFS. in the world of consensus protocols, there are many different trade offs that build a network that suits your needs
however the consensus protocol has little to do with how mathematically secure a network is: the security of the consensus protocol comes down to a lot of complex things
it also has nothing to do with how you bootstrap a node
these things are all different, albeit interconnected things
the consensus algorithm is the only thing that contributes to the network’s security. That, and because it’s trying to solve an impossible problem, it also needs the psychological element exploiting humans’ greed (and therefore want to hoard currency).
You say so but I guess it’s hard to convince a lot of people who recognize it’s folly to try to fix a social/human problem with a technological solution.
Git is a merkle-tree based system like a blockchain. People have no problem with the tech. They’re just tired of the hype train.
How do you see memes like this? Because I see them as lame and sad, especially since we have been seeing them for 10+ years now and they are still the same. But apparently you think blockchain has reasonable uses.
Damn! You had my up vote until that last sentence.
Why? He used the same exact words?
Because I agree with everything except the last sentence. Even after a decade the thinks the block chain has no uses.
He literally said he thinks it has uses.
I think he is most certainly right. People that think otherwise should go back to their bar order another one and keep ranting about it to their half dead drunkard friends.
No, he said “you [meaning in contrast to himself] think it has uses”
No. That’s what I said and did not mean it like that.
Misguided
Only misguided?
I mean usually they are accompanied by false information and references to stuff like “crypto bros”, “pyramid schemes”,…
You said “memes like this”. This one I see as misguided. Ones that shit on crypto and nft I generally agree with.
This one is shitting on crypto.
No, it’s shitting on blockchain too. The only options are “don’t use blockchain” and “stop making crypto” which is misguided. I agree with the sentiment about crypto, not about blockchain
There is no blockchain without crypto.
I love how you can’t provide even a single example of useful Blockchain functionality. Doesn’t mean it *doesn’t exist, but says something… And no, “banking” and “internal ledgers” is not detailed enough to be a sufficient example.
How about Git?
You just… linked your own comment. I mean, most of us are nerds, but can you just… use language? What benefit does it provide?
I linked you to my other comment where I provide FIVE links to the thing you said I “can’t provide”. I had literally already provided it elsewhere. So that’s where I sent you. Excuse me for not retyping the same thing for every single person.
I don’t owe you my time. I provided a one-click path to what you asked for but you couldn’t even be assed to ponder why I linked you that comment.
Done with you now.
blockchains do not do jack shit with reconciliating records.
Walmart seems to have had success here, and logistics is their whole thing.
https://hbr.org/2022/01/how-walmart-canada-uses-blockchain-to-solve-supply-chain-challenges
Please go and attempt understanding the thing you are talking about before talking about it.
i for one would have liked a media licensing system that operates agnostic of any centralized authority
for instance, irrefutable and independently verifiable proof that you own a valid software, music, or visual art license and are therefore immune to prosecution for piracy.
A registry of licenses like this could shield creators from copyright claims on social media applications such as youtube. Could also automate revenue sharing and royalties for artists whose works are used in derivative media so the people who actually perform the work get paid. Would be nice to cut the publisher middleman out. And there is absolutely no reason there has to be anything like a “proof of work” system burning down entire fucking rainforests’ worth of energy to verify every single gods damned transaction because this sort of system isn’t for trading shit, it’s strictly for proving a valid chain of custody between producers and consumers and you don’t need megawatt-hours to just fucking LOOK SOMETHING UP.
imagine if, for instance, fucking warner brothers couldn’t “takes backsies” content that they SOLD to end users through a distribution network; the license is yours, and anyone can look up the fact that the license was sold to the user id you happen to control.
imagine if, for instance, you buy a video game through a digital distributor like steam but then the store goes out of business and no longer exists to serve you a copy or recognize the sale, but on this massively distributed and decentralized database you can prove that you did indeed compensate the developers of that software and thereby legally acquire entitlement to access it in accordance with the end user license agreement.
imagine if ownership of stuff you bought fair and square can never be taken away from you
THAT’S what we could have had
instead of this fucking bullshit.
I feel like here you get to the NFT problem of having proof of ownership of something doesn’t mean much when that thing is being hosted on servers you don’t control
so if you have an entry with a licence for a steam game, and steam gets closed, you are out of luck
it’s that holding a license for a game entitles you to operating a copy of it regardless of where you bought it.
it’s the whole basis for why emulation and ROM images were LEGAL
because you had a right to retain a backup of the software you own through the license.
with an independent licensing infrastructure, if GoG closes you can take your licenses with you, download the game from anywhere, and if anyone tries to charge you for stealing it, you can just present your license: “See, i bought it fair and square.”
if i bought a dryer from SEARS, it didn’t stop being mine when SEARS closed.
NFT’s don’t show you have proof of ownership of anything other than the NFT. Think of all the people who got their metamask account hacked and lost all their apes with zero recourse.
Why would anyone want anything required for daily life attached to something so insecure and irreversible as that?
It’s like if losing your wallet automatically burns down your house. Sounds amazing, let’s do it!
All such copyright licenses are rooted in local jurisdictional law, so your country’s copyright office should be the authority because anything else means the courts can tell you that your on-chain transactions are invalid
Well, if those licenses are entries on the blockchain, they could be transferred on the blockchain. You could sell your game used when you’re bored of playing it. You can’t play it after you sell it but someone else can. Publishers hate resale markets though, when people buy used games they don’t make any money. So they’ll probably never go for this.
yeah on top of that, if your computer breaks or something now you lost all of your keys.
say goodbye to whatever you own on the blockchain when the keys are gone. poof!
this is the biggest problem with any scheme tying private keys (digital) to anything in the real world.
Once my mom threw out all the cases for my computer games and put all the disks into a cd binder to save room.
It was devastating.
As people said, you can backup your private keys to a flash drive. You can put them in a safe deposit box. You can give them to your lawyer or other fiduciary with a legal responsibility to act in your best interests (who also knows how to protect digital property if they keep digital copy). You could write it with lemon juice onto the back of the Declaration of Independence at the National Archives. You could have a laser thingie that displays it on a wall surgically implanted into your arm. Pretty much all the ways people protect gold or cash in the real world you can do with a piece of paper with your private key.
You can lose access to regular accounts as easily as to a blockchain. In fact, losing database of your password manager is even worse, because even if you have backups, they’re not going to be complete.
With a blockchain all you have to worry is your private key. And you can write it down on a piece of paper, if you want, and put it away in a safe or a bank vault or something. Then, if you use it to restore your access years later, nothing will be lost.
“There are 2 types of people in the world: those who make backups, and those who don’t make backups yet.”
Not really. You backup you keys like a normal human. Or create any of those new account abstraction keys that are tied to another account, or anything else.
Not really. You backup you keys like a normal human. Or create any of those new account abstraction keys that are tied to another account, or anything else.
With smart contracts on blockchain you can do exactly that. Everyone involved in the process can ensure they get their cut.
imagine if, for instance, you buy a video game through a digital distributor like steam but then the store goes out of business and no longer exists to serve you a copy or recognize the sale, but on this massively distributed and decentralized database you can prove that you did indeed compensate the developers of that software and thereby legally acquire entitlement to access it in accordance with the end user license agreement.
What you’re arguing for is forcing the distributor to distribute in perpetuity, which has nothing to do with how you show ownership of your license.
Right now, I can show steam I’ve purchased, say Delistopolis, and they will agree I am indeed perfectly allowed to have and play it. But they are not required to provide me with a copy.
A blockchain system will not solve this.
no. you’re putting words in my mouth. if the distributor wants to stop distributing they can.
they can take down their servers, they can even cease to be, but it would no longer affect the availability of product they sold.
Then I don’t think I understand you. Are you suggesting we put millions of full games on a bloxkchain?
Only the keys need to be stored cryptographically, really, because the game files themselves are nigh inevitably available on torrenting networks. it’s inevitable that people are going to rip backups of all game files for the delicious delights of datamining and as long as enough of them will seed them (which shouldn’t be a problem as long as there’s any INTEREST in a game existing…) that availability never arises as an issue. And if it’s not popular enough to put there, it’ll probably end up on The Internet Archive.
Would be nice if there were an infrastructural ‘backup of last resort’ such as the library of congress, which is something the LoC already does for other audiovisual media. It’d just be nice if that service were extended to software.
So more of a blockchain KMS then? I don’t see how you could construct such a thing.
The requirements of allowing a publisher control of their game for some time (for example, allowing them to retract some keys when violating the EULA, but not all keys when “unpublishing” a game), but also allowing people to resell keys, which are somehow publically accesible but only for the legit owner, and the owner has to allow third-party acces without publically sharing a private key.
This is the age-old identity problem with blockchain. It’s all well and good that Bob’s name is written on a smart contract, but that doesn’t remove the issue with how to identify Bob.
Blockchain is a nebulous buzzword with a vague meaning. But I have yet to see a sensible definition of a blockchain that doesn’t include git. At the end of the day they are both just Merkle trees.
Git is pretty useful imo.
Well yes but can you pump and dump git commits ?
Blockchain is pretty well defined.
Git doesn’t have update rules that are only valid if signed by a particular private key.
Please share a source! I can’t find anything as robust as a whitepaper (the bitcoin whitepaper doesn’t use the term).
NIST informally defines it as:
A distributed digital ledger of cryptographically-signed transactions that are grouped into blocks. Each block is cryptographically linked to the previous one (making it tamper evident) after validation and undergoing a consensus decision. As new blocks are added, older blocks become more difficult to modify (creating tamper resistance). New blocks are replicated across copies of the ledger within the network, and any conflicts are resolved automatically using established rules.
Which git certainly meets this.
IBM informally defines it as:
Blockchain is a shared, immutable ledger that facilitates the process of recording transactions and tracking assets in a business network. An asset can be tangible (a house, car, cash, land) or intangible (intellectual property, patents, copyrights, branding).
Which git meets.
Git is hash linked, not cryptographicly linked. Only cryptographicly valid changes are allowed to blockchain state. All data can be modified in git.
Yes. IBMs definition is bad and could equally apply to git. They’ve totally forgotten about the private key aspect.
I’ll see if I can source a better definition online, but make no promises.
Edit: https://aws.amazon.com/what-is/blockchain/ the last line is not applicable to Git
Oh a 3rd definition, that definitely hurts the case that blockchain is vague ill defined term. If it were a well-defined term, there would be whitepapers defining it like merkle trees or bitcoin. Blockchain is just a marketing term defined by businesses, not scientists or engineers and thus is vague and variable.
I also don’t think your definition is a very good definition. Do you think git fundamentally changes when it moves from sha1 to sha256? Or are you referring to the fact that the payloads of cryptocurrency’s blockchain is required to be signed (just like you can optionally require git commits to be signed)? I don’t think that’s fundamental to blockchain either.
Only cryptographicly valid changes are allowed to blockchain state. All data can be modified in git.
No. You can’t modify the chain in git. Each commit is an immutable snapshot of the repository. To change history you have to create a new hash and then broadcast that to everyone that they should stop using the old one. Depending in how your network is setup you may onky have to convince a centralized server, or you might have to convince 51% of the actors on your network or you may just choose to only form a network that agrees with you. You could alter bitcoin’s blockchain too, but you’d need 51% of the network to agree with you.
Oh a 3rd definition, that definitely hurts the case that blockchain is vague ill defined term.
The phrases used to describe the technology to the public may change, but the technolgical approach doesn’t
If it were a well-defined term, there would be whitepapers defining it like merkle trees or bitcoin.
There are hundreds of blockchain whitepapers, all of which link blocks of data via hash functions and only accept state changes if they are valid and cryptographicaly signed.
Blockchain is just a marketing term defined by businesses, not scientists or engineers and thus is vague and variable.
If we were discussing web3 or Metaverse then you may have a point. But no-one in tech is confused about what blockchain is anymore.
Do you think git fundamentally changes when it moves from sha1 to sha256?
No.
Or are you referring to the fact that the payloads of cryptocurrency’s blockchain is required to be signed
Yes. Exactly this.
(just like you can optionally require git commits to be signed)?
Optionally is the key word. Blockchain transactions must be signed, and they must be accepted as following the blockchain rules by validators.
I don’t think that’s fundamental to blockchain either.
Find me a blockchain that doesn’t require signed transactions to make state changes.
No. You can’t modify the chain in git.
I didn’t say anything about modify the chain.
Each commit is an immutable snapshot of the repository.
A commit can contain any data it likes. A commit to a blockchain is highly restricted. Only cryptographicly valid rule following changes are allowed to blockchain state.
Optionally is the key word. Blockchain transactions must be signed, and they must be accepted as following the blockchain rules by validators.
But this is just a policy decision, not a property of the technology. You can easily implement a script that checks if every commit from remotes are signed, accepts them if they are and drops them if they aren’t or the signature is invalid.
If you contribute to a project where the majority require signed commits, then you need to sign commits in order for your change to be integrated into the consensus.
That has nothing to do with the technology itself, just with the application.
So if you state that signatures are required to be a blockchain, then you can use git to create a blockchain, by just having that policy.
(IMO I wouldn’t say that signatures are required, just that blockchains usually have them.)
You can easily implement a script that checks if every commit from remotes are signed, accepts them if they are and drops them if they aren’t or the signature is invalid.
Now add some logic to check whether the actual data is valid (i.e. bob has enough coins in his account to send to Charlie).
Make some incentive to ensure only the main branch survives and forks are either eliminated or merged.
Automate
Now git replicates blockchain’s functionality.
So if you state that signatures are required to be a blockchain, then you can use git to create a blockchain, by just having that policy.
Yes, but add automatically processing the content of the commit for validity and incentives to reduce the number of forks.
(IMO I wouldn’t say that signatures are required, just that blockchains usually have them.)
Without public key cryptography you just have a hash linked list (like Git).
Hash is cryptographic function.
A hash function doesn’t check if a signature is valid. Neither does git. Blockchain does check.
And?
How does it “certainly meet it”? There is no consensus mechanism in git, new blocks are not replicated across the network, there is no network at all, git works offline. You can replicate changes with remotes but there is no “git network” in any similar sense. And conflicts are definitely not resolved automatically. And the git hashes are certainly not cryptographic.
That’s 4 ways it doesn’t meet the definition. You could maybe stretch the meaning of a network to make it 3.
While blockchain is well defined, it in itself is not a product but a technology. I think what the other commenter is getting at is that simply saying something “is blockchain” means very little because what the blockchain does depends on the implementation, so when used in marketing it’s just a nebulous buzzword in that it doesn’t actually give you much information about what the product is. Same with terms like cloud, AI, virtual reality, etc.
Yes. There were a lot of companies selling “blockchain base” solutions where blockchain wasn’t really needed in the solution at all.
Then it was Metaverse based solutions. (I would argue VR is well defined)
Now it’s AI solutions.
But I think “cloud” is now post that marketing phase, and blockchain is heading that way.
Git might not count because you can have branches that then merge? But yeah, git is useful, it’s decentralized and distributed, it could be used P2P…
Git might not count because you can have branches that then merge?
AKA referencing to two past states.
Who decides to commit changes though? A human. A human who can be corrupt.
The best use case for blockchains in my opinion is elections. The dude who owns the election server won’t be able to manipulate results in any way.
While manipulating results isn’t impossible in case of a blockchain, it is still very very difficult.
Who decides to commit changes though? A human. A human who can be corrupt
I’m not entirely sure what your getting at here, but git can be run as democratically as a crypto currency where the canonical version of the project is the one with the longest chain. Seems like a bad idea to me though. I think you may be assuming the way most people rely on github/gitlab etc as an inherent part of the system, when it’s really just the most convenient way of doing things.
The best use case for blockchains in my opinion is elections.
I’ll believe it when I see a real implementation. I think the problem is anonymity, I don’t see how we can set a system up such that the results are auditable but also impossible for anyone to tie a specific vote to a specific person.
I’m not entirely sure what your getting at here, but git can be run as democratically as a crypto currency where the canonical version of the project is the one with the longest chain.
Which means elections. Which means a dude/committee in charge of a server. See the problem?
I’ll believe it when I see a real implementation. I think the problem is anonymity, I don’t see how we can set a system up such that the results are auditable but also impossible for anyone to tie a specific vote to a specific person.
This is a very very interesting topic that I’ve spent a rlly long time thinking about. I wish I had more energy to go in depth for this. The gist is this:
There will be a tradeoff between anonymity and “vote buying”.
You can have absolute anonymity by implementing a monero like blockchain. Each registered voter address gets one token. The thing that you can cast a vote for is also an address. The voter sends this token to an unknown address (that theoretically belongs to the voter themselves). Then, the voter votes from this address. This way, absolute anonymity is maintained as noone knows who sent the token to the address in the middle. BUT. I could buy votes like this too. I could bribe a voter to send their token to the middle address, which I control.
To prevent voter buying, you can have an open blockchain where all transactions are visible to everyone. However, you get pseudo anonymity here. Every registered voter address gets one token like above. No one except for the election commission knows which address belongs to whom. So while the election commission cannot manipulate votes, it can leak who voted for whom.
Now that being said, normal elections aren’t as theoretically anonymous as well. For ballots, your name is on the envelope. A compromised election commission could leak this info as well. For EVMs, one line of code could leak who you are. The person granting you entry can note down your information. The EVM can ping this person as to which vote was cast while you were in there.
Hence, in my opinion, the second option of the open blockchain is the best one provided that the election commission is under strict regulation (which it generally is in any case).
Which means elections. Which means a dude/committee in charge of a server. See the problem?
No you don’t need a centralized server or a committee.
So who conducts elections then?
I don’t know what you are talking about.
You said you could democratically manage git, hence bypassing blockchains. Democracy means elections (unless you mean some exotic form of democracy like Athenian democracy). But elections need to be conducted.
I said you would need a central authority (like an election commission) to conduct elections. You said that there was no need for that. So I asked for your method of conducting elections.
The dude who owns the election server won’t be able to manipulate results in any way.
Sure he will. He can just ignore votes for one candidate and not add them to the chain. Blockchains are only resistant to manipulation if they’re distributed and people agree on the canonical version. Even then if enough people agree to manipulate them they can, like they did with Ethereum.
The integrity of blockchains isn’t immune from malicious activity. It is just way way harder to be manipulated. No blockchain means 1 server needs to be manipulated. Blockchain means more than 1 servers need to be manipulated.
Man, I remember how back in 2009 we were hyped about this possible chance for a fairer world that a independent currency might bring. Guess we were quite wrong. :)
The independent currency was still worth standard currency… So the ones already hoarding all of that existing make-believe-number money just bought up and schemed us out of new make-believe-number money.
How did we not see this coming? :(
not smart
Not gonna claim any foresight.
But now in 2024. It dose seem rather insane to me. That no one predicted the energy problems of proof of work.
We were well aware of the co2 cost of computing.
No one expected that dozens of crypto currencies would pop up. Most of us actually expected it to just fail and dissolve. But there was the naive, little glimpse of hope that this might destroy the petro dollar (which was much stronger in 2009 than today).
I think the only project I’ve seen so far where I’ve felt that a blockchain has actually been the correct choice is Alfis, which is a decentralized DNS that uses the blockchain as the public append-only ledger that it is, and it uses proof-of-work to add arbitrary costs to updates - to make spamming or namesquatting expensive.
Amazon has a database project called QLDB that uses blockchain for its audit log.
What do you call an audit log that’s cryptographically verifiable? A blockchain.
So why not do the same with a bank ledger?
Here is why
Web3 is more about smart contracts and alt coins, you didn’t address my point
Edit: you can downvote if you like but your post objectively shows you don’t know the difference between web3 and block chain, and choosing to debate web3 instead of making changes to bank ledgers in my original post is a logical fallacy
Banks should.
But there is too much technological debt to implement.
Even if a particular coin has a finite number of possible coins, it exists in an unbounded universe of other coins.
Other SHIT coins… to be precise
Only my made up digital monopoly money is legit, all the rest are pointless.
What is this argument even supposed to mean? Just because other coins exist doesn’t have any effect on a particular coin’s value or use case. I’m not even pro crypto or trying to be a dick or anything, just totally lost.
I’ve read through this whole thread, and I still haven’t really come to any solid conclusions on it. I’m skeptical of crypto as a kind of idiotic speculative market, but that’s also every market ever. But then, the blockchain is apparently different from crypto, even though they’re both hype-laden marketing terms that have been completely fucked up. I think doing [redacted] with crypto is still potentially cool, though I think it still has limited anonymity, from what I’ve heard, and the speculative market also fucks it up.
Is “the blockchain” just like some nerd shit that’s for internal hospital ledgers, and beyond that it’s all kind of moot garbage, or what? Someone spoonfeed me.
One is the tech, the other is an example of a type of the tech. A square is a rectangle, but a rectangle is not a square.
For most applications, this isn’t necessary:
There are some examples like in biotech/finance that I personally believe will require a blockchain to be truly “fair” at the end
I like this flowchart but honestly most third party data handling solutions are just asking for a major breach: stoking vulnerable people over the coals.
Ignore the FBI hack, and the SEC hack, and the DoD hack, and the FINRA hack, and the…
Now add that trustlessness is impossible and you can scratch the blockchain box for good.
You cannot get rid of trust in some form. You need entry to the system, so you need to trust its gateway. You need to trust the network to not have some vulnerability like a 50% attack. And eventually you need to trust the developers not to add critical bugs (that alone is virtually impossible) or pull off some scam.
So, since you need to trust someone, might as well choose some government regulated party like a bank or a lawyer and choose conventional and efficient tech.
The solution to the requirement of minimal trust is not to just give up on and trust few peopme with everything. 50% attacks in large networks are next to impossible.
Diagram is missing a “do records need to interact” control box.
I’m stupid, can you give me a like, more clear practical example of a good use of blockchain? Cause I get the sense that a good amount of this conflict, going off that flowchart, is going to be due to the evaluation of these situations as like, not needing to arise in the first place, or maybe like, a philosophical objection to the necessity of the technology, maybe. But I think a clearer example could help with this.
can you give me a like, more clear practical example of a good use of blockchain?
Do you see how all the answers are generic, tend to be long and read like a sales pitch? That’s because the actual answer is: no, there is no practical legal application that isn’t better solved with conventional tech.
The only application that is successfully used in practice is paying for organized crime: buying goods and services on the dark web and paying for extortion like ransomware attacks.
Blockchain technology can improve health care services in a decentralized, tamper-proof, transparent, and secure manner.
This can also be used for research institutes to be able to research with each others’ findings.
Here is a paper on the topic: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8555946/
Blockchains are also great for the verification of digital goods as tangible assets. While I’m not sure we reach this level of meme, people could 100% mint their own house’s deed and trade that as a legit way to buy/sell their house.
I am very carefully avoiding the words “NFT” because they are another horrible use-case of a blockchain (and a prime example of how capitalists turn a good tech into something stupid for a quick buck), but this would theoretically be a tokenized-security with a 1:1 to the actual deed to the house.
Is that more secure than the normal process of buying a house? Do you really need it to be external to a 3rd party when the transfer of homes already exists? No not really lol, hence why we probably see it the most in highly regulated industries like biotech and finance first.
HIPPA/Securities-laws (or lack-thereof) will require a tough regulatory framework that “could” realistically be done via a 3rd party, but you have to ask yourself if you trust big-pharma and wallstreet enough to regulate themselves like that.
Edit: Looked up and saw c/lemmyshitpost, maybe I’m spending too much time elucidating a response on a meme thread but this is my take on the tech.
I just wrote out another comment, and I think I kinda figured out my core question, but, is there a way to save my medical information without doxxing myself, if this is supposed to be like, a public database, you know, if that’s kinda the point, is that everyone can look at everyone else’s stuff? I got the impression that a lot of the current blockchain stuff wasn’t capable of the necessary levels of storage that would be required for like, health records, on their own.
I dunno, maybe you could have some situation where you have a key, that opens up some cryptography on the blockchain, and that blockchain piece when unlocked gives you another key that lets you access your medical records, or something like that, and that might be able to fit. But, then, I don’t really see how that’s any different from just having like, the key to the person’s medical records be contingent on person. Like biometric security, or government ID, or something.
Point out wherever I’ve made wrong assumptions here, I’m just kind of talking out my ass, and hoping that I’m correct inso that the conversation can continue and I can scrape more out of it, I don’t really expect to be right.
No no, thank you for this.
I understand blockchain as a concept, and kind of hownit plays into cryptocurrency, but understanding a true example of blockchain use outside of finances is something I needed more info on, thank you
The big improvement is the removal of the need to trust some 3rd party but also to add the precision and complexity of computer language to some domain. For example health care data, a block chain system would make one standard for how the records are stored, it would make it so the data in encrypted by the patient and they alone could grant access. When a new provider wants access there is one standard way that is automated and secure. None of which is dependent on a 3rd party who can be compromised or become corrupt and no longer act in good faith. Obviously there is a lot of details here dependent on making the block chain work flawlessly.
Imo block chains have 2 core issues to over come in order to really solve problems. First is being constructed so that they are bug free. Software is not a mature enough discipline for that as of yet. Second, is what happens when you loose you key or it gets stolen. If someone steals you Bitcoin private key, you can’t get them back after they transfer them out. Or if you just loose the key your up a creek. What is required is a way to prove you are you to the system that can’t be stolen and can’t be lost. That is a far harder question.
The blockchain is essentially a ledger that tracks transactions (including the creation of currency). One thing that is not always clear is how important it is for a blockchain to be decentralized. When I say “decentralized,” I mean that many different people are operating a server that performs transactions on a larger network. These people are rewarded in currency for their efforts, and are sometimes referred to as “miners,” though this term is changing somewhat.
There are thousands of these servers in a network that are operating on and tracking the ledger for blockchains like Bitcoin or Ethereum. Any updates to the ledger are verified by all of these nodes. As long as 51% of nodes can verify a transaction, it will be added to the ledger. This means that as long as someone doesn’t own 51% of the network, they can’t just inject whatever transactions they want (i.e., fraudulent activity). In practice, this makes these networks very resilient to fraud.
I think this paves the way for a lot of the practical examples you’re looking for. For example, there’s no way for the network to decide to just give tons of money to a single entity for some “economic policy” like Too Big to Fail (i.e., corporate bailouts). This means you don’t have to wake up one morning worrying about whether or not your currency will rapidly inflate because of things like corruption. Another example is the true ownership of digital assets. NFTs have (rightly) gotten a lot of flack for being overpriced JPEGs, but there are real use cases here. A random middleman can’t just decide to price gouge because they own all the tickets first (Ticketmaster). Instead, artists can mint tickets on the blockchain (very important: this ensures authenticity) and then fans can buy them on the blockchain - no middle man required. You still show a QR code at the door for verification like you would now.
As long as 51% of nodes can verify a transaction, it will be added to the ledger. This means that as long as someone doesn’t own 51% of the network, they can’t just inject whatever transactions they want (i.e., fraudulent activity). In practice, this makes these networks very resilient to fraud.
Could like, 51% of the owners just coordinate to kind of, do a fraud? I mean it sounds like an inherently democratic system, but from what I’ve understood of, say, miners, right (dunno how this works for proof of stake, but I imagine it has similar problems), those rigs are gonna be bought by people who disproportionately have higher earnings and can afford more GPUs in finland or wherever, and then that’s going to just kinda recreate the same power dynamic that we see in the real world already. Which ends up in the same kind of speculative market garbage we have with stock ownership in companies already.
I also don’t really understand how a ticketing system would really work on the blockchain. I probably don’t know enough about cryptography to know how it might work, but I got the sense that nfts weren’t even overpriced jpegs, they were overpriced links with pseudo-legal contracts, that were still prone to link rot, and didn’t really indicate any IP ownership. If you had a code on the ticket instead that could only be verified as real, rather than fake, by a ticketing person, instead of like, a link, that would probably be the use case, right? am I getting that correct, is that something cryptography can do? probably, right?
Also, can someone just like, steal your ticket still? Or like impersonate you as the ticket guy, or what? Like from the others have told me and also just from what I know already, you can’t really change the chain unless, like you said, you have 51% of the owners, so how would you be able to like, put something in the chain that identifies the owner as being the owner? Wouldn’t it be more secure to have just like, a verifiable code or something, that you can delete, that isn’t public, between the artist and the buyer? Then you could ensure anonymity between the buyer and the venue and stuff, you could work in establishing characteristics like oh here’s my driver’s license, here’s my government ID, without putting that stuff on the blockchain, which seems like a bad idea.
In practice, this makes these networks very resilient to fraud.
Could like, 51% of the owners just coordinate to kind of, do a fraud?
Sybil attacks sound like the kind of thing you’re talking about. I don’t have the expertise to go into it, but one person (or a group) creates lots of nodes and uses that influence to do bad things to the network, potentially including fraud. Or as you suggest, legitimate users can just coordinate to do whatever they wanted (see ethereum vs ethereum classic if you want a chuckle).
I want to make a note that the networks are only resilient to a specific type of fraud - people trying to enter data in a way that doesn’t meet the criteria of the system. That’s all well and good for wallet to wallet transactions, but when you have transactions going off chain (like buying something, trading for other kinds of coins, doing anything with crypto exchanges), there are still plenty of other kinds of fraud that are possible and happen all the time, because while the chain is fairly trustworthy, nothing else about the system is. Most kinds of fraud involve doing things that technically you have permission to do, because you lied to people to access their password or promised them bigger returns in the future or missold a product or service etc and all of that is still possible under crypto. In some cases crypto is more vulnerable to these things because of having no central authority or regulator or laws or whatever.
A blockchain can provide an irrevocable record, and it can provide a mechanism for uncooperating parties to agree that the record should be created. This is usually used for financial transactions involving coins of dubious value, but it can also be used for recording transactions of real world assets as long as those transactions can be faithfully linked to the event on the blockchain. Therefore the blockchain doesn’t really prove that a transaction is fraudulent or not, all it proves is that a sufficient number of parties believe it is not.
as long as those transactions can be faithfully linked to the event on the blockchain.
That kind of seems like the big glaring video game boss style weak point, to me. I feel like you’d still need some external third party to verify that everything is properly linked up to the blockchain, or like, someone could just impersonate someone else through whatever things are used to link something to the blockchain, and then it’s just kinda back to square one, I would think. I dunno, I think also maybe I just don’t really quite get it.
The oracle problem has had some attempts at being solved.
A the moment external data on a blockchain is more about transparency than trust.
Git is not a blockchain. There is no distributed ledger; no consensus algorithm.
Ledger: repository database.
Consensus algorithm: repository access key.
Key word distributed ledger. Git repositories don’t talk to each other except when told to do so by users.
I shouldn’t need to explain why an access key is not a consensus algorithm. Seriously?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_ledger no need to talk automatically, only distribution necessary without single point of failure. say „synchronized“, if you mean realtime synchronized then not in git, but synchronized manually.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_(computer_science) only need to determine which block to commit to database, access key do that. if meant in term of „which repo is real one“, signed commit optional feature, maybe that speak against it being blockchain because not by default.
Well in decentralized, autonomous (user run) systems you have actually 0 trust.
Blockchain is often described as a solution in search for a problem. It’s a clever technology, but people don’t really know what it can be used for besides storing cryptocurrency transactions.
People have thought about storing other kinds of data in the blockchain, like health records, but no one can really point out to why this would be better than other solutions.
To achieve something similar with health records without blockchain, all that is needed is just a cryptographic signature. The hospital cryptographically signs a digital health document and email it to you. The hospital in turn stores it in some shared database accessible by other hospitals. Done.
If the health record is somehow lost from the shared database, then you got your own copy of it as backup. They can’t modify the health record either, because then it would diverge from your own copy.
The worst thing they can do is to add falsified health records without your approval, but that’s a problem with blockchain as well. Blockchain cannot verify that the input data is truthful (garbage in, garbage out).
The cryptographic signature step is a part of blockchain either way, so there’s no extra technical overhead in the non-blockchain way.
The cryptography has much simpler algebraic analogues - what we are looking for is a “one-way function”. This means a mathematical symbol that only works on the left side of the equals. The simplest one is the remainder of a division. For example if I told you that I had a remainder of 5 after dividing by 20, you wouldn’t know if the original numerator was 25, 45, 65, 85, and so on. This operator is called
mod(modulus). Even if you don’t know what value I started with, It’s not hard to guess what possible numerators could be with modulus. That’s where the cryptography comes into play: a cryptographic hash is designed so that it’s practically impossible to guess the original numerator. We’ll stick with the modulus for explanatory purposes, but imagine that you can’t list off possible numerators like I did.Now we can invent a puzzle for a computer to solve. We’ll start off with the same values as before, but - again - we are disallowing easy guesses. This forces us to check
1 mod 20,2 mod 20,3 mod 20,4 mod 20,5 mod 20and so on. Eventually we’ll hit25 mod 20giving us the solution toX mod 20 = 25. Now you can go back to the person that gave you the puzzle and prove that you’ve done 25 steps of work to arrive at a solution (or have made a lucky 1/25 guess). This is called “proof of work”. A cryptographic has consists of a certain number of bits, such as 256 bits - this means a series of 1’ s and 0’s 256 long. The puzzle presented to the computer is “find the numerator that results in the first 50 bits being zero” (the more bits are required to be zero, the longer it will take to find the answer). Because of the incredibly slim chance of guessing the correct numerator, it doesn’t really matter if the computer counts up (like we did with modulus) or guesses. So, in practice, everybody trying to find the solution starts at a random number and starts counting, or trying other random numbers, until someone wins the jackpot. It’s basically a lottery, but the correct numbers have to be discovered instead of being dropped out of a glass ball at the end of the week. Once a computer finds a solution, everybody else playing the game can check their numerator as [probabilistic] proof that they have done work.Now we can use this lottery to create a blockchain. We start with 5 things: a globally agreed on solution we are looking for (789), an initial block (which is just a number - lets say 12345), Bob’s account #5 of $100, and Sally’s account #6 of $200, and a huge amount of players of the above game. Sally wants to transfer $20 to Bob, so she says to all the players: “I’m #6 and want to give #5 $20. There’s a $1 prize for finding a new block for me.” All the players make a new denominator, by placing the numbers next to eachother - so
12345 6 200 5 100 20 1- or just1234562005100201. All the players start trying to find the number that will result in 789. Eventually someone finds 1234562005100990 after a lot of work/guesses. Everybody checks their work1234562005100990 mod 1234562005100201 = 789. The winning player receives their prize, and now everybody has a new block to start from:1234562005100201 1234562005100990. Next time someone wants to send some money they will use12345620051002011234562005100990as the initial block instead of 12345. Hence, we have set up a chain starting with:12345->12345620051002011234562005100990-> …There’s your block…chain. Anybody can independently verify that the work has been done by checking the answers. It’s incredibly elegant but, as we’ve seen, incredibly destructive.
Good explanation. I am extremely bad at math, I never made it past kind of, high school algebra, and I still can’t do basic math very well, but this explained it pretty well, thank you. So, someone has to start a transaction before mining can start, if that’s how it works?
I’m Bitcoin there is a built-in reward to keep things moving forward even if there are no transactions. Different coins do different things.
PoW is destructive. Blockchain doesn’t have to be PoW.
Hash linked list part was good.
You missed out public key cryptography which is also key to blockchain.
A blockchain is just an verifiable chain of transactions using cryptography and some agreed upon protocol. Each “block” in the chain is a block of data that follows a format specified by the protocol. The protocol also decides who can push blocks and how to verify a block is valid. The advantages it has comes from the fact the protocol can describe a method of giving authority across a pool of untrusted third parties, while still making sure none of them can cheat. Currently the most popular forms are Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Stake (PoS).
Bitcoin for example is just an outgoing transaction to a specific crypto key (which is similar to a checking account) as a reward for “mining” the block, followed by a list of transactions going from a specific account to another account. These are verified by needing a special chunk of data that turns the overall hash of the entire block to a binary chunk containing a number of 0 bits in front, which makes it hard to compute and a race to get the right input data. This way of establishing an authority is called Proof of Work, and whoever is first and gets their block across the network faster wins. Other cryptocurrencies like Ethereum use Proof of Stake where you “stake” currency you’ve already acquired as a promise that you won’t cheat, and if someone can prove you cheated your stake is lost.
The problem it solves is not needing a trusted third party to handle this process, such as a government agency or an organization. Everyone can verify the integrity of a blockchain by using the protocol and going over each block, making sure the data follows the rules. This blockchain is distributed so everyone can make sure they are on the same chain, else it’s considered a “forked” chain and will migrate back to the point of consensus. This can be useful for situations where the incentive to cheat the system for monetary or political gain outweigh the cost of running a distributed ledger. It can also be useful when you don’t want anyone selectively removing past data as the chain of verifiability will be broken. The only issue with this is you need some way to reach a consensus of who gets to make each block in the chain, as someone need to be the authority for that instant in time. This is where the requirement of Proof of Work (PoS) or Proof of Stake (PoS) come in. Without these or another system that distributes the authority to create blocks, you lose the power of the blockchain.
Examples I’ve heard of are tracking shipments or parts (similar to how the FAA already mandates part traceability) and medical records. This way lots of organizations can publish records relating to these to a central system that isn’t under any single entities control, and can’t change their records to suit their needs.
These systems are not fool proof though, PoW has the ability to be abused using a 51% attack and PoS requires some form of punishment for trying to cheat the system (in cryptocurrency you “stake” currency and lose it if you try to cheat the system). Both of these run into issues when there is no incentive to invest resources into the system, a lack of distribution across independent parties, or one party has sufficient power to gain a majority control of the network.
Overall you are right to be skeptical of cryptocurrency, it’s been a long time since I participated due to the waves of scam coins and general focus on illegal activities such as gambling. The lack of central authorities also perpetuates the problem of cryptoscams, as anyone can start one and there are limited controls over stopping such scams. This is not dissimilar to previous investment scams though, it’s just the modern iteration of such scams. The real question is does it solve a real problem, as Bitcoin did in the sense it helps facilitate transactions outside of government controls. You might not agree with that but it does give it an intrinsic value to a large number of people looking to move currency without as much paperwork. Now if it makes it worth $68.5k USD (at current prices) is a different story, different people have different use cases and I only highlighted one of those.
I read all the replies in kind of, an order going from simplest to what looked to be like the more complicated ones, and this seems like the least charged and best explanation of the sort of, externalities, and it seems like a pretty good overview of it. The other guy did a good summary of how the technology works for a dumbass like me but I’m still not sure I got all of it.
So, like, you could kind of conceive of a use for these technologies generally, right, but it would seem like, even from your explanation and also from what I kind of passively know already, this is kind of, reliant on a libertarian conception of society, which isn’t necessarily bad. I think more concerningly it also seems like both of the basic technologies, there, PoW and PoS, are vulnerable to abuse from the powerful, or from those who have more resources, with maybe PoS being less so, I dunno, still don’t really get how that one works specifically which might change it. Which is sort of, antithetical to a libertarian conception of society. I mean unless you’re an ancap but those guys are dumbasses.
So I dunno. It seems like a kind of inherently conflicted technology to me, like, paradoxical. I kinda hope someone can conceivably work out the problems of power abuse, but that would seem to be what I define as a “whole enchilada” style of issue, there.
Still, I do like the ability to freely buy drugs and circumvent the government, that’s kind of epic. Well, most of the time, anyways. Maybe not when the CIA does it, or when narcos and cartels do it, but I dunno how much either of them have tied up in crypto, it’d probably make more sense for both of them just to deal in fiat currency or trade resources or something.
It’s the whole web 3 concept of the community powers the infrastructure to run the community. It’s an enticing concept, The people using the service pay with their CPU and internet connection to use the service. It makes what would be a rather expensive infrastructure almost free.
With blockchain they’re doing some smart things, you can wrap code around the ledgers, in the end it’s just varying fancy levels of receipts verified and secured by the community. It’s verifiable but anonymous.
But then you’ve got cryptocurrency doing complex math burning through tons of electricity looking for unicorns to add to the ledger, in a massive pyramid scheme. Okay, it’s not exactly a pyramid scheme. Whoever starts a given currency makes the vast majority of the money off of it when the coins are easy to find, but at some point it is pretty close to any other given financial system, with the benefits of being anonymous and verifiable.
The bitcoins are just entries on the ledgers. But then s*** like NFTs are on ledgers. Someone sells you a receipt for a JPEG on a URL. It’s all only worth what someone will pay you for it. And without a whole bunch of regulation, it’s not exactly a safe market.
So data stores tend to present interfaces which allow the CRUD operations on each record: Create, Read, Update, and Destroy.
Create: You hit submit on a comment form Read: Your client app shows the content of the comment Update: You hit submit on the comment editing form Destroy: You delete the comment
Well, in some cases it’s very handy to make a data store with only two operations: Create, and Read.
This is called a “log”. A log is an append-only data structure.
One of the benefits of using a log is that two different processes can operate on the data, at different times, and can be confident they’re operating on the same context despite not being in communication with each other.
This “log” structure could be useful for instance in recording the moves of a chess game. Then, a hundred years later, someone can read each move out of a book and deterministically re-create the board state.
Now they know that they are looking at the same chess game that Ben Franklin was in 1775, despite not being in touch with Ben at all.
Really big, distributed systems benefit from this “synchronization without communication” feature of logs.
Excellent article on this data structure and its benefits here: https://engineering.linkedin.com/distributed-systems/log-what-every-software-engineer-should-know-about-real-time-datas-unifying
Blockchain is a log.
Relying on a log requires you to trust that nobody else has Update or Destroy access. For it to work correctly and everyone be on the same page, Updates and Destroys need to never happen.
With a coordinated system like people trying to understand historical chess games, or a corporation like LinkedIn seeking its own self interest, there’s no trust issue.
But with other things, like “who’s got how much money”, people don’t want to have to trust that some centralized log owner is modifying the data on the sly.
That’s where blockchain goes beyond a regular log. It’s a log designed to resist tampering, because each “block” in the chain goes through a distributed checking process where many copies of the log are used, and everyone checks each other’s copies to ensure nobody is cheating.
we need the blockchainsaw
git is a blockchain, just without PoW
I’ll likely get downvoted but Polestar, the EV automaker that used to build performance variants for Volvo, uses blockchain to track minerals used in their EV’s.
Circulor Circulor’s blockchain technology enables tracing of extracted raw materials, particularly those with significant impact to communities and the environment.
I like that they use blockchain to ensure the minerals they use aren’t coming from negative sources but I’m sure someone will argue and say it’s stupid or that SQL can do the same.
Polestar uses contracts and audits to ethically source materials, not blockchain. It uses blockchain as a shitty append-only SQL database to (apparently) tell you where the materials came from. Let me quote from Circulor’s website:
data can be fed seamlessly to the blockchain via system integration using RESTful Web Service APIs with security and authentication protocols
So the chain is private and accessible only through a centralized, authenticated REST API. This is a traditional web application. A centralized append-only ledger is not even a blockchain.
Yes, it can probably be done with a traditional database
You could do literally the same thing with a series of private key signed envelopes containing the prior chain of signed content. Boom, verifiable chain of custody without any rainforests being burned down.
I’m hoping you’re being hyperbolic about burning rainforests because not every blockchain is power hungry like Bitcoin or the old the POW Ethereum.
Besides, the rainforest is being burned down to make way for more cattle to provide more beef. Not sure why you chose the rainforest as example of intense computational power.
It’s somewhat hyperbolic, but in relative terms, it is pretty wasteful to implement it with a blockchain over what I just suggested. Cryptographic consensus doesn’t solve anything for the given example that the verifiable chain of custody in my proposed alternative does not and there’s zero way it’s less expensive than a bunch of asymmetric signatures that can be verified offline on demand. If anything, it’s better than a blockchain since it would only require a majority of parties to be complicit in a lie to rewrite history in a blockchain full of parties that have no business with any given transaction other than to enforce immutability whereas it would require every single node in the chain of custody before you to be complicit in my proposal.
And I’m surprised that the rainforest thing confuses you. It and burning tires are the go-to colloquialisms for complaining about things that are unnecessarily environmentally hostile, particularly when talking about crypto crap. But yeah, blockchains are a solution in search of a problem, so the derision is intentional. There’s no legitimate problem that can be solved with blockchain that can’t be solved in a better way. Cryptocurrency only in theory and this supply chain problem are the closest it gets to blockchain making sense and it still fails to be better than non-blockchain alternatives.
No, because it would be trivial to make a change and regenerate the entire chain.
Yeah, you would only need to have every single private key for all nodes that follow you in the supply chain. Super trivial.
OK. So you are proposing a private blockchain with minimal data validation rules.
How do you decide who gets to add the next record?
You would also need some protection against all nodes sharing their keys.
It’s not a blockchain. It’s closer to a series of forwarded emails with certificate signing. Who gets to add the next record? How about the party that is doing that step of processing in the supply chain. And I have a great idea for protecting the keys. It’s called asymmetric key pairs. You can verify a signature using a public key without having the private key required to be able to generate that signature.
as hostile as people are to block chain due to NFT’s and bad implementations, the technology itself has its use cases. It’s a great solution for information exchange that requires verification and Immutation. This makes them perfect for ledgers or transaction networks.
It’s just there is so much bad PR regarding it everyone just discredits it. Not all of the block chain technologies are massively energy intensive per transaction, it’s just many of the cryptocurrencies use the most intensive one because it’s also arguably the most secure
I think it’s funny how most lemmy users are pro open source, pro privacy, pro digital rights; but once it comes to money all that is thrown out of the window and they happily get on their knees for paypal and the few other large players.
Yes, the current state of crypto is a mess. People are attracted by the promise of the big payout, rather then seeking an alternative payment system, making them ripe for scammers that promise the world, but in the end only rug “investors”. Even “functional” cryptos are often highly centralized, making them as bad as banks in terms of reliability. Almost none implement any privacy features, and if they do, its typically a tacked on afterthought.
But this does not make the original idea invalid. Will it ever live up to the promise of alternative money? Maybe. Maybe not. Only time will tell if the issues that exist right now will be fixed.
Crypto is a liberterian capitalist’s wet dream.
Tax-free, anonymous, with no accountability. Perfect for white washing corporate gain.
Just because it is “open-source” doesn’t mean it will be used for good.
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Crypto is not anonymous. Even monero, the most private cryptocurrency, has a feature called “view only wallets”, so 3rd party auditing is possible, if not easier then auditing today. Will individuals use it to avoid some taxes? Sure, it gets easier for them. Will corporations avoid more taxes then they already do? Doubtful.
A view only wallet doesn’t trace anything that doesn’t get received directly by that view only wallet. If we had two wallets that didn’t interact with that wallet, it couldn’t do shit to trace or audit my transactions.
If you are a company and run a webstore, it could be mandatory that all funds must go through a wallet where the tax authorities have a view key. This would be trivial to enforce with penalties whenever for publicly using addresses that point to other wallets. Peer to peer transactions (for eg. used goods or produce from your garden) are already except from taxes in my jurisdiction, so these transactions can be private.
Ahhhh I see what you mean now that’s true but would be dependant on the legislation of the area like you said.
Currency is a pretty sound idea, whether it will ever get (back?) to a usable place is it’s own discussion.
A lot of the conversation about blockchain as a technology though involves the ones that store additional information as a distributed database, which comes with problems.
It’s also ‘neat’, but they all depend on trusting the validation method for putting info into the database, which largely defeats the point of having a “trustless” database once the data is in there. There’s the occasional proposed use case that seems vaguely useful, but they mostly boil down to replacing legal contracts with a database that’s distributed “somewhere”.
Just because it’s open source doesn’t mean it’s good. Also not every situation is the same. Using Linux instead of windows has advantages/disadvantages very different than using crypto instead of fiat.
I can think of thousands of reasons to pick Linux, thousands to pick windows and thousands to pick fiat. I’d have to think real hard to even think of a single reason to pick crypto over fiat.
I prefer free software not for its price, but for the freedom it gives me. Naturally I donate to these causes roughly what I’d have spend on a commercial one. They however do not need to know who I am, so I exclusively use crypto for that. I made one exception for an organization using paypal, and promptly they pulled address and name from that, gave it to a 3rd party which then send a postcard to me. You could see it as a nice gesture, but I think it’s just rude to use data in ways I did not explicitly consented to. Just take your money and leave me in peace.
In a similar manner I like to use it to pay for email, vpn, hosting and other online stuff. In fact this lemmy instance is 100% paid for by microdonations from its users, and because the provider accepts it directly no conversion was needed.
Open source has nothing to do with it. All the things you’ve mentioned is made for the good of the people. Crypto is not. Crypto is for the rich to get richer and exploit the poor.
Anonymous payments is not a good thing and throws any sort of fraud protection out the window. It’s just for libertarians trying to avoid taxes, and criminals trying to launder money. It’s not beneficial to hide from the government that you bought a extra fatty pizza.
Also nothing about Crypto is grass roots whatsoever unlike what you listed before. Crypto took off because it was inorganically and heavily pushed by very rich people knowing they can make a large profit.
Your instance is literally an archaic PoW token that causes a tremendous amount of harm to the environment and wastes energy so you can hide buying drugs. That’s not including the fact either that you have to go through exchanges who require identifying information to withdraw into non monopoly money.
Centralization is not always bad, this is libertarian logic.
Do you what to know the best part about xmr? You can kick and scream and bitch about me using it, but you can’t do jack shit about it. Maybe you can lobby at the side of paypal for more regulations, until the enshittification eventually catches up with you. glhf
It’s too late for you. As soon as you want to turn that monero into cash, you’re going to be asked a lot of questions by the exchanges and the tax man.
But I don’t want to exchange is back to fiat, that’s the entire point.
but once it comes to money all that is thrown out of the window and they happily get on their knees for paypal and the few other large players.
I don’t think anybody likes paypal, Visa, Mastercard or any of the other major players. It’s just that blockchain “currencies” are much, much worse.
The idea of “Alternative Money” is a silly idea. Money has always been, and will always be connected to a state. The taxing and spending of the state is what gives money its value.
With cryptocurrencies, the “value” is only “greater fool” value. Someone is willing to pay 70k in dollars for a bitcoin because they think someone else is going to be willing to buy it from them for $71k at some point in the future. If it were a legitimate currency people wouldn’t bother checking its value in dollars because it would be useful in its own right. The only legitimate demand for cryptocurrencies is to pay ransom, and even then, the people who get the ransom immediately transform it back to a useful “fiat” currency.
Lemmy users are knowledgeable about open source, privacy, digital rights and knowledgeable enough to know that cryptocurrencies are a scam.
The idea that money is tied to the state is silly. Many things have been used as money, way before the concept of a “state” existed. Undeniably the money that lasted best across the passage of time is gold. Up until very recently it was the standard to settle cross country currency exchanges with. The value does not come from the state, but from people willing to exchange it for goods and services. Todays fiat money is created at will by a few select people that are not democratically elected. They get to decide how much they debase your savings for the “greater good”, while the ones that profit the most are those who control the source.
Most people do not care about their open source, privacy and digital rights, so they only hear and care about crypto when the price jumps or when it is used for crime. Everything else is simply not newsworthy. So you end up with a bunch of “investors” looking to make a quick buck and people who believe to solve crime with more laws (requesting ransoms is already illegal, has existed before crypto and currently gift cards are scammers favorite form of payment).
I never mentioned the price nor suggested investing, because quite frankly, I don’t care. What I do care about is giving the few big companies that control the internet as little data and influence as possible, and not processing payments through them is a really important step. So I keep about as much crypto as I keep cash in my wallet, and use it preferably when buying or selling.
The idea that money is tied to the state is silly.
No, it’s not. It’s historically accurate. All money is state money, always has been, always will be.
Many things have been used as money, way before the concept of a “state” existed.
Nope. Sorry, that’s wrong.
Undeniably the money that lasted best across the passage of time is gold.
Gold isn’t money. Gold is a commodity. Gold was used for jewelry, and as a bright shiny thing that didn’t tarnish had value because of that. People would sometimes exchange gold or things made of gold, but not gold coins. But, they’d also exchange other useful things: food, tools, cloth, etc. Gold coins were created by various states.
people willing to exchange it for goods and services
Never happened. Sure, there were gifts or donations, but it wasn’t X amount of gold for Y amount of grain. There were debts, but debts weren’t listed as a certain amount of gold, or a certain amount of money. Debts are old, money is new. Trading one thing for a certain “price” didn’t happen until coins existed, and coins didn’t exist until there was a state.
Todays fiat money is created at will by a few select people that are not democratically elected
Oh, blah blah blah. “Fiat money” is the only kind of money that has ever existed or will ever exist. It doesn’t much matter whether the government is “democratically elected” or not, currencies are created by and backed by a state and their ability to obtain a monopoly on the use of force within their area of influence. Most states with currencies are currently democratic, even if the structure of the US federal reserve is confusing to you.
They get to decide how much they debase your savings for the “greater good”, while the ones that profit the most are those who control the source.
More blah blah blah crypto nonsense.
Look, do some research on this stuff. Debt is a good place to start.
people willing to exchange it for goods and services Never happened.
This is literally what you do every day. You exchange something for goods and services. This something is money based on it’s functional role, not some obscure definitions. To be money, it must be used as money. To be used as money, a group of people must agree that the item is worth exchanging for. This something does need to fulfill additional properties to be useful, notably it must be fungible, durable, portable, recognizable, divisible and have a stable supply. Gold does fit this description, but so does fiat.
What you are describing is a government issued currency, which has some overlap with money, but is not the same thing. Maybe you should research on this stuff.
This is literally what you do every day. You exchange something for goods and services
Yes, now that there’s money it’s what happens. Prior to money there were debts, but no exchange of “X” for a set amount of goods or services.
To be money, it must be used as money.
To be money it must meet all the definitions of money. It must be a store of value, it must be a unit of account and a medium of exchange. There was no real money until there were states.
What you are describing is a government issued currency
Government issued currencies are the only real currencies. Everything else is valued by what someone will pay for it in government issued currency.
Gold being a commodity because its shiny and therefore has value is no different than “I want to use this coin to better protect my data and privacy”. Both are values attributed to a commodity. Also, “It may have intrinsic value (commodity money), or be legally exchangeable for something with intrinsic value (representative money), or only have nominal value (fiat money).”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_money
You are wrong that money has always existed as state issued. That isn’t true
Gold being a commodity because its shiny and therefore has value is no different than “I want to use this coin to better protect my data and privacy”.
It’s completely different. Gold is a commodity because it is inherently useful in itself. If someone invented a way to create gold out of thin air, people would continue to want gold because it’s pretty and shiny, and because it’s a very good electrical conductor that doesn’t tarnish. Crypto coins are only useful because everyone thinks that a greater fool will come along and pay as much or more. Everyone knows they have no inherent value, but so far there has always been a greater fool.
You are wrong that money has always existed as state issued. That isn’t true
Sure it is.
Hey by the way, after we had that discussion bitcoin surpassed silver to become the 8th most valuable asset by market cap on the entire planet More than coca cola and Pepsi combined.
Also no, money has existed outside of States and Countries before you should look into the Theory of Money and the history behind it
It’s not an asset. A bubble doesn’t prove anything. Tulips were once as valuable as houses… until they weren’t.
The theory of money is a theory. The fact is that money has always been associated with a state.
If making payments in crypto back to FIAT was free it would be more popular. For me it’s mostly useless since the fee to spend crypto is more than the (often free) fee for using my credit card.
New needs to be better and cheaper to be picked up.
There’s attempts at having payments with 0 fees, that is, if you don’t involve exchanges or payment service providers, who obviously charge a fee for fiat conversion.
Using Nano you have 0 fees for the transaction and ideally as little as 0.25% fee at an exchange for fiat conversion.
It’s not only without fees, it’s very fast (ideallly sub-second confirmation) and eco-friendly (requiring no special hardware, because there is no mining and using very little energy overall).
What’s lacking is places where you can actually pay for things with Nano, but that’s the classic chicken and egg problem.
Fixing issues like energy consumption, confirmation time, fees?
Just in case you haven’t heard of Nano, allow me to tell you it’s an attempt at creating a peer-to-peer digital currency with minimal energy consumption, 0 fees, 0 minimum account balance, very fast confirmation (ideally sub-second, sometimes a bit slower) and 0 supply inflation.
It focuses on doing one thing and doing it well: transferring value efficiently, sustsinably and without middlemen.
It’s around since 2015 and still kicking, getting better and better with each release, ironing kinks out.
It might sound too good to be true, but it’s worth a look; make up your own mind.This is what I learnt on Lemmy. Not all people who agree with your position have arrived there logically. (In my case, this position would be leftist ideals). People who you share the same values with are not exempt from being illogical.
New tech leads to scammers pouncing on it to make a quick buck. However, just because scammers pounce on it doesn’t make the tech bad inherently.
See Lemmy’s hate for AI for instance. The advancements in the field of machine learning are mind boggling. Lemmings unfortunately fail to disassociate the tech from the scammers who talk about this tech. It’s disappointing, but oh well… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
AI has the potential to become a tool which strongly favors and benefits the ruling class. Us peasants get the locked down version, while government agencies get to use the full power for cyber warfare and disinformation campaigns, and large corpos get to manipulate (“advertise”) to you in most manipulative way to act in their best interest.
The way I see it good people shy away form using AI, leaving only the assholes wielding their new would powers. Those with ill intentions will find ways to use it, no matter how many laws you put up to prevent it. To defend yourself the best approach would be to learn how to use AI yourself, so that you can detect and react when AI is used against your best interests.
Does this make me pro or con AI? I honestly don’t know. Maybe complex things are never that black and white to begin with.
Agreed completely. Usage of AI is a political issue. The tech can be used both for the good and bad. However, just because it can be used for the bad doesn’t make the tech bad.
Development in nuclear science made a bomb that could end civilisation. It also gave us a pathway to solve climate change. How we use the tech should be an issue. The tech itself shouldn’t be.
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You mean like one with actual practical value, one you can program, do actual finance with?
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I don’t even know where to begin. Btc was distrubuted as fairly as anything else, it’s not as stable as since we have stablecoins, scarcity means nothing, it’s decentralised as much as anything else.
Must I repeat that it just exists? You can’t do anything with it. It’s like comparing a pretty rock to a computer. Today all what btc does is pollute.
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So you decide what is fair and what not? Its so fairly distributed now, isn’t it?
Its stable because it’s issued on a schedule? Lol? Wtf? And why would this be a benefit? This is a joke!
You don’t understand bitcoin and crypto. Especially the incentive part needed to run it.
Is vitalik the boss of eth? Give me a break. You arguments are weak af.
Pollution baby. Btc is like there just because it was first. There is nothing there.
Usd is not programmable. You are completely missing the point, you don’t understand what it’s about. Which is not surprising. Btc is boring polluted. Yeah ok it exists. Nobody that works in crypto cares about btc. It’s for investment companies, hedge funds and people in suits. And most of it will end up locked in smart contracts on other chains lol.
People are always like “it doesn’t do anything we couldn’t do with SQL,” as if riding a horse isn’t an improvement in transportation over walking. Things don’t have to be impossible to accomplish in any other way in order to be marginally more useful or efficient depending on the goal. Public ledgers are indeed useful. Blockchain is one technology among a small handful that might be appropriate for your project depending on trust dynamics it demands. Consensus protocols are also useful.
One example, right now our global food supply’s movement and distribution is based largely on market dynamics. Say we want to focus on distribution based on need instead. A blockchain based ledger could allow a fred to ‘commit’ a few bushels of carrots which george ‘commits’ to transporting to mike, who in turn has committed to do do a supply run to Uruguay with his barge. Could they have done this in excel? Probably. Would it be more organized on blockchain? Yes. Would a regular database with a lot of contributors that is carefully designed to keep out bad actors work too? Yes, sure.
You can use blockchain technology for a wide variety of things, just please no more cryptocurrency and NFTs.
Nothing particularly useful though. It’s a very slow, inefficient, trustless, immutable database. There really aren’t many good applications for that.
That highly depends on what blockchain implementation is being used and what it’s being used for. Blockchains used for craptocurrency are highly inefficient, which is the vast majority. But there are a small handful of specialized (proprietary) blockchains that are just efficient enough to be practical in their highly specific use case.
Such as?
Walmarts proprietary food tracking system based on Hyperledger Fabric that they partnered with IBM to tweak & implement, enabling customers to track ingredients back to the farms within seconds, improving food safety, optimizing supply chain operations, enabling efficient tracking of stores and distribution centers, enhancing procurement management by collecting data on product origins, batch numbers, and quality parameters through QR codes and e-certificates.
Hyperledger is just git but with fancy buzzwords. It’s like taking everything that makes blockchain, and then remove everything that makes blockchain special. All you have left is another centralized system.
It’s just IBM’s excuse to stay relevant.
That’s an incredibly wrong oversimplification.
Git doesn’t have any consensus mechanisms, chaincode execution or ledger, is just a history tracker & manipulator. Neither Git or Hyperledger Fabric are centralized, they’re both distributed.
Just because it’s for specialized non-financial related tasks using customizable specialized consensus mechanisms and often distributed only within a select few instead of being a big inefficient permissionless PoW/PoS craptocurrency blockchain with a bunch of clowns waisting energy mining nonsense doesn’t make it any less of a blockchain with smartcontacts and the works.with fancy buzzwords
That’s literally just all blockchain technology ever.
“Just blast them with buzzwords they don’t understand to distract from how fundamentally flawed our shit is and FOMO the shit out of them then rug pull every last dime from them” - NFTs.Git doesn’t need consensus mechanisms because it’s “permissioned”, like Hyperledger. All actors are known and given permission by some entity to contribute.
You can’t contribute to the Linux kernel unless your changes have been approved by someone trusted with permission. You cannot contribute to whatever Walmart is doing, because you haven’t acquired permission to do so.
