News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against bl... by mattwilsonn888 on Friday January 28, 2022 @07:17PM (#30122338)
If 51% of miners could change anything everyone would be spinning up Alpine Virtual Machines with minuscule hash power. You fundamentally misunderstand how blockchain works.

Your "we" in the second example is the majority of network users - any network where that isn't true is not decentralized.

You do not know what you are talking about. The fact that grifters often don't know what they are talking about and use that to whip up positive spin on blockchain tech does not give you any good excuse to do the opposite - you are both morons.

Re:Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against bl... by boopboopbadoop on Friday January 28, 2022 @07:39PM (#30122480)
> Your "we" in the second example is the majority of network users - any network where that isn't true is not decentralized.

So... you’re saying it’s mutable.

Re:Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against bl... by philistine on Friday January 28, 2022 @10:36PM (#30123534)
You both are talking from the unsaid point of view that an immutable public ledger is a good thing. The reality of our world disagrees with your unsaid compact.

Nothing needs an immutable public ledger. Any fraud due to shipping, or banking, or taxes, is a problem of inaccurate entry of data into a ledger, not nefarious changes to what already exists.

Re:Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against bl... by brian_cloutier on Saturday January 29, 2022 @01:44AM (#30124325)
Immutable ledgers are a godsend and are useful in many different contexts:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_Transparency

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lab_notebook

- https://www.newamerica.org/digital-impact-governance-initiat...

Adjustments needed for shipping, banking, or taxes are trivially accommodated; those are additional events which can be appended to the log.

Re:Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against bl... by philistine on Sunday January 30, 2022 @02:09PM (#30140073)
None of your examples are all, at the same time, immutable, public, or ledgers. The Georgian land thingie is the most interesting, but a Georgian judge could definitely order a change in ownership due to incorrect data entered into the ledger, so it's not immutable.
Re:Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against bl... by brian_cloutier on Sunday January 30, 2022 @09:32PM (#30143817)
> a Georgian judge could definitely order a change in ownership due to incorrect data entered into the ledger, so it's not immutable.

There seems to be a misunderstanding. The ledger is immutable. That doesn't mean the state is immutable! Immutable state is not very useful. A judge could absolutely order that the ownership of some parcel is changed, but the change will appear as a separate record and everybody will be able to see the change and nobody can credibly deny that the change happened, not even the judge.