This is one reason why I'm still cold on blockchain tech in general. When push came to shove and Ethereum was hacked, the solution was an informal social consensus to fork the chain. Which proved that as far as the flow of value is concerned, the buck stops not at the tech but at the social consensus. So all this mental effort going into fancy byzantine algorithms is effectively just smoke and mirrors and the rest is a Merkle tree.
Worse than this. Code is law, but some insiders are above the law.
It doesn't make sense to take an example of what happened in the infancy of a technological innovation like Ethereum and think that that's what still defines it.
A rollback like the one the one that happened in 2016 is almost impossible right now as the tech and the community/ecosystem has matured and grown.
It turned out that the only value proposition they had was that they "used blockchain" but literally only in the sense that at some point a blockchain would have some data on it.
They were true believers too, but simultaneously didn't care that it was fakery. I have lingering PTSD from that gig.
The crazy thing (for me) is that I remain enamored with the special qualities of blockchains and would like to put them to use in a non-financial manner.
Can you think of any practical uses of a blockchain? I also think they're a fascinating concept, but I cannot think of a killer application for them.
I remember one of the original ideas was a trustless logistics system for things like shipping, but even then all the blockchain proves is that someone said they'd shipped you a box, you could still open it and find it full of rocks. And the smart contract stuff is very clever, but seems to be essentially techno-escrow except that you just have to trust your smart contract broker and the authors of the blockchain rather than your escrow agent, and also if everything goes sideways there's no legal system to interpret the contract "sensibly".
Identity / authenticity. As we head into a world of digital (deep) fakes, being able to authenticate the source of information/media will be very important. Block chain seems well positioned for this?
I think NFTs will settle down eventually and they'll be useful (after these short term stupids).
I'm not a fan of blockchain currencies mostly due to the preponderance of bad actors. Maybe some day, but it's a bit of a shit show atm, and not nearly as practical as originally hoped for.
What would stop an actor with enough resources (Russia, China, USA) to put deepfakes onto the chain?
What would stop them from blackmailing service providers who act as gatekeepers / market platforms to put deepfakes into the chain?
Why would they even accept any single "Blockchain X" as the source of truth? Why wouldn't they just say "Oh that's the evil state Y, of course they're pretending that their fakes on their state-governed propaganda blockchain are authentical, whereas OUR blockchain tells the TRUTH!"
How would you correct honest mistakes on the chain? By a correction update? Then what would stop an evil actor (Taliban) who overturns the government, or takes over a giant corporation, from "correcting" an unpleasant truth, and rewriting history?
Once again, a social problem is attempted to be solved with technology. This never works.
> I think NFTs will settle down eventually and they'll be useful
What would be different, given some time, from now? What needs to change for NFTs to become useful?
I think being able to identify and authenticate original works is a good idea that has practical uses. Practical in the same way as identifying originals in meatspace. I believe there's a ton of hype and bad actors (as usual in a new market), but suspect that'll eventually settle down. I don't see any issue with the idea of purchasing the Nyan cat original if we (society?) all agree that it as an original, same as a material painting.
Maybe NFTs are a misstep on the way to that, I don't know, and I don't care to be honest (I'm not invested in anything crypto related). There's at least a useful idea there.
I agree. I don't agree that blockchain, or NFTs, can ever deliver on their promises to contribute to that matter, because of their nature. How do you think would the blockchain, or NFTs, help to identify and authenticate original works?
> I believe there's a ton of hype and bad actors (as usual in a new market)
Can you name an example of another market where this was the case - i.e. bad actors were the majority of actors, and then something (what?) happened that made the market unviable for scams?
> the idea of purchasing the Nyan cat original
What does the "original" .gif of the Nyan Cat do for you that my copy of it doesn't?
> same as a material painting
I see 2 purposes of the "original" in a material world: 1. speculation, 2. paying the original artist. Since 2. isn't possible for e.g. the Mona Lisa, what remains is that it's a pure speculation object. You could argue that experts could distinguish the orginal Mona Lisa from any copy, but that wouldn't work in the digital world, where my copy of the Nyan Cap .gif would gif just as your original would.
What is the problem statement here, and how would NFTs, or blockchain, contribute to a solution here?
I think that the way would be to use a permission-based, id-linked, reputation-maintaining mechanism. No PoW or PoS -- proof of self. It would have to be designed from the start to account for hostile manipulation. Easier said than done, of course.
Even distributed trust doesn't need a blockchain; web of trust is an example of that.
This is all fairly irrelevant anyway as people do not do not check things before sharing them anyway, and/or trust authenticated information from untrustworthy sources (if Fox News put their reporting on a blockchain, it doesn't suddenly become truth).
There's two problems / truths here; 1) the source (E.g. Fox), which is what I think we'll need to verify, and 2) the truth of the content, which is an age old problem with no technical solution I'm aware of (or would even believe if presented with one).
I've got some fuzzy notions on identity management and other non monetary things but it still needs thinking through.
Which special qualities are you enamored with? And to what use would you like to put them?
The shared ownership of state -- theoretically "serverless" in that there's not a specific server that rules them all.
> And to what use would you like to put them?
Something wiki-like, as well as service discovery.
Lot of hype back in the day that this technology e.g. torrent was going to revolutionise the internet and society would never be the same.
And whilst it is still widely used today and has practical use cases e.g. data distribution it wasn't transformative.
This comment reminds me of the scene in The Social Network where Eduardo Saverin taunts Sean Parker about Napster losing to the record companies, and Parker says "you wanna buy a Tower Records, Eduardo?"
By which I mean: just because peer-to-peer didn't win as a technology, does not mean it wasn't transformative. We live in a world where the iPod could launch and we have access to $10/mo unlimited (centralized) streaming. This world exists because the mere existence of p2p technology places limits on the way that the content industry can operate.
There's really something worth it, perhaps?
Eventhough I consider myself above average, I'm sure there are smarter and more creative people that can come up with more use cases by time.
Just like the Internet evolved to what it is over decades, crypto space also will. We're in the "animated gifs, visitor counts, and unskippable huge flash intros" era of the crypto space.
Regarding your use cases.
> uncensorable payments
would your corrupt country not eventually catch up by regulating the ability to convert your BTC into fiat to buy things, or do you anticipate doing all your payments on the blockchain and never converting to fiat?
> also super quick payments (donated to Ukrania during war ar Sunday night < 30 secs)
a global payment system does seem very useful, assuming the currency is stable; not justified to the current hype though
> moving the ownership of items to a decentralized system (e.g. NFTs as trading cards)
I have failed to understand this one. If you own NFT 1 on Blockchain X, how do you enforce your ownership rights in the real world if someone else chooses not to acknowledge the authority of this decentralized system? If it's a real world asset, and I steal it from you, who do you appeal to? If it's a digital asset, and I copy and use it, who do you appeal to? Or is the utility here people who all buy into and respect the authority of this chain's ownership ledger being able to trade these things within that ecosystem?
> smart contracts (lock your tokens and you're guaranteed, by code, that something happens like being paid an interest at some time/logic trigger)
I haven't found this one that compelling, but maybe I'm missing something. Code isn't immutable, so what's to stop my "smart contract" from changing? I may be unaware of some guarantees that the blockchain provides that the code itself is also immutable.
While it's true that you can't really censor the blockchain transfer, how much that allows someone to 'take' a payment depends a great deal on the legal circumstances where they live. I don't mean that the core transfer mechanism isn't cool - but there's a pretty big gap between a digital currency and acquiring physical goods where authorities can step in.
> super quick payments
Blockchain technology is, on average, pretty much the slowest possible way to make a payment. The slowness of other techniques are not because of any underlying technical reason - they're based on laws and policies. It's true that it can be faster than other methods in certain circumstances - but that has more to do with gaps in regulation than the technology.
I fully agree that distributed ownership is cool, but I wanted to note something about this:
> I can have my trading cards on a privately owned server too, for sure, then I'm bound to them not banning me, not crashing and losing my data, not going bankrupt, not changing the rules of the game etc
You are still bound by them not crashing, losing your data, going bankrupt or changing the rules. Many blockchains have gone down, lost history, shut down entirely, or changed the rules. There are ways that these problems are more easily addressed in a blockchain ecosystem, but it's not straightforwardly "better." If your usecase suffers from a bug, and a majority of the nodes benefit from that bug, you will likely never be able to get that bug fixed on the main chain.
I also think that copyright is the elephant in the room. Imagine two versions of...a world of warcraft sword. One is the texture & model that are included with the game - the other is, additionally, an NFT. The material reality of adding that sword to another game are identical in both cases: you can just put the sword in another game if you have the assets. That has never been a technical challenge. The challenge is legal and NFTs do not help with the legal problems.
If I sign a contract with you saying you can use the sword in another game the contract is the thing that matters. It does not matter if the contract is in an NFT or references an NFT. If anything, creating a system to manage & mint NFTs is an additional technical lift in creating multi-game assets.
I'm hard pressed think of how NFTs would be better than a centralized server that publishes daily signed database dumps of all owned assets. The cryptographic guarantees are the same and in either case the service continuing to sell assets depends on their willingness to assign copyright.
Being smart isn't an indicator of correctness.
Just because whom you believe may be credible people might back something up doesn’t give it value. It’s value does.
What's funny about that is China is adopting blockchain technologies specifically to bind together databases for tracking social credit scores across different provinces because they've previously been silo'ed and unable to communicate with each other in a straightforward way (for whatever reason).
China is banking on blockchain technologies precisely because it's can be such a powerful censorship tool.
https://decrypt.co/39905/blockchain-now-powers-parts-of-chin...
> tracking social credit scores across different provinces because they've previously been silo'ed and unable to communicate with each other in a straightforward way (for whatever reason).
does this sentence mean something to you? what does a blockchain do in this situation?
Only a guess, but I suspect that Covid got as bad as it did partly because Wuhan officials didn't want the central government to know how bad things were (at least at first).
The situation you describe can be handled via a write-only log with cryptographic signing of each change.
But the solution to the problem of uncooperative governors is the application of soft power (media, agitprop, appointments, rewards, threats, denunciations and disappearances, liquidation of problem people, their families, their friends, their pets, etc), not some over-engineered technological non-solution that still relies on the cooperation of all the parties in question to work.
A blockchain can't enforce that anyone actually enters data into it, or that the data that is entered isn't garbage. A snail-mail package containing data sent to Beijing has the exact same immutability property for the only party that cares about it - the national government.
Something like a blockchain is useful when peers don't trust eachother, but all care to build a shared consensus. When the peers don't care about consensus, and a central authority with the power of pit and gallows exists, none of those usecases hold.
And in a system where it's considered sometimes desirable to erase inconvenient history, an immutable ledger doesn't help with that.
George Orwell was mistaken when he thought that anyone would care about facts, figures, and how much sugar was rationed every week. You just need to tell people that it's raining while you piss on them, and they'll believe you.
Sure, you have a limited number of participants and some tweaking to do on the quorum (in some cases you might want all parties to sign).
But hey - the blockchain cool-aid gang tried to sell it as a solution for COVID contact tracing. Which is beyond laughable. The entire industry is a shillfest.
That being said, it is not clear to me how a hash chain guarantees that the data it stores hasn't been modified.
The basic idea is, you have a chain of 'transactions' (like in bitcoin or think git commits) und you store the hash of the content + the hash of the member before as a checksum. This way, if you alter the log file, the hash for the modified entry is suddenly different, and the chain breaks, because the next member used your hash as input to calculate their checksum. So you can not only see that the file was tampered with, you can also say which entry was modified.
Edit: Merkle trees[0] generalize this concept into trees, which are e.g. used in ZFS (the file system), git and in the blockchain.
(Social factors and forks to change our minds on blockchains notwithstanding)
In addition, I don't see what prevents an "official" from writing a social credit transaction (disclaimer that I have no idea how China's "social credit" system works or even what it is) to the blockchain. Nodes validate to solve disagreements where one node says a transaction happened that did not. This does not appear to be the same type of dishonesty being referred to here.
The world has functioned up until the magical dawning of the blockchain.
A blockchain doesn't prevent individual parties from lying about things only they would know about -- if that's what's on your chain, you still need trust.
How far down the chain could a 51% blockchain rewrite occur before consuming all of the computation power of the universe?
I have seen arguments in which the 51% steals all of the new coins but how long can that be maintained, the other 49% needs to pay their bills and audits would inevitably out the bad players. Eventually, the last bitcoin will be minted, making the whole issue mute.
https://www.dhs.gov/science-and-technology/blockchain-portfo...
There are many anti-fraud and enhanced supply chain tracking notions associated with blockchain tech. Of course, those are all enabled with this form of 'surveillance.'
How often is this true in practice? It seems like crypto often has centralized points where people have admin powers.
Blockchain has unique attributes, I don't think it has any unique quality.
Most of its "qualities" are things that you do not want under any circumstance in your systems even independently, so adding them all together turns it into a worthless technology.
Immutability? Harmful in 99% of the use cases. Trustless? Harmful in 99% of the use cases. Decentralized? A waste in 99% of the use cases. Now put all 3 together, add more "qualities" akin to those, and you've got blockchain.
I suspect this will increase over time.
>if code isn't really law then we're just back to systems of social consensus and there's no need for all this blockchain nonsense.
Exactly, and the "code is law" thing is not going so well, given that many of the programmer error catastrophes thus far have been "solved" by the social consensus of a small clique of developers.
> Sent $80M a Month to Himself
In the end, it turns out that you don't need admin powers to steal lots of money.
You just need to know the laws very well to steal a lot of money: this holds both in the "ordinary" world and for cryptocurrencies (there code is law).
With cryptocurrency, code is more like possession. The law is still law.
The way I phrase it is, blockchain offers an interesting/useful requirements document, with a poor implementation.
It’s a Merkel tree, with a distributed clock. I still don’t know where it would be useful outside of cryotocurrencies. And for currency, it’s still extremely questionable.*
Though I suppose we're not "users" of such a system, but are rather "subjected to it"
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_score_in_the_United_Sta...
EDIT: I guess you could rules-lawyer about the meaning of "majority" but like... you don't even need a majority of users to start a fork! Two people is enough to start a fork. There's nothing preventing me from starting a fork of Bitcoin today and mining/trading it among my friends. It's just that normally people feel compelled to go along with what the majority is doing
If enough people on the blockchain decide to update their code to do something different, you either fork or move with them.
* blockchains are centralized; just in a different way
I wish bitcoin were solving a real problem for the amount of energy it uses.
Absolute integrity is a lot less important in systems which assume that inexpensive manual overrides will be possible - because you save a ton by simply deciding to build a system that 'only' works 99.9% of the time and intervening in 0.1% of cases. Obviously blockchains don't work 100% of the time but that's the premise for their increased costs.
I'm not sure the analogy even works, but in the case of driving, if 99% decided to switch how the roads were to be used, I assure you that literal resistance would not be tolerated. There might be some incidents, but there wouldn't be very many before the 1% were the ones getting pushed around.
Samoa changed road direction a while ago. Not everyone was on board, but it happened anyway.
I also think that relatively few real-world problems are made easier by blockchain's strengths - and many of them are situations where you're seeking to avoid some kind of censorship. I think avoiding censorship is important and I'm glad we have a technology that is useful there - but by volume most human interactions do not have to worry about censorship.
An under-rated problem of blockchains, imo, is how the system shifts incentives for the stakeholders: if code really is law every system is one mistake away from giving away its entire value, if code isn't really law then we're just back to systems of social consensus and there's no need for all this blockchain nonsense. Very, very few people have the technical skill to implement a useful system which is fully automated. I'm extremely skeptical that we've been missing something that is going to make that dramatically easier in the future - and without several orders of magnitude decrease in programmer error smart contracts seem like a bad bet.