News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Binance's books are a black box, filings show, as it tries to rally confidence. Parent comment

Re:Binance's books are a black box, filings show, as it trie... by quartz on Monday December 19, 2022 @09:15PM (#34060709)
Sounds like you've already got it right there: implemented well a decentralized blockchain is basically a 3rd party as a transactional service (which through programmability can act as a ledger or escrow).

The commenter up above is directly referencing where existing 3rd party / escrow services are pretty terrible today and they're certainly not easily accessible to the general public or your average piece of computer code.

A lot of the pre-boom blockchain contract excitement really was as simple as "turn the awful banking middlemen into code so we can get the advantages of them programmatically."

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Binance's books are a black box, filings show, as it trie... by cduzz on Tuesday December 20, 2022 @08:27AM (#34065548)
A blockchain in this context is much worse than a 3rd party because there's nobody to sign a contract, arrest, subpoena, or bring a lawsuit against.

"It's math, bro" isn't actually comforting if the contents of the distributed database are actually in question, perhaps because of mistakes, shenanigans or misbehavior.

No sane risk assessment of "our company depends on this being correct and consistent" is going to sign up for this.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Binance's books are a black box, filings show, as it trie... by marcus_holmes on Tuesday December 20, 2022 @09:32AM (#34066402)
Yes, but no-one is doing it. Which would point to "this problem isn't as amenable to tech as our initial impression of it would suggest".
[ Parent | on HN ]