Please Stop

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.

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.

How is the blockchain different from a read only ( write only once to be specific) DB that follows ACID?

Why would you want the computational power of a bank system have anything to do with whether it's ledger is correct?

Yeah let’s use the computing power of an entire country to pay for a small coffee.

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.

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.

blockchains do not do jack shit with reconciliating records.

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.

Absolute immutability is kind of a terrible property for a financial system though, cos it completely ignores the fact that mistakes and fraud happen and you need a way to forcefully recover funds other than "lol sucks to be you I guess".

The one actually genuinely useful application for this kind of technology that anyone has come up with is Certificate Transparency, but crypto people don't get excited about it cos it's not possible to make money from it.

the technology itself has its use cases.

Cool.

Name one successful example.

I mean, it's been, what, 15 years of hype? Surely there must be a successful deployment of a commercially viable and useful blockchain that isn't just a speculative cryptocurrency or derivative thereof, right?

Right?

There is nothing Crypto can do better than regular database. Immutability is not a desirable property.

Monero actually has very good uses. It does use POW but their algorithm is made to encourage using CPUs instead of GPUs and slower, power efficient devices, which makes it a lot less energy intensive than other POW cryptocurrencies.

I find the actual technology very interesting. At one point I wanted to create a distributed research journal, and I spent some time trying to develop a trustless, immutable ledger that didn't have the high overhead that most blockchains have for proof of work. It was extremely cool, but nobody gives a shit unless it has coins lol

I look forward to 20 years from now when it gets resurrected and used for interesting things that don't involve cryptocurrency.

This makes them perfect for ledgers or transaction networks.

It doesn't scale well, so it generally works best for ledgers of relatively small scale. Anything that might need to go beyond that small scale will run into technical/performance issues.

the technology itself has its use cases.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15RTC22Z2xI I would love to hear the counterarguments. video is <15 mins, academic setting.

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.

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...

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.

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 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.

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?

Other SHIT coins... to be precise

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.

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

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 20 and so on. Eventually we'll hit 25 mod 20 giving us the solution to X 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 just 1234562005100201. 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 work 1234562005100990 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 use 12345620051002011234562005100990 as 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.

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.

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.

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.

... or data validation.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

Nothing particularly useful though. It's a very slow, inefficient, trustless, immutable database. There really aren't many good applications for that.

You didn't actually read the page you linked to, did you?

Let's just jump to the conclusion:

This author believes it is technologically indefensible to call Fossil a “blockchain” in any sense likely to be understood by a majority of those you’re communicating with. Using a term in a nonstandard way just because you can defend it means you’ve failed any goal that requires clear communication. The people you’re communicating your ideas to must have the same concept of the terms you use.

(Emphasis mine)

Hint: a blockchain is always a Merkel tree, but a Merkel tree is not always a blockchain.

No no ANY possible application using blockchain tech HAS to be bad.