this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2024
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I’ve read that blockchain itself is a good technology. NFTs are a laughably absurd attempt to exploit that technology for profit.
Xitter op needs to shut up.
Blockchain is a solution in search of a problem. A way to establish trust while not trusting any party is a cool concept, but in the real world it's far easier to establish a source of trust.
Congratulations, now your trust relies on your subject never becoming important enough that someone bothers to run 50%+1 of the nodes in your network which means only very, very large subjects (or ones where trust wasn't very important in the first place) ever even have a chance of that not happening. What do you say? Your technology doesn't scale to very, very large subjects because of abysmal transaction rates?
Yup. Very well said. People don't realize the extent of wealth inequality (and how ridiculously resource intensive blockchain tech is). If anything important were to be decide by a blockchain, the top 1% would control the network.
More on wealth inequality here.
Today's inequality was created by the Cantillon effect.
Is it easier to establish a source of trust? With blockchain trust lies in the protocol and in the node operators who make decisions about how to operate their nodes. Running a node isn't extremely difficult. Running a financial institution is difficult.
Well, sure, now you have a currency that doesn't rely on trust
...now what? How are you going to spend that currency if you don't trust anyone? How will you ensure you get what you bought? How will your property get protected? Hell, how do you get others to agree that your crypto is the one they should use?
It's trust all the way down. Removing it from one small part of the chain isn't going to fundamentally change things
What problem does blockchain solve?
Having too much electricity and not enough CO2.
We recently developed AI for that purpose though which does the same thing but is useless in occasionally funny ways.
Apparently, it can be very secure. If “pieces” of a secure key are stored in multiple places, for example, only changing one link in the “chain” means it won’t match with the others. They ALL have to be changed at the same time, which is virtually impossible to do in secret.
Please note that I am far from an expert on the subject. I’m paraphrasing an article I read months ago.
Can’t you takeover a blockchain by owning the majority of a block chain, or by having a majority of the processing power to compute hashes?
Yes which is part of why the major chains are owned and controlled by companies, but then that makes the whole thing pointless. IMO, a company controlled blockchain may as well just be a DB cluster, it would be faster and more efficient.
Are you saying that they “solve” that by never giving up more than 49% stake?
That… seems like a bad solution
Those things sound possible, but I’m not knowledgeable enough to speculate. Sorry.
Essentially, verifiability (the token exists on the blockchain), de-duplication (each token can only exist once on the blockchain), and proof of ownership (only one account number can be associated with each token on the blockchain). There's nothing wrong with this idea in a technical sense and it could be useful for some things.
But... the transaction process is computationally expensive. For the transaction to be trustworthy, many nodes on the blockchain network must process the same transaction, which creates a whole bunch of issues around network scaling and majority control and real-world resource usage (electricity, computer hardware, network infrastructure, cooling, etc).
And beyond that, the nature of society and economics created a community around this unregulated financial market that was filled with... well, exactly the kind of people you'd expect would be most interested in an unregulated financial market - scammers, speculative investors, thieves, illegal bankers, exploitatitive gambling operators, money launderers, and criminals looking to get paid without the government noticing.
The technology can solve some interesting problems around verifying that a particular digital file is unique/original (which can be useful, because it's extremely easy to make copies of digital information) but it creates a long list of other problems as a side effect.
Almost every single non-theoretical problem that blockchains solve is something we've already solved. And most of the problems you could solve with a blockchains are severely limited by data-size limitations.
It would be amazing if I could decentrally store, say, a movie or videogame on a blockchain. Then, I could sell access tokens, would the owners could resell as they wanted. That's a GREAT way to use blockchain tech, because people would always have access, and they could use or sell the keys as they wanted. It doens't work though, because in the real world, that movie doesn't fit on the blockchain, it'll just be a link the a secondary source, and the whole thing falls apart.
And that's really the problem. Blockchains have a lot of nifty uses, but it almost always immediately falls apart around the edges, where it touches on non-blockchain tech, or, even worse, physical objects.
Intermediary free monetary transfer, lack of trust, transparency
It does only the last one and only partially.
How do you transfer money without an intermediary through blockchain?
I am pretty sure you just turn your money over to a scammer who just disappears with it. Since it is stateless and a libertarian dream, nothing can be done. So, congratulations!
You don’t need blockchain for that either. #theranos
Blockchain / NFTs do not solve proof of ownership. Just ask all the people who had their NFTs or crypto stolen or lost in scams.
In your example, technically title fraud is more difficult because it needs to be done in two places. In reality it becomes far, far easier because you've now opened up a gigantic attack surface that you have no control over, and made both systems of verification worth less. If someone manages to compromise either one, there goes your proof of validity. Which one of them is real and which one is fraudulent?
Don’t we already have systems for that? What about the vulnerabilities of blockchain takeover?
I've heard of using them as parts of like contracts?
What does blockchain solve that existing contracts don’t do? Blockchain has takeover possibility
Honestly I don't know. I'm just pointing out the only thing that kind of sort of sounded like a good idea for it I've ever heard. For pictures it's stupid that's for sure
It’s not a picture though. It’s a link to a picture on a server somewhere. If the host goes down, you own nothing.
It's one of those things where scientists discovered something interesting and novel, and then a bunch of dumb grifters came in to try and make it their new snake oil.
A very, very long time ago, back when Bitcoin was viewed as a currency instead of an "investment" platform, Bitcoin kinda fulfilled the ideal use case for the blockchain. I think now the general public is just too soured on them for that to ever be the case, unless Elon makes Bitcoin the new currency of the U.S...
the way people use NFTs with art are certainly absurd, but even the core technology of NFTs is actually excellent
I agree completely!