this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2026
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[–] neatchee@piefed.social 144 points 4 weeks ago (7 children)

sigh

Once again:

Blockchain is not synonymous with cryptomining

Blockchain does not require proof of work

Cryptocurrency and NFT grifting does not devalue blockchain as an immutable distributed ledger

I swear to god people just copy paste whatever makes them feel good without any effort at understanding

[–] prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 67 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

True... But Satoshi did invent Bitcoin, which is proof of work, and is everything in OP

[–] papertowels@mander.xyz 4 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (4 children)

Elon musk popularized the electric car.

It had dumb handles that killed people. It lied about having self-driving capabilities. It had terrible manufacturing tolerances.

The "technically true" nature of it reads like propaganda against electric cars as a whole, does it not? I'd argue that applies here too.

[–] Ulvain@sh.itjust.works 33 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

"Popularized" the electric car, maybe?

There were electric cars since there were cars

[–] papertowels@mander.xyz 5 points 4 weeks ago

Popularized it is. I was careful to not put invent, but morning brain not work good.

[–] prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 11 points 4 weeks ago

Fair enough, I forgot that OP said "blockchain," instead of "bitcoin."

[–] njm1314@lemmy.world 6 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (1 children)

Your example is not even close to technically true.

[–] papertowels@mander.xyz 2 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago)

Sure. Sure. Insert your own example of applying the sins of a particular implementation of a technology to a hierarchical supergroup. That was an example I came up with in a few minutes on the shitter, not a deep philosophical argument.

_ is bad, because (specific implementation) has these flaws!

That's the issue being discussed here. It's misleading without precision.

[–] Fedizen@lemmy.world 2 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (1 children)
  1. most electric cars are teslas so like a statistical analysis would be mostly correct.

2)propaganda against electric cars is generally just propaganda against cars in general, for example:

if full self driving becomes a thing you can expect traffic to become MUCH worse as like one minivan for a parent with 3 kids is replaced by four self driving cars that drive each kid around and one for the parent.

[–] papertowels@mander.xyz 2 points 4 weeks ago (3 children)

Doesn't have to be cars.

I'm just saying the original post is conflating criticisms against a particular implementation of blockchain with all blockchain.

"The wright brothers invented a useless machine they called the airplane. It only held one person and could fly for only a limited duration. It was also extremely dangerous."

That'd be a silly sentence, would it not?

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[–] Cenotaph@mander.xyz 28 points 4 weeks ago (10 children)

Immutable so long as no one party or group owns more than half of the coins on a given blockchain... then the ledger is whatever they say it is and it propagates down because they can manufacture their own "consensus".

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/1/51-attack.asp

and most use cases around things like "smart contracts" end up still requiring a trusted third party at some point

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/30/the-inevitability-of-trusted-third-parties/

[–] qwerty@discuss.tchncs.de 7 points 4 weeks ago

Immutable so long as no one party or group owns more than half of the coins on a given blockchain... then the ledger is whatever they say it is and it propagates down because they can manufacture their own "consensus".

No, the community controls the consensus through their nodes. A 51% attack only allows the attacker to perform:

  1. A double spend attack - sending a transaction, receiving the goods and then reorganizing the chain to undo the transaction.
  2. Censoring transactions.

In the event of a 51% attack the community can fork the chain - change the consensus and implement preventive measures like changing the mining algorithm, changing to PoW/PoS, banning all of the attackers coins, implementing a finality layer or a checkpoiting system etc.

[–] endless_nameless@lemmy.world 5 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

It's not 51% of the coins, it's 51% of the computing power on the network. Both of which are virtually impossible in the case of Bitcoin, though not entirely impossible. I just wouldn't consider a 51% attack even remotely a threat to the network compared to something like government crackdown

[–] mattyroses@lemmy.today 12 points 4 weeks ago (5 children)

That's PoW. With PoS, it is coin ownership.

Which is much more distributed than computing power.

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[–] Fedizen@lemmy.world 20 points 4 weeks ago

I swear to god people just copy paste whatever makes them feel good without any effort at understanding

Why do you think LLMs are so popular?

[–] infinitesunrise@slrpnk.net 10 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

This is a good comment that makes all good points. But I just wanna say let's stop saying "blockchain" singular and with no preceding article like we're tech CEOs and it's some immutable god. They're blockchains, plural, like any other data structure there can be more than one and there are. eg The blockchain of ethereum is distinct from the blockchain for bitcoin but they are both blockchains.

[–] neatchee@piefed.social 7 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

Valid point! But then how do you refer to the data structure/architecture/model concept? Sometimes we want a concise term (like bittorrent or ActivityPub) for the abstraction

[–] infinitesunrise@slrpnk.net 4 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago)

It's a novel data structure, we can refer to it like we do other data structures: Linked lists, hash tables, primitives. The branded implementation of these things is what we typically make singular: Bitcoin, ethereum, monero (bittorrent, activitypub...)

Bittorrent implements a torrent swarm, activitypub implements a federated social network.

[–] ayyy@sh.itjust.works 5 points 4 weeks ago (4 children)

Then why hasn’t a better blockchain based currency gained any popularity? If they don’t have critical mass then your distinction is meaningless. It turns out there is just zero real world need for an untrusted distributed ledger. Databases and governments solve the problem much better.

[–] papertowels@mander.xyz 10 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (2 children)

Questioning the technical virtues of an alternative product based on lack of critical mass adoption is pretty funny, when you consider we're on the fediverse. I know that doesn't defray your argument, but just an amusing observation.

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[–] DomeGuy@lemmy.world 7 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

Two points:

Then why hasn’t a better blockchain based currency gained any popularity?

https://www.forbes.com/digital-assets/categories/proof-of-stake-pos/

Etherium and virtually the whole rest of the crypto scene that is "not bitcoin" has pretty soundly rejected the wasteful Bitcoin design. There was even a fork of Bitcoin that would have used the much more efficient proof-of-stake, but since that would be bad for everyone with a proof-of-work "mining" rig it didn't take over.

It turns out there is just zero real world need for an untrusted distributed ledger

https://git-scm.com/

An "untrusted distributed ledger" is literally the backbone of modern software development. While you could plausibly split hairs and assert that git requires "trust", I don't think you'd wind up in a spot that both supports your assertion and a cognizable difference for anyone but mathematicians and security nerds. (And even if you did, the exact same sort of non-scam usages of blockchains are ones that operate like git, with the ledger used for something else.)

[–] _Nico198X_@europe.pub 2 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

would you recommend any crypto in particular?

[–] neatchee@piefed.social 5 points 4 weeks ago (6 children)

Blockchain is not synonymous with crypto. Why are you bringing up crypto specifically? Crypto is garbage. But Blockchain is not crypto

[–] fishos@lemmy.world 8 points 4 weeks ago (4 children)

People bring up crypto because it is the only use of blockchain that isn't worse than already established methods. And crypto is only "better" because it's unregulated and allowed a bunch of scams to be pulled.

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[–] infinitesunrise@slrpnk.net 2 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago)

Cryptocurrency development makes a whole bunch of arbitrary value-guided decisions during creation, all of these decisions have tradeoffs such that nobody has figured out a way to feature them all at the same time, or would they want to.

For example, bitcoin is fully auditable. Anyone with a copy of the bitcoin blockchain can review every single transaction in bitcoin's history, and trace the flow of every last satoshi from it's mining to today. This is because the developers of bitcoin place a high value on verifiable auditability and security. Conversely monero was developed for the purpose of being a completely untraceable, unauditable currency that still has a knowable supply. And ethereum was created in a manner that intentionally supported scripting, so that it could be used as a platform for novel applications and contracts. None of these primary features could be ported to either of the other two without breaking them completely, because of the deep programmatic implications of the requirements.

It's not really a question of better or worse, but of use case. The fact of the matter is that the reason these three examples are the leading currencies for their use case is literally because nobody has yet been able to do a better job. And for bitcoin at least, at this point it's security rests just as much in it's wide adoption and interest as it's design intent, so it's unlikely that anyone ever will.

[–] Bleys@lemmy.world 4 points 4 weeks ago (11 children)

The only alternative to proof of work is proof of stake. And if the world ever ran on proof of stake crypto, it would make today’s wealth inequality look like a Marxist paradise.

[–] mattyroses@lemmy.today 5 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

There's other alternatives. But PoS does not reward just by ownership either.

Check out Gnosis, especially Circles, which is creating a UBI type thing.

[–] Bleys@lemmy.world 5 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

I just looked at Circles’ webpage, and respectfully, that is a Ponzi scheme.

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[–] neatchee@piefed.social 3 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

You are exactly the type of person I'm talking about :\

Crypto is not the only use case for blockchain. 

Blockchain can be useful in inherently trusted, closed ecosystems.

Depending on the use case, proof doesn't even need to be anything more than a valid certificate (not work, not stake)

Consider a bank that develops its own blockchain ledger for internal use only, replacing their branch ledgers (which require daily reconciliation and propagation).

An immutable, distributed ledger has plenty of valid, valuable use cases without looking like crypto.

[–] Bleys@lemmy.world 12 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

“Internal use only” blockchain is an oxymoron. If all contributors are trusted entities, then what does it matter if the data is stored in a blockchain vs any other data structure? If anything the amount of extra work to maintain and modify the blockchain in the case of errors just makes it unnecessary.

If that’s the best example of its many “valid, valuable use cases”, then it’s still a pass from me, dawg.

[–] Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 4 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

If all contributors are trusted entities,

This is not true, even inside a bank. Employees commit fraud. Branches don't trust each other.

the amount of extra work to maintain

Once built, maintaining is easy.

and modify the blockchain

Er. The whole point is that blockchains are immutable.

[–] bountygiver@lemmy.ml 2 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (1 children)

But as long as you can have a trusted central authority, you don't need blockchain without needing to trust all the clients. The central authority can enforce authentication and authorization for what each client can do, combine with proper logging it is already sufficient. Blockchain is only needed if there's absolutely no central authority (which is not the case for any traditional business as by nature they already have a hierarchy where the top would act as the central authority, therefore any business that implements blockchain internally is just BS-ing).

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[–] neatchee@piefed.social 2 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

I have a large number of examples in this comment from four months ago. Please read them: https://lemmy.world/post/36683795/19677963

[–] Bleys@lemmy.world 3 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (1 children)

Literally the first example you gave was shut down a year later: https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoReality/comments/1mpeh9z/when_crypto_bros_are_asked_for_a_blockchain_use/

Pretty obvious that its use in the first place was some FOMO executives trying to get in on “blockchain” technology, just like they’re doing with AI and LLMs now. Funny how BTC and ETH both plateaued a year ago, right around the time AI became the new thing.

I’m not going to bother reading the rest, I already wasted too much time arguing with a true believer. GL with the crypto that you say you don’t have.

[–] neatchee@piefed.social 2 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago)

Lol you're a judgemental prick. I have zero crypto because that shit is absolutely moronic.

It's like you talked to someone who supports nuclear power and responded "good luck with the nuclear bombs you definitely don't have, true believer"

Sounds like you just want to hate on shit you don't understand. Go on with your bad self though 👍

EDIT: LMAO from the article you linked they even point out that the tech itself isn't the problem, but the willingness of businesses to invest in the improvements (which is, like, an incredibly common problem in business that does not in any way make the tech bad) 

Its plan to digitize global supply chains hasn’t received sufficient cooperation and support to remain viable. 

That is the downside of corporate blockchain projects. They need everyone to share a mindset and commit to a long-term plan. Unfortunately, businesses face ever-changing conditions and financial problems. Few can warrant the cost of buying into such systems under the current market conditions.

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[–] HumanOnEarth@lemmy.ca 2 points 4 weeks ago (3 children)

Shut up shut up shut up shut up shut up

Don't ruin a good thing we've got going on here

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