For a long time, I thought of the blockchain as almost synonymous with cryptocurrencies, so as I saw stuff like “Odyssey” and “lbry” appearing and being “based on the blockchain”, my first thought was that it was another crypto scam. Then, I just got reminded of it and started looking more into it, and it just seemed like regular torrenting. For example, what’s the big innovation separating Odyssey from Peertube, which is also decentralized and also uses P2P? And what part of it does the blockchain really play, that couldn’t be done with regular P2P? More generally, and looking at the futur, does the blockchain offer new possibilities that the fediverse or pre-existing protocols don’t have?
The “blockchain” I use on a daily basis is git, where the sha of the previous commit affects the next.
Given that git was invented before the word “blockchain” started being used, shouldn’t we call blockchain applications “git-like” rather than retroactively calling Git a blockchain?
A commitchain
Merkel Trees are fine, and are how things like “Git” keep track of different files (and how distributed hash tables and file-sharing often work).
Merkel Trees are trees-of-hashes, which the cryptocoin world wants us to believe go by the new name of ‘Blockchain’, but people familiar with comp. sci history know that they’re just flailing about making shit up.
Blockchain is an application of Merkel Trees. Merkel Trees have lots of good uses, but Blockchain doesn’t seem to have much use after 10+ years of experimentation.
ETH has DNS. I would think the fediverse would like to see adoption of DNS that governments and big companies can’t mess with or take over with lots of cash.
As fast as money talks, you’ll be losing.
IMO. We should make global random networks and base our connections on top of them instead of clinging onto the hope of niceties because someone have the site google.com for example.
That kind of thing is actually possible with Ethereum DNS and hosting. It’s not mature enough to be viable yet, but the possibility is there.
A good start, but using crypto to just have a website seems overkill.
I have built a shared hosting protocol (and implementation) where you use link-files instead of website+DNS (nor crypto). Simple and lightweight, but with my communication skills it isn’t really taking off 😅
That’s cool. Got a link you’d be willing to share?
Here is the ‘official’ website : Tenfingers
There are versions for Linux and Windows and also the python source code.
Any feedback greatly appreciated!
So Google, Amazon, Apple, and many other large companies in the IoT space are using a blockchain as a federated data store: https://github.com/zigbee-alliance/distributed-compliance-ledger
It stores the data needed for Matter [ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter_(standard) ] device attestation.
I think its an interesting use case on how entities that don’t particularly trust each other can operate a federated system. Accounts are linked to an identity out-of-band in order to have write permissions to the chain. When an account writes, all the readers of the chain have reasonable assurances of the author of that write. No company can inject false state as another company without that company’s guarded private key. All transactions are also auditable as an additional assurance the data isn’t undergoing a malicious act.
tl;dr; interesting use cases for tamper proof federated ledgers.
Asset Tokenization and Smart Contracts are two things that will be increasingly used in Finance. That is why the recent BIS report on CBDCs included both of those as essential features of a Central Bank Digital Currency.
What Blockchain does is provide these features of a digital currency in a way that doesn’t require a trusted intermediary. This makes Blockchains resistant to censorship in a way that a central bank digital currency can never truly guarantee. It is true that a centralization system like a database or ledger can be faster, more efficient and more secure but that you will always have to trust that provider of that service that they will continue operating in a manner that is congruent with what a user may want.
A recent example of this would be the news that Ubisoft is deleting inactive accounts on Uplay, which is potentially resulting in many users losing access to games they bought on that platform. Were the rights to those game tokenized on a Blockchain or CBDC, the users could potentially redeem that on another platform. Another example would be the case of the user losing his 900 hour character in Red Dead Redemption after Google shutdown stadia. Had that player’s character been tokenized as an NFT he might have the capacity to move it off of stadia and onto another game platform.
Get a little nervous about your Steam Game collection worth 1000s of dollars that is completely locked into Valve’s ecosystem? How about a decentralised, immutable and censorship-resistant record of your ownership of those games? That is what asset tokenization is about and it will become more important in the future as our lives and our assets become more digital.
Then there are multitude of uses for smart contracts which, again, don’t require a blockchain provided you are ok with relying on a trusted intermediary to execute the contract as it was termed. Given that contracts by their nature often involve agreement between organisations or individuals with diverging interests, it almost a certainty that having an immutable, censorship resistant network to run those smart contracts is desirable.
I’ve heard of a couple interesting applications (interesting doesn’t necessarily mean good)
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I’ve been out of the industry for a couple years, but at the time I left both the US’s NAR and CA’s CREA were looking to create blockchains that would eventually hold an immutable history of every salable property in North America. The sales pitch is that no one will ever be able to hide things like flood damage or zoning changes if they’re all those events are in a trusted database. Carfax, but for buildings.
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Several US states with legalized Marijuana have what are known as Seed To Sale laws. One company was trying to move into this space and eventually into all of agriculture. The idea being that if you buy pot, scanning a QR code would tell you what clone# the seeds were from, where and when it was planted, what pesticides/herbicides were used on/near it, when it was harvested, any tests it had gone through, etc.
So I have two questions about this:
- Why use blockchain for that? Both of these sound like they will be centralized databases and blockchains just add a bunch of overhead for no benefit.
- How does a database prevent me from … just lying to it? The blockchain won’t magically detect if I paid off some guy to claim he inspected my house or weed and just hand out a certificate.
Probably transparency. It’s a public ledger. That’s one of the benefits I’m aware of.
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I have wet dreams about a new text based mesh internet powered by the gemini protocol. Imagine, if you will, instead of paying monthly to your ISP/cell service provider to acess the internet, that instead you bought an ‘internet box’ once. Where each router/gateway acts both as a self-hosting site for the user, and transmits this site text data to other local routers through LoRaWAN. There are many technical challenges to this kind of networks, one being “how do I check that all other routers have an up-to-date version of any one site?” and blockchain technology seems to fit nicely for that particular issue.
If you take a longer historical view, there have long been strong opinions about how we should base our currency. Because money impacts us all so viscerally, even the most uninformed develop deep seated emotional stances about very obscure topics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_of_Gold_speech
This link is an example of a historical moment where a stance taken against the gold standard was influential in national elections in the US.
The people who would have been emotionally exercised about bimetalism are probably the same people who we call crypto-bros today.
In all, the furor over blockchain, especially currency and NFT, has yielded heat but no light. Where’s the killer application? It never takes this long for a truly useful technology to find that killer app, not in today’s technology environment. Maybe it just isn’t that useful and people should calm down?
The value is in the forward signed, immutable ledger written by neutral consensus. This can take a lot of form and be the backbone of many types of applications (and already is used by large firms), the current market for direct public ledgers is a mess and I don’t generally agree with much of the last craze beyond the fundamentals needed to manage transfers, ownership and executions. The applications that will use these kinds of networks haven’t really been built yet.
Any sources in large firms using it? I haven’t seen anything other than generic marketing talk.
I can say of the top of my head the JPM and AMEX are running internal ledgers but there are many more, IBM and Accenture co-developed a system called Hyperledger which was given to the Linux Foundation. Its a tool kit for developing and deploying ledger applications primarily targeted at internal corps.
One of the cases these are good for is an easier to manage rights and asset control systems than many products you would pay more for and with less futzing with IAM, LADP or AD.
That’s a lot of words to say nothing. Like, you literally aren’t saying anything of substance.
>The value is in the forward signed, immutable ledger written by neutral consensus. This can take a lot of form and be the backbone of many types of applications (and already is used by large firms), the current market for direct public ledgers is a mess and I don’t generally agree with much of the last craze beyond the fundamentals needed to manage transfers, ownership and executions.
All of that is word salad. Blockchain is 100% redundant technology that uses obscene amounts of electricity. Why do I need a network of computers around the globe to make sure a contract and checks get signed? Why does it require a global network of computers constantly refreshing themselves and checking for inconsistencies to implement new business? If the smartest minds on Earth actually can’t come up with a use case, then it’s trash.
Grifters love it.
Blockchains come in many forms, the ones you are thinking of are what are called Proof of Work chains, these uses a kind of cryptographic race to secure thier data and use a TON of waste energy as a result. Def not a fan either.
The growing popularity and interest in chains is around forms of Proof Of Stake, these use other internal protocol mechanisms to secure the network and work to run the cryptographic functions as efficiently as possible. Unsurprisingly the fastest blockchains are proof of stake and power wise are similar to traditional applications in utilization.
You don’t need any of these networks if you don’t want to use them, fundamentally, they arent even networks, they are cryptographic messaging systems. How the data is sent and processed is incidental, you could work out a bitcoin block on pen and paper if you wanted. This concept has extended to a cryptographic tool called Zero Knowledge Proofs, these will be part of next generation identity verification systems and is a fundamental of the W3C standard around DiD, the whole point is for disconnected attestation.
Maybe this is my “too old for this shit” moment, but this all just sounds like convoluted non-sense that’s never going to go anywhere. We still have SMS and ATMs that run XP.
surprisingly small hardware is needed to sign a message. though I do agree that we are still a bit early for workable end-user use cases. People really dont care what the database or app server is, they just want it to work and raw dogging some public node is just a bit much for people, i dont blame them.
more packaged solutions are under development, these will be more like a proper application with the differences of a chain being abstracted by the provider
things like sms, what if i told you SMS would be fine with this, so would smoke signals
I think the problem I have with it is the online enthusiasm for it is acting like it’s already going to change my life yet it’s been more than a decade and no one has shown tangible and understandable utility, just marketing bs and grifting.
But we’re still early lol
Yea I’ve been hearing that for a decade. Aside from missing out on bitcoin at $300, I’m still waiting. 🤷♂️
So, if I get it, it’s like torrent, except instead of you manually verifying the hash code, each computer your file passes pay automatically checks and says “yup, the file I received and transmitted is the file I was supposed to receive and transmit” ?
pretty much, think of the files like what you would see in your .git folder for a code project. they are all linked together in a history graph. so you are validating the data, its position in history along with its entire history, you also know who changed the data and what systems were responsible for writing those changes. really solid tooling for provenance and chain-of-evidence scenarios.
I see, but if I’m not mistaken, git is anterior to the blockchain. What I’m asking here is what new things the blockchain brings to the table, that preexisting protocols like Git or P2P couldn’t do. Or is the blockchain just another application of the same principles (the Merkle chain, as a previous commenter was saying)? If so, what sets it appart ?
Blockchain (simplified) is a giant excel spreadsheet that you can never edit, only add to. I struggle to think of any applications that is a benefit for, and even then append only databases would already do it better.
One of the benefits is supposed to be decentralization, but people tout that as a benefit for things like house deeds, or identification, or whatever. Imagine how massive an append only excel file of every house with every owner change etc etc included in it would be. Then we once again only have the people who can afford to store that much data storing it, and we are back to where we are now.
It doesn’t really solve any problems, it just is a worse version of what already exists.
Would a git repo count as a blockchain? It kinda fits your simplified description
Something about this comment didn’t seem right to me, so I did some quick math:
There are approx 144,000,000 homes (incl apartments, etc) in the US. https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/VET605221
Assuming every home is sold 5 times on average, that’s 720,000,000 sale records/deeds.
Existing blockchain implementations use IDs that are around 32 bits, or 4 bytes.
A “home sales record” or deed on the blockchain needs to include the buyer and the time/date of sale (8 bytes), along with a cryptographic signature (4-16 bytes). The seller’s identity doesn’t need to be included because it’s always doing to be the previous owner.
So each record is 16-28 bytes, and there are 720,000,000 records. If we go with 28bytes, it would take about 20GB to store all of the deeds for the US. A 500GB hard drive costs $20.
…and 20G that needs to be replicated to tons of nodes if it should be really decentralized.
16-28 bytes seems extremely understated, I think it could easily be off by orders of magnitude.
What do you think I’m missing in my estimate? Do you have any experience in CS?
You’re just talking about ownership of a title right?
A deed contains a lot more information than the owner. Mine is 4 pages long. Contains a map of the street, various easements, et cetera.
Yeah, but that kind of data would be better in an auxiliary database. There’s no reason to include it in the blockchain.
well but doesn’t that beat the purpose of using the blockchain in the first place? why not just store everything in the auxiliary database?
Depends on why you want to use the blockchain, I guess. If you want a system to allows anyone to verify ownership of property without 3rd parties (government, etc) being involved then the auxiliary database should work fine.
What purpose were you thinking of, that would be defeated by an aux DB?
You forget that the blockchain is all about not trusting some middle-man/site, so you need to stock that blockchain yourself, everyone needs to stock that blockchain.
So multiply not only the cost, but also the ecological impact just buying all those drives.
And that’s only for *US" housing (I didn’t get the timeframe you used to calculate it, is it for like year 2050? Old data stays forever.).
BTW found the guy buying 0.5TB Hard drives ;-)
Yes, everyone would need a copy of the 10s-of-GB blockchain. That’s a fraction of the amount of space a single computer game would use, does that seem unreasonable/impractical to you?
And I buy used enterprise 2-3TB drives on eBay :) . I was going to use a 32GB flash drive for my example, but a 500GB HDD is the same price
Fair enough about the size.
Checked out eBay, there are some cheap 2-3Tb drives there! How does it pan out quality wise? I guess they sell them off like after 5 years of usage right?
Yeah, that’s my understanding. Tbh I don’t have a lot of experience with them yet, but I’m building an 8 disk RAID6 array and I decided to go with those used drives. 10 matching disks will be around $120, and I’ll have 2 extra drives so I can rebuild the array asap if a drive fails.
Edit: I also backup all of my important files, so it wouldn’t be the end of the world if the entire array fails. And a little downtime isn’t that big of a deal for my home server, unlike a commercial data center.
I thought it sounded interesting when it was new but the more I’ve learned, the more convinced I am that it’s completely useless. I’ve never seen anything done on a blockchain that couldn’t be done faster, cheaper, and more securely in a SQL database. Even the not-a-scam applications are ridiculous and fall apart upon examination. Blockchain as a definitive record of ownership? Absolutely not. There’s no way to force a person to update a record. Lose your house in a bankruptcy? The sheriff on his way to evict you isn’t going to care that you’ve got some NFT saying you still own the house. Anything involving contracts at all? If a court can’t unilaterally update the blockchain record, then the record is unreliable. But if the government can unilaterally update a record, then you’re not relying on community consensus and immutability in the first place.
Blockchain isn’t useful for anything important, and it’s not a logical choice for anything trivial aside from literally just playing with blockchain stuff for the sake of playing with blockchains. I think it’s a dead-end technology.
> Blockchain as a definitive record of ownership? Absolutely not.
Oh, its worse than you think.
https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/publications/mining_CCS.pdf
Once BTC hits enough halvening-cycles, the entire protocol doesn’t work anymore. Its more beneficial to fork the blockchain (and collect ~50 transaction fees), rather than work on the head (and only collect ~5 transaction fees).
So if the last block confirmed 100-transactions (aka: collected 100 transaction fees), its more beneficial to undo that block and “steal” ~50 transactions, knowing that you’re leaving ~50 transactions for another miner to follow onto your block. (Ex: there are now two blocks: one with ~5 transactions available, the truth… and ~55 transactions available. The lie / false block you created. The lie is more economically beneficial to the next miner, so they’ll switch to your block).
It turns out that BTC forgot how to handle ties after the end of the “Free reward”, and there’s a good chance that “definitive record” is not so definitive.
What’s wrong with that though? BTC handles forks just fine. Eventually one fork will win out and life will continue on as usual.
The bigger issue this paper presents is that miners become incentivized to mine empty blocks. But can’t you just enforce a minimum transaction count on blocks?
> > > But can’t you just enforce a minimum transaction count on blocks? > >
Miners can just create their own nonsense transactions.
So the actual tech behind could lead to some interesting ways to utilize it, but it’s admittedly squandered on cryptocurrencies and shitty NFT “art”.
Like, you could probably get rid of identity theft being an issue if you had unique tokens that would have your personal info like your legal name, birthdate, SSN, etc to ensure that it’s you and not somebody pretending to be you. Instead of entering in this info, you could just share the necessary tokens with the other party - so if a bank needed your info, for example, you could just give them the tokens containing the different info they need into their wallet. No idea how feasible that would be, but I do think there’s more actually creative and useful ways to utilize the blockchain tech versus just relegating it to shitcoins and ape art.
What you’re describing kinda just sounds like ID cards or passwords… I mean, these can be stolen, falsified ot lost, but even assuming the “falsified” part is and remains impossible, couldn’t it be possible to obtain or duplicate someone’s token? The crudest example I could think of would be someone just stealing a computer on which someone else’s crypto keys are saved, but through hacking there’d probably be more ways to do it…
From my understanding (and it could be wrong tbh, this is a bit out of my wheelhouse), you cannot duplicate NFTs - it’s already recorded on the blockchain, so it’ll be the only unique one on the chain. Even if somebody were to create another token with your info, you can still say that the duplicated token is not your token because you can prove when the duplicated one was created after your token was, and can even prove each transaction done with your specific token. Plus, to even hack the blockchain, iirc it would require one party to have over 50% of the processes running it - which is reportedly hard to do, so take that for what you will.
I think what they’re asking is how do you protect your token?
You have to have some way of storing and presenting that token so what would stop somebody from stealing or replicating the method of presenting said token? The way it is done now with cryptocurrency is far, far from ideal and can easily lead to permanent loss of access.
Sam Altman’s Worldcoin is addressing this issue in a way. Your proof of humanity is tied to a unique eye scan. Similarly, a wallet whose private key is tied to biometric verification could greatly, but completely, secure one’s digital identity held in that wallet.
What if you lose your eye in an accident? What if you lose your finger or hand?
no longer human then.
I advocate for using a dick pic for dudes and a booby pic for the ladies to verify your identity in those extreme cases.
I haven’t been able to quite figure it out. But I keep having this idea that blockchain would be really good for journaling and validating elections. I haven’t been able to solve how you handle both anonymity and spam bots simultaneously because you can only give each person one vote. But the concept of peer 2 peer journaling sounds perfect for handling trust
That’d probably be a component. The problem with digital elections is that they’re EXTREMELY complicated. Complexity means risk of error and you don’t want to fuck up an election. We’ve already seen the fuss people make when an election is generally successful.
Many have devoted a lot of thought about how to make digital election systems. So far, no one has figured out a better alternative than paper ballots.
Blockchain doesn’t bring any closer to a solution.
I find it to be an interesting solution looking for a problem. There could be many applications but I’ve yet to see one that blockchain could solve better than anything else that we already have, outside of crypto currencies.
Web3 is an interesting thought experiment but I don’t see how it would work in real life. It would be extremely slow, data loss would be a daily occurrence and it would be a privacy/security nightmare.
NFTs could have a useful case of keeping online records of ownership. Being cars, homes and even cattle. Which coulld also make it easier and cheaper to sell or buy these things.
Ignoring privacy concerns of course.
But you would still need an authority that can unilaterally make changes to these ownership records. People die, things get lost, stuff happens. So it can’t all be based on signing with private keys of individual persons. At that point: Why not run a central database of it all. It’s cheaper, more efficient and you could still publish a public record for traceability.
I really don’t see any problem that Blockchain could solve better than other solutions. Except Cryptocurrency.
IMHO technically speaking the concpt of a Blockchain and decentralized zero trust computing like in Ethereum are indeed “interesting” as concepts.
But in practice there are a ton of issues with current implementations and it’s likely not going to be used on a large scale because zero-trust doesn’t scale well.
It was “interesting” 15 fucking years ago when it came out and we didn’t know what it could (or couldn’t) do.
15 years later, no one has come up with an application, so I think we can stop pretending that there’s a solution here. We’re now into “just 5 more years” to figure out a good use of this thing, and no one is any closer to an answer.
15 Years Ago, the Wii U hadn’t come out yet and iPhone App store wasn’t used yet. Think about how much life has changed, and how little the cryptocoin people moved forward with their tech. Its mind-boggling how much money they’ve been given and how little progress has been made.
15 years ago when Bitcoin was invented was roughly the launch of Super Smash Bros Brawl and Halo 3, to put this into video-game terms.
I see blockchain technology and it’s potential as analogous to a globally shared spreadsheet where nobody can go back and change history.
Now, just imagine what billions of humans could do if they could all work on the same spreadsheets without needing to trust each other.
- Many financial institutions would be unnecessary
- Ownership can be verified without need of paper and it’s risks of destruction, or trusting corporate computer networks. This applies to houses and boats just as much to movies and songs. Imagine commodity/utility music streaming validating your ownership of music via NFT ownership, not locked down by Apple, Amazon, or anyone else?
What?
I just wrote in Cell A5441 that you owe me 354000,- EUR.
Ownership has to be calculated by all participants, making a Blockchain unneccesary environmental load. You should revisit more reliable sources about the technology.
Cryptocurrency does work. It wasn’t so good at scaling or maintaining a stable price. Or converting between other currencies. Really, it was more of a speculative gambling or money laundering vehicle than a currency, but it can handle transactions. Both sides have to cryptographically sign the transaction (using their wallet’s private key); one side can’t just unilaterally decide that transactions happened and now it’s rich.
Edit: I realize I just addressed part of your comment. For the other part: the high environmental load was a choice, intended to be used to control how new currency is issued. There is a computational cost for maintaining the ledger, but it doesn’t have to be as ridiculous as Bitcoin/ether mining got.
Sure, point me to one.
You would need to start with a literature research. https://scholar.google.com
I understand your point but that is the worst attempt at discussion I’ve ever seen lmao
“Too lazy to formulate an argument, look one up yourself”
You are right and I did think about it and the comment wasn’t written easily. I did open scholar.google.com but I didn’t wanted to put energy into an argument online about a topic I have no passion about.
I once wanted to get an overview about Blockchains because I wanted to see if the hype was real. There was no citable literature I could make use of in order to link it to my own understanding. A literature research can’t ne done by somebody else.
This topic is too hard for me. I just felt some medium-knowledge vibes, so I did post a rude comment. But I did attempt to do good and point one to building his own opinion.
Sorry to be not helpful.
