Over the years I feel brainwashed by the thoughts of others with no willpower to affirm my own beliefs.
Simply, to me blockchain/crypto is this idea of P2P communication where the intermediate technology that “handshakes” our connection isn’t essentially governed by a centralized entity. But, “handshaking” in this world costs and gas is often times used as the processing/energy to enact this exchange.
Now, for what can be exchanged, it can be quantities of an item. Or information stored within an item. Kind of like Pass by value vs. Pass by reference, in a weird way? Or cryptocurrencies vs. smart contracts?
Now, my own belief is, comparing this system with torrenting, seeding and other technologies that existed long ago and still today. What makes “blockchain/crypto” so valuable that cannot be solved with the technology invented prior to it. To me, it seems like there is extra charge and latency and thus just more negative values overall, when the final overall goal should be this idea of exchanging information without a middle man. We still need ISPs, we still need physical wires to complete the “end-to-end” connection with a peer. So isn’t everything still fundamentally centralized?
What is it actually improving? And is my way of thinking accurate? Why can’t there be a normal P2P project handling exchange of information and/or modern fiat in the same way (Something like Paypal, but transactions have no middleman)?
Edit: The only thing I recognized was the ease of transferring money in other countries. But, that was solved pretty much in the beginning. Why didn't it just stop there? And, now with US regulations, it's much harder to buy crypto and all the fees on top of it, kind of ruins a lot of the advantages the early adopters (at least for US citizens) had.
OK, so I'm going to highly overgeneralize here, and will primarily be using Bitcoin and Ethereum as frames of reference.
A block chain is basically a network of computers that all agree on the state of a linked list database that basically is append-only.
There's some game theory that keeps all the computers basically following the same ruleset of how more blocks (sets of new transactions) get created and propagated to everyone in the network.
Smart contracts are just code baked into the block chain that a network node can run and get a result. All these "items" and things are just resulting computations of the contract. I think these are cool because we can make the money programmable in some very limited ways.
You're also right to be skeptical of other points of centralization and how they get overlooked.
Where is the use? Because you're right, having a large network of computers maintaining and continually syncing a redundant data set that can't be tampered with is significantly harder than a sql database. Well, you have to trust the database maintainer that they didn't do anything suspicious, and banks are incredibly suspect institutions. Well, what about cash? That works, but it's highly impractical for the internet age. With a crypto wallet, you can have internet money you have full control (and responsibility) over.
It has some niche use cases it is great for like cross border remitences.
I see the value in transparency. But, also see that significant challenge of "having a large network of computers maintaining and continually syncing a redundant data set".
Do you have any suggestions on further reading or persons of interest that are actively improving/researching better ways for syncing and maintaining the "database" or framework? Not a company or some crypto firm, but more like a research institution maybe?
Nothing that immediately springs to mind, but you're better off looking into "distributed ledger technology" instead of blockchain specifically. There are some incredibly novel and interesting approaches out there.
Many implement zero-knowledge proofs in order to quickly verify validity or for privacy features. I saw one "chain" that was basically just one block of the entire current state that used a proof in order to create the next single block.
There's also "directed acyclic graphs" that is another interesting implementation. The examples I'm familiar with would Nano/Banano.
Thank you, this is a great place to start