this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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No Stupid Questions

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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?

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[–] dragontamer 51 points 1 year ago (5 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] dragontamer 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

ETH staking is looking like its literally illegal in the USA, you know that right?

Coinbase Earn is quite possibly trading in unsecured, unregulated securities and is being sued over it.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] dragontamer 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

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.

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[–] alokir 27 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (4 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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 ;-)

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[–] netvor 5 points 1 year ago (6 children)

...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.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The "blockchain" I use on a daily basis is git, where the sha of the previous commit affects the next.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

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?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

A commitchain

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] dragontamer 15 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[–] MargotRobbie 8 points 1 year ago

As we see here on the Fediverse, decentralization works fine without monetization using an actively anti-scaling append only database that emits the pollution of a medium sized country.

The only other good thing that came out of it is it increased the prevalence of digital payment system in the world, but I struggle to think of anything that would actually directly benefit from blockchain.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (17 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (8 children)

Any sources in large firms using it? I haven’t seen anything other than generic marketing talk.

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[–] dragontamer 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (19 children)

The value is in the forward signed, immutable ledger written by neutral consensus.

I have Excel spreadsheets at home though and you can be assured that they haven't changed if you take a hash of them.

In fact, taking cryptographic hashes and signatures of people is automatic with Adobe signature products, and is how I signed for my house mortgage. You know, things that people really don't want changing or someone doing shenanigans with. Just a click here and a send the .pdf over and... yeah, its not that hard in practice.

Signed, immutable proof of the transaction that nobody can manipulate. It also doesn't require a legion of ASICs hashing numbers until the end of time. Because your "blockchain" is vulnerable to the 51% attack if the hashrate ever declines precipitously.

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[–] WintryLemon 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

sorry, gpt said i could do better

A blockchain is like a special notebook that many people can write in. Once something is written, it cannot be changed, and everyone can check that it was written correctly. This notebook help different people or companies work together by writing down and sharing important information in a safe and secure way.

Some people use these special notebooks to make digital money like Bitcoin. But it's just way to use them. Companies also use these notebooks for other things, like making sure their business runs smoothly and securely.

So, the blockchain is not just about digital money, but also a to help people and businesses work together safely and fairly.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

https://lemmy.intai.tech/comment/578972

You can also look in my post history, ask away, I'm no fan of where public systems have gone and understand the anger, point is, these techs ARE being used already in corp systems and even if you dont use this crop of chains, you will likely be using a system like this in the future, even if you dont know it.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

My principle of "blockchain's fundamental value" is simply this: A blockchain that secures valuable information is valuable.

To break that down further:

  • "Valuable information" isn't data - it's something that you can interpret, that has meaning and power to affect your actions. So, price speculation taking place on a chain isn't that valuable in a broad, utilitarian sense, but something like encyclopedic knowledge, historical records, and the like might be. The sense of "this is real" vs "this is Monopoly money" is related to the information quality.
  • "Secures" means that we have some idea of where the information came from, who can access it, and whether it's been altered or tampered. Most blockchains follow the Bitcoin model and are fully public ledgers, storing everything - and just within that model(leaving aside Monero etc.) there are positive applications, but "automatically secure" is all dependent on what application you're aiming for.

You don't need to include tokens, trading, finance, or the specific method of security, to arrive at this idea of what a blockchain does, but having them involved addresses - though maybe without concretely solving - the question of paying upkeep costs, a problem that has always dogged open, distributed projects in the past. If the whole chain becomes more valuable because one person contributes something to it, then you have a positive feedback loop in which a culture of remixing and tipping is good. It tends to get undercut by "what if I made scam tokens and bribed an exchange to list them", the maxi- "we will rule the world" cultures of Bitcoin and Ethereum, or the cynical "VC-backed corporate blockchains", but the public alt chains that are a bit out of the spotlight with longer histories, stuff like Tezos and NEM/Symbol, tend to have a more visible sense of purpose in this direction - they need to make a myth about themselves, and the myth turns into information by chance and persistence.

What tends to break people's brains - both the maxis, and people who are rabidly anti-crypto - is that securing on-chain value in this way also isn't a case of "public" vs "private" goods. It's more akin to "commons" vs "enclosed" spaces, which is an older notion that hasn't been felt in our political lives in centuries, because the partnership of nation-states and capital has been so strong as a societal coordinating force - the state says where the capital should go, the people that follow that lead and build out an empire get rewarded. The commons is, in essence, the voice in the back of your mind asking, "Why are you in the rat race? Do you really need an empire?" And this technology is stating that, clearly and patiently: making a common space better is another way to live.

And so there is a huge amount of spam around "ownership", but ownership itself isn't really a factor. That's just another kind of information that the technology is geared towards storing. The social contract is more along the lines that if you are doing good for a chain and taking few risks, a modest, livable amount of credit is likely to flow to you in time. Everyone making "plays" and getting burned is trying to gamble with it, or to advance empire-building goals in a basically hostile environment that will patch you out of the flow of information.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I've heard of a couple interesting applications (interesting doesn't necessarily mean good)

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.
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[–] zanzo 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

zero knowledge proofs, like those being deployed on blockchains recently, have the potential to be the killer app for this tech. Imagine you want a library card which requires proof of residence. With a zero-proof identity system, you could get your library card without revealing any personal info, like your name or address. Your wallets would simply prove to the library that you are a resident as credentialed by some local/state authority.

This also could have profound implications for the web like universal logins to web services, online privacy while still providing attribution, ownership and rights to digital content, copyright, etc.

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