Hello,
I have been researching about blockchains and stuff and it all seems like a big scam. It’s not sustainable and can be replaced by a simple database.
is there any legitimate use cases of blockchains or it is all just a big scam?
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Yes. Decentralised certificates (NFTs) for the likes of digitally owning something non fungible (think like a concert or plane ticket that isn’t tied to Ticketmaster, etc), or more commonly, cryptocurrency. A way of storing wealth digitally without anyone controlling it centrally.
I would argue against this stance, but not completely. The need for decentralized authorities only comes about due to a lack or trust or failure of the custodians of the product.
From your example, you could turn concert tickets into verifiable tokens (I do think this would be a good idea), and it would solve a lot of after market sale and validation issues. The only reason we have these issues in [checks current year] is because monopolies like LiveNation/TicketMaster have so throughly turbo-fucked the system that venues and customers cant do anything about it.
IMO, blockchains are a cool concept, and I love that cryptography is now a common topic of discussion because of it. However, its a solution looking for a problem and the problems up until this point are manufactured by the people selling the product or straight up ponzi schemes.
Most techbros trying to sell the Blockchain are just ponzi schemes/scams. It does have a legitimate use. But not for whatever the techbros are yapping about. It is essentially a decentralised database under nobody’s control.
People will easily list a lot of credible legitimate usecases
that are hypothetical
and have remained hypothetical for 18 years.
Yes, your honor. My buying of drugs online was only hypothetical, it never happened.
Being on Lemmy, I like the idea of decentralized and permissionless stuff, including money. The problem I have with crypto is that they’re either clearly scams (Trumpcoin, Melaniacoin etc) or they were not intended as a scam but the market in my opinion fails to fairly price it because they speculate on it (e.g. Bitcoin).
Also I don’t understand why people keep insisting in buying Bitcoin when the energy to “produce” it is enormous and is responsible for a lot of CO2 emissions when there are greener cryptocurrencies.
@tired_n_bored @Deestan the mining aspect is what makes it secure.,. In theory Proof of Stake is greener, but once someone archive 51% of stake he became the owner of the network, while with proof of work the cost of securing the network is permanent… Saying this, i do agree that bitcoin energy spend is ab issue…
That’s true, but also the algorithm plays an important role. Do we really need ASIC farms in order to secure the network? Ideally, and how it was thought at the beginning, the individual nodes should also be responsible for its validation, using consumer grade hardware.
There are greener algorithms like the Monero’s. Also Nano uses something called “block lattice” in order to secure the network, with close to 0 required energy
@tired_n_bored I totally agree with that (I did made a thread on my last reply where I states monero approach), not sure about nano tho… Dont it have the same 51% issue as PoS?
@tired_n_bored @Deestan I think monero made the right choice of making ASICs useless and be mined on traditional PCs… Anyone can join the mining at anytime what makes mining farms (like the ones with ASICs or GPUs) way less common
“Blockchain” as commonly meant as used in cryptocurrencies - no. Only for Bitcoin - all other *coins are scams.
However git can be considered to be based on blockchain so in that sense, absolutely.
However git can be considered to be based on blockchain
That’s really stretching the definition of blockchain.
Blockchain is about providing consensus without relying on a central authority. If there are two variants of the same blockchain, anyone should be able to independently verify which one is the real one. Git doesn’t do this.
That’s one definition of blockchain. Since the solution to the Byzantine Generals’ problem in Bitcoin is done by Proof of Work it can’t be said to be a part of the blockchain definition since there are many (most?) blockchains that don’t use PoW. Some companies peddling “blockchain solutions” even use central authorities.
So, with “blockchain” just being a chain of cryptographically verified blocks then git indeed fulfills that definition.
No a blockchain is a chain of blocks. Its an append only datastructure that provides a cryptographically verifiable history. Proof-of-work is what allows for public concensus in crypto currencies like bitcoin, where as git uses signed blocks to identify different chains.
Git doesn’t sign commits, at least not cryptographically. I can download the Linux git repo and add whatever commits I like to it. I can even create my own commits under Torvalds’ name and email if I’d like, or rewrite all his commits under my own name.
It’s highly unlikely I can fool anyone it’s the real deal though. They will just download the kernel from the official repo instead.
Git doesn’t sign commits, at least not cryptographically.
Yeah, it does…
If you barely know shit about git why wouldnt you at least try googleing before posting??It’s a bonus feature used by almost no one. I’ve never encountered a git repo which signs its commits.
However git can be considered to be based on blockchain so in that sense, absolutely.
How would that work?
I think parent is referring to Merkle trees.
Maybe Odysee and monero???
Those are the only BlockChain technology platforms I can think offsince a lot of replies branched towards Cryptocurrency, which is where blockchains are implemented the most in. But it isn’t the sole purpose of blockchain.
It’s a distributed, append only(theoretically), tamper proof data structure. Look up merkle tree, certificate distribution, etc. These comes in different shapes and sizes for storing transaction logs, to keeping track of online identity and false impersonation.
You can implement a blockchain that might not get as power hungry as crypto block chains(because mining), and it’s a cool solution in distributed systems
An easy way for employers to verify that your certifications are authentic.
Tangentially, a lot of scientists do research on topics that do not see application in everyday life immediately.
I can’t think of any examples off the top of my head, but I remember reading articles on how some research bear fruit - ones with huge impacts - only decades later.
To stop research into a topic because there is no practical application now is short-sighted IMO.
OpenCerts does require institutions to be trusted partners, so this isn’t permissionless. Why not just make the normal database searchable if it relies on trusting someone?
It’s not that blockchain doesn’t have any applications. It’s just that it only solves problems in ways that are easier and better solved by other implementations. It’s not that are no practical applications, it’s that there aren’t even any realistic theoretical applications.
it’s that there aren’t even any realistic theoretical applications.
Here’s the neat thing about research: the researcher themselves may not even know the kind of outcomes their research would bring about in the future.
It is not necessarily a known unknown in which we work towards a theoretical application; it could very well be an unknown unknown.
I have a PhD, I know how research works. But the new for a new data distribution system isn’t caused by a technological advancement, it’s driven by social systems.
The usecases for blockchain technology are wellknown, and they are basicaly the antithesis of the technology itself. You need a massive breach of trusted institutions, while maintaining free, open and fast electronic communication throughout the network. You also need to solve the first-owner problem without introducing a trusted party, which is a huge issue in almost every practical application.
So yeah, it can be an unknown unknown, but it’s one in the same way that research into moonratpoison has potential applications. Maybe something vastly unlikely happens, and then it’ll be a good thing we have the tech.
A database is not an alternative to the blockchain.
it cannot really replace a simple database. it has an integrity guarantee. not in the way that data won’t get modified accidentally, but that it won’t get modified onesided.
the git version control system also uses a kind of a blockchain structure. git was made by the creator of linux. a major difference is that git does not use proof of work for consensus, I think it just does not use anything for that, other than the web server’s access control mechanism.
commits are built on top of a large chain of histories, and the commit ID verifies that the current state and the history of it is the exact same when you checkout that commit ID on any other computer. if you go find in the repository a commit made 3 years ago, and change that commit (this is supported by git but not recommended), either the content or the metadata like time of commit, the whole history after that also need to get rewritten to remain valid, and so all those commits will now have a new commit IDThe point of the blockchain is to achieve distributed consensus of what’s in the database. That way, one entity can’t unilaterally change what the database says.
If you have a public non-profit institution maintaining the database, obligated to serve all legal customers, with serious consequences for tampering with it, you can get pretty much everything blockchain can do, for a billionth of the computing power.
But with that system, you would lose these features:
- partially-anonymous participants
- service of all customers, even illegal ones
- immunity to court orders
Not a scam but maybe over engineered and difficult to sell for most uses? Theoretically blockchain could be used for all sorts of applications, but apart from a bunch of startups it’s not taken off. Maybe it’s just not compelling financially for businesses.
For an established business or organisation It’d be a big leap to switch over to blockchain but the benefits are not immediately relisable or tangible in a business setting. In a world where short term profits already trump long term investment, it does make sense that business are not rushing to adopt blockchain.
I’d think of it like this - companies don’t have the foresight to invest in IT and security; they slash IT budgets, use equipment until the last possible moment deferring expensive upgrades and don’t put money in to protect themselves from cyber crime. For example, big banks quite literally still use systems that are decades out of date.
If companies behave like that already why would they invest in switching to the block chain? The benefits are long term and not easily understood. It’s hard to sell investment in a technology on blockchain when most people struggle to understand what it is, let alone what it’s benefits may be.
Most people only know about it because of cryptocurrency but even then don’t really understand how it works, and that usage scenario is world’s away from the other theoretical uses. Cryptocurrency makes money because it’s a speculative asset (at the moment at least). Other uses at best prevent fraud and companies are generally useless at trying to prevent fraud. When they do, it’s focused around the actual transactions not the ledger. They don’t see someone “cooking the books” being the priority problem to solve.
Data security and verifying is not a priority for companies. If companies are spending money at the moment, it’s short term nonsense such as the AI bubble. And public organisations seldom have the imagination or freedom/resource to be an early adoptor a new technology.
So, no I don’t think it’s a scam. I think it’s something that is difficult to implement and sell in the real world. And all people can see at present is “crypto currency goes up in value” not the actual underlying benefit of cryptocurency as a currency. Crytpcurrency is doing well currently because it is scarce and has become an asset bubble, not because the blockchain itself is the star.
blockchains are a solution looking for a problem.
No. From the most base concepts, some authority still needs to recognize and enforce the contents of the blockchain (ownership, currency, whatever). If an authority is already trusted to act on this data, they might as well be the secure custodian of it. Or, if not entirely trusted, a third party trustee. At very best the blockchain offers complete transparency and auditability, but this is the trust you place into any given system on your end. If you do not place trust in a system, what are you doing engaging with it?
Supporters of blockchain generally don’t accept these arguments because they are anti-authority, and without passing further comment on that, fair enough. But that means it will only ever be relegated to buying drugs on the internet and scams.
No. From the most base concepts, some authority still needs to recognize and enforce the contents of the blockchain (ownership, currency, whatever).
What authority is needed when blockchain is used as a currency, what is there to enforce?
But that means it will only ever be relegated to buying drugs on the internet and scams.
You can buy much more than drugs using cryptocurrency, so this is absolutely false.
Some countries are considering using blockchain in the future for their land title registry.
I read something about potentially using blockchain the future while using onland (ontarios land registry service) but i can’t seem to find the page that mentions it.
There’s a few issues with that approach:
- Blockchains can’t forget, but they also need to add new blocks on every period, meaning that there’s a lot of idle events that are added to the chain. You can increase the period, but then the chain has more latency. Either way, the disk space needed to store the full chain grows really fast, which becomes a problem when trying to bootstrap a new root node, or backup an existing one.
- Unless you’re trading land titles internationally (read: there’s no single trusted authority), blockchains could just be replaced with a regular distributed database and servers.
- Chains don’t offer out of band recovery and error correction.
Totally agree. And my problem with the example of land use that a single entity (the government where the land is) will be the sole enforcer of it. So who cares if the information is slightly less centralized, when the actual product is just as centralized as ever?
Anything that requires a public, immutable database. Land registry would be one example. Notary public for electronic documents would be another.
You can leverage the majority consensus to create a trusted software build system. Each block would be a package build
If you have to have someone enforce the land registry or the documents, what is the benefit of the database being zero trust?
land registry
Yes! No more need for title insurance if ownership records are clear and public.
But them the government can’t unilaterally take your property from you for a pittance under eminent domain. Who wants a system like that?
Yes they could? Just append a block with the government stating they now own the land.
I guess you could fork the blockchain and don’t accept this change but this would be useless. Even if no one accepted the claim, the government can just do whatever they want with that land.
You can only guarantee the records have not been tampered with if you maintain a full copy of the records to compare. Even if you do have that full copy you will have a problem proving your copy is the correct one. A full crypto-verified ledger solves that.
If you empower e.g. every change filer (court, notary public) to run a node fudging records becomes effectively impossible.
They already are in most countries. E.g. in Poland land registry is maintained by court system and any changes are made only as a result of court order or a filing made by a notary public, who has a real incentive to check all the documents, because they are on the hook financially for any false filings.
In other words, this is a solved problem without any blockchain nonsense.
Updates lag 4-6 months after filing, so not 100% solved.
Usually, lag like that is due to an ancient codebase, database, and process setup. If you were to solve that, you still wouldn’t need blockchain. The software and process engineering does need careful consideration–almost all the stuff like this has had at least one major attempt to replace it over the decades, and it obviously failed–but again, nothing you would be able to solve just because blockchain.
It absolutely can’t be replaced by a simple database, saying that makes me question that you truly understand the technology. Here’s the important question, who owns the database and how do you know you can trust them?
Would you trust me to manage a database that holds your money? What about someone who’s actively opposing you? How about a foreign nation? That’s the thing blockchains solve, a decentralized 0-trust way to have an append only ledger, yes a database can be an append only ledger, but it can’t be decentralized or 0-trust, that’s the important thing here.
Let me give you a very recent example, Steam has been censored, and has had to remove certain games from their catalog, this happened because PayPal and other payment providers forced their hand. This is the sort of problems that arise from having someone own the database, they can dictate what you do or don’t. Let me be extra clear, this sort of censorship is essentially impossible in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies because no one controls the database.
