OK but there are actually great uses for blockchain that are completely disconnected from anything you typically see
For example, banks may begin using blockchain for maintaining their internal ledgers. It will help solve a ton of issues around reconciling the transactions from all over the globe
Blockchain has reasonable uses. Really good ones. Crypto and nft bros just completely ruined the image of it
EDIT: I love all the comments demonstrating how little people understand about blockchain. Bitcoin was not the first blockchain, nor is its design the only type of blockchain. Assuming that all blockchain looks like the crypto/nft paradigm is just showing your ignorance.
Blockchain is only potentially useful if there’s no single entity that can be trusted. If banks can’t even trust themselves to manage their own internal ledgers, they have much bigger problems to deal with.
Trustless systems aren’t a bad thing that has to step in when the good thing fails. Trustless systems are inherently better because you don’t have to trust a bank (or anyone for that matter).
Additionally, ledgers can be gamed/corrupted/falsified. This is significantly more complex (bordering on impossible) on the blockchain.
There are often easier, more reliable, and far cheaper ways to achieve the same things without using a blockchain. Some of the principles are even used in normal web browsing to ensure secure untampered connections.
Blockchain just solves a subproblem that only arises when there’s no appointed central entity.
Blockchains aren't hard, unreliable or expensive
Cryptocurrency Ledgers can be corrupted?
I was hedging against a particularly snarky commenter showing up. You can do a 51% attack and theoretically corrupt it. In practice, that’s much more difficult.
You dont need 51% attack to corrupt a ledger. Just enter incorrect info and the ledger is wrong. Not a damn thing a blockchain can do about that. Same issue is with any trustless system where you have to trust someone to input the correct info/do the agreed thing/ship the ordered physical item.
Just enter incorrect info and the ledger is wrong.
The concept behind cryptocurrency is that the ledger is the info, because you’re right, a half-assed blockchain ledger used for external (e.g. cash) transactions doesn’t really solve the root problem. Proof of work is fucking stupid though, and it has (rightfully) ruined the perception of blockchain technology among those who can see past their own crypto wallet.
Blockchain has been around as a technology for nearly two decades. If financial institutions thought it could help them you can bet they would be all-in on it by now. As it is, blockchain has no significant advantages over traditional financial ledger systems, so what incentive is there for them to use it.
It's not something new or cutting edge any more, just waiting for a bright spark to discover the technology and put it to use.
If financial institutions thought it could help them you can bet they would be all-in on it by now.
How do you see memes like this?
Because I see them as lame and sad, especially since we have been seeing them for 10+ years now and they are still the same.
But apparently you think blockchain has reasonable uses.
I love how you can't provide even a single example of useful Blockchain functionality. Doesn't mean it *doesn't exist, but says something... And no, "banking" and "internal ledgers" is not detailed enough to be a sufficient example.
as hostile as people are to block chain due to NFT's and bad implementations, the technology itself has its use cases. It's a great solution for information exchange that requires verification and Immutation. This makes them perfect for ledgers or transaction networks.
It's just there is so much bad PR regarding it everyone just discredits it. Not all of the block chain technologies are massively energy intensive per transaction, it's just many of the cryptocurrencies use the most intensive one because it's also arguably the most secure
Absolute immutability is kind of a terrible property for a financial system though, cos it completely ignores the fact that mistakes and fraud happen and you need a way to forcefully recover funds other than "lol sucks to be you I guess".
The one actually genuinely useful application for this kind of technology that anyone has come up with is Certificate Transparency, but crypto people don't get excited about it cos it's not possible to make money from it.
You can implement clawback while still having an immutable blockchain. The transaction will always stay on the blockchain, but the funds can be recovered
this is how it should be anyway, you do not want any ledger or database to be mutable because it allows for integrity violations and will cause you to lose the ability to trust it. Even non-blockchain styles follow that principle.
You can revert transactions with immutable storage. For example git can do revert-commits.
Reverts work because users have equal write access to all the data. You can mess things up in the codebase, and even if you die of a heart attack 10m later, my revert is just as valid as your commit.
It's not really the same when every user has "sovereignty" over their address in the ledger. A bad actor has to consent to pushing a revert transaction onto the chain, or they have to consent to using a blockchain system where 3rd-party reversion is possible (which exists on some systems, but also defeats the concept of true sovereignty over your address).
So, would the bitcoin equivalent be sending the BTC back?
Yes. Clawback might be executed by having some entity or system of trust that is able to reverse a transaction by creating and posting the opposite of the faulty transaction. This is not built in to the current BTC.
Its a good concept, but it violates other concepts of the blockchain and would mean implementing a central authority with the power to force a transaction. Try telling a cryptobro to use a coin with a central bank and imagine the reaction you'd get.
At least with the way the regular banking system is set up, you can get a court order to enforce a correction without needing the consent of all parties, which is useful for fraud, theft, and even probate cases when one party is deceased and can no longer consent to a transaction. There are enough problems with our system to write an entire library of books ON TOP OF the library that already exists, but this feature is one of the few benefits.
It could be done on a blockchain. It doesn't require a central authority.
It could be escrow-based. It could use majority rule or even Monte Carlo methods.
the technology itself has its use cases.
Cool.
Name one successful example.
I mean, it's been, what, 15 years of hype? Surely there must be a successful deployment of a commercially viable and useful blockchain that isn't just a speculative cryptocurrency or derivative thereof, right?
Right?
I can't find the case study, but this blockchain project by IBM was implemented in Singapore and was shown to reduce customs processing times from several weeks to just several hours.
The general idea was that with a successful blockchain implementation, the Singapore government was able to expedite parts of their customs process which normally require intensive human labor, and the use of smart contracts removed the need for having documents sent and resent when all parties had access to the smart contract directly.
There are specific use cases where it can benefit existing processes, but people just think blockchain = crypto.
First thing I found when I searched for "Maersk IBM blockchain":
The only selling point of blockchain is that it's trustless. This becomes a less-useful property when it comes to things in the real world, as you tend to need to trust at least one party.
For example, anything they achieved there with blockchain, they could have achieved with a simple government-run web service and a traditional database.
Except it's not though. Because you have to trust the majority, hence why you've had forks like Bitcoin Cash. Because those people wanted to trust someone else. "trustless" is just a buzzword, like everything else with Bitcoin
I can’t find the case study, but this blockchain project by IBM was implemented in Singapore and was shown to reduce customs processing times from several weeks to just several hours.
the real question is what part of this was specific to blockchain, something that would be difficult or impossible to do without it. if you want to put forward this argument you need to at least provide a simple, clear, coherent answer to that.
in this case, i could easily argue a sqlite db hosted on gitea would work better and theres no way to prove im wrong.
There is nothing Crypto can do better than regular database. Immutability is not a desirable property.
It can coordinate disjoint actors without a 3rd party.
Does it though? Because to me the fact that the largest cryptos have had several forks is proof that no, in fact, the magic of crypto can't coordinate people. People coordinate people and then decide what to do with the technology.
Monero actually has very good uses. It does use POW but their algorithm is made to encourage using CPUs instead of GPUs and slower, power efficient devices, which makes it a lot less energy intensive than other POW cryptocurrencies.
I find the actual technology very interesting. At one point I wanted to create a distributed research journal, and I spent some time trying to develop a trustless, immutable ledger that didn't have the high overhead that most blockchains have for proof of work. It was extremely cool, but nobody gives a shit unless it has coins lol
I look forward to 20 years from now when it gets resurrected and used for interesting things that don't involve cryptocurrency.
I remember reading a few years ago that the US postal service was looking into using it for voting. I haven't seen anything about it since, but it did peak my interest. I'd love to see it used for research if possible, too, but then I can barely understand these decentralized social media platforms so my opinion isn't worth much with tech
That, to me, seems like an ideal use case. My only reservation is that I think it would be bungled in implementation, then pushed without enough testing and validation, then hacked due to the bungled implementation, and then rejected forever because it was hacked once lol
This makes them perfect for ledgers or transaction networks.
It doesn't scale well, so it generally works best for ledgers of relatively small scale. Anything that might need to go beyond that small scale will run into technical/performance issues.
Just responding that I did see this, The video has peaked my curiosity and I plan on watching it later when I have more free time outside of midterm's season
His arguments are:-
We don't need blockchain to stop problems from happening because we have a [super efficient, cheap, accessible, well constructed] legal system to correct those problems when they occur.
We don't need distributed ledgers to store the data because we can just trust Amazon Web services.
Blockchain is a nebulous buzzword with a vague meaning. But I have yet to see a sensible definition of a blockchain that doesn't include git. At the end of the day they are both just Merkle trees.
Git doesn't have update rules that are only valid if signed by a particular private key.
Please share a source! I can't find anything as robust as a whitepaper (the bitcoin whitepaper doesn't use the term).
NIST informally defines it as:
A distributed digital ledger of cryptographically-signed transactions that are grouped into blocks. Each block is cryptographically linked to the previous one (making it tamper evident) after validation and undergoing a consensus decision. As new blocks are added, older blocks become more difficult to modify (creating tamper resistance). New blocks are replicated across copies of the ledger within the network, and any conflicts are resolved automatically using established rules.
Which git certainly meets this.
IBM informally defines it as:
Blockchain is a shared, immutable ledger that facilitates the process of recording transactions and tracking assets in a business network. An asset can be tangible (a house, car, cash, land) or intangible (intellectual property, patents, copyrights, branding).
Which git meets.
Git is hash linked, not cryptographicly linked. Only cryptographicly valid changes are allowed to blockchain state. All data can be modified in git.
Yes. IBMs definition is bad and could equally apply to git. They've totally forgotten about the private key aspect.
I'll see if I can source a better definition online, but make no promises.
Oh a 3rd definition, that definitely hurts the case that blockchain is vague ill defined term. If it were a well-defined term, there would be whitepapers defining it like merkle trees or bitcoin. Blockchain is just a marketing term defined by businesses, not scientists or engineers and thus is vague and variable.
I also don't think your definition is a very good definition. Do you think git fundamentally changes when it moves from sha1 to sha256? Or are you referring to the fact that the payloads of cryptocurrency's blockchain is required to be signed (just like you can optionally require git commits to be signed)? I don't think that's fundamental to blockchain either.
Only cryptographicly valid changes are allowed to blockchain state. All data can be modified in git.
No. You can't modify the chain in git. Each commit is an immutable snapshot of the repository. To change history you have to create a new hash and then broadcast that to everyone that they should stop using the old one. Depending in how your network is setup you may onky have to convince a centralized server, or you might have to convince 51% of the actors on your network or you may just choose to only form a network that agrees with you. You could alter bitcoin's blockchain too, but you'd need 51% of the network to agree with you.
Oh a 3rd definition, that definitely hurts the case that blockchain is vague ill defined term.
The phrases used to describe the technology to the public may change, but the technolgical approach doesn't
If it were a well-defined term, there would be whitepapers defining it like merkle trees or bitcoin.
There are hundreds of blockchain whitepapers, all of which link blocks of data via hash functions and only accept state changes if they are valid and cryptographicaly signed.
Blockchain is just a marketing term defined by businesses, not scientists or engineers and thus is vague and variable.
If we were discussing web3 or Metaverse then you may have a point. But no-one in tech is confused about what blockchain is anymore.
Do you think git fundamentally changes when it moves from sha1 to sha256?
No.
Or are you referring to the fact that the payloads of cryptocurrency's blockchain is required to be signed
Yes. Exactly this.
(just like you can optionally require git commits to be signed)?
Optionally is the key word. Blockchain transactions must be signed, and they must be accepted as following the blockchain rules by validators.
I don't think that's fundamental to blockchain either.
Find me a blockchain that doesn't require signed transactions to make state changes.
No. You can't modify the chain in git.
I didn't say anything about modify the chain.
Each commit is an immutable snapshot of the repository.
A commit can contain any data it likes. A commit to a blockchain is highly restricted. Only cryptographicly valid rule following changes are allowed to blockchain state.
Optionally is the key word. Blockchain transactions must be signed, and they must be accepted as following the blockchain rules by validators.
But this is just a policy decision, not a property of the technology. You can easily implement a script that checks if every commit from remotes are signed, accepts them if they are and drops them if they aren't or the signature is invalid.
If you contribute to a project where the majority require signed commits, then you need to sign commits in order for your change to be integrated into the consensus.
That has nothing to do with the technology itself, just with the application.
So if you state that signatures are required to be a blockchain, then you can use git to create a blockchain, by just having that policy.
(IMO I wouldn't say that signatures are required, just that blockchains usually have them.)
You can easily implement a script that checks if every commit from remotes are signed, accepts them if they are and drops them if they aren't or the signature is invalid.
Now add some logic to check whether the actual data is valid (i.e. bob has enough coins in his account to send to Charlie).
Make some incentive to ensure only the main branch survives and forks are either eliminated or merged.
Automate
Now git replicates blockchain's functionality.
So if you state that signatures are required to be a blockchain, then you can use git to create a blockchain, by just having that policy.
Yes, but add automatically processing the content of the commit for validity and incentives to reduce the number of forks.
(IMO I wouldn't say that signatures are required, just that blockchains usually have them.)
Without public key cryptography you just have a hash linked list (like Git).
Hash is cryptographic function.
A hash function doesn't check if a signature is valid. Neither does git. Blockchain does check.
How does it "certainly meet it"? There is no consensus mechanism in git, new blocks are not replicated across the network, there is no network at all, git works offline. You can replicate changes with remotes but there is no "git network" in any similar sense. And conflicts are definitely not resolved automatically. And the git hashes are certainly not cryptographic.
That's 4 ways it doesn't meet the definition. You could maybe stretch the meaning of a network to make it 3.
While blockchain is well defined, it in itself is not a product but a technology. I think what the other commenter is getting at is that simply saying something "is blockchain" means very little because what the blockchain does depends on the implementation, so when used in marketing it's just a nebulous buzzword in that it doesn't actually give you much information about what the product is. Same with terms like cloud, AI, virtual reality, etc.
Yes. There were a lot of companies selling "blockchain base" solutions where blockchain wasn't really needed in the solution at all.
Then it was Metaverse based solutions. (I would argue VR is well defined)
Now it's AI solutions.
But I think "cloud" is now post that marketing phase, and blockchain is heading that way.
Git might not count because you can have branches that then merge? But yeah, git is useful, it's decentralized and distributed, it could be used P2P...
Git might not count because you can have branches that then merge?
Man, I remember how back in 2009 we were hyped about this possible chance for a fairer world that a independent currency might bring. Guess we were quite wrong. :)
The independent currency was still worth standard currency... So the ones already hoarding all of that existing make-believe-number money just bought up and schemed us out of new make-believe-number money.
How did we not see this coming? :(
not smart
Not gonna claim any foresight.
But now in 2024. It dose seem rather insane to me. That no one predicted the energy problems of proof of work.
We were well aware of the co2 cost of computing.
No one expected that dozens of crypto currencies would pop up. Most of us actually expected it to just fail and dissolve. But there was the naive, little glimpse of hope that this might destroy the petro dollar (which was much stronger in 2009 than today).
I think the only project I've seen so far where I've felt that a blockchain has actually been the correct choice is Alfis, which is a decentralized DNS that uses the blockchain as the public append-only ledger that it is, and it uses proof-of-work to add arbitrary costs to updates - to make spamming or namesquatting expensive.
Amazon has a database project called QLDB that uses blockchain for its audit log.
What do you call an audit log that's cryptographically verifiable? A blockchain.
I've read through this whole thread, and I still haven't really come to any solid conclusions on it. I'm skeptical of crypto as a kind of idiotic speculative market, but that's also every market ever. But then, the blockchain is apparently different from crypto, even though they're both hype-laden marketing terms that have been completely fucked up. I think doing [redacted] with crypto is still potentially cool, though I think it still has limited anonymity, from what I've heard, and the speculative market also fucks it up.
Is "the blockchain" just like some nerd shit that's for internal hospital ledgers, and beyond that it's all kind of moot garbage, or what? Someone spoonfeed me.
One is the tech, the other is an example of a type of the tech. A square is a rectangle, but a rectangle is not a square.
For most applications, this isn't necessary:
There are some examples like in biotech/finance that I personally believe will require a blockchain to be truly "fair" at the end
I like this flowchart but honestly most third party data handling solutions are just asking for a major breach: stoking vulnerable people over the coals.
Ignore the FBI hack, and the SEC hack, and the DoD hack, and the FINRA hack, and the..
Now add that trustlessness is impossible and you can scratch the blockchain box for good.
You cannot get rid of trust in some form. You need entry to the system, so you need to trust its gateway. You need to trust the network to not have some vulnerability like a 50% attack. And eventually you need to trust the developers not to add critical bugs (that alone is virtually impossible) or pull off some scam.
So, since you need to trust someone, might as well choose some government regulated party like a bank or a lawyer and choose conventional and efficient tech.
Diagram is missing a "do records need to interact" control box.
I'm stupid, can you give me a like, more clear practical example of a good use of blockchain? Cause I get the sense that a good amount of this conflict, going off that flowchart, is going to be due to the evaluation of these situations as like, not needing to arise in the first place, or maybe like, a philosophical objection to the necessity of the technology, maybe. But I think a clearer example could help with this.
can you give me a like, more clear practical example of a good use of blockchain?
Do you see how all the answers are generic, tend to be long and read like a sales pitch? That's because the actual answer is: no, there is no practical legal application that isn't better solved with conventional tech.
The only application that is successfully used in practice is paying for organized crime: buying goods and services on the dark web and paying for extortion like ransomware attacks.
Blockchains are also great for the verification of digital goods as tangible assets. While I'm not sure we reach this level of meme, people could 100% mint their own house's deed and trade that as a legit way to buy/sell their house.
I am very carefully avoiding the words "NFT" because they are another horrible use-case of a blockchain (and a prime example of how capitalists turn a good tech into something stupid for a quick buck), but this would theoretically be a tokenized-security with a 1:1 to the actual deed to the house.
Is that more secure than the normal process of buying a house? Do you really need it to be external to a 3rd party when the transfer of homes already exists? No not really lol, hence why we probably see it the most in highly regulated industries like biotech and finance first.
HIPPA/Securities-laws (or lack-thereof) will require a tough regulatory framework that "could" realistically be done via a 3rd party, but you have to ask yourself if you trust big-pharma and wallstreet enough to regulate themselves like that.
Edit: Looked up and saw c/lemmyshitpost, maybe I'm spending too much time elucidating a response on a meme thread but this is my take on the tech.
No no, thank you for this.
I understand blockchain as a concept, and kind of hownit plays into cryptocurrency, but understanding a true example of blockchain use outside of finances is something I needed more info on, thank you
The big improvement is the removal of the need to trust some 3rd party but also to add the precision and complexity of computer language to some domain. For example health care data, a block chain system would make one standard for how the records are stored, it would make it so the data in encrypted by the patient and they alone could grant access. When a new provider wants access there is one standard way that is automated and secure. None of which is dependent on a 3rd party who can be compromised or become corrupt and no longer act in good faith. Obviously there is a lot of details here dependent on making the block chain work flawlessly.
Imo block chains have 2 core issues to over come in order to really solve problems. First is being constructed so that they are bug free. Software is not a mature enough discipline for that as of yet. Second, is what happens when you loose you key or it gets stolen. If someone steals you Bitcoin private key, you can't get them back after they transfer them out. Or if you just loose the key your up a creek. What is required is a way to prove you are you to the system that can't be stolen and can't be lost. That is a far harder question.
I just wrote out another comment, and I think I kinda figured out my core question, but, is there a way to save my medical information without doxxing myself, if this is supposed to be like, a public database, you know, if that's kinda the point, is that everyone can look at everyone else's stuff? I got the impression that a lot of the current blockchain stuff wasn't capable of the necessary levels of storage that would be required for like, health records, on their own.
I dunno, maybe you could have some situation where you have a key, that opens up some cryptography on the blockchain, and that blockchain piece when unlocked gives you another key that lets you access your medical records, or something like that, and that might be able to fit. But, then, I don't really see how that's any different from just having like, the key to the person's medical records be contingent on person. Like biometric security, or government ID, or something.
Point out wherever I've made wrong assumptions here, I'm just kind of talking out my ass, and hoping that I'm correct inso that the conversation can continue and I can scrape more out of it, I don't really expect to be right.
A blockchain can provide an irrevocable record, and it can provide a mechanism for uncooperating parties to agree that the record should be created. This is usually used for financial transactions involving coins of dubious value, but it can also be used for recording transactions of real world assets as long as those transactions can be faithfully linked to the event on the blockchain. Therefore the blockchain doesn't really prove that a transaction is fraudulent or not, all it proves is that a sufficient number of parties believe it is not.
as long as those transactions can be faithfully linked to the event on the blockchain.
That kind of seems like the big glaring video game boss style weak point, to me. I feel like you'd still need some external third party to verify that everything is properly linked up to the blockchain, or like, someone could just impersonate someone else through whatever things are used to link something to the blockchain, and then it's just kinda back to square one, I would think. I dunno, I think also maybe I just don't really quite get it.
The oracle problem has had some attempts at being solved.
A the moment external data on a blockchain is more about transparency than trust.
The blockchain is essentially a ledger that tracks transactions (including the creation of currency). One thing that is not always clear is how important it is for a blockchain to be decentralized. When I say "decentralized," I mean that many different people are operating a server that performs transactions on a larger network. These people are rewarded in currency for their efforts, and are sometimes referred to as "miners," though this term is changing somewhat.
There are thousands of these servers in a network that are operating on and tracking the ledger for blockchains like Bitcoin or Ethereum. Any updates to the ledger are verified by all of these nodes. As long as 51% of nodes can verify a transaction, it will be added to the ledger. This means that as long as someone doesn't own 51% of the network, they can't just inject whatever transactions they want (i.e., fraudulent activity). In practice, this makes these networks very resilient to fraud.
I think this paves the way for a lot of the practical examples you're looking for. For example, there's no way for the network to decide to just give tons of money to a single entity for some "economic policy" like Too Big to Fail (i.e., corporate bailouts). This means you don't have to wake up one morning worrying about whether or not your currency will rapidly inflate because of things like corruption. Another example is the true ownership of digital assets. NFTs have (rightly) gotten a lot of flack for being overpriced JPEGs, but there are real use cases here. A random middleman can't just decide to price gouge because they own all the tickets first (Ticketmaster). Instead, artists can mint tickets on the blockchain (very important: this ensures authenticity) and then fans can buy them on the blockchain - no middle man required. You still show a QR code at the door for verification like you would now.
As long as 51% of nodes can verify a transaction, it will be added to the ledger. This means that as long as someone doesn’t own 51% of the network, they can’t just inject whatever transactions they want (i.e., fraudulent activity). In practice, this makes these networks very resilient to fraud.
Could like, 51% of the owners just coordinate to kind of, do a fraud? I mean it sounds like an inherently democratic system, but from what I've understood of, say, miners, right (dunno how this works for proof of stake, but I imagine it has similar problems), those rigs are gonna be bought by people who disproportionately have higher earnings and can afford more GPUs in finland or wherever, and then that's going to just kinda recreate the same power dynamic that we see in the real world already. Which ends up in the same kind of speculative market garbage we have with stock ownership in companies already.
I also don't really understand how a ticketing system would really work on the blockchain. I probably don't know enough about cryptography to know how it might work, but I got the sense that nfts weren't even overpriced jpegs, they were overpriced links with pseudo-legal contracts, that were still prone to link rot, and didn't really indicate any IP ownership. If you had a code on the ticket instead that could only be verified as real, rather than fake, by a ticketing person, instead of like, a link, that would probably be the use case, right? am I getting that correct, is that something cryptography can do? probably, right?
Also, can someone just like, steal your ticket still? Or like impersonate you as the ticket guy, or what? Like from the others have told me and also just from what I know already, you can't really change the chain unless, like you said, you have 51% of the owners, so how would you be able to like, put something in the chain that identifies the owner as being the owner? Wouldn't it be more secure to have just like, a verifiable code or something, that you can delete, that isn't public, between the artist and the buyer? Then you could ensure anonymity between the buyer and the venue and stuff, you could work in establishing characteristics like oh here's my driver's license, here's my government ID, without putting that stuff on the blockchain, which seems like a bad idea.
In practice, this makes these networks very resilient to fraud.
Could like, 51% of the owners just coordinate to kind of, do a fraud?
Sybil attacks sound like the kind of thing you're talking about. I don't have the expertise to go into it, but one person (or a group) creates lots of nodes and uses that influence to do bad things to the network, potentially including fraud. Or as you suggest, legitimate users can just coordinate to do whatever they wanted (see ethereum vs ethereum classic if you want a chuckle).
I want to make a note that the networks are only resilient to a specific type of fraud - people trying to enter data in a way that doesn't meet the criteria of the system. That's all well and good for wallet to wallet transactions, but when you have transactions going off chain (like buying something, trading for other kinds of coins, doing anything with crypto exchanges), there are still plenty of other kinds of fraud that are possible and happen all the time, because while the chain is fairly trustworthy, nothing else about the system is. Most kinds of fraud involve doing things that technically you have permission to do, because you lied to people to access their password or promised them bigger returns in the future or missold a product or service etc and all of that is still possible under crypto. In some cases crypto is more vulnerable to these things because of having no central authority or regulator or laws or whatever.
Blockchain is often described as a solution in search for a problem. It’s a clever technology, but people don’t really know what it can be used for besides storing cryptocurrency transactions.
People have thought about storing other kinds of data in the blockchain, like health records, but no one can really point out to why this would be better than other solutions.
To achieve something similar with health records without blockchain, all that is needed is just a cryptographic signature. The hospital cryptographically signs a digital health document and email it to you. The hospital in turn stores it in some shared database accessible by other hospitals. Done.
If the health record is somehow lost from the shared database, then you got your own copy of it as backup. They can’t modify the health record either, because then it would diverge from your own copy.
The worst thing they can do is to add falsified health records without your approval, but that’s a problem with blockchain as well. Blockchain cannot verify that the input data is truthful (garbage in, garbage out).
The cryptographic signature step is a part of blockchain either way, so there’s no extra technical overhead in the non-blockchain way.
The cryptography has much simpler algebraic analogues - what we are looking for is a "one-way function". This means a mathematical symbol that only works on the left side of the equals. The simplest one is the remainder of a division. For example if I told you that I had a remainder of 5 after dividing by 20, you wouldn't know if the original numerator was 25, 45, 65, 85, and so on. This operator is called mod (modulus). Even if you don't know what value I started with, It's not hard to guess what possible numerators could be with modulus. That's where the cryptography comes into play: a cryptographic hash is designed so that it's practically impossible to guess the original numerator. We'll stick with the modulus for explanatory purposes, but imagine that you can't list off possible numerators like I did.
Now we can invent a puzzle for a computer to solve. We'll start off with the same values as before, but - again - we are disallowing easy guesses. This forces us to check 1 mod 20, 2 mod 20, 3 mod 20, 4 mod 20, 5 mod 20 and so on. Eventually we'll hit 25 mod 20 giving us the solution to X mod 20 = 25. Now you can go back to the person that gave you the puzzle and prove that you've done 25 steps of work to arrive at a solution (or have made a lucky 1/25 guess). This is called "proof of work". A cryptographic has consists of a certain number of bits, such as 256 bits - this means a series of 1' s and 0's 256 long. The puzzle presented to the computer is "find the numerator that results in the first 50 bits being zero" (the more bits are required to be zero, the longer it will take to find the answer). Because of the incredibly slim chance of guessing the correct numerator, it doesn't really matter if the computer counts up (like we did with modulus) or guesses. So, in practice, everybody trying to find the solution starts at a random number and starts counting, or trying other random numbers, until someone wins the jackpot. It's basically a lottery, but the correct numbers have to be discovered instead of being dropped out of a glass ball at the end of the week. Once a computer finds a solution, everybody else playing the game can check their numerator as [probabilistic] proof that they have done work.
Now we can use this lottery to create a blockchain. We start with 5 things: a globally agreed on solution we are looking for (789), an initial block (which is just a number - lets say 12345), Bob's account #5 of $100, and Sally's account #6 of $200, and a huge amount of players of the above game. Sally wants to transfer $20 to Bob, so she says to all the players: "I'm #6 and want to give #5 $20. There's a $1 prize for finding a new block for me." All the players make a new denominator, by placing the numbers next to eachother - so 12345 6 200 5 100 20 1 - or just 1234562005100201. All the players start trying to find the number that will result in 789. Eventually someone finds 1234562005100990 after a lot of work/guesses. Everybody checks their work 1234562005100990 mod 1234562005100201 = 789. The winning player receives their prize, and now everybody has a new block to start from: 1234562005100201 1234562005100990. Next time someone wants to send some money they will use 12345620051002011234562005100990 as the initial block instead of 12345. Hence, we have set up a chain starting with:
12345 -> 12345620051002011234562005100990 -> ...
There's your block...chain. Anybody can independently verify that the work has been done by checking the answers. It's incredibly elegant but, as we've seen, incredibly destructive.
PoW is destructive. Blockchain doesn't have to be PoW.
Hash linked list part was good.
You missed out public key cryptography which is also key to blockchain.
Good explanation. I am extremely bad at math, I never made it past kind of, high school algebra, and I still can't do basic math very well, but this explained it pretty well, thank you. So, someone has to start a transaction before mining can start, if that's how it works?
I'm Bitcoin there is a built-in reward to keep things moving forward even if there are no transactions. Different coins do different things.
A blockchain is just an verifiable chain of transactions using cryptography and some agreed upon protocol. Each "block" in the chain is a block of data that follows a format specified by the protocol. The protocol also decides who can push blocks and how to verify a block is valid. The advantages it has comes from the fact the protocol can describe a method of giving authority across a pool of untrusted third parties, while still making sure none of them can cheat. Currently the most popular forms are Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Stake (PoS).
Bitcoin for example is just an outgoing transaction to a specific crypto key (which is similar to a checking account) as a reward for "mining" the block, followed by a list of transactions going from a specific account to another account. These are verified by needing a special chunk of data that turns the overall hash of the entire block to a binary chunk containing a number of 0 bits in front, which makes it hard to compute and a race to get the right input data. This way of establishing an authority is called Proof of Work, and whoever is first and gets their block across the network faster wins. Other cryptocurrencies like Ethereum use Proof of Stake where you "stake" currency you've already acquired as a promise that you won't cheat, and if someone can prove you cheated your stake is lost.
The problem it solves is not needing a trusted third party to handle this process, such as a government agency or an organization. Everyone can verify the integrity of a blockchain by using the protocol and going over each block, making sure the data follows the rules. This blockchain is distributed so everyone can make sure they are on the same chain, else it's considered a "forked" chain and will migrate back to the point of consensus. This can be useful for situations where the incentive to cheat the system for monetary or political gain outweigh the cost of running a distributed ledger. It can also be useful when you don't want anyone selectively removing past data as the chain of verifiability will be broken. The only issue with this is you need some way to reach a consensus of who gets to make each block in the chain, as someone need to be the authority for that instant in time. This is where the requirement of Proof of Work (PoS) or Proof of Stake (PoS) come in. Without these or another system that distributes the authority to create blocks, you lose the power of the blockchain.
Examples I've heard of are tracking shipments or parts (similar to how the FAA already mandates part traceability) and medical records. This way lots of organizations can publish records relating to these to a central system that isn't under any single entities control, and can't change their records to suit their needs.
These systems are not fool proof though, PoW has the ability to be abused using a 51% attack and PoS requires some form of punishment for trying to cheat the system (in cryptocurrency you "stake" currency and lose it if you try to cheat the system). Both of these run into issues when there is no incentive to invest resources into the system, a lack of distribution across independent parties, or one party has sufficient power to gain a majority control of the network.
Overall you are right to be skeptical of cryptocurrency, it's been a long time since I participated due to the waves of scam coins and general focus on illegal activities such as gambling. The lack of central authorities also perpetuates the problem of cryptoscams, as anyone can start one and there are limited controls over stopping such scams. This is not dissimilar to previous investment scams though, it's just the modern iteration of such scams. The real question is does it solve a real problem, as Bitcoin did in the sense it helps facilitate transactions outside of government controls. You might not agree with that but it does give it an intrinsic value to a large number of people looking to move currency without as much paperwork. Now if it makes it worth $68.5k USD (at current prices) is a different story, different people have different use cases and I only highlighted one of those.
I read all the replies in kind of, an order going from simplest to what looked to be like the more complicated ones, and this seems like the least charged and best explanation of the sort of, externalities, and it seems like a pretty good overview of it. The other guy did a good summary of how the technology works for a dumbass like me but I'm still not sure I got all of it.
So, like, you could kind of conceive of a use for these technologies generally, right, but it would seem like, even from your explanation and also from what I kind of passively know already, this is kind of, reliant on a libertarian conception of society, which isn't necessarily bad. I think more concerningly it also seems like both of the basic technologies, there, PoW and PoS, are vulnerable to abuse from the powerful, or from those who have more resources, with maybe PoS being less so, I dunno, still don't really get how that one works specifically which might change it. Which is sort of, antithetical to a libertarian conception of society. I mean unless you're an ancap but those guys are dumbasses.
So I dunno. It seems like a kind of inherently conflicted technology to me, like, paradoxical. I kinda hope someone can conceivably work out the problems of power abuse, but that would seem to be what I define as a "whole enchilada" style of issue, there.
Still, I do like the ability to freely buy drugs and circumvent the government, that's kind of epic. Well, most of the time, anyways. Maybe not when the CIA does it, or when narcos and cartels do it, but I dunno how much either of them have tied up in crypto, it'd probably make more sense for both of them just to deal in fiat currency or trade resources or something.
So data stores tend to present interfaces which allow the CRUD operations on each record: Create, Read, Update, and Destroy.
Create: You hit submit on a comment form
Read: Your client app shows the content of the comment
Update: You hit submit on the comment editing form
Destroy: You delete the comment
Well, in some cases it’s very handy to make a data store with only two operations: Create, and Read.
This is called a “log”. A log is an append-only data structure.
One of the benefits of using a log is that two different processes can operate on the data, at different times, and can be confident they’re operating on the same context despite not being in communication with each other.
This “log” structure could be useful for instance in recording the moves of a chess game. Then, a hundred years later, someone can read each move out of a book and deterministically re-create the board state.
Now they know that they are looking at the same chess game that Ben Franklin was in 1775, despite not being in touch with Ben at all.
Really big, distributed systems benefit from this “synchronization without communication” feature of logs.
Relying on a log requires you to trust that nobody else has Update or Destroy access. For it to work correctly and everyone be on the same page, Updates and Destroys need to never happen.
With a coordinated system like people trying to understand historical chess games, or a corporation like LinkedIn seeking its own self interest, there’s no trust issue.
But with other things, like “who’s got how much money”, people don’t want to have to trust that some centralized log owner is modifying the data on the sly.
That’s where blockchain goes beyond a regular log. It’s a log designed to resist tampering, because each “block” in the chain goes through a distributed checking process where many copies of the log are used, and everyone checks each other’s copies to ensure nobody is cheating.
It's the whole web 3 concept of the community powers the infrastructure to run the community. It's an enticing concept, The people using the service pay with their CPU and internet connection to use the service. It makes what would be a rather expensive infrastructure almost free.
With blockchain they're doing some smart things, you can wrap code around the ledgers, in the end it's just varying fancy levels of receipts verified and secured by the community. It's verifiable but anonymous.
But then you've got cryptocurrency doing complex math burning through tons of electricity looking for unicorns to add to the ledger, in a massive pyramid scheme.
Okay, it's not exactly a pyramid scheme. Whoever starts a given currency makes the vast majority of the money off of it when the coins are easy to find, but at some point it is pretty close to any other given financial system, with the benefits of being anonymous and verifiable.
The bitcoins are just entries on the ledgers. But then s*** like NFTs are on ledgers. Someone sells you a receipt for a JPEG on a URL. It's all only worth what someone will pay you for it. And without a whole bunch of regulation, it's not exactly a safe market.
I'll likely get downvoted but Polestar, the EV automaker that used to build performance variants for Volvo, uses blockchain to track minerals used in their EV's.
Circulor
Circulor's blockchain technology enables tracing of extracted raw materials, particularly those with significant impact to communities and the environment.
I like that they use blockchain to ensure the minerals they use aren't coming from negative sources but I'm sure someone will argue and say it's stupid or that SQL can do the same.
Polestar uses contracts and audits to ethically source materials, not blockchain. It uses blockchain as a shitty append-only SQL database to (apparently) tell you where the materials came from. Let me quote from Circulor's website:
data can be fed seamlessly to the blockchain via system integration using RESTful Web Service APIs with security and authentication protocols
So the chain is private and accessible only through a centralized, authenticated REST API. This is a traditional web application. A centralized append-only ledger is not even a blockchain.
Yes, it can probably be done with a traditional database
You could do literally the same thing with a series of private key signed envelopes containing the prior chain of signed content. Boom, verifiable chain of custody without any rainforests being burned down.
I think it's funny how most lemmy users are pro open source, pro privacy, pro digital rights; but once it comes to money all that is thrown out of the window and they happily get on their knees for paypal and the few other large players.
Yes, the current state of crypto is a mess. People are attracted by the promise of the big payout, rather then seeking an alternative payment system, making them ripe for scammers that promise the world, but in the end only rug "investors". Even "functional" cryptos are often highly centralized, making them as bad as banks in terms of reliability. Almost none implement any privacy features, and if they do, its typically a tacked on afterthought.
But this does not make the original idea invalid. Will it ever live up to the promise of alternative money? Maybe. Maybe not. Only time will tell if the issues that exist right now will be fixed.
If making payments in crypto back to FIAT was free it would be more popular. For me it's mostly useless since the fee to spend crypto is more than the (often free) fee for using my credit card.
New needs to be better and cheaper to be picked up.
It would also be popular if the entire crypto landscape wasn't replete with late stage capitalist-douche tech bros trying to scam literally everyone.
In my experience it works extremely well for everything online and digital content. The instance I'm on? 100% crowd funded with microdonations and the hoster directly accepts it without conversion back to fiat. I pay my email and VPN also like this, and on mullvad you even get a 10% discount.
But yes, for everything physical it's a long way ahead to become widely accepted.
Currency is a pretty sound idea, whether it will ever get (back?) to a usable place is it's own discussion.
A lot of the conversation about blockchain as a technology though involves the ones that store additional information as a distributed database, which comes with problems.
It's also 'neat', but they all depend on trusting the validation method for putting info into the database, which largely defeats the point of having a "trustless" database once the data is in there. There's the occasional proposed use case that seems vaguely useful, but they mostly boil down to replacing legal contracts with a database that's distributed "somewhere".
Just because it's open source doesn't mean it's good. Also not every situation is the same. Using Linux instead of windows has advantages/disadvantages very different than using crypto instead of fiat.
I can think of thousands of reasons to pick Linux, thousands to pick windows and thousands to pick fiat. I'd have to think real hard to even think of a single reason to pick crypto over fiat.
I prefer free software not for its price, but for the freedom it gives me. Naturally I donate to these causes roughly what I'd have spend on a commercial one. They however do not need to know who I am, so I exclusively use crypto for that. I made one exception for an organization using paypal, and promptly they pulled address and name from that, gave it to a 3rd party which then send a postcard to me. You could see it as a nice gesture, but I think it's just rude to use data in ways I did not explicitly consented to. Just take your money and leave me in peace.
In a similar manner I like to use it to pay for email, vpn, hosting and other online stuff. In fact this lemmy instance is 100% paid for by microdonations from its users, and because the provider accepts it directly no conversion was needed.
People are always like “it doesn’t do anything we couldn’t do with SQL,” as if riding a horse isn’t an improvement in transportation over walking. Things don’t have to be impossible to accomplish in any other way in order to be marginally more useful or efficient depending on the goal. Public ledgers are indeed useful. Blockchain is one technology among a small handful that might be appropriate for your project depending on trust dynamics it demands. Consensus protocols are also useful.
One example, right now our global food supply’s movement and distribution is based largely on market dynamics. Say we want to focus on distribution based on need instead. A blockchain based ledger could allow a fred to ‘commit’ a few bushels of carrots which george ‘commits’ to transporting to mike, who in turn has committed to do do a supply run to Uruguay with his barge. Could they have done this in excel? Probably. Would it be more organized on blockchain? Yes. Would a regular database with a lot of contributors that is carefully designed to keep out bad actors work too? Yes, sure.
You can use blockchain technology for a wide variety of things, just please no more cryptocurrency and NFTs.
Nothing particularly useful though. It's a very slow, inefficient, trustless, immutable database. There really aren't many good applications for that.
That highly depends on what blockchain implementation is being used and what it's being used for. Blockchains used for craptocurrency are highly inefficient, which is the vast majority. But there are a small handful of specialized (proprietary) blockchains that are just efficient enough to be practical in their highly specific use case.
Such as?
Walmarts proprietary food tracking system based on Hyperledger Fabric that they partnered with IBM to tweak & implement, enabling customers to track ingredients back to the farms within seconds, improving food safety, optimizing supply chain operations, enabling efficient tracking of stores and distribution centers, enhancing procurement management by collecting data on product origins, batch numbers, and quality parameters through QR codes and e-certificates.
How is that better than a database? Is someone concerned that Walmart will fabricate supply chain tracking?
Their prior database lacked transparency, real-time tracking, & scalability making tracing take days.
Just an FYI, Hyperledger Fabric is not like the blockchains for craptocurrency. It's a highly modular, permissioned not permissionless, distributed ledger & it allows for pluggable consensus mechanisms. It's very likely that Walmart uses a custom consensus algorithm and nothing like any of the public PoW, PoS, PoA, or PoET consensus algorithms.
OK but there are actually great uses for blockchain that are completely disconnected from anything you typically see
For example, banks may begin using blockchain for maintaining their internal ledgers. It will help solve a ton of issues around reconciling the transactions from all over the globe
Blockchain has reasonable uses. Really good ones. Crypto and nft bros just completely ruined the image of it
EDIT: I love all the comments demonstrating how little people understand about blockchain. Bitcoin was not the first blockchain, nor is its design the only type of blockchain. Assuming that all blockchain looks like the crypto/nft paradigm is just showing your ignorance.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/j5nzx4/what-was-the-first-blockchain
Blockchain is only potentially useful if there’s no single entity that can be trusted. If banks can’t even trust themselves to manage their own internal ledgers, they have much bigger problems to deal with.
Trustless systems aren’t a bad thing that has to step in when the good thing fails. Trustless systems are inherently better because you don’t have to trust a bank (or anyone for that matter).
Additionally, ledgers can be gamed/corrupted/falsified. This is significantly more complex (bordering on impossible) on the blockchain.
https://youtu.be/bBC-nXj3Ng4
There are often easier, more reliable, and far cheaper ways to achieve the same things without using a blockchain. Some of the principles are even used in normal web browsing to ensure secure untampered connections.
Blockchain just solves a subproblem that only arises when there’s no appointed central entity.
Blockchains aren't hard, unreliable or expensive
Cryptocurrency Ledgers can be corrupted?
I was hedging against a particularly snarky commenter showing up. You can do a 51% attack and theoretically corrupt it. In practice, that’s much more difficult.
You dont need 51% attack to corrupt a ledger. Just enter incorrect info and the ledger is wrong. Not a damn thing a blockchain can do about that. Same issue is with any trustless system where you have to trust someone to input the correct info/do the agreed thing/ship the ordered physical item.
The concept behind cryptocurrency is that the ledger is the info, because you’re right, a half-assed blockchain ledger used for external (e.g. cash) transactions doesn’t really solve the root problem. Proof of work is fucking stupid though, and it has (rightfully) ruined the perception of blockchain technology among those who can see past their own crypto wallet.
guys they are putting micro chips in the cheese and using block chains to track the micro chips https://www.businessinsider.com/edible-microchips-on-parmigiano-reggiano-used-to-fight-counterfeiters-2023-8
Blockchain has been around as a technology for nearly two decades. If financial institutions thought it could help them you can bet they would be all-in on it by now. As it is, blockchain has no significant advantages over traditional financial ledger systems, so what incentive is there for them to use it.
It's not something new or cutting edge any more, just waiting for a bright spark to discover the technology and put it to use.
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2024/03/12/goldman-sachs-bny-mellon-and-others-test-enterprise-blockchain-for-tokenized-assets/
How is the blockchain different from a read only ( write only once to be specific) DB that follows ACID?
Blockchains add cryptographic signing and limit actions based on those signatures.
Why would you want the computational power of a bank system have anything to do with whether it's ledger is correct?
Yeah let’s use the computing power of an entire country to pay for a small coffee.
While that is an inherent component of how proof-of-work cryptos work, and utterly stupid, it's not an inherent part of how to do blockchains.
You can have a blockchain without consuming stupid amounts of energy.
Yeah it's called a database....
There aren’t a lot of distributed databases with no single owner and all writes are signed.
Yeah, but not having an owner is actually a fucking terrible thing for a banking system, how do you not grasp this?
How do you see memes like this? Because I see them as lame and sad, especially since we have been seeing them for 10+ years now and they are still the same. But apparently you think blockchain has reasonable uses.
I love how you can't provide even a single example of useful Blockchain functionality. Doesn't mean it *doesn't exist, but says something... And no, "banking" and "internal ledgers" is not detailed enough to be a sufficient example.
How about Git?
as hostile as people are to block chain due to NFT's and bad implementations, the technology itself has its use cases. It's a great solution for information exchange that requires verification and Immutation. This makes them perfect for ledgers or transaction networks.
It's just there is so much bad PR regarding it everyone just discredits it. Not all of the block chain technologies are massively energy intensive per transaction, it's just many of the cryptocurrencies use the most intensive one because it's also arguably the most secure
Absolute immutability is kind of a terrible property for a financial system though, cos it completely ignores the fact that mistakes and fraud happen and you need a way to forcefully recover funds other than "lol sucks to be you I guess".
The one actually genuinely useful application for this kind of technology that anyone has come up with is Certificate Transparency, but crypto people don't get excited about it cos it's not possible to make money from it.
You can implement clawback while still having an immutable blockchain. The transaction will always stay on the blockchain, but the funds can be recovered
this is how it should be anyway, you do not want any ledger or database to be mutable because it allows for integrity violations and will cause you to lose the ability to trust it. Even non-blockchain styles follow that principle.
You can revert transactions with immutable storage. For example git can do revert-commits.
Reverts work because users have equal write access to all the data. You can mess things up in the codebase, and even if you die of a heart attack 10m later, my revert is just as valid as your commit.
It's not really the same when every user has "sovereignty" over their address in the ledger. A bad actor has to consent to pushing a revert transaction onto the chain, or they have to consent to using a blockchain system where 3rd-party reversion is possible (which exists on some systems, but also defeats the concept of true sovereignty over your address).
So, would the bitcoin equivalent be sending the BTC back?
Yes. Clawback might be executed by having some entity or system of trust that is able to reverse a transaction by creating and posting the opposite of the faulty transaction. This is not built in to the current BTC.
Its a good concept, but it violates other concepts of the blockchain and would mean implementing a central authority with the power to force a transaction. Try telling a cryptobro to use a coin with a central bank and imagine the reaction you'd get.
At least with the way the regular banking system is set up, you can get a court order to enforce a correction without needing the consent of all parties, which is useful for fraud, theft, and even probate cases when one party is deceased and can no longer consent to a transaction. There are enough problems with our system to write an entire library of books ON TOP OF the library that already exists, but this feature is one of the few benefits.
It could be done on a blockchain. It doesn't require a central authority.
It could be escrow-based. It could use majority rule or even Monte Carlo methods.
Cool.
Name one successful example.
I mean, it's been, what, 15 years of hype? Surely there must be a successful deployment of a commercially viable and useful blockchain that isn't just a speculative cryptocurrency or derivative thereof, right?
Right?
I can't find the case study, but this blockchain project by IBM was implemented in Singapore and was shown to reduce customs processing times from several weeks to just several hours.
The general idea was that with a successful blockchain implementation, the Singapore government was able to expedite parts of their customs process which normally require intensive human labor, and the use of smart contracts removed the need for having documents sent and resent when all parties had access to the smart contract directly.
There are specific use cases where it can benefit existing processes, but people just think blockchain = crypto.
First thing I found when I searched for "Maersk IBM blockchain":
A.P. Moller - Maersk and IBM to discontinue TradeLens, a blockchain-enabled global trade platform
The only selling point of blockchain is that it's trustless. This becomes a less-useful property when it comes to things in the real world, as you tend to need to trust at least one party.
For example, anything they achieved there with blockchain, they could have achieved with a simple government-run web service and a traditional database.
Except it's not though. Because you have to trust the majority, hence why you've had forks like Bitcoin Cash. Because those people wanted to trust someone else. "trustless" is just a buzzword, like everything else with Bitcoin
the real question is what part of this was specific to blockchain, something that would be difficult or impossible to do without it. if you want to put forward this argument you need to at least provide a simple, clear, coherent answer to that.
in this case, i could easily argue a sqlite db hosted on gitea would work better and theres no way to prove im wrong.
https://git-scm.com/
Yes, both git and blockchain tech use merkle trees. No, that doesn't make git a blockchain
There is nothing Crypto can do better than regular database. Immutability is not a desirable property.
It can coordinate disjoint actors without a 3rd party.
Does it though? Because to me the fact that the largest cryptos have had several forks is proof that no, in fact, the magic of crypto can't coordinate people. People coordinate people and then decide what to do with the technology.
Monero actually has very good uses. It does use POW but their algorithm is made to encourage using CPUs instead of GPUs and slower, power efficient devices, which makes it a lot less energy intensive than other POW cryptocurrencies.
I find the actual technology very interesting. At one point I wanted to create a distributed research journal, and I spent some time trying to develop a trustless, immutable ledger that didn't have the high overhead that most blockchains have for proof of work. It was extremely cool, but nobody gives a shit unless it has coins lol
I look forward to 20 years from now when it gets resurrected and used for interesting things that don't involve cryptocurrency.
I remember reading a few years ago that the US postal service was looking into using it for voting. I haven't seen anything about it since, but it did peak my interest. I'd love to see it used for research if possible, too, but then I can barely understand these decentralized social media platforms so my opinion isn't worth much with tech
That, to me, seems like an ideal use case. My only reservation is that I think it would be bungled in implementation, then pushed without enough testing and validation, then hacked due to the bungled implementation, and then rejected forever because it was hacked once lol
It doesn't scale well, so it generally works best for ledgers of relatively small scale. Anything that might need to go beyond that small scale will run into technical/performance issues.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15RTC22Z2xI I would love to hear the counterarguments. video is <15 mins, academic setting.
Just responding that I did see this, The video has peaked my curiosity and I plan on watching it later when I have more free time outside of midterm's season
His arguments are:-
We don't need blockchain to stop problems from happening because we have a [super efficient, cheap, accessible, well constructed] legal system to correct those problems when they occur.
We don't need distributed ledgers to store the data because we can just trust Amazon Web services.
That's a unique interpretation
Blockchain is a nebulous buzzword with a vague meaning. But I have yet to see a sensible definition of a blockchain that doesn't include git. At the end of the day they are both just Merkle trees.
Git is pretty useful imo.
Well yes but can you pump and dump git commits ?
Only non-fungible commits.
…kinda
Blockchain is pretty well defined.
Git doesn't have update rules that are only valid if signed by a particular private key.
Please share a source! I can't find anything as robust as a whitepaper (the bitcoin whitepaper doesn't use the term).
NIST informally defines it as:
Which git certainly meets this.
IBM informally defines it as:
Which git meets.
Git is hash linked, not cryptographicly linked. Only cryptographicly valid changes are allowed to blockchain state. All data can be modified in git.
Yes. IBMs definition is bad and could equally apply to git. They've totally forgotten about the private key aspect.
I'll see if I can source a better definition online, but make no promises.
Edit: https://aws.amazon.com/what-is/blockchain/ the last line is not applicable to Git
Oh a 3rd definition, that definitely hurts the case that blockchain is vague ill defined term. If it were a well-defined term, there would be whitepapers defining it like merkle trees or bitcoin. Blockchain is just a marketing term defined by businesses, not scientists or engineers and thus is vague and variable.
I also don't think your definition is a very good definition. Do you think git fundamentally changes when it moves from sha1 to sha256? Or are you referring to the fact that the payloads of cryptocurrency's blockchain is required to be signed (just like you can optionally require git commits to be signed)? I don't think that's fundamental to blockchain either.
No. You can't modify the chain in git. Each commit is an immutable snapshot of the repository. To change history you have to create a new hash and then broadcast that to everyone that they should stop using the old one. Depending in how your network is setup you may onky have to convince a centralized server, or you might have to convince 51% of the actors on your network or you may just choose to only form a network that agrees with you. You could alter bitcoin's blockchain too, but you'd need 51% of the network to agree with you.
The phrases used to describe the technology to the public may change, but the technolgical approach doesn't
There are hundreds of blockchain whitepapers, all of which link blocks of data via hash functions and only accept state changes if they are valid and cryptographicaly signed.
If we were discussing web3 or Metaverse then you may have a point. But no-one in tech is confused about what blockchain is anymore.
No.
Yes. Exactly this.
Optionally is the key word. Blockchain transactions must be signed, and they must be accepted as following the blockchain rules by validators.
Find me a blockchain that doesn't require signed transactions to make state changes.
I didn't say anything about modify the chain.
A commit can contain any data it likes. A commit to a blockchain is highly restricted. Only cryptographicly valid rule following changes are allowed to blockchain state.
But this is just a policy decision, not a property of the technology. You can easily implement a script that checks if every commit from remotes are signed, accepts them if they are and drops them if they aren't or the signature is invalid.
If you contribute to a project where the majority require signed commits, then you need to sign commits in order for your change to be integrated into the consensus.
That has nothing to do with the technology itself, just with the application.
So if you state that signatures are required to be a blockchain, then you can use git to create a blockchain, by just having that policy.
(IMO I wouldn't say that signatures are required, just that blockchains usually have them.)
Now add some logic to check whether the actual data is valid (i.e. bob has enough coins in his account to send to Charlie).
Make some incentive to ensure only the main branch survives and forks are either eliminated or merged.
Automate
Now git replicates blockchain's functionality.
Yes, but add automatically processing the content of the commit for validity and incentives to reduce the number of forks.
Without public key cryptography you just have a hash linked list (like Git).
Hash is cryptographic function.
A hash function doesn't check if a signature is valid. Neither does git. Blockchain does check.
How does it "certainly meet it"? There is no consensus mechanism in git, new blocks are not replicated across the network, there is no network at all, git works offline. You can replicate changes with remotes but there is no "git network" in any similar sense. And conflicts are definitely not resolved automatically. And the git hashes are certainly not cryptographic.
That's 4 ways it doesn't meet the definition. You could maybe stretch the meaning of a network to make it 3.
While blockchain is well defined, it in itself is not a product but a technology. I think what the other commenter is getting at is that simply saying something "is blockchain" means very little because what the blockchain does depends on the implementation, so when used in marketing it's just a nebulous buzzword in that it doesn't actually give you much information about what the product is. Same with terms like cloud, AI, virtual reality, etc.
Yes. There were a lot of companies selling "blockchain base" solutions where blockchain wasn't really needed in the solution at all.
Then it was Metaverse based solutions. (I would argue VR is well defined)
Now it's AI solutions.
But I think "cloud" is now post that marketing phase, and blockchain is heading that way.
Git might not count because you can have branches that then merge? But yeah, git is useful, it's decentralized and distributed, it could be used P2P...
AKA referencing to two past states.
Man, I remember how back in 2009 we were hyped about this possible chance for a fairer world that a independent currency might bring. Guess we were quite wrong. :)
The independent currency was still worth standard currency... So the ones already hoarding all of that existing make-believe-number money just bought up and schemed us out of new make-believe-number money.
How did we not see this coming? :(
not smart
Not gonna claim any foresight.
But now in 2024. It dose seem rather insane to me. That no one predicted the energy problems of proof of work.
We were well aware of the co2 cost of computing.
No one expected that dozens of crypto currencies would pop up. Most of us actually expected it to just fail and dissolve. But there was the naive, little glimpse of hope that this might destroy the petro dollar (which was much stronger in 2009 than today).
I think the only project I've seen so far where I've felt that a blockchain has actually been the correct choice is Alfis, which is a decentralized DNS that uses the blockchain as the public append-only ledger that it is, and it uses proof-of-work to add arbitrary costs to updates - to make spamming or namesquatting expensive.
Amazon has a database project called QLDB that uses blockchain for its audit log.
What do you call an audit log that's cryptographically verifiable? A blockchain.
Even if a particular coin has a finite number of possible coins, it exists in an unbounded universe of other coins.
Other SHIT coins... to be precise
Only my made up digital monopoly money is legit, all the rest are pointless.
I've read through this whole thread, and I still haven't really come to any solid conclusions on it. I'm skeptical of crypto as a kind of idiotic speculative market, but that's also every market ever. But then, the blockchain is apparently different from crypto, even though they're both hype-laden marketing terms that have been completely fucked up. I think doing [redacted] with crypto is still potentially cool, though I think it still has limited anonymity, from what I've heard, and the speculative market also fucks it up.
Is "the blockchain" just like some nerd shit that's for internal hospital ledgers, and beyond that it's all kind of moot garbage, or what? Someone spoonfeed me.
One is the tech, the other is an example of a type of the tech. A square is a rectangle, but a rectangle is not a square.
For most applications, this isn't necessary:
There are some examples like in biotech/finance that I personally believe will require a blockchain to be truly "fair" at the end
I like this flowchart but honestly most third party data handling solutions are just asking for a major breach: stoking vulnerable people over the coals.
Ignore the FBI hack, and the SEC hack, and the DoD hack, and the FINRA hack, and the..
Now add that trustlessness is impossible and you can scratch the blockchain box for good.
You cannot get rid of trust in some form. You need entry to the system, so you need to trust its gateway. You need to trust the network to not have some vulnerability like a 50% attack. And eventually you need to trust the developers not to add critical bugs (that alone is virtually impossible) or pull off some scam.
So, since you need to trust someone, might as well choose some government regulated party like a bank or a lawyer and choose conventional and efficient tech.
Diagram is missing a "do records need to interact" control box.
I'm stupid, can you give me a like, more clear practical example of a good use of blockchain? Cause I get the sense that a good amount of this conflict, going off that flowchart, is going to be due to the evaluation of these situations as like, not needing to arise in the first place, or maybe like, a philosophical objection to the necessity of the technology, maybe. But I think a clearer example could help with this.
Do you see how all the answers are generic, tend to be long and read like a sales pitch? That's because the actual answer is: no, there is no practical legal application that isn't better solved with conventional tech.
The only application that is successfully used in practice is paying for organized crime: buying goods and services on the dark web and paying for extortion like ransomware attacks.
Blockchain technology can improve health care services in a decentralized, tamper-proof, transparent, and secure manner.
This can also be used for research institutes to be able to research with each others' findings.
Here is a paper on the topic: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8555946/
Blockchains are also great for the verification of digital goods as tangible assets. While I'm not sure we reach this level of meme, people could 100% mint their own house's deed and trade that as a legit way to buy/sell their house.
I am very carefully avoiding the words "NFT" because they are another horrible use-case of a blockchain (and a prime example of how capitalists turn a good tech into something stupid for a quick buck), but this would theoretically be a tokenized-security with a 1:1 to the actual deed to the house.
Is that more secure than the normal process of buying a house? Do you really need it to be external to a 3rd party when the transfer of homes already exists? No not really lol, hence why we probably see it the most in highly regulated industries like biotech and finance first.
HIPPA/Securities-laws (or lack-thereof) will require a tough regulatory framework that "could" realistically be done via a 3rd party, but you have to ask yourself if you trust big-pharma and wallstreet enough to regulate themselves like that.
Edit: Looked up and saw c/lemmyshitpost, maybe I'm spending too much time elucidating a response on a meme thread but this is my take on the tech.
No no, thank you for this.
I understand blockchain as a concept, and kind of hownit plays into cryptocurrency, but understanding a true example of blockchain use outside of finances is something I needed more info on, thank you
The big improvement is the removal of the need to trust some 3rd party but also to add the precision and complexity of computer language to some domain. For example health care data, a block chain system would make one standard for how the records are stored, it would make it so the data in encrypted by the patient and they alone could grant access. When a new provider wants access there is one standard way that is automated and secure. None of which is dependent on a 3rd party who can be compromised or become corrupt and no longer act in good faith. Obviously there is a lot of details here dependent on making the block chain work flawlessly.
Imo block chains have 2 core issues to over come in order to really solve problems. First is being constructed so that they are bug free. Software is not a mature enough discipline for that as of yet. Second, is what happens when you loose you key or it gets stolen. If someone steals you Bitcoin private key, you can't get them back after they transfer them out. Or if you just loose the key your up a creek. What is required is a way to prove you are you to the system that can't be stolen and can't be lost. That is a far harder question.
I just wrote out another comment, and I think I kinda figured out my core question, but, is there a way to save my medical information without doxxing myself, if this is supposed to be like, a public database, you know, if that's kinda the point, is that everyone can look at everyone else's stuff? I got the impression that a lot of the current blockchain stuff wasn't capable of the necessary levels of storage that would be required for like, health records, on their own.
I dunno, maybe you could have some situation where you have a key, that opens up some cryptography on the blockchain, and that blockchain piece when unlocked gives you another key that lets you access your medical records, or something like that, and that might be able to fit. But, then, I don't really see how that's any different from just having like, the key to the person's medical records be contingent on person. Like biometric security, or government ID, or something.
Point out wherever I've made wrong assumptions here, I'm just kind of talking out my ass, and hoping that I'm correct inso that the conversation can continue and I can scrape more out of it, I don't really expect to be right.
https://medium.com/@emilpepil/medical-system-with-zero-knowledge-7fb4441d6d47
A blockchain can provide an irrevocable record, and it can provide a mechanism for uncooperating parties to agree that the record should be created. This is usually used for financial transactions involving coins of dubious value, but it can also be used for recording transactions of real world assets as long as those transactions can be faithfully linked to the event on the blockchain. Therefore the blockchain doesn't really prove that a transaction is fraudulent or not, all it proves is that a sufficient number of parties believe it is not.
That kind of seems like the big glaring video game boss style weak point, to me. I feel like you'd still need some external third party to verify that everything is properly linked up to the blockchain, or like, someone could just impersonate someone else through whatever things are used to link something to the blockchain, and then it's just kinda back to square one, I would think. I dunno, I think also maybe I just don't really quite get it.
The oracle problem has had some attempts at being solved.
A the moment external data on a blockchain is more about transparency than trust.
The blockchain is essentially a ledger that tracks transactions (including the creation of currency). One thing that is not always clear is how important it is for a blockchain to be decentralized. When I say "decentralized," I mean that many different people are operating a server that performs transactions on a larger network. These people are rewarded in currency for their efforts, and are sometimes referred to as "miners," though this term is changing somewhat.
There are thousands of these servers in a network that are operating on and tracking the ledger for blockchains like Bitcoin or Ethereum. Any updates to the ledger are verified by all of these nodes. As long as 51% of nodes can verify a transaction, it will be added to the ledger. This means that as long as someone doesn't own 51% of the network, they can't just inject whatever transactions they want (i.e., fraudulent activity). In practice, this makes these networks very resilient to fraud.
I think this paves the way for a lot of the practical examples you're looking for. For example, there's no way for the network to decide to just give tons of money to a single entity for some "economic policy" like Too Big to Fail (i.e., corporate bailouts). This means you don't have to wake up one morning worrying about whether or not your currency will rapidly inflate because of things like corruption. Another example is the true ownership of digital assets. NFTs have (rightly) gotten a lot of flack for being overpriced JPEGs, but there are real use cases here. A random middleman can't just decide to price gouge because they own all the tickets first (Ticketmaster). Instead, artists can mint tickets on the blockchain (very important: this ensures authenticity) and then fans can buy them on the blockchain - no middle man required. You still show a QR code at the door for verification like you would now.
Could like, 51% of the owners just coordinate to kind of, do a fraud? I mean it sounds like an inherently democratic system, but from what I've understood of, say, miners, right (dunno how this works for proof of stake, but I imagine it has similar problems), those rigs are gonna be bought by people who disproportionately have higher earnings and can afford more GPUs in finland or wherever, and then that's going to just kinda recreate the same power dynamic that we see in the real world already. Which ends up in the same kind of speculative market garbage we have with stock ownership in companies already.
I also don't really understand how a ticketing system would really work on the blockchain. I probably don't know enough about cryptography to know how it might work, but I got the sense that nfts weren't even overpriced jpegs, they were overpriced links with pseudo-legal contracts, that were still prone to link rot, and didn't really indicate any IP ownership. If you had a code on the ticket instead that could only be verified as real, rather than fake, by a ticketing person, instead of like, a link, that would probably be the use case, right? am I getting that correct, is that something cryptography can do? probably, right?
Also, can someone just like, steal your ticket still? Or like impersonate you as the ticket guy, or what? Like from the others have told me and also just from what I know already, you can't really change the chain unless, like you said, you have 51% of the owners, so how would you be able to like, put something in the chain that identifies the owner as being the owner? Wouldn't it be more secure to have just like, a verifiable code or something, that you can delete, that isn't public, between the artist and the buyer? Then you could ensure anonymity between the buyer and the venue and stuff, you could work in establishing characteristics like oh here's my driver's license, here's my government ID, without putting that stuff on the blockchain, which seems like a bad idea.
Sybil attacks sound like the kind of thing you're talking about. I don't have the expertise to go into it, but one person (or a group) creates lots of nodes and uses that influence to do bad things to the network, potentially including fraud. Or as you suggest, legitimate users can just coordinate to do whatever they wanted (see ethereum vs ethereum classic if you want a chuckle).
I want to make a note that the networks are only resilient to a specific type of fraud - people trying to enter data in a way that doesn't meet the criteria of the system. That's all well and good for wallet to wallet transactions, but when you have transactions going off chain (like buying something, trading for other kinds of coins, doing anything with crypto exchanges), there are still plenty of other kinds of fraud that are possible and happen all the time, because while the chain is fairly trustworthy, nothing else about the system is. Most kinds of fraud involve doing things that technically you have permission to do, because you lied to people to access their password or promised them bigger returns in the future or missold a product or service etc and all of that is still possible under crypto. In some cases crypto is more vulnerable to these things because of having no central authority or regulator or laws or whatever.
https://git-scm.com/
Well in decentralized, autonomous (user run) systems you have actually 0 trust.
Blockchain is often described as a solution in search for a problem. It’s a clever technology, but people don’t really know what it can be used for besides storing cryptocurrency transactions.
People have thought about storing other kinds of data in the blockchain, like health records, but no one can really point out to why this would be better than other solutions.
To achieve something similar with health records without blockchain, all that is needed is just a cryptographic signature. The hospital cryptographically signs a digital health document and email it to you. The hospital in turn stores it in some shared database accessible by other hospitals. Done.
If the health record is somehow lost from the shared database, then you got your own copy of it as backup. They can’t modify the health record either, because then it would diverge from your own copy.
The worst thing they can do is to add falsified health records without your approval, but that’s a problem with blockchain as well. Blockchain cannot verify that the input data is truthful (garbage in, garbage out).
The cryptographic signature step is a part of blockchain either way, so there’s no extra technical overhead in the non-blockchain way.
The cryptography has much simpler algebraic analogues - what we are looking for is a "one-way function". This means a mathematical symbol that only works on the left side of the equals. The simplest one is the remainder of a division. For example if I told you that I had a remainder of 5 after dividing by 20, you wouldn't know if the original numerator was 25, 45, 65, 85, and so on. This operator is called
mod(modulus). Even if you don't know what value I started with, It's not hard to guess what possible numerators could be with modulus. That's where the cryptography comes into play: a cryptographic hash is designed so that it's practically impossible to guess the original numerator. We'll stick with the modulus for explanatory purposes, but imagine that you can't list off possible numerators like I did.Now we can invent a puzzle for a computer to solve. We'll start off with the same values as before, but - again - we are disallowing easy guesses. This forces us to check
1 mod 20,2 mod 20,3 mod 20,4 mod 20,5 mod 20and so on. Eventually we'll hit25 mod 20giving us the solution toX mod 20 = 25. Now you can go back to the person that gave you the puzzle and prove that you've done 25 steps of work to arrive at a solution (or have made a lucky 1/25 guess). This is called "proof of work". A cryptographic has consists of a certain number of bits, such as 256 bits - this means a series of 1' s and 0's 256 long. The puzzle presented to the computer is "find the numerator that results in the first 50 bits being zero" (the more bits are required to be zero, the longer it will take to find the answer). Because of the incredibly slim chance of guessing the correct numerator, it doesn't really matter if the computer counts up (like we did with modulus) or guesses. So, in practice, everybody trying to find the solution starts at a random number and starts counting, or trying other random numbers, until someone wins the jackpot. It's basically a lottery, but the correct numbers have to be discovered instead of being dropped out of a glass ball at the end of the week. Once a computer finds a solution, everybody else playing the game can check their numerator as [probabilistic] proof that they have done work.Now we can use this lottery to create a blockchain. We start with 5 things: a globally agreed on solution we are looking for (789), an initial block (which is just a number - lets say 12345), Bob's account #5 of $100, and Sally's account #6 of $200, and a huge amount of players of the above game. Sally wants to transfer $20 to Bob, so she says to all the players: "I'm #6 and want to give #5 $20. There's a $1 prize for finding a new block for me." All the players make a new denominator, by placing the numbers next to eachother - so
12345 6 200 5 100 20 1- or just1234562005100201. All the players start trying to find the number that will result in 789. Eventually someone finds 1234562005100990 after a lot of work/guesses. Everybody checks their work1234562005100990 mod 1234562005100201 = 789. The winning player receives their prize, and now everybody has a new block to start from:1234562005100201 1234562005100990. Next time someone wants to send some money they will use12345620051002011234562005100990as the initial block instead of 12345. Hence, we have set up a chain starting with:12345->12345620051002011234562005100990-> ...There's your block...chain. Anybody can independently verify that the work has been done by checking the answers. It's incredibly elegant but, as we've seen, incredibly destructive.
PoW is destructive. Blockchain doesn't have to be PoW.
Hash linked list part was good.
You missed out public key cryptography which is also key to blockchain.
Good explanation. I am extremely bad at math, I never made it past kind of, high school algebra, and I still can't do basic math very well, but this explained it pretty well, thank you. So, someone has to start a transaction before mining can start, if that's how it works?
I'm Bitcoin there is a built-in reward to keep things moving forward even if there are no transactions. Different coins do different things.
A blockchain is just an verifiable chain of transactions using cryptography and some agreed upon protocol. Each "block" in the chain is a block of data that follows a format specified by the protocol. The protocol also decides who can push blocks and how to verify a block is valid. The advantages it has comes from the fact the protocol can describe a method of giving authority across a pool of untrusted third parties, while still making sure none of them can cheat. Currently the most popular forms are Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Stake (PoS).
Bitcoin for example is just an outgoing transaction to a specific crypto key (which is similar to a checking account) as a reward for "mining" the block, followed by a list of transactions going from a specific account to another account. These are verified by needing a special chunk of data that turns the overall hash of the entire block to a binary chunk containing a number of 0 bits in front, which makes it hard to compute and a race to get the right input data. This way of establishing an authority is called Proof of Work, and whoever is first and gets their block across the network faster wins. Other cryptocurrencies like Ethereum use Proof of Stake where you "stake" currency you've already acquired as a promise that you won't cheat, and if someone can prove you cheated your stake is lost.
The problem it solves is not needing a trusted third party to handle this process, such as a government agency or an organization. Everyone can verify the integrity of a blockchain by using the protocol and going over each block, making sure the data follows the rules. This blockchain is distributed so everyone can make sure they are on the same chain, else it's considered a "forked" chain and will migrate back to the point of consensus. This can be useful for situations where the incentive to cheat the system for monetary or political gain outweigh the cost of running a distributed ledger. It can also be useful when you don't want anyone selectively removing past data as the chain of verifiability will be broken. The only issue with this is you need some way to reach a consensus of who gets to make each block in the chain, as someone need to be the authority for that instant in time. This is where the requirement of Proof of Work (PoS) or Proof of Stake (PoS) come in. Without these or another system that distributes the authority to create blocks, you lose the power of the blockchain.
Examples I've heard of are tracking shipments or parts (similar to how the FAA already mandates part traceability) and medical records. This way lots of organizations can publish records relating to these to a central system that isn't under any single entities control, and can't change their records to suit their needs.
These systems are not fool proof though, PoW has the ability to be abused using a 51% attack and PoS requires some form of punishment for trying to cheat the system (in cryptocurrency you "stake" currency and lose it if you try to cheat the system). Both of these run into issues when there is no incentive to invest resources into the system, a lack of distribution across independent parties, or one party has sufficient power to gain a majority control of the network.
Overall you are right to be skeptical of cryptocurrency, it's been a long time since I participated due to the waves of scam coins and general focus on illegal activities such as gambling. The lack of central authorities also perpetuates the problem of cryptoscams, as anyone can start one and there are limited controls over stopping such scams. This is not dissimilar to previous investment scams though, it's just the modern iteration of such scams. The real question is does it solve a real problem, as Bitcoin did in the sense it helps facilitate transactions outside of government controls. You might not agree with that but it does give it an intrinsic value to a large number of people looking to move currency without as much paperwork. Now if it makes it worth $68.5k USD (at current prices) is a different story, different people have different use cases and I only highlighted one of those.
I read all the replies in kind of, an order going from simplest to what looked to be like the more complicated ones, and this seems like the least charged and best explanation of the sort of, externalities, and it seems like a pretty good overview of it. The other guy did a good summary of how the technology works for a dumbass like me but I'm still not sure I got all of it.
So, like, you could kind of conceive of a use for these technologies generally, right, but it would seem like, even from your explanation and also from what I kind of passively know already, this is kind of, reliant on a libertarian conception of society, which isn't necessarily bad. I think more concerningly it also seems like both of the basic technologies, there, PoW and PoS, are vulnerable to abuse from the powerful, or from those who have more resources, with maybe PoS being less so, I dunno, still don't really get how that one works specifically which might change it. Which is sort of, antithetical to a libertarian conception of society. I mean unless you're an ancap but those guys are dumbasses.
So I dunno. It seems like a kind of inherently conflicted technology to me, like, paradoxical. I kinda hope someone can conceivably work out the problems of power abuse, but that would seem to be what I define as a "whole enchilada" style of issue, there.
Still, I do like the ability to freely buy drugs and circumvent the government, that's kind of epic. Well, most of the time, anyways. Maybe not when the CIA does it, or when narcos and cartels do it, but I dunno how much either of them have tied up in crypto, it'd probably make more sense for both of them just to deal in fiat currency or trade resources or something.
So data stores tend to present interfaces which allow the CRUD operations on each record: Create, Read, Update, and Destroy.
Create: You hit submit on a comment form Read: Your client app shows the content of the comment Update: You hit submit on the comment editing form Destroy: You delete the comment
Well, in some cases it’s very handy to make a data store with only two operations: Create, and Read.
This is called a “log”. A log is an append-only data structure.
One of the benefits of using a log is that two different processes can operate on the data, at different times, and can be confident they’re operating on the same context despite not being in communication with each other.
This “log” structure could be useful for instance in recording the moves of a chess game. Then, a hundred years later, someone can read each move out of a book and deterministically re-create the board state.
Now they know that they are looking at the same chess game that Ben Franklin was in 1775, despite not being in touch with Ben at all.
Really big, distributed systems benefit from this “synchronization without communication” feature of logs.
Excellent article on this data structure and its benefits here: https://engineering.linkedin.com/distributed-systems/log-what-every-software-engineer-should-know-about-real-time-datas-unifying
Blockchain is a log.
Relying on a log requires you to trust that nobody else has Update or Destroy access. For it to work correctly and everyone be on the same page, Updates and Destroys need to never happen.
With a coordinated system like people trying to understand historical chess games, or a corporation like LinkedIn seeking its own self interest, there’s no trust issue.
But with other things, like “who’s got how much money”, people don’t want to have to trust that some centralized log owner is modifying the data on the sly.
That’s where blockchain goes beyond a regular log. It’s a log designed to resist tampering, because each “block” in the chain goes through a distributed checking process where many copies of the log are used, and everyone checks each other’s copies to ensure nobody is cheating.
It's the whole web 3 concept of the community powers the infrastructure to run the community. It's an enticing concept, The people using the service pay with their CPU and internet connection to use the service. It makes what would be a rather expensive infrastructure almost free.
With blockchain they're doing some smart things, you can wrap code around the ledgers, in the end it's just varying fancy levels of receipts verified and secured by the community. It's verifiable but anonymous.
But then you've got cryptocurrency doing complex math burning through tons of electricity looking for unicorns to add to the ledger, in a massive pyramid scheme. Okay, it's not exactly a pyramid scheme. Whoever starts a given currency makes the vast majority of the money off of it when the coins are easy to find, but at some point it is pretty close to any other given financial system, with the benefits of being anonymous and verifiable.
The bitcoins are just entries on the ledgers. But then s*** like NFTs are on ledgers. Someone sells you a receipt for a JPEG on a URL. It's all only worth what someone will pay you for it. And without a whole bunch of regulation, it's not exactly a safe market.
we need the blockchainsaw
git is a blockchain, just without PoW
... or data validation.
I'll likely get downvoted but Polestar, the EV automaker that used to build performance variants for Volvo, uses blockchain to track minerals used in their EV's.
Circulor Circulor's blockchain technology enables tracing of extracted raw materials, particularly those with significant impact to communities and the environment.
I like that they use blockchain to ensure the minerals they use aren't coming from negative sources but I'm sure someone will argue and say it's stupid or that SQL can do the same.
Polestar uses contracts and audits to ethically source materials, not blockchain. It uses blockchain as a shitty append-only SQL database to (apparently) tell you where the materials came from. Let me quote from Circulor's website:
So the chain is private and accessible only through a centralized, authenticated REST API. This is a traditional web application. A centralized append-only ledger is not even a blockchain.
This guy ICTs ... Keep up the great work!
Yes, it can probably be done with a traditional database
You could do literally the same thing with a series of private key signed envelopes containing the prior chain of signed content. Boom, verifiable chain of custody without any rainforests being burned down.
I think it's funny how most lemmy users are pro open source, pro privacy, pro digital rights; but once it comes to money all that is thrown out of the window and they happily get on their knees for paypal and the few other large players.
Yes, the current state of crypto is a mess. People are attracted by the promise of the big payout, rather then seeking an alternative payment system, making them ripe for scammers that promise the world, but in the end only rug "investors". Even "functional" cryptos are often highly centralized, making them as bad as banks in terms of reliability. Almost none implement any privacy features, and if they do, its typically a tacked on afterthought.
But this does not make the original idea invalid. Will it ever live up to the promise of alternative money? Maybe. Maybe not. Only time will tell if the issues that exist right now will be fixed.
If making payments in crypto back to FIAT was free it would be more popular. For me it's mostly useless since the fee to spend crypto is more than the (often free) fee for using my credit card.
New needs to be better and cheaper to be picked up.
It would also be popular if the entire crypto landscape wasn't replete with late stage capitalist-douche tech bros trying to scam literally everyone.
In my experience it works extremely well for everything online and digital content. The instance I'm on? 100% crowd funded with microdonations and the hoster directly accepts it without conversion back to fiat. I pay my email and VPN also like this, and on mullvad you even get a 10% discount.
But yes, for everything physical it's a long way ahead to become widely accepted.
Crypto is a liberterian capitalist's wet dream.
Tax-free, anonymous, with no accountability. Perfect for white washing corporate gain.
Just because it is "open-source" doesn't mean it will be used for good.
Wait until you hear about cash! We should outlaw that immediately.
Currency is a pretty sound idea, whether it will ever get (back?) to a usable place is it's own discussion.
A lot of the conversation about blockchain as a technology though involves the ones that store additional information as a distributed database, which comes with problems.
It's also 'neat', but they all depend on trusting the validation method for putting info into the database, which largely defeats the point of having a "trustless" database once the data is in there. There's the occasional proposed use case that seems vaguely useful, but they mostly boil down to replacing legal contracts with a database that's distributed "somewhere".
Just because it's open source doesn't mean it's good. Also not every situation is the same. Using Linux instead of windows has advantages/disadvantages very different than using crypto instead of fiat.
I can think of thousands of reasons to pick Linux, thousands to pick windows and thousands to pick fiat. I'd have to think real hard to even think of a single reason to pick crypto over fiat.
I prefer free software not for its price, but for the freedom it gives me. Naturally I donate to these causes roughly what I'd have spend on a commercial one. They however do not need to know who I am, so I exclusively use crypto for that. I made one exception for an organization using paypal, and promptly they pulled address and name from that, gave it to a 3rd party which then send a postcard to me. You could see it as a nice gesture, but I think it's just rude to use data in ways I did not explicitly consented to. Just take your money and leave me in peace.
In a similar manner I like to use it to pay for email, vpn, hosting and other online stuff. In fact this lemmy instance is 100% paid for by microdonations from its users, and because the provider accepts it directly no conversion was needed.
As a bitcoiner I couldn't agree more, please don't make another cryptocurrency.
You mean like one with actual practical value, one you can program, do actual finance with?
People are always like “it doesn’t do anything we couldn’t do with SQL,” as if riding a horse isn’t an improvement in transportation over walking. Things don’t have to be impossible to accomplish in any other way in order to be marginally more useful or efficient depending on the goal. Public ledgers are indeed useful. Blockchain is one technology among a small handful that might be appropriate for your project depending on trust dynamics it demands. Consensus protocols are also useful.
One example, right now our global food supply’s movement and distribution is based largely on market dynamics. Say we want to focus on distribution based on need instead. A blockchain based ledger could allow a fred to ‘commit’ a few bushels of carrots which george ‘commits’ to transporting to mike, who in turn has committed to do do a supply run to Uruguay with his barge. Could they have done this in excel? Probably. Would it be more organized on blockchain? Yes. Would a regular database with a lot of contributors that is carefully designed to keep out bad actors work too? Yes, sure.
You can use blockchain technology for a wide variety of things, just please no more cryptocurrency and NFTs.
Nothing particularly useful though. It's a very slow, inefficient, trustless, immutable database. There really aren't many good applications for that.
That highly depends on what blockchain implementation is being used and what it's being used for. Blockchains used for craptocurrency are highly inefficient, which is the vast majority. But there are a small handful of specialized (proprietary) blockchains that are just efficient enough to be practical in their highly specific use case.
Such as?
Walmarts proprietary food tracking system based on Hyperledger Fabric that they partnered with IBM to tweak & implement, enabling customers to track ingredients back to the farms within seconds, improving food safety, optimizing supply chain operations, enabling efficient tracking of stores and distribution centers, enhancing procurement management by collecting data on product origins, batch numbers, and quality parameters through QR codes and e-certificates.
How is that better than a database? Is someone concerned that Walmart will fabricate supply chain tracking?
Their prior database lacked transparency, real-time tracking, & scalability making tracing take days.
Just an FYI, Hyperledger Fabric is not like the blockchains for craptocurrency. It's a highly modular, permissioned not permissionless, distributed ledger & it allows for pluggable consensus mechanisms. It's very likely that Walmart uses a custom consensus algorithm and nothing like any of the public PoW, PoS, PoA, or PoET consensus algorithms.
Interesting! Thanks for elaborating.