For a long time, I thought of the blockchain as almost synonymous with cryptocurrencies, so as I saw stuff like “Odyssey” and “lbry” appearing and being “based on the blockchain”, my first thought was that it was another crypto scam. Then, I just got reminded of it and started looking more into it, and it just seemed like regular torrenting. For example, what’s the big innovation separating Odyssey from Peertube, which is also decentralized and also uses P2P? And what part of it does the blockchain really play, that couldn’t be done with regular P2P? More generally, and looking at the futur, does the blockchain offer new possibilities that the fediverse or pre-existing protocols don’t have?
Merkel Trees are fine, and are how things like “Git” keep track of different files (and how distributed hash tables and file-sharing often work).
Merkel Trees are trees-of-hashes, which the cryptocoin world wants us to believe go by the new name of ‘Blockchain’, but people familiar with comp. sci history know that they’re just flailing about making shit up.
Blockchain is an application of Merkel Trees. Merkel Trees have lots of good uses, but Blockchain doesn’t seem to have much use after 10+ years of experimentation.
ETH has DNS. I would think the fediverse would like to see adoption of DNS that governments and big companies can’t mess with or take over with lots of cash.
As fast as money talks, you’ll be losing.
IMO. We should make global random networks and base our connections on top of them instead of clinging onto the hope of niceties because someone have the site google.com for example.
That kind of thing is actually possible with Ethereum DNS and hosting. It’s not mature enough to be viable yet, but the possibility is there.
A good start, but using crypto to just have a website seems overkill.
I have built a shared hosting protocol (and implementation) where you use link-files instead of website+DNS (nor crypto). Simple and lightweight, but with my communication skills it isn’t really taking off 😅
That’s cool. Got a link you’d be willing to share?
Here is the ‘official’ website : Tenfingers
There are versions for Linux and Windows and also the python source code.
Any feedback greatly appreciated!
ETH staking is looking like its literally illegal in the USA, you know that right?
Coinbase Earn is quite possibly trading in unsecured, unregulated securities and is being sued over it.
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That’s FUD. Lots of US based companies promote ETH staking and there’s no sign that the SEC is going to declare it a security.
Yo!
You seems to know what you’re talking about, have you heard of Juliana trees? Like trees based only on the keys, so searching for a key takes len(key) time.
Bet there is an other name for it but I so remember like that and no web search says anything about it so I’m trying my luck here :-)
Same for robin hood hash trees :-D
Cheers
This sounds similar to a trie - maybe that’s what you were thinking of?
I mean look at big corpo/government servers. They’re running an OS from 1980 and software that hasn’t been updated since 1960’s.
We’ll get there. Eventually. Maybe.
My Android phone’s marketplace, Google Play, is literally newer than Bitcoin and I have government services + banking applications on it.
I think you’re blind to how slow and inconsequential cryptocoin’s entire world is at innovation. They’ve wasted 15 years. Literally wasted, the world has changed and they haven’t noticed.
I thought it sounded interesting when it was new but the more I’ve learned, the more convinced I am that it’s completely useless. I’ve never seen anything done on a blockchain that couldn’t be done faster, cheaper, and more securely in a SQL database. Even the not-a-scam applications are ridiculous and fall apart upon examination. Blockchain as a definitive record of ownership? Absolutely not. There’s no way to force a person to update a record. Lose your house in a bankruptcy? The sheriff on his way to evict you isn’t going to care that you’ve got some NFT saying you still own the house. Anything involving contracts at all? If a court can’t unilaterally update the blockchain record, then the record is unreliable. But if the government can unilaterally update a record, then you’re not relying on community consensus and immutability in the first place.
Blockchain isn’t useful for anything important, and it’s not a logical choice for anything trivial aside from literally just playing with blockchain stuff for the sake of playing with blockchains. I think it’s a dead-end technology.
Blockchain as a definitive record of ownership? Absolutely not.
Oh, its worse than you think.
https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/publications/mining_CCS.pdf
Once BTC hits enough halvening-cycles, the entire protocol doesn’t work anymore. Its more beneficial to fork the blockchain (and collect ~50 transaction fees), rather than work on the head (and only collect ~5 transaction fees).
So if the last block confirmed 100-transactions (aka: collected 100 transaction fees), its more beneficial to undo that block and “steal” ~50 transactions, knowing that you’re leaving ~50 transactions for another miner to follow onto your block. (Ex: there are now two blocks: one with ~5 transactions available, the truth… and ~55 transactions available. The lie / false block you created. The lie is more economically beneficial to the next miner, so they’ll switch to your block).
It turns out that BTC forgot how to handle ties after the end of the “Free reward”, and there’s a good chance that “definitive record” is not so definitive.
What’s wrong with that though? BTC handles forks just fine. Eventually one fork will win out and life will continue on as usual.
The bigger issue this paper presents is that miners become incentivized to mine empty blocks. But can’t you just enforce a minimum transaction count on blocks?
But can’t you just enforce a minimum transaction count on blocks?
Miners can just create their own nonsense transactions.
There’s only incentive to do that if the mempool is empty. If the mempool is full, there will be plenty of transactions for both the first miner and the next miner.
Wait… This entire paper only makes sense if the mempool is near empty. If the mempool is full, then there is no reason to mine an empty/partial block because there will always be transactions left for future miners.
So basically:
- Mempool full = miner would mine full blocks just like intended.
- Mempool empty = miner would mine empty blocks but that isn’t a problem because there are no transactions to process in the mempool.
I find it to be an interesting solution looking for a problem. There could be many applications but I’ve yet to see one that blockchain could solve better than anything else that we already have, outside of crypto currencies.
Web3 is an interesting thought experiment but I don’t see how it would work in real life. It would be extremely slow, data loss would be a daily occurrence and it would be a privacy/security nightmare.
NFTs could have a useful case of keeping online records of ownership. Being cars, homes and even cattle. Which coulld also make it easier and cheaper to sell or buy these things.
Ignoring privacy concerns of course.
But you would still need an authority that can unilaterally make changes to these ownership records. People die, things get lost, stuff happens. So it can’t all be based on signing with private keys of individual persons. At that point: Why not run a central database of it all. It’s cheaper, more efficient and you could still publish a public record for traceability.
I really don’t see any problem that Blockchain could solve better than other solutions. Except Cryptocurrency.
A simple database has trust issues – the blockchain IS this database with trust issues resolved.
Yeah right. It’s that easy :D
Blockchain (simplified) is a giant excel spreadsheet that you can never edit, only add to. I struggle to think of any applications that is a benefit for, and even then append only databases would already do it better.
One of the benefits is supposed to be decentralization, but people tout that as a benefit for things like house deeds, or identification, or whatever. Imagine how massive an append only excel file of every house with every owner change etc etc included in it would be. Then we once again only have the people who can afford to store that much data storing it, and we are back to where we are now.
It doesn’t really solve any problems, it just is a worse version of what already exists.
Something about this comment didn’t seem right to me, so I did some quick math:
There are approx 144,000,000 homes (incl apartments, etc) in the US. https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/VET605221
Assuming every home is sold 5 times on average, that’s 720,000,000 sale records/deeds.
Existing blockchain implementations use IDs that are around 32 bits, or 4 bytes.
A “home sales record” or deed on the blockchain needs to include the buyer and the time/date of sale (8 bytes), along with a cryptographic signature (4-16 bytes). The seller’s identity doesn’t need to be included because it’s always doing to be the previous owner.
So each record is 16-28 bytes, and there are 720,000,000 records. If we go with 28bytes, it would take about 20GB to store all of the deeds for the US. A 500GB hard drive costs $20.
You forget that the blockchain is all about not trusting some middle-man/site, so you need to stock that blockchain yourself, everyone needs to stock that blockchain.
So multiply not only the cost, but also the ecological impact just buying all those drives.
And that’s only for *US" housing (I didn’t get the timeframe you used to calculate it, is it for like year 2050? Old data stays forever.).
BTW found the guy buying 0.5TB Hard drives ;-)
Yes, everyone would need a copy of the 10s-of-GB blockchain. That’s a fraction of the amount of space a single computer game would use, does that seem unreasonable/impractical to you?
And I buy used enterprise 2-3TB drives on eBay :) . I was going to use a 32GB flash drive for my example, but a 500GB HDD is the same price
Fair enough about the size.
Checked out eBay, there are some cheap 2-3Tb drives there! How does it pan out quality wise? I guess they sell them off like after 5 years of usage right?
Yeah, that’s my understanding. Tbh I don’t have a lot of experience with them yet, but I’m building an 8 disk RAID6 array and I decided to go with those used drives. 10 matching disks will be around $120, and I’ll have 2 extra drives so I can rebuild the array asap if a drive fails.
Edit: I also backup all of my important files, so it wouldn’t be the end of the world if the entire array fails. And a little downtime isn’t that big of a deal for my home server, unlike a commercial data center.
…and 20G that needs to be replicated to tons of nodes if it should be really decentralized.
16-28 bytes seems extremely understated, I think it could easily be off by orders of magnitude.
What do you think I’m missing in my estimate? Do you have any experience in CS?
You’re just talking about ownership of a title right?
A deed contains a lot more information than the owner. Mine is 4 pages long. Contains a map of the street, various easements, et cetera.
Yeah, but that kind of data would be better in an auxiliary database. There’s no reason to include it in the blockchain.
well but doesn’t that beat the purpose of using the blockchain in the first place? why not just store everything in the auxiliary database?
Depends on why you want to use the blockchain, I guess. If you want a system to allows anyone to verify ownership of property without 3rd parties (government, etc) being involved then the auxiliary database should work fine.
What purpose were you thinking of, that would be defeated by an aux DB?
Would a git repo count as a blockchain? It kinda fits your simplified description
No because you can do a git revert and remove the addition to the git tree.
Set all branches to fast forward only!!
The “blockchain” I use on a daily basis is git, where the sha of the previous commit affects the next.
Given that git was invented before the word “blockchain” started being used, shouldn’t we call blockchain applications “git-like” rather than retroactively calling Git a blockchain?
A commitchain
So Google, Amazon, Apple, and many other large companies in the IoT space are using a blockchain as a federated data store: https://github.com/zigbee-alliance/distributed-compliance-ledger
It stores the data needed for Matter [ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter_(standard) ] device attestation.
I think its an interesting use case on how entities that don’t particularly trust each other can operate a federated system. Accounts are linked to an identity out-of-band in order to have write permissions to the chain. When an account writes, all the readers of the chain have reasonable assurances of the author of that write. No company can inject false state as another company without that company’s guarded private key. All transactions are also auditable as an additional assurance the data isn’t undergoing a malicious act.
tl;dr; interesting use cases for tamper proof federated ledgers.
IMHO technically speaking the concpt of a Blockchain and decentralized zero trust computing like in Ethereum are indeed “interesting” as concepts.
But in practice there are a ton of issues with current implementations and it’s likely not going to be used on a large scale because zero-trust doesn’t scale well.
It was “interesting” 15 fucking years ago when it came out and we didn’t know what it could (or couldn’t) do.
15 years later, no one has come up with an application, so I think we can stop pretending that there’s a solution here. We’re now into “just 5 more years” to figure out a good use of this thing, and no one is any closer to an answer.
15 Years Ago, the Wii U hadn’t come out yet and iPhone App store wasn’t used yet. Think about how much life has changed, and how little the cryptocoin people moved forward with their tech. Its mind-boggling how much money they’ve been given and how little progress has been made.
15 years ago when Bitcoin was invented was roughly the launch of Super Smash Bros Brawl and Halo 3, to put this into video-game terms.
As we see here on the Fediverse, decentralization works fine without monetization using an actively anti-scaling append only database that emits the pollution of a medium sized country.
The only other good thing that came out of it is it increased the prevalence of digital payment system in the world, but I struggle to think of anything that would actually directly benefit from blockchain.
My principle of “blockchain’s fundamental value” is simply this: A blockchain that secures valuable information is valuable.
To break that down further:
- “Valuable information” isn’t data - it’s something that you can interpret, that has meaning and power to affect your actions. So, price speculation taking place on a chain isn’t that valuable in a broad, utilitarian sense, but something like encyclopedic knowledge, historical records, and the like might be. The sense of “this is real” vs “this is Monopoly money” is related to the information quality.
- “Secures” means that we have some idea of where the information came from, who can access it, and whether it’s been altered or tampered. Most blockchains follow the Bitcoin model and are fully public ledgers, storing everything - and just within that model(leaving aside Monero etc.) there are positive applications, but “automatically secure” is all dependent on what application you’re aiming for.
You don’t need to include tokens, trading, finance, or the specific method of security, to arrive at this idea of what a blockchain does, but having them involved addresses - though maybe without concretely solving - the question of paying upkeep costs, a problem that has always dogged open, distributed projects in the past. If the whole chain becomes more valuable because one person contributes something to it, then you have a positive feedback loop in which a culture of remixing and tipping is good. It tends to get undercut by “what if I made scam tokens and bribed an exchange to list them”, the maxi- “we will rule the world” cultures of Bitcoin and Ethereum, or the cynical “VC-backed corporate blockchains”, but the public alt chains that are a bit out of the spotlight with longer histories, stuff like Tezos and NEM/Symbol, tend to have a more visible sense of purpose in this direction - they need to make a myth about themselves, and the myth turns into information by chance and persistence.
What tends to break people’s brains - both the maxis, and people who are rabidly anti-crypto - is that securing on-chain value in this way also isn’t a case of “public” vs “private” goods. It’s more akin to “commons” vs “enclosed” spaces, which is an older notion that hasn’t been felt in our political lives in centuries, because the partnership of nation-states and capital has been so strong as a societal coordinating force - the state says where the capital should go, the people that follow that lead and build out an empire get rewarded. The commons is, in essence, the voice in the back of your mind asking, “Why are you in the rat race? Do you really need an empire?” And this technology is stating that, clearly and patiently: making a common space better is another way to live.
And so there is a huge amount of spam around “ownership”, but ownership itself isn’t really a factor. That’s just another kind of information that the technology is geared towards storing. The social contract is more along the lines that if you are doing good for a chain and taking few risks, a modest, livable amount of credit is likely to flow to you in time. Everyone making “plays” and getting burned is trying to gamble with it, or to advance empire-building goals in a basically hostile environment that will patch you out of the flow of information.
The value is in the forward signed, immutable ledger written by neutral consensus. This can take a lot of form and be the backbone of many types of applications (and already is used by large firms), the current market for direct public ledgers is a mess and I don’t generally agree with much of the last craze beyond the fundamentals needed to manage transfers, ownership and executions. The applications that will use these kinds of networks haven’t really been built yet.
Any sources in large firms using it? I haven’t seen anything other than generic marketing talk.
I can say of the top of my head the JPM and AMEX are running internal ledgers but there are many more, IBM and Accenture co-developed a system called Hyperledger which was given to the Linux Foundation. Its a tool kit for developing and deploying ledger applications primarily targeted at internal corps.
One of the cases these are good for is an easier to manage rights and asset control systems than many products you would pay more for and with less futzing with IAM, LADP or AD.
Hyperledger is a private “blockchain”. I write blockchain in quotes because it’s not really a blockchain. There’s not really a distributed consensus in a private “blockchain”. It’s like taking the concept blockchain, and strips not only down the bad parts but also all the good parts.
Sure, there are multiple actors signing each entry, but who has elected these actors? A central authority of course!
It’s decentralised in the same way a git repo is decentralised. Mostly because Hyperledger is basically a git repo.
Most of the times when a company says they’re using blockchain, they’re either:
- using a private “blockchain”, which is not really a blockchain.
- not actually using blockchain, but say they do for marketing reasons.
- a Ponzi scheme.
A private blockchain is no more than a spicy linked list
I think we are grasping for new words here really, its only been in the last few years orgs have been exploring actual deployments internally.
I do have a very reductive definition of “blockchain” as I believe it is what it says. what is considered “satoshi’s vision” includes a blockchain system but it does not define the word.
HL is a blank canvas that allows you to deploy whatever consensus you want including those commonly found in public chains, it is entirely possible to run a hyperledger instance that is compatible with any network you would like, presuming you would want that effort.
These sound more like publicity stunts than anything else. There isn’t really much value in running a private Blockchain. At that point it lost all value a Blockchain would provide. Who are you protecting yourself against?
You don’t need a distributed untrusted consensus algo for internal ledgers. That’s trusted parties only.
for the most part yes, there are interesting regulatory scenarios that are on idea boards, mostly they want the secure write and a form of DiD being provided. these system provide some interesting legal scenarios with regards to accounting for assets in escrow on behalf of clients. In one form they are liabilities, in another, they are technically under the customers control.
But what value does Blockchain bring to the table here that other technologies wouldn’t?
The value is in the forward signed, immutable ledger written by neutral consensus.
I have Excel spreadsheets at home though and you can be assured that they haven’t changed if you take a hash of them.
In fact, taking cryptographic hashes and signatures of people is automatic with Adobe signature products, and is how I signed for my house mortgage. You know, things that people really don’t want changing or someone doing shenanigans with. Just a click here and a send the .pdf over and… yeah, its not that hard in practice.
Signed, immutable proof of the transaction that nobody can manipulate. It also doesn’t require a legion of ASICs hashing numbers until the end of time. Because your “blockchain” is vulnerable to the 51% attack if the hashrate ever declines precipitously.
This is true, the fundamental of a blockchain is simply signed blocks of binary data. We can get into the debates on weather this can work in a public system like many groups are trying now, though I presume that that is not really what the poster is talking about since most public chains fundamentally rely on thier cryptocurrencies to to function, which for some is an argument as to why they can’t work.
My cryptographically signed .pdf for my mortgage document requires no cryptocoin or “blockchain” to function.
Its just simple hashing and signatures. You know, standard cryptography. The thing that allows “HTTPS” connections? The thing that signs your credit-card each time you enter it into Amazon? The thing that signs your password as you type it into the password field?
Yeah, that’s cryptography. Not “cryptocoins” or “blockchain”, its just a cryptographic hash, signature, or encryption.
if you just keep your document on your machine and only use it for personal encryption sure. its a key exchange network, this is for when bob and alice want to talk, not look at something in the safe and put it back. distributed PKI has been a challenge for decades, im not sure about this current incarnation of public systems but I find a lot of promise in many other applications.
I’m not sure if you fully understand what I’m talking about.
https://www.docusign.com/solutions/industries/mortgage
I’m talking about real world business. I’m not getting a $300,000 mortgage leaving a pdf on my personal computer. I’m talking about real world applications here.
distributed PKI has been a challenge for decades
Yeahhhh… no. Its point-and-click these days. Most people don’t even realize they’re utilizing PKI to handle typical business transactions. It literally “just works”, click click boom. It happened, and is legally binding, happens hundreds-of-thousands of times a day across this country and is perfectly functioning cryptography.
so if you are looking at this its a question to trust scopes, at least in public systems. here you are trusting:
- the bank
- the broker
- docusign
- you govt
- your courts
the proposal for a decentralized ledger with neutral execution is that the only “trust” needed is that in the contracts function, however this is not entirely true, in reality you are shifting trust to:
- genesis ceremony
- your ability/resources to asses the contracts function and your counterparties.
some people feel this is a better way of doing things, ive found it interesting to work in the space technically but I dont necessarily agree with the wildwest nature of the public systems and am more an advocate of regulated channels if these are going to be done at all. There is also the idea that a large enough network makes it possible for the network to handle larger loads than any individual processor could handle, this has borne out in some cases though its not perfect since we know P2P network instability tends to ripple through a network.
Finally if an application has been built with web3 practices enshrined its entirely possible to ensure service continuity even in the event of the provider failing financially and being unable to serve the users. Important to note this is RARELY done properly and I have only seen a couple cases where it worked so far.
If we are talking the internal org, like docusign itself, an org like might adopt a ledger based system for the in-built capabilities of some chains, you find quickly that enterprise grade cryptographic tracking of large scales of assets or process gets VERY expensive. Ledgers can be very helpful in these cases though are more a consideration when validating a new system rather than it being an impetus to upgrade in and of itself.
I often refer to it as a specialized app-server stack to clients.
And… where does FTX and Celsius come into the mix? Because in practice, that’s where people lose $8 Billion overnight.
Cryptocoin folk pretend they got this “trust” issue figured out, when in actuality, they just technobabble fake words and pretend that I haven’t taken a cryptography class in college. Guess what? I know what a hash is, I know how PKI works and I can implement BTC or Monero.
Just because Cryptocoin community is ignorant of very trivial hacks (ex: a hardware wallet using a shitty RNG which would leak the private-key), and is ignorant of how they are unable to trust even the most basic of operations in their house of cards doesn’t mean anything. (Are you sure that your hardware wallet generates real, random numbers? And not a pre-made list of ~1-billion, easily hacked wallets?)
Cryptocoin fans can’t even solve the hardware wallet trust problem, let alone any other trust issue going on in their little world.
Explain like I’m five?
sorry, gpt said i could do better
A blockchain is like a special notebook that many people can write in. Once something is written, it cannot be changed, and everyone can check that it was written correctly. This notebook help different people or companies work together by writing down and sharing important information in a safe and secure way.
Some people use these special notebooks to make digital money like Bitcoin. But it’s just way to use them. Companies also use these notebooks for other things, like making sure their business runs smoothly and securely.
So, the blockchain is not just about digital money, but also a to help people and businesses work together safely and fairly.
Thank you very much!
https://lemmy.intai.tech/comment/578972
You can also look in my post history, ask away, I’m no fan of where public systems have gone and understand the anger, point is, these techs ARE being used already in corp systems and even if you dont use this crop of chains, you will likely be using a system like this in the future, even if you dont know it.
So, if I get it, it’s like torrent, except instead of you manually verifying the hash code, each computer your file passes pay automatically checks and says “yup, the file I received and transmitted is the file I was supposed to receive and transmit” ?
pretty much, think of the files like what you would see in your .git folder for a code project. they are all linked together in a history graph. so you are validating the data, its position in history along with its entire history, you also know who changed the data and what systems were responsible for writing those changes. really solid tooling for provenance and chain-of-evidence scenarios.
I see, but if I’m not mistaken, git is anterior to the blockchain. What I’m asking here is what new things the blockchain brings to the table, that preexisting protocols like Git or P2P couldn’t do. Or is the blockchain just another application of the same principles (the Merkle chain, as a previous commenter was saying)? If so, what sets it appart ?
I’ll refer to one of my earlier responses someone asked about this in context of a process like docusigns’
so if you are looking at this its a question to trust scopes, at least in public systems. here you are trusting:
- the bank
- the broker
- docusign
- you govt
- your courts
the proposal for a decentralized ledger with neutral execution is that the only “trust” needed is that in the contracts function, however this is not entirely true, in reality you are shifting trust to:
- genesis ceremony
your ability/resources to asses the contracts function and your counterparties.
some people feel this is a better way of doing things, ive found it interesting to work in the space technically but I dont necessarily agree with the wildwest nature of the public systems and am more an advocate of regulated channels if these are going to be done at all. There is also the idea that a large enough network makes it possible for the network to handle larger loads than any individual processor could handle, this has borne out in some cases though its not perfect since we know P2P network instability tends to ripple through a network.
Finally if an application has been built with web3 practices enshrined its entirely possible to ensure service continuity even in the event of the provider failing financially and being unable to serve the users. Important to note this is RARELY done properly and I have only seen a couple cases where it worked so far. However personally this is one of the most impressive features, I am biased however as I was involved in the recovery of a commons that has turned into a defacto standard. Didn’t make anything from it other than consulting feed, just really cool to help a non-profit
If we are talking the internal org, like docusign itself, an org like might adopt a ledger based system for the in-built capabilities of some chains, you find quickly that enterprise grade cryptographic tracking of large scales of assets or process gets VERY expensive. Ledgers can be very helpful in these cases though are more a consideration when validating a new system rather than it being an impetus to upgrade in and of itself.
I often refer to it as a specialized app-server stack to clients.
That’s a lot of words to say nothing. Like, you literally aren’t saying anything of substance.
The value is in the forward signed, immutable ledger written by neutral consensus. This can take a lot of form and be the backbone of many types of applications (and already is used by large firms), the current market for direct public ledgers is a mess and I don’t generally agree with much of the last craze beyond the fundamentals needed to manage transfers, ownership and executions.
All of that is word salad. Blockchain is 100% redundant technology that uses obscene amounts of electricity. Why do I need a network of computers around the globe to make sure a contract and checks get signed? Why does it require a global network of computers constantly refreshing themselves and checking for inconsistencies to implement new business? If the smartest minds on Earth actually can’t come up with a use case, then it’s trash.
Grifters love it.
Blockchains don’t inherently need obscene amount of erlectriciy
Proof of work mechanism does. There’s lots of other consensus mechanism that don’t.
Forward signed, immutable ledger - a dataset that is written and logged at time of write and validated using cryptographic signatures of the creator of that data and the node of the network responsible for the data. public systems use incentive systems to ensure unbiased writes, private systems work more like your typical app server.
neutral consensus - this is the p2p aspect, this is a bunch of unrelated actors promising to work toward an unrelated goal, in public systems this is done via some form of game theory, in private systems orgs working together have contract law and are more interested in the the controlled writing.
How it can take a lot of forms. Most people are just familiar with what the general public refers to as cryptocurrency. These are ledgers managed on p2p networks with the aforementioned game theory based consensus system. However ledgers are not required to do this, a ledger and even a blockchain can work without fees or even energy wasting miners, in these cases its usually the cryptographic write and channel messaging they want (some of these are a step up from AWS’s messaging stack).
Ledgers like this are used in many ways and used in large orgs around the world, what the public is angry at and what the technology is are very different things.
I hope I have “unsaladed things” for you
Blockchains come in many forms, the ones you are thinking of are what are called Proof of Work chains, these uses a kind of cryptographic race to secure thier data and use a TON of waste energy as a result. Def not a fan either.
The growing popularity and interest in chains is around forms of Proof Of Stake, these use other internal protocol mechanisms to secure the network and work to run the cryptographic functions as efficiently as possible. Unsurprisingly the fastest blockchains are proof of stake and power wise are similar to traditional applications in utilization.
You don’t need any of these networks if you don’t want to use them, fundamentally, they arent even networks, they are cryptographic messaging systems. How the data is sent and processed is incidental, you could work out a bitcoin block on pen and paper if you wanted. This concept has extended to a cryptographic tool called Zero Knowledge Proofs, these will be part of next generation identity verification systems and is a fundamental of the W3C standard around DiD, the whole point is for disconnected attestation.
Maybe this is my “too old for this shit” moment, but this all just sounds like convoluted non-sense that’s never going to go anywhere. We still have SMS and ATMs that run XP.
surprisingly small hardware is needed to sign a message. though I do agree that we are still a bit early for workable end-user use cases. People really dont care what the database or app server is, they just want it to work and raw dogging some public node is just a bit much for people, i dont blame them.
more packaged solutions are under development, these will be more like a proper application with the differences of a chain being abstracted by the provider
things like sms, what if i told you SMS would be fine with this, so would smoke signals
I think the problem I have with it is the online enthusiasm for it is acting like it’s already going to change my life yet it’s been more than a decade and no one has shown tangible and understandable utility, just marketing bs and grifting.
i think there was a lot of hope among some at the public systems, no clue if it will bear out, the tech however is a viable PKI distro strategy that has been proven to work already in multiple large orgs in different forms. We don’t talk about how expensive or difficult it is to control your own PKI. Its one of the key reasons why you have to yield so much data and control to providers.
I could go on a long rant about what the internet was built to be vs what “big tech” has perverted it into, using p2p technologies to do it then saying “i dont see what the point is for people to have versions of this for themselves rather than it being only in the hands of big corps controlled by share holders” but thats about as far as Ill go.
as for private systems, this stuff is already starting to rule your world. distributed PKI systems in enterprise require expensive and technically onerous trust ceremonies for each cross system connection. you also require functioning cert trees from root to tip in order to validate anything in most of these systems (tools like pgp are the exception rather than the rule sadly). These systems are expensive to operate and add another single point of attack to the system. There are already chains doing internal asset management at companies, and its quite likely that any DiD standard that becomes a gov ID will be on a ledger network not that it should matter to end users.
the biggest push with the latest wave of the tech is to stop trying to sell to people, sell to enterprise, the usecases are more solid and don’t require strange economic games to function.
You will be using blockchain tech, but if its deployed right. You will never know. Do you know or care what app server or db your provider uses? of course not.
But we’re still early lol
Yea I’ve been hearing that for a decade. Aside from missing out on bitcoin at $300, I’m still waiting. 🤷♂️
zero knowledge proofs, like those being deployed on blockchains recently, have the potential to be the killer app for this tech. Imagine you want a library card which requires proof of residence. With a zero-proof identity system, you could get your library card without revealing any personal info, like your name or address. Your wallets would simply prove to the library that you are a resident as credentialed by some local/state authority.
This also could have profound implications for the web like universal logins to web services, online privacy while still providing attribution, ownership and rights to digital content, copyright, etc.
You don’t need blockchain to do ZKP.
You don’t even need ZKP to do these things. Obviously (as you said) there’s a local/state authority who knows this. The library could just ask them about it.
You need a blockchain to revoke proofs. Also, I would like to be able to prove something without notifying an authority of some sort
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So the actual tech behind could lead to some interesting ways to utilize it, but it’s admittedly squandered on cryptocurrencies and shitty NFT “art”.
Like, you could probably get rid of identity theft being an issue if you had unique tokens that would have your personal info like your legal name, birthdate, SSN, etc to ensure that it’s you and not somebody pretending to be you. Instead of entering in this info, you could just share the necessary tokens with the other party - so if a bank needed your info, for example, you could just give them the tokens containing the different info they need into their wallet. No idea how feasible that would be, but I do think there’s more actually creative and useful ways to utilize the blockchain tech versus just relegating it to shitcoins and ape art.
What you’re describing kinda just sounds like ID cards or passwords… I mean, these can be stolen, falsified ot lost, but even assuming the “falsified” part is and remains impossible, couldn’t it be possible to obtain or duplicate someone’s token? The crudest example I could think of would be someone just stealing a computer on which someone else’s crypto keys are saved, but through hacking there’d probably be more ways to do it…
From my understanding (and it could be wrong tbh, this is a bit out of my wheelhouse), you cannot duplicate NFTs - it’s already recorded on the blockchain, so it’ll be the only unique one on the chain. Even if somebody were to create another token with your info, you can still say that the duplicated token is not your token because you can prove when the duplicated one was created after your token was, and can even prove each transaction done with your specific token. Plus, to even hack the blockchain, iirc it would require one party to have over 50% of the processes running it - which is reportedly hard to do, so take that for what you will.
I think what they’re asking is how do you protect your token?
You have to have some way of storing and presenting that token so what would stop somebody from stealing or replicating the method of presenting said token? The way it is done now with cryptocurrency is far, far from ideal and can easily lead to permanent loss of access.
Ohhh, I see. Yeah, that would be probably one of the major obstacles that would need to be sorted before something like that would be feasible, because you are right - right now you’d be just as screwed if you lost access to that token as you would be if you lost your SSN card or something.
Sam Altman’s Worldcoin is addressing this issue in a way. Your proof of humanity is tied to a unique eye scan. Similarly, a wallet whose private key is tied to biometric verification could greatly, but completely, secure one’s digital identity held in that wallet.
What if you lose your eye in an accident? What if you lose your finger or hand?
no longer human then.
I advocate for using a dick pic for dudes and a booby pic for the ladies to verify your identity in those extreme cases.
I’ve heard of a couple interesting applications (interesting doesn’t necessarily mean good)
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I’ve been out of the industry for a couple years, but at the time I left both the US’s NAR and CA’s CREA were looking to create blockchains that would eventually hold an immutable history of every salable property in North America. The sales pitch is that no one will ever be able to hide things like flood damage or zoning changes if they’re all those events are in a trusted database. Carfax, but for buildings.
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Several US states with legalized Marijuana have what are known as Seed To Sale laws. One company was trying to move into this space and eventually into all of agriculture. The idea being that if you buy pot, scanning a QR code would tell you what clone# the seeds were from, where and when it was planted, what pesticides/herbicides were used on/near it, when it was harvested, any tests it had gone through, etc.
So I have two questions about this:
- Why use blockchain for that? Both of these sound like they will be centralized databases and blockchains just add a bunch of overhead for no benefit.
- How does a database prevent me from … just lying to it? The blockchain won’t magically detect if I paid off some guy to claim he inspected my house or weed and just hand out a certificate.
Probably transparency. It’s a public ledger. That’s one of the benefits I’m aware of.
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Asset Tokenization and Smart Contracts are two things that will be increasingly used in Finance. That is why the recent BIS report on CBDCs included both of those as essential features of a Central Bank Digital Currency.
What Blockchain does is provide these features of a digital currency in a way that doesn’t require a trusted intermediary. This makes Blockchains resistant to censorship in a way that a central bank digital currency can never truly guarantee. It is true that a centralization system like a database or ledger can be faster, more efficient and more secure but that you will always have to trust that provider of that service that they will continue operating in a manner that is congruent with what a user may want.
A recent example of this would be the news that Ubisoft is deleting inactive accounts on Uplay, which is potentially resulting in many users losing access to games they bought on that platform. Were the rights to those game tokenized on a Blockchain or CBDC, the users could potentially redeem that on another platform. Another example would be the case of the user losing his 900 hour character in Red Dead Redemption after Google shutdown stadia. Had that player’s character been tokenized as an NFT he might have the capacity to move it off of stadia and onto another game platform.
Get a little nervous about your Steam Game collection worth 1000s of dollars that is completely locked into Valve’s ecosystem? How about a decentralised, immutable and censorship-resistant record of your ownership of those games? That is what asset tokenization is about and it will become more important in the future as our lives and our assets become more digital.
Then there are multitude of uses for smart contracts which, again, don’t require a blockchain provided you are ok with relying on a trusted intermediary to execute the contract as it was termed. Given that contracts by their nature often involve agreement between organisations or individuals with diverging interests, it almost a certainty that having an immutable, censorship resistant network to run those smart contracts is desirable.
If you take a longer historical view, there have long been strong opinions about how we should base our currency. Because money impacts us all so viscerally, even the most uninformed develop deep seated emotional stances about very obscure topics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_of_Gold_speech
This link is an example of a historical moment where a stance taken against the gold standard was influential in national elections in the US.
The people who would have been emotionally exercised about bimetalism are probably the same people who we call crypto-bros today.
In all, the furor over blockchain, especially currency and NFT, has yielded heat but no light. Where’s the killer application? It never takes this long for a truly useful technology to find that killer app, not in today’s technology environment. Maybe it just isn’t that useful and people should calm down?