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As someone who stopped getting involved in blockchain "tech" 12 years ago because of the prevalence of scams and bad actors and lack of interesting tech beyond

As someone who stopped getting involved in blockchain "tech" 12 years ago because of the prevalence of scams and bad actors and lack of interesting tech beyond the merkle tree, what's great about it? FWIW I am genuinely asking. I don't know anything about the current tech. There's something about "zero knowledge proofs" but I don't understand how much of that is used in practice for real blockchain things vs just being research. As far as I know, the throughput of blockchain transactions at scale is miserably slow and expensive and their usual solution is some kind of side channel that skips the full validation. Distributed computation on the blockchain isn't really used for anything other than converting between currencies and minting new ones mostly AFAIK as well. What is the great tech that we got from the blockchain revolution?

throwme_123 2y ago
Scams and bad actors haven't changed sadly. But zk-based really decentralized consensus now does 400 tps and it's extraordinary when you think about it and all the safety and security properties it brings. And that's with proof-of-stake of course with decentralized sequencers for L2. But I get that people here prefer centralized databases, managed by admins and censorship-empowering platforms. Your bank stack looks like it's designed for fraud too. Manual operations and months-long audits with errors, but that is by design. Thanks everyone for all the downvotes.
- dspillett 2y ago
  > But I get that people here prefer For many of us it isn't that we think the status quo is the RightWay™ - we just aren't convinced that crypto as it currently is presents a better answer. It fixes some problems, but adds a number of its own that many of us don't think are currently worth the compromise for our needs. As you said yourself: > The crypto ecosystem is shady, I know, but the tech is great That but is not enough for me to want to take part. Yes the tech is useful, heck I use it for other things (blockchains existed as auditing mechanisms long before crypto-currencies), but I'm not going to encourage others to take part in an ecosystem that is as shady as crypto is. > Thanks everyone for all the downvotes. I don't think you are getting downvoted for supporting crypto, more likely because you basically said “you know that article you are all discussing?, well I think you'll want to know that I didn't bother to read it”, then without a hint of irony made assertions of “angst and negativity”. And if I might make a mental health suggestion: caring about online downvotes is seldom part of a path to happiness :)
  - nottorp 2y ago
    The main problem with blockchain is identical to the one with LLMs. When snake oil salesmen try to apply the same solution to every problem, you stop wasting your time with those salesmen. Both can be useful now and then, but the legit uses are lost in the noise. And for blockchain... it was launched with the promise of decentralized currency. But we've had decentralized currency before in the physical world. Until the past few hundred years. Then we abandoned it in favor of centralized currency for some reason. I don't know, reliability perhaps?
    - dspillett 2y ago
      > And for blockchain... it was launched with the promise of decentralized currency. Cryptocurrencies were launched with that promise. They are but one use¹ of block-chains / merkle-trees, which existed long before them². ---- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle_tree#Uses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle_tree#Uses [2] 1982 for blockchains/trees as part of a distributed protocol as people generally mean when they use the words now³, hash chains/trees themselves go back at least as far as 1979 when Ralph Merkle patented the idea [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain#History
      - nottorp 2y ago
        But if you put it that way neural networks were defined in the 70s too :)
        dspillett 2y ago
        Very much so. Is there a problem with that? To what time period would attribute their creation? In fact it is only the 70s if you mean networks that learn via backprop & similar methods. Some theoretical work on artificial neurons was done in the 40s.
        nottorp 2y ago
        The point is whatever you said in defense of blockchain/crypto applies or does not apply to neural networks/LLMs in equal measure. I for one fail to see the difference between these two kinds of snake oil. > Some theoretical work on artificial neurons was done in the 40s. "The perceptron was invented in 1943 by Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts. The first hardware implementation was Mark I Perceptron machine built in 1957"

throwme_123 2y ago

Scams and bad actors haven't changed sadly. But zk-based really decentralized consensus now does 400 tps and it's extraordinary when you think about it and all the safety and security properties it brings. And that's with proof-of-stake of course with decentralized sequencers for L2. But I get that people here prefer centralized databases, managed by admins and censorship-empowering platforms. Your bank stack looks like it's designed for fraud too. Manual operations and months-long audits with errors, but that is by design. Thanks everyone for all the downvotes.

dspillett 2y ago
> But I get that people here prefer For many of us it isn't that we think the status quo is the RightWay™ - we just aren't convinced that crypto as it currently is presents a better answer. It fixes some problems, but adds a number of its own that many of us don't think are currently worth the compromise for our needs. As you said yourself: > The crypto ecosystem is shady, I know, but the tech is great That but is not enough for me to want to take part. Yes the tech is useful, heck I use it for other things (blockchains existed as auditing mechanisms long before crypto-currencies), but I'm not going to encourage others to take part in an ecosystem that is as shady as crypto is. > Thanks everyone for all the downvotes. I don't think you are getting downvoted for supporting crypto, more likely because you basically said “you know that article you are all discussing?, well I think you'll want to know that I didn't bother to read it”, then without a hint of irony made assertions of “angst and negativity”. And if I might make a mental health suggestion: caring about online downvotes is seldom part of a path to happiness :)
- nottorp 2y ago
  The main problem with blockchain is identical to the one with LLMs. When snake oil salesmen try to apply the same solution to every problem, you stop wasting your time with those salesmen. Both can be useful now and then, but the legit uses are lost in the noise. And for blockchain... it was launched with the promise of decentralized currency. But we've had decentralized currency before in the physical world. Until the past few hundred years. Then we abandoned it in favor of centralized currency for some reason. I don't know, reliability perhaps?
  - dspillett 2y ago
    > And for blockchain... it was launched with the promise of decentralized currency. Cryptocurrencies were launched with that promise. They are but one use¹ of block-chains / merkle-trees, which existed long before them². ---- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle_tree#Uses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle_tree#Uses [2] 1982 for blockchains/trees as part of a distributed protocol as people generally mean when they use the words now³, hash chains/trees themselves go back at least as far as 1979 when Ralph Merkle patented the idea [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain#History
    - nottorp 2y ago
      But if you put it that way neural networks were defined in the 70s too :)
      - dspillett 2y ago
        Very much so. Is there a problem with that? To what time period would attribute their creation? In fact it is only the 70s if you mean networks that learn via backprop & similar methods. Some theoretical work on artificial neurons was done in the 40s.
        nottorp 2y ago
        The point is whatever you said in defense of blockchain/crypto applies or does not apply to neural networks/LLMs in equal measure. I for one fail to see the difference between these two kinds of snake oil. > Some theoretical work on artificial neurons was done in the 40s. "The perceptron was invented in 1943 by Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts. The first hardware implementation was Mark I Perceptron machine built in 1957"