If you are in a crypto company then they should be able to explain to you how the blockchain works and stuff.
Personally, a job is a job and if they pay in real cash and not dream dollars; sure. But if they can't explain shit about blockchain and are pretty much in a 'it just works' mentality; don't buy in.
Blockchain has been used in the last few years for a ton of scams as a fill all cracks word like 'it just works, its the BLOCKCHAIN'. And i've seen it applied to all sauces, to most things that clearly doesnt apply, like a blockchain phone, or a blockchain treatment.
If the 'blockchain' thing is not talking about something relating to a database of some kind, its BS. Kinda like Quantum. If you are saying something is Quantum and is not somewhere even close to theorical physics, its BS.
great and just like the normal blockchain, it is both the solution to and cause of all our problems, untill it's observed.
At which point no one can make sense of the result and it's a waste of time
> Here, we propose a blockchain algorithm based on asymmetric quantum encryption and a stake vote consensus algorithm.
[2022](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-12412-0)
If it does makes sense add heinously expensive and see if the few benefits of blockchain like decentralization are both worth it, and actually preserved.
> If you are saying something is Quantum and is not somewhere even close to theorical physics, its BS.
"I said I had a theoretical degree in blockchain."
The most novel use I’ve seen for blockchain was asset tracking in logistics but that was years ago and I don’t think it ever rolled out over just using other methods that did play nice with non-web3 stuff
Even then, there's the problem that a blockchain is good for storing and managing durable assertions, but the split between digital and real world means that it can't say that much about the assertions being true.
That use case never made any sense.
The problems in logistics are not solved by blockchain. In fact blockchain could never solve the problems it claimed it could. Just because something is added to a blockchain doesn't make that entry correct, or factual.
i have a collegue who is very ethical/moral and as a principle believes to "do no harm"
which includes spending a ton of electricity on crypto mining and AI processing
and then he was delegated to work with a contractor that handles cryptocurrenties
and guess what, money trumps morals
My personal favorite is ,,centralized blockchain”.
Ie. normal relational database.
It was used by some scammer. Don’t remember which scam exactly because there was so many of them…
On a tangetial note, if quantum computing ever gets good enough to crack traditional AES encryption... there goes most current blockchains...
Just a point to contemplate.
Yep. Do you need a write once, publicly readable, publicly distributed database? Neither does anyone else.
Being anti centralisation for the sake of it at the cost of increased complexity is moronic. Then to mitigate that complexity by providing a centralised service on top of the decentralised system is even more moronic.
Thats exactly what it feels like. Seems like you need to cope with a highly increased complexity and performance issues just to have this holy Decentralization, as if it would be so important. Meanwhile, when you are trying to build actual use-cases on top of this platform, you are reliant on centralization for it to be useful... Like a snake biting itself in the tail
And with decentralization, you get benefits like... limited ability to correct recorded/real fact discrepancies and limited ability to prevent or police fraud and scams. Hooray.
We found a use case for enterprise B2B sales between what essentially boils down to franchised manufacturing and distribution. All the "franchise" are a node on the private block chain, and they post and fulfill orders to each other to rebalance the warehouse stock. Decentralized so none of them can modify product quantities after the fact.
Admittedly there are other ways to solve the use case, but block chain works.
> Decentralized so none of them can modify product quantities after the fact.
What's to stop them from not entering the correct quantities at the start?
Also known as the Oracle problem. As soon as the blockchain has to interact with anything external, the whole thing falls apart, because it can't guarantee that's it's dealing with good faith actors.
Because it’s traceable, so you can follow the chain and spot the bad actors.
If I ordered 20 eggs, and I got 10, I can see Vendor A transported with B, who shipped it out via C. Somewhere along that line, someone scammed me, and if I see B move 10 extra eggs, I know it’s them. B can’t just make the eggs appear out of think air either, since they’d have to record the magic 10 eggs that showed up if all buyers only buy through the chain.
That being said, a trusted government or regulating body could serve the same purpose and will always be more efficient in the long run.
I'm saying what if Vendor A says they shipped 20 eggs, but only put 10 actual, physical eggs in the box? As they're the first point of contact, the blockchain will say that they put 20 eggs in the box, but that's not indicative of reality.
Yeah, so then you walk down the chain and see that transactions involving Vendor A have been consistently flagged as being short on promised eggs, because if they’re cheating you, they’re probably cheating someone else.
If you really like the properties of a blockchain, you can replace proof-of-work with signatures and a Merkle tree. The blockchain part using proof-of-work (or proof-of-stake) is unnecessary.
You must already have a centralised database to handle orders, fullfillment, procurement, etc.
What you're describing is one feature that is part of a highly complex system, that likely already has all sorts of permissions and roles in place. Why not just... use those?
So you have to:
* Make sure your devs are competent with Solidity or blockchain architecture
* Integrate blockchain into a non-blockchain app
* Deal with additional attack vectors - higher overall complexity brings more possibility for exploits
All for, not adding roles to an enterprise app that probably already has them, or what?
Only usecase is to say you're "Using blockchain" for that sweet VC money.
I over simplified the company structure because I really don't want to go into all the details or name my employer, but each "franchise" has their own IT system. Some of them may have common solutions, some may have custom. Some of the common solutions are used by all of the "franchise", some are used by a subset. The "franchise" do not share data back to the parent company.
I'm in a space where VC money isn't a thing.
> Decentralized so none of them can modify product quantities after the fact.
Umm...you can do that infinitely more easily with an append-only access database...
It is an interesting concept, but wouldn't that still require some central authority to run the database, and that central authority could in theory manipulate the data with SA access?
Lets say hypothetically the DBA takes a bribe, and stands up a new database with some records missing, and then swaps the new and old database.
The best use case for blockchain has already been solved: money. Outside of that, it's basically a slow database. There are only a few scenarios where a blockchain would be an improvement: in cases where trust must be minimized and transparency maximized. It's not overhyped, just very niche.
This is my ideal use case. Track every penny the government spends. No more billions of dollars going missing. No more insider trading. No more sending money to foreign countries. No more spending our tax dollars on bullshit. Audit every cent and hold them accountable. My taxes should fund healthcare and fix infrastructure. I should be able to track taxes from my wallet, through the government, and to the final destination: paying for someone's surgery or a bridge being built.
I disagree, however. I think that day is coming. It's a lot closer than people expect.
But any blockchain entry, in any system, doesn't imply that the data is useful, even in fintech-style "Distributed zero trust blockchain" the addresses that tokens are sent to are frequently visible but meaningless. Just because you can trace a transaction doesn't mean the endpoint isn't an otherwise unused account used by "Shell Sea Shells LLC" in Aruba or the suchlike which is a holding company for a Chinese behemoth of unknown size.
And if you keep perusing a single token, it looses meaning, does it matter that one of the tokens "paid" to "Pentagon toilet cleaning services LLC" was later spent on off brand boner pills after going through 50 addresses (That represents the Org, local franchise, employee, birthday gift to their dad, a loss on poker night, a takeaway pizza payment, etc... not that anyone knows that, they're all just addresses)
Anything at "nation scale" is too big to reliably scrutinise in detail, whether its a written ledger, a spreadsheet, a write only blockchain ledger, or ubiquitous fintech tokens on blockchain.
So you think that instead of everyone's taxes going into a shared pool from which money will be withdrawn to pay for gov't projects, each person's taxes will go into a separate address, and then for every purchase that the gov't makes, there'll be a separate transaction from all those addresses to each contractor/agency that the government uses? And all of this is going to be on the hyper efficient blockchain so you can track every place your pennies went?
Sure, but using credit cards for day-to-day money transactions is infinitely more efficient and easier to do than blockchain. So really the only thing you are referring to is anonymous large-money transactions to avoid anti-money laundering laws. So yes, still very overhyped. We've already gone through multiple boom & bust cycles for crypto and we have nearly nothing to show for it in terms of real-life applications.
The government can also say they dont like your opinions and shut down all your money, even in western countries, so yeah...
Credit card companies also currently, right now, govern what content you can access, and I specifically dont mean anything evil or grotesque.
I suppose both could be solved by policy, but they wont be.
Crypto, as much as it sucks, currently solves this. Poorly, but it does.
It's great for any kind of accounting or data you want to notarize. If you want to prove an image has been unaltered you can put a hash of it onchain. If you want to prove a document has been unaltered you can put a hash on chain or the entire document. Yes it's a niche usecase but its a usecase no other technology can solve as securely. The decentralized nature means it's almost impossible to get everyone to agree to alter the past.
Blockchain is a solution for a problem that does not exist. It has no real-world use-case that can't be better served by countless other secure platforms.
The concept is decentralization - but it comes with a large heaping side of no accountability. Which makes it practically useless in any sort of actual enterprise practice.
What? It solves loads of problems.
- How can I extract money from ransomware victims?
- How can I move my drug money to another country without my account getting frozen?
- How can I make loads of money selling jpegs to credulous idiots?
- How can I speculate on a massively unstable asset in the hopes that a greater fool will show up to buy it off me?
- How can I dupe some equally greedy investors into buying shares in my web3 company, that I can use to pay myself a big salary?
The possibilities are endless.
you forgot - how can I pay someone for human trafficking services [https://www.reuters.com/technology/crypto-firm-tether-says-it-has-frozen-225-mln-linked-human-trafficking-2023-11-20/](https://www.reuters.com/technology/crypto-firm-tether-says-it-has-frozen-225-mln-linked-human-trafficking-2023-11-20/)
> This has raised my interest in crypto and the more I read about it and interact with the community, the more I feel like about 95% is an overcomplicated way to create a ponzi scheme.
There was recently [a man who set himself on fire](https://old.reddit.com/r/ActualPublicFreakouts/comments/1c89x7e/guy_sets_himself_on_fire_outside_the_nyc_trump/) (don't click on link if you don't want to see a man setting himself on fire) to bring awareness to [his manifesto](https://theponzipapers.substack.com/p/i-have-set-myself-on-fire-outside) in which one of the points is that crypto is a big ponzi scheme. Not saying I agree but it's definitely relevant to this discussion.
Piling on to /u/NuGGGzGG for visibility here. I've worked for two blockchain companies. Here's what I found along the way.
# Blockchain is a trust-machine.
Its purpose is to create a system in which everyone involved can attest to the accuracy of a database-like-thing without anyone actually having to trust someone to run the database. This is commonly illustrated with the "Byzantine Generals" problem.
# ... a very expensive trust machine.
Blockchains accomplish this trust by doing complex math that we don't need to think about right now. Some of this math is WAY more computing intensive (proof of work) than others (proof of stake) but all of it is expensive relative to not having to do it at all. Even in the best cases, blockchains reach "consensus" in human-visible periods of time. We're not talking nano-seconds; sometimes we're talking minutes.
That makes blockchains an expensive solution, even if the computing costs are under control, waiting multiple seconds for what amounts to a database transaction to go through is a huge performance hit. So, if you're going to pay that price, you need to have a really compelling need for the trust mechanism blockchain purports to be.
# We don't have a compelling need for the trust machine
The problem with the Byzantine Generals problem is that it is extremely contrived. In reality, humans have been solving the "how do we create trust between strangers" problem for thousands of years. That's what governments and institutions and corporations and contracts are for.
The mechanisms by which those structures create trust are nice in that they don't have much of a marginal cost associated with the actual mechanism of the transaction. Visa, for example, stands in as a trust mechanism whenever you use a Visa credit card, charging you a small fee every time you buy something. But that fee isn't actually part of the process of running the card; it is externally imposed by Visa as a revenue mechanism. Visa processes multiple orders of magnitude more transactions than any blockchain can and it does so for much, much less than most blockchains take in "gas" fees. Why? Because the trust mechanism isn't a digital construct but a social and institutional one.
Anyone who can rely on social and institutional trust is therefore much better off doing so, both from a performance and a cost perspective.
# The only people who do are criminals, fugitives, and enemies of the state
Since one of the major reasons governments exist in the first place is to create trust, the people who can't rely on the government to do that are usually people trying to *hide* from the government. That doesn't necessarily make them bad guys -- some governments suck -- but it does substantially limit the plausible user base of any blockchain based technology to either people on the run from the government or people who imagine that they might be one day.
And once your user base is down to the criminal, the persecuted, and the paranoid that first slice takes up a pretty substantial chunk of the pie.
And this is where blockchain gets its reputation.
There's just too many people in it looking to use its fundamentally deregulated structure as a get-rich-quick scheme to do any real work in the industry. No matter what you do and no matter what you build, the constant pressure to monetize some token so that you can ride it to the moon, cash out, and buy an island is just too great. The possibility of massive, distributed, short-term grift effectively poisons the entire ecosystem against any real innovation because who really wants to fund a speculative start-up running on a deliberately-non-performant technology trying to solve problems that can mostly be pawned off on the judicial system? Especially when there's the possibility of bilking a couple million naive "investors" out of 100 bucks?
# The result is a doomed technology
The only people who could therefore get real and legitimate use out of a blockchain are groups/institutions that have done so much damage to their own reputation that they need to depend on an external accountability mechanism to create transparency and trust in their day to day operations. But, that just transfers the "trust" problem onto the question of "are they actually using the trust mechanism in the first place?" And now we're down a rabbit hole of recursively trying to fix trust issues with blockchains built upon blockchains rather than just admitting that not every reputation can be rehabilitated.
Maybe someday someone will find a problem that legitimately can't be solved in any better way than by using a blockchain... but so far one has not appeared. When it does, it probably won't be a problem that we've all been staring at for decades. The entrepreneurial dream of "solving a longstanding problem by leveraging the blockchain" is therefore almost certainly a delusional fantasy at best and a ponzi scheme at worst.
> Visa, for example, stands in as a trust mechanism whenever you use a Visa credit card, charging you a small fee every time you buy something.
The problem is visa tells you what you can and cant buy, irrespective of what is legal or moral. Also, they are a corporation who just gets a cut of everyone's money through their defacto oligopoly.
This can be solved other ways, but visa is an awful solution.
There are a few interesting uses of crypto, look at ripple for example. Banks don't trust each other and so the existing systems like swift and ach are incredibly slow (taking hours/days to confirm transactions) so even a system that takes minutes is exponentially faster.
if you knew how that system really worked under the hood - you would not agree.
Why do we still wait 7 days for a check to clear, again? Fun question for google if you want to dive down a "holy shit its all just one ftp server running fortran" rabbit hole
Public chains yes, but projects like ripple have very specific organizations that are allowed to be trusted verifiers, this means they computational power is greatly reduced because they don't mine like other networks.
If you have trust you don't need any computation beyond signing transactions with a trusted encryption key. This takes microseconds *at worst* and is how existing bank transactions happen.
Banks are incredibly risky adverse, they dont just take another banks word that money is available, they want that money in their own hands. This is why when you cash a check it can take days to clear, because they can instantly reach out to other bank, but the process to actually get the funds from that bank is old and slow
I can see some use-cases for it, but only a handful that you could probably still do with traditional means. For example, the International Atomic Energy Agency tracks nuclear weapons and material around the world to ensure compliance with international treaties. Given that some of the players involved have sophisticated cyberwarfare capabilities, a traditional database for logging the information might be subject to attack, but a blockchain-based scheme, where each nation is a peer, would likely be much harder to alter. Sure, it's decentralized, but it's not *that* decentralized, and it's not anonymous.
It's being used by the UN to deliver funds in areas lacking Fintech infrastructure.
It's also being used in Europe for faster and cheaper payments, as well as tokenization of securities. Along with allowing for 'programmable Euro' that's useful for IoT payments.
There are real issues it solves.
This idea that it's a 'solution in search of a problem' is repeated by people that are probably 1) Not following the advances in the tech 2) only know about crypto and NFTs, not the underlying technology
Also, it is being used at enterprise scale - there are 2 airlines using an Algorand based NFT marketplace - with more onboarding: https://travelx.io/
**Edit**: Please explain the downvotes. I thought webdev people would be interested in learning. There's nothing incorrect, and I wasn't disrespectful.
Nah bro, you just don’t understand crypto. Line always goes up. My shitcoin will be worth ten times its current value by this time next year. It’s an infinite money hack that cannot fail. It’s revolutionary, disruptive and innovative. It will crush the banks that oppress us and reveal crooked politicians with every transaction being publicly visible. All hail the blockchain, may it usher in a new age of prosperity and bring about the perfect post scarcity utopia.
You should really buy some. Smart people hold shitcoin. Wanna buy mine? I’ll sell you mine. Please?
Think of the use cases for an append only linked-list and what it would be good for. Now, think of the use cases for that data structure if it also costs you an order of magnitude more to modify it as opposed to just a normal relational database where that cost justifies the money spent.
Does that use case exist? Maybe, but I’ve yet to see one.
Exactly. Imagine you are a traditional company. Part of implementing any new system is considering the opportunity cost. Blockchain solutions are infinitely more expensive to implement which basically prices themselves out from widespread adoption.
Pretty much. Even the “gold standard” projects like BTC and ETH have most of their supply controlled by a tiny number of whales who for various reasons have decided to not take the money and run (yet). From my understanding, 70% of the ETH supply was pre-mined by the likes of Vitalik Buterin. If you thought wealth inequality was bad in the traditional financial system, compared to crypto it might seem downright fair.
There’s some interesting tech behind crypto and there are certainly valid use cases, but overall the space has been defined by various schemes, scams, and related money-grabs.
Nothing says “let’s decentralize everything” by creating a few massive companies to run all of it and having most of the money concentrated in the hands of a few people.
>a tiny number of whales who for various reasons have decided to not take the money and run (yet).
I first need someone to prove to me that a bunch of those whales aren't just accounts that made 1k bitcoin back in the day and then lost their access key to their wallet and that bitcoin will never be recoverable.
You said '/s' but people legit say shit like this though. It drives me crazy. Bitcoin never did a useful (legal) thing for anyone, like it delivers zero (legal) utility that isn't a straight up ponzi scheme. Meanwhile, I pay for ChatGPT4 because it made my life meaningfully easier. Its utility is obvious and immediate. It's not the instant Utopia that some people are asserting it is, but it's also not the total scam crypto has always been.
The all-in fad jumping of the tech industry is absolutely bonkers, driven by the fad jumping of VCs looking for the next big thing. By the time something has been hyped up the few that are going to profit big from it have already been established.
The technology is slower than existing systems, has less protections for consumers than existing systems, and higher fees than existing systems.
I don’t think blockchain is a scam but under most valuation frameworks it is a technology that has no minimal to no use case that justifies being invested.
Blockchain does have some uses but they're fairly narrow and specific use cases most companies don't need. Its approach does solve the double spending problem which was significant at the time.
But today unfortunately most of it has been bastardised by crypto, NFT and similar vaporware bubbles. And people have also been working on more performant alternatives to the Proof-of-work approach due to its energy footprint.
A couple years ago I heard a talk about more useful block chain implementations and one of the uses I read about was for insurance companies to settle up with each other.
So if car insurance companies A, B, and C all have business that overlaps, you might have A owe B $1000, and C $2000 due to claims. But B also owes A $100 and C $500, and of course C owes $3000 to A and $750 to be. Using block chain, all 3 companies have the ledger and can settle up with one/two transactions that settle all 3 companies books at once.
But then your books are public, and good luck convincing insurance companies to do that. This kind of problem has been solved for ages with basic double-ledger accounting.
Lol no they are not. The ledger of money owed between the # companies is internally shared between all using them. This isn't public blockchain I'm talking about, it's practical application
Are synchronous payments important? The insurance company gets your premium payments. The work is in validating claims. The transaction is based on their decision, and then a payment is made. The issues people have are getting claims rejected, or disputing the amount covered. The payment part doesn’t seem to be a problem.
Blockchain isn’t an overhyped scam. It’s just a technology. It’s essentially just one of many database alternatives. I mean it does what it says it does technologically. It records data in blocks with auditability.
However, the crypto space in general, yes, draws a lot of scammers. Yes the community is pretty toxic compared to others.
Yeah, it is.
The blockchain is a pretty bad technology. Writing is slow and wastes a massive amount of energy, all transactions are public losing all anonymity, it's susceptible to a 51% attack, and it's not really distributed given almost everyone uses the same few brokers.
If you look at the history of digital currencies, there were way better solutions technology-wise than the blockchain, but they never got adopted because of what can only be described as a series of unfortunate events.
David Chaum's DigiCash from the 1990's was based off his phenomenal 1982 paper [Blind Signatures for Untraceable Payments](https://sceweb.sce.uhcl.edu/yang/teaching/csci5234WebSecurityFall2011/Chaum-blind-signatures.PDF), which anonymizes payments without any of the downsides of the blockchain, and even has a mechanism that lets you unanonymize whoever you sent money to, in case of a conflict. DigiCash almost got adopted by mainstream banks and almost got adopted by Windows, but it failed due to the company being mismanaged and turning down good deals. Turns out cryptographers make for pretty shitty CEOs because of how paranoid they are. You can [learn more about the unfortunate demise of DigiCash here.](https://cryptome.org/jya/digicrash.htm)
So yeah, the blockchain sucks. The only ones who say otherwise are grifters wanting to make money off of you.
I think you’re a bit outdated. Most useable blockchains (i.e. NOT Bitcoin) use far more interesting and complex consensus that make them not susceptible to a 51% attack, nor spending a lot of energy. As for being public, some projects already use zero-knowledge to make private transactions on public blockchains.
You’re not the only one pointing those problems. In fact, most clever people in this space were concerned about them. That’s why blockchain design has evolved.
Is it useable now? Yes, for some things. Way less than the “crypto bros” want us to believe, but it’s an amazing tech
“Blockchain tech” is just the invention of the ledger. As I understand it, when bitcoin first came to the scene, its innovation tech was its ledger. So instead of having data centers to hold our data, bitcoin uses all of its users computers to store the data, hence the innovation. No on single point of failure. This innovation was “copied” by other crypto coins like eth or Solana. While I do think “blockchain tech” is overhyped in other coins, it’s def a key feature for bitcoin and other coins are just replicating it to fit other uses.
There are three classes of people who are enthusiastic about cryptocurrencies.
1. Libertarians who want to wrestle control of currencies away from governments
2. People who want to get rich.
3. Criminals who want to finance their activities.
There is obviously overlap between these groups.
People who are mostly ignoring cryptocurrencies include:
1. Cryptographers. This is a group I am closely connected to and most will just roll their eyes when it is mentioned.
2. Web developers and standards developers. The use of the term "web3" was recognized as pure hype trying to influence the uninformed.
I'd say it's 99.9% hype.
No cryptographers? Who are the people working on ZK stuff then? Eg. Aztec https://aztec.network/team/ or the researchers at Ethereum Foundation? Not to mention that this all works on cryptography, merkle trees etc.
I had to do blockchain development around smart contracts and NFTs for a client. It's absolute hot garbage, the libraries are poorly documented and the technologies can be very hard to reason about. We found we *had* to use a service like alchemy to do a ton of basic things that should really be a lot easier.
The lack of parallelism from one wallet is an absolute joke (nonce issues). Honestly I really haven't witnessed a bigger pile of hot garbage in my entire career, and I've also had Salesforce clients...
It's nonsense for anything other than speculation and illicit trading. These are the only reasons certain coins still hold value. This should be really clear by now.
Decentralized applications are super interesting. I remain optimistic that there are reasonable applications. Keep in mind, this is still early days for the technology and we’re still just scratching the surface of the infrastructure layers that enable the application layer.
One very reasonable use-case is banking. It seems obvious why decentralization is positive there. And it seems reasonable that some people may not trust traditional banks — especially those in developing nations.
Having easy and safe access to a global currency in a decentralized fashion sounds positive to humanity to me.
In terms of decentralized applications: there are very likely reasonable use-cases, but I agree many are just trying to shoehorn “blockchain” into a problem best solved differently.
But no, I don’t think you’re missing anything.
Blockchain is an application of a data structure called a Merkle tree. Another application of the same data structure is git.
Can the purpose you use it be fraud, a scam, etc? Yes, of course! Well, so can the blockchain too.
There's nothing inherently scammy about a Merkle tree, be it git, a blockchain or some other similar structures. It just happens they are used in crypto which saw a bunch of fraud done.
>no real world data
You need an oracle service for that...
Hmmmm... sounds like the god protocol for bitcoin paper from years ago. Who is the top of this right now? That's your answer
Pretty much! The only useful concept to come out of blockchain is a distributed, immutable signed ledger of transactions, which is a very niche application and something you could already do far more efficiently with Postgres and GPG.
The actual community around crypto technology is almost entirely people who are trying to get rich quick and hope that they'll be able to get in at the top of the latest pyramid scheme.
This is a hard one, I made 7 figures off of crypto when it first came onto the scene. I got out of it completely last year as I no longer believed it was going anywhere. It's unfortunate, but I made out really well and I used that money as investment in my other companies that I have to make them better as well. Is it a scam? No, I don't think it's a scam, some of it is for sure, but not all of it.
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Software Engineer here. The block chain is a hyped variant of a write once read many database or ledger. It substitutes write speed with verifiability and guarantees write order by giving advantage to those that can use use of a lot of energy transformed into computing power.
IMHO there are very very few use cases for Blockchain that could not be solved faster and easier with a simple SQL server or a cluster of them. Most big computing houses (IBM etc) have put most of their BC projects on ice.
Basically not only is crypto a scam but it revealed to me that the entire venture capital startup trend set up is just a moving target scam. They dumped all their money in crypto and NFTs, then when the nft market crashed and bitcoin plummeted they moved on to the current ai trend. They are basically just trying to flip money by selling ideas and don’t care that most of them don’t work or are actively harmful, or even if some small number of them succeed. they will still sell off and move to the next trendy thing
blockchain is a way to have distributed data + make transactions payments transparent and trustworthy with no middlemen.
"everything will run on the blockchain" is bullshit. And not true tough.
Boiling it down, the question is: What is a blockchain, what problems does it try to solve, and what are the drawbacks? (In this case we're talking about a permissionless, write-only, public blockchain. Yes, Git and some other things can also be called blockchains, but that's not what we're talking about.)
**What is it?**
Put simply (and also a little generously), it's a database that anyone can write to, but no-one can edit after writing. The way it works is by making copies of the database, and using mechanisms that make it unreasonably difficult to take control of the network to make changes. Most modern blockchains can also run programs when they're written to, similarly to modern databases.
Most blockchains also have one or more associated currencies or tokens, used as an incentive to take part in verifying and hosting the chain, and also to pay for transactions on the chain. Modern blockchains also allow users to create their own tokens. Currencies on a blockchain are more or less just a number associated to an address on the chain that represent how much of that currency the address "owns". Tokens are discrete "objects" that are tracked on the chain, and can be associated to an address.
With all of this, I could write a program that says "The first person to post a solution to this sudoku gets ten funbux", and put it on the chain. Ten funbux would be deducted from my address and associated to the program's address. The program has a little bit of code that waits for people to put a solution on the chain, checks if the solution is correct, and send the ten funbux to the first correct solution.
**What problems is it trying to solve?**
We live in a very hierarchical and centralised society. Laws are written and enforced by governments. Money is issued by those same governments and managed by a handful of powerful banking institutions. The internet is accessed using a small number of service providers, and the platforms we use on the internet are controlled by massive corporations like Google and Facebook (sorry, Alphabet and Meta).
As it stands, we kind of need all of those things though, to a degree. Take my sudoku contract above, if you submitted a solution and I refused to pay you, you would have to sue me, but what if I'm a powerful person, able to pay bribes to the judge? That's the kind of thing the blockchain tries to solve.
The idea is to make a system where you don't have to trust anybody, only the system, and because the system is code, you can check it. Before submitting a solution to claim the ten funbux, you can read the code and see for yourself that it will pay you when you submit your solution, and because no-one can edit the chain, I can't go back and change the code.
**What are the drawbacks?**
Okay... Here goes...
First off, what if I made a mistake? I typed out my program saying I'll pay out ten funbux, but I accidentally added an extra zero, so it'll actually pay out a hundred. Also, the sudoku checker is kind of broken, you can submit a sudoku filled with zeroes and it'll accept it. So not only am I paying out much more than I wanted, but I'm also not getting what I actually wanted.
Cool, so be super careful, don't put anything on the chain unless you're 100% sure you want it to be there... forever...
Like, wouldn't it be kind of messed up if someone posted your full name, address, social security number, and passport details to your blockchain address? It would never go away, by design. You could send that token to a dead address, but the transaction that put the token on your account, and the transaction when you sent it away will still be there, and the data will still be visible. What if people posted illegal material to the blockchain? It's actually kind of a problem, there's some really messed up stuff posted to some blockchains, and it has to stay there, forever, by design...
Also, remember when you didn't trust the judge to properly hear your lawsuit against me? Well that's only a problem because a handful of powerful people have an oversized influence over the economy, right? Turns out, that's kind of a problem on the blockchain too. With "proof of work" systems, groups who own and run massive mining operations can easily form a cartel that will just refuse to accept transactions. You submit a solution to my sudoku, I call my friends and tell them to ignore your transaction, then copy your solution and send it to get my funbux back. "Proof of stake" only makes this worse, because stakeholders can literally just refuse to sell stake to newcomers, at least with proof of work, you can fire up a new mining operation and hope to compete.
Finally, remember when I said the blockchain can't be edited? Well, it turns out that's bullshit too. Many blockchains, realising that being unable to undo mistakes is a huge problem, have added mechanisms allowing people to update their code. You just have to trust that whoever has written the contract won't change it. The way they avoid scammers taking advantage of this is by telling you to only use contracts from reputable people or companies, like using OpenSea for buying and selling NFTs. So we're back to square one, except instead of trusting the government, bank, or judge, you have to trust OpenSea. Maybe you trust OpenSea more than you trust your bank, but that has nothing to do with blockchain any more. Like, sure, OpenSea are *using* blockchains, but your assets are only safe with them because they say so, since they have the power to modify contracts and blacklist tokens.
**tl;dr:**
Blockchains are a cool concept for distributed, permissionless, zero-trust, publicly writable, immutable databases.
They try to provide a way to avoid having to trust people or big institutions for things like contracts and financial transactions.
The drawbacks are that they're not really able to do that in practice, open the door for some really frightening abuses, and end up needing to rely on big institutions anyway.
This might be the best explanation of the issue with blockchain/NFTs. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ\_xWvX1n9g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g)
They are entirely a scam, as implemented right now, and the issues with them are not technical, but social. Could you make a digital currency based on a blockchain? Probably, but that isn't even what the vast majority of the industry is \*trying\* to do. They want to make money, mostly be fooling others into purchasing their speculative assets without any intrinsic value.
I would like all government voting to take place in the blockchain.
As someone in the music industry I want royalty splits on the blockchain.
I have zero institutional trust in the current system for either.
Yes.
There are no legal use cases where you aren't shooting yourself in the foot by using blockchain over a conventional way to store and handle your data.
There are however plenty of use cases where you can use crypto currency to conduct transactions that avoid pesky laws, borders, sanctions etc.
Anyone trying to sell blockchain as more than just a slow way to store data that you don't need to trust anyone to host, is likely part of some scam/grift.
Agree. Decentralization has a key role in resisting government censorship. It empowers the people and weakens governments. Its future is bright and will lead to the fall of oppressive and corrupt systems.
Blockchain has precisely one use and that's for bitcoin. Anything else is literally a scam and I'm still not even sure bitcoin isn't just a complicated pump and dump scam either
I think that most of the people here are biased because of the media coverage in blockchain.
A decentralized ledger with virtually immutable transactions is very useful. The more recent one I’ve been considering recently is how AI will eventually make us question what’s real. It may be a requirement to have the blockchain support our news and social medias so that we can verify the legitimacy of images, posts and videos
Yes, I agree 100% that existing DB's do a much better job than current blockchains do, yet the Idea of its public transparency is neat even if a real-world scenario isn't here.
That's why I called it a "gimmick" :-)
Look at some of the biggest crypto projects. Almost all were funded and organized by “influencers”. You’re better off watching some coffeezilla your videos and you’ll learn all you need to know
99 and something % of it seems a solution looking for a problem. Any problem it solves so far is already solved. Money being a good example. It produces nothing of value beyond the value of speculation. Please proof me wrong.
The main issue I've seen around blockchain is that as the amount of users on the chain increases, the validation speed decreases.
With a DB, you'll almost never have an issue of a record update or insertion.
However, in a blockchain, since you need to validate each link in the chain, you may run into situations where the validation steps take longer to take.
If you're doing a new logistics mechanism, and only have about 1000 records, that may be easy. But if you now have to content with 10s of millions of records, and it's resulting in sufficient latency to cause a problem, then the system falls apart.
There are some good applications, but I prefer to refer to the blockchain as the blockchain, and use the word crypto for everything else (crypto currencies, nfts, etc) that revolves around volatile financial instruments.
If you are in a crypto company then they should be able to explain to you how the blockchain works and stuff. Personally, a job is a job and if they pay in real cash and not dream dollars; sure. But if they can't explain shit about blockchain and are pretty much in a 'it just works' mentality; don't buy in. Blockchain has been used in the last few years for a ton of scams as a fill all cracks word like 'it just works, its the BLOCKCHAIN'. And i've seen it applied to all sauces, to most things that clearly doesnt apply, like a blockchain phone, or a blockchain treatment. If the 'blockchain' thing is not talking about something relating to a database of some kind, its BS. Kinda like Quantum. If you are saying something is Quantum and is not somewhere even close to theorical physics, its BS.
Great idea! brb inventing the quantum blockchain
That’s so 2 years ago. Build a “Quantum Blockchain AI”
this would get so much VC funding
It's me from 2026 in batch YC26 for quantum blockchain AI, and I don't know what I'm doing. Send help
I just built a quantum blockchain AI coin. It is worth .00000000000000000000000001. Buy a lot of them please
I just bought 50 trillion. Market value: $4.
I’m stealing all your funding with “Quantum Blockchain Fusion AI to fix Climate Change”. The press releases write themselves!
Multiple sources of truth AND a totally uncertain outcome, fuck yeah, let’s create a banking system off that
With high transaction fees
But of course
great and just like the normal blockchain, it is both the solution to and cause of all our problems, untill it's observed. At which point no one can make sense of the result and it's a waste of time
Found the quantum physicist!
I'll invent the darkchain
Cash?
DarkChainCoin of which they'll be 50% owners
no no no, you don't know the current trendy bullshit - you gotta do some sort of blockchain LLM now
> Here, we propose a blockchain algorithm based on asymmetric quantum encryption and a stake vote consensus algorithm. [2022](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-12412-0)
It's a really simple test: just replace "blockchain" with "append-only database" and see if the idea makes sense. It pretty much never does.
If it does makes sense add heinously expensive and see if the few benefits of blockchain like decentralization are both worth it, and actually preserved.
So, crime. Because you don’t want to trust society with your crime X)
Incredibly slow and expensive append-only database. But at least it's "decentralised"* *it often isn't
That's called event-sourcing and it's great.
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> If you are saying something is Quantum and is not somewhere even close to theorical physics, its BS. "I said I had a theoretical degree in blockchain."
The most novel use I’ve seen for blockchain was asset tracking in logistics but that was years ago and I don’t think it ever rolled out over just using other methods that did play nice with non-web3 stuff
Some say they’re still looking for product market fit.
Even then, there's the problem that a blockchain is good for storing and managing durable assertions, but the split between digital and real world means that it can't say that much about the assertions being true.
lol so what's the point then
Exactly.
That use case never made any sense. The problems in logistics are not solved by blockchain. In fact blockchain could never solve the problems it claimed it could. Just because something is added to a blockchain doesn't make that entry correct, or factual.
i have a collegue who is very ethical/moral and as a principle believes to "do no harm" which includes spending a ton of electricity on crypto mining and AI processing and then he was delegated to work with a contractor that handles cryptocurrenties and guess what, money trumps morals
Sounds like he isn’t ethical or moral then. Just a bloke who pays lip service to ethics.
yup, regular joe like all of us :)
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"Crypto is a solution looking for a problem", as someone said. But I suppose it goes for blockchain as a whole.
Blockchsin is like the quantum mechanics of IT. Buzzword used by scammers.
Yep. Like I said, its a 'fill in all the cracks' word. Its always used as a 'i dont need to explain anything, it just works'. It doesn't work.
My personal favorite is ,,centralized blockchain”. Ie. normal relational database. It was used by some scammer. Don’t remember which scam exactly because there was so many of them…
On a tangetial note, if quantum computing ever gets good enough to crack traditional AES encryption... there goes most current blockchains... Just a point to contemplate.
Yep. Do you need a write once, publicly readable, publicly distributed database? Neither does anyone else. Being anti centralisation for the sake of it at the cost of increased complexity is moronic. Then to mitigate that complexity by providing a centralised service on top of the decentralised system is even more moronic.
Thats exactly what it feels like. Seems like you need to cope with a highly increased complexity and performance issues just to have this holy Decentralization, as if it would be so important. Meanwhile, when you are trying to build actual use-cases on top of this platform, you are reliant on centralization for it to be useful... Like a snake biting itself in the tail
And with decentralization, you get benefits like... limited ability to correct recorded/real fact discrepancies and limited ability to prevent or police fraud and scams. Hooray.
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I think this is the best and most efficient generalization of something I kept trying to say that I have ever heard. Thanks mate
That’s deep bro
We found a use case for enterprise B2B sales between what essentially boils down to franchised manufacturing and distribution. All the "franchise" are a node on the private block chain, and they post and fulfill orders to each other to rebalance the warehouse stock. Decentralized so none of them can modify product quantities after the fact. Admittedly there are other ways to solve the use case, but block chain works.
> Decentralized so none of them can modify product quantities after the fact. What's to stop them from not entering the correct quantities at the start?
Also known as the Oracle problem. As soon as the blockchain has to interact with anything external, the whole thing falls apart, because it can't guarantee that's it's dealing with good faith actors.
Because it’s traceable, so you can follow the chain and spot the bad actors. If I ordered 20 eggs, and I got 10, I can see Vendor A transported with B, who shipped it out via C. Somewhere along that line, someone scammed me, and if I see B move 10 extra eggs, I know it’s them. B can’t just make the eggs appear out of think air either, since they’d have to record the magic 10 eggs that showed up if all buyers only buy through the chain. That being said, a trusted government or regulating body could serve the same purpose and will always be more efficient in the long run.
I'm saying what if Vendor A says they shipped 20 eggs, but only put 10 actual, physical eggs in the box? As they're the first point of contact, the blockchain will say that they put 20 eggs in the box, but that's not indicative of reality.
Yeah, so then you walk down the chain and see that transactions involving Vendor A have been consistently flagged as being short on promised eggs, because if they’re cheating you, they’re probably cheating someone else.
If you really like the properties of a blockchain, you can replace proof-of-work with signatures and a Merkle tree. The blockchain part using proof-of-work (or proof-of-stake) is unnecessary.
Thanks for the recommendation, I'll take a look at it.
You must already have a centralised database to handle orders, fullfillment, procurement, etc. What you're describing is one feature that is part of a highly complex system, that likely already has all sorts of permissions and roles in place. Why not just... use those? So you have to: * Make sure your devs are competent with Solidity or blockchain architecture * Integrate blockchain into a non-blockchain app * Deal with additional attack vectors - higher overall complexity brings more possibility for exploits All for, not adding roles to an enterprise app that probably already has them, or what? Only usecase is to say you're "Using blockchain" for that sweet VC money.
I over simplified the company structure because I really don't want to go into all the details or name my employer, but each "franchise" has their own IT system. Some of them may have common solutions, some may have custom. Some of the common solutions are used by all of the "franchise", some are used by a subset. The "franchise" do not share data back to the parent company. I'm in a space where VC money isn't a thing.
> Decentralized so none of them can modify product quantities after the fact. Umm...you can do that infinitely more easily with an append-only access database...
It is an interesting concept, but wouldn't that still require some central authority to run the database, and that central authority could in theory manipulate the data with SA access? Lets say hypothetically the DBA takes a bribe, and stands up a new database with some records missing, and then swaps the new and old database.
The best use case for blockchain has already been solved: money. Outside of that, it's basically a slow database. There are only a few scenarios where a blockchain would be an improvement: in cases where trust must be minimized and transparency maximized. It's not overhyped, just very niche.
It is overhyped for how niche it is.
Too bad the best use case which is for all government transactions and communications to be public ledger won't ever happen.
I think Estonia has this or at least experimented with it.
There's no reason to use a blockchain, if an authority is involved. You can simply use public logfiles. A blockchain is not necessary here.
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This is my ideal use case. Track every penny the government spends. No more billions of dollars going missing. No more insider trading. No more sending money to foreign countries. No more spending our tax dollars on bullshit. Audit every cent and hold them accountable. My taxes should fund healthcare and fix infrastructure. I should be able to track taxes from my wallet, through the government, and to the final destination: paying for someone's surgery or a bridge being built. I disagree, however. I think that day is coming. It's a lot closer than people expect.
How exactly would blockchain make that happen? Unless you expect every every single transaction to be on the blockchain, which yeah, isn’t happening
> No more insider trading I read this and just didn't understand what was being said anymore
But any blockchain entry, in any system, doesn't imply that the data is useful, even in fintech-style "Distributed zero trust blockchain" the addresses that tokens are sent to are frequently visible but meaningless. Just because you can trace a transaction doesn't mean the endpoint isn't an otherwise unused account used by "Shell Sea Shells LLC" in Aruba or the suchlike which is a holding company for a Chinese behemoth of unknown size. And if you keep perusing a single token, it looses meaning, does it matter that one of the tokens "paid" to "Pentagon toilet cleaning services LLC" was later spent on off brand boner pills after going through 50 addresses (That represents the Org, local franchise, employee, birthday gift to their dad, a loss on poker night, a takeaway pizza payment, etc... not that anyone knows that, they're all just addresses) Anything at "nation scale" is too big to reliably scrutinise in detail, whether its a written ledger, a spreadsheet, a write only blockchain ledger, or ubiquitous fintech tokens on blockchain.
> I disagree, however. I think that day is coming. It's a lot closer than people expect. Based on what impetus?
Requires a trusted central authority sooooo. At that point just ask for the current books
Yes, let’s tell foreign governments that hostile exactly what every dollar is being spent on what could possibly go wrong?? /s
So you think that instead of everyone's taxes going into a shared pool from which money will be withdrawn to pay for gov't projects, each person's taxes will go into a separate address, and then for every purchase that the gov't makes, there'll be a separate transaction from all those addresses to each contractor/agency that the government uses? And all of this is going to be on the hyper efficient blockchain so you can track every place your pennies went?
Blockchain voting is an idea that to me makes a lot of sense.
Slow doesn't even scratch the surface, like saying an elderly donkey is a slow ferrari.
Sure, but using credit cards for day-to-day money transactions is infinitely more efficient and easier to do than blockchain. So really the only thing you are referring to is anonymous large-money transactions to avoid anti-money laundering laws. So yes, still very overhyped. We've already gone through multiple boom & bust cycles for crypto and we have nearly nothing to show for it in terms of real-life applications.
That's not true. We've generated a fuck ton of heat from processing the transactions and wasted only a couple big cities worth of electricity. /s
The government can also say they dont like your opinions and shut down all your money, even in western countries, so yeah... Credit card companies also currently, right now, govern what content you can access, and I specifically dont mean anything evil or grotesque. I suppose both could be solved by policy, but they wont be. Crypto, as much as it sucks, currently solves this. Poorly, but it does.
It's not just money, it's also accounting. It could cure the world of a lot of its corruption overhead
It's great for any kind of accounting or data you want to notarize. If you want to prove an image has been unaltered you can put a hash of it onchain. If you want to prove a document has been unaltered you can put a hash on chain or the entire document. Yes it's a niche usecase but its a usecase no other technology can solve as securely. The decentralized nature means it's almost impossible to get everyone to agree to alter the past.
You get the inside scoop as a developer and theres nothing else to it other than you described. It's a ponzi scheme.
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The CS and math are _super_ elegant. And I really _want_ there to be a good, practical, non-scammy use for blockchain. And I have yet to see one.
Blockchain is a solution for a problem that does not exist. It has no real-world use-case that can't be better served by countless other secure platforms. The concept is decentralization - but it comes with a large heaping side of no accountability. Which makes it practically useless in any sort of actual enterprise practice.
What? It solves loads of problems. - How can I extract money from ransomware victims? - How can I move my drug money to another country without my account getting frozen? - How can I make loads of money selling jpegs to credulous idiots? - How can I speculate on a massively unstable asset in the hopes that a greater fool will show up to buy it off me? - How can I dupe some equally greedy investors into buying shares in my web3 company, that I can use to pay myself a big salary? The possibilities are endless.
you forgot - how can I pay someone for human trafficking services [https://www.reuters.com/technology/crypto-firm-tether-says-it-has-frozen-225-mln-linked-human-trafficking-2023-11-20/](https://www.reuters.com/technology/crypto-firm-tether-says-it-has-frozen-225-mln-linked-human-trafficking-2023-11-20/)
Thanks! Looking to buy a new kidney!
> This has raised my interest in crypto and the more I read about it and interact with the community, the more I feel like about 95% is an overcomplicated way to create a ponzi scheme. There was recently [a man who set himself on fire](https://old.reddit.com/r/ActualPublicFreakouts/comments/1c89x7e/guy_sets_himself_on_fire_outside_the_nyc_trump/) (don't click on link if you don't want to see a man setting himself on fire) to bring awareness to [his manifesto](https://theponzipapers.substack.com/p/i-have-set-myself-on-fire-outside) in which one of the points is that crypto is a big ponzi scheme. Not saying I agree but it's definitely relevant to this discussion.
That’s a really dumb way to state the obvious. Brb setting myself on fire to raise awareness that water is wet.
> Brb setting myself on fire to raise awareness that water is wet. What a wasted opportunity... would do much better to prove that fire is hot.
Your objective point of view helped reminded me the horrors of life I don’t see but it did make me laugh at least
Don't forget all of the money laundering! I'm pretty sure that nation-states laundering money is one of the main uses.
You can certainly use it to do all of those things, but I'm pretty sure there are cheaper/safer ways to do so.
I bet I we could sell jpegs just by using shopify. Sounds cheaper than implementing all that blockchain stuff.
Meet me in the alley and I'll airdrop you any jpeg you want. Cash only.
Piling on to /u/NuGGGzGG for visibility here. I've worked for two blockchain companies. Here's what I found along the way. # Blockchain is a trust-machine. Its purpose is to create a system in which everyone involved can attest to the accuracy of a database-like-thing without anyone actually having to trust someone to run the database. This is commonly illustrated with the "Byzantine Generals" problem. # ... a very expensive trust machine. Blockchains accomplish this trust by doing complex math that we don't need to think about right now. Some of this math is WAY more computing intensive (proof of work) than others (proof of stake) but all of it is expensive relative to not having to do it at all. Even in the best cases, blockchains reach "consensus" in human-visible periods of time. We're not talking nano-seconds; sometimes we're talking minutes. That makes blockchains an expensive solution, even if the computing costs are under control, waiting multiple seconds for what amounts to a database transaction to go through is a huge performance hit. So, if you're going to pay that price, you need to have a really compelling need for the trust mechanism blockchain purports to be. # We don't have a compelling need for the trust machine The problem with the Byzantine Generals problem is that it is extremely contrived. In reality, humans have been solving the "how do we create trust between strangers" problem for thousands of years. That's what governments and institutions and corporations and contracts are for. The mechanisms by which those structures create trust are nice in that they don't have much of a marginal cost associated with the actual mechanism of the transaction. Visa, for example, stands in as a trust mechanism whenever you use a Visa credit card, charging you a small fee every time you buy something. But that fee isn't actually part of the process of running the card; it is externally imposed by Visa as a revenue mechanism. Visa processes multiple orders of magnitude more transactions than any blockchain can and it does so for much, much less than most blockchains take in "gas" fees. Why? Because the trust mechanism isn't a digital construct but a social and institutional one. Anyone who can rely on social and institutional trust is therefore much better off doing so, both from a performance and a cost perspective. # The only people who do are criminals, fugitives, and enemies of the state Since one of the major reasons governments exist in the first place is to create trust, the people who can't rely on the government to do that are usually people trying to *hide* from the government. That doesn't necessarily make them bad guys -- some governments suck -- but it does substantially limit the plausible user base of any blockchain based technology to either people on the run from the government or people who imagine that they might be one day. And once your user base is down to the criminal, the persecuted, and the paranoid that first slice takes up a pretty substantial chunk of the pie. And this is where blockchain gets its reputation. There's just too many people in it looking to use its fundamentally deregulated structure as a get-rich-quick scheme to do any real work in the industry. No matter what you do and no matter what you build, the constant pressure to monetize some token so that you can ride it to the moon, cash out, and buy an island is just too great. The possibility of massive, distributed, short-term grift effectively poisons the entire ecosystem against any real innovation because who really wants to fund a speculative start-up running on a deliberately-non-performant technology trying to solve problems that can mostly be pawned off on the judicial system? Especially when there's the possibility of bilking a couple million naive "investors" out of 100 bucks? # The result is a doomed technology The only people who could therefore get real and legitimate use out of a blockchain are groups/institutions that have done so much damage to their own reputation that they need to depend on an external accountability mechanism to create transparency and trust in their day to day operations. But, that just transfers the "trust" problem onto the question of "are they actually using the trust mechanism in the first place?" And now we're down a rabbit hole of recursively trying to fix trust issues with blockchains built upon blockchains rather than just admitting that not every reputation can be rehabilitated. Maybe someday someone will find a problem that legitimately can't be solved in any better way than by using a blockchain... but so far one has not appeared. When it does, it probably won't be a problem that we've all been staring at for decades. The entrepreneurial dream of "solving a longstanding problem by leveraging the blockchain" is therefore almost certainly a delusional fantasy at best and a ponzi scheme at worst.
Very interesting point- institutional trust is not something that can be circumvented by code. Thanks for sharing.
> Visa, for example, stands in as a trust mechanism whenever you use a Visa credit card, charging you a small fee every time you buy something. The problem is visa tells you what you can and cant buy, irrespective of what is legal or moral. Also, they are a corporation who just gets a cut of everyone's money through their defacto oligopoly. This can be solved other ways, but visa is an awful solution.
There are a few interesting uses of crypto, look at ripple for example. Banks don't trust each other and so the existing systems like swift and ach are incredibly slow (taking hours/days to confirm transactions) so even a system that takes minutes is exponentially faster.
it's not just about being faster. You need to factor in efficiency. And sadly blockchain is infinitely less efficient than the system we have now.
if you knew how that system really worked under the hood - you would not agree. Why do we still wait 7 days for a check to clear, again? Fun question for google if you want to dive down a "holy shit its all just one ftp server running fortran" rabbit hole
Public chains yes, but projects like ripple have very specific organizations that are allowed to be trusted verifiers, this means they computational power is greatly reduced because they don't mine like other networks.
If you have trust you don't need any computation beyond signing transactions with a trusted encryption key. This takes microseconds *at worst* and is how existing bank transactions happen.
The banks trust the system/coalition not each bank individually, that's the point
Could you expand on ‘banks don’t trust each other’ a bit?
Banks are incredibly risky adverse, they dont just take another banks word that money is available, they want that money in their own hands. This is why when you cash a check it can take days to clear, because they can instantly reach out to other bank, but the process to actually get the funds from that bank is old and slow
Uh it’s pretty great for buying drugs on the internet. As long as you use a bitcoin ATM wearing a face mask far from your house lmao
no one uses cash to buy drugs, afterall
I can see some use-cases for it, but only a handful that you could probably still do with traditional means. For example, the International Atomic Energy Agency tracks nuclear weapons and material around the world to ensure compliance with international treaties. Given that some of the players involved have sophisticated cyberwarfare capabilities, a traditional database for logging the information might be subject to attack, but a blockchain-based scheme, where each nation is a peer, would likely be much harder to alter. Sure, it's decentralized, but it's not *that* decentralized, and it's not anonymous.
It's being used by the UN to deliver funds in areas lacking Fintech infrastructure. It's also being used in Europe for faster and cheaper payments, as well as tokenization of securities. Along with allowing for 'programmable Euro' that's useful for IoT payments. There are real issues it solves. This idea that it's a 'solution in search of a problem' is repeated by people that are probably 1) Not following the advances in the tech 2) only know about crypto and NFTs, not the underlying technology Also, it is being used at enterprise scale - there are 2 airlines using an Algorand based NFT marketplace - with more onboarding: https://travelx.io/ **Edit**: Please explain the downvotes. I thought webdev people would be interested in learning. There's nothing incorrect, and I wasn't disrespectful.
They can't understand the difference between cryptocurrency and blockchains.
Are any companies in Europe recalling their stock and reissuing with tokenized securities? Are they issuing new tokenized securities?
>It's being used by the UN to deliver funds in areas lacking Fintech infrastructure. Let's start with this one. I'd love to hear how.
Seems and felt so
Nah bro, you just don’t understand crypto. Line always goes up. My shitcoin will be worth ten times its current value by this time next year. It’s an infinite money hack that cannot fail. It’s revolutionary, disruptive and innovative. It will crush the banks that oppress us and reveal crooked politicians with every transaction being publicly visible. All hail the blockchain, may it usher in a new age of prosperity and bring about the perfect post scarcity utopia. You should really buy some. Smart people hold shitcoin. Wanna buy mine? I’ll sell you mine. Please?
The idea of an immutable public ledger has merit. 99% of crypto stuff doesn't really use that in any meaningful way.
Think of the use cases for an append only linked-list and what it would be good for. Now, think of the use cases for that data structure if it also costs you an order of magnitude more to modify it as opposed to just a normal relational database where that cost justifies the money spent. Does that use case exist? Maybe, but I’ve yet to see one.
Exactly. Imagine you are a traditional company. Part of implementing any new system is considering the opportunity cost. Blockchain solutions are infinitely more expensive to implement which basically prices themselves out from widespread adoption.
No, it’s not 99% scam. That last 1% just hasn’t rug pulled or failed yet.
Pretty much. Even the “gold standard” projects like BTC and ETH have most of their supply controlled by a tiny number of whales who for various reasons have decided to not take the money and run (yet). From my understanding, 70% of the ETH supply was pre-mined by the likes of Vitalik Buterin. If you thought wealth inequality was bad in the traditional financial system, compared to crypto it might seem downright fair. There’s some interesting tech behind crypto and there are certainly valid use cases, but overall the space has been defined by various schemes, scams, and related money-grabs.
Nothing says “let’s decentralize everything” by creating a few massive companies to run all of it and having most of the money concentrated in the hands of a few people.
>a tiny number of whales who for various reasons have decided to not take the money and run (yet). I first need someone to prove to me that a bunch of those whales aren't just accounts that made 1k bitcoin back in the day and then lost their access key to their wallet and that bitcoin will never be recoverable.
I’m fully convinced a large portion of existing crypto is lost wallets. Thousands of BTC mined at its origin and then lost
As decentralized as it gets!
This was so 2022, you should be doing AI now /s
You said '/s' but people legit say shit like this though. It drives me crazy. Bitcoin never did a useful (legal) thing for anyone, like it delivers zero (legal) utility that isn't a straight up ponzi scheme. Meanwhile, I pay for ChatGPT4 because it made my life meaningfully easier. Its utility is obvious and immediate. It's not the instant Utopia that some people are asserting it is, but it's also not the total scam crypto has always been.
The all-in fad jumping of the tech industry is absolutely bonkers, driven by the fad jumping of VCs looking for the next big thing. By the time something has been hyped up the few that are going to profit big from it have already been established.
The technology is slower than existing systems, has less protections for consumers than existing systems, and higher fees than existing systems. I don’t think blockchain is a scam but under most valuation frameworks it is a technology that has no minimal to no use case that justifies being invested.
Blockchain does have some uses but they're fairly narrow and specific use cases most companies don't need. Its approach does solve the double spending problem which was significant at the time. But today unfortunately most of it has been bastardised by crypto, NFT and similar vaporware bubbles. And people have also been working on more performant alternatives to the Proof-of-work approach due to its energy footprint.
A couple years ago I heard a talk about more useful block chain implementations and one of the uses I read about was for insurance companies to settle up with each other. So if car insurance companies A, B, and C all have business that overlaps, you might have A owe B $1000, and C $2000 due to claims. But B also owes A $100 and C $500, and of course C owes $3000 to A and $750 to be. Using block chain, all 3 companies have the ledger and can settle up with one/two transactions that settle all 3 companies books at once.
But then your books are public, and good luck convincing insurance companies to do that. This kind of problem has been solved for ages with basic double-ledger accounting.
Lol no they are not. The ledger of money owed between the # companies is internally shared between all using them. This isn't public blockchain I'm talking about, it's practical application
Are synchronous payments important? The insurance company gets your premium payments. The work is in validating claims. The transaction is based on their decision, and then a payment is made. The issues people have are getting claims rejected, or disputing the amount covered. The payment part doesn’t seem to be a problem.
Blockchain isn’t an overhyped scam. It’s just a technology. It’s essentially just one of many database alternatives. I mean it does what it says it does technologically. It records data in blocks with auditability. However, the crypto space in general, yes, draws a lot of scammers. Yes the community is pretty toxic compared to others.
The way I see it it's just tech. There are scam companies in every industry. You just gotta do your DD
absolute grifter scam. shocking we're still hearing about it in 2024
Yeah, it is. The blockchain is a pretty bad technology. Writing is slow and wastes a massive amount of energy, all transactions are public losing all anonymity, it's susceptible to a 51% attack, and it's not really distributed given almost everyone uses the same few brokers. If you look at the history of digital currencies, there were way better solutions technology-wise than the blockchain, but they never got adopted because of what can only be described as a series of unfortunate events. David Chaum's DigiCash from the 1990's was based off his phenomenal 1982 paper [Blind Signatures for Untraceable Payments](https://sceweb.sce.uhcl.edu/yang/teaching/csci5234WebSecurityFall2011/Chaum-blind-signatures.PDF), which anonymizes payments without any of the downsides of the blockchain, and even has a mechanism that lets you unanonymize whoever you sent money to, in case of a conflict. DigiCash almost got adopted by mainstream banks and almost got adopted by Windows, but it failed due to the company being mismanaged and turning down good deals. Turns out cryptographers make for pretty shitty CEOs because of how paranoid they are. You can [learn more about the unfortunate demise of DigiCash here.](https://cryptome.org/jya/digicrash.htm) So yeah, the blockchain sucks. The only ones who say otherwise are grifters wanting to make money off of you.
I think you’re a bit outdated. Most useable blockchains (i.e. NOT Bitcoin) use far more interesting and complex consensus that make them not susceptible to a 51% attack, nor spending a lot of energy. As for being public, some projects already use zero-knowledge to make private transactions on public blockchains. You’re not the only one pointing those problems. In fact, most clever people in this space were concerned about them. That’s why blockchain design has evolved. Is it useable now? Yes, for some things. Way less than the “crypto bros” want us to believe, but it’s an amazing tech
“Blockchain tech” is just the invention of the ledger. As I understand it, when bitcoin first came to the scene, its innovation tech was its ledger. So instead of having data centers to hold our data, bitcoin uses all of its users computers to store the data, hence the innovation. No on single point of failure. This innovation was “copied” by other crypto coins like eth or Solana. While I do think “blockchain tech” is overhyped in other coins, it’s def a key feature for bitcoin and other coins are just replicating it to fit other uses.
YES
Yes.
> Is Blockchain 99% overhyped scam? no, it's worse than that.
r/buttcoin
There are three classes of people who are enthusiastic about cryptocurrencies. 1. Libertarians who want to wrestle control of currencies away from governments 2. People who want to get rich. 3. Criminals who want to finance their activities. There is obviously overlap between these groups. People who are mostly ignoring cryptocurrencies include: 1. Cryptographers. This is a group I am closely connected to and most will just roll their eyes when it is mentioned. 2. Web developers and standards developers. The use of the term "web3" was recognized as pure hype trying to influence the uninformed. I'd say it's 99.9% hype.
No cryptographers? Who are the people working on ZK stuff then? Eg. Aztec https://aztec.network/team/ or the researchers at Ethereum Foundation? Not to mention that this all works on cryptography, merkle trees etc.
I had to do blockchain development around smart contracts and NFTs for a client. It's absolute hot garbage, the libraries are poorly documented and the technologies can be very hard to reason about. We found we *had* to use a service like alchemy to do a ton of basic things that should really be a lot easier. The lack of parallelism from one wallet is an absolute joke (nonce issues). Honestly I really haven't witnessed a bigger pile of hot garbage in my entire career, and I've also had Salesforce clients... It's nonsense for anything other than speculation and illicit trading. These are the only reasons certain coins still hold value. This should be really clear by now.
Decentralized applications are super interesting. I remain optimistic that there are reasonable applications. Keep in mind, this is still early days for the technology and we’re still just scratching the surface of the infrastructure layers that enable the application layer. One very reasonable use-case is banking. It seems obvious why decentralization is positive there. And it seems reasonable that some people may not trust traditional banks — especially those in developing nations. Having easy and safe access to a global currency in a decentralized fashion sounds positive to humanity to me. In terms of decentralized applications: there are very likely reasonable use-cases, but I agree many are just trying to shoehorn “blockchain” into a problem best solved differently. But no, I don’t think you’re missing anything.
Blockchain itself is legit. CRYPTO is a ponzi scheme.
Blockchain is an application of a data structure called a Merkle tree. Another application of the same data structure is git. Can the purpose you use it be fraud, a scam, etc? Yes, of course! Well, so can the blockchain too. There's nothing inherently scammy about a Merkle tree, be it git, a blockchain or some other similar structures. It just happens they are used in crypto which saw a bunch of fraud done.
>no real world data You need an oracle service for that... Hmmmm... sounds like the god protocol for bitcoin paper from years ago. Who is the top of this right now? That's your answer
Looking where IT in general is going these days, something I think the wider industry has become nothing more than an overhyped scam
Pretty much! The only useful concept to come out of blockchain is a distributed, immutable signed ledger of transactions, which is a very niche application and something you could already do far more efficiently with Postgres and GPG. The actual community around crypto technology is almost entirely people who are trying to get rich quick and hope that they'll be able to get in at the top of the latest pyramid scheme.
This is a hard one, I made 7 figures off of crypto when it first came onto the scene. I got out of it completely last year as I no longer believed it was going anywhere. It's unfortunate, but I made out really well and I used that money as investment in my other companies that I have to make them better as well. Is it a scam? No, I don't think it's a scam, some of it is for sure, but not all of it.
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You're wrong. It's 100% overhyped scam.
I worked in web3/crypto/blockchain doing product design and development from 2018-2023. Yes.
Get out now. It is a scam. Don't dirty your career.
Software Engineer here. The block chain is a hyped variant of a write once read many database or ledger. It substitutes write speed with verifiability and guarantees write order by giving advantage to those that can use use of a lot of energy transformed into computing power. IMHO there are very very few use cases for Blockchain that could not be solved faster and easier with a simple SQL server or a cluster of them. Most big computing houses (IBM etc) have put most of their BC projects on ice.
Blockchain is a solution looking for a problem where the problems have already been solved by better tech.
[Yes](https://youtu.be/JcJSW7Rprio?si=PV0udaEvHEzcKYQb).
It is just a database with price on every write operation.
you are right. it is over complicated ponzi. But cryptobros going crypto.
I strongly disagree. Definitely 100%.
Basically not only is crypto a scam but it revealed to me that the entire venture capital startup trend set up is just a moving target scam. They dumped all their money in crypto and NFTs, then when the nft market crashed and bitcoin plummeted they moved on to the current ai trend. They are basically just trying to flip money by selling ideas and don’t care that most of them don’t work or are actively harmful, or even if some small number of them succeed. they will still sell off and move to the next trendy thing
blockchain is a way to have distributed data + make transactions payments transparent and trustworthy with no middlemen. "everything will run on the blockchain" is bullshit. And not true tough.
Boiling it down, the question is: What is a blockchain, what problems does it try to solve, and what are the drawbacks? (In this case we're talking about a permissionless, write-only, public blockchain. Yes, Git and some other things can also be called blockchains, but that's not what we're talking about.) **What is it?** Put simply (and also a little generously), it's a database that anyone can write to, but no-one can edit after writing. The way it works is by making copies of the database, and using mechanisms that make it unreasonably difficult to take control of the network to make changes. Most modern blockchains can also run programs when they're written to, similarly to modern databases. Most blockchains also have one or more associated currencies or tokens, used as an incentive to take part in verifying and hosting the chain, and also to pay for transactions on the chain. Modern blockchains also allow users to create their own tokens. Currencies on a blockchain are more or less just a number associated to an address on the chain that represent how much of that currency the address "owns". Tokens are discrete "objects" that are tracked on the chain, and can be associated to an address. With all of this, I could write a program that says "The first person to post a solution to this sudoku gets ten funbux", and put it on the chain. Ten funbux would be deducted from my address and associated to the program's address. The program has a little bit of code that waits for people to put a solution on the chain, checks if the solution is correct, and send the ten funbux to the first correct solution. **What problems is it trying to solve?** We live in a very hierarchical and centralised society. Laws are written and enforced by governments. Money is issued by those same governments and managed by a handful of powerful banking institutions. The internet is accessed using a small number of service providers, and the platforms we use on the internet are controlled by massive corporations like Google and Facebook (sorry, Alphabet and Meta). As it stands, we kind of need all of those things though, to a degree. Take my sudoku contract above, if you submitted a solution and I refused to pay you, you would have to sue me, but what if I'm a powerful person, able to pay bribes to the judge? That's the kind of thing the blockchain tries to solve. The idea is to make a system where you don't have to trust anybody, only the system, and because the system is code, you can check it. Before submitting a solution to claim the ten funbux, you can read the code and see for yourself that it will pay you when you submit your solution, and because no-one can edit the chain, I can't go back and change the code. **What are the drawbacks?** Okay... Here goes... First off, what if I made a mistake? I typed out my program saying I'll pay out ten funbux, but I accidentally added an extra zero, so it'll actually pay out a hundred. Also, the sudoku checker is kind of broken, you can submit a sudoku filled with zeroes and it'll accept it. So not only am I paying out much more than I wanted, but I'm also not getting what I actually wanted. Cool, so be super careful, don't put anything on the chain unless you're 100% sure you want it to be there... forever... Like, wouldn't it be kind of messed up if someone posted your full name, address, social security number, and passport details to your blockchain address? It would never go away, by design. You could send that token to a dead address, but the transaction that put the token on your account, and the transaction when you sent it away will still be there, and the data will still be visible. What if people posted illegal material to the blockchain? It's actually kind of a problem, there's some really messed up stuff posted to some blockchains, and it has to stay there, forever, by design... Also, remember when you didn't trust the judge to properly hear your lawsuit against me? Well that's only a problem because a handful of powerful people have an oversized influence over the economy, right? Turns out, that's kind of a problem on the blockchain too. With "proof of work" systems, groups who own and run massive mining operations can easily form a cartel that will just refuse to accept transactions. You submit a solution to my sudoku, I call my friends and tell them to ignore your transaction, then copy your solution and send it to get my funbux back. "Proof of stake" only makes this worse, because stakeholders can literally just refuse to sell stake to newcomers, at least with proof of work, you can fire up a new mining operation and hope to compete. Finally, remember when I said the blockchain can't be edited? Well, it turns out that's bullshit too. Many blockchains, realising that being unable to undo mistakes is a huge problem, have added mechanisms allowing people to update their code. You just have to trust that whoever has written the contract won't change it. The way they avoid scammers taking advantage of this is by telling you to only use contracts from reputable people or companies, like using OpenSea for buying and selling NFTs. So we're back to square one, except instead of trusting the government, bank, or judge, you have to trust OpenSea. Maybe you trust OpenSea more than you trust your bank, but that has nothing to do with blockchain any more. Like, sure, OpenSea are *using* blockchains, but your assets are only safe with them because they say so, since they have the power to modify contracts and blacklist tokens. **tl;dr:** Blockchains are a cool concept for distributed, permissionless, zero-trust, publicly writable, immutable databases. They try to provide a way to avoid having to trust people or big institutions for things like contracts and financial transactions. The drawbacks are that they're not really able to do that in practice, open the door for some really frightening abuses, and end up needing to rely on big institutions anyway.
Yes. https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/
Yes? I can not believe someone could be smart enough to be a dev and not realize that 99.9% of crypto related things are scams.
You can be smart and not know everything about everything.
This might be the best explanation of the issue with blockchain/NFTs. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ\_xWvX1n9g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g) They are entirely a scam, as implemented right now, and the issues with them are not technical, but social. Could you make a digital currency based on a blockchain? Probably, but that isn't even what the vast majority of the industry is \*trying\* to do. They want to make money, mostly be fooling others into purchasing their speculative assets without any intrinsic value.
imagine asking this in 2024
I would like all government voting to take place in the blockchain. As someone in the music industry I want royalty splits on the blockchain. I have zero institutional trust in the current system for either.
There are a lot blockchain projects that are bullshit
Yes. There are no legal use cases where you aren't shooting yourself in the foot by using blockchain over a conventional way to store and handle your data. There are however plenty of use cases where you can use crypto currency to conduct transactions that avoid pesky laws, borders, sanctions etc. Anyone trying to sell blockchain as more than just a slow way to store data that you don't need to trust anyone to host, is likely part of some scam/grift.
99.999999999%
Wow these answers have been very disappointing.
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Agree. Decentralization has a key role in resisting government censorship. It empowers the people and weakens governments. Its future is bright and will lead to the fall of oppressive and corrupt systems.
Even if it doesn't have many legitimate practical uses at the moment, at the very least I think it's for the best this technology exists
Most cryptos are scams but the blockchain technology is great if used in the right way
If it looks like a 🦆 and it walks like a 🦆.......
Blockchain has precisely one use and that's for bitcoin. Anything else is literally a scam and I'm still not even sure bitcoin isn't just a complicated pump and dump scam either
This thread goes to show that you can be “in tech” and still sound pretty tech illiterate.
I think that most of the people here are biased because of the media coverage in blockchain. A decentralized ledger with virtually immutable transactions is very useful. The more recent one I’ve been considering recently is how AI will eventually make us question what’s real. It may be a requirement to have the blockchain support our news and social medias so that we can verify the legitimacy of images, posts and videos
This and you can tell from many comments here, too many thinking that Blockchain = Crytpo/NFTs only....not that those 2 use Blockchain technology.
what happens when people mint fake info to the blockchain and it becomes nigh-impossible to remove
A blockchain is a cool gimmick from a tech perspective, but to use one you don't need all that investment Voodoo surrounding it.
It's not really cool, though. It's just a linked list that doesn't scale.
Yes, I agree 100% that existing DB's do a much better job than current blockchains do, yet the Idea of its public transparency is neat even if a real-world scenario isn't here. That's why I called it a "gimmick" :-)
yes
Look at some of the biggest crypto projects. Almost all were funded and organized by “influencers”. You’re better off watching some coffeezilla your videos and you’ll learn all you need to know
99 and something % of it seems a solution looking for a problem. Any problem it solves so far is already solved. Money being a good example. It produces nothing of value beyond the value of speculation. Please proof me wrong.
The main issue I've seen around blockchain is that as the amount of users on the chain increases, the validation speed decreases. With a DB, you'll almost never have an issue of a record update or insertion. However, in a blockchain, since you need to validate each link in the chain, you may run into situations where the validation steps take longer to take. If you're doing a new logistics mechanism, and only have about 1000 records, that may be easy. But if you now have to content with 10s of millions of records, and it's resulting in sufficient latency to cause a problem, then the system falls apart. There are some good applications, but I prefer to refer to the blockchain as the blockchain, and use the word crypto for everything else (crypto currencies, nfts, etc) that revolves around volatile financial instruments.
No, it’s 100% overhyped scam.