> The very mechanical understanding of a contract means that we cannot tell the difference between a transaction that abides by the rules and one that exploits a bug in the system, respecting the letter of the law but not its spirit.<p>This is really the key issue, which is difficult to change. I can't think of many important systems where we wouldn't expect human intervention if something goes wrong.
IMO, nothing. Regarding security/integrity of records, block chain is not better but with more complexity.
And for the so claimed decentralization, it is a catch 22: centralized organizations are there for reasons, and block chain resolved none of them. So now you can see a funny situation that so called decentralized transactions are through centralized exchanges. But if you do need exchanges, why not simply go for banks?
Great writeup. I don't know how big crypto/blockchains will get, but I do know 1) a lot of smart people are betting on it, and 2) I've learned not to confuse the limits of my imagination with the limits of reality.<p>So I've made a relatively small investment in crypto across a couple of dozen coins as an experiment. I am cautiously optimistic in the future, assuming it'll be 5-10 years until viability at any practical level for a mainstream audience.
Could it potentially be used to keep a distributed database of information collected by a large array of satellites orbiting something like the sun? I know I’m reaching here, and I’m pretty anti-cryptocurrency so I’m not looking for a nail really, but I just think distributed stuff is cool and the way blockchains work surely has some purpose when light lag is in play.<p>Like couldn’t it be used across a dyson swarm of rotating habitats or something as the transaction currency between them?
They also allow for micro transactions in a way we’ve not been able to do so far.<p>You can use the original Bitcoin protocol to stream (and pay) for each packet of data. We can now make a pay-to-use netflix, something we haven’t done yet. <a href="https://xiaohuiliu.medium.com/netflix-over-bitcoin-payment-channels-ec55b3c242da" rel="nofollow">https://xiaohuiliu.medium.com/netflix-over-bitcoin-payment-c...</a>
The profile picture of the author sums up the whole thing. Emotional outburst. I understand blockchains perfectly. Aiding crime and being a pyramid scheme are the only things they have been shown to solve so far.
I think a good resource to give you an idea of what blockchain can actually <i>do</i> comes from the "Blockchain use cases " and "Blockchain solutions" sections of IBM's Blockchain marketing page:<p><a href="https://www.ibm.com/blockchain" rel="nofollow">https://www.ibm.com/blockchain</a><p>This gives you an idea of some real world business problems that have been solved with the technology. Still, personally, I find the question of "when do I decide to consider using a blockchain as an implementation choice?" a difficult one to answer.
What blockchains solve is the whole pesky problem of following the law and paying taxes, and being a normal member of society. No wonder that much of the early crypto literature was all about anarchy. To this day, the only useful thing that crypto has enabled (on a very small scale) international asset transfer that bypasses mainstream financial systems. As Diehl[1] wrote, decentralized trustless systems are only useful to criminals -- every other social system on the planet has "trust" embedded in it, because that is more efficient, socially constructive, and powerful. Oh, and crypto isn't actually decentralized or trustless either, as you still need to trust the developers that wrote the code, and the people that run your exchanges, because otherwise you will get robbed by them, as it happens on a regular basis in the crypto world.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/nothing-burger.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/nothing-burger.html</a>
There is not one actual practical problem blockchains solve. It's a get rich quick / pyramid scheme built on top of a theoretical concept that appeals to nerds but doesn't work in the world we live in.<p>The same issues persist, they're just packaged/framed differently - and, due to lack of regulation and norms to mitigate them in the real world, can still be exploited.<p>People were complaining that Google eats up so many engineers to solve ad-problems but the whole blockchain space is much worse - what a colossal waste of human and ecological resources.
The comments here show, again, that this is maybe the most charged topic in hackernews.<p>Why is this topic so charged? Is it because the environmental damage (but then PoS should change it)? or because there's money involved (but then ENS+IPFS are poor, so should be good)? Or is it just because it's complex and takes a lot of effort to understand?
Ethereum has only been around since 2015. Naturally smart contracts, DAos and NFTs are somewhat newer technology, still exhibiting flaws.<p>Block chain as a concept with the single use case of store of value has been around since 2009 in the form of Bitcoin. So let me only pick one battle here: The problem is federally-issued inflationary currency. Bitcoin solves it.