10mo ago

Please Stop

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You can use blockchain technology for a wide variety of things, just please no more cryptocurrency and NFTs.
- Nothing particularly useful though. It's a very slow, inefficient, trustless, immutable database. There really aren't many good applications for that.
  
  That highly depends on what blockchain implementation is being used and what it's being used for. Blockchains used for craptocurrency are highly inefficient, which is the vast majority. But there are a small handful of specialized (proprietary) blockchains that are just efficient enough to be practical in their highly specific use case.
  
  Such as?
  
  Walmarts proprietary food tracking system based on Hyperledger Fabric that they partnered with IBM to tweak & implement, enabling customers to track ingredients back to the farms within seconds, improving food safety, optimizing supply chain operations, enabling efficient tracking of stores and distribution centers, enhancing procurement management by collecting data on product origins, batch numbers, and quality parameters through QR codes and e-certificates.
  
  How is that better than a database? Is someone concerned that Walmart will fabricate supply chain tracking?
  
  Their prior database lacked transparency, real-time tracking, & scalability making tracing take days.
  \ Just an FYI, Hyperledger Fabric is not like the blockchains for craptocurrency. It's a highly modular, permissioned not permissionless, distributed ledger & it allows for pluggable consensus mechanisms. It's very likely that Walmart uses a custom consensus algorithm and nothing like any of the public PoW, PoS, PoA, or PoET consensus algorithms.
  
  Interesting! Thanks for elaborating.
  
  Hyperledger is just git but with fancy buzzwords. It’s like taking everything that makes blockchain, and then remove everything that makes blockchain special. All you have left is another centralized system.
  It’s just IBM’s excuse to stay relevant.
  
  That's an incredibly wrong oversimplification.
  \ Git doesn't have any consensus mechanisms, chaincode execution or ledger, is just a history tracker & manipulator. Neither Git or Hyperledger Fabric are centralized, they're both distributed.
  \ Just because it's for specialized non-financial related tasks using customizable specialized consensus mechanisms and often distributed only within a select few instead of being a big inefficient permissionless PoW/PoS craptocurrency blockchain with a bunch of clowns waisting energy mining nonsense doesn't make it any less of a blockchain with smartcontacts and the works.
  with fancy buzzwords
  That's literally just all blockchain technology ever.
  \ "Just blast them with buzzwords they don't understand to distract from how fundamentally flawed our shit is and FOMO the shit out of them then rug pull every last dime from them" - NFTs.
  
  Git doesn’t need consensus mechanisms because it’s “permissioned”, like Hyperledger. All actors are known and given permission by some entity to contribute.
  You can’t contribute to the Linux kernel unless your changes have been approved by someone trusted with permission. You cannot contribute to whatever Walmart is doing, because you haven’t acquired permission to do so.
  
  And?
  \ Hyperledger Fabric still uses a consensus mechanism, and I promise you Walmart uses one. You can't trust China with food safety.
  \ Permission is given out to various suppliers with various levels of trust.
  \ "Permissioned" in the context of Hyperledger Fabric just means all participants are known entities with identities managed by a Membership Service Provider (MSP), which is likely Walmart in this case and have access control governed by policies ensuring that only authorized actors can interact with the network and its resources. It doesn't mean that a consensus mechanism isn't used or needed.
  \ Shit, without using GPG and SSH to sign commits and outside identity verification mechanisms, you run the risk of git identity fraud.
  
  In what way can blockchain ensure food safety? Just because participants use proof of work or whatever doesn’t mean the input data is more truthful. The oracle problem is a thing.
  
  By providing transparency, auditability, and traceability throughout the food supply chain.
  \ Or in other words it prevents fraud via a tamper-proof system for data collection and monitoring. If the input data is falsified and people to get sick, it's just a matter of plugging in the QR code for the contaminated product and within seconds you know the identity of the participant who authored the product and where it came from. The identities of all participants are already known before hand by the Membership Service Provider.
  \ Think of it like as if someone signed a malicious commit with their GPG key containing their name and address but with additional tamper-proofing pushed to an immutable repo, it's not going to be very hard to trace back and slap a fine on whoever is responsible; effectively greatly reducing the Oracle problem.

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