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  • I've read through this whole thread, and I still haven't really come to any solid conclusions on it. I'm skeptical of crypto as a kind of idiotic speculative market, but that's also every market ever. But then, the blockchain is apparently different from crypto, even though they're both hype-laden marketing terms that have been completely fucked up. I think doing [redacted] with crypto is still potentially cool, though I think it still has limited anonymity, from what I've heard, and the speculative market also fucks it up.

    Is "the blockchain" just like some nerd shit that's for internal hospital ledgers, and beyond that it's all kind of moot garbage, or what? Someone spoonfeed me.

    • One is the tech, the other is an example of a type of the tech. A square is a rectangle, but a rectangle is not a square.

      For most applications, this isn't necessary:

      There are some examples like in biotech/finance that I personally believe will require a blockchain to be truly "fair" at the end

    • Blockchain is often described as a solution in search for a problem. It’s a clever technology, but people don’t really know what it can be used for besides storing cryptocurrency transactions.

      People have thought about storing other kinds of data in the blockchain, like health records, but no one can really point out to why this would be better than other solutions.

      To achieve something similar with health records without blockchain, all that is needed is just a cryptographic signature. The hospital cryptographically signs a digital health document and email it to you. The hospital in turn stores it in some shared database accessible by other hospitals. Done.

      If the health record is somehow lost from the shared database, then you got your own copy of it as backup. They can’t modify the health record either, because then it would diverge from your own copy.

      The worst thing they can do is to add falsified health records without your approval, but that’s a problem with blockchain as well. Blockchain cannot verify that the input data is truthful (garbage in, garbage out).

      The cryptographic signature step is a part of blockchain either way, so there’s no extra technical overhead in the non-blockchain way.

    • The cryptography has much simpler algebraic analogues - what we are looking for is a "one-way function". This means a mathematical symbol that only works on the left side of the equals. The simplest one is the remainder of a division. For example if I told you that I had a remainder of 5 after dividing by 20, you wouldn't know if the original numerator was 25, 45, 65, 85, and so on. This operator is called mod (modulus). Even if you don't know what value I started with, It's not hard to guess what possible numerators could be with modulus. That's where the cryptography comes into play: a cryptographic hash is designed so that it's practically impossible to guess the original numerator. We'll stick with the modulus for explanatory purposes, but imagine that you can't list off possible numerators like I did.

      Now we can invent a puzzle for a computer to solve. We'll start off with the same values as before, but - again - we are disallowing easy guesses. This forces us to check 1 mod 20, 2 mod 20, 3 mod 20, 4 mod 20, 5 mod 20 and so on. Eventually we'll hit 25 mod 20 giving us the solution to X mod 20 = 25. Now you can go back to the person that gave you the puzzle and prove that you've done 25 steps of work to arrive at a solution (or have made a lucky 1/25 guess). This is called "proof of work". A cryptographic has consists of a certain number of bits, such as 256 bits - this means a series of 1' s and 0's 256 long. The puzzle presented to the computer is "find the numerator that results in the first 50 bits being zero" (the more bits are required to be zero, the longer it will take to find the answer). Because of the incredibly slim chance of guessing the correct numerator, it doesn't really matter if the computer counts up (like we did with modulus) or guesses. So, in practice, everybody trying to find the solution starts at a random number and starts counting, or trying other random numbers, until someone wins the jackpot. It's basically a lottery, but the correct numbers have to be discovered instead of being dropped out of a glass ball at the end of the week. Once a computer finds a solution, everybody else playing the game can check their numerator as [probabilistic] proof that they have done work.

      Now we can use this lottery to create a blockchain. We start with 5 things: a globally agreed on solution we are looking for (789), an initial block (which is just a number - lets say 12345), Bob's account #5 of $100, and Sally's account #6 of $200, and a huge amount of players of the above game. Sally wants to transfer $20 to Bob, so she says to all the players: "I'm #6 and want to give #5 $20. There's a $1 prize for finding a new block for me." All the players make a new denominator, by placing the numbers next to eachother - so 12345 6 200 5 100 20 1 - or just 1234562005100201. All the players start trying to find the number that will result in 789. Eventually someone finds 1234562005100990 after a lot of work/guesses. Everybody checks their work 1234562005100990 mod 1234562005100201 = 789. The winning player receives their prize, and now everybody has a new block to start from: 1234562005100201 1234562005100990. Next time someone wants to send some money they will use 12345620051002011234562005100990 as the initial block instead of 12345. Hence, we have set up a chain starting with:

      12345 -> 12345620051002011234562005100990 -> ...

      There's your block...chain. Anybody can independently verify that the work has been done by checking the answers. It's incredibly elegant but, as we've seen, incredibly destructive.

    • A blockchain is just an verifiable chain of transactions using cryptography and some agreed upon protocol. Each "block" in the chain is a block of data that follows a format specified by the protocol. The protocol also decides who can push blocks and how to verify a block is valid. The advantages it has comes from the fact the protocol can describe a method of giving authority across a pool of untrusted third parties, while still making sure none of them can cheat. Currently the most popular forms are Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Stake (PoS).

      Bitcoin for example is just an outgoing transaction to a specific crypto key (which is similar to a checking account) as a reward for "mining" the block, followed by a list of transactions going from a specific account to another account. These are verified by needing a special chunk of data that turns the overall hash of the entire block to a binary chunk containing a number of 0 bits in front, which makes it hard to compute and a race to get the right input data. This way of establishing an authority is called Proof of Work, and whoever is first and gets their block across the network faster wins. Other cryptocurrencies like Ethereum use Proof of Stake where you "stake" currency you've already acquired as a promise that you won't cheat, and if someone can prove you cheated your stake is lost.

      The problem it solves is not needing a trusted third party to handle this process, such as a government agency or an organization. Everyone can verify the integrity of a blockchain by using the protocol and going over each block, making sure the data follows the rules. This blockchain is distributed so everyone can make sure they are on the same chain, else it's considered a "forked" chain and will migrate back to the point of consensus. This can be useful for situations where the incentive to cheat the system for monetary or political gain outweigh the cost of running a distributed ledger. It can also be useful when you don't want anyone selectively removing past data as the chain of verifiability will be broken. The only issue with this is you need some way to reach a consensus of who gets to make each block in the chain, as someone need to be the authority for that instant in time. This is where the requirement of Proof of Work (PoS) or Proof of Stake (PoS) come in. Without these or another system that distributes the authority to create blocks, you lose the power of the blockchain.

      Examples I've heard of are tracking shipments or parts (similar to how the FAA already mandates part traceability) and medical records. This way lots of organizations can publish records relating to these to a central system that isn't under any single entities control, and can't change their records to suit their needs.

      These systems are not fool proof though, PoW has the ability to be abused using a 51% attack and PoS requires some form of punishment for trying to cheat the system (in cryptocurrency you "stake" currency and lose it if you try to cheat the system). Both of these run into issues when there is no incentive to invest resources into the system, a lack of distribution across independent parties, or one party has sufficient power to gain a majority control of the network.

      Overall you are right to be skeptical of cryptocurrency, it's been a long time since I participated due to the waves of scam coins and general focus on illegal activities such as gambling. The lack of central authorities also perpetuates the problem of cryptoscams, as anyone can start one and there are limited controls over stopping such scams. This is not dissimilar to previous investment scams though, it's just the modern iteration of such scams. The real question is does it solve a real problem, as Bitcoin did in the sense it helps facilitate transactions outside of government controls. You might not agree with that but it does give it an intrinsic value to a large number of people looking to move currency without as much paperwork. Now if it makes it worth $68.5k USD (at current prices) is a different story, different people have different use cases and I only highlighted one of those.

      • I read all the replies in kind of, an order going from simplest to what looked to be like the more complicated ones, and this seems like the least charged and best explanation of the sort of, externalities, and it seems like a pretty good overview of it. The other guy did a good summary of how the technology works for a dumbass like me but I'm still not sure I got all of it.

        So, like, you could kind of conceive of a use for these technologies generally, right, but it would seem like, even from your explanation and also from what I kind of passively know already, this is kind of, reliant on a libertarian conception of society, which isn't necessarily bad. I think more concerningly it also seems like both of the basic technologies, there, PoW and PoS, are vulnerable to abuse from the powerful, or from those who have more resources, with maybe PoS being less so, I dunno, still don't really get how that one works specifically which might change it. Which is sort of, antithetical to a libertarian conception of society. I mean unless you're an ancap but those guys are dumbasses.

        So I dunno. It seems like a kind of inherently conflicted technology to me, like, paradoxical. I kinda hope someone can conceivably work out the problems of power abuse, but that would seem to be what I define as a "whole enchilada" style of issue, there.

        Still, I do like the ability to freely buy drugs and circumvent the government, that's kind of epic. Well, most of the time, anyways. Maybe not when the CIA does it, or when narcos and cartels do it, but I dunno how much either of them have tied up in crypto, it'd probably make more sense for both of them just to deal in fiat currency or trade resources or something.

    • So data stores tend to present interfaces which allow the CRUD operations on each record: Create, Read, Update, and Destroy.

      Create: You hit submit on a comment form Read: Your client app shows the content of the comment Update: You hit submit on the comment editing form Destroy: You delete the comment

      Well, in some cases it’s very handy to make a data store with only two operations: Create, and Read.

      This is called a “log”. A log is an append-only data structure.

      One of the benefits of using a log is that two different processes can operate on the data, at different times, and can be confident they’re operating on the same context despite not being in communication with each other.

      This “log” structure could be useful for instance in recording the moves of a chess game. Then, a hundred years later, someone can read each move out of a book and deterministically re-create the board state.

      Now they know that they are looking at the same chess game that Ben Franklin was in 1775, despite not being in touch with Ben at all.

      Really big, distributed systems benefit from this “synchronization without communication” feature of logs.

      Excellent article on this data structure and its benefits here: https://engineering.linkedin.com/distributed-systems/log-what-every-software-engineer-should-know-about-real-time-datas-unifying

      Blockchain is a log.

      Relying on a log requires you to trust that nobody else has Update or Destroy access. For it to work correctly and everyone be on the same page, Updates and Destroys need to never happen.

      With a coordinated system like people trying to understand historical chess games, or a corporation like LinkedIn seeking its own self interest, there’s no trust issue.

      But with other things, like “who’s got how much money”, people don’t want to have to trust that some centralized log owner is modifying the data on the sly.

      That’s where blockchain goes beyond a regular log. It’s a log designed to resist tampering, because each “block” in the chain goes through a distributed checking process where many copies of the log are used, and everyone checks each other’s copies to ensure nobody is cheating.

    • It's the whole web 3 concept of the community powers the infrastructure to run the community. It's an enticing concept, The people using the service pay with their CPU and internet connection to use the service. It makes what would be a rather expensive infrastructure almost free.

      With blockchain they're doing some smart things, you can wrap code around the ledgers, in the end it's just varying fancy levels of receipts verified and secured by the community. It's verifiable but anonymous.

      But then you've got cryptocurrency doing complex math burning through tons of electricity looking for unicorns to add to the ledger, in a massive pyramid scheme. Okay, it's not exactly a pyramid scheme. Whoever starts a given currency makes the vast majority of the money off of it when the coins are easy to find, but at some point it is pretty close to any other given financial system, with the benefits of being anonymous and verifiable.

      The bitcoins are just entries on the ledgers. But then s*** like NFTs are on ledgers. Someone sells you a receipt for a JPEG on a URL. It's all only worth what someone will pay you for it. And without a whole bunch of regulation, it's not exactly a safe market.

  • I think it's funny how most lemmy users are pro open source, pro privacy, pro digital rights; but once it comes to money all that is thrown out of the window and they happily get on their knees for paypal and the few other large players.

    Yes, the current state of crypto is a mess. People are attracted by the promise of the big payout, rather then seeking an alternative payment system, making them ripe for scammers that promise the world, but in the end only rug "investors". Even "functional" cryptos are often highly centralized, making them as bad as banks in terms of reliability. Almost none implement any privacy features, and if they do, its typically a tacked on afterthought.

    But this does not make the original idea invalid. Will it ever live up to the promise of alternative money? Maybe. Maybe not. Only time will tell if the issues that exist right now will be fixed.

    • If making payments in crypto back to FIAT was free it would be more popular. For me it's mostly useless since the fee to spend crypto is more than the (often free) fee for using my credit card.

      New needs to be better and cheaper to be picked up.

    • Crypto is a liberterian capitalist's wet dream.

      Tax-free, anonymous, with no accountability. Perfect for white washing corporate gain.

      Just because it is "open-source" doesn't mean it will be used for good.

      • Wait until you hear about cash! We should outlaw that immediately.

      • Crypto is not anonymous. Even monero, the most private cryptocurrency, has a feature called "view only wallets", so 3rd party auditing is possible, if not easier then auditing today. Will individuals use it to avoid some taxes? Sure, it gets easier for them. Will corporations avoid more taxes then they already do? Doubtful.

    • Currency is a pretty sound idea, whether it will ever get (back?) to a usable place is it's own discussion.

      A lot of the conversation about blockchain as a technology though involves the ones that store additional information as a distributed database, which comes with problems.

      It's also 'neat', but they all depend on trusting the validation method for putting info into the database, which largely defeats the point of having a "trustless" database once the data is in there. There's the occasional proposed use case that seems vaguely useful, but they mostly boil down to replacing legal contracts with a database that's distributed "somewhere".

    • Just because it's open source doesn't mean it's good. Also not every situation is the same. Using Linux instead of windows has advantages/disadvantages very different than using crypto instead of fiat.

      I can think of thousands of reasons to pick Linux, thousands to pick windows and thousands to pick fiat. I'd have to think real hard to even think of a single reason to pick crypto over fiat.

      • I prefer free software not for its price, but for the freedom it gives me. Naturally I donate to these causes roughly what I'd have spend on a commercial one. They however do not need to know who I am, so I exclusively use crypto for that. I made one exception for an organization using paypal, and promptly they pulled address and name from that, gave it to a 3rd party which then send a postcard to me. You could see it as a nice gesture, but I think it's just rude to use data in ways I did not explicitly consented to. Just take your money and leave me in peace.

        In a similar manner I like to use it to pay for email, vpn, hosting and other online stuff. In fact this lemmy instance is 100% paid for by microdonations from its users, and because the provider accepts it directly no conversion was needed.

    • Open source has nothing to do with it. All the things you've mentioned is made for the good of the people. Crypto is not. Crypto is for the rich to get richer and exploit the poor.

      Anonymous payments is not a good thing and throws any sort of fraud protection out the window. It's just for libertarians trying to avoid taxes, and criminals trying to launder money. It's not beneficial to hide from the government that you bought a extra fatty pizza.

      Also nothing about Crypto is grass roots whatsoever unlike what you listed before. Crypto took off because it was inorganically and heavily pushed by very rich people knowing they can make a large profit.

      Your instance is literally an archaic PoW token that causes a tremendous amount of harm to the environment and wastes energy so you can hide buying drugs. That's not including the fact either that you have to go through exchanges who require identifying information to withdraw into non monopoly money.

      Centralization is not always bad, this is libertarian logic.

      • Do you what to know the best part about xmr? You can kick and scream and removed about me using it, but you can't do jack shit about it. Maybe you can lobby at the side of paypal for more regulations, until the enshittification eventually catches up with you. glhf

    • but once it comes to money all that is thrown out of the window and they happily get on their knees for paypal and the few other large players.

      I don't think anybody likes paypal, Visa, Mastercard or any of the other major players. It's just that blockchain "currencies" are much, much worse.

      The idea of "Alternative Money" is a silly idea. Money has always been, and will always be connected to a state. The taxing and spending of the state is what gives money its value.

      With cryptocurrencies, the "value" is only "greater fool" value. Someone is willing to pay 70k in dollars for a bitcoin because they think someone else is going to be willing to buy it from them for $71k at some point in the future. If it were a legitimate currency people wouldn't bother checking its value in dollars because it would be useful in its own right. The only legitimate demand for cryptocurrencies is to pay ransom, and even then, the people who get the ransom immediately transform it back to a useful "fiat" currency.

      Lemmy users are knowledgeable about open source, privacy, digital rights and knowledgeable enough to know that cryptocurrencies are a scam.

      • The idea that money is tied to the state is silly. Many things have been used as money, way before the concept of a "state" existed. Undeniably the money that lasted best across the passage of time is gold. Up until very recently it was the standard to settle cross country currency exchanges with. The value does not come from the state, but from people willing to exchange it for goods and services. Todays fiat money is created at will by a few select people that are not democratically elected. They get to decide how much they debase your savings for the "greater good", while the ones that profit the most are those who control the source.

        Most people do not care about their open source, privacy and digital rights, so they only hear and care about crypto when the price jumps or when it is used for crime. Everything else is simply not newsworthy. So you end up with a bunch of "investors" looking to make a quick buck and people who believe to solve crime with more laws (requesting ransoms is already illegal, has existed before crypto and currently gift cards are scammers favorite form of payment).

        I never mentioned the price nor suggested investing, because quite frankly, I don't care. What I do care about is giving the few big companies that control the internet as little data and influence as possible, and not processing payments through them is a really important step. So I keep about as much crypto as I keep cash in my wallet, and use it preferably when buying or selling.

    • Fixing issues like energy consumption, confirmation time, fees?
      Just in case you haven't heard of Nano, allow me to tell you it's an attempt at creating a peer-to-peer digital currency with minimal energy consumption, 0 fees, 0 minimum account balance, very fast confirmation (ideally sub-second, sometimes a bit slower) and 0 supply inflation.
      It focuses on doing one thing and doing it well: transferring value efficiently, sustsinably and without middlemen.
      It's around since 2015 and still kicking, getting better and better with each release, ironing kinks out.
      It might sound too good to be true, but it's worth a look; make up your own mind.

    • This is what I learnt on Lemmy. Not all people who agree with your position have arrived there logically. (In my case, this position would be leftist ideals). People who you share the same values with are not exempt from being illogical.

      New tech leads to scammers pouncing on it to make a quick buck. However, just because scammers pounce on it doesn't make the tech bad inherently.

      See Lemmy's hate for AI for instance. The advancements in the field of machine learning are mind boggling. Lemmings unfortunately fail to disassociate the tech from the scammers who talk about this tech. It's disappointing, but oh well... ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

      • AI has the potential to become a tool which strongly favors and benefits the ruling class. Us peasants get the locked down version, while government agencies get to use the full power for cyber warfare and disinformation campaigns, and large corpos get to manipulate ("advertise") to you in most manipulative way to act in their best interest.

        The way I see it good people shy away form using AI, leaving only the assholes wielding their new would powers. Those with ill intentions will find ways to use it, no matter how many laws you put up to prevent it. To defend yourself the best approach would be to learn how to use AI yourself, so that you can detect and react when AI is used against your best interests.

        Does this make me pro or con AI? I honestly don't know. Maybe complex things are never that black and white to begin with.

      • You're either arguing in bad faith or just ignorant if you think those are the actual issues with crypto and AI.

        Most people dislike crypto due to the severe negative environmental impact it has on the world. We are literally on the precipice of global warming fucking everything up for us and some greedy motherfuckers decide they need to reinvent something that isn't broken, and has yet to show a single viable use case that can't be matched with traditional methods.

        As for AI, are you defending the plagiarism machine or the art theft machine? I just fail to see how stealing writer's and artist's livelihoods to create a dystopian society where creative expression is replaced by soulless machines is a good thing. There is a world where this isn't a negative, however in this late-stage capitalism world we live in, artists and writers are being layed off in exchange for AI.

        Honestly the real disappointment here is you.

  • 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.

    • Stocks are not bad for the environment the way crypto is bad for the environment. I’m not defending companies or the ethics of stock trading, but generating stocks doesn’t consume massive amounts of electricity. That’s like blaming money itself for environmental damage that spending it could theoretically cause.

      There are so many legitimate arguments against publicly traded companies and capitalism in general, but this one just isn’t it.

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