You Do Not Need Blockchain: Popular Use Cases and Why They Do Not Work (2019)

Why would you voluntarily want a data store that can't store sensitive values?

We've been using neural networks as classifiers for decades. They were useful immediately

I think what we've been seeing with generative AI is much more of an argument against blockchains being a revolutionary technology than for it. This is what it looks like for a technology to go mainstream, relentless adoption that touches nearly everyone, and an innovation flywheel that keeps pushing the state of art forward every month.

The past decade and a half of big promises and "is there actually anything to this?" debates on HN is just night and day in comparison.

Your point might be that there just hasn't been another breakthrough on top of blockchains the way chatgpt was a breakthrough on top of neural networks. I think that's a reasonable point, but I still see a notable difference in that blockchains have been hyped as a product technology that has already arrived for nearly this whole time, rather than as an enabling technology still looking for its mainstream niche.

So what might be blocking applications of cryptocurrency the way computational limitations blocked (many) applications of neural networks?

Neural networks were immediately useful, what are you talking about

I think that taxes can and should be funded through the single tax on property proposed by Henry George as opposed to sales or income tax. Widespread adoption of private cryptocurrency may be sufficient to enable adoption of the single tax system.

> They're deliberately undermining the mechanism that funds our shared existence. They want the benefits of living in society without contributing to its maintenance.

So I pay income tax, property tax, road tax, sales tax and even my savings I have to put in the hands of the govt which has been unreliable, corrupt and mostly serves the interests of the few over the interests of the many regardless of which political party has been elected.

Libertarians are like house cats, they’re convinced of their fierce independence while dependent on a system they don’t appreciate or understand.

>Fiat money exists within a social contract - governments that issue currency must also maintain the infrastructure that makes society work.

Imagine saying this to someone who lost their home in the LA wildfires despite paying high taxes all their life to live there. Some social contract.

I mean, there have been a number of examples of people losing access to cryptocurrency trading during times of chaos. The rebuttal is "sure, but not the ones that are actually decentralized!". Ok, but the cryptocurrency industry doesn't actually want "you can only use Bitcoin and Ethereum and only via direct interactions with them, not via intermediaries" to be the message, because then what are all these other projects even doing?

Why do you consider this a positive?

Remember: freedom for the people is authoritarianism to the monied and powerful[0]; and vice versa, the only freedom they care about is the one where they get to put us in chains.

Capital controls make the powerful accountable to democracy, because we're not letting them take their toys and go home. The obsolescence of such controls does not bring about more freedom for us. It just means the rich and powerful can play a shell game with the people.

[0] A pleonasm, I know.

This to me is the archetypal answer to question about what crypto is useful for. Like it has all these words in it and it seems like a statement of some kind but there’s literally nothing there.

NLS, the system demoed in the Mother of All Demos, was a lot less well known in 1984 than it is now and I doubt anyone expected it to be delivered by packet-switched IP or HTTP (which didn't even exist yet).

In 1984 the big hype was ISDN - digital telephony to the home - and all the wonky (and expensive) special services and gadgets you could layer on top of a whole two digital circuits. What killed that future was a combination of corporate ineptitude[0] and government action to kill AT&T's monopoly before AT&T got big enough to just buy out the US government.

The thing about the Internet is that while it was invented very early on, it wasn't accessible until far later. The Internet was a DARPA project that had escaped into college campuses. You needed a hookup at a local college campus in order to even access it. In fact, USENET users refer to the time when normal people could just sign up to AOL and get Internet access as "the Eternal September" because it was an immediate and measurable cultural change. I think it's fair to say that the Internet before September 1993 was a fundamentally different concept than what was available afterwards, and for most people, that is when the Internet launched. September 1993 to 2009 takes us from "hey AOL has these funny new 'Internet' forums" to "tweeting on my iPhone in the bathroom".

Other NLS ideas have similar trajectories. The mouse saw use in workstations but it took Apple and the Macintosh to try and actually make a mouse-driven computer for ordinary consumers. Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu was getting plenty of Autodesk money in 1984, but the hypertext protocol we actually use, HTTP, was invented at CERN in 1991. A lot of technologies are good ideas being held back by a world that isn't ready for them yet.

Blockchain finance[1] is more akin to Xanadu or ISDN: something that exists because it's creators would be rich if it took off rather than because it has some obvious value to it. It runs off hype. As a regular Internet user, it actually provides negative value, because the people who actually gain value from having a financial system with nobody to tell you no[2] are literal scammers and thieves.

[0] ISDN was notoriously poorly rolled out in the US, as BRI lines had been priced as a business service. Most people didn't need two lines over one wire and all the other usages of ISDN were purely speculative. Other countries whose local phone companies didn't have their heads up their asses actually did manage to sell it on the basis of clearer calls.

[1] Being very specific here in case someone shouts "Git is a blockchain, your argument is invalid"

[2] Well, unless what you want to do is raise the base block size of Bitcoin, then there's plenty of people who will tell you 'no'.

Yes, but you've proven my point because you missed the complex mechanism at the heart of the system. the nitty gritty is where it gets opaque, for example: a user sends BTC to an 'agent' (collateralized data provider), the btc is 'wrapped' as wbtc and then the user can participate in deFi services in flare network. The user therefore enters a contractual relationship with the agent to look after their btc while they participate in deFi activities, and everyone trusts that the agent doesn't run off with the btc.

> They're not going to spend tax-payer money on crypto

Feds, not yet. But some red states are [1].

[1] https://x.com/samuelarmes/status/1864059964928442424

Yes, they are spending tax-payer money. Previously, seized crypto would have been sold and could be used to reduce taxes.

It's probably increasingly hard to launder large sums of cash.

To be completely fair, crypto is an ingenious money laundering vehicle. And money laundering is going to happen whether we like it or not because people will continue to engage in illegal economic activities.

"Carried away" implies that they didn't know what they were doing rather than cynically exploiting a bubble they knew would collapse eventually.

Still short sighted though. I feel like they are speed running "how to create backlash".

One problem with git is that it's mutable, and real problems have arisen (some quite recently) because of that. An immutable git might benefit from some kind of blockchain integration, but there's also way less complicated ways to do the same. Proof-of-work mined coins should be outlawed.

There are a couple of use cases I have come across.

One is supply chain, using what is now called an NFT (the application predates that term). The case mentioned in the article is based on assuring that a physical item (a bottle of wine) is not a fake. This doesn't work, for the reason given. However a different supply chain application is avoiding real items of forbidden provenance being introduced into the supply chain - specifically conflict diamonds. Large diamonds are marked with a microscopic serial number, which addresses the problem of how to associate the physical item with a blockchain token. The company which first sells the diamond adds a record of a transfer to a new owner, associating this serial number. [Point of trust: you have to assume that De Beers et al. will not introduce a conflict diamond]. Every time the diamond is sold, the transaction is recorded. If someone tries to sell a diamond with a new serial number, it is clear that the origin was never recorded. If someone tries to duplicate a serial number, it is evident that they are not the owner. This was implemented for diamonds, and I have seen it in at least prototype form for other materials such as tropical hardwood.

I'm not sure if the second case was ever implemented, but it was receiving serious commercial attention. There is a type of disaster insurance which does not insure against damage, but against circumstances which can cause damage. So you might want to insure against a flood if you have a house next to a river. Rather than a loss adjuster checking damage and months later you get a cheque, an alternative is that the contract says if the water level is above level x, you get $y. Because this does not require any judgement, just an oracle giving the water level, it can disburse funds quickly. A smart contract is one way to handle this. It's one of the few cases where suitable machine-readable oracles often exist already. The advantage to the policy holder is quick access to fund when needed for emergency response. The insurer can in theory reduce operational cost, though most of the saving comes from the type of policy (no loss adjuster needed) rather than the mechanism.

i do feel like your comment has made me have the thought “i guess using LLMs in your day to day life is a form of gambling, also”

Everything that was machine learning for the past two decades now has a glossy "AI" branding to appease it to wide eyed breathless morons. Even just basic searching and sorting algorithms get the AI branding to ride the hype train.

That's not to say there's not legitimate uses of LLMs/LVMs or anything but every computation on a computer labeled "AI" has reached a fever pitch of ridiculousness.

... but we don't know which 5%