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Comment by Egidius | Hacker News Reader

Great to see these young guys attempting to tackle these huge problems out of their believe that they can make "the world a better place". Not sure DLT will live up to its promise, but these guys truly believe the world is better off with trustless systems. And I cannot blame them, intermediaries, wether it be Google or Facebook, standing in between the user and the content creators, or banks, standing between creditors and debitors, haven't got the best reputation. A lot has gone wrong overthere, but I'm afraid DLT will bring entirely new problems to the table that we cannot forsee at this point. So I'm curious what the future will bring.

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Offtopic. DLT is basically a marketing fraud. Both "permissioned" and "permissionless" DLT are packed into one term. Problem is - they are vastly different. Permissioned DLT is not interesting at all from technical and social point of view. We knew how to do them for a long long time. Openness, permissionless is the key innovation introduced with Bitcoin. "Permissioned blockchains" are just repackaged tech with lot of marketing sauce.

I use the term DLT as, for example, DAGs are not exactly blockchains if I'm not mistaken. They have no blocks, just transactions. It had nothing to do with permission.

Not all DAGs have blocks however many DAGs do have blocks. BlockDAGs are usually considered blockchains.

I wasn't aware of that. Thanks for that insight!!

>Openness, permissionless is the key innovation introduced with Bitcoin.

Can you think of non currency, voting, or timestamp applications for this?

People pay extra for currency verification, I cant imagine they'd pay extra for social media picture verification.

100%: Bitcoin was the first known solution for the double spend problem in a permissionless network while DLT doesn't have any dependency to this innovation.

What companies want to sell for DLTs is the vision of a "API 3.0" where different organizations make agreements with smart contracts instead of negotiating bilateral or multilateral protocols. The truth is that the hard problem here is the political and organizational agreements between parties and this cannot solved by technology.

Very well put.

Why is it a marketing fraud? As a mathematician, I can see the solution of a fully public permissionless DLT as long as (1) there is a PKI — not too hard to accomplish, (2) the generation time of ZKPs and SMPC can cross below the network latency threshold — to which I can say that I know researchers in the space and even a simple run rate calculations indicates this will be feasible soon...

I wonder whether your stance would update if you were to read Foundations of Cryptography by Oded Goldreich?

I think there is some typo in your comment - because otherwise - do you mean that permissionless DLT was obvious (as in anyone who read Foundations of Cryptography by Oded Goldreich could create it) and bitcoin was not a breakthrough?

Nope. I simply mean that it is not a fraud, and can provide a legitimate service in the form of a new abstraction implemented in software.

There is the worry that there might be a whole new set of problems that will arise with this system.

The other worry I have, and where I think, in the long run I will probably be right, is that, when the system collapses and cryptocurrencies' price crashes, nobody except for these few individuals will care for any philosophic reasons to support this product. People invested in crypto to make money, not to support free, distributed networks or smart contracts. It would be sad to see the entire idea vanish at that point.

This is why Bitcoin seems the most secure. 9 years of not breaking is pretty good.

Things like IOTA and Nano use verification methods that are untested.

ETH just seems wayy to expensive in POW, and seeing how they are already getting spammed in POW, POS seems insane.

The gold coin seems to be the most secure for me to be honest. If we're looking at monetary stability I'd rather have more than 9 years. Looking at our traditional ways of exchanging money, we have a history of about 6-7000 years, so that's a little more researched I'd suggest.

Honestly looking at the BTC prices right now and in the latest months, I'm seeing a few months of stability for the future followed by either a massive crash or some kind of small increase. Not really worth or secure enough to put my money into.

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