Ask HN: Has anyone come up with a use for blockchain yet?
Came about this 5 years old article and thinking myself has anything really changed since?
https://hackernoon.com/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-a-use-case-for-blockchain-ee98c180100
https://hackernoon.com/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-a-use-case-for-blockchain-ee98c180100
NFTs are not cryptocurrencies, but I assume the parent comment was also calling them a scam? (well, they didn't use the word scam, but it looks implied)
There are also other "solutions" on top of blockchains, but I keep reading about them only from people who have a vested interest in getting more people to take part, in order to increase their own net worth. Which sounds like a pyramid scheme to me.
But to kinda contradict myself: Yes, there are blockchain things that are not pyramid schemes or other scams. But they also don't provide any other value. Whether they are scams or not depends on if you think the people pushing it actually believe in what they're saying.
NFTs are storing links to pictures
Coins are storing the state of the ledger.
Exatly same technology
NFTs are… well they added the concept of nonfungibility. It's interesting, albeit currently without useful applications.
But take "blockchain land registry". The blockchain will be a pointer to a physical house, or piece of land. In that way it's pretty much exactly NFTs, but I would not say they are exactly cryptocurrency.
So if cryptocurrency, NFT, and land registry are A B and C, then I would say that B and C "are the same", but A and C "are not", but A&B as you say sure are very similar.
Note that I'm not saying blockchain land registry makes any sense what so ever. Because it doesn't. A block chain will never decide who owns land, because courts and government does, backed by the power of the police.
- Decentralised Money Markets (including forward rate curves), biggest analogue to this is the emergence of a nascent eurodollar market in the 50's
- Trustless Borrowing and Lending
- Evasion of sanctions and capital controls (N.B. this is not necessarily negative)
- Allow decentralised autonomous organisations (D.A.O's) to manage treasury assets (e.g. are a key part of coordination)
- Allow me to self custody my wealth outside a traditional institution and outside of inflationary govt. backed currencies
Decentralized markets often cause the liquidity provider to lost value from “impermanent loss”
The capital controls thing is a fairy tale. When was the last time someone accepted a ruble in exchange for any major crypto currency? If someone can but BTC with a dollar, why don’t they just evade the control with their dollars?
Major cryptos are all down 20%+ from their peak. That’s wild inflation.
So somebody is making mad money from arbitraging them?
>Decentralized markets often cause the liquidity provider to lost value from “impermanent loss”
Someone's loss is someone's gain.
>The capital controls thing is a fairy tale. When was the last time someone accepted a ruble in exchange for any major crypto currency? If someone can but BTC with a dollar, why don’t they just evade the control with their dollars?
Please try sending money from China to the outside and report back.
>Major cryptos are all down 20%+ from their peak. That’s wild inflation.
You can do other things with assets than "buy and pray".
Bank transfere works... or alipay .. or western union... I dont get the problem. But I get the money from chinese customer.
Chinese corporations must too also observe strict limits on foreign exchange transfers (although the limits are a little higher).
Foreign investors in China have ongoing and substantial difficulty repatriating money/earnings and have previously had to rely on pools of capital known as "QFII" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualified_Foreign_Institutiona... , things have improved somewhat in recent years, but it would only take a minor unexpected decline/appreciation in the CNYUSD or CNH/CNY spread for things to tighten back up.
I literally could not get my money out in time.
Literally the opposite, b/c if they were, the arbitrage gaps would close! That's how arb. works!
>Someone's loss is someone's gain.
Sure, if your argument is that crypto's main use case is tricking retail into being fleeced by institutions, then I agree with you.
>Please try sending money from China to the outside and report back.
You mean the country that will send you to jail for 10 years for transacting in crypto?
>You can do other things with assets than "buy and pray"
Uhhh is this a currency or a security we are talking about?
Why is this a bad thing? It only implies that there are information inefficiencies. A discount/premium represents a oppurtunity to capture it and make money, remind me again why this is a bad thing? ADR's/GDR's are a very similar thing (well actually inferior in some respects) in traditional finance and have a tremendous product market fit.
>Major cryptos are all down 20%+ from their peak. That’s wild inflation.
Uh, you and I must have a different definition of inflation. I dont think taking price delta is a useful thing. Conversely I could argue that if you moved the point of comparison back 18 months, the dollar has markedly declined vs. crypto (which is a fact), obviously this is cherry picking, hence why price discussions arent useful.
Capital controls are not a fairy tale for a large group (see: billions) of people. Crypto has found a use case in Venezuela, China, Turkey, Lebanon and Argentina amongst others. As a point of clarification you cant evade controls with dollars in financial systems that neccessitate holding said dollars in bank accounts, with the very same banks that are controlled by regulators who enforce those capital controls, frankly that is nonsensical. If you are implying bags of USD hidden under beds is suitable, then good luck with that.
It's kind of wild to me that crypto has caused some people be to pro arbitrage. Arbitrage is the most inefficient form economic rent because it is a tax on producers of value (a group that largely gets ignored in the crypto-verse) that goes directly to speculators.
>Uh, you and I must have a different definition of inflation.
Yeah, my definition if inflation is a year over year comparison oh how much a basket of goods and services cost relative to a currency. What's yours?
>Crypto has found a use case in Venezuela, China, Turkey, Lebanon and Argentina amongst others.
Which currency and where are the transactions? Are Venezuelans buying BTC with bolivars? If so who is selling their BTC for Bolivars? Are they transacting day-to-day in a currency I'm not aware of?
Arbitrage is a neutral activity, I dont see any universe where it could be seen to be a tax on producers of value (whatever that means), it is simply market participants correcting informational inefficiencies and providing liquidity.
>>Yeah, my definition if inflation is a year over year comparison oh how much a basket of goods and services cost relative to a currency. What's yours?
Reread my previous response to your reply on this point, on why this is not at all useful.
>>Which currency and where are the transactions? Are Venezuelans buying BTC with bolivars? If so who is selling their BTC for Bolivars? Are they transacting day-to-day in a currency I'm not aware of?
https://www.ft.com/content/02194361-a5b9-4bf0-9147-f36ba7759...
You are describing the process of eliminating arbitrage. What synthetic stocks have is arbitrage. Is that distinction not clear to you?
>why this is not at all useful.
So a pizza slice cost 0.0002 BTC last year and now costs .0003 BTC and that's not meaningful to you? Just because someone said the word 'non-inflationary' doesn't mean Bitcoin is immune from the factors that cause inflation (supply and demand of a currency vs. supply and demand of goods and services - note that fixing currency supply is only 25% of that equation).
>the FT article
"While Turks have long chosen to protect themselves against lira volatility by keeping their savings in dollars or euros, data suggest that some of them are turning to “stablecoins”, which are pegged to hard currencies or other assets and act as a bridge between digital coins and national currencies."
So the use case of crypto is making it so Turks can hold USDC (bought with USD) instead of just holding USD? Cool.
EDIT: Just to be clear on my last point here, unless people are willing to sell their tokens for Lira, then Lira holders can't buy the tokens. If there is a large market of people willing to sell tokens for Lira, then the Lira can't be that bad of a currency or somebody is lying somewhere. Just because it's crypto doesn't mean you don't have to thinks about the two sides of the transaction - contrary to popular crypto belief, value isn't generated arbitrarily from the ether.
There are occasional grey areas (e.g. Wikileaks donations) but that's the truth 99% of the time.
I guess I have to spell it out: It obviously depends on the sanction, who is declaring it against who, and why, and even on a variety of individual details case by case.
If you would question helping Russia, instead of generally "getting around sanctions", that would be more valid, but really even that is too simplistic.
You don't have to actually have a family member in Russia yourself to imagine that there are probably countless circumstances where you would not criticize someone for getting around any policy.
Or maybe your particular ethics says that you still couldn't even help a family member because ultimately it would come at the cost of some Ukraninian family that you can't justify helping to kill. That would be a defensible stance and I wouldn't call you a bad person for it, but it's not the only valid ethical stance, and you likewise don't have much right to criticise anyone else for deciding that they have their reaons for getting around a sanction.
The short answer to your question was really just "Yes." with no apology or defense needed.
In some cases, you might even be right.
There are doubtless some valid reasons to 'work around' these particular sanctions, but IMHO paying your Russian devs to keep developing your website or whatever, which appears to be the case here, is perhaps not one of them.
Governments have a long history of doing the wrong things, and trying to starve the populations of countries acting against our interests, is one of many examples. If Bitcoin can be used to help feed the innocent, you've actually turned me into a crypto-convert.
You want to take out Putin, take him out. Don't try to harm innocent people just because they had the misfortune of being born in a country that we no longer find economically useful.
One definite potential use-case is FX settlement, which currently goes through an obscure (and expensive) bank-owned coop-type institution (CLS bank). I think other inter-bank and central bank uses might also make sense.
It doesn't seem like a great idea to me for name registrations to be perpetual, but a name service on Ethereum could certainly work that way.
The funny thing (to me anyway) is that a big part of the culture seems to be how absolute "ownership" is -- at least around NFTs -- and how this is decentralized, but with ENS it's a rental just like a .COM (but with something like 1000% processing fees) and it's more centralized than DNS.
I wanted to try out the .ETH name and I'm fine with them doing whatever they want with the contract, I just find it amusing.
Unstoppable seems a lot closer to the overall ethos: https://unstoppabledomains.com
“So, we want to recreate databases, except vastly slower, far less energy-efficient, and way harder to use.”
1. They're immutable (this is as I understand even unique as compared to git, which also uses Merkle trees)
2. They use distributed replicas (as opposed to distributed partitions).
3. Maybe some other stuff that's slipping my mind at the moment.
The multi-billion dollar question is in which use cases those traits are actually useful. So far we're progressively ruling things out as we watch distributed blockchain products simply gravitate back towards centralization.
Blockchain is not Bitcoin or crypto somehow. Crypto is blockchain + proof of work and some p2p. Blockchain is more or less the fancy word for immutable merkle tree. The idea to have a tree or chain of hashes based ond the previus one existed before bitcoin. And proof of work existed also before. It was used to prevent spam in emails. But didnt have sucess.
The glorius idea of nakamoto was to put it all together.. it was a good idea and worth a try but now we know its mostly worthless unsless you are a criminal or some fringe use case that shouldnt exist in Democratic and humanistic conditions
Put an NGINX proxy in front of content or an API and then wire it up to Lightning. Requests can be done without site authentication and the site still gets paid for the content or service.
This would finally implement 402s: https://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html#sec1...
418 I'm a teapot
Two things seem to be an emerging, er, consensus:
1. Having the blockchain part (the NFT for instance) actually have some real relationship to the art is much more interesting than just having pointers to artworks that are fine without it.
2. The exciting thing is that people can go and do what they like with the NFTs (etc) without your permission. This applies to non-art too I think: nothing is stopping you from making Mutant Ape Yacht Mashup.
So, I contend that “decentralized user interaction with artworks via a system the artist doesn’t control” is a use for blockchain, though I admit it’s a pretty fringe one.
I don't really understand how it works (if you have a fat finger error, is it reversible?) or why it's better than a simple relational database, but apparently this is a use case
https://www.ft.com/content/1a4dcaf5-2b4b-4f0b-8c58-a8fa173f2... https://archive.is/qs8Cg (archive.is link to bypass the paywall)
In a similar situation today, a mnemonic phrase for a crypto account serves a similar purpose.
is that substantial? Seems rather unprecedented.
Some also may not feel as comfortable as you do about gambling their entire future on the generosity of "the EU or somesorts". The generosity is real, but having some
Translation:
> Ukraine has legalized the cryptosector - @ZelenskyyUa profile Law.
> Now foreign and Ukrainian cryptocurrencies will operate legally in Ukraine and banks will open accounts for crypto companies. This is another important step towards the development of the virtual assets market in Ukraine.
You can see podcasts updated in real time at https://podping.watch/
All data is stored on blockchains, so in contrast to the old social networks, your post history, likes and comments can not be taken away from you.
Yes. There is no central Mastodon server. Anyone can run a host and federate with other hosts at will.
> If you use YourName@SomeMastodonSite and SomeMastodonSite deplatforms you - how do you keep your posts, likes, comments and contacts?
The Mastodon interface makes it easy to export/import your information so that you can copy it over to a new host - if you worry you might get deplatformed and get cut off without warning, you can do a periodic local backup to be safe: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/
The export includes your posts, but that document does say "Mastodon currently does not support importing toots or media due to technical limitations, but your archive can be viewed by any software that understands how to parse ActivityPub documents." I'd be curious what those technical limitations are. Presumably you could write a script to re-post the archived posts since it's just stored in ActivityPub JSON.
Edit to add: The most sure-fire way to avoid deplatforming is to run or pay for your own host. Other hosts may decide not to federate with you, but you'll at least be guaranteed a platform for those who do decide to engage with it.
That is the benefit of decentralized solutions. Your identity and history can not be deleted or changed by a single actor.
> That is the benefit of decentralized solutions. Your identity and history can not be deleted or changed by a single actor.
Yes, in consensus systems, but how much this is a benefit is an open question. Perhaps you find yourself in a situation where you actually do want to modify/delete your identity and/or history (cleaning up a drunk post, for instance?) and now it's technically impossible. In this case, having it stored somewhere mutable by a trusted host gives you the ability to make that change. On the other hand, maybe (the rhetorical) you are okay with these being immutable because it's more honest about what really happened and doesn't let people artificially clean up after themselves. I think an argument could be made for both approaches depending on what someone wants from their decentralized Twitter clone.
And if you lose your domain, you lose your identity. There are horror stories out there, where businesses are destroyed because incompetent registrars gave the domain away. Again, you would need a decentralized solution like ENS to prevent that.
There are decentralized solutions which allow the author of a piece of data to update or delete it. It is just a matter of incentives. When the protocol has a way for the author to update or delete content, that just means storing the old version of the content is not incentivised anymore.
Generally the ActivityPub protocol disseminates a user's actions to a number of other users. On Mastodon specifically all users mentioned in a post will receive copies. Activities generated by users on other servers can be double checked against their own servers for validity, I think there's very few things that you can game when you're running your own instance without people being able to verify based on what these other instances have received.
Especially for a social network where everything is immutable and you cannot edit or even truly 'delete' anything and it is all public. Thus opens the gate to abuse. [0] Even if you try to 'hide' it, it is still on the public blockchain permanently and forever.
[0] https://blog.mollywhite.net/abuse-on-the-blockchain-lecture/
“Nobody has come up with a use case”.
How about DeFi? I think that’s a pretty big use case! Besides, who cares? Either use it (DeFi, donations, salary etc) or don’t.
Most people coming from the traditional finance world understand the value of this.
Most people coming from the traditional finance world understand the de-value in this.
If you are sophisticated (or even just have a functioning brain instead of a void between your ears) you can easily:
1) Avoid assets that are inflationary, by conducting your own due diligance, or even better inspect the code of the smart contract to determine if minting is even possible.
2) No oversight is a feature not a bug. Nobody forces you to trade, but knowing the rules of the game are unalterable is ultimately the best arbiter of active capital allocation decisions. Did you follow the story of the LME and Nickel futures over the last fortnight? That market is now bust and the LME's reputation is (rightly) in tatters.
3) Having worked as a trader at a blue chip investment bank and then at a hedge fund for many years I am almost positive despite the present clunkiness and inefficency of some AMM based DeFi exchanges, this model is the future of exchange. CLOB's are manipulated just as much (if not more) than DeFi/CEX OB's.
This is being used in more than half of all crypto trades and can easily be used to influence crypto prices across the board.
There is really nothing "free" about a market where the market makers are also active players with an unlimited supply of funds. And without a "free market", most everything else is irrelevant.
For your info an example of a decentralized exchange is "Uniswap" which operates onchain and does not (in most circumstances) custody your assets or even have humans in the loop. A centralised exchange is Binance, which largely operates fully off chain and custodies your assets.
Lastly I dont think anyone is pretending the space is not without risks - its a "caveat emptor" environment in its purest form. USDT isnt the only game in town by a mile & congruently Jump/Jane Street/Hudson River/other U.S. regulated actors have no problem acting as a credit counterparty with USDT so due diligence must check out to some degree of satisfaction (indeed I hold my own reservations).
Decentralized exchanges simply follow the centralized exchange market. It is the only available, practical way for anyone to set prices.
What the centralized exchanges do affects the entire market by sheer force of their trading volume.
Decentralized exchanges can't just mint more tokens, unless they deployed the token for that contract with an allowance for them to mint it.
AKA, the largest decentralized exchange, Uniswap, does have a Uniswap token. But they can't just mint it whenever/however they want, the contract (which anyone can audit) doesn't allow it
Saws are not useful because they can cut your hand off? Fire is not useful because it can burn your house down?
But as to markets, for every valid critique you can present against decentralized and/or anonymous markets, there is an equally valid critique to be made against centralized & controlled markets.
What is being traded is less interesting than the fact that it can be traded 24/7, cheaply, globally, transparently, pseudoanonymously, settle instantly, and with no counterparty risk.
Nothing like this has ever been achieved in human history, any other observations are a distraction.
>>A hash chain is similar to a blockchain, as they both utilize a cryptographic hash function for creating a link between two nodes. However, a blockchain (as used by Bitcoin and related systems) is generally intended to support distributed consensus around a public ledger (data), and incorporates a set of rules for encapsulation of data and associated data permissions.
So a Blockchain is only a configuration of a hashchain. So we have to make clear that blockchain is only a fancy name and nothing realy special. There are a shitload of different setups of hashchains and they mostly have no fancy name, as far as I know. Everyone with the skill can make whatever with hashchains and call it whatever.. Trianglechain.... NextgenQuantumsuperchain...ChainChain... whatever... So if the basic question is, do hashchains have real use cases? Most certainly. But I am to lazy to google.
Or does the configuration of a hashchain called blockhcain does have a real use. Atm Crypto but as far as I know some banks and supply chains and IBM tried to find problems for blockchains, but failed. Even if highly controverse, the german goverment wants to put things like the passport, diplomas and drivers licence on the blockchain. I think somehow IBM is involved. But is more or less that they want to try to sell that shit. But its not p2p whatever, only a Databank that is a blockchain.. at the end it will be a better database. Maybe a hashchain. Btw it did allready fail for the vaccines passport. They wanted to but that into 5 blockchains. At the end it was a central database, maybe a merkle tree or similar.
Or Putin could try to seize the Ukrainian national bank, but unless Russia can annex the entire country, that's a bit futile.
There are many ways to send money to Ukraine and Ukrainians and Bitcoin seems like the least practical one, on both ends.