I just created the worlds slowest database. People will have to pay many dollars to specialists called "miners" to update it. For design reasons, no one can delete anything from it. It's going to change the world.
-- Fixed it for you
Same people who also control the hash rate? :)
That's why it's important to the Bitcoin community that the average person can run a full node and that as many people as possible also do so.
https://web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=beanstalk-farms-stablecoin-...
Who can afford to keep their money in a ledger that you can’t fix mistakes in? Not these people.
Sadly it won't. There is nothing about any kind of cryptocurrency that makes it incorruptible or immune to integrity problems. That's more myth-building that I hear quite often but it's not true. The hardest part in any data integrity problem is verifying that the data going into the system was correct in the first place, and blockchains cannot solve this. And actually they make it worse by making it prohibitively expensive to remove incorrect data from the database.
(Note that in general computers and automation cannot solve this because "correct" here refers to whatever the humans designing the system specified according to their human purposes)
Except if they're the central authority, in which case they can unilaterally rollback the blockchain, rewrite history and fork? Totally makes sense.
And how is this change supposed to work?
Sounds like bringing back aristocracy.
It's surprising to me that anyone taking blockchain technologies seriously for "standing up to power" fails to recognize some basic realities of how power works in practice.
Blockchain is an obstacle to no real power, since real power does not care if some external source disagrees with it. There is no dictator that is going to say "damn, got me with that blockchain stuff *sigh* you win", they'll just torture you until you agree that you don't see anything troublesome in the ledger either.
As we've seen from cryptocurrencies rampant use in scams and ransomware it is absolutely impotent in the face of real corruption and power.
Ironically for crypto to work at all for these idyllic cases it requires a remarkably stable civil society, in which case a piece of paper in the public square works as well.
By the way, do you know how I can view the image? The link doesn't work anymore.
This is factually wrong.
50+% of those miners could collude (or secretly be the same person) and change anything in the database. You would have no warning before this happened.
As for deleting, unless you want to enter a philosophical argument on the nature of deleting, and whether anything in the universe can truly be deleted [1], for all practical purposes a 51% attack does allow one to delete transactions off the blockchain but the older the transaction is the more expensive and impractical it would be to do so.
A 51% attack does not allow someone to create new bitcoins or spend coins they don't have the keys to, but they could double spend coins or delete existing transactions.
A 51% attack can't immediately change other people's history, but it can eventually[1][2]. You would not need to change transaction history very deeply to cause a lot of chaos.
1. https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/101565/why-cant-...
This is a feature, not a bug.
I wouldn't want to have to tell a judge "I can't remove it" in a libel proceeding, either.
If the government decides that your crypto is a Munition or Child Porn, you're going to need a lot to convince them otherwise, and you're probably going to spend time in jail while waiting for your lawyers to deal with it.
Yes, it is a free market issue, and people will choose what they know, and will choose based on their fears.
We could just print money and all be rich? If you value money, and you think that compensation for work can be paid with money, then compensating the work that went into creating digital goods seems appropriate. Should compensation for digital goods be through donations?
I consume digital goods all the time, and I pay for them with money.
Money is an inflationary asset that I keep in order to pay people. It is not an investment, it's value (in my country, the US) is stable, and I get paid in money.
There is no cryptocurrency that shares these characteristics and there never will be as long as people try to pitch it as both deflationary (good investment) and spendable.
Do you have an example of one that's not digitally scarce or donation based? Or is donation the future?
Is that the same thing as saying: should this system be used to design a whole new "Web 3.0"? No, it isn't the same (and no, it shouldn't).
If we're trying to do accurate record-keeping on the scarcity of tangible artifacts using digital means... That's useful, but it's not the problem BTC or its ilk solves.
The NBA NFTs, for example. Why NFT? If the NBA is running the enforcement, you'd de facto have to trust them to be in the system, and if you trust them, then surely you'd trust their MySQL database just as much.
A group of foreign investors comes in. “It’s shocking how the market for bottled water is completely inexistant here. Don’t worry, we’re going to teach you how to make money selling imported water! First thing, we’ll dynamite those springs that disturb the market…”
Do you welcome these business gurus and their scarcity-introducing ideas with open arms?