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Comment by howmayiannoyyou | Hacker News Reader

I just created the world's most redundant and incorruptible database. People will have to pay many dollars to specialists called "miners" to add rows. For integrity reasons, no one can delete anything from it. It might change parts of the world where redundancy and integrity are threats to very powerful people who want to control transactions and corresponding data.

-- Fixed it for you

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>It might change parts of the world where redundancy and integrity are threats

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)

Claiming a technology is not a silver bullet is a statement that contains no useful information, because no technology is a silver bullet. However, blockchains do provide a very high level of durability across various dimensions, and some integrity failures reduce onto durability failures.

Yes but so does any other distributed consensus algorithm. Blockchains just happen to be based on the worst ones that don't have any good properties but still keep all of the bad ones.

Yes, but blockchains were first. If your point is that we should evolve to newer, better solutions sure. But I'm guessing you're arguing something else.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_T0oq_rQ9s#t=9m8s

No they weren't, byzantine fault tolerance has been studied since the 70s.

That’s a bad thing when you’re running programs on it that may have unintentional behavior aka bugs.

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.

Many cryptography books will include a brief mention of "Rubber-hose cryptanalysis", pointing out the gap between theoretically sound crypto-systems and realpolitik. Everyone in the cryptography community knows that, no mater how secure your system, if a powerful state actor really wants to get you, they will.

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.

Also, it runs a 2KHz and needs a constant flow of tons of coal to keep working.

> For integrity reasons, no one can delete anything from it.

Except if they're the central authority, in which case they can unilaterally rollback the blockchain, rewrite history and fork? Totally makes sense.

Well, they're not "web3" then. No central authorities allowed.

I was referencing what happened to Ethereum, which apparently has one.

> It might change parts of the world where redundancy and integrity are threats to very powerful people who want to control transactions and corresponding data.

And how is this change supposed to work?

If you need many dollars to add rows only the powerful could add lines.

Sounds like bringing back aristocracy.

> threats to very powerful people

Same people who also control the hash rate? :)

Hashing power is not the only line of defence. The (non-mining) nodes have the ability to reject blocks that they don't consider legitimate.

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.

There is not mechanism in Bitcoin for the non-mining nodes to somehow agree in the case of a 51% attack though so I am not sure what you are trying to prove here

The average person who just has a Coinbase account through their iPhone.

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