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Comment by cy_overlord | Hacker News Reader

"I suspect that legacy industry and regulators have smothered two generations of technological improvement, largely (I suspect) by building a (mostly) closed and permissioned financial system."

It's technically possible to replace any blockchain with a database but where are you going to host it and who is the trusted central authority?

Blockchain might not the solution but it shows us an alternative to trusting some middlemen that have too much power, instead we trust code that is emotionless, non-judgemental and consistent.

A distributed ledger is more than just a database, it's a technology that can orchestrated trust online without a central authority. That's a huge deal, compared to a sql database that is owned by someone, who is the singularity that administrates the whole thing.

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>It's technically possible to replace any blockchain with a database but where are you going to host it and who is the trusted central authority?

Who is hosting the blockchain? Who is the trusted authority over the maintenance of the protocol that implements the blockchain, that all miners must use if they want to participate in the system? Who is it you're trusting not to organize a malicious 51% attack against the system, when it has already happened several times to quite a few blockchains? It is a blatant falsehood that blockchains don't have any trusted authorities. They actually require trusted authorities to function. You're not trusting "emotionless code" as the code is well known to have these flaws even by the admission of its own designers; what you're actually trusting is some game theory laid out by programmers you trust, that says the miners won't do bad things because they're getting paid. But in several cases we've seen that they actually will do bad things! And that's not even considering all the other bad things like fraud and ransomware that happens on blockchains that the operators seemingly just throw their hands up and don't do anything about. They don't even consider that to be their problem.

I hate, hate, hate that this line is used so often in discussion of cryptocurrency. It makes no sense at all. In order to have any kind of real discussion around this, the crypto community needs to move past these thought-terminating cliches.

"Who is hosting the blockchain?"

Miners/Stakers who is incentivize to validate the network and maintain the collective consensus.

All your points are valid and universally known but the more important here is whether or not those vulnerabilities are inherently caused by the nature of blockchain or tehcnical problems that we can/need to solve.

A good blockchain is not owned by anyone, any changes made need to go through multiple layers of peer review.

We are still very rooted in our current ways of doing things hence we are seeing phenomenon where companies are trying to take control by either building their own blockchain or centralised service on top of a blockchain. But if I travel back to the 70's and told you that someday you can run an Internet company, would you believe it?

We are no where near endgame but if you dig deep enough, you will see many exciting technical breakthroughs. One of the fascinating one is zero-knowledge validation. Blockchain could be the solution or maybe not, I don't care, I'm excited about the innovative opportunities that it brought upon.

> But if I travel back to the 70's and told you that someday you can run an Internet company, would you believe it?

If I understood what you were talking about, I would probably idly wonder how I could fit it in between being President of the United States, a firefighter, an astronaut, and a professional soccer player, but I wouldn't actually disbelieve it.

(Hey, in the part of the 1970s where I was alive at all, I was pretty young.)

Exactly, I don't see blockchain as a solution to cure world hunger or help us "decentralised" everything but I won't dismissed it as a possible route to a new future. I have high hopes for it to be a better future than it turning out to be a buzzword the same way that I will dismiss the dot com idea (the notion that every business and everything needs the Internet) but I strongly believe in the underlying technology that connects everyone and everything.

> instead we trust code that is emotionless, non-judgemental and consistent.

Yes. Because that code just appeared out of nowhere, and it's perfect, and devoid of issues.

No, that's why many people is working on it now. If you compare old smart contract with new ones, you will see that things are slowly getting fixed.

For e.g., you could literally send NFTs to any address (including a smart contract address) which make things stuck forever. Now there's a safe way to transfer things which check whether or not it is a valid address. And this became the de facto standard for almost any NFT smart contract.

All these didn't came out of nowhere.

Exactly. So when you write something like this: "instead we trust code that is emotionless, non-judgemental and consistent." what you're really saying is: "we trust a bunch of programmers to write perfect code" when even those programmers cannot understand the code they write: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31692704

In an ideal world, things will be build to facilitate the trust, we don't have to trust any programmer at all.

The trust in put on the code itself which not one but all of us agreed upon. Today, we don't have the tools to allow people to actually understand it but it doesn't mean that we won't in the future. Abstraction layers will be built.

Of course this is an optimistic speculation. I'm personally not attached to crypto in anyways but I'm excited about innovative opportunities that it enabled.

> In an ideal world

There are ponies and magical unicorns that grant you wishes.

> Abstraction layers will be built.

And those abstractions will definitely be built and will be different from any existing ones because? And once again we will have to trust people building them that they are built correctly.

> I'm excited about innovative opportunities that it enabled.

And those innovative opportunities are what exactly?

An opportunity to do things differently. The Internet today have flaws and we had exhausted all the possible way to build a better one on existing technology.

Blockchain present us with a new way to coordinate online activities and transactions. It's the right path forward? We don't know, at least not until we exhaust all the possible options and therein lies a lot of opportunities for technical breakthroughs that could possible solve all the concerns we had, technically.

> An opportunity to do things differently. The Internet today have flaws and we had exhausted all the possible way to build a better one on existing technology.

Demagoguery

> Blockchain present us with a new way to coordinate online activities and transactions.

No it doesn't. Blockchain is a distributed spend-only log. There are very few if any applications for it.

> therein lies a lot of opportunities for technical breakthroughs that could possible solve all the concerns we had, technically.

Yeah, yeah, magical blockchain will solve all the issues, we just have to believe hard enough.

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