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Comment by NikolaNovak | Hacker News Reader

>>A central bank and blockchain technology are antithetical concepts,

I feel I need to screenshot this. It demonstrates more succinctly than I could write an essay on, how much we are muddying up technology, and purpose / politics / ideals when we start discussing this area (Crypto currency etc)

How is a human institution in your mind "antithetical" to a technology? Is a government "antithetical" to 3rd normal form or airline antithetical to a b-tree? You are inserting a large number of undisclosed assumptions to even begin to make such a statement (whether aware of it or not).

>>if a central bank is ever offering you something blockchain it's probably a scam by means of sham decentralization.

I don't disagree with this... I just think it neatly extends fully to "if anybody is ever offering you something block chain" :-)

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I feel like you're intentionally playing semantic games, i.e. trolling, so let me tell you straight that I don't appreciate that.

The fact a central bank is a "human institution" is irrelevant. The fact blockchain is a "technology" is also in itself irrelevant. The point is that each concept necessitates characteristics that are irreconcilable. Most importantly a central bank can not function without central authority. The defining property of the blockchain is the decentralization of authority. Authority can not be simultaneously centralized and decentralized, and so the blockchain and the central bank are antithetical concepts.

> The defining property of the blockchain is the decentralization of authority

No it’s not. A blockchain can be used in a way that only specific central authorities can add to it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain#Private_blockchains

I was kind of expecting you to link to an article about Git repository permissions.

You can use a rock as a spoon but that just makes you retarded.

Are you familiar with git repositories?

>> The defining property of the blockchain is the decentralization of authority.

So "unaware assumptions" it is then.

I'm sorry if you perceive that as snarky (and not everyone that disagrees is a troll btw), but to me, decentralized authority is what some people perceive an important (if not zealous) use case. It is not the defining property of blockchain. There are many companies that are building distributed ledger with centralized authority. You may disagree with that use case. I feel it's lack of self awareness to think a valid and clearly implemented use case is somehow antithetical to a simple neutral well defined technology.

>There are many companies that are building distributed ledger with centralized authority.

The fundamental innovation of the bitcoin protocol is how it made the blockchain, a traditionally centralized data structure invented in the early 1990s, a distributed append-only database using PoW consensus. It's incredibly inefficient, its unimaginable inefficiency is there to buy trust in a trustless peer-to-peer network. You're basically forcing every writer to cut down a pound of their own computational flesh to write to the database. How can this be necessary or useful in a trusted setting? why can you not rely on trust or traditional register-and-authenticate to write to the database?

You're either using PoW consensus or you're not. If you're, you're not a central authority (unless the blockchain is somehow not an authoritative state and you're simply using it as a fancy bulletin board), if you're not, then whatever you're doing is different from what everbody else have been calling 'blockchain' since 13 years and you're just inviting confusion by calling it that.

I think there's a difference between "blockchain + PoW" and "blockchain". Blockchain taken literally is just verification of history via hashing. It's a form of provenance that is hard to fake. Even if you are a central authority as to what transactions are being made, you can't rewrite history beyond any point that you've made publicly visible, without losing the trust of people who rely on you as a central authority, as to do so you would need to break the hashing algorithm.

But I'm still rejecting the premise. There's TONS of small startups and large companies that are building blockchain for verification purposes and centralized or known limited authorities. Many of them are showing pragmatic promise in supply chain verification etc. Certainly they're calling it blockchain. What they're not calling it is Crypto currency. Are we saying they're synonymous and there's no other use case?

I'm an outsider laughing at the whole Blockchain brouhaha, have zero horse in any race. I'm just amused endlessly how any given individual strongly believes their perspective is the only valid one and all others are simply "wrong", and heretics to the one true religion I mean bitcoin I mean blockchain I mean Crypto currency (Note how people are switching which one we are talking about in the thread. Due to various assumptions of equivalence ). Everything in this thread has firmed up my perspective.

>Are we saying they're synonymous and there's no other use case?

No, we're saying that modern usage of "blockchain", dating back 13 years, is specifically about distributed trustless append-only ledgers, which is only useful for distributed authoritative state. Crypto currencies just happen to be a really good application for distributed authoritative state. You can do trusty applications with trustless ledgers, but that would be pointless and needlessly wasteful. You can do a centralized 1990s blockchain, but calling it 'blockchain', though technically true, just smells of marketing hype.

>amused endlessly how any given individual strongly believes their perspective is the only valid one and all others are simply "wrong", and heretics to the one true religion

Snark.

>Note how people are switching which one we are talking about in the thread. Due to various assumptions of equivalence

People on HN probably don't need to be reminded by the entry level 101 stuff about the difference between bitcoin and the blockchain, so your point is just trivial hair splitting. Bitcoin is a special case of crypto currencies, which is enabled by PoW driven blockchains, which without PoW are just boring old data structures. People switch between them because they are a natural fit that exist for and because of each other, and anyone of them alone either don't make any sense or make little sense.

>Everything in this thread has firmed up my perspective.

I don't see why you're so proud that you have learned nothing, but anything that makes you happy I guess.

Fair enough to the last point; but I did enter this thread open to be proven wrong, and then keep seeing sentences in the form of "which is only useful for distributed authoritative state", which is specifically my point. I have made reference several times to successful businesses, from startup to multinational, which are implementing blockchain without distributed authoritative state. Rather than specific discussion on validity of those use cases, all I am repeatedly seeing is casual dismissal without discussion. It is that repeated response that firms up my perspective.

I also do not believe blockchain, bitcoin, and cryptocurrency are actually synonyms and easily interchangeable, in knowledgeable or not knowledgeable audiences. I do think they're deemed interchangeable for some subset of people, per my initial point, who believe them to be trivially synonymous; and who cannot themselves be educated or be opened minded enough or escape internal context to see how anybody else can possibly have a different perspective. Here, too, we have failed to reach each other, and I suppose to neither of our surprise either.

>How is a human institution in your mind "antithetical" to a technology?

It's not human institution vs technology, it's the very structure of central banking vs decentral banking. It's the concepts themselves that are antithetical.

-Edit I couldn't remember the word, but I believe the term that applies here is 'diametrically opposed'

But that's the unspoken assumption I'm talking about - that blockchain and decentralized banking are one and the same / that this is the only design use case for the technology. There are many people actively working in block chain space who do not believe these are identical concepts. They may yet win out long term.

I'm not claiming that blockchain is a one use concept. Yes it can be used for other things then banking. I personally feel that NFTs are a great example of that, and that they hold many possibilities for the future.

But the main benefit that blockchain provides is a way to decentralize a network, it's quite inefficient from a performance standpoint. So to use it for anything other than that is a waste (at least currently). Centralized currencies are better than decentralized ones performance wise, and I don't predict that will change anytime in the near future.

To quote Eldenwrong's perfect comment here "You can use a rock as a spoon but that just makes you retarded"

Hense blockchain currencies (the ones that aren't scams ofc) are decentralized by their nature, since that's the only draw to using that method.

Because of the Pareto distribution this should fail at some point, but with the innumerable amount of new currencies coming into existence, that shouldn't be a problem.

Blockchain has a purpose: consensus without trust.

Central banks are institutions that are trusted and cooperate with trusted institutions.

In general as long as you have a mechanism to establish trust-based consensus by relying on people or a government there is really no advantage by using a blockhain and a huge number of disadvantages.

I agree.frequently it seems I'm in twilight zone minority :-)

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