Hacker News Reader

Comment by HideousKojima | Hacker News Reader

>The blockchain technology itself is a marvel and the safety/security properties of properly decentralized systems are unmatched. The whole financial world would be better written using blockchain/smart contracts, same goes for voting/governance, etc.

No, blockchain really isn't all that amazing. Blockchain is useful when you need something decentralized, immutable, and trustless. That trustless bit is the important part, there are existing solutions for decentralized immutable ledgers that work far better than blockchains and require far less compute power. And it turns out that the vast majority of human and business interactions and transactions are actually based on varying levels of trust.

And that's before you get into blockchain-specific issues like the Oracle Problem.

View on HN

Most important property of blockchains is verifiable transparency. That is a huge deal and yes, most financial and government systems would be much better for people if they were built with that type of verifiable transparency.

Decentralization is important but isn't as important. There are many successful chains that aren't decentralized at all and are quite useful.

Most top/real projects in blockchains aren't immutable. Pretty much everything is upgradable/changeable, including blockchains themselves.

Trustless - even this part isn' true for most blockchain systems. They all contain various levels of trusting different entities.

It is the transparency and verifiability that is the key idea and most important improvement that blockchains bring.

>It is the transparency and verifiability that is the key idea and most important improvement that blockchains bring.

You can have transparency and verifiability without blockchain, so long as you trust the parties publishing the ledger. So once again, trustless is really the key part to blockchain.

> Most top/real projects in blockchains aren't immutable. Pretty much everything is upgradable/changeable, including blockchains themselves.

> Trustless - even this part isn' true for most blockchain systems.

Blockchains are immutable, trustless, permissionless. Otherwise it's called a database.

Spoke to some people working at big banks: They say trust, or rather lack thereof, _between_ banks is a key issue. Blockchains solve that.

No, they don't. Bank networks are fundamentally permissioned, only authorized entities are allowed to participate. Verifiability is a political/legal decision between these entities, not a technical limitation of existing systems.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com