OK but there are actually great uses for blockchain that are completely disconnected from anything you typically see
For example, banks may begin using blockchain for maintaining their internal ledgers. It will help solve a ton of issues around reconciling the transactions from all over the globe
Blockchain has reasonable uses. Really good ones. Crypto and nft bros just completely ruined the image of it
EDIT: I love all the comments demonstrating how little people understand about blockchain. Bitcoin was not the first blockchain, nor is its design the only type of blockchain. Assuming that all blockchain looks like the crypto/nft paradigm is just showing your ignorance.
Blockchain is only potentially useful if there’s no single entity that can be trusted. If banks can’t even trust themselves to manage their own internal ledgers, they have much bigger problems to deal with.
Trustless systems aren’t a bad thing that has to step in when the good thing fails. Trustless systems are inherently better because you don’t have to trust a bank (or anyone for that matter).
Additionally, ledgers can be gamed/corrupted/falsified. This is significantly more complex (bordering on impossible) on the blockchain.
There are often easier, more reliable, and far cheaper ways to achieve the same things without using a blockchain. Some of the principles are even used in normal web browsing to ensure secure untampered connections.
Blockchain just solves a subproblem that only arises when there’s no appointed central entity.
I was hedging against a particularly snarky commenter showing up. You can do a 51% attack and theoretically corrupt it. In practice, that’s much more difficult.
You dont need 51% attack to corrupt a ledger. Just enter incorrect info and the ledger is wrong. Not a damn thing a blockchain can do about that. Same issue is with any trustless system where you have to trust someone to input the correct info/do the agreed thing/ship the ordered physical item.
Just enter incorrect info and the ledger is wrong.
The concept behind cryptocurrency is that the ledger is the info, because you’re right, a half-assed blockchain ledger used for external (e.g. cash) transactions doesn’t really solve the root problem. Proof of work is fucking stupid though, and it has (rightfully) ruined the perception of blockchain technology among those who can see past their own crypto wallet.
You can implement public or semi public ledgers without Blockchain. That’s what banks are doing already by sending huge CSV files internally and externally.
Blockchain is not a technology of zero trust. It’s close to the opposite. You trust a few peers and blindly trust everyone they trust. That way you trust a network that you know nothing about and if the network decides on a common truth that you are convinced is incorrect, there is nothing you can do about it. The consensus always wins and there is no single entity to complain to and get it fixed.
This is great for making sure that many actors need to be bad actors in order to have the whole system fail. It’s bad if you don’t trust anyone and want to make sure that your standards are always observed.
From a technology standpoint I love the concept of Blockchain. But use cases that are not forced are few and far apart. Too few for the amount of hype it receives.
so I put my trust in software instead. And by extension its developers. You’re saying of all people, we should trust some programmers above all else. You know, the “move fast and break things” guys.
As a programmer myself, this thought is both terrifying and hilarious.
As a fellow programmer: what kind of doomer take is this? I don’t have any opinion on the efficacy of blockchain technology, but all of us put an immeasurable amount of trust in software every single day. And it’s not like current banking practices are different in this regard, either: blockchain tech requires faith in the software implementation, while contemporary banking requires faith in banks and the software they use (including a borderline unmaintainable COBOL stack, from what I’ve heard).
because problems in the bank’s software are the bank’s responsibility. If they lose my money, it’s their responsibility to get it back. Cryptocurrencies are the exact opposite, by design. If you’re fucked, you’ee fucked. unless of course half the participants decide to fork, half don’t and you end up with two “currencies” out of thin air.
Agreed, audits are beneficial in virtually every situation. I just think that, of all the well-formed arguments to be made against cryptocurrencies (especially PoW coins), the fact that it is software isn’t one of them. In my opinion, fueling distrust of software in general is ill-advised.
Blockchain has been around as a technology for nearly two decades. If financial institutions thought it could help them you can bet they would be all-in on it by now. As it is, blockchain has no significant advantages over traditional financial ledger systems, so what incentive is there for them to use it.
It’s not something new or cutting edge any more, just waiting for a bright spark to discover the technology and put it to use.
Well, why would banks replace the system which allows them to charge fees for every other interaction with their services? A blockain solution would allow multiple different banks (and, possibly, even regular people) to access the data with no middlemen, and, therefore, no fees. Or, well, no fees that directly end up in the bank’s pockets as profit, that is.
Getting rid of that is bad for business. So, unless something magical happens and the EU, for example, pass a law requiring the banks to switch to a more de-centralized, more fair system, it’s not going to happen.
That’s kind of my point. Blockchain evangelists have been banging the drum for many years saying “This is a perfect fit for the financial industry. Why won’t fintech wake up and recognise that?”
When in fact fintech took a long, hard look at blockchain a long time ago and decided “nope, there’s nothing here that would tempt us” outside of a few very niche applications.
Rather than resorting to that age-old cry of the cult member “do your own research!” can I respectfully suggest that if you’re aiming to change somebody’s mind, the onus is on you to provide the evidence, not on them. By all means take hours out of your day to search google and compile a list of things that you think will convince me. Me, personally, I have better things to do with my life.
I didn’t ask them to do their own research. I asked that, if they are skeptical of a claim I made, either do a simple Google search to check if it’s very easily verifiable, or ask me directly instead of immediately saying “you’re wrong because I would have heard of it”
Like, I’m happy to provide citations when requested, but lemmy isn’t a scientific journal where I’m expected to provide every source for my information up front
Meaning, in a DB, the admin could change roles and modify anything.
Database triggers can have bugs, and we generally don’t let third parties log into the database directly because it’s a huge attack surface
In blockchain, without a key you’re cryptographically locked out. The only way around that is if the network as a whole changes their code to a version that allows something like that
It’s just a ledger where every entry is signed by a private key. That’s a fantastic structure for certain specific use cases…
How can you trust that the database is really append only? Blockchain provides a way to verify the state of the database and the ordering of the transactions. Beyond that, not much benefit to be had. However, for certain situations, that is a very big benefit!
Sure! So some students of mine were working on a multiplayer video game that was started by a different group of students the previous semester. The first group of students made a design choice that, to over-simplify, basically tracked achievements and milestones on the client side and then synchronized those achievements to the server. Players could cheat the system by sending malicious packets of achievements to the server. Some achievements could only be completed by a single person in the game, so this was a big problem for the 2nd group of students to overcome. Faced with the choice of rearchitecting the game to be more authoritative on the server and less resilient to frequent disconnections, which affected some aspects of the game, or creating a logical and verifiable sequence of in-game events on the server side. The students went with the latter, and implemented a Lamport clock using a blockchain to verify the authenticity of the events, and prevent a rogue student from updating the game later to give themself a bonus. Basically, along with needing an authoritative sequence of events that is protected from user interference, it also needed to be protected from developer interference.
It was kinda similar to that situation a few years back of the EVE online developers playing the game and giving their guild members certain bonuses and special in-game items. The solution there was to fire the malicious developers, but I can’t exactly fire an entire class of students from an educational project.
EDIT: What seems to be the problem here? I was asked to name a situation where a blockchain would be useful and I did? It’s a computer data structure, there are pros and cons that are context dependent like any other data structure. It I so weird to me to receive downvotes because of the politics surrounding a data structure.
To your edit; it was a great example, but if you say anything positive about blockchain (or Apple, or capitalism, etc) you’ll likely be heavily downvoted on Lemmy.
But yeah, like others have said in this post, it had a bad light cast on it due to the jpg and gif NFTs. Folks started to realize: “wait… this token just contains a link to a web server hosting a jpg file??”
Well, yes. But also the rights.
“The heck you mean ‘the rights’??”
I mean, your Drunk Monkey in Teal Color Theme artwork is yours to use, you’ve purchased the license in the form of an NFT.
“But it’s just a link that anyone could just copy!”
Well, that would be stealing.
So NFTs in that regard are like any movie or TV show, or video game you rent or purchase. That utility may or may not seem to have any value to any one person, but it is a utility, and a pretty cool one if you ask me. But the usage, its implementation, is what matters. Whatever that usage requirement is for the individual or business, blockchain will do it well. Even if it is used to license junk.
It’s distributed so no single entity can take it down. Among many other possible benefits depending on architecture and infrastructure.
It’s far more complex than coins and NFTs. Blockchain is like a new internet. Coins and NFTs are like those shitty GIFs you used to see everywhere. Evocative of old internet, but not the internet itself.
Distributed databases have existed for decades. It’s how large healthcare systems maintain electronic health records for their patients across dozens of hospitals in real time.
Simple, it’s not. If it were, they’d have been using them for decades (blockchains were invented in the 70s).
The consensus algorithm, which is not the blockchain itself, was invented later. But banks don’t need to reach concensus with themselves. They all maintain their own data, and heavily guard it. So the only bad actor they could have is themselves. And they banks all keep watch each other.
This isn’t true: there are not-distributed blockchains.
The definition of a blockchain is a ledger where every entry is cryptographically signed with a hash of the current entry plus a previous entry. There’s no requirement that this be at all distributed. In fact, QLDB uses a non-distributed blockchain as its audit log.
Blockchain are often used in distributed systems because of the verifiability of the records; its a way of providing security of history in a fundamentally insecure environment. But there’s no requirement that they be distributed, and they add value in non-distributed environments as well - in any case you want to be able to review a history of changes and know that someone hasn’t been cooking the books, for instance.
I’ll give a real-world example. One place I worked we had databases that had data constantly streaming in from many different sources. Something that would frequently happen would be some data issue that would break applications; often, this was bad data from sources outside of our control. Ops*, who’s only priority was to get the applications back up and running, would often track down and directly modify records and fix the data. The issue was that some time later, sometime days later, a customer would call and complain about data being incorrect. By then, it was impossible to figure out what had happened: did we get the wrong data from the source? Did one of the import processes mangle the data? Did someone poke around in the database and change the data? We had no way of telling, and investigations would take many hours, often from several senior people, who would frequently in the end have to shrug and say, “we don’t know.” There were lots of things that could have improved this, with varying levels of success, but a global audit log would have been the first step. A verifiable audit log would have been better, because often it’d come down to us being convinced the data a third party was giving us was bad, and it became an our word vs. their word since we shared the same client. If we’d had a blockchain layer through which every transaction was recorded, we could have rolled back in time and figure out exactly how a record came to be what it was and been able to prove it to the client.
Blockchains are awesome. People who say otherwise have their heads up their asses, and are unable to differentiate between blockchain the technology, and the sometimes questionable uses they’re put to. Iron is used to make guns and bombs; that doesn’t make iron bad.
Thank you for being in this thread. I felt like I was taking crazy pills with all these other replies. So many people think bitcoin was the first blockchain. And that the paradigm used by crypto is the only type of blockchain there is.
I will never forgive tech bros for making blockchain a buzzword tied exclusively to crypto and NFTs. The amount of lost potential is infuriating
Using a blockchain to maintain their internal ledgers means they have complete control over that blockchain, so they can manipulate it all they want. Blockchains aren’t magic.
A blockchain won’t solve incorrect transaction information any more than an audit log in this case. This is an entirely internal process controlled by the bank and access would be restricted, so they couldn’t just edit audit logs. How do you think a blockchain would be used to improve this?
The actions that an employee could perform would be limited by their private key’s abilities. Blockchain can be preventative. It’s not only for retrospective analysis.
The actions that an employee could perform in any database would be limited by their account permissions. Blockchain doesn’t change this. I pointed out a retrospective mechanism because a completely internal blockchain wouldn’t prevent tampering either.
I don’t really know what situation it makes sense for. It seems like a tool for cases where nobody can agree who should own the records of something so now everyone should.
you’ve just demonstrated your lack of depth of understanding of blockchains. congratulations, your opinion was correct about 15 years ago. the technology has moved on
and the “solutions” are all objectively worse security wise. And by thinking blockchains need proof of anything, you too misunderstand what a blockchain even is. Proof of whatever is needed by the concensus algorithm, not the blockchain.
no; they all have trade-offs and that’s different… you can have trust less proof amongst semi-trusted parties like a consortium of banks: they don’t entirely trust each other, but trust each other enough to keep an eye on the other members of the consortium
there are plenty of situations like this that are non-public
i wasn’t talking about ethereum, and i don’t think anyone was saying they don’t have TRADE OFFS. in the world of consensus protocols, there are many different trade offs that build a network that suits your needs
however the consensus protocol has little to do with how mathematically secure a network is: the security of the consensus protocol comes down to a lot of complex things
it also has nothing to do with how you bootstrap a node
these things are all different, albeit interconnected things
the consensus algorithm is the only thing that contributes to the network’s security. That, and because it’s trying to solve an impossible problem, it also needs the psychological element exploiting humans’ greed (and therefore want to hoard currency).
You say so but I guess it’s hard to convince a lot of people who recognize it’s folly to try to fix a social/human problem with a technological solution.
Git is a merkle-tree based system like a blockchain. People have no problem with the tech. They’re just tired of the hype train.
How do you see memes like this?
Because I see them as lame and sad, especially since we have been seeing them for 10+ years now and they are still the same.
But apparently you think blockchain has reasonable uses.
No, it’s shitting on blockchain too. The only options are “don’t use blockchain” and “stop making crypto” which is misguided. I agree with the sentiment about crypto, not about blockchain
I think he is most certainly right. People that think otherwise should go back to their bar order another one and keep ranting about it to their half dead drunkard friends.
I love how you can’t provide even a single example of useful Blockchain functionality. Doesn’t mean it *doesn’t exist, but says something… And no, “banking” and “internal ledgers” is not detailed enough to be a sufficient example.
I linked you to my other comment where I provide FIVE links to the thing you said I “can’t provide”. I had literally already provided it elsewhere. So that’s where I sent you. Excuse me for not retyping the same thing for every single person.
I don’t owe you my time. I provided a one-click path to what you asked for but you couldn’t even be assed to ponder why I linked you that comment.
i for one would have liked a media licensing system that operates agnostic of any centralized authority
for instance, irrefutable and independently verifiable proof that you own a valid software, music, or visual art license and are therefore immune to prosecution for piracy.
A registry of licenses like this could shield creators from copyright claims on social media applications such as youtube. Could also automate revenue sharing and royalties for artists whose works are used in derivative media so the people who actually perform the work get paid. Would be nice to cut the publisher middleman out. And there is absolutely no reason there has to be anything like a “proof of work” system burning down entire fucking rainforests’ worth of energy to verify every single gods damned transaction because this sort of system isn’t for trading shit, it’s strictly for proving a valid chain of custody between producers and consumers and you don’t need megawatt-hours to just fucking LOOK SOMETHING UP.
imagine if, for instance, fucking warner brothers couldn’t “takes backsies” content that they SOLD to end users through a distribution network; the license is yours, and anyone can look up the fact that the license was sold to the user id you happen to control.
imagine if, for instance, you buy a video game through a digital distributor like steam but then the store goes out of business and no longer exists to serve you a copy or recognize the sale, but on this massively distributed and decentralized database you can prove that you did indeed compensate the developers of that software and thereby legally acquire entitlement to access it in accordance with the end user license agreement.
imagine if ownership of stuff you bought fair and square can never be taken away from you
I feel like here you get to the NFT problem of having proof of ownership of something doesn’t mean much when that thing is being hosted on servers you don’t control
so if you have an entry with a licence for a steam game, and steam gets closed, you are out of luck
it’s that holding a license for a game entitles you to operating a copy of it regardless of where you bought it.
it’s the whole basis for why emulation and ROM images were LEGAL
because you had a right to retain a backup of the software you own through the license.
with an independent licensing infrastructure, if GoG closes you can take your licenses with you, download the game from anywhere, and if anyone tries to charge you for stealing it, you can just present your license: “See, i bought it fair and square.”
if i bought a dryer from SEARS, it didn’t stop being mine when SEARS closed.
NFT’s don’t show you have proof of ownership of anything other than the NFT. Think of all the people who got their metamask account hacked and lost all their apes with zero recourse.
Why would anyone want anything required for daily life attached to something so insecure and irreversible as that?
imagine if, for instance, you buy a video game through a digital distributor like steam but then the store goes out of business and no longer exists to serve you a copy or recognize the sale, but on this massively distributed and decentralized database you can prove that you did indeed compensate the developers of that software and thereby legally acquire entitlement to access it in accordance with the end user license agreement.
What you’re arguing for is forcing the distributor to distribute in perpetuity, which has nothing to do with how you show ownership of your license.
Right now, I can show steam I’ve purchased, say Delistopolis, and they will agree I am indeed perfectly allowed to have and play it. But they are not required to provide me with a copy.
Only the keys need to be stored cryptographically, really, because the game files themselves are nigh inevitably available on torrenting networks. it’s inevitable that people are going to rip backups of all game files for the delicious delights of datamining and as long as enough of them will seed them (which shouldn’t be a problem as long as there’s any INTEREST in a game existing…) that availability never arises as an issue. And if it’s not popular enough to put there, it’ll probably end up on The Internet Archive.
Would be nice if there were an infrastructural ‘backup of last resort’ such as the library of congress, which is something the LoC already does for other audiovisual media. It’d just be nice if that service were extended to software.
So more of a blockchain KMS then? I don’t see how you could construct such a thing.
The requirements of allowing a publisher control of their game for some time (for example, allowing them to retract some keys when violating the EULA, but not all keys when “unpublishing” a game), but also allowing people to resell keys, which are somehow publically accesible but only for the legit owner, and the owner has to allow third-party acces without publically sharing a private key.
This is the age-old identity problem with blockchain. It’s all well and good that Bob’s name is written on a smart contract, but that doesn’t remove the issue with how to identify Bob.
All such copyright licenses are rooted in local jurisdictional law, so your country’s copyright office should be the authority because anything else means the courts can tell you that your on-chain transactions are invalid
Well, if those licenses are entries on the blockchain, they could be transferred on the blockchain. You could sell your game used when you’re bored of playing it. You can’t play it after you sell it but someone else can. Publishers hate resale markets though, when people buy used games they don’t make any money. So they’ll probably never go for this.
As people said, you can backup your private keys to a flash drive. You can put them in a safe deposit box. You can give them to your lawyer or other fiduciary with a legal responsibility to act in your best interests (who also knows how to protect digital property if they keep digital copy). You could write it with lemon juice onto the back of the Declaration of Independence at the National Archives. You could have a laser thingie that displays it on a wall surgically implanted into your arm. Pretty much all the ways people protect gold or cash in the real world you can do with a piece of paper with your private key.
You can lose access to regular accounts as easily as to a blockchain. In fact, losing database of your password manager is even worse, because even if you have backups, they’re not going to be complete.
With a blockchain all you have to worry is your private key. And you can write it down on a piece of paper, if you want, and put it away in a safe or a bank vault or something. Then, if you use it to restore your access years later, nothing will be lost.
“There are 2 types of people in the world: those who make backups, and those who don’t make backups yet.”
Not really. You backup you keys like a normal human. Or create any of those new account abstraction keys that are tied to another account, or anything else.
Not really. You backup you keys like a normal human. Or create any of those new account abstraction keys that are tied to another account, or anything else.
OK but there are actually great uses for blockchain that are completely disconnected from anything you typically see
For example, banks may begin using blockchain for maintaining their internal ledgers. It will help solve a ton of issues around reconciling the transactions from all over the globe
Blockchain has reasonable uses. Really good ones. Crypto and nft bros just completely ruined the image of it
EDIT: I love all the comments demonstrating how little people understand about blockchain. Bitcoin was not the first blockchain, nor is its design the only type of blockchain. Assuming that all blockchain looks like the crypto/nft paradigm is just showing your ignorance.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/j5nzx4/what-was-the-first-blockchain
Blockchain is only potentially useful if there’s no single entity that can be trusted. If banks can’t even trust themselves to manage their own internal ledgers, they have much bigger problems to deal with.
Trustless systems aren’t a bad thing that has to step in when the good thing fails. Trustless systems are inherently better because you don’t have to trust a bank (or anyone for that matter).
Additionally, ledgers can be gamed/corrupted/falsified. This is significantly more complex (bordering on impossible) on the blockchain.
https://youtu.be/bBC-nXj3Ng4
There are often easier, more reliable, and far cheaper ways to achieve the same things without using a blockchain. Some of the principles are even used in normal web browsing to ensure secure untampered connections.
Blockchain just solves a subproblem that only arises when there’s no appointed central entity.
Blockchains aren’t hard, unreliable or expensive
Cryptocurrency Ledgers can be corrupted?
I was hedging against a particularly snarky commenter showing up. You can do a 51% attack and theoretically corrupt it. In practice, that’s much more difficult.
You dont need 51% attack to corrupt a ledger. Just enter incorrect info and the ledger is wrong. Not a damn thing a blockchain can do about that. Same issue is with any trustless system where you have to trust someone to input the correct info/do the agreed thing/ship the ordered physical item.
The concept behind cryptocurrency is that the ledger is the info, because you’re right, a half-assed blockchain ledger used for external (e.g. cash) transactions doesn’t really solve the root problem. Proof of work is fucking stupid though, and it has (rightfully) ruined the perception of blockchain technology among those who can see past their own crypto wallet.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/bBC-nXj3Ng4
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
guys they are putting micro chips in the cheese and using block chains to track the micro chips https://www.businessinsider.com/edible-microchips-on-parmigiano-reggiano-used-to-fight-counterfeiters-2023-8
That’s the thing, they shouldn’t trust a single source of assumed truth. If the single source is tampered with, there’s nothing to compare to.
Removing the need to trust a single entity is just a great security feature
You can implement public or semi public ledgers without Blockchain. That’s what banks are doing already by sending huge CSV files internally and externally. Blockchain is not a technology of zero trust. It’s close to the opposite. You trust a few peers and blindly trust everyone they trust. That way you trust a network that you know nothing about and if the network decides on a common truth that you are convinced is incorrect, there is nothing you can do about it. The consensus always wins and there is no single entity to complain to and get it fixed. This is great for making sure that many actors need to be bad actors in order to have the whole system fail. It’s bad if you don’t trust anyone and want to make sure that your standards are always observed. From a technology standpoint I love the concept of Blockchain. But use cases that are not forced are few and far apart. Too few for the amount of hype it receives.
If the bank can’t even trust themselves then there’s no point in having the bank at all.
You really don’t get it? Trust is a problem. Anyone, or anything, can and will fail or be compromised.
so I put my trust in software instead. And by extension its developers. You’re saying of all people, we should trust some programmers above all else. You know, the “move fast and break things” guys.
As a programmer myself, this thought is both terrifying and hilarious.
As a fellow programmer: what kind of doomer take is this? I don’t have any opinion on the efficacy of blockchain technology, but all of us put an immeasurable amount of trust in software every single day. And it’s not like current banking practices are different in this regard, either: blockchain tech requires faith in the software implementation, while contemporary banking requires faith in banks and the software they use (including a borderline unmaintainable COBOL stack, from what I’ve heard).
because problems in the bank’s software are the bank’s responsibility. If they lose my money, it’s their responsibility to get it back. Cryptocurrencies are the exact opposite, by design. If you’re fucked, you’ee fucked. unless of course half the participants decide to fork, half don’t and you end up with two “currencies” out of thin air.
Banks and firms that uses their services are audited thoug. It is not blind trust. And regadress the tech used there would sitll be audits.
Agreed, audits are beneficial in virtually every situation. I just think that, of all the well-formed arguments to be made against cryptocurrencies (especially PoW coins), the fact that it is software isn’t one of them. In my opinion, fueling distrust of software in general is ill-advised.
Blockchains is a tool for moving trust around in a decentralized network, not a tool for removing it.
Security starts with trust.
Blockchain has been around as a technology for nearly two decades. If financial institutions thought it could help them you can bet they would be all-in on it by now. As it is, blockchain has no significant advantages over traditional financial ledger systems, so what incentive is there for them to use it.
It’s not something new or cutting edge any more, just waiting for a bright spark to discover the technology and put it to use.
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2024/03/12/goldman-sachs-bny-mellon-and-others-test-enterprise-blockchain-for-tokenized-assets/
Well, why would banks replace the system which allows them to charge fees for every other interaction with their services? A blockain solution would allow multiple different banks (and, possibly, even regular people) to access the data with no middlemen, and, therefore, no fees. Or, well, no fees that directly end up in the bank’s pockets as profit, that is.
Getting rid of that is bad for business. So, unless something magical happens and the EU, for example, pass a law requiring the banks to switch to a more de-centralized, more fair system, it’s not going to happen.
That’s kind of my point. Blockchain evangelists have been banging the drum for many years saying “This is a perfect fit for the financial industry. Why won’t fintech wake up and recognise that?”
When in fact fintech took a long, hard look at blockchain a long time ago and decided “nope, there’s nothing here that would tempt us” outside of a few very niche applications.
Yeah I imagine they probably would.
Maybe do a simple Google search next time? They ARE using it. It’s getting a ton of investment from them.
Also it’s over three decades. Bitcoin wasn’t the first. They just popularized a specific type of blockchain
Rather than resorting to that age-old cry of the cult member “do your own research!” can I respectfully suggest that if you’re aiming to change somebody’s mind, the onus is on you to provide the evidence, not on them. By all means take hours out of your day to search google and compile a list of things that you think will convince me. Me, personally, I have better things to do with my life.
I didn’t ask them to do their own research. I asked that, if they are skeptical of a claim I made, either do a simple Google search to check if it’s very easily verifiable, or ask me directly instead of immediately saying “you’re wrong because I would have heard of it”
Like, I’m happy to provide citations when requested, but lemmy isn’t a scientific journal where I’m expected to provide every source for my information up front
How is the blockchain different from a read only ( write only once to be specific) DB that follows ACID?
Blockchains add cryptographic signing and limit actions based on those signatures.
Big words that mean nothing
To you maybe. Maybe other lemmings reading this understand them.
They mean nothing in the sense its nothing you cant do with DBs, so like I said, big words that mean nothing
Cryptography - means that only you can make changes. No database administrator. No hacker. No-one but you.
Limited actions - means the changes you make must follow rules that cannot be altered by anyone.
Both impossible to implement on a normal DB, which is why bitcoin was revolutionary.
thats not what cryptography means, and is a huge fucking downside especially for banking which us centrally controlled
It’s called triggers, user roles etc, once again you dont want this to be unalterabale for banking because what if regulations change…
Only thing bitcoin revolutionized was the speed with which scammers can dupe people out of their money.
You didn’t even know what “those big words” meant a second ago.
Banking doesn’t need to be centrally controlled. It only has been for the past few hundred years.
Why pay and trust a 3rd party control those?
You update the smart contracts
Almost true. Scams are not the only thing revolutionized.
They were saying what it meant in this context
Meaning, in a DB, the admin could change roles and modify anything.
Database triggers can have bugs, and we generally don’t let third parties log into the database directly because it’s a huge attack surface
In blockchain, without a key you’re cryptographically locked out. The only way around that is if the network as a whole changes their code to a version that allows something like that
It’s just a ledger where every entry is signed by a private key. That’s a fantastic structure for certain specific use cases…
How can you trust that the database is really append only? Blockchain provides a way to verify the state of the database and the ordering of the transactions. Beyond that, not much benefit to be had. However, for certain situations, that is a very big benefit!
Name fucking one situation
Sure! So some students of mine were working on a multiplayer video game that was started by a different group of students the previous semester. The first group of students made a design choice that, to over-simplify, basically tracked achievements and milestones on the client side and then synchronized those achievements to the server. Players could cheat the system by sending malicious packets of achievements to the server. Some achievements could only be completed by a single person in the game, so this was a big problem for the 2nd group of students to overcome. Faced with the choice of rearchitecting the game to be more authoritative on the server and less resilient to frequent disconnections, which affected some aspects of the game, or creating a logical and verifiable sequence of in-game events on the server side. The students went with the latter, and implemented a Lamport clock using a blockchain to verify the authenticity of the events, and prevent a rogue student from updating the game later to give themself a bonus. Basically, along with needing an authoritative sequence of events that is protected from user interference, it also needed to be protected from developer interference.
It was kinda similar to that situation a few years back of the EVE online developers playing the game and giving their guild members certain bonuses and special in-game items. The solution there was to fire the malicious developers, but I can’t exactly fire an entire class of students from an educational project.
EDIT: What seems to be the problem here? I was asked to name a situation where a blockchain would be useful and I did? It’s a computer data structure, there are pros and cons that are context dependent like any other data structure. It I so weird to me to receive downvotes because of the politics surrounding a data structure.
To your edit; it was a great example, but if you say anything positive about blockchain (or Apple, or capitalism, etc) you’ll likely be heavily downvoted on Lemmy.
Yeah, I think that seems to be the case here. It just feels so weird to me to have a politicized data structure.
“Remember kids, only coke-fiends and meth-heads use Binomial Heaps.”
Ha!
But yeah, like others have said in this post, it had a bad light cast on it due to the jpg and gif NFTs. Folks started to realize: “wait… this token just contains a link to a web server hosting a jpg file??”
Well, yes. But also the rights.
“The heck you mean ‘the rights’??”
I mean, your Drunk Monkey in Teal Color Theme artwork is yours to use, you’ve purchased the license in the form of an NFT.
“But it’s just a link that anyone could just copy!”
Well, that would be stealing.
So NFTs in that regard are like any movie or TV show, or video game you rent or purchase. That utility may or may not seem to have any value to any one person, but it is a utility, and a pretty cool one if you ask me. But the usage, its implementation, is what matters. Whatever that usage requirement is for the individual or business, blockchain will do it well. Even if it is used to license junk.
Replication and verifiable timestamps, which you can add to regular databases too BTW
It’s distributed so no single entity can take it down. Among many other possible benefits depending on architecture and infrastructure.
It’s far more complex than coins and NFTs. Blockchain is like a new internet. Coins and NFTs are like those shitty GIFs you used to see everywhere. Evocative of old internet, but not the internet itself.
Distributed databases have existed for decades. It’s how large healthcare systems maintain electronic health records for their patients across dozens of hospitals in real time.
How is that useful in a bank ledger?
Simple, it’s not. If it were, they’d have been using them for decades (blockchains were invented in the 70s).
The consensus algorithm, which is not the blockchain itself, was invented later. But banks don’t need to reach concensus with themselves. They all maintain their own data, and heavily guard it. So the only bad actor they could have is themselves. And they banks all keep watch each other.
Preaching to the choir here.
This isn’t true: there are not-distributed blockchains.
The definition of a blockchain is a ledger where every entry is cryptographically signed with a hash of the current entry plus a previous entry. There’s no requirement that this be at all distributed. In fact, QLDB uses a non-distributed blockchain as its audit log.
Blockchain are often used in distributed systems because of the verifiability of the records; its a way of providing security of history in a fundamentally insecure environment. But there’s no requirement that they be distributed, and they add value in non-distributed environments as well - in any case you want to be able to review a history of changes and know that someone hasn’t been cooking the books, for instance.
I’ll give a real-world example. One place I worked we had databases that had data constantly streaming in from many different sources. Something that would frequently happen would be some data issue that would break applications; often, this was bad data from sources outside of our control. Ops*, who’s only priority was to get the applications back up and running, would often track down and directly modify records and fix the data. The issue was that some time later, sometime days later, a customer would call and complain about data being incorrect. By then, it was impossible to figure out what had happened: did we get the wrong data from the source? Did one of the import processes mangle the data? Did someone poke around in the database and change the data? We had no way of telling, and investigations would take many hours, often from several senior people, who would frequently in the end have to shrug and say, “we don’t know.” There were lots of things that could have improved this, with varying levels of success, but a global audit log would have been the first step. A verifiable audit log would have been better, because often it’d come down to us being convinced the data a third party was giving us was bad, and it became an our word vs. their word since we shared the same client. If we’d had a blockchain layer through which every transaction was recorded, we could have rolled back in time and figure out exactly how a record came to be what it was and been able to prove it to the client.
Blockchains are awesome. People who say otherwise have their heads up their asses, and are unable to differentiate between blockchain the technology, and the sometimes questionable uses they’re put to. Iron is used to make guns and bombs; that doesn’t make iron bad.
Edit clarification
Thank you for being in this thread. I felt like I was taking crazy pills with all these other replies. So many people think bitcoin was the first blockchain. And that the paradigm used by crypto is the only type of blockchain there is.
I will never forgive tech bros for making blockchain a buzzword tied exclusively to crypto and NFTs. The amount of lost potential is infuriating
It’s become one of my pet peeves.
I have a conspiracy theory that a lot of the anti-cryptocoin stuff that gets posted is an organized disinformation campaign run by some governments and central banks who are particularly threatened by crypto, and that it extends to bad-mouthing any technology related to cryptocoins. I also believe that there are a fair number of secondary internet users who read “crypto bad” and have picked up the messaging because (a) they’re kinda pissed they didn’t get in on the ground floor, (b) they lost money playing in the markets, © because, whether they’re self-aware enough to know it or not, people love a good mob mentality, and/or_ © because crypto farms really are shitty wastes of resources and are easily villified. I guarantee, however, that not a single one of those people could describe - in even then most general terms - how a blockchain works. Not even at a programmer level, although the programmers who do this are the worst, because they should know better. And this is what infuriates me: “Blockchain is bad!” “Why?” “Because I read it on the interwebs that it causes global warming and is a pyramid scheme!”
Pet peeve.
What do you have against bombs?!
Very interesting perspective, thanks :)
Why would you want the computational power of a bank system have anything to do with whether it’s ledger is correct?
Banks/hackers can manipulate data if they want to. Manipulating data on blockchains is way waaaaay harder.
Using a blockchain to maintain their internal ledgers means they have complete control over that blockchain, so they can manipulate it all they want. Blockchains aren’t magic.
Oh, didn’t see the “internal”. Yea, that’s stupid then.
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Who are “they” in the above message?
If you trust all your employees then an internal blockchain is useless, but do banks really totally trust their employees?
A blockchain won’t solve incorrect transaction information any more than an audit log in this case. This is an entirely internal process controlled by the bank and access would be restricted, so they couldn’t just edit audit logs. How do you think a blockchain would be used to improve this?
The actions that an employee could perform would be limited by their private key’s abilities. Blockchain can be preventative. It’s not only for retrospective analysis.
The actions that an employee could perform in any database would be limited by their account permissions. Blockchain doesn’t change this. I pointed out a retrospective mechanism because a completely internal blockchain wouldn’t prevent tampering either.
You end up with a very complex database account management.
I agree in general. Fully internal databases should not be blockchains.
But if external access is required at any point then there may be a blockchain use case.
Yeah let’s use the computing power of an entire country to pay for a small coffee.
While that is an inherent component of how proof-of-work cryptos work, and utterly stupid, it’s not an inherent part of how to do blockchains.
You can have a blockchain without consuming stupid amounts of energy.
Yeah it’s called a database…
There aren’t a lot of distributed databases with no single owner and all writes are signed.
Yeah, but not having an owner is actually a fucking terrible thing for a banking system, how do you not grasp this?
No owner is great for a banking system. It stops the owner printing money whenever they feel like it.
Bruh
I do grasp it.
I don’t really know what situation it makes sense for. It seems like a tool for cases where nobody can agree who should own the records of something so now everyone should.
exactly, you have others methods of proof-of-work
you’ve just demonstrated your lack of depth of understanding of blockchains. congratulations, your opinion was correct about 15 years ago. the technology has moved on
and the “solutions” are all objectively worse security wise. And by thinking blockchains need proof of anything, you too misunderstand what a blockchain even is. Proof of whatever is needed by the concensus algorithm, not the blockchain.
no; they all have trade-offs and that’s different… you can have trust less proof amongst semi-trusted parties like a consortium of banks: they don’t entirely trust each other, but trust each other enough to keep an eye on the other members of the consortium
there are plenty of situations like this that are non-public
they are objectively, mathematically weaker.
Joining ethereum now implies trusting a complete stranger to get you up to speed. It is objectively subjective.
i wasn’t talking about ethereum, and i don’t think anyone was saying they don’t have TRADE OFFS. in the world of consensus protocols, there are many different trade offs that build a network that suits your needs
however the consensus protocol has little to do with how mathematically secure a network is: the security of the consensus protocol comes down to a lot of complex things
it also has nothing to do with how you bootstrap a node
these things are all different, albeit interconnected things
the consensus algorithm is the only thing that contributes to the network’s security. That, and because it’s trying to solve an impossible problem, it also needs the psychological element exploiting humans’ greed (and therefore want to hoard currency).
You say so but I guess it’s hard to convince a lot of people who recognize it’s folly to try to fix a social/human problem with a technological solution.
Git is a merkle-tree based system like a blockchain. People have no problem with the tech. They’re just tired of the hype train.
How do you see memes like this? Because I see them as lame and sad, especially since we have been seeing them for 10+ years now and they are still the same. But apparently you think blockchain has reasonable uses.
Misguided
Only misguided?
I mean usually they are accompanied by false information and references to stuff like “crypto bros”, “pyramid schemes”,…
You said “memes like this”. This one I see as misguided. Ones that shit on crypto and nft I generally agree with.
This one is shitting on crypto.
No, it’s shitting on blockchain too. The only options are “don’t use blockchain” and “stop making crypto” which is misguided. I agree with the sentiment about crypto, not about blockchain
There is no blockchain without crypto.
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This is false. Bitcoin was the first modern and well known implementation of blockchain but it was not the first.
The principles and methodologies behind blockchain have been slowly building for over 30 years
https://www.vice.com/en/article/j5nzx4/what-was-the-first-blockchain
Damn! You had my up vote until that last sentence.
Why? He used the same exact words?
Because I agree with everything except the last sentence. Even after a decade the thinks the block chain has no uses.
He literally said he thinks it has uses.
I think he is most certainly right. People that think otherwise should go back to their bar order another one and keep ranting about it to their half dead drunkard friends.
No, he said “you [meaning in contrast to himself] think it has uses”
No. That’s what I said and did not mean it like that.
I love how you can’t provide even a single example of useful Blockchain functionality. Doesn’t mean it *doesn’t exist, but says something… And no, “banking” and “internal ledgers” is not detailed enough to be a sufficient example.
How about Git?
Try again
You just… linked your own comment. I mean, most of us are nerds, but can you just… use language? What benefit does it provide?
I linked you to my other comment where I provide FIVE links to the thing you said I “can’t provide”. I had literally already provided it elsewhere. So that’s where I sent you. Excuse me for not retyping the same thing for every single person.
I don’t owe you my time. I provided a one-click path to what you asked for but you couldn’t even be assed to ponder why I linked you that comment.
Done with you now.
blockchains do not do jack shit with reconciliating records.
Walmart seems to have had success here, and logistics is their whole thing.
https://hbr.org/2022/01/how-walmart-canada-uses-blockchain-to-solve-supply-chain-challenges
Please go and attempt understanding the thing you are talking about before talking about it.
i for one would have liked a media licensing system that operates agnostic of any centralized authority
for instance, irrefutable and independently verifiable proof that you own a valid software, music, or visual art license and are therefore immune to prosecution for piracy.
A registry of licenses like this could shield creators from copyright claims on social media applications such as youtube. Could also automate revenue sharing and royalties for artists whose works are used in derivative media so the people who actually perform the work get paid. Would be nice to cut the publisher middleman out. And there is absolutely no reason there has to be anything like a “proof of work” system burning down entire fucking rainforests’ worth of energy to verify every single gods damned transaction because this sort of system isn’t for trading shit, it’s strictly for proving a valid chain of custody between producers and consumers and you don’t need megawatt-hours to just fucking LOOK SOMETHING UP.
imagine if, for instance, fucking warner brothers couldn’t “takes backsies” content that they SOLD to end users through a distribution network; the license is yours, and anyone can look up the fact that the license was sold to the user id you happen to control.
imagine if, for instance, you buy a video game through a digital distributor like steam but then the store goes out of business and no longer exists to serve you a copy or recognize the sale, but on this massively distributed and decentralized database you can prove that you did indeed compensate the developers of that software and thereby legally acquire entitlement to access it in accordance with the end user license agreement.
imagine if ownership of stuff you bought fair and square can never be taken away from you
THAT’S what we could have had
instead of this fucking bullshit.
I feel like here you get to the NFT problem of having proof of ownership of something doesn’t mean much when that thing is being hosted on servers you don’t control
so if you have an entry with a licence for a steam game, and steam gets closed, you are out of luck
it’s that holding a license for a game entitles you to operating a copy of it regardless of where you bought it.
it’s the whole basis for why emulation and ROM images were LEGAL
because you had a right to retain a backup of the software you own through the license.
with an independent licensing infrastructure, if GoG closes you can take your licenses with you, download the game from anywhere, and if anyone tries to charge you for stealing it, you can just present your license: “See, i bought it fair and square.”
if i bought a dryer from SEARS, it didn’t stop being mine when SEARS closed.
NFT’s don’t show you have proof of ownership of anything other than the NFT. Think of all the people who got their metamask account hacked and lost all their apes with zero recourse.
Why would anyone want anything required for daily life attached to something so insecure and irreversible as that?
It’s like if losing your wallet automatically burns down your house. Sounds amazing, let’s do it!
What you’re arguing for is forcing the distributor to distribute in perpetuity, which has nothing to do with how you show ownership of your license.
Right now, I can show steam I’ve purchased, say Delistopolis, and they will agree I am indeed perfectly allowed to have and play it. But they are not required to provide me with a copy.
A blockchain system will not solve this.
no. you’re putting words in my mouth. if the distributor wants to stop distributing they can.
they can take down their servers, they can even cease to be, but it would no longer affect the availability of product they sold.
Then I don’t think I understand you. Are you suggesting we put millions of full games on a bloxkchain?
Only the keys need to be stored cryptographically, really, because the game files themselves are nigh inevitably available on torrenting networks. it’s inevitable that people are going to rip backups of all game files for the delicious delights of datamining and as long as enough of them will seed them (which shouldn’t be a problem as long as there’s any INTEREST in a game existing…) that availability never arises as an issue. And if it’s not popular enough to put there, it’ll probably end up on The Internet Archive.
Would be nice if there were an infrastructural ‘backup of last resort’ such as the library of congress, which is something the LoC already does for other audiovisual media. It’d just be nice if that service were extended to software.
So more of a blockchain KMS then? I don’t see how you could construct such a thing.
The requirements of allowing a publisher control of their game for some time (for example, allowing them to retract some keys when violating the EULA, but not all keys when “unpublishing” a game), but also allowing people to resell keys, which are somehow publically accesible but only for the legit owner, and the owner has to allow third-party acces without publically sharing a private key.
This is the age-old identity problem with blockchain. It’s all well and good that Bob’s name is written on a smart contract, but that doesn’t remove the issue with how to identify Bob.
All such copyright licenses are rooted in local jurisdictional law, so your country’s copyright office should be the authority because anything else means the courts can tell you that your on-chain transactions are invalid
Well, if those licenses are entries on the blockchain, they could be transferred on the blockchain. You could sell your game used when you’re bored of playing it. You can’t play it after you sell it but someone else can. Publishers hate resale markets though, when people buy used games they don’t make any money. So they’ll probably never go for this.
yeah on top of that, if your computer breaks or something now you lost all of your keys.
say goodbye to whatever you own on the blockchain when the keys are gone. poof!
this is the biggest problem with any scheme tying private keys (digital) to anything in the real world.
Once my mom threw out all the cases for my computer games and put all the disks into a cd binder to save room.
It was devastating.
She wanted you to hear some of her favorite chiptunes but she didn’t know how
I don’t know what this means
Serial key generators would play chiptunes in the background - give a listen!
Now I regret not having this experience
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
listen
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
As people said, you can backup your private keys to a flash drive. You can put them in a safe deposit box. You can give them to your lawyer or other fiduciary with a legal responsibility to act in your best interests (who also knows how to protect digital property if they keep digital copy). You could write it with lemon juice onto the back of the Declaration of Independence at the National Archives. You could have a laser thingie that displays it on a wall surgically implanted into your arm. Pretty much all the ways people protect gold or cash in the real world you can do with a piece of paper with your private key.
You can lose access to regular accounts as easily as to a blockchain. In fact, losing database of your password manager is even worse, because even if you have backups, they’re not going to be complete.
With a blockchain all you have to worry is your private key. And you can write it down on a piece of paper, if you want, and put it away in a safe or a bank vault or something. Then, if you use it to restore your access years later, nothing will be lost.
“There are 2 types of people in the world: those who make backups, and those who don’t make backups yet.”
Not really. You backup you keys like a normal human. Or create any of those new account abstraction keys that are tied to another account, or anything else.
Not really. You backup you keys like a normal human. Or create any of those new account abstraction keys that are tied to another account, or anything else.
With smart contracts on blockchain you can do exactly that. Everyone involved in the process can ensure they get their cut.