First of all, the hype of different blockchains has garnered attention. People who fall into the hype hasn’t learned about the financial literacy and the risks of investing into those.
When Axie Infinity became popular in my country, influencers have started promoting the game and so-called scholarship, which is to refer to a new player. Within a few months of playing, people lost money. Influencers haven’t spoken about the players losing money.
Remember, investment into such blockchains carries a risk. Those are called the digital Ponzi scheme by some people.
I thought the same as you about the exciting technological fundamentals before realising that it was unfortunately also very overblown.
Basically Blockchain technology is a solution in search of a problem. It was invented by someone who was convinced that decentralised currency would realise the ancap utopia. In order make it mainstream, people have been trying very hard to find better use cases and it turns out that you always end up concluding that the centralised approach is always better.
Proof of stake could make the thing not too environmentally damaging but it’s been years that major blockchains are saying they will implement it the next year. And again, the use cases would remain weak in the end
There are other cryptographic mechanisms at play, which are amazingly interesting but it is not going to revolutionise the internet since it’s already being used everywhere (for example asymmetrical keys).
I gave a number of real life use cases where it would solve real problems. There are so many more, especially “boring” ones like official documents, research, and medical records that would benefit from it tremendously. Blockchain does not equal crypto, but they complement each other really well.
What do you mean, Ethereum is pos.
I sort of understood the premise for chain-of-custody style use cases, but the other side of the coin is that these usually, or always, have a final arbiter of validity. Typically it’s a court system or an end purchaser who decides if the data is valid.
For example, an obvious use case is “record a will or deed on the blockchain, cryptographically signed and timestamped, to eliminate any disputes about ownership.” Except the same problem is trivially solved by a scheme where I could register my will/deed with the legal system itself, which is already pretty good at storing documents, and no need to cart around a big, heavy blockchain. Most of the problems in that space come from spotty, inconsistent record keeping (why aren’t these documents centrally registered in the US?) and more centralization solves them.
That’s why the fixation on decentralization is often a waste. I suspect the real appeal is fear of human institutions. A banking or legal system subject to laws and social norms might refuse to honour the documents you file, but soulless decentralized code will dance as it’s told to. For example, I could imagine wiring a smart contract triggered to irrevocably pay on the event of someone’s death, while writing “hitman fees” in the memo of a paper cheque probably raises a few eyebrows at the bank.
I guess I wasn’t up to date. That’s cool actually!
Interesting! I will do more research then.
I doubt this. With crypto, the ledger needs to be repeated multiple multiple times, it’s incredibly wasteful. There’s no improvement over a central server.
I think it’s super dangerous to take the developers’ word on their product. Probably it’s literally POS, but I’m not gonna believe all the hype without a disinterested confirmation.
If you believe a coin on the scale of Ethereum can lie about whether it’s proof of stake or work, you have no idea what you’re talking about.
Would be helpful to explain why you think deception is impossible in that context. Crypto and NFTs have a lot of con artistry going on and it’s reasonable for people to be skeptical.
It’s a fundamental part of the blockchain. In PoW you have to constantly run a mining program on your computer. In PoS you designate an amount to stake (by smart contract, if I’m not mistaken) and that’s it. How would the ethereum devs (or whoever else) run PoW without telling anyone? Who would pay the electricity bills?
People should be skeptical, but within reason. No investigation, no right to speak and all that.
You don’t sound very confident on the details. I do appreciate the explanation and I am not trying to be snarky or dismissive here. But if you are trying to hold people to a standard of no investigation, no right to speak, I would expect a little more than this for being the one who has done investigation.
Here is part of the quote:
The full thing can be found here for discussion: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-6/mswv6_11.htm
My takeaway as relevant to this is that it’s more about people who hypothesize and invent wildly from nothing and resist going among the masses to learn what they need and how it can be done rather than being about people who are skeptical in the year 2024 in encountering anonymous claims made to them about technology on the internet.
I’ve been in situations before of having investigated something quite a bit and facing stubbornness from people who haven’t. I can empathize on that level. It’s frustrating when you’ve done the work to learn and people act like their knowledge is equal to yours in spite of having spent little to no time on it at all. But I think there is a line we can cross where it’s going to sound like we’re saying “turn your brain off and take my word for it” instead of “let’s educate the masses so they are better informed.”
In this context, for example, how are we defining what “within reason” is for skepticism? Skepticism is more or less a kind of wariness. I’m having trouble working out where you’d draw the line for reasonable or unreasonable skepticism if we’re starting from the premise that the whole reason a person is being skeptical is because they lack the information to confidently draw a conclusion.
I don’t ask a detailed reply here, just consider it as food for thought and if you want to dig into it, you’re welcome to of course.
I will not spend hours of my time researching and writing a detailed reply for someone that thinks PoW can be masked as PoS. I know the fundamentals of software engineering and blockchains, and those are enough to explain why you should take the devs word about ethereum being PoS. How the staking mechanism works is irrelevant for this discussion.
Maybe I should’ve included the small explanation in my first reply, but given the other commenter’s attitude I doubt it would matter.
It’s capitalist apologia when I correct you on something? Give me a break.
I stand by my original tone, I stated that you have no idea what you’re talking about, which is true, without attacking you with names, expletives etc.
Defending a capitalist projects without evidence or justification is pretty much capitalist apologia.
I didn’t say that they lied about pos. I said it’s probably pos but we needn’t take them on they word about everything, and you’re continuing to insist I said that. And being “you have no idea what you’re talking about”.
You didn’t downright say that they lie about being PoS, but you said that a third party must confirm it, which is an equally bonkers statement. You can check my reply to the other commenter for a small explanation on why that’s true.
Asking for second party to confirm something is “equally bonkers”. Great job with the ableist slut. Comrade, you went to personal insults after the first comment.
How are you elucidating Satoshi’s intent? The Bitcoin white paper doesn’t say anything to indicate it would predicate a utopia. It puts forward decentralisation as meaningful. If you don’t think it is, chances are it’s because the existing centralised systems cater to you. That’s great, but there are millions in the global south for whom that isn’t the case. For whom those systems serve to restrain and restrict. For whom there is no reason for a “better use case” than simple and fair value transfer they don’t have access to. IMO, that empowerment alone justifies the means, by which I mean proof of work. As real value transfer always has a cost, whether or not it’s realised by the transactor at the time of the transaction. And under any non-anarchical system of government, someone is realising that cost. PoW doesn’t worsen that cost, it is more transparent about it.