The issue here is actually pretty easy to grok. Crypto is a new market, so there is a historical amount of information asymmetry between consumers and producers. This brings a lot of scammers to the space. A lot of crypto is definitely bullshit, but there are some use-cases that I admire that aren’t just gambling on Shit coins.
That's certainly not true. P2P file transfer systems have long provided cryptographic guarantees that the file you receive hasn't been modified by anyone, even though you're fetching it from multiple untrusted sources simultaneously.
Merkle trees have made this more efficient and offered maybe more guarantees, but being able to have files be transferred in a distributed fashion but impervious to corruption is not a new invention.
The one thing cryptocurrencies have not figured out how to solve is the root problem of all PKI systems, which is establishing trust of identity.
> How would I prove that a file existed without a middlemen?
How are you defining "middleman"? You can do this with any basic commitment scheme: take a cryptographically secure hash of your file and publish it somewhere that's either (1) trivially copyable, or (2) difficult to tamper with. Alternatively, you could do an online scheme where someone asks you for your proof and you present them with your hash after being challenged. That's a gross oversimplification, but it's the general idea.
(In general, "prove that a file existed" is not something that you often want to do in the real world. What is it you're actually trying to accomplish?)
I work with ALOT of documents that have a deadline / need to be finished at a certain time.
The blockchain helps me to proof mathematical in front of a curt that the file already existed at a given date. It is the most secure way that I know.
A simple example of what I need without a middlemen.
A student writes a thesis. The last time he is allowed to modify the file is friday evening. He can now send the file via mail or deliver in person to prove that the thesis was finished by then. However he then trusts either the mail server administration or the person at the front desk.
This is fine in most cases and works like this since decades.
I however do not want to trust a person or company. I do not want ANY possible explanation how I could have archived it in a different way.
It’s accepted in court that a simple email showing the file as an attachment is acceptable.
Certainly blockchains are more trustworthy, but acceptableness in court is a pretty low bar. I mean having something signed on paper in front of a notary is acceptable.
What cases are you involved with where a notary isn’t acceptable? Or a non-blockchain digital signature?
I’m involved in really high dollar amount contracts and we just use pki-based digital signatures with a time stamp. Of course the time stamp could be fraudulent, but so could the notary’s stamp. But its acceptable in court and stands up to litigation.
I also teach a class and would accept an email from the student as proof. To me that’s more reliable than me having to research some blockchain signature that I’m unfamiliar with.
These are hypothetical use cases and don’t solve a real problem. And they certainly don’t justify paying transaction fees as they are now. It’s cheaper to just pay DocuSign.
A good place to look for middleman that can be cut with blockchain is the exchange between two random people that a third party needs to trust.
The example with the email in the court is a bad example because it is not the court's job to prove whether or not an email is fraudulent. It is the opposing counsel. Non digital evidence works the same way. This is why you have expert witnesses to verify or invalidate some evidence.
A better example would be real estate transactions. It would be best for everyone involved to move real estate transactions to the blockchain. I want to know that John Doe is the real owner of a house when I pay him $500k for the house. The government handles this with paper and their databases now but it would be far more efficient to do this on the blockchain.
> The example with the email in the court is a bad example because it is not the court's job to prove whether or not an email is fraudulent.
But it’s good because it is acceptable, predictable, durable, and low cost. Blockchain is solving for a problem that doesn’t exist as there aren’t a ton of fraud cases in this area (accused nor proven). So perhaps there’s an argument for the new uses that would be possible without the risk of fraud but they aren’t brought up.
Blockchain is more expensive than PKI and digital signatures so why propose it over a simple government PKI issuer? If the goal is to be useful in courts then certainly a government issuer is better as it’s trusted.
In this case blockchain is inferior to just including PKI with every drivers license, passport, and government id.
> A better example would be real estate transactions. It would be best for everyone involved to move real estate transactions to the blockchain.
Not better for the consumer who has to pay more for this new feature.
This is already done by closing attorneys and title search companies. Forcing local counties in the US to provide APIs is much more effective than a blockchain because the county deed office is the legal authority. The issue isn’t trust, the issue is assess. In a world where counties aren’t the source of truth for deeds a blockchain would be nice, although having a single, National registrar would be better. But since you have to ask the county if John Doe is the real owner, blockchains don’t help with this. A simple free, http, unencrypted, rest api is needed.
As an engineer this bugs me because these problems are better solved with technologies other than blockchain.
You've run into a person here who has confused "a blockchain would fix this" with "better systems, standards and openness would fix this, the exact implementation doesn't matter so much".
I ran into one last week talking about concert tickets. Apparently we could fix the problems of ticketmaster dominance by using a blockchain. When I proposed that an API+DB system would do the job just as well, and we have an authority in the picture already (the venue operator) so distributed trust was overkill, I was told "good luck getting ticketmaster to use your API system".
Because apparently the data-structure and trust model now dictate how the market works, and if we just chant "blockchain" loud enough, that'll magically fix monopoly issues. It's very weird thinking.
I mean, sure, if we force ticket issuing, or the land registry or whatever onto a public blockchain solution, that would address some of the issues. But the improvement comes from the forcing, not the specific tech...
I’d love to see Tickmaster’s blockchain+NFT system for how horrible and anti-user it would be.
I agree with both points. For a while it seemed like small venues were using indie $1 ticket processing services that would basically just generate a QR code and keep everything cheap. But those seem to be going away as Ticketmaster just takes over and turns a $1 transaction into a $20 transaction.
If venues just used Shopify then they’d have their db+api solution. But I think vendors like being able to 1) reduce their work, 2) blame Ticketmaster for all fees, and 3) make more money.
For the same reason vendors don’t use api+db, I don’t see them using a blockchain.
Another reason is that blockchains are forever and I don’t see the value in a huge blockchain with mostly garbage data of tickets sold 50 years ago. This seems like a really unnecessary expense for something simple like temporal transactions that are meaningless after the event.
An api+db can be flushed out so the storage costs are very low.
I'm still not convinced blockchain is a good solution here. Why is a cryptographic signature by each party that they acknowledge the transfer insufficient?
About the only arguable place is maybe escrow but the marginal increase in cost of traditional escrow vs blockchain seems insignificant vs the magnitudes of monies being discussed. Additionally, if I make a mistake and send things to the wrong account, with escrow & traditional banking I probably can unwind that transaction. With blockchain, not so much.
to me a blockchain is very similar to a cryptographic signature used in a recursive manner, meaning that a new document which is based on the previous document history includes the signatures for all those documents and signs it all in order to prove that the chain has not been tampered with.
im not at all a blockchain proponent but i really see a usecase here. but then again i see even git as a blockchain so its not that it would be expensive or exciting to get it working. (Dubai reportedly uses blockchain for their property register)
this is actually a common attack vector in countries like Pakistan were someone falsifies a stamped court document that actually the current owner of a certain property is not valid because he bought it from someone who did not actually own the property. the rightful owner is therefor me. (called qabza in urdu)
Naive response here, but that particular use case seems solved by a central authority, where the school is the entity that (1) cares the most and (2) should other students or decentralised entities be involved in observing student progress?
Could you share you use-case and current method? I have no advice for you I'm just interested in how this is being used and who is providing said services.
Now we trust mining pools which can become monopolies instead... Everyone seems to not see the positive feedback loops somehow. It results in the same system in the end.
Summary for other people who might not know what this is:
Nicholas Weaver, Lecturer at UC Berkeley after 9 years of research in cryptocurrency, lectures on Cryptocurrency as part of CS161: Computer Security. He explains the history of the data structures, some implementation choices, then a bunch of obvious lies from Bitcoin hucksters debunked, security problems, more history/lies debunked, the fraud and bs, computational power, power consumption, blah blah, everything is there in one hour.
I think it could be a good thing to send to people so that they either come out of it knowing bitcoin is braindead or have to admit they're not capable of understanding it because they don't have the basic computer science knowledge :P
There’s a reason HN largely misses the innovation behind crypto, and it’s fairly simple. Bitcoin is not a technical innovation; Bitcoin’s value does not come from being an interesting data structure. Bitcoins value and genius is almost entirely economic in nature and hand waiving the (very simple) cryptography and computer science involved to analyze the economics is where the sophistication and avenue for critiques would come in.
Technical knowledge gives you a menial job of auditing when it comes to Bitcoin. If you don’t have the economic sophistication and approach when discussing Bitcoin it only proves you are ignorant to what’s relevant.
I can see that you didn't watch the video. More than half of it was about economics. No, the reason HN thinks shitcoins are a pyramid scheme is because it's trivially obvious that they are and people here aren't braindead.
"economic sophistication" This is just a baseless ad hominem and you have no knowledge about anyone's economic knowledge.
A bit hypocritical to complain about alleged hand-waving with hand-waving, no?
There are multiple, independent entities both maintaining and submitting to the logs. The short answer: CAs submit precertificates to the logs; the logs respond with signed certificate timestamps that are embedded within the ultimate certificate rendered to the user. User agents (i.e., browsers) cross-check against the logs using the SCTs. Third parties ("monitors") additionally watch the logs for suspicious events (unexpected issuances, unusual certificates being signed for, etc.)
For 30+ year olds who learned by cracking video games, used eMule/limewire and partipated in crypto CTF, crypto is still cryptography, but let's be honest, this usage is loosing.
Aging kinda sucks too, but alas it is biological reality.
"Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun" - Mao
The infrastructure required to support these schemes - networks, energy, hardware - are all firmly under the control of those who have a firmer grasp on political realities on planet Earth than 'crypto' enthusiasts.
Seriously hate to break these facts to you, but past/present/future reality is about systems of "authority", and not systems of "trust". An 'authority' gives you a digital ID, a social security card, a driver's license, etc. And this authority has political power and as to how it maintains its power, what Mao said.
[p.s. Let's grant that Unicorns are 'prettier' than generic horses. Fine. That does not alter the fact that unicorns are fictional. And no, sticking a paper mache horn colored in hashes on a horse does not make it a unicorn. (see 'scam', 'fraud', 'snake oil' for related matters.)]
The thing to keep in mind for crypto is that the inherent inefficiency leads to high transaction costs that tend to make it a less viable option for legal activities.
You can have virtual game worlds (like a MMORPG) that can't ever be turned off, by nobody. That means your items will last forever. 50 years from now, your sword will still be on your backpack. Can't say that for company-hosted MMORPGs like World of Warcraft, because these companies might go bankrupt, close servers, update items, etc. Not a cure-the-cancer colonize-mars hype level, of course, but it is still an interesting neat thing you can do with blockchains.
In 50 years who's running the servers that are required for the game.
It's not like the characters movement will be on the block chain. You're not spending eth every time you attack a mob. It's not like everyone else's computers are running the ai for mobs. Are all the cinematics on the blockchain?
How the hell do you use an item from one game in another. It's not like the functionality from game in another. Whats to stop someone from publishing their own super-OP sword to the block chain and just ruining any game that supports it.
This makes zero sense when you spend any thought on it.
I guess they meant that you can have a persistent and eternal database of the game state stored in a blockchain which everybody could host a game server with.
I guess you might be able to find a way to handle non-player actions but I think performance is going to be unresolvably terrible and scale quite limited.
over the internet. And I’m only being slightly facetious, these are serious industries. Bringing the coordination and scale of the internet to these activities is big business.
Super weird reading comments like this, when you're saying that being opposed to these industries is "morality policing":
- illegal drug trafficking/sales
- sex trafficking
- immigration trafficking
- child sexual abuse material sales
- contract killing
If being opposed to these industries makes me into the "morality police", then I think you're delusional. You could make the same argument for any crime; that all laws are "morality policing".
These industries destroy an enormous number of lives and we should be crushing the people who profit from them.
Smart contracts, DAOs, payments, self-sovereign identity, tokenization of real world assets, a few security use-cases, operating markets for prediction and asset-trade outside the control of external authorities (libertarian wet dream stuff), insurance and legal arbitration outside of the control of external authorities (more wet dreaming, but it’s happening), supply chain / provenance of assets…
All of these could probably be done using a database, but it’s more about the trust aspect than the mechanics of storing data.
Crypto will succeed because the rich among us want it to. Crypto will succeed because the corrupt among us want it to.
Crypto will succeed because the libertarians among us want it to.
Crypto will succeed because it makes exit a reality.
>Crypto will succeed because the rich...corrupt...liberarians want it to
Just because you want something to happen doesn't mean it will. Especially when you have to assume that we live in some fantasy world where nobody can be trusted and everything has to be done outside the influence of government (i.e. illegally) so we have to use a decentralized append-only database where nothing can be reversed because while you can trust nobody you also can trust people to not do decisions which need to be reversed.
>Crypto will succeed because it makes exit a reality
What does this even mean?
>Smart contracts, DAOs, payments, self-sovereign identity, tokenization of real world assets, a few security use-cases
these are all buzzwords or further tech that actually needs explaining as to what it's useful for (hint: it's nothing)
> Especially when you have to assume that we live in some fantasy world where nobody can be trusted
I think the value of crypto is that trust is not required to participate in the system and transact. You don't need to be second guessing every single person to benefit from this. It doesn't hurt to have a system that minimizes the consequences when trust is abused. It is a bit like the adage of wanting privacy even if you have nothing to hide. I might not want someone to have the option of stealing my money in a transaction, even if I don't think that they actually will.
Society will evolve towards being trustless as the moneyed-class pursue sovereign citizenship and shop for preferential territory on a global scale. They will need a secure way to trustlessly store and exchange funds. Cryptocurrency literally exists nearly entirely for this reason.
Thanks for the recommendation. Having skimmed the book, yes, it would be fantastic to give the material the same treatment Paul Verhoeven gave to Starship Troopers specifically in its reappraised interpretation.
Oh lord, a hybrid cross of "sovereign citizen" and "cryptocurrency geek". This is an unholy combination. No, none of your fantasies are correct or true in any way. Rich people don't need to escape government, they can influence it just fine.
Regulation of the cryptocurrency space, for example, such that huge amounts of funds can't be kept and moved anonymously and without consideration of (for instance) local taxes in these countries the rich shop between.
Those who do so must be held to the same standards as those already resident.
In the UK recently we have seen (yet another) backlash against this in the form of the outcry against the wife of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who was using "non-Domiciled" status to avoid masses of tax, despite having been resident in the country for multiple years.
I've no issue with people moving around, but moving around specifically to avoid contributing to the country you're actually residing in needs to be ended, and regulating cryptocurrency may have to be part of that.
You have a good heart, and I’m not saying I entirely disagree with you, but think of it this way:
If I’m paying taxes, I want it to go to something I care about. “Non-dom” status is blatant fraud for sure and I can’t entirely support that. But, shopping around for preferential territories is kind of what everyone is already doing, right? Imagine if your town made it illegal or expensive for you to move to a neighboring town? That’s the problem cryptocurrency is solving for the rich
If my town did that, and did that for everyone, I would be trying to change the system rather than raising my middle finger to others who live there and who don't have my resources to avoid the consequences.
Sure, it's solving a 'problem' for them, the 'problem' is that they have to follow the same rules as the little people. I can see why they might pursue such a thing, and as I say - it's incumbent upon the rest of us to stop that behaviour, and force them to contribute as others do.
I'm not aware of any serious supply chain or asset provenance efforts that rely on cryptocurrencies or DeFi. Lots of serious work uses Merkle constructions, but it would be a remarkable distortion to spin something like Certificate Transparency as a form of DeFi.
I’m aware of a use case where person/asset location is being determined using a distributively owned set of radio transmitters so that proof-of-location can be established without use of GPS.
Plenty of supply chain use cases already exist using private chains/ledgers — this will skew more toward public chains or hybrid solutions as demands for transparency amp up.
> I’m aware of a use case where person/asset location is being determined using a distributively owned set of radio transmitters so that proof-of-location can be established without use of GPS.
Yes, I am. I'm not aware of a threat model in which you can't trust the frequencies GPS is on but you can trust the frequencies that the FCC allows personal radio transmissions to be on. Seems like a lot of added complexity (and, notably, no legal recourse) for essentially the same failure mode.
Yes, GPS is not particularly secure. But I don't think that addresses the threat model above.
(In general, jamming is always a possibility with anything wireless. That is just not going to change. What might change is spoof resistance, which can be accomplished with schemes that are a lot simpler than anything DeFi can conjure. There's a decent amount of work on related schemes in the vehicle-to-vehicle communication space.)
Aren't those use cases mentioned for blockchain not crypto which seem the original article seem to be about
The so called rich people are trying to get more rich by investing in dog coin, cat coin and other crazy stuff instead of using the brains for greater good of humanity like CRISPR etc
Beyond issues of PoW and energy consumption, the bigger crime is the brain cycles wasted getting rich trying to find the next shitty coin and chest thumping that they are rich.
I know it can be hard for even the most equanimous individual but See crypto rich as a lottery which was earned without much hardwork. only thump your chest when it is put to use for greater good
It has only one use. To circumvent the global fiat currency system and artificially blow up the value of an arbitrary data point in a get rich quick scheme
> Smart contracts, DAOs, payments, self-sovereign identity, tokenization of real world assets, a few security use-cases, operating markets for prediction and asset-trade outside the control of external authorities (libertarian wet dream stuff), insurance and legal arbitration outside of the control of external authorities (more wet dreaming, but it’s happening), supply chain / provenance of assets…
None of this has proven any value in the real world.
Libertarian wet dreams are the other side of the coin of communists' wet dreams: utopian, not based on reality, not feasible in our current reality.
Legal arbitration is only possible under a legal system, that is under a government, that has a military and other enforcement powers. Some bits proving that a contract is valid won't change that...
As usual from the cryptospace, it's all techno-babble built on a house of cards that hasn't given anything to reality except an easier way to transfer funds without KYC, so basically it's a wet dream for criminal activities: scams, drug deals and so on.
Ring me up when all these wet dreams become a reality, they've been repeated ad nauseam for quite a few years already and nothing has really materialised.
Well said. This encapsulates a mature position most crypto skeptics will continue ignoring in favor of harping on tired arguments and cherry picked stories from centralized disasters which larp as open and decentralized.
