Microblog Memes

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[–] endless_nameless@lemmy.world 12 points 7 months ago (1 child)

It's not 51% of the coins, it's 51% of the computing power on the network. Both of which are virtually impossible in the case of Bitcoin, though not entirely impossible. I just wouldn't consider a 51% attack even remotely a threat to the network compared to something like government crackdown

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[–] mattyroses@lemmy.today 12 points 7 months ago (5 children)

That's PoW. With PoS, it is coin ownership.

Which is much more distributed than computing power.

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[–] qwerty@discuss.tchncs.de 7 points 7 months ago

Immutable so long as no one party or group owns more than half of the coins on a given blockchain... then the ledger is whatever they say it is and it propagates down because they can manufacture their own "consensus".

No, the community controls the consensus through their nodes. A 51% attack only allows the attacker to perform:

A double spend attack - sending a transaction, receiving the goods and then reorganizing the chain to undo the transaction.
Censoring transactions.

In the event of a 51% attack the community can fork the chain - change the consensus and implement preventive measures like changing the mining algorithm, changing to PoW/PoS, banning all of the attackers coins, implementing a finality layer or a checkpoiting system etc.

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[–] Fedizen@lemmy.world 27 points 7 months ago

I swear to god people just copy paste whatever makes them feel good without any effort at understanding

Why do you think LLMs are so popular?

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[–] infinitesunrise@slrpnk.net 13 points 7 months ago (1 child)

This is a good comment that makes all good points. But I just wanna say let's stop saying "blockchain" singular and with no preceding article like we're tech CEOs and it's some immutable god. They're blockchains, plural, like any other data structure there can be more than one and there are. eg The blockchain of ethereum is distinct from the blockchain for bitcoin but they are both blockchains.

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[–] neatchee@piefed.social 9 points 7 months ago (1 child)

Valid point! But then how do you refer to the data structure/architecture/model concept? Sometimes we want a concise term (like bittorrent or ActivityPub) for the abstraction

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[–] infinitesunrise@slrpnk.net 7 points 7 months ago*

It's a novel data structure, we can refer to it like we do other data structures: Linked lists, hash tables, primitives. The branded implementation of these things is what we typically make singular: Bitcoin, ethereum, monero (bittorrent, activitypub...)

Bittorrent implements a torrent swarm, activitypub implements a federated social network.

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[–] Bleys@lemmy.world 9 points 7 months ago (10 children)

The only alternative to proof of work is proof of stake. And if the world ever ran on proof of stake crypto, it would make today’s wealth inequality look like a Marxist paradise.

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[–] mattyroses@lemmy.today 6 points 7 months ago (1 child)

There's other alternatives. But PoS does not reward just by ownership either.

Check out Gnosis, especially Circles, which is creating a UBI type thing.

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[–] Bleys@lemmy.world 4 points 7 months ago (1 child)

I just looked at Circles’ webpage, and respectfully, that is a Ponzi scheme.

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[–] mattyroses@lemmy.today 3 points 7 months ago

How exactly is it a Ponzi scheme, when you don't need to pay to get a share?

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[–] Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 5 points 7 months ago (3 children)

Why? If the rewards are fixed and independent of the amount staked then there is no issue.

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[–] explodicle@sh.itjust.works 2 points 7 months ago (5 children)

What matters is whether or not there's any significant profit - the reward being bigger than the cost. PoW minimizes this with difficulty adjustment flushing most profits down the toilet. PoS must always have a return competitive with other investments.

Profits should be low, or else it promotes inequality.

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[–] ayyy@sh.itjust.works 5 points 7 months ago (4 children)

Then why hasn’t a better blockchain based currency gained any popularity? If they don’t have critical mass then your distinction is meaningless. It turns out there is just zero real world need for an untrusted distributed ledger. Databases and governments solve the problem much better.

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[–] papertowels@mander.xyz 12 points 7 months ago* (4 children)

Questioning the technical virtues of an alternative product based on lack of critical mass adoption is pretty funny, when you consider we're on the fediverse. I know that doesn't defray your argument, but just an amusing observation.

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[–] neatchee@piefed.social 8 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Blockchain is not synonymous with crypto. Why are you bringing up crypto specifically? Crypto is garbage. But Blockchain is not crypto

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[–] fishos@lemmy.world 7 points 7 months ago (4 children)

People bring up crypto because it is the only use of blockchain that isn't worse than already established methods. And crypto is only "better" because it's unregulated and allowed a bunch of scams to be pulled.

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[–] ayyy@sh.itjust.works 3 points 7 months ago (1 child)

If [other applications of the blockchain, which has now existed for an extremely long time] don’t have critical mass then your distinction is meaningless.

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[–] neatchee@piefed.social 7 points 7 months ago (1 child)

Critical mass is not required for internal systems. Not all implementations of blockchain are intended for public use.

I'm really tired of this. Blockchain. Is not. Crypto.

Here's the research I did for everyone four months ago: https://lemmy.world/post/36683795/19677963

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[–] scratchee@feddit.uk 7 points 7 months ago (1 child)

I'm not convinced there's any internal use for blockchain. Internal implies under a specific umbrella, some overarching organisation, who can then be the central trusted server that makes blockchain unnecesary.

That said, non-public but open uses, such as tracking dealings between companies in markets with little trust and no single governments (the shipping example in your referenced comment) is indeed the thin slither of a plausible use-case.

Another limitation is that blockchain loses its benefits if anyone tries to design over the complexity of using it directly (using a ui that under the hood uses blockchain is no different to using a ui that talks to a central database, you're trusting the central ui provider, you need to (at least be able to) build your own interface to realise the benefits of blockchain.

That means blockchain basically will never benefit individuals, it can't. Sure, you could have multiple compatible uis shared around, but that's no different security-wise to multiple central banks with an interoperable transfer system.

The only place blockchain has real benefits is when multiple large corporations/governments are interacting and don't trust eachother/anyone.

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[–] neatchee@piefed.social 2 points 7 months ago* (1 child)

See the link in my other replies for some examples of internal uses that still benefit from immutable, distributed ledgers.

Large organizations still have loss and risk from individual bad actors. Operating a central authority that validates every single transaction in a ledger, and validates ledger history and consistency, can be prohibitively complicated. A well designed blockchain implementation can resolve most of these issues.

A great example is a pharma/healthcare company that wants to manage medicine batch and expiration tracking, as well as distribution/patient assignment. With a traditional infrastructure every participant needs to phone home to a central authority. In a blockchain setup, peers can report ledger events one hop up and propagate it through the chain.

That's a very simple example but I hope it gets my point across

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[–] ayyy@sh.itjust.works 2 points 7 months ago (1 child)

Identifying anomalous behavior from bad actors is already a solved problem with databases and governing bodies.

https://www.forbes.com/digital-assets/categories/proof-of-stake-pos/

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[–] DomeGuy@lemmy.world 7 points 7 months ago (1 child)

Two points:

Then why hasn’t a better blockchain based currency gained any popularity?

Etherium and virtually the whole rest of the crypto scene that is "not bitcoin" has pretty soundly rejected the wasteful Bitcoin design. There was even a fork of Bitcoin that would have used the much more efficient proof-of-stake, but since that would be bad for everyone with a proof-of-work "mining" rig it didn't take over.

It turns out there is just zero real world need for an untrusted distributed ledger

https://git-scm.com/

An "untrusted distributed ledger" is literally the backbone of modern software development. While you could plausibly split hairs and assert that git requires "trust", I don't think you'd wind up in a spot that both supports your assertion and a cognizable difference for anyone but mathematicians and security nerds. (And even if you did, the exact same sort of non-scam usages of blockchains are ones that operate like git, with the ledger used for something else.)

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[–] _Nico198X_@europe.pub 2 points 7 months ago (1 child)

would you recommend any crypto in particular?

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[–] qwerty@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 7 months ago (1 child)

Monero

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[–] _Nico198X_@europe.pub 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 child)

thanks! looking into it and syncing up. care to share why you're positive about it?

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[–] qwerty@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 7 months ago (2 children)

The most distinguishing feature is that it's private by default, the sender, receiver and the amounts are cryptographically hidden from uninvolved parties. Other than that

Tiny fees - fees are only used to prevent spam, not to replace block rewards.
Tail emissions - every block rewards the miner with 0.6 XMR ensuring chain security, keeping the fees low and the inflation predictable and small - forever approaching 0 but never reaching it.
Variable block sizes - the block size grows and shrinks with the demand, allowing for more transactions when demand is high but still limiting spam.
RandomX mining algorithm - ASIC resistant mining algorithm best mined with the CPU ensures fair access to mining and prevents big minig firms from taking over the mining process.
Community and culture - the focus of most other cryptos is investing and speculation while monero's focus is on being the best private, uncensored, p2p money. Because of this while other cryptos encourage their users to HODL their coins, monero users are encouraged to save and also spend their coins, treat them like digital cash rather than something who's only purpose is to go up in price. In my opinion this culture leads to several things:

Business acceptance - many privacy centric services like VPN, VPS, e-sim, phone top up, gift card providers etc. accept monero. Usually any service that does, sees it at the top of the chart as the most used crypto, often more than all the other coins combined. Many open source projects accept it for donations as well, with similar findings.
Community built infrastructure - the monero community focuses on building the infrastructure around the idea of monero being digital cash. Things like xmrbazaar.com, a monero based e-bay/craigslist like market where you can buy/sell things for monero, kuno a monero based gofundme alternative for fundraisers, retoswap.com an instance of haveno, a decentralized, p2p monero exchange, monerica.com a repository of monero accepting business and other monero related things are designed with the idea of treating monero as money.
Price stability - because of the fact that monero is actually used for payments it's price is established through adoption rather than speculation which makes it fairly stable in comparison to the rest of the crypto market, thanks to this you can safely spend and receive monero without worrying that a month from now it will loose 50% of it's value. Of course, there are peaks and valleys often caused by the macro market movements like the recent few day pump to $800 and crash back to $400 but that's an exception rather than the rule, for the most part (excluding stable coins) it's one of the most stable cryptos out there with a slight long-term uptrend.

5 Years

All time

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