this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2023
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chapotraphouse
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This is not true. Distributed ledgers allow for consensus without trust. That is it. Every other application of them is just a slower database. So pretty much all they are good for is digital money, but digital money with a hard throughput limit and no backing from any government. The rush to use them for anything and everything violates the most basic principles of good computer engineering, and there's a very good reason no one has created anything worthwhile with them besides money that can be used for crime.
Iπ€crime. The Revolution will be funded by and implemented by criminals.
oh worm?
That's like saying asymmetric cryptography only allows for trust irrespective of medium. We still deployed it everywhere because it turns out that's useful in countless ways. Blockchains are also not necessarily public, and generally most of the shit they get from leftists has more to do with stupid wasteful consensus mechanisms than anything to do with the principle of a fancy networked Merkle tree itself.
In the end it's just another mathematical guarantee and we can do better than "concept is related to bad people and is therefore bad"
edit : Also worth noting that PKI was a huge gold rush when it started and still to this day lots of companies make utter bank on the sole basis that their certificate chains are trusted by default in your browser
No, I think crime money is good. But every time someone tries to come up with another use for them it's like, demonstrably worse than what already exists. It just sets off my bullshit sensors.
Completely fair. I'm mostly interested in what it can do for distributed computing and inter-organizational trust and most of that is being done outside flashy VC circles and not getting much media coverage. Naturally anything that allows organizing outside of bougie government institutions is good up to and including crime money
gitis a blockchain without a consensus model. Once you remove the artificial scarcity component of blockchains the are extremely useful.a blockchain without a consensus model is just a linked list
Distributed Merkel trees aren't linked lists.
no but they are also a data structure that has been around since the 80s
Eh. Blockchains and git both use merckle trees, but boats and cars both have engines.
Distributed Merkel trees are blockchains. Git is distributed. Git commits are blocks.
Even this is overselling blockchains, to be honest. There are a variety of far cheaper ways to do distributed trustless consensus, for example CRDTs. You can even run a CRDT-based ledger if you're willing for people to have negative balance. The only thing a blockchain adds is an incredibly expensive clock mechanism to slow the transactions down enough that they can prevent double-spend and enforce positive balances.