It's not that controversial, every single country has limits on speech, including the US. So European countries control a little bit more than the US, largely when it comes to racial abuse and other hate speech. So? The American model when combined with social media and the internet appears to have disastrous outcomes, judging by who has been elected there. It clearly worked in the past, but not any more.
Americans supposedly being outraged at other free, democratic countries (often in reality both more free and democratic than the US) having different laws regarding speech is really just a smoke screen for what they really want: for their social media companies and billionaires to completely control our media, so that we end up just as fucked up and insane as they are. In the end if we allow Americans to poison our countries, we will lose our freedoms and democracies. Why would we allow that? What do you expect?
P.S. it's cringe to cry about lack of free speech in Europe as if we've changed. We never, ever had 100% free speech in Europe. Stop trying to hark back to some free speech utopia that literally never existed. This is the continent that up until 110 years ago was overwhelmingly ruled by kings and queens and indeed we are in many ways far more conservative than you are. Get over it and stop trying to turn us into you.
I would just like the early American project of liberal democracy and Constitutional rights to outlive American capitalism and American militarism, even if it means it survives it in some other country. Because it's looking pretty bleak over here.
We ought to avoid repeating your mistakes, no? Maybe unlimited campaign donations and so on, all this wonderful "American free speech (money = speech)" is a fundamentally bad idea. Worked exceedingly well for ~225 years, now it has lead to the implosion of the empire by electing a sociopathic retard to the presidency. Yes to free speech, no to whatever fucked up shit the US, its billionaire "libertarians" and Christian nationalists are pushing for us to adopt here in Europe.
If the likes of JD Vance are pushing for us to adopt his idea of free speech, you can be sure it's a bad idea.
The American political system didn't implode until its system of capitalism had the conditions necessary to escape its popular control. That wasn't necessarily an eventuality. We had a semi-functional campaign finance system in living memory.
Without the protections the Americans tried to shove into the First Amendment (which did not include anything about corporations at the time, as they did not exist) being enshrined into law, I worry that your issues with capital-government overreach will arise even faster than ours.
I don’t disagree with you but I disagree on a point of history.
> Without the protections the Americans tried to shove into the First Amendment (which did not include anything about corporations at the time, as they did not exist) being enshrined into law
If I recall correctly, Britain had joint stock companies from the 1600s, and Adam Smith and all that. They also even before this had “trusts” and “trusts which own trusts” which had certain rights, and the court of chancery had established precedent around these.
The French also had a massive state stock company in this time, and it became a massive bubble which imploded in XXXX. This attracted a lot of attention and commentary and it’s impossible that the American Founders were ignorant.
The Brit’s never had a freedom of speech, but in English common law, companies had property rights, standing to sue, and so on. Most activities a business person could take, they could take on behalf of their company instead.
So in the American context, it seems that the founders were likely aware of corporations. Why they didn’t put explicit limits in the first amendment, who knows. Maybe it just didn’t seem important at the time.
It came very close in the 1930s, it is arguable that the New Deal headed off revolution
The USA should have been considered a pariah state since the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964, now it is rapidly becoming one
The USAnian system has been a corrupt oligarchy with only trappings of democracy since it's inception. Those "trappings" run deep, but are not allowed to unseat the true source of power: money
The Founding Fathers [sic] gave that a lot of thought and worked very hard to make it that way from the very beginning
Ask Alex Jones about his free speech on Sandy Hook to understand how bad (EU) censorship really is!
Jokes aside. Restriction of freedoms, including speech, is not bad by definition, it's the scale and intention behind it that matters but this aspect is always missing, kind of censored, in public debate. You may downvote me now :-)
Edit: In the same sense, Alon does not cry about specific and obviously unjustified cases of EU censorship on X.
"We do have a lot of interest in blockchain, the technology behind cryptocurrencies. We believe its application to a number of other uses besides crypto will make capital markets more efficient, and we’ve been actively involved in research to use blockchain technology."
The exact opposite is true. Blockchain "technology" is useless beyond its ability to enable Bitcoin - a monetary innovation. Using it for anything other than that is simply trying to find a problem for a solution. Crypto beyond Bitcoin is also largely useless beyond serving as a democratized casino.
While I personally don’t believe in Bitcoin or any other crypto currency, I couldn’t stop laughing about your comment on the blockchain.
I have met so many people obsessed with building things on top of the blockchain and when you ask them what it is they need it is essentially a database and they don’t want it to be public. Fortunately the recent years this has been a decreasing trend. Only now a days the requests are to replace developers with 10x AI agents.
Yeah. The reality is that we enter into very few zero trust transactions. I don’t need a blockchain to guarantee things when the law and contracts have handled that fine for a very long time.
Possession is 9/10 of the law. A guarantee of possession gives you that 9/10. A legal contract leaves you calling a lawyer to grasp at the other 1/10, if it's even worth it for the financial value of your contract.
In short, the legal system is pretty useless in enforcing any broken contract that's worth less than a few thousand dollars, especially one of any complexity.
And as an aside, I feel like I enter into low-trust transactions all the time. Don't you?
* I don't trust people who sell products to me online. I've gotten bad product many times. But I need to be able to buy from independent sellers online.
* On a related note, I don't trust half the websites I put my credit card info into. But it's an important part of sending money over the internet.
* I don't trust my ride share drivers or short-term-rental hosts. I could do without short-term-rentals by only staying at trusted hotels, but I can't really do without ride shares.
* When I trade a stock with some random counterparty, I don't trust them to actually deliver the stock to me at T+1. But I need to be able to trade stocks with whoever else can give me the best price.
The typical solution is to have a corporation step in to act as judge and jury for contract breaches that are too small to be worth bringing to court (brokerages, credit card companies, Amazon, PayPal, AirBnB, Uber). In fact, these companies' main value creation has come from adding a layer of trust to traditionally zero-trust transactions. Thus, these zero-trust transactions have been able to thrive while the dispute resolution corporation charges fees for their value-added trust.
The only reason these roles traditionally have to be performed by companies is that autonomous money-custodying software did not exist. But programmable blockchains now allow for this. You could easily imagine a dispute-resolution alternative to PayPal where the organizational structure is a piece of autonomous software directly employing people/AI, rather than a traditional corporate entity.
No, the idea is anonymity. How can you trust the contract between you and some user across the world? Yes, crypto solves it. Law won’t help when someone tries to scam you across the world, at least in majority of cases.
A friend who in cybercrime talks weekly about scammers using Bitcoin ATMs and there being no way to get it back compared to traditional banking where he regularly gets victims their money back.
Crypto lets you engage in any contract you and your counterparty can codify. The reason that so many scams are run through crypto is because the vast majority of people either don't use smart contracts (in which case you're just sending your money to someone and praying), or if they do, they don't read or understand the smart contracts they're using.
The solution to this is maturity. The endgame is to be able to create smart contracts that are as readable to a layperson, if not more readable, than legal contracts. And to come up with a set of standard smart contract templates vetted by programmers, just as today we have a set of standard legal contract templates vetted by lawyers.
That, and encouraging people to actually read what they sign, whether it's a pen-and-paper signature or a cryptographic signature.
Aside from my point that most contracts can be based on highly-vetted templates, smart contracts don't need to be written in JavaScript or Rust. They can be written using little puzzle pieces that anyone can understand.
Fully disagree. Tokenization enables better financial markets. Bitcoin is the useless asset since it's proven that productive assets (think stocks) are better store of values than unproductive ones (think gold). Ethereum in that sense is productive because you can stake it for a yield and collaterize it natively to borrow against it and you can tokenize anything on top of it.
There's an intermediary scenario to consider: when multiple trusted parties are involved. This is basic computer science, and software engineering: crash and byzantine fault-tolerant systems.
On a related note, blockchains often obscure the true consensus mechanism behind layers of complex jargon. Upon closer inspection, consensus is still built on trusted parties, just not the same ones typically found in the traditional economy. In Bitcoin, for example, you not only have the relatively few powerful miners but also the Bitcoin Core developers, who wield significant influence over which changes are incorporated into the Bitcoin node. For example, enabling the OP_CAT opcode again [1][2].
Parent's point is weak - it's not possible right now for people around the world to hold fiat/stocks in their own centralized, custodial wallets due to stringent KYC/AML, and blockchains currently fill that need for stablecoins, and will fill that need for tokenized stocks, treasuries, etc.
> Bitcoin is the useless asset since it's proven that productive assets (think stocks) are better store of values than unproductive ones (think gold).
This has hardly been proven. Gold has been recognized as source of value across several millennia and multiple cultures. I would bet that 1000 years from now gold will still have value, whereas stocks are only valuable in as much as the rights that they represent can be enforced by a court and implicitly the state backing it.
We are <one mile-sized asteroid made of gold> away from gold losing all its value. One such asteroid has been discovered already. It's called 16 Psyche, 140 miles in diameter and made largely of gold and other precious metals. To compare, all gold ever mined on Earth fits into a 22-meter cube.
If it’s truly digital gold, that will only lead to the demise of the chain as a result of block rewards going down and not enough transaction fees to support the miners. Bitcoin truly has a security budget issue.
I didn't say that mining would cease - it's that there would be way less incentive for people to mine, so less hash power, and more susceptible to 51% attacks.
Doesn’t it self regulate? If there is too fewer miners then reward goes up?
Also, unlike gold, you can anonymously transport it around the world without getting robbed.
Network effect, first-mover advantage, and fair launch that did not pre-mine coins for insiders. It's the only "pure" one because it was first and honest.
Satoshi ninja-mined in the beginning for themselves. If they had posted about Bitcoin further in advance and had many more people mining, that would’ve been different.
Every human endeavor since the beginning of history has had some form of information asymmetry. Not everyone can be lucky enough to buy AAPL in 2001 or BTC in 2009. Apple management and Satoshi both announced what they were doing publicly to anyone who would listen, but not everyone was listening. Unless you can conjure up a method to deliver every piece of information globally to everyone on earth instantaneously, you'll just have to accept that as a fact of life. It's not bitcoin's problem to solve. Complaining on the internet about how life is unfair certainly won't solve it.
Doge has unlimited supply, so there is an infinite amount of Doge.
Investing into something which has an infinite amount that will get created for free by the system (and therefore reduce the value of your investment) ?
Because more people have confidence in Bitcoin than the other digital golds because it has been in the news the most over the years.
Also, the price won't be as volatile as the other coins (even though it is much more volatile than dollars) because if someone decides to sell $50 million worth of Bitcoin, the price barely budges because $50 million is such a small fraction of the $2.2 trillion worth of Bitcoin in existence.
The price will move (down) until the sell is fulfilled - if there are not $50MM worth of buyers at that price point then the price will drop until buyers are found.
The 'market cap' of Bitcoin is irrelevant here, only the price sensitivity of buyers. Given there is no underlying income stream from bitcoin, there is no real floor. If nobody wants to buy it, a 50MM sell will go to zero pretty quick.
I would not say useless. But blockchain has very limited use outside cryptocurrencies. Although, some of the innovations that happened around blockchains are useful in many other scenarios.
P.S. I do have a Ph.D. in trying to fit blockchain for other use cases.
Guatemalan dev Rafael Cordon made a project called Simple Proof that leverages OpenTimestamps for election security.
It was used in the Guatemalan 2023 elections to timestamp tally sheets in different election districts around the country, so they can't be manipulated at a later time.
Timestamp.com is owned by a buddy of mine. Long before blockchain, we tried to build a company around being an SMTP relay and a special HP PCIe card that took the GPS signal as its source. The card was special because it was encased in glass and an inert gas, which could sense if it was tampered with. Ahh... the good old days.
....or, you just use the same timestamp mechanism available for code signing. Aka you ask a CA to issue a signed timestamp against a content hash and while you are at it, you can get multiple CAs in it.
The fact that there are other ways to work around previous limitations to accomplish something doesn't render the use-case invalid. The GP was asking for a usecase outside of currency and one was provided. If a valid use-case for electricity was asked, and someone described a lightbulb, you could just as well say "...or, you could just use an oil lamp"
The problem with any privately run, or centrally controlled blockchain, is that it’s difficult as the operator of the blockchain to demonstrate to a third party that the blockchain hasn’t been tampered with.
If I run a blockchain that I, or my business, has full control of, and I show you as a form of “proof”, you shouldn’t believe me. A time stamped Twitter post would hold more weight.
The power of, say, the bitcoin blockchain, is in the fact that it’s widely distributed and publicly verifiable by anyone, and due to the size of the network it is prohibitively expensive to tamper with.
My favorite example is Ethereum Name Service (ENS).
Instead of a patchwork of DNS servers that can go down, registrars that go through enshittification cycles, and complicated ownership/transfer rules that vary based on country and TLD, ENS presents a single unified database that runs on signed message broadcasts.
To change an ENS entry, you just sign a message and broadcast it anywhere. No need to interface with a registrar. The global resolver gets updated seconds later.
It reduces an incredibly complex system of registries and registrars, authoritative and recursive resolvers, domain transfers - it distills it down to a system of just sending signed messages to update a single global name database that gets replicated to everyone who cares to have a copy.
Clearly, digital ownership for something that truly lives on the blockchain and not outside is an obvious use case. But it also illustrates that blockchains are pretty useless beyond that.
I also wonder how the long-term monetary incentives work for a truly trustless domain name scheme. Having a quick look at https://app.ens.domains this doesn't seem terribly cheaper than a traditional registrar.
> To change an ENS entry, you just sign a message and broadcast it anywhere. No need to interface with a registrar. The global resolver gets updated seconds later.
Yeah. And if your domain name keys are stolen or lost, they're gone. Forever. Or held for ransom. That's a huge reason why people are not rushing to use blockchain-based DNS.
Have you ever had a domain name stolen? They're also gone forever in most cases. There is no standard recovery path once a domain leaves the hands of your registrar. You might as well be trying to reverse an international wire transfer.
ENS is not worse in this respect than DNS. The DNS solution is for your registrar to require 2FA to protect your name from being transferred out in the first place. The ENS solution is for your custodian to... require 2FA to protect your name from being transferred out in the first place.
The difference is that anyone has the option to custody their own domain name if they want to - entrusting a third party is not a necessity.
Edit: Additionally, ENS gives you the equivalent of DNSSEC for free. So no need for certificate authorities, which represent DNS' reliance on cryptographic keys that would be catstrophic if stolen anyways.
> If it's a high-value domain, you call the registrar and get it back.
When a domain name is stolen, definitionally it leaves control of the registrar.
> Worst case, you can sue the thief if you hold a trademark for the name.
You can also sue a thief who has a blockchain name. Blockchains don't magically make it so you can't sue someone and win a judgement.
International lawsuits for domain recovery work fine if you're a medium to large company. But "just sue an international thief" doesn't work so well if you're a small business or an individual. In that case, DNS doesn't hold any legal advantage over ENS, whereas ENS allows for much greater flexibility in secure custody setups to prevent theft in the first place.
> There is. It's called "a lawsuit".
And you can just as "easily" sue someone who steals a blockchain name. Just dig past the fake identity they're hiding behind, figure out which city and country they live in, hire a private investigator to determine their name and address, and hire a lawyer that practices in the theif's country but speaks your native language. It's not any harder than suing someone who stole your DNS name.
> When a domain name is stolen, definitionally it leaves control of the registrar.
So call the registry?
The difference is that a judgement will actually get you something because in the end, the registry can give the domain to whoever they want. If your crypto DNS name is gone, you can’t appeal anywhere, even if you win your lawsuit (which you will, the opponent won’t appear).
Verisign's phone tree is pretty gnarly last time I checked.
> The difference is that a judgement will actually get you something
It could easily cost tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars to win a lawsuit in the registrar's jurisdiction, which is not feasible for an individual or small business.
As far as large corporations go, they don't have to worry about domain theft anyways. They all just pay tens of thousands of dollars for MarkMonitor to guard their domains with enterprise security, never have their domains stolen, and call it a day. I think where ENS shines is for small businesses and individuals.
The better option than recovery is just to prevent your domain from being stolen in the first place. For ENS or DNS this is fundamentally the same concept - just make sure you trust the company that holds custody of your domain name. For ENS, you have the option but not the obligation to custody your name yourself, or to use an M-of-N signature scheme amongst trusted friends, business partners, and/or third-party companies. It's hard to steal a domain name when you need to fool 3 out of 5 executives plus a third party into approving a transfer.
> the registry can give the domain to whoever they want
Never mind that most registrars have protections against the transfer and will generally spam the hell out of you with notifications.
This makes the domain hijacking a low-value target for crooks. It happens, but not a lot.
> The better option than recovery is just to prevent your domain from being stolen in the first place.
Which will not happen. You still have all the same issues with lost keys, misconfigured settings, etc. Except now with zero recourse.
> For ENS, you have the option but not the obligation to custody your name yourself, or to use an M-of-N signature scheme amongst trusted friends, business partners, and/or third-party companies.
Yeah. Have you actually ever done anything like that in real life?
That's the thing, blockchain astronauts are kinda like PGP enthusiasts. They keep claiming that it solves all the problems, if you attend their groupie, erm, key signing party.
> If your name is like `microsoft.com`, then you call the registrar.
As I said, large companies like Microsoft don't risk their domains being stolen in the first place, since they use enterprise protection services like MarkMonitor.
> there's a formal process
Ultimately every time I discuss ENS, the conversation turns into a discussion about how feasible it is for a layperson to afford, file, and actually win a UDRP dispute to recover a stolen domain name, which doesn't have any provision for theft by the way. UDRP only considers whether the current owner of the domain is using the domain to infringe upon your business trademark (if you have one).
The answer is that UDRP is completely unworkable for the vast majority of people who are at risk of domain theft; it isn't even an anti-theft tool. In terms of theft resolution, it's a justice theater where you can watch it work for very specific types of companies who have very specific trademark issues that the UDRP covers, and imagine that it must work great for every mom and pop who has a domain name nicked because surely we live in a just world.
The individual filing the dispute is on the hook for the UDRP fees which are significant and I believe well into the four figures (completely unaffordable in developing countries, and likely not worth it for small businesses). Typically companies need to hire a specialized lawyer to navigate the UDRP system, at additional expense.
So you're misinformed that there is a formal process for domain theft - the UDRP is only for trademark infringement. UDRP is unnecessary for large companies (who have the resources to safeguard their name from theft) and it's useless to individuals and small companies who can't afford it and/or have theft problems but no trademark infringement problems. UDRP is only useful if you are a medium-sized company with a well-established trademark in a developed country and you didn't do your due diligence in properly securing your domain name.
So I'll give you that - if you're a medium-sized company with a well-established trademark in a developed country and you didn't do your due diligence in properly securing your domain name, then UDRP might be better than nothing. But depending on what kind of company you are, it still might be cheaper and easier to just switch domain names.
> Never mind that most registrars have protections against the transfer and will generally spam the hell out of you with notifications.
A blockchain can be designed to be more reliable because it doesn't "generally" do anything. It always, specifically, does exactly what it's programmed to do. A smart contract's predictability is a function of how well it's understood, and the tooling for creating and auditing bug-free smart contracts is maturing rapidly.
If you want to be spammed with notifications, there's nothing more reliable than multiple audited pieces of open source software that run directly on all your devices and monitor a public blockchain for an action. Add several third-party blockchain monitoring services for good measure.
And, of course, it's easy to write custody code in such a way that transfers are time-locked, so you have time to see the notification before the name changes owners. Write-once, audit-once, use-many.
> Have you actually ever done anything like that in real life?
Yes.
But aside from that, I use cryptographic keys in my life for countless reasons other than cryptocurrency. Git, SSH, E2E messaging apps, web passkeys, object storage, HTTPS server certificates, tapping my credit card at the supermarket, accessing the cell network, unlocking my car, etc. Everyone is already managing cryptographic keys whether they know it or not, and everyone's cell phone has keys already available and quite safe in its secure element, ready to sign messages with.
No need to break out the pocket protectors and meet up in someone's living room. A key signing ceremony for ENS could be easily piggybacked off a standard E2E group chat, like for example a Signal or iMessage chat:
* Someone creates a group chat on their smartphone and invites people (specifying the "M" value, aka the threshold for a valid group signature)
* The invited people join, their devices silently and automatically exchange keys, and the chat displays the group key
* Whoever has the asset transfers it to the group key
* Whenever someone proposes a message to sign, the system messages the group chat showing how many more signatures are needed, with a "sign" button that people can click.
This is pretty similar to what Safe Wallet already does, and it currently secures over $100 billion worth of cryptocurrency for some of the largest companies in the industry. But it's also quite simple to just download the app and use it as an end-user. It's directly compatible with ENS, since they both implement the ERC-721 token standard.
I've thought through all of this extensively, I know quite a lot of details about how both blockchains and the current DNS systems work, I've had numerous conversations with countless people about it, and it all adds up to me.
The thing is, ENS is strictly _worse_ than regular domains. If your key is stolen, then you are at the total mercy of the thief. With the regular domains, you simply lodge a complaint with the registrar, and they'll roll back the transfer within 90 days.
You can lose a domain if you basically register it, don't use it, and then forget to renew it for a year.
> But aside from that, I use cryptographic keys in my life for countless reasons other than cryptocurrency.
Can you please stop the bullshit? It's downright nauseating.
We're not talking about the general cryptography, which is incredibly useful. We're talking about "code is law" blockchains with proof-of-work/proof-of-stake method of consensus. They are completely useless for anything but paying for illicit drugs and other illegal transactions.
Not an LLM, just someone who has way too much time on my hands and a penchant for jumping into internet comment threads in a way that I end up regretting later. I'm not sure whether I should take it as a compliment that I can apparently type with flawless spelling and grammar just like an LLM (shout outs to my excellent English teachers!) or as an insult that my writing is not particularly compelling.
Yes, I naturally type in walls of text that are usually grammatically sound but tend to meander in structure. I'm pretty sure I repeated myself in places. You're repeating yourself in places, too. But believe what you want to believe. Maybe you're the LLM and the dead internet theory is well underway.
> With the regular domains, you simply lodge a complaint with the registrar, and they'll roll back the transfer within 90 days.
Domain registrars (for DNS) do not do this and they structurally cannot do this.
> You can lose a domain if you basically register it, don't use it, and then forget to renew it for a year.
Equally true of both systems.
> We're not talking about the general cryptography, which is incredibly useful. We're talking about "code is law" blockchains with proof-of-work/proof-of-stake method of consensus. They are completely useless for anything but paying for illicit drugs and other illegal transactions.
When you say that, what I hear is "When you use cryptography to sign messages, it's incredibly useful. When you timestamp messages, that can also be useful. But if you sign and timestamp messages, that makes it a Blockchain and Blockchains are incredibly UnUseful. That's silly.
To be very clear I think "code is law" is a nonsensical idea, almost as incongruous as the term "cryptocurrency" itself. They are definitely not currencies, and their code is definitely not law. But blockchains can be useful without trying to create new currencies, and without their code being law.
I've been seeing where the tides are headed in both the public and private sectors, and everyone wants to use cross-organization attributable append-only timestamped databases as an accounting tool now, in part because they are so easily auditable. From there it makes perfect sense to want to attach expressive internal constraints to these databases, via a scripting language. And I'm not sure what anyone could call that kind of database except "blockchain".
This comment is peculiar - among technologists, for years the common refrain I’ve heard is “Bitcoin makes no sense but the underlying block chain ideas are very useful”.
Of course the combination of signed transactions, common visible ledgers, introducing computational challenges to forgery, resiliency through consensus (kinda)… all the bits and pieces can be remixed into really interesting ideas.
Bitcoin, I still don’t get. More public, slower, more expensive, no fundamental utility, and still subject to nation-state interference?
> This comment is peculiar - among technologists, for years the common refrain I’ve heard is “Bitcoin makes no sense but the underlying block chain ideas are very useful”.
That's because they have no idea what they're talking about. At a certain point you have to ask yourself why Bitcoin is worth $2T and no enterprise blockchain has ever taken off. How many years more of this trend is required to prove the "technologists" are wrong? It's already been 16 years.
And while I don't believe in appeal to authority, it's worth mentioning that I have been working in this field for pretty much my entire career and TA'd the first Stanford CS course on blockchains and crypto currencies in 2015. I very much know what I'm talking about and the people at Vanguard are blindly parroting what Deloitte and McKinsey are telling them about "blockchain".
It's all down to how money is issued. The tokens we have to work for are created effortless by bankers from nothing whenever they issue a loan, and then they charge interest on them. This value of the new tokens they create is sucked out of the ones in your bank account, pension etc. It's theft and it's about 7% year.
Gold didn't have this problem because it's issued through proof of work - you have to put in N kgs of gold worth of work to mine N kgs of gold. But it's a rock and in today's world we need a digital form.
I’ve always wondered why there isn’t a general purpose blockchain ledger for businesses. It seems like it would make auditing simple since all of the entries would be cryptographically guaranteed to not be manipulated.
SQL database is mutable, right? One of the biggest features of blockchain tech is that it's almost completely immutable. Something happens and it happens forever and ever.
The major problem is that private solutions (like consortium chains) offer privacy but no standardized interoperability or neutral root of trust, and public solutions (like Ethereum blobs) offer interoperability and neutrality but no inbuilt privacy.
I believe this will change either when consortium chains figure out the interoperability problem (so they can bridge seamlessly with public chains) or public chains figure out the privacy problem (allowing consensus over entirely private transaction zones).
To me it seems like the latter is more likely than the former. We've finally got both featureful/performant Ethereum roll-ups and private Ethereum roll-ups. Now the trick is to combine all those properties and bundle them into a business ledger that's high-performance, with customizable privacy zones, with consensus and data availability provided by a credibly neutral setup such as the Ethereum validator set.
This seems to be the direction some firms are going, for example Ernst & Young with their Nightfall product, and more recently their OpsChain Contract Manager to try to bring it to enterprise customers.
Auditing isn't typically about forcing people to be honest, it's about discovering when people haven't been honest and being able to attribute the fault to a specific bad actor.
Actual businesses don’t need any trustless, decentralized storage solution, because they already heavily rely on the state monopoly on violence and state recognization of the “business” as an entity in order to function. They gain nothing from using a blockchain ledger instead of a trusted source enforced by laws and contracts.
By using a blockchain ledger, you move source of truth to a private group of people who are the best at leveraging money to buy ASICs/GPUs and run the technical infrastructure.
Ironically, where you had 1 person = 1 vote (democracy), now this system favors the ultra-rich.
And it is presented as decentralized / free, but in reality, control is in the handful of very rich people.
No surprise that Trump, Musk and others are promoting it.
>"cryptographically guaranteed to not be manipulated."
That is only achieved with bitcoin because of a security model that has financial value to the blocks, and a distributed system of nodes and financially-invested miners. As soon as you remove the valuable digital token from the system it all falls apart; people could just rewrite the blocks and back-date the timestamps. It's like a machine that needs all of the parts to make sense.
It really doesn't traditional accounting is built around the use of an immutable ledger. Historical errors are fixed with correction entries. There is also a multidimensional conception of time to support this. We capture both the date the entry is made in the ledger and also the real world date it is meant to apply to.
So if you overstate something in December 2024, you can enter a correcting transaction today for that.
The first, erroneous entry has both it's accounting and business dates in December 2024.
The second entry, correcting the first is made today and so has an accounting date of today and a business date of December 2024.
I've worked on such a platform: Hyperledger from IBM et al. It was generic enough we could deploy our own "smart contract" / business logic layer via a Lisp dialect built in Go.
How would it make auditing simple? Auditors would still have to go out and count things to verify that the blockchain contents match assets and liabilities in the real world.
Thought experiment: if you were tasked with creating an eventually consistent distributed database where the nodes were to be run by different organizations that didn't trust each other, with predefined validity constraints on the data of some sort, and a scheme for incentivizing the operators of said database to keep operating it long term, how would you propose doing that?
Hint: if you look at similar systems such as those used for certificate transparency logs, they look quite like...a blockchain.
Thus, a problem in search of a solution. Who has asked for that exactly ?`It's been more than a decade and still no one has found an actually useful real-world application for blockchain besides gambling and money laundering.
I'm just a newb passing, but a self sustained decentralized 24/7 logic+network layer could be nice for stupid computational tasks like tracking physical items or updating multi-source (different services, different companies) data easily, which are often done at the human level today (even if 99% of the time it's not necessary and very wasteful). Again i'm not knowledgeable but when thinking of blockchains, I always have this in mind.
It can't track physical items, because you can always just lie about the data. Company A says "I put the jewels in box 1352", and Company B opens the box to receive a bunch of dish towels. Just because it's cryptographically verified, doesn't mean it has any semantic value.
If Company A and B already trust each other not to put bad data on the chain, then they also trust each other to just send emails back and forth, and you don't need a cryptographically verified blockchain. It secures the least important part of the process.
No, they don't do any of that. There are 100 different blockchain implementations at least, and none of them are standardized across any of those metrics. Everything from the consensus mechanism to the packet format to the bytecode is different. The standard way to interop between the Tezos blockchain and the Polygon blockchain is to create a token on both sides and attach a tag saying "don't touch me I'm actually somewhere else".
The only way to standardize ~all companies would be to have them all run the same exact ledger system, and if it was easy enough to make them do that, it would be easy enough to have them standardize a different reporting system for the same purpose.
Yeah I think i remember stories about that, that said, a failed attempt doesn't mean future will not be different (nobody seeing programming languages evolution as comparison point). Neither will it means that a decentralized event chain store is the solution.. just saying it kinda felt like an interesting "small logic global network application layer" .. which felt way more efficient than the litany of different b2b apps.
Sure, but that’s not a thing any actual business needs, except in rare, esoteric situations. For all actual business purposes, a centralized database is better fit for purpose (note that pretty much all finance runs, eventually, on centralized databases like the Fed’s ACH system and the Depository Trust Company. It’s fine.)
So interesting how your conclusion (which I strongly agree) is a bit of knowledge that can be obtained with diligence and research, however, it's a limitation of Bitcoin that it requires that level of diligence and research to understand.
Not really. I just means that it doesn't grow too fast for itself and gives people chance to accumulate it - its kind of poetic.
Ultimately it will just keep going up in price relative to everything else and people will invest simply based on that without understanding why - similar to the real estate investment market.
Typical Bitcoin maximalistic bullshit that pretends that the only worthwhile cryptocurrency will ever be Bitcoin, ignoring the fact that for example Monero is a superior currency (being actually fungible, a requirement for a currency).
I do agree that cryptocurrencies are the killer feature of the blockchain but other use cases do exist (like trustless timestamping).
None of the smart contracts have done anything materially useful without huge risk of scams, rug pulls, or enabling criminal activity (e.g. mixers for money laundering.) After a decade, there are no examples of widely used smart contracts or even long-running projects that haven't been fueled by boom and bust speculation cycles (e.g. NFTs.)
Every time there is a "code is law" gone wrong with large $ at stake, people immediately fall back to real life police. Because "code is law" is either a bad idea or immediately has to compromise to meet real human uses (for example, people forget their passwords all the time and not supporting password resets—which right now requires a centralized key store—is a non-starter.)
There is both a ton of money in crypto and it has completely failed to reach its promised potential.
The largest uses in the next half decade will continue to be scams, pump-and-dumps, speculative frenzies, and money laundering. We'll see shockingly open corruption with the president of the United States having a coin for on-chain bribery.
> After a decade, there are no examples of widely used smart contracts or even long-running projects that haven't been fueled by boom and bust speculation cycles
MakerDAO, Aave, Uniswap, Ethereum Name Service, and OpenSea are all long-running smart contract projects that have weathered multiple speculation cycles chugging along all the same.
> Every time there is a "code is law" gone wrong with large $ at stake, people immediately fall back to real life police.
It's one potential recourse. As opposed to legal contracts, where falling back to real life police is the only recourse.
Code is not law, but it does solve the "possession is 9/10 of the law" issue by aligning possession with legal ownership more closely than legal contracts do, so that the law has to get involved a lower percentage of the time. This is especially helpful for low-value contracts in the hundreds of dollars or less where it's not economical to involve a lawyer. Same for cross-border contracts where international litigation is infeasible.
> There is both a ton of money in crypto and it has completely failed to reach its promised potential.
Smart contract tooling has only been mature since about 2018 or so. Blockchains have only started scaling since about 2021. Coinbase, the largest cryptocurrency-related company, didn't launch their chain until 2023. Sharded data availability won't even be in production on a major blockchain until next year, with Ethereum's PeerDAS. Zero knowledge proof technology is both in its infancy and developing extremely rapidly. In other words a text-based browser isn't going to host a video stream over a dial-up connection. These roadmaps are long, and it takes time for new breakthroughs in math and computer science to mature, standardize and reach production.
> The largest uses in the next half decade will continue to be scams, pump-and-dumps, speculative frenzies, and money laundering.
The "largest" uses aren't really relevant unless you're trying to make an overarching moral judgement and say "blockchains are bad", which whether true or not, I think is an observation about as useless as "knives can be used to hurt people".
If you're trying to determine whether a tool has any legitimate helpful uses, look for an increase in its legitimate helpful uses.
stablecoins are useful but you don't really need a blockchain. you just need enough of a rube-goldberg machine to claim it's "decentralized". The most popular "blockchain" for stablecoins is Tron, if that tells you anything about why the technology itself doesn't matter
The blockchain can't do anything with stablecoins, because that's interfacing with a financial system that's out of the reach of smart contracts. Even if we assume that a stablecoin is backed by real USD sitting in a bank account, there's nothing stopping anyone from just taking money out of the bank account, and the smart contract is none the wiser. You still have to trust someone at the end of the day.
Problem with stablecoins is that in reality they are just extremely fancy IOUs or namely debt. Issuer promises to give money back. And if they don't well best you can do is to sue them.
Vacuuming is a design decision that may have been valid back in the day, but is really a ball and chain today.
In a low-resource environment deferring work makes sense. But even in low-resource environment the vacuum process would consume huge amounts of resources to do its job, especially given any kind of scale. And the longer it's deferred the longer the process will take. And if you actually are in a low-resource environment it'll be a challenge to have enough disk space to complete the vacuum (I'm looking at you, sunos4) - and don't even talk about downtime.
I don't understand how large pgsql users handle vacuuming in production. Maybe they just don't do it and let the disk usage grow unbounded, because disk space is cheap compared to the aggravation of vacuuming?
You run VACUUM often enough that you never need a VACUUM FULL. A normal VACUUM doesn't require any exclusive locks or a lot of disk space, so usually you can just run it in the background. Normally autovacuum does that for you, but at scale you transition to running it manually at low traffic times; or if you update rows a lot you throw more CPUs at the database server and run it frequently.
Vacuuming indices is a bit more finicky with locks, but you can just periodically build a new index and drop the old one when it becomes an issue
People not realizing you can tune autovacuum on a per-table basis is the big one. Autovacuum can get a lot done if you have enough workers and enough spare RAM to throw at them.
For indices, as you mentioned, doing either a REINDEX CONCURRENTLY (requires >= PG12), or a INDEX CONCURRENTLY / DROP CONCURRENTLY (and a rename if you’d like) is the way to go.
In general, there is a lot more manual maintenance needed to keep Postgres running well at scale compared to MySQL, which is why I’m forever upset that Postgres is touted as the default to people who haven’t the slightest clue nor the inclination to do DB maintenance. RDS doesn’t help you here, nor Aurora – maintenance is still on you.
We make good money 'saving' people from Aurora; you can throw traffic at it and pay more. We often migrate companies who then end up with a fraction of the price.
I’m convinced that Aurora’s team consists mostly of sales. There are certainly some talented engineers working on it – I’ve talked to a few – but by and large, all of my interactions with AWS about DB stuff was been them telling me how much better it is than other options.
I’ve tested Aurora Postgres and MySQL against both RDS and native (on my own, extremely old hardware), and Aurora has never won in performance. I’ve been told that “it’s better in high concurrency,” but IMO, that’s what connection poolers are for.
> but I'm really confused as to why they always choose the most random obscure bank. Why not partner with a major bank.
Because major banks won't support startups looking to compete with them. Why would JPM, BoA, etc. service Mercury who is going after their SMB business banking vertical? Banking is a cartel in the US. The bank lobby makes it as hard as possible to compete with them.
You're right. For the argument for the other side, the top four largest banks—JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, and Wells Fargo—collectively hold approximately 43% of all deposits in the United States, and in some ways they are self regulating or have a revolving door with their regulators. But we certainly have a lot of banks and anyone can buy a small one and give the banking business a shot.
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