• Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
    81·
    6 hours ago

    You need to explain that, though they are generally rich, it’s not unusual for unheard of princes to occasionally fall on hard times and have their fortunes compensated until they are able to pay a ransom to get a corrupt bank or government to release their vast wealth back to them AND that they are almost always grateful to anyone who assists them in paying that ransom.

    Oh wait, sorry, wrong scam.

    Wouldn’t you find it useful to be able to prove that you paid for something? When you buy an NFT, you’re buying just that: the ability to prove that you bought it. And sometimes it even comes with a copy of an image or a spaceship you might just be able to use in a video game or just hold on to until we develop the technology to live in video game spaceships and you sell it for massive profits!

  • Seeders@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    29·
    9 hours ago

    You should join us in the world of Bitcoin. It is a path to freedom. I’m telling you from personal experience.

    The best time to plant a tree was 10 years ago, the second best time is now.

  • superkret@feddit.org
    331·
    1 day ago

    Relationships are like the blockchain.
    There’s no trusted, central database of all relationships that determines what is or isn’t cheating.
    That trust is negotiated in each interaction.

    Marriages follow the traditional method of a chain of trust. There is a central database that lies with the government or the church, and everyone decides which database they want to trust.

  • magnetosphere@fedia.io
    1412·
    1 day ago

    I’ve read that blockchain itself is a good technology. NFTs are a laughably absurd attempt to exploit that technology for profit.

    Xitter op needs to shut up.

    • djsoren19@yiffit.net
      14·
      18 hours ago

      It’s one of those things where scientists discovered something interesting and novel, and then a bunch of dumb grifters came in to try and make it their new snake oil.

      A very, very long time ago, back when Bitcoin was viewed as a currency instead of an “investment” platform, Bitcoin kinda fulfilled the ideal use case for the blockchain. I think now the general public is just too soured on them for that to ever be the case, unless Elon makes Bitcoin the new currency of the U.S…

    • ryathal@sh.itjust.works
      14510·
      1 day ago

      Blockchain is a solution in search of a problem. A way to establish trust while not trusting any party is a cool concept, but in the real world it’s far easier to establish a source of trust.

      • taladar@sh.itjust.works
        282·
        1 day ago

        Congratulations, now your trust relies on your subject never becoming important enough that someone bothers to run 50%+1 of the nodes in your network which means only very, very large subjects (or ones where trust wasn’t very important in the first place) ever even have a chance of that not happening. What do you say? Your technology doesn’t scale to very, very large subjects because of abysmal transaction rates?

        • prototype_g2@lemmy.ml
          51·
          12 hours ago

          now your trust relies on your subject never becoming important enough that someone bothers to run 50%+1 of the nodes in your network

          Yup. Very well said. People don’t realize the extent of wealth inequality (and how ridiculously resource intensive blockchain tech is). If anything important were to be decide by a blockchain, the top 1% would control the network.

          More on wealth inequality here.

      • Peruvian_Skies@sh.itjust.works
        2·
        19 hours ago

        I have a friend who works at a major bank and they use Blockchain technology to keep track of something or other internally, though I don’t remember exactly what. In this case at keast we can bet that it has found a problem wirth using it to sokve. Banks are nothing if not efficient.

        I find it funny that it was touted as an alternative to the current banking system and ended up being absorved into it though

        • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
          5·
          18 hours ago

          Banks are nothing if not efficient.

          Banks are businesses made up of people. If a manager thought he could get a promotion by supporting a blockchain project at the height of blockchain mania, that’s what he would do. Whether if fails or not is of no consequence, the manager is already on another project.

        • sik0fewl@lemmy.ca
          5·
          18 hours ago

          If it’s used internally, then I question whether it made sense to use blockchain. At the end of the day, it’s probably the trust in the bank that matters and not blockchain.

        • Serinus@lemmy.world
          23·
          1 day ago

          Blockchain is effectively a distributed database. Almost always a good centralized database functions better.

        • simplymath@lemmy.world
          37·
          1 day ago

          Nah. the commenter above is just wrong. It’s just that anyone who isn’t selling bullshit uses their real name- Merkel trees - which are fundamental to modern software development (git, zfs, nix, nosql).

          • ryathal@sh.itjust.works
            10·
            1 day ago

            That’s a similar but different concept. Blockchain adds a way to determine consensus of the correct tree. While git is distributed, it’s generally not trustless, there’s generally a trusted version of the repository.

            • simplymath@lemmy.world
              25·
              17 hours ago

              what? Git is very much distributed and while you can have a main branch, you can set as many up streams as you want and merge things sideways.

              It’s trust less in the sense that commits can’t be easily forged and are signed with cryptographic keys and identities-- as in, I don’t have to trust that the source code is genuine since I can verify the commit history myself.

              Consensus is just a pull request.

              That wiki article literally lists Bitcoin and Ethereum as implementations of Merkel trees.

              • I Cast Fist@programming.dev
                2·
                20 hours ago

                It’s trust less in the sense that commits can’t be easily forged and are signed with cryptographic keys and identities.

                I’m pretty sure being able to verify that the person responsible for a push is an actual maintainer is the opposite of trustless.

                • simplymath@lemmy.world
                  2·
                  20 hours ago

                  How is it any different than verifying that a transaction occurred?

                  How is a trusted repository different from a hard fork?

                  Isn’t “proving someone is a maintainer” just an IRL proof of stake?

      • ConnecticutKen@lemmy.world
        77·
        1 day ago

        Is it easier to establish a source of trust? With blockchain trust lies in the protocol and in the node operators who make decisions about how to operate their nodes. Running a node isn’t extremely difficult. Running a financial institution is difficult.

        • SkyeStarfall@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
          9·
          23 hours ago

          Well, sure, now you have a currency that doesn’t rely on trust

          …now what? How are you going to spend that currency if you don’t trust anyone? How will you ensure you get what you bought? How will your property get protected? Hell, how do you get others to agree that your crypto is the one they should use?

          It’s trust all the way down. Removing it from one small part of the chain isn’t going to fundamentally change things

        • taladar@sh.itjust.works
          19·
          1 day ago

          We recently developed AI for that purpose though which does the same thing but is useless in occasionally funny ways.

      • magnetosphere@fedia.io
        304·
        1 day ago

        Apparently, it can be very secure. If “pieces” of a secure key are stored in multiple places, for example, only changing one link in the “chain” means it won’t match with the others. They ALL have to be changed at the same time, which is virtually impossible to do in secret.

        Please note that I am far from an expert on the subject. I’m paraphrasing an article I read months ago.

        • hddsx@lemmy.ca
          19·
          1 day ago

          Can’t you takeover a blockchain by owning the majority of a block chain, or by having a majority of the processing power to compute hashes?

          • KazuyaDarklight@lemmy.worldEnglish
            371·
            1 day ago

            Yes which is part of why the major chains are owned and controlled by companies, but then that makes the whole thing pointless. IMO, a company controlled blockchain may as well just be a DB cluster, it would be faster and more efficient.

            • hddsx@lemmy.ca
              13·
              1 day ago

              Are you saying that they “solve” that by never giving up more than 49% stake?

              That… seems like a bad solution

          • DannyBoy@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            35·
            1 day ago

            If you had 51% of the world’s computing power (to blockchains using proof of work) yes you could forge records, from what I could wrap my head around about blockchains.

            • Strykker@programming.dev
              191·
              1 day ago

              You don’t need 51% of the world’s power though, just 51% of the power of people who care about how the system works. Most people using block chain cryptos don’t care at all, so the threshold is a tiny percentage of the user base.

              • DannyBoy@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
                3·
                1 day ago

                Yeah you’re right. I was thinking specifically Bitcoin and the astronomical amount of compute power that’s behind it.

              • hddsx@lemmy.ca
                2·
                1 day ago

                That’s proof of work. Proof of stake is you just need more than everyone else, right?

                • ConnecticutKen@lemmy.world
                  3·
                  1 day ago

                  It works more like loaning money and then receiving interest, except you are loaning crypto to the network and then you get it back, plus some, after a certain period of time

            • ConnecticutKen@lemmy.world
              32·
              1 day ago

              This would just create a fork in the blockchain where 51% of the network doesn’t match the correct state of the blockchain that the 49% have. The 49% would effectively stop working because they could never validate the transactions that the 51% takeover has falsely created. The node operators of the 49% of the network would need to reach consensus for how to deal with the problem, but essentially they would just adopt code that ignores the 51% data, so they could continue to process blocks of transactions. Without manual intervention the 49% would be frozen. The 51% is just fake, they haven’t really changed anything because every real node operator would know it’s false data.

      • NaibofTabr@infosec.pubEnglish
        201·
        1 day ago

        Essentially, verifiability (the token exists on the blockchain), de-duplication (each token can only exist once on the blockchain), and proof of ownership (only one account number can be associated with each token on the blockchain). There’s nothing wrong with this idea in a technical sense and it could be useful for some things.

        But… the transaction process is computationally expensive. For the transaction to be trustworthy, many nodes on the blockchain network must process the same transaction, which creates a whole bunch of issues around network scaling and majority control and real-world resource usage (electricity, computer hardware, network infrastructure, cooling, etc).

        And beyond that, the nature of society and economics created a community around this unregulated financial market that was filled with… well, exactly the kind of people you’d expect would be most interested in an unregulated financial market - scammers, speculative investors, thieves, illegal bankers, exploitatitive gambling operators, money launderers, and criminals looking to get paid without the government noticing.

        The technology can solve some interesting problems around verifying that a particular digital file is unique/original (which can be useful, because it’s extremely easy to make copies of digital information) but it creates a long list of other problems as a side effect.

        • Tar_Alcaran@sh.itjust.works
          3·
          18 hours ago

          Almost every single non-theoretical problem that blockchains solve is something we’ve already solved. And most of the problems you could solve with a blockchains are severely limited by data-size limitations.

          It would be amazing if I could decentrally store, say, a movie or videogame on a blockchain. Then, I could sell access tokens, would the owners could resell as they wanted. That’s a GREAT way to use blockchain tech, because people would always have access, and they could use or sell the keys as they wanted. It doens’t work though, because in the real world, that movie doesn’t fit on the blockchain, it’ll just be a link the a secondary source, and the whole thing falls apart.

          And that’s really the problem. Blockchains have a lot of nifty uses, but it almost always immediately falls apart around the edges, where it touches on non-blockchain tech, or, even worse, physical objects.

          • Blade9732@lemmy.world
            192·
            1 day ago

            I am pretty sure you just turn your money over to a scammer who just disappears with it. Since it is stateless and a libertarian dream, nothing can be done. So, congratulations!

        • hddsx@lemmy.ca
          11·
          1 day ago

          What does blockchain solve that existing contracts don’t do? Blockchain has takeover possibility

          • Iheartcheese@lemmy.world
            3·
            1 day ago

            Honestly I don’t know. I’m just pointing out the only thing that kind of sort of sounded like a good idea for it I’ve ever heard. For pictures it’s stupid that’s for sure

            • hddsx@lemmy.ca
              12·
              1 day ago

              It’s not a picture though. It’s a link to a picture on a server somewhere. If the host goes down, you own nothing.

              • Zagorath@aussie.zone
                31·
                1 day ago

                Isn’t it just a small amount of data? If the picture is small enough you could put it directly on the blockchain.

                Dunno why you would though. It’s very limiting for no particular gain.

                • ConnecticutKen@lemmy.world
                  5·
                  1 day ago

                  But in NFTs the picture is not on the Blockchain. Only a link to the picture is on the Blockchain and the picture itself is still just on the web.

              • Iheartcheese@lemmy.world
                32·
                1 day ago

                The technology behind it can be used for things other than pictures. That’s kind of the point people are making

                • hddsx@lemmy.ca
                  2·
                  19 hours ago

                  Right, and my original question was what does the technology solve? And so far the answer appears to be nothing

        • Sc00ter@lemm.ee
          32·
          1 day ago

          Yea the idea there is that with it being decentralized, it has an unedited history. So if each block added to the chain is a new transaction, you can see previous agreements. Being decentralized also means that it’s public record and everyone can see the contract/agreement/transaction.

          There’s a lot of neat stuff that can be done, but as the other guy stated, it’s a solution looking for a problem.

      • simplymath@lemmy.world
        36·
        1 day ago

        Nah. the other commenters are wrong.

        They’re super useful.

        Its just that anyone who isn’t selling bullshit uses their real name- Merkel trees - which are fundamental to modern software development (git, zfs, nix, nosql).

        • Tar_Alcaran@sh.itjust.works
          3·
          18 hours ago

          Merkel is the previous chancelor of Germany, Merkle is a computer scientist ;)

          Hash trees are a part of blockchains, but not the entire thing. This is kinda like saying acupuncture isn’t bullshit because needles are useful in real medicine as well.

      • bjorney@lemmy.ca
        45·
        1 day ago

        It’s a solution that allows two parties, who are so paranoid they don’t trust banks, let alone one another, to send funds and maintain a record of transactions with one another.

        • ayyy@sh.itjust.works
          82·
          1 day ago

          No, it requires a lot more than two parties, because the resulting “funds” from the transaction still have to be valued by everyone else that provide goods and services. So it becomes a social issue if it is to be a currency, and then you just end up re-discovering all the lessons that lead to how currencies already work.

          • bjorney@lemmy.ca
            1·
            19 hours ago

            The valuation of Bitcoin is a completely separate topic than practical use cases of blockchain.

              • bjorney@lemmy.ca
                11·
                14 hours ago

                Once again, we are talking about blockchain, not Bitcoin

                You realize blockchain is used by many large companies for practical purposes, not just by hobbyists swapping magical internet money, right?

                Many large retailers (e.g. Walmart) and pharmaceutical companies use managed blockchain solutions (e.g. IBMs supply chain software) to track end to end process flow and see the pedigree of products at their end destination, because it means the end user doesn’t need to request unfettered access to 6 different companies ERP systems to know when the hell their purchase order is getting delivered

                • ayyy@sh.itjust.works
                  1·
                  14 hours ago

                  They really, truly don’t. There are a few “pilot projects” so that the companies can tell investors that they have a “blockchain strategy” but the world runs off of normal databases.

        • Eranziel@lemmy.world
          13·
          1 day ago

          Blockchain / NFTs do not solve proof of ownership. Just ask all the people who had their NFTs or crypto stolen or lost in scams.

          In your example, technically title fraud is more difficult because it needs to be done in two places. In reality it becomes far, far easier because you’ve now opened up a gigantic attack surface that you have no control over, and made both systems of verification worth less. If someone manages to compromise either one, there goes your proof of validity. Which one of them is real and which one is fraudulent?

        • hddsx@lemmy.ca
          8·
          1 day ago

          Don’t we already have systems for that? What about the vulnerabilities of blockchain takeover?

    • Pup Biru@aussie.zoneEnglish
      86·
      1 day ago

      the way people use NFTs with art are certainly absurd, but even the core technology of NFTs is actually excellent

    • Artyom@lemm.ee
      57·
      1 day ago

      It’s a way of guaranteeing behavior when you shouldn’t have to trust any individual to review it. It’s a great tool for currency, but most people seem to prefer the system where we treat the companies behind the 2008 financial crisis as the trusted party.