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Ask HN: Is the fintech Blockchain excitement deeply flawed?

6 points by flockonus ↗ HN
Context: If you follow startup trends you probably heard fintech sector is getting more excited by the day with blockchain, altho not necessarily Bitcoin itself. They highlight, among others:

- possibility of smart contracts - fully transparent databases - peer to peer network - trust(less) service layer between - efficiency savings

Mostly created the list from this podcast: https://soundcloud.com/a16z/business-blockchain - a really good episode btw.

The question: is the fintech ignoring the most important factor, which is the ever increasing competing mining computer power applied to BTC network being the reason it's so safe only because mining is rewarding. If at any point an ill intentioned player controls over 50% of computer power would the whole system would crumble? Doesn't that make it unpractical for any startup to implement a network they can actually make safe?

3 comments

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[dead] spidergears
Nopes. Along with the reward for miners, the bitcoin system also has a concept of a transaction fee. So whenever a miner adds a block to the chain, they get the corresponding transaction fee. This is their new reward. Going by this principle, if a certain entity has enough computational power i.e. more than 50% of the whole network, the entity is in a better position to earn by working honestly as opposed to trying to fraud the system.
wslh
Your question has focused too much in the Bitcoin implementation issues and not on blockchain implementations where the issue with mining doesn't happen because they use other alternatives like PoS or in private blockchains just votes per entity.

I think the noise in the community is related to the combination of political community (e.g. anarchochapitalists), great security developers, fintech hype, and dark markets. A lot of people think this is a sectir to make easy money.

Having said that, the whole startup sector is full of hype but if you take a look all startup sectors are full of hype. Just compare what media says about a company to then realize their real numbers are not so good and full of red lights.