Over the past few years, I’ve been helping and on-boarding new team members and developers into the blockchain space. This helped me to collect blogs, links, materials, and resources and see which worked well for everyone’s learning journey. It’s time to share that with a broader audience.
The guide provides a starting point for developers who’re keen to learn more about blockchain and development on top of Ethereum.
It's permissionless access to financial markets that are guaranteed to remain running, and to operate according to the rules encoded in their smart contract, indefinitely.
Its properties make it enormously valuable for applications involving large numbers of people coordinating amongst each other.
Ethereum's DeFi has seen collateral increase from $750 million on April 1st to $2 billion today, so people are seeing utility in it.
It's still incredible to me how pro-blockchain HN is, as evidenced by all the downvoting in this thread. The only use case at this point is decentralized gambling / drug purchasing / Augur / etc, and the technology itself is useless in a variety of different ways (scaling, transaction cost, energy consumption, fraud protection, reversibility, and so on). A similar technology in a different space would be ripped apart here.
Scaling and transaction cost have been solved using ZK-rollups. Transactions cost less than a cent and take less than a second. 2000 transactions per second throughput. A lot has changed in the last 2 years.
Reading through your post, I want to point out that all your insightful reasons why cryptocurrency should be shut down are actually acknowledged problems that have been worked on by many in the space leading to solutions that address different pain points you've brought up. Examples include stablecoins (this name is meant to be as ironic as you think it is), private blockchains (here's a hint, nobody is using these to buy drugs or demand ransom), blockchains protected by something other than "energy wasting" Proof of Work.
I do have a few points for you to consider that might help you see the value of all this experimentation for society:
- Imagine someone living in a country such as Cuba or Venezuela or Iran that wants to buy things online (no, not heroin) and why they might find the existence of something like Bitcoin or Ethereum useful.
- You call for it all to be shut down, but how exactly would that be accomplished? (Most) cryptocurrencies are open source software and in a fringe scenario where experimentation here only serves to improve the anti-fraud precautions surrounding traditional currencies, isn't that still of some value to our society?
Some might argue that these supposed benefits don't outweigh the existing harm and therefore there isn't net value to society and there I'd just say we need to agree to disagree.
Have I perhaps changed your mind that cryptocurrencies don't have any value for our global society?
Blockchain is not just crypto currencies. It was just the first use-case.
I'd recommend to check out some of the links from the 1st section: Blockchain foundations, on why we need decentralized technologies, such as blockchain.
Our current internet is broken and blockchain could potentially help to make a change.
My guide to Ethereum: don't get involved in shady, unregulated industries unless you're aware of the possible consequences are are willing to accept them gracefully
There were no ICOs in the last 2 years. The community moved on from that. Decentralized non custodial exchange usage is growing, like https://loopring.org/ that’s based on zero knowledge proofs cryptography and allows 2000 trades per second, and the people who built it can’t steal your money even if they wanted to.
Sure, many of those won't be using ethereum, but they still happened. And that's before you dive into the IEOs and STOs, which appear to be more of the same.
Loopring is interesting, thanks for passing that along.
Even with the options on ethereum, Tether alternatives, etc. involvement with cryptocurrencies has high risk for someone who doesn't have a strong understanding of how it all works at a technical level, which is what the parent comment stated.
It's specifically trading and speculating in cryptocurrencies that's incredibly risky. There's a playbook of scams people used to pull with stocks were made illegal, but are suddenly viable again in the crypto space. There's also the risk of loss because of lax security on your part or the part of your wallet.
Seriously, crypto is one of the shadiest things you can get into. Avoid it, and any exchanges, like the plague. It's interesting tech, but nothing more than that. Hugely speculative and not worth wasting hard earned money over.
What's your point? It is high risk/high reward industry. There are loads of possible consequences. You might get insanely rich as some have gotten, or you might lose all your assets and sanity. Also jailtime is possibility, however that is still very rare in the space.
That folks should be skeptical and perform due diligence? Many similar things have been said about the recent rise in amateur options trading on the normal stock market. It's fine if the person knows and accepts the potential consequences, which amateurs visiting a link aggregator/forum should be explicitly warned against.
I would differentiate here between crypto (yes, there's a lot of scams and shady projects out there) and blockchain. Where the latter is getting bigger and bigger. Not just for crypto and financial services.
In the books, there is an electronic guide to the combined knowledge and wisdom of all the various species that inhabit the universe. The guide is itself called "the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy."
I have always interpreted such titles to be a reference to this in-universe guide rather then to the novel or its characters.
We could split hairs over the fact the in-universe guide is more analogous to Wikipedia in scope and scale than a more condensed tutorial or primer, or whether the reference is obscure enough that it confuses, alienates, or distracts readers who aren't part of the intersection of Hackernews Readers and Hitchikers Guide fans.
It never really bothered me but I was a huge fan of the series when I was younger.
Edit to add: as I am a technical writer on the side, it's a timely reminder to avoid any analogies or cultural references that require knowledge others in my target audience might not share. So, interesting point!
Before those books, there was a non-fiction book called The Hitch-hiker's Guide to Europe [0]. It was a reference for travellers in Europe on a budget, something similar to the niche the Lonely Planet books fill today. It was a big tome, updated regularly with new editions from 1971 through the mid-90s, and well enough known that Douglas Adams' readers would have got the joke. My parents had a copy.
That's the original inspiration for the in-universe Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy and perhaps the better point of comparison for other guides that are named after it.
Thanks for the insight, I never heard of this until today and this adds another dimension to explore.
I read some excerpts here https://h2g2.com/edited_entry/A4158164 and it definitely adds context that only really improves my interpretation of the Douglas Adams series.
"Always carry a towel" is one such reference that I can now replay and re-imagine as a parody of the original guide. I'd assumed them to just be a random amalgamation that parodies the overall genre of various guides and travel literature, it's fun to know there's a solid reference point.
As for the relevance of the "Hitchhiker's Guide to <subject>" title format in light of this information, I agree with you that the original source is a better comparison point; while there will be a lot of fans of the Adams work who can relate on that level, there will be others who either owned or knew about the original source of the parody who will interpret the format more closely to its intention. And ultimately it's a format that's so frequently used that there will be a broader spectrum of people for whom "Hitchiker's Guide..." is just synonymous with "down and dirty advice to get you started quickly, without pretension."
This has turned out to be an interesting rabbit hole, personally at least.
You're thinking of the wrong book. 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' referenced here is the guide to the whole universe, published by Megadodo Publications of Ursa Minor Beta.
Why do people instantly jump to the extreme negative? Any technology can be used for to do bad things. The community is aware of this possibility and have taken precautions. Also any financial market can also be viewed as an assassination market. You can short a stock and assassinate the CEO and profit, but people don’t actually do that in practice. Also, Augur v1 (V2 is coming out this month) has existed for about 2 years and there were no assassination markets on it. The community would resolve them as “invalid”, so it’a not possible to guarantee profit unlike in the regular stock market.
If people tout anonymity and 'censorship resistance' as a market's main advantage over other markets, it's hardly surprising that people focus on the use cases - hypothetical and otherwise - which wouldn't be possible on prediction market platforms where the platform operator knows their customer and rules out certain types of trade. If your USP is the ability to do 'bad things' to manipulate outcomes [manipulating the 'reporting' is probably a likelier outcome than assassination, admittedly] with little chance of your trades being discovered or reversed then people are going to focus on that.
Yes, in the same way an online stock market interface is a betting site. In the same way that stock markets allow (in principle) accurate valuation of companies through people buying and selling stocks, a prediction market should enable better-than current prediction of the future- because the people making the predictions have skin in the game, and have an incentive to change their prediction if they genuinely think the event will go the other way.
> Has anyone found a non-criminal use case for blockchain yet?
As others has pointed out, DeFi is impressive, though still mostly fueled by speculation at this point. Digital collectables is another (think digital trading cards with limited supply). Might sound silly at first, but could prove an economic lever for artists and game designers.
> Preferably one that isn't better addressed by a single Postgres instance?
And here's the problem. Blockchain is expensive. A central, trustworthy server is going to be ridiculously inexpensive in comparison. For all the cost, the major benefit is resilience.
Layer 1 is expensive. There are other really cool projects that get the same level of security as layer 1, but are much faster and cheaper. For example https://zksync.io/ allows payments that take less than a second and cost less than 1 cent. It’s based on zero knowledge cryptography.
Someone should build a way for people to pay 10 cents per article to read the New York Times without registering using this technology and a stable coin.
How can I prove if tables holding records of balances of money hasn't been tampered with in a single postgres instance? Can the integrity of data of a single postgres instance be verifiable in a trustless way?
When the internet first came out people thought it was only for porn and criminals. Look at where it's at now.
Don't focus strictly on the negative aspects and instead look at the possible things that the technology unlocks that didn't exist before. For one, Ethereum has unlocked global banking through defi for anyone in the world.
> When the internet first came out people thought it was only for porn and criminals. Look at where it's at now.
This is such a bogus analogy, and cryptocurrency stans keep pushing it.
Not even counting the internet, ten years after the world wide web was opened to commercial use, we had Wikipedia, Google, eBay, Craigslist, MapQuest...
We're now 11+ years on from bitcoin's start, and what have you got to show for it? Not a single thing that any normal mainstream user would care about.
I agree it's not a good analogy but ask any of my peers in Venezuela how they feel about bitcoin and they'll strongly disagree with your sentiment that users don't care about a single thing about it.
Saying bitcoin is a failure because mainstream users don't care about it is like saying electric cars are a failure because they've been around for decades and aren't mainstream yet. Disruptive technologies take time to become the de facto standard.
Yes - establishing provenance of digital assets for one example.
In a democracy, it is critical that legislators have access to verified sources. Most legislative assemblies in non-corrupt democracies don't allow representatives simply waving documents around to make a point if they aren't "tabled" - which is an entire verification process with a full chain of custody so that if as a result of some kind of negligence or nefarious intent certain "facts" which ultimately encourage an outcome that favours a particular agenda prove to be inaccurate (whether or not the legislators are aware of this at the time), the source of the inaccuracy can be traced, the cause investigated, and the situation remedied.
Current processes used by the less corrupt governments around the world ostensibly work, but they are labour intensive. Think carefully scheduled vans of printed documents moving between supreme courts where laws are passed, and humidity controlled vaults adjoining parliaments and senates with layers of approvals and security at each step.
These documents have been reviewed, verified, signed, stamped, approved, classified and filed.
These exact documents, that is, those specific printed copies. If a document or collection is lost, damaged, or otherwise tampered with, they must be resourced and re-validated. This manual and physical re-validation occurs whenever the contents of the document changes in any way.
Think about the EU parliament which moves from Brussels to Strasbourg every month, which costs €114m per year. A big portion of this cost is transporting the physical documents back and forth. They can't just print new copies at both ends, because you can't trust the version you're printing at one side or the other is the same document you think you're printing.
A digital solution could be more efficient but then you worry about the security of your database. All it would take if you have a single postgres instance is a single breach and every document in your system would be in question - you wouldn't know what to trust. The physical process currently used has that major selling point - if someone steals a box or a document at least you don't have to burn every document in the country and start over.
So what you could do is have all the documents in digital form in a single PostGres database, and stick that on a thumb drive. Now instead of trucking tons of printed material back and forth you only have to move a single thumbdrive. Or by this point, why not forget about the thumb drive and just email the copy to the destination. Or, why not just upload it to a server.
But how can you be certain that the database that ends up at the destination is the same database that came from the origin? How can you be certain that whoever emailed, drove, or uploaded the database didn't pull a switcheroo before they even sent it?
What you could do is, every time the database changes, you log who changed it, what they changed, and when exactly they changed it. Then both sides can compare their logs and if they differ, you know something is afoot. Then all you'd need to do is get the real, verified change log which starts from scratch, and replay all the changes to reconstitute the correct and verified data set right?
Ah, but where are the logs stored? Are they stored in the same or a separate database? Do we still need to go through a process of printing and verifying the logs through umpteen different government staff wherever the database needs to be used? I can't trust your version of the change logs is the real version and you can't trust that my version is the real version, so now what do we do?
Well, we know that if we just keep a log of changes that we can replay them. What we need is a consensus on which changes are actually official and which changes are nefarious or erroneous.
How can we build a consensus agreement?
With oversight.
So rather than having one PostGres database, we can install PostGres on 10, 100, 10...
This is an almost comical example given the current US government's relationship with alternative facts. Meanwhile, one EU member state has recently completed its transition to autocracy. The EU with its boxes of expensively-verified documents did nothing.
You genuinely believe anyone is going to care about some hashes in distributed ledgers somewhere? Nobody can be fucked to digitally sign an email.
I am talking about mechanical systems that can be created and that will operate in automated ways. No one would have to push any buttons. Mathematics and physics doesn't care about our feelings. Your point on EU states politics isn't relevant to the technology.
I never made any claim about what I believe, or what I expect other people to believe.
If you have an actual point on the actual use case of blockchain I would be happy to have a conversation about it, but it seems you didn't comprehend anything I wrote.
Edit: and to drive home my point, sure, as you say, the boxes of documents driving back and forth didn't fix politics, but that was never my argument.
Ethereum seems to be taking a lot of time to release their "2.0" version that provides scalability and doesn't require using huge amounts of energy - something that is pretty much inexcusable in this age of global warming.
In the meantime other contenders seem to have more momentum.
Case in point: CryptoKitties is leaving Ethereum because it lacked capacity and had high transaction fees.
Ethereum is scalable already. Layer 2 solutions like https://zksync.io/ and https://loopring.org/#/ are already live and allow 2000 transactions per second. This is based on ZK-rollups and provides the same level of security as the base layer. This technology can be used for trades or transfers.
Another exciting technology that is coming this year is optimistic rollups, which will provide the same level of scalability for arbitrary smart contracts.
"WARNING: zkSync v1.0 is in alpha. Blockchains and zero-knowledge proofs are still experimental technologies with rapidly evolving attack vectors. zkSync relies on cutting-edge cryptography that has never been used in production before. While Matter Labs is rigorously following scientific and engineering best practices with regard to security, we can not provide 100% fault-free guarantee. Use zkSync at your own risk and do not put more money into it than you can afford to lose."
That doesn't sound like 'scalable already', it sounds more like be prepared to lose your money.
Further, on the ZK-Rollups website, we have:
"The initial set up of ZK-Rollups promotes a centralized schemeThe security scheme assumes a level of unverifiable trust
The initial setup of ZK-Rollups is assumed to be a trusted state, when this trust cannot be proven. A small group of developers will be subject matter experts on the initial trusted state. This undermines decentralization and opens the risk of social engineering hacking attacks by convincing a developer to manipulate code or provide vulnerability information."
This is not reliable scalable technology. It's centralised so it takes all the supposed advantages of blockchains away, at which point you are better off just using a single trusted database, instead of thousands of machines duplicating the same work.
> Blockchain has emerged from the once shadowy world of cryptocurrency to become the most in-demand skill in 2020, according to LinkedIn. The promise of blockchain is huge. And large companies are continuing to hire and expand their blockchain teams, incl. Facebook, Amazon, Microsft, EY, Deloitte, IBM, and Oracle, to name a few. So, it should be well worth the effort to become familiar with how blockchain works, what its perceived benefits are, and as a developer starting building on top of them.
This is the problem with "Blockchain" in one paragraph.
Notice how there's no statement of a problem? Notice how it leads with hype and technology? Notice how it tries to FOMO you into action?
The Bitcoin block chain has been tried in many different situations. So far there is very little show beyond electronic cash. Not inventory control, not voting, not land registration.
The one other application that might be considered mostly viable is timestamping. Bitcoin is a timestamping server, after all.
The good news is that the problems electronic cash solves are getting worse every year. Privacy. Deplatforming. Weaponization of the dollar and other local currencies.
The bad news is that Bitcoin is also good at running itself, which means there isn't a lot of room for startups in the traditional sense. There may be room for sponsored non-profits such as Blockstream and Lightning Labs. There the funder model seems to be "improve Bitcoin and the value of your holdings will increase."
The article lost me at "According to LinkedIn" :) I think this perfectly captures how Blockchain is something you put on your LinkedIn profile purely for signaling to recruiters and non-technical PR and marketing people that use LinkedIn, which is full of spam and pyramid schemes.
Maybe I should've quoted the entire line, that it's in search of problems. According to LinkedIn.
But I don't agree with that. Check out some of the links from the 1st section: Blockchain foundations on why we need decentralized technologies, such as blockchain.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 118 ms ] threadThe guide provides a starting point for developers who’re keen to learn more about blockchain and development on top of Ethereum.
Good luck I guess.
Its properties make it enormously valuable for applications involving large numbers of people coordinating amongst each other.
Ethereum's DeFi has seen collateral increase from $750 million on April 1st to $2 billion today, so people are seeing utility in it.
We must be reading different sites.
https://louwrentius.com/cryptocurrencies-are-detrimental-to-...
I do have a few points for you to consider that might help you see the value of all this experimentation for society:
- Imagine someone living in a country such as Cuba or Venezuela or Iran that wants to buy things online (no, not heroin) and why they might find the existence of something like Bitcoin or Ethereum useful.
- You call for it all to be shut down, but how exactly would that be accomplished? (Most) cryptocurrencies are open source software and in a fringe scenario where experimentation here only serves to improve the anti-fraud precautions surrounding traditional currencies, isn't that still of some value to our society?
Some might argue that these supposed benefits don't outweigh the existing harm and therefore there isn't net value to society and there I'd just say we need to agree to disagree.
Have I perhaps changed your mind that cryptocurrencies don't have any value for our global society?
I'd recommend to check out some of the links from the 1st section: Blockchain foundations, on why we need decentralized technologies, such as blockchain.
Our current internet is broken and blockchain could potentially help to make a change.
Nothing world-changing has been delivered after the biggest hype-cycle in modern history...
There are also decentralized options to protect you from volatility https://opyn.co/ or https://www.hegic.co/
There are many alternatives to Tether, for example USDc or a decentralized stable coin like DAI.
Having trouble believing that, especially as I can see evidence of hundreds of the damn things after a simple search - https://ico.tokens-economy.com/statistics/country.html?count...
Sure, many of those won't be using ethereum, but they still happened. And that's before you dive into the IEOs and STOs, which appear to be more of the same.
Even with the options on ethereum, Tether alternatives, etc. involvement with cryptocurrencies has high risk for someone who doesn't have a strong understanding of how it all works at a technical level, which is what the parent comment stated.
Seriously, crypto is one of the shadiest things you can get into. Avoid it, and any exchanges, like the plague. It's interesting tech, but nothing more than that. Hugely speculative and not worth wasting hard earned money over.
[1] https://www.coindesk.com/understanding-dao-hack-journalists
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
How should I picture "Hitchhiker" - in the book, isn't the main character an unintentional observer/participant? So is this a beginner?
Or perhaps a hitchhiker is a hardened, obstinate person who enjoys the frontier and moving around a lot?
I don't know; it never made sense to me.
I have always interpreted such titles to be a reference to this in-universe guide rather then to the novel or its characters.
We could split hairs over the fact the in-universe guide is more analogous to Wikipedia in scope and scale than a more condensed tutorial or primer, or whether the reference is obscure enough that it confuses, alienates, or distracts readers who aren't part of the intersection of Hackernews Readers and Hitchikers Guide fans.
It never really bothered me but I was a huge fan of the series when I was younger.
Edit to add: as I am a technical writer on the side, it's a timely reminder to avoid any analogies or cultural references that require knowledge others in my target audience might not share. So, interesting point!
That's the original inspiration for the in-universe Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy and perhaps the better point of comparison for other guides that are named after it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitch-hiker's_Guide_to_Europe
I read some excerpts here https://h2g2.com/edited_entry/A4158164 and it definitely adds context that only really improves my interpretation of the Douglas Adams series.
"Always carry a towel" is one such reference that I can now replay and re-imagine as a parody of the original guide. I'd assumed them to just be a random amalgamation that parodies the overall genre of various guides and travel literature, it's fun to know there's a solid reference point.
As for the relevance of the "Hitchhiker's Guide to <subject>" title format in light of this information, I agree with you that the original source is a better comparison point; while there will be a lot of fans of the Adams work who can relate on that level, there will be others who either owned or knew about the original source of the parody who will interpret the format more closely to its intention. And ultimately it's a format that's so frequently used that there will be a broader spectrum of people for whom "Hitchiker's Guide..." is just synonymous with "down and dirty advice to get you started quickly, without pretension."
This has turned out to be an interesting rabbit hole, personally at least.
Has anyone found a non-criminal use case for blockchain yet? Preferably one that isn't better addressed by a single Postgres instance?
https://reason.com/2018/07/27/markets-in-assassination-every...
They are not the assassination market thought experiment.
Am I looking at the wrong product website or is Auger a betting site?
The average person has absolutely no use for this. And a shitty government is not fixed with a rogue currency.
As others has pointed out, DeFi is impressive, though still mostly fueled by speculation at this point. Digital collectables is another (think digital trading cards with limited supply). Might sound silly at first, but could prove an economic lever for artists and game designers.
> Preferably one that isn't better addressed by a single Postgres instance?
And here's the problem. Blockchain is expensive. A central, trustworthy server is going to be ridiculously inexpensive in comparison. For all the cost, the major benefit is resilience.
Someone should build a way for people to pay 10 cents per article to read the New York Times without registering using this technology and a stable coin.
When the internet first came out people thought it was only for porn and criminals. Look at where it's at now.
Don't focus strictly on the negative aspects and instead look at the possible things that the technology unlocks that didn't exist before. For one, Ethereum has unlocked global banking through defi for anyone in the world.
This is such a bogus analogy, and cryptocurrency stans keep pushing it.
Not even counting the internet, ten years after the world wide web was opened to commercial use, we had Wikipedia, Google, eBay, Craigslist, MapQuest...
We're now 11+ years on from bitcoin's start, and what have you got to show for it? Not a single thing that any normal mainstream user would care about.
Saying bitcoin is a failure because mainstream users don't care about it is like saying electric cars are a failure because they've been around for decades and aren't mainstream yet. Disruptive technologies take time to become the de facto standard.
In a democracy, it is critical that legislators have access to verified sources. Most legislative assemblies in non-corrupt democracies don't allow representatives simply waving documents around to make a point if they aren't "tabled" - which is an entire verification process with a full chain of custody so that if as a result of some kind of negligence or nefarious intent certain "facts" which ultimately encourage an outcome that favours a particular agenda prove to be inaccurate (whether or not the legislators are aware of this at the time), the source of the inaccuracy can be traced, the cause investigated, and the situation remedied.
Current processes used by the less corrupt governments around the world ostensibly work, but they are labour intensive. Think carefully scheduled vans of printed documents moving between supreme courts where laws are passed, and humidity controlled vaults adjoining parliaments and senates with layers of approvals and security at each step.
These documents have been reviewed, verified, signed, stamped, approved, classified and filed.
These exact documents, that is, those specific printed copies. If a document or collection is lost, damaged, or otherwise tampered with, they must be resourced and re-validated. This manual and physical re-validation occurs whenever the contents of the document changes in any way.
Think about the EU parliament which moves from Brussels to Strasbourg every month, which costs €114m per year. A big portion of this cost is transporting the physical documents back and forth. They can't just print new copies at both ends, because you can't trust the version you're printing at one side or the other is the same document you think you're printing.
A digital solution could be more efficient but then you worry about the security of your database. All it would take if you have a single postgres instance is a single breach and every document in your system would be in question - you wouldn't know what to trust. The physical process currently used has that major selling point - if someone steals a box or a document at least you don't have to burn every document in the country and start over.
So what you could do is have all the documents in digital form in a single PostGres database, and stick that on a thumb drive. Now instead of trucking tons of printed material back and forth you only have to move a single thumbdrive. Or by this point, why not forget about the thumb drive and just email the copy to the destination. Or, why not just upload it to a server.
But how can you be certain that the database that ends up at the destination is the same database that came from the origin? How can you be certain that whoever emailed, drove, or uploaded the database didn't pull a switcheroo before they even sent it?
What you could do is, every time the database changes, you log who changed it, what they changed, and when exactly they changed it. Then both sides can compare their logs and if they differ, you know something is afoot. Then all you'd need to do is get the real, verified change log which starts from scratch, and replay all the changes to reconstitute the correct and verified data set right?
Ah, but where are the logs stored? Are they stored in the same or a separate database? Do we still need to go through a process of printing and verifying the logs through umpteen different government staff wherever the database needs to be used? I can't trust your version of the change logs is the real version and you can't trust that my version is the real version, so now what do we do?
Well, we know that if we just keep a log of changes that we can replay them. What we need is a consensus on which changes are actually official and which changes are nefarious or erroneous.
How can we build a consensus agreement?
With oversight.
So rather than having one PostGres database, we can install PostGres on 10, 100, 10...
You genuinely believe anyone is going to care about some hashes in distributed ledgers somewhere? Nobody can be fucked to digitally sign an email.
I never made any claim about what I believe, or what I expect other people to believe.
If you have an actual point on the actual use case of blockchain I would be happy to have a conversation about it, but it seems you didn't comprehend anything I wrote.
Edit: and to drive home my point, sure, as you say, the boxes of documents driving back and forth didn't fix politics, but that was never my argument.
And I agree that healthy skepticism is good, while we continue to explore such technologies
I haven't had anyone yet dismiss my digital provenance use case for any technical reason, just the usual political pearl clutching and strawmen.
Someone tell me why it's technically a worse idea than ad hoc custom built database driven applications.
In the meantime other contenders seem to have more momentum.
Case in point: CryptoKitties is leaving Ethereum because it lacked capacity and had high transaction fees.
Another exciting technology that is coming this year is optimistic rollups, which will provide the same level of scalability for arbitrary smart contracts.
"WARNING: zkSync v1.0 is in alpha. Blockchains and zero-knowledge proofs are still experimental technologies with rapidly evolving attack vectors. zkSync relies on cutting-edge cryptography that has never been used in production before. While Matter Labs is rigorously following scientific and engineering best practices with regard to security, we can not provide 100% fault-free guarantee. Use zkSync at your own risk and do not put more money into it than you can afford to lose."
That doesn't sound like 'scalable already', it sounds more like be prepared to lose your money.
Further, on the ZK-Rollups website, we have:
"The initial set up of ZK-Rollups promotes a centralized scheme The security scheme assumes a level of unverifiable trust
The initial setup of ZK-Rollups is assumed to be a trusted state, when this trust cannot be proven. A small group of developers will be subject matter experts on the initial trusted state. This undermines decentralization and opens the risk of social engineering hacking attacks by convincing a developer to manipulate code or provide vulnerability information."
This is not reliable scalable technology. It's centralised so it takes all the supposed advantages of blockchains away, at which point you are better off just using a single trusted database, instead of thousands of machines duplicating the same work.
This is the problem with "Blockchain" in one paragraph.
Notice how there's no statement of a problem? Notice how it leads with hype and technology? Notice how it tries to FOMO you into action?
The Bitcoin block chain has been tried in many different situations. So far there is very little show beyond electronic cash. Not inventory control, not voting, not land registration.
The one other application that might be considered mostly viable is timestamping. Bitcoin is a timestamping server, after all.
The good news is that the problems electronic cash solves are getting worse every year. Privacy. Deplatforming. Weaponization of the dollar and other local currencies.
The bad news is that Bitcoin is also good at running itself, which means there isn't a lot of room for startups in the traditional sense. There may be room for sponsored non-profits such as Blockstream and Lightning Labs. There the funder model seems to be "improve Bitcoin and the value of your holdings will increase."
But I don't agree with that. Check out some of the links from the 1st section: Blockchain foundations on why we need decentralized technologies, such as blockchain.
Our current internet is broken.