Comment on Is the blockchain an interesting innovation, aside from cryptocurrencies ?

• EnmaAi22@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Blockchains don’t inherently need obscene amount of erlectriciy

  Proof of work mechanism does. There’s lots of other consensus mechanism that don’t.

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• manitcor@lemmy.intai.tech ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Blockchains come in many forms, the ones you are thinking of are what are called Proof of Work chains, these uses a kind of cryptographic race to secure thier data and use a TON of waste energy as a result. Def not a fan either.

  The growing popularity and interest in chains is around forms of Proof Of Stake, these use other internal protocol mechanisms to secure the network and work to run the cryptographic functions as efficiently as possible. Unsurprisingly the fastest blockchains are proof of stake and power wise are similar to traditional applications in utilization.

  You don’t need any of these networks if you don’t want to use them, fundamentally, they arent even networks, they are cryptographic messaging systems. How the data is sent and processed is incidental, you could work out a bitcoin block on pen and paper if you wanted. This concept has extended to a cryptographic tool called Zero Knowledge Proofs, these will be part of next generation identity verification systems and is a fundamental of the W3C standard around DiD, the whole point is for disconnected attestation.

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  • phillaholic@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Maybe this is my “too old for this shit” moment, but this all just sounds like convoluted non-sense that’s never going to go anywhere. We still have SMS and ATMs that run XP.

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    • manitcor@lemmy.intai.tech ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      surprisingly small hardware is needed to sign a message. though I do agree that we are still a bit early for workable end-user use cases. People really dont care what the database or app server is, they just want it to work and raw dogging some public node is just a bit much for people, i dont blame them.

      more packaged solutions are under development, these will be more like a proper application with the differences of a chain being abstracted by the provider

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      • phillaholic@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        I think the problem I have with it is the online enthusiasm for it is acting like it’s already going to change my life yet it’s been more than a decade and no one has shown tangible and understandable utility, just marketing bs and grifting.

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• manitcor@lemmy.intai.tech ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Forward signed, immutable ledger - a dataset that is written and logged at time of write and validated using cryptographic signatures of the creator of that data and the node of the network responsible for the data. public systems use incentive systems to ensure unbiased writes, private systems work more like your typical app server.

  neutral consensus - this is the p2p aspect, this is a bunch of unrelated actors promising to work toward an unrelated goal, in public systems this is done via some form of game theory, in private systems orgs working together have contract law and are more interested in the the controlled writing.

  How it can take a lot of forms. Most people are just familiar with what the general public refers to as cryptocurrency. These are ledgers managed on p2p networks with the aforementioned game theory based consensus system. However ledgers are not required to do this, a ledger and even a blockchain can work without fees or even energy wasting miners, in these cases its usually the cryptographic write and channel messaging they want (some of these are a step up from AWS’s messaging stack).

  Ledgers like this are used in many ways and used in large orgs around the world, what the public is angry at and what the technology is are very different things.

  I hope I have “unsaladed things” for you

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