Comment on Is the blockchain an interesting innovation, aside from cryptocurrencies ?
kirklennon@kbin.social 1 year ago
I thought it sounded interesting when it was new but the more I've learned, the more convinced I am that it's completely useless. I've never seen anything done on a blockchain that couldn't be done faster, cheaper, and more securely in a SQL database. Even the not-a-scam applications are ridiculous and fall apart upon examination. Blockchain as a definitive record of ownership? Absolutely not. There's no way to force a person to update a record. Lose your house in a bankruptcy? The sheriff on his way to evict you isn't going to care that you've got some NFT saying you still own the house. Anything involving contracts at all? If a court can't unilaterally update the blockchain record, then the record is unreliable. But if the government can unilaterally update a record, then you're not relying on community consensus and immutability in the first place.
Blockchain isn't useful for anything important, and it's not a logical choice for anything trivial aside from literally just playing with blockchain stuff for the sake of playing with blockchains. I think it's a dead-end technology.
dragontamer@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Oh, its worse than you think.
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www.cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/…/mining_CCS.pdf
Once BTC hits enough halvening-cycles, the entire protocol doesn’t work anymore. Its more beneficial to fork the blockchain (and collect ~50 transaction fees), rather than work on the head (and only collect ~5 transaction fees).
nulldev@lemmy.vepta.org 1 year ago
What’s wrong with that though? BTC handles forks just fine. Eventually one fork will win out and life will continue on as usual.
The bigger issue this paper presents is that miners become incentivized to mine empty blocks. But can’t you just enforce a minimum transaction count on blocks?
magic_lobster_party@kbin.social 1 year ago
Miners can just create their own nonsense transactions.
nulldev@lemmy.vepta.org 1 year ago
There’s only incentive to do that if the mempool is empty. If the mempool is full, there will be plenty of transactions for both the first miner and the next miner.
In fact, this entire paper only makes sense if the mempool is near empty. If the mempool is full, then there is no reason to mine an empty block because there will always be transactions left for future miners.
So basically: