git is a blockchain, just without PoW
Please Stop
Submitted 2 months ago by ElCanut@jlai.lu to [deleted]
https://jlai.lu/pictrs/image/d1769722-07cf-42d9-a515-701c7e40b28b.webp
Comments
strahlemann@feddit.de 2 months ago
Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 2 months ago
… or data validation.
Oderus@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I’ll likely get downvoted but Polestar, the EV automaker that used to build performance variants for Volvo, uses blockchain to track minerals used in their EV’s.
Circulor Circulor’s blockchain technology enables tracing of extracted raw materials, particularly those with significant impact to communities and the environment.
I like that they use blockchain to ensure the minerals they use aren’t coming from negative sources but I’m sure someone will argue and say it’s stupid or that SQL can do the same.
__dev@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Polestar uses contracts and audits to ethically source materials, not blockchain. It uses blockchain as a shitty append-only SQL database to (apparently) tell you where the materials came from. Let me quote from Circulor’s website:
data can be fed seamlessly to the blockchain via system integration using RESTful Web Service APIs with security and authentication protocols
So the chain is private and accessible only through a centralized, authenticated REST API. This is a traditional web application. A centralized append-only ledger is not even a blockchain.
DarkSpectrum@lemmy.world 2 months ago
This guy ICTs!
Oderus@lemmy.world 2 months ago
So you’re saying Polestar is lying about using blockchain?
media.polestar.com/global/en/media/…/500098
Polestar enters strategic partnership with blockchain provider Circulor
Collaboration targets blockchain traceability and CO2e tracking
Progressive in scope and ambition, partnership enables unprecedented supply chain transparency
VR20X6@slrpnk.net 2 months ago
You could do literally the same thing with a series of private key signed envelopes containing the prior chain of signed content.
Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 2 months ago
No, because it would be trivial to make a change and regenerate the entire chain.
Oderus@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I’m hoping you’re being hyperbolic about burning rainforests because not every blockchain is power hungry like Bitcoin or the old the POW Ethereum.
Besides, the rainforest is being burned down to make way for more cattle to provide more beef. Not sure why you chose the rainforest as example of intense computational power.
ElCanut@jlai.lu 2 months ago
Yes, it can probably be done with a traditional database
basxto@discuss.tchncs.de 2 months ago
we need the blockchainsaw
oweka@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
I’m kinda amazed I haven’t seen anyone mention the biggest upcoming use case for block chain here. In a world where anyone can create any media with Ai we are going to need robust systems of cryptographic proof of origin and history that anyone can access and that is not controlled by anyone who may wish to manipulate information. The exact strength of block chain.
As for cryptocurrency I’m seeing a lot of confusion here in how people think it works. While scaling has been an issue its not an insolvable one and multiple solutions exist. The issue with crypto is its image not the tech in general. And thats a combination of people using it to scam and governments/banks doing their best to discredit it.
basxto@discuss.tchncs.de 2 months ago
One technical reason is that it’s more traceable than cash.
oweka@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
For a reputation based system and proof of origin and history traceability is exactly what we want.
For untraceable internet cash just look to monero
paholg@lemm.ee 2 months ago
That is not a use for blockchain.
Say I want to say that I created an image. I could post that image’s hash to a block chain, and point to it as something anyone can check.
But you already have to trust me for that to be valuable. So I can just host that hash in any of a myriad of conventional methods that are simpler, more performant, and less wasteful.
oweka@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
Your missing the history part. Obviously any signature in isolation is only as good as your knowlage of that person. Thats how cryptography has worked classically. A block chain is not just a hosting service. Of course that could be done cheaper. The point is to have imutable history of what information is provided. This allows a reputation system as well as the ability for parties to endorce or rebuke information in a way that can not be covered up later.
Trust requires reputation. No anonymous person in isolation can be trusted. The point is to allow collaborative verification with proof. And that can not be done by a centralized host or authority without giving that authority control over what is “true”.
ElCanut@jlai.lu 2 months ago
This does not need blockchain, this is exactly what NFTs were about, and it completly failed
oweka@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
It failed because owning digital collectables is dumb or because block chain failed to create immutable cryptographic proofs and history that could be read by anyone? I think your missing the forest for the trees. Confusing a demo case for the tech that made it possible.
BobGnarley@lemm.ee 2 months ago
@itsmect mentioned this too but it is wild how this community just hates cryptpo. There’s a good chance the instance you’re on accepts it for donations. Why would they do that if it is so unusable and bad? Open source everything except the money. Makes no sense.
petrol_sniff_king@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 months ago
Why would people do something stupid and against their best interests?
Hm, I wonder.reassure6869@lemm.ee 2 months ago
Open source everything except the money.
this is a truly perplexing statement. what about a currency that is controlled predominantly by early adopters is open source?
emilStigsson@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Bitcoin Core is MIT licensed.
There is value in having core functions of society like social medla and money decentralized and running on open source software even though it will not fix wealth inequality.
Like the rest of society, some people get ridiculous wealth by luck of being at the right place at the right time. That is no reason to hate on open source money.
There are many issues with bitcoin but that one I do not buy.
HaywardT@lemmy.sdf.org 2 months ago
There is a lot of propaganda pushing the price down. It’s funny that they think the cryptobros have half a trillion dollars and still keep pushing the price up.
menemen@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Man, I remember how back in 2009 we were hyped about this possible chance for a fairer world that a independent currency might bring. Guess we were quite wrong. :)
HumanPenguin@lemmy.cafe 2 months ago
Not gonna claim any foresight.
But now in 2024. It dose seem rather insane to me. That no one predicted the energy problems of proof of work.
We were well aware of the co2 cost of computing.
menemen@lemmy.world 2 months ago
No one expected that dozens of crypto currencies would pop up. Most of us actually expected it to just fail and dissolve. But there was the naive, little glimpse of hope that this might destroy the petro dollar (which was much stronger in 2009 than today).
MonkeMischief@lemmy.today 2 months ago
The independent currency was still worth standard currency… So the ones already hoarding all of that existing make-believe-number money just bought up and schemed us out of new make-believe-number money.
How did we not see this coming? :(
reassure6869@lemm.ee 2 months ago
not smart
EmperorHenry@discuss.tchncs.de 2 months ago
“crypto currency is a scam and it’s bad for the environment!..now excuse me, I have stocks to buy!”
shinratdr@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
Stocks are not bad for the environment the way crypto is bad for the environment. I’m not defending companies or the ethics of stock trading, but generating stocks doesn’t consume massive amounts of electricity. That’s like blaming money itself for environmental damage that spending it could theoretically cause.
There are so many legitimate arguments against publicly traded companies and capitalism in general, but this one just isn’t it.
EmperorHenry@discuss.tchncs.de 2 months ago
Stocks are not bad for the environment the way crypto is bad for the environment
Those computers the stock market runs on must be generating electricity then…right?
AVincentInSpace@pawb.social 2 months ago
Ok but the Fossil version control system (which uses a mini-blockchain to store software version history) is pretty cool
zaphod@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
Did you seriously not read the conclusion?
This author believes it is technologically indefensible to call Fossil a “blockchain” in any sense likely to be understood by a majority of those you’re communicating with. Using a term in a nonstandard way just because you can defend it means you’ve failed any goal that requires clear communication. The people you’re communicating your ideas to must have the same concept of the terms you use.
(Emphasis mine)
magic_lobster_party@kbin.run 2 months ago
To expand further, a blockchain requires some kind of distributed consensus. If you have two versions of the same blockchain, there must be a way to figure out which one of these is the one everybody else is following. In Bitcoin this is achieved with proof of work (i.e the version of the chain that has wasted most electricity).
If you don’t have distributed consensus, then you just have a git repo.
nexguy@lemmy.world 2 months ago
No no ANY possible application using blockchain tech HAS to be bad.
Pizza_Rat@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Can you name another technology that has such a high hype to delivered value ratio?
intensely_human@lemm.ee 2 months ago
Even if a particular coin has a finite number of possible coins, it exists in an unbounded universe of other coins.
GiveMemes@jlai.lu 2 months ago
What is this argument even supposed to mean? Just because other coins exist doesn’t have any effect on a particular coin’s value or use case. I’m not even pro crypto or trying to be a dick or anything, just totally lost.
nexguy@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Other SHIT coins… to be precise
Agent641@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Only my made up digital monopoly money is legit, all the rest are pointless.
daltotron@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I’ve read through this whole thread, and I still haven’t really come to any solid conclusions on it. I’m skeptical of crypto as a kind of idiotic speculative market, but that’s also every market ever. But then, the blockchain is apparently different from crypto, even though they’re both hype-laden marketing terms that have been completely fucked up. I think doing [redacted] with crypto is still potentially cool, though I think it still has limited anonymity, from what I’ve heard, and the speculative market also fucks it up.
Is “the blockchain” just like some nerd shit that’s for internal hospital ledgers, and beyond that it’s all kind of moot garbage, or what? Someone spoonfeed me.
magic_lobster_party@kbin.run 2 months ago
Blockchain is often described as a solution in search for a problem. It’s a clever technology, but people don’t really know what it can be used for besides storing cryptocurrency transactions.
People have thought about storing other kinds of data in the blockchain, like health records, but no one can really point out to why this would be better than other solutions.
To achieve something similar with health records without blockchain, all that is needed is just a cryptographic signature. The hospital cryptographically signs a digital health document and email it to you. The hospital in turn stores it in some shared database accessible by other hospitals. Done.
If the health record is somehow lost from the shared database, then you got your own copy of it as backup. They can’t modify the health record either, because then it would diverge from your own copy.
The worst thing they can do is to add falsified health records without your approval, but that’s a problem with blockchain as well. Blockchain cannot verify that the input data is truthful (garbage in, garbage out).
The cryptographic signature step is a part of blockchain either way, so there’s no extra technical overhead in the non-blockchain way.
excitingburp@lemmy.world 2 months ago
The cryptography has much simpler algebraic analogues - what we are looking for is a “one-way function”. This means a mathematical symbol that only works on the left side of the equals. The simplest one is the remainder of a division. For example if I told you that I had a remainder of 5 after dividing by 20, you wouldn’t know if the original numerator was 25, 45, 65, 85, and so on. This operator is called
mod
(modulus). Even if you don’t know what value I started with, It’s not hard to guess what possible numerators could be with modulus. That’s where the cryptography comes into play: a cryptographic hash is designed so that it’s practically impossible to guess the original numerator. We’ll stick with the modulus for explanatory purposes, but imagine that you can’t list off possible numerators like I did.Now we can invent a puzzle for a computer to solve. We’ll start off with the same values as before, but - again - we are disallowing easy guesses. This forces us to check
1 mod 20
,2 mod 20
,3 mod 20
,4 mod 20
,5 mod 20
and so on. Eventually we’ll hit25 mod 20
giving us the solution toX mod 20 = 25
. Now you can go back to the person that gave you the puzzle and prove that you’ve done 25 steps of work to arrive at a solution (or have made a lucky 1/25 guess). This is called “proof of work”. A cryptographic has consists of a certain number of bits, such as 256 bits - this means a series of 1’ s and 0’s 256 long. The puzzle presented to the computer is “find the numerator that results in the first 50 bits being zero” (the more bits are required to be zero, the longer it will take to find the answer). Because of the incredibly slim chance of guessing the correct numerator, it doesn’t really matter if the computer counts up (like we did with modulus) or guesses. So, in practice, everybody trying to find the solution starts at a random number and starts counting, or trying other random numbers, until someone wins the jackpot. It’s basically a lottery, but the correct numbers have to be discovered instead of being dropped out of a glass ball at the end of the week. Once a computer finds a solution, everybody else playing the game can check their numerator.Now we can use this lottery to create a blockchain. We start with 5 things: a globally agreed on solution we are looking for (789), an initial block (which is just a number - lets say 12345), Bob’s account #5 of $100, and Sally’s account #6 of $200, and a huge amount of players of the above game. Sally wants to transfer $20 to Bob, so she says to all the players: “I’m #6 and want to give #5 $20. There’s a $1 prize for finding a new block for me.” All the players make a new denominator, by placing the numbers next to eachother - so
12345 6 200 5 100 20 1
- or just1234562005100201
. All the players start trying to find the number that will result in 789. Eventually someone finds 1234562005100990 after a lot of work/guesses. Everybody checks their work1234562005100990 mod 1234562005100201 = 789
. The winning player receives their prize, and now everybody has a new block to start from:1234562005100201 1234562005100990
. Next time someone wants to send some money they will use12345620051002011234562005100990
as the initial block instead of 12345. Hence, we have set up a chain starting with:12345
->12345620051002011234562005100990
-> …There’s your block…chain.
Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 2 months ago
PoW is destructive. Blockchain doesn’t have to be PoW.
Hash linked list part was good.
You missed out public key cryptography which is also key to blockchain.
daltotron@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Good explanation. I am extremely bad at math, I never made it past kind of, high school algebra, and I still can’t do basic math very well, but this explained it pretty well, thank you. So, someone has to start a transaction before mining can start, if that’s how it works?
intensely_human@lemm.ee 2 months ago
So data stores tend to present interfaces which allow the CRUD operations on each record: Create, Read, Update, and Destroy.
Create: You hit submit on a comment form Read: Your client app shows the content of the comment Update: You hit submit on the comment editing form Destroy: You delete the comment
Well, in some cases it’s very handy to make a data store with only two operations: Create, and Read.
This is called a “log”. A log is an append-only data structure.
One of the benefits of using a log is that two different processes can operate on the data, at different times, and can be confident they’re operating on the same context despite not being in communication with each other.
This “log” structure could be useful for instance in recording the moves of a chess game. Then, a hundred years later, someone can read each move out of a book and deterministically re-create the board state.
Now they know that they are looking at the same chess game that Ben Franklin was in 1775, despite not being in touch with Ben at all.
Really big, distributed systems benefit from this “synchronization without communication” feature of logs.
Excellent article on this data structure and its benefits here: …linkedin.com/…/log-what-every-software-engineer-…
Blockchain is a log.
Relying on a log requires you to trust that nobody else has Update or Destroy access. For it to work correctly and everyone be on the same page, Updates and Destroys need to never happen.
With a coordinated system like people trying to understand historical chess games, or a corporation like LinkedIn seeking its own self interest, there’s no trust issue.
But with other things, like “who’s got how much money”, people don’t want to have to trust that some centralized log owner is modifying the data on the sly.
That’s where blockchain goes beyond a regular log. It’s a log designed to resist tampering, because each “block” in the chain goes through a distributed checking process where many copies of the log are used, and everyone checks each other’s copies to ensure nobody is cheating.
dudeami0@lemmy.dudeami.win 2 months ago
A blockchain is just an verifiable chain of transactions using cryptography and some agreed upon protocol. Each “block” in the chain is a block of data that follows a format specified by the protocol. The protocol also decides who can push blocks and how to verify a block is valid. The advantages it has comes from the fact the protocol can describe a method of giving authority across a pool of untrusted third parties, while still making sure none of them can cheat. Currently the most popular forms are Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Stake (PoS).
Bitcoin for example is just an outgoing transaction to a specific crypto key (which is similar to a checking account) as a reward for “mining” the block, followed by a list of transactions going from a specific account to another account. These are verified by needing a special chunk of data that turns the overall hash of the entire block to a binary chunk containing a number of 0 bits in front, which makes it hard to compute and a race to get the right input data. This way of establishing an authority is called Proof of Work, and whoever is first and gets their block across the network faster wins. Other cryptocurrencies like Ethereum use Proof of Stake where you “stake” currency you’ve already acquired as a promise that you won’t cheat, and if someone can prove you cheated your stake is lost.
The problem it solves is not needing a trusted third party to handle this process, such as a government agency or an organization. Everyone can verify the integrity of a blockchain by using the protocol and going over each block, making sure the data follows the rules. This blockchain is distributed so everyone can make sure they are on the same chain, else it’s considered a “forked” chain and will migrate back to the point of consensus. This can be useful for situations where the incentive to cheat the system for monetary or political gain outweigh the cost of running a distributed ledger. It can also be useful when you don’t want anyone selectively removing past data as the chain of verifiability will be broken. The only issue with this is you need some way to reach a consensus of who gets to make each block in the chain, as someone need to be the authority for that instant in time. This is where the requirement of Proof of Work (PoS) or Proof of Stake (PoS) come in. Without these or another system that distributes the authority to create blocks, you lose the power of the blockchain.
Examples I’ve heard of are tracking shipments or parts (similar to how the FAA already mandates part traceability) and medical records. This way lots of organizations can publish records relating to these to a central system that isn’t under any single entities control, and can’t change their records to suit their needs.
These systems are not fool proof though, PoW has the ability to be abused using a 51% attack and PoS requires some form of punishment for trying to cheat the system (in cryptocurrency you “stake” currency and lose it if you try to cheat the system). Both of these run into issues when there is no incentive to invest resources into the system, a lack of distribution across independent parties, or one party has sufficient power to gain a majority control of the network.
Overall you are right to be skeptical of cryptocurrency, it’s been a long time since I participated due to the waves of scam coins and general focus on illegal activities such as gambling. The lack of central authorities also perpetuates the problem of cryptoscams, as anyone can start one and there are limited controls over stopping such scams. This is not dissimilar to previous investment scams though, it’s just the modern iteration of such scams. The real question is does it solve a real problem, as Bitcoin did in the sense it helps facilitate transactions outside of government controls. You might not agree with that but it does give it an intrinsic value to a large number of people looking to move currency without as much paperwork. Now if it makes it worth $68.5k USD (at current prices) is a different story, different people have different use cases and I only highlighted one of those.
daltotron@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I read all the replies in kind of, an order going from simplest to what looked to be like the more complicated ones, and this seems like the least charged and best explanation of the sort of, externalities, and it seems like a pretty good overview of it. The other guy did a good summary of how the technology works for a dumbass like me but I’m still not sure I got all of it.
So, like, you could kind of conceive of a use for these technologies generally, right, but it would seem like, even from your explanation and also from what I kind of passively know already, this is kind of, reliant on a libertarian conception of society, which isn’t necessarily bad. I think more concerningly it also seems like both of the basic technologies, there, PoW and PoS, are vulnerable to abuse from the powerful, or from those who have more resources, with maybe PoS being less so, I dunno, still don’t really get how that one works specifically which might change it. Which is sort of, antithetical to a libertarian conception of society. I mean unless you’re an ancap but those guys are dumbasses.
So I dunno. It seems like a kind of inherently conflicted technology to me, like, paradoxical. I kinda hope someone can conceivably work out the problems of power abuse, but that would seem to be what I define as a “whole enchilada” style of issue, there.
Still, I do like the ability to freely buy drugs and circumvent the government, that’s kind of epic. Well, most of the time, anyways. Maybe not when the CIA does it, or when narcos and cartels do it, but I dunno how much either of them have tied up in crypto, it’d probably make more sense for both of them just to deal in fiat currency or trade resources or something.
linearchaos@lemmy.world 2 months ago
It’s the whole web 3 concept of the community powers the infrastructure to run the community. It’s an enticing concept, The people using the service pay with their CPU and internet connection to use the service. It makes what would be a rather expensive infrastructure almost free.
With blockchain they’re doing some smart things, you can wrap code around the ledgers, in the end it’s just varying fancy levels of receipts verified and secured by the community. It’s verifiable but anonymous.
But then you’ve got cryptocurrency doing complex math burning through tons of electricity looking for unicorns to add to the ledger, in a massive pyramid scheme. Okay, it’s not exactly a pyramid scheme. Whoever starts a given currency makes the vast majority of the money off of it when the coins are easy to find, but at some point it is pretty close to any other given financial system, with the benefits of being anonymous and verifiable.
The bitcoins are just entries on the ledgers. But then s*** like NFTs are on ledgers. Someone sells you a receipt for a JPEG on a URL. It’s all only worth what someone will pay you for it. And without a whole bunch of regulation, it’s not exactly a safe market.
Zuberi@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
One is the tech, the other is an example of a type of the tech. A square is a rectangle, but a rectangle is not a square.
For most applications, this isn’t necessary:
There are some examples like in biotech/finance that I personally believe will require a blockchain to be truly “fair” at the end
Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Diagram is missing a “do records need to interact” control box.
PropaGandalf@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Well in decentralized, autonomous (user run) systems you have actually 0 trust.
Dnn@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Now add that trustlessness is impossible and you can scratch the blockchain box for good.
You cannot get rid of trust in some form. You need entry to the system, so you need to trust its gateway. You need to trust the network to not have some vulnerability like a 50% attack. And eventually you need to trust the developers not to add critical bugs (that alone is virtually impossible) or pull off some scam.
FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today 2 months ago
I like this flowchart but honestly most third party data handling solutions are just asking for a major breach: stoking vulnerable people over the coals.
daltotron@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I’m stupid, can you give me a like, more clear practical example of a good use of blockchain? Cause I get the sense that a good amount of this conflict, going off that flowchart, is going to be due to the evaluation of these situations as like, not needing to arise in the first place, or maybe like, a philosophical objection to the necessity of the technology, maybe. But I think a clearer example could help with this.
Rustmilian@lemmy.world 2 months ago
You can use blockchain technology for a wide variety of things, just please more cryptocurrency and NFTs.
merc@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
Nothing particularly useful though. It’s a very slow, inefficient, trustless database. There really aren’t many good applications for that.
Rustmilian@lemmy.world 2 months ago
That highly depends on what blockchain implementation is being used and what it’s being used for. Blockchains used for craptocurrency is highly inefficient, which is the vast majority. But their are a small handful of specialized blockchains that are just efficient enough to be practical.
SwingingKoala@discuss.tchncs.de 2 months ago
As a bitcoiner I couldn’t agree more, please don’t make another cryptocurrency.
NoiseColor@startrek.website 2 months ago
You mean like one with actual practical value, one you can program, do actual finance with?
SwingingKoala@discuss.tchncs.de 2 months ago
This is how tech people often think because they don’t understand economics and the value bitcoin provides. Bitcoin was distributed fairly, is stable, is scarce, and most importantly, is decentralized. Probably all “programmable” shitcoins have zero of those properties and the market reflects that.
Pika@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
as hostile as people are to block chain due to MFC’s and bad implementations, the technology itself has its use cases. It’s a great solution for information exchange that requires verification and Immutation. This makes them perfect for ledgers or transaction networks.
It’s just there is so much bad PR regarding it everyone just discredits it. Not all of the block chain technologies are massively energy intensive per transaction, it’s just many of the cryptocurrencies use the most intensive one because it’s also arguably the most secure
reassure6869@lemm.ee 2 months ago
the technology itself has its use cases.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=15RTC22Z2xI I would love to hear the counterarguments. video is <15 mins, academic setting.
Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 2 months ago
His arguments are:-
We don’t need blockchain to stop problems from happening because we have a [super efficient, cheap, accessible, well constructed] legal system to correct those problems when they occur.
We don’t need distributed ledgers to store the data because we can just trust Amazon Web services.
Pika@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
Just responding that I did see this, The video has peaked my curiosity and I plan on watching it later when I have more free time outside of midterm’s season
GamingChairModel@lemmy.world 2 months ago
This makes them perfect for ledgers or transaction networks.
It doesn’t scale well, so it generally works best for ledgers of relatively small scale. Anything that might need to go beyond that small scale will run into technical/performance issues.
zaphod@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
the technology itself has its use cases.
Cool.
Name one.
I mean, it’s been, what, 15 years of hype? Surely there must be a successful deployment of a commercially viable and useful blockchain, right?
Right?
nothead@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I can’t find the case study, but this blockchain project by IBM was implemented in Singapore and was shown to reduce customs processing times from several weeks to just several hours.
The general idea was that with a successful blockchain implementation, the Singapore government was able to expedite parts of their customs process which normally require intensive human labor, and the use of smart contracts removed the need for having documents sent and resent when all parties had access to the smart contract directly.
There are specific use cases where it can benefit existing processes, but people just think blockchain = crypto.
sloppy_diffuser@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
csa-iot.org/…/distributed-compliance-ledger/
Matter Distributed Client Ledger. In use by Apple, Amazon, Google, Samsung, and many more.
Contains all the attestation information for on boarding Matter devices. Where once it was Google Home vs Apple HomeKit vs Amazon Echo / Alexa, supporting devices can now work cross ecosystem.
Since many of these companies are competitors working together. A distributed ledger makes sense to keep everyone honest and provide a level of tech supported governance.
mlg@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I mean… the original Bitcoin?
Blockchain never promised anything related to economic viability or stability. Only that it would ensure a P2P network would remain practically safe from malicious transactions by utilizing a system that rewards verification.
By that standard, every other crypto that people use happens to be a pretty successful blockchain use case.
If you want something stable and not a straight cryptocurrency then I’m pretty XRP qualifies because it also handles fiat and other commodities.
Otherwise, most DDBSs don’t use blockchain because they don’t need verification requirements relating to transactions and ownership. DHTs are way more common like IPFS.
hglman@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
Who are you? Go make bad arguments elsewhere.
Randomgal@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
There is nothing Crypto can do better than regular database. Immutability is not a desirable property.
ReallyKinda@kbin.social 2 months ago
People are always like “it doesn’t do anything we couldn’t do with SQL,” as if riding a horse isn’t an improvement in transportation over walking. Things don’t have to be impossible to accomplish in any other way in order to be marginally more useful or efficient depending on the goal. Public ledgers are indeed useful. Blockchain is one technology among a small handful that might be appropriate for your project depending on trust dynamics it demands. Consensus protocols are also useful.
One example, right now our global food supply’s movement and distribution is based largely on market dynamics. Say we want to focus on distribution based on need instead. A blockchain based ledger could allow a fred to ‘commit’ a few bushels of carrots which george ‘commits’ to transporting to mike, who in turn has committed to do do a supply run to Uruguay with his barge. Could they have done this in excel? Probably. Would it be more organized on blockchain? Yes. Would a regular database with a lot of contributors that is carefully designed to keep out bad actors work too? Yes, sure.
itsmect@monero.town 2 months ago
I think it’s funny how most lemmy users are pro open source, pro privacy, pro digital rights; but once it comes to money all that is thrown out of the window and they happily get on their knees for paypal and the few other large players.
Yes, the current state of crypto is a mess. People are attracted by the promise of the big payout, rather then seeking an alternative payment system, making them ripe for scammers that promise the world, but in the end only rug “investors”. Even “functional” cryptos are often highly centralized, making them as bad as banks in terms of reliability. Almost none implement any privacy features, and if they do, its typically a tacked on afterthought.
But this does not make the original idea invalid. Will it ever live up to the promise of alternative money? Maybe. Maybe not. Only time will tell if the issues that exist right now will be fixed.
saigot@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
Blockchain is a nebulous buzzword with a vague meaning. But I have yet to see a sensible definition of a blockchain that doesn’t include git.
Git is pretty useful imo.
ace@lemmy.ananace.dev 2 months ago
I think the only project I’ve seen so far where I’ve felt that a blockchain has actually been the correct choice is Alfis, which is a decentralized DNS that uses the blockchain as the public append-only ledger that it is, and it uses proof-of-work to add arbitrary costs to updates - to make spamming or namesquatting expensive.
bruhduh@lemmy.world 2 months ago
neatchee@lemmy.world 2 months ago
OK but there are actually great uses for blockchain that are completely disconnected from anything you typically see
For example, banks may begin using blockchain for maintaining their inter-branch ledgers. It will help solve a ton of issues around reconciling the transactions from all over the globe
Blockchain has reasonable uses. Really good ones. Crypto and nft bros just completely ruined the image of it
NoiseColor@startrek.website 2 months ago
Haha crypto sux. So funny.
spaphy@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
Can someone tell me how decentralized money became the enemy? It is decentralized currency that is like everything we stand for literally using mastodon protocol here.
it’s not the creators fault that the first thing the userbase did was centralize it onto these marketplaces lol. I’m reminding people that this is conceptually great but terrible implementation, across the board.