For a long time, I thought of the blockchain as almost synonymous with cryptocurrencies, so as I saw stuff like “Odyssey” and “lbry” appearing and being “based on the blockchain”, my first thought was that it was another crypto scam. Then, I just got reminded of it and started looking more into it, and it just seemed like regular torrenting. For example, what’s the big innovation separating Odyssey from Peertube, which is also decentralized and also uses P2P? And what part of it does the blockchain really play, that couldn’t be done with regular P2P? More generally, and looking at the futur, does the blockchain offer new possibilities that the fediverse or pre-existing protocols don’t have?
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
Merkel Trees are fine, and are how things like “Git” keep track of different files (and how distributed hash tables and file-sharing often work).
Merkel Trees are trees-of-hashes, which the cryptocoin world wants us to believe go by the new name of ‘Blockchain’, but people familiar with comp. sci history know that they’re just flailing about making shit up.
Blockchain is an application of Merkel Trees. Merkel Trees have lots of good uses, but Blockchain doesn’t seem to have much use after 10+ years of experimentation.
Terevos@lemm.ee 1 year ago
ETH has DNS. I would think the fediverse would like to see adoption of DNS that governments and big companies can’t mess with or take over with lots of cash.
dragontamer@lemmy.world 1 year ago
ETH staking is looking like its literally illegal in the USA, you know that right?
Coinbase Earn is quite possibly trading in unsecured, unregulated securities and is being sued over it.
Valmond4@lemmy.mindoki.com 1 year ago
As fast as money talks, you’ll be losing.
IMO. We should make global random networks and base our connections on top of them instead of clinging onto the hope of niceties because someone have the site google.com for example.
dog@suppo.fi 1 year ago
I mean look at big corpo/government servers. They’re running an OS from 1980 and software that hasn’t been updated since 1960’s.
We’ll get there. Eventually. Maybe.
dragontamer@lemmy.world 1 year ago
My Android phone’s marketplace, Google Play, is literally newer than Bitcoin and I have government services + banking applications on it.
Valmond4@lemmy.mindoki.com 1 year ago
Yo!
You seems to know what you’re talking about, have you heard of Juliana trees? Like trees based only on the keys, so searching for a key takes len(key) time.
Bet there is an other name for it but I so remember like that and no web search says anything about it so I’m trying my luck here :-)
Same for robin hood hash trees :-D
Cheers
geoxel@lemmy.world 1 year ago
This sounds similar to a trie - maybe that’s what you were thinking of?