Ask HN: What do you think about blockchain's current trajectory

Posted by mobear 20 hours ago

Comments

Comment by al_borland 19 hours ago

Ledgers have existed for a long time. Most ledgers are held by private organizations, so the need for a public ledger system seems very niche without a major societal change. It also seems much slower than a simple database update, so it can’t scale to all needs. The slowness and increased costs don’t seem worth it for most situations. This relegates blockchain for use as a means to create digital play money for people to gamble with.

Comment by uberman 20 hours ago

For the most part, I believe outside of bitcoin, blockchain is a solution in search of a problem,

Comment by bnova 18 hours ago

I feel this depends on whether you believe concentration is a problem. Like before the Neolithic Revolution people didn't really have leaders, if someone tried to be a tyrant it was a lot easier to leave.

Though after agriculture and the ability to concentrate wealth blockchain is imo the first real shot of a store of value independent of a system.... though by creating a new system in which a few centralized players are in charge, humanity prevails

Comment by mobear 19 hours ago

interesting, I've heard the phrase before. I figured decentralizing trust in areas beyond currency like data ownership and preventing censorship would be beneficial as well

Comment by uberman 17 hours ago

So, there are other ways to decentralize trust that don't involve proof of work or spoof of space or what have you. Proof of work is in fact not a way to decentralize trust as almost all blockchains will be vulnerable to 51% attacks. Big ones, like bitcoin, work because there is enough return to keep mining pools competitive. Likewise there are other ways to circumvent censorship. I don't believe Anna's Archive uses any blockchain other than for payments for example. Again, using bitcoin metadata to store information in a way that prevents censorship is cool but that is again because the size and power of the miners who protect the integrity of the blockchain. A boutique blockchain seems to be to be both needlessly complicated and vulnerable to attack that make the idea of a boutique shared public ledger questionable.

I have done a lot of work in the higher Ed space and many people have suggested to me over the years that "what we need" is a blockchain of course grades and credentials. I struggle to understand why we "need" that or if it was needed, why that would be better than getting a transcript directly from the University or from a public clearing house say College Board. If a public ledger was of generic use, why would the NCAA Transfer Portal not already be using one?

Your milage may vary (as they say) but this is just what my gut is telling me.

Comment by mobear 43 minutes ago

yeah I'm not an expert, but Anna’s Archive seems to reduce censorship by using torrents, mirrors, ipfs (built by the same team behind filecoin). incentives to seed content are mostly through volunteers, which works well if people care about preserving the data

I guess blockchains like filecoin introduce economic incentives, you pay independent storage providers to preserve data rather than relying on volunteers. a good complementary service for additional redundancy. blockchain doesn't need to replace every existing solution, but in instances where it makes more sense to reduce dependence on a single party

Comment by asxndu 13 hours ago

Very big future.

Will definitely be bigger than AI.