So wait, it’s like stocks? Who knew? (Everyone)
Only with the added benefit of being a completely unregulated “market”.
Lots of cries of “HODL” lately, I’m sure.
Interesting to see Goldman’s suggestion that crypto will take the place of gold - another reason I’m not interested.
Yeah, that foldable human video really opened my eyes to the whole situation. I vaguely understood what crypto was used for, and how the system worked, but it was nice getting a view from a non-evangelist on the actual functions of the systems in crypto, and how terrible they are suited for the many MANY applications crypto enthusiasts tout.
The damning thing though is how absolutely rotten all crypto systems are and how completely broken they are currently for everyday use. How reliant they are on 3rd party systems, which completely breaks a lot of the “decentralized” claims that go out there.
It is a new system, but it isn’t any better, and in some ways worse than the current system. It is just changing those in power from the banks to the programmers and early adopters.
Woof.
Now I am mad I invested in BTC and ETH last spring. Though, it was chump change really, stuff I was not afraid to lose. Looks like I will be HODL’ing forever until it gets back up to a place I can sell it w/o a loss.
Wha? Foldable human?
Dan Olsen, creator of the video linked above.
Speaking of which …
FRP players have been amassing crypt-o-currency for decades now
Yeah, my fault put a video and not comment anything, but the 2 hours long video (at least you can skip the first 7 mins!) I put above really explains cryptocurrency and nfts very well.
It really showed to me how cryptocurrencies serve no purpose as the original intention (currency) is not viable, the transaction time and fees are too high the moment it’s used in high volumes, and how then they are searching for new uses for cryptocurrencies (nft!, smart contract!, dao!, web3!) in an attempt to find something to still promote the use of it beyond mere speculation, but they all have a long list of issues. Because if it’s pure speculation, the bubble will burst at some point.
Right, they have no clear usecases other than buying illegal drugs on the darknet. Beyond that it’s just speculation.
Now blockchain has some interesting applications, primarily in verifying chain of custody. For example, you could track each individual component in your iPhone to ensure none of them were produced in a factory employing children or whatever. But that’s separate from cryptocurrency.
The video actually goes into how the blockchain idea itself is flawed, due to the distributed nature of the processing and verification systems now take ages to reach consensus.
The blockchain technology really does feel like a system created in need of a use, rather than the other way around.
I didn’t watch the video but blockchain tech itself is solid enough and consensus speed/cost isn’t an issue outside of cryptocurrency. Of course there are other ways to track chain of custody and such, but blockchain seems perfectly designed to do it.
If you put that on a public ledger, then you’d have to make a link on the chain for each component, and that costs money doesn’t it? It seems like you’d want to create your own controlled ledger that you don’t have to pay for, or you know…just make a database. It’s not like the entity adding the component can’t lie about who added them.
The other thing the video goes into, which you really should watch, even at a 2 hours length, is how impossible it is to edit the blockchain once it has been written.
It is a huge roadblock for a lot of applications, especially because it makes bug fixing near impossible. If there is an erroneous entry that gets verified by the consensus, it becomes a permanent part of the blockchain, unless you want to fork into a new chain, or go through the impossible task of getting the distributed network to get consensus on a change.
Honestly, it really feels like blockchain technology has so many flaws that it doesn’t have a good use case at present. These are things that developers can fix, but currently as a concept it has fundamental flaws.
He goes into a lot of detail about how blockchain technology was built as a security against “main in the middle” attacks. Which it does admirably. It is impossible to edit the blockchain with falsified data.
This also makes it impossible to edit with correct data.
This makes blockchain based applications extremely vulnerable to social engineering or other types of hacks to get bad data put in on purpose.
Like I said, it is an interesting piece of tech in search of a practical application. Which I don’t think exists currently.
It costs money in that you need to host machines to run the ledger, and plug them into power, and give them internet access. It doesn’t cost money in that there’s no actual fee in real terms.
Ledger data is indeed immutable, but that’s a feature not a bug. You can use versioning to handle that.
Yeah, the uses that Stusser is leaning into involve Corporations running their own private blockchains, not leveraging the ‘public’ ones. And to that end there are a handful of commercially available blockchain offerings from several vendors.
I agree it’s a use case, but you’d still really need to have a reason to not trust other Write Once Read Many technologies, or be really, really worried about internal bad actors, or have a B2B data sharing requirement where trust was an issue. Still super-duper niche, IMO.
The problem with versioning is that is a centralized solution to a decentralized (in theory) network. The problem with this is that the versions need to be distributed and agreed upon. You are splitting the network up.
In a corporate solution, it is already something that is centralized, why would it need blockchain to accomplish its tasks?
Like I said the issue with blockchain technology is that it is very vulnerable to injection attacks, as any bad data, virus or malware that gets injected becomes distributed and permanent.
I really don’t see blockchain tech solving any problems better than the ones it introduces.
The usual advantages, it’s immutable and transparent to your B2B customers and even end-users. You can prove your iPhone wasn’t built by Uyghur slaves or whatever.
That’s the main usecase, and it seems niche now, but we have a growing problem with copycat inferior products on Amazon so there is some value.