[IronIvan]

> Any application that could be done on a blockchain could be better done on a centralized database. Except crime.

After all as we all know: If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear.

And look at how inefficient all these permissionless, trustless protocols are! What a waste! Let's just all trust a central authority and think of the savings and the children.

[padobson]

Yeah, this is what I don't understand from the naysayers. Anyone who says blockchain-driven assets don't have intrinsic value seems to ignore the value of trust - the ability to trust that the ledger is accurate seems extremely valuable.

The author of the article skips over the question entirely, maybe he's addressed it elsewhere, but if the crypto skeptics continue to ignore one of its primary value propositions, I have to assume either ignorance or bad faith.

[horsawlarway]

But that ledger isn't accurate. It's just distributed and difficult to change.

I technically am the owner of (quite a few) bitcoin that were being processed by MtGox when they imploded.

The wallet they were in at the time was emptied and no longer exists.

I still receive the relevant court documents as the case continues still.

As far as the ledger is concerned - they are no longer mine.

---

So question to you: How do you reconcile the theft of my property with the ledger at this point?

It turns out I have no ability to do so at all. The ledger is distributed and impossible to meaningfully change.

So while I trust that the ledger can't be changed easily - I don't trust the ledger to accurately reflect ownership (it can only represent possession, not true ownership).

So now what?

Now it turns out I have to turn around and trust a central authority anyways! That authority being the government that is handling the prosecution of MtGox for fraud and theft.

[keyanp]

> the ability to trust that the ledger is accurate seems extremely valuable

Maybe it "seems" valuable, but why exactly is it valuable? For what use case and which situation (besides crime)?

I think the issue is that many don't see value in its "primary value proposition" because the features they want from banks are already there (stability, FDIC insurance). The only thing I personally see missing is no/low-fee instant transfers, but crypto hasn't solved that either (too slow and/or high fees).

[swenger]

A blockchain doesn’t provide trust, though. A person who doesn’t understand technology doesn’t trust a distributed ledger, but they do trust their centralised bank because it’s regulated.

[HelloNurse]

The article discusses pseudo-money, not generic decentralized databases. The main point is that even if a blockchain distributed database technically "works" it is highly inadequate for many practical money-like applications, particularly because trust has to include the real world.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

In some context I would agree, there is theoretical value to a decentralized trustless ledger[0]. What I can't agree with, however, is that entries in a decentralized trustless ledger are inherently valuable as cryptocurrency proponents would like us to believe. The entries in the ledger have no inherent meaning, they're just a number associated with another number and the only reason anyone equates that with a monetary value is that, for the moment, they can find someone else[1] to give them money to shuffle those numbers around. I think that, at best, one could say that BTC is backed by hype and speculation. I am not convinced that is a useful basis for a currency[2].

This is in contrast to fiat currencies which their various governments offer guarantees that they will honor.

NFTs, on the other hand, make even less sense to me. They seem like they are just cryptocurrency in disguise trying to fool people who otherwise question the concept of inherent value by claiming (falsely) that they are equivalent to ownership of digital goods[3].

[0] I have yet to hear a use case for which they are actually better than traditional alternatives, but I can imagine that one might exists.

[1] read: greater fool.

[2] Leaving aside all the energy wasted on PoW.

[3] And that's before we get into my conviction that attempts to force artificial scarcity into a post-scarcity space are backward and perverted.

[gfodor]

It turns out in history lots of people committed crimes where the evil party was not the criminal, but the state deeming their actions criminal.

[the_gastropod]

Is trust in bank records generally low? Especially in moderately modernized countries?

[pron]

That argument doesn't work with currency, because money requires trust by definition (as opposed to immediate barter), and, as a backup -- enforcement.

In the end, it's just a question of whether you trust a centralised authority that's ultimate accountable, however imperfectly, or decentralised authorities that are accountable only to themselves and have no enforcement power.

If you give me bitcoin and I don't give you goods in exchange, or vice-versa, aren't you going to run to that central authority?

[soco]

The same can be said about NFTs: you must verify their authenticity off-chain, you must trust that off-chain authority, or sue people off-chain if they infringe on your off-chain property rights...

[etherael]

I'll give you a bad review in a venue where your reputation is more valuable than the trade or I wouldn't trade with you to begin with. Or I would insist on an escrowed bond.

There's many other ways than inserting a monopoly on violence dispensing political authority into the loop and still ensuring that transactions are suitably reliable.

Big sticks just aren't a very efficient solution.

[maneesh]

This is why I always have thought that election voting would be a perfect use case for a blockchain.

Imagine a way that you could look up the blockchain with your key (SSN?) that is somehow one-way-hashed to show you the result of your vote. The value param would be plain-text. Someone else wouldn't be able to see your vote without your key, but you could confirm yours was recorded properly. Anyone could tally the values to get the final value.

Because the blockchain is trustless and distributed, you wouldn't have to worry about an election machine flipping your vote.

Apart from currency, this seems like a great use-case! Are there any flaws in this basic structure?

[andrewla]

First of all, what you're talking about more resembles a Merkle Tree rather than a blockchain, because the "chaining" property is really useless in this scenario. Each election can publish the Merkle Tree of its results and you can be sure that your vote was properly registered. Or frankly, just publish the list of one-way hashes and their vote, and you can dispense with all the Merkle-ing.

But what about a Sybil attack? How do you ensure "one person == one or zero votes"? I could submit a jillion votes for Donald Duck and how would you ever know that those votes were all cast by the same person? Any sort of election scheme has to deal with messy real-world identity, and there's no cryptographic solution to that, only various weak social network approaches that are pretty much the norm.

[ninjanomnom]

Voting is intentionally designed for it to be impossible to verify what your final vote is so that it's impossible for someone to use that to hold you to a particular vote. A classic example being a household all being forced to vote one way by the head of that household. With no verification possible you can freely vote without influence from others who would use that verification for their own ends.

This is also why taking a picture of your ballot will nullify it if you're caught doing so. Not as punishment, but so you can vote again with potentially different choices and a valid excuse for having no verification.

[pron]

> This is why I always have thought that election voting would be a perfect use case for a blockchain.

You mean, other than trusting elected representatives to oversee the election you'd rather trust miners?

[brazzy]

Of all the things you could do with a blockchain, it's probably the worst.

The legitimacy of voting outcomes depends critically on everyone understanding and in principle being able to verify how it works, and it being resistant to tampering at scale.

Very few people would understand a blockchain based voting mechanism well enough to really verify, and any implementation error could give an attacker complete and untraceable control over the results.

Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2030/

[Nursie]

You also need a way to use your key to show a false result, or someone can use rubber-hose cryptanalysis to see your vote.

[keyanp]

There are a number of attempts to accomplish this goal by using homomorphic encryption, without needing blockchain. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_Voting

[andrewla]

Exactly -- "except crime".

Practically speaking these can just be anything from conflicting jurisdictions (buying weed in a state where it's legal but the Federal government is skeptical), to "crimes" like circumventing KYC or AML -- things that look like structuring (like sending > $10k) even if they are not in furtherance of criminal activity.