1260
17 years*
(lemmy.blahaj.zone)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2026
1260 points (100.0% liked)
Microblog Memes
12059 readers
1122 users here now
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
RULES:
- Your post must be a screen capture of a microblog-type post that includes the UI of the site it came from, preferably also including the avatar and username of the original poster. Including relevant comments made to the original post is encouraged.
- Your post, included comments, or your title/comment should include some kind of commentary or remark on the subject of the screen capture. Your title must include at least one word relevant to your post.
- You are encouraged to provide a link back to the source of your screen capture in the body of your post.
- Current politics and news are allowed, but discouraged. There MUST be some kind of human commentary/reaction included (either by the original poster or you). Just news articles or headlines will be deleted.
- Doctored posts/images and AI are allowed, but discouraged. You MUST indicate this in your post (even if you didn't originally know). If an image is found to be fabricated or edited in any way and it is not properly labeled, it will be deleted.
- Absolutely no NSFL content.
- Be nice. Don't take anything personally. Take political debates to the appropriate communities. Take personal disagreements & arguments to private messages.
- No advertising, brand promotion, or guerrilla marketing.
RELATED COMMUNITIES:
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
sigh
Once again:
Blockchain is not synonymous with cryptomining
Blockchain does not require proof of work
Cryptocurrency and NFT grifting does not devalue blockchain as an immutable distributed ledger
I swear to god people just copy paste whatever makes them feel good without any effort at understanding
True... But Satoshi did invent Bitcoin, which is proof of work, and is everything in OP
The "technically true" nature of it reads like propaganda against electric cars as a whole, does it not? I'd argue that applies here too.
"Popularized" the electric car, maybe?
There were electric cars since there were cars
Popularized it is. I was careful to not put invent, but morning brain not work good.
Fair enough, I forgot that OP said "blockchain," instead of "bitcoin."
Your example is not even close to technically true.
Sure. Sure. Insert your own example of applying the sins of a particular implementation of a technology to a hierarchical supergroup. That was an example I came up with in a few minutes on the shitter, not a deep philosophical argument.
_ is bad, because (specific implementation) has these flaws!
That's the issue being discussed here. It's misleading without precision.
most electric cars are teslas so like a statistical analysis would be mostly correct.
propaganda against electric cars is generally just propaganda against cars in general, for example:
if full self driving becomes a thing you can expect traffic to become MUCH worse as like one minivan for a parent with 3 kids is replaced by four self driving cars that drive each kid around and one for the parent. This could lead to traffic jams at every subburb
Doesn't have to be cars.
I'm just saying the original post is conflating criticisms against a particular implementation of blockchain with all blockchain.
That'd be a silly sentence, would it not?
Immutable so long as no one party or group owns more than half of the coins on a given blockchain... then the ledger is whatever they say it is and it propagates down because they can manufacture their own "consensus".
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/1/51-attack.asp
and most use cases around things like "smart contracts" end up still requiring a trusted third party at some point
https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/30/the-inevitability-of-trusted-third-parties/
It's not 51% of the coins, it's 51% of the computing power on the network. Both of which are virtually impossible in the case of Bitcoin, though not entirely impossible. I just wouldn't consider a 51% attack even remotely a threat to the network compared to something like government crackdown
That's PoW. With PoS, it is coin ownership.
Which is much more distributed than computing power.
I'm not an expert, but I never understood why people would prefer PoS over PoW. Indeed, the latter requires to "waste" larger amounts of energy, but doesn't PoS favor rich groups of people colluding against the blockchain timeline?
Not anymore than PoW, which requires specialized hardware that can't be repurposed for other uses (and thus requires money to enter). I'm not sure if is still true, but I believe at one point less than 10 companies had over 51% of the BTC network.
Because ownership tends to be much more evenly distributed than ACIS ownership, it makes it harder to collude - you have to have 51% of all coins that are staked (and smaller owners generally pool to stake as well). In addition, a move to collude would almost instantly destroy the value of the staked coin (though maybe not assets tokenized on it), providing another incentive against it.
Can't you just split it up into however many wallets you want? If you're rich that seems like basic security.
You are making my point. Blockchain is not crypto. Blockchain can be useful in private, internal use cases (like a transaction ledger for bank branches) where trust is largely implicit.
If you have trust, why do you need a blockchain?
Distributed / immutable databases are not solely a feature of blockchain either.
It's a very interesting thing in a vacuum. Basically any application of it so far (with the possible exception of the original one, if it weren't just a speculation investment machine at the moment) runs into the problem where it has to interact with reality at some point. And most of the problems Blockchains solve are already solved by a variety of other systems, for less time/currency/hardware investment.
Because it's an immutable ledger, not just a database. It maintains a history of every previous transaction/entry. Blockchains are used by banks and in the supply chain because it makes backtracing and identifying discrepancies trivial. For things like cryptocurrency, blockchains allow "don't trust, verify" but for something where you already have trust, they allow "trust but verify"
Cryptographically immutable append only ledgers (aka merkel trees) have existed since at least 1979. A blockchain is different because it has distributed consensus. If your consensus algorithm is trust, then it's not a fucking blockchain.
Here, I provided a bunch of examples months ago of other ways blockchain is being used: https://lemmy.world/post/36683795/19677963
Why do you think LLMs are so popular?
This is a good comment that makes all good points. But I just wanna say let's stop saying "blockchain" singular and with no preceding article like we're tech CEOs and it's some immutable god. They're blockchains, plural, like any other data structure there can be more than one and there are. eg The blockchain of ethereum is distinct from the blockchain for bitcoin but they are both blockchains.
Valid point! But then how do you refer to the data structure/architecture/model concept? Sometimes we want a concise term (like bittorrent or ActivityPub) for the abstraction
It's a novel data structure, we can refer to it like we do other data structures: Linked lists, hash tables, primitives. The branded implementation of these things is what we typically make singular: Bitcoin, ethereum, monero (bittorrent, activitypub...)
Bittorrent implements a torrent swarm, activitypub implements a federated social network.
The only alternative to proof of work is proof of stake. And if the world ever ran on proof of stake crypto, it would make today’s wealth inequality look like a Marxist paradise.
There's other alternatives. But PoS does not reward just by ownership either.
Check out Gnosis, especially Circles, which is creating a UBI type thing.
I just looked at Circles’ webpage, and respectfully, that is a Ponzi scheme.
How exactly is it a Ponzi scheme, when you don't need to pay to get a share?
You are exactly the type of person I'm talking about :\
Crypto is not the only use case for blockchain.
Blockchain can be useful in inherently trusted, closed ecosystems.
Depending on the use case, proof doesn't even need to be anything more than a valid certificate (not work, not stake)
Consider a bank that develops its own blockchain ledger for internal use only, replacing their branch ledgers (which require daily reconciliation and propagation).
An immutable, distributed ledger has plenty of valid, valuable use cases without looking like crypto.
“Internal use only” blockchain is an oxymoron. If all contributors are trusted entities, then what does it matter if the data is stored in a blockchain vs any other data structure? If anything the amount of extra work to maintain and modify the blockchain in the case of errors just makes it unnecessary.
If that’s the best example of its many “valid, valuable use cases”, then it’s still a pass from me, dawg.
I have a large number of examples in this comment from four months ago. Please read them: https://lemmy.world/post/36683795/19677963
Literally the first example you gave was shut down a year later: https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoReality/comments/1mpeh9z/when_crypto_bros_are_asked_for_a_blockchain_use/
Pretty obvious that its use in the first place was some FOMO executives trying to get in on “blockchain” technology, just like they’re doing with AI and LLMs now. Funny how BTC and ETH both plateaued a year ago, right around the time AI became the new thing.
I’m not going to bother reading the rest, I already wasted too much time arguing with a true believer. GL with the crypto that you say you don’t have.
Lol you're a judgemental prick. I have zero crypto because that shit is absolutely moronic.
It's like you talked to someone who supports nuclear power and responded "good luck with the nuclear bombs you definitely don't have, true believer"
Sounds like you just want to hate on shit you don't understand. Go on with your bad self though 👍
EDIT: LMAO from the article you linked they even point out that the tech itself isn't the problem, but the willingness of businesses to invest in the improvements (which is, like, an incredibly common problem in business that does not in any way make the tech bad)
You probably preach about how nuclear power is terrible, how if it were so great there would be more of it, and people sticking to coal is proof that coal power is better.
Big brain you've got there 😂🫡
Then why hasn’t a better blockchain based currency gained any popularity? If they don’t have critical mass then your distinction is meaningless. It turns out there is just zero real world need for an untrusted distributed ledger. Databases and governments solve the problem much better.
Two points:
https://www.forbes.com/digital-assets/categories/proof-of-stake-pos/
Etherium and virtually the whole rest of the crypto scene that is "not bitcoin" has pretty soundly rejected the wasteful Bitcoin design. There was even a fork of Bitcoin that would have used the much more efficient proof-of-stake, but since that would be bad for everyone with a proof-of-work "mining" rig it didn't take over.
https://git-scm.com/
An "untrusted distributed ledger" is literally the backbone of modern software development. While you could plausibly split hairs and assert that git requires "trust", I don't think you'd wind up in a spot that both supports your assertion and a cognizable difference for anyone but mathematicians and security nerds. (And even if you did, the exact same sort of non-scam usages of blockchains are ones that operate like git, with the ledger used for something else.)
would you recommend any crypto in particular?
Questioning the technical virtues of an alternative product based on lack of critical mass adoption is pretty funny, when you consider we're on the fediverse. I know that doesn't defray your argument, but just an amusing observation.
Blockchain is not synonymous with crypto. Why are you bringing up crypto specifically? Crypto is garbage. But Blockchain is not crypto
Critical mass is not required for internal systems. Not all implementations of blockchain are intended for public use.
I'm really tired of this. Blockchain. Is not. Crypto.
Here's the research I did for everyone four months ago: https://lemmy.world/post/36683795/19677963
I'm not convinced there's any internal use for blockchain. Internal implies under a specific umbrella, some overarching organisation, who can then be the central trusted server that makes blockchain unnecesary.
That said, non-public but open uses, such as tracking dealings between companies in markets with little trust and no single governments (the shipping example in your referenced comment) is indeed the thin slither of a plausible use-case.
Another limitation is that blockchain loses its benefits if anyone tries to design over the complexity of using it directly (using a ui that under the hood uses blockchain is no different to using a ui that talks to a central database, you're trusting the central ui provider, you need to (at least be able to) build your own interface to realise the benefits of blockchain.
That means blockchain basically will never benefit individuals, it can't. Sure, you could have multiple compatible uis shared around, but that's no different security-wise to multiple central banks with an interoperable transfer system.
The only place blockchain has real benefits is when multiple large corporations/governments are interacting and don't trust eachother/anyone.
See the link in my other replies for some examples of internal uses that still benefit from immutable, distributed ledgers.
Large organizations still have loss and risk from individual bad actors. Operating a central authority that validates every single transaction in a ledger, and validates ledger history and consistency, can be prohibitively complicated. A well designed blockchain implementation can resolve most of these issues.
A great example is a pharma/healthcare company that wants to manage medicine batch and expiration tracking, as well as distribution/patient assignment. With a traditional infrastructure every participant needs to phone home to a central authority. In a blockchain setup, peers can report ledger events one hop up and propagate it through the chain.
That's a very simple example but I hope it gets my point across
Identifying anomalous behavior from bad actors is already a solved problem with databases and governing bodies.
Cryptocurrency development makes a whole bunch of arbitrary value-guided decisions during creation, all of these decisions have tradeoffs such that nobody has figured out a way to feature them all at the same time, or would they want to.
For example, bitcoin is fully auditable. Anyone with a copy of the bitcoin blockchain can review every single transaction in bitcoin's history, and trace the flow of every last satoshi from it's mining to today. This is because the developers of bitcoin place a high value on verifiable auditability and security. Conversely monero was developed for the purpose of being a completely untraceable, unauditable currency that still has a knowable supply. And ethereum was created in a manner that intentionally supported scripting, so that it could be used as a platform for novel applications and contracts. None of these primary features could be ported to either of the other two without breaking them completely, because of the deep programmatic implications of the requirements.
It's not really a question of better or worse, but of use case. The fact of the matter is that the reason these three examples are the leading currencies for their use case is literally because nobody has yet been able to do a better job. And for bitcoin at least, at this point it's security rests just as much in it's wide adoption and interest as it's design intent, so it's unlikely that anyone ever will.