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What is something that gets a lot of hate for absolutely no reason?
(midwest.social)
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this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2024
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Asklemmy
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it’s not blockchain itself, it’s how over-hyped it is for what is a data structure with a very limited and specific use-case.
It’s the fact that ‘blockchain companies’ exist while there are no ‘binary search tree’ companies or ‘weighted directional graph’ companies.
Yeah, I completely agree. For a while there, it was the new "cloud." What made it worse, I think, is that blockchain is a relatively simple concept ane a fu& programming exercise. And once you've written your first, you look side-eye at Bitcoin prices and the temptation is too much for some people.
It's painful, because cryptocurrency - if done well, without POW - does address a number of capitalism problem spaces; and blockchain has applications in secure digital voting and other data integrity areas. Cryptobros do seem to be a rather unsavory lot, I'll admit. The majority give off greasy libertarian vibes, and I mostly keep quiet about the topic for fear of being associated with them.
The issue is that cryptocurrency doesn't really work without proof of work though, right? That's the fundamental basis of how the Blockchain ensures correctness.
Proof of work has nothing to do with blockchain itself. In Bitcoin, POW is how new blocks are found, but blocks are just payloads stored in the chain. Other, non-currency data can (and is) be stored in the Bitcoin blockchain, and this data does't necessarily require POW.
Bitcoin POW chunks might as well be new prime numbers; you spend a bunch of processing to calculate new primes, then you digitally sign the data and store those on the public blockchain and now you have digital currency. A blockchain block itself is no more CPU intensive than what it "costs" to set up a new SSL connection to whatever porn site you're browsing. It's literally just a chain of blocks of data hashes (even cheaper than your SSL connection) than include a previous block's hash, and which are signed.
POW is part of the cryptocoin part; blockchain is entirely unrelated - it's just a publically verifiable audit log (in this case also encapsulating the signed data).
There even exist cryptocurrencies which are not based on POW and the entire argument about environmental impact falls apart. Those have less environmental impact than Fortnight. But, in most cryptocurrencies there needs to be a mechanism to prevent people from arbitrarily printing cash and devaluing the system; aside from POW, staking is popular: you just buy coins outright. There are other methods; but in no case does the technology of blockchain involve POW.