Ask Lemmy

No. From the most base concepts, some authority still needs to recognize and enforce the contents of the blockchain (ownership, currency, whatever). If an authority is already trusted to act on this data, they might as well be the secure custodian of it. Or, if not entirely trusted, a third party trustee. At very best the blockchain offers complete transparency and auditability, but this is the trust you place into any given system on your end. If you do not place trust in a system, what are you doing engaging with it?

Supporters of blockchain generally don't accept these arguments because they are anti-authority, and without passing further comment on that, fair enough. But that means it will only ever be relegated to buying drugs on the internet and scams.

Gods unchained is a digital TCG that is the only good use of NFTs (and thus Blockchain) that I can think of.

The idea of NFTs is you have a specific instance of a thing that you can trade around. NFT art is stupid, because at the end of the day it's a jpg. However, with a digital TCG, each NFT can represent a singular copy of a digital trading card. It brings back the "trading" aspect of a digital TCG, made more convenient than physical cards due to digital transfers.

It absolutely can't be replaced by a simple database, saying that makes me question that you truly understand the technology. Here's the important question, who owns the database and how do you know you can trust them?

Would you trust me to manage a database that holds your money? What about someone who's actively opposing you? How about a foreign nation? That's the thing blockchains solve, a decentralized 0-trust way to have an append only ledger, yes a database can be an append only ledger, but it can't be decentralized or 0-trust, that's the important thing here.

Let me give you a very recent example, Steam has been censored, and has had to remove certain games from their catalog, this happened because PayPal and other payment providers forced their hand. This is the sort of problems that arise from having someone own the database, they can dictate what you do or don't. Let me be extra clear, this sort of censorship is essentially impossible in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies because no one controls the database.

A database is not an alternative to the blockchain.

it's really difficult to be anonymous with a credit card

Not a scam but maybe over engineered and difficult to sell for most uses? Theoretically blockchain could be used for all sorts of applications, but apart from a bunch of startups it's not taken off. Maybe it's just not compelling financially for businesses.

For an established business or organisation It'd be a big leap to switch over to blockchain but the benefits are not immediately relisable or tangible in a business setting. In a world where short term profits already trump long term investment, it does make sense that business are not rushing to adopt blockchain.

I'd think of it like this - companies don't have the foresight to invest in IT and security; they slash IT budgets, use equipment until the last possible moment deferring expensive upgrades and don't put money in to protect themselves from cyber crime. For example, big banks quite literally still use systems that are decades out of date.

If companies behave like that already why would they invest in switching to the block chain? The benefits are long term and not easily understood. It's hard to sell investment in a technology on blockchain when most people struggle to understand what it is, let alone what it's benefits may be.

Most people only know about it because of cryptocurrency but even then don't really understand how it works, and that usage scenario is world's away from the other theoretical uses. Cryptocurrency makes money because it's a speculative asset (at the moment at least). Other uses at best prevent fraud and companies are generally useless at trying to prevent fraud. When they do, it's focused around the actual transactions not the ledger. They don't see someone "cooking the books" being the priority problem to solve.

Data security and verifying is not a priority for companies. If companies are spending money at the moment, it's short term nonsense such as the AI bubble. And public organisations seldom have the imagination or freedom/resource to be an early adoptor a new technology.

So, no I don't think it's a scam. I think it's something that is difficult to implement and sell in the real world. And all people can see at present is "crypto currency goes up in value" not the actual underlying benefit of cryptocurency as a currency. Crytpcurrency is doing well currently because it is scarce and has become an asset bubble, not because the blockchain itself is the star.

it cannot really replace a simple database. it has an integrity guarantee. not in the way that data won't get modified accidentally, but that it won't get modified onesided.

the git version control system also uses a kind of a blockchain structure. git was made by the creator of linux. a major difference is that git does not use proof of work for consensus, I think it just does not use anything for that, other than the web server's access control mechanism.
commits are built on top of a large chain of histories, and the commit ID verifies that the current state and the history of it is the exact same when you checkout that commit ID on any other computer. if you go find in the repository a commit made 3 years ago, and change that commit (this is supported by git but not recommended), either the content or the metadata like time of commit, the whole history after that also need to get rewritten to remain valid, and so all those commits will now have a new commit ID

What are the alternatives?
How else can you create decentralized permissionless money (you know, the thing it was created for in the first place, before people got an idea of putting monkey jpegs there)?

In theory you could use them for ERP systems like SAP to track components in global supply chains

Recording data on an "eternal" digital data storage is incredibly useful. You don't need much imagination here but I think we overestimated how much people actually want this and how ok we are with less perfectionist systems given that they work now just fine. Storing something on the web is usually just as good in practice despite being less perfect data store mechanism.

That being said what if we have incredibly important information that is difficult to share or preserve - an immutable blockchain with so much financial security is a really powerful tool here.

Thats what got me into bitcoin at the beginning but disappoingly it never reached the point where it would outcompete non-blockchain tech. Mostly because we live in a better world than many believe 🙃

The decentralized idea is great, but with so many shitcoins out there...it's tough.

Are you really going to build an entire car title company stop something like Binance or Trump Coin or Ninja Bits? Hell no.

I think the concept is good, but the execution thus far remains to be seen.

Blockchain has been ”the next big thing” for 10+ years without making any real impact outside of cryptocurrency speculation (which is mostly a pyramid scheme). If it had any legitimate use, it would be widely used today.