Agree 100%. Web3 is useless. The whole web3 thing is an extension to get more people and more real money to get into the crypto ecosystem and provide liquidity to the early adopters and insiders.
I haven't found one legitimate use case for blockchain. The only thing it is useful for it speculative gambling.
There are some use cases for blockhains, namely cryptocurrencies and their unregulated nature. There have been plenty of times that I didn't want to hand over my name and address for an online purchase, but the traditional payment systems aren't set up for privacy.
Payment providers also discriminate against certain aspects of society, such as sex work. The fees an adult content provider needs to pay are astronomical if they can even get a contract with any payment provider at all. Furthermore, the USA has a severe problem that stems from companies like Equifax deciding what you can and cannot afford with no way to protest their decisions.
I suppose the only useful use case for blockchain is close to money laundering, but there are definitely legitimate use cases for it. It's the closest thing we have to cash in the online world.
While I'm all for regulating shitcoins and the gambling ("speculation") that accompanies them, it's an alternative that will need to exist as long as the normal payment system continues to force their own arbitrary, corrupt ideologies on everyone.
> Payment providers also discriminate against certain aspects of society, such as sex work. The fees an adult content provider needs to pay are astronomical if they can even get a contract with any payment provider at all. Furthermore, the USA has a severe problem that stems from companies like Equifax deciding what you can and cannot afford with no way to protest their decisions.
This is not a technology problem, this is a legal problem. To change it, we need to change the laws, not the technology. Sure, they can use crypto now to skirt those regulations, but clearly crypto payments will be regulated exactly as fiat payments very soon. Then, you're back at square one but have burned the planet and enabled ransomware and scammers along the way.
If crypto's main use case is to skirt common agreed upon societal rules that might be debatable, imagine it can be used extensively for all causes that are not up for debate - for ex financing terrorism
It's hardly a legal problem, there are plenty of countries and US states where many kinds of sex work are perfectly legal, and having your life ruled by credit agencies is far from universal.
I understand that with decent regulation illegal goods can't just fly under the radar anymore, I'm just saying that in the current ecosystem there is a use case for this fake money where real money simply cannot be exchanged reliably. In an ideal world we wouldn't need fake underground value transfers but the world is far from ideal.
Cryptocurrencies are terrible at privacy, too. Any time you try to use cryptocurrency to buy physical goods (or fiat currency), whoever you're transacting with can know every transaction you've ever made.
Just ban crypto advertising. That way people who actually need crypto for whatever reason can use it, and Matt Damon can't convince your aunt to throw away her inheritance into some shitcoin
This is applying technical solutions to social issues. Nothing technically prevents credit card or other online payment means from being anonymous, there are implemented that way for social reasons.
This is also where I see the cryptocurrencies going: regulatory bodies putting more and more resources and restrictions to align them with other monetary systems, to a point where them being based on blockchain will just be an implementation detail.
> There have been plenty of times that I didn't want to hand over my name and address for an online purchase, but the traditional payment systems aren't set up for privacy.
Private payments can easily solved without a blockchain. For private payments you don't need a completely trust-less system. Taler[1] solves this quite elegantly: they provide completetly anonymous payments for the customer but still require the merchant to be 'on-record' to make money laundering harder/impossible. For that they rely on a regulated and trusted party as you would with a regular payment provider or bank. No proof of work needed, no value volatility, just an online representation of cash with accountability for the merchant built-in.
Of course, this also means that your second point is still valid for Taler: The involved trusted parties could collectively decide that they want to discriminate against certain merchants, in the same way the current payment providers did.
I know exactly one legitimate use case for blockchain: a public ledger like bitcoin.
The thing is that you don’t need more than this one online currency though, right? It’s also the safest in terms of PoW [1]. I don’t see any reason for all other altcoins to exist other than charting and trading on exchanges (which is certainly fun, but does not provide value).
A trusted ledger is valuable, but a ledger doesn't have to be public to be trusted. When I swipe my card at the grocery store, I'm not shaking in my boots with my fingers crossed, doubting whether the transaction will be recorded as transmitted or not.
If for some looney toons secret agent reason you need a transaction to be public, you can tweet a picture of the receipt. Or, even better, you can mail it to yourself, the postmark is legally binding.
Bitcoin uses almost as much energy as the entire global banking system, with its associated costs in capital, emissions, and e-waste, to process less than 0.001% the transaction volume of Visa alone, while providing no additional benefit.
> A trusted ledger is valuable, but a ledger doesn't have to be public to be trusted. When I swipe my card at the grocery store, I'm not shaking in my boots with my fingers crossed, doubting whether the transaction will be recorded as transmitted or not.
Of course, because as the customer nothing bad happens to you if it’s not. Worst case scenario, the merchant doesn’t accept your payment and you either have to pay with cash or not buy anything.
The worst case scenario for the merchant is substantially worse. If the payment doesn’t go through, they lose money. This could happen days or weeks later if the customer decides to chargeback the merchant. There are countless stories of payment processors siding with customers, placing holds on a business’s funds for extended periods of time while conducting investigations, etc.
I would actually take the opposite stance. Unless a ledger is public and independently verifiable, there is no reason to trust it at all. Nearly every instance of financial fraud has relied on people trusting a private ledger.
First of all, being public does nothing to change that scenario.
Second of all, abusing chargebacks when a vendor upheld their side of an agreement is a crime, and if you can prove that you delivered the goods as the consumer requested, the chargeback can be reversed. This is not a problem with the system.
The way that blockchain "solves" this non-problem is by making the transaction record immutable, so that no transaction can ever be undone, no longer how fraudulent or illegal. That's why the main users of blockchain technology these days, aside from speculators, is scammers and theives, because once you have somebody's crypto money, it is technologically impossible to ever return it to its rightful owner, even with a court order.
Theft on the blockchain has already surpassed all other financial theft in the world pre-2016. Getting access to people's keys, or tricking them into authorizing a transaction, or writing malware into smart contracts has enabled a golden age of theft that cannot be undone.
Immutability does not imply correctness.
> Unless a ledger is public and independently verifiable
You say this as if those things are connected. They are not. Your credit card transaction ledger is already independently verifiable, with the magical future technologies known as "receipts" and "bank statements".
A distributed ledger is also not inherently valuable.
A trusted ledger is valuable, but a ledger does not need to be distributed to be trusted. See above.
If, for some looney toons secret agent reason you need a transaction to be in a lot of places, you can ship out usb sticks, put copies of it on different data centers.
Or, just use a regular-ass bank. They already have distributed ledger systems for redundancy and responsiveness. What, you think that out of all of Chase's data centers there's only one server that has any transaction data on it?
Blockchain adds nothing that existing database and data transfer solutions don't have, but it always comes with cost and immutability (which is not the same as correctness- the >1 billion dollars stolen out of people's crypto wallets per year since 2018 is testament to that).
Private blockchains are entirely useless. If you already have a permissioned system, there is not point in using a trustless and permission less database
When I use $payment_processor/card_network then I need to trust a corporation again. I don’t want to do that due to bad experiences.
Yes, unfortunately mining is too profitable with the current prices, we need it to go back to a much lower price. Probably won’t happen for a long time (bubbles can exist for decades). Bitcoin can in theory transact more volume than VISA while using the same energy as it is now since the block time is always 10 minutes.
The payment processor is the party to the transaction whose trust is least dangerous.
You swipe at the grocery store, what's Visa gonna do, not record your transaction? Why is that the only part of the exchange that you're worried about?
Why is it them you want to stop trusting, and not the POS terminal manufacturer who could be lying about the total on the screen?
Or the grocery store you're buying from who could be selling you poison, or who could refuse to carry out a delivery you ordered after taking your money, or who could mischarge you for the items you bought?
And how is your situation improved by switching away from the payment processor with legal responsibilities and administrative controls, to an immutable system that will never, ever, ever let you get the money back in the event of any of the other parties to the transaction turning out to be untrustworthy, even if a court orders it?
Immutability is not correctness. In fact it is the opposite, because in any system that takes input from the real world, errors are guaranteed, whether malicious or accidental. Eliminating the possibility of error correction from the system decreases it's trustworthiness.
> Bitcoin can in theory transact more volume than VISA while using the same energy as it is now since the block time is always 10 minutes.
No it can't. The bitcoin block size is fixed at 10mb, and they've been full for years.
It is theoretically possible for consumption to go down as people exit the network, but that won't ever happen, because the POW system is inherently a power-consumption arms race. There is not, nor can there ever be, a disincentive from buying more hardware and consuming more power. If you crunch more than the other guys you're going to win more blocks and be financially rewarded. The protocol guarantees that the ROI is always positive.
I hope you and your machete of common sense are not allowed into any meetings to ruin any big deals! billions are being raised right now to do web3 things, which we dont know what they are. who are you to ruin this ecstasy of grift?
what scares me is that I dont really have any idea of what the really good useful investable things are underlying all this bullshit, because I trained up in computer programming and time series analysis and trading and machine learning not crypto. so while I can squint and see that like in authentication maybe, or maybe tokenizing assets, or maybe that distributed name service, some of it is interesting, but why are we putting billions into all this crap instead of electrolysis or better fission reactors, or biotech to create chemicals without oil, or ammonia, we are investing in this behavioral social tech which feeds off of, and amplifies, our worst social traits?
it doesn't even help us with our number one collective behavioral shortcoming which is how to reach consensus about externalized problems. it just encourages more externalization so that VCs can make money. I love money but I dont like society choosing only to solve the easy problems while neglecting everything else.
I dont think we can live in crypto fantasy land for example while all the new supply chain problems create real new challenges which require trillions of investment to fix. "how I pay for things" kind of pales in comparison to "why cant we manufacture electronics"
No, the BTC protocol is limited to an upper limit determined by the maximum blocksize. Last I checked that put the limit of BTC at something in the region of 7 transactions/second without increasing the block size.
To match Visa alone you'd need to increase that by a factor of 250 - you could reduce block time, increase block size, whatever. But that would also by necessity increase the storage requirements of each node by a similar factor.
Ah, yes, a system where you can steal an unlimited amount of money from somebody else without any possibility of recourse by just saying that they agreed and hoping that nobody notices, clearly this is better than a trusted processor with strict legal obligations and easy reversibility in the event of error.
The whole reason that Bitcoin has smart contracting is to enable this kind of scalability without compromising the security. After all, all that fancy decentralized stuff wouldn't be useful if you had to go use a centralized server (or abandon security) to make use of it.
Imagine you, me, and some of the other posters here decide we'd like to transact efficiently amongst ourselves without the resource expenditure of telling others about our transactions but we don't trust each other, so we establish a set of rules about the records we need to keep when doing so. If there is never a dispute great! But if there is a dispute, we take our agreement and our transaction records and head off to court to settle the dispute.
To apply that to Bitcoin: the rules and records get made machine interpretable. Transact as you like, and if there is a dispute you take the relevant records to the blockchain and it enforces according to them. Because the enforcement is automatic and untamperable there isn't any reason to cause a dispute in the first place (which creates some challenges for software Q/A)... so then when channels are used globally broadcast transactions are only needed to enroll or unenrole coins in a scheme (or in the event of a dispute or a software fault).
You could, of course, instead have some insecure trust based way of exchanging coins-- that is, after all, how all legacy banking technology works. But with Bitcoin you don't have to. The system offers a spectrum of different ways to transact, each with their own costs and benefits.
> Transact as you like, and if there is a dispute you take the relevant records to the blockchain and it enforces according to them.
This whole idea falls down once you realize that the blockchain knows nothing about what was actually transacted. Say I give you a piece of bread in exchange for 1 Satoshi, but never receive that Satoshi. A court of law can, in principle, coerce you to pay what you owe me, but the blockchain can do no such thing. Similarly, if you do pay me that Satoshi but I never give you the bread, you'll also never be able to convince the blockchain to reverse the transaction or make me give you the bread.
The ancestor post was about not needing to place every transaction directly into the blockchain, to which someone replied assuming that doing so would eliminate the security, to which I explained it did not eliminate the security. My apologies for using broad language which could be read as implying that any possible dispute could be settled that way-- that wasn't the point I was trying to make.
HOWEVER, you're not entirely correct for two reasons:
(1) There is a much wider class of transactions that can be made cheat proof than you might expect. If, for example, I were purchasing machine validable information from you that could be made resolvable https://bitcoincore.org/en/2016/02/26/zero-knowledge-conting...
(2) Even when that's not possible-- when you transact you can use excrow transactions to specify that any monotone function of additional key holders can release the funds. In the simpliest form, the transfer requires you me and an arbitrator. So you could make it so that if there is a dispute one or more other parties have to approve the outcome-- which could be a court or a private arbitrator (or some quorum of arbitrators, if you like). There the third party isn't eliminated, but it's made very flexible.
As an aside, in US legal tradition civil courts do not usually award specific performance -- I might get my money back and damages, but they won't make you give me bread you promised to give me. (2) is similarly limited, but (1) isn't if applies and you don't choose for it to be.
Lightning seems explicitly worse than any non crypto-adjacent payment system, as in addition to having to trust people, there's also no ability to reverse a transaction, and no ability to identify who defrauded you.
Lightning network is not bitcoin, and has none of Bitcoin's security guarantees. It is, by design, easy to abuse either to steal money (if a node goes down) or to do DoS to a node.
Coins have different attributes and use cases. Who is to say who can make what. The best of the niche needed will win out, just like every other sector of all industries.
Ethereum has it's EVM. Monero has it's RandomX algo to prevent ASICs, and it's Ring signatures to prevent tracing.
Some coins are pure Proof of Stake and try to solve scaling differently, see Algorand and Cardano.
There are altcoins that are just clones, referred to generally as shitcoins.
Just because you can’t buy an ASIC Ant miner doesn’t mean that they have not developed one internally and are running a monopoly. (Spoiler: Bitmain already developed several ASIC miners for Cryptonight in the past)
I believe in a decentralized web, but one that you don't need a data center to participate in; nor, a buy in to participate.
As at the end if the day, that's what the web was back in the day. And still is if you ignore the main stays.
It's silly really, but it's more of a question as to what is possible with access to a boundless tape of computers. How do you organize and for what purpose.
The "original" web3 before the cryptocurrency scammers claimed the term was all about the decentralized web with protocols like IPFS backing them. With IPFS, someone needs to host the data (either yourself or some service you pay) but the more popular your data is, the more hosts will have it cached and the quicker and cheaper the content loads.
Even now, after the surge of cryptocurrency gambling, products like NFTs often leverage IPFS to store data, since the blockchains themselves are absolutely useless for actually storing information and nobody wants their decentralized system to rely on someone else's server.
You haven't looked very hard if you think it's 100% useless. Some top of mind things:
- Transferring funds overseas
- Trading/speculation on public exchanges
- Selling art online
There's a lot of sensationalist articles about how these things are all ponzis or as you say "providing liquidity to early adopters", but you don't have to buy and hodl major coins to use Web3/decentralization. Many of the above use cases are much easier on the blockchain than using traditional brokers. Not to mention there's a lot of friction in the form of providing personal info when you sign up (which may end up hacked/leaked) and chance of being subject to random discrimination.
2. Immutable, digital, accessible, secure ownership of music, video, real-estate, cars, gaming assets, health data
3. Instant access to nearly all possible financial products (loans, lending, startup investments etc.) without a middle man
There are many, many more use cases. Crypto drastically increases accountability, transparency, accessibility, trustworthiness for every kind of use case.
It seems like you are creating a lot of straw men to not see that, for example an impossible standard such as saying not all of crypto is 100% decentralized, so it's centralized, which just makes no sense and is a very strong logical fallacy.
1. Nope. Still need to convert it to real money for buying something. Gas fees > transfer fees.
2. Nope. It doesn't grant any ownership. It's a just a pointer to a file on third party server. Ownership is enforced by a central authority. Code is not law.
3. Nope. Without an underlying economic activity it's all a ponzi scheme. There is no finance in DeFi. Just scammers running pump and dump schemes and rugpulling starry eyed idiots who think centuries old financial principals are useless and want to make a quick buck without doing anything.
Trust me when I say this, I did a lot of research and reading in earnest. I really hoped there was something of substance in it. I really wanted to embrace web3 and its promise of an open distributed web. I am a programmer. I am always open to learning about and adopting new technologies. I tried hard. I started by reading the original Bitcoin whitepaper by Satoshi. I looked at the web3.js framework. I read as many whitepapers as I could. I looked at many of the projects. Things just don't add up.
>3. Nope. Without an underlying economic activity it's all a ponzi scheme. There is no finance in DeFi. Just scammers running pump and dump schemes and rugpulling starry eyed idiots who think centuries old financial principals are useless and want to make a quick buck without doing anything.
There's plenty of projcts ran by people who are clearly not trying to scam anyone. Time will tell whether they will actually be successful but you are clearly biased again and not even attempting to be objective.
There is a lack of balance here. Yashg is not wrong in his assertions, and nor are you, that time will tell if the non-scammers are successful or not. I was laughing at the concept of bitcoin when it was mere cents to the coin and some pizza was bought. I'm not laughing now, but I'm also well aware that if you need to explain why something is NOT a Ponzi scheme, it's a Ponzi scheme. I've done a fair bit of work in the NFT space, and saw myself how riddled with fraud it is - not the operation itself, but the punters trying to scam the platform for a free token. I also saw how brittle the concept really is. In many cases, the smart contract is simply saying address X owns the number 4. That later gets translated to some URL which is not guaranteed to be there in 10 years time. Storing the actual asset on the chain would have been preferable but is not practical. So where does that leave us? How does one's ownership of the number 4 translates to them owning a deed to a building or a picture of a monkey, in the sense that you could explain it to your grandma?
I'm on the fence here. I want this to work, but I also understand how it works and know that it's not a simple task.
If it helps you understand, there's blockchains being built with close to none tokenomic concept to it. Meaning, there's no value on investing on their token but on using the platform. In some cases it's posible, in others it's not since you need to leverage costs/incentives in some way (but they still manage for it to remain low price through inflation, etc).
> Nope. Still need to convert it to real money for buying something. Gas fees > transfer fees.
Sure, if you choose an expensive (congested) blockchain to make the transaction. Otherwise the fees are about comparable or in some cases even less (below 1% for a round-trip from "real money" to crypto and back).
> Without an underlying economic activity it's all a ponzi scheme.
What do you mean by "underlying economic activity", and what kind of such activity does for example a bank or fintech possess that distributed ledger tech does not?
1. Transfers of what? The recipient has to convert to fiat to do anything useful.
Cheaper and faster don't seem to be happening either, at the moment.
2. You can never digitally own a physical object. Your ownership is centralized in the real-world legal system.
You say "secure" as though people are going around stealing houses from each other by snatching their deeds. Ownership of all of those things is already secure enough.
3. In the US at least, none of this is true. Users still have to go through KYC and there is almost always a middleman involved. Crypto has escaped neither institutionalization nor regulations in developed countries.
1) would be just as expensive if taxed properly, so not cheaper just illegal
2) immutable is a pretty shitty property for some of those assets, also its a pretty negative turn of society to go and try and make fungible products like music listening into private non fungible ownable assets
3) The middle man is usually there for a number of reasons. Same way exchanges showed up almost immidietly after crypto, you would also have crypto banks to handle loans etc. Add the financial constraints the goverment needs, for lawful contracts to be enforceable and now you just have a more expensive, volatile and environmentally destructive banking system.
Like it seems most of the ideas of things "crypto works for" is just what banks used to do before regulation was added. And the regulation is there for a reason, for every extra fee you pay to do cross border money transfer, some money is not being laundered. For every notary you pay to get a deed in a house or doctor to check your health data, some will or some medical anomaly gets corrected. For every fee you pay in a loan someone elses gets secured and has no extortionate shark loan fees.
With crypto right now you lose all that protection in exchange for a slow, expensive gas fees, environmentally destructive proofs of work and absolutely no legal protection if you get scammed in the end. Its an extremely silly proposition and I am not surprised it is being peddled by the likes of Jordan Belfort because he seems to like to do old medieval scams on new targets.
> immutable is a pretty shitty property for some of those assets
Because smart contract chains allow for turing complete code, mutability can be programmed in to particular tokens at the smart contract level.
> regulation is there for a reason, for every extra fee you pay to do cross border money transfer, some money is not being laundered.
It shouldn't be my personal financial responsibility to pay for a corporation to double check my own assertion that I am not breaking any law.
> With crypto right now you lose all that protection in exchange for a slow, expensive gas fees, environmentally destructive proofs of work and absolutely no legal protection if you get scammed in the end.
I'm breaking this down.
> slow
Taking Ethereum as an example, payments generally go through within 15 seconds, compared to several hours for a same-day wire transfer or several days for an ACH payment.
> expensive gas fees
Gas fees are expensive because too many people are using it. Ethereum processes over a million transactions daily, not including Layer 2 and side chains which have increased that capacity and lowered gas fees in practice.
> environmentally destructive proofs of work
Proof of Stake reduces energy consumption by over 99%, and most blockchains currently use it.
> absolutely no legal protection if you get scammed in the end
The standard way to send money abroad, international wire transfer, also gives you next to no legal protection if you get scammed.
> mutability can be programmed in to particular tokens at the smart contract level.
Yeah but contingencies not predicted in the original contract cannot be added, hence they are immutable from the original design. Something legally not really enforceable as laws change making previously written contracts or clauses void.
> It shouldn't be my personal financial responsibility to pay for a corporation to double check my own assertion that I am not breaking any law.
Someone has to double check the financial and legal frameworks are being abided by in transactions of money, specially cross country. If you do not want to pay it directly in your transfer, then whatever alternative you propose would mean either tax payers or other bank users end up paying more than their fair share if they do not do as many transactions as you.
> Taking Ethereum as an example, payments generally go through within 15 seconds, compared to several hours for a same-day wire transfer or several days for an ACH payment.
This is a false equivalence. The transaction in ethereum takes however long you wanna pay a gas fee for, the 15 second thing is an average not a median, and certainly not a general use case for smaller transactions.
Secondly, the money in an ACH payment goes through in miliseconds, the 2 day wait is a legal escrow for legal purposes not technological ones. One that crypto should also abide if it had any real use.
> Gas fees are expensive because too many people are using it.
Gas fees are expensive because you can pay to jump the queue, and considering the number of fraudulent transactions, scams etc people are incentivized to over pay to make their quick buck after a rug pull.
> Proof of Stake reduces energy consumption by over 99%,
It also reduces security, increses centralisation and increases fees. Certainly a cure-all for a problem created by crypto in the first place.
> The standard way to send money abroad, international wire transfer, also gives you next to no legal protection if you get scammed.
The 2 day to send allows plenty of time to report a transaction, for the goverment to intervene if flags are raised etc. It certainly offers tons of legal protection.
What it doesn't protect is against Nigerian Prince scams but thats not a failure of the wire transfer, and it certainly is even worse thanks to crypto...
> Yeah but contingencies not predicted in the original contract cannot be added, hence they are immutable from the original design. Something legally not really enforceable as laws change making previously written contracts or clauses void.
This could be a feature or a bug, depending on use case.
> Someone has to double check the financial and legal frameworks are being abided by in transactions of money, specially cross country.
Not really. I think money transfer, especially in the United States, is way over-regulated. But our opinions don't really matter, because crypto is a cat out of the bag.
Maybe you would want to make it illegal to make a peer to peer crypto transaction without a middleman checking it for legality first. I believe that's impossible without outlawing crypto altogether, which is a political nonstarter (though they might be successful at outlawing proof of work only).
> The transaction in ethereum takes however long you wanna pay a gas fee for, the 15 second thing is an average not a median, and certainly not a general use case for smaller transactions.
Since the EIP-1559 fee market change in August 2021 introducing flexible block sizes, the 15 second transaction time is very much a median. Not sure what you mean by "not a general use case for smaller transactions."
> Gas fees are expensive because you can pay to jump the queue, and considering the number of fraudulent transactions, scams etc people are incentivized to over pay to make their quick buck after a rug pull.
No more overpaying in the general case since EIP-1559, since block sizes are flexible now. Blocks can double in size, so as long as the network demand doesn't double within a 15-second period, you can include a fee at the market rate and your transaction will be processed in a timely manner.
Ethereum fees are an open auction market where anyone can bid. If scams can afford to outprice legitimate transactions, then that says something about society, not about the network. The network is impartial, providing service to whoever bids high enough.
> It also reduces security, increses centralisation and increases fees. Certainly a cure-all for a problem created by crypto in the first place.
Proof of Stake increases security, decreases centralization, and reduces fees. It would take a long comment to describe why this is the case with sources, so tell me if you want me to write it up.
> The 2 day to send allows plenty of time to report a transaction, for the goverment to intervene if flags are raised etc. It certainly offers tons of legal protection.
From my understanding, international wire transfers can only typically be cancelled within the first 30 minutes or so, if you're lucky. The payment method offers exactly zero legal protection - it's as if you've handed the recipient cash and they walked away with it. If you send money to the wrong account, or if the recipient does not provide you with the services you purchased, your only recourse is to hire an international lawyer and sue the recipient in whatever country they are in. You can look on your wire transfer form and see disclaimers to this effect.
What about international transfers without a middle man dictating what, when and how? If not for blockchain I would probably be working on a completely different field. Just because you don't find it useful does not mean that it's the same for everyone else
Turns out most people wanting to do international transfers without a middleman are criminals. Regular people are for the most part fine with international transfers going through banks, likely via SWIFT.
I don't know if you've actually tried to send an international wire transfer, but it requires more paperwork/effort, is more expensive, and is less reliable than signing a crypto transaction.
Many smaller banks require you to physically drive to the branch and wait in line to send one. They usually cost upwards of $40 and that's before currency conversion, which is done at a rate that may or may not be favorable.
Making a blockchain payment has pros and cons, but it has enough pros that the "only useful for criminals" argument is tired.
> I don't know if you've actually tried to send an international wire transfer, but it requires more paperwork/effort, is more expensive, and is less reliable than signing a crypto transaction.
Don't platforms such as https://wise.com/ solve international wire transfer problems? I have experience with only a few currencies, but as long as you can do transfers in your home currency online you should be able to do the rest via Wise online as well.
In terms of costs, you'd have to go into details to really compare (e.g. some platforms claiming "no fees" are just subsidizing them unsustainably), but if you're converting from and to fiat currencies via something other than a stablecoin you might already lose more because of volatility.
I haven't experienced or heard of reliability problems with bank transfers, is that a thing?
The problem here is that I'm tied to "Wise", and they can single handedly change how the service works. They decide to which accounts I can send money, not me. They decide what data I must share, not me. They decide the fees, not me. It's just another middle man, like Payoneer, Paysera, Paypal, Revoult, Bankera, Western Union, etc. (yes, I tried them all).
Depending on the country, it can truly be. Some of my relatives have money stuck in Lebanon and there is currently not really any way of getting the money out of the country.
Turns out that's no longer the case since banks started to adopt cancel culture too, as seen in Canada. Overbearing governments have created legitimate use cases for crypto money transfers.
I dare you to send me a SWIFT transfer. Not only is very expensive, but most likely I will get my account frozen because international transfers are pretty much not allowed.
It's always the same: entitled people from first world countries where the banking system actually works.
I don't understand this hatred for middlemen amongst the crypto crowd. Middlemen provide trust. You want to replace middlemen as trust providers with code? The trustless solutions like Proof of work are slow and inefficient and cost much more than middlemen do.
And despite all of that the cryptoverse still has middlemen and centralised platforms. Because not everyone has to run their own node. Be your own banks is not feasible for majority of human population.
Have you used several middlemen? I have, because I have no other option if I want to actually get paid. I've used Wise, Payoneer, Paypal, Paysera, Western Union, Revoult, Bankera, among others that I'm probably forgetting.
They all suck. They decide what I can or can't do with my money. They can freeze my accounts, stop transfers, force me to share details and I can't do anything about it. I rather use crypto than any of those awful services.
Actually I have. I have also rambled against PayPal right here on HN. I would still deal with a middleman like that than trust a Ponzi scam to handle my money.
This is not the experience of the vast majority of crypto owners right? How can it be a defense of anything if only very few people even use it like that.
Also, you haven't solved the question of middlemen. Now instead of mostly trustworthy Binance you would have to deal with the guy in the dark alley who pinky promises not to run away with your cash.
Not in Argentina. The P2P market is big enough that you don't need to worry about finding buyers/sellers. Also, "dark alley", here? Not even close. We've been doing this for several years now (used to be only USD), it's a well oiled machine.
Walmart Canada has used blockchain [1] to better their supply chains systems. I suspect when you say you "haven't found one legitimate use case for blockchain" you're referring to the consumer space based on current offerings. I would argue that "blockchain" just as an idea and technology has plenty of use cases.
The article is co-authored by two co-founders of a supply chain management solution company called DLT Labs that uses blockchain somewhere. I checked out their solution on their website.
The product looks like any other web app. Is it really using a blockchain somewhere at the backend to store something? May be. It is certainly using some standard RDBMS to store the structured data. There's no way you can store all of that you see in the screenshots on a blockchain.
So what it is that is actually being stored on a blockchain? Not clear.
Is it possible that they use the word blockchain to get free PR? May be. I don't want to judge.
"And because its built using distributed ledger technology, every transaction is 100% auditable, immutable, and visible only to permissioned users – helping to create a genuine layer of trust between the parties that transact on the platform."
It refers to permissioned users, so it's not a blockchain. Which is supposed to be permissionless. They aren't even claiming. They are calling it a distributed ledger.
In fact I have noticed this even with R3 Corda. The enterprise blockchain provider. They use the term distributed ledger to describe their offering, not blockchain. But all the marketing material and PR pieces always tout blockchain in the headline.
If something is permissioned, trustful and centralised, is it even a blockchain?
I just don't see how that use case couldn't have been more easily served with a boring old centralized database. Why do you need a trustless system where all the users are either in-house or contractually obligated to not screw each other over?
The merkle tree part of blockchains is absolutely valuable here… but that’s kind of where it ends. There’s no real consensus mechanism when there are 'merge conflicts', it needs manual overrides.
It’s more like git than bitcoin – and it helps them for similar reasons to why git helps us even when there’s a canonical source. People go offline and can’t sync immediately to the master store; people want to write events down now and deal with discrepancies later; disagreements are reified and can be formally reviewed, etc.
As best I can tell, it seems other aspects of blockchains just came along for the ride. The best open source code for their use case included it, and using it was better than building from scratch. The decentralisation is all but coded out – the central authority is the only one that can authorise transactions or resolve a 'merge conflict'.
And they can't on a Walmart owned database based system? You know the good old boring web application? HN is one example. Hundreds of people are using it, upvoting and commenting at at any given second. Works just fine.
Federated database systems are totally a thing also! It's not even that hard to set up a pub-sub system, service bus, or whatever. There's entire ecosystems of vendors that have turnkey or SaaS solutions in this space also.
People just forgot that these things can be done with boring old technology in the excitement of doing something hip and cool.
Can you please connect me with someone in the tech team at Walmart Canada who was part of this implementation? I am really curious to know exactly what it is that they store in blockchain. What kind of chain it is public or private. What is the consensus mechanism?
A public truly distributed PoW blockchain is slow and inefficient by design. It's a feature not a bug. A private, permissioned, controlled blockchain is pointless. So I really want to know what are these companies doing when they use blockchain for supposed benefits.
Blockchain in supply chain is often the most publicized use case. It somehow assumes that since blockchain is immutable (actually it isn't) whatever you add to it is authentic. Using it for supply chain assumes that a supplier won't lie about the origin or if they employed child labor. Using a blockchain doesn't automatically guarantee any of these.
I remember a project when I was consulting that was floated, a few years ago. It was a blockchain-backed ledger for tracking fuel charges across a truck fleet - effectively, when the truckies filled up with fuel, they'd record it in the ledger. It can't be modified or altered, nobody can defraud the company because it's an immutable record!, shouted the sales team.
I mean, the truckie could always put the wrong value in when he entered it.
Also if the company just created a simple web/mobile app for truckers to enter data that doesn't have edit and delete functionality it is immutable. Non programmers think immutability is inherent in a system and not something controlled by code. Even if I use a blockchain and cryptography to timestamp it, if I am the one controlling the node, who in the world can prevent me from going in and changing it and time stamping it again with the same old timestamp? And if I create the UI, what stops me from showing whatever I want on the UI?
It would still remove plausible deniability. The trucker would not be able to blame anyone else for entering the wrong data in the system.
Another advantage is that you immediately see if an entry in the ledger has been dropped due to a network or other technical error, which can be a problem if you’re running a complex state machine on the data. I once helped a company build an IoT product where that was a problem. I pitched the idea but got absolutely no traction. I think the mistake I made was not calling it a blockchain, but just said I wanted to include hashes in the messages, so it didn’t sound sexy enough. I don’t like blockchain hype either, I didn’t care about being public, distributed, having proof of work or consensus, I just wanted to know if and when a message had been dropped, which is apparently too much to ask.
Also I think the vendor of the actual device didn’t understand what message authentication was, so they wouldn’t have been able to make it happen on their end. Their idea of security was just encrypting the data, but making no effort to ensure who it came from. I also think they wanted to use DES, which had already been broken for a few years at that point.
The problem of paper trails being changed. When something goes wrong, if you can't trust your paper trail, you can't attribute fault with certainty.
Without an immutable shared database standard, it's difficult for processes like that to cross company lines. And supply chain is a fancy phrase for processes that cross many company lines.
It doesn't ensure that the data is correct, valid, hasn't been tampered with, or even entered.
A supply chain involves 3rd parties who have nothing to gain from this. If the issue is the middle man between A and C, blockchain isn't solving any problem. The distrust is with B, having a blockchained backed paper trail doesn't provide anything a database gives you right now.
You're asking for a single source of truth between A B and C. And saying you cannot trust A B or C, so you want blockchain to solve it, which needs to be created by someone, so you introduce D and now you have a central governing body who dictates everything for A B and C. Or you are A and you say 'hey B and C, you need to use this system we created cos we don't trust you!'.
It ensures that data hasn't been tampered with after initial entry. And that a uniquely attributable digital signature gets recorded at the point of entry, along with a timestamp.
Auditing is a core feature of most modern RDBMS systems.
Anyways the reason why it's immutable is that it's public so everyone knows every transaction. You can just have a normal db and maker it public. Blockchain is overkill in this case.
Also this is a much more niche problem than "supply chains"
I do not see anything in this that would not be resolved by a trivial database, and if you read the article that is what they have created: It is a private "blockchain" that only allows trusted participants, so doesn't require all the negative externalities of "blockchain".
The only thing "blockchain" about what Walmart has done is riding the absurd investor hype for anything with blockchain in the title.
I haven't found one legitimate use case for blockchain. The only thing it is useful for it speculative gambling.
I wrote about it some time ago and and shared here on HN https://yash.info/blog/what-is-web3/