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0 pointschroem-4y ago0 comments

Sure:

- consensus

- distributed computation

- statefulness

- peer to peer identity

- peer to peer reputation of nodes

- resistance against many classic failure modes (e.g. Sybil attacks)

- peer to peer source of truth (e.g. Namecoin/DNScoin)

- verifiable code execution (smart contracts)

- immutability/ tamper proof

- and (obviously) peer to peer payments

Granted, some of these overlap with each other, but the point still stands. The pearl clutching over cryptocurrency seems extremely inauthentic when you consider the vast sums of energy tech giants expend to target us with ads.

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dmitriid4y ago

> The pearl clutching over cryptocurrency seems extremely inauthentic when you consider the vast sums of energy tech giants expend to target us with ads.

The amount of energy they expend on ads is dwarfed by the amount of energy spent on doing the amount of "distributed computation" that can be run on a Raspberry Pi ten times over.

Most of the problems that this "breakthrough" supposedly solves are solved either extremely poorly, inefficiently, or not at all.

And the reason is simple. Blockchain is a distributed append-only log with an extremely inefficient and expensive way to append logs to it. And that's it. Anything else you ascribe to this breakthrough is wishful thinking.

byzantinegene4y ago

Excuse me? The only concept blockchain introduced was a distributed ledger. Most of those advantages you listed were already present in distributed computing way before blockchain paper was out, it's what blockchain was based on, not what it brought about. Distributed databases like Cassandra were using those even before bitcoin, please educate yourself before spreading misinformation.

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