Discussion about the Conclusion Part

[DanielTongAwesome]

I came across your simulation and want to discuss with you about your last paragraph. Were you indicating most blockchain ideas are useless or inefficient?

[Lapin0t]

Were you indicating most blockchain ideas are useless or inefficient?

Well yes. Agreed the end was mostly a rant, some stuff i wrote should be taken with a grain of salt (never bothered to update that thing, it's not like this repo is important for anyone). Yet i still believe in the general idea.

I'm gonna retract the thing about databases and integers. That was imprecise and blocks can have any payload. Do you have more specific questions or things you disagree with? I don't really know where to start and what your assumptions are so difficult to explain myself. The general intuition behind my critics are:

• pow is a funny hack for rate-limiting that combines well with broadcast and cryptographically append-only things but well, its based on slowness, no hard commit, etc
• trust is out-of-band, it is preexisting to any system; acting like there is no trust involved somewhere is illusory (eg there actually is, see various blockchain forks); blockchains act as if there is no outside world, no external stake (that is what byzantine behavior is); SCP gets this right
• blockchains are overwhelmingly ill-motivated (encouraging addictive behavior, fame seeking, outright scams) and foster a big ecosystem of anti-science, technological bloat, closed-source bs, short-term thinking
• interesting applications which would only need the low guarantees currently provided already have better solutions (certificate transparency, git/torrent-like content certification)

[Lapin0t]

@DanielTongAwesome i'm genuinely curious why someone would think otherwise; i doubt your reasons will surprise me but please do contradict me: maybe we will both better understand the deeper reasons why we think about this the way we do. I'm always in the search for arguments that have weaker premises (hence stronger arguments) and thus that more people can accept, and for this i need people explain to me why their view doesn't accept my points.