this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
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So true.
With LLMs, I can think of a few realistic and valuable applications even if they don’t successfully deliver on the hype and don’t actually shake the world upside down. With blockchain, I just could never see anything in it. Anyone trying to sell me on its promises would use the exact words people use to sell a scam.
Blockchain is a great solution to a almost nonexistent problem. If you need a small, public, slow, append only, hard to tamper with database, then it is perfect. 99.9% of the time you want a database that is read-write, fast and private.
My thoughts exactly.
I was told that except for flying scams under regulatory radars, the thing it’s great at is low-trust business transactions. But like, there are so many application-level ways to reasonably guarantee trust of any kind of transaction for all kinds of business needs, into a private database. I guess it would be an amazing solution if those other simpler ways didn’t exist!
I personally really like what Monero is doing with blockchain, but in most cases attempts at cryptocurrency (when not outright scams) fail in terms of privacy or performance. Bitcoin (the most popular one) has both of these problems, it is slow, limited to just around 7 transactions per second. Bitcoin also lacks any privacy, with transaction history completely public. Monero has to do a whole lot of work to obfuscate transaction history.
Currently basically all of these have another scalability problem due to the size of the blockchain constantly getting bigger, with Monero's strething up to 150GB and growing.
While applying it where most shitcoins have applied Blockchain, I agree it's all hype. But Blockchain doesn't solve a non-existent problem.
Trusting humans is an inherent security flaw. Blockchain solves that problem. You don't have to trust banks to not shortsell the housing market with your own money (causing a recession for the entire world) if you could cut humans out of the equation.
Forget money. Say the data that you want to be able to transact and operate on is health data instead of financial information. You could create a decentralized identity system based on people's biometric information. From there, you could automate and decentralize governance in general.
Suggesting Blockchain solves a non-existent problem is like suggesting Lemmy solves a non-existent problem
Unrelated to the overall point you're trying to make, but shorts didn't cause the '08 recession. They just profited from it. The cause was banks treating mortgage backed securities as if they were an unsinkable asset class.
Relating things back to your point though, I'm not convinced that blockchains solve this. Take the crypto crash of spring/summer '22: You have a few products (TerraUSD/Luna, CEL token) "generating" yield that everyone (DEFI, CEFI, retail, institutions) piles on top of. Then that base layer of "value" turns out to be a naked emperor and there's a massive crash when everything based on that system is now backed by nothing. Rigid computerized rules are only as solid as the axioms that underpin them. You can decentralize the interpretation of rules, but somebody can always start with a flawed assumption and then it doesn't matter how reliable your decentralized system is.
As long as any asset can be rehypothecated into another, shinier asset, there's always a risk that the underlying asset is shit. It's no less true in crypto as in conventional banking.
He did not claim that shorting caused the 08 crash, or am i missing something?
According to "the big short", the reason was that banks gave loans to people who could not really afford them in case of an unexpected drop in the housingmarket (mortage backed, as you say), bundled the loans into packages, went to rating agencies who gave best ratings for the packages, sold them to other institutions and then shorted them when they noticed that the market unexpectedly dropped, knowing people would not be able to pay back the loans in the packages. Which was completely reasonable, just somewhat unethical.
So, i think you could say it was an error of the rating agencies, as they underestimated the risk of a drop in the housing market when giving out the rating.
The way I read this, it suggests that banks shorting the housing market with my deposits caused a global recession.
You're right about the ratings agencies (as far as I know, also from The Big Short), I was skipping over that for brevity.
At the very least it compounded it. But didn't the banks that short it know the crash was going to happen? Why would an institution that large bet again the housing market, when the stigma was
Why would health data be something you want decentralized?
The only possible usecase I can think of for that is someone who has unique info that an emergency room would need. At that point, a medical alert bracelet would be the way to communicate that. Otherwise, I want to know exactly who has my medical information. That's super sensitive info
Alright it's early so I'm not structure this so much, but here's my cypherpunk argument
So, a decentralized ID system could be implemented by having a microchip implanted in the heart. The measured signals are more unique than your fingerprint, and if someone stole it, they'd have to kill you by ripping it out of your heart.
But no one can trust a single company or government to make such a chip and not abuse that very rich health data which you can infer emotional states with. So instead a standard is developed so other people can develop the device independently.
But decentralization goes beyond just manufacturing of the device itself, but also in governance of the data it collects. It doesn't matter if your data is encrypted on the way to a single corporations servers, they still own the data.
Furthermore, fully homomorphic encryption could be used to perform operations on encrypted data without ever decrypting it (unless you decrypt it with the keys from your microchip)
So decentralization and FHE can remove the element of human trust from both monitoring health and establishing an identity system. While being transparent but also keeping your personal information hidden. For me, trusting humans is a security flaw. If that element of trust can be automated away, it should be.
The problem has always been can you trust the people automating. With Blockchain, you can trust the servers are running the code that's been agreed upon by the node operators and miners. With FHE, the data processed by the miners stays anonymous, and if you need to display that data say to a doctor, you have the ability to retrieve your encrypted data from a decentralized database (no one wants to manage their own data, like how most people don't manage their own Lemmy instance)
Anyone can splinter off and change the code, but if its incompatible they're isolated on their own network. Kind of like if sublemmy instances content moderation policy is incompatible with others, they get defederated
But does it though? A blockchain is the ultimate zero tolerance policy. Lost your password? Grandma gave the house to a scammer? Too fucking bad
Cryptocurrency is basically like digital cash. No one can control how you spend it, or take it away. But you can't undo transactions without tracking down the recipient, and getting them to give it back. If you don't trust anyone, cash and crypto are the only real ways to pay for stuff.
Cash doesn't leave you holding worthless numbers when the founders cut and run.
Well, it does in some economies, but not the ones that cryptocurrency advocates actually choose to live in. If you live in Menlo Park or Toronto or Phoenix or Dublin, you live in conditions that would not be possible without a stable "real money" economy.
This is exactly the same thing as cash. If you buy a major currency, like usd, euro, bitcoin, ethereum, etc, then it will be much more stable than some random currency. Would you trust a cash currency that was created by some random dude in an alleyway?
Honestly I never bought that cryptocurrencies could remain unregulated long, there was just no reason for governments to want it to stay that way. It probably took more time for the regulator to catch up than I initially thought, but the writing was on the wall from day 1.
For NFTs; yeah, I see what you mean. And digital asset management don’t feel to me like it particularly needed that kind of disruption. Like, there isn’t significant business upside or value to my house title’s ownership being stored in the blockchain, rather than in my county’s private database like it is today. And since there wasn’t a reason for people to assign any perceived business value to the NFT vs the private DB record, therefore the NFT had no value, by definition. I could just never see it.
No, Blockchain was and is a stupid concept with an even stupider implementation. Nothing that the Blockchain promises cannot be achieved with less friction, costs and more speed and reliability using other technologies...
We're currently adding AI support to our platform for email marketing and it's crazy what can be done. Whole campaigns (including links to products or articles) made entirely by GPT-4 and Stable Diffusion. You just need to proofread it afterwards and it's done. Takes 15 minutes tops (including the proofreading).
Not including the hours dicking around with prompts.
Nope, it really takes 15 minutes, you don't get full access to GPT, you only get to parts, the rest of the prompt is filled by our app.
The funny thing is, I imagine this won’t actually save marketers much time. If campaigns become easier to run I think it’s likely the number of campaigns going after a particular market will increase. That might limit their overall effectiveness. Marketers would then have to work harder to find creative ways to get their audience’s attention.
Well, it'll save a lot of time that they'll be spending somewhere else and be more effective. I've worked as a dev in a marketing company or two and the backlog is always full, so it's not like there will be shortage of tasks to work on when one part of the work gets replaced by AI.