knightly the Sneptaur @ knightly @pawb.social

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2 yr. ago

A "database with appropriate access control" is a completely different use case, not appropriate at all for communal and open, transparent use. You

It's precisely the same use case, you're just talking about using a blockchain as your access-controlled database and merely pretending that a centralized DB can't be communal, transparent, and open.

You need to have admins, you probably need some management organization altogether, admins can change stuff and it's difficult to prove they didn't, and a lot more issues.

You need all that for a distributed database too. In fact, you'd need more management, admins, and paper trails because there would be more copies of the ledger to maintain, and you'd have the same lack of accountability to deal with since you'd be relying on every node to prove their own work.

At the core: no authority in control, complete transparency, unchangeable, decentralized (just like a renewable energy grid should be), everyone can participate.

Again, why is a blockchain needed to achieve these goals? You can get all this more reliably with a neighborhood electric co-op.

A good idea does not need to convince, so if these arguments don't answer the question, either it needs better explaining or it is not that good.

Please do explain, then. I'm still waiting to find out why you think the blockchain is more useful for your stated goals than other kinds of ledgers.

Communal, local infrastructure. Not a grid spanning vast areas, although it could.

Then why does it need a global management system? If it's all local, why not use a local database and save the expense of distributing it?

Look, this might totally not be the way to do it, but essentially to achieve independence we need to break up those monopolies.

Independence from what?

If you're talking about independence from having to share electricity services with other people then you can just go off the grid, no blockchain necessary.

If you're talking about independence from utility providers then you've crafted a tautology, as the only way to achieve independence is to be independent.

If you're talking about independence from for-profit grid service utilities, then making every home an independent participant in the real-time electricity market will only compound the problem.

Otherwise we will always be enslaved to the powers that I thought we wanted to replace.

Those powers would still exist. Replacing the utility-scale grid operators with a local electric homeowners' association doesn't solve the problem, it just moves it closer to home. You still have to deal with the cost of building and maintaining the grid, as well as constant negotiation with all providers and consumers to ensure that the grid will remain stable.

Energy and food independence as well as communal land management I think are fundamental requirements for that - whatever the means, I subscribe.

Adding blockchain makes those goals more complicated to achieve for no benefit.

If you want energy and food independence, you can just do that.

Blockchains (if used correctly) are good at breaking up such monopolies. But it's just tech. People need to want and do it. So whatever people say :)

False. Blockchains, as a feature of Capitalism, create monopolies. If they broke them up, then the tech bros would have already replaced the banking system with them. What actually happened is that the existing banking system started using crypto too, so now most blockchain-based value is held by an extremely small number of obscenely wealthy folks.

If openness is your concern, then distributed ledgers have already been a thing for decades.

The questions are: What problem are you trying to solve with the blockchain and why wouldn't a non-blockchain distributed database or a regular database with appropriate access controls be a better solution?

Crypto is just capitalism with fewer safety nets. No FDIC insurance on deposits and no SEC to prevent scams and fraud.

What do you mean, "alternatives"? This sounds like a distinction without a difference.

So you think cryptos "solve" the same problem as paper money? A distributed open network is just the same as some rich bros printing paper?

No and yes.

Money was created to improve upon the barter system by adding a standard unit of value. Paying salaries no longer needed stores of salarium, the state just prints money to pay for services and taxes it back to prevent the currency from inflating.

The problem that crypto solves is that rich bros don't like the state monopoly on the creation of money. It's not an actual problem, they just want a legal means of committing fraud.

Sometime the point is not to solve a new problem but to improve a fundamentally broken "solution".

How is it an improvement?

Also, "Proof of stake" would just mean that the owners of the ledger are unaccountable random rich guys instead of the shareholders of the utility company. That's a distinction with absolutely zero difference.

But why would we need a blockchain for that?

Crypto is just math

Then crypto is already involved in the electrical grid..

It's not an open market though. It's gated and you are at the mercy of the local authorities, which often are very restrictive and difficult.

Utility services are natural monopolies.

Are you proposing that people build a totally independent electrical grid that somehow isn't regulated by local authorities?

If you aren't using a proof-of-work blockchain algorithm then why not just use a regular database instead?

Blockchain currencies have been part of the status quo for almost 15 years now..

I'm failing to understand what problem the blockchain would solve that isn't already solved more efficiently by a regular database..

There's application in responding to requests for information quickly, in a mesh network, perhaps in presence of malactors.

Online databases already exist and have been handling requests for information quickly for longer than there has been an internet, and always in the presence of bad actors. What problem is there, specifically, that the blockchain would solve?

For example the medical records of injured US soldiers are stored in and delivered using a block chain solution.

No they arent, the DoD did a study that said it might be useful for that purpose if they can solve the challenges with scaling, interoperability, and integration with legacy services.

There's application in a hypothetical currency free from the corruption of governance. For example, an orange President couldn't print gobs of money during a pandemic, devaluing your currency, then hand that money to corporations.

No there isn't. Unregulated currencies are still subject to corrupt governance, the only difference being that the governance isn't nominally accountable to the electorate. Literally nothing has stopped Elon from printing scam tokens for his pump and dump schemes and keeping the extracted value for himself.

Yeah, I had to go back to a 15-year-old journal article to find something with the multi-viewer light path diagrams I was looking for.

By getting fancy with the lenses, it's possible to accomodate more than one viewer:

https://www.cs.unc.edu/~andrei/pubs/2010_ISMAR_Autostereo.pdf

The terms got confused during the introduction of teppanyaki-style food to America in the 60's. One theory being that "hibachi" is a lot easier for Americans to pronounce, so the marketers for the first teppanyaki restaurants in America chose that term instead.

If you're using a such a fine filter you'll need to keep up with the monthly replacements. Clogged air filters reduce the air flow, which can allow heat soak to damage the failsafe pressure sensor that stops your furnace when the fan dies.

But can you detect the link being broken by someone other than your intended communication partner?

Yes, because breaking the entanglement destroys the link between the photons received at either end.

Observing an entangled photon requires extremely precise timing, the lightspeed lag on the line has to be known down to the nanosecond to ensure that the photon received is paired with the photon at the other end. Even if a MitM wanted to try retransmitting the quantum states it observes on the line, they wouldn't be able to do so without introducing enough lag to desync the connection.

Alternatively, if M tried sending their own random data in sync with the expected timing, then the bits received by B would only have a 50-50 chance of matching the bits sent from A. Any encryption based on that data would almost immediately begin to suffer a 100% error rate.

It's physically impossible to intercept an entangled photon without disrupting the entanglement. The act of observing the photon collapses the quantum uncertainty of it's state, so even the most sophisticated MitM attempt is going to immediately break the link.