Husband, father (3 boys, 1 girl, 2 dogs, many chickens), web platform champion, DIYer, bamboo farmer, occasional traveler, generally nice, apologetic in all things
Solving the "financial freedom" problem for the 1.6 billion "unbanked" people with a technology that requires internet connectivity when 2.9 billion people don't use the internet seems a bit tone deaf. news.un.org/en/story/2021/12/1106862
Edit: sounds like this comment may be dead wrong. See Ski’s reply.
I was about to +1 this comment when I thought more about it. Are you sure "blockchain" requires the internet? Based on my (admittedly very limited) understanding, the primary advantage of decentralization is actually that you don't need the internet. You do need some kind of networking where you can connect to the devices around you, but since everything is decentralized you don't actually need to connect to the internet. More broadly, I think the whole point of blockchain is that you can have verifiable transactions between two people who are offline without needing a centralized authority (i.e. without needing the internet).
Husband, father (3 boys, 1 girl, 2 dogs, many chickens), web platform champion, DIYer, bamboo farmer, occasional traveler, generally nice, apologetic in all things
Yeah, my limited understanding is the same. My comment comes from this post's question that they're apparently trying to answer, and is similar to other comments I've heard from web3 advocates "How can we build a global economy where anyone with an internet connection can participate, where property rights are enforced, and where money preserves its value?" - blog.coinbase.com/how-crypto-enabl...
How would you handle situation, if someone offline tries to spend same money twice in different remote cities? This is so called double-spending problem. The way blockchains solve it is by all nodes coming online and synchronising and agreeing on events before accepting any payment as valid. You can't run transactions offline.
There are certain techniques that can take some transactions out of blockchains. But this requires initial deposits and money being locked up with strict transaction rules attached. For example, let's say you want to pay your neighbor $5 for a chicken offline - first you' need to create an account that basically locks up money for away for any other purpose other than paying money to your neighbor, then you deposit at least 5$ to this account, once this is done and this can only be done online - only then can you pay to your neighbor offline. Problem is, this money will be frozen away for any other use, for certain period of time, to guarantee your neighbor that when you pay him you do have real funds online.
Being always short on cash being able to deposit and guarantee funds early on in business deals is typically is what these poor people without internet access struggle the most.
Current blockchain tech (bitcoin, ehtereum, etc) is built on assumption that internet is always there. It's not even clear what would happen in case of major network division was to occur for noticeable period of time, for example either because of event of war or a natural catastrophe, or major sun flare event. In a possible scenario two partitions would continue to run transactions and would not be able to merge resulting in blockchain branching out - for example it could result in 'bitcoin west' and 'bitcoin east' if a major military conflict would broke out that would sever internet connection between two blocks.
Thanks for the info, I edited my comment. It’s even more unclear to me now what value blockchain has. It seems like the value is solely to avoid regulation, but I like regulation. I don’t want people skirting taxes or doing illegal things, for example.
Husband, father (3 boys, 1 girl, 2 dogs, many chickens), web platform champion, DIYer, bamboo farmer, occasional traveler, generally nice, apologetic in all things
I'll take the Semantic Web any day though, so I can have canonical places to reference web assets from and schema to define and utilize for all kinds of great things.
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Solving the "financial freedom" problem for the 1.6 billion "unbanked" people with a technology that requires internet connectivity when 2.9 billion people don't use the internet seems a bit tone deaf. news.un.org/en/story/2021/12/1106862
Edit: sounds like this comment may be dead wrong. See Ski’s reply.
I was about to +1 this comment when I thought more about it. Are you sure "blockchain" requires the internet? Based on my (admittedly very limited) understanding, the primary advantage of decentralization is actually that you don't need the internet. You do need some kind of networking where you can connect to the devices around you, but since everything is decentralized you don't actually need to connect to the internet. More broadly, I think the whole point of blockchain is that you can have verifiable transactions between two people who are offline without needing a centralized authority (i.e. without needing the internet).
Yeah, my limited understanding is the same. My comment comes from this post's question that they're apparently trying to answer, and is similar to other comments I've heard from web3 advocates "How can we build a global economy where anyone with an internet connection can participate, where property rights are enforced, and where money preserves its value?" - blog.coinbase.com/how-crypto-enabl...
How would you handle situation, if someone offline tries to spend same money twice in different remote cities? This is so called double-spending problem. The way blockchains solve it is by all nodes coming online and synchronising and agreeing on events before accepting any payment as valid. You can't run transactions offline.
There are certain techniques that can take some transactions out of blockchains. But this requires initial deposits and money being locked up with strict transaction rules attached. For example, let's say you want to pay your neighbor $5 for a chicken offline - first you' need to create an account that basically locks up money for away for any other purpose other than paying money to your neighbor, then you deposit at least 5$ to this account, once this is done and this can only be done online - only then can you pay to your neighbor offline. Problem is, this money will be frozen away for any other use, for certain period of time, to guarantee your neighbor that when you pay him you do have real funds online.
Being always short on cash being able to deposit and guarantee funds early on in business deals is typically is what these poor people without internet access struggle the most.
Current blockchain tech (bitcoin, ehtereum, etc) is built on assumption that internet is always there. It's not even clear what would happen in case of major network division was to occur for noticeable period of time, for example either because of event of war or a natural catastrophe, or major sun flare event. In a possible scenario two partitions would continue to run transactions and would not be able to merge resulting in blockchain branching out - for example it could result in 'bitcoin west' and 'bitcoin east' if a major military conflict would broke out that would sever internet connection between two blocks.
Thanks for the info, I edited my comment. It’s even more unclear to me now what value blockchain has. It seems like the value is solely to avoid regulation, but I like regulation. I don’t want people skirting taxes or doing illegal things, for example.
I'll take the Semantic Web any day though, so I can have canonical places to reference web assets from and schema to define and utilize for all kinds of great things.