For a long time, I thought of the blockchain as almost synonymous with cryptocurrencies, so as I saw stuff like “Odyssey” and “lbry” appearing and being “based on the blockchain”, my first thought was that it was another crypto scam. Then, I just got reminded of it and started looking more into it, and it just seemed like regular torrenting. For example, what’s the big innovation separating Odyssey from Peertube, which is also decentralized and also uses P2P? And what part of it does the blockchain really play, that couldn’t be done with regular P2P? More generally, and looking at the futur, does the blockchain offer new possibilities that the fediverse or pre-existing protocols don’t have?
Blockchain (simplified) is a giant excel spreadsheet that you can never edit, only add to. I struggle to think of any applications that is a benefit for, and even then append only databases would already do it better.
One of the benefits is supposed to be decentralization, but people tout that as a benefit for things like house deeds, or identification, or whatever. Imagine how massive an append only excel file of every house with every owner change etc etc included in it would be. Then we once again only have the people who can afford to store that much data storing it, and we are back to where we are now.
It doesn’t really solve any problems, it just is a worse version of what already exists.
Something about this comment didn’t seem right to me, so I did some quick math:
There are approx 144,000,000 homes (incl apartments, etc) in the US. https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/VET605221
Assuming every home is sold 5 times on average, that’s 720,000,000 sale records/deeds.
Existing blockchain implementations use IDs that are around 32 bits, or 4 bytes.
A “home sales record” or deed on the blockchain needs to include the buyer and the time/date of sale (8 bytes), along with a cryptographic signature (4-16 bytes). The seller’s identity doesn’t need to be included because it’s always doing to be the previous owner.
So each record is 16-28 bytes, and there are 720,000,000 records. If we go with 28bytes, it would take about 20GB to store all of the deeds for the US. A 500GB hard drive costs $20.
You forget that the blockchain is all about not trusting some middle-man/site, so you need to stock that blockchain yourself, everyone needs to stock that blockchain.
So multiply not only the cost, but also the ecological impact just buying all those drives.
And that’s only for *US" housing (I didn’t get the timeframe you used to calculate it, is it for like year 2050? Old data stays forever.).
BTW found the guy buying 0.5TB Hard drives ;-)
Yes, everyone would need a copy of the 10s-of-GB blockchain. That’s a fraction of the amount of space a single computer game would use, does that seem unreasonable/impractical to you?
And I buy used enterprise 2-3TB drives on eBay :) . I was going to use a 32GB flash drive for my example, but a 500GB HDD is the same price
…and 20G that needs to be replicated to tons of nodes if it should be really decentralized.
16-28 bytes seems extremely understated, I think it could easily be off by orders of magnitude.
What do you think I’m missing in my estimate? Do you have any experience in CS?
Would a git repo count as a blockchain? It kinda fits your simplified description
No because you can do a git revert and remove the addition to the git tree.
