8941dc91-867e-4412-afd5-4698d32477be:t_blink:
William PietriIn the 15+ years people have been promoting blockchains, this flowchart remains undefeated.
I didn't realize there were any blockchain fans left! They may be few in number but they are as tiresome and blockworthy as they ever were.
Alex Ball@williampietri They don’t call it the BLOCKchain for nothin’, ya know…
ɹ uɐp 
@williampietri maybe a blockchain is actually a thread of replies which warrant blocks.
paul
#2RR - 2 Ruote di Resistenza@amiserabilist @williampietri oopsie, my mistake 🤦
SKC 🏳️🌈@amiserabilist @williampietri under pressure from the US, the crypto industry has decided to get rid of their diversity initiatives and just all be vanilla ponzi
majick@williampietri Thank you for posting this! It was just enough bait to draw out several tiresome blockchain dipshits for me to block. I appreciate your service.
@majick Way more dipshits than I expected! At this point so many of the grifters have moved on to either cryptocurrencies or AI that I honestly didn't expect any would show up. To be stuck in the scam 5 years after the peak is kinda pitiful.
Andreas K@majick
Cryptocurrencies are generally implemented using blockchains, aren't they.
@yacc143 @williampietri Ah, I see you have found the point. Yes. Yes they are. Hence, y'know, the original post.
fluffy 💜
David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)There are a lot, because it turns out that blockchains do have a couple of important uses:
- Scams
- Money laundering
And these are quite profitable industries.
I would argue that those people don't need blockchains either. There are plenty of good scams available. Including just saying you're using a blockchain and then using a better technology (that is, any of them).
JackPearse@williampietri Maybe they do #AI now.
crispy branzino ☭ (sold out forever)@williampietri "if there are followup questions I have prepared another room, with a separate projector, and the exact same slide, to replay whilst I finish a book."
Fancy Pants 🧐🩲@williampietri One day the sheeple will wake up (!) and realise blockchain tech is being pushed by #BigDataStorage.
Who makes money off ever growing storage needs, that ideally are replicated across an infinite number of drives...?
BDS.
(I was trying to write this ironically, but reading it back there's a fine line between being ironic about conspiracy theories, and actually just sounding like a proper conspiratard.)
@fancypants Poe's Law rules our era!
@williampietri A proper law you say? Wonderful.
I've just always referred to it as the "S Club 7" paradox.
The more we pretended we only liked them ironically, the more we clearly actually just liked them...but only ironically?
The Doctor@fancypants @williampietri Fun fact: Seagate was an early investor in Ripple.
When rippled released truncated ledger support, the business relationship cooled off considerably.
yxc@williampietri
No. Only earned money
No. Only earned money
Doctor M. Popular
william ⁂ maggosI think that's true but I also want to do it without a middleman. Transfer money easily. Like email. Someday soon hopefully with @Interledger perhaps. But I'd still rather use what we've already got over crypto.
Dima Pasechnik 🇺🇦 🇳🇱@wjmaggos @docpop @williampietri @Interledger it's an exclusively US banking bug - problems with bank transfers. Europe and at least parts of Asia are doing fine with this, no blockchains etc needed.
Crypto is only great for money laundering, otherwise, what's the point? Crypto is a more expensive way to transfer funds.
@dimpase @wjmaggos @docpop @Interledger For sure. To the success cases, I'd add M-Pesa. Launched at about the same time as bitcoin, it solved the same nominal "e-cash" use case. But it actually works and is widely used in a number of African countries. No blockchain, no need of one.
@williampietri @wjmaggos @docpop @Interledger as a relatively fresh off the boat US resident, I find it truly insane that the easiest way to transfer funds in US is to mail a check.
I gather it's Visa/MasterCard/Amex/PayPal/etc cartel lobbying which prevented and prevents a sane, (almost) free, US-wide electronic fund clearance.
EU/EEA, which is considerably bigger, less centralised, has more than one currency, etc., does this already for over 20 years. Yes, I can give anyone my UK bank account number (it's perfectly safe to do so -- unless you're afraid that someone will try to impersonate you at a physical branch of your bank, good luck trying the latter though, it's a quick and sure way to jail) to send me money.
@williampietri @wjmaggos @docpop @Interledger
And the biggest hiccup with SEPA instant payments was for example that the Austrian government managed to print quite a number of paper wire transfer forms with wrong account owners around the time when SEPA armed the "banks must warn users if the recipient name differs from the account holder name".
Although the real issue is the accounts for civil servants allowed to take payments personally is that they are named weirdly.
ManuX@wjmaggos @docpop @williampietri @Interledger After carefully considering all the angles, I want exactly as many middlemen as possible. It is the only way to minimise frauds and revert thefts in most cases. Security over convenience, always.
@manux @wjmaggos @docpop @Interledger Yes, as more than a decade of heists has demonstrated, cryptocurrency's lack of reversibility and traceability, sold as convenience and freedom, primarily enables crime. I'd be much obliged if people kept their libertarian fantasies onanistic in scope and out of our shared financial system.
@williampietri @manux @docpop @Interledger
agreed. but the decentralized middlemen of banks work. like fedi servers. the centralized middlemen of PayPal, Venmo etc suck but dominate. I just want a protocol to make transferring money work more like fedi than Facebook etc. maybe we weaken the power of credit card companies in the process. and stop empowering sites like Amazon by storing our billing info with them.
crypto is like everybody keeping gold and cash under their mattress.
@wjmaggos @manux @docpop @Interledger
In the middle of dealing with a bunch of blockchain loons is not the best time to approach me with very similar libertarian fantasies.
But my short answer is: The Fediverse *barely* works at ~1% of the traffic levels of a modern social network. And it only continues to work because it's not very lucrative for spammers.
Banks are, yes, somewhat decentralized, but they are backed by a number of dedicated centralized organizations and systems. Compare with the wildcat banking era if you want to see what truly decentralized banking looks like.
If actual money were flowing through something like the Fediverse, it would be a piñata for everybody from script kiddies up to rogue nations. I too have a raft of issues with large corporations, but moving money is the single worst place for open-source dilettantes to indulge their naivete.
Giacinto Boccia@wjmaggos @williampietri @manux @docpop @Interledger
Well, a platform that allows different institutions to transfer money sounds kind of familiar...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Euro_Payments_Area
Sure, there are governing bodyes, but this doesn't make it a megacorporation.
Well, a platform that allows different institutions to transfer money sounds kind of familiar...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Euro_Payments_Area
Sure, there are governing bodyes, but this doesn't make it a megacorporation.
@g_boccia @williampietri @manux @docpop @Interledger
@dimpase
I'm fine with this kind of govt centralization.
The US has an ACH (automatic clearing house) system where banks have a routing number and then we get account numbers. What I don't get is why we can't modernize this into something like a username/domain to make transferring money like sending an email. then let us build that into apps. also #FedNow is starting up.
do other countries have this? could we have an international system?
@wjmaggos @g_boccia @williampietri @manux @docpop @Interledger EU/EEA, and beyond (e.g. Ukraine, Israel,...), 87 countries in total, have International Bank Account Numbers (IBAN).
If your bank supports transfers to IBAN, and I gather all the banks which allow incoming IBAN also allow outgoing ones, you can send money to an IBAN account from your (internet, or not) banking system. In many countries only transactions using IBAN are supported.
here is a reasonably up to date list of IBAN countries:
@dimpase @g_boccia @williampietri @manux @docpop @Interledger
awesome. so the US should join IBAN. I'd love to see the screens of two people using different banking apps transferring money to each other, and hear from somebody who has programmed for that system.
@wjmaggos @dimpase @g_boccia @williampietri @docpop @Interledger auch, it is so normal to me that I didn't even think it was not the same everywhere. I have been transferring money with just the iban code for at least 10 years now. For free and since two years, instantly.
@dimpase @g_boccia @williampietri @manux @docpop @Interledger
Well, it literally works, despite that it's not the usual way to use the system.
With the latest upgrade to SEPA (now a couple of years old) we literally have instant wires as the normal case. And in the past couple of years even or legacy bank app
literally show proof of "money arrival at destination bank (account)". Now not general to SEPA but to some MS is the user of standardized QR for wire instructions, that is also printed on paper invoices and wire firms included with the bills, to make it possible to pay your bills by scanning the bill.
@wjmaggos @dimpase @g_boccia @williampietri @manux @docpop @Interledger
@wjmaggos
That's btw how one notices that e.g. the Revolt app is not native for the Austrian market: you have to enter regular wires by hand not by scanning QR codes.
@dimpase @g_boccia @williampietri @manux @docpop @Interledger
That's btw how one notices that e.g. the Revolt app is not native for the Austrian market: you have to enter regular wires by hand not by scanning QR codes.
@dimpase @g_boccia @williampietri @manux @docpop @Interledger
Josh (humble with pride)@docpop @timo21 @williampietri “I’ve got a neat conceptual math idea!”
—Early Blockchain Development
“And I can make it way shittier!”
—Banks and Government
10tothe22
Jadon@williampietri I'll never forget the first time a VP told my team to "put this in blockchain" ("this" being a relational db of logistics data). It's sad that these blockchain bros have sunk their teeth into so many exec positions that they're likely never going away. To make matters worse, this is a preview of what's happening with AI. We're going to be battling these AH (Artificial Hype) trains for decades to come.
Nic Roland 
@williampietri "oh, are you sure? What if I..." --> No
SomeVeganCheeseIsOk@williampietri OK BUT
Use a blockchain for audit for digital forensic evidence like screenshots and body cam footage, to prove it's not AI slop.
@SomeVeganCheeseIsOk Your very first post on Mastodon and it's this? Blocked.
Tor Iver Wilhelmsen@SomeVeganCheeseIsOk @williampietri Um payload max size limits are small compared to image sizes, which is why NFTs store the actual file/document elsewhere. Which defeats the point of immutability. And if you are not going to do any transactions on it, and you really don’t want it to be public so you have to make your own separate blockchain… and then what you really need is a regular database with file fingerprints for authentification.
Sharif Naas@toriver @SomeVeganCheeseIsOk @williampietri Image sizes are a problem but a regular database can use file fingerprints? There are stronger arguments against blockchain, no need for weaker ones. 🙂
@toriver I was thinking storing hashes, not whole images. Evidence which is used to determine whenever something is AI generated *might* potentially be vulnerable if left on a traditional database with traditional vulns.
@SomeVeganCheeseIsOk Yes the «code is law» single-purpose database of the blockchain has different vulnerabilities… and again, unless you intend to use the «chain» part where you transfer said data somewhere, it is just a very slow and expensive storage. A reference to what the hash is a hash of also needs to be stored there so you risk link rot issues.
@toriver a very slow, expensive storage database that isn't owned by a single entity or located in a single place is, potentially, a *great* mechanism to prevent deletion or modification of evidence by any group who doesn't like what the evidence says.
@SomeVeganCheeseIsOk @williampietri you don't need a blockchain for this, you can do this with signatures instead.
🇺🇦 haxadecimal 🚫👑@williampietri
The Blockchain is an incredibly clever idea, but its only practical applications are scams and crimes.
The Blockchain is an incredibly clever idea, but its only practical applications are scams and crimes.
Helge Heß@brouhaha @williampietri Scans seem useful though
Stadler BLÅHAJ Evo 
@brouhaha @williampietri but how else do we get children hooked on online offshore unregulated gambling
woe2you@brouhaha @williampietri The blockchain itself is just a linked list. There's nothing particularly clever or revolutionary about it without the other legs of the stool: a distributed currency that you earn by securing it.
Once the grifters caught on it was doomed, but separating currency from central government was a laudable idea.