this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023

97 points (94.5% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35696 readers

1065 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)

Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.

Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.

Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.

Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.

Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.

Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.

Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.

Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.

Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.

Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.

Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Is the blockchain an interesting innovation, aside from cryptocurrencies ? (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

179 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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?

(page 2) 50 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

zero knowledge proofs, like those being deployed on blockchains recently, have the potential to be the killer app for this tech. Imagine you want a library card which requires proof of residence. With a zero-proof identity system, you could get your library card without revealing any personal info, like your name or address. Your wallets would simply prove to the library that you are a resident as credentialed by some local/state authority.

This also could have profound implications for the web like universal logins to web services, online privacy while still providing attribution, ownership and rights to digital content, copyright, etc.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

You don’t need blockchain to do ZKP.

You don’t even need ZKP to do these things. Obviously (as you said) there’s a local/state authority who knows this. The library could just ask them about it.

load more comments (2 replies)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Asset Tokenization and Smart Contracts are two things that will be increasingly used in Finance. That is why the recent BIS report on CBDCs included both of those as essential features of a Central Bank Digital Currency.

What Blockchain does is provide these features of a digital currency in a way that doesn't require a trusted intermediary. This makes Blockchains resistant to censorship in a way that a central bank digital currency can never truly guarantee. It is true that a centralization system like a database or ledger can be faster, more efficient and more secure but that you will always have to trust that provider of that service that they will continue operating in a manner that is congruent with what a user may want.

A recent example of this would be the news that Ubisoft is deleting inactive accounts on Uplay, which is potentially resulting in many users losing access to games they bought on that platform. Were the rights to those game tokenized on a Blockchain or CBDC, the users could potentially redeem that on another platform. Another example would be the case of the user losing his 900 hour character in Red Dead Redemption after Google shutdown stadia. Had that player's character been tokenized as an NFT he might have the capacity to move it off of stadia and onto another game platform.

Get a little nervous about your Steam Game collection worth 1000s of dollars that is completely locked into Valve's ecosystem? How about a decentralised, immutable and censorship-resistant record of your ownership of those games? That is what asset tokenization is about and it will become more important in the future as our lives and our assets become more digital.

Then there are multitude of uses for smart contracts which, again, don't require a blockchain provided you are ok with relying on a trusted intermediary to execute the contract as it was termed. Given that contracts by their nature often involve agreement between organisations or individuals with diverging interests, it almost a certainty that having an immutable, censorship resistant network to run those smart contracts is desirable.

load more comments