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In 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.
@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?
@fancypants @williampietri Fun fact: Seagate was an early investor in Ripple.
When rippled released truncated ledger support, the business relationship cooled off considerably.
15 years remaining willfully ignorant of something is... not really impressive, everyone does it, it's actually the easiest thing you can do
@zombiewarrior Is there some sort of point you're trying to make?
@zombiewarrior @williampietri Do regale us about the advantages of a slow, resource-hungry database with no transactional rollback you can store small bits of data on.
@zombiewarrior @williampietri 15 years of watching people who desperately try to invent a problem for their solution and I have yet to see something actually useful come out of that.
@williampietri i could use a personal blockchain for my keys and glasses and food budget
@williampietri
No. Only earned money
I 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.
@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.
@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.
@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.
@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.
@docpop @timo21 @williampietri “I’ve got a neat conceptual math idea!”
—Early Blockchain Development
“And I can make it way shittier!”
—Banks and Government
@docpop
Catchy, but not entirely true. There are some nieche use cases!
@williampietri
@irrlicht @williampietri I’ve been hearing that for years, but those cases always fall through. Other than using crypto as a way to sidestep financial regulations, all other blockchain uses turned out to be nothing.
(DO1TTK) @docpop @irrlicht @williampietri well, one could add a cryptographic signature of row N of a table to row n+1 to avoid row being 0 being tampered with. Voila: Blockchain. I heard git does that.
@ttk That's a Merkle tree.
@coderbyheart @ttk and blockchain utilizes meekle trees, we need to understand blockchain != cryptocurrency
张殿李@docpop @irrlicht @williampietri The one I always get tossed at me is "supply chain validation" or some similar such rot.
As if making fancy, and idiotically expensive, numbers is somehow going to stop a truck from being drained of extra virgin olive oil and replaced by canola oil with food colouring, say. Or a box of real computer chips from being opened and having its contents replaced with counterfeit.
@ZDL @irrlicht @williampietri Walmart, UPS, FedEx, Microsoft Azure, Maersk shipping, and many others tried using the blockchain for various reasons (like supply chain validation), but they've all closed those projects. Like you say, blockchain validation doesn't actually solve for the oracle problem, so all of those real-world-on-the-blockchain projects fail.
@AmericanScream has a great explanation of why the blockchain can't prove authenticity here https://youtu.be/YMhtMEf2QPA?si=xcQkRpmI__zK-VKZ
@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.
@williampietri "oh, are you sure? What if I..." --> No
@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.
@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.
@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. 
@SomeVeganCheeseIsOk @williampietri
As if digital signatures were not a thing.
@williampietri They don’t call it the BLOCKchain for nothin’, ya know…
@williampietri maybe a blockchain is actually a thread of replies which warrant blocks.
@williampietri still way to many are left.
You see em a lot around the gameing sphere
@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
@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.