9 items tagged “blockchain”
2024
Follow the Crypto (via) Very smart new site from Molly White tracking the huge increase in activity from Cryptocurrency-focused PACs this year. These PACs have already raised $203 million and spent $38 million influencing US elections in 2024.
Right now Molly's rankings show that the "Fairshake" cryptocurrency PAC is second only to the Trump-supporting "Make America Great Again Inc" in money raised by Super PACs this year - though it's 9th in the list that includes other types of PAC.
Molly's data comes from the FEC, and the code behind the site is all open source.
There's lots more about the project in the latest edition of Molly's newsletter:
Did you know that the cryptocurrency industry has spent more on 2024 elections in the United States than the oil industry? More than the pharmaceutical industry?
In fact, the cryptocurrency industry has spent more on 2024 elections than the entire energy sector and the entire health sector. Those industries, both worth hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars, are being outspent by an industry that, even by generous estimates, is worth less than $20 billion.
But increasingly, I’m worried that attempts to crack down on the cryptocurrency industry — scummy though it may be — may result in overall weakening of financial privacy, and may hurt vulnerable people the most. As they say, “hard cases make bad law”.
2023
In 2022, web3 went just great. Molly White’s essential roundup of 2022 in cryptocurrency. “$4.27 billion was stolen in various hacks and scams this year alone”.
2021
Imagine writing the investment memo for “20% of a picture of a dog” and being like “the most we should pay is probably about $2 million because the whole picture of the dog sold for $4 million three months ago and it can’t realistically have appreciated more than 150% since then; even if the whole picture of the dog is worth, aggressively, $10 million, this share would be worth $2 milllion.” What nonsense that is!
2019
Private blockchains are completely uninteresting. (By this, I mean systems that use the blockchain data structure but don't have the above three elements.) In general, they have some external limitation on who can interact with the blockchain and its features. These are not anything new; they're distributed append-only data structures with a list of individuals authorized to add to it. Consensus protocols have been studied in distributed systems for more than 60 years. Append-only data structures have been similarly well covered. They're blockchains in name only, and -- as far as I can tell -- the only reason to operate one is to ride on the blockchain hype.
2018
Easy explainer: a "blockchain" is a linked list with an append-only restriction, and appending is made incredibly expensive but super parallelizable, so when things work well a big group of people can work together and it's too expensive for a small evil group to compete. [...] Does your problem benefit from storing information in an append-only list, and relying on a central authority to manage it is so bad that it's worth paying the enormous append costs to have a bunch of Chinese servers manage it for you? Then maybe look at a blockchain.
A traditional centralized database only needs to be written to once. A blockchain needs to be written to thousands of times. A traditional centralized database needs to only checks the data once. A blockchain needs to check the data thousands of times. A traditional centralized database needs to transmit the data for storage only once. A blockchain needs to transmit the data thousands of times. The costs of maintaining a blockchain are orders of magnitude higher and the cost needs to be justified by utility. Most applications looking for some of the properties stated earlier like consistency and reliability can get such things for a whole lot cheaper utilizing integrity checks, receipts and backups.
Watching companies gradually realize "blockchain is just super expensive consensus and only makes sense for untrusted counterparties" is a wild, expensive trip
Consider Bitcoin a grand middle finger. It’s a prank, almost a parody of the global financial system, that turned into a bubble. “You plutocrats of Davos may think you control the global money supply,” the pranksters seem to say. “But humans will make an economy out of anything. Even this!”