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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Banks are already paying for servers to process and store information.

    Yes

    A few validators or collators (quite cheap for a private network) provided by several banks would cost a fraction of what they pay now

    How? They’d be doing extra compute work for no reason (validating already valid transactions), and storing extra data (lots of hashes) for no reason, so it can only make infra costs more expensive. Plus the added complexity meaning you have to hire an extra team just to understand it.

    Don’t mix blockchain with the speculative world built on top of it. That’s only an unfortunate use of the technology.

    That speculative world as shitty as it is, is the only proven use case of the technology, if you take that away then blockchains are even less useful


  • All my points? That’s a bit rich

    You make a good point that PoS would solve one of the issues I raised which is electricity usage.

    In theory it could also increase throughput and reduce costs, but: a) in practice that hasn’t happened yet despite years of development, b) it’s never going to be as efficient as a centralised system because of the extra overheads necessary to decentralise it, so that point still stands

    All my other points still stand as well, plus the additional problems PoS creates to do with centralisation of power


  • Ok so firstly you’re not the OP I was replying to, so neither of us know for certain whether they were talking about replacing the banking system with a decentralised currency vs keeping the existing centralised private banks and just having them use a blockchain as their database. I assumed the former because of their wording (“replace the banking system”), and because the latter offers no advantages that I know of.

    Secondly if you think a blockchain would offer some advantages over other more efficient write only databases, I’d be interested to know what those are, because to me if you’re not running a decentralised system then you’re only getting the downsides of blockchain (such as it being single threaded, slow, and space inefficient) without any of the upsides.

    For some background, I’m well aware of how both blockchains and crypto work, having been obsessed with them for a little while in 5 or 6 years ago like many of us were before becoming disillusioned. I’ve also got professional experience as a developer on both immutable databases and banking ledgers.







  • A banking system running on Blockchain

    Is an astronomically terrible idea. It:

    • would use as much electricity as an entire country
    • payments/transfers would be both much slower AND much more expensive than via a bank
    • would have no protection against fraud. You got scammed? Your money’s gone. You paid for something online and it never arrived? Too bad
    • would have no way to stop money laundering
    • would have no way to help people who forgot their password, they’d just lose their life savings permanently
    • would tie up a bunch of capital, preventing reinvestment and growth. There would be no way to get a bank loan to buy a house for example
    • the list goes on








  • Sure :)

    There are a lot of downsides of C++ compared to more modern languages that make it not a great choice if you’re starting a web browser from scratch

    1. Complexity of the language leading to increased bugs and slower development
    2. Manual memory management is error-prone and leads to issues like memory leaks or segmentation faults. Modern browsers need to handle large amounts of dynamic content, making memory management complicated
    3. C++ lacks some of the built-in safety features of more modern languages, which has led to the majority of security vulnerabilities found in major browsers. It’s so bad that Mozilla invented an entirely new programming language just to deal with this
    4. Compared to higher-level languages, C++ can be slower to develop in, which may impact the ability to quickly implement new web standards or features unless you have a massive team
    5. While C++ is cross-platform, ensuring consistent behavior across different operating systems can be more challenging than with some other languages.
    6. Newer languages often provide built-in support for concurrent programming, garbage collection, and other features useful for browser development, which C++ lacks.

    So tl;dr: a browser but in C++ will take much longer to develop, have fewer features, more bugs, less concurrency and and more security vulnerabilities