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(lemmy.blahaj.zone)
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this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2026
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sigh
Once again:
Blockchain is not synonymous with cryptomining
Blockchain does not require proof of work
Cryptocurrency and NFT grifting does not devalue blockchain as an immutable distributed ledger
I swear to god people just copy paste whatever makes them feel good without any effort at understanding
Why do you think LLMs are so popular?
True... But Satoshi did invent Bitcoin, which is proof of work, and is everything in OP
The "technically true" nature of it reads like propaganda against electric cars as a whole, does it not? I'd argue that applies here too.
"Popularized" the electric car, maybe?
There were electric cars since there were cars
Then why hasn’t a better blockchain based currency gained any popularity? If they don’t have critical mass then your distinction is meaningless. It turns out there is just zero real world need for an untrusted distributed ledger. Databases and governments solve the problem much better.
Questioning the technical virtues of an alternative product based on lack of critical mass adoption is pretty funny, when you consider we're on the fediverse. I know that doesn't defray your argument, but just an amusing observation.
I see why you might draw the comparison, but I actually don’t think the comparison is valid at all. Forums/communities can still be useful and fun with only a few people. Discord is also massively popular with a small community model, for a more successful example to compare with the fediverse. However a currency that nobody uses or accepts is entirely useless until mass adoption happens. That’s why they typically get mandated by force by governments.
Or if you need it for some other particular application, like drugs on the dark web.
You don't need mass adoption to be useful, the more adopted a currency is the more useful it becomes but it's not binary. Seychelles has a population of 130k, does that mean that the seychellois rupee is useless? Of course not, 130k people use it everyday.
~100 milion people use or at least own bitcoin, meaning they would probably be willing to pay or accept payment in it, that's 1.3% of the world's population, 1 in 80 people, that puts bitcoin between the Japanese yen and the British pound. ~260 milion people use crypto currencies in one way or another, over 3% of world's population, 1 in 30 people, that's just under the euro or the us dolar. And if you use 1 crypto you basically know how to use them all, just like €,$,£. If that's not mass adoption I don't know what is.
Most merchants who accept ₿ also accept other cryptos like ethereum, stable coins, litecoin, monero, tron, bitcoin cash... There are payment gateways that make it incredibly easy and automatically convert to your currency of choice, so there is no reason not to accept even the shittiest of shitcoins if it will be swapped before it even gets to you.
Cryptocurrency development makes a whole bunch of arbitrary value-guided decisions during creation, all of these decisions have tradeoffs such that nobody has figured out a way to feature them all at the same time, or would they want to.
For example, bitcoin is fully auditable. Anyone with a copy of the bitcoin blockchain can review every single transaction in bitcoin's history, and trace the flow of every last satoshi from it's mining to today. This is because the developers of bitcoin place a high value on verifiable auditability and security. Conversely monero was developed for the purpose of being a completely untraceable, unauditable currency that still has a knowable supply. And ethereum was created in a manner that intentionally supported scripting, so that it could be used as a platform for novel applications and contracts. None of these primary features could be ported to either of the other two without breaking them completely, because of the deep programmatic implications of the requirements.
It's not really a question of better or worse, but of use case. The fact of the matter is that the reason these three examples are the leading currencies for their use case is literally because nobody has yet been able to do a better job. And for bitcoin at least, at this point it's security rests just as much in it's wide adoption and interest as it's design intent, so it's unlikely that anyone ever will.
Blockchain is not synonymous with crypto. Why are you bringing up crypto specifically? Crypto is garbage. But Blockchain is not crypto
Critical mass is not required for internal systems. Not all implementations of blockchain are intended for public use.
I'm really tired of this. Blockchain. Is not. Crypto.
Here's the research I did for everyone four months ago: https://lemmy.world/post/36683795/19677963
People bring up crypto because it is the only use of blockchain that isn't worse than already established methods. And crypto is only "better" because it's unregulated and allowed a bunch of scams to be pulled.
Uses of blockchain other than cryptocurrency that just came to my mind, some are already functioning or being introduced:
Two points:
https://www.forbes.com/digital-assets/categories/proof-of-stake-pos/
Etherium and virtually the whole rest of the crypto scene that is "not bitcoin" has pretty soundly rejected the wasteful Bitcoin design. There was even a fork of Bitcoin that would have used the much more efficient proof-of-stake, but since that would be bad for everyone with a proof-of-work "mining" rig it didn't take over.
https://git-scm.com/
An "untrusted distributed ledger" is literally the backbone of modern software development. While you could plausibly split hairs and assert that git requires "trust", I don't think you'd wind up in a spot that both supports your assertion and a cognizable difference for anyone but mathematicians and security nerds. (And even if you did, the exact same sort of non-scam usages of blockchains are ones that operate like git, with the ledger used for something else.)
would you recommend any crypto in particular?
Monero
thanks! looking into it and syncing up. care to share why you're positive about it?
The most distinguishing feature is that it's private by default, the sender, receiver and the amounts are cryptographically hidden from uninvolved parties. Other than that
Business acceptance - many privacy centric services like VPN, VPS, e-sim, phone top up, gift card providers etc. accept monero. Usually any service that does, sees it at the top of the chart as the most used crypto, often more than all the other coins combined. Many open source projects accept it for donations as well, with similar findings.
Community built infrastructure - the monero community focuses on building the infrastructure around the idea of monero being digital cash. Things like xmrbazaar.com, a monero based e-bay/craigslist like market where you can buy/sell things for monero, kuno a monero based gofundme alternative for fundraisers, retoswap.com an instance of haveno, a decentralized, p2p monero exchange, monerica.com a repository of monero accepting business and other monero related things are designed with the idea of treating monero as money.
Price stability - because of the fact that monero is actually used for payments it's price is established through adoption rather than speculation which makes it fairly stable in comparison to the rest of the crypto market, thanks to this you can safely spend and receive monero without worrying that a month from now it will loose 50% of it's value. Of course, there are peaks and valleys often caused by the macro market movements like the recent few day pump to $800 and crash back to $400 but that's an exception rather than the rule, for the most part (excluding stable coins) it's one of the most stable cryptos out there with a slight long-term uptrend.
5 Years
All time
Immutable so long as no one party or group owns more than half of the coins on a given blockchain... then the ledger is whatever they say it is and it propagates down because they can manufacture their own "consensus".
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/1/51-attack.asp
and most use cases around things like "smart contracts" end up still requiring a trusted third party at some point
https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/30/the-inevitability-of-trusted-third-parties/
It's not 51% of the coins, it's 51% of the computing power on the network. Both of which are virtually impossible in the case of Bitcoin, though not entirely impossible. I just wouldn't consider a 51% attack even remotely a threat to the network compared to something like government crackdown
That's PoW. With PoS, it is coin ownership.
Which is much more distributed than computing power.
Can't you just split it up into however many wallets you want? If you're rich that seems like basic security.
No, the community controls the consensus through their nodes. A 51% attack only allows the attacker to perform:
In the event of a 51% attack the community can fork the chain - change the consensus and implement preventive measures like changing the mining algorithm, changing to PoW/PoS, banning all of the attackers coins, implementing a finality layer or a checkpoiting system etc.
You are making my point. Blockchain is not crypto. Blockchain can be useful in private, internal use cases (like a transaction ledger for bank branches) where trust is largely implicit.
If you have trust, why do you need a blockchain?
Distributed / immutable databases are not solely a feature of blockchain either.
It's a very interesting thing in a vacuum. Basically any application of it so far (with the possible exception of the original one, if it weren't just a speculation investment machine at the moment) runs into the problem where it has to interact with reality at some point. And most of the problems Blockchains solve are already solved by a variety of other systems, for less time/currency/hardware investment.
Because it's an immutable ledger, not just a database. It maintains a history of every previous transaction/entry. Blockchains are used by banks and in the supply chain because it makes backtracing and identifying discrepancies trivial. For things like cryptocurrency, blockchains allow "don't trust, verify" but for something where you already have trust, they allow "trust but verify"
Cryptographically immutable append only ledgers (aka merkel trees) have existed since at least 1979. A blockchain is different because it has distributed consensus. If your consensus algorithm is trust, then it's not a fucking blockchain.
A blockchain is nothing more than a data structure. It's essentially a linked list using the hash of the previous block. Distributed consensus is something blockchains are useful for, but it doesn't define it
This is a good comment that makes all good points. But I just wanna say let's stop saying "blockchain" singular and with no preceding article like we're tech CEOs and it's some immutable god. They're blockchains, plural, like any other data structure there can be more than one and there are. eg The blockchain of ethereum is distinct from the blockchain for bitcoin but they are both blockchains.
Valid point! But then how do you refer to the data structure/architecture/model concept? Sometimes we want a concise term (like bittorrent or ActivityPub) for the abstraction
It's a novel data structure, we can refer to it like we do other data structures: Linked lists, hash tables, primitives. The branded implementation of these things is what we typically make singular: Bitcoin, ethereum, monero (bittorrent, activitypub...)
Bittorrent implements a torrent swarm, activitypub implements a federated social network.
The only alternative to proof of work is proof of stake. And if the world ever ran on proof of stake crypto, it would make today’s wealth inequality look like a Marxist paradise.
There's other alternatives. But PoS does not reward just by ownership either.
Check out Gnosis, especially Circles, which is creating a UBI type thing.
I just looked at Circles’ webpage, and respectfully, that is a Ponzi scheme.
Why? If the rewards are fixed and independent of the amount staked then there is no issue.
What matters is whether or not there's any significant profit - the reward being bigger than the cost. PoW minimizes this with difficulty adjustment flushing most profits down the toilet. PoS must always have a return competitive with other investments.
Profits should be low, or else it promotes inequality.
You are exactly the type of person I'm talking about :\
Crypto is not the only use case for blockchain.
Blockchain can be useful in inherently trusted, closed ecosystems.
Depending on the use case, proof doesn't even need to be anything more than a valid certificate (not work, not stake)
Consider a bank that develops its own blockchain ledger for internal use only, replacing their branch ledgers (which require daily reconciliation and propagation).
An immutable, distributed ledger has plenty of valid, valuable use cases without looking like crypto.
“Internal use only” blockchain is an oxymoron. If all contributors are trusted entities, then what does it matter if the data is stored in a blockchain vs any other data structure? If anything the amount of extra work to maintain and modify the blockchain in the case of errors just makes it unnecessary.
If that’s the best example of its many “valid, valuable use cases”, then it’s still a pass from me, dawg.
I have a large number of examples in this comment from four months ago. Please read them: https://lemmy.world/post/36683795/19677963
Literally the first example you gave was shut down a year later: https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoReality/comments/1mpeh9z/when_crypto_bros_are_asked_for_a_blockchain_use/
Pretty obvious that its use in the first place was some FOMO executives trying to get in on “blockchain” technology, just like they’re doing with AI and LLMs now. Funny how BTC and ETH both plateaued a year ago, right around the time AI became the new thing.
I’m not going to bother reading the rest, I already wasted too much time arguing with a true believer. GL with the crypto that you say you don’t have.