• miridius@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    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
    • Mubelotix@jlai.lu
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      4 months ago

      Bitcoin only consumes the energy people put in it. It literaly would adjust to only consume 20W if that’s what was available. But that also means it can absord an infinite amount of excess energy if necessary

    • RedDoozer@lemmy.zip
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      4 months ago

      All your points are about an obsolete idea of Bitcoin, a PoW public blockchain. A PoS private blockchain with private keys not handled by the users would invalidate your entire list.

      • miridius@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        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

      • Katana314@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        PoS centralizes the authority to whoever is richest. That’s literally worse than how paper currency with semi corrupt government works.

        • RedDoozer@lemmy.zip
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          4 months ago

          The PoS option was to highlight that power consumption doesn’t have to be an issue. Of course, PoS has its own issues.

          The network can use any other type of proof, like Proof of Authority where only a buch of validators owned by the banking system can process the transactions. The network can be even tokenless, no profit or incentives from it, just the secure architecture.

      • faercol@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        4 months ago

        You mean PoS, which feature is literally that the more you have, the more you can stake, and the more you can earn in return? So basically the system that has built-in wealth concentration?

        • RedDoozer@lemmy.zip
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          4 months ago

          Yes, but if we are talking about a private permissioned blockchain, there’s no need to obtain returns from staking. It can be even a Proof of Authority tokenless network for what banking care.

          Banks are already paying for servers to process and store information. A few validators or collators (quite cheap for a private network) provided by several banks would cost a fraction of what they pay now and they’ll keep owning the data, they could reverse transactions, be covered by several layers of public encryption, guard the user’s wallet/login, etc.

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

    • Fuzzypyro@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      Just to elaborate here. You are describing one implementation of a blockchain that provides a cryptocurrency. Blockchain is literally just another form of a database. It’s just that it can contain traits that would allow the database to be shared and distributed unlike typical databases. Currently there are some companies that are utilizing blockchain for their inventory systems. They aren’t using any more energy than they would with a typical system. They are just doing it to keep an unchanging record of past transactions which helps with fraud and loss prevention.

      P.S. Money laundering using a system that is publicly distributed and has every transaction involving usd paired with an ID, social security number and enough pictures of your fact to make a 3D model is genuinely idiotic.

    • drathvedro@lemm.ee
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      4 months ago

      payments/transfers would be both much slower AND much more expensive than via a bank

      Not necessarily. You could have a federated system, where only big players like banks participate in larger blockchain, like banks already do with forex and wire transfers and pay ridiculous fees to clearing agencies, and clear out local transfers locally, possibly inside their own smaller and much faster blockchain.

    • abruptly8951@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      Relative point to point

      • which Blockchain are we talking here? How does it compare to the current banking infrastructure?
      • again, which one? How does it compare to the current pricing?
      • escrow is a thing, someone can build up a PayPal equivalent on top of a Blockchain, the list goes on
      • the current system doesn’t do great here, some Blockchains makes it way more traceable, in fact
      • skill issue, but also solvable with a PayPal equivalent
      • not a fact, what does this even mean?
      • does it?

      You could say the Linux kernel is an astronomically terrible idea because it doesn’t do anything…but it is just the platform, the good comes from what people build on top of it that add all these quality of life features you miss

      Buy ydy

    • I_Has_A_Hat@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      You seem to have conflated blockchain technology with cryptocurrency. Most cryptocurrencies use blockchain technology, but that’s not it’s only use case. Literally every problem you have listed relates to crypto and not blockchain itself. Blockchain is just a ledger of transactions. A private company using it to say, keep track of their inventory, or track their payments, or use it for document control, can implement it however they want.