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Submission + - Documentary Film Aims To Dispell The Mysteries/Claims Of Blockchain Technology (youtube.com)

mabu writes: Adam R. Smith, a software engineer with 40+ years of experience reportedly became frustrated with his friends and associates' claims about the potential of crypto technology and their subsequent losses of money in various schemes, and set out to write a series of articles explaining what blockchain is and whether it lives up to its claims. This ended up morphing into a passion project that produced an 84 minute documentary entitled, "Blockchain — Innovation or Illusion?

The film, which is currently making the rounds at various film festivals, has recently been released online in its entirety on YouTube. In it, Smith, who goes by the alias, "American Scream" explains what blockchain is in layman's terms, how it relates to conventional databases and tech, and how the crypto industry seems more dependent upon coercive psychology, than innovation. The film addresses a wide variety of topics including, "Is blockchain disruptive?", "Is de-centralization even worthwhile?", and explains the how and why tokens, mining, and other blockchain-based elements like smart contracts and NFTs operate.

In the second half of the film, Smith goes into specific claims and scenarios such as, "Is blockchain really immutable?" and "Can blockchain verify authenticity?" identifying common issues like "The Oracle problem" and whether arguments like, "Crypto helps bank the unbanked" and "Crypto is digital gold" really make sense?

John Reed Stark, former Chief of the SEC Office of Internet Enforcement called Smith one of his favorite technologists and that the film was "spot on" in its characterization of the technology.

Watch the full documentary here.

Comment This woman still doesn't get it (Score 1) 44

It's 2023. The crypto industry has had almost a decade and a half to prove they can do something people really want or need, and they've failed.

She needs to watch this documentary on blockchain. It lays out how it works and the various false promises it doesn't live up to.

I get that there's money on the line for some people, but still... this tech really doesn't make any sense.

Comment Hasbro has killed MTG (Score 5, Insightful) 54

I sold off my collection, around 2014. I made quite a bit of money. I then watched prices skyrocket even more, and after a few years tried to get back into it, but I was absolutely flabbergasted at how predatory Hasbro has been just releasing expansion after expansion. And then adding additional tiers of rarities and other odd things making it more of a speculative commodity than the game knew and loved. I'm so glad I got out when I did. I feel sorry for the people holding huge batches of cards thinking they're going to forever go up in value. They're in for a rude awakening. When you piss off the player base, you undermine the entire value proposition of the whole franchise.

Comment It's plausible this tech already exists (Score 1) 69

As a software developer, I can't think of a more irresponsible thing, not building in some way to identify if your auto-generated work was attributable to your system.

It just seems like second nature.

We know every printer made embeds hidden pixels.

There's a very good chance Adobe and Microsoft codes unique ID info in every file written by their systems.

That ChatGPT or DAL-E wouldn't do this is laughably unlikely.

Submission + - Software Engineer's documentary on blockchain claims it's an "illusion." (youtube.com) 1

mabu writes: Adam R. Smith, a software engineer who became frustrated so many of his friends were losing money to crypto schemes sought out a way to educate people as to the inadequacy of blockchain as a so-called, "disruptive technology" ended up producing a feature length documentary entitled, "Blockchain — Innovation or Illusion? — This low budget, self-funded film has been making the rounds at various film festivals winning several awards, was released publicly on New Years day.

Instead of focusing on low-hanging fruit like NFTs and overt crypto scams, this film does a deep dive into the core tech behind all crypto projects: blockchain, and answers the question, "Does it live up to the hype?" Covering everything from the so-called value of "decentralisation" to whether or not blockchain can verify authenticity, this documentary walks through all the technical issues of crypto, exposing its inner secrets.

Comment Blockchain has outlived any claims of usefulness (Score 4, Interesting) 36

As a programmer, I still do not understand why so many people think these inefficient databases provide any real utility?

Another engineer has a documentary coming out on Jan 1 that talks about this. Why isn't the media asking tough questions? Why are the people hyping this "new tech" not actual tech people?

Comment Open source projects to stop server hacking (Score 1) 70

There are several new open source projects that we've been using to stop server attacks:

https://github.com/DPsystems/L...

and

https://github.com/DPsystems/w...

The use of these two utilities has stopped 90+% of all my attacks and system probes. It's basically a ipset ipv4 blacklist, works great as a companion to Fail2Ban and takes a ton of stress away from F2B by wholesale blocking certain address ranges (for example, should other server space that aren't authorized web crawlers be able to hit your web server? 99% of that is nefarious)... check out these projects

Comment This could take off... but (Score 1) 20

I like the idea and concept, but like Mastodon, you're a raindrop in the ocean unless there's an efficient way to collaborate and share. The "Federation" feature makes sense but the details of how that's done will really determine how useful the system really is.

I think one feature that would put PeerTube on the map, is an integrated way to stream directly to Smart TVs. If a content creator could roll out their own channel on Chromecast or Roku easily (keyword: easily) then they would have an angle that would allow them to offer something unique that you can't get from YouTube or Twitch.

It that's a feature, I'll set up a server right now.

Comment Misleading: Paypal has nothing to do with Crypto (Score 1) 27

This article is very misleading. Paypal has nothing to do with crypto, and will continue to not be dealing with crypto currencies. Paypal is merely allowing a third party company, Paxos to transact with its users to supposedly buy and sell cryptocurrencies. Paypal will still be dealing with fiat, not crypto.

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