Why aren’t distributed systems engineers working on blockchain technology?(eng.paxos.com)
eng.paxos.com
Why aren’t distributed systems engineers working on blockchain technology?
https://eng.paxos.com/why-arent-distributed-systems-engineers-working-on-blockchain-technology
196 comments
It's also surrounded by a ton of cargo cultism, poorly considered engineering, people who don't understand the math but claim to be gurus, and strange parasitic political views.
It's a frustrating community to engage with because it has redefined a lot of longstanding terms to (in my opinion) make itself look better and smarter. It also is a constant roiling tempest of non-self-reliant-but-fantastically-dedicated-to-anarcho-capitalists-type folks, which can be terribly tedious to deal with.
For example, ask a btc engineer if they have byzantine fault tolerance. Then ask anyone else. Ask them if they have eventual consistency. Then ask anyone else.
It's a frustrating community to engage with because it has redefined a lot of longstanding terms to (in my opinion) make itself look better and smarter. It also is a constant roiling tempest of non-self-reliant-but-fantastically-dedicated-to-anarcho-capitalists-type folks, which can be terribly tedious to deal with.
For example, ask a btc engineer if they have byzantine fault tolerance. Then ask anyone else. Ask them if they have eventual consistency. Then ask anyone else.
It's also surrounded by a ton of cargo cultism, poorly considered engineering, people who don't understand the math but claim to be gurus, and strange parasitic political views.
So it's just your typical programming sub-field? (Alan Kay would say: "Field.")
So it's just your typical programming sub-field? (Alan Kay would say: "Field.")
Pessimistically yes, but in my opinion its problems are magnified.
In part because bitcoin is a technology that so many people ascribe political superpowers to. This brings in a lot of people that normally don't push deeply into a high-complexity tech field.
In part because bitcoin is a technology that so many people ascribe political superpowers to. This brings in a lot of people that normally don't push deeply into a high-complexity tech field.
Some would say that the "wisdom of the crowd" and startups are things that so many people ascribed special superpowers to, it brought in a lot of people that normally wouldn't push deeply into a high-complexity tech field.
That's cool, but how is it relevant?
It's relevant, in that the HN crowd should be reminded to be self skeptical about their own groupthink. (I know I'm preaching to the choir here.)
Even if the tech is "legit" it's encredibly inefficient. We're spewing off tons of CO2 just to verify the block chain, but we have plenty of technologies that can do the same with a minuscule amount of energy.
The problem is that they want a system that's trustless and that's simply not what most engineers care about. We want a system that's fast and efficient.
The problem is that they want a system that's trustless and that's simply not what most engineers care about. We want a system that's fast and efficient.
There are solutions to that though, like Proof of Stake. If distributed systems really cared about that, then that's exactly why they ought to be working on blockchains, to make them more efficient.
In part because this is trodden ground for distributed systems engineers and we know that, on balance, the correct solutions all involve massive centralization.
You don't want that. So we're at a bit of an impasse.
Distributed systems these days mostly argue that you do your trusting up front, outside of the protocol itself. You then validate that the actors share the secrets you all agreed upon, and then optimize the agreement process. Only the most robust systems actually consider "active" dissent; most distributed systems engineers consider this a special case that is most often focused on the idea of "incorrectness" as opposed to "maliciousness."
You can see elements of these assumptions in more modern data structures used for eventual consistency, like CRDTs. CRDTs are amazing and fast and often abstract-able to a trivial programming model. Anyone can use them, but they have to be monotonic, so we can't ever forget bad input, just try and cancel it out.
You don't want that. So we're at a bit of an impasse.
Distributed systems these days mostly argue that you do your trusting up front, outside of the protocol itself. You then validate that the actors share the secrets you all agreed upon, and then optimize the agreement process. Only the most robust systems actually consider "active" dissent; most distributed systems engineers consider this a special case that is most often focused on the idea of "incorrectness" as opposed to "maliciousness."
You can see elements of these assumptions in more modern data structures used for eventual consistency, like CRDTs. CRDTs are amazing and fast and often abstract-able to a trivial programming model. Anyone can use them, but they have to be monotonic, so we can't ever forget bad input, just try and cancel it out.
In some cases you can forget bad input, though, can't you? It's a rather wasteful example, but if (like you say, having established trust beforehand) every element of a grow-only set is a signed message, you can reject any messages that don't validate against their signature when merging. On one hand, this breaks idempotence. On the other, if we regard that set as a subset of the set of validly signed messages, it could not have been there in the first place, so to speak, so I wouldn't immediately think it breaks any guarantees. As far as I can tell, any properly functioning machine will only ever see correct state this way, unless it receives some state and doesn't merge it with anything, for example when initially starting to participate. However, that's easily fixed by always having some state, for example by starting with the empty set in this case.
> you can reject any messages that don't validate against their signature when merging.
That's not really what I meant by "bad". I meant bad as in intent, not structural and immediately verifiable message integrity.
If all entities in the coalescing set can independently verify that a message does not meet its signature requirements, it will be rejected and idempotence is maintained.
If ONE member is somehow deceived about key validity it'll propagate the message into every other member's state, eventually.
That's not really what I meant by "bad". I meant bad as in intent, not structural and immediately verifiable message integrity.
If all entities in the coalescing set can independently verify that a message does not meet its signature requirements, it will be rejected and idempotence is maintained.
If ONE member is somehow deceived about key validity it'll propagate the message into every other member's state, eventually.
Most of the bitcoin researchers have thoroughly convinced themselves that Proof of Stake is not achievable with acceptable levels of security, and for good reason. The reason you don't see more active research on Proof-of-Stake is that it is thought to only lead to dead ends.
Tezos will use Proof of Stake. They have a development version working now and there is good reason to expect a production version within a year.
The Ethereum team is serious about proof of stake.
Ethereum has not shown a particularly strong track record when it comes to security, so I think the comment stands until they address that or get replaced by the next hotness.
Ethereum actually has a better security track record than Bitcoin does [1]. It's the contracts on top of Ethereum that are the problem. Calling those incidents Ethereum security problems is like calling a Windows 0day an Intel security problem.
1. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Value_overflow_incident
1. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Value_overflow_incident
If Ethereum is forking because of contract problems, then an Ethereum contract problem is an Ethereum problem.
I think that statement is a little disingenuous. There haven't been any attacks that target Etherium proper, only bugs in smart contracts riding on top of Eth.
> I think that statement is a little disingenuous. There haven't been any attacks that target Etherium proper, only bugs in smart contracts riding on top of Eth.
This is a bit No True Scotsman. It's like "secured by math!" about Bitcoin - the ecosystem is rife with fraud and error.
So too with Ethereum. Given that smart contract functionality is literally Ethereum's unique selling point, you can't claim that is somehow not something that can be discussed as a problem with Ethereum. They broke the immutability guarantee for one bad smart contract, after all.
You really can't say "Ethereum is completely secure!! Except for everything that people actually use it for" without being more than a little disingenuous yourself.
This is a bit No True Scotsman. It's like "secured by math!" about Bitcoin - the ecosystem is rife with fraud and error.
So too with Ethereum. Given that smart contract functionality is literally Ethereum's unique selling point, you can't claim that is somehow not something that can be discussed as a problem with Ethereum. They broke the immutability guarantee for one bad smart contract, after all.
You really can't say "Ethereum is completely secure!! Except for everything that people actually use it for" without being more than a little disingenuous yourself.
It is, thus far, completely secure. The fact that SQL injection bugs exist does not negate the security of HTTP. The fact that stack overflow bugs exist does not make x86 insecure. The primitives you are provided are secure - how you use them may not be.
Now you may legitimately argue that Ethereum is poorly designed to encourage secure contract authorship. And I would agree with you in many respects. But that is a distinct concern from the security of Ethereum itself. Conflating the two is at best confusing and at worst maliciously spurious.
Now you may legitimately argue that Ethereum is poorly designed to encourage secure contract authorship. And I would agree with you in many respects. But that is a distinct concern from the security of Ethereum itself. Conflating the two is at best confusing and at worst maliciously spurious.
I don't mean that I have concerns about Ethereum itself, just the fact that it's currently too easy to write insecure contracts. And there has been some low-hanging fruit in remedying that, such as the whole "functions are public unless otherwise specified" thing.
Only a 31MM dollar bug, nothing to see here, we're secure.
WAT?
WAT?
Again, the bug was in the application layer, not the protocol layer. That's like saying that HTTPS is broken because you can do SQLi against someone's poorly coded website.
I believe it's not core Ethereum that has issues, it's buggy smart contracts. They don't make it particularly difficult to write insecure contracts, though.
Doesn't blockchain verification depend on a certain amount of inefficiency? Isn't that what makes forgery difficult?
That's a bit of a mistake. It doesn't rely on inefficiency it relies on economic costs. At the moment, hashing is a form of economic sunk cost. If you invest in hashpower, you can't split it without reducing your probability of success. It's an unforgable economic burden. Proof of stake architectures attempt to do the same thing with the currency of the network itself. There are lots of arguments about whether or not this is truly secure - but anyone on here telling you they know it's not is pretty much an idiot. There are tons of proof of stake coins operating successfully right now. There are no known attacks on these coins that allow you to do anything untoward (if there were, they'd be exploited on one of the many existing PoS coins).
That correct and why PoS probably will not be secure anytime soon.
No serious blockchain relies on proof-of-work. Bitcoin (being forked now) doesn't and ethereum (already forked twice) definitely doesn't.
Blockchains are a social construct and what ultimately protects them are the participants. Exactly like actual currencies they are subject to market forces; people either believe in and want the currency or they don't. It's this confidence that gives the currency strength.
More simply:
"On medium to long time scales, humans are quite good at consensus. Even if an adversary had access to unlimited hashing power, and came out with a 51% attack of any major blockchain that reverted even the last month of history, convincing the community that this chain is legitimate is much harder than just outrunning the main chain’s hashpower. They would need to subvert block explorers, every trusted member in the community, the New York Times, archive.org, and many other sources on the internet; all in all, convincing the world that the new attack chain is the one that came first in the information technology-dense 21st century is about as hard as convincing the world that the US moon landings never happened. These social considerations are what ultimately protect any blockchain in the long term, regardless of whether or not the blockchain’s community admits it (note that Bitcoin Core does admit this primacy of the social layer)." [1]
[1] https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/a-proof-of-stake-design-p...
The subtlety here is making the distinction between confidence and resistance to attack. They're not the same thing at all. And what's interesting here is that, going off the model of real currencies, one could assume market forces will prevail here. Developed nations let their currencies float precisely because on the whole they're confident that the market will ultimately punish any malicious attacker who attempts to destroy the currency by selling large amounts of it.
Blockchains are a social construct and what ultimately protects them are the participants. Exactly like actual currencies they are subject to market forces; people either believe in and want the currency or they don't. It's this confidence that gives the currency strength.
More simply:
"On medium to long time scales, humans are quite good at consensus. Even if an adversary had access to unlimited hashing power, and came out with a 51% attack of any major blockchain that reverted even the last month of history, convincing the community that this chain is legitimate is much harder than just outrunning the main chain’s hashpower. They would need to subvert block explorers, every trusted member in the community, the New York Times, archive.org, and many other sources on the internet; all in all, convincing the world that the new attack chain is the one that came first in the information technology-dense 21st century is about as hard as convincing the world that the US moon landings never happened. These social considerations are what ultimately protect any blockchain in the long term, regardless of whether or not the blockchain’s community admits it (note that Bitcoin Core does admit this primacy of the social layer)." [1]
[1] https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/a-proof-of-stake-design-p...
The subtlety here is making the distinction between confidence and resistance to attack. They're not the same thing at all. And what's interesting here is that, going off the model of real currencies, one could assume market forces will prevail here. Developed nations let their currencies float precisely because on the whole they're confident that the market will ultimately punish any malicious attacker who attempts to destroy the currency by selling large amounts of it.
So, your argument is: "you say our thing sucks at X, but if you really think so, why aren't you trying to fix it?" Filling in the variables differently, we could construct an argument like "If civil engineers really cared about structural stability, then that's exactly why they ought to be working on my bridge made out of playing cards."
It's not their job to fix someone else's bad idea.
It's not their job to fix someone else's bad idea.
Cryptocurrencies aren't going away. Which means that if your primary motivation to not work on cryptocurrency is that it wastes energy, then there's a whole lot of room for you to be making it better, and that is a stupid motivation. I'm not saying that they are obligated to work on it because it wastes energy. But the comment I was responding to implied that distributed systems engineers didn't want to work on blockchains because they are wasteful - which is clearly illogical. That'd be like Elon Musk not working on electric cars because they're inefficient. Or Solar cells. Etc, etc..
No that's not illogical, Why would I work to bend something like block chain, that was designed to be inefficent, to my will when I can just start from scratch using projects that were designed to be efficient first? That's very logical, the kind of decision that an engineer that's getting paid the make the best distributed system for the least money would make.
It's not designed to be inefficient. It's designed to solve the distributed consensus problem in an adversarial environment. There are other now proposed mechanisms of doing that (e.g. PoS) that are quite efficient. Working on those would be extremely beneficial to the cause of environmental efficiency.
Evironmental efficiently solving a problem I don't have is still inefficient. I still can't think of a mojor user for proof of work in a destributed system. I have trouble thinking of a distributed system that someone would pay for to not be centrally trusted, usually by the benefactor of employment? We always hear what a great solution blockchain is. Even if that's true, I never hear the actual problem it solves. Sure, say distributed ledger, and proof of work but those are solutions of sorts.
Name a problem that would best be solved with blockchain.
Name a problem that would best be solved with blockchain.
The block chain offers the following unique benefits for asset transfer:
- Assets move directly between entities — transfer and settlement are one-and-the-same — eliminating counterparty risk (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_risk#Counterparty_risk)
- Assets move instantly, and settlement time is ~10 minutes (settlement can also be instant if the parties trust the other won’t “double spend”)
- The transfer mechanism is public infrastructure and is always improving — everyone has a shared incentive to make it better, similar to Internet protocols like email and http
- Assets and end-user data are privately controlled, and strong security for assets can be achieved by using multiple signing keys across several parties
- Policy rules about the movement of assets can be enforced programmatically — whether those are “terms and conditions” or regulatory requirements
- Assets are fungible and play nice together — e.g., you can use reward points to buy mobile minutes
- A single transaction can include multiple entities and assets, on both sides of the transaction — e.g., you could execute a merger of two companies in a single transaction, with the inputs to the transaction being all stockholders across all share classes for both companies, and the outputs being all the newco shares going to all the new stockholders (again, no escrow service needed)
- Every transaction is added to an immutable record which, while anonymous, can be used to construct a perfect audit trail of an asset’s movement when combined with the private data held by the entities using the system — this defends against fraud, and also gives issuers transparency into asset movements
- It’s easy to integrate new parties
- Like the Internet itself, it’s a global system
Worth a read: https://blog.chain.com/wall-street-meet-block-chain-b2747909...
- Assets move directly between entities — transfer and settlement are one-and-the-same — eliminating counterparty risk (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_risk#Counterparty_risk)
- Assets move instantly, and settlement time is ~10 minutes (settlement can also be instant if the parties trust the other won’t “double spend”)
- The transfer mechanism is public infrastructure and is always improving — everyone has a shared incentive to make it better, similar to Internet protocols like email and http
- Assets and end-user data are privately controlled, and strong security for assets can be achieved by using multiple signing keys across several parties
- Policy rules about the movement of assets can be enforced programmatically — whether those are “terms and conditions” or regulatory requirements
- Assets are fungible and play nice together — e.g., you can use reward points to buy mobile minutes
- A single transaction can include multiple entities and assets, on both sides of the transaction — e.g., you could execute a merger of two companies in a single transaction, with the inputs to the transaction being all stockholders across all share classes for both companies, and the outputs being all the newco shares going to all the new stockholders (again, no escrow service needed)
- Every transaction is added to an immutable record which, while anonymous, can be used to construct a perfect audit trail of an asset’s movement when combined with the private data held by the entities using the system — this defends against fraud, and also gives issuers transparency into asset movements
- It’s easy to integrate new parties
- Like the Internet itself, it’s a global system
Worth a read: https://blog.chain.com/wall-street-meet-block-chain-b2747909...
> Name a problem that would best be solved with blockchain.
Money. E.g. Bitcoin.
Money. E.g. Bitcoin.
Bitcoin as money has all the worst properties of both credit cards (traceable, non-anonymous) and cash (irreversible, theft-prone).
It isn't intrinsically theft prone, the UI around using it is just not up to snuff yet. Credit cards, on the other hand, are intrinsically theft prone. They are a pull architecture. Every time you use your credit card, the store takes money from you. This is patently absurd, and the only reasonable definition of 'theft prone'. Bitcoin is a push architecture. You can never take my bitcoin, I can only send you bitcoin. Further, irreversibility is definitely what you want in the underlying protocol. It's fine if people want to implement escrowing and chargebacks via intermediaries on top of Bitcoin, and I would encourage that. But at a fundamental level, a payment system should be irreversible, immutable, uncensorable and push-based. Which is exactly what Bitcoin is.
> Every time you use your credit card, the store takes money from you.
No, precisely no credit cards work that way. That's why they're called credit cards.
No, precisely no credit cards work that way. That's why they're called credit cards.
Any time you require 1) a distributed database 2) in the face of adversarial participants, which truthfully, is less common than the blockchain obsessives would think.
A centralized organization (.com or .gov) that can achieve consensus amongst participants can do just fine with Postgres and a REST API.
Adversarial participants are common, but typically that's solved with a third-party overseer that administers the system. Finding use cases that demand decentralization are harder.
Bitcoin was created to remove central banks/govts from the money creation process, but in most cases, if you don't trust the central authority, you just don't participate. With cash, you can't easily get around dealing with the govt.
A centralized organization (.com or .gov) that can achieve consensus amongst participants can do just fine with Postgres and a REST API.
Adversarial participants are common, but typically that's solved with a third-party overseer that administers the system. Finding use cases that demand decentralization are harder.
Bitcoin was created to remove central banks/govts from the money creation process, but in most cases, if you don't trust the central authority, you just don't participate. With cash, you can't easily get around dealing with the govt.
When cash was gold and/or silver the central authority might do some minting of coin but you did not need to trust them with a ledger or not to print huge amounts of paper currency. Gold and silver were currency for thousands of years. Soon all the people who lived under that system will be dead. It will be interesting what the system of global fiat will bring in the future.
> There are other now proposed mechanisms of doing that (e.g. PoS) that are quite efficient.
Well, no they aren't, because they're proposals.
Well, no they aren't, because they're proposals.
No they're not. They're implemented in many altcoins. And to say that 'proposals' are not efficient because they haven't been implemented is both semantically wrong, and an incredibly stupid point even if it weren't.
But the entire point is that it wastes energy. That's why it works. It isn't like a car that can be made more efficient and therefore better. The central premise is that we're going to waste energy to do something that can be done in other ways without wasting energy.
No, wasting energy is not why blockchain works. proof of work is just one way a blockchain can work. There are alternatives:
https://www.stellar.org/developers/guides/concepts/scp.html
disclosure: I work at stellar
https://www.stellar.org/developers/guides/concepts/scp.html
disclosure: I work at stellar
The entire point is that it wastes something. Not specifically energy. The idea is that there is a sunk, unrecoverable cost associated with mining. That cost may be able to take other forms, though. In the case of proof-of-stake, that cost is the time-value of money.
There's a lot of work on non-mining private blockchains that you're ignoring.
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but isn't this why LiteCoin was created by a Google Engineer?
Does it solve the problem? Or did it just make a step in the right direction?
Does it solve the problem? Or did it just make a step in the right direction?
LiteCoin's proof of work is memory hard so it's harder to create an asic.
A hard proof of work algorithm is required for decentralized coin chains to work. Otherwise it would be easy to create a denial of service attack by rogue agents filling up your blockchain with worthless blocks.
A hard proof of work algorithm is required for decentralized coin chains to work. Otherwise it would be easy to create a denial of service attack by rogue agents filling up your blockchain with worthless blocks.
It's worth noting that the qualification should be "easier." But the POW is only one side of the DoS problem bitcoin's model can be forced to experience.
By carefully attacking the network links between miners, someone can significantly extend the amount of time that an attack can take place in. These attacks are expensive, but orthogonal to any PoW algorithm.
Then the problem transforms into: "can I trigger enough small pluralities of miners to split and form opposing but equally long viewpoints?" The only resolution to such a scenairo is to discard most of the divergent blockchains arbitrarily by human consensus.
By carefully attacking the network links between miners, someone can significantly extend the amount of time that an attack can take place in. These attacks are expensive, but orthogonal to any PoW algorithm.
Then the problem transforms into: "can I trigger enough small pluralities of miners to split and form opposing but equally long viewpoints?" The only resolution to such a scenairo is to discard most of the divergent blockchains arbitrarily by human consensus.
No Litecoin is not significantly different from Bitcoin in that regard.
Most mining is hydro powered.
Actually, Bitmain's building with 75% of mining capacity appears to run on wind and solar.
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/bitmain-reveals-plans-f...
(was planned then, I believe it's in service now)
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/bitmain-reveals-plans-f...
(was planned then, I believe it's in service now)
Please cite your sources.
Beyond this: https://www.coindesk.com/carbon-footprint-bitcoin/
Which is sort of unvalidated and points to one or two actors in the space suggesting that they want to move to non-fossil fuels and one that miiiiight be.
Beyond this: https://www.coindesk.com/carbon-footprint-bitcoin/
Which is sort of unvalidated and points to one or two actors in the space suggesting that they want to move to non-fossil fuels and one that miiiiight be.
Not the parent commentor, but this is certainly true to some degree. To what extent is very hard to say, but China has built several large hydroelectric projects in remote areas where electricity is very inexpensive. Many miners have taken advantage of this.
http://technode.com/2017/02/27/bitcoin-mining-sichuan-cheap-... https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/in-chinas-...
Of course, there is also cheap coal power in China, so the environmental impact may be very significant.
Going forward, I anticipate the rise of solar mining in some favorable areas. Possibly geothermal as well. Since Bitcoin mining can be done anywhere with decent internet access, it seems natural that it should gravitate toward renewables over time. Fossil fuels continue to get more expensive, while renewables get cheaper. Of course, building e.g. solar panels isn't without environmental impact, either.
http://technode.com/2017/02/27/bitcoin-mining-sichuan-cheap-... https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/in-chinas-...
Of course, there is also cheap coal power in China, so the environmental impact may be very significant.
Going forward, I anticipate the rise of solar mining in some favorable areas. Possibly geothermal as well. Since Bitcoin mining can be done anywhere with decent internet access, it seems natural that it should gravitate toward renewables over time. Fossil fuels continue to get more expensive, while renewables get cheaper. Of course, building e.g. solar panels isn't without environmental impact, either.
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> The blockchain community is immature and historically unwelcoming.
I can't disagree too much about the immaturity, but you don't see too much more of that in the deeper technical circles than you might see on the Linux mailing list. Room for improvement? Plenty. But it's also not grossly out of line as long as you are in the right places.
The 'unwelcoming' bit though is more justified. Blockchain design is like cryptography - security is very important, and one tiny mistake means that your design is completely unviable. And if that tiny mistake occurred early in your design process, it may be too deep to be easily routed around.
Designing secure blockchains is very hard. As a result, the first year or so you try to improve on blockchain systems you usually end up with a bunch of broken stuff that nobody appreciates at all. The same is true if you are trying to make a better hashing algorithm, or doing quantum resistant cryptography. Except with blockchains people haven't learned to expect it to be this difficult to innovate yet, so it feels a lot more hostile.
That will fix with time. As more things blow up in production, people are realizing more and more that blockchains are tricky, and that good designs take a lot of expertise, a lot of collaboration, and are very rare. That will make it seem less unwelcoming when your intro to blockchains is 'well, this thing you are proposing doesn't work for at least 10 reasons, and here they are...'
I can't disagree too much about the immaturity, but you don't see too much more of that in the deeper technical circles than you might see on the Linux mailing list. Room for improvement? Plenty. But it's also not grossly out of line as long as you are in the right places.
The 'unwelcoming' bit though is more justified. Blockchain design is like cryptography - security is very important, and one tiny mistake means that your design is completely unviable. And if that tiny mistake occurred early in your design process, it may be too deep to be easily routed around.
Designing secure blockchains is very hard. As a result, the first year or so you try to improve on blockchain systems you usually end up with a bunch of broken stuff that nobody appreciates at all. The same is true if you are trying to make a better hashing algorithm, or doing quantum resistant cryptography. Except with blockchains people haven't learned to expect it to be this difficult to innovate yet, so it feels a lot more hostile.
That will fix with time. As more things blow up in production, people are realizing more and more that blockchains are tricky, and that good designs take a lot of expertise, a lot of collaboration, and are very rare. That will make it seem less unwelcoming when your intro to blockchains is 'well, this thing you are proposing doesn't work for at least 10 reasons, and here they are...'
Anything that's related to profits and democratized will attract all kinds of characters. Democratization lowers the barrier and profits provide the incentive.
The choice to corner cryptocurrencies and choose to see the shady characters in this combination is an artificial one based on what you can and choose to "see". The same shady characters are in finance, fund raising, and perhaps around your desk. They may be less obvious or you may be more tolerant towards the corporate backstabber, but they're still there.
I guess it's not surprising that untrustworthy people would flock to technologies that eliminate the need for trust.
It's not necessarily the people who can benefit from a trustless network that cloud the ecosystem, it's shady people who want in on the hype solely to make money and apply blockchain to every conceivable use case just for the sake of applying blockchain. It's the kind of people who are an expert on fintech, blockchain, AI/machine learning and IoT all at the same time and seem to use the terms interchangeably.
Anonymous and irreversible transactions help too.
That's not true for all companies. Take Ripple or Coinbase, for example. Both have worked from the beginning to be legit. Ripple's various technologies (including their currency) are being adopted by banks across the world. And Coinbase has worked with the Feds from the beginning to make sure they were complying with regulations. Granted there are a lot of bad actors in crypto, but there are good ones, too.
I've spent a decent amount of time understanding blockchain at this point. Am I wrong in saying that it's really just a data structure for solving a problem (like a tree or array), but a lot of the hype seems to be people trying to find commercial applications to use the specific data structure?
I mean, no one says 'lets go find a good use for an array,' you sort of pick the array after you have an idea
It's an approach to solving a problem that allows problems to be solved in totally new ways. I think it's understandable to be on a search for opportunities to apply it.
The problem it seems to me is that, although the idea of trustless systems seem really cool and applicable to a lot of domains, it turns out that there are actually way fewer useful applications than people originally thought. But no one is letting go, and a lot of people are wrongly convincing themselves and others that most systems are better off trustless.
The problem it seems to me is that, although the idea of trustless systems seem really cool and applicable to a lot of domains, it turns out that there are actually way fewer useful applications than people originally thought. But no one is letting go, and a lot of people are wrongly convincing themselves and others that most systems are better off trustless.
Yes the blockchain is just a data structure. A fancy tree. The more interesting part of cryptocurrencies are the dynamic membership multiparty signature schemes they implement, but those don't make for as nice of soundbites.
> You just can't trust anyone
Isn't that one of the reasons blockchain came to existence?
I know you aren't using that in the same context, it just sounded funny in my head :)
Isn't that one of the reasons blockchain came to existence?
I know you aren't using that in the same context, it just sounded funny in my head :)
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The tech is legit for its application - but for many other purposes its very much not. It's being thrown around as a buzzword.
This is true of any new burgeoning technology. Were you around for the Internet boom in the 90s?
I keep hearing this is like the internet from 30 years ago. Thirty years ago, there was no good way to do ecommerce or send an email. Today, there is a good way to pay for things and do all financial transactions in a simple low hastle way. The internet was sending instant, asyncronious communication vs letters (async) or phone (instant). Bitcoin is creating phone calls and post mail in the email age and using a metal envelope as an upgrade.
Yeah I sent my first emails to a system that connected to neighboring systems via modem at a pre determined time to ftp mail bundles around.
Yeah I sent my first emails to a system that connected to neighboring systems via modem at a pre determined time to ftp mail bundles around.
I was talking about how scam artists flocked to the internet with pyramid schemes, chain emails, get rich quick schemes, etc. All that stuff is still here, but it's drowned out by people doing actual normal business now.
Proof-of-work blockchains were developed to solve a problem that only exists in a small percentage of distributed engineering use-cases. Unless you need to build a "censorship-free" peer-to-peer ledger distributed among untrusted, anonymous participants, the complexity costs and latency and computation costs simply aren't worth it.
It's the same reason that Ford doesn't build a tunnel under the US/Mexico border to ferry car parts to America.
It's the same reason that Ford doesn't build a tunnel under the US/Mexico border to ferry car parts to America.
Proof-of-work is simply not sustainable (energy-wise), IMO, for the foundation of a global system. The stability of whole ecosystems is predicated upon those ecosystems being attractive to people who want to make money by competing to solve hard problems by brute force.
That's a lot of energy going into a system that can commit a new block of transactions once every 10 minutes on average. It solves a problem in an interesting way, but it's nowhere near quick enough or efficient enough to solve 99% of engineering problems. That's why only 1% of engineers are working on it.
That's a lot of energy going into a system that can commit a new block of transactions once every 10 minutes on average. It solves a problem in an interesting way, but it's nowhere near quick enough or efficient enough to solve 99% of engineering problems. That's why only 1% of engineers are working on it.
IMO, the core problem is if you want a global transaction system to become popular it needs to process and store ~TB / day of new transactions. Which means you quickly get into EB territory for the full database which is not something distributed systems can really handle without scaling issues.
Now if you want a system used by 0.01% of the global population then that's a very different problem, but far less useful.
Now if you want a system used by 0.01% of the global population then that's a very different problem, but far less useful.
unless it's really just s global settlement system for an unregulated global banking system for world trade.
Two points, first if you abandon the system for something else then you have to solve all the original problems again making the first system more or less useless. Second, even just 2 transactions / month * ~7 billion people is a lot of data.
PS: USD actually operate on a 3 tiered system that works well (Fed, Banks, cash) but doing the same thing in a *coin seems like just giving up.
PS: USD actually operate on a 3 tiered system that works well (Fed, Banks, cash) but doing the same thing in a *coin seems like just giving up.
Look up "Lightning Network". This is a solved problem. You can build on top of bitcoin to scale basically as large as you want, trustlessly. The software is being developed as we speak.
Lighting network boosts the number of transactions between two people, but you need to have 'banks' to make it efficient. And even then a minimum of 2 transactions per month * 7 billion people is still a lot of data.
https://medium.com/@jonaldfyookball/mathematical-proof-that-...
https://medium.com/@jonaldfyookball/mathematical-proof-that-...
Yes, I'm aware of these limitations. Neither of them refute my point, which is that you can trustlessly scale bitcoin basically as much as you want. Maybe you have "banks" (highly connected nodes), but it's still trustless, unlike with real banks.
> Neither of them refute my point, which is that you can trustlessly scale bitcoin basically as much as you want.
This is unsupported. LN is a research project, not a production-ready payment system. It has plenty of limitations (trustlessness is a huge limitation), and the topology of the network doesn’t match that of a real economy (routes to fellow consumers are practically useless, since everyone wants to pay merchants). There’s plenty of work left before LN can scale properly, if it ever manages to (again, trustlessness for both senders and receivers is setting the bar as high as it can possibly go).
Scalability is secondondary for LN, trustlessness is primary. Due to this choice I predict difficulty in scaling sufficiently.
This is unsupported. LN is a research project, not a production-ready payment system. It has plenty of limitations (trustlessness is a huge limitation), and the topology of the network doesn’t match that of a real economy (routes to fellow consumers are practically useless, since everyone wants to pay merchants). There’s plenty of work left before LN can scale properly, if it ever manages to (again, trustlessness for both senders and receivers is setting the bar as high as it can possibly go).
Scalability is secondondary for LN, trustlessness is primary. Due to this choice I predict difficulty in scaling sufficiently.
I sense incoming downvotes, it would be great if we could get a link to an existing rebuttal, or something. Stomping on someone's dream just so you don't have to risk disappointment holds us all back. What are the limits of the Lightning network?
The challenge for the Lightning Network is cheaply routing payments from consumers to merchants. LN is optimized for anyone-to-anyone payments, while in a real economy money moves from consumer to merchant to producer to worker (consumer). LN is not optimized for this circular pattern, where many consumers pay a single merchant.
Also, everything is done via two-way payment channels in LN, which means that you need to lock X BTC in a channel in order to send it, which becomes very capital intensive for nodes close to merchants who need to lock millions of dollars worth of bitcoins to cover merchants’ monthly turnover (this is in addition to the BTC locked up by other nodes who participate in the transfer but are not directly connected to merchants). If you want to send 0.1 BTC through 10 nodes, each of these 10 nodes must have locked up 0.1 BTC on the blockchain, and you’ll pay blockchain fees if just a single channel/node in your path doesn’t have at least as much as you need to send.
A proper payment network needs two different types of nodes: senders and receivers. Using a single type of node for both doesn’t make much sense, since merchants and consumers have completely different needs. Senders need to be able to send relatively small amounts relatively frequently (a consumer making a few purchases per day), while receivers (merchants) need to redeem relatively large amounts (e.g. one week’s worth of payments) relatively rarely for bitcoins (on the blockchain).
Also, everything is done via two-way payment channels in LN, which means that you need to lock X BTC in a channel in order to send it, which becomes very capital intensive for nodes close to merchants who need to lock millions of dollars worth of bitcoins to cover merchants’ monthly turnover (this is in addition to the BTC locked up by other nodes who participate in the transfer but are not directly connected to merchants). If you want to send 0.1 BTC through 10 nodes, each of these 10 nodes must have locked up 0.1 BTC on the blockchain, and you’ll pay blockchain fees if just a single channel/node in your path doesn’t have at least as much as you need to send.
A proper payment network needs two different types of nodes: senders and receivers. Using a single type of node for both doesn’t make much sense, since merchants and consumers have completely different needs. Senders need to be able to send relatively small amounts relatively frequently (a consumer making a few purchases per day), while receivers (merchants) need to redeem relatively large amounts (e.g. one week’s worth of payments) relatively rarely for bitcoins (on the blockchain).
>Proof-of-work is simply not sustainable (energy-wise), IMO, for the foundation of a global system.
What have you found that is cheaper to proof-of-work that works on a global system?[1]
[1] "Nothing is Cheaper than Proof of Work" http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/
What have you found that is cheaper to proof-of-work that works on a global system?[1]
[1] "Nothing is Cheaper than Proof of Work" http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/
Centralized authority. With the obvious tradeoffs. :-/
Maybe there's a happy medium where trustworthiness of central authorities is appropriately distributed, but common operations are quicker and less wasteful.
Maybe there's a happy medium where trustworthiness of central authorities is appropriately distributed, but common operations are quicker and less wasteful.
> Maybe there's a happy medium where trustworthiness of central authorities is appropriately distributed, but common operations are quicker and less wasteful.
I’m working on this. It’s an implementation of a protocol called Stroem, which uses payment channels to transfer bitcoins from consumers to so-called issuers, who issue payments in exchange which consumers then send to merchants. Then merchants collect these off-chain payments from issuers, and redeem them into bitcoins on the blockchain when they wish.
This system compromises with the security of the payment receivers only (the merchants). Everything is trustlessness for the payment sender/consumer, while merchants need to trust issuers. But, if desired, the merchant-issuer trust can be reduced to almost nothing by the merchant redeeming very often (at the cost of higher fees).
And, importantly, the open nature of the protocol will ensure competition between issuers, since anyone can join the network.
I’m working on this. It’s an implementation of a protocol called Stroem, which uses payment channels to transfer bitcoins from consumers to so-called issuers, who issue payments in exchange which consumers then send to merchants. Then merchants collect these off-chain payments from issuers, and redeem them into bitcoins on the blockchain when they wish.
This system compromises with the security of the payment receivers only (the merchants). Everything is trustlessness for the payment sender/consumer, while merchants need to trust issuers. But, if desired, the merchant-issuer trust can be reduced to almost nothing by the merchant redeeming very often (at the cost of higher fees).
And, importantly, the open nature of the protocol will ensure competition between issuers, since anyone can join the network.
The happy medium has been found already. Would people trust Visa and MasterCard if they allowed double spending? I'm guessing not. So by virtue of having a very large investment in their corporate brands, the old economy already came up with a solution to the trust problem.
Heck, everywhere you look there's a solution to the trust problem; it's fundamental to human interactions.
- There are courts. If you try to screw me, I can drag you into one. Nothing's perfect and there's probably a minimum amount I'd not bother Judge Judy for, but it's a solution a LOT of people rely on. And I can tack all sorts of things on to this like warranties and insurances.
- Brands. Look, we burn all this money on getting sports stars to pose for pictures. And there's reviews of our product in papers. If we did something stupid, you'd know. Again, it ain't perfect.
- Escrow. Don't trust me? Trust this guy.
Heck, everywhere you look there's a solution to the trust problem; it's fundamental to human interactions.
- There are courts. If you try to screw me, I can drag you into one. Nothing's perfect and there's probably a minimum amount I'd not bother Judge Judy for, but it's a solution a LOT of people rely on. And I can tack all sorts of things on to this like warranties and insurances.
- Brands. Look, we burn all this money on getting sports stars to pose for pictures. And there's reviews of our product in papers. If we did something stupid, you'd know. Again, it ain't perfect.
- Escrow. Don't trust me? Trust this guy.
True, and funny too how technology "disrupts" only to eventually repeat history.
What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.You're assuming that a global system must be trustless. This is not really a requirement. Heck, in most cases its not even desirable.
It's funny that proof of work still doesn't seem to protect from people loosing 31MM a while ago, or the Mt.Gox hack. I can't remember the last time my bank fucked up like that. That problem may be more solved then we are letting on. I know, I know, fuck the man.
If there's nothing cheaper solution to cryptocurrency than proof of work, it seems to me that we just have to ban cryptocurrency altogether at the legislature level.
Or, you could fund nuclear fusion research. That has better odds of success.
If you ban it in your country, your country will fall behind.
Cryptocurrency is backed entirely by free market incentives. You can fight the market if you want, but you will lose.
Cryptocurrency is backed entirely by free market incentives. You can fight the market if you want, but you will lose.
Countries won't ban it -- countries love it. It's perfectly traceable non-anonymous currency. What they'll do is centralize it so they get the citizen-control benefits (and, of course, the ability to create and destroy it -- imagine EO6102 where they can remotely seize your gold!) without the unsustainable energy expenditure.
Using bidirectional off-chain payment channels, you can build trustless payment networks that use Bitcoin as a backend (see "lightning network"). It's almost as good as normal bitcoin, and it's much faster and cheaper. This is perhaps what most transactions will end up using.
Once most of the coins are mined doesn't bitcoin basically become a global settlement network for other crypto currencies. Although ethereum might do that easier.
> Proof-of-work is simply not sustainable (energy-wise), IMO, for the foundation of a global system. The stability of whole ecosystems is predicated upon those ecosystems being attractive to people who want to make money by competing to solve hard problems by brute force.
What do you mean by this, exactly? Bitcoin miners look more than willing to earn money on brute forcing hard problems.
The point of proof-of-work is that it shouldn’t matter what anyone thinks about it. It’s basically impossible to ban (anyone can do a SHA256 calculation), and the difficulty automatically adjusts. In addition to this, the block reward — currently 12.5 BTC per block — halves every ~4 years, so less and less electricity will be consumed until only transaction fees provide capital for proof-of-work[1].
[1] http://www.bitcoinnotbombs.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/37...
What do you mean by this, exactly? Bitcoin miners look more than willing to earn money on brute forcing hard problems.
The point of proof-of-work is that it shouldn’t matter what anyone thinks about it. It’s basically impossible to ban (anyone can do a SHA256 calculation), and the difficulty automatically adjusts. In addition to this, the block reward — currently 12.5 BTC per block — halves every ~4 years, so less and less electricity will be consumed until only transaction fees provide capital for proof-of-work[1].
[1] http://www.bitcoinnotbombs.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/37...
I mean that to stay stable and grow in popularity, bitcoin must sustain ever-increasing energy demands so that nobody has a majority and can start double-spending. The whole goal with variable difficulty is to counteract the ebb/flow in popularity and ensure that the work takes ~10 minutes. This ensures that as the popularity grows, more energy is required since it will always take 10 minutes for a new block, regardless of how many contributors are involved.
Furthermore, the miners are here for the direct mining rewards. I think the future transaction fees approach will be significantly less attractive, so I'll be very interested to see how that change plays out once the era of rewarded mining is over.
Furthermore, the miners are here for the direct mining rewards. I think the future transaction fees approach will be significantly less attractive, so I'll be very interested to see how that change plays out once the era of rewarded mining is over.
The difficulty you mentioned only applies to certain currencies. Ethereum, for example, has a built-in "difficulty bomb" set for later this year to make hashing essentially unworkable.
> Proof-of-work is simply not sustainable (energy-wise), IMO, for the foundation of a global system.
Visa, MasterCard, AmEX, &c along with each individual bank, not to mention the intermediaries and gateways all of them use also consume a tremendous amount of power. It's not as if our current system uses a negligible amount of power, not to mention the number of steps and entities a transaction needs in order to be finalized.
Visa, MasterCard, AmEX, &c along with each individual bank, not to mention the intermediaries and gateways all of them use also consume a tremendous amount of power. It's not as if our current system uses a negligible amount of power, not to mention the number of steps and entities a transaction needs in order to be finalized.
> It's not as if our current system uses a negligible amount of power
Our current system does in fact use a negligible amount of power. Each $2 latte you put on a credit card uses an amount of electricity so infinitesimal that it can only be measured in the aggregate.
The percentage of the power used to generate a single bitcoin block for a single transaction can power an average US household for (approximately) an entire week.
To put it in perspective: If the bitcoin network scaled up to the size of the VISA network it would require 100% of all energy used for all purposes planet-wide, from transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, etc. Everything you could possibly want to buy with bitcoin would be unavailable, as 100% of all human activity would go to powering the miners.
Our current system does in fact use a negligible amount of power. Each $2 latte you put on a credit card uses an amount of electricity so infinitesimal that it can only be measured in the aggregate.
The percentage of the power used to generate a single bitcoin block for a single transaction can power an average US household for (approximately) an entire week.
To put it in perspective: If the bitcoin network scaled up to the size of the VISA network it would require 100% of all energy used for all purposes planet-wide, from transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, etc. Everything you could possibly want to buy with bitcoin would be unavailable, as 100% of all human activity would go to powering the miners.
No, miners hash rate is what eats watts.
Bitcoin network scaling has to do with transactions per second, and it is a protocol problem, and an storage problem, but it is independent of the hash capacity of the system.
We can theoretically improve the Bitcoin network capacity to handle 100x the number of transactions, while having the same hash rate.
In fact, if hash rate were halved each month, and the protocol unchanged, Bitcoin network transaction capacity would still be the same after Bitcoin difficulty is auto adjusted.
Hash rate and transaction capacity are orthogonal issues.
Bitcoin network scaling has to do with transactions per second, and it is a protocol problem, and an storage problem, but it is independent of the hash capacity of the system.
We can theoretically improve the Bitcoin network capacity to handle 100x the number of transactions, while having the same hash rate.
In fact, if hash rate were halved each month, and the protocol unchanged, Bitcoin network transaction capacity would still be the same after Bitcoin difficulty is auto adjusted.
Hash rate and transaction capacity are orthogonal issues.
What if you also include the energy consumed by the employees and facilities of Visa, including their commute-to-work energy? And the energy used to construct their facilities, improve network infrastructure, etc? Now are we getting within an order of magnitude of the energy consumption of an army of ASIC miners, and the people who farm them?
On a per-transaction basis? No.
Those costs specifically end up being reified in the fee those processors charge to their customers, so we can determine an upper limit to how much is spent on energy in that way.
Those costs specifically end up being reified in the fee those processors charge to their customers, so we can determine an upper limit to how much is spent on energy in that way.
The same is true of bitcoin transaction fees, no? Miners set the minimum fee that they will accept, and people tack a fee onto a transaction, large enough that a miner will likely process it.
No, because there is a block reward too that subsidizes the miners, so you have to account for that too.
We don't really know the relationship between transaction rate and electrical usage in a mature BTC system, because mining is mainly used to prevent double-spends and the minimum required mining rate to support a given transaction rate is a game-theoretical concern and not a technical one. We can only really observe what has happened so far in the Bitcoin ecosystem.
We don't really know the relationship between transaction rate and electrical usage in a mature BTC system, because mining is mainly used to prevent double-spends and the minimum required mining rate to support a given transaction rate is a game-theoretical concern and not a technical one. We can only really observe what has happened so far in the Bitcoin ecosystem.
Why is so much compute needed for the blockchain? Couldn't a proof-of-work system be developed that consumes VISA-network levels of power? How costly the computation should be (and how much the cost has scaled up) seems like it was an arbitrary design decision.
No, the amount of energy needed will always be enormous as their is a direct linkage between the value of bitcoin and the amount of energy required to secure the network.
Otherwise there will be a point where it is cost effective to attack the network.
Bitcoin is designed to be wasteful.
Otherwise there will be a point where it is cost effective to attack the network.
Bitcoin is designed to be wasteful.
I guess I was asking for a hypothetical, new crypto coin. Does proof-of-work have to be costly compute-wise in order to be proof-of-worky?
Yes. Think about what it is.
"I'm working on these hashes. You know I'm not taking a shortcut, because there's not yet a known way to do that with this secure hash. And because you know I'm doing the work, you should reward me with some coins."
Alternatives have been considered, like proof-of-stake.
"I'm working on these hashes. You know I'm not taking a shortcut, because there's not yet a known way to do that with this secure hash. And because you know I'm doing the work, you should reward me with some coins."
Alternatives have been considered, like proof-of-stake.
You try to equate the current Visa, Mastercard, etc. to the current Bitcoin. This is not possible because Visa alone handles like 100,000 times the volume of Bitcoin. As soon as Bitcoin&Co. become serious currencies, the incentives for manipulation rise. When eventually no new Bitcoins will be generated, all miner incentives come from mining blocks for the transaction fees. How do you want to protect the chain? How much will a single transaction cost to pay for the power to prevent this manipulation by working faster than the "enemy"?
If you raise the block size to put more transactions into a single block, you will end up with a normal banking system because nobody can carry the whole blockchain with them to pay and has to trust providers that manage wallets.
If you raise the block size to put more transactions into a single block, you will end up with a normal banking system because nobody can carry the whole blockchain with them to pay and has to trust providers that manage wallets.
So what? That's a totally meaningless comparison because the ubiquity of cryptocurrencies would not obviate the need for financial services. Besides, market forces incentivize businesses to use as little power as possible because it costs them money, PoW incentivizes miners to use as much power as possible because that is a necessary requirement for increasing hash output.
> So what? That's a totally meaningless comparison because the ubiquity of cryptocurrencies would not obviate the need for financial services.
The person I replied to compalined about "wasting" power to run the bitcoin network. It's only a valid comparison when compared against current usage, as our current system also "wastes" power to run the current system.
> PoW incentivizes miners to use as much power as possible because that is a necessary requirement for increasing hash output.
It also incentives them to get the most performance per Watt. I'm just saying it's meaningless to complain that bitcoin uses power, it only matters how it compares to the current system.
The person I replied to compalined about "wasting" power to run the bitcoin network. It's only a valid comparison when compared against current usage, as our current system also "wastes" power to run the current system.
> PoW incentivizes miners to use as much power as possible because that is a necessary requirement for increasing hash output.
It also incentives them to get the most performance per Watt. I'm just saying it's meaningless to complain that bitcoin uses power, it only matters how it compares to the current system.
> It's only a valid comparison when compared against current usage, as our current system also "wastes" power to run the current system.
No, even if "the current system" was an apt comparison, there is still a fundamental difference between PoW and everything else. The power consumed in the process of facilitating a bank or any type of business is incidental to the useful work being performed. Power is burned so there are lights for people to see, power is burned so computers can perform calculations so that employees can get their jobs done faster, power is burned so that people can go back home after their shift is over; all this is incidental, the power is expended to make the business process more efficient, but the business could still run (though much less efficiently) without spending power on lights, computers and transportation. On the other hand, PoW is literally a waste of work because the nature of the work itself does not matter, the only thing that matters is that the unbounded cost of wasting energy keeps everyone honest.
> I'm just saying it's meaningless to complain that bitcoin uses power, it only matters how it compares to the current system.
The comparison is meaningless because "the current system" continues to exist regardless of any developments in bitcoin, if anything ubiquitous bitcoin would almost certainly increase the power impact of the finance industry.
No, even if "the current system" was an apt comparison, there is still a fundamental difference between PoW and everything else. The power consumed in the process of facilitating a bank or any type of business is incidental to the useful work being performed. Power is burned so there are lights for people to see, power is burned so computers can perform calculations so that employees can get their jobs done faster, power is burned so that people can go back home after their shift is over; all this is incidental, the power is expended to make the business process more efficient, but the business could still run (though much less efficiently) without spending power on lights, computers and transportation. On the other hand, PoW is literally a waste of work because the nature of the work itself does not matter, the only thing that matters is that the unbounded cost of wasting energy keeps everyone honest.
> I'm just saying it's meaningless to complain that bitcoin uses power, it only matters how it compares to the current system.
The comparison is meaningless because "the current system" continues to exist regardless of any developments in bitcoin, if anything ubiquitous bitcoin would almost certainly increase the power impact of the finance industry.
> Visa, MasterCard, AmEX, &c along with each individual bank, not to mention the intermediaries and gateways all of them use also consume a tremendous amount of power.
But is it more or less than the equivalent amount of power it would take for Bitcoin (or something like it) to scale to Visa, MC, AMEX, etc. global levels?
But is it more or less than the equivalent amount of power it would take for Bitcoin (or something like it) to scale to Visa, MC, AMEX, etc. global levels?
That's what I don't have good numbers on, I was just pointing out that talking about bitcoins using a lot of energy isn't a good argument unless you're comparing it against the current system, which also uses a substantial amount of power. The big question is what you're asking: How do they compare?
I think that depends on how much mining hashing power scales with regard to transaction rate. From a technical point of view, there's no reason that the hash rate has to increase to process more transactions. But from an economic and game theoretical point of view, increasing transaction rate makes the network more valuable, which makes attack rewards more valuable, which necessitates a higher hash rate. I'm not sure anyone has sussed out what the relationship is between transaction rate and minimum necessary hash rate.
The Bitcoin we have now won't be the same network we have at that scale. L2 and on-chain optimizations will get us some of the way.
These companies handle orders of magnitude more traffic than Bitcoin and also provide services beyond just processing transactions. The comparison is not useful.
Very good points. In complex financial transactions (at least within regulatory domains), my understanding is that rollbacks can and do happen. I initially thought across borders/regulatory domains, blockchain will shine. I haven't seen a killer application just yet. It is a bit frustrating because the tech is indeed interesting .. we just don't have multi-billion dollar real (as opposed to imagined) use-cases beyond the distributed ledger.
"I initially thought across borders/regulatory domains, blockchain will shine."
Massive institutions with billions of dollars at stake would rather have a predictable and stable regulatory regime to conduct transactions in the shadow of then to rely on a technical solution that supposedly obviates the need for one. Things come up -- bugs, acts of god, internal fraud, hacking, flash crashes, and so forth and so on. They want to be able to go to arbitrator and ask for a sensible and reasonable result and not be reliant on a totally inflexible mechanical rule set. Not the least of which because they can afford the very best lawyers to try to convince those arbitrators that what they want is sensible and reasonable.
Massive institutions with billions of dollars at stake would rather have a predictable and stable regulatory regime to conduct transactions in the shadow of then to rely on a technical solution that supposedly obviates the need for one. Things come up -- bugs, acts of god, internal fraud, hacking, flash crashes, and so forth and so on. They want to be able to go to arbitrator and ask for a sensible and reasonable result and not be reliant on a totally inflexible mechanical rule set. Not the least of which because they can afford the very best lawyers to try to convince those arbitrators that what they want is sensible and reasonable.
A few years ago, a substantial amount of money was accidentally wired to my bank account. After about a month, I got a letter from the bank if I agreed on that money being wired back to the sender. I agreed, because I knew the implications.
With a technology like bitcoin, where receivers are pseudononymous, that would have never been possible.
Noone except for those who wish to remain pseudononymous will ever use bitcoin for any real-world scenarios. The costs are higher, the risks are higher, it doesn't scale, there are no checks and balances.
I don't want bitcoin for the same reason I don't want an AI to run national defenses.
With a technology like bitcoin, where receivers are pseudononymous, that would have never been possible.
Noone except for those who wish to remain pseudononymous will ever use bitcoin for any real-world scenarios. The costs are higher, the risks are higher, it doesn't scale, there are no checks and balances.
I don't want bitcoin for the same reason I don't want an AI to run national defenses.
I wonder if there's such a thing as Bitcoin address typosquatting. Especially targeting single bit typos (of busy wallets) to catch single bit errors. I guess, though, vanity wallet addresses are hard to create. Or maybe there's also a checksum that keeps this from working anyway.
There's a checksum, so your desired typosquatting address may not even be a valid address to begin with (the chance that it is valid is only 1 in 2^32). Even if it is a valid address it would be very very difficult to generate it. The difficulty of doing so would be at least as difficult as preimage attacks on both SHA-256 and RIPEMD-160.
Interesting thanks. Is it remotely plausible on any other cryptocoin?
https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/blog/the-blockchain-paradox-why-dis...
"Let me explain why. In economic organization, we must distinguish between enforcing rules and making rules. Laws are rules enforced by state bureaucracy and made by a legislature. The SWIFT Protocol is a set of rules enforced by SWIFTNet (a centralized computational system) and made, ultimately, by SWIFT’s Board of Directors. The Bitcoin Protocol is a set of rules enforced by the Bitcoin Network (a distributed network of computers) made by — whom exactly? Who makes the rules matters at least as much as who enforces them. Blockchain technology may provide for completely impartial rule-enforcement, but that is of little comfort if the rules themselves are changed. This rule-making is what we refer to as governance."
"Let me explain why. In economic organization, we must distinguish between enforcing rules and making rules. Laws are rules enforced by state bureaucracy and made by a legislature. The SWIFT Protocol is a set of rules enforced by SWIFTNet (a centralized computational system) and made, ultimately, by SWIFT’s Board of Directors. The Bitcoin Protocol is a set of rules enforced by the Bitcoin Network (a distributed network of computers) made by — whom exactly? Who makes the rules matters at least as much as who enforces them. Blockchain technology may provide for completely impartial rule-enforcement, but that is of little comfort if the rules themselves are changed. This rule-making is what we refer to as governance."
>The Bitcoin Protocol is a set of rules enforced by the Bitcoin Network (a distributed network of computers) made by — whom exactly?
Bitcoin and Blockchains are an opt-in rule system. You literally subscribe to the rule set (called consensus) that you wish to participate in. No one coerces you into participating in a rule system you do not want to participate it.
Your capitalist||socialist country is invaded by socialist||capitalists and they change the rules of your country's bank? Your blockchain doesn't care, it is enforced at the user level, at the edge.
Bitcoin and Blockchains are an opt-in rule system. You literally subscribe to the rule set (called consensus) that you wish to participate in. No one coerces you into participating in a rule system you do not want to participate it.
Your capitalist||socialist country is invaded by socialist||capitalists and they change the rules of your country's bank? Your blockchain doesn't care, it is enforced at the user level, at the edge.
And if there's a fork? As I see it, either you follow the fork supported by the majority of miners, or you run the risk of finding your coins worthless, because everyone else is on the other fork.
>And if there's a fork?
If someone proposes to violate the rules of your blockchain, you ignore them. Only when users support rule changes does the market value them.
>either you follow the fork supported by the majority [...], or you run the risk of finding your coins worthless
Any thing is only worth what others will pay for it. This is the case regardless if you are using a blockchain or not. If the world suddenly decided USD were worthless and you held lots of USD, yes you would find that your USD are now worthless.
>either you follow the fork supported by the majority [...], or you run the risk of finding your coins worthless
Any thing is only worth what others will pay for it. This is the case regardless if you are using a blockchain or not. If the world suddenly decided USD were worthless and you held lots of USD, yes you would find that your USD are now worthless.
The problem seems to me that users and miners have different priorities, and it's the miners who decide what the consensus is, not people who actually hold bitcoin. Of course, miners hold BTC too, and presumably want BTC to hold its value, so they wouldn't, say, intentionally inflate BTC (unlike a government-backed currency). But there's still a disconnect there. Consensus is consensus of miners, not consensus of users.
This is true in the abstract. However in the real world Bitcoin is in such a bind right now. While the USD had been stable in that sense since it came into existence.
In my opinion, the ICO is the blockchain killer app. You don't really need a distributed ledger except in case of digital currencies, which can be used to facilitate transactions in specific apps
> In my opinion, the ICO is the blockchain killer app.
There are so many examples, from Canadian Tire Money https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Tire_money to Microsoft Points https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Points showing you can create private currencies granting the bearer certain privileges without a blockchain.
There are so many examples, from Canadian Tire Money https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Tire_money to Microsoft Points https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Points showing you can create private currencies granting the bearer certain privileges without a blockchain.
Airline miles, etc. Of course, you can. It's not that you can't do it, it's that blockchain makes creation of such currencies easier.
Came here to say essentially the same thing. One possibility would be a government mandate that financial transactions are done with a blockchain in order to have transparency. I don't see that as likely though as the use case is pretty tenuous.
> One possibility would be a government mandate that financial transactions are done with a blockchain in order to have transparency.
How does that stop governments from engaging in Iran-Contra behavior?
How is that better than a government mandate requiring a list of expenditures PGP-signed by the government and their vendors?
How does that stop governments from engaging in Iran-Contra behavior?
How is that better than a government mandate requiring a list of expenditures PGP-signed by the government and their vendors?
I work in distributed systems, and I consider blockchain very interesting. It's so interesting I click on a lot of links on Hacker News, and sometimes I take an afternoon on a weekend or vacation to read through some of the papers.
I just have a well-paying job and I don't see any opportunities lucrative enough for me to jump away. Why? Bitcoin is an experiment. Reading through the paper, Bitcoin does not scale to general purpose commerce. All of the other technology appears to be "me too." When I first heard about Etherium, the bullshit smelt so bad that I couldn't even look at the paper.
What will get me really interested? Pay me to implement a real-world use case that fits the scalability constrains of blockchain. This isn't things like general-purpose currency, or general-purpose contracts. Someone needs to pay me to implement something that requires blockchain; instead of someone paying me to implement a blockchain and then going and finding a use for it.
I just have a well-paying job and I don't see any opportunities lucrative enough for me to jump away. Why? Bitcoin is an experiment. Reading through the paper, Bitcoin does not scale to general purpose commerce. All of the other technology appears to be "me too." When I first heard about Etherium, the bullshit smelt so bad that I couldn't even look at the paper.
What will get me really interested? Pay me to implement a real-world use case that fits the scalability constrains of blockchain. This isn't things like general-purpose currency, or general-purpose contracts. Someone needs to pay me to implement something that requires blockchain; instead of someone paying me to implement a blockchain and then going and finding a use for it.
> Someone needs to pay me to implement something that requires blockchain
It's difficult to find something that requires a blockchain, because the unique distinguishing feature of blockchains is the lack of any trusted central authority.
If you have a trusted authority, then you can do anonymous currency, money transfers, smart contracts, or anything similar 1000x more efficiently with a single server, an API, and some backend logic. All the distributed effort goes into making these possible at all without any central authority who can ban or filter transactions.
And for most real-world projects, having a government agency or tech company working as the trusted authority works just fine. It's only shady to illegal businesses where the lack of one is required.
It's difficult to find something that requires a blockchain, because the unique distinguishing feature of blockchains is the lack of any trusted central authority.
If you have a trusted authority, then you can do anonymous currency, money transfers, smart contracts, or anything similar 1000x more efficiently with a single server, an API, and some backend logic. All the distributed effort goes into making these possible at all without any central authority who can ban or filter transactions.
And for most real-world projects, having a government agency or tech company working as the trusted authority works just fine. It's only shady to illegal businesses where the lack of one is required.
Which makes it look like blockchain is a solution looking for a problem.
I still believe that problem will come up, and/or we'll see technologies that borrow concepts from blockchain without being true "blockchain."
I still believe that problem will come up, and/or we'll see technologies that borrow concepts from blockchain without being true "blockchain."
The problem exists for ages, from a libertarian point of view: the govs as oppressing power and the tax as a "legalised" theft mechanism to sustain only a few in power. And all related issues that come from it: corruption, lack of transparency and bureaucracy to name only a few.
The blockchain comes as the refactoring of this legacy system.
The blockchain comes as the refactoring of this legacy system.
As a "coincidence", these guys are hiring. Although, it doesn't look like folks working there [0] will be able to explain meaning of "paxos" in their domain name
paxos.com == pets.com of blockchain Ah, feels like it is 1999 all over again. To the moon!
[0] https://www.paxos.com/our-team
paxos.com == pets.com of blockchain Ah, feels like it is 1999 all over again. To the moon!
[0] https://www.paxos.com/our-team
>Someone needs to pay me to implement something that requires blockchain; instead of someone paying me to implement a blockchain and then going and finding a use for it.
That would require those who are arguing for "blockchain technology" to admit that they are Bitcoin poor and would rather talk than trade.
That would require those who are arguing for "blockchain technology" to admit that they are Bitcoin poor and would rather talk than trade.
What are the real uses for blockchain you could see?
I see it going in two different directions:
Blockchain: Useful where there are groups of actors, (people, countries, companies, ect,) of a large but limited size, incomplete trust, and limited exchanges. (For example, a group of 1000) A blockchain could be used to publish who owns an asset; as long as the blockchain technology can scale to the number of assets, number of owners, and number of transactions that occur. The actors need to have sufficient motivation to provide the computing power to run the blockchain; otherwise, it makes a lot more sense to just pay a private clearinghouse.
The problem with "blockchain" is that every computer in the network has to keep a complete copy of the ledger. Useful in the above examples, but this is also highly limiting to scalability, which leads to...
Blockchain-like: I think "blockchain" will lead to blockchain-like technologies where every computer doesn't have to keep an entire copy of the ledger. Instead, the graph of computers allows for searching publicly published knowledge, and participants are encouraged to preserve facts that are in their best interest. This allows for much higher scalability because computers in the network can merely ignore most transactions. If you are a small player in the network, you might pay a larger player to monitor the network and provide you with search.
Blockchain: Useful where there are groups of actors, (people, countries, companies, ect,) of a large but limited size, incomplete trust, and limited exchanges. (For example, a group of 1000) A blockchain could be used to publish who owns an asset; as long as the blockchain technology can scale to the number of assets, number of owners, and number of transactions that occur. The actors need to have sufficient motivation to provide the computing power to run the blockchain; otherwise, it makes a lot more sense to just pay a private clearinghouse.
The problem with "blockchain" is that every computer in the network has to keep a complete copy of the ledger. Useful in the above examples, but this is also highly limiting to scalability, which leads to...
Blockchain-like: I think "blockchain" will lead to blockchain-like technologies where every computer doesn't have to keep an entire copy of the ledger. Instead, the graph of computers allows for searching publicly published knowledge, and participants are encouraged to preserve facts that are in their best interest. This allows for much higher scalability because computers in the network can merely ignore most transactions. If you are a small player in the network, you might pay a larger player to monitor the network and provide you with search.
Distributed consensus algorithms are super interesting, but most distributed databases run in a trusted context. So instead of spending time optimizing a trustless system, database engineers optimize commit protocols like Calvin[1], because high-throughput scalable consistency solves so many business problems.
When you have a general purpose globally consistent distributed database, many of the problems that look like blockchain algorithm problems turn out to be standard application programming tasks. Eg a distributed ledger is just a table in a distributed database.
[1] https://fauna.com/blog/distributed-consistency-at-scale-span...
When you have a general purpose globally consistent distributed database, many of the problems that look like blockchain algorithm problems turn out to be standard application programming tasks. Eg a distributed ledger is just a table in a distributed database.
[1] https://fauna.com/blog/distributed-consistency-at-scale-span...
I just wanted to drop appreciation for this answer. I never thought to see the blockchain from this perspective.
Here's one take DLT and Blockchain:
https://hbr.org/2017/01/the-truth-about-blockchain
TL;DR, it's gonna take a real long time to make blockchain useful, if it even is.
Further, I have yet to see a real production application of blockchain that isn't a crypto-currency. Everyone and their grandmothers has invested in it, or started a company or w/e. But has it actually been used to solve another problem? Blockchain was the SOLUTION to the PROBLEM of how do I make a cryptocurrency. It now seems that some folks are trying to make a PROBLEM out of a SOLUTION in every other domain.
TL;DR, it's gonna take a real long time to make blockchain useful, if it even is.
Further, I have yet to see a real production application of blockchain that isn't a crypto-currency. Everyone and their grandmothers has invested in it, or started a company or w/e. But has it actually been used to solve another problem? Blockchain was the SOLUTION to the PROBLEM of how do I make a cryptocurrency. It now seems that some folks are trying to make a PROBLEM out of a SOLUTION in every other domain.
Blockchain is not the solution to the problem of how to make a crypto currency. Blockchain is the solution to the problem of how to cooperatively timestamp documents.
Completely agree. A true crypto-currency would not be "quasi-anonymous". Bitcoin is a government's wet dream, a near-complete map of every dark web transaction globally.
For now yes. More privacy features are on the road map though. You can always easily convert Bitcoin for a more anonymous eccentric currency and then convert it back to Bitcoin if you want to hide your trail if you need to.
co-operatively with no trusted authority.
If you are happy to have a trusted authority, then timestamp servers have been around since the dawn of PKI
If you are happy to have a trusted authority, then timestamp servers have been around since the dawn of PKI
> But has it actually been used to solve another problem?
Maersk is interested http://fortune.com/2017/03/05/maersk-tests-blockchain-based-...
Makes some sense freight shipments involve a lot of parties who don't completely trust one another, and they've got a lot of information to move back and forth between one another.
Maersk is interested http://fortune.com/2017/03/05/maersk-tests-blockchain-based-...
Makes some sense freight shipments involve a lot of parties who don't completely trust one another, and they've got a lot of information to move back and forth between one another.
The innovation of Bitcoin is combining the Proof-of-Work with a signed ledger. But Proof-of-Work is only needed because otherwise anonymous people might create new nodes from thin air and get a majority.
In this case, all the parties are well identified, so if a new node appears, it can simply be rejected by the existing participants. So there's no need for PoW, all you need is for companies to sign and publish documents to each other. The only possible fraud is publishing different documents to different parties, but that's easily fixable by having the nodes confirm each others' documents.
So yeah, that's just a signed ledger. All invoicing programs in my country had that before Bitcoin even appeared, as part of the SAF-T standard (mandated by our tax authority). It's nothing new.
In this case, all the parties are well identified, so if a new node appears, it can simply be rejected by the existing participants. So there's no need for PoW, all you need is for companies to sign and publish documents to each other. The only possible fraud is publishing different documents to different parties, but that's easily fixable by having the nodes confirm each others' documents.
So yeah, that's just a signed ledger. All invoicing programs in my country had that before Bitcoin even appeared, as part of the SAF-T standard (mandated by our tax authority). It's nothing new.
The article doesn't explain why a public distributed ledger such as the blockchain would make sense. A privately run ledger would probably also solve their problems, be cheaper and it would be a lot more secure against tampering.
which of the mutually untrustworthy parties will operate the ledger?
customs agents don't trust shipping companies, shipping companies don't trust their customers, shipping companies might trust most customs agents in western countries but they operate everywhere, and there are, as i understand it, a number of other middle-men involved in the process, who probably aren't trusted much either.
i don't see how a privately operated database would solve any of the problems, or appear more secure to the folks not running the database. (certainly it would be cheaper.)
customs agents don't trust shipping companies, shipping companies don't trust their customers, shipping companies might trust most customs agents in western countries but they operate everywhere, and there are, as i understand it, a number of other middle-men involved in the process, who probably aren't trusted much either.
i don't see how a privately operated database would solve any of the problems, or appear more secure to the folks not running the database. (certainly it would be cheaper.)
So are you suggesting that shipping companies, their customers, customs and middlemen should be mining a cryptocurrency? Or that they should record their interactions on a blockchain running on a peer-to-peer network of random miners around the world?
Sorry, I just don't see that. There's laws, governments, clearing houses that have allowed untrustworthy parties to work together for... ever. And if they need a database, surely there's going to be a more pragmatic solution?
Sorry, I just don't see that. There's laws, governments, clearing houses that have allowed untrustworthy parties to work together for... ever. And if they need a database, surely there's going to be a more pragmatic solution?
It's fairly easy to provide cryptographic signing on records. You don't need the fullblown blockchain technology for that. Not trusting other partners isn't something that was suddenly invented when the blockchain was invented. Untrustworthiness has been around as long as humanity has been. We've solved these problems a long long time ago.
> Further, I have yet to see a real production application of blockchain that isn't a crypto-currency.
Do
- Bitcache (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcache) - in development
- Namecoin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namecoin)
- Steemit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steemit)
- Synereo (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synereo)
count? I know, formally these can be considered as a cryptocurrencies, but I would not consider this as the central purpose of existence.
Do
- Bitcache (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcache) - in development
- Namecoin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namecoin)
- Steemit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steemit)
- Synereo (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synereo)
count? I know, formally these can be considered as a cryptocurrencies, but I would not consider this as the central purpose of existence.
If by "real production" you mean "implemented profitably by classic corporations", then you're not really getting the crypto-anarchist philosophy that espouses the view that blockchains are a generally useful tool. The long-term crypo-anarchist plan (lol) is to replace corporations with ephemeral networks of strangers who, as a group, accomplish the tasks traditionally handled by corporations and governments.
I had the same observation that the blockchain is "just" a distributed log database with horrific performance overhead...
...but it's not true that nobody's working on it: quietly, Serious Engineers(tm) working for blockchain companies and you can expect big improvements in the next few years.
This rant is nearly isomorphic to the whining in the early 90s by the academics and SunRPC & CORBA fanboys vs HTTP and HTML, which its insane parsing and communications overhead. Serious Engineers(tm) showed up, made the early web work, it took off, and... you don't see many HN job posts asking for CORBA engineers.
As with the web, blockchains are exciting because they're a 'looser' and more open protocol than other systems.
...but it's not true that nobody's working on it: quietly, Serious Engineers(tm) working for blockchain companies and you can expect big improvements in the next few years.
This rant is nearly isomorphic to the whining in the early 90s by the academics and SunRPC & CORBA fanboys vs HTTP and HTML, which its insane parsing and communications overhead. Serious Engineers(tm) showed up, made the early web work, it took off, and... you don't see many HN job posts asking for CORBA engineers.
As with the web, blockchains are exciting because they're a 'looser' and more open protocol than other systems.
Can't remember how I stumbled across this article, but I thought it was a good summary of Bitcoin works in spite of some glaring flaws.
https://www.gwern.net/Bitcoin%20is%20Worse%20is%20Better
https://www.gwern.net/Bitcoin%20is%20Worse%20is%20Better
Because I have yet to find an actual legitimate use-case for a blockchain. Every task in our modern business world actually requires a central trusted authority.
Edit: not to mention that mining is an incredible waste of time and energy that can instead be put to good use.
Edit: not to mention that mining is an incredible waste of time and energy that can instead be put to good use.
Good use is subjective, plenty of people are using the blockchain as a speculative asset and willing to pay transaction fees for it.
It's a great way to hide a pump-and-dump scheme. Although blockchain is a legitimate undertaking, if you're good at surfing hype, you'll know when to get in, get out at a profit, and then leave all the other suckers holding worthless bitcoin.
Because it turns out the good bits are the ledger of transactions made tamper-evident in a Merkle tree, and we had that with Git in 2005 and it works great thanks.
The bit Git doesn't do: distributed consensus via Proof of Work, because it turns out that a bit of trust is fabulously more efficient.
I predict any good and useful product labeled "Blockchain" will be the cryptographically tamper-evident ledger of transactions, and not any of the stuff that makes a blockchain different to Git.
(Researching the book, I had one developer admit that his "blockchain product" was pretty much a simplified Git in terms of what it offered ;-) )
The bit Git doesn't do: distributed consensus via Proof of Work, because it turns out that a bit of trust is fabulously more efficient.
I predict any good and useful product labeled "Blockchain" will be the cryptographically tamper-evident ledger of transactions, and not any of the stuff that makes a blockchain different to Git.
(Researching the book, I had one developer admit that his "blockchain product" was pretty much a simplified Git in terms of what it offered ;-) )
Too many crooks. Too much hype. Too much ignorance of how the real world works.
I'd be interested in working with large and boring financial institutions on those sorts of projects, because they don't offer the failure modes as above.
I'd be interested in working with large and boring financial institutions on those sorts of projects, because they don't offer the failure modes as above.
I don't really get this article. The transaction rate limit and the wastefulness and limitations of PoW as a fault-tolerance mechanism are brought up but then just hand-waved away.
If we had discussed proof of stake or theorized about how some of these other hurdles like transaction rate could be leaped then sure. Otherwise it's just a list of things any distributed system has to solve for, demonstration that blockchain solves for them (inefficiently) with the undertone of "I bought in on the hype, and you can too".
If we had discussed proof of stake or theorized about how some of these other hurdles like transaction rate could be leaped then sure. Otherwise it's just a list of things any distributed system has to solve for, demonstration that blockchain solves for them (inefficiently) with the undertone of "I bought in on the hype, and you can too".
DLT strips away almost everything that makes blockchain compelling.
Why would a distributed systems engineer work on what amounts to a really shitty database?
Why would a distributed systems engineer work on what amounts to a really shitty database?
Append-only, log-structured databases are a great, genuinely useful thing. Zero-trust through proof-of-work is expensive and irrelevant for most use cases.
See also the crazy cash they can make building distributed machine learning/big data systems at next to zero risk...
This is just incorrect. Making money on a distributed product is just as hard as on anything else if not harder and riskier, because everything takes more time.
Tell that to my bank account.
We live in a world where most current and future performance benefits come from understanding how to program both parallel and distributed algorithms in an age where almost everyone is either a single-threaded Java or Python programmer relying on OSS frameworks and packages to do the distributed dirty work for them.
And that's made it nearly free beer right now to have gone against the above curve and stayed current on C++ and multi-core/distributed algorithms so one can build those frameworks and packages. That will probably change now that GPUs are a hot commodity as opposed to nerdy gamer stuff, but chance favored the minority of prepared programmers here.
Further, I have zero interest in the blockchain. There's interesting technology there, but it is of zero use to me or any of my life goals. Also the hucksters and low-information sorts trying to make me believe I can't live without it are driving me even further away from it.
And before you downvote me for negativity, this thread did ask why distributed system engineers aren't interesting in this, yes?
We live in a world where most current and future performance benefits come from understanding how to program both parallel and distributed algorithms in an age where almost everyone is either a single-threaded Java or Python programmer relying on OSS frameworks and packages to do the distributed dirty work for them.
And that's made it nearly free beer right now to have gone against the above curve and stayed current on C++ and multi-core/distributed algorithms so one can build those frameworks and packages. That will probably change now that GPUs are a hot commodity as opposed to nerdy gamer stuff, but chance favored the minority of prepared programmers here.
Further, I have zero interest in the blockchain. There's interesting technology there, but it is of zero use to me or any of my life goals. Also the hucksters and low-information sorts trying to make me believe I can't live without it are driving me even further away from it.
And before you downvote me for negativity, this thread did ask why distributed system engineers aren't interesting in this, yes?
The goal of the article is to get distributed systems engineers excited about blockchain and invite them to explore positions at Paxos. Ironically none of the open positions are actually for distributed systems engineers :)
I think it's funny the author chose to center the article around that assumption. IMO most engineers related to distributed computing (not necessarily themselves distributed systems engineers) are actually quite aware of the technology and many of the challenges.
I think it's funny the author chose to center the article around that assumption. IMO most engineers related to distributed computing (not necessarily themselves distributed systems engineers) are actually quite aware of the technology and many of the challenges.
Why isn't X working on blockchain technology?
Maybe instead of asking this, we should ask the cryptocurrency enthusiasts what area of technology won't be dropped-and-replaced by blockchains, because so far it seems apparently applicable to every single use case in every single industry... By the way, did you guys hear this thing is an immutable ledger?
Maybe instead of asking this, we should ask the cryptocurrency enthusiasts what area of technology won't be dropped-and-replaced by blockchains, because so far it seems apparently applicable to every single use case in every single industry... By the way, did you guys hear this thing is an immutable ledger?
That's a complete strawman.
There is very little overlap between cryptocurrency enthusiasts and those who think blockchain technology will take over everything.
There is very little overlap between cryptocurrency enthusiasts and those who think blockchain technology will take over everything.
> There is very little overlap between cryptocurrency enthusiasts and those who think blockchain technology will take over everything.
Do you really believe that? Because from the outside, it seems that the only people talking about "blockchain technology" are those who have a significant amount of money invested in it.
This article is a blockchain banking service saying, "hey, other people should use this solve-all technology that is definitely the future too!"
Do you really believe that? Because from the outside, it seems that the only people talking about "blockchain technology" are those who have a significant amount of money invested in it.
This article is a blockchain banking service saying, "hey, other people should use this solve-all technology that is definitely the future too!"
Yes, I really believe that.
The people who are into "blockchain banking" are not actually into cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency is about decentralised, trustless, permissionless, peer-to-peer networks. "Blockchain all the things" is decidedly not.
I acknowledge that this can be hard to see from the outside.
Edit: And at risk of "no true Scotsman"... the people talking about "blockchain technology" are not cryptocurrency enthusiasts.
The people who are into "blockchain banking" are not actually into cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency is about decentralised, trustless, permissionless, peer-to-peer networks. "Blockchain all the things" is decidedly not.
I acknowledge that this can be hard to see from the outside.
Edit: And at risk of "no true Scotsman"... the people talking about "blockchain technology" are not cryptocurrency enthusiasts.
My observation is this:
The "killer app" of Blockchains are the trustless nature of the system. In most practical application, allowing actors without a trust relationship to interact with the log is not a significant requirement of the system. Once you remove that requirement, there are technically superior approaches to maintaining a ledger.
The "killer app" of Blockchains are the trustless nature of the system. In most practical application, allowing actors without a trust relationship to interact with the log is not a significant requirement of the system. Once you remove that requirement, there are technically superior approaches to maintaining a ledger.
That's why I've never understood all this talk about "private blockchains." Why? What's the point? We already have distributed database systems that are light years faster than blockchains. The ONLY benefits of a blockchain-based approach are censorship resistance and not having to trust the actors in the system. If you don't need either of those two benefits, then there are far better existing solutions for record keeping.
As far as I've seen, the point is mainly PR. These private blockchains are usually not bitcoin-style proof of work chains, but would more accurately just be called distributed databases. For example, look at https://www.openchain.org/, "How does it work" section. A lot of altcoins actually are the same, with explicit "trusted nodes", such as Stellar (https://www.stellarcoin.org).
Happy to learn about any counterexamples and use-cases for those.
Happy to learn about any counterexamples and use-cases for those.
Private blockchains have a use case where you have a central authority coordinating many participants that don't trust each other - if the central authority periodically publishes the signed blockchain ledger/update, it enables "shared truth" that every participant can use, and each of them can verify that noone has "altered history", that particular constraints have been met, etc.
In essence, it can be used as a versioning + signing mechanism for a shared database that ensures authenticity and non-repudiation even in the absence of trust.
In essence, it can be used as a versioning + signing mechanism for a shared database that ensures authenticity and non-repudiation even in the absence of trust.
> ...if the central authority periodically publishes the signed blockchain ledger/update, it enables "shared truth" that every participant can use, and each of them can verify that noone has "altered history", that particular constraints have been met, etc.
In other words, something like http://ledger-cli.org/ stored in a git repository with some input validation and signed commits would suffice.
Proponents call this "blockchain technology" because it sounds advanced. They can because nobody has a definition of what "blockchain technology" is. In my mind, if it could have been designed by any competent engineer prior to Bitcoin, then it isn't "blockchain technology". But that's just me.
In other words, something like http://ledger-cli.org/ stored in a git repository with some input validation and signed commits would suffice.
Proponents call this "blockchain technology" because it sounds advanced. They can because nobody has a definition of what "blockchain technology" is. In my mind, if it could have been designed by any competent engineer prior to Bitcoin, then it isn't "blockchain technology". But that's just me.
Because we got better things to do than wasting time on bullshit blockchain tech in a bullshit company filled with suits [0] who can produce only... bullshit
https://www.paxos.com/our-team
https://www.paxos.com/our-team
Where's the data, or at least arguments suggesting that no distributed systems engineer is working on blockchain technology?
If anyone could point to me what's the name for this fallacy. Lile when you ask a question that tricks people in assuming the premise.
If anyone could point to me what's the name for this fallacy. Lile when you ask a question that tricks people in assuming the premise.
https://github.com/kadena-io/juno actually this is poc research from jp morgan into using another bft algo: raft.
RAFT is not BFT. You need nodes to cooperate. If the nodes lie, the system will collapse.
Answer: because most distributed systems are operated by a single entity and don't need to solve the trustless consensus problem.
From OP: https://twitter.com/naval/status/878018839044161536
The cynic in me thinks "it's a scheme by oligarchs and tyrants to get rid of troublesome /fully anonymous/ cash sold as a utopian scheme to those who are motivated by the promise of a quick rich scheme."
The cynic in me thinks "it's a scheme by oligarchs and tyrants to get rid of troublesome /fully anonymous/ cash sold as a utopian scheme to those who are motivated by the promise of a quick rich scheme."
The choice of font and lack of contrast make this nearly unreadable for me...
The text is #0 on a #F background for me?
I was reading on Android. Perhaps the colors are different there.
I mean, you read the most ridiculous things happening in those circles. Not sure why most talented engineers would be interested in associating themselves with that.
>It feels like a get rich quick scheme - https://twitter.com/naval/status/878018839044161536
This is what it comes down to IMO. Anything cryptocurrency related is just surrounded by a cloud of shady characters and scammers, even though the tech is legit. You just can't trust anyone, nor their intentions. Living your life and working in a constant state of paranoia like that is awful.