AWS and Blockchain(tbray.org)
tbray.org
AWS and Blockchain
https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2022/11/19/AWS-Blockchain
692 comments
I used to think this, but working with DeFi on Ethereum for a while I've realized the killer feature is actually permissionless composability. Which is why enterprise block chains make little sense.
Having one neutral platform, controlled by no one, with standardized API's and immutable open programs that anyone can permissionlessly build on - is amazing.
We've never had this before, and it's incredible how fast the DeFi space is moving because of it. I work for a platform (Balancer) that has had over 20 different companies (Aave, Element, CopperLaunch, Gyro, Aura, Hidden Hand) build financial applications on top of our tech stack in the last 2 years.
Then there are different wallets (Metamask, Rainbow, Ledger), aggregators (1inch, Matcha, 0x), portfolio management tools (Zapper, Zerion, DeFi Saver).
All of these work with each other mostly out of the box and without any formal partnerships between anyone. This is a radical new way of building finance and it's the fastest paced industry I've ever been a part of.
It's similar to AWS where it got exponentially more valuable as each new service was added - but the entire world can contribute to it. Like AWS people didn't understand the value initially, but over time they realized how big of a deal it was as more and more components were added.
Having one neutral platform, controlled by no one, with standardized API's and immutable open programs that anyone can permissionlessly build on - is amazing.
We've never had this before, and it's incredible how fast the DeFi space is moving because of it. I work for a platform (Balancer) that has had over 20 different companies (Aave, Element, CopperLaunch, Gyro, Aura, Hidden Hand) build financial applications on top of our tech stack in the last 2 years.
Then there are different wallets (Metamask, Rainbow, Ledger), aggregators (1inch, Matcha, 0x), portfolio management tools (Zapper, Zerion, DeFi Saver).
All of these work with each other mostly out of the box and without any formal partnerships between anyone. This is a radical new way of building finance and it's the fastest paced industry I've ever been a part of.
It's similar to AWS where it got exponentially more valuable as each new service was added - but the entire world can contribute to it. Like AWS people didn't understand the value initially, but over time they realized how big of a deal it was as more and more components were added.
> It's similar to AWS where it got exponentially more valuable as each new service was added
But... I have yet to see a service which really adds value. All I've seen so far are:
A) collection games, which are not different from collecting Pokémon for real money.
B) liquidity PvP, where users open leveraged bets to hunt other market participants' stops/liquidations, so the hunter can reduce their position for cheap, which the hunted takes a loss (this is not different from tradfi).
I am looking at Aave right now, and all I see is a speculation platform with tokens instead of currencies. So basically, you guys are re-inventing what tradfi had years ago, just with worthless(?) tokens instead of debt backed assets. I am assuming they are worthless because every project you have mentioned is optimized for USD cash inflow, as you have "buy crypto with fiat"-buttons on almost every project[1][2][3], but no way to cash out to fiat. Furthermore, the staking feature from AAVE seems to only artificially decrease supply, so prices rise. What's the value proposition here?
Anyway, I don't really think that this stuff is even remotely comparable to AWS.
[1] https://app.aave.com/ (press "more" on the nav bar)
[2] https://zerion.io/ (FAQ > "just tap the blue button in the center of your screen, select ‘Buy’, and you will be taken to the dialogue window where you can buy crypto with a credit or debit card.")
[3] https://blog.1inch.io/transak-fiat-on-ramp-provider-is-integ...
But... I have yet to see a service which really adds value. All I've seen so far are:
A) collection games, which are not different from collecting Pokémon for real money.
B) liquidity PvP, where users open leveraged bets to hunt other market participants' stops/liquidations, so the hunter can reduce their position for cheap, which the hunted takes a loss (this is not different from tradfi).
I am looking at Aave right now, and all I see is a speculation platform with tokens instead of currencies. So basically, you guys are re-inventing what tradfi had years ago, just with worthless(?) tokens instead of debt backed assets. I am assuming they are worthless because every project you have mentioned is optimized for USD cash inflow, as you have "buy crypto with fiat"-buttons on almost every project[1][2][3], but no way to cash out to fiat. Furthermore, the staking feature from AAVE seems to only artificially decrease supply, so prices rise. What's the value proposition here?
Anyway, I don't really think that this stuff is even remotely comparable to AWS.
[1] https://app.aave.com/ (press "more" on the nav bar)
[2] https://zerion.io/ (FAQ > "just tap the blue button in the center of your screen, select ‘Buy’, and you will be taken to the dialogue window where you can buy crypto with a credit or debit card.")
[3] https://blog.1inch.io/transak-fiat-on-ramp-provider-is-integ...
You're still missing the forest for the trees. All of this was created in the last 2-3 years and already it's replicated most of what's in traditional finance. It's the rate of innovation that is important, not the current y-intercept.
Furthermore this is a global system that anyone can contribute to. How hard do you think it is for I as an Australian to build a financial firm that interfaces with Bank of America or the NYSE? It's almost impossible. In DeFi I can spin up my own app in days.
Aave is used for being able to borrow against your crypto assets, so if you need a loan you don't have to sell, this isn't a service any bank offers. You can also just deposit your assets and earn interest on them.
In 2009 most of my colleagues similarly dismissed AWS "Oh it's just some easy storage with a way to spin up servers, big deal. Bare metal is cheaper and easier". It wasn't until most business components were automated that it became an obvious choice.
Now imagine you're starting a new financial firm and want to offer an exchange, options, perpetuals, savings accounts, loans etc. You could build all these pieces yourself for a few million dollars and a few years work. Or you could use DeFi protocols, build a nice easy to use front-end and be up and running in a few months.
Furthermore this is a global system that anyone can contribute to. How hard do you think it is for I as an Australian to build a financial firm that interfaces with Bank of America or the NYSE? It's almost impossible. In DeFi I can spin up my own app in days.
Aave is used for being able to borrow against your crypto assets, so if you need a loan you don't have to sell, this isn't a service any bank offers. You can also just deposit your assets and earn interest on them.
In 2009 most of my colleagues similarly dismissed AWS "Oh it's just some easy storage with a way to spin up servers, big deal. Bare metal is cheaper and easier". It wasn't until most business components were automated that it became an obvious choice.
Now imagine you're starting a new financial firm and want to offer an exchange, options, perpetuals, savings accounts, loans etc. You could build all these pieces yourself for a few million dollars and a few years work. Or you could use DeFi protocols, build a nice easy to use front-end and be up and running in a few months.
>> You're still missing the forest for the trees. All of this was created in the last 2-3 years and already it's replicated most of what's in traditional finance.
Making a copy of an existing technology while repeating every historical mistake on the way is not innovation but rather poor learning ability. It's been 13 years since the advent of blockchain and we are yet to see anything actually useful. Yet all we see is smuggling, money laundering and fraud. With stories like FTX we also see incredible ineptitude, incompetence and ignorance. I am so tired of seeing these same groundless arguments over and over again, especially now, once money got dear and all of the crypto started crashing down.
Making a copy of an existing technology while repeating every historical mistake on the way is not innovation but rather poor learning ability. It's been 13 years since the advent of blockchain and we are yet to see anything actually useful. Yet all we see is smuggling, money laundering and fraud. With stories like FTX we also see incredible ineptitude, incompetence and ignorance. I am so tired of seeing these same groundless arguments over and over again, especially now, once money got dear and all of the crypto started crashing down.
It's almost as if the "anyone can do it without permission" argument is one of the reasons traditional finance evolved into the regulated system it is today.
TradFi - Anyone can do it without permissions and lie, except regulations force accounting practices, revealing malfeasance.
DeFi - Anyone can do it without permissions, and everyone can see they didn't lie.
Crap-coin FTX Crypto Bros - Let's lie, do "TradFi" and call it "DeFi", comply with no regulations or accounting practices, and steal the Crypto. What could go wrong?
HN low-research "Eternal September" Bros: Told ya Crypto was all a scam, yer dumb!
DeFi - Anyone can do it without permissions, and everyone can see they didn't lie.
Crap-coin FTX Crypto Bros - Let's lie, do "TradFi" and call it "DeFi", comply with no regulations or accounting practices, and steal the Crypto. What could go wrong?
HN low-research "Eternal September" Bros: Told ya Crypto was all a scam, yer dumb!
You're No-true-Scottsman'ing DeFi by excluding FTX after the fact.
I posit there is no way to tell apart the "real" DeFi from the Crap-coins. If you can tell them apart, which tokens and/or exchanges will fail next, and when?
There's a pervasive aura of "secret knowledge" in crypto, where the in-group think of themselves as superior operators who scoff as the noobs get fleeced[1]; yet these suave traders continually fail to recognize peaks and troughs and trade accordingly.
1. Sometimes while trying to scam the noobs themselves. The whole "to the moon"/HODL/meme-stock episode was naked preying on unsophisticated traders/bag-holders
I posit there is no way to tell apart the "real" DeFi from the Crap-coins. If you can tell them apart, which tokens and/or exchanges will fail next, and when?
There's a pervasive aura of "secret knowledge" in crypto, where the in-group think of themselves as superior operators who scoff as the noobs get fleeced[1]; yet these suave traders continually fail to recognize peaks and troughs and trade accordingly.
1. Sometimes while trying to scam the noobs themselves. The whole "to the moon"/HODL/meme-stock episode was naked preying on unsophisticated traders/bag-holders
Pretty much everyone credible has been warning people to get off all exchanges, since well, forever. Because you can't (and shouldn't) "trust" someone. If you want to trust someone, go to a bank. This isn't really too much a matter of "secret knowledge", but historical fact. But, hope springs eternal.
And, self-referential Crap Coins (like Luna) are just, well, insane at first glance. Trust-based "Staking" for returns w/ no revenue model? Nuts! But, I've been modelling the behavior of wealth-backed currency systems for 15 years, so maybe it seemed obvious to me. I've been boring people to death with warnings about these for as long as they've existed. Again, this time it's different!
And, the risks to all but the absolutely largest PoW and PoS networks are well known (relatively trivial 51% attack, see OFAC "compliance" disaster). And to "permissioned" networks (XRP, etc.); perfect for CBDCs, for liberty not so much. And the list goes on...
So, spare me the "No True Scottsman" whitewash.
The signs were all there, and the warnings were blaring. Dedicated, competent and highly-funded attackers are at work. Central/commercial banks, Treasuries, etc. cannot abide any fire-exit that is not chained shut, for what's coming.
So, the stakes for attackers are high. The stakes for liberty-valuing citizens: even higher.
Buckle up.
And, self-referential Crap Coins (like Luna) are just, well, insane at first glance. Trust-based "Staking" for returns w/ no revenue model? Nuts! But, I've been modelling the behavior of wealth-backed currency systems for 15 years, so maybe it seemed obvious to me. I've been boring people to death with warnings about these for as long as they've existed. Again, this time it's different!
And, the risks to all but the absolutely largest PoW and PoS networks are well known (relatively trivial 51% attack, see OFAC "compliance" disaster). And to "permissioned" networks (XRP, etc.); perfect for CBDCs, for liberty not so much. And the list goes on...
So, spare me the "No True Scottsman" whitewash.
The signs were all there, and the warnings were blaring. Dedicated, competent and highly-funded attackers are at work. Central/commercial banks, Treasuries, etc. cannot abide any fire-exit that is not chained shut, for what's coming.
So, the stakes for attackers are high. The stakes for liberty-valuing citizens: even higher.
Buckle up.
> Central/commercial banks, Treasuries, etc. cannot abide any fire-exit that is not chained shut
Ok, then call it what it actually is: tax evasion, fraud, and laundering money.
You're getting caught up in an anti-government agenda and forgetting that's not a good thing to most people.
Ok, then call it what it actually is: tax evasion, fraud, and laundering money.
You're getting caught up in an anti-government agenda and forgetting that's not a good thing to most people.
I think most reasonable people would agree that desiring the freedom to invest your personal wealth in non-government approved investments isn't "tax evasion, fraud and laundering money".
Isn't such a claim a bit ... bizarre?
Isn't such a claim a bit ... bizarre?
No? "Non-government approved" either means "unregulated" or
"illegal".
Unregulated financial speculation has a lot of issues. See: FTX and NFTs
Unregulated financial speculation has a lot of issues. See: FTX and NFTs
It's not investment when there is no industry behind it. It's called speculation. Or gambling - for some people.
> and forgetting that's not a good thing to most people.
you are living in a bubble to assume that governments are always good and anyone bucking their government is a bad actor. Try to learn more about Venezuela, Iran, Russia, North Korea or Syria. Or even truckers in Canada whose accounts were frozen because of peaceful protests.
At this point, the best thing for crypto would be for someone like Trump to freeze all the finances for some people like BLM protestors. Then perhaps people will get out of "ye subvert yer gubmint? ye traitor..." mindset.
you are living in a bubble to assume that governments are always good and anyone bucking their government is a bad actor. Try to learn more about Venezuela, Iran, Russia, North Korea or Syria. Or even truckers in Canada whose accounts were frozen because of peaceful protests.
At this point, the best thing for crypto would be for someone like Trump to freeze all the finances for some people like BLM protestors. Then perhaps people will get out of "ye subvert yer gubmint? ye traitor..." mindset.
This ridiculous straw man comes up all the time. Stop it. Nobody said "governments are always good" or denied that dictatorships exist.
The rest of this is pure irrational FUD. Democracies are not dictatorships.
A president doesn't have the legal authority to freeze finances like that. They are not a king.
The rest of this is pure irrational FUD. Democracies are not dictatorships.
A president doesn't have the legal authority to freeze finances like that. They are not a king.
> Dedicated, competent and highly-funded attackers are at work. Central/commercial banks, Treasuries, etc. cannot abide any fire-exit
First-world tech bros drinking cool-aid and shoveling money by the truckload with zero understanding of finance, and in it just for scams, get rich schemes and money: check.
"It's a coordinated attack by the Big Money and State Actors" whine: also check.
> So, the stakes for attackers are high. The stakes for liberty-valuing citizens: even higher.
Spare us the bullshit.
"DeFi" is literally just currency speculation and flash loans, all of them happening with fantasy tokens. But it's a big circle jerk because blockchain and programs in esoteric programming languages on inefficient esoteric VMs (yes, that's what "smart" "contracts" are).
All of the crypto scams and failures are entirely on those in crypto space. No highly-funded attackers needed. You're busy doing it to yourselves.
First-world tech bros drinking cool-aid and shoveling money by the truckload with zero understanding of finance, and in it just for scams, get rich schemes and money: check.
"It's a coordinated attack by the Big Money and State Actors" whine: also check.
> So, the stakes for attackers are high. The stakes for liberty-valuing citizens: even higher.
Spare us the bullshit.
"DeFi" is literally just currency speculation and flash loans, all of them happening with fantasy tokens. But it's a big circle jerk because blockchain and programs in esoteric programming languages on inefficient esoteric VMs (yes, that's what "smart" "contracts" are).
All of the crypto scams and failures are entirely on those in crypto space. No highly-funded attackers needed. You're busy doing it to yourselves.
> You're No-true-Scottsman'ing DeFi by excluding FTX after the fact.
You are trying to fit the square peg of scam otherwise known as FTX into the round hole of DeFi. It was apparent since the day of its founding that FTX is not DeFi nor trustless.
You are trying to fit the square peg of scam otherwise known as FTX into the round hole of DeFi. It was apparent since the day of its founding that FTX is not DeFi nor trustless.
I've been making more than a few jokes lately that Games Done Quick should have pre-banned categories like "Great Depression-era Wall Street Finance Speed Run ANY%".
This just reinforces my view that the only value crypto provides is evading government financial regulations. Is it actually good that anybody can spin up a new financial firm in a few months with little oversight or regulation?
>Aave is used for being able to borrow against your crypto assets, so if you need a loan you don't have to sell, this isn't a service any bank offers.
Every bank offers this service, unless you're just talking about getting a loan with crypto as collateral.
>Aave is used for being able to borrow against your crypto assets, so if you need a loan you don't have to sell, this isn't a service any bank offers.
Every bank offers this service, unless you're just talking about getting a loan with crypto as collateral.
Have you ever implemented a smart contract? If not, I highly recommend you do so before holding an opinion on blockchains. I've never owned crypto, and I've recommended others to stay away from investing in crypto. Yet, I think the computing platform has a lot of promise. Implementing a smart contract for fun helped me see why.
The block-chain can be thought of as cryptographically secure state. That is, everyone agrees on the state of the blockchain and no one can modify it save for modifications in accordance with the "rules". A smart contract can be thought of as a cryptographically secure program, i.e. it cannot be modified. So you have cryptographically secure inputs (the blockchain), and a cryptographically secure program (the smart contract), which means the output is also guaranteed to be cryptographically secure. That is quite a strong premise. You can give your program to anyone and they can execute it for you without you needing to worry about nefarious modifications. This level of trust allows for the creation of a global computing platform. Software authors need only to bring their program and can have it executed on-demand without needing to maintain their own infrastructure. That is quite an innovation.
Of course, in its current form, this "global computing platform" is actually pretty shitty. It is prohibitively expensive to store / operate on a lot of data. However, crypto-currencies are there first viable "apps" built on this platform. If you think about it a crypto-currency is basically a very primitive program that stores a series of transactions as two addresses and an amount. The total amount of data per transaction is tiny. And yet, just by operating on this tiny amount of data you can basically implement the entire financial system: currency, stocks, bonds, options, etc.
We're basically in the dot-com bubble for crypto. People are starting to realize that this new computing platform is cool and has a lot of potential, just as many realized the computers and the internet were cool in the late 90s. Yet, just like in the 90s, the tech sucks and isn't good enough to bring much of anything valuable to the market.
The block-chain can be thought of as cryptographically secure state. That is, everyone agrees on the state of the blockchain and no one can modify it save for modifications in accordance with the "rules". A smart contract can be thought of as a cryptographically secure program, i.e. it cannot be modified. So you have cryptographically secure inputs (the blockchain), and a cryptographically secure program (the smart contract), which means the output is also guaranteed to be cryptographically secure. That is quite a strong premise. You can give your program to anyone and they can execute it for you without you needing to worry about nefarious modifications. This level of trust allows for the creation of a global computing platform. Software authors need only to bring their program and can have it executed on-demand without needing to maintain their own infrastructure. That is quite an innovation.
Of course, in its current form, this "global computing platform" is actually pretty shitty. It is prohibitively expensive to store / operate on a lot of data. However, crypto-currencies are there first viable "apps" built on this platform. If you think about it a crypto-currency is basically a very primitive program that stores a series of transactions as two addresses and an amount. The total amount of data per transaction is tiny. And yet, just by operating on this tiny amount of data you can basically implement the entire financial system: currency, stocks, bonds, options, etc.
We're basically in the dot-com bubble for crypto. People are starting to realize that this new computing platform is cool and has a lot of potential, just as many realized the computers and the internet were cool in the late 90s. Yet, just like in the 90s, the tech sucks and isn't good enough to bring much of anything valuable to the market.
I feel like I've heard this argument a lot over the last decade or so: it's early days, the valuable stuff is yet to come.
I've gone through about three phases of opinions on crypto:
1. "Blockchain is an interesting primitive that you could probably build something neat (besides a cryptocurrency) out of! I can't think of anything good off the top of my head, but I look forward to seeing what valuable thing people come up with."
2. Smart Contracts are an interesting primitive that you could probably build something neat (besides rebuilding existing finance tools without regulation) out of! I can't think of anything good off the top of my head, but I look forward to seeing what valuable thing people come up with.
3. NFTs are an interesting primitive that you could probably build something neat (besides speculative digital assets) out of! I can't think of anything good off the top of my head, but I look forward to seeing what valuable thing people come up with.
In each case, the tech looks like a neat idea, but I continue to wait for the actually valuable use-case to emerge. At this point, I'm starting to just pattern-match all crypto to "unlikely to provide real value ever."
I've gone through about three phases of opinions on crypto:
1. "Blockchain is an interesting primitive that you could probably build something neat (besides a cryptocurrency) out of! I can't think of anything good off the top of my head, but I look forward to seeing what valuable thing people come up with."
2. Smart Contracts are an interesting primitive that you could probably build something neat (besides rebuilding existing finance tools without regulation) out of! I can't think of anything good off the top of my head, but I look forward to seeing what valuable thing people come up with.
3. NFTs are an interesting primitive that you could probably build something neat (besides speculative digital assets) out of! I can't think of anything good off the top of my head, but I look forward to seeing what valuable thing people come up with.
In each case, the tech looks like a neat idea, but I continue to wait for the actually valuable use-case to emerge. At this point, I'm starting to just pattern-match all crypto to "unlikely to provide real value ever."
> Have you ever implemented a smart contract?
No
> A smart contract can be thought of as a cryptographically secure program, i.e. it cannot be modified. So you have cryptographically secure inputs (the blockchain), and a cryptographically secure program (the smart contract), which means the output is also guaranteed to be cryptographically secure.
The output is not guaranteed to be correct, what you intended, or even what you agreed to. Even the most trivial computer programme can have unexpected properties.
Why would I have to explain that here?
No
> A smart contract can be thought of as a cryptographically secure program, i.e. it cannot be modified. So you have cryptographically secure inputs (the blockchain), and a cryptographically secure program (the smart contract), which means the output is also guaranteed to be cryptographically secure.
The output is not guaranteed to be correct, what you intended, or even what you agreed to. Even the most trivial computer programme can have unexpected properties.
Why would I have to explain that here?
Agreed. I've never understood why people think this.
No, the output is guaranteed to be correct. Correct, as in what you specified in the contract, which may not be what you had intended, but that’s besides the point. Can you explain how the output would differ from the contract specification?
"The code does what it does" is not a useful statement; insisting that a smart contract is an executable specification is not helpful unless there's a really very small semantic step from how the user intentions are formed - which again is not the case here.
I think you’re moving the goal post. As I mentioned in my original post, smart contracts allow for the creation of a global computing platform we call a blockchain. Maybe you want formal verification, but not everyone cares about that.
What? You're the one with the "output is guaranteed to be correct" line. A smart contract is just code.
Yes, the output is guaranteed to be correct. Let’s say you give me a program and ask me to run it for you. Can you guarantee that I won’t tamper with the executable? No you can’t. You can’t trust the output of an arbitrary program you give me to run. The only way you could trust my result would be to run the program yourself and verify I provided you the correct output. If you run the program yourself, then what’s the point of paying me to run your code? With a smart contract, you can trust the output. That’s the difference.
This brings me back to my main point. You clearly have not implemented a smart contact and have misconceptions about what it does. I suggest you implement one first. You can still think the idea is stupid afterwards. That’s fine. But right now, it seems like you are arguing about how you think the blockchain works, which doesn’t necessarily match how it actually works.
This brings me back to my main point. You clearly have not implemented a smart contact and have misconceptions about what it does. I suggest you implement one first. You can still think the idea is stupid afterwards. That’s fine. But right now, it seems like you are arguing about how you think the blockchain works, which doesn’t necessarily match how it actually works.
Contracts are agreements between humans. Therefore, the only "correct" outcome is the intended outcome.
If your code has bugs or errors or security vulnerabilities, those will all lead to incorrect behavior.
That's why smart contracts aren't useful.
If your code has bugs or errors or security vulnerabilities, those will all lead to incorrect behavior.
That's why smart contracts aren't useful.
Contracts are agreements between legal entities, human and non-human.
"Smart" contracts in it's current form allows for automatic execution between parties, where one or both parties can be another SC. I would put them im the juridical person or non-human camp legally speaking. This property can generate quite an advanced exexutiom through cascadation effect with a lot of deployed SC on the blockchain and is publicly auditable by anyone and will be audited by a lot of people if a huge amount of financial stake is present.
I personally see an immense upside in this approach rather then current contract law in TradFi, based solely on promises and insurance to customer front.
IMO one such deployed contract does indeed not make it smart but an inter-connected network of them can generate systems that can be indeed called smart.
May as well say "that's why software isn't useful" which obviously isn't true.
Most contracts end in the happy case 99% of the time, it seems very worthwhile to automate that happy case and fall back to the traditional legal system in the failure case where either party isn't happy with the outcome.
Most contracts end in the happy case 99% of the time, it seems very worthwhile to automate that happy case and fall back to the traditional legal system in the failure case where either party isn't happy with the outcome.
Contracts aren't for when things go right, they're for when things go wrong.
It's just as true to say contacts aren't "necessary" 99% of the time, because people follow through on the agreement.
It's just as true to say contacts aren't "necessary" 99% of the time, because people follow through on the agreement.
I think you’re conflating legal contracts and smart contracts. Legal contracts are instruments used by two or more parties that outlines their responsibilities to one another in a way that is protected by civil law. A smart contract is just a program that runs on the blockchain.
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In my experience, virtually all kinds of substantially useful smart contracts depend on observing or modifying the world outside of the blockchain, which means you have the oracle problem, or you have the side effect problem.
Not entirely coincidentally, aside from plain faulty implementations and operational security failings, these two problems represent the ways most successful attacks on smart contracts are accomplished.
Not entirely coincidentally, aside from plain faulty implementations and operational security failings, these two problems represent the ways most successful attacks on smart contracts are accomplished.
Smart contracts are useless and will always be useless for two reasons:
1. It is impossible to write code that always works exactly how you want, all of the time, forever.
2. Law exists. The legal system exists. The moment you have a problem with a smart contract, it's going to court.
You might as well save yourselves the time, expense, hassle and potential embarrassment by just going to a lawyer in the first place and having them draft a contract.
1. It is impossible to write code that always works exactly how you want, all of the time, forever.
2. Law exists. The legal system exists. The moment you have a problem with a smart contract, it's going to court.
You might as well save yourselves the time, expense, hassle and potential embarrassment by just going to a lawyer in the first place and having them draft a contract.
On regulations: FTX and SBF were the main proponents of regulations. Not because it solves anything, but because it eliminates a competition and for them it gave more freedom to do a fraud. So I'm not sure it's always a good thing.
On loans: Give me a bank that can loan me $100M without even asking for an ID? Without a collateral, of course. Like Aave Flashloan provides on blockchain.
On loans: Give me a bank that can loan me $100M without even asking for an ID? Without a collateral, of course. Like Aave Flashloan provides on blockchain.
>Give me a bank that can loan me $100M without even asking for an ID? Without a collateral, of course. Like Aave Flashloan provides on blockchain.
That seems like a really bad idea!
That seems like a really bad idea!
It's great for levelling the playing field of finance. In traditional finance only the most capitalised players are able to do small arbitrage opportunities, and many firms make billions of dollars this way. In DeFi anyone can take advantage of them using flash loans.
> In DeFi anyone can take advantage of them using flash loans.
Ok... how do you repay flash loans when things go bad?
Please, do elaborate.
Ok... how do you repay flash loans when things go bad?
Please, do elaborate.
Flash loans only happen if they're paid back. Pretty cool tech actually as someone pretty skeptical of blockchains
Flash loans are repaid instantly in the same block. If it doesn't repay itself the transaction isn't valid.
> How hard do you think it is for I as an Australian to build a financial firm that interfaces with Bank of America or the NYSE? It's almost impossible. In DeFi I can spin up my own app in days
This sounds nice in theory, but aren't most of the guard rails of the financial institutions for complying with government regulation? If anyone could interface with these companies then it would be too easy for abuse. USG is not going to let that happen, which is why these DeFi applications will be limited to unregulated cryptocurrencies where the user will have to trust the "bank" that has no Federal Reserve backing.
> Aave is used for being able to borrow against your crypto assets... You can also just deposit your assets and earn interest on them.
Why would any crypto supporter want to hold their decentralized currency in a centralized exchange after the FTX fiasco
This sounds nice in theory, but aren't most of the guard rails of the financial institutions for complying with government regulation? If anyone could interface with these companies then it would be too easy for abuse. USG is not going to let that happen, which is why these DeFi applications will be limited to unregulated cryptocurrencies where the user will have to trust the "bank" that has no Federal Reserve backing.
> Aave is used for being able to borrow against your crypto assets... You can also just deposit your assets and earn interest on them.
Why would any crypto supporter want to hold their decentralized currency in a centralized exchange after the FTX fiasco
Aave is decentralised.
> if you need a loan you don't have to sell, this isn't a service any bank offers
I mean, the bank will make sure you aren’t North Korea first. Which crypto will not. So that’s a plus, if you’re North Korea. (Collateralised lending is incredibly commonplace in finance, including against crypto.)
I mean, the bank will make sure you aren’t North Korea first. Which crypto will not. So that’s a plus, if you’re North Korea. (Collateralised lending is incredibly commonplace in finance, including against crypto.)
Permissionless means hizbulla or the Syrian regime can make revenue generating financial products just as easily as an Australian. As long as there is conflict (forever), permissionless systems will not be embraced by the global powers. There is potential for lower permissions within some sort of financial sandbox where there’s strong controls at the entrance to the system and strong auditing and logging within the system, but there’s no potential for a global permissionless system.
I think there are still legalities to follow when you are offering anything to public with financial implications.
How do you see current regulations change to make this all fit, i.e., what's your roadmap there?
That's unclear. From a game theory perspective you don't want to be the government that stifles your country by restricting access to a financial system everyone else adopts, so I think many are waiting to see how that plays out.
I fear, if the DeFi community doesn't engage with policy makers and regulators it will not magically fall into place.
This sort of nonsense thinking is exactly why governments have been such a soft touch and allowed scam after fraud after Ponzi after rug-pull to bloom.
Fingers crossed that sort of time is over and the cryptocurrency space can be made to comply with regulations or be cut off from on-ramps.
Fingers crossed that sort of time is over and the cryptocurrency space can be made to comply with regulations or be cut off from on-ramps.
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> So basically, you guys are re-inventing what tradfi had years ago, just with worthless(?) tokens instead of debt backed assets.
Crypto has debt backed primitives as well. You’ve linked one. AAVE is a lending protocol. If you don’t like AAVE, maybe you’re looking for DAI.
> but no way to cash out to fiat.
This is just a result of US KYC regulation. Like it or not, this isn’t a choice made by crypto.
> What's the value proposition here?
The value prop is, as the gp said, trustless composability. Crypto (post eth) is to money as the internet is to a mainframe. A kid in a garage can build a financial primitive on top of a “blue chip” and the “blue chip” builder doesn’t have to worry (vis a vis bugs, which have been a big problem but a lot of progress has been made in that area).
I’m not claiming crypto(I wish there was a word for crypto minus btc) has achieved its end state, but the goal and road map seem very clear. Composable, trust-less finance is a strong use case.
Aside — you really have to decide whether the price is important in crypto or not. Opponents often use phrases like “worthless tokens” and then claim they don’t care ab the price.
Crypto has debt backed primitives as well. You’ve linked one. AAVE is a lending protocol. If you don’t like AAVE, maybe you’re looking for DAI.
> but no way to cash out to fiat.
This is just a result of US KYC regulation. Like it or not, this isn’t a choice made by crypto.
> What's the value proposition here?
The value prop is, as the gp said, trustless composability. Crypto (post eth) is to money as the internet is to a mainframe. A kid in a garage can build a financial primitive on top of a “blue chip” and the “blue chip” builder doesn’t have to worry (vis a vis bugs, which have been a big problem but a lot of progress has been made in that area).
I’m not claiming crypto(I wish there was a word for crypto minus btc) has achieved its end state, but the goal and road map seem very clear. Composable, trust-less finance is a strong use case.
Aside — you really have to decide whether the price is important in crypto or not. Opponents often use phrases like “worthless tokens” and then claim they don’t care ab the price.
I do not know much about sophisticated finance. Can you explain the meaning of this phrase, or sketch out an example, or provide links to assist my understanding?
>A kid in a garage can build a financial primitive on top of a “blue chip” and the “blue chip” builder doesn’t have to worry (vis a vis bugs).
I get that a "blue chip" is supposed to be a big brand (at least that's how I hear the term often used?) but what does it mean to "build a financial primitive" and how does it relate to this (presumably third-party) blue chip brand?
>A kid in a garage can build a financial primitive on top of a “blue chip” and the “blue chip” builder doesn’t have to worry (vis a vis bugs).
I get that a "blue chip" is supposed to be a big brand (at least that's how I hear the term often used?) but what does it mean to "build a financial primitive" and how does it relate to this (presumably third-party) blue chip brand?
Right, so it turns out that there are a fair amount of operations you can perform on financial objects to change their properties. You can buy, sell, combine, or split their risk profiles in different manners to get properties that are useful in different scenarios.
Mortgage tranches played a big role in 2008, Black-Scholes helps us describe the behavior of options contracts, and maybe the most accessible for someone not familiar w/ finance is the Ray Dalio McNugget story - https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/03/how-ray-dalio-helped-launch-...
The EVM specifically gives you a Turing complete financial system and, hence, probably a complete expression of operations on financial structures.
Mortgage tranches played a big role in 2008, Black-Scholes helps us describe the behavior of options contracts, and maybe the most accessible for someone not familiar w/ finance is the Ray Dalio McNugget story - https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/03/how-ray-dalio-helped-launch-...
The EVM specifically gives you a Turing complete financial system and, hence, probably a complete expression of operations on financial structures.
> The EVM specifically gives you a Turing complete financial system and, hence, probably a complete expression of operations on financial structures.
Which is nice, but doesn't solve any problems that actually exist. That is the running theme with all of these crypto/blockchain/"defi" projects, because they are created by tech people who don't understand the domain. They just start building all of these things that seem useful to tech people, but completely miss what is actually important.
Which is nice, but doesn't solve any problems that actually exist. That is the running theme with all of these crypto/blockchain/"defi" projects, because they are created by tech people who don't understand the domain. They just start building all of these things that seem useful to tech people, but completely miss what is actually important.
Can you clarify what is "solving a problem that actually exist" means?
I just looked around and I'm not sure I have anything that solves an actual problem. Like the HN right now, it doesn't solve anything, right. In the morning I bought stuff on Amazon, but it also doesn't solve any real problem. Not sure AWS is solving anything since we can rent servers directly. I used Zoom for a call, but it solves nothing, I guess. Also used Github, but it's just a useless service because we can use plain Git. I can't really find a tech product I use that clearly "solves a problem". The only problem solver I can recall is my coffee maker, but it's an analog device.
So I'm wondering, what it's the criteria to decided if something solves an actual problem or not?
I just looked around and I'm not sure I have anything that solves an actual problem. Like the HN right now, it doesn't solve anything, right. In the morning I bought stuff on Amazon, but it also doesn't solve any real problem. Not sure AWS is solving anything since we can rent servers directly. I used Zoom for a call, but it solves nothing, I guess. Also used Github, but it's just a useless service because we can use plain Git. I can't really find a tech product I use that clearly "solves a problem". The only problem solver I can recall is my coffee maker, but it's an analog device.
So I'm wondering, what it's the criteria to decided if something solves an actual problem or not?
Not the original commenter, but here's my stab at it:
> In the morning I bought stuff on Amazon, but it also doesn't solve any real problem.
Sure it does. It solves the problem of "I need something, I have money, and I don't have the time/ability/car/... to go to a physical location to buy it."
> Not sure AWS is solving anything since we can rent servers directly.
AWS gives you you
- The ability to spin up MANY classes of servers instantly, whereas traditional server renting is more limited ime.
- A host of extra services on top of it that all integrate fairly well with each other
- Paid support if you want/need
- ...
> I used Zoom for a call, but it solves nothing, I guess.
People like to see each other, phone calls can have quality issues and dead zones, ...
---
Now, when I read the parent comments, I see:
> The EVM specifically gives you a Turing complete financial system and, hence, probably a complete expression of operations on financial structures.
And while that *sounds* interesting, I have absolutely no IDEA what the utility of this is. With AWS, Zoom, Amazon, ... I can point to things that very very directly benefit both technical and non-technical users day-to-day. That's not to say that there ISN'T use to the EVM -- I'm sure there probably is! -- just that imo it's less-obvious.
> In the morning I bought stuff on Amazon, but it also doesn't solve any real problem.
Sure it does. It solves the problem of "I need something, I have money, and I don't have the time/ability/car/... to go to a physical location to buy it."
> Not sure AWS is solving anything since we can rent servers directly.
AWS gives you you
- The ability to spin up MANY classes of servers instantly, whereas traditional server renting is more limited ime.
- A host of extra services on top of it that all integrate fairly well with each other
- Paid support if you want/need
- ...
> I used Zoom for a call, but it solves nothing, I guess.
People like to see each other, phone calls can have quality issues and dead zones, ...
---
Now, when I read the parent comments, I see:
> The EVM specifically gives you a Turing complete financial system and, hence, probably a complete expression of operations on financial structures.
And while that *sounds* interesting, I have absolutely no IDEA what the utility of this is. With AWS, Zoom, Amazon, ... I can point to things that very very directly benefit both technical and non-technical users day-to-day. That's not to say that there ISN'T use to the EVM -- I'm sure there probably is! -- just that imo it's less-obvious.
I would disagree with all the reasons. I understand that it's some real problems the mentioned services solve for you, but I can easily point to a person who has none of those problems. Like my grandma. She doesn't see any point in any of the mentioned products. Even the coffee maker. So we must agree that it depends on the person and is not an objective criterion. Same for blockchan/defi/evm/etc. Some people argue that it solves some of their problems, and you may disagree with them, but it doesn't make their point invalid.
I can go with refusing the points you said about the mentioned products. Not because I want to argue, but because it's really not the reason and problems it solved for _me_. I just question myself why I use them and have no answer.
1) Rel. Amazon. I can go to the seller's website directly. I guess I used Amazon because they are so good at marketing, so they are the first to go. But I kind of agree that it solves the problem of simplicity/easier access because a seller's website may have a clumsy website. Some people say that something similar is solved for them by Defi.
2) For AWS, I don't use anything you mentioned. It sounds interesting, like spinning many instances, but I never witnessed it being used like that. Except for instances where someone was playing with the tech (and you can apply it the exact same way to EMV). Also, recently I played with Kubespray, a tool to easily roll out a Kubernetes cluster on a bare metal, and now I don't see a reason to use AWS or another cloud provider. Bare servers + Kubernetes is a way to go imho. Maybe the real reason people use AWS is b/c they simply don't know alternatives?
3) For Zoom, I disagree because I am not even sure we always needed to call, honestly. I mean, we have an email and slack, so what's the point of wasting everyone's time on a call. It's just a routine now.
Again, not arguing. Just trying to say that there could be multiple points of view. And if something works one way for someone, it may be completely useless and even stupid for others.
I can go with refusing the points you said about the mentioned products. Not because I want to argue, but because it's really not the reason and problems it solved for _me_. I just question myself why I use them and have no answer.
1) Rel. Amazon. I can go to the seller's website directly. I guess I used Amazon because they are so good at marketing, so they are the first to go. But I kind of agree that it solves the problem of simplicity/easier access because a seller's website may have a clumsy website. Some people say that something similar is solved for them by Defi.
2) For AWS, I don't use anything you mentioned. It sounds interesting, like spinning many instances, but I never witnessed it being used like that. Except for instances where someone was playing with the tech (and you can apply it the exact same way to EMV). Also, recently I played with Kubespray, a tool to easily roll out a Kubernetes cluster on a bare metal, and now I don't see a reason to use AWS or another cloud provider. Bare servers + Kubernetes is a way to go imho. Maybe the real reason people use AWS is b/c they simply don't know alternatives?
3) For Zoom, I disagree because I am not even sure we always needed to call, honestly. I mean, we have an email and slack, so what's the point of wasting everyone's time on a call. It's just a routine now.
Again, not arguing. Just trying to say that there could be multiple points of view. And if something works one way for someone, it may be completely useless and even stupid for others.
> Again, not arguing. Just trying to say that there could be multiple points of view. And if something works one way for someone, it may be completely useless and even stupid for others.
Yeah, but it's about who the thing is useful to, and how many people are in that category.
Amazon is very useful to the general population.
AWS is very useful to startup and corporations in general.
Zoom is very useful to the large amounts of people that like human interactions and consider text-only to be cold and distant.
Crypto so far is useful to... not that many people, and worst of all, many of those people are scammers and grifters and criminals. Many of the others it's "useful" to look a lot like marks, gullible people that lose a lot of money.
When a business the size of AWS decides it's not worth investing into it, that's a bad sign. They'll go for anything that can make them a ton of money long term.
Yeah, but it's about who the thing is useful to, and how many people are in that category.
Amazon is very useful to the general population.
AWS is very useful to startup and corporations in general.
Zoom is very useful to the large amounts of people that like human interactions and consider text-only to be cold and distant.
Crypto so far is useful to... not that many people, and worst of all, many of those people are scammers and grifters and criminals. Many of the others it's "useful" to look a lot like marks, gullible people that lose a lot of money.
When a business the size of AWS decides it's not worth investing into it, that's a bad sign. They'll go for anything that can make them a ton of money long term.
The fact that AWS didn't find anyone to talk to about blockchain doesn't mean anything. They are just in their own bubble, talking to the CTO/CIO of large corps.
But just look at the mobile apps of the major enterprises, all of them are completely awful. But it doesn't mean that mobile tech is dead, right? Or even further, just go to any web app of any major US bank. It seems that they still think that Web is not for them. I guess all those CIO/CTO still believe that sending a paper check is a very efficient tech. So what can they say about blockchain? Nothing. I don't think any of the current enterprises would even catch it. They missed mobile and still catching the web.
According to a public stat, right now there are about 3000 Ethereum nodes hosted on AWS. Maybe similar numbers for other blockchains. But AWS didn't go to ask those customers about their use of blockchain. Maybe because it's mostly college kids, and AWS Sales Managers don't care about them. But that's the only people who can answer the question why exactly they use AWS for their blockchain hosting and how AWS can help them.
But just look at the mobile apps of the major enterprises, all of them are completely awful. But it doesn't mean that mobile tech is dead, right? Or even further, just go to any web app of any major US bank. It seems that they still think that Web is not for them. I guess all those CIO/CTO still believe that sending a paper check is a very efficient tech. So what can they say about blockchain? Nothing. I don't think any of the current enterprises would even catch it. They missed mobile and still catching the web.
According to a public stat, right now there are about 3000 Ethereum nodes hosted on AWS. Maybe similar numbers for other blockchains. But AWS didn't go to ask those customers about their use of blockchain. Maybe because it's mostly college kids, and AWS Sales Managers don't care about them. But that's the only people who can answer the question why exactly they use AWS for their blockchain hosting and how AWS can help them.
I've just googled the number. There are about 1M users of AWS, which compared to global population of 7B people makes it useful for about 0.01%. So it's a pretty negligible number, outside of NH. With that low number anything can be comparable useful imho.
I'm not sure how you measure share of scammers, so it's hard to compare. But I'm wondering you you care about scammers but not legit people who want to use blockchain tech? Latter is a magnitude larger audience.
I'm not sure how you measure share of scammers, so it's hard to compare. But I'm wondering you you care about scammers but not legit people who want to use blockchain tech? Latter is a magnitude larger audience.
> I would disagree with all the reasons. I understand that it's some real problems the mentioned services solve for you, but I can easily point to a person who has none of those problems. Like my grandma. She doesn't see any point in any of the mentioned products.
This doesn't make any sense, there's nothing in the world except food, water and shelter that's actually needed for every living human being.
You're grossly mischaracterising or misinterpreting the meaning of "solving a real problem".
What exactly is all this crypto-technobabble solving that isn't just feeding the system to make it work? Where is the end where a person is going to use all this bumbling infrastructure of finance primitives to actually solve a problem they face? Again, not a problem created or caused by the other mumbo-jumbo lying around, piling solutions on top of solutions still looking for a problem is ultimately not solving any problem. If the fundamental piece of technology you are working on doesn't have any applicable uses in the end, all the other pieces supporting this fundamental are not solving anything of value.
I really, really don't follow your line of argumentation, I keep looking for the base argument and there's none except for "if some people believe this has value, then it has value". No, like Matt Levine said to SBF, the fundamental economical value of this thing is zero.
This doesn't make any sense, there's nothing in the world except food, water and shelter that's actually needed for every living human being.
You're grossly mischaracterising or misinterpreting the meaning of "solving a real problem".
What exactly is all this crypto-technobabble solving that isn't just feeding the system to make it work? Where is the end where a person is going to use all this bumbling infrastructure of finance primitives to actually solve a problem they face? Again, not a problem created or caused by the other mumbo-jumbo lying around, piling solutions on top of solutions still looking for a problem is ultimately not solving any problem. If the fundamental piece of technology you are working on doesn't have any applicable uses in the end, all the other pieces supporting this fundamental are not solving anything of value.
I really, really don't follow your line of argumentation, I keep looking for the base argument and there's none except for "if some people believe this has value, then it has value". No, like Matt Levine said to SBF, the fundamental economical value of this thing is zero.
Right, it doesn't make much sense and that's my point. If we don't have an objective criteria we cannot judge what is a good tech and what is a bad tech.
You think one techonoly is not important, another person think it's very important. I'm sure you're must better person that the any other person so we have to rely on your judgement, but it's not very scalable.
You think one techonoly is not important, another person think it's very important. I'm sure you're must better person that the any other person so we have to rely on your judgement, but it's not very scalable.
> Like the HN right now, it doesn't solve anything, right.
What do you mean? It definitely solves a problem of information sharing, spreading, foster discussion, and creates some networking which definitely do add value, it might not be instant but there are various stories on HN about how HN affected their lives. Be with founders meeting, people getting ideas for starting products and so on. That's tangible value, even if a little abstract.
> In the morning I bought stuff on Amazon, but it also doesn't solve any real problem.
Again, I don't understand, you bought something expecting it to do something for you, solving an actual problem. If not it's just pure consumerism in a way that might even be pathological, buying stuff for no reason at all is extremely bizarre.
Solving something means to actually provide an economical value, an outcome with tangible impact in the real world. People sharing knowledge and information provides tangible value in the real world. People buying stuff they want to use for a hobby, profession, entertainment, etc., have a tangible impact in the real world.
You are going full post-modernism on what "value" or "solving a problem" means without directing the conversation to your point, you are almost completely paraphrasing SBF's words from this interview [1]:
> Let me give you sort of like a really toy model of it, which I actually think has a surprising amount of legitimacy for what farming could mean. You know, where do you start? You start with a company that builds a box and in practice this box, they probably dress it up to look like a life-changing, you know, world-altering protocol that's gonna replace all the big banks in 38 days or whatever. Maybe for now actually ignore what it does or pretend it does literally nothing. It's just a box. So what this protocol is, it's called ‘Protocol X,’ it's a box, and you take a token. You can take ethereum, you can put it in the box and you take it out of the box. Alright so, you put it into the box and you get like, you know, an IOU for having put it in the box and then you can redeem that IOU back out for the token.
> So far what we've described is the world's dumbest ETF or ADR or something like that. It doesn't do anything but let you put things in it if you so choose. And then this protocol issues a token, we'll call it whatever, ‘X token.’ And X token promises that anything cool that happens because of this box is going to ultimately be usable by, you know, governance vote of holders of the X tokens. They can vote on what to do with any proceeds or other cool things that happen from this box. And of course, so far, we haven't exactly given a compelling reason for why there ever would be any proceeds from this box, but I don't know, you know, maybe there will be, so that's sort of where you start.
> And then you say, alright, well, you’ve got this box and you’ve got X token and the box protocol declares, or maybe votes by on-chain governance, or, you know, something like that, that what they're gonna do is they are going to take half of all the X tokens that were re-minted. Maybe two thirds will, two thirds will offer X tokens, and they're going to give them away for free to whoever uses the box. So anyone who goes, takes some money, puts in the box, each day they're gonna airdrop, you know, 1% of the X token pro rata amongst everyone who's put money in the box. That's for now, what X token does, it gets given away to the box people. And now what happens? Well, X token has some market cap, right? It's probably not zero. Let say it's, you know, a $20 million market …
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-25/sam-bankm...
What do you mean? It definitely solves a problem of information sharing, spreading, foster discussion, and creates some networking which definitely do add value, it might not be instant but there are various stories on HN about how HN affected their lives. Be with founders meeting, people getting ideas for starting products and so on. That's tangible value, even if a little abstract.
> In the morning I bought stuff on Amazon, but it also doesn't solve any real problem.
Again, I don't understand, you bought something expecting it to do something for you, solving an actual problem. If not it's just pure consumerism in a way that might even be pathological, buying stuff for no reason at all is extremely bizarre.
Solving something means to actually provide an economical value, an outcome with tangible impact in the real world. People sharing knowledge and information provides tangible value in the real world. People buying stuff they want to use for a hobby, profession, entertainment, etc., have a tangible impact in the real world.
You are going full post-modernism on what "value" or "solving a problem" means without directing the conversation to your point, you are almost completely paraphrasing SBF's words from this interview [1]:
> Let me give you sort of like a really toy model of it, which I actually think has a surprising amount of legitimacy for what farming could mean. You know, where do you start? You start with a company that builds a box and in practice this box, they probably dress it up to look like a life-changing, you know, world-altering protocol that's gonna replace all the big banks in 38 days or whatever. Maybe for now actually ignore what it does or pretend it does literally nothing. It's just a box. So what this protocol is, it's called ‘Protocol X,’ it's a box, and you take a token. You can take ethereum, you can put it in the box and you take it out of the box. Alright so, you put it into the box and you get like, you know, an IOU for having put it in the box and then you can redeem that IOU back out for the token.
> So far what we've described is the world's dumbest ETF or ADR or something like that. It doesn't do anything but let you put things in it if you so choose. And then this protocol issues a token, we'll call it whatever, ‘X token.’ And X token promises that anything cool that happens because of this box is going to ultimately be usable by, you know, governance vote of holders of the X tokens. They can vote on what to do with any proceeds or other cool things that happen from this box. And of course, so far, we haven't exactly given a compelling reason for why there ever would be any proceeds from this box, but I don't know, you know, maybe there will be, so that's sort of where you start.
> And then you say, alright, well, you’ve got this box and you’ve got X token and the box protocol declares, or maybe votes by on-chain governance, or, you know, something like that, that what they're gonna do is they are going to take half of all the X tokens that were re-minted. Maybe two thirds will, two thirds will offer X tokens, and they're going to give them away for free to whoever uses the box. So anyone who goes, takes some money, puts in the box, each day they're gonna airdrop, you know, 1% of the X token pro rata amongst everyone who's put money in the box. That's for now, what X token does, it gets given away to the box people. And now what happens? Well, X token has some market cap, right? It's probably not zero. Let say it's, you know, a $20 million market …
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-25/sam-bankm...
> because they are created by tech people who don't understand the domain. They just start building all of these things that seem useful to tech people, but completely miss what is actually important.
This is just false. idk what to tell you, but there are plenty of major builders in the crypto space who are highly regarded in tradfi. See ie jump
Even if it were true (it’s not), it’s also a thing that could be said about any product built by tech people and hasn’t really seemed to play out that way in most other places.
This is just false. idk what to tell you, but there are plenty of major builders in the crypto space who are highly regarded in tradfi. See ie jump
Even if it were true (it’s not), it’s also a thing that could be said about any product built by tech people and hasn’t really seemed to play out that way in most other places.
> You can buy, sell, combine, or split their risk profiles in different manners to get properties that are useful in different scenarios.
I would contend that the only reason things like options, futures, etc. are actually useful in markets like, e.g., the stock market, is, in no small part, due to the highly liquid nature of the underlying. Since the underlying is highly liquid, these derivatives are highly liquid, and therefore we can actually use them for things like de-risking. Of course, people on WSB still gamble using options, but basically they're meant as a hedging mechanism.
Even though these "financial primitives" on the blockchain are neat from a technical standpoint, they tend to blow up precisely because the markets are not liquid enough (so second-order effects are amplified).
I would contend that the only reason things like options, futures, etc. are actually useful in markets like, e.g., the stock market, is, in no small part, due to the highly liquid nature of the underlying. Since the underlying is highly liquid, these derivatives are highly liquid, and therefore we can actually use them for things like de-risking. Of course, people on WSB still gamble using options, but basically they're meant as a hedging mechanism.
Even though these "financial primitives" on the blockchain are neat from a technical standpoint, they tend to blow up precisely because the markets are not liquid enough (so second-order effects are amplified).
> Even though these "financial primitives" on the blockchain are neat from a technical standpoint, they tend to blow up precisely because the markets are not liquid enough (so second-order effects are amplified).
I would rephrase this to say that the less liquid state of blockchain markets limits the available set of financial primitives which are resistant to manipulation.
It’s true, but if liquidity is the only hurdle — I think you’ve more or less ceded that blockchain provides value. It just needs wider adoption. (Probably a stronger support of blockchain than I would personally offer.)
I would rephrase this to say that the less liquid state of blockchain markets limits the available set of financial primitives which are resistant to manipulation.
It’s true, but if liquidity is the only hurdle — I think you’ve more or less ceded that blockchain provides value. It just needs wider adoption. (Probably a stronger support of blockchain than I would personally offer.)
> I think you’ve more or less ceded that blockchain provides value. It just needs wider adoption
This is a vacuous non-sequitur. It's like saying "my new social network provides value, it just needs wider adoption"—uh, yeah, that's how social networks (or markets) work. If no one is using it, by definition, it has no value. Markets are social games (not merely "financial" ones).
And exceedingly few people are using crypto in general, but even fewer are using it as a store of value, or as a way to transfer money, or as any kind of hedge. And even if we look at the people using it, most use it merely as a casino.
I mean think about it: not even 100 million people have a BTC wallet. It took Snapchat 4 years to reach 100 million daily active users. We're now in year 14 of Bitcoin.
This is a vacuous non-sequitur. It's like saying "my new social network provides value, it just needs wider adoption"—uh, yeah, that's how social networks (or markets) work. If no one is using it, by definition, it has no value. Markets are social games (not merely "financial" ones).
And exceedingly few people are using crypto in general, but even fewer are using it as a store of value, or as a way to transfer money, or as any kind of hedge. And even if we look at the people using it, most use it merely as a casino.
I mean think about it: not even 100 million people have a BTC wallet. It took Snapchat 4 years to reach 100 million daily active users. We're now in year 14 of Bitcoin.
> This is a vacuous non-sequitur
In finance, liquidity _is_ adoption. They’re the same thing.
In finance, liquidity _is_ adoption. They’re the same thing.
> In finance, liquidity _is_ adoption. They’re the same thing.
While this is true on the face of it, I think it's a bit more nuanced when looking at crypto where one can literally mint tokens out of nothing. Plenty of tokens have (or had) unrealistic market caps, and there was plenty of wash trading dredging up liquidity. In fact, there was a famous arbitrage bot that specialized in doing this[1] (faking liquidity via thousands of transactions to make certain assets seem more valuable than they were).
So even though you're technically correct, I think there's a big "but" when looking specifically at crypto land. To make matters more confusing, a lot of liquidity pools and trading is done in non-USD denominated terms. For example, you trade in some weird staking pair sABC/sXYZ (where both of these are some random staked token, maybe not even pegged). And there might be some down-the-road sXYZ/XYZ and XYZ/ETH transaction you can do (and ETH/USD even further down the road), but I'm not exactly sure if you can count your sABC/sXYZ trade as "volume." Even though Coingecko and other token portals will certainly list both sABC and sXYZ in USD terms[2] (market cap/volume).
[1] https://cointelegraph.com/news/arbitrage-bot-s-spam-attack-o...
[2] https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/lido-staked-ether
While this is true on the face of it, I think it's a bit more nuanced when looking at crypto where one can literally mint tokens out of nothing. Plenty of tokens have (or had) unrealistic market caps, and there was plenty of wash trading dredging up liquidity. In fact, there was a famous arbitrage bot that specialized in doing this[1] (faking liquidity via thousands of transactions to make certain assets seem more valuable than they were).
So even though you're technically correct, I think there's a big "but" when looking specifically at crypto land. To make matters more confusing, a lot of liquidity pools and trading is done in non-USD denominated terms. For example, you trade in some weird staking pair sABC/sXYZ (where both of these are some random staked token, maybe not even pegged). And there might be some down-the-road sXYZ/XYZ and XYZ/ETH transaction you can do (and ETH/USD even further down the road), but I'm not exactly sure if you can count your sABC/sXYZ trade as "volume." Even though Coingecko and other token portals will certainly list both sABC and sXYZ in USD terms[2] (market cap/volume).
[1] https://cointelegraph.com/news/arbitrage-bot-s-spam-attack-o...
[2] https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/lido-staked-ether
What bearing does the existence of fake liquidity have on the equivalence between real liquidity and adoption?
This is a vacuous non-sequitur.
This is a vacuous non-sequitur.
I think there would be value but we neeed a real currency(i.e usd) on the blockchain. It's obvious that all those pegged currencies are prone to "bank run" scenarios. Not to mention the fiat conversion ruines the whole experience.
With a real currency we could have at least real open and standards based p2p payments which would be great! Just like with cash offline we would no longer need visa, paypal or banks to transact online.
With a real currency we could have at least real open and standards based p2p payments which would be great! Just like with cash offline we would no longer need visa, paypal or banks to transact online.
It's not the type of currency you have that prevents bank runs. There were plenty of bank runs with very real dollars in the beginning of the century. What stopped it was proper regulation.
EDIT: I mean the beginning the 20th century, of course.
Bank runs still happen. And I will keep it strictly to banks. Abacus being one case, when the DoJ went after it just to punish someone. A lot of banks in Europe during the 2008+ crisis -- which is why "capital controls" were enforced.
People attempted runs on Chinese banks a few months ago at the beginning of the real estate collapse there.
What keeps bank runs from happening is trust. Trust that the central bank will print as much money as necessary to ensure people have them. Trust that the government will deploy people with guns to protect or stop people from doing a bank run. Trust that regulation works: even if it doesn't and causes systemic issues that lead to issues years later like the 2008 crisis.
It is good that we "believe" bank runs don't or are not going to happen and that is the whole idea.
People attempted runs on Chinese banks a few months ago at the beginning of the real estate collapse there.
What keeps bank runs from happening is trust. Trust that the central bank will print as much money as necessary to ensure people have them. Trust that the government will deploy people with guns to protect or stop people from doing a bank run. Trust that regulation works: even if it doesn't and causes systemic issues that lead to issues years later like the 2008 crisis.
It is good that we "believe" bank runs don't or are not going to happen and that is the whole idea.
> Bank runs still happen.
I do agree with that. But it has become an extremely rare occurrence that usually indicates some deeper problems.
> A lot of banks in Europe during the 2008+ crisis -- which is why "capital controls" were enforced.
Well, one of the root causes of the whole crisis was deregulation, poor enforcement of regulations and "new" financial instruments that allowed for circumventing regulations.
> People attempted runs on Chinese banks a few months ago at the beginning of the real estate collapse there.
China is a bad example for many reasons. It is not really a market economy. There are extreme levels of corruption at all levels of the government. The real estate bubble has been growing for a long time at this point and the whole industry was marred with bad practices that eventually lead to the present state. I am no expert in the Chinese banking system, but I have heard about deep problems in there as well, which, I'd assume, would be at least partially tied to the corruption, poor regulation and poor enforcement of regulation. In such a situation when the whole real estate industry is collapsing due to the issues that have been ignored for more than a decade it would be odd not to expect it to negatively affect the banking sector also in the form of bank runs.
> It is good that we "believe" bank runs don't or are not going to happen and that is the whole idea.
It is indeed good that we have this belief. But it's also the result of the banking system's stability (even with all these crises). These two things reinforce each other.
I do agree with that. But it has become an extremely rare occurrence that usually indicates some deeper problems.
> A lot of banks in Europe during the 2008+ crisis -- which is why "capital controls" were enforced.
Well, one of the root causes of the whole crisis was deregulation, poor enforcement of regulations and "new" financial instruments that allowed for circumventing regulations.
> People attempted runs on Chinese banks a few months ago at the beginning of the real estate collapse there.
China is a bad example for many reasons. It is not really a market economy. There are extreme levels of corruption at all levels of the government. The real estate bubble has been growing for a long time at this point and the whole industry was marred with bad practices that eventually lead to the present state. I am no expert in the Chinese banking system, but I have heard about deep problems in there as well, which, I'd assume, would be at least partially tied to the corruption, poor regulation and poor enforcement of regulation. In such a situation when the whole real estate industry is collapsing due to the issues that have been ignored for more than a decade it would be odd not to expect it to negatively affect the banking sector also in the form of bank runs.
> It is good that we "believe" bank runs don't or are not going to happen and that is the whole idea.
It is indeed good that we have this belief. But it's also the result of the banking system's stability (even with all these crises). These two things reinforce each other.
There is already USDC, USDT, DAI that are all US dollars.
I use Argent wallet for payments between friends using them and it is a nice experience (especially because Venmo and Cash both aren't available outside the USA), the friction is sending them to and from a traditional bank account, you currently have to use an exchange - but this will change soon.
I use Argent wallet for payments between friends using them and it is a nice experience (especially because Venmo and Cash both aren't available outside the USA), the friction is sending them to and from a traditional bank account, you currently have to use an exchange - but this will change soon.
> There is already USDC, USDT, DAI that are all US dollars.
They would dearly like you to believe that they are dollars.
To date the dollar-backing of USDT at least has not been substantiated and I don't think I know anyone in the cryptocurrency space who thinks any of those are actually real and responsible--they're just trying not to be the ones caught with the bag when the music stops and actual money is called in.
They would dearly like you to believe that they are dollars.
To date the dollar-backing of USDT at least has not been substantiated and I don't think I know anyone in the cryptocurrency space who thinks any of those are actually real and responsible--they're just trying not to be the ones caught with the bag when the music stops and actual money is called in.
> I think there would be value but we neeed a real currency(i.e usd) on the blockchain.
So making sure I understand, there’s no value today?
So making sure I understand, there’s no value today?
I fail to see any value other than fliping "worthless" coins. The coins fliping is not working great either which is the reason we have binance and ftx. The real value seems to be for money launderying and scam payments though so there is indeed some value.
Crypto payments for real businesses is not feasible. I've tried that and the volatility and transaction fees makes them unusuable.
It is a neat property but lines like this trip me up: "it's incredible how fast the DeFi space is moving because of it".
The crypto/dapp/defi/etc spaces have supposedly been "moving incredibly fast" and "all the smartest people are working on it" for ~5 years now. That's a long time to be moving really fast without really getting anywhere. Where's the payoff?
To me this space feels like a solution without a real problem. The decentralized part is a neat trick, but on the margin a centralized authority to mediate financial platforms is more good than bad.
The crypto/dapp/defi/etc spaces have supposedly been "moving incredibly fast" and "all the smartest people are working on it" for ~5 years now. That's a long time to be moving really fast without really getting anywhere. Where's the payoff?
To me this space feels like a solution without a real problem. The decentralized part is a neat trick, but on the margin a centralized authority to mediate financial platforms is more good than bad.
I feel the "value" of DeFi only appears once all the scams have broken - and then only if there is actual value in trading crypto beyond just buying drugs or whatever people used to do with bitcoin before it was "popular".
And these arguments are being made just as the crypto industry is imploding all around us. Gives new meaning to the motto "move fast and break things".
> controlled by no one, with standardized API's
Controlled by no one, but suddenly standardized APIs exist. Who standardized them?
Controlled by no one, but suddenly everyone is going to use those standardized APIs that appeared by magic. And even those entities that never ever used open or standardized APIs will rush to use them because blockchain.
> We've never had this before, and it's incredible how fast the DeFi space is moving because of it
Theres nothing amazing about companies busy reinventing flash loans and currency speculation.
> This is a radical new way of building finance and it's the fastest paced industry I've ever been a part of.
It's only fast because it deals in fantasy tokens in a very limited scope with zero oversight or regulation. And this space is busy re-discovering why these regulations exist in the first place.
> Like AWS people didn't understand the value initially
Most people understood AWS value initially. 2-3 years after launch everyone understood AWS. Now everyone uses it.
AWS provided, and still provides, a multitude of services that are actually useful. Where as the "fast moving space" offers nothing outside the "buy low sell high flash loan" hamster wheel that is "defi"?
> I think a lot of HN doesn't get it because they don't work in finance, but everyone I've talked to who works in finance (or has to deal with their archaic systems) is really excited about the possibilities.
There are very very few people in finance who are excited about it. For many, many, many reasons.
Those who are excited are excited for all the wrong reasons: scams, speculations, unlimited investor money. The last one will probably go away soon. Speculations are only valuable as long as the fictional tokens are valuable for some definition of value. There's almost nothing else in the crypto space.
Controlled by no one, but suddenly standardized APIs exist. Who standardized them?
Controlled by no one, but suddenly everyone is going to use those standardized APIs that appeared by magic. And even those entities that never ever used open or standardized APIs will rush to use them because blockchain.
> We've never had this before, and it's incredible how fast the DeFi space is moving because of it
Theres nothing amazing about companies busy reinventing flash loans and currency speculation.
> This is a radical new way of building finance and it's the fastest paced industry I've ever been a part of.
It's only fast because it deals in fantasy tokens in a very limited scope with zero oversight or regulation. And this space is busy re-discovering why these regulations exist in the first place.
> Like AWS people didn't understand the value initially
Most people understood AWS value initially. 2-3 years after launch everyone understood AWS. Now everyone uses it.
AWS provided, and still provides, a multitude of services that are actually useful. Where as the "fast moving space" offers nothing outside the "buy low sell high flash loan" hamster wheel that is "defi"?
> I think a lot of HN doesn't get it because they don't work in finance, but everyone I've talked to who works in finance (or has to deal with their archaic systems) is really excited about the possibilities.
There are very very few people in finance who are excited about it. For many, many, many reasons.
Those who are excited are excited for all the wrong reasons: scams, speculations, unlimited investor money. The last one will probably go away soon. Speculations are only valuable as long as the fictional tokens are valuable for some definition of value. There's almost nothing else in the crypto space.
You're dead on. It's staggering in its power -- permissionless composability, even if most of the data is not on-chain, and the programs are very limited in size/complexity due to the expense of running them.
Now, imagine a system where all of the data is also on-chain, and the programs you can compose are full-complexity applications... All while maintaining every independent program's data invariant in a completely decentralized manner, with transaction rates that grow linearly with the DHT size.
Such a system is now in public beta. It could be world-changing (at least for programmers).
Now, imagine a system where all of the data is also on-chain, and the programs you can compose are full-complexity applications... All while maintaining every independent program's data invariant in a completely decentralized manner, with transaction rates that grow linearly with the DHT size.
Such a system is now in public beta. It could be world-changing (at least for programmers).
How is permissionless composability different from the MIT license? I'm confused what you're composing now that you couldn't before and the benefit of that permissionless composability. Ecosystems of programming libraries and compostable abstractions don't require a blockchain as far as I can tell.
The big difference is that a smart contract is a running, stateful, immutable piece of software. Alternatively, I can run software with an MIT license by myself, but I can always modify the data or API without any approval of the users.
In practice almost every vaguely live protocol has god mode where some "Sam" can upgrade the contract to whatever they want, because bug risk in immutable contracts is too high (VCs who fund the projects don't want to be sued for bugs). So this becomes functionally equivalent to a SQL server just slow and taking 100x the server capacity.
This is interesting. Essentially a reference piece of software where anyone on the network can run the exact same bits (assuming they have compatible hardware). But also the ability to extend or compose where the new system will also have a reference identity.
This may have use in defining standards. You could have a standards authority without any actual standards body. Free but standard.
This may have use in defining standards. You could have a standards authority without any actual standards body. Free but standard.
It's like the MIT license, plus AWS with an unlimited account and auto-scaling.
In the case of self-hosted Apps (ie. where you need to "install" something on your phone or computer), each peer provides their own compute/storage/networking to host their own usage of the App, plus a small fragment of everyone else's usage (proportional to a few average user's worth).
So, the cost to each user is a small constant C times the average user's utilization. And the benefit is that the application persists, in its entirety, as long as any number of users >= 1 continue to use the App.
In the case of self-hosted Apps (ie. where you need to "install" something on your phone or computer), each peer provides their own compute/storage/networking to host their own usage of the App, plus a small fragment of everyone else's usage (proportional to a few average user's worth).
So, the cost to each user is a small constant C times the average user's utilization. And the benefit is that the application persists, in its entirety, as long as any number of users >= 1 continue to use the App.
It’s not really an unlimited account. Execution on eth is expensive…
It's like AWS serverless compute with inefficiency built-in as a feature and a jacked-up billing rate.
This concept is very interesting. Is there an existing framework that implements this? It would seem there would need to be some baseline tools for development on such a system.
I feel like the tools available for this purpose would need to be more powerful than existing IDE systems in order for it to be adopted on a wide scale.
Is it possible to design such a system without a blockchain?
I feel like the tools available for this purpose would need to be more powerful than existing IDE systems in order for it to be adopted on a wide scale.
Is it possible to design such a system without a blockchain?
Yes, in the case of Ethereum "DeFi", the end user is expected to pay the (significant) cost of executing functionality.
For next-gen "DeFi" systems like Holochain -- the incremental cost of executing functionality is vanishingly small, and can be distributed across a DHT substrate hosted by all users of the App.
A self hosted Holochain "DeFi" app costs a small constant factor C times the average agent's memory / network / storage cost, to each client.
In other words, you gain the benefit of the "DeFi" version of App for yourself, by investing a small C x your own cost to run the App for yourself, alone.
For next-gen "DeFi" systems like Holochain -- the incremental cost of executing functionality is vanishingly small, and can be distributed across a DHT substrate hosted by all users of the App.
A self hosted Holochain "DeFi" app costs a small constant factor C times the average agent's memory / network / storage cost, to each client.
In other words, you gain the benefit of the "DeFi" version of App for yourself, by investing a small C x your own cost to run the App for yourself, alone.
> It could be world-changing (at least for programmers).
If you don’t mind, could you give an example for a programmer who isn’t building finance or crypto related applications? I think that would help me understand what we’re talking about.
If you don’t mind, could you give an example for a programmer who isn’t building finance or crypto related applications? I think that would help me understand what we’re talking about.
https://twitter.com/pjkundert/status/1590009435619217413
The clutter.social App is a decentralized Twitter-like app implemented on Holochain. This one is hosted on https://holo.host (only in public Beta, so it doesn't scale automatically), but illustrates a full-complexity app that is deployed. You can compose this (eg. re-skin it, or build it into another app as a commenting back-end), without having to copy the implementation or host the data.
You can also "clone" such an app (with or without any functional changes) and host that fork yourself (eg. on a company’s or family's computers), and nobody can stop you.
The clutter.social App is a decentralized Twitter-like app implemented on Holochain. This one is hosted on https://holo.host (only in public Beta, so it doesn't scale automatically), but illustrates a full-complexity app that is deployed. You can compose this (eg. re-skin it, or build it into another app as a commenting back-end), without having to copy the implementation or host the data.
You can also "clone" such an app (with or without any functional changes) and host that fork yourself (eg. on a company’s or family's computers), and nobody can stop you.
Who pays the hosting bills for the app? If whoever is responsible fails to pay the hosting bills, presumably the app will cease to function and perhaps even disappear? When I fork it, do I maintain my ability to communicate with users who live on the "source" app?
The App's current owner(s) pay, of course. For traditional "installed" Apps, this could easily be the current (and new) end-users of the App. For a purely hosted app (eg. an App that serves web clients), hosting must be arranged.
If the App has no revenue model to pay for hosting, perhaps don't use it (embed it) within your app? That would be a risk.
If you "fork" it, then you're responsible to host it -- if it isn't hosted by each client App installation already. The "forked" version of the App hosts its own DHT, so its data is completely distinct from the original.
So, yes: there are decisions to be made, but they revolve around long-term viability of the encapsulated/forked App -- not the fundamental possibility of doing so.
If the App has no revenue model to pay for hosting, perhaps don't use it (embed it) within your app? That would be a risk.
If you "fork" it, then you're responsible to host it -- if it isn't hosted by each client App installation already. The "forked" version of the App hosts its own DHT, so its data is completely distinct from the original.
So, yes: there are decisions to be made, but they revolve around long-term viability of the encapsulated/forked App -- not the fundamental possibility of doing so.
It is somehow telling that you link to a Twitter post instead to a post on clutter.social.
Yup. This is a web app (so, hosting is required), and it was built in a few days by a newbie and is hosted on a few machines by some randos.
But, isn't that ... interesting? That something like this could be built and deployed and -- theoretically scale globally?
Just think of what could be done with a bit of planning and a (tiny) revenue model?
But, isn't that ... interesting? That something like this could be built and deployed and -- theoretically scale globally?
Just think of what could be done with a bit of planning and a (tiny) revenue model?
> Yup. This is a web app (so, hosting is required), and it was built in a few days by a newbie and is hosted on a few machines by some randos. But, isn't that ... interesting? That something like this could be built and deployed and -- theoretically scale globally?
Sure. It is interesting that someone can build a web app, host it on temporary machines, and then one day scale it into a major business model.
That's not new to blockchain. That's how the internet works at a fundamental level. What specifically drives blockchain to be useful or novel or interesting in this model? How is this application better for being on chain?
Sure. It is interesting that someone can build a web app, host it on temporary machines, and then one day scale it into a major business model.
That's not new to blockchain. That's how the internet works at a fundamental level. What specifically drives blockchain to be useful or novel or interesting in this model? How is this application better for being on chain?
Because: this specific App (not "something like" it, but this one written in a few days by a newbie), could potentially scale to 1B users -- and nobody could stop it. Some static assets would need to be tuned in a real App, to be hosted by a CDN like Cloudflare (or, possibly provided by the App's hosting nodes themselves if no CDN is desired), but the App itself would scale.
If a certain fraction of those users decided to install it (instead of use it via the Web interface), this scaling would be "free" -- paid for by the eg. 10% who installed it.
I've been doing this professionally for 40 years, 30 of which I've spend searching for solutions to specific problems in this domain. I was there in '09 and downloaded Satoshi's reference implementation, and again in '15 for Ethereum; that's "blockchain"; what you call "being on chain". They didn't solve the problems I was trying to find solutions for (scalable consistency in occasionally connected systems).
This is new.
If a certain fraction of those users decided to install it (instead of use it via the Web interface), this scaling would be "free" -- paid for by the eg. 10% who installed it.
I've been doing this professionally for 40 years, 30 of which I've spend searching for solutions to specific problems in this domain. I was there in '09 and downloaded Satoshi's reference implementation, and again in '15 for Ethereum; that's "blockchain"; what you call "being on chain". They didn't solve the problems I was trying to find solutions for (scalable consistency in occasionally connected systems).
This is new.
> could potentially scale to 1B users -- and nobody could stop it. Some static assets would need to be tuned in a real App, to be hosted by a CDN like Cloudflare
You've just show at least one way how it would be stopped. Who exactly is going to pay for static assets delivered to 1B users via Cloudflare?
> but the App itself would scale.
Of course it wouldn't. None of the blockchains have the required throughput. Yes, they want you to believe they have it, but they don't.
> that's "blockchain"; what you call "being on chain". They didn't solve the problems
> This is new.
So they didn't solve the problems, but somehow this "app by a newbie" is suddenly solving all these problems and "scales to 1B users" because blockchain?
Oh. And it doesn't scale because you can't even link to a post on it because "someone needs to pay for hosting". So it couldn't scale beyond a single user?
You've just show at least one way how it would be stopped. Who exactly is going to pay for static assets delivered to 1B users via Cloudflare?
> but the App itself would scale.
Of course it wouldn't. None of the blockchains have the required throughput. Yes, they want you to believe they have it, but they don't.
> that's "blockchain"; what you call "being on chain". They didn't solve the problems
> This is new.
So they didn't solve the problems, but somehow this "app by a newbie" is suddenly solving all these problems and "scales to 1B users" because blockchain?
Oh. And it doesn't scale because you can't even link to a post on it because "someone needs to pay for hosting". So it couldn't scale beyond a single user?
Hmm, okay. For others that come later in search of information, I'll address some of these.
> ... one way it can be stopped.
Yes, this newbie developer made some decisions that couldn't scale to 1B users. Alternatively, each node can serve static assets, thus scaling linearly w/o CDNs. This isn't required for most apps, as they aren't targets for state-level actors seeking to deplatform them from CDNs. But, if a totally free client self-hosted app is desired, this is possible.
> ... None of the blockchains have the required throughput.
Obviously. That's why "this is new." Blockchains enforcing global consensus on a "total order" of unrelated events cannot: the laws of physics forbid it, besides it being wasteful and unnecessary. Holochain does not enforce such unnecessary "total order" consensus; it is not necessary, as it turns out, for maintaining state consistency in distributed systems. That is the breakthrough. This is a low-research "Bro" comment.
> ... can't even link to ... it because "someone needs to pay for hosting"
Ya, I was just being considerate. It's a newbie's app, hosted by a few people.
The point is, there is something new going on here; something that some hackers on HN might be interested in. I know the 2018 "Me" would have been interested!
If you're not, that's fine - carry on! However, no more low-research "Bro" comments, okay? ... Ah, I see that you are rabidly anti-Crypto, and that's fine: fill your boots! But, for those visitors who are interested in amazing things, don't be discouraged! There are indeed new things happening here that are worth investigating.
> ... one way it can be stopped.
Yes, this newbie developer made some decisions that couldn't scale to 1B users. Alternatively, each node can serve static assets, thus scaling linearly w/o CDNs. This isn't required for most apps, as they aren't targets for state-level actors seeking to deplatform them from CDNs. But, if a totally free client self-hosted app is desired, this is possible.
> ... None of the blockchains have the required throughput.
Obviously. That's why "this is new." Blockchains enforcing global consensus on a "total order" of unrelated events cannot: the laws of physics forbid it, besides it being wasteful and unnecessary. Holochain does not enforce such unnecessary "total order" consensus; it is not necessary, as it turns out, for maintaining state consistency in distributed systems. That is the breakthrough. This is a low-research "Bro" comment.
> ... can't even link to ... it because "someone needs to pay for hosting"
Ya, I was just being considerate. It's a newbie's app, hosted by a few people.
The point is, there is something new going on here; something that some hackers on HN might be interested in. I know the 2018 "Me" would have been interested!
If you're not, that's fine - carry on! However, no more low-research "Bro" comments, okay? ... Ah, I see that you are rabidly anti-Crypto, and that's fine: fill your boots! But, for those visitors who are interested in amazing things, don't be discouraged! There are indeed new things happening here that are worth investigating.
> Obviously. That's why "this is new." Blockchains enforcing global consensus on a "total order" of unrelated events cannot: the laws of physics forbid it, besides it being wasteful and unnecessary. Holochain does not enforce such unnecessary "total order" consensus; it is not necessary, as it turns out, for maintaining state consistency in distributed systems. That is the breakthrough. This is a low-research "Bro" comment.
I really want to see the peer reviewed research published in respectable science publications.
Otherwise this stuff is a dime a dozen like battery breakthroughs.
This is the kind of thing that gets that person Nobel prizes and Turing awards.
Odds are 99.999999% that whoever's against this thing is right and it's just vaporware or dead ends somewhere months of years down the line.
In any case, go have fun meanwhile, any lesson is good, including about what NOT to do :-)
I really want to see the peer reviewed research published in respectable science publications.
Otherwise this stuff is a dime a dozen like battery breakthroughs.
This is the kind of thing that gets that person Nobel prizes and Turing awards.
Odds are 99.999999% that whoever's against this thing is right and it's just vaporware or dead ends somewhere months of years down the line.
In any case, go have fun meanwhile, any lesson is good, including about what NOT to do :-)
It unsurprising how you went from "could potentially scale to 1B users -- and nobody could stop it, this is new" to "of course it cannot scale, but this is still new"
So what exactly is new, and how can it scale?
Note: for a newbie Glitch and Itch are infinitely more scalable, and more innovative.
So what exactly is new, and how can it scale?
Note: for a newbie Glitch and Itch are infinitely more scalable, and more innovative.
What’s the use case for this? I’m not seeing it.
You see no benefit in Apps that cannot be "disappeared" by anyone (even the person who deployed it), and which scales without bound and can be composed (re-skinned or extended) without restriction? Or, forked and restricted to your own cryptographically identified and secured set of users?
What is the value proposition of "can't be disappeared by anyone" exactly? Reversibility and deletability are actually features of most systems.
Scales without bound is cool, but generally lacks use and is expensive. I would rather scale to my actual usage bounds rather than paying for infinite scalability.
Composed without restriction is cool, but I got that with the MIT and BSD licenses. Forked and restricted has already been possible using traditional open-source computer infrastructure.
Scales without bound is cool, but generally lacks use and is expensive. I would rather scale to my actual usage bounds rather than paying for infinite scalability.
Composed without restriction is cool, but I got that with the MIT and BSD licenses. Forked and restricted has already been possible using traditional open-source computer infrastructure.
Can you answer the question with use cases and examples instead of this rhetorical question? It doesn't help your credibility when you can't list off 10-20 use cases and examples for your groundbreaking technology without contorting yourself.
OK, I’ve always considered these types of questions as disingenuous. But, enough people seem to disagree.
So, at risk of stating the obvious:
- Avoid risk of accidental/malicious deplatforming
- Personal control of all data, avoiding incompetence/malfeasance presenting faulty data
- Deploying enhanced presentation of existing functionality and data cannot be restricted
- Reuse of existing functionality in private environments can’t be prevented
- Guarantee that results based on trees of publicly committed data are themselves valid, without personally traversing the tree and recomputing results
- …
As I write this, I’m struggling to comprehend how these benefits aren’t obvious.
Maybe it’s because I’ve been searching for solutions to these problems since the early 90’s for distributed industrial control and monitoring. But seriously, I’m certain lots of developers run into these constraints and are seeking solutions.
So, at risk of stating the obvious:
- Avoid risk of accidental/malicious deplatforming
- Personal control of all data, avoiding incompetence/malfeasance presenting faulty data
- Deploying enhanced presentation of existing functionality and data cannot be restricted
- Reuse of existing functionality in private environments can’t be prevented
- Guarantee that results based on trees of publicly committed data are themselves valid, without personally traversing the tree and recomputing results
- …
As I write this, I’m struggling to comprehend how these benefits aren’t obvious.
Maybe it’s because I’ve been searching for solutions to these problems since the early 90’s for distributed industrial control and monitoring. But seriously, I’m certain lots of developers run into these constraints and are seeking solutions.
None of those are things people care about, though, outside of a tiny niche.
Most people find it pretty easy to avoid getting kicked off social media, and even if they do, it doesn't affect them.
Likewise, "personal control of data" is meaningless. It's not like you can prevent people from taking the data and doing things with it.
I struggle to think of any actual use cases for your last three points that don't boil down to FUD.
Blockchain is neat, but it has no real use outside of extracting money from other people involuntarily.
Most people find it pretty easy to avoid getting kicked off social media, and even if they do, it doesn't affect them.
Likewise, "personal control of data" is meaningless. It's not like you can prevent people from taking the data and doing things with it.
I struggle to think of any actual use cases for your last three points that don't boil down to FUD.
Blockchain is neat, but it has no real use outside of extracting money from other people involuntarily.
At this very moment, reasonable people are debating the very real possibility that Twitter could be removed from both the Apple and Google app stores.
So, doesn't that astonishing fact deny pretty much every claim in your post?
Crazies (the least perjorative term I could think of) that have the power to eject an App used by hundreds of millions of people, from those people's own platform, are dangerous -- to our liberty.
And, when people are starving, and are forced to use only their oppressive regime's worthless money: these issues put citizens' lives at risk.
So, yes: these are things people care about. Many just don't yet realize they could be the victims of these dangerous bullies forcing these sub-standard tools on them.
So, doesn't that astonishing fact deny pretty much every claim in your post?
Crazies (the least perjorative term I could think of) that have the power to eject an App used by hundreds of millions of people, from those people's own platform, are dangerous -- to our liberty.
And, when people are starving, and are forced to use only their oppressive regime's worthless money: these issues put citizens' lives at risk.
So, yes: these are things people care about. Many just don't yet realize they could be the victims of these dangerous bullies forcing these sub-standard tools on them.
No, and saying it's "astonishing" and "it's a threat to liberty" is ridiculous and incredibly overdramatic.
It's just an app. Companies rise and fall, it's how it works. We lived just fine before it, we will be just fine after.
Something will replace Twitter just like something replaced Friendster and MySpace.
It's just an app. Companies rise and fall, it's how it works. We lived just fine before it, we will be just fine after.
Something will replace Twitter just like something replaced Friendster and MySpace.
A specific application I'm working on right now involves using Crypto for direct payments between software Licensees (end users) and the App developer.
Presently, there is a high risk of loss of income (see: every small individual Russian or Iranian software developer. Their families are now suffering because their income has been shut off, even though this is a textbook example of "Group Punishment" under the Geneva Convention. If I had decided to send some of my company's income to the Canadian "Freedom Convoy", my family's income would also have also been summarily cut off, without trial or conviction in a court of law).
So, like it or not: there are innocent individual who, due to no fault of their own, cannot use "TradFi" -- "DeFi" is their only alternative to achieve an income to care for their families.
Using a trivial Ethereum Smart Contract, a single-use Ethereum wallet address is generated for a set of payees (eg. the software author(s) and any number of other license fee recipients) designated to receive a proportion of an Ethereum fee payment. When the payment is received at the designated address -- the software License is generated, and any one of the payees can trigger the "smart contract" executing distribution of the fees to each of the payees' accounts, without being able to change the proportional distribution.
None of this is possible under "TradFi". All of it (except for the automatic generation of the License) is possible under Ethereum "DeFi". The entire application (including automatic, atomic generation of the License and distribution of fees) is possible under Holochain.
In all honesty -- whenever I hear "Crypto is a solution in search of a problem", I really have trouble not rolling my eyes. Perhaps that's not nice. But seriously; if you're here on HN, I have higher expectations of you. If you're enraged by this; perhaps there may be other forums more appropriate for you?
:)
Presently, there is a high risk of loss of income (see: every small individual Russian or Iranian software developer. Their families are now suffering because their income has been shut off, even though this is a textbook example of "Group Punishment" under the Geneva Convention. If I had decided to send some of my company's income to the Canadian "Freedom Convoy", my family's income would also have also been summarily cut off, without trial or conviction in a court of law).
So, like it or not: there are innocent individual who, due to no fault of their own, cannot use "TradFi" -- "DeFi" is their only alternative to achieve an income to care for their families.
Using a trivial Ethereum Smart Contract, a single-use Ethereum wallet address is generated for a set of payees (eg. the software author(s) and any number of other license fee recipients) designated to receive a proportion of an Ethereum fee payment. When the payment is received at the designated address -- the software License is generated, and any one of the payees can trigger the "smart contract" executing distribution of the fees to each of the payees' accounts, without being able to change the proportional distribution.
None of this is possible under "TradFi". All of it (except for the automatic generation of the License) is possible under Ethereum "DeFi". The entire application (including automatic, atomic generation of the License and distribution of fees) is possible under Holochain.
In all honesty -- whenever I hear "Crypto is a solution in search of a problem", I really have trouble not rolling my eyes. Perhaps that's not nice. But seriously; if you're here on HN, I have higher expectations of you. If you're enraged by this; perhaps there may be other forums more appropriate for you?
:)
Defi doesn't solve this at all. It is currently illegal for me and a lot of the world to buy software from Iran and Russia. Using blockchain to circumvent the law is the only use case people can scrape together.
It doesn't matter if blockchain allows you to break the law. You are still breaking the law and punishments exists outside of the chain.
Blockchain enthusiasts get confused between "a solution" and a "better solution". A car with an airplane propeller engine is technically a solution that solves a use case of getting a person from point a to point b, but is it the best solution when compared to current cars? Right now the crypto industry is slapping all sorts of stuff on and then just because their car makes it down the street, suddenly they think somebody in africa who never had a car before will want it.
The use case you describe has been beaten over and over in crypto over the past 5-7 years. DRM. Its old news. But no major company wants anything to do with it. Its a social problem not a technical one.
Blockchain is an engineers wet dream. Infinite solutions that make theoretical sense and the math works, but lack any way to solve the current problems better.
It doesn't matter if blockchain allows you to break the law. You are still breaking the law and punishments exists outside of the chain.
Blockchain enthusiasts get confused between "a solution" and a "better solution". A car with an airplane propeller engine is technically a solution that solves a use case of getting a person from point a to point b, but is it the best solution when compared to current cars? Right now the crypto industry is slapping all sorts of stuff on and then just because their car makes it down the street, suddenly they think somebody in africa who never had a car before will want it.
The use case you describe has been beaten over and over in crypto over the past 5-7 years. DRM. Its old news. But no major company wants anything to do with it. Its a social problem not a technical one.
Blockchain is an engineers wet dream. Infinite solutions that make theoretical sense and the math works, but lack any way to solve the current problems better.
Unfortunately, while many people believe this to be true -- there is nothing legally or morally wrong with you purchasing software from a small Russian or Iranian software developer. How do we know this, you ask?
In fact, the entire Open Source (and most Closed Source) stacks depend on this fact, including the stacks underlying the entire US Government's (and its Military's) operations. Which functions on large amounts of software (free and paid) from Russian individual developers.
So, any demand by them (or any other government) that you personally cannot pay Yegor the Russian for his little Python package is morally, logically, legally and practically ridiculous.
And "DeFi" absolutely does solve this problem.
The fact that "all the baaaad people" can also use "DeFi" is immaterial. Just like you, too, can buy and use a windowless white van.
In fact, the entire Open Source (and most Closed Source) stacks depend on this fact, including the stacks underlying the entire US Government's (and its Military's) operations. Which functions on large amounts of software (free and paid) from Russian individual developers.
So, any demand by them (or any other government) that you personally cannot pay Yegor the Russian for his little Python package is morally, logically, legally and practically ridiculous.
And "DeFi" absolutely does solve this problem.
The fact that "all the baaaad people" can also use "DeFi" is immaterial. Just like you, too, can buy and use a windowless white van.
> morally, logically, legally and practically ridiculous.
Well i mean thats your opinion not the facts. There is a whole web of regulations when dealing with those countries and if they are allowed to buy from you.
There are even more laws around money movement and debt and financing.
Just declaring "it shouldnt be that way. it is unfair" doesn't change the laws.
Well i mean thats your opinion not the facts. There is a whole web of regulations when dealing with those countries and if they are allowed to buy from you.
There are even more laws around money movement and debt and financing.
Just declaring "it shouldnt be that way. it is unfair" doesn't change the laws.
Conversely, declaring "this is the law" doesn't change the fact that the Bitcoin or Ethereum networks process these transactions anyway.
> In all honesty -- whenever I hear "Crypto is a solution in search of a problem", I really have trouble not rolling my eyes.
..and some of us can't help but roll our eyes when we hear yet another crypto use case being skirting government laws / regulations.
..and some of us can't help but roll our eyes when we hear yet another crypto use case being skirting government laws / regulations.
In my opinion, removing the last paragraph would improve your post immensely. It would be a shame if the post got downvoted to oblivion because of it.
I agree.
But, my last 30 years of laissez faire has resulted in forums like HN becoming toxic with smug "Crypto is a solution in search of a problem" and "told ya Crypto was all a scam, yer dumb" Bros, yelling low-research insults without anyone pushing back on them...
So, I'll leave it. If only the "Eternal September" crowd is allowed to be comfortable here (because we all just "let them have their opinion", as usual), we know what happens.
But, my last 30 years of laissez faire has resulted in forums like HN becoming toxic with smug "Crypto is a solution in search of a problem" and "told ya Crypto was all a scam, yer dumb" Bros, yelling low-research insults without anyone pushing back on them...
So, I'll leave it. If only the "Eternal September" crowd is allowed to be comfortable here (because we all just "let them have their opinion", as usual), we know what happens.
> So, I'll leave it. If only the "Eternal September" crowd is allowed to be comfortable here (because we all just "let them have their opinion", as usual), we know what happens.
Smug-o, not all of us here were born yesterday.
This is actually the wrong audience as the concentration of people who have been around the block a while is higher than for the average internet community.
Smug-o, not all of us here were born yesterday.
This is actually the wrong audience as the concentration of people who have been around the block a while is higher than for the average internet community.
> yelling low-research insults without anyone pushing back on them...
You'd think that in the past 14 years anyone would come up with a well-researched eloquent push back to the multitude of actually well researched eloquent questions that have been frequently asked of crypto enthusiasts.
However, all we get back is utter drivel, cultlike devotion, and "just join the discords".
The time of of eloquent questions has long passed. There is now a 0.999999999999999999999999 probabilty of anything crypto-related to be a scam, a solution in search of a problem, or a solution that ignores or is oblivious of the real world.
It's on crypto enthuiasts to prove that their latest scam du-jour isn't a scam, and is an actual solution.
You'd think that in the past 14 years anyone would come up with a well-researched eloquent push back to the multitude of actually well researched eloquent questions that have been frequently asked of crypto enthusiasts.
However, all we get back is utter drivel, cultlike devotion, and "just join the discords".
The time of of eloquent questions has long passed. There is now a 0.999999999999999999999999 probabilty of anything crypto-related to be a scam, a solution in search of a problem, or a solution that ignores or is oblivious of the real world.
It's on crypto enthuiasts to prove that their latest scam du-jour isn't a scam, and is an actual solution.
Someone still has to convert the Eth to local currency for the person to have an income no? The dev has to find someone willing to exchange local currency for the eth - same as if someone had gifted a video game skin and now has to find someone to exchange it to local currency.
So … circumventing sanctions?
Absolutely none of this is obvious.
What does "permissionless composability" in DeFi mean, if not this?
Sure, its very expensive presently under the Ethereum version of "DeFi". Just like the original motorcar was expensive and fragile, and would break your arm occasionally while you crank-started it.
Now, if the cost basis of each "DeFi" transaction is reduced by 5 orders of magnitude (see: Ethereum vs. Holochain) -- what are the potential outcomes of that?
Sure, its very expensive presently under the Ethereum version of "DeFi". Just like the original motorcar was expensive and fragile, and would break your arm occasionally while you crank-started it.
Now, if the cost basis of each "DeFi" transaction is reduced by 5 orders of magnitude (see: Ethereum vs. Holochain) -- what are the potential outcomes of that?
I have no idea what "permissionless composability" means. "Permissionless" isn't even a word (without permission or permission-less to be pedantic), and I can think of several overlapping contexts that those words could be meaningful in finance and/or software.
The problem is the language you're using sounds like bullshit.
The problem is the language you're using sounds like bullshit.
Ah, sorry! Mea culpa. Permissioned vs. permissionless systems has been used for so long in my circles that I thought it was a thing...
Even "DeFi" systems may not be permissionless, though. It's just that the permissions are visible constraints (ie. in the code) -- not just randos deciding to deplatform you because, you know, "reasons".
This is an emerging risk to eg. Ethereum. Now, most "Staking" validators are "OFAC compliant". Does this mean that eventually the Ethereum blockchain will orphan any wallet that contains any Eth that went through the Tornado Cash mixer?
What if you decided to compose the Tornado Cash mixer into your payment app, to maintain some anonymity in the face of a repressive regime say throwing gay people off roof tops? Would you consider a permissionless system bad, in that case? Because, OFAC decrees that you are currently a criminal (and guilty without charge or trial) if you do so. What if they decide, next week, that whatever you do presently use is now verboten?
So, these concepts aren't "bullshit"; they are a present, serious concern to free peoples around the globe.
Even "DeFi" systems may not be permissionless, though. It's just that the permissions are visible constraints (ie. in the code) -- not just randos deciding to deplatform you because, you know, "reasons".
This is an emerging risk to eg. Ethereum. Now, most "Staking" validators are "OFAC compliant". Does this mean that eventually the Ethereum blockchain will orphan any wallet that contains any Eth that went through the Tornado Cash mixer?
What if you decided to compose the Tornado Cash mixer into your payment app, to maintain some anonymity in the face of a repressive regime say throwing gay people off roof tops? Would you consider a permissionless system bad, in that case? Because, OFAC decrees that you are currently a criminal (and guilty without charge or trial) if you do so. What if they decide, next week, that whatever you do presently use is now verboten?
So, these concepts aren't "bullshit"; they are a present, serious concern to free peoples around the globe.
Just a meta note, what I'm saying is that you need to work on your communication. This reply is logically disjoint and succumbs to the problem that I was mentioning - the use of imprecise and confusing language or jargon. If you combine that with jumps to conclusions and pretend certain things are self-evident, it sounds like bullshit. It's how hucksters talk.
I didn't say that what you were talking about was bullshit. I said the language you used made it sound like it.
I didn't say that what you were talking about was bullshit. I said the language you used made it sound like it.
> It's just that the permissions are visible constraints (ie. in the code) -- not just randos deciding to deplatform you because, you know, "reasons".
Those "reasons" are called market forces and law.
Law is, you know, written, it's very complex (people are complex), but not some hidden thing.
Market forces are more abstract but they're the thing making human systems work.
Those "reasons" are called market forces and law.
Law is, you know, written, it's very complex (people are complex), but not some hidden thing.
Market forces are more abstract but they're the thing making human systems work.
My best guess is that unless the rules around large-scale finance change, in the end permissionless composability will go away and the platforms will get controls of some sort, e.g, who can do what, reporting requirements, KYC, ... And that also does not have to come just from direct rules, but could come via capital requirements when touching such systems or users of such systems.
> Having one neutral platform, controlled by no one, with standardized API's and immutable open programs that anyone can permissionlessly build on - is amazing.
Isn't that also an open door to bad actors?
Isn't that also an open door to bad actors?
For sure, it's the same principles as the internet, and that unfortunately is why there are so many bad actors in the space.
There are companies and technologies being created to mitigate them just like how the internet spawned anti-(virus/spam/malware) companies. On the early internet with ActiveX, Flash, and few firewalls it was so easy to get exploited and this is the phase of DeFi we're in now, but it will get better over time.
There are companies and technologies being created to mitigate them just like how the internet spawned anti-(virus/spam/malware) companies. On the early internet with ActiveX, Flash, and few firewalls it was so easy to get exploited and this is the phase of DeFi we're in now, but it will get better over time.
Freedom always is.
Define bad actor.
What is the benefit of deploying something on a platform controlled by no one? Why not just run all of those things on a server you own?
One benefit is that you can more credibly offer to keep your promises. I haven’t audited Uniswap’s smart contract code, but if I did I feel I could be pretty confident they won’t steal my money. Meanwhile, users of FTX depended on government regulation and pinky-swears to keep their money safe, but since SBF owned the platform he could do whatever he wanted.
disclosure: I work for a crypto company
disclosure: I work for a crypto company
> One benefit is that you can more credibly offer to keep your promises.
We are yet to see a working example of that.
> Meanwhile, users of FTX depended on government regulation and pinky-swears to keep their money safe, but since SBF owned the platform he could do whatever he wanted.
These two sentences contradict each other. And no, there was no government regulation that insured FTX deposits. There was so little regulation, they didn't even keep their transaction history.
We are yet to see a working example of that.
> Meanwhile, users of FTX depended on government regulation and pinky-swears to keep their money safe, but since SBF owned the platform he could do whatever he wanted.
These two sentences contradict each other. And no, there was no government regulation that insured FTX deposits. There was so little regulation, they didn't even keep their transaction history.
> We are yet to see a working example of that.
I referenced Uniswap, which seems like it works to me
> These two sentences contradict each other. And no, there was no government regulation that insured FTX deposits. There was so little regulation, they didn't even keep their transaction history.
There's no public insurance for it, but if there were no regulations against doing what FTX did I'm not sure why their executives are fleeing the country
I referenced Uniswap, which seems like it works to me
> These two sentences contradict each other. And no, there was no government regulation that insured FTX deposits. There was so little regulation, they didn't even keep their transaction history.
There's no public insurance for it, but if there were no regulations against doing what FTX did I'm not sure why their executives are fleeing the country
Because "there are no regulations" is not permission to defraud others.
The fact that fraud is a crime is a form of regulation, although it's clearly not sufficient on its own (just like how smart contract code being auditable isn't sufficient on its own)
Sure, but it's not specific. I'm thinking more along the lines of requiring public SEC filings or prospectuses.
Then you are arguing for allowing fraud and crime.
Yeah, but if they're not personally affected, it's fine.
People who are affected are just dumb or they had it coming, anyway.
People who are affected are just dumb or they had it coming, anyway.
> I haven’t audited Uniswap’s smart contract code, but if I did I feel I could be pretty confident they won’t steal my money.
Funny how there now have been multiple contracts which successfully passed multiple audits, have survived bug bounties, and still had errors in them.
But sure, do tell me how you can audit and instantly spot all the issues in a smart contract.
> users of FTX depended on government regulation and pinky-swears to keep their money safe, but since SBF owned the platform he could do whatever he wanted.
FTX was deliberately set up ouside of government regulation, and with no oversight.
Funny how there now have been multiple contracts which successfully passed multiple audits, have survived bug bounties, and still had errors in them.
But sure, do tell me how you can audit and instantly spot all the issues in a smart contract.
> users of FTX depended on government regulation and pinky-swears to keep their money safe, but since SBF owned the platform he could do whatever he wanted.
FTX was deliberately set up ouside of government regulation, and with no oversight.
Good comment. While a lot of the complaints about blockchain are valid issues, the argument that it is useless and could be replaced with a database always makes me roll my eyes given the fundamental benefit is the open nature of the platform. Nonetheless, I think the key issue is scalability/performance.
"It could just be a database" is my litmus test now for an engineer who thinks he's really smart but really isn't.
See this is where HN has fallen off a cliff, the top commented Runeks supplies a highly theoretical and nonchalant answer to what blockchains _can_ be. That’s been the majority of HNs take on the technology. But the Internet was made for text communication and here we are decades later with social media and streaming video.
TimJRobinson at least states something which is rare on HN, a take on blockchain technology with experimental instead of theoretical knowledge on the subject matter.
TimJRobinson at least states something which is rare on HN, a take on blockchain technology with experimental instead of theoretical knowledge on the subject matter.
> But the Internet was made for text communication
No it wasn't.
ARPANET [1] was made for transferring software and allowing remote access into the large mainframes on the network. Email came in 1971 and then 6 years later audio was being transferred. So it was always intended to support binary transmission and streaming video was being demoed by the BBC not soon after.
The reason to be nitpicking is that the original protocols were flexible and efficient enough from day one to support a myriad of use cases. Where as platforms like Ethereum are already struggling with a lack of flexibility and a lack of efficient and cheap data transfer.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET
No it wasn't.
ARPANET [1] was made for transferring software and allowing remote access into the large mainframes on the network. Email came in 1971 and then 6 years later audio was being transferred. So it was always intended to support binary transmission and streaming video was being demoed by the BBC not soon after.
The reason to be nitpicking is that the original protocols were flexible and efficient enough from day one to support a myriad of use cases. Where as platforms like Ethereum are already struggling with a lack of flexibility and a lack of efficient and cheap data transfer.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET
TimJ lists simply enumerates a bunch of software names with almost no content to move the discussion along.
I could have said, "Well blockchain is important because I used Schmaltz, Goober, and Cookie deployed on Flanders, Homer and Kearney, the open API just works out of the box," and by your logic I'd be some wizened mage on the subject.
There is a cliff on HN, but you might want to invest in a parachute.
I could have said, "Well blockchain is important because I used Schmaltz, Goober, and Cookie deployed on Flanders, Homer and Kearney, the open API just works out of the box," and by your logic I'd be some wizened mage on the subject.
There is a cliff on HN, but you might want to invest in a parachute.
This. It's not like all innovation that has occurred in the crypto-currency space is useless, there are some real valuable innovations there. Blockchain as a whole is just too tainted to see the forest for the trees in all the greed, specifically the word "blockchain" has become magical and deceptive.
"Having one neutral platform, controlled by no one, with standardized API's and immutable open programs that anyone can permissionlessly build on - is amazing."
Tim is dead on with this observation, this is amazing. And it's not a magic bullet statement either.
"Having one neutral platform, controlled by no one, with standardized API's and immutable open programs that anyone can permissionlessly build on - is amazing."
Tim is dead on with this observation, this is amazing. And it's not a magic bullet statement either.
> Tim is dead on with this observation, this is amazing.
I'm not saying Tim's wrong, but one of the problems that Ive seen a lot - to the point of being tempted to use the word "constantly" - with blockchain is this sort of gushing rhetoric that actually does a really poor job of explaining why it's amazing, and especially of explaining why it's amazing in a few short paragraphs of jargon-free plain English that anyone with technical background can understand.
Again, Tim's post may be right, but it really falls short here and that's a big problem for the perception of blockchain. Until you can get people to understand why it's valuable, without the answer being to go and spend hours reading when there's perhaps no certainty of what you learn being valuable, it's always going to face this scepticism.
It's not helped by the fact that the scammers and the non-scammers talk about it in the same kind of way, so you end up unable to distinguish the real information from the "blockchain doublespeak" - again, certainly without a lot of research. If you're busy you end up developing a heuristic where you file all of this in the mental waste basket.
I'm not saying Tim's wrong, but one of the problems that Ive seen a lot - to the point of being tempted to use the word "constantly" - with blockchain is this sort of gushing rhetoric that actually does a really poor job of explaining why it's amazing, and especially of explaining why it's amazing in a few short paragraphs of jargon-free plain English that anyone with technical background can understand.
Again, Tim's post may be right, but it really falls short here and that's a big problem for the perception of blockchain. Until you can get people to understand why it's valuable, without the answer being to go and spend hours reading when there's perhaps no certainty of what you learn being valuable, it's always going to face this scepticism.
It's not helped by the fact that the scammers and the non-scammers talk about it in the same kind of way, so you end up unable to distinguish the real information from the "blockchain doublespeak" - again, certainly without a lot of research. If you're busy you end up developing a heuristic where you file all of this in the mental waste basket.
You're right, it is hard to explain. That's why I believe long term it's going to be more like AWS - it will be financial plumbing that firms build upon and most end users won't even know they're using it.
I think a lot of HN doesn't get it because they don't work in finance, but everyone I've talked to who works in finance (or has to deal with their archaic systems) is really excited about the possibilities.
Then again, a lot of people didn't understand the internet or it's jargon in the 90's, so we'll see how it plays out.
I think a lot of HN doesn't get it because they don't work in finance, but everyone I've talked to who works in finance (or has to deal with their archaic systems) is really excited about the possibilities.
Then again, a lot of people didn't understand the internet or it's jargon in the 90's, so we'll see how it plays out.
> I think a lot of HN doesn't get it because they don't work in finance, but everyone I've talked to who works in finance (or has to deal with their archaic systems) is really excited about the possibilities.
The people I've talked to in finance are really excited about Blockchain/DeFi because it's an opportunity for arbitrage in a completely unregulated market.
The people I've talked to in finance are really excited about Blockchain/DeFi because it's an opportunity for arbitrage in a completely unregulated market.
> You're right, it is hard to explain. That's why I believe long term it's going to be more like AWS - it will be financial plumbing that firms build upon and most end users won't even know they're using it.
It sounds good, but ALL the money needs to be taken out of the ecosystem.
They need to go back to the drawing board and work in silence and fix their core problems: scalability, respecting core financial laws such as AML and KYC, and then they need to present their platform.
The problem with that is that it's fundamental research, making no money, possibly for decades.
Ain't no one got time for that.
It sounds good, but ALL the money needs to be taken out of the ecosystem.
They need to go back to the drawing board and work in silence and fix their core problems: scalability, respecting core financial laws such as AML and KYC, and then they need to present their platform.
The problem with that is that it's fundamental research, making no money, possibly for decades.
Ain't no one got time for that.
Steve Jobs in a university lecture in 1991 (iirc) articulated the vision among him and his industry contemporaries of consumers using thin clients accessing data from the cloud, a reality that took two decades to really come to fruition and that had to wait for infrastructure to catch up - the point being that while some people didn’t see the value of the internet, people in the know were able to simply and quickly articulate beneficial use cases.
Let's drop Steve Jobs as some sort of magic visionary.
If you really want to talk about a true tech visionary, use:
Douglas Engelbart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Engelbart
Mother of All Demos: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos
> The 90-minute presentation demonstrated for the first time many of the fundamental elements of modern personal computing: windows, hypertext, graphics, efficient navigation and command input, video conferencing, the computer mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and a collaborative real-time editor.
> December 9, <<<1968>>>
1968, not 1991.
If you really want to talk about a true tech visionary, use:
Douglas Engelbart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Engelbart
Mother of All Demos: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos
> The 90-minute presentation demonstrated for the first time many of the fundamental elements of modern personal computing: windows, hypertext, graphics, efficient navigation and command input, video conferencing, the computer mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and a collaborative real-time editor.
> December 9, <<<1968>>>
1968, not 1991.
> Having one neutral platform, controlled by no one, with standardized API's and immutable open programs that anyone can permissionlessly build on - is amazing
It is unquestionably amazing. But it's not the reality.
Most data is not stored on the blockchain but instead in proprietary databases due to the prohibitive cost. And even if it was free the VCs are pushing hard for a defensible moat i.e. lock your users in with proprietary data and features.
We've seen this play out with OpenSea and how its view of NFTs is different from what's on chain.
It is unquestionably amazing. But it's not the reality.
Most data is not stored on the blockchain but instead in proprietary databases due to the prohibitive cost. And even if it was free the VCs are pushing hard for a defensible moat i.e. lock your users in with proprietary data and features.
We've seen this play out with OpenSea and how its view of NFTs is different from what's on chain.
The data that matters is all on-chain: the smart contracts and the balances. This is why what Tim talks about has actually played out, and we have seen incredible composability between different protocols.
> We've seen this play out with OpenSea and how its view of NFTs is different from what's on chain.
If anything, the NFT ecosystem proofs this point. It consists of a dizzying array of aggregators, lending platforms, fractionalization platforms, alternative marketplaces, curation tools, API providers, all interacting with another. The fact that OpenSea retains a large marketshare among marketplaces is true (though now down to 60% - https://dune.com/sealaunch/NFT), but hasn't stopped this interoperability at all. Because in fact, what matters is on-chain, not what OpenSea exposes.
> We've seen this play out with OpenSea and how its view of NFTs is different from what's on chain.
If anything, the NFT ecosystem proofs this point. It consists of a dizzying array of aggregators, lending platforms, fractionalization platforms, alternative marketplaces, curation tools, API providers, all interacting with another. The fact that OpenSea retains a large marketshare among marketplaces is true (though now down to 60% - https://dune.com/sealaunch/NFT), but hasn't stopped this interoperability at all. Because in fact, what matters is on-chain, not what OpenSea exposes.
The fact that you use the NFT ecosystem as proof of anything is baffling.
NFT doesn't even store its data.
It's not even a true protocol that mandates things ensuring stability.
You're buying thin air.
NFT doesn't even store its data.
It's not even a true protocol that mandates things ensuring stability.
You're buying thin air.
Yeah. You can also argue that Git and IPFS aren't really blockchain, but at some point that's just splitting hairs...
The big question is of course how best to deal with all the scammers in specifically the cryptocurrency space ?
The big question is of course how best to deal with all the scammers in specifically the cryptocurrency space ?
Are the comments different, though? "Permissionless composability" - basically blockchain jargon for financial transactions that have no oversight - are made possible by the things runeks mentions. It's like someone saying "this solves the double spending problem," and someone else going "no, this allows me to buy contraband."
It's not exactly a surprise that crypto allows transactions without oversight. The issue is whether or not that's something actually useful, and for the vast majority of people it clearly isn't.
It's not exactly a surprise that crypto allows transactions without oversight. The issue is whether or not that's something actually useful, and for the vast majority of people it clearly isn't.
It is a surprise, since all accounts and transactions are teansparent to all.
And if you say that it was "obvious" that working mixers would exist, we are going to have to disagree. (Also I am willing to bet that if you put a significant amount of computing power into it, you can untangle that ball of yarn, and the US intelligence agencies did, like for Tor.)
And if you say that it was "obvious" that working mixers would exist, we are going to have to disagree. (Also I am willing to bet that if you put a significant amount of computing power into it, you can untangle that ball of yarn, and the US intelligence agencies did, like for Tor.)
the examples he gave of 20 companies building on defi on his platform are all varying examples of a liquidity pools that if you go to their websites need yet another layer of companies to use their platforms to build the exciting products on.
> the killer feature is actually permissionless composability
This right here is it! Everyone is always focused on the main feature being decentralization, but decentralization isn't a feature, it's an implementation detail. Decentralization is certainly a requirement for these goals, but permissionlessness is the goal. I'll note that permisionless for users, in the ability to create accounts and send transactions is every bit as import as permisionless building.
This is why I think the term DeFi misses the mark a bit, because it's a nod to the implementation (decentralized) rather than the features (open and permissionless). But at the end of the day I think it's catchier than something like OpenFi, and the terminology is set at this point.
This right here is it! Everyone is always focused on the main feature being decentralization, but decentralization isn't a feature, it's an implementation detail. Decentralization is certainly a requirement for these goals, but permissionlessness is the goal. I'll note that permisionless for users, in the ability to create accounts and send transactions is every bit as import as permisionless building.
This is why I think the term DeFi misses the mark a bit, because it's a nod to the implementation (decentralized) rather than the features (open and permissionless). But at the end of the day I think it's catchier than something like OpenFi, and the terminology is set at this point.
How does this work faced with legal systems, which <<mandate>> permissions?
The main problem is when weighing these things is not blockchain advocate honestly asks the question: "why is this better than using a simple relational database, in a way that makes all the extra complexity worthwhile?"
> Hidden Hand is a marketplace for governance incentives, commonly referred to as "bribes".
Protocols can leverage Hidden Hand to enable more efficient governance processes and to engage their voters, while users can earn extra yield on their favorite vote escrowed governance tokens through bribes.
https://hiddenhand.finance/
I...i mean this just speaks for itself doesn't it?
https://hiddenhand.finance/
I...i mean this just speaks for itself doesn't it?
The issue with this story is this:
Governments will not protect something they have no control over. When they regulate it, that control will come in. Some of the things you speak about will disappear.
Kinda like if you have a wife and you care about her if she is loyal. But once she cheats you don't care anymore. Similar situation between unregulated financial systems and the government.
Governments will not protect something they have no control over. When they regulate it, that control will come in. Some of the things you speak about will disappear.
Kinda like if you have a wife and you care about her if she is loyal. But once she cheats you don't care anymore. Similar situation between unregulated financial systems and the government.
[deleted]
Completely agree
Thank you. I feel like the tide is finally turning on this. The Ethereum VM (and its derivatives) is one of the biggest innovations in recent history.
I've been yelling at the top of my lungs why NFTs have revolutionized digital art and happy to see the top comment nails it - a zero trust verification environment makes it possible to sell it on an open global market. This just wasn't there before.
Blockchains are useless takes are already out of date.
I've been yelling at the top of my lungs why NFTs have revolutionized digital art and happy to see the top comment nails it - a zero trust verification environment makes it possible to sell it on an open global market. This just wasn't there before.
Blockchains are useless takes are already out of date.
Have nfts revolutionised digital art? I haven't seen it. Stable diffusion is potentially revolutionary, but nfts seem like last years fad.
> Only if your problem exhibits the above property (and it's a distributed system) does using a blockchain make sense.
I think we also need to specify that it's also an extremely distinct and rare type of "distributed": When you must support unrestricted and unlimited creation of new participant nodes.
That's the fundamental requirement that drives an entire cascade of other blockchain design choices, such as proof-of-work to prevent a takeover by sockpuppet-nodes, and mining to incentivize regular consistent participation by a presumed-benign majority. Without that requirement and workarounds, we're left with a kind of regular distributed database, pre-hype technology that already featured hashes and linked-lists.
This requirement ("anybody can become part of the network anonymously") also makes for a great litmus-test for whether you need blockchain.
For example, in national elections we probably don't want/need literally any number of computers anywhere in the world to jump in and deciding what happens based on their CPU power. It would be dramatically faster/easier/safer to simply define a fixed list of nodes, where each state runs a couple plus the federal government, and then rely on the fact that evildoers would have to compromise too many different systems and agencies.
I think we also need to specify that it's also an extremely distinct and rare type of "distributed": When you must support unrestricted and unlimited creation of new participant nodes.
That's the fundamental requirement that drives an entire cascade of other blockchain design choices, such as proof-of-work to prevent a takeover by sockpuppet-nodes, and mining to incentivize regular consistent participation by a presumed-benign majority. Without that requirement and workarounds, we're left with a kind of regular distributed database, pre-hype technology that already featured hashes and linked-lists.
This requirement ("anybody can become part of the network anonymously") also makes for a great litmus-test for whether you need blockchain.
For example, in national elections we probably don't want/need literally any number of computers anywhere in the world to jump in and deciding what happens based on their CPU power. It would be dramatically faster/easier/safer to simply define a fixed list of nodes, where each state runs a couple plus the federal government, and then rely on the fact that evildoers would have to compromise too many different systems and agencies.
I think the word is "decentralised" rather than distributed: no single authority that controls membership of a distributed system, in a P2P style
I think Byzantine Fault Tolerance is the name of such propriety (being resilient to a limited number of adversarial nodes).
People don’t use that term anymore because the generals of many countries present the same problem, not just those of the Eastern Roman Empire.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/byzanti...
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/byzanti...
This seems like another case of deprecating language based on an individual or cohort realizing something that a reasonable person would have already assumed.
No, that its not the problem that bitcoin solves. You can do distributed consensus just fine without a block chain - if you have to make a choice between two options, everyone broadcasts a vote for one of the options and the option with the most votes is the accepted option.
The problem that bitcoin solves is that you can not prevent me from casting a million votes because the system is anonymous - or pseudonymous if you want - and therefore there is no list of participants that would prevent casting more than one vote. This is called a Sybil attack.
Bitcoin's solution - and similarly that of other block chains - is to make casting a vote expensive, either in terms of computational resources or owned tokens or whatever.
The problem that bitcoin solves is that you can not prevent me from casting a million votes because the system is anonymous - or pseudonymous if you want - and therefore there is no list of participants that would prevent casting more than one vote. This is called a Sybil attack.
Bitcoin's solution - and similarly that of other block chains - is to make casting a vote expensive, either in terms of computational resources or owned tokens or whatever.
Compared to paper ballots it makes casting a ballot cheaper, more opaque, and less accountable.
But immune to fraud. Conservation of energy proves the vote happened without manipulation.
That’s a ludicrous argument I am not even sure where to start.
What exactly is the mechanism that proves that each vote registered by the system is in fact an accurate recording of the registered voting preference of an eligible voter?
What exactly is the mechanism that proves that each vote registered by the system is in fact an accurate recording of the registered voting preference of an eligible voter?
Although I take slight issue with how you've worded it, I think I'm in agreement. I'll attempt to add clarification to the parts I find difficult to parse.
Blockchains only ensure that coins are never spent twice. They make no attempts to ensure that coins are sent to the correct recipients. At the end of the block, they only care that debits are equal to credits.
This can be confusing because the term "double spend" is also frequently used in cryptocurrency in the context of fraud prevention. In this context, you definitely do care that the coins get to the correct recipients but this concern is outside of the functional scope of the blockchain mechanism.
Instead, fraud prevention is typically satisfied through additional code, adjacent to the "blockchain stuff", which establishes signaling networks and transaction inclusion criteria.
They're very different mechanisms inside blockchain clients but, confusingly, they both make frequent use of the term "double spend".
Blockchains only ensure that coins are never spent twice. They make no attempts to ensure that coins are sent to the correct recipients. At the end of the block, they only care that debits are equal to credits.
This can be confusing because the term "double spend" is also frequently used in cryptocurrency in the context of fraud prevention. In this context, you definitely do care that the coins get to the correct recipients but this concern is outside of the functional scope of the blockchain mechanism.
Instead, fraud prevention is typically satisfied through additional code, adjacent to the "blockchain stuff", which establishes signaling networks and transaction inclusion criteria.
They're very different mechanisms inside blockchain clients but, confusingly, they both make frequent use of the term "double spend".
> Blockchains only ensure that coins are never spent twice. They make no attempts to ensure that coins are sent to the correct recipients. At the end of the block, they only care that debits are equal to credits.
I know the origin is tightly linked to bitcoin, but I feel like even this muddies the definition.
Blockchains are not implicitly related to "coins", more facts? contracts? Maybe that's a useless nit to pick, or only useful in this thread where the GP was trying to layout where blockchains are useful (eg: distributed facts - that happen to often be wealth transfer).
Or do I have it all wrong? I admit to not having much experience with them, but from the few random (non-btc) meet up groups talks I saw a decade ago, it was all about consensus more than anything. Ironically before the current NFT craze, the talk I remember most was one about using NFTs to authenticate stuff like (non-programatically-generated) album/artwork ownership and allowing users to resell in a second hand digital market.
I assume you could build a mastodon like that distributes and "authenticates" posts via a blockchain - perhaps with terrible performance though.
I know the origin is tightly linked to bitcoin, but I feel like even this muddies the definition.
Blockchains are not implicitly related to "coins", more facts? contracts? Maybe that's a useless nit to pick, or only useful in this thread where the GP was trying to layout where blockchains are useful (eg: distributed facts - that happen to often be wealth transfer).
Or do I have it all wrong? I admit to not having much experience with them, but from the few random (non-btc) meet up groups talks I saw a decade ago, it was all about consensus more than anything. Ironically before the current NFT craze, the talk I remember most was one about using NFTs to authenticate stuff like (non-programatically-generated) album/artwork ownership and allowing users to resell in a second hand digital market.
I assume you could build a mastodon like that distributes and "authenticates" posts via a blockchain - perhaps with terrible performance though.
> Blockchains are not implicitly related to "coins" ...
That was definitely an oversimplification, and a slightly wrong one at that. In bitcoin, there isn't actually a concept of "coins". Just transactions which spend numbered UTXOs.
If I'm remembering correctly, the term "block chain" came from a conversation between Hal Finney and Satoshi Nakamoto about Bitcoin. If so, one could argue that it IS implicitly related to cryptocurrency.
That being said, the underlying "block chain" data structure is just an alteration of a previously existing data structure called a Merkle Tree which has data blocks that can be used for things that are not transaction data.
Blocks in a blockchain have a payload section reserved for transaction data. Theoretically you could put anything in the payload section but if you're calling the data structure a blockchain, people are probably going to expect transactions in it.
> I assume you could build a mastodon like that distributes and "authenticates" posts via a blockchain - perhaps with terrible performance though.
This has already been done many times actually and it's quite impressive. Basically, a cryptocurrency full node is modified to serve as a social client and an appropriate user interface is built on top. The mechanism by which cryptocurrency transactions are shared with other validating nodes is the very thing that keeps user's "streams" updated and in sync.
It has some major drawbacks but performance doesn't have to be one of them. With UTXO based blockchains like bitcoin, the "mempool" portion of the client code receives transactions containing social data embedded within. This means they are able to show the social media content immediately upon it being sent, even if the transactions containing that data have yet to be included in a block. One problem though, is that like transaction data, the social data doesn't get "finalized" until it's included then mined in a block. So you'd be able to see the messages in your feed but the content might change ten minutes later after it's finalized.
In my opinion, the Achilles heel of blockchain based social media is the Achilles heel of so many otherwise brilliant technologies: "What is someone uses it for child porn?"
Otherwise, most of the other drawbacks can be dealt with.
That was definitely an oversimplification, and a slightly wrong one at that. In bitcoin, there isn't actually a concept of "coins". Just transactions which spend numbered UTXOs.
If I'm remembering correctly, the term "block chain" came from a conversation between Hal Finney and Satoshi Nakamoto about Bitcoin. If so, one could argue that it IS implicitly related to cryptocurrency.
That being said, the underlying "block chain" data structure is just an alteration of a previously existing data structure called a Merkle Tree which has data blocks that can be used for things that are not transaction data.
Blocks in a blockchain have a payload section reserved for transaction data. Theoretically you could put anything in the payload section but if you're calling the data structure a blockchain, people are probably going to expect transactions in it.
> I assume you could build a mastodon like that distributes and "authenticates" posts via a blockchain - perhaps with terrible performance though.
This has already been done many times actually and it's quite impressive. Basically, a cryptocurrency full node is modified to serve as a social client and an appropriate user interface is built on top. The mechanism by which cryptocurrency transactions are shared with other validating nodes is the very thing that keeps user's "streams" updated and in sync.
It has some major drawbacks but performance doesn't have to be one of them. With UTXO based blockchains like bitcoin, the "mempool" portion of the client code receives transactions containing social data embedded within. This means they are able to show the social media content immediately upon it being sent, even if the transactions containing that data have yet to be included in a block. One problem though, is that like transaction data, the social data doesn't get "finalized" until it's included then mined in a block. So you'd be able to see the messages in your feed but the content might change ten minutes later after it's finalized.
In my opinion, the Achilles heel of blockchain based social media is the Achilles heel of so many otherwise brilliant technologies: "What is someone uses it for child porn?"
Otherwise, most of the other drawbacks can be dealt with.
The novelty of Blockchain is that it's a way for everyone to agree about which blocks are in the chain, such that we're confident everyone won't change their minds later. The content of the blocks is irrelevant to the consensus, in which every participant will independently pick the longest valid chain it can see.
(In other words: yes, you've got it exactly right, but there are some details around incentives that tie creation of blocks to receiving some kind of benefit which mean that in practice someone will reduce things to money at some point)
(In other words: yes, you've got it exactly right, but there are some details around incentives that tie creation of blocks to receiving some kind of benefit which mean that in practice someone will reduce things to money at some point)
What you are referring to is a distributed ledger, built on top of a blockchain data structure.
The word Blockchain is so overloaded, people forget you can build a "blockchain" in 50 lines of code if not less. "Mining" new blocks is added on top of that, it's not a hard requirement - you can just create new blocks and link them up. You can choose to "mine" on CPU (slow) or on the GPU, if you want "mining" at all. You can then choose to persist it (file or sql or whatever) or only run it in memory. After that you can get into the concept of ledgers and currencies, and after that into making it distributed via some gossip-y protocols.
So a cleaner definition of a block chain would be, a tamper-proof daisy-chained data structure, similar to a linked list. All the stuff about ledgers, currencies, mining and consensus are separate concerns, stacked on top of a blockchain.
Also checkout: Merkle trees, linked lists, Chain of Responsibility.
Anyone agree/disagree?
The word Blockchain is so overloaded, people forget you can build a "blockchain" in 50 lines of code if not less. "Mining" new blocks is added on top of that, it's not a hard requirement - you can just create new blocks and link them up. You can choose to "mine" on CPU (slow) or on the GPU, if you want "mining" at all. You can then choose to persist it (file or sql or whatever) or only run it in memory. After that you can get into the concept of ledgers and currencies, and after that into making it distributed via some gossip-y protocols.
So a cleaner definition of a block chain would be, a tamper-proof daisy-chained data structure, similar to a linked list. All the stuff about ledgers, currencies, mining and consensus are separate concerns, stacked on top of a blockchain.
Also checkout: Merkle trees, linked lists, Chain of Responsibility.
Anyone agree/disagree?
Yeah, basically everyone. "Blockchain" as commonly understood was brought into being by Bitcoin, and encapsulates far more than just a linked list with a cryptographic component.
If it doesn't contain a mechanism for trustless, distributed consensus, then it's not really a blockchain in the sense that HN or the wider industry understands it.
Your definition is wide enough to cover a lot of things that are well outside of normal discussion of blockchains. I'm not insinuating this is your goal, but it is a common argumentation tactic of people desperately trying to defend the sector, to widen the definition until they can include within it things like git, and then say "so of course blockchain tech is useful! You're using it!"
If it doesn't contain a mechanism for trustless, distributed consensus, then it's not really a blockchain in the sense that HN or the wider industry understands it.
Your definition is wide enough to cover a lot of things that are well outside of normal discussion of blockchains. I'm not insinuating this is your goal, but it is a common argumentation tactic of people desperately trying to defend the sector, to widen the definition until they can include within it things like git, and then say "so of course blockchain tech is useful! You're using it!"
I think you’re just describing merkle trees; and “blockchain” in popular usage includes the consensus mechanism (mining or otherwise).
https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2019/02/theres_no_g... explains why talking about "blockchain" for anything but a public blockchain (including consensus etc.) is uninteresting.
He's right, the phrase "private blockchain" is almost a contradiction in terms, like "horse-drawn automobile" or "centimeter-scale nanotechnology".
Git has nothing to do with blockchain and is essentially what you are describing.
There’s already a word for that: distributed version control. We don’t need to move the goal posts on what blockchain is to make it have an interesting use case.
Blockchain is more specific to the consensus part not really about the self proving data structure part.
There’s already a word for that: distributed version control. We don’t need to move the goal posts on what blockchain is to make it have an interesting use case.
Blockchain is more specific to the consensus part not really about the self proving data structure part.
The consensus part is the piece that that vast majority of businesses (potentially all businesses) don’t need. There are other mechanisms for trusting nodes and having a shared coordination mechanism is solved many times over.
Maybe I am a confused luddite, but it seems telling that this argument immediately launches into the solution space of a problem that is itself created by the presence of a blockchain.
Double-spend has been solved by the financial sector quite some time ago. The distributed system part - I guess this is the problem that I think the article is claiming is yet to be found.
Double-spend has been solved by the financial sector quite some time ago. The distributed system part - I guess this is the problem that I think the article is claiming is yet to be found.
Double spend was solved by the use of cash money, not the financial sector.
If I give you a coin (or paper money), then by definition I don't have it any more. I can't spend it twice.
Accounting with transactions netting to zero ("double entry") solved the problem of recording transactions in an immutable way on a ledger, assuming you control the ledger.
Clearing houses solved the problem of interparty risk when settling (by using an intermediary that controls the ledger of transactions between parties).
Title registries solved the problem of "ownership" by creating the concept of a "title" (ie a government backed identification of property that is recognized by law that the bearer "owns"). Title registries (like "Torrens titles" invented in Australia) solve the bearer problem by having a central ledger of title holding.
Blockchain can "solve" the ledger parts of these elements. But the ledger being immutable doesn't solve the problem of recognition of title (see NFTs). By adding the machinations of "mining" and "proof of stake/work", blockchains can be extended to include the "title" as part of the ledger itself. The mining transaction effectively creates something that is initially owned by the miner.
Ethereum adds to the "intelligence" of the transactions stored on the ledger, adding elements of computation to each one.
All the rest of it, all the invented coins etc, the "exchanges", etc etc ad infinitum are attempts to map these ledgers back to fiat currencies so that "actual" money can be made.
If I give you a coin (or paper money), then by definition I don't have it any more. I can't spend it twice.
Accounting with transactions netting to zero ("double entry") solved the problem of recording transactions in an immutable way on a ledger, assuming you control the ledger.
Clearing houses solved the problem of interparty risk when settling (by using an intermediary that controls the ledger of transactions between parties).
Title registries solved the problem of "ownership" by creating the concept of a "title" (ie a government backed identification of property that is recognized by law that the bearer "owns"). Title registries (like "Torrens titles" invented in Australia) solve the bearer problem by having a central ledger of title holding.
Blockchain can "solve" the ledger parts of these elements. But the ledger being immutable doesn't solve the problem of recognition of title (see NFTs). By adding the machinations of "mining" and "proof of stake/work", blockchains can be extended to include the "title" as part of the ledger itself. The mining transaction effectively creates something that is initially owned by the miner.
Ethereum adds to the "intelligence" of the transactions stored on the ledger, adding elements of computation to each one.
All the rest of it, all the invented coins etc, the "exchanges", etc etc ad infinitum are attempts to map these ledgers back to fiat currencies so that "actual" money can be made.
I think the confusion is the parent is talking about an implementation detail (blockchain), rather than the main problem cryptocurrency actually solves. Cryptocurrency solves for internet based financial sovereignty. Whether or not you think that's important to the world is a different discussion.
> Double-spend has been solved by the financial sector.
Traditional finance offers “at-most-one spend”while blockchain protocols offer “one spend up to 1/3 malicious nodes”.
The limit on the former is government, and Byzantine Fault Tolerance sets the limit on the latter.
Government can unilaterally seize “your” funds in traditional banking, while a substantial computational attack is required to cause a loss of confidence event (double spend) on a particular blockchain.
Traditional finance offers “at-most-one spend”while blockchain protocols offer “one spend up to 1/3 malicious nodes”.
The limit on the former is government, and Byzantine Fault Tolerance sets the limit on the latter.
Government can unilaterally seize “your” funds in traditional banking, while a substantial computational attack is required to cause a loss of confidence event (double spend) on a particular blockchain.
Can't governments force people to hand over control of their keys?
They can't guarantee that there is only one set of keys. They are just files after all.
Doesn't seem to stop organisations like the FBI from "seizing" Bitcoins?
e.g.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/07/feds-seize-3point36-billion-...
e.g.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/07/feds-seize-3point36-billion-...
Yep, this is called poor opsec. Had this person had someone else with a copy of that wallet's keys, they could have been moved before this happened.
What real life use case - that resonates with regular people - would this solve?
Isn’t Blockchain just a convoluted solution to a problem nobody has?
(Which is the conclusion of the article)
Isn’t Blockchain just a convoluted solution to a problem nobody has?
(Which is the conclusion of the article)
> What real life use case - that resonates with regular people - would this solve?
The problem that some people really, really hate authority, and frankly, really hate other people, and would like a magical machine to do away with all that messiness.
So they put a million barriers between themselves and that messiness and hope it all works out in the end.
It's like a sort of niche religion.
After the first believers announced their faith, a much, much larger group of grifters realized that they could shout: "FREEDOM! PROFIT! FREEDOM! PROFIT!" and make a ton of money.
Like a real religion, basically, just read up about incense and Christianity to see the real believer versus grifter dichotomy happen in another case.
Anyway, so here we are now :-)
The problem that some people really, really hate authority, and frankly, really hate other people, and would like a magical machine to do away with all that messiness.
So they put a million barriers between themselves and that messiness and hope it all works out in the end.
It's like a sort of niche religion.
After the first believers announced their faith, a much, much larger group of grifters realized that they could shout: "FREEDOM! PROFIT! FREEDOM! PROFIT!" and make a ton of money.
Like a real religion, basically, just read up about incense and Christianity to see the real believer versus grifter dichotomy happen in another case.
Anyway, so here we are now :-)
Assuming people who think differently to you must be mostly motivated by hatred works well for a Taylor Swift song, but it's just about the worst way to think of other perspectives and ideas.
Replace hate with "are mildly inconvenienced by", if it makes you feel better :-)
It doesn't change the fact that the whole idea here is to replace human judgment with algorithms, with little thought into how the technology will actually be used by humans.
Trick question.
Let's say I'm not tech savvy. I can barely use my iPhone, I'm frequently confused by Instagram UI updates.
> Bitcoin
> Initial release 0.1.0 / 9 January 2009 (13 years ago)
How can I buy Bitcoin, sell it, use it to buy things with it, 13 years after the fact, in a decentralized fashion, just as Satoshi Nakamoto-sama originally intended?
It doesn't change the fact that the whole idea here is to replace human judgment with algorithms, with little thought into how the technology will actually be used by humans.
Trick question.
Let's say I'm not tech savvy. I can barely use my iPhone, I'm frequently confused by Instagram UI updates.
> Bitcoin
> Initial release 0.1.0 / 9 January 2009 (13 years ago)
How can I buy Bitcoin, sell it, use it to buy things with it, 13 years after the fact, in a decentralized fashion, just as Satoshi Nakamoto-sama originally intended?
> if it makes you feel better
Just to be completely clear, it's not about how I'm feeling, just as people disagreeing with you not meaning they feel hatred.
Just to be completely clear, it's not about how I'm feeling, just as people disagreeing with you not meaning they feel hatred.
This is an internet forum, I'm just commenting, I reserve my right to make over the top comments loaded with scandalous language :-)
Oh that’s totally what I observe.
Crypto really incentivizes terrible, predatory behavior. A lot of scamming or other criminal behavior. But that’s not the kind of use case I’m looking for.
Obviously I want something beneficial and legal. I don’t believe there is any.
Crypto really incentivizes terrible, predatory behavior. A lot of scamming or other criminal behavior. But that’s not the kind of use case I’m looking for.
Obviously I want something beneficial and legal. I don’t believe there is any.
So does any form of "money".
The only reason crypto is incentivizing it is because the law hasn't caught up with regulating it.
The only reason crypto is incentivizing it is because the law hasn't caught up with regulating it.
Title conveyancing.
When purchasing a property, there is a dance between the seller and the purchaser (and intermediaries) that effectively perform the necessary transactions to: a) ensure the seller gets paid b) ensure the purchaser gets the property c) ensure that the record of ownership of the property is correctly updated.
This all has to be done simultaneously and atomically.
Moving the records of ownership (ie "title") to the blockchain and then having the appropriate contracts/transactions to ensure the points above solve the conveyancing problems.
But, given that for the most part, the title that declares ownership is essentially a legal document, and that legal documents only have power because of the laws that are enforced, there's no advantage to blockchain that can't be also solved by a central trust registry that maintains the records.
When purchasing a property, there is a dance between the seller and the purchaser (and intermediaries) that effectively perform the necessary transactions to: a) ensure the seller gets paid b) ensure the purchaser gets the property c) ensure that the record of ownership of the property is correctly updated.
This all has to be done simultaneously and atomically.
Moving the records of ownership (ie "title") to the blockchain and then having the appropriate contracts/transactions to ensure the points above solve the conveyancing problems.
But, given that for the most part, the title that declares ownership is essentially a legal document, and that legal documents only have power because of the laws that are enforced, there's no advantage to blockchain that can't be also solved by a central trust registry that maintains the records.
You can just solve this with locking or a (self referencing) unique foreign key constraint on any mainstream SQL db though. If we include programming langues as well, the possible amount of solutions multiplies.
As the article's author says at some point society is always built on trust in another entity.
Crypto fully shifts this from the database operator to the software developer and is willing to accept significant trade offs to do so.
Most of the unique complexity and challenges in blockchain technology originates from this.
Crypto fully shifts this from the database operator to the software developer and is willing to accept significant trade offs to do so.
Most of the unique complexity and challenges in blockchain technology originates from this.
The author also says all of the implementations he witnessed were reliant on databases and did not require the unique complexity and challenges of the blockchain.
Whether or not the underlying storage mechanism uses a database is not the point.
The point is who can edit that database and under which rules (imagine that database holds a lot of your money and you live in an oppressive regime).
The point is who can edit that database and under which rules (imagine that database holds a lot of your money and you live in an oppressive regime).
> imagine that database holds a lot of your money and you live in an oppressive regime
That opressive regime holds:
- your access to the internet (crypto requires continuous access to internet to function)
- your access to exchange offices because crypto is useless if it cannot be converted to fiat
So, what exactly have you solved?
That opressive regime holds:
- your access to the internet (crypto requires continuous access to internet to function)
- your access to exchange offices because crypto is useless if it cannot be converted to fiat
So, what exactly have you solved?
> So, what exactly have you solved?
Ownership of your funds, which is the primary requirement from which all others stem. You will still have those when you regain access to the internet, or the ability to spend them.
The reality is that a government having the ability to confiscate the funds in your bank account, and attempting to restrict you and your neighbours peer to peer actions, personal mobility or internet access are totally different things. This sort black and white thinking provides lacks a valuable analysis of actual power structures. No one claims your crypto currency will protect you from a bullet.
Ownership of your funds, which is the primary requirement from which all others stem. You will still have those when you regain access to the internet, or the ability to spend them.
The reality is that a government having the ability to confiscate the funds in your bank account, and attempting to restrict you and your neighbours peer to peer actions, personal mobility or internet access are totally different things. This sort black and white thinking provides lacks a valuable analysis of actual power structures. No one claims your crypto currency will protect you from a bullet.
> > So, what exactly have you solved?
> Ownership of your funds
Nope, ownership is law. The problem you’ve mitigated (but not solved) is the ability to retain possession of your funds.
> The reality is that a government having the ability to confiscate the funds in your bank account, and attempting to restrict you and your neighbours peer to peer actions, personal mobility or internet access are totally different things.
They are motivated on rely on very much the same social conditions, they are not “totally different things”, and they are even less different the more it becomes necessary for the government to do the latter in order to achieve the effect of the former.
> No one claims your crypto currency will protect you from a bullet.
The capacity and willingness to use a bullet to effectuate their will for that end is what enables a government to drain your money from a bank; it may be masked and may not be immediately evident in the mechanics they use to do it in practice, because the time and repetition and institutionalization has routinized and streamlined the process. But, at root, its all the bullet.
> Ownership of your funds
Nope, ownership is law. The problem you’ve mitigated (but not solved) is the ability to retain possession of your funds.
> The reality is that a government having the ability to confiscate the funds in your bank account, and attempting to restrict you and your neighbours peer to peer actions, personal mobility or internet access are totally different things.
They are motivated on rely on very much the same social conditions, they are not “totally different things”, and they are even less different the more it becomes necessary for the government to do the latter in order to achieve the effect of the former.
> No one claims your crypto currency will protect you from a bullet.
The capacity and willingness to use a bullet to effectuate their will for that end is what enables a government to drain your money from a bank; it may be masked and may not be immediately evident in the mechanics they use to do it in practice, because the time and repetition and institutionalization has routinized and streamlined the process. But, at root, its all the bullet.
> Ownership of your funds,
Which ends the moment that oppressive government makes you give up your keys.
> This sort black and white thinking provides lacks a valuable analysis of actual power structures.
The "blockchain is godsend for oppressive governments" is the sort of non-thinking that is currently unsurprising for most crypto enthusiasts pushing it while completely ignoring (or plain not knowing) the realities.
Which ends the moment that oppressive government makes you give up your keys.
> This sort black and white thinking provides lacks a valuable analysis of actual power structures.
The "blockchain is godsend for oppressive governments" is the sort of non-thinking that is currently unsurprising for most crypto enthusiasts pushing it while completely ignoring (or plain not knowing) the realities.
Point 2 is strictly false, crypto can be exchanged for goods or services on its own.
> Point 2 is strictly false, crypto can be exchanged for goods or services on its own.
In dreams, maybe. In reality there are vanishingly few goods or services that can be exchanged for crypto. For obvious reasons immediately obvious to anyone who could care to think about the supply chain for more than 30 seconds [2].
This is especially true for oppressive governments where the use of crypto is grounds for criminal persecution [1]
[1] E.g. https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-journalists-alexei...
[2] Let's say you buy bread from a shop. That shop has to pay salaries, rent, pay suppliers of flour, spice, herbs. Those suppliers have to pay their salaries and their suppliers. The owner of the place who rents out to the shop needs to pay for his stuff.
Almost no one in this chain accepts payments in crypto. So even if the shop accepts payments in crypto, they need to convert it to fiat. So the shop's question becomes: is it worth the hassle? in the absolute vast majority of cases the answer is "no".
In dreams, maybe. In reality there are vanishingly few goods or services that can be exchanged for crypto. For obvious reasons immediately obvious to anyone who could care to think about the supply chain for more than 30 seconds [2].
This is especially true for oppressive governments where the use of crypto is grounds for criminal persecution [1]
[1] E.g. https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-journalists-alexei...
[2] Let's say you buy bread from a shop. That shop has to pay salaries, rent, pay suppliers of flour, spice, herbs. Those suppliers have to pay their salaries and their suppliers. The owner of the place who rents out to the shop needs to pay for his stuff.
Almost no one in this chain accepts payments in crypto. So even if the shop accepts payments in crypto, they need to convert it to fiat. So the shop's question becomes: is it worth the hassle? in the absolute vast majority of cases the answer is "no".
https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoin/who-accepts/
Apparently, I must be dreaming this entire list. Now, to head off what will certainly be a response absolutely loaded with special pleading and/or strawmen, the claim was "crypto can be exchanged for goods and services on its own". Provided was a rather substantial, yet not exhaustive, list of merchants of various sizes which accept one kind of crypto in exchange for goods and services. QED.
Apparently, I must be dreaming this entire list. Now, to head off what will certainly be a response absolutely loaded with special pleading and/or strawmen, the claim was "crypto can be exchanged for goods and services on its own". Provided was a rather substantial, yet not exhaustive, list of merchants of various sizes which accept one kind of crypto in exchange for goods and services. QED.
> Apparently, I must be dreaming this entire list.
I'll say this again: "In reality there are vanishingly few goods or services that can be exchanged for crypto."
> Provided was a rather substantial, yet not exhaustive, list of merchants
So. What started with "money in oppressive regimes" became:
here's a list of companies in first-world countries many which at one point played with crypto, but now:
- don't accept crypto anymore due to its volatility or for other reasons (many links no longer work or don't list crypto as payment: Wikipedia, Microsoft etc.)
- actually accept payments in fiat provided by an external exchange because the need actual fiat (AT&T, everyone else who uses BitPay)
- don't accept crypto because it was a limited time marketing gimmick (KFC in Canada, and this is written directly in the list)
- don't exist as a company anymore if they existed at all (do not search, or open, Lumfile the cloud-based service at work)
This leaves us with, again, "vanishingly few goods or services that can be exchanged for crypto" because reality doesn't care for your dreams.
> QED.
QED indeed
I'll say this again: "In reality there are vanishingly few goods or services that can be exchanged for crypto."
> Provided was a rather substantial, yet not exhaustive, list of merchants
So. What started with "money in oppressive regimes" became:
here's a list of companies in first-world countries many which at one point played with crypto, but now:
- don't accept crypto anymore due to its volatility or for other reasons (many links no longer work or don't list crypto as payment: Wikipedia, Microsoft etc.)
- actually accept payments in fiat provided by an external exchange because the need actual fiat (AT&T, everyone else who uses BitPay)
- don't accept crypto because it was a limited time marketing gimmick (KFC in Canada, and this is written directly in the list)
- don't exist as a company anymore if they existed at all (do not search, or open, Lumfile the cloud-based service at work)
This leaves us with, again, "vanishingly few goods or services that can be exchanged for crypto" because reality doesn't care for your dreams.
> QED.
QED indeed
An even cursory reading of the list does not disqualify all, or even most of them, so not sure what you're getting at. This is childish nit picking at this point, anyone who wants to actually spend bitcoin will have no trouble finding a place to do so.
> An even cursory reading of the list does not disqualify all
Did i ever say all. Read what I write, not what you think I write.
For the fourth time: vanishingly few goods or services that can be exchanged for crypto
> anyone who wants to actually spend bitcoin will have no trouble finding a place to do so.
A very small amount of services catering mostly to first world. Since you're incapable of following context or understanding what your opponent writes, i will not engage in this conversation further.
Adieu.
Did i ever say all. Read what I write, not what you think I write.
For the fourth time: vanishingly few goods or services that can be exchanged for crypto
> anyone who wants to actually spend bitcoin will have no trouble finding a place to do so.
A very small amount of services catering mostly to first world. Since you're incapable of following context or understanding what your opponent writes, i will not engage in this conversation further.
Adieu.
There are some merchants in some places that accept crypto currencies in exchange for goods and services. So yes, saying that none do is "strictly" false.
The question though is are there any merchants that provide, on a wide basis, to numerous consumers, goods and services that are paid for by crypto.
Essentially the answer is no, because most merchant supply chains require fiat, governments require all taxes to be paid in fiat (that's why it exists).
So there is no "crypto" world where I can go live that entirely uses any crypto currency as its medium of exchange.
All of them require conversion to/from fiat, because that's what the world/governments/taxation/laws are based on for value exchanges.
The question though is are there any merchants that provide, on a wide basis, to numerous consumers, goods and services that are paid for by crypto.
Essentially the answer is no, because most merchant supply chains require fiat, governments require all taxes to be paid in fiat (that's why it exists).
So there is no "crypto" world where I can go live that entirely uses any crypto currency as its medium of exchange.
All of them require conversion to/from fiat, because that's what the world/governments/taxation/laws are based on for value exchanges.
This problem has been solved in numerous prior computer architecture most notably in the algorithms around leader selection in clusters or very wide distributed systems. The implementation varies from one use case to another but the point is the problem or solution is not new at all and blockchain is certainly not the earliest and most elegant solution for this.
Out of curiosity which solution operate in a zero trust environment?
All the solutions start with the premise of a zero trust environment where trust is established by a key exchange based on some sort of key management infrastructure.
I am sorry, but I think I am missing something here: isn't the "double spend problem" actually needing to be resolved by the choice of including one specific transaction (and no others), from a set of conflicting ones, truly relevant (vs. irrelevant)?
The point is that it does not matter which one is included, only that it's only one of the choices that all agree on. Which one that is is not relevant, there is no part of the algorithm that determines one transaction to be "more valid" than another one. There is no ranking of transactions, one of them has to be picked but which one it is can be random, as long as there is agreement.
Also see the response from and sub-thread from uncletammy.
Also see the response from and sub-thread from uncletammy.
There are certainly tx validity rules, though, and when presented with a set of equally valid txs, miners will likely choose the one that is best for them (called "MEV", miner extractable value).
Neither the OP or me said there are no rules and they have to use an RNG to make a decision, only that it does not matter. That they then go and use an algorithm that maximizes their profits is only to be expected and the rational outcome from the fact that there is no other constraint from the technical algorithm.
Just sharing for general interest / awareness, not as a "gotcha".
Though I will point out...
> only that it does not matter
... that this isn't true! MEV can destabilize consensus. There's been research around this in the Bitcoin/Lightning ecosystem, and it's been an active discussion in Ethereum for quite a while.
Though I will point out...
> only that it does not matter
... that this isn't true! MEV can destabilize consensus. There's been research around this in the Bitcoin/Lightning ecosystem, and it's been an active discussion in Ethereum for quite a while.
Yes, a specific transaction needs to be chosen as the consensus transaction. But if there are multiple to choose from (e.g. in the case of an attempted double spend), the miner can choose either one.
The blockchain doesn’t guarantee, for example, that the transaction which appeared earlier will always be chosen (in practice, it’s likely the one with the highest transaction fee)
The blockchain doesn’t guarantee, for example, that the transaction which appeared earlier will always be chosen (in practice, it’s likely the one with the highest transaction fee)
IIRC there were some hacks on bitcoin ATMs using this sort of knowledge.
The attacker would set up a withdrawal of (IIRC) CAD on the ATM, then transfer the bitcoin. The ATM would see the transaction, and dispense the cash. However the attacker would immediately, before the next block was generated, send the same BTC to another address which they controlled, with a higher fee. The miner would discard the first one and roll the update into a new block.
I may have one or two of the details wrong (is there an explicit way in the bitcoin protocol to mark a transaction as superseding a previous one?), but anyway, like many things, it worked until they got caught.
The attacker would set up a withdrawal of (IIRC) CAD on the ATM, then transfer the bitcoin. The ATM would see the transaction, and dispense the cash. However the attacker would immediately, before the next block was generated, send the same BTC to another address which they controlled, with a higher fee. The miner would discard the first one and roll the update into a new block.
I may have one or two of the details wrong (is there an explicit way in the bitcoin protocol to mark a transaction as superseding a previous one?), but anyway, like many things, it worked until they got caught.
ATMs would dispense actual cash when a transaction enters the mempool without waiting for (say) 6 confirmations? That seems like a pretty egregious design choice even a decade ago. If that story is true, the ATM designers merited the loss.
https://thenextweb.com/news/double-spenders-scam-150000-bitc...
2018, and yes, it seems like the Bitcoin arms were dispensing cache as soon as a valid transaction but the mempool.
2018, and yes, it seems like the Bitcoin arms were dispensing cache as soon as a valid transaction but the mempool.
A reason I have been interested in blockchain is that it seems like a good way to make a decentralized application that could exist beyond the life of the company or person that creates it.
I work in a hobby industry where a lot of community run ledgers are suddenly lost forever due to the death of someone in the fandom (or rarely intentional sabotage or hacking).
Would this be a good use for blockchain or are there maybe other solutions I'm not considering or aware of?
I work in a hobby industry where a lot of community run ledgers are suddenly lost forever due to the death of someone in the fandom (or rarely intentional sabotage or hacking).
Would this be a good use for blockchain or are there maybe other solutions I'm not considering or aware of?
A blockchain requires significant, persistent and consistent community effort.
If you can not have one guy taking up the mantle and doing the hosting, how can you get hundreds to do the same?
>A reason I have been interested in blockchain is that it seems like a good way to make a decentralized application that could exist beyond the life of the company or person that creates it.
Community run projects have existed for decades on the internet. They never needed a blockchain to persist. If they died, they died due to lack of interest and effort by their communities. A blockchain can not prevent that.
>maybe other solutions I'm not considering or aware of? IPFS potentially.
If you can not have one guy taking up the mantle and doing the hosting, how can you get hundreds to do the same?
>A reason I have been interested in blockchain is that it seems like a good way to make a decentralized application that could exist beyond the life of the company or person that creates it.
Community run projects have existed for decades on the internet. They never needed a blockchain to persist. If they died, they died due to lack of interest and effort by their communities. A blockchain can not prevent that.
>maybe other solutions I'm not considering or aware of? IPFS potentially.
> If you can not have one guy taking up the mantle and doing the hosting, how can you get hundreds to do the same?
Well I mean if you were to use a public blockchain like Ethereum it's likely the Ethereum community wouldn't be going away. I am not thinking about rolling out our own chain.
> Community run projects have existed for decades on the internet. They never needed a blockchain to persist
Unfortunately my experience hasn't really been the same. Community data controlled by a single user can go away pretty easily. If you open up the data and let people host their own database then you don't have a single source of truth.
Our data is largely just a ledger of who owns what with minimal meta data.
> IPFS potentially
Thanks will look into it!
Well I mean if you were to use a public blockchain like Ethereum it's likely the Ethereum community wouldn't be going away. I am not thinking about rolling out our own chain.
> Community run projects have existed for decades on the internet. They never needed a blockchain to persist
Unfortunately my experience hasn't really been the same. Community data controlled by a single user can go away pretty easily. If you open up the data and let people host their own database then you don't have a single source of truth.
Our data is largely just a ledger of who owns what with minimal meta data.
> IPFS potentially
Thanks will look into it!
This is really interesting, and I'd love to learn more about it. One thing to look into is rollups - they will soon enable custom application with cheap transaction fees, but with the full security of Ethereum. See e.g.: https://docs.celestia.org/category/recipe-book/
There is one other case where a structure like a block chain can make sense. It’s an easy way to build an unalterable log. If you give me hash 200000 in the chain I know that log entries 0-200000 are all unaltered.
This is perhaps the simplest easiest use case for a hash based linked list. Of course this is not the complete picture of what cryptocurrencies are; the hash list is just part of the system.
This is perhaps the simplest easiest use case for a hash based linked list. Of course this is not the complete picture of what cryptocurrencies are; the hash list is just part of the system.
That tech exists without blockchain in a distributed way. Look at Git or GitHub.
Saying that is a unique feature or reason to use blockchain is similar to saying blockchain can add two numbers together so we should use it to build a calculator.
Saying that is a unique feature or reason to use blockchain is similar to saying blockchain can add two numbers together so we should use it to build a calculator.
Then you're just trusting Github, and they don't have a perfect track record on neutrality:
https://www.jessesquires.com/blog/2022/04/19/github-suspendi...
https://www.jessesquires.com/blog/2022/04/19/github-suspendi...
This is such a narrow view on the problem because you also have to restrict the "make sense" part to the set of problems where it's ok to have the entire ledger in public view, not to mention that there are other mechanisms to accomplish the double spend issue
"Absolute power corrupts absolutely", and blockchain has activated absolute greed in most, hence blockchain not really being developed for anything that is not Ponzi-like.
reading this, it struck me how ironic crypto was built to "stop the doublespend" but here we have all these crypto exchanges doing things way worse than that.
company minting their own token and then using it as collateral, accounting it as if they had billions. the "stable coins" cannot produce basic accounting audits that a low level book-keeper could do on any normal business.
there has been so much fraud in crypto the past few years. and the algorithm did not help to stop that.
company minting their own token and then using it as collateral, accounting it as if they had billions. the "stable coins" cannot produce basic accounting audits that a low level book-keeper could do on any normal business.
there has been so much fraud in crypto the past few years. and the algorithm did not help to stop that.
A lot of applications have that problem though.
Take a text editor, it would be improved if edits or saves which are just transactions are stores on a blockchain if the text is being stored and shared synchronously and live between devices.
Basically, people have more devices, want to collaborate and add redundancies to important systems which means changes to data (transaction) where the historical sequence of changes is important to someone can use blockchain, but of course it isn't neccesarily the best solution, especially if there is trust between nodes or out of sync nodes causing a mess can be solves by simpler solutions.
Take a text editor, it would be improved if edits or saves which are just transactions are stores on a blockchain if the text is being stored and shared synchronously and live between devices.
Basically, people have more devices, want to collaborate and add redundancies to important systems which means changes to data (transaction) where the historical sequence of changes is important to someone can use blockchain, but of course it isn't neccesarily the best solution, especially if there is trust between nodes or out of sync nodes causing a mess can be solves by simpler solutions.
Blockchains wouldn't fix anything here, though. The last-connected device doesn't necessarily have the canonical file, and the blockchain doesn't have any way to resolve syncing conflicts. Git is a much better choice for transactional history, and it didn't need a blockchain to implement this concept.
Git requires a human to resolve conflicts, a blockchain comes to a majority consensus. But yeah, I would use git and try to automate conflict resolution but it stands to reason blockchain can also solve the problem. If you have 10 people live-editing a text content git will be messy for example but you can come to a consensus on agreeing who made what changes and when between participants (assume p2p connection).
> but you can come to a consensus on agreeing who made what changes and when between participants
How is this different from Git's model of development?
How is this different from Git's model of development?
Git is too slow for the use case I mentioned you resolve conflicts when you merge to your repo but you don't establish a consensus allowing everyone to accept your conflict resolution without centralizing.
Establishing consensus is more difficult than a single person deciding what to merge, if you need a trustless system then you can add consensus on top of Git.
Yeah and speed up git to commit/push/merge very fast. Or use a blockchain. I feel like there is stigma against the term, shall we call it distributed leger instead?
You can call it a BitTorrent magnet for all I care, it doesn't change the fact that a distributed ledger only has so many uses. Git already has consensus mechanisms baked into it's architecture, and immutability is provided with GPG signing if you care enough about it.
Both of those features have been available in Git since the 90s. You're not revolutionizing anything by proposing a migration to an even less ubiquitous protocol than HTTP or SSH.
Both of those features have been available in Git since the 90s. You're not revolutionizing anything by proposing a migration to an even less ubiquitous protocol than HTTP or SSH.
> You're not revolutionizing anything by proposing a migration to an even less ubiquitous protocol than HTTP or SSH.
I did not propose that. I didn't know git had a consensus mechanism built into it other than manual resolution of merge conflicts. A simple blockhain over https is easier for me than trying to get git to do something it wasn't designed to do (it works with files and repos, can you imagine having a commit+push+merge for every word edit in my example?) there are ready made libraries for this. The path of least resistance to acheive desires goals is what I would take. To each his own, blockhain can solve these problems outside of crypto.
Another big problem area is PKI as well. I'm sure you've seen stories about suspicious CAs, a distributed ledger of CA issuance and in the wild certificate observations is one legitimate goal that can be solved by blockhain (better than centralized CT logs that don't take ITW observations).
I did not propose that. I didn't know git had a consensus mechanism built into it other than manual resolution of merge conflicts. A simple blockhain over https is easier for me than trying to get git to do something it wasn't designed to do (it works with files and repos, can you imagine having a commit+push+merge for every word edit in my example?) there are ready made libraries for this. The path of least resistance to acheive desires goals is what I would take. To each his own, blockhain can solve these problems outside of crypto.
Another big problem area is PKI as well. I'm sure you've seen stories about suspicious CAs, a distributed ledger of CA issuance and in the wild certificate observations is one legitimate goal that can be solved by blockhain (better than centralized CT logs that don't take ITW observations).
> I didn't know git had a consensus mechanism built into it other than manual resolution of merge conflicts
Git has cryptographic identity baked-in, so people can assert authority over their own contributions. That enabled mailing groups and IRC channels which encouraged discussion before arriving at a consensus and merging relevant files to the master branch. It's not decentralized, but it could just as easily be hosted as a torrent if that was something people cared about. However, decentralized development has historically been a farce, so most people use something like Github to control and moderate their repos. You're right, this is a "to each his own" situation, and there's literally no one on the "hosting Git via BitTorrent" side of the room. Moving to a less-efficient, more-convoluted process does not fix this. I've been following decentralized technology and the likes of Bitcoin for almost a decade, and the successes and failures of the space are self-evident.
> Another big problem area is PKI as well.
To who?
To the scary boogyman white-supremacist KiwiFarms NBC fearmonger types? Yeah, have fun getting anyone to rule in favor of them. To the rest of society, centralized CAs are a boon. Not only are they wicked-fast (good luck querying a blockchain faster than a DNS request), they go out of their way to prevent systemic abuse and domain-squatting in ways that crypto can't. You want to apply PKI to this space? Convince me that it wouldn't start another FTX-like situation, with powerful individual exerting economic power to centralize the market a-la crypto exchanges.
Git has cryptographic identity baked-in, so people can assert authority over their own contributions. That enabled mailing groups and IRC channels which encouraged discussion before arriving at a consensus and merging relevant files to the master branch. It's not decentralized, but it could just as easily be hosted as a torrent if that was something people cared about. However, decentralized development has historically been a farce, so most people use something like Github to control and moderate their repos. You're right, this is a "to each his own" situation, and there's literally no one on the "hosting Git via BitTorrent" side of the room. Moving to a less-efficient, more-convoluted process does not fix this. I've been following decentralized technology and the likes of Bitcoin for almost a decade, and the successes and failures of the space are self-evident.
> Another big problem area is PKI as well.
To who?
To the scary boogyman white-supremacist KiwiFarms NBC fearmonger types? Yeah, have fun getting anyone to rule in favor of them. To the rest of society, centralized CAs are a boon. Not only are they wicked-fast (good luck querying a blockchain faster than a DNS request), they go out of their way to prevent systemic abuse and domain-squatting in ways that crypto can't. You want to apply PKI to this space? Convince me that it wouldn't start another FTX-like situation, with powerful individual exerting economic power to centralize the market a-la crypto exchanges.
the original purpose of an invention does not limit the scope of its application
No, but ignoring the design criteria that an invention solves for is a recipe for using the wrong tool for the job.
'right tools for the right job' seems like just re-stating the original point in different terms, how right a tool is depends on the actual context a big part of that context is culture, preferences, politics etc. not just engineering concerns
If “right tool for the job” is too hand-wavey, maybe “optimal tool given the problem constraints” is a better phrase.
E.g. I’ve seen proposals for “credentials on the blockchain”, but if you assume that a credential issuer has a known public key (as these proposals do), the issuer can just sign a credential, no public ledger is needed. The complexity of using a blockchain for this is just waste.
E.g. I’ve seen proposals for “credentials on the blockchain”, but if you assume that a credential issuer has a known public key (as these proposals do), the issuer can just sign a credential, no public ledger is needed. The complexity of using a blockchain for this is just waste.
sure, but the problem contraints arent reducible to engineering, so in the example you're giving an established centralized authority can profit from selling credentials using only a key signature, but a new decentralized bottom-up credential system needs a blockchain and smart-contracts to do it ...
The problem is that most such schemes end up requiring both a blockchain and an established centralized authority, because the blockchain doesn't actually solve the problem its meant to solve (since the only problem it solves is distributed consensus on the order of events in the blockchain - no more, no less).
I think it does, because of its complexity, it's more of a set of technologies than just a software solution. Preventing double-spend is just the main use, however in order to do this a whole game-theoretical economic/technological system is required and that also solves and/or creates other problems. For cryptocurrencies, DAOs and similar systems economics is a security concern (wrong incentives will make it possible for an someone to game and/or break the system).
The point is that blockchains don't provide you with anything other than that "main use". For any other kind of feature you need to add something else - and if you're adding a centralized trusted authority (which is by far the easiest way to do anything), then you can get rid of the blockchain altogether.
The book How Innovation Works by Matt Ridley changed my perspective on this. Originally I thought all innovation was like the dotcom era. Ridley attempts to show that there are times when it is not always clear what the final innovation will be.
I recommend Mumford's Technics and Civilization.
I had a real experience that perfectly reflects the research presented here (safer ledgers useful, blockchains are not).
I accidentally got wrapped up in a project to automate some HR functions, and the product manager demanded that it must be blockchain because blockchains are the future.
It turns out that append-only databases are well-suited for HR records, and (especially when dealing with things like background checks, immigration papers, etc.) it doesn't hurt to have a history with cryptographically-verifiable date stamps.
We used an existing database that did all of the above, told everyone it was blockchain, and released the product.
That was a great strategy for a few years until everyone realized blockchain was a boondoggle, and now you never need to work with anyone who still believes in it. You can just understand their mention of blockchain to be a sign that you need to avoid doing business with them.
I accidentally got wrapped up in a project to automate some HR functions, and the product manager demanded that it must be blockchain because blockchains are the future.
It turns out that append-only databases are well-suited for HR records, and (especially when dealing with things like background checks, immigration papers, etc.) it doesn't hurt to have a history with cryptographically-verifiable date stamps.
We used an existing database that did all of the above, told everyone it was blockchain, and released the product.
That was a great strategy for a few years until everyone realized blockchain was a boondoggle, and now you never need to work with anyone who still believes in it. You can just understand their mention of blockchain to be a sign that you need to avoid doing business with them.
" it must be blockchain because blockchains are the future."
Wow, that's next level PM cringe.
I'm glad you were able to jujitsu your way around it.
Wow, that's next level PM cringe.
I'm glad you were able to jujitsu your way around it.
Blockchains are great for one-thing... guarantee that data is being appended and never modified.
When you want to display a record, you can aggregate the data historically and allow people to see changes and attribute them to users and time but you can always see what was originally added.
However that's kinda risky for HR because anything committed to that DB will be there... forever!
When you want to display a record, you can aggregate the data historically and allow people to see changes and attribute them to users and time but you can always see what was originally added.
However that's kinda risky for HR because anything committed to that DB will be there... forever!
That’s an event sourcing architecture, and something like Kafka will do it much better than a blockchain.
The forever problem can be, ironically, resolved with crypto. If you encrypt each employer record with an employee key then, if the employee data needs to be deleted you just delete the key and the data is gone.
The forever problem can be, ironically, resolved with crypto. If you encrypt each employer record with an employee key then, if the employee data needs to be deleted you just delete the key and the data is gone.
How about for sharing data between semi-co-operating companies?
One problem with sharing data between multiple parties is that you need somewhere central to store it, somewhere that's ultimately trusted. If you decide to trust one party, they could still make mistakes, have downtime, stop supporting the project that requires the shared data, or go rogue.
I'm perhaps too ignorant of blockchain, but could it help with this scenario? Does it give a better promise of availability and more trust in its consistency and integrity?
edit: I'm thinking here of a blockchain whose only users are this group of companies, not a public system. I don't know if a blockchain becomes useless when it is only used by a small group.
One problem with sharing data between multiple parties is that you need somewhere central to store it, somewhere that's ultimately trusted. If you decide to trust one party, they could still make mistakes, have downtime, stop supporting the project that requires the shared data, or go rogue.
I'm perhaps too ignorant of blockchain, but could it help with this scenario? Does it give a better promise of availability and more trust in its consistency and integrity?
edit: I'm thinking here of a blockchain whose only users are this group of companies, not a public system. I don't know if a blockchain becomes useless when it is only used by a small group.
Not really with crypto, if you use a a not forever secure crypto algo.
This argument is equivalent to saying a data center isn't secure because a nuclear bomb can fall on it.
The usual reason for doing this is to convince auditors or lawyers that the system is in compliance with GDPR or similar legislation, not to resist the attention of three letter agencies. If you can say you’re using industry standard / government approved crypto it should be fine.
> Blockchains are great for one-thing... guarantee that data is being appended and never modified.
in a distributed, trustless fashion
If it's not distributed or trustless, you can do the same without the blockchain.
in a distributed, trustless fashion
If it's not distributed or trustless, you can do the same without the blockchain.
Yeah, a git repo covers 99% of these pseudo-blockchain usecases
That's not the full story, certificate transparency logs (and many other applications) achieve that without using a blockchain.
This is true as long as you trust the issuer of the transparency log to not go back and re-write the history of the log. That's a trust assumption that most folks are fine with, but it should be explicitly be understood to be there.
A blockchain takes that trust assumption and spreads it out amongst the social consensus of the chain, so re-witing of history could only occur if there is a consensus to do so.
A blockchain takes that trust assumption and spreads it out amongst the social consensus of the chain, so re-witing of history could only occur if there is a consensus to do so.
Who is both internal enough to get a copy of your HR database but external enough that their logs can't be changed as easily as a non-blockchain system's?
Honestly, it might be possible to do this magic by having the third party issue a signing certificate based on a hash.
Send me a hash as new data is added to your DB and I cut you a cert... the next cert includes hash of the last cert plus the new hash you just gave me...
Send me a hash as new data is added to your DB and I cut you a cert... the next cert includes hash of the last cert plus the new hash you just gave me...
An external service that signs and dates [a hash of] your database is very viable! But at that point there's no longer a distributed ledger.
Isn't the whole idea of certificate transparency to detect that situation? That's why the system also has auditors which would detect such tampering.
CT doesn’t require anonymity: the trust in CT comes from the tamper-evident design creating a risk to your reputation if you cheat. Once you have third-party trust relationships you no longer benefit from the expensive blockchain mechanism designed to work without them.
The challenge is that if a discrepency is shown, how do you know who is lying? The whistleblowers or the CT log vendor? A consensus mechanism built on top of the log would be able to show the 'history of the history' to enable folks to make better determinations on who to trust or not.
The CT log vendor is signing entries, so although you don't know what the "true" state of the log is, you know that you cannot trust the CT log vendor.
Can be removed/rewinded if you are in a shorter chain of the fork while the block was mined.
>>It turns out that append-only databases are well-suited for HR records
It may seem so, bu then You find out what are Your governments limit's for storing workers data, and Your company lawyers forces You to make it possible to delete everything that past that limit to limit legal risk and be gdpr compliant. And at this moment You find out that world is not constant and far from Your ideal model of spherical cow.
It may seem so, bu then You find out what are Your governments limit's for storing workers data, and Your company lawyers forces You to make it possible to delete everything that past that limit to limit legal risk and be gdpr compliant. And at this moment You find out that world is not constant and far from Your ideal model of spherical cow.
Can we design an append-only database that also allows for deletions if you replace those deletions with a direct reference to the hash that was once computed at that point in the chain?
Yes, I know this isn’t strictly “append only”, but it still gives the ability to prevent silent updates and silent deletes. Any record that’s deleted must be replaced with something that indicates that it was deleted.
Yes, I know this isn’t strictly “append only”, but it still gives the ability to prevent silent updates and silent deletes. Any record that’s deleted must be replaced with something that indicates that it was deleted.
If the database is distributed you have no way of enforcing that the other peers don't keep shadow copies of the data that is supposed to be deleted.
If you know you can trust all your peers to act in good faith, then you might as well just use a regular database as none of your peers will edit old records due to being good actors.
If you know you can trust all your peers to act in good faith, then you might as well just use a regular database as none of your peers will edit old records due to being good actors.
Yeah, what I'm describing is more like a journaled database, not bLoCkChaIn tEcHnOloGy.
There's a chain for sure, but nothing that allows it to be decentralized, or 100% immutable, etc.
There's a chain for sure, but nothing that allows it to be decentralized, or 100% immutable, etc.
Such a database already exists, and it is called AWS QLDB.
Deleting a document revision in QLDB does not actually delete it, but rather moves the last known revision into a shadow history table that accompanies every table in QLDB. The full document change history lookup has to accommodate in the code path a fallback to the history table when a document revision can't be located in the main data entity table. If no document revision exists in either table, it has never existed in the database.
Deleting a document revision in QLDB does not actually delete it, but rather moves the last known revision into a shadow history table that accompanies every table in QLDB. The full document change history lookup has to accommodate in the code path a fallback to the history table when a document revision can't be located in the main data entity table. If no document revision exists in either table, it has never existed in the database.
Use envelope encryption and wipe the key after the fact.
Bonus: use a committing AEAD mode and use the previous record as AEAD when writing the record.
You can keep the ciphertext in the ledger forever. Zeroing out the wrapped key makes it unretrievable.
Bonus: use a committing AEAD mode and use the previous record as AEAD when writing the record.
You can keep the ciphertext in the ledger forever. Zeroing out the wrapped key makes it unretrievable.
Small nitpick: "You" and "Your" don't need to be capitalized. It makes reading the text a bit weird.
Thank you [see what I did here :)] for pointing this out - I'm not native and on top of that used to learn german (never went anywhere with it, but the capitalization of every noun somehow stayed with me longer than necessary).
Add english oddities such as capitalizing first person pronoun (which I do, as you probably noticed) and it's kinda easy to be oblivious that I do this.
Add english oddities such as capitalizing first person pronoun (which I do, as you probably noticed) and it's kinda easy to be oblivious that I do this.
Kind of off-topic: in what kind of weird organisation is a product manager dictating engineering decisions?!
In most of them.
It's not difficult: You simply dictate requirements that can be only solved by one engineering solution.
But that, in essence, is part of the challenge with blockchain. People treat it as a self-describing requirement. ("This must be on the blockchain") rather than a technical solution for a dubious set of problems most people don't have.
It's not difficult: You simply dictate requirements that can be only solved by one engineering solution.
But that, in essence, is part of the challenge with blockchain. People treat it as a self-describing requirement. ("This must be on the blockchain") rather than a technical solution for a dubious set of problems most people don't have.
It was a small startup, so "product manager" wasn't a narrow role with clear boundaries. Their job was to bridge the clients and the software team, and they insisted that clients would jump at the chance to have a blockchain vendor.
They're not wrong. When a prospective client asks us if we do AI, we have to say yes, otherwise we will lose them on the spot. At least in this case it's not really wrong (we do machine learning).
> I accidentally got wrapped up in a project to automate some HR functions, and the product manager demanded that it must be blockchain because blockchains are the future.
Stomps on brake with both feet
Stomps on brake with both feet
> [Andy Jassey] said something like this: “All these leaders [CIOs and CTOs of huge enterprises] are asking me what our blockchain strategy is. They tell me that everyone’s saying it’s the future, the platform that’s going to obsolete everything else. I need to have a good answer for them. I’ll be honest, when they explain why it’s wonderful I just don’t get it. You guys got to go figure it out for us.”
To me the tell is not just that Andy didn't understand.
It's that all of these leaders said "everyone says it's the future", but not one of them said "I have this problem and here's how blockchain solves it for me."
To me the tell is not just that Andy didn't understand.
It's that all of these leaders said "everyone says it's the future", but not one of them said "I have this problem and here's how blockchain solves it for me."
I think one of the hardest parts of becoming an expert in a technical area is the transition from "I don't understand so I must be wrong" to "I don't understand so something must be wrong or I'm not seeing something".
When you're more junior you often make the mistake of wrongly dismissing ideas because you think you are very clever. I find that by the time you unlearn this, you typically should reverse direction.
Early in my career, every time something didn't make sense, it's because I had a misunderstanding of how things really worked.
Much later in my career I started to realize more and more often when I said "this doesn't make sense" I would start assuming I was the one missing something, only to time and time again uncover some one else had messed up or that something else was fundamentally wrong.
Obviously even the most expert in their field should reserve some probability that they are misunderstanding, but learning to recognize that you are an expert and that you not understanding something is in fact smoke is an important late career skill.
When you're more junior you often make the mistake of wrongly dismissing ideas because you think you are very clever. I find that by the time you unlearn this, you typically should reverse direction.
Early in my career, every time something didn't make sense, it's because I had a misunderstanding of how things really worked.
Much later in my career I started to realize more and more often when I said "this doesn't make sense" I would start assuming I was the one missing something, only to time and time again uncover some one else had messed up or that something else was fundamentally wrong.
Obviously even the most expert in their field should reserve some probability that they are misunderstanding, but learning to recognize that you are an expert and that you not understanding something is in fact smoke is an important late career skill.
most of the problems blockchain attempts to solve are public coordination problems in adversarial environments rather than corporate problems the CTOs/CIOs are likely to have.
I recently attended a trade show, which mostly revolved around emerging ML/AI and other "hot" tech products in the market.
So it actually seems that in the logistics line of things like manufacturing / production / etc. there is a place for blockchain, mainly due to the immutability and decentralized distribution properties. What could take a whole week to track down using older methods, takes seconds if all the data is recorded on the blockchain...for example, food production. You want to find out exactly which animal your food comes from, and all the things involved (use of antibiotics? which factory? how did the product travel before ending up at your grocery store? etc.).
Some researchers working on these products repeated that they often get approached by directors and CxO level people regarding this - wondering if blockchain can "solve problems". And every time, they have to reply: Using the blockchain can solve some specialized problems, but there's no magic fairy dust involved, and it's not some general structure which will solve all their problems.
Unfortunately, it's kind of like AI. High-level directors dream of General AI, but you need to explain to them that it's all ML models which aid (replace if you're lucky) workers, and automate some tasks.
I think any CTO worth their salt should know these things, and manage the expectations of the other C-suite executives.
So it actually seems that in the logistics line of things like manufacturing / production / etc. there is a place for blockchain, mainly due to the immutability and decentralized distribution properties. What could take a whole week to track down using older methods, takes seconds if all the data is recorded on the blockchain...for example, food production. You want to find out exactly which animal your food comes from, and all the things involved (use of antibiotics? which factory? how did the product travel before ending up at your grocery store? etc.).
Some researchers working on these products repeated that they often get approached by directors and CxO level people regarding this - wondering if blockchain can "solve problems". And every time, they have to reply: Using the blockchain can solve some specialized problems, but there's no magic fairy dust involved, and it's not some general structure which will solve all their problems.
Unfortunately, it's kind of like AI. High-level directors dream of General AI, but you need to explain to them that it's all ML models which aid (replace if you're lucky) workers, and automate some tasks.
I think any CTO worth their salt should know these things, and manage the expectations of the other C-suite executives.
> So it actually seems that in the logistics line of things like manufacturing / production / etc. there is a place for blockchain, mainly due to the immutability and decentralized distribution properties. What could take a whole week to track down using older methods, takes seconds if all the data is recorded on the blockchain...for example, food production. You want to find out exactly which animal your food comes from, and all the things involved (use of antibiotics? which factory? how did the product travel before ending up at your grocery store? etc.).
Literally none of that should involve (let alone requires) a blockchain.
Literally none of that should involve (let alone requires) a blockchain.
I'm no expert on that, but we had a bunch of senior researchers (NGO) advocate blockchain for that exact task.
I'm not going to argue against people with combined decades and decades of research and development experience in the food logistics community.
I'm not going to argue against people with combined decades and decades of research and development experience in the food logistics community.
Using the definition of blockchain as: "A blockchain is a type of distributed ledger technology (DLT) that consists of growing list of records, called blocks, that are securely linked together using cryptography."
Then, no, you don't need "blockchain" for that. You don't need it to be distributed. You don't need them to be linked using cryptography. In fact there are good reasons not to use blockchain, such as "I don't want my competitors seeing the exact details of my business transactions". I've heard, "oh but we can fix that with encryption", and then silence when asked "so how are you going to distribute those keys?" etc.
Looked into this for large medical supply chain company. Blockchain isn't merely no use, it's actively unfit for purpose.
Then, no, you don't need "blockchain" for that. You don't need it to be distributed. You don't need them to be linked using cryptography. In fact there are good reasons not to use blockchain, such as "I don't want my competitors seeing the exact details of my business transactions". I've heard, "oh but we can fix that with encryption", and then silence when asked "so how are you going to distribute those keys?" etc.
Looked into this for large medical supply chain company. Blockchain isn't merely no use, it's actively unfit for purpose.
Such people latch onto trends to look smart.
Then they scrub history, as most investors are doing wrt blockchain, when trends change.
Then they scrub history, as most investors are doing wrt blockchain, when trends change.
> Such people latch onto trends to look smart.
Or because they figure the hype will allow them to finally sell (launder) the project they need to management.
smt88's top-level comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33688576) is a thing I've seen multiple people mention.
Or because they figure the hype will allow them to finally sell (launder) the project they need to management.
smt88's top-level comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33688576) is a thing I've seen multiple people mention.
I'm still trying to wrap my head around how a blockchain would be helpful, even in your example. How is tracking say, a cow, from farm to lot to slaughterhouse, and knowing what all was done to said cow, not simply something that could be done easily and fast with a database?
Is the portability of the blockchain the thing? I could see maybe how that would help, if there wasn't a standard across the databases involved or something.
Honestly just trying to understand, thanks!
Is the portability of the blockchain the thing? I could see maybe how that would help, if there wasn't a standard across the databases involved or something.
Honestly just trying to understand, thanks!
The problem with traceability systems comes down to interfacing between the various nodes. Interoperability is probably the largest obstacle on the road to provide a full farm-to-table product tracking.
Probably not so much of a problem for the fully vertically integrated companies - especially those that also build or control their electronic systems, but large parts of agriculture still consists of independent actors on each node.
IIRC, the argument was that blockchain does not explicitly "solve" the problem, but rather that interoperability between blockchain-based systems will be easier than between those using completely different standards.
And of course, then you have the problem that food can travel around the globe many times before ending up on the table. Which again means more trust.
Probably not so much of a problem for the fully vertically integrated companies - especially those that also build or control their electronic systems, but large parts of agriculture still consists of independent actors on each node.
IIRC, the argument was that blockchain does not explicitly "solve" the problem, but rather that interoperability between blockchain-based systems will be easier than between those using completely different standards.
And of course, then you have the problem that food can travel around the globe many times before ending up on the table. Which again means more trust.
A database works if you have a central authority that manages it and accepts inputs. I’m going to switch to a different animal for a better perspective.
In the Pacific, tuna is caught within the EEZ of a number of (mostly) poor island nations. Some boats are part of the national fleet, but most are foreign flagged. The privilege to fish in an EEZ is costly, so there are a number of measures used to ensure that there is no cheating. The boat owners keep records, there are third party observers on board, and vessels broadcast positions. You need to cross check all these records, and do it in an environment without broadband.
To make things more complicated, there are incentives between countries. Fishing days are a finite resource governed by treaties. Poor countries have an incentive to oversell, and it’s possible to look the other way within an EEZ sometimes. Not only that, but countries have legitimate reasons for not broadcasting anything but gross yields from their EEZ.
All of this means that there’s not one central authority that can provide a single database.
In the Pacific, tuna is caught within the EEZ of a number of (mostly) poor island nations. Some boats are part of the national fleet, but most are foreign flagged. The privilege to fish in an EEZ is costly, so there are a number of measures used to ensure that there is no cheating. The boat owners keep records, there are third party observers on board, and vessels broadcast positions. You need to cross check all these records, and do it in an environment without broadband.
To make things more complicated, there are incentives between countries. Fishing days are a finite resource governed by treaties. Poor countries have an incentive to oversell, and it’s possible to look the other way within an EEZ sometimes. Not only that, but countries have legitimate reasons for not broadcasting anything but gross yields from their EEZ.
All of this means that there’s not one central authority that can provide a single database.
they’ve been talking about that agtech solution for over 5 years and no one has built it? They could do the same with a database
A friend of mine is an economist that did a similar project (sans blockchain) in grad school. He set up a program to label fish with information about where it was caught, who caught it, when, how it was processed etc. Some of it on the package including a smiling photo of the boat owner, more details on the web behind a QR code/URL. He worked with a local chain roughly equivalent to Whole foods and had a cold case full of product like this in several of their stores.
People seemed to like it when asked, but when given the choice to pay a premium for it vs the unlabeled fish, the majority declined. And this is at a store that caters to the whole hippies with money crowd.
I think the people hawking this idea for consumers utterly fail to take into account that most consumers simply do not care about this. A non trivial portion actually do NOT want to know this information, similar to how some people are fine eating chicken but can't touch a raw one to cook it.
People seemed to like it when asked, but when given the choice to pay a premium for it vs the unlabeled fish, the majority declined. And this is at a store that caters to the whole hippies with money crowd.
I think the people hawking this idea for consumers utterly fail to take into account that most consumers simply do not care about this. A non trivial portion actually do NOT want to know this information, similar to how some people are fine eating chicken but can't touch a raw one to cook it.
> people hawking this idea for consumers
Do people actually... do that?
I struggle to think of traceability as a massive consumer boon, as far as I could think the primary customers of such would be:
1. states (regulatory agencies)
2. consumer advocacy groups
3. the corporations themselves
Do people actually... do that?
I struggle to think of traceability as a massive consumer boon, as far as I could think the primary customers of such would be:
1. states (regulatory agencies)
2. consumer advocacy groups
3. the corporations themselves
Published transparency records work without blockchains. Certificate Transparency is an example of a project that does this without all the mess of blockchains. And that also works well because it operates on purely digital things - once you start having to unify a physical object with a digital record all the usual supply-chain-management problems re-emerge.
I'm not sure I see why or how would blockchain solve this information centralization problem better than other "classic" tools?
>So it actually seems that in the logistics line of things like manufacturing / production / etc. there is a place for blockchain, mainly due to the immutability and decentralized distribution properties. What could take a whole week to track down using older methods, takes seconds if all the data is recorded on the blockchain...for example, food production. You want to find out exactly which animal your food comes from, and all the things involved (use of antibiotics? which factory? how did the product travel before ending up at your grocery store? etc.).
The usual shitty dismissive HN response to this would be something like "but that doesn't require a block chain it could just be a database".
To those people I would ask who is running that database? What are their incentives?
Forget about the currency uses of block chains for a moment. The fact that you have this distributed network, controlled by nobody in particular but with their incentives aligned to keep it running and keep it secure, means that you have a platform you can build other stuff on top of.
An Ethereum smart contract is a type of append only database, the code of which is strongly open source and very battle tested (basically everyone is using openzeppelin), where you do not have to care about where or by who it is being hosted, with an uptime that puts every hosting provider in existence today to shame.
The usual shitty dismissive HN response to this would be something like "but that doesn't require a block chain it could just be a database".
To those people I would ask who is running that database? What are their incentives?
Forget about the currency uses of block chains for a moment. The fact that you have this distributed network, controlled by nobody in particular but with their incentives aligned to keep it running and keep it secure, means that you have a platform you can build other stuff on top of.
An Ethereum smart contract is a type of append only database, the code of which is strongly open source and very battle tested (basically everyone is using openzeppelin), where you do not have to care about where or by who it is being hosted, with an uptime that puts every hosting provider in existence today to shame.
In case anyone needs a thorough source to explain why you don't need a Blockchain, I found the NIST paper (esp the flowchart on page 42) quite helpful:
https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/ir/2018/nist.ir.8202.pdf
It worked wonderfully to cut the BS coming from a greedy manager, in a non confrontational way ("so, what do you actually need?" , "you say 'security', but which aspect do you need? immutability ? non-repudiability? confidentiality??"). I think NIST's clout helped, along that they'd have to fully understand a 65 page report. I'm sure the content of the report would have been quite eye-opening, but that wasn't needed. Greed is a feeling, not a rational process.
https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/ir/2018/nist.ir.8202.pdf
It worked wonderfully to cut the BS coming from a greedy manager, in a non confrontational way ("so, what do you actually need?" , "you say 'security', but which aspect do you need? immutability ? non-repudiability? confidentiality??"). I think NIST's clout helped, along that they'd have to fully understand a 65 page report. I'm sure the content of the report would have been quite eye-opening, but that wasn't needed. Greed is a feeling, not a rational process.
That's an excellent flowchart. BTW, there is a real example of meaningful blockchain use for auditing single source data (the "caveat" in the flowchart). It's the hypercore protocol https://hypercore-protocol.org/
That's very interesting. Would you mind coming up with a concrete and detailed business case? In this example you will provide, who are the entities with write access? How do they have a hard time deciding who should be control of the data store?
In the hypercore protocol participants control only their own data. So, no write conflicts. But they need to verify parts of data of other participants. The blockchain (specifically, the Merkle tree) helps with that. An alternative solution would be to just sign the pairs `(recordCounter, recordData)` instead of putting records in a tree and signing the root node. But the hash tree also helps to verify integrity, in addition to authenticity.
You didn't answer my question. Let's stay strictly on topic here if you would mind. We don't want to waste resources exploring a dead-end. So, what's the business case?
Would you mind coming up with a concrete and detailed business case? In this example you will provide, who are the business entities with write access? What's their context? What are their interests? How do they have a hard time deciding who should be control of the data store?
Would you mind coming up with a concrete and detailed business case? In this example you will provide, who are the business entities with write access? What's their context? What are their interests? How do they have a hard time deciding who should be control of the data store?
I think the cost of trust is underestimated.
All those shiny skyscrapers that the banks build? It's for trust, along with a good deal of banking licensing requirements and regulation.
The example with the farmers' fields is quite valid. We forget in our relatively well-governed western nations that some governments really can't be trusted to simply keep records straight and not 'lose' vital documents, in cases where bribes abound.
Another example is foreign exchange trading settlements; I can't trust that if I send you $500mn in swiss francs, you'll actually send me the equivalent settlement in USD. You might go bankrupt half way through the transaction. And so there exists an expensive jointly owned escrow bank for exactly this purpose, CLS bank.
I'm sure there are many other examples, but the point is, trust is actually quite expensive.
All those shiny skyscrapers that the banks build? It's for trust, along with a good deal of banking licensing requirements and regulation.
The example with the farmers' fields is quite valid. We forget in our relatively well-governed western nations that some governments really can't be trusted to simply keep records straight and not 'lose' vital documents, in cases where bribes abound.
Another example is foreign exchange trading settlements; I can't trust that if I send you $500mn in swiss francs, you'll actually send me the equivalent settlement in USD. You might go bankrupt half way through the transaction. And so there exists an expensive jointly owned escrow bank for exactly this purpose, CLS bank.
I'm sure there are many other examples, but the point is, trust is actually quite expensive.
Rather than saying trust is expensive, I would express it as trust is precious.
By analogy, sunlight and air are cheap, not expensive, even though we can't live without them. If either of these were in short supply they would become extremely expensive. But since they're abundant we don't normally dwell on their value.
In a civilized society with a stable government, we take trust for granted. That's how society is able to build skyscrapers and shipping terminals and air travel. If society collectively loses trust in itself, we will lose these nice things. Trust is a feature of living in a liberal democracy. Autocracies may manage it too, but their historical record is questionable.
So trust is precious, but I wouldn't express it as trust is expensive because it creates far more value than it costs.
By analogy, sunlight and air are cheap, not expensive, even though we can't live without them. If either of these were in short supply they would become extremely expensive. But since they're abundant we don't normally dwell on their value.
In a civilized society with a stable government, we take trust for granted. That's how society is able to build skyscrapers and shipping terminals and air travel. If society collectively loses trust in itself, we will lose these nice things. Trust is a feature of living in a liberal democracy. Autocracies may manage it too, but their historical record is questionable.
So trust is precious, but I wouldn't express it as trust is expensive because it creates far more value than it costs.
Trust is expensive, lack of trust is even more so.
Say, how would you build a skyscraper without trust? Are you going to set up an on-premises laboratory to test the quality of the concrete and steel? Are you going to personally verify the entire building's plans? Check whether the geological study was accurate? Follow every worker around to make sure they don't cut corners anywhere?
The less you can trust that the many people involved did their job, the harder and more expensive it gets to actually get the work done, until it turns out it just can't be practically done.
A lack of trust gets you a place like Afghanistan -- where the moment you stop looking stuff starts disappearing.
Say, how would you build a skyscraper without trust? Are you going to set up an on-premises laboratory to test the quality of the concrete and steel? Are you going to personally verify the entire building's plans? Check whether the geological study was accurate? Follow every worker around to make sure they don't cut corners anywhere?
The less you can trust that the many people involved did their job, the harder and more expensive it gets to actually get the work done, until it turns out it just can't be practically done.
A lack of trust gets you a place like Afghanistan -- where the moment you stop looking stuff starts disappearing.
"you going to set up an on-premises laboratory to test the quality of the concrete and steel?"
This isn't a good example because there are whole infrastructures to verify that buildings are being made "to code" and quality of materials is a part of that. E.g. this lab that tests steel: https://www.leica-microsystems.com/science-lab/steel-the-all...
Now what you're getting at is, OK, now you have to trust the lab. But that's OK because the incentives are better aligned. Trust is a thing with complex shapes. Maybe you develop trust in a single lab because being trusted is their whole business, and now you can easily switch between steel suppliers depending on who can sell the cheapest with peace of mind, so you've moved the trust problem around and reshaped it.
A lot of trust problems in the business world are like this. You can't eliminate it entirely everywhere, but reducing the amount you need and reshaping it/moving it around is still useful.
This isn't a good example because there are whole infrastructures to verify that buildings are being made "to code" and quality of materials is a part of that. E.g. this lab that tests steel: https://www.leica-microsystems.com/science-lab/steel-the-all...
Now what you're getting at is, OK, now you have to trust the lab. But that's OK because the incentives are better aligned. Trust is a thing with complex shapes. Maybe you develop trust in a single lab because being trusted is their whole business, and now you can easily switch between steel suppliers depending on who can sell the cheapest with peace of mind, so you've moved the trust problem around and reshaped it.
A lot of trust problems in the business world are like this. You can't eliminate it entirely everywhere, but reducing the amount you need and reshaping it/moving it around is still useful.
Yes, but even that is potentially troublesome. If you're in a low trust environment, then probably nobody trusts the labs either.
Like, why do the labs exist? Because the building companies really, really wants to build a solid building but the concrete industry is oddly shady? Or because there's an official/unofficial requirement for it? If the second, you easily end up with labs that rubber stamp whatever you want them to.
Trust in this sense is something that needs to be encouraged society-wide. You can patch imperfections, but there's a very real limit to how practical that is.
Like, why do the labs exist? Because the building companies really, really wants to build a solid building but the concrete industry is oddly shady? Or because there's an official/unofficial requirement for it? If the second, you easily end up with labs that rubber stamp whatever you want them to.
Trust in this sense is something that needs to be encouraged society-wide. You can patch imperfections, but there's a very real limit to how practical that is.
There's not really such a thing as low trust/high trust society. That's an abstraction that sounds good but hides too much detail to be useful when discussing specific projects.
You can't just encourage everyone to trust everyone else. To the extent developed countries can be described as "high trust", it's not because they are just magically more trusting. They get that way because there are extensive and mostly working mechanisms to find and penalize betrayals of trust. Corruption is low in the west because corrupt people get caught and punished, and because once the problem gets small enough people won't just blindly accept it but will make an effort to report it and ensure it's resolved (vs when it's endemic).
Stuff like concrete mixing is commodity, lots of small firms scattered around the world. They compete on price and delivery time so there's a temptation to cut corners. Delivery time is easily understood and measured, so is price, if you can properly measure quality then you can switch between providers easily. The alternative is that someone fixes the trust issue another way, like a big centralized mega-brand or having to in-source everything, but that comes with bigger downsides.
You can't just encourage everyone to trust everyone else. To the extent developed countries can be described as "high trust", it's not because they are just magically more trusting. They get that way because there are extensive and mostly working mechanisms to find and penalize betrayals of trust. Corruption is low in the west because corrupt people get caught and punished, and because once the problem gets small enough people won't just blindly accept it but will make an effort to report it and ensure it's resolved (vs when it's endemic).
Stuff like concrete mixing is commodity, lots of small firms scattered around the world. They compete on price and delivery time so there's a temptation to cut corners. Delivery time is easily understood and measured, so is price, if you can properly measure quality then you can switch between providers easily. The alternative is that someone fixes the trust issue another way, like a big centralized mega-brand or having to in-source everything, but that comes with bigger downsides.
This comment helped me to put into words something I've been thinking about recently.
Propaganda that erodes the concept of truth in a society also destroys trust. While a dictator may benefit in the short term from confused opposition, their erosion of truth deeply damages the society on which their power depends.
That being said, I don't know how long a truth-optional trust-destroyed society can last. For instance North Korea, but I know nothing about how much corruption exists there.
(Apologies for being off topic)
Propaganda that erodes the concept of truth in a society also destroys trust. While a dictator may benefit in the short term from confused opposition, their erosion of truth deeply damages the society on which their power depends.
That being said, I don't know how long a truth-optional trust-destroyed society can last. For instance North Korea, but I know nothing about how much corruption exists there.
(Apologies for being off topic)
Perfectly put. Needed a comment as well as an upvote.
>Trust is expensive
Trust is free. Trust plus verification plus enforcement is expensive. If all we needed was trust, we could save ourselves trillions per year. When our machine overlords arrive, we'll be able to get buy on trust alone ;)
Trust is free. Trust plus verification plus enforcement is expensive. If all we needed was trust, we could save ourselves trillions per year. When our machine overlords arrive, we'll be able to get buy on trust alone ;)
I think what you mean by trust here is just a thin layer over a vast system of enforced checks and balances.
Materials standards, building codes, fair contract law, etc, etc, etc, and the courts and police to back it all up.
Materials standards, building codes, fair contract law, etc, etc, etc, and the courts and police to back it all up.
You actually know something about the finance industry, not sure this is the thread for you ;) You're absolutely right about the core problem.
I worked for several years on an 'enterprise blockchain' system. We often called it distributed ledger technology because our platform didn't actually use chains of blocks or proof of work, and it didn't have a token or anything like that. It was essentially a type of database but it had a lot of ideas from Bitcoin in it and was blockchainy enough that customers accepted it as such.
I have to admit, at the very start I was skeptical about why so many large companies seemed to want this stuff. Like Tim, I also spent a lot of time talking to staff at these large institutions to understand where they were coming from. Unlike him I didn't work for AWS which is pretty much the exemplar of centralised infrastructure, so maybe it was easier to pick up on some of the more subtle issues involved.
There are a few things to understand about businesses that decided they wanted blockchain:
1. They have complicated inter-firm communication and synchronization needs.
2. They solve those needs today via creating centralized trusted intermediaries (like CLS). This comes with a world of pain and problems like the obvious "too big to fail" issue that was exposed in 2008, but there's also a lot of less obvious problems, like these institutions immediately becoming stagnant rent seekers who don't innovate.
3. They exist in markets that lack obviously dominant players who can push things forward. Many people in the tech world don't understand this because we rely so heavily on a handful of ultra-profitable, ultra-huge tech firms that spend lots of treasure on giving out freebies and standards setting, but that's abnormal.
So they heard about how Bitcoin can synchronize different companies view of a real financial object like a ledger without a SWIFT-like organization sitting in the middle, and thought "yes that sounds like what we need". And they're kind of right, as long as you think in terms of business problems rather than technology!
"Blockchain" is a concept that works for them speaking in the purely abstract social sense because it acts as a neutral rallying point. If one company in a market observes that maybe having a giant specialized too-big-to-fail clearing house like CLS isn't the ideal way to solve atomic transactions, and they go to their partners saying "hey let's use this cool thing we designed" the answer will always be no because their partners will say, why should we empower our competitor? Blockchain as a concept is owned by nobody, and the core idea is that it empowers nobody, so it acted as an enabler for conversations that would otherwise never have happened. Whether the final result actually uses proof of work or even has blocks at all actually isn't so relevant except in the sense that business owners don't want to get ripped off by people lying to them about what they built.
Tim Bray should really understand this dynamic better than most people because he created XML, which crops up in the enterprise space all over the place, often in ways that aren't really appropriate. Something like protobufs would have been a far better fit but they use XML. Why is that? Well, XML went through a massive hype wave ~20 years ago thanks to the W3C relentlessly pushing this vapourware "semantic web" concept, so for a brief period XML was the future of everything. Again, this created a socially acceptable rallying point at which complex inter-firm business problems could be solved in a relatively decentralized way. The tech got used regardless of merit simply because it was something everyone could agree on and unlike ASN.1 the protocols/tooling was free.
Back to blockchain. The platform I designed for this use case (Corda) was a competitor of the DA platform used in ASX and has done relatively well in the market - it reached number 1 by number of projects using it and unlike the ASX case actually has real deployments that are actually decentralized. Over 90% of Italian banks are using it for inter-bank reconciliation! [1] There are other projects that use it too which seem to be working (I'm not involved in any of them directly and haven't worked on Corda for several years now). You never hear about them on HN because they're too Starship Enterprise to be interesting to the crowd here, but the idea that there are no working blockchain projects isn't actually true.
We managed this partly by walking the tightrope between what people said they wanted (blockchain!) and what they were telling us they actually wanted in customer interviews (what we came to call distributed ledger technology). There was definitely a fair bit of overlap but not enough to just throw Ethereum at a problem and call it solved. What they really needed was a combination of better inter-firm messaging, signing/cryptography, atomic financial transactions without a CLS-style intermediary that actually takes custody of the assets, a robust identity framework, good developer support and training materials etc. Some of this can be found in blockchain related research like BFT algos, others were somewhat solved already, but blending them together into a coherent platform was hard.
There's lots more that can be said about this - some customer projects failed, but the reasons ran the gamut from tech to social/political/business reasons. It wasn't as simple as "blockchain is a scam", which is what Bray seems trying to imply here. There actually is a there, there. It's just really, really hard to solve these problems without a hype wave to coordinate and synchronize intent.
[1] https://www.r3.com/case-studies/spunta/
I worked for several years on an 'enterprise blockchain' system. We often called it distributed ledger technology because our platform didn't actually use chains of blocks or proof of work, and it didn't have a token or anything like that. It was essentially a type of database but it had a lot of ideas from Bitcoin in it and was blockchainy enough that customers accepted it as such.
I have to admit, at the very start I was skeptical about why so many large companies seemed to want this stuff. Like Tim, I also spent a lot of time talking to staff at these large institutions to understand where they were coming from. Unlike him I didn't work for AWS which is pretty much the exemplar of centralised infrastructure, so maybe it was easier to pick up on some of the more subtle issues involved.
There are a few things to understand about businesses that decided they wanted blockchain:
1. They have complicated inter-firm communication and synchronization needs.
2. They solve those needs today via creating centralized trusted intermediaries (like CLS). This comes with a world of pain and problems like the obvious "too big to fail" issue that was exposed in 2008, but there's also a lot of less obvious problems, like these institutions immediately becoming stagnant rent seekers who don't innovate.
3. They exist in markets that lack obviously dominant players who can push things forward. Many people in the tech world don't understand this because we rely so heavily on a handful of ultra-profitable, ultra-huge tech firms that spend lots of treasure on giving out freebies and standards setting, but that's abnormal.
So they heard about how Bitcoin can synchronize different companies view of a real financial object like a ledger without a SWIFT-like organization sitting in the middle, and thought "yes that sounds like what we need". And they're kind of right, as long as you think in terms of business problems rather than technology!
"Blockchain" is a concept that works for them speaking in the purely abstract social sense because it acts as a neutral rallying point. If one company in a market observes that maybe having a giant specialized too-big-to-fail clearing house like CLS isn't the ideal way to solve atomic transactions, and they go to their partners saying "hey let's use this cool thing we designed" the answer will always be no because their partners will say, why should we empower our competitor? Blockchain as a concept is owned by nobody, and the core idea is that it empowers nobody, so it acted as an enabler for conversations that would otherwise never have happened. Whether the final result actually uses proof of work or even has blocks at all actually isn't so relevant except in the sense that business owners don't want to get ripped off by people lying to them about what they built.
Tim Bray should really understand this dynamic better than most people because he created XML, which crops up in the enterprise space all over the place, often in ways that aren't really appropriate. Something like protobufs would have been a far better fit but they use XML. Why is that? Well, XML went through a massive hype wave ~20 years ago thanks to the W3C relentlessly pushing this vapourware "semantic web" concept, so for a brief period XML was the future of everything. Again, this created a socially acceptable rallying point at which complex inter-firm business problems could be solved in a relatively decentralized way. The tech got used regardless of merit simply because it was something everyone could agree on and unlike ASN.1 the protocols/tooling was free.
Back to blockchain. The platform I designed for this use case (Corda) was a competitor of the DA platform used in ASX and has done relatively well in the market - it reached number 1 by number of projects using it and unlike the ASX case actually has real deployments that are actually decentralized. Over 90% of Italian banks are using it for inter-bank reconciliation! [1] There are other projects that use it too which seem to be working (I'm not involved in any of them directly and haven't worked on Corda for several years now). You never hear about them on HN because they're too Starship Enterprise to be interesting to the crowd here, but the idea that there are no working blockchain projects isn't actually true.
We managed this partly by walking the tightrope between what people said they wanted (blockchain!) and what they were telling us they actually wanted in customer interviews (what we came to call distributed ledger technology). There was definitely a fair bit of overlap but not enough to just throw Ethereum at a problem and call it solved. What they really needed was a combination of better inter-firm messaging, signing/cryptography, atomic financial transactions without a CLS-style intermediary that actually takes custody of the assets, a robust identity framework, good developer support and training materials etc. Some of this can be found in blockchain related research like BFT algos, others were somewhat solved already, but blending them together into a coherent platform was hard.
There's lots more that can be said about this - some customer projects failed, but the reasons ran the gamut from tech to social/political/business reasons. It wasn't as simple as "blockchain is a scam", which is what Bray seems trying to imply here. There actually is a there, there. It's just really, really hard to solve these problems without a hype wave to coordinate and synchronize intent.
[1] https://www.r3.com/case-studies/spunta/
Haha, this beginning was eerie to read:
> We often called it distributed ledger technology because our platform didn't actually use chains of blocks or proof of work, and it didn't have a token or anything like that. It was essentially a type of database but it had a lot of ideas from Bitcoin in it and was blockchainy enough that customers accepted it as such.
because it was actually how I selected Corda as the infrastructure for a project a few years ago. The customers and managers wanted Blockchain®, and I wanted to deliver something that actually added some kind of value, and I found Corda which - as I told my CEO - was "close enough to a blockchain that our marketing splash wasn't lying".
(Whereas to my fellow devs, I said more or less "look, it's Spring Boot with a replicated event-sourced database and a funny CLI admin panel")
Unfortunately the project never got past the test stage because - this is gonna shock you - the very first, extremely basic smart contract we encoded in Corda was immediately violated by the customer's processes, and they absolutely refused to change.
Still, I want to thank you because your platform enabled me to retain my dignity without pissing off my boss for a half year or so.
> We often called it distributed ledger technology because our platform didn't actually use chains of blocks or proof of work, and it didn't have a token or anything like that. It was essentially a type of database but it had a lot of ideas from Bitcoin in it and was blockchainy enough that customers accepted it as such.
because it was actually how I selected Corda as the infrastructure for a project a few years ago. The customers and managers wanted Blockchain®, and I wanted to deliver something that actually added some kind of value, and I found Corda which - as I told my CEO - was "close enough to a blockchain that our marketing splash wasn't lying".
(Whereas to my fellow devs, I said more or less "look, it's Spring Boot with a replicated event-sourced database and a funny CLI admin panel")
Unfortunately the project never got past the test stage because - this is gonna shock you - the very first, extremely basic smart contract we encoded in Corda was immediately violated by the customer's processes, and they absolutely refused to change.
Still, I want to thank you because your platform enabled me to retain my dignity without pissing off my boss for a half year or so.
By funny CLI admin panel you mean the banking jokes, right? ;)
Glad you liked the design, thanks for the kind words!
Glad you liked the design, thanks for the kind words!
Hi everybody... Richard Brown, CTO of R3, the firm behind Corda, here.
As Mike says, we're somewhat unusual in that there are many live, successful Corda deployments around the world. Mike's comment about how Corda is blockchain-like but not, strictly speaking, a chain of blocks is at the heart of this I think. Here's what I mean:
How many 'introductory' presentations have you been to (or, worse, given) to semi-technical people, where Bitcoin and other public blockchains are 'explained' by describing the components? You probably know the sort of pitch I mean: they laboriously build up the concepts - transactions, signatures, hashes, blocks, chains of blocks, mining, etc, etc. Such presentation are usually correct. But they impart almost no intuition. It's little wonder that so many 'business people' come away from them thinking that a blockchain is some sort of mysterious and magical technology.
There's a presentation I like to give where I go the other way. I give a one-line description of the problem Bitcoin solves [1] and then I help the audience 'invent' Bitcoin for themselves from first principles. There's an old blog post of mine that gives the rough idea [2]. The point is that successful architectures solve well-stated problems. Cargo culting never works.
Where I think many corporate deployments of blockchain went wrong was that they saw the huge enthusiasm for 'blockchain tech', had a vague intuition that 'inter-firm' or 'market-level' problems were ripe to be solved, but they never fully internalised that Bitcoin's (or Ethereum's) architecture isn't some sort of inviolable, handed-down-from-high blueprint... it's merely a very elegant engineering solution to a well-stated 'business problem'.
Yet many 'enterprise blockchain' platforms seemed to begin with the architecture of a public blockchain, and then tweaked it to make it palatable to businesses (eg engineering cumbersome privacy solutions on top to work around the inherently broadcast nature of the public chains). This always felt a bit weird to me.
With Corda, we were fortunate to have been given the time and space by our backers to write down our equivalent of the Bitcoin problem statement, and then to engineer a solution to that problem. Yes - of course, we knew we were in the 'inter-firm business process' space, and we knew the problem we were trying to solve was in some way 'blockchainy' But we did try really quite hard to write down the problem statement [3] and then go forward from there, rather than starting with a pre-existing architecture and then modifying it.
Yes - as Mike says, architecturally it looks a lot like Bitcoin (eg it has an unspent-transaction output data model). But it also has a bunch of other things that, to this day, no other Blockchain has... eg the Flow Framework that allows decentralised inter-firm workflows to be modelled (think temporal.io but without any centralised infrastructure). And, like Mike says, Corda passes data point-to-point and confirms each transaction one at a time - no blocks, no broadcast.
You would not believe HOW MUCH GRIEF we got from the blockchain community for that design in the early days. Yet - several years on, it seems to be working.
[1] I claim that the 'requirement' for which Bitcoin is the solution is: "build me a system of un-censorable digital cash."
[2] https://gendal.me/2014/05/21/bitcoin-mining-the-first-techno...
[3] Our problem statement? "Build me a platform that enables multiple firms to record and manage the lifecycle of the business contracts they have with each other, minimising the need for any new third parties." At least, that's what I thought I was building. Mike might disagree, however... I know he likes the "decentralised database" interpretation of Corda.
As Mike says, we're somewhat unusual in that there are many live, successful Corda deployments around the world. Mike's comment about how Corda is blockchain-like but not, strictly speaking, a chain of blocks is at the heart of this I think. Here's what I mean:
How many 'introductory' presentations have you been to (or, worse, given) to semi-technical people, where Bitcoin and other public blockchains are 'explained' by describing the components? You probably know the sort of pitch I mean: they laboriously build up the concepts - transactions, signatures, hashes, blocks, chains of blocks, mining, etc, etc. Such presentation are usually correct. But they impart almost no intuition. It's little wonder that so many 'business people' come away from them thinking that a blockchain is some sort of mysterious and magical technology.
There's a presentation I like to give where I go the other way. I give a one-line description of the problem Bitcoin solves [1] and then I help the audience 'invent' Bitcoin for themselves from first principles. There's an old blog post of mine that gives the rough idea [2]. The point is that successful architectures solve well-stated problems. Cargo culting never works.
Where I think many corporate deployments of blockchain went wrong was that they saw the huge enthusiasm for 'blockchain tech', had a vague intuition that 'inter-firm' or 'market-level' problems were ripe to be solved, but they never fully internalised that Bitcoin's (or Ethereum's) architecture isn't some sort of inviolable, handed-down-from-high blueprint... it's merely a very elegant engineering solution to a well-stated 'business problem'.
Yet many 'enterprise blockchain' platforms seemed to begin with the architecture of a public blockchain, and then tweaked it to make it palatable to businesses (eg engineering cumbersome privacy solutions on top to work around the inherently broadcast nature of the public chains). This always felt a bit weird to me.
With Corda, we were fortunate to have been given the time and space by our backers to write down our equivalent of the Bitcoin problem statement, and then to engineer a solution to that problem. Yes - of course, we knew we were in the 'inter-firm business process' space, and we knew the problem we were trying to solve was in some way 'blockchainy' But we did try really quite hard to write down the problem statement [3] and then go forward from there, rather than starting with a pre-existing architecture and then modifying it.
Yes - as Mike says, architecturally it looks a lot like Bitcoin (eg it has an unspent-transaction output data model). But it also has a bunch of other things that, to this day, no other Blockchain has... eg the Flow Framework that allows decentralised inter-firm workflows to be modelled (think temporal.io but without any centralised infrastructure). And, like Mike says, Corda passes data point-to-point and confirms each transaction one at a time - no blocks, no broadcast.
You would not believe HOW MUCH GRIEF we got from the blockchain community for that design in the early days. Yet - several years on, it seems to be working.
[1] I claim that the 'requirement' for which Bitcoin is the solution is: "build me a system of un-censorable digital cash."
[2] https://gendal.me/2014/05/21/bitcoin-mining-the-first-techno...
[3] Our problem statement? "Build me a platform that enables multiple firms to record and manage the lifecycle of the business contracts they have with each other, minimising the need for any new third parties." At least, that's what I thought I was building. Mike might disagree, however... I know he likes the "decentralised database" interpretation of Corda.
I think your interpretation is fine :) Maybe I was aiming for a fully generalized decentralized database, but in the end there's probably too many finance or business-specific concepts in the core model to really deserve the title. At least in Corda 4.
And I should have given you more credit in my post, apologies for that. Indeed Corda has successful 'blockchain' projects where other platforms often don't, largely because of your rigorous problem-definition-first mentality that kept us seeing Bitcoin/Ethereum as a bag of useful ideas rather than a template that we had to follow. It was a great collaboration which I enjoyed a lot, and the platform was very fundamentally shaped by your efforts and insights!
And I should have given you more credit in my post, apologies for that. Indeed Corda has successful 'blockchain' projects where other platforms often don't, largely because of your rigorous problem-definition-first mentality that kept us seeing Bitcoin/Ethereum as a bag of useful ideas rather than a template that we had to follow. It was a great collaboration which I enjoyed a lot, and the platform was very fundamentally shaped by your efforts and insights!
No need to layer on the flattery... I was hand-waver in chief (and like to think I did a good job in bringing people with us and creating the space for you and the team to work without too much distraction and noise), but it was you who actually brought all the pieces together into a coherent platform. There was nothing in your post I disagreed with!
Yes, and #include cost of military, courts and police ("guys with guns")
Trust is arguably the most expensive thing in society.
For those looking for a fun read about trust read some Francis Fukuyama.
For those looking for a fun read about trust read some Francis Fukuyama.
The events described here took place in 2016, over six years ago. That's a long time in technology!
Since then additional billions of investment dollars have flowed into the space (a "VC crypto spasm" as the author calls it). Yet zero meaningful products have emerged. But we've witnessed many giant scams and endless crypto startups that happily spun their wheels producing nothing, just minting tokens so that insiders and investors can dump them onto retail investors.
How long will this have to go on? There are real things to build in software. This nonsense is both an embarrassment to the profession as well as a giant distraction. Time spent thinking about cryptocurrency mindgames is time you'll never get back to use on something productive.
Since then additional billions of investment dollars have flowed into the space (a "VC crypto spasm" as the author calls it). Yet zero meaningful products have emerged. But we've witnessed many giant scams and endless crypto startups that happily spun their wheels producing nothing, just minting tokens so that insiders and investors can dump them onto retail investors.
How long will this have to go on? There are real things to build in software. This nonsense is both an embarrassment to the profession as well as a giant distraction. Time spent thinking about cryptocurrency mindgames is time you'll never get back to use on something productive.
Any moment now…
I think in any other space, if you had millions of people (some of them wicked smart) m looking for applications of a technology without results, you’d see the space dwindle into irrelevance quickly…
Crypto is very special in this sense. Despite massive failures and frauds at scale, people keep flocking to it. Is it the promise of unlimited riches, the romantic aspects of it (“decentralization”, etc.), something else altogether?
I don’t know, but to answer your question: I get the feeling that despite the FTX case crypto still has many years ahead of it, regardless of whether it ever produces positive outcomes.
I think in any other space, if you had millions of people (some of them wicked smart) m looking for applications of a technology without results, you’d see the space dwindle into irrelevance quickly…
Crypto is very special in this sense. Despite massive failures and frauds at scale, people keep flocking to it. Is it the promise of unlimited riches, the romantic aspects of it (“decentralization”, etc.), something else altogether?
I don’t know, but to answer your question: I get the feeling that despite the FTX case crypto still has many years ahead of it, regardless of whether it ever produces positive outcomes.
> Crypto is very special in this sense.
I noticed crypto's quality of being special is in reverse proportion to the Fed's interest rates. Just an observation.
In all seriousness, the are two real drivers here: 1) speculation 2) money laundering and avoiding regulation in general. These are the things that keep crypto afloat and cryptomaniacs repeating promises of the next big thing that's gonna change everything tomorrow. The real question is what's gonna happen sooner, Tesla's fool self-driving to Mars or blockchains taking over the world.
I noticed crypto's quality of being special is in reverse proportion to the Fed's interest rates. Just an observation.
In all seriousness, the are two real drivers here: 1) speculation 2) money laundering and avoiding regulation in general. These are the things that keep crypto afloat and cryptomaniacs repeating promises of the next big thing that's gonna change everything tomorrow. The real question is what's gonna happen sooner, Tesla's fool self-driving to Mars or blockchains taking over the world.
A pretty direct correlation for your observation:
https://twitter.com/aakashdotio/status/1593347543739441153?c...
https://twitter.com/aakashdotio/status/1593347543739441153?c...
> How long will this have to go on?
As long as money flows into it (which seems to be ending) and people accept that Bitcoin was the "killer app," as the kids say.
Everything else was just slower database apps jazzed up with buzzwords front-run by narcissists who realized they needed a new grift beyond Uber for Cats.
As long as money flows into it (which seems to be ending) and people accept that Bitcoin was the "killer app," as the kids say.
Everything else was just slower database apps jazzed up with buzzwords front-run by narcissists who realized they needed a new grift beyond Uber for Cats.
I was able to circumvent my state's betting laws using Litecoin, so that feels meaningful, heh...
With regards to the land markers.
You could have a database at the government land authority. If markers in the field don't match up with records, the land authority will ask police to correct the issue.
If neither police nor land authority can be trusted to keep records and uphold the law, who is going to help you when a marker in the field doesn't match up to some distributed database?
Big land owner will say "I don't know anything about that record in the sky. But look at this land marker on the ground. That's reality!" and with no police, who is going to help you?
You could have a database at the government land authority. If markers in the field don't match up with records, the land authority will ask police to correct the issue.
If neither police nor land authority can be trusted to keep records and uphold the law, who is going to help you when a marker in the field doesn't match up to some distributed database?
Big land owner will say "I don't know anything about that record in the sky. But look at this land marker on the ground. That's reality!" and with no police, who is going to help you?
Imagine that the govt and the police actually treated the blockchain record as the infallible final source of truth, without any ifs and buts, without any traditional database on the side overriding what the blockchain says.
If an attacker came to your house, kicked your ass until you give your private key, and then transferred the land to themselves on the blockchain — the land would be fully legally theirs now! It's a valid transaction, and the courts can't reverse it — there's one source of truth, and it's cryptographically unchangeable without the private key. That's what the blockchain says, and the police will evict you from your own house.
(and then to prevent that you build enough off-chain trust systems, escrows, and side databases on top, and courts gain ability to dictate changes, and the actual blockchain becomes an irrelevant implementation detail).
If an attacker came to your house, kicked your ass until you give your private key, and then transferred the land to themselves on the blockchain — the land would be fully legally theirs now! It's a valid transaction, and the courts can't reverse it — there's one source of truth, and it's cryptographically unchangeable without the private key. That's what the blockchain says, and the police will evict you from your own house.
(and then to prevent that you build enough off-chain trust systems, escrows, and side databases on top, and courts gain ability to dictate changes, and the actual blockchain becomes an irrelevant implementation detail).
Well suppose you nominally have the support of local government and police, but in practice they can bought cheaply, and suddenly the records match what the large landholder says instead of the markers you used to have. An immutable record would help solve this, but the point stands that it is not convincing that you need a blockchain or that it would solve the problem. How would you get local government to buy into it in the first place? If the national government is willing to force them, they could just manage a database with immutable records.
An immutable record adds problems.
What do you do when a river moves? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croatia%E2%80%93Serbia_border_...
Who owns new land in Hawaii when the volcano meets the sea? https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/who-owns-the-land-created-...
What happens when someone makes a surveying mistake and enters that permanently into the blockchain?
What do you do when a river moves? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croatia%E2%80%93Serbia_border_...
Who owns new land in Hawaii when the volcano meets the sea? https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/who-owns-the-land-created-...
What happens when someone makes a surveying mistake and enters that permanently into the blockchain?
Sorry, by immutable records I do not mean that data is never changed, only that the records of such changes are immutable. The current state can always be computed by applying a log of changes, and when you make a change you'd be recording who made the change and why. Invalid changes could still be made, but you'd have a record to expedite appeal processes or litigation. This is why I don't think blockchain helps, because government authorities still have to be trusted to do their job when the facts are clear. So any kind of centralized cryptographic ledger (such as AWS QLDB) would work.
You don't even need a database with immutable records. You just need to make the contents of the database public, so that people can archive a copy and thus easily tell when the data has been altered.
I always wonder with these things: what is the deadline after which you are allowed to say "There is no value".
It has been almost 14 years since the inception of Bitcoin. There is nuance to this timeline that's why I usually use the launch of Ethereum as a starting point (~7 years If I recall correctly). Nevertheless so far nothing substantial running in production has come out of it Blockchain technology.
The typical response then is "well it takes time there is a lot of potential". I mean yeah but if you compare it to something like contactless payments or ride sharing apps these products have moved a lot faster and now have high user adoption.
So again: At what point can we just ignore all these Blockchain prophets that say "just wait the innovation is around the corner". 10 years, 20 years?
It has been almost 14 years since the inception of Bitcoin. There is nuance to this timeline that's why I usually use the launch of Ethereum as a starting point (~7 years If I recall correctly). Nevertheless so far nothing substantial running in production has come out of it Blockchain technology.
The typical response then is "well it takes time there is a lot of potential". I mean yeah but if you compare it to something like contactless payments or ride sharing apps these products have moved a lot faster and now have high user adoption.
So again: At what point can we just ignore all these Blockchain prophets that say "just wait the innovation is around the corner". 10 years, 20 years?
Technically 25 years since Hashcash was first proposed. I'd argue it could have had value sticking to that original application in preventing network spam, but instead it turns out people are more interested in storing the proof-of-work tokens on a blockchain and selling them, as if collecting and trading postage stamps had become more widespread than actually sending mail with them, to the extent that at least some people and a few entire countries proposed replacing currency with postage stamps.
Something arbitrary with no value went from a random Internet forum to $300b market cap and a legal currency for a nation-state. That’s something!
I don’t know what’s would be a better outcome.
Did you expect it to be world reserve currency in a decade? Replace the 5000 years gold? Upend the global banking system? Render the IMF obsolete? Make nation-states think twice about waging war without taxation?
I mean - surely you aren’t comparing these world-shattering outcomes to a mobile app that doesn’t make money after that long!
I don’t know what’s would be a better outcome.
Did you expect it to be world reserve currency in a decade? Replace the 5000 years gold? Upend the global banking system? Render the IMF obsolete? Make nation-states think twice about waging war without taxation?
I mean - surely you aren’t comparing these world-shattering outcomes to a mobile app that doesn’t make money after that long!
I should have said "Blockchain applications outside of cryptocurrency" but as you seem to equate the two let's talk about that.
A good metric is: "people are using it".
That is not the case for any cryptocurrency (yes and that includes El Salvador). I frequently wire money across borders and cryptocurrencies are still completely useless for it despite it being the number one use case that is shouted from the crypto rooftops.
So you're left with: "It made a ton of money for rich and a few lucky middle class people" and "some quasi dictator implemented it as an additional currency without a mandate".
A good metric is: "people are using it".
That is not the case for any cryptocurrency (yes and that includes El Salvador). I frequently wire money across borders and cryptocurrencies are still completely useless for it despite it being the number one use case that is shouted from the crypto rooftops.
So you're left with: "It made a ton of money for rich and a few lucky middle class people" and "some quasi dictator implemented it as an additional currency without a mandate".
Moving the goalposts to something vague and further in the future wont help you convince anyone about usefulness
Tim didn't mention a contemporary sibling tech at AWS which should not be thrown out with the bathwater: private (centralized), immutable, signed ledgers. Their version is called QLDB and does have concrete applications where you need an provable audit trail of a stream of transactions with search and index on top. I was on a team at a fintech closely engaged with AWS to prototype a money movement system using that as a central ledger. There's an open source one with similar properties on GH somewhere, also.
It's not sexy like blockchain so it seems marketing had to slip in some Quantum to bump the buzzword sex count.
If financial industry regulators were serious about catching laundering or book cooking, they would demand this kind of tech as a foundation of compliance reporting.
It's not sexy like blockchain so it seems marketing had to slip in some Quantum to bump the buzzword sex count.
If financial industry regulators were serious about catching laundering or book cooking, they would demand this kind of tech as a foundation of compliance reporting.
> […] compliance […].
This is the crux of the matter. In a prevailing number of cases, when people ask about a blockchain, they actually want a ledger database with the following properties:
– an immutable, tamper proof, append-only transaction log;
– cryptographically verifiable datasets;
– certification and/or compliance validation by externally accredited auditing bodies for SOC, PCI-DSS, ISO, HIPPA etc.
Use cases for ledger databases go beyond finance, and have been becoming a commonplace in health, education, supply change and inventory management, archive record management and similar. Anywhere, where compliance, strict record keeping and/or audit requirements are in place, the ledger databases provide the answer. AWS has QLDB, and Azure will soon have the Azure SQL Ledger Database (built on top of their SQL Server product).
Fully fledged blockchains are not required in most cases.
This is the crux of the matter. In a prevailing number of cases, when people ask about a blockchain, they actually want a ledger database with the following properties:
– an immutable, tamper proof, append-only transaction log;
– cryptographically verifiable datasets;
– certification and/or compliance validation by externally accredited auditing bodies for SOC, PCI-DSS, ISO, HIPPA etc.
Use cases for ledger databases go beyond finance, and have been becoming a commonplace in health, education, supply change and inventory management, archive record management and similar. Anywhere, where compliance, strict record keeping and/or audit requirements are in place, the ledger databases provide the answer. AWS has QLDB, and Azure will soon have the Azure SQL Ledger Database (built on top of their SQL Server product).
Fully fledged blockchains are not required in most cases.
Ledgers are quite easy to build. Git is a ledger. It doesn't use a block chain but it does link commits via their hashes; which makes it an audit proof ledger. Unless you can break the hashes, you can't modify its history.
And git is used between many different developers and companies working on the same projects. It was actually designed for this use case. The reason git doesn't need blockchains for this is because it funnels all the commits and pull requests through trusted code owners: people. The consensus model is very simple: a mutually respected developer has looked at the thing and gave their thumbs up.
Banks, insurers, etc. use ledgers. But mostly they lack cryptographic safety. And they use a similar reputation based consensus model. Auditors, regulators, accountants, etc. It's good enough but the failure modes can be somewhat expensive. And of course the flaky nature of the whole system actually represents a business opportunity in it self. Banking is a very lucrative business.
Blockchains are potentially a nicer/cheaper technical alternative for all this. But so far not an essential or very practical one. And of course most block chains have scaling challenges. Ethereum is a non starter for running anything at scale. Transactions are too slow, too costly and the throughput sucks. Even with the new version it's still nowhere good enough to run even a small bank. Highly unsuitable for running millions of accounts on where the cost of each transaction would far exceed the value of that transaction.
And git is used between many different developers and companies working on the same projects. It was actually designed for this use case. The reason git doesn't need blockchains for this is because it funnels all the commits and pull requests through trusted code owners: people. The consensus model is very simple: a mutually respected developer has looked at the thing and gave their thumbs up.
Banks, insurers, etc. use ledgers. But mostly they lack cryptographic safety. And they use a similar reputation based consensus model. Auditors, regulators, accountants, etc. It's good enough but the failure modes can be somewhat expensive. And of course the flaky nature of the whole system actually represents a business opportunity in it self. Banking is a very lucrative business.
Blockchains are potentially a nicer/cheaper technical alternative for all this. But so far not an essential or very practical one. And of course most block chains have scaling challenges. Ethereum is a non starter for running anything at scale. Transactions are too slow, too costly and the throughput sucks. Even with the new version it's still nowhere good enough to run even a small bank. Highly unsuitable for running millions of accounts on where the cost of each transaction would far exceed the value of that transaction.
> Ledgers are quite easy to build. Git is a ledger. It doesn't use a block chain but it does link commits via their hashes; which makes it an audit proof ledger. Unless you can break the hashes, you can't modify its history.
Easy as an arm chair theory, impossible in practice without a complete rewrite of git from scratch. You are also disregarding the immutability of the data and the append-only property of stored datasets in ledger DB's: the entire temporal history of changes to a document (or a table) must be available in a ledger database. Changes are linked by virtue a Merkle tree, and the content of each node (i.e. revision) can be cryptographically proven to be untampered with. QLDB documentation provides a visualisation of the cryptographic verification process and of a sequence of steps: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/qldb/latest/developerguide/verif...
Git is absolutely the wrong tool for the job as hashes in git are used as identifiers to identify a specific change, but not to cyrptographically checksum the document/the change to the data. Git commits can also merged, rewritten, squashed or deleted – something is absolutely unacceptable in the compliance space.
So no, Git it is not easy to build a ledger database out of git if there are strict compliance requirements as I can pull out a revision M out of N revisions of my documents stored in a ledger database, run the revision N through the proof interface and use it in a court hearing as evidence or turn it over to external auditors. And no external auditing body will ever certify a git based solution.
Easy as an arm chair theory, impossible in practice without a complete rewrite of git from scratch. You are also disregarding the immutability of the data and the append-only property of stored datasets in ledger DB's: the entire temporal history of changes to a document (or a table) must be available in a ledger database. Changes are linked by virtue a Merkle tree, and the content of each node (i.e. revision) can be cryptographically proven to be untampered with. QLDB documentation provides a visualisation of the cryptographic verification process and of a sequence of steps: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/qldb/latest/developerguide/verif...
Git is absolutely the wrong tool for the job as hashes in git are used as identifiers to identify a specific change, but not to cyrptographically checksum the document/the change to the data. Git commits can also merged, rewritten, squashed or deleted – something is absolutely unacceptable in the compliance space.
So no, Git it is not easy to build a ledger database out of git if there are strict compliance requirements as I can pull out a revision M out of N revisions of my documents stored in a ledger database, run the revision N through the proof interface and use it in a court hearing as evidence or turn it over to external auditors. And no external auditing body will ever certify a git based solution.
> Git is absolutely the wrong tool for the job as hashes in git are used as identifiers to identify a specific change, but not to cyrptographically checksum the document/the change to the data. Git commits can also merged, rewritten, squashed or deleted – something is absolutely unacceptable in the compliance space.
Read up on git internals, it's a very elegant and simple design and you seem to assume a few things about it that are flat out wrong. A git repository is in fact a Merkle tree. Every commit is chained to the previous commit via a hash that includes the commit content and the hash of the previous commit. So, git history is immutable. You can't modify commits without breaking the chain of hashes. It's by definition append only.
You can of course modify your local copy of a git repository and rewrite history (i.e. change all the hashes). But that makes it incompatible with upstream history. People tend to use this to clean up their local change history before they send it upstream. With the exception of force push (i.e. just overwrite the remote repository), there is no way to merge a rewritten history. In order to merge changes, there MUST be a shared commit with the same history. It's not optional.
Read up on git internals, it's a very elegant and simple design and you seem to assume a few things about it that are flat out wrong. A git repository is in fact a Merkle tree. Every commit is chained to the previous commit via a hash that includes the commit content and the hash of the previous commit. So, git history is immutable. You can't modify commits without breaking the chain of hashes. It's by definition append only.
You can of course modify your local copy of a git repository and rewrite history (i.e. change all the hashes). But that makes it incompatible with upstream history. People tend to use this to clean up their local change history before they send it upstream. With the exception of force push (i.e. just overwrite the remote repository), there is no way to merge a rewritten history. In order to merge changes, there MUST be a shared commit with the same history. It's not optional.
> Read up on git internals, it's a very elegant and simple design and you seem to assume a few things about it that are flat out wrong.
I am well acquainted with git internals and object types, which include blobs, trees, commits, and tags. But I do acknowledge that I was wrong about git not hashing the object's contents – it does.
> A git repository is in fact a Merkle tree. Every commit is chained to the previous commit via a hash that includes the commit content and the hash of the previous commit.
Commits in git are grouped into commit trees that form a single atomic commit, and git allow manipulations of the commit trees, which is fundamentally unacceptable for an immutable, verifiable ledger. That is why I am asserting that git is not an acceptable technology for a ledger.
> You can of course modify your local copy of a git repository and rewrite history (i.e. change all the hashes). But that makes it incompatible with upstream history.
I have personally squashed commits in my local project copy and force pushed such a squashed commit into a upstream repository thereby completely decimating the commit history in the upstream repository. Previous commit history was completely gone every single time. It is an occasionally useful feature (i.e. fixing mistakes of young developers), but the commit history rewrite is absolutely unacceptable in the compliance world. Just the fact that there is direct, unabridged write access to the history or to the storage where the history is recorded makes such a solution untenable as a ledger database.
I do concede that there are some conceptual similarities between git and ledger databases at the architectural level; I do, however, vociferously dispute the suitability of git as a foundation for building a ledger database without a substantial rewrite of the git foundation.
I am well acquainted with git internals and object types, which include blobs, trees, commits, and tags. But I do acknowledge that I was wrong about git not hashing the object's contents – it does.
> A git repository is in fact a Merkle tree. Every commit is chained to the previous commit via a hash that includes the commit content and the hash of the previous commit.
Commits in git are grouped into commit trees that form a single atomic commit, and git allow manipulations of the commit trees, which is fundamentally unacceptable for an immutable, verifiable ledger. That is why I am asserting that git is not an acceptable technology for a ledger.
> You can of course modify your local copy of a git repository and rewrite history (i.e. change all the hashes). But that makes it incompatible with upstream history.
I have personally squashed commits in my local project copy and force pushed such a squashed commit into a upstream repository thereby completely decimating the commit history in the upstream repository. Previous commit history was completely gone every single time. It is an occasionally useful feature (i.e. fixing mistakes of young developers), but the commit history rewrite is absolutely unacceptable in the compliance world. Just the fact that there is direct, unabridged write access to the history or to the storage where the history is recorded makes such a solution untenable as a ledger database.
I do concede that there are some conceptual similarities between git and ledger databases at the architectural level; I do, however, vociferously dispute the suitability of git as a foundation for building a ledger database without a substantial rewrite of the git foundation.
You were arguing it's not a proper merkle tree and it is. You are not a little bit wrong there but flat out barking up the wrong tree. It's a merkle tree with full immutability and append only behavior. This is not an accidental/conceptual similarity. It's the single most important design decision that Git is based on.
Force push only allows you to wipe out repositories that you control. The whole point of git is that you do not need write access at all to share commits. That's why it's called a pull request and not a push demand. You invite others to look at and maybe merge your changes. There is no way to force the other side to do that and force push rewriting their commit history is not going to help your case for obvious reasons.
Force push only allows you to wipe out repositories that you control. The whole point of git is that you do not need write access at all to share commits. That's why it's called a pull request and not a push demand. You invite others to look at and maybe merge your changes. There is no way to force the other side to do that and force push rewriting their commit history is not going to help your case for obvious reasons.
I am not arguing the case of git having or not having Merkle trees (git has a «weak» implementation of the Merkle trees, for in a ledger database every block's cryptographic signature derives from the contents of the preceding block – a property that git does not possess as it does not support the concept of blocks and operates of commit trees instead that are allowed to be moved around). I am arguing two points, specifically:
Point no. 1: > Ledgers are quite easy to build.
Cryptographically provable, tamper-proof ledgers that will sustain a 3rd party compliance certification are not easy to build, they are expensive to build, test and certify (very expensive!), and are very expensive to operate, especially in large scale environments.
Point no. 2: > Git is a ledger.
git is not a proper ledger due to the lack of two fundamental properties of a ledger, as originally stated:
1. an immutable, tamper proof, append-only transaction log;
git does not satisfy this requirement by virtue of allowing one to tamper with the commit history. Write access to commits is the major offender here as it is there, and it opens the door for the commit history abuse. An append-only transaction log also offers a linear, entirely immutable, history (a very important quality from the compliance perspective!), whereas git (by virtue of allowing branches) allows for a non-linear, mutable, temporal history that breaks the linear progression of revisions of valuable documents/assets being stored in it.
2. cryptographically verifiable datasets;
git offers a limited facility into the verification due to allowing one to modify the commit trees, and, by extension, to rewrite the commit history. A git commit history can't be trusted to from the compliance perspective.
What I am sensing is a misconstruction of the purpose of git. git is designed to track changes but not to provide the evidence of changes having not been tampered with. Both purposes have their own places and their own use cases, and the git design is sound and solid, yet it serves an entirely different purpose altogether, and – no – it can't be repurposed as a ledger. That is the case I am arguing.
Point no. 1: > Ledgers are quite easy to build.
Cryptographically provable, tamper-proof ledgers that will sustain a 3rd party compliance certification are not easy to build, they are expensive to build, test and certify (very expensive!), and are very expensive to operate, especially in large scale environments.
Point no. 2: > Git is a ledger.
git is not a proper ledger due to the lack of two fundamental properties of a ledger, as originally stated:
1. an immutable, tamper proof, append-only transaction log;
git does not satisfy this requirement by virtue of allowing one to tamper with the commit history. Write access to commits is the major offender here as it is there, and it opens the door for the commit history abuse. An append-only transaction log also offers a linear, entirely immutable, history (a very important quality from the compliance perspective!), whereas git (by virtue of allowing branches) allows for a non-linear, mutable, temporal history that breaks the linear progression of revisions of valuable documents/assets being stored in it.
2. cryptographically verifiable datasets;
git offers a limited facility into the verification due to allowing one to modify the commit trees, and, by extension, to rewrite the commit history. A git commit history can't be trusted to from the compliance perspective.
What I am sensing is a misconstruction of the purpose of git. git is designed to track changes but not to provide the evidence of changes having not been tampered with. Both purposes have their own places and their own use cases, and the git design is sound and solid, yet it serves an entirely different purpose altogether, and – no – it can't be repurposed as a ledger. That is the case I am arguing.
Git provides all of those things, as long as everyone agrees on what the current HEAD commit id (hash) is. You could publish that hash in a printed newspaper or with a government regulator. After publishing it is impossible to rewrite commit history without evidence of tampering.
Rewriting history and amending commits forces the recalculation of all commit hashes that follow it, and you end up with a completely different final hash.
AWS QLDB does the same thing with Amazon holding the final hash.
Rewriting history and amending commits forces the recalculation of all commit hashes that follow it, and you end up with a completely different final hash.
AWS QLDB does the same thing with Amazon holding the final hash.
Publishing a commit ID in a printed newspaper does not prevent the data loss nor the tampering with the data.
Destructive operations in a ledger database are simply not available at the API/interface contract level.
A delete operation in a ledger database is non-destructive and does not delete the data but rather creates a new «deleted» revision in the history table. The deleted revision is always available, and it can be «undeleted» as there is nothing special about the deleted revision: it is merely another document revision with the N+1 revision number. The document can be deleted (revision N+1), undeleted (revision N+2), updated multiple times (revision N + M1, N + M2 …), deleted again (revision N + M1 + M2 + P), yet the entire history of all past and current revision(s) is always available, and it can be retrieved/inspected; even after the table is dropped, it can still be undropped without incurring a data loss – all of that is the append-only ledger guarantee.
The only destructive operation that is practically possible is tearing down the entire ledger at the infrastructure level, which is irreversible and will result in a full data loss. However it can be mitigated (to a very large extent) through segregating and locking down access to the infrastructure.
git does not provide the immutability guarantee as it allows destructive operations, therefore it does not qualify for a ledger proper. A commit history can be rewritten or deleted resulting in a data loss. Published commit ID's are of no use if the data has been tampered with later and valuable revisions have been deleted in perpetuity.
Destructive operations in a ledger database are simply not available at the API/interface contract level.
A delete operation in a ledger database is non-destructive and does not delete the data but rather creates a new «deleted» revision in the history table. The deleted revision is always available, and it can be «undeleted» as there is nothing special about the deleted revision: it is merely another document revision with the N+1 revision number. The document can be deleted (revision N+1), undeleted (revision N+2), updated multiple times (revision N + M1, N + M2 …), deleted again (revision N + M1 + M2 + P), yet the entire history of all past and current revision(s) is always available, and it can be retrieved/inspected; even after the table is dropped, it can still be undropped without incurring a data loss – all of that is the append-only ledger guarantee.
The only destructive operation that is practically possible is tearing down the entire ledger at the infrastructure level, which is irreversible and will result in a full data loss. However it can be mitigated (to a very large extent) through segregating and locking down access to the infrastructure.
git does not provide the immutability guarantee as it allows destructive operations, therefore it does not qualify for a ledger proper. A commit history can be rewritten or deleted resulting in a data loss. Published commit ID's are of no use if the data has been tampered with later and valuable revisions have been deleted in perpetuity.
> every block's cryptographic signature derives from the contents of the preceding block
Eh no. Every git commits hash derives from the previous commit hash. That's a bona-fide cryptographic hash. And you can verify it. And git in fact does that when you merge changes. By recalculating the hashes. And it rejects your changes if things don't line up.
> git is not a proper ledger due to .... an immutable, tamper proof, append-only transaction log;
Also no. It's called a commit log which is exactly this. It's tamper proof because you can verify the chain of hashes (and git does this). It's append only because of those hashes. If you break the chain, git will reject your merge attempts. Any repository fork you don't own, is read-only and won't be able to accept your force pushes with modified hashes because you won't be able to push anything at all. You can only request others to pull; which triggers the before mentioned checks. So you have no way of tricking others into pulling your broken chain of commits. You can only do that to your own repositories. And you have to opt in to it via force push. This is not a weakness but a simple feature. Your data, your choice.
> ... cryptographically verifiable datasets
Also no. Git uses sha1 hashes, which are cryptographic hashes that you can verify. Better hash algorithms are available and sha1 is not super safe at this point. But good luck creating commits that look legit and preserve the sha1 hash. As mentioned before, they include the hash of the previous commit.
Your central, and only, argument is that you can modify your own copies of a repository via force push or poking around on the filesystem. Or whatever. Yes you can; just like with your local copy of whatever blockchain! But don't do that. Because you won't be able to get others to accept your changes/transactions because they'll trivially detect that you tampered with the merkle tree and reject your changes. That's why it's called force push, you opt into this. And others will opt out of it.
So, that too is simply wrong.
Eh no. Every git commits hash derives from the previous commit hash. That's a bona-fide cryptographic hash. And you can verify it. And git in fact does that when you merge changes. By recalculating the hashes. And it rejects your changes if things don't line up.
> git is not a proper ledger due to .... an immutable, tamper proof, append-only transaction log;
Also no. It's called a commit log which is exactly this. It's tamper proof because you can verify the chain of hashes (and git does this). It's append only because of those hashes. If you break the chain, git will reject your merge attempts. Any repository fork you don't own, is read-only and won't be able to accept your force pushes with modified hashes because you won't be able to push anything at all. You can only request others to pull; which triggers the before mentioned checks. So you have no way of tricking others into pulling your broken chain of commits. You can only do that to your own repositories. And you have to opt in to it via force push. This is not a weakness but a simple feature. Your data, your choice.
> ... cryptographically verifiable datasets
Also no. Git uses sha1 hashes, which are cryptographic hashes that you can verify. Better hash algorithms are available and sha1 is not super safe at this point. But good luck creating commits that look legit and preserve the sha1 hash. As mentioned before, they include the hash of the previous commit.
Your central, and only, argument is that you can modify your own copies of a repository via force push or poking around on the filesystem. Or whatever. Yes you can; just like with your local copy of whatever blockchain! But don't do that. Because you won't be able to get others to accept your changes/transactions because they'll trivially detect that you tampered with the merkle tree and reject your changes. That's why it's called force push, you opt into this. And others will opt out of it.
So, that too is simply wrong.
You can do the same things with ledger databases, it's just no so convenient, as just typing --force
If you have permission to replace database with with your new one (or spin up new instance of DB, adn redirect app to use that, depending on how you are set up), it's just not as convenient (by design).
I used centera WORM disks at my previous jobs, for added guarantees. (not by choice, stay away of you have a choice)
And once the GDPR came out, and we had to remove some content, that's what we did, made a copy, with bad data removed, nuked centera clean, (created new partition, and disabled old one) and restored now clean data on. As far as our applications were concerned nothing happened.
If you have permission to replace database with with your new one (or spin up new instance of DB, adn redirect app to use that, depending on how you are set up), it's just not as convenient (by design).
I used centera WORM disks at my previous jobs, for added guarantees. (not by choice, stay away of you have a choice)
And once the GDPR came out, and we had to remove some content, that's what we did, made a copy, with bad data removed, nuked centera clean, (created new partition, and disabled old one) and restored now clean data on. As far as our applications were concerned nothing happened.
You are not incorrect. Ledger databases, as a technology, do not eliminate a possibility of spinning up a shadow ledger and rebuilding the change history in the new ledger that is purged of inconvenient records.
Managed ledger database services in the cloud (e.g. QLDB in AWS) offer a partial solution to the problem such as platform generated timestamps in the delete/change history table (hard to forge), delete operations not actually deleting the data but moving it into a separate history table, the separation of access to the ledger (app vs account administrator), disallowing direct access to the storage, setting up anomaly detection alarms in the monitoring layer etc etc.
But none of that precludes the possibility of a ledger being nuked or rebuilt (and later nuked).
Managed ledger database services in the cloud (e.g. QLDB in AWS) offer a partial solution to the problem such as platform generated timestamps in the delete/change history table (hard to forge), delete operations not actually deleting the data but moving it into a separate history table, the separation of access to the ledger (app vs account administrator), disallowing direct access to the storage, setting up anomaly detection alarms in the monitoring layer etc etc.
But none of that precludes the possibility of a ledger being nuked or rebuilt (and later nuked).
> Easy as an arm chair theory, impossible in practice without a complete rewrite of git from scratch.
> Git is absolutely the wrong tool for the job
Our company uses ledger.cli on top of git as a bookkeeping ledger [https://www.ledger-cli.org]. Works brilliantly, so much easier to use the text wrangling tools we know and love instead of some brain dead GUI of an accounting program.
Our company uses ledger.cli on top of git as a bookkeeping ledger [https://www.ledger-cli.org]. Works brilliantly, so much easier to use the text wrangling tools we know and love instead of some brain dead GUI of an accounting program.
We want permissionless, which requires decentralization, which requires blockchain
The analogy to git comes to mind. To match the above you'd need to be using it with signed commits. In the Git world there's the debate about rewriting vs preserving history. The similarities might be actually interesting.
In Git users there are two schools of thought, one which advocates preservign history (even if it is messy / involves fixes) because preserving a record of what actually happened is useful [1]. The other insists that a curated version of the history is more important because it is easier to understand in retrospect.
[1] There are other downsides in Git history rewriting, such as the blow up you get when attempting to merge / join branches where one has rewritten history and the other not... and the blow up you get when two people attempt to collaborate on a branch in presence of rewriting. These might have accounting analogies too
In Git users there are two schools of thought, one which advocates preservign history (even if it is messy / involves fixes) because preserving a record of what actually happened is useful [1]. The other insists that a curated version of the history is more important because it is easier to understand in retrospect.
[1] There are other downsides in Git history rewriting, such as the blow up you get when attempting to merge / join branches where one has rewritten history and the other not... and the blow up you get when two people attempt to collaborate on a branch in presence of rewriting. These might have accounting analogies too
Azure has something similar as well: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/s...
Read tbray's article looking for QLDB. There were keywords along the way suggesting the possibility, but it didn't get there.
As a NYC financial services CTO, a few years back I spoke to Jassy personally, asking him to please not make 'traditional' blockchain nonsense, but to please productize and release a distributed ledger primitive. A few weeks later, AWS got back to us and said they were willing to work on such a thing, and a few groups (perhaps such as yours) jumped on as well. In our case, we were looking to use it to help manage multiparty contracts where we as a bank were trusted by the multiple parties who didn't need to trust each other.
When AWS did eventually* announce AWS Blockchain at re:Invent, they announced QLDB alongside. One was what everyone was begging for, one was useful. I'll leave which is which as an exercise for the reader. :-)
TL;DR:
I encourage anyone serious about solving financial services problems where blockchain comes up to look at QLDB instead, but also anyone looking at security, compliance attestation, or other multi-party trust or regtech related problems.
* Note: "eventually" as in, quite late to the blockchain hype party, and dragged kicking and screaming by the sales org, as tbray describes, so that at least they'd stay in the room with "big IT" signing up for IBMs hyperledger and other failed experiments.
As a NYC financial services CTO, a few years back I spoke to Jassy personally, asking him to please not make 'traditional' blockchain nonsense, but to please productize and release a distributed ledger primitive. A few weeks later, AWS got back to us and said they were willing to work on such a thing, and a few groups (perhaps such as yours) jumped on as well. In our case, we were looking to use it to help manage multiparty contracts where we as a bank were trusted by the multiple parties who didn't need to trust each other.
When AWS did eventually* announce AWS Blockchain at re:Invent, they announced QLDB alongside. One was what everyone was begging for, one was useful. I'll leave which is which as an exercise for the reader. :-)
TL;DR:
I encourage anyone serious about solving financial services problems where blockchain comes up to look at QLDB instead, but also anyone looking at security, compliance attestation, or other multi-party trust or regtech related problems.
* Note: "eventually" as in, quite late to the blockchain hype party, and dragged kicking and screaming by the sales org, as tbray describes, so that at least they'd stay in the room with "big IT" signing up for IBMs hyperledger and other failed experiments.
Do you have any other clues for finding that open source project?
It sounds very interesting to me.
It sounds very interesting to me.
Hyperledger is one such project: https://www.hyperledger.org/ (mostly the marketing fluff) and https://github.com/hyperledger/fabric
Here's one https://github.com/codenotary/immudb/
The new thing with blockchain tech is that we can now enforce invariants on state transitions in a decentralized manner. Paired with non-interactive zero-knowledge cryptography, we can also enforce those invariants while keeping the confidentiality of transactions.
The tech is rapidly improving and it’s pretty easy to see where things are going from here: soon we’ll have general purpose decentralized databases where data is open as open source code is open. In fact, state-of-the-art smart chains can be viewed as special (financial) purpose decentralized databases.
As to why decentralized databases are desirable: imagine if you could fork databases like you can fork code in a completely permission-less manner. This is how web development would look like:
You, the programmer, take a look at a public data schema (eg. a smart contract that implements the ERC-721 interface) and decide to build on top of it. Then, a user, who has already interacted with what you built on, decides that they like what you built and lets your app use their data. You, the programmer, can be sure that the data you built on remains available, and the user can be sure that they'll be able to port the data produced by your app into new apps.
The tech is rapidly improving and it’s pretty easy to see where things are going from here: soon we’ll have general purpose decentralized databases where data is open as open source code is open. In fact, state-of-the-art smart chains can be viewed as special (financial) purpose decentralized databases.
As to why decentralized databases are desirable: imagine if you could fork databases like you can fork code in a completely permission-less manner. This is how web development would look like:
You, the programmer, take a look at a public data schema (eg. a smart contract that implements the ERC-721 interface) and decide to build on top of it. Then, a user, who has already interacted with what you built on, decides that they like what you built and lets your app use their data. You, the programmer, can be sure that the data you built on remains available, and the user can be sure that they'll be able to port the data produced by your app into new apps.
This somewhat assumes blockchain can also deliver on privacy. Perhaps full encryption of the data is enough. But who is paying for all the nodes?
Another way to do this without the blockchain is open standards (think… HTML for example!) and software that lets you export. Where possible run this software open source on the desktop or as an open source web app. Think Photopea as the pinnacle here.
The blockchain or no blockchain approachable both suffer when you have a data format per app locking you into that app anyway.
Another way to do this without the blockchain is open standards (think… HTML for example!) and software that lets you export. Where possible run this software open source on the desktop or as an open source web app. Think Photopea as the pinnacle here.
The blockchain or no blockchain approachable both suffer when you have a data format per app locking you into that app anyway.
Re costs: it’s decreasing rapidly. Solana is within 100x of DynamoDB prices so costs are soon becoming negligible. At that point costs can be taken over by the app developer or paid by users on a subscription basis. There are also decentralized consensus mechanisms that don’t rely on paying fees (FBA, delay functions). Idk which will succeed.
Re open standards and “software that lets you export”: we’ve had this for the past 30 years and see how it turned out.
Re lock in: no, in a decentralized database, the data schema is public which means it’s trivial to write an app that works with another app’s data.
Re open standards and “software that lets you export”: we’ve had this for the past 30 years and see how it turned out.
Re lock in: no, in a decentralized database, the data schema is public which means it’s trivial to write an app that works with another app’s data.
Thanks. Keeping an open mind! This is the best blockchain argument I have heard. At least in terms of what I value.
> He named a region in Asia and explained that the small farmers there mark their landholdings carefully, but then the annual floods sometimes wash the markers away. Then unscrupulous larger landowners use the absence of markers to cut away at the smallholdings of the poorest. “But if the boundary markers were on the blockchain,” he said, “they wouldn’t be able to do that, would they?”
The developed world is distinguished from the developing world often by the strength of its institutions, by the general accessibility of legal recourse, by the prevalence of trust within the society at large.
Many places in the world have none of those things. Weak institutions, corrupt legal systems, and low levels of trust undermine development and prevent people from building and maintaining wealth for themselves and their families.
For me, the promise of the blockchain is that it can provide a technological framework upon which to build new kinds of institutions—institutions that function as alternatives to the institutions that we all take for granted here in the first world.
Is a smart contract better than a written contract? Maybe it is, if there is no well-functioning judiciary to adjudicate contractual disputes. Is a cryptocurrency better than a national currency? Perhaps, if your national currency is subject to hyperinflation. Is an NFT representing property ownership better than property title registered with a state agency? Yes it is, if the state agency can be bribed to alter or lose records that are inconvenient to large land owners.
It's important to remember that what might seem redundant or useless to those of us who reside in the first world may not be redundant or useless to those who live elsewhere.
The developed world is distinguished from the developing world often by the strength of its institutions, by the general accessibility of legal recourse, by the prevalence of trust within the society at large.
Many places in the world have none of those things. Weak institutions, corrupt legal systems, and low levels of trust undermine development and prevent people from building and maintaining wealth for themselves and their families.
For me, the promise of the blockchain is that it can provide a technological framework upon which to build new kinds of institutions—institutions that function as alternatives to the institutions that we all take for granted here in the first world.
Is a smart contract better than a written contract? Maybe it is, if there is no well-functioning judiciary to adjudicate contractual disputes. Is a cryptocurrency better than a national currency? Perhaps, if your national currency is subject to hyperinflation. Is an NFT representing property ownership better than property title registered with a state agency? Yes it is, if the state agency can be bribed to alter or lose records that are inconvenient to large land owners.
It's important to remember that what might seem redundant or useless to those of us who reside in the first world may not be redundant or useless to those who live elsewhere.
If there's no functioning judiciary to adjudicate contractual disputes, then who is going to effectively and durably tell someone who won and enforce that with the threat of state-level punishment? If a state agency can be bribed, what's claiming to have an NFT going to do for the holder, besides radically increase their property ownership risk if they actually rely on that to be true?
The problem with all of these cockamamie blockchain arguments is that they talk about a problem, and then they talk about a (bad, expensive, difficult to use) database that might form part of that problem, but in fact the problem is always far bigger and way more complicated than the choice of the database vendor.
The problem with all of these cockamamie blockchain arguments is that they talk about a problem, and then they talk about a (bad, expensive, difficult to use) database that might form part of that problem, but in fact the problem is always far bigger and way more complicated than the choice of the database vendor.
The effectiveness of institutions cannot be measured in black and white. There is a continuum of effectiveness. It is very rare in the developing world that the courts are completely ineffective—it's often just that they are slow, expensive, subject to corrupt influence, etc. They function, to an extent—but they function poorly. How poorly depends on where you are.
In addition, bribery and corruption themselves also operate on a continuum. In the example cited in the article, the rich landowners don't just remove the property markers—they wait for flooding to wash them away before illegally expanding their claims. In other words, even in a society where official corruption is rampant, there are still societal limits within which corruption is possible.
The impact that blockchains can have is to simplify the tasks that systems of adjudication must undertake in order to enforce property rights and contracts. They also remove individual judgement from most decisions, and make it impossible to alter or destroy records.
I'm not saying that blockchains can entirely replace all human governance systems. Rather, blockchains can make it cheaper and easier to maintain functioning and accessible systems for adjudication. They reduce the surface area for the use of individual judgement, and thereby reduce costs and opportunities for the injection of corrupt influence.
Yes, many of the things that blockchains can do can also be done by centralized database applications—maintaining property records, for example. Those centralized databases still need to be maintained by trusted parties, however—trusted parties who themselves may be subject to corrupt influence.
By moving title records from paper to a centralized database all you are doing is changing who becomes the bribery target—the Postgres DBA instead of the clerk at the records office. With a public blockchain, there is no one you can bribe.
In addition, bribery and corruption themselves also operate on a continuum. In the example cited in the article, the rich landowners don't just remove the property markers—they wait for flooding to wash them away before illegally expanding their claims. In other words, even in a society where official corruption is rampant, there are still societal limits within which corruption is possible.
The impact that blockchains can have is to simplify the tasks that systems of adjudication must undertake in order to enforce property rights and contracts. They also remove individual judgement from most decisions, and make it impossible to alter or destroy records.
I'm not saying that blockchains can entirely replace all human governance systems. Rather, blockchains can make it cheaper and easier to maintain functioning and accessible systems for adjudication. They reduce the surface area for the use of individual judgement, and thereby reduce costs and opportunities for the injection of corrupt influence.
Yes, many of the things that blockchains can do can also be done by centralized database applications—maintaining property records, for example. Those centralized databases still need to be maintained by trusted parties, however—trusted parties who themselves may be subject to corrupt influence.
By moving title records from paper to a centralized database all you are doing is changing who becomes the bribery target—the Postgres DBA instead of the clerk at the records office. With a public blockchain, there is no one you can bribe.
Yeah, but these kind of ideas don't really work in the complexity of the real world. If somebody hacks a computer and steals my land title token, we need off-chain ways of adjudicating that and fixing the database. So we have exactly the same kind of problems, can't rely on the blockchain for actually saying somebody definitely owns something, and may as well just not have bothered with the blockchain...
Unless you want to change it so 'code is law' and if you can hack someone and transfer ownership to yourself, then you legally own it. But I think few want to live in that kind of society...
Unless you want to change it so 'code is law' and if you can hack someone and transfer ownership to yourself, then you legally own it. But I think few want to live in that kind of society...
Why not just make the records public? In the US, you can usually just look up who owns the parcels of land in your area. If the records are public, it will be pretty obvious if they've been tampered with; you can just compare the current data against a copy archived earlier.
There is also a problem of what happens when the farmers computer gets hacked and their land NFT stolen. Are the police meant to roll in and kick out the farmer who clearly still owns the land? Or do they just ignore the blockchain record as it's obviously wrong but not fixable.
One of the interesting aspects of blockchain for many scenarios is that it makes the ledger of ownership or whatever universally available.
Hopefully with some of the charlatans going bust this will transform back into a technology instead of some bizarre religion.
Hopefully with some of the charlatans going bust this will transform back into a technology instead of some bizarre religion.
What are you even talking about? Who owns what has always been available to everyone, that's how land title deeds work.
If you read upthread, the example given was that of Asian farmers who struggle with markers being damaged by floods.
A cheap device that was able to locate reference points with GPS to some sort of online land registry would potentially avoid these disputes. Blockchain could be a tool to mitigate the limited connectivity available.
It’s potentially a way to make information more available and maybe facilitate certain transactions.
Again, it’s just a technology. It may make sense as a solution or not.
A cheap device that was able to locate reference points with GPS to some sort of online land registry would potentially avoid these disputes. Blockchain could be a tool to mitigate the limited connectivity available.
It’s potentially a way to make information more available and maybe facilitate certain transactions.
Again, it’s just a technology. It may make sense as a solution or not.
> A cheap device that was able to locate reference points with GPS to some sort of online land registry would potentially avoid these disputes.
Okay, and why would you use a blockchain over a state-held database?
Because it doesn't matter what your blockchain says about ownership, the state that issued the title deeds are the ones who decide where the boundaries are.
If the state is not recording it, recording it in a blockchain doesn't help.
Okay, and why would you use a blockchain over a state-held database?
Because it doesn't matter what your blockchain says about ownership, the state that issued the title deeds are the ones who decide where the boundaries are.
If the state is not recording it, recording it in a blockchain doesn't help.
So what happens when a rich baron approaches a farmer who's exact GPS ownership record is registered on the blockchain and says "transfer digital ownership of your land to me, or i kill your sister"?
Exactly the same thing as what happens without a blockchain.
Weak institutions are absolutely a problem in human society, but they are not solved by decentralization technology.
Exactly the same thing as what happens without a blockchain.
Weak institutions are absolutely a problem in human society, but they are not solved by decentralization technology.
Even better for the land owner, they (or more likely a "subcontractor") can force the transfer once and even if courts get involved and decide in favor of the farmer, the records can't be corrected if they are based on blockchain technology.
A less violent example would be a fraud based on social engineering.
A less violent example would be a fraud based on social engineering.
It sounds like you’re throwing hands up and stating that no change is possible.
Land records are by definition ledgers. A distributed ledger is also a ledger. Does it protect you from a physical harm? Of course not.
Weak institutions are a problem, but technolgy can be used to strengthen them. If you can make facts more available and easier to access, perhaps you can push disputes to local magistrates and improve access to justice.
Land records are by definition ledgers. A distributed ledger is also a ledger. Does it protect you from a physical harm? Of course not.
Weak institutions are a problem, but technolgy can be used to strengthen them. If you can make facts more available and easier to access, perhaps you can push disputes to local magistrates and improve access to justice.
> It sounds like you’re throwing hands up and stating that no change is possible.
No, they're saying there must be a point to the change. If adding blockchain doesn't help in any way, why add it to the mix?
No, they're saying there must be a point to the change. If adding blockchain doesn't help in any way, why add it to the mix?
Do they work that way in rural Africa?
If no one knows if you own something, then you don't own it. Literally the entire concept of "ownership" it based on socialized distribution of that information.
Which means anyone within range of an item for ownership rights to matter, by definition, is either aware of your claim by some means and respecting it, or unaware and you now get to see how good your legal or kinetic protections of it are.
EDIT: The parent poster is possibly referring to an entirely different problem - many underdeveloped nations have antiquated automation for their land title systems, which makes proving ownership difficult due to a lack of computerization. This is a problem for the owners occupying the land, because they can't prove to third parties this claim is legal and thus use it as collateral for seeking lines of credit.
One of the interesting things the Bush Jr. admin of all things spearheaded was a project which looked at funding and helping update these systems in some nations as a means of economic development.
But of course, blockchain here is still useless. The problem isn't that the ledger of ownership is "secret" (which doesn't make any sense) it's that it can't be verified because the record keeping is manual. Once again, "blockchain" fixes nothing that a central database wouldn't do faster, cheaper and better.
Which means anyone within range of an item for ownership rights to matter, by definition, is either aware of your claim by some means and respecting it, or unaware and you now get to see how good your legal or kinetic protections of it are.
EDIT: The parent poster is possibly referring to an entirely different problem - many underdeveloped nations have antiquated automation for their land title systems, which makes proving ownership difficult due to a lack of computerization. This is a problem for the owners occupying the land, because they can't prove to third parties this claim is legal and thus use it as collateral for seeking lines of credit.
One of the interesting things the Bush Jr. admin of all things spearheaded was a project which looked at funding and helping update these systems in some nations as a means of economic development.
But of course, blockchain here is still useless. The problem isn't that the ledger of ownership is "secret" (which doesn't make any sense) it's that it can't be verified because the record keeping is manual. Once again, "blockchain" fixes nothing that a central database wouldn't do faster, cheaper and better.
> Once again, "blockchain" fixes nothing that a central database wouldn't do faster, cheaper and better.
Some things that blockchains would do better than centralized databases in your example:
* Blockchains are natively replicated on a massive basis, so you wouldn't have to worry about data loss due to disruption, inaccessibility or incompetent management of the centralized system.
* Blockchains cannot be corrupted by bad actors managing the central system. As I've noted in another comment, a Postgres DBA can be bribed to modify a property record and wipe the backups. That can't happen to a blockchain record.
* Blockchains can streamline the availability of credit, making it easier for a property owner to leverage their property to grow their business.
* Blockchains can increase the liquidity of the property market by providing via smart contract services that might not otherwise be available. For instance: escrow, auction, and mortgage lending.
Some things that blockchains would do better than centralized databases in your example:
* Blockchains are natively replicated on a massive basis, so you wouldn't have to worry about data loss due to disruption, inaccessibility or incompetent management of the centralized system.
* Blockchains cannot be corrupted by bad actors managing the central system. As I've noted in another comment, a Postgres DBA can be bribed to modify a property record and wipe the backups. That can't happen to a blockchain record.
* Blockchains can streamline the availability of credit, making it easier for a property owner to leverage their property to grow their business.
* Blockchains can increase the liquidity of the property market by providing via smart contract services that might not otherwise be available. For instance: escrow, auction, and mortgage lending.
Many of these seem like downsides.
> Blockchains cannot be corrupted by bad actors managing the central system. As I've noted in another comment, a Postgres DBA can be bribed to modify a property record and wipe the backups. That can't happen to a blockchain record.
What is to happen if a land-owner drops their cell-phone with their private keys, and now needs to re-gain ownership of their land? Well, either the government/admins can update the blockchain to have a new private key as an owner (in which case they could be bribed to do the same), OR the blockchain will be inaccurate, it will have an old address owning some land even though no one can use that address. See also, a farmer dies and has no beneficiary.
Also, how is new land added to the blockchain and old land removed? If the government needs to exercise eminent domain to build a railway, the farm's boundaries are changed. Perhaps the farmer does not want to make the update... so how does the land get updated to align with reality?
Natural disasters can also make land change drastically.
> Blockchains can streamline the availability of credit, making it easier for a property owner to leverage their property to grow their business
This just seems bad. Easier access to credit has not been great.
> Blockchains are natively replicated on a massive basis
They are if you have a lot of nodes. Which you do if you use bitcoin/eth/whatever (but then the cost of doing anything is incredibly expensive for those in the global south, so it's unusable). If each town builds their own to manage their land, it would be just as replicated as a .json file in s3 people can mirror if they want, which is to say archive.org might save a copy, a few farmers and companies in the area might, but most people would not care. Heck, people mirroring a json dump of a database would be more likely to happen than people figuring out how to spin up weird blockchain software I bet.
> Blockchains cannot be corrupted by bad actors managing the central system. As I've noted in another comment, a Postgres DBA can be bribed to modify a property record and wipe the backups. That can't happen to a blockchain record.
What is to happen if a land-owner drops their cell-phone with their private keys, and now needs to re-gain ownership of their land? Well, either the government/admins can update the blockchain to have a new private key as an owner (in which case they could be bribed to do the same), OR the blockchain will be inaccurate, it will have an old address owning some land even though no one can use that address. See also, a farmer dies and has no beneficiary.
Also, how is new land added to the blockchain and old land removed? If the government needs to exercise eminent domain to build a railway, the farm's boundaries are changed. Perhaps the farmer does not want to make the update... so how does the land get updated to align with reality?
Natural disasters can also make land change drastically.
> Blockchains can streamline the availability of credit, making it easier for a property owner to leverage their property to grow their business
This just seems bad. Easier access to credit has not been great.
> Blockchains are natively replicated on a massive basis
They are if you have a lot of nodes. Which you do if you use bitcoin/eth/whatever (but then the cost of doing anything is incredibly expensive for those in the global south, so it's unusable). If each town builds their own to manage their land, it would be just as replicated as a .json file in s3 people can mirror if they want, which is to say archive.org might save a copy, a few farmers and companies in the area might, but most people would not care. Heck, people mirroring a json dump of a database would be more likely to happen than people figuring out how to spin up weird blockchain software I bet.
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When you say "blockchain", are you referring to something like bitcoin? In other words, a proof of work blockchain? If we put all the world's data on a POW blockchain, we will cook the planet very quickly, and we won't have any energy for anything else.
The technology here is the least of that small shareholder's problems.
To register that land, they need to convince a corruptible human to accept their application, get another corruptible human to enter the data correctly in the database and get a third corruptible human to give them an authentic certificate proving that their land holding has been registered. You can already see three points where this can be trivially subverted, but it gets worse.
The hard part, you see, is defending their property rights. Local bigwig casually stomps on their land, now they need to convince the corruptible police to investigate (good luck with that when they're on the bigwig's payroll), find a lawyer willing to take this on (in exchange for what?), get the corruptible land rights registry to verify their claim, get a corruptible judge to give a true verdict, and then convince that corruptible police to carry out the verdict. If you're a poor subsistence farmer, it's nearly impossible to navigate this morass, and blockchain solves precisely zero of these problems.
Finally and most fundamentally, a land registry is by nature a centralized registry of holdings with a legal monopoly. Why on earth would you need to use a blockchain here, when an append-only database does the same job?
To register that land, they need to convince a corruptible human to accept their application, get another corruptible human to enter the data correctly in the database and get a third corruptible human to give them an authentic certificate proving that their land holding has been registered. You can already see three points where this can be trivially subverted, but it gets worse.
The hard part, you see, is defending their property rights. Local bigwig casually stomps on their land, now they need to convince the corruptible police to investigate (good luck with that when they're on the bigwig's payroll), find a lawyer willing to take this on (in exchange for what?), get the corruptible land rights registry to verify their claim, get a corruptible judge to give a true verdict, and then convince that corruptible police to carry out the verdict. If you're a poor subsistence farmer, it's nearly impossible to navigate this morass, and blockchain solves precisely zero of these problems.
Finally and most fundamentally, a land registry is by nature a centralized registry of holdings with a legal monopoly. Why on earth would you need to use a blockchain here, when an append-only database does the same job?
This.
A friend of mine moved down to Mexico and bought land on a beach to build his dream off grid eco airbnb.
After he'd been there a while and had completed some construction, a bunch of police came walking up his drive armed with assault rifles. They were with a local politician's sister that's known in the area for various land scams. They tried to kick him off his land under some pretext. My friend stood his ground despite them threatening to shoot him. After a standoff they left.
Now in my friend's case he's a remote tech worker with plenty of income as well as a bunch of social/professional connections to a bunch of wealthy business owners in Mexico city. So he was able to get connected up with the right kind of lawyer to go intimidate the captain of the police office the goons came from.
What was recorded on the deed in the county office mattered not one bit in this scenario.
A friend of mine moved down to Mexico and bought land on a beach to build his dream off grid eco airbnb.
After he'd been there a while and had completed some construction, a bunch of police came walking up his drive armed with assault rifles. They were with a local politician's sister that's known in the area for various land scams. They tried to kick him off his land under some pretext. My friend stood his ground despite them threatening to shoot him. After a standoff they left.
Now in my friend's case he's a remote tech worker with plenty of income as well as a bunch of social/professional connections to a bunch of wealthy business owners in Mexico city. So he was able to get connected up with the right kind of lawyer to go intimidate the captain of the police office the goons came from.
What was recorded on the deed in the county office mattered not one bit in this scenario.
> Finally and most fundamentally, a land registry is by nature a centralized registry of holdings with a legal monopoly. Why on earth would you need to use a blockchain here, when an append-only database does the same job?
Records within an append-only database running on a central server can be altered or deleted by whomever has the root password to that server.
The only way to guard against that risk is to replicate and publicize the data, make sure all data modifications are cryptographically signed and valid according the logic of the application, and incorporate into each new version of the data a hash of prior versions of the data, in order to guard against data deletions. In other words, to implement a blockchain.
> The hard part, you see, is defending their property rights. Local bigwig casually stomps on their land, now they need to convince the corruptible police to investigate (good luck with that when they're on the bigwig's payroll), find a lawyer willing to take this on (in exchange for what?), get the corruptible land rights registry to verify their claim, get a corruptible judge to give a true verdict, and then convince that corruptible police to carry out the verdict. If you're a poor subsistence farmer, it's nearly impossible to navigate this morass, and blockchain solves precisely zero of these problems.
You have described a horribly corrupt and oppressive society. It's not what most of the developing world looks like. You are right that there is unlikely to be a technical solution to this level of oppression, except that it would be harder to implement in the first place in a society where property records were managed via a blockchain.
Records within an append-only database running on a central server can be altered or deleted by whomever has the root password to that server.
The only way to guard against that risk is to replicate and publicize the data, make sure all data modifications are cryptographically signed and valid according the logic of the application, and incorporate into each new version of the data a hash of prior versions of the data, in order to guard against data deletions. In other words, to implement a blockchain.
> The hard part, you see, is defending their property rights. Local bigwig casually stomps on their land, now they need to convince the corruptible police to investigate (good luck with that when they're on the bigwig's payroll), find a lawyer willing to take this on (in exchange for what?), get the corruptible land rights registry to verify their claim, get a corruptible judge to give a true verdict, and then convince that corruptible police to carry out the verdict. If you're a poor subsistence farmer, it's nearly impossible to navigate this morass, and blockchain solves precisely zero of these problems.
You have described a horribly corrupt and oppressive society. It's not what most of the developing world looks like. You are right that there is unlikely to be a technical solution to this level of oppression, except that it would be harder to implement in the first place in a society where property records were managed via a blockchain.
> The only way to guard against that risk is to replicate and publicize the data, make sure all data modifications are cryptographically signed and valid according the logic of the application, and incorporate into each new version of the data a hash of prior versions of the data, in order to guard against data deletions. In other words, to implement a blockchain.
nothing you’ve described here requires the decentralized parts of a blockchain. there exist centralized databases that have all of these properties, and people have mentioned them in the comments.
nothing you’ve described here requires the decentralized parts of a blockchain. there exist centralized databases that have all of these properties, and people have mentioned them in the comments.
You are quibbling with semantics. What you have quoted is the definition of a blockchain. Any "centralized" database with these properties is a blockchain, for all intents and purposes.
A system with all those properties is a git repository containing all this data. Which would also scale to more operations per second than a block chain, is much more battle-hardened than any blockchain...
And decidedly isn't a blockchain. It's just a merkle tree that can easily be replicated / updated via "git clone" / "git fetch".
Your definition of a blockchain seems to be different than what most people use, though I admit a lot of blockchain advocates seem to make the definition tighter or looser depending on which is more convenient for the current argument.
And decidedly isn't a blockchain. It's just a merkle tree that can easily be replicated / updated via "git clone" / "git fetch".
Your definition of a blockchain seems to be different than what most people use, though I admit a lot of blockchain advocates seem to make the definition tighter or looser depending on which is more convenient for the current argument.
Your comment makes me believe that you don't think very highly of "blockchain advocates". But you don't seem to have much of a problem with using a replicated git repository in this manner.
So what is the specific problem that you have? You just don't like the fact that blockchain data mutations are bundled into periodically-generated blocks that incorporate changes from multiple users, rather than being pushed by individual users on an ad hoc basis? Is it a problem for you that blockchain nodes maintain network connections with each other, and have a protocol for ensuring that they all remain in sync, rather than relying on individual users to pull and manually merge changes explicitly?
A typical feature of religious disputes is that the smallest distinction takes on the most momentous significance. Is that not what's going on here?
So what is the specific problem that you have? You just don't like the fact that blockchain data mutations are bundled into periodically-generated blocks that incorporate changes from multiple users, rather than being pushed by individual users on an ad hoc basis? Is it a problem for you that blockchain nodes maintain network connections with each other, and have a protocol for ensuring that they all remain in sync, rather than relying on individual users to pull and manually merge changes explicitly?
A typical feature of religious disputes is that the smallest distinction takes on the most momentous significance. Is that not what's going on here?
You're right that this level of pedantry isn't actually that useful. However, we're both on hacker news and thus presumably steeped in technology, which seems to turn people into pedants quite easily. I'm making the pedantic point because you're already talking specifically about tiny semantic points in this thread, and if you're going to quibble semantics, pedantry seems open.
This distinction is not the one that actually matters and does not have huge significance in my frustration with blockchain advocates.
To me, the large issue seems to be that people advocating for blockchain _stuff_ usually seem to be ignoring reality and trying to paint a libertarian dream that is simply entirely divorced from how real governments and societies currently function.
The exact definition of blockchain doesn't matter. The use of a blockchain technology also doesn't matter (like, I don't care if my doctor is saving my records in Oracle SQL, some private blockchain, or whatever, never have cared, as long as the data is still there next time my doctor needs it, and it's compliant with legal privacy requirements).
What matters is that "blockchain" always seems to be coupled with "and by using it, it will fix this social problem somehow" when that problem is inevitably social or political, not technical.
I'm all for fixing these problems, but switching databases ain't it when the problem is several layers off, so it seems like at best a distraction from useful action, and at worst a grift to extract money from various entities by promising an easy solution to a difficult problem, which cannot realistically be delivered on.
This distinction is not the one that actually matters and does not have huge significance in my frustration with blockchain advocates.
To me, the large issue seems to be that people advocating for blockchain _stuff_ usually seem to be ignoring reality and trying to paint a libertarian dream that is simply entirely divorced from how real governments and societies currently function.
The exact definition of blockchain doesn't matter. The use of a blockchain technology also doesn't matter (like, I don't care if my doctor is saving my records in Oracle SQL, some private blockchain, or whatever, never have cared, as long as the data is still there next time my doctor needs it, and it's compliant with legal privacy requirements).
What matters is that "blockchain" always seems to be coupled with "and by using it, it will fix this social problem somehow" when that problem is inevitably social or political, not technical.
I'm all for fixing these problems, but switching databases ain't it when the problem is several layers off, so it seems like at best a distraction from useful action, and at worst a grift to extract money from various entities by promising an easy solution to a difficult problem, which cannot realistically be delivered on.
surveying definitions of blockchain, decentralized consensus is consistently a part of the definition. a blockchain without distributed consensus is something less specific.
i also don’t know why you put “centralized in quotes”. amazon qldb has all of the qualities you describe and is 100% centralized.
i also don’t know why you put “centralized in quotes”. amazon qldb has all of the qualities you describe and is 100% centralized.
An NFT representing ownership of farmland is, frankly, absurd.
If I own farmland and lose my private key (or screw up a smart contract and lock it away forever, etc), should that land never be farmed again?
If a river moves and boundaries must change but the NFT isn’t aware of this, what happens?
If someone with guns takes my land, who cares about my NFT?
Maybe technology can help create a system where transactions really happen on a common-carrier basis and can’t be censored without censorship being documentable and illegal. But at the end of the day, ownership of real things isn’t something on chain and is enforced by centralized institutions, and a blockchain won’t change that.
If I own farmland and lose my private key (or screw up a smart contract and lock it away forever, etc), should that land never be farmed again?
If a river moves and boundaries must change but the NFT isn’t aware of this, what happens?
If someone with guns takes my land, who cares about my NFT?
Maybe technology can help create a system where transactions really happen on a common-carrier basis and can’t be censored without censorship being documentable and illegal. But at the end of the day, ownership of real things isn’t something on chain and is enforced by centralized institutions, and a blockchain won’t change that.
Not to mention that the only thing that actually matters is what's in the government's land title ledger. They're the ones with the guns that enforce (or don't enforce) ownership.
These crypto crazies absolutely crack me up. Can you imagine some dirt poor farmer in the arse end of nowhere confronting the local constabulary that were bribed by their rich neighbour?
"You see here in my wallet how my Landz Titles NFT clearly states that this parcel of land is mine?"
Cue: a bunch of uniformed thugs glance at each other and smirk before proceeding to pummel the life out of the farmer that paid in Bitcoin for a few thousand bits that won't protect him from fists, batons, or bullets.
Some people are so naive and clueless that it's a parody of entitlement.
These crypto crazies absolutely crack me up. Can you imagine some dirt poor farmer in the arse end of nowhere confronting the local constabulary that were bribed by their rich neighbour?
"You see here in my wallet how my Landz Titles NFT clearly states that this parcel of land is mine?"
Cue: a bunch of uniformed thugs glance at each other and smirk before proceeding to pummel the life out of the farmer that paid in Bitcoin for a few thousand bits that won't protect him from fists, batons, or bullets.
Some people are so naive and clueless that it's a parody of entitlement.
To augment this slightly: It doesn't even matter if the uninformed thugs completely understand, embrace, and accept the technology of the ledger.
They then just simply glance, smirk, and pummel the farmer until they initiate the transfer of the digital ownership record to them.
They then just simply glance, smirk, and pummel the farmer until they initiate the transfer of the digital ownership record to them.
> Some people are so naive and clueless that it's a parody of entitlement
It's nice to think that one can stand his/her ground and not have to rely on others especially in societies were rugged individualism is a concept.
Reality disagrees with that and has proven throughout history that organized and coordinated groups of people are much more powerful than the sum of their parts.
It's the same with prepers (the crazy political kind), who think that in an apocalyptical world of madness and warlords their 1 family home will not just be sieged down immediately with them either bending the knee or getting killed.
It's nice to think that one can stand his/her ground and not have to rely on others especially in societies were rugged individualism is a concept.
Reality disagrees with that and has proven throughout history that organized and coordinated groups of people are much more powerful than the sum of their parts.
It's the same with prepers (the crazy political kind), who think that in an apocalyptical world of madness and warlords their 1 family home will not just be sieged down immediately with them either bending the knee or getting killed.
You cannot replace illegitimate or suboptimal institutions with systems of record or value storage and transfer they don’t have to respect or acknowledge, just as a court who cannot enforce their ruling has no authority. The systems are simply tools, it is the execution layer (ie government very broadly) that determines the outcome.
If your property record is on a blockchain but those whose recognize such rights ignore it, it’s not a property record, for example. It’s an internet comment or public expression of opinion. Similarly, what makes your name typed on a Docusign a legally binding signature? Federal statute recognizing it as such.
If your property record is on a blockchain but those whose recognize such rights ignore it, it’s not a property record, for example. It’s an internet comment or public expression of opinion. Similarly, what makes your name typed on a Docusign a legally binding signature? Federal statute recognizing it as such.
I don't disagree with you. My point is that blockchains can reduce the cost and complexity of enforcing property rights and adjudicating contractual disputes to a meaningful extent such that many of the institutional deficiencies that exist in the developing world in this regard can be overcome.
You couldn't realize such a reform, however, without buy-in from the government itself.
You couldn't realize such a reform, however, without buy-in from the government itself.
> can reduce the cost and complexity of enforcing property rights and adjudicating contractual disputes to a meaningful extent
No, they can't. A blockchain is, at best, a database. A database cannot do anything.
No, they can't. A blockchain is, at best, a database. A database cannot do anything.
So you would assert that the use of centralized relational databases would would not reduce the cost and complexity of enforcing property rights, in comparison to the use of paper records? A database cannot do anything?
> So you would assert that the use of centralized relational databases would would not reduce the cost and complexity of enforcing property rights, in comparison to the use of paper records?
1. No, I wouldn't assert that
2. It depends entirely on implementation (there are numerous examples around the world where transferring paper records to digital records mad a lot of things less efficient due to bad implementations)
3. You have to show that blockchain as a store of record is significantly better than a traditional relational database (given e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33691566 and other like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33688603 and other issues that you dismiss or ignore)
1. No, I wouldn't assert that
2. It depends entirely on implementation (there are numerous examples around the world where transferring paper records to digital records mad a lot of things less efficient due to bad implementations)
3. You have to show that blockchain as a store of record is significantly better than a traditional relational database (given e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33691566 and other like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33688603 and other issues that you dismiss or ignore)
I have some serious problems believing your argument. For example, this:
> Is a smart contract better than a written contract? Maybe it is, if there is no functioning judiciary to adjudicate contractual disputes.
If there’s no functioning judiciary, then who will enforce the contract? Who will decide if one side is not acting in good faith, or if there was coercion, or deception? I claim that smart contracts solve none of the issues actually caused by having weak institutions.
> Is a smart contract better than a written contract? Maybe it is, if there is no functioning judiciary to adjudicate contractual disputes.
If there’s no functioning judiciary, then who will enforce the contract? Who will decide if one side is not acting in good faith, or if there was coercion, or deception? I claim that smart contracts solve none of the issues actually caused by having weak institutions.
You cannot enforce the physical world through virtual means. It does not work.
What you can enforce is digital goods via virtual means. Depending of what you want to enforce the presence of a central authority in the physical world may still be needed
What you can enforce is digital goods via virtual means. Depending of what you want to enforce the presence of a central authority in the physical world may still be needed
Even digital goods are pretty limited because you need a situation where both parties honor the system. If that doesn’t fall naturally out of the model you need something like a government enforcement to prevent cheating.
They're public in a way that written contracts usually aren't. I can at least imagine scenarios where that might matter (even if I'm not at all certain they're realistic).
The real promise of blockchains is that they can provide a technological framework upon which to build new institutions that are alternatives to the types of institutions that are foundational to developed economies.
There's no evidence that this is true. People have been saying this for years and there's nothing to show for it.
There's no evidence that this is true. People have been saying this for years and there's nothing to show for it.
> Is a smart contract better than a written contract? Maybe it is, if there is no functioning judiciary to adjudicate contractual disputes.
This doesn’t seem like it could possibly be true without something like an outside force requiring use of the blockchain. For example, if my neighbor uses some of my land, who cares if I say it’s not valid according to someone’s computer? If the local legal system is inept or corrupt, who’s going to do something about it? In almost all cases the local control of state power wins.
This is especially relevant when you think about the long history of how lane has historically been stolen by tricking or threatening people, bribing surveyors, or by making promises which aren’t kept. Blockchains not only improve none of those situations but also add new ones like tricking people into using exploitable smart contracts or phishing their transfer approvals.
This doesn’t seem like it could possibly be true without something like an outside force requiring use of the blockchain. For example, if my neighbor uses some of my land, who cares if I say it’s not valid according to someone’s computer? If the local legal system is inept or corrupt, who’s going to do something about it? In almost all cases the local control of state power wins.
This is especially relevant when you think about the long history of how lane has historically been stolen by tricking or threatening people, bribing surveyors, or by making promises which aren’t kept. Blockchains not only improve none of those situations but also add new ones like tricking people into using exploitable smart contracts or phishing their transfer approvals.
Why would a corrupt state agree to use a system resistant to their influence? And if they did, why wouldn't they use violence to force the owner to transfer the property?
> Why would a corrupt state agree to use a system resistant to their influence?
Blockchain isn't resistant to their influence. Case in point: courts still exist. What's to stop me to get a court order showing I'm the rightful owner of something? How can blockchain prevent that?
Moreover, what if I actually am the rightful owner, and the original record was incorrect?
Blockchain isn't resistant to their influence. Case in point: courts still exist. What's to stop me to get a court order showing I'm the rightful owner of something? How can blockchain prevent that?
Moreover, what if I actually am the rightful owner, and the original record was incorrect?
Arguments like this one strike me as extremely condescending.
Have you directly spoken to developing world farmers who have experienced these problems?
Do you think people with these problems are just clamoring for the first world to come in and solve this for them with blockchain technology?
Do you think all of the participants in the situation you described would even adopt blockchain (the small farmer, the larger farmer who wants to steal land, the corrupt central government officials open to bribes)? If so, why? It seems the only person with an incentive for change is the one least likely to have strong influence for that change.
Have you directly spoken to developing world farmers who have experienced these problems?
Do you think people with these problems are just clamoring for the first world to come in and solve this for them with blockchain technology?
Do you think all of the participants in the situation you described would even adopt blockchain (the small farmer, the larger farmer who wants to steal land, the corrupt central government officials open to bribes)? If so, why? It seems the only person with an incentive for change is the one least likely to have strong influence for that change.
> Do you think people with these problems are just clamoring for the first world to come in and solve this for them with blockchain technology?
Especially in this case where the pitch is “commit now to paying me and friends first world transaction fees on everything you do, and maybe we’ll figure out how to help with the actual hard problems in the future”. If the real goal is helping small farmers I’d expect the answer to involve things like paying for accurate surveying and working with big agricultural buyers so the calculation changes from “bribe local official to ignore this small farmer’s deed; profit!” to include things like major buyers not buying from any of your farms.
Especially in this case where the pitch is “commit now to paying me and friends first world transaction fees on everything you do, and maybe we’ll figure out how to help with the actual hard problems in the future”. If the real goal is helping small farmers I’d expect the answer to involve things like paying for accurate surveying and working with big agricultural buyers so the calculation changes from “bribe local official to ignore this small farmer’s deed; profit!” to include things like major buyers not buying from any of your farms.
This a solved problem that isn’t solved using blockchain.
In Thailand when you get out into the rural areas, there’s no central database you can go and argue to in regards to land ownership. You have chiefs. He mediates sales between people and ensures who owns what land. If a land dispute happens it gets resolved by the chief.
In cities it’s all controlled by local governments and paper records.
It works in the city with government and paper. It works less in rural areas where people can be bought.
Blockchain is not solving any problems here. The problem is no one managing any records.
Paper records and up to date gps records are enough.
In Thailand when you get out into the rural areas, there’s no central database you can go and argue to in regards to land ownership. You have chiefs. He mediates sales between people and ensures who owns what land. If a land dispute happens it gets resolved by the chief.
In cities it’s all controlled by local governments and paper records.
It works in the city with government and paper. It works less in rural areas where people can be bought.
Blockchain is not solving any problems here. The problem is no one managing any records.
Paper records and up to date gps records are enough.
> Weak institutions, corrupt legal systems, and low levels of trust undermine development and prevent people from building and maintaining wealth for themselves and their families.
> For me, the promise of the blockchain is that it can provide a technological framework upon which to build new kinds of institutions
You're trying to solve social and political problems with tech. And you cannot. You could spend 30 seconds thinking abuout the problem and realised why it can't.
Question: who is the rightful owner of the marked land? See my comments in this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27212564
> Is a smart contract better than a written contract? Maybe it is, if there is no well-functioning judiciary to adjudicate contractual disputes.
And who is going to enforce this smart contract?
> It's important to remember that what might seem redundant or useless to those of us who reside in the first world may not be redundant or useless to those who live elsewhere.
It's also important to remember that people who claim this (and claim blockchains are solutions to problems) also reside in the first world and have literally no clue about the problems outside their cushy bubbles.
> For me, the promise of the blockchain is that it can provide a technological framework upon which to build new kinds of institutions
You're trying to solve social and political problems with tech. And you cannot. You could spend 30 seconds thinking abuout the problem and realised why it can't.
Question: who is the rightful owner of the marked land? See my comments in this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27212564
> Is a smart contract better than a written contract? Maybe it is, if there is no well-functioning judiciary to adjudicate contractual disputes.
And who is going to enforce this smart contract?
> It's important to remember that what might seem redundant or useless to those of us who reside in the first world may not be redundant or useless to those who live elsewhere.
It's also important to remember that people who claim this (and claim blockchains are solutions to problems) also reside in the first world and have literally no clue about the problems outside their cushy bubbles.
They simply need to record the location of the property markers. They could even use paper. The problem is that they don't have surveying equipment and the training to use it so all they have is the sticks.
As others have said, you can't (usefully) represent ownership in the blockchain because ownership can change or be made irrelevant outside of the blockchain.
While blockchain wouldn't be useful for this, a host of cryptographic tools would be.
If a country used signed survey data they could prevent a host of crimes and bugs changing boundaries, and if they issued signed land titled you could check their validity offline - helpful for remote areas. They could be tied together entry to entry, like a blockchain, to assure that no records "go missing". There could be a single-core proof of work stored regularly, checkpointing the data, to prevent the country's IT team from rewriting the whole database. It just doesn't need to be "a blockchain" because there is a centralized authority who we all follow, if not trust, so the decentralized thing isn't that important. And we don't need to limit publishing so we don't need a currency.
As others have said, you can't (usefully) represent ownership in the blockchain because ownership can change or be made irrelevant outside of the blockchain.
While blockchain wouldn't be useful for this, a host of cryptographic tools would be.
If a country used signed survey data they could prevent a host of crimes and bugs changing boundaries, and if they issued signed land titled you could check their validity offline - helpful for remote areas. They could be tied together entry to entry, like a blockchain, to assure that no records "go missing". There could be a single-core proof of work stored regularly, checkpointing the data, to prevent the country's IT team from rewriting the whole database. It just doesn't need to be "a blockchain" because there is a centralized authority who we all follow, if not trust, so the decentralized thing isn't that important. And we don't need to limit publishing so we don't need a currency.
> The developed world is distinguished from the developing world often by the strength of its institutions, by the general accessibility of legal recourse, by the prevalence of trust within the society at large.
The developed world is not immune to some of the problems, namely: genuine human errors, negligence and a great uneasiness to accept the personal responsibility for making mistakes, inadvertent or out of sheer incompetence (rampant in the British culture). The latter two somewhat step into a gray area, but I digress.
Ledger databases/blockchains provide a technological solution to the problem in multiple areas where a full immutable temporal history of changes is necessary even in the developed world where the governance is strong and corruption is less frequent.
The developed world is not immune to some of the problems, namely: genuine human errors, negligence and a great uneasiness to accept the personal responsibility for making mistakes, inadvertent or out of sheer incompetence (rampant in the British culture). The latter two somewhat step into a gray area, but I digress.
Ledger databases/blockchains provide a technological solution to the problem in multiple areas where a full immutable temporal history of changes is necessary even in the developed world where the governance is strong and corruption is less frequent.
Currency is the only one of those that actually works within the corrupt legal system because it doesn't require any action on the part of the corrupt system. You can use it directly with other parties.
(smart) Contracts? Without institutional enforcement, doesn't matter. Maybe being all on-chain, but that hasn't really functioned.
Ownership (NFT)? Doesn't work at all without some level of institutional enforcement.
Blockchain does only one thing well.
(smart) Contracts? Without institutional enforcement, doesn't matter. Maybe being all on-chain, but that hasn't really functioned.
Ownership (NFT)? Doesn't work at all without some level of institutional enforcement.
Blockchain does only one thing well.
> it can provide a technological framework upon which to build new kinds of institutions
But will those institutions be democratic or respect human rights? Proof-of-work blockchains are effectively plutocracies, controlled by those with the most computing power.
But will those institutions be democratic or respect human rights? Proof-of-work blockchains are effectively plutocracies, controlled by those with the most computing power.
> But if the boundary markers were on the blockchain,” he said, “they wouldn’t be able to do that, would they?
Or they could store the makers are stored in a free-tier dynomodb instance…
Or they could store the makers are stored in a free-tier dynomodb instance…
Very nice article. As others have alluded to, I think Tim does miss an important point about trust. He writes:
> we just couldn’t convince ourselves that the real world wanted zero-trust; so there was a transaction manager you had to trust.
And then later:
> It seems a good idea to have a land-registry database but, blockchain or no, I wonder if the large landowners might be able to find another way to fiddle the records and still steal the land? Perhaps this is more about power than boundary markers?
Yes. Blockchain is about decentralization of power. It's exactly the most interesting in situations with no trusted third party (i.e. weak rule of law) and an imbalance of power. I think Tim missed that aspect of this discussion (which is no knock on him in 2016, but should be reevaluated now). The rest I found insightful and very interesting.
> we just couldn’t convince ourselves that the real world wanted zero-trust; so there was a transaction manager you had to trust.
And then later:
> It seems a good idea to have a land-registry database but, blockchain or no, I wonder if the large landowners might be able to find another way to fiddle the records and still steal the land? Perhaps this is more about power than boundary markers?
Yes. Blockchain is about decentralization of power. It's exactly the most interesting in situations with no trusted third party (i.e. weak rule of law) and an imbalance of power. I think Tim missed that aspect of this discussion (which is no knock on him in 2016, but should be reevaluated now). The rest I found insightful and very interesting.
No. Tim did not miss an important point about trust.
You missed an important point about power.
Those large land owners do not give a fuck about your blockchain. They'll take the land and farm it anyways. You can "own" the virtual stake; they're happy to cede you cyber nonsense as long as they get to control who touches the actual grass.
The large land owners, who have local authorities in their pocket, would simply quote President Andrew Jackson's apocryphal opinion on blockchain: "The blockchain has made its decision; now let the blockchain's army and police enforce it!" [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worcester_v._Georgia
You missed an important point about power.
Those large land owners do not give a fuck about your blockchain. They'll take the land and farm it anyways. You can "own" the virtual stake; they're happy to cede you cyber nonsense as long as they get to control who touches the actual grass.
The large land owners, who have local authorities in their pocket, would simply quote President Andrew Jackson's apocryphal opinion on blockchain: "The blockchain has made its decision; now let the blockchain's army and police enforce it!" [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worcester_v._Georgia
A central part of the quote I was responding to is "fiddle the records". I agree with what you said otherwise.
How does being able to point at a database prevent land being stolen in the absence of a trusted third party? It's not like the land itself can authenticate the farmer. For the database to have any weight, there'd need to be an authority that can enforce what it says (and won't take bribes to ignore it, or collude in extorting "voluntary" transfers). If you do have such an agency, well, there's your trusted third party.
Here's the issue.
In a country with a stable, effective government, you don't need a blockchain for this: you can just have a centralized database.
In a country without such a government, a blockchain wouldn't help: the government will care more about the large landholders than about the blockchain records, and will have little incentive to enforce the latter.
(Also: I won't look forward to the day when some hacker figures out how to get into a bunch of farmers' crypto wallets and takes all their land. If the government doesn't respect the hackers' claims, then the blockchain isn't really the source of truth; if it does, then a bunch of people's lives are destroyed.)
In a country with a stable, effective government, you don't need a blockchain for this: you can just have a centralized database.
In a country without such a government, a blockchain wouldn't help: the government will care more about the large landholders than about the blockchain records, and will have little incentive to enforce the latter.
(Also: I won't look forward to the day when some hacker figures out how to get into a bunch of farmers' crypto wallets and takes all their land. If the government doesn't respect the hackers' claims, then the blockchain isn't really the source of truth; if it does, then a bunch of people's lives are destroyed.)
The utility of decentralized blockchains is that they facilitate permissionless financial innovation. Yes, that means "regulatory arbitrage". But not just circumventing the law, more importantly, circumventing the de facto law of corporate gatekeepers.
A substantial amount of de facto financial regulation comes not from democratically elected governments, but from companies that gate-keep access to the databases where financial truth resides. A great example of this is Visa and Mastercard dropping PornHub as a client. But there are many others. Building software that interfaces with money is extremely difficult, what you can and cannot do is extremely limited, and you may only do so at the pleasure of the major financial institutions that sit between your code and the traditional financial system.
Right now, if you want to write code that manipulate's someone's money, you have to ask the permission of both the owner of the funds, and several intermediaries along the way. What those intermediaries choose to allow you to do can be arbitrary, capricious, and certainly is not democratic.
It is true that decentralized blockchains also facilitate the flouting of the law, and that can be good or bad, depending on your point of view. But fundamentally, having an open fabric for finance, in which anyone can build any kind of application they wish, seems like a pretty cool thing to me.
A substantial amount of de facto financial regulation comes not from democratically elected governments, but from companies that gate-keep access to the databases where financial truth resides. A great example of this is Visa and Mastercard dropping PornHub as a client. But there are many others. Building software that interfaces with money is extremely difficult, what you can and cannot do is extremely limited, and you may only do so at the pleasure of the major financial institutions that sit between your code and the traditional financial system.
Right now, if you want to write code that manipulate's someone's money, you have to ask the permission of both the owner of the funds, and several intermediaries along the way. What those intermediaries choose to allow you to do can be arbitrary, capricious, and certainly is not democratic.
It is true that decentralized blockchains also facilitate the flouting of the law, and that can be good or bad, depending on your point of view. But fundamentally, having an open fabric for finance, in which anyone can build any kind of application they wish, seems like a pretty cool thing to me.
But that's not even true. You can always get people's money and turn them into some tokens. You can run whatever code you want to manipulate those tokens, then at the end of each day you tell them their new balance of tokens. The whole proof-of-work, decentralization, ledger, ... are in no way necessary steps in this.
As long as you go through creepy, deregulated, fallible exchanges to obtain/trade/redeem those tokens, you are not permissionless or cryptographically secure or free from gate-keepers or anything of the sort.
As long as you go through creepy, deregulated, fallible exchanges to obtain/trade/redeem those tokens, you are not permissionless or cryptographically secure or free from gate-keepers or anything of the sort.
What, precisely, are you saying is not true? You need a decentralized consensus mechanism in order to solve the double-spend problem, unless you've come up with something novel.
Trivially lying to the ledger makes that irrelevant.
And those transactions will fail. Please learn about a subject before speaking about it.
That’s an incredibly rude way to try to invite someone to a learn about a subject.
Having said that, I think that if these things are so obvious in your opinion, you haven’t considered real world scenarios.
Having said that, I think that if these things are so obvious in your opinion, you haven’t considered real world scenarios.
Not GP, but you called it "trivially irrelevant", it didn't seem like you wanted to be invited to learn anything...
I said trivially lying, as in - the ease with which one can simply lie about the nature of a transaction.
People tend to respond that smart contracts are a solution. I personally think they will always contain bugs and are too complicated for the average person to vet.
In any case, I really wasn’t saying I think the whole subject is trivial. Pinky promise.
People tend to respond that smart contracts are a solution. I personally think they will always contain bugs and are too complicated for the average person to vet.
In any case, I really wasn’t saying I think the whole subject is trivial. Pinky promise.
[deleted]
> The whole proof-of-work, decentralization, ledger, ... are in no way necessary steps in this.
If you know of a ledger that's
(1) permissionless and
(2) avoids the double-spending problem and
(3) _does not_ involve those things you mentioned
...then please, do tell me about it. I'd love to know your breakthrough solution.
If you know of a ledger that's
(1) permissionless and
(2) avoids the double-spending problem and
(3) _does not_ involve those things you mentioned
...then please, do tell me about it. I'd love to know your breakthrough solution.
What I'm saying is that you don't need a decentralized ledger to enable the "financial innovation" we've been seeing, and that it's not permissionless if every meaningful action (buy/sell/trade) happens on good ol' central exchanges.
Truly decentralized exchanges exist and clear tens of billions of dollars in volume every single day.
Within an ecosystem, yes. You can trade Ethereum currency for Ethereum-based tokens.
As for "billions of dollars in volume every single day", I find that hard to believe.
As for "billions of dollars in volume every single day", I find that hard to believe.
https://info.uniswap.org/
Uniswap alone clears this amount. Part of the power of decentralized exchanges is that every trade is logged and publicly available, which is not something you can claim for their centralized counterparts.
Uniswap alone clears this amount. Part of the power of decentralized exchanges is that every trade is logged and publicly available, which is not something you can claim for their centralized counterparts.
Ethereum's Proof of Stake?
They are not talking about the consensus mechanism but the overall raison d'etre of blockchain.
Which involves decentralization and a ledger.
> What those intermediaries choose to allow you to do can be arbitrary, capricious, and certainly is not democratic.
In practice, to adopt crypto you usually also need to rely on intermediaries to handle parts of the process for you. Fortunately, in the crypto space, you can use trusted, non-capricious, democratic intermediaries like FTX.
In practice, to adopt crypto you usually also need to rely on intermediaries to handle parts of the process for you. Fortunately, in the crypto space, you can use trusted, non-capricious, democratic intermediaries like FTX.
> fundamentally, having an open fabric for finance, in which anyone can build any kind of application they wish, seems like a pretty cool thing to me.
Where money is concerned, no.
Having gatekeepers, boundaries, approvals, registers, participants and authorities is onerous, but it keeps things more honest and it makes them much more traceable in cases of negligence or fraud. We have ... well pretty much all of recorded history to show us how very many people will use any and every means available to remove money from others and disappear.
So no, this idea of an open fabric, in which anyone can build anything is a recipe for disaster by its very nature.
Where money is concerned, no.
Having gatekeepers, boundaries, approvals, registers, participants and authorities is onerous, but it keeps things more honest and it makes them much more traceable in cases of negligence or fraud. We have ... well pretty much all of recorded history to show us how very many people will use any and every means available to remove money from others and disappear.
So no, this idea of an open fabric, in which anyone can build anything is a recipe for disaster by its very nature.
That's certainly a valid point on the trade-off curve to choose. But you could make a similarly reductionist argument about free speech, guns, home chemistry sets, etc. I think the position that "money is too important to be open" is a potentially reasonable one!
But what I don't think is particularly defensible is the position that the gatekeepers of our monetary system should be the corporations who happen to occupy the current choke points. And I think if you wanted to build a democratically controlled financial system that doesn't have corporate gatekeepers, you'd actually want to start with something very much like a decentralized open blockchain. That is, if you want to build a democratically controlled permissioned system, you need to start with an open fabric, and place the gatekeepers and choke points with intention.
Personally I prefer an open fabric, but I do understand the appeal of walled gardens.
But what I don't think is particularly defensible is the position that the gatekeepers of our monetary system should be the corporations who happen to occupy the current choke points. And I think if you wanted to build a democratically controlled financial system that doesn't have corporate gatekeepers, you'd actually want to start with something very much like a decentralized open blockchain. That is, if you want to build a democratically controlled permissioned system, you need to start with an open fabric, and place the gatekeepers and choke points with intention.
Personally I prefer an open fabric, but I do understand the appeal of walled gardens.
Yeah don't get me wrong, I think there's loads of stuff that can change and be improved about the current system, including getting rid of various entrenched interests.
But yes, finance is a walled garden, especially where retail is involved, and I think it should continue to be one. It's not just that money is too important, it's that we know it attracts people who will do anything to part joe public from his dollar, and we know that without sufficient regulation, said people can and do concoct all sorts of shonky, magical schemes to do it. We can see it happening in the cryptocurrency space at the moment. These schemes not only rip off their own marks but can, without oversight, create systemic risks on entire economies.
So there should be oversight, licensing, monitoring and democratically accountable authorities that can correct and direct actions. As such I don't think any improvement here resembles a blockchain at all, because blockchain systems are designed specifically for (and really only provide benefit in) situations where these are not present.
And the alternative is a world in which people are having to constantly be on guard over every little thing. I don't want to have to do due diligence on how I store my money, or whether somewhere I choose to deposit it might evaporate next week despite being assured by 'the community' that it's legit and 100% SAFU. Just like I don't want to have to be my own food standards inspector at a restaurant...
But yes, finance is a walled garden, especially where retail is involved, and I think it should continue to be one. It's not just that money is too important, it's that we know it attracts people who will do anything to part joe public from his dollar, and we know that without sufficient regulation, said people can and do concoct all sorts of shonky, magical schemes to do it. We can see it happening in the cryptocurrency space at the moment. These schemes not only rip off their own marks but can, without oversight, create systemic risks on entire economies.
So there should be oversight, licensing, monitoring and democratically accountable authorities that can correct and direct actions. As such I don't think any improvement here resembles a blockchain at all, because blockchain systems are designed specifically for (and really only provide benefit in) situations where these are not present.
And the alternative is a world in which people are having to constantly be on guard over every little thing. I don't want to have to do due diligence on how I store my money, or whether somewhere I choose to deposit it might evaporate next week despite being assured by 'the community' that it's legit and 100% SAFU. Just like I don't want to have to be my own food standards inspector at a restaurant...
I was going to simply paste a list of notable crypto scams, but... heh... other people have already put together annual "top-10" lists of scams:
https://mashable.com/article/biggest-crypto-scams-2022
https://mashable.com/article/biggest-cryptocurrency-scams-20...
https://www.zdnet.com/article/2020s-worst-cryptocurrency-bre...
https://www.zdnet.com/article/bitcoin-battered-the-worst-cry...
https://mashable.com/article/biggest-crypto-scams-2022
https://mashable.com/article/biggest-cryptocurrency-scams-20...
https://www.zdnet.com/article/2020s-worst-cryptocurrency-bre...
https://www.zdnet.com/article/bitcoin-battered-the-worst-cry...
Pornhub was cut off for failing to police child pornography. Why would you want to participate in a financial system that was incapable of excluding evildoers?
Look, I dislike crypto as much as the next guy, but I must have missed the memo. Are evildoers not perfectly capable of participating in the current financial system?
https://www.thelocal.ch/20150208/hsbc-swiss-bank-helped-terr...
https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/business/how-the--war-on-terror...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/apr/03/us-bank-mexico...
Let’s also ignore all the shadiness that the Russian Oligarchs, oil shieks, Bibi, Berlosconi all seem to engage in and yet seemingly have no limit to the financial systems. The belief that our financial system excludes evildoers is a nice fantasy that I haven’t seen be rooted in reality.
https://www.thelocal.ch/20150208/hsbc-swiss-bank-helped-terr...
https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/business/how-the--war-on-terror...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/apr/03/us-bank-mexico...
Let’s also ignore all the shadiness that the Russian Oligarchs, oil shieks, Bibi, Berlosconi all seem to engage in and yet seemingly have no limit to the financial systems. The belief that our financial system excludes evildoers is a nice fantasy that I haven’t seen be rooted in reality.
That should be dealt with by the justice system, not some corporations.
Payment processors saw the writing on the wall. The reason they did what they did and PH made a 180 and disposed of incriminating content all in one month is because justice system has teeth and they did not want to find themselves liable.
And justice system has teeth because PH is a proper company participating in a financial system. Good luck stopping a criminal in another country profiting from crime by accepting bitcoin
And justice system has teeth because PH is a proper company participating in a financial system. Good luck stopping a criminal in another country profiting from crime by accepting bitcoin
There is no reason for payment processors to be liable. If you have a problem with Bitcoin, you need to support a general, unrestricted right be all persons and orgs to be served by the financial system, except maybe for a narrow and limited set of injunctions through the courts.
No other position is cohesive.
No other position is cohesive.
Sorry, I do not support your right to be serviced by financial system if it supports your wrongdoing. Your freedom stops where mine begins. My position seems pretty cohesive to me.
If you do not do evil, then you have nothing to fear. If you have something to fear despite doing no evil, let's fix the government. This is a human problem and won't be solved with tech.
(And again, it was pretty clear to anyone that there was wrongdoing in this case and PH was going to get sued. I do think it should have been sued anyway, that it was not may have to do with victims not willing to come forward given sensitive nature of the crime, general disinclination of people to deal with dirt, or a good content cleanup job.)
If you do not do evil, then you have nothing to fear. If you have something to fear despite doing no evil, let's fix the government. This is a human problem and won't be solved with tech.
(And again, it was pretty clear to anyone that there was wrongdoing in this case and PH was going to get sued. I do think it should have been sued anyway, that it was not may have to do with victims not willing to come forward given sensitive nature of the crime, general disinclination of people to deal with dirt, or a good content cleanup job.)
> If you do not do evil, then you have nothing to fear. If you have something to fear despite doing no evil, let's fix the government.
So - if I have to fear being being shutoff from the financial system by private actors who dislike me, despite not having been convicted of a crime, a law to ensure my right to be served.
So - if I have to fear being being shutoff from the financial system by private actors who dislike me, despite not having been convicted of a crime, a law to ensure my right to be served.
What private individual was blocked by MasterCard? Private actors significant enough don't care about you enough to not deal with you unless dealing you puts them in legal jeopardy. At which point you might want to ask yourself why.
> Good luck stopping a criminal in another country profiting from crime by accepting bitcoin
Interesting choice of examples: the FBI found bitcoin to be very helpful in exactly that context since it gave hard evidence linking criminals together.
https://www.wired.com/story/tracers-in-the-dark-welcome-to-v...
This idea that police agencies haven’t figured out how to talk with their colleagues in other countries is oddly anachronistic given that we have examples going back to before the turn of the previous century.
Interesting choice of examples: the FBI found bitcoin to be very helpful in exactly that context since it gave hard evidence linking criminals together.
https://www.wired.com/story/tracers-in-the-dark-welcome-to-v...
This idea that police agencies haven’t figured out how to talk with their colleagues in other countries is oddly anachronistic given that we have examples going back to before the turn of the previous century.
It is helpful with those who don't use mixers, like the article says. I'm sure criminals not smart enough to use mixers are not the ones making the real money.
why would you want to participate in an internet that is incapable of excluding evildoers?
The pipes of the internet are essentially a public utility. Anyone operating above the level of an ISP should be able to police their usage.
because internet is not the mechanism that allows distributors and producers of CSAM to get paid?
But good point, with cryptocurrency the internet would obviously have to become capable of excluding evildoers.
But good point, with cryptocurrency the internet would obviously have to become capable of excluding evildoers.
My understanding is they policed it a lot better than facebook does.
And the solution they were pushed into was extreme overkill.
Either way, I don't want a financial system to punish a Canadian company for breaking the law, I want the government to do it.
And the solution they were pushed into was extreme overkill.
Either way, I don't want a financial system to punish a Canadian company for breaking the law, I want the government to do it.
Your understanding is wrong.
In fact, Facebook has been consistently reporting millions of videos even before PH got heat. Any platform that hosts images or videos has this problem, but with all its shenanigans FB has been among the best at identifying and removing the content. It is ridiculous to blame them for actually doing the right thing, which includes reporting found CSAM. Microsoft with Bing done markedly worse. PH pre-2021, obviously, too (and the bar is higher since it distributed this content for actual profit).
This is all public information.
In fact, Facebook has been consistently reporting millions of videos even before PH got heat. Any platform that hosts images or videos has this problem, but with all its shenanigans FB has been among the best at identifying and removing the content. It is ridiculous to blame them for actually doing the right thing, which includes reporting found CSAM. Microsoft with Bing done markedly worse. PH pre-2021, obviously, too (and the bar is higher since it distributed this content for actual profit).
This is all public information.
Reporting millions of videos is a good thing, but having millions is pretty crazy too.
And Bing doesn't host things.
And Bing doesn't host things.
Anywhere you can upload images they have this. No one is on the radar because no one cares except few companies. For a porn-oriented platform however, having this and not reporting this and selling this, that's egregious.
> host
If it's findable on Bing with previews and all, Bing has ingested the content at some point.
In some cases it's justified to get all technicalities fully clarified before taking an action, otherwise we'd be wondering and litigating whether PH did something wrong.
> host
If it's findable on Bing with previews and all, Bing has ingested the content at some point.
In some cases it's justified to get all technicalities fully clarified before taking an action, otherwise we'd be wondering and litigating whether PH did something wrong.
From an Indian pov my take is the boundary markers use-case sounds pretty good. I don't expect an American flying around from EWR to Seattle to ever understand this intuitively without being exposed to the realities in this part of the world, but having thought about it for all of 20 seconds it sounds like a very good idea.
Yes - it is a solution to the problem of power and corruption. In India there is corruption at all levels of government. The wealthy and powerful could absolutely influence some levels and steal land. Even petty regional criminals are able to do it. It has happened to my own family - imagine the odds. 1 billion people here, and I read this article and even I can personally relate to the issue of stolen land.
A blockchain that stored GPS coordinates and could realistically withstand a 51% attack, would solve the problem in my view. Are there other architectures that can also solve this problem? No doubt. Is the blockchain solution perfect? No it isn't.
Yes - it is a solution to the problem of power and corruption. In India there is corruption at all levels of government. The wealthy and powerful could absolutely influence some levels and steal land. Even petty regional criminals are able to do it. It has happened to my own family - imagine the odds. 1 billion people here, and I read this article and even I can personally relate to the issue of stolen land.
A blockchain that stored GPS coordinates and could realistically withstand a 51% attack, would solve the problem in my view. Are there other architectures that can also solve this problem? No doubt. Is the blockchain solution perfect? No it isn't.
As we've learned from the "They've stolen my apes" scenarios, the very nature of blockchain as the central authority of trust means that there is no such thing as theft on the blockchain.
Today, corrupt powerful people use violence and intimidation to go move physical markers to change landownership.
If land ownership was on the blockchain, the same corrupt powerful people will use violence and intimidation to force digital transfer of ownership.
The same threats to the safety and wellbeing of family members works equally well to induce the desired actions in the physical word or the digital one.
This is why Tim wrote to be wary of technical solutions for political problems.
Today, corrupt powerful people use violence and intimidation to go move physical markers to change landownership.
If land ownership was on the blockchain, the same corrupt powerful people will use violence and intimidation to force digital transfer of ownership.
The same threats to the safety and wellbeing of family members works equally well to induce the desired actions in the physical word or the digital one.
This is why Tim wrote to be wary of technical solutions for political problems.
I imagine the rich, corrupt land lords in India would be able to steal your land even easier on the blokchain by sending a gang of armed bandits to your farm, torture you until you transfer everything to their wallet... and when you go to the police to denounce the harassment, you get arrested because the police is on the land lord's pocket. The blockchain cannot and will not stop violence in the real world from working around all the cryptography in the world, and it's shocking to me that anyone actually believes that to be somehow the case.
Also: Couldn't the wealthy and the powerful influence the creation of the blockchain and the first data set put on the blockchain as well?
In the US, property records are maintained by a local government authority. That alone doesn’t stop squatters or unauthorized encroachment on your property. Normally, the boundaries of a parcel of land are not a mystery, but enforcing them requires more than just knowing their location
A petty criminal visits your farm with a gun in his hands. You tell him that the blockchain says this land belongs to you. What happens then? Does he say "oh, sorry to bother you, have a nice day" and go away? Or does he just shoot you and take over the land?
Or worse, steal your only phone and take over the land, as ownership of the keys is now ownership of the land.
Blockchain would actually make property theft easier in a poor area where people only have a phone.
Blockchain would actually make property theft easier in a poor area where people only have a phone.
[deleted]
Can you help me understand how this would help? The way I see it: if the government were on board with recording property boundaries in a public ledger, it could do it without a blockchain. And if it's not on board, then I don't see how a random third-party ledger would help, since the government wouldn't defer to it.
Not the parent post, but a reasonable implication would be that the government-as-a-whole could be forced to enforce the property boundaries as long as it is difficult for individual government officials to make undetected illegitimate changes to the ledger; such a mechanism would be disempowering the specific officials and force them to follow the rules enforced by the system.
It would have to be a solution that involves the government
> Yes - it is a solution to the problem of power and corruption.
It's not.
Question: who is the rightful owner of the marked land? See my comments in this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27212564
> The wealthy and powerful could absolutely influence some levels and steal land. Even petty regional criminals are able to do it.
So the wealthy and the powerful get the person entering data on the blockchain to enter that the land belongs to them. What exactly has blockchain solved?
It's not.
Question: who is the rightful owner of the marked land? See my comments in this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27212564
> The wealthy and powerful could absolutely influence some levels and steal land. Even petty regional criminals are able to do it.
So the wealthy and the powerful get the person entering data on the blockchain to enter that the land belongs to them. What exactly has blockchain solved?
But how will poor people own enough computation to ensure rich people can't mount a 51% attack?
If the database relies on trusted nodes run by eg, the government, why can't the government use MySQL and periodically publish a dump?
If the database relies on trusted nodes run by eg, the government, why can't the government use MySQL and periodically publish a dump?
It would have to be a mix of government and non government nodes for it to work.
I used to follow the conventional wisdom (there won’t be wide base adoption of cryptocurrencies, but blockchain tech will be useful in a variety of other technologies). I never really looked to hard into blockchain or the work being done in the industry. But based on the various crypto firms collapsing and the fact that there is no place that is making any meaningful progress with blockchain at this point, I’m at the point where I’ll dismiss any crypto / blockchain project reflexively. Seems like it’s been a great way to get funding for those clued in and taking advantage of the hype.
This situation could be contrasted with the other (successful) distributed consensus policy - democratic governance.
- No applications in commercial environments.
- I've seen 10-20 people in my life who can explain the details of why Democracy is a good choice. Most people, for example, fail to identify that the typical democracy is much better at fighting then winning wars than any alternative.
Blockchains could turn out to be similar technology. It is still too early to write them off. There just needs to be one big application, and it'll be something simple but also something that hasn't been done before because it was impossible to organise.
- No applications in commercial environments.
- I've seen 10-20 people in my life who can explain the details of why Democracy is a good choice. Most people, for example, fail to identify that the typical democracy is much better at fighting then winning wars than any alternative.
Blockchains could turn out to be similar technology. It is still too early to write them off. There just needs to be one big application, and it'll be something simple but also something that hasn't been done before because it was impossible to organise.
> Dear Reader: I think that at some point, in a civilization, there has to be trust. I think that’s maybe the main reason we have civilizations. Call me crazy.
Dead on
Dead on
Disclaimer: speaking only of Bitcoin, the utility of the larger crypto space is somewhat questionable.
Yes, there will always be a need for trust, and Bitcoin doesn't change that. What it does is actually facilitate more, rather than less, trust.
By having a rock-solid form of money with a well-known, immutable monetary policy and issuance rate, that doesn't rely on any single entity and is very difficult to corrupt, all kinds of trust-related issues (moral hazard, Cantillon effect, theft of purchasing power) are resolved.
In addition, commerce and exchange between strangers can more easily be facilitated based on such a system rather than one that relies on multiple intermediaries.
If I can have cryptographic proof of escrow in a multi-sig wallet (2 of 3, where there is a trusted (!) 3rd party), I might be willing to do a transaction with someone I might otherwise not (e.g. due to a lack of trust that they have the funds available).
Yes, there will always be a need for trust, and Bitcoin doesn't change that. What it does is actually facilitate more, rather than less, trust.
By having a rock-solid form of money with a well-known, immutable monetary policy and issuance rate, that doesn't rely on any single entity and is very difficult to corrupt, all kinds of trust-related issues (moral hazard, Cantillon effect, theft of purchasing power) are resolved.
In addition, commerce and exchange between strangers can more easily be facilitated based on such a system rather than one that relies on multiple intermediaries.
If I can have cryptographic proof of escrow in a multi-sig wallet (2 of 3, where there is a trusted (!) 3rd party), I might be willing to do a transaction with someone I might otherwise not (e.g. due to a lack of trust that they have the funds available).
Spot on. I think part of the problem is in the common framing of cryptocurrencies as trustless. At the end of the day there is trust in every human made system, blockchain or not. With Bitcoin, you're still trusting that all of the developers, miners, and users won't decided to increase the block reward at any point in the future.
So what's the point of Bitcoin (and other cryptos) from a risk management perspective if it's not actually trustless. It gives you exposure to a significantly different risk profile, and one that can be better reasoned about. You're no longer at the whim of governments and corporations, but instead a loosely "organized" set of developers, miners, and users. And we can reason about what those actors will do, based on human psychology and the fact that people tend to act in their financial best interest. And Bitcoin is setup in such a way that the system operates correctly when the participants behave this way.
So what's the point of Bitcoin (and other cryptos) from a risk management perspective if it's not actually trustless. It gives you exposure to a significantly different risk profile, and one that can be better reasoned about. You're no longer at the whim of governments and corporations, but instead a loosely "organized" set of developers, miners, and users. And we can reason about what those actors will do, based on human psychology and the fact that people tend to act in their financial best interest. And Bitcoin is setup in such a way that the system operates correctly when the participants behave this way.
Pure freedom is what we came from and what we don't want to go back to.
_Well known tech guy thinks blockchain is dumb because he can’t see its value for a private company._
There’s nothing new here. No, a blockchain isn’t a good replacement for a traditional database. It’s a distributed append only database built on zero trust. It’s extremely inefficient. Very few problems require that solution, especially one where a single party would be running all the nodes.
There’s nothing new here. No, a blockchain isn’t a good replacement for a traditional database. It’s a distributed append only database built on zero trust. It’s extremely inefficient. Very few problems require that solution, especially one where a single party would be running all the nodes.
Indeed, I expect the ONLY application where this combination of requirements makes sense is.. a global currency.
The notion of smart contracts might have a perfect use-case when it comes to setting up and maintaining infrastructure on AWS. E.g. something like "I want an Amazon RDS PostgreSQL instance with such and such specs. full daily backups and 99.999% uptime and I'm will to pay $xxxx for it". From there solution providers "bid" on the contract and are paid automatically on the basis of meeting the requirements of the contract, the determination of whether requirements were met also being automated.
The idea is something that grew out of blockchain platforms - Decentralized autonomous organizations - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_autonomous_organ... - this doesn't actually require a crypto currency backing it but some kind of smart contract would be required.
The idea is something that grew out of blockchain platforms - Decentralized autonomous organizations - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_autonomous_organ... - this doesn't actually require a crypto currency backing it but some kind of smart contract would be required.
> the determination of whether requirements were met also being automated.
That seems like the sticking point. Most likely, someone "fulfilling" the contract would try to fool the (publicly available) verification code, rather than actually providing a PostgreSQL instance. It would be hard to create a bulletproof, automated way of verifying that something is a fully functioning PostgreSQL instance with working backups. If verification code was shared across many contracts, any bug discovered in that code could allow someone to wipe out the entire market.
That seems like the sticking point. Most likely, someone "fulfilling" the contract would try to fool the (publicly available) verification code, rather than actually providing a PostgreSQL instance. It would be hard to create a bulletproof, automated way of verifying that something is a fully functioning PostgreSQL instance with working backups. If verification code was shared across many contracts, any bug discovered in that code could allow someone to wipe out the entire market.
You guys have issues with elections and vote couting. I think Blockchain would solve this problem once and for all, but I'm afraid it is not a problem anyone wants to solve...
Specifically for election security, the key problem that's not easy to solve via blockchain is ensuring a hidden ballot - namely, that after voting there must be no way for you to verify how your specific vote was counted to someone who might be coercing or bribing you, but you still want to verify that the votes were counted properly. A physical ballot box mixing up envelopes under supervision of representatives of all the parties trivially solves that, a block chain does not.
You also need a mechanism for preventing (or invalidating afterwards) votes made remotely under coercion/bribery - current mechanisms for handling mail-in votes implement mitigations for that, but a fully digital remote voting makes it tricky.
Also, one of the major discussion points regarding USA voting is the eligibility of voters, ensuring that certain people are prevented from voting, but that eligible people can vote without requiring a centralized ID. Again, blockchain only makes this problem more difficult.
And finally, by far the most important factor of vote counting is having the losing voters trust that the votes were counted fairly - and a formal mathematical proof is bad at that (for the majority of voters) compared to a relatively simpler, clearer physical system.
You also need a mechanism for preventing (or invalidating afterwards) votes made remotely under coercion/bribery - current mechanisms for handling mail-in votes implement mitigations for that, but a fully digital remote voting makes it tricky.
Also, one of the major discussion points regarding USA voting is the eligibility of voters, ensuring that certain people are prevented from voting, but that eligible people can vote without requiring a centralized ID. Again, blockchain only makes this problem more difficult.
And finally, by far the most important factor of vote counting is having the losing voters trust that the votes were counted fairly - and a formal mathematical proof is bad at that (for the majority of voters) compared to a relatively simpler, clearer physical system.
Just like CBDCs. The only problem they are designed to "solve" is the problem of you having liberty.
But that's a PR disaster, so the authorities proposing these things have to convince you that they're solving some more important problem -- like "all the baaad people" using money. Hopefully, you'll soon forget you used to have that liberty.
But that's a PR disaster, so the authorities proposing these things have to convince you that they're solving some more important problem -- like "all the baaad people" using money. Hopefully, you'll soon forget you used to have that liberty.
It's interesting to read how much research tbray did on crypto back then. Definitely doesn't seem like new entrants today were doing the same level of diligence, on average.
yumraj(2)
Yes I didn't see a single .com name a stadium or bowl game or have most of the super bowl ads in 1999 at all, none at all. Oh wait yes I did, literally every superbowl ad was a dot com right before the .com bust. https://www.cnbc.com/2010/01/20/The-Stadium-Curse:-Naming-De... puts a nice writeup of all the comapnies that went under after naming stadiums, there's quite a few from the .com bust. Aah WorldCom how I miss thee. Pets.com as well.
Playing Devil’s Advocate here a bit: what’s the size of the tech industry today, compared to the heights just before the “.com bust”?
Maybe there is room for one more boom cycle.
Maybe there is room for one more boom cycle.
Good point. Most of the B2B sites that died in 1999 are valid ideas that were too early. Intel tried cloud computing. Online grocery is a thing now, etc.
Blockchain skeptics are all defending the tech of the current financial system, and implicitly arguing it can’t be improved. They are wrong. The tech underlying the current system is really bad. For example:
(1) How can I perform an atomic transaction across two stock exchanges?
(2) How can I take stock held on one exchange, and use it as collateral on an unaffiliated lending platform?
(3) How can I launch a new financial app, as a small startup, and open it to assets held on ETrade.
All of these are impossible in the current system. In contrast they are all trivial using Ethereum’s blockchain.
https://ortutay.substack.com/p/the-computer-science-case-for...
(1) How can I perform an atomic transaction across two stock exchanges?
(2) How can I take stock held on one exchange, and use it as collateral on an unaffiliated lending platform?
(3) How can I launch a new financial app, as a small startup, and open it to assets held on ETrade.
All of these are impossible in the current system. In contrast they are all trivial using Ethereum’s blockchain.
https://ortutay.substack.com/p/the-computer-science-case-for...
The underlying system is mostly written in COBOL and desperately needs a replacement before all the COBOL engineers die out with many large bags of money going to their descendants. Blockchain, no matter how good it might be or might have been, is clearly not that system due to its now tarnished reputation at this point in time.
> Blockchain, no matter how good it might be or might have been, is clearly not that system due to its now tarnished reputation at this point in time.
I never understand how people can consider the reputation of glorified timestamped linked lists to be "tarnished". This isn't a company or even a particular piece of software, it's a class of data structures. You're trying to tell me that a particular way of structuring data has a reputation that can be tarnished?
I never understand how people can consider the reputation of glorified timestamped linked lists to be "tarnished". This isn't a company or even a particular piece of software, it's a class of data structures. You're trying to tell me that a particular way of structuring data has a reputation that can be tarnished?
Someone comes out with a new database called "BigBucksDB" that uses a previously unknown technology called "blockchain." Suddenly every scammer and grifter decides to pump up this new "BigBucksDB" and emphasizes how safe and secure it is, thanks to blockchain, because all transactions are public and the ledger or whatever can't be modified in any way except to append new data. Then the companies using "BigBucksDB" decide to transfer all of their customers funds into their own accounts at a real bank and declare bankruptcy. What was the point of implementing "blockchain" in the first place? What use case can it possibly have for future services that would be worth taking a risk on it to implement when its primary use case for crypto transactions just fell apart? I know practically nothing about blockchain except how it was touted in the media as something that was supposed to make it difficult to modify crypto transactions and commit fraud. That fraud has still managed to be committed. What was even the point?
> Then the companies using "BigBucksDB" decide to transfer all of their customers funds into their own accounts at a real bank and declare bankruptcy.
Not your keys, not your coins. If some random company that you don't trust has permission on the chain to transfer your funds, you're not doing it right.
> That fraud has still managed to be committed.
FTX was plain old fashioned fraud, the fraud wasn't committed on a blockchain. Ironically, blockchains (in particular decentralized exchanges and "DeFi") are a solution to the type of fraud FTX committed. They purported to be in custody of their customer's funds, while in reality they frittered them away, because there was no transparency. From the perspective of people who had Bitcoin and Ether in their own custody, the chain has been chugging along as normal.
Not your keys, not your coins. If some random company that you don't trust has permission on the chain to transfer your funds, you're not doing it right.
> That fraud has still managed to be committed.
FTX was plain old fashioned fraud, the fraud wasn't committed on a blockchain. Ironically, blockchains (in particular decentralized exchanges and "DeFi") are a solution to the type of fraud FTX committed. They purported to be in custody of their customer's funds, while in reality they frittered them away, because there was no transparency. From the perspective of people who had Bitcoin and Ether in their own custody, the chain has been chugging along as normal.
> Not your keys, not your coins. If some random company that you don't trust has permission on the chain to transfer your funds, you're not doing it right.
0 caution about this was offered in the MSM. Everyone agrees that the average crypto investor was clueless about how it all worked behind the scenes, but that didn't stop them from FOMO and wanting to jump on the fail whale anyway because investment firms like Sequoia Capital pumped it up.
> FTX was plain old fashioned fraud, the fraud wasn't committed on a blockchain.
Whether it was legitimately committed on a blockchain or not is not really relevant here. It was marketed as being a way to prevent fraud for all these exchanges who claimed they were using it for its intended purpose. How is the average investor, who got shafted thinking everything was safe thanks to this emerging new technology, supposed to keep thinking that any exchanges existing presently are going to implement it the way it was intended if they got so duped by what was supposed to be the one exchange that legitimized the whole industry?
0 caution about this was offered in the MSM. Everyone agrees that the average crypto investor was clueless about how it all worked behind the scenes, but that didn't stop them from FOMO and wanting to jump on the fail whale anyway because investment firms like Sequoia Capital pumped it up.
> FTX was plain old fashioned fraud, the fraud wasn't committed on a blockchain.
Whether it was legitimately committed on a blockchain or not is not really relevant here. It was marketed as being a way to prevent fraud for all these exchanges who claimed they were using it for its intended purpose. How is the average investor, who got shafted thinking everything was safe thanks to this emerging new technology, supposed to keep thinking that any exchanges existing presently are going to implement it the way it was intended if they got so duped by what was supposed to be the one exchange that legitimized the whole industry?
I believe that average investors (without domain-specific knowledge) should not be investing in crypto at this point in time because the tech is too immature and there are too many pitfalls, so everything you said is consistent with my beliefs.
Another ten years from now we'll have social recovery wallets, better regulatory frameworks and bulletproof ETFs - and that's the point where average investors might consider some sort of nontrivial allocation in their retirement accounts. Then again, people still get screwed left and right nowadays through traditional investment means such as shady financial advisors peddling high expense ratio active funds, so perhaps the answer is that safe investing will always require some minimum amount of domain-specific knowledge.
But in the mean time, companies will consider building on its APIs and data structure ideas regardless of whether the general public sees it as "tarnished" as an investment option.
Another ten years from now we'll have social recovery wallets, better regulatory frameworks and bulletproof ETFs - and that's the point where average investors might consider some sort of nontrivial allocation in their retirement accounts. Then again, people still get screwed left and right nowadays through traditional investment means such as shady financial advisors peddling high expense ratio active funds, so perhaps the answer is that safe investing will always require some minimum amount of domain-specific knowledge.
But in the mean time, companies will consider building on its APIs and data structure ideas regardless of whether the general public sees it as "tarnished" as an investment option.
I opened the site thinking it would be serious but got a popup for web3. So I closed it.
> Blockchain skeptics are all defending the tech of the current financial system, and implicitly arguing it can’t be improved.
Homeopathy skeptics are all defending the mainstream medical system and big pharma, and implicitly arguing it can't be improved.
Homeopathy skeptics are all defending the mainstream medical system and big pharma, and implicitly arguing it can't be improved.
Never once as a retail investor have i needed any of those features. Blockchain a solution looking for a problem.
> (1) How can I perform an atomic transaction across two stock exchanges?
I'm not sure why you're mandating across two stock exchanges? If you want to swap two assets in a single transaction, there is a very mature market for this. This has more to do with CPAMM vs. CLOB than it does anything else.
> (2) How can I take stock held on one exchange, and use it as collateral on an unaffiliated lending platform?
Well, assets aren't held on exchanges...but again, there is a huge industry that facilitates this.
> (3) How can I launch a new financial app, as a small startup, and open it to assets held on ETrade.
This has more to do with ETrade than anything else. It's like saying how can I launch a startup and get my product in every Walmart store...well you need their cooperation.
> All of these are impossible in the current system.
Absolutely not even remotely true. Just because you don't know, doesn't mean it's not possible.
I'm not sure why you're mandating across two stock exchanges? If you want to swap two assets in a single transaction, there is a very mature market for this. This has more to do with CPAMM vs. CLOB than it does anything else.
> (2) How can I take stock held on one exchange, and use it as collateral on an unaffiliated lending platform?
Well, assets aren't held on exchanges...but again, there is a huge industry that facilitates this.
> (3) How can I launch a new financial app, as a small startup, and open it to assets held on ETrade.
This has more to do with ETrade than anything else. It's like saying how can I launch a startup and get my product in every Walmart store...well you need their cooperation.
> All of these are impossible in the current system.
Absolutely not even remotely true. Just because you don't know, doesn't mean it's not possible.
> I'm not sure why you're mandating across two stock exchanges? If you want to swap two assets in a single transaction, there is a very mature market for this. This has more to do with CPAMM vs. CLOB than it does anything else.
If you want to do arbitrage across two exchanges, it is helpful to have an atomic transaction that's all or nothing across them.
> This has more to do with ETrade than anything else. It's like saying how can I launch a startup and get my product in every Walmart store...well you need their cooperation.
In web3/defi, I can do this without even talking to the defi equivalent of ETrade. It makes it a lot easier to start a startup.
If you want to do arbitrage across two exchanges, it is helpful to have an atomic transaction that's all or nothing across them.
> This has more to do with ETrade than anything else. It's like saying how can I launch a startup and get my product in every Walmart store...well you need their cooperation.
In web3/defi, I can do this without even talking to the defi equivalent of ETrade. It makes it a lot easier to start a startup.
Blockchain in itself is nothing else, just a chain of blocks (linked list of bunch of data with cryptographic hash of the previous block stored in the blocks).
It's an amazing data structure, but putting money in it is no different than putting money into hash maps (which is another great data structure): it doesn't make sense in itself.
What some companies and VCs really want to do (and are doing) is reputation laundering: invest a bit of money in some crypto tokens, and sell them to retail investors for much higher price.
Of course after FTX collapsed they have to wait a few years to do it again.
It's an amazing data structure, but putting money in it is no different than putting money into hash maps (which is another great data structure): it doesn't make sense in itself.
What some companies and VCs really want to do (and are doing) is reputation laundering: invest a bit of money in some crypto tokens, and sell them to retail investors for much higher price.
Of course after FTX collapsed they have to wait a few years to do it again.
I am always torn when it comes to blockchain.
(As an aside, I was an advisor to Storj.io, a web3 storage company. Largely because of my relationship with the CEO and less because of my enthusiasm with the space.)
The leveraged, financial engineering side of Crypto as a get rich scheme never really appealed to me. I see this like any other risky investment, blurring the lines between lawful and not. Borrowing a ton of money and staking it on crypto seemed like a path to glory to many, and I am saddened by all of the people that lost their shirt in the process.
There's another side of me, however, that sees web3 as an evolution of the traditional technology marketplace. A lot like early days of the internet, or of open source.. web3 seemed to be the continuation of the hacker spirit, where builders met to build cool stuff.
Some of the coolest websites and communities these days are related to NFT's and minting them. Some cool thinking about persistent storage, or cloud, or storage with blockchain/coins as an incentive structure for micropayments. How to directly monetize content on the web without having to prop up the ad industry. Interesting, worthy goals.
It's hard to reconcile this spectrum of thoughts and come up with a clear, personal, answer on the value of blockchain technology as a whole.
(As an aside, I was an advisor to Storj.io, a web3 storage company. Largely because of my relationship with the CEO and less because of my enthusiasm with the space.)
The leveraged, financial engineering side of Crypto as a get rich scheme never really appealed to me. I see this like any other risky investment, blurring the lines between lawful and not. Borrowing a ton of money and staking it on crypto seemed like a path to glory to many, and I am saddened by all of the people that lost their shirt in the process.
There's another side of me, however, that sees web3 as an evolution of the traditional technology marketplace. A lot like early days of the internet, or of open source.. web3 seemed to be the continuation of the hacker spirit, where builders met to build cool stuff.
Some of the coolest websites and communities these days are related to NFT's and minting them. Some cool thinking about persistent storage, or cloud, or storage with blockchain/coins as an incentive structure for micropayments. How to directly monetize content on the web without having to prop up the ad industry. Interesting, worthy goals.
It's hard to reconcile this spectrum of thoughts and come up with a clear, personal, answer on the value of blockchain technology as a whole.
> Some of the coolest websites and communities these days are related to NFT's and minting them.
Can you give a few examples? Everything I've seen in this space are transparent scams.
Can you give a few examples? Everything I've seen in this space are transparent scams.
When I was in university around 15 years ago, the idea of peer-to-peer currency was floating around as an evolution of the tit-for-tat idea in BitTorrent, which was still popular at the time.
The expectation back then was that peer-to-peer would continue to evolve, especially in the area of distributed computing. Clouds did not exist yet, but projects like SETI@Home were having some success in terms of sharing compute resources. A peer-to-peer network could meter you for your consumption of compute resources through a lot of microtransactions in a virtual currency that avoided traditional banks or credit card providers.
Then came the first and least efficient implementation of peer-to-peer currency: Bitcoin, which did not sell the distributed computing capacity, but used it to do meaningless computations. It was clever, since up until that point the problem of zero-cost identity had been unaddressed, but appears to have few practical applications. It is surprising to me that people view it as some kind of alternative currency or store of value and send real currency to "trusted" exchanges. You deposit money just for the pleasure of doing a transaction? Yeh, sure, you don't need to agree on a global, trusted intermediary, but you still need to trust your exchange not to screw you over.
Ethereum is closer to the original ideas behind distributed computing and peer-to-peer currency, but the Internet has largely moved on from peer-to-peer networks. Today I can instantly get all the compute resources I need in a trustworthy, secure environment, and only pay for what I use. BitTorrent has also lost a lot much of its relevance with streaming services providing a greater level of convenience.
The expectation back then was that peer-to-peer would continue to evolve, especially in the area of distributed computing. Clouds did not exist yet, but projects like SETI@Home were having some success in terms of sharing compute resources. A peer-to-peer network could meter you for your consumption of compute resources through a lot of microtransactions in a virtual currency that avoided traditional banks or credit card providers.
Then came the first and least efficient implementation of peer-to-peer currency: Bitcoin, which did not sell the distributed computing capacity, but used it to do meaningless computations. It was clever, since up until that point the problem of zero-cost identity had been unaddressed, but appears to have few practical applications. It is surprising to me that people view it as some kind of alternative currency or store of value and send real currency to "trusted" exchanges. You deposit money just for the pleasure of doing a transaction? Yeh, sure, you don't need to agree on a global, trusted intermediary, but you still need to trust your exchange not to screw you over.
Ethereum is closer to the original ideas behind distributed computing and peer-to-peer currency, but the Internet has largely moved on from peer-to-peer networks. Today I can instantly get all the compute resources I need in a trustworthy, secure environment, and only pay for what I use. BitTorrent has also lost a lot much of its relevance with streaming services providing a greater level of convenience.
Blockchains are an incredible technology. It is obvious that their first attempted uses are contractual and monetary, because blockchain guarantees can make things better fastest in those arenas. The unfortunate part is it doesn't seem like anyone has really figured out the how yet.
I am reminded of the Web, Amazon was the first company to really "get" e-commerce and made all the money - there will likely be a similar story with blockchains 10 years from now.
I am reminded of the Web, Amazon was the first company to really "get" e-commerce and made all the money - there will likely be a similar story with blockchains 10 years from now.
Merkle trees are an incredible technology too.
My point? There are many incredible technologies, but not all are "secret weapons" that justify a seismic industry shift. Not all are suitable or able to upend existing technologies.
Fitness of purpose is contextual. Some of the most amazing innovations in computer science cannot be captured by one industry. Most do not lead to widespread disruption.
My point? There are many incredible technologies, but not all are "secret weapons" that justify a seismic industry shift. Not all are suitable or able to upend existing technologies.
Fitness of purpose is contextual. Some of the most amazing innovations in computer science cannot be captured by one industry. Most do not lead to widespread disruption.
We're already 14 years in. Where is the evidence it can make anything better? Why hasn't the amazon thing happened in the last ten years of blockchain?
To be fair, Amazon didn't hit their stride as a retailer until the 2000s, roughly 20 years after the internet's "big bang" date.
And while we're 14 years into distributed ledger technology, we're only 7 years into turing-complete distributed ledger technology, which I would argue is the actual innovation.
And while we're 14 years into distributed ledger technology, we're only 7 years into turing-complete distributed ledger technology, which I would argue is the actual innovation.
I don't understand setting the internet "big bang" date somewhere in the 80s.
The big bang was the web which was at least 1990-1993 (CERN says 1993). In 1990-1993 and beyond for the next few years a tiny portion of US households even had a computer that was capable (modem, etc) of getting on the internet/web. Arguably until AOL it was also extremely expensive. When I got on the internet it was with an inflation adjusted $5000 computer, per minute long distance toll charges, and paying an ISP (also by the minute).
For the entirety of the existence of blockchain we've had ubiquitous broadband, social media, smartphones with always available data, etc. The conditions for the first 14 years of the web were vastly different and disadvantaged compared to the last 14 years in which blockchain has had plenty of time, audience, etc for widespread adoption and yet it still hasn't happened.
The big bang was the web which was at least 1990-1993 (CERN says 1993). In 1990-1993 and beyond for the next few years a tiny portion of US households even had a computer that was capable (modem, etc) of getting on the internet/web. Arguably until AOL it was also extremely expensive. When I got on the internet it was with an inflation adjusted $5000 computer, per minute long distance toll charges, and paying an ISP (also by the minute).
For the entirety of the existence of blockchain we've had ubiquitous broadband, social media, smartphones with always available data, etc. The conditions for the first 14 years of the web were vastly different and disadvantaged compared to the last 14 years in which blockchain has had plenty of time, audience, etc for widespread adoption and yet it still hasn't happened.
> blockchain has had plenty of time, audience, etc for widespread adoption
Blockchains have been in a dial-up era. Bitcoin only supports balance transfers and has a hard-coded throughput limit of 1 Megabyte every 10 minutes (1990s modem speeds), and that effectively represented the state of the art of blockchain technology for 6 years. Until 2015, you couldn't even run a simple script on a blockchain (I don't count Bitcoin's extremely limited stack-based language).
The official 1983 birthday of the internet is very much analogous to the 2009 birthday of the blockchain. It was the "spark moment" where the tech was there but extremely limited, and thereafter was a long "dead period" where it didn't do much for a long time as it waited for the world to catch on. Then 10 years later in 1993, the underlying internet technology saw its first really useful framework built on top, the web. 7 years later in 2015, the underlying blockchain technology saw its first really useful framework built on top, a turing-complete programming language. It would take the web another 20 years until the 2000s to build its first true killer apps, and I predict that blockchain's true killer apps (e.g. an Uber killer) won't be seen until the late 2020s to early 2030s.
> Arguably until AOL it was also extremely expensive. When I got on the internet it was with an inflation adjusted $5000 computer, per minute long distance toll charges, and paying an ISP (also by the minute).
Until layer-2 technologies (conceived ~2017 and still maturing), blockchains were also extremely expensive, peaking at tens of dollars for a simple transaction or hundreds for a more complex one. When I first interacted with a blockchain it was through a heavy client that downloaded tens of gigabytes of data to my computer, extremely low network bandwidth for transactions, zero hardware support for key management, one shady exchange that required international money transfers, and effectively zero support for publishing code on the blockchain. That's all changed now.
> For the entirety of the existence of blockchain we've had ubiquitous broadband, social media, smartphones with always available data, etc. The conditions for the first 14 years of the web were vastly different and disadvantaged compared to the last 14 years in which blockchain has had plenty of time, audience, etc for widespread adoption and yet it still hasn't happened.
The internet was a technology built on the progression of hardware and software tech; blockchains are built much more on progression of software tech. Blockchains as a framework need to get good enough to be able to support killer apps; they are not good enough today, but they are in intensive development along straightforward roadmaps to alleviate a lot of the pain points.
Blockchains have been in a dial-up era. Bitcoin only supports balance transfers and has a hard-coded throughput limit of 1 Megabyte every 10 minutes (1990s modem speeds), and that effectively represented the state of the art of blockchain technology for 6 years. Until 2015, you couldn't even run a simple script on a blockchain (I don't count Bitcoin's extremely limited stack-based language).
The official 1983 birthday of the internet is very much analogous to the 2009 birthday of the blockchain. It was the "spark moment" where the tech was there but extremely limited, and thereafter was a long "dead period" where it didn't do much for a long time as it waited for the world to catch on. Then 10 years later in 1993, the underlying internet technology saw its first really useful framework built on top, the web. 7 years later in 2015, the underlying blockchain technology saw its first really useful framework built on top, a turing-complete programming language. It would take the web another 20 years until the 2000s to build its first true killer apps, and I predict that blockchain's true killer apps (e.g. an Uber killer) won't be seen until the late 2020s to early 2030s.
> Arguably until AOL it was also extremely expensive. When I got on the internet it was with an inflation adjusted $5000 computer, per minute long distance toll charges, and paying an ISP (also by the minute).
Until layer-2 technologies (conceived ~2017 and still maturing), blockchains were also extremely expensive, peaking at tens of dollars for a simple transaction or hundreds for a more complex one. When I first interacted with a blockchain it was through a heavy client that downloaded tens of gigabytes of data to my computer, extremely low network bandwidth for transactions, zero hardware support for key management, one shady exchange that required international money transfers, and effectively zero support for publishing code on the blockchain. That's all changed now.
> For the entirety of the existence of blockchain we've had ubiquitous broadband, social media, smartphones with always available data, etc. The conditions for the first 14 years of the web were vastly different and disadvantaged compared to the last 14 years in which blockchain has had plenty of time, audience, etc for widespread adoption and yet it still hasn't happened.
The internet was a technology built on the progression of hardware and software tech; blockchains are built much more on progression of software tech. Blockchains as a framework need to get good enough to be able to support killer apps; they are not good enough today, but they are in intensive development along straightforward roadmaps to alleviate a lot of the pain points.
Name one app that would be killer.
Public auditing software that transparently shows how government or charity funds are being spent in real time - from the incoming tax proceeds, through each agency and department, down to (when appropriate) every individual purchase, with each transaction digitally signed by a person who could be held accountable.
If you are comparing the state of the internet in 1983 (calling it the "big bang" because TCP/IP was standardized!!!) and equating it to the release of a software client that could be downloaded and run in 2009 I'm not sure that we can have a rational debate on this.
The US Census didn't even track /access to a computer/ until 1984[0], at which point roughly 18% of the US population had "access" to a computer either at home or at work. Note that "access to a computer" != access to the internet. At the end of 1985 there were 2,000 total hosts on the internet[1]. You can't even find internet usage statistics until the early-mid 1990s at best because it was almost exclusively a tiny network of government and academia.
If you are comparing blockchain transaction costs peaking at tens or hundreds of dollars to a minimum several thousand dollar investment and (at least for me) internet access prices of roughly $3 per minute[2] as late as 1994 I'm not sure that we can have a rational debate on this.
If we are comparing technical complexity I'll take early blockchain over serial ports, Hayes commands, CHAT scripts, PPP/SLIP, installing your own TCP/IP stack, etc any day of the week. Note that if you were doing any of this in the 1980s/1990s you were either stumbling through it or flipping through pages in a book. For any technical challenges of blockchain it's always been a Google search away.
If you are comparing the state of software development from 2009 - 2015/2017 to the first 10 years of the internet I'm not sure we can have a rational debate on this. Needless to say because of the maturity and ubiquity of the internet and the software ecosystem, etc and the efficiencies it enabled by 2009 the situation each of these technologies matured in cannot even be compared.
If we're being extremely generous the five years (from 2017 - present) and tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars that have been invested in blockchain is more than enough for some kind of application or use case to have emerged to trigger mass adoption. Yet here we are with a tiny fraction (1% at best) of the five billion people on the internet having anything to do with blockchain.
[0] - https://www.census.gov/history/pdf/computerusage1984.pdf
[1] - https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1980s/
[2] - https://transition.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Common_Carrier/Reports/FC...
The US Census didn't even track /access to a computer/ until 1984[0], at which point roughly 18% of the US population had "access" to a computer either at home or at work. Note that "access to a computer" != access to the internet. At the end of 1985 there were 2,000 total hosts on the internet[1]. You can't even find internet usage statistics until the early-mid 1990s at best because it was almost exclusively a tiny network of government and academia.
If you are comparing blockchain transaction costs peaking at tens or hundreds of dollars to a minimum several thousand dollar investment and (at least for me) internet access prices of roughly $3 per minute[2] as late as 1994 I'm not sure that we can have a rational debate on this.
If we are comparing technical complexity I'll take early blockchain over serial ports, Hayes commands, CHAT scripts, PPP/SLIP, installing your own TCP/IP stack, etc any day of the week. Note that if you were doing any of this in the 1980s/1990s you were either stumbling through it or flipping through pages in a book. For any technical challenges of blockchain it's always been a Google search away.
If you are comparing the state of software development from 2009 - 2015/2017 to the first 10 years of the internet I'm not sure we can have a rational debate on this. Needless to say because of the maturity and ubiquity of the internet and the software ecosystem, etc and the efficiencies it enabled by 2009 the situation each of these technologies matured in cannot even be compared.
If we're being extremely generous the five years (from 2017 - present) and tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars that have been invested in blockchain is more than enough for some kind of application or use case to have emerged to trigger mass adoption. Yet here we are with a tiny fraction (1% at best) of the five billion people on the internet having anything to do with blockchain.
[0] - https://www.census.gov/history/pdf/computerusage1984.pdf
[1] - https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1980s/
[2] - https://transition.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Common_Carrier/Reports/FC...
> If you are comparing the state of the internet in 1983 (calling it the "big bang" because TCP/IP was standardized!!!) and equating it to the release of a software client that could be downloaded and run in 2009 I'm not sure that we can have a rational debate on this.
In 1983 the TCP/IP internet protocol was standardized, but so nascent as to be basically useless. In 2009 the Bitcoin internet protocol was standardized, but so nascent as to be basically useless.
Because both are internet protocols, they are directly comparable in some ways.
> The US Census didn't even track /access to a computer/ until 1984[0], at which point roughly 18% of the US population had "access" to a computer either at home or at work. Note that "access to a computer" != access to the internet. At the end of 1985 there were 2,000 total hosts on the internet[1]. You can't even find internet usage statistics until the early-mid 1990s at best because it was almost exclusively a tiny network of government and academia.
Usage of Bitcoin wasn't tracked during its early days. Note that "access to bitcoin" is not the same thing as being able to use it safely, which for less-technical users wasn't until the advent of licensed exchanges (such as Coinbase) and hardware wallets in 2012-2014. You can't even find node or participation data before about 2015 because it was almost exclusively a tiny network of cryptography and civil rights enthusiasts.
> If you are comparing blockchain transaction costs peaking at tens or hundreds of dollars to a minimum several thousand dollar investment and (at least for me) internet access prices of roughly $3 per minute[2] as late as 1994 I'm not sure that we can have a rational debate on this.
In order to take advantage of those sometimes hundreds-of-dollars DeFi transactions, you need to do a ton of prerequisite research so that you know how to safely manage keys and seed phrases, avoid scams, grant contracts no more access to your wallet than required, set gas prices, know what to do if a transaction gets stuck, and know the relative level of reliability and software maturity of each crypto network, for starters. For most people that requires a time investment of hundreds of hours or more, or dozens of hours at best if they are already tech savvy with a basic understanding of cryptography. It might as well be an amount of money (and people do end up "paying tuition" sometimes by falling victim to lost keys, scams, pump and dumps, etc).
Today, the internet doesn't require thousands in hardware and $3 per minute - you can buy a cheap phone and pop a cheap sim card in. I believe crypto will eventually reach this level of maturity, where grandma can execute a DeFi transaction cheaply, safely, and reliably - just as easy as clicking "confirm" on a web page.
> If you are comparing the state of software development from 2009 - 2015/2017 to the first 10 years of the internet I'm not sure we can have a rational debate on this. Needless to say because of the maturity and ubiquity of the internet and the software ecosystem, etc and the efficiencies it enabled by 2009 the situation each of these technologies matured in cannot even be compared.
1983 to 1993 as the internet's "spark period" (progress at the protocol layer) and 1993 to 2009 as its blossoming at the application layer.
2009 to 2025 as the blockchain's "spark period" (progress at the protocol layer - major upgrades to the Ethereum roadmap extend roughly this far), and 2025+ as its blossoming at the application layer.
> If we're being extremely generous the five years (from 2017 - present) and tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars that have been invested in blockchain is more than enough for some kind of application or use case to have emerged to trigger mass adoption. Yet here we are with a tiny fraction (1% at best) of the five billion people on the internet having anything to do with blockchain.
As of June 2022:
> According to data acquired by Finbold, about 10.2% of the global population using the internet owns some form of cryptocurrency (as per a survey carried in Q3, 2021 and published on January 26, 2022). Thailand accounts for the highest share at 20.1%, followed by Nigeria at 19.4%, a similar percentage to Philippine users. United States users rank in the 14th spot with a share of 12.7%. [1]
That's a figure of 10.2% of global internet users, so if you think only "1% at best" have anything to do with blockchain, then I'm "not sure that we can have a rational debate on this." In America, the figure is 56%! [2]
You plucked that 2017 date as "the date that blockchains are now scalable", but that's not exactly fair. That was the conception date of rollup tech - when someone first documented the idea to structure a chain in that way. Rollups are still not mature as of today - their date of full maturity is likely to be closer to 2024 (or 2025-2026 for the zk proof variety).
In the end, it's not a race and the exact timeline doesn't matter all that much. The important point to take in is that blockchain technology is still progressing at a very fast pace, and the tech will be able to do a lot more another five years from now than it's able to do today (and I am always happy to discuss the exact technical changes that are being made).
None of what I said seems irrational to me, and I think you are being unfair to the discussion process by categorically dismissing my arguments as such.
[1]: https://finbold.com/10-of-the-global-population-owns-some-fo...
[2]: https://www.fool.com/the-ascent/research/study-americans-cry...
In 1983 the TCP/IP internet protocol was standardized, but so nascent as to be basically useless. In 2009 the Bitcoin internet protocol was standardized, but so nascent as to be basically useless.
Because both are internet protocols, they are directly comparable in some ways.
> The US Census didn't even track /access to a computer/ until 1984[0], at which point roughly 18% of the US population had "access" to a computer either at home or at work. Note that "access to a computer" != access to the internet. At the end of 1985 there were 2,000 total hosts on the internet[1]. You can't even find internet usage statistics until the early-mid 1990s at best because it was almost exclusively a tiny network of government and academia.
Usage of Bitcoin wasn't tracked during its early days. Note that "access to bitcoin" is not the same thing as being able to use it safely, which for less-technical users wasn't until the advent of licensed exchanges (such as Coinbase) and hardware wallets in 2012-2014. You can't even find node or participation data before about 2015 because it was almost exclusively a tiny network of cryptography and civil rights enthusiasts.
> If you are comparing blockchain transaction costs peaking at tens or hundreds of dollars to a minimum several thousand dollar investment and (at least for me) internet access prices of roughly $3 per minute[2] as late as 1994 I'm not sure that we can have a rational debate on this.
In order to take advantage of those sometimes hundreds-of-dollars DeFi transactions, you need to do a ton of prerequisite research so that you know how to safely manage keys and seed phrases, avoid scams, grant contracts no more access to your wallet than required, set gas prices, know what to do if a transaction gets stuck, and know the relative level of reliability and software maturity of each crypto network, for starters. For most people that requires a time investment of hundreds of hours or more, or dozens of hours at best if they are already tech savvy with a basic understanding of cryptography. It might as well be an amount of money (and people do end up "paying tuition" sometimes by falling victim to lost keys, scams, pump and dumps, etc).
Today, the internet doesn't require thousands in hardware and $3 per minute - you can buy a cheap phone and pop a cheap sim card in. I believe crypto will eventually reach this level of maturity, where grandma can execute a DeFi transaction cheaply, safely, and reliably - just as easy as clicking "confirm" on a web page.
> If you are comparing the state of software development from 2009 - 2015/2017 to the first 10 years of the internet I'm not sure we can have a rational debate on this. Needless to say because of the maturity and ubiquity of the internet and the software ecosystem, etc and the efficiencies it enabled by 2009 the situation each of these technologies matured in cannot even be compared.
1983 to 1993 as the internet's "spark period" (progress at the protocol layer) and 1993 to 2009 as its blossoming at the application layer.
2009 to 2025 as the blockchain's "spark period" (progress at the protocol layer - major upgrades to the Ethereum roadmap extend roughly this far), and 2025+ as its blossoming at the application layer.
> If we're being extremely generous the five years (from 2017 - present) and tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars that have been invested in blockchain is more than enough for some kind of application or use case to have emerged to trigger mass adoption. Yet here we are with a tiny fraction (1% at best) of the five billion people on the internet having anything to do with blockchain.
As of June 2022:
> According to data acquired by Finbold, about 10.2% of the global population using the internet owns some form of cryptocurrency (as per a survey carried in Q3, 2021 and published on January 26, 2022). Thailand accounts for the highest share at 20.1%, followed by Nigeria at 19.4%, a similar percentage to Philippine users. United States users rank in the 14th spot with a share of 12.7%. [1]
That's a figure of 10.2% of global internet users, so if you think only "1% at best" have anything to do with blockchain, then I'm "not sure that we can have a rational debate on this." In America, the figure is 56%! [2]
You plucked that 2017 date as "the date that blockchains are now scalable", but that's not exactly fair. That was the conception date of rollup tech - when someone first documented the idea to structure a chain in that way. Rollups are still not mature as of today - their date of full maturity is likely to be closer to 2024 (or 2025-2026 for the zk proof variety).
In the end, it's not a race and the exact timeline doesn't matter all that much. The important point to take in is that blockchain technology is still progressing at a very fast pace, and the tech will be able to do a lot more another five years from now than it's able to do today (and I am always happy to discuss the exact technical changes that are being made).
None of what I said seems irrational to me, and I think you are being unfair to the discussion process by categorically dismissing my arguments as such.
[1]: https://finbold.com/10-of-the-global-population-owns-some-fo...
[2]: https://www.fool.com/the-ascent/research/study-americans-cry...
Usage of bitcoin statistics are available since epoch. Blockchain advocates always seem to forget about the public nature of blockchain when I bring up adoption. Look at a blockchain explorer. It’s all right there.
Your references to the UI/UX nightmare that still is blockchain only further highlight my points.
The surveys are hilarious. Setting up an account on Coinbase with an email address to trade on their internal order book has nothing to do with blockchain. It could just as easily be swapping virtual poker chips on a gambling website. Yet in a survey that counts as “blockchain”.
I generously “plucked” 2017 because that’s what you put forth as a best-case date to start triggering adoption. Yet here we are.
Timeline matters (though not a race) because blockchain is a doomsday preacher - “it’s about to happen” and then it never does.
Your references to the UI/UX nightmare that still is blockchain only further highlight my points.
The surveys are hilarious. Setting up an account on Coinbase with an email address to trade on their internal order book has nothing to do with blockchain. It could just as easily be swapping virtual poker chips on a gambling website. Yet in a survey that counts as “blockchain”.
I generously “plucked” 2017 because that’s what you put forth as a best-case date to start triggering adoption. Yet here we are.
Timeline matters (though not a race) because blockchain is a doomsday preacher - “it’s about to happen” and then it never does.
Amazon’s book unit was profitable within a couple of years (say by the time Clinton was re-elected), and that pattern continued for each business line. They invested all of the profits in expansion so “analysts” would say they were doomed but anyone who looked at the numbers could see they could report a profit any time they wanted by halting expansion.
Comparisons to the internet timeframes are hard to make because there’s a key difference: computers were expensive and slow, and network connectivity was very limited. The Apple II was a major advance in accessibility and that brought the price down to roughly the equivalent of $6k today - and you still needed to buy a monitor and modem to get online! This is a huge contrast to the way blockchains have been basically globally available since day one.
It’s also worth noting that the internet and the web are not the same. While the latter’s popularity depended on things which weren’t available earlier like GUIs, better displays, etc. that doesn’t mean that there weren’t plenty of people paying for network access before then. There were clear uses of value to many people – people loved email, software downloads beat shipping floppies by mail and led to the shareware business model, services provided access to information like real-time stock quotes, etc. - and profitable businesses existed before the web came along. If memory serves, the first wedding from an online relationship happened in the late 70s, too, so it’s not like people were only paying for business reasons.
The contrast with cryptocurrencies is substantial: many people saw the value, it was just a question of whether they could afford it and as soon as prices dropped waves of people came online and never left. Blockchain apps have had enormous investment but there hasn’t been anything like that other than speculation on whether a number will go up. It’s been quite noticeable that none of the people who’ve asked me for tech advice for years have ever asked about a blockchain tech or mentioned using one except the guy who likes trading penny stocks instead of going to casinos.
Comparisons to the internet timeframes are hard to make because there’s a key difference: computers were expensive and slow, and network connectivity was very limited. The Apple II was a major advance in accessibility and that brought the price down to roughly the equivalent of $6k today - and you still needed to buy a monitor and modem to get online! This is a huge contrast to the way blockchains have been basically globally available since day one.
It’s also worth noting that the internet and the web are not the same. While the latter’s popularity depended on things which weren’t available earlier like GUIs, better displays, etc. that doesn’t mean that there weren’t plenty of people paying for network access before then. There were clear uses of value to many people – people loved email, software downloads beat shipping floppies by mail and led to the shareware business model, services provided access to information like real-time stock quotes, etc. - and profitable businesses existed before the web came along. If memory serves, the first wedding from an online relationship happened in the late 70s, too, so it’s not like people were only paying for business reasons.
The contrast with cryptocurrencies is substantial: many people saw the value, it was just a question of whether they could afford it and as soon as prices dropped waves of people came online and never left. Blockchain apps have had enormous investment but there hasn’t been anything like that other than speculation on whether a number will go up. It’s been quite noticeable that none of the people who’ve asked me for tech advice for years have ever asked about a blockchain tech or mentioned using one except the guy who likes trading penny stocks instead of going to casinos.
> computers were expensive and slow, and network connectivity was very limited
Blockchains have been expensive and slow, and functionality was very limited. When Bitcoin launched, you couldn't run turing-complete scripts, it only supported balance transfers. It had a hard-coded 1 Megabyte per 10 minutes throughput limit (slower than dial-up). There were no transaction privacy tools.
That has been changing. The first turing-complete chain, Ethereum, was launched in 2015. It launched a sustainable consensus model in 2020, and switched over to it ("merged") in 2022. Private smart contract support came in 2020-2021, with projects like SCRT and Aztec. Layer-2 scaling technology is just beginning to hit its stride this year, with several competing companies. Still on the base layer roadmap is single-slot finality, data availability sampling to expand the chain's storage capacity, zero-knowledge-proof based VMs to expand its execution throughput, and state and history expiry to automatically prune it.
Once all of those technologies are complete and have had a chance to mature (much like dial-up matured into broadband), I expect blockchains to look more attractive for certain applications.
Blockchains have been expensive and slow, and functionality was very limited. When Bitcoin launched, you couldn't run turing-complete scripts, it only supported balance transfers. It had a hard-coded 1 Megabyte per 10 minutes throughput limit (slower than dial-up). There were no transaction privacy tools.
That has been changing. The first turing-complete chain, Ethereum, was launched in 2015. It launched a sustainable consensus model in 2020, and switched over to it ("merged") in 2022. Private smart contract support came in 2020-2021, with projects like SCRT and Aztec. Layer-2 scaling technology is just beginning to hit its stride this year, with several competing companies. Still on the base layer roadmap is single-slot finality, data availability sampling to expand the chain's storage capacity, zero-knowledge-proof based VMs to expand its execution throughput, and state and history expiry to automatically prune it.
Once all of those technologies are complete and have had a chance to mature (much like dial-up matured into broadband), I expect blockchains to look more attractive for certain applications.
I was responding specifically the implicit assumption that the timeframes can be directly compared — since things happened on different scales, that doesn't make sense especially when you're comparing different things. The number of people using the internet changed as a function of reasonable speed/price connectivity becoming available where they lived so the process was a lot slower than shipping an update to a blockchain network because it involved things like getting permits and deploying crews to install cables.
That said, even if you want to ignore Bitcoin, things like Ethereum still are lagging far behind — if that network shut off tomorrow, nobody not involved in selling tokens would notice. The same would not have been true of the web 7 years, or even 2 years, after it launched because tons of people were using it for things unrelated to selling web services.
It's certainly possible that at some point some level of functionality will make it more attractive but I suspect that this will involve rolling back parts of the current sales pitch and that will unfavorably affect the cost relative to other models like distributed ledgers or standard APIs.
That said, even if you want to ignore Bitcoin, things like Ethereum still are lagging far behind — if that network shut off tomorrow, nobody not involved in selling tokens would notice. The same would not have been true of the web 7 years, or even 2 years, after it launched because tons of people were using it for things unrelated to selling web services.
It's certainly possible that at some point some level of functionality will make it more attractive but I suspect that this will involve rolling back parts of the current sales pitch and that will unfavorably affect the cost relative to other models like distributed ledgers or standard APIs.
> the process was a lot slower than shipping an update to a blockchain network
The process of creating a system for private, energy efficient smart contract transactions took 12 years. To make them scalable and foolproof for the general public will likely take another 5-10 years.
Blockchain updates are less like the process of laying physical cable, more like the process of building up a very large piece of software with lots of moving parts, like an operating system. They both require a lot of effort, but with laying cables the effort is physical and legal whereas with operating systems (and blockchain platforms) the effort is heady and research-oriented.
We've seen that shipping an update to a blockchain network can be extremely slow indeed, if that update requires a lot of R&D.
The process of creating a system for private, energy efficient smart contract transactions took 12 years. To make them scalable and foolproof for the general public will likely take another 5-10 years.
Blockchain updates are less like the process of laying physical cable, more like the process of building up a very large piece of software with lots of moving parts, like an operating system. They both require a lot of effort, but with laying cables the effort is physical and legal whereas with operating systems (and blockchain platforms) the effort is heady and research-oriented.
We've seen that shipping an update to a blockchain network can be extremely slow indeed, if that update requires a lot of R&D.
Many people see the value of decentralized ledgers, including. the head of the SEC:
https://news.bitcoin.com/sec-chairman-satoshi-nakamotos-inno...
My home state passed a law allowing me to pay taxes in bitcoin as well, there was the Ecuador thing.
The hydraulics behind financial movements take decades to really shift, and I still regularly use crypto when sending or receiving money from international friends because international payments are a cartelized mess.
Investment dollars cannot make regulatory and social shifts happen sooner.
My home state passed a law allowing me to pay taxes in bitcoin as well, there was the Ecuador thing.
The hydraulics behind financial movements take decades to really shift, and I still regularly use crypto when sending or receiving money from international friends because international payments are a cartelized mess.
Investment dollars cannot make regulatory and social shifts happen sooner.
Decentralized ledgers are very different because they reuse existing trust relationships - that’s why they’re so much more efficient and safe to use.
This is an important point to understand because when cryptocurrency salespeople use those experiments as examples of real-world adoption they don’t spell out the connection — fully aware that if the Fed sets up a distributed ledger, it won’t have a step which involves making Bitcoin holders wealthy.
> My home state passed a law allowing me to pay taxes in bitcoin as well,
Do they actually accept bitcoin or do they just convert it into hard currency first? For example, when Colorado did this they implemented it by using PayPal and converting to USD at the time of the transaction so it’s like paying with a credit card including the single vendor charging a processing fee.
> there was the Ecuador thing.
Yes. Specifically the one where people protested against it, most people never use it, and the country has lost most of the money it put in? You were going to mention that, right?
https://nayibtracker.com/
This is an important point to understand because when cryptocurrency salespeople use those experiments as examples of real-world adoption they don’t spell out the connection — fully aware that if the Fed sets up a distributed ledger, it won’t have a step which involves making Bitcoin holders wealthy.
> My home state passed a law allowing me to pay taxes in bitcoin as well,
Do they actually accept bitcoin or do they just convert it into hard currency first? For example, when Colorado did this they implemented it by using PayPal and converting to USD at the time of the transaction so it’s like paying with a credit card including the single vendor charging a processing fee.
> there was the Ecuador thing.
Yes. Specifically the one where people protested against it, most people never use it, and the country has lost most of the money it put in? You were going to mention that, right?
https://nayibtracker.com/
The biggest reason is social, or occasionally legal. There are tons of barriers in place to getting the legal system to agree that smart contracts are legitimate - which creates a barrier to real world, because regulators of real world business want to see contracts and legal language. (And you can't get away from if if you're operating a physical store with physical employees)
The only group that has managed to beat this was early Uber, and their political lobbying arm was legendary.
The only group that has managed to beat this was early Uber, and their political lobbying arm was legendary.
In Italy a famous news website is using blockchain since 2020 to, I quote literally: "help readers check source of news", "strengthen bonds of trust between its organization and its readers and customers", "trace the history and source of each news item."
News (EN): https://www.ansa.it/english/news/science_tecnology/2020/04/0...
Example of news in the blockchain: https://blockchain.check.ansa.it/landing/b150aff9f028f7339f0...
The first time I saw it I was quite surprised. I'd like to hear opinions about it here. Eg: it's blockchain stricly necessary here?
News (EN): https://www.ansa.it/english/news/science_tecnology/2020/04/0...
Example of news in the blockchain: https://blockchain.check.ansa.it/landing/b150aff9f028f7339f0...
The first time I saw it I was quite surprised. I'd like to hear opinions about it here. Eg: it's blockchain stricly necessary here?
What does that bring on top of TLS?
If you want to check whether an article ever appeared (even if it's no longer there), then something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_Transparency would be enough.
No that's not a blockchain, at least not for a useful definition of blockchain (see https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2019/02/theres_no_g...).
If you want to check whether an article ever appeared (even if it's no longer there), then something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_Transparency would be enough.
No that's not a blockchain, at least not for a useful definition of blockchain (see https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2019/02/theres_no_g...).
If they add every revision on it, it could be interesting, but i doubt they do that.
One interesting thing I have been seeing recently is newspapers quickly changing news a few hours after they posted it, in reaction to public opinion of said news (or maybe some editorial "request").
In th BBC its quite egregious, they have been posting some news, and a few hours later changing the headline and the photo, to either something meaner and an uglier photo of the same person, or the opposite, a much more neutral/flaterring headline and a PR photo of the person.
If those changes were on the blockchain, UK citizens could demand their money back for what they pay for the BBC as it is a ridiculous practice that should not be paid by taxes. But again, I doubt the Italian newspapers saves their own slanted coverage for their own users to see.
One interesting thing I have been seeing recently is newspapers quickly changing news a few hours after they posted it, in reaction to public opinion of said news (or maybe some editorial "request").
In th BBC its quite egregious, they have been posting some news, and a few hours later changing the headline and the photo, to either something meaner and an uglier photo of the same person, or the opposite, a much more neutral/flaterring headline and a PR photo of the person.
If those changes were on the blockchain, UK citizens could demand their money back for what they pay for the BBC as it is a ridiculous practice that should not be paid by taxes. But again, I doubt the Italian newspapers saves their own slanted coverage for their own users to see.
Share a link demonstrating the BBC's egregiousness please.
I can't because stealth edits are not meant to be caught. I tried finding some on archive.org but their scrapping isnt usually fast enough.
I think some of the most noticeable ones tend to be on big political news. It happened fairly quickly with Truss. All "happy" headlines and smiling photos, to ugly photos and total lack of positive adjectives as the news of her departure became more obvious.
Sometimes they have done it on the same piece of content, a few hours apart as the narrative changed. The content of the piece was untouched but the photo and headline on the front page tell the opposite story all of a sudden.
I think some of the most noticeable ones tend to be on big political news. It happened fairly quickly with Truss. All "happy" headlines and smiling photos, to ugly photos and total lack of positive adjectives as the news of her departure became more obvious.
Sometimes they have done it on the same piece of content, a few hours apart as the narrative changed. The content of the piece was untouched but the photo and headline on the front page tell the opposite story all of a sudden.
Where did you hear about it?
Blockchain needs a good "winter" imo. Stuff like hashgraph and some other non-proof of work protocols have a lot of potential but there's way too much hype in the industry and way too much investment ensuring BTC's dominance for them to ever really emerge
Bundle up because winter seems to be here ;)
I think the farmers use case can totally work as long as those land parcels are also on the blockchain.
That whole story sounds a bit apocryphal but even if it's true this is some sort of semi-literate culture. If they're making marks in mud, how are they supposed to encode geographic positions with enough accuracy and write them to a computer system of any kind. And then have everyone understand and agree to what it means. Why it would it be superior to taking a picture and posting it to Whatsapp or Facebook?
Armed mobs probably don't care about the blockchain though. And shall I lose the ability to sell my land if I or somebody else loses a private key? Shall my land be taken from me if a criminal is able to hack a computer and transfer it to themselves?
The worst part is cryptocow's milk tastes like shit
The government would have to cede control of transfers, which good luck with that. If you require the government to sign the transaction you now effectively have a permissioned database which doesn't require a blockchain to implement.
> Since I left AWS in 2020, I’ve been super-careful not to share things from behind the scenes. I can’t actually remember the details of the nondisclosure agreement, but I have strong feelings about the ethics. This story, though, doesn’t reflect poorly on anyone and I’m pretty sure nothing in it is material to any business plans at AWS or elsewhere.
"Can't actually remember"? Yikes.
"I'm pretty sure" ... based on...? Not working there any more?
"Strong feelings about the ethics?" Dude. Contracts are not about your feelings about ethics.
Mr. Bray doesn't have -- or didn't take the time to find -- a signed contract from two years ago.
Not a great example to follow.
"Can't actually remember"? Yikes.
"I'm pretty sure" ... based on...? Not working there any more?
"Strong feelings about the ethics?" Dude. Contracts are not about your feelings about ethics.
Mr. Bray doesn't have -- or didn't take the time to find -- a signed contract from two years ago.
Not a great example to follow.
Oh well...never mind... another fried air article which deserves only criticism...mixing rug pulls with actual good technology is a tragic error made my a newbie... here's some help free of charge...PoS = centralization or in other words no trust involved. There are a number or PoW Blockchains that literally kick ass yawning. Kadena, for instance has been founded and created by the very ppl that deployed JPM first Blockchain, their target is US stock exchanges to run on their braided chains... Hathor, another excellent example....but most importantly the point is triple entry accounting....go figure what a third accounting dimension does to accounting...
I believe that putting the equal sign between a blockchain and a database is fundamentally wrong. I also think that a lot of "cryptos" were just get rich quick schemes. After the dust settles we will see if blockchain is really useful or not.
Note that he wasn’t saying that it was identical to a classic database but rather that the applications being built were treating it like one. I’ve seen a number of hypotheticals batted around and it was clear that most of them could have been a database, perhaps with signatures on certain records, because they didn’t need any of the anonymous aspects.
That could be a sign that developers don’t know how to architect blockchain apps but that’s probably the same as saying most people don’t need blockchains. It seems unlikely that there’s sone widespread benefit still to be discovered rather than maybe some niche applications.
That could be a sign that developers don’t know how to architect blockchain apps but that’s probably the same as saying most people don’t need blockchains. It seems unlikely that there’s sone widespread benefit still to be discovered rather than maybe some niche applications.
Imho blockchain == distributed consensus in a low trust environment. When you are talking about a database and managing it you are by default outside of the low trust zone (or there exists an authority that everyone trusts)
Yes, that’s the anonymity part. You only need that if the parties don’t have some kind of relationship and reputations to maintain.
This distinction matters because almost no real world situation is like that: people need to know that what they’re buying is what they were promised, sellers want to avoid doing business with anyone who fraudulently claims damages, etc. If you need to add reputations and/or trusted third parties, you get no value from a blockchain to make up for all of the negatives unavoidably added by using one.
This distinction matters because almost no real world situation is like that: people need to know that what they’re buying is what they were promised, sellers want to avoid doing business with anyone who fraudulently claims damages, etc. If you need to add reputations and/or trusted third parties, you get no value from a blockchain to make up for all of the negatives unavoidably added by using one.
In your opinion how long is it before the dust will settle?
IMHO, the dust has already settled and been washed away by the rain water..
IMHO, the dust has already settled and been washed away by the rain water..
I think there are 2 scenarios really: 1) btc and eth go to zero or 2) we have btc and eth gaining the full recognition and regulation
Blockchain as a technology is revolutionary and will be used in niche problems outside of crypto.
One thing that most people seem to miss is that money is only as good as our faith in it. No matter what instrument you use this has to apply.
Blockchain as a technology is revolutionary and will be used in niche problems outside of crypto.
One thing that most people seem to miss is that money is only as good as our faith in it. No matter what instrument you use this has to apply.
I, personally, don’t think we’ll get to either of those two scenarios for a really really long time.
Reason, too much money has been invested into them. I believe it’ll trickle to zero slowly, but very slowly, over a long period marked by lot of volatility.
Reason, too much money has been invested into them. I believe it’ll trickle to zero slowly, but very slowly, over a long period marked by lot of volatility.
In what sense is blockchain revolutionary? Merkle trees are many decades old.
Distributed consensus with zero trust.
Only in an extremely limited sense. You have to trust the developers, for one.
Also it's only trustworthy as far as everything happens on the blockchain. Once you step off it for even a second, it doesn't help. Eg, witness the absolutely amazing number of scams happening in the area, and the number of well known, and supposedly trustworthy services suddenly crashing and burning.
Also it's only trustworthy as far as everything happens on the blockchain. Once you step off it for even a second, it doesn't help. Eg, witness the absolutely amazing number of scams happening in the area, and the number of well known, and supposedly trustworthy services suddenly crashing and burning.
There are a set of rules that applies to everyone and are enforced by everyone.
Re: trust the devs: do you trust the electricity in your house? What about the wires in the wall? Do you trust others to follow traffic rules?
Re: trust the devs: do you trust the electricity in your house? What about the wires in the wall? Do you trust others to follow traffic rules?
The point is that blockchains have different incentives for different parties, and the interests of the most influential people don't necessarily align with those of the users. So the vast majority (users) are just really switching to a different master.
Eg, I had a passing interest in BTC, but I my interest was in the very old school "buy pizza with it" kind of use. That usage is of no interest or importance to the current BTC system, and it doesn't matter one bit how many of me there are.
The people who matter are the people who commit to the repo, the people who run miners, and the people who run exchanges. The desires of the 99.9% who aren't any of these are nearly irrelevant.
Eg, I had a passing interest in BTC, but I my interest was in the very old school "buy pizza with it" kind of use. That usage is of no interest or importance to the current BTC system, and it doesn't matter one bit how many of me there are.
The people who matter are the people who commit to the repo, the people who run miners, and the people who run exchanges. The desires of the 99.9% who aren't any of these are nearly irrelevant.
We're 14 years in. I think the dust settled some years ago, personally.
But (and this is an honest question) how long should we give this? What is the appropriate amount of time before we can say "This was basically a bust"?
Because AFAICT the blockchain revolution never came. It's been talked about endlessly for over a decade, it's been hyped to hell and back, it's been oh-my-god-so-full-of-amazing-potential-just-think-of-the-uses for all this time and the only thing that ever seems to come out of it is a variety of schemes that reward early entrants and then crash into the dust, without delivering the utility that was so vaguely promised for so long.
But (and this is an honest question) how long should we give this? What is the appropriate amount of time before we can say "This was basically a bust"?
Because AFAICT the blockchain revolution never came. It's been talked about endlessly for over a decade, it's been hyped to hell and back, it's been oh-my-god-so-full-of-amazing-potential-just-think-of-the-uses for all this time and the only thing that ever seems to come out of it is a variety of schemes that reward early entrants and then crash into the dust, without delivering the utility that was so vaguely promised for so long.
If the dust settled why are we still talking about this?
If you want my personal opinion: blockchain had/has great potential but once bitcoin exploded the whole crypto world was hijacked by snake oil salesmen whose only goal was to get rich. People have been scammed (and continue to be scammed) by these techno babble and the dream of getting rich.
If you want my personal opinion: blockchain had/has great potential but once bitcoin exploded the whole crypto world was hijacked by snake oil salesmen whose only goal was to get rich. People have been scammed (and continue to be scammed) by these techno babble and the dream of getting rich.
> I believe that putting the equal sign between a blockchain and a database is fundamentally wrong
In what way is a blockchain not a cryptographically-verified, distributed, append-only database? If you added a consensus protocol to git, you'd have a blockchain.
I'd say it's fundamentally right because the fundamentals are the same.
> After the dust settles we will see if blockchain is really useful or not.
Blockchain has been around for more than 10 years. If it had any valid use cases, we'd see them in use already, regardless of what crypto bros are doing.
In what way is a blockchain not a cryptographically-verified, distributed, append-only database? If you added a consensus protocol to git, you'd have a blockchain.
I'd say it's fundamentally right because the fundamentals are the same.
> After the dust settles we will see if blockchain is really useful or not.
Blockchain has been around for more than 10 years. If it had any valid use cases, we'd see them in use already, regardless of what crypto bros are doing.
Focus on the distributed aspect of it. What does distributed mean to you? In fact if you look at blockchain itself it's not dostributed in the sense that you need all the blocks to verify current state.
The innovation is that 2 parties that don't know each other and don't trust each other can transact without a central authority and without trusting eachother.
Has blockchain been around for 10 years? Most of this time was spent in obscurity or making it super hard for the average joe to distinguish useful tech from scams.
Also think about neural nets. How long have neural nets been around? Did we figure interesting new ways to use them in the current AI/ML cycle?
The innovation is that 2 parties that don't know each other and don't trust each other can transact without a central authority and without trusting eachother.
Has blockchain been around for 10 years? Most of this time was spent in obscurity or making it super hard for the average joe to distinguish useful tech from scams.
Also think about neural nets. How long have neural nets been around? Did we figure interesting new ways to use them in the current AI/ML cycle?
> Blockchain has been around for more than 10 years. If it had any valid use cases, we'd see them in use already
I think modern darknet markets use smart contracts for escrow, so that you don't have to trust the escrow arbiter to not run off with your cryptocoins.
I think modern darknet markets use smart contracts for escrow, so that you don't have to trust the escrow arbiter to not run off with your cryptocoins.
This isn’t any difference than traditional escrow SaaS companies. They’re fully automated unless you have a dispute.
In your stated case, “smart contract” means software. It can’t verify that both sides of the transaction have met their obligations unless both obligations are on-chain, in which case there’s no added value.
In your stated case, “smart contract” means software. It can’t verify that both sides of the transaction have met their obligations unless both obligations are on-chain, in which case there’s no added value.
It is a little bit different, if you are doing it in centralised way - you have to control and secure everything - from databases to access to admin panels. It is quite complicated, requires robust processes, etc. Most of the finances are not really programmable, everything is done via simple scripts on some machine that just turns the knobs. You have to secure this part also.
It is a lot of work.
While for crypto-escrow you can just do a simple multi-sig with a hot keys that running on admin machines and they sign results there and they couldn't get the money, so no reason to try to hack the system.
Much easier setup.
It is a lot of work.
While for crypto-escrow you can just do a simple multi-sig with a hot keys that running on admin machines and they sign results there and they couldn't get the money, so no reason to try to hack the system.
Much easier setup.
But with these darknet markets everything's hidden and anonymous, so there used to be (?) something called an "exit scam" where they'd just disappear with whatever funds were currently waiting for a decision. If things are set up so that the cryptocoins can only go to one of two places (seller's or buyer's wallet) that can't happen.
That situation that it's avoiding is less of a concern with legitimate things where everyone knows who everyone is and law enforcement actually exists.
That situation that it's avoiding is less of a concern with legitimate things where everyone knows who everyone is and law enforcement actually exists.
> But the Eth folk managed to get proof-of-stake to work at scale; good on ’em.
That’s a bit charitable IMO. It works with at least two major caveats:
1. You can’t unstake staked ETH. (This seems to have all manner of strange effects.). Fixing this is apparently a big deal, and, if nothing else, could enable attacks in which one unstakes and then uses knowledge of old staked private keys to attack other parties.
2. It hasn’t actually been that long, and the major validators likely have a strong interest in making Ethereum work well. Just working at scale does not mean it’s secure at scale.
1. You can’t unstake staked ETH. (This seems to have all manner of strange effects.). Fixing this is apparently a big deal, and, if nothing else, could enable attacks in which one unstakes and then uses knowledge of old staked private keys to attack other parties.
2. It hasn’t actually been that long, and the major validators likely have a strong interest in making Ethereum work well. Just working at scale does not mean it’s secure at scale.
You can’t unstake staked ETH.
This is temporary and AFAIK all the other PoS systems allow unstaking.
attacks in which one unstakes and then uses knowledge of old staked private keys to attack other parties.
These "long-range attacks" are not real. They're impossible to pull off in reality.
This is temporary and AFAIK all the other PoS systems allow unstaking.
attacks in which one unstakes and then uses knowledge of old staked private keys to attack other parties.
These "long-range attacks" are not real. They're impossible to pull off in reality.
One little clarifier: You can unstake and stop running your validator, the exit-validator process already exists as it is necessary for slashing. What you cant do is withdraw exited ether until withdrawals are enabled.
Well, they did manage to cut their energy usage by like 100x. Gotta respect that. Not that I think Eth is currently used for anything but scams.
Very big article that basically buried the core difference: zero trust or some "trusted transaction manager".
Moving from the second to the first is very trivial - just make it based on distributed consensus of nodes that are run by separate entities, may be even several different cloud vendors.
AWS also doesn't have some interesting things from crypto-world - smart contracts, that are just like lambda functions that couldn't be altered in any way and could be trusted by third-party. They have Nitro Enclaves, this is close, but quite hard to use.
Moving from the second to the first is very trivial - just make it based on distributed consensus of nodes that are run by separate entities, may be even several different cloud vendors.
AWS also doesn't have some interesting things from crypto-world - smart contracts, that are just like lambda functions that couldn't be altered in any way and could be trusted by third-party. They have Nitro Enclaves, this is close, but quite hard to use.
For whatever reason, SMS operators in India rely on blockchain to validate SMS templates and customer’s do-not-disturb settings.
For a sense of scale, SMS is a 12.5 billion dollar business in India.
For a sense of scale, SMS is a 12.5 billion dollar business in India.
Do you have a link to more information about this?
EDIT: So doing some googling finds that Telecom Regulatory Authority of India implemented “Distributed Ledger Technology” for fighting spam, but roll-out seems to have lasted not long (a week? A month?) because it didn’t work (didn’t scale?) and every so often tech vendors suggest they’re going to re-do it? Honestly there’s a lot of promo articles and conflicting information that I’m struggling to understand what’s going on there, my take-away is that it’s not currently being used because it didn’t work?
EDIT: So doing some googling finds that Telecom Regulatory Authority of India implemented “Distributed Ledger Technology” for fighting spam, but roll-out seems to have lasted not long (a week? A month?) because it didn’t work (didn’t scale?) and every so often tech vendors suggest they’re going to re-do it? Honestly there’s a lot of promo articles and conflicting information that I’m struggling to understand what’s going on there, my take-away is that it’s not currently being used because it didn’t work?
I work (well, serving out my notice period) for an SMS aggregator in India. All SMS operators in India use blockchain to manage SMS marketing campaigns
https://dltconnect.airtel.in - for context, Airtel is India's largest GSM provider. https://www.tanla.com - the best known DLT-as-a-service provider in India.
DLT (branded as being built on blockchain) is alive and well in India.
https://dltconnect.airtel.in - for context, Airtel is India's largest GSM provider. https://www.tanla.com - the best known DLT-as-a-service provider in India.
DLT (branded as being built on blockchain) is alive and well in India.
couldnt find this, but given the india connection at a guess probably something on polygon.
there are other india anti-corruption uses on polygon too e.g. police complaints records https://twitter.com/firozabadpolice/status/15794707131234058...
crickets
https://www.fast2sms.com/help/dlt-sms-faq/
Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) is a blockchain based online panel where the record of entities, sender ID and message templates will be maintained in a safe and secure manner. The whole panel entities will be interlinked with each other thereby regulating the fraudulent practices and creating a transparent SMS sending mechanism.
Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) is a blockchain based online panel where the record of entities, sender ID and message templates will be maintained in a safe and secure manner. The whole panel entities will be interlinked with each other thereby regulating the fraudulent practices and creating a transparent SMS sending mechanism.
from a developer perspective, “smart contract” platforms are very unique and cheap
pay to write once and never pay again at any level of traffic, customers pay. no SaaS service offers this
developers bring their whole communities to that platform and this keeps happening
you know whats most important? I don’t care what the underlying consensus model or blockchain is, or whether there is one at all, but there is no [meaningful] smart contract platform operating any other way, and I don’t care about that being the case either. but the equilibrium in consensus mechanisms are why it is this way.
its cheaper for developers and as far as customer acquisition and convincing a customer to pay, it is a highly optimized version of the web 2.0 funnel, as every call-to-action is a payment
the development stack is dead simple - frontend website with a single call-to-action (possible even a static site), and a few variables stored in a smart contract - and the customers already want to pay
pay to write once and never pay again at any level of traffic, customers pay. no SaaS service offers this
developers bring their whole communities to that platform and this keeps happening
you know whats most important? I don’t care what the underlying consensus model or blockchain is, or whether there is one at all, but there is no [meaningful] smart contract platform operating any other way, and I don’t care about that being the case either. but the equilibrium in consensus mechanisms are why it is this way.
its cheaper for developers and as far as customer acquisition and convincing a customer to pay, it is a highly optimized version of the web 2.0 funnel, as every call-to-action is a payment
the development stack is dead simple - frontend website with a single call-to-action (possible even a static site), and a few variables stored in a smart contract - and the customers already want to pay
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Everyone uses Git by day and then moans how blockchain in not useful by night.
Specific technologies have specific applications. Blockchains in general - immutable history. Crypto blockchains - consensus in untrusted environment. Just use given technology for what it’s designed for, and stop being full of yourself.
Specific technologies have specific applications. Blockchains in general - immutable history. Crypto blockchains - consensus in untrusted environment. Just use given technology for what it’s designed for, and stop being full of yourself.
We understand the difference between a proof-of-work/stake/waste blockchain and a merkel tree.
Do you?
Do you?
If we're including git in 'blockchain' now then that changes the nature of the discussion. But we both know that systems like git are not what's being talked about here.
> Just use given technology for what it’s designed for, and stop being full of yourself.
The point is that there has been hype after hype after hype about "blockchain" revolutionising damn near everything for years and so far it has failed to deliver on this. It's not wrong to call the phenomenon out for what it is.
> Just use given technology for what it’s designed for, and stop being full of yourself.
The point is that there has been hype after hype after hype about "blockchain" revolutionising damn near everything for years and so far it has failed to deliver on this. It's not wrong to call the phenomenon out for what it is.
The double standard you mention is actually created by the Blockchain advocates.
Git does not include a distributed consensus algorithm. So it's a chain of blocks, but not a "Blockchain". Blockchain advocates will gladly tell you so when they want to sell you on how revolutionary Blockchain tech is.
But once you ask for actually useful use cases, all they can point to is things that are trivially done with Git and its predecessors, in the sense that they don't require distributed consensus…
Git does not include a distributed consensus algorithm. So it's a chain of blocks, but not a "Blockchain". Blockchain advocates will gladly tell you so when they want to sell you on how revolutionary Blockchain tech is.
But once you ask for actually useful use cases, all they can point to is things that are trivially done with Git and its predecessors, in the sense that they don't require distributed consensus…
Only thing annoying the the flood of negative articles only pop up after a crash. All that VC money made a lot of people afraid to look like fools by speaking up against the tech.
Where was he (not personally, as a symbol of tech bloggers) at the height of the bubble?
Off topic: isn’t Amazon know for forcing people to be better writers due to how they conduct meetings with written memos.
I bring this up because that post could have been 1/2 the length, if not shorter, without losing any content or messaging.
I bring this up because that post could have been 1/2 the length, if not shorter, without losing any content or messaging.
Different styles for different audiences. Busy executives want concise pitches because they receive a ton of them, people reading a long-running blog are looking more for the color and background of a personal blog.
It is a shame that we are ending up here with "Blockchain technology". Beyond the financial aspect (Bitcoin/Stablecoins), here are a few use cases where a Blockchain will shine:
- Tracking shipments across countries. This is an append-only operation, across multiple jurisdictions/languages/infrastructures. A blockchain ledger can play the role of standardizing operations for the tracking of shipments.
- Healthcare records.
- Company registry records. Once submitted, they are publicly available and immutable.
- Title deeds. You wouldn't own the NFT yourself. The government could assign it to you and be the only one able to transfer it across its "subjects".
- Stocks/Assets. For this one I'll blame ASE for failing to deliver. They have picked the wrong company to build such a thing while spending a gigantic sum of money in the process.
- Digital Identities. There was never enough investment in this area, especially for key retrieval in the case of loss.
- Decentralized DNS. The tech is there (Namecoin) and roughly functional. There was never any investment in this comparing to the billions thrown in NFTs and other crap projects.
Instead of addressing any of the above points, Blockchain and Crypto degenerated into fancy websites and gifs aimed to drill money from everyone who can be influenced. We are here 5-6 years later after the Defi/Smart Contracts fever and all we have to show for it is some apes NFT. This could have been done a lot earlier with Namecoin which has a much more native support of NFT. But Namecoin never took off because the founders were never interested to make money out of this.
It does seem that governments might be more fundamental than we thought. They might be protecting us more from ourselves than we see them as an imposition on our freedom. Here we have a worldwide experiment of a government-less operation at wild.
- Tracking shipments across countries. This is an append-only operation, across multiple jurisdictions/languages/infrastructures. A blockchain ledger can play the role of standardizing operations for the tracking of shipments.
- Healthcare records.
- Company registry records. Once submitted, they are publicly available and immutable.
- Title deeds. You wouldn't own the NFT yourself. The government could assign it to you and be the only one able to transfer it across its "subjects".
- Stocks/Assets. For this one I'll blame ASE for failing to deliver. They have picked the wrong company to build such a thing while spending a gigantic sum of money in the process.
- Digital Identities. There was never enough investment in this area, especially for key retrieval in the case of loss.
- Decentralized DNS. The tech is there (Namecoin) and roughly functional. There was never any investment in this comparing to the billions thrown in NFTs and other crap projects.
Instead of addressing any of the above points, Blockchain and Crypto degenerated into fancy websites and gifs aimed to drill money from everyone who can be influenced. We are here 5-6 years later after the Defi/Smart Contracts fever and all we have to show for it is some apes NFT. This could have been done a lot earlier with Namecoin which has a much more native support of NFT. But Namecoin never took off because the founders were never interested to make money out of this.
It does seem that governments might be more fundamental than we thought. They might be protecting us more from ourselves than we see them as an imposition on our freedom. Here we have a worldwide experiment of a government-less operation at wild.
No. Blockchain was invented to solve one particular problem: distributed consensus on a sequence of transactions, where the choice of which transaction to include from a set of conflicting transactions is irrelevant.
The latter property here is key to understanding where blockchain is useful. It was created to solve the "double spend problem", ie. two transitions that spend the same coin but send it to different recipients (and so they conflict and cannot both be included in the canonical list of transactions). A double spend is the result of the sender either (a) making a mistake, or (b) attempting fraud. In both cases the important property is that as long as only a single of these conflicting transactions is included, the systems works.
For all the applications you list above, this property is not present. If I create a transaction in your "shipping blockchain" that says "shipment A moved to location X" and another, conflicting transaction that says "shipment A moved to location Y", then it's obviously important which transaction we include, since it must reflect the actual, physical location of "shipment A".
The latter property here is key to understanding where blockchain is useful. It was created to solve the "double spend problem", ie. two transitions that spend the same coin but send it to different recipients (and so they conflict and cannot both be included in the canonical list of transactions). A double spend is the result of the sender either (a) making a mistake, or (b) attempting fraud. In both cases the important property is that as long as only a single of these conflicting transactions is included, the systems works.
For all the applications you list above, this property is not present. If I create a transaction in your "shipping blockchain" that says "shipment A moved to location X" and another, conflicting transaction that says "shipment A moved to location Y", then it's obviously important which transaction we include, since it must reflect the actual, physical location of "shipment A".
Is there a double spend problem in fiat currencies? Honestly, I do not think there is. So what is the point of cryptocurrency?
yes, the entire reason a bank is needed in all online transactions is because nobody trusts YOU to not double spend, but they do trust the bank to make sure they don't let you spend your money twice.
Then the banks have solved the double-spending problem, so in effect there isn't one.
I was asking the question because if double-spending has been solved, then why do we need crypto/blockchain?
I was asking the question because if double-spending has been solved, then why do we need crypto/blockchain?
Sure, if double-spending has been solved for you, you don't need a blockchain. It hasn't been solved for everyone yet though. A great book to learn about this is: Check Your Financial Privilege (https://www.amazon.com/Check-Your-Financial-Privilege-Gladst...)
This guy is exactly what's wrong with the crypto space. It's a fundamental misunderstanding of the strengths and weaknesses of blockchains.
Putting all those things he listed on a blockchain is the perfect example of “That's not a blockchain, that's a sequence of poor engineering decisions!”
Everything he listed can already be done with basic software engineering. Add a blockchain to these things makes it slow, adds unnecessary complexity and fake decentralization where its not even needed.
Crypto is full of Ape NFTs and casino gambling because there is nothing useful in blockchains other than removing trusted third parties.
Bitcoin added something new, crypto asked what more can we do with this? The answer is not much.
Putting all those things he listed on a blockchain is the perfect example of “That's not a blockchain, that's a sequence of poor engineering decisions!”
Everything he listed can already be done with basic software engineering. Add a blockchain to these things makes it slow, adds unnecessary complexity and fake decentralization where its not even needed.
Crypto is full of Ape NFTs and casino gambling because there is nothing useful in blockchains other than removing trusted third parties.
Bitcoin added something new, crypto asked what more can we do with this? The answer is not much.
Total disagree and not sure why you believe why any of those woukd have value added if on blockchain.
Especially, health care records, wtf??
Standardized and encrypted healthcare records. It means wherever you travel you can: 1. Access your health records at your discretion; and 2. Make sure these records are never lost and 3. These records are immutable.
Encrypted records can be easily added by any doctor/clinic as your public key is publicly available.
Encrypted records can be easily added by any doctor/clinic as your public key is publicly available.
Healthcare records frequently need to be modified (e.g. a test was done incorrectly and needs to be voided). Sure, you can stick another entry in there saying "modify this other entry", but then any operations involve canonicalizing the state by scanning the entire subsequent chain. All the caching/indexing optimizations I can think of to make this not a complete nightmare also break all the data privacy and RTBF protections patients have.
There's also a lot of healthcare data. Is there any blockchain that scales to literally petabytes of data a year per facility/organization?
There's also a lot of healthcare data. Is there any blockchain that scales to literally petabytes of data a year per facility/organization?
> then any operations involve canonicalizing the state by scanning the entire subsequent chain
Sounds exactly like what blockchain node software does when you first start it up and it syncs the chain?
Sounds exactly like what blockchain node software does when you first start it up and it syncs the chain?
The scales are completely different orders of magnitude. Crypto chains are miniscule, a few hundred GB max and even that's problematic for a lot of devices. A single CT scan is something like 20+ GB. There are ~220,000 of those in the US every single day and probably billions or trillions of other little things being logged. You can store offchain, but then you're a. Centralizing things again and b. Probably violating patient data privacy.
Decentralized data stores exist. IPFS is perhaps the most widely known. But if you discount imaging and store only medical summaries (which if we're being honest is often the only thing doctors look at after the fact anyways), it would definitely be technically feasible.
I would imagine the complexities of building and rolling out such a system would not be technical. Imagine trying to get 200+ countries to agree and implement a standard to store healthcare records, blockchain or no blockchain.
See the other responses for more, but would be curious how that discretion is completely lost when you want to proove something?
Geberally surprised about the false beliefs around anonimity on block chains, as soon as you have the right anchors they are the most tracable.
Or do you mean you sit at the doctor on your vacation, pull out an app to access your CT scan and hand it him over somehow or what is the use case here really? Seems so unrealistic on manu levels and much more easily realized with more solid tech, sorry?!
> Encrypted records can be easily added by any doctor/clinic as your public key is publicly available.
Yes, crypto101, which works fine without any blockchain?
Geberally surprised about the false beliefs around anonimity on block chains, as soon as you have the right anchors they are the most tracable.
Or do you mean you sit at the doctor on your vacation, pull out an app to access your CT scan and hand it him over somehow or what is the use case here really? Seems so unrealistic on manu levels and much more easily realized with more solid tech, sorry?!
> Encrypted records can be easily added by any doctor/clinic as your public key is publicly available.
Yes, crypto101, which works fine without any blockchain?
There are lots of p2p distributed data store designs around that fit this better.
> Standardized and encrypted healthcare records.
This is probably a non-starter in many cases. In my country, we had an e-health system that had millions invested in its development (we're a small country) and yet didn't work, nor was it really compatible with the systems already in place: https://www-delfi-lv.translate.goog/news/national/politics/e... (translated link)
> Title: E-health is written off: those responsible for the "fraud" worth millions went unpunished, will create a new system
> Excerpt: Its unpredictable operation has caused quite a lot of worries not only for doctors, but also for patients, who may go to the pharmacy for the medicine prescribed by the doctor and not get it, because e-health has rebelled. Likewise, e-health tends to be incompatible with the local systems of some large medical institutions, so there are situations when the electronic referral of a family doctor to a medical institution must be printed anyway.
> On the other hand, doctor Nīcmane-Aišpure remembers a case when she visited a patient during a home visit, concluded that the condition was serious, wrote an electronic referral to call an ambulance, but "the ambulance is unhappy because the electronic referral cannot be opened".
> The eHealth system also still requires users to perform many manual steps. "It is a manual system, where at best you can extract some Excel files," says Solvita Olsen, a sworn lawyer and associate professor at the University of Latvia, who has been following the e-health saga since its inception.
And that was a system that didn't even try anything new, how do you imagine most mediocre countries out there will manage to deal with the technical complexity of blockchain based systems? Why even bother at that point, wouldn't they be better off with an XML or JSON schema or whatever other lowest common denominator one can come up with, to have some base data about the person and then additional bits that might be dependent on each country's laws?
It's not like there aren't people that enter the data in these systems anyways, in your example of shipment tracking, someone could enter whatever data they want regardless. Want to make it appear that a package has left the country, even when you haven't bothered to send it out? Sure, just bribe whoever is running the system, very much like: https://xkcd.com/538/
This is probably a non-starter in many cases. In my country, we had an e-health system that had millions invested in its development (we're a small country) and yet didn't work, nor was it really compatible with the systems already in place: https://www-delfi-lv.translate.goog/news/national/politics/e... (translated link)
> Title: E-health is written off: those responsible for the "fraud" worth millions went unpunished, will create a new system
> Excerpt: Its unpredictable operation has caused quite a lot of worries not only for doctors, but also for patients, who may go to the pharmacy for the medicine prescribed by the doctor and not get it, because e-health has rebelled. Likewise, e-health tends to be incompatible with the local systems of some large medical institutions, so there are situations when the electronic referral of a family doctor to a medical institution must be printed anyway.
> On the other hand, doctor Nīcmane-Aišpure remembers a case when she visited a patient during a home visit, concluded that the condition was serious, wrote an electronic referral to call an ambulance, but "the ambulance is unhappy because the electronic referral cannot be opened".
> The eHealth system also still requires users to perform many manual steps. "It is a manual system, where at best you can extract some Excel files," says Solvita Olsen, a sworn lawyer and associate professor at the University of Latvia, who has been following the e-health saga since its inception.
And that was a system that didn't even try anything new, how do you imagine most mediocre countries out there will manage to deal with the technical complexity of blockchain based systems? Why even bother at that point, wouldn't they be better off with an XML or JSON schema or whatever other lowest common denominator one can come up with, to have some base data about the person and then additional bits that might be dependent on each country's laws?
It's not like there aren't people that enter the data in these systems anyways, in your example of shipment tracking, someone could enter whatever data they want regardless. Want to make it appear that a package has left the country, even when you haven't bothered to send it out? Sure, just bribe whoever is running the system, very much like: https://xkcd.com/538/
>Tracking shipments across countries.
This has been a failed use case from the start because there's no effective way to control the entry point from the real world onto the blockchain. Farmer in South Carolina imports a boatload of tomatoes from China, enters them onto the blockchain as his own during harvest season, now you have a permanent indelible record of those tomatoes as they make every stop along the way to the consumer, with a completely fraudulent point of origin.
This has been a failed use case from the start because there's no effective way to control the entry point from the real world onto the blockchain. Farmer in South Carolina imports a boatload of tomatoes from China, enters them onto the blockchain as his own during harvest season, now you have a permanent indelible record of those tomatoes as they make every stop along the way to the consumer, with a completely fraudulent point of origin.
From the blog post:
> They presented some of the systems they’d built and yep, we were impressed. Then, with the startup CTO in the room, one of my fellow engineers asked the key question: “All these systems, are there any that wouldn’t work without blockchain?” The guy didn’t even hesitate: “No, not really.”
> And that was about that.
> They presented some of the systems they’d built and yep, we were impressed. Then, with the startup CTO in the room, one of my fellow engineers asked the key question: “All these systems, are there any that wouldn’t work without blockchain?” The guy didn’t even hesitate: “No, not really.”
> And that was about that.
What I see missing in most of those is that decentralized immutable storage is the only part solved by blockchain technologies, and:
- Storage is not the hard part of all those proposals. Standard formats and a shared ontology between all players is the actual hard part. Medical records are useless if you can't read them.
- Immutable storage is not hard to do in a centralized fashion and can be made much more efficient. Do blockchain-based systems offer the bandwidth to ingest _all_ medical records produced worldwide? I'd say the required amount of records-per-second would surprise you (as well as the potential size of those records, where some are high resolution scans and stuff like that).
- Usually you _don't_ want immutable records, even when it seems like you do. What happens when you want to advance the formats stored in the blockchain? You can't edit old records (to update them to the new format), so your only options become: create a new blockchain and/or keep the cruft forever.
- Storing anything private via encryption poses problems in many domains: sometimes you want certain third-parties to be able to access that information (e.g.: the hospital should have access to your medical records if you get there unconscious in an ambulance). I've seen no real solution to the kind of issues that arise there.
These are very serious limitations against blockchains _shining_ if you ask me. Of all your proposed use-cases the only one that I can't see hitting those issues is the company registry records one (and maybe that's because I'm not acquainted enough with that domain).
- Storage is not the hard part of all those proposals. Standard formats and a shared ontology between all players is the actual hard part. Medical records are useless if you can't read them.
- Immutable storage is not hard to do in a centralized fashion and can be made much more efficient. Do blockchain-based systems offer the bandwidth to ingest _all_ medical records produced worldwide? I'd say the required amount of records-per-second would surprise you (as well as the potential size of those records, where some are high resolution scans and stuff like that).
- Usually you _don't_ want immutable records, even when it seems like you do. What happens when you want to advance the formats stored in the blockchain? You can't edit old records (to update them to the new format), so your only options become: create a new blockchain and/or keep the cruft forever.
- Storing anything private via encryption poses problems in many domains: sometimes you want certain third-parties to be able to access that information (e.g.: the hospital should have access to your medical records if you get there unconscious in an ambulance). I've seen no real solution to the kind of issues that arise there.
These are very serious limitations against blockchains _shining_ if you ask me. Of all your proposed use-cases the only one that I can't see hitting those issues is the company registry records one (and maybe that's because I'm not acquainted enough with that domain).
> Tracking shipments across countries. This is an append-only operation, across multiple jurisdictions/languages/infrastructures. A blockchain ledger can play the role of standardizing operations for the tracking of shipments.
People seem to forget that you still have to trust the people and/or hardware doing data entry while tracking shipments. If you can't solve that first, there's no need to have a blockchain as a storage medium.
People seem to forget that you still have to trust the people and/or hardware doing data entry while tracking shipments. If you can't solve that first, there's no need to have a blockchain as a storage medium.
Garbage in, garbage out. Tracking shipments only works if you have proof that the shipment wasn't tampered with. Tracking shipments is only as reliable as the carrier not mucking with it, and we already have tamper-proof tape for solving that one. It doesn't prove anything, though. It's merely a tool in our arsenal of confirming trust, that makes it easier to tell where the problem lies if someone along the chain is lying. If someone along the chain is lying, their blockchain record is no more meaningful than any other document they'd produce.
Registry records and title deeds and stock assets are already solved problems, and there's an important problem that blockchain is trying to solve: It is possible for the centralized services to transfer ownership without the owner's permission. This is an important feature. It is used in things like bankruptcy proceedings [1] and other law enforcement action all the time. The people trying to create the "feature" of not having that feature are called anarchists, and decent societies lock them up, shortly before or after their crimes cause actual damage.
All of these are reasons for actual cryptography - Signatures and Merkel Trees. Blockchains have no advantages in any of them.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/18/investing/ftx-bahamas-seizure - Whether the governments doing the seizure are trustworthy is an entirely different problem with an entirely different scope of solutions, but the places that have actual anarchy going on are not typically nice places to live[2] and other governments typically do their best to insulate their population from them. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piracy_off_the_coast_of_Somali...
Registry records and title deeds and stock assets are already solved problems, and there's an important problem that blockchain is trying to solve: It is possible for the centralized services to transfer ownership without the owner's permission. This is an important feature. It is used in things like bankruptcy proceedings [1] and other law enforcement action all the time. The people trying to create the "feature" of not having that feature are called anarchists, and decent societies lock them up, shortly before or after their crimes cause actual damage.
All of these are reasons for actual cryptography - Signatures and Merkel Trees. Blockchains have no advantages in any of them.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/18/investing/ftx-bahamas-seizure - Whether the governments doing the seizure are trustworthy is an entirely different problem with an entirely different scope of solutions, but the places that have actual anarchy going on are not typically nice places to live[2] and other governments typically do their best to insulate their population from them. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piracy_off_the_coast_of_Somali...
> It's merely a tool in our arsenal of confirming trust, that makes it easier to tell where the problem lies if someone along the chain is lying.
That makes it a useful tool, no?
> people trying to create the "feature" of not having that feature are called anarchists
Smart contracts are partial to neither law nor anarchy. It's trivial to write token code that allows a centralized service to transfer said token without the owner's permission. And that token still enjoys the benefits of being interoperable by default with other tokens and contracts that may not be under that same centralized service's control, yet are written to the same protocol standard.
> All of these are reasons for actual cryptography - Signatures and Merkel Trees. Blockchains have no advantages in any of them.
Blockchains provide reliable ordering and timestamping, something that cryptography itself cannot provide. Cryptographic shipment signing/tracking isn't very useful if the company can retroactively create a conflicting chain of backdated signatures and purport it to be the canonical one.
That makes it a useful tool, no?
> people trying to create the "feature" of not having that feature are called anarchists
Smart contracts are partial to neither law nor anarchy. It's trivial to write token code that allows a centralized service to transfer said token without the owner's permission. And that token still enjoys the benefits of being interoperable by default with other tokens and contracts that may not be under that same centralized service's control, yet are written to the same protocol standard.
> All of these are reasons for actual cryptography - Signatures and Merkel Trees. Blockchains have no advantages in any of them.
Blockchains provide reliable ordering and timestamping, something that cryptography itself cannot provide. Cryptographic shipment signing/tracking isn't very useful if the company can retroactively create a conflicting chain of backdated signatures and purport it to be the canonical one.
No, much cheaper and easier solutions to that already exist, in the form of "Every postal tracking app"
> the company can retroactively create a conflicting chain of backdated signatures and purport it to be the canonical one
Again, that can be incredibly easily solved with signatures stored in a separate system of record - Effectively, publishing a git sha somewhere else on a regular basis. This is not a blockchain, this is a merkle tree, which is a good idea and is currently unimplemented.
The immense fraud and criminal behavior associated with the "Blockchain" ecosystem is the biggest inhibitor to actually good crypto being used for system-of-record. It sucks all the air out of the room and that's a bad thing.
The immense fraud and criminal behavior associated with the "Blockchain" ecosystem is the biggest inhibitor to actually good crypto being used for system-of-record. It sucks all the air out of the room and that's a bad thing.
Git does not guarantee the validity of timestamps stored within it, nor does it explicitly provide a single canonical tip. Those two guarantees are what prevent history from being forged.
> The immense fraud and criminal behavior associated with the "Blockchain" ecosystem is the biggest inhibitor to actually good crypto being used for system-of-record.
You could say the same thing about internet scams in the 90s. Eventually, everyone got over themselves and picked out the good parts.
> The immense fraud and criminal behavior associated with the "Blockchain" ecosystem is the biggest inhibitor to actually good crypto being used for system-of-record.
You could say the same thing about internet scams in the 90s. Eventually, everyone got over themselves and picked out the good parts.
> Distributed DNS
As opposed to normal DNS?
As opposed to normal DNS?
Edited to decentralized.
DNS is already decentralized, it's one of the most decentralized projects on the internet.
And while domains (not DNS) are less decentralized, it's all standardised and protocol based. If you want decentralized domains you need to champion for alternative DNS roots because all the technology is already there, just change the config file and get the people to do the same. Which is less effort than creating a whole new "blockchain" based system that does the same but slower.
And while domains (not DNS) are less decentralized, it's all standardised and protocol based. If you want decentralized domains you need to champion for alternative DNS roots because all the technology is already there, just change the config file and get the people to do the same. Which is less effort than creating a whole new "blockchain" based system that does the same but slower.
> And while domains (not DNS) are less decentralized, it's all standardised and protocol based.
For what it's worth as an example, Ethereum's name system (ENS) is also standardized and protocol based. And it eliminates the requirement of centralized registry corporations.
For what it's worth as an example, Ethereum's name system (ENS) is also standardized and protocol based. And it eliminates the requirement of centralized registry corporations.
I've lost count of how many product owners have interchanged the word Database with Blockchain to try and score some PR points with their customers/bosses.
For the older devs, has there been anything in the past like this?
As in some new hyped tech that people kept trying to insert into their business?
As in some new hyped tech that people kept trying to insert into their business?
Speaking of Tim Bray, in the 1990s people kept using XML in places where it wasn't appropriate.
There have been so many tech fads. Distributed objects (e.g. CORBA), mobile code, object databases, micropayments, push, WAP, and I want to give a special lifetime achievement award to VR which is now on its third hype wave.
There have been so many tech fads. Distributed objects (e.g. CORBA), mobile code, object databases, micropayments, push, WAP, and I want to give a special lifetime achievement award to VR which is now on its third hype wave.
NoSQL!
Rep from <NoSQL company> comes along, shows a CTO some graphs about how well it performs vs <BoringButReliableSQL>. If developers are unlucky CTO mandates a migration to NoSQL.
Rep from <NoSQL company> comes along, shows a CTO some graphs about how well it performs vs <BoringButReliableSQL>. If developers are unlucky CTO mandates a migration to NoSQL.
The last hype cycle, from about 10 years ago, I remember is that of BigData and associated technologies such as MapReduce, Hadoop, NoSQL DBs, data pipelines and so on. That lasted for about 4 years I guess? Then ML took over.
* Certain aspects of social networks (I remember leadership at google being convinced everyone will do online stuff on social networks in around 2011)
* To much smaller extent some core tech like NoSQL, SOA
* More recently - AR/VR bubble
* To much smaller extent some core tech like NoSQL, SOA
* More recently - AR/VR bubble
XML is the only one that was really as egregious, iirc.
serverless
>A huge, almost incomprehensible, volume of venture capital was flowing into the sector, and that money was localized in the Finance sector, specifically in Manhattan.
I think the worst part about this whole thing is there are still millions if not billions of dollars being pumped into it. I literally just got a job interview request for a crypto exchange with hundreds of millions supposedly in the bank. It's absurd.
I think the worst part about this whole thing is there are still millions if not billions of dollars being pumped into it. I literally just got a job interview request for a crypto exchange with hundreds of millions supposedly in the bank. It's absurd.
[deleted]
People saying a database is as good as a blockchain are taking a look from the wrong perspective.
Blockchains are more like always available, immutable logs for interfacing parties that don't trust each other or an intermediary.
Blockchains are more like an API than a database.
Blockchains are more like always available, immutable logs for interfacing parties that don't trust each other or an intermediary.
Blockchains are more like an API than a database.
Blockchains normally has a database and then an API. Many of the newer chains uses Rocksdb.
Unrelated, but
> Which was pretty nice, except for it was stinking hot that August and we were on multiple steamy subway trips every day; got back to our hotel rooms pretty well emptied out.
Upper level amazon engineers can’t take ubers through new york?
> Which was pretty nice, except for it was stinking hot that August and we were on multiple steamy subway trips every day; got back to our hotel rooms pretty well emptied out.
Upper level amazon engineers can’t take ubers through new york?
Some people would rather ride a train or subway over an uber in principal, even if the cost is charged to their employer and no different to them personally.
I'm not claiming with certainty that that is the case here, but I know it is for some people.
Also, subways/trains are quicker for some routes, YMMV
I'm not claiming with certainty that that is the case here, but I know it is for some people.
Also, subways/trains are quicker for some routes, YMMV
In 2016? It was probably going to take 2-3x longer to Uber around Manhattan. Traffic sucks.
Ironic that CBDC systems are being built on a technology exclusively aimed at eliminating the C in that acronym.
How so?
Central Bank Digital Currencies are being implemented exclusively on systems that allow the "Central" authority to absolutely ensure that nobody except that central authority can control every transaction in those ledgers.
And I don't think you meant the "C" in "Currency".
Central Bank Digital Currencies are being implemented exclusively on systems that allow the "Central" authority to absolutely ensure that nobody except that central authority can control every transaction in those ledgers.
And I don't think you meant the "C" in "Currency".
> Ironic that CBDC systems are being built on a technology exclusively aimed at eliminating the C in that acronym.
Thanks Pjkundert, you're correct I should have said 'first C".
What I meant was that it was ironic that CBDCs are being constructed using systems that use blockchain, i.e., centralised systems, designed to deliver centralised currencies, based upon technology exclusively designed to deliver decentralised currencies.
Thanks Pjkundert, you're correct I should have said 'first C".
What I meant was that it was ironic that CBDCs are being constructed using systems that use blockchain, i.e., centralised systems, designed to deliver centralised currencies, based upon technology exclusively designed to deliver decentralised currencies.
reminds me of my post where i tried to understand blockchain in good faith:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31132610
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31132610
Proof-of-Waste :)
Anyone got a good one for Proof-of-Stake.
Anyone got a good one for Proof-of-Stake.
TL;DR anyone? I couldn't care less about communication skills of Andy and whether some meeting was in person, before even getting a hint of what is the point of that post.
So is the fundamental problem with blockchain, as described here anyway, that you can basically do all of the cool parts of blockchain that people get excited about, but using a central service instead?
I feel like I don't really understand that, because wouldn't that mean you'd have to re-solve a lot of problems on your own, with your own team? Wouldn't it be easier to figure out how to plug blockchain into this central service instead?
I feel like I don't really understand that, because wouldn't that mean you'd have to re-solve a lot of problems on your own, with your own team? Wouldn't it be easier to figure out how to plug blockchain into this central service instead?
Amid all this sudden blockchain skepticism, one question remains prominent in my mind: where were all these skeptics when blockchain enthusiasm was on the rise?
Sure, hindsight is 20/20, but you have to wonder if this chorus of I-toldya-so's were genuinely right, or if they are merely rewriting history to boost their own credibility.
Blockchain was always experimental. The chance of success on any given project was always slim, but the potential payoff huge. So, putting anything more than what you are willing to lose is reckless.
Sure, hindsight is 20/20, but you have to wonder if this chorus of I-toldya-so's were genuinely right, or if they are merely rewriting history to boost their own credibility.
Blockchain was always experimental. The chance of success on any given project was always slim, but the potential payoff huge. So, putting anything more than what you are willing to lose is reckless.
> where were all these skeptics when blockchain enthusiasm was on the rise?
Literally here, in every single thread to the chagrin of the enthusiasts whose defining identity became "you just don't get it, man". Blockchain stuff, by anyone who didn't have a vested financial interest in it has always been called out for what it is.
Now when the AI hype eventually dies down then you'll have a point.
Literally here, in every single thread to the chagrin of the enthusiasts whose defining identity became "you just don't get it, man". Blockchain stuff, by anyone who didn't have a vested financial interest in it has always been called out for what it is.
Now when the AI hype eventually dies down then you'll have a point.
> where were all these skeptics when blockchain enthusiasm was on the rise
You might need to define the exact period when it was "on the rise", but as far as I've seen, in the last six or seven years they (we) have been very vocal and all over the place - including on this very site.
You might need to define the exact period when it was "on the rise", but as far as I've seen, in the last six or seven years they (we) have been very vocal and all over the place - including on this very site.
I've been here all the time, but it is hard to keep talking when you are shouted down by all the people who bought into crypto late and are trying to pump it higher.
The last few comments I made on it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29830090
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21541591
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21542591
The last few comments I made on it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29830090
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21541591
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21542591
I don't know if I accept the premise. I've been hearing that "blockchain is a solution in search of a problem" critique as long as I've heard about blockchains. I think that during a hype cycle, the hype is what gets signal boosted so you see a lot more "here's how blockchains are going to solve X" content than you do content repeating for the millionth time that the blockchain doesn't actually solve the problem any better than a database would.
>where were all these skeptics when blockchain enthusiasm was on the rise?
Everywhere? I can't think of a single (or at least memorable) time I've heard blockchain and there wasn't at least someone who was skeptical.
Everywhere? I can't think of a single (or at least memorable) time I've heard blockchain and there wasn't at least someone who was skeptical.
As others have pointed out, there was always debate. But I think what's changed is that the down-shouters have backed off. When we'd say "there's nothing here, and what is here is likely semi-criminal" there was almost always a vigorous thread of people who would argue back.
Especially so because a large part of the HN community have this libertarian tinge which brought them philosophically close to web3/crypto generally.
Many of those people have gone quite quiet recently. And I don't want to turn this into a "told you so" moment; I think this is good. Let's try to let the hype cycle end without knives coming out.
The question is what the long-term shake-out from all of this will be for tech more broadly. Many legitimate technologies and projects have gotten themselves caught up in this hype cycle, and there could be fall-outs for people and projects that associated themselves this way -- what I'm calling "crypto-taint." I'm thinking everything from the Rust PL community (where the bulk of employers are web3 companies, it seems) through to a lot of recent novel database tech generally.
I recently quit a job in part for this reason. The product itself was not crypto, but was associating itself with the language and community around ETH. I personally don't want the taint on my resume, even if it's merely marketing.
Where VCs put their money can be fickle. And the consequences for business entities emphasizing in the wrong place can be brutal. This is the third "down cycle" I've been through in my 25ish year software career, and I have some sense of how it could shake out.
Right now, people need to focus on fundamentals.
Especially so because a large part of the HN community have this libertarian tinge which brought them philosophically close to web3/crypto generally.
Many of those people have gone quite quiet recently. And I don't want to turn this into a "told you so" moment; I think this is good. Let's try to let the hype cycle end without knives coming out.
The question is what the long-term shake-out from all of this will be for tech more broadly. Many legitimate technologies and projects have gotten themselves caught up in this hype cycle, and there could be fall-outs for people and projects that associated themselves this way -- what I'm calling "crypto-taint." I'm thinking everything from the Rust PL community (where the bulk of employers are web3 companies, it seems) through to a lot of recent novel database tech generally.
I recently quit a job in part for this reason. The product itself was not crypto, but was associating itself with the language and community around ETH. I personally don't want the taint on my resume, even if it's merely marketing.
Where VCs put their money can be fickle. And the consequences for business entities emphasizing in the wrong place can be brutal. This is the third "down cycle" I've been through in my 25ish year software career, and I have some sense of how it could shake out.
Right now, people need to focus on fundamentals.
The latter property here is key to understanding where blockchain is useful. It was created to solve the "double spend problem", ie. two transitions that spend the same coin but send it to different recipients (and so they conflict and cannot both be included in the canonical list of transactions). A double spend is the result of the sender either (a) making a mistake, or (b) attempting fraud. In both cases the important property is that as long as only a single of these conflicting transactions is included, the systems works.
Only if your problem exhibits the above property (and it's a distributed system) does using a blockchain make sense.