Why aren’t distributed systems engineers working on blockchain technology?
eng.paxos.com
eng.paxos.com
>It feels like a get rich quick scheme - https://twitter.com/naval/status/878018839044161536
This is what it comes down to IMO. Anything cryptocurrency related is just surrounded by a cloud of shady characters and scammers, even though the tech is legit. You just can't trust anyone, nor their intentions. Living your life and working in a constant state of paranoia like that is awful.
The problem is that they want a system that's trustless and that's simply not what most engineers care about. We want a system that's fast and efficient.
WAT?
This is a bit No True Scotsman. It's like "secured by math!" about Bitcoin - the ecosystem is rife with fraud and error.
So too with Ethereum. Given that smart contract functionality is literally Ethereum's unique selling point, you can't claim that is somehow not something that can be discussed as a problem with Ethereum. They broke the immutability guarantee for one bad smart contract, after all.
You really can't say "Ethereum is completely secure!! Except for everything that people actually use it for" without being more than a little disingenuous yourself.
Now you may legitimately argue that Ethereum is poorly designed to encourage secure contract authorship. And I would agree with you in many respects. But that is a distinct concern from the security of Ethereum itself. Conflating the two is at best confusing and at worst maliciously spurious.
Blockchains are a social construct and what ultimately protects them are the participants. Exactly like actual currencies they are subject to market forces; people either believe in and want the currency or they don't. It's this confidence that gives the currency strength.
More simply:
"On medium to long time scales, humans are quite good at consensus. Even if an adversary had access to unlimited hashing power, and came out with a 51% attack of any major blockchain that reverted even the last month of history, convincing the community that this chain is legitimate is much harder than just outrunning the main chain’s hashpower. They would need to subvert block explorers, every trusted member in the community, the New York Times, archive.org, and many other sources on the internet; all in all, convincing the world that the new attack chain is the one that came first in the information technology-dense 21st century is about as hard as convincing the world that the US moon landings never happened. These social considerations are what ultimately protect any blockchain in the long term, regardless of whether or not the blockchain’s community admits it (note that Bitcoin Core does admit this primacy of the social layer)." [1]
[1] https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/a-proof-of-stake-design-p...
The subtlety here is making the distinction between confidence and resistance to attack. They're not the same thing at all. And what's interesting here is that, going off the model of real currencies, one could assume market forces will prevail here. Developed nations let their currencies float precisely because on the whole they're confident that the market will ultimately punish any malicious attacker who attempts to destroy the currency by selling large amounts of it.
It's not their job to fix someone else's bad idea.
https://www.stellar.org/developers/guides/concepts/scp.html
disclosure: I work at stellar
Name a problem that would best be solved with blockchain.
Money. E.g. Bitcoin.
No, precisely no credit cards work that way. That's why they're called credit cards.
If I buy something with a credit card for $2k and have $2k in my bank account, the $2k is still there until I pay the credit card company. It could take years or be paid off immediately.
It's not a "pull" at all.
A centralized organization (.com or .gov) that can achieve consensus amongst participants can do just fine with Postgres and a REST API.
Adversarial participants are common, but typically that's solved with a third-party overseer that administers the system. Finding use cases that demand decentralization are harder.
Bitcoin was created to remove central banks/govts from the money creation process, but in most cases, if you don't trust the central authority, you just don't participate. With cash, you can't easily get around dealing with the govt.
- Assets move directly between entities — transfer and settlement are one-and-the-same — eliminating counterparty risk (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_risk#Counterparty_risk)
- Assets move instantly, and settlement time is ~10 minutes (settlement can also be instant if the parties trust the other won’t “double spend”)
- The transfer mechanism is public infrastructure and is always improving — everyone has a shared incentive to make it better, similar to Internet protocols like email and http
- Assets and end-user data are privately controlled, and strong security for assets can be achieved by using multiple signing keys across several parties
- Policy rules about the movement of assets can be enforced programmatically — whether those are “terms and conditions” or regulatory requirements
- Assets are fungible and play nice together — e.g., you can use reward points to buy mobile minutes
- A single transaction can include multiple entities and assets, on both sides of the transaction — e.g., you could execute a merger of two companies in a single transaction, with the inputs to the transaction being all stockholders across all share classes for both companies, and the outputs being all the newco shares going to all the new stockholders (again, no escrow service needed)
- Every transaction is added to an immutable record which, while anonymous, can be used to construct a perfect audit trail of an asset’s movement when combined with the private data held by the entities using the system — this defends against fraud, and also gives issuers transparency into asset movements
- It’s easy to integrate new parties
- Like the Internet itself, it’s a global system
Worth a read: https://blog.chain.com/wall-street-meet-block-chain-b2747909...
Well, no they aren't, because they're proposals.
You don't want that. So we're at a bit of an impasse.
Distributed systems these days mostly argue that you do your trusting up front, outside of the protocol itself. You then validate that the actors share the secrets you all agreed upon, and then optimize the agreement process. Only the most robust systems actually consider "active" dissent; most distributed systems engineers consider this a special case that is most often focused on the idea of "incorrectness" as opposed to "maliciousness."
You can see elements of these assumptions in more modern data structures used for eventual consistency, like CRDTs. CRDTs are amazing and fast and often abstract-able to a trivial programming model. Anyone can use them, but they have to be monotonic, so we can't ever forget bad input, just try and cancel it out.
That's not really what I meant by "bad". I meant bad as in intent, not structural and immediately verifiable message integrity.
If all entities in the coalescing set can independently verify that a message does not meet its signature requirements, it will be rejected and idempotence is maintained.
If ONE member is somehow deceived about key validity it'll propagate the message into every other member's state, eventually.
Does it solve the problem? Or did it just make a step in the right direction?
A hard proof of work algorithm is required for decentralized coin chains to work. Otherwise it would be easy to create a denial of service attack by rogue agents filling up your blockchain with worthless blocks.
By carefully attacking the network links between miners, someone can significantly extend the amount of time that an attack can take place in. These attacks are expensive, but orthogonal to any PoW algorithm.
Then the problem transforms into: "can I trigger enough small pluralities of miners to split and form opposing but equally long viewpoints?" The only resolution to such a scenairo is to discard most of the divergent blockchains arbitrarily by human consensus.
Beyond this: https://www.coindesk.com/carbon-footprint-bitcoin/
Which is sort of unvalidated and points to one or two actors in the space suggesting that they want to move to non-fossil fuels and one that miiiiight be.
http://technode.com/2017/02/27/bitcoin-mining-sichuan-cheap-... https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/in-chinas-...
Of course, there is also cheap coal power in China, so the environmental impact may be very significant.
Going forward, I anticipate the rise of solar mining in some favorable areas. Possibly geothermal as well. Since Bitcoin mining can be done anywhere with decent internet access, it seems natural that it should gravitate toward renewables over time. Fossil fuels continue to get more expensive, while renewables get cheaper. Of course, building e.g. solar panels isn't without environmental impact, either.
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/bitmain-reveals-plans-f...
(was planned then, I believe it's in service now)
I can't disagree too much about the immaturity, but you don't see too much more of that in the deeper technical circles than you might see on the Linux mailing list. Room for improvement? Plenty. But it's also not grossly out of line as long as you are in the right places.
The 'unwelcoming' bit though is more justified. Blockchain design is like cryptography - security is very important, and one tiny mistake means that your design is completely unviable. And if that tiny mistake occurred early in your design process, it may be too deep to be easily routed around.
Designing secure blockchains is very hard. As a result, the first year or so you try to improve on blockchain systems you usually end up with a bunch of broken stuff that nobody appreciates at all. The same is true if you are trying to make a better hashing algorithm, or doing quantum resistant cryptography. Except with blockchains people haven't learned to expect it to be this difficult to innovate yet, so it feels a lot more hostile.
That will fix with time. As more things blow up in production, people are realizing more and more that blockchains are tricky, and that good designs take a lot of expertise, a lot of collaboration, and are very rare. That will make it seem less unwelcoming when your intro to blockchains is 'well, this thing you are proposing doesn't work for at least 10 reasons, and here they are...'
It's a frustrating community to engage with because it has redefined a lot of longstanding terms to (in my opinion) make itself look better and smarter. It also is a constant roiling tempest of non-self-reliant-but-fantastically-dedicated-to-anarcho-capitalists-type folks, which can be terribly tedious to deal with.
For example, ask a btc engineer if they have byzantine fault tolerance. Then ask anyone else. Ask them if they have eventual consistency. Then ask anyone else.
So it's just your typical programming sub-field? (Alan Kay would say: "Field.")
In part because bitcoin is a technology that so many people ascribe political superpowers to. This brings in a lot of people that normally don't push deeply into a high-complexity tech field.
Isn't that one of the reasons blockchain came to existence?
I know you aren't using that in the same context, it just sounded funny in my head :)
Yeah I sent my first emails to a system that connected to neighboring systems via modem at a pre determined time to ftp mail bundles around.
The problem it seems to me is that, although the idea of trustless systems seem really cool and applicable to a lot of domains, it turns out that there are actually way fewer useful applications than people originally thought. But no one is letting go, and a lot of people are wrongly convincing themselves and others that most systems are better off trustless.
It's the same reason that Ford doesn't build a tunnel under the US/Mexico border to ferry car parts to America.
"Let me explain why. In economic organization, we must distinguish between enforcing rules and making rules. Laws are rules enforced by state bureaucracy and made by a legislature. The SWIFT Protocol is a set of rules enforced by SWIFTNet (a centralized computational system) and made, ultimately, by SWIFT’s Board of Directors. The Bitcoin Protocol is a set of rules enforced by the Bitcoin Network (a distributed network of computers) made by — whom exactly? Who makes the rules matters at least as much as who enforces them. Blockchain technology may provide for completely impartial rule-enforcement, but that is of little comfort if the rules themselves are changed. This rule-making is what we refer to as governance."
Bitcoin and Blockchains are an opt-in rule system. You literally subscribe to the rule set (called consensus) that you wish to participate in. No one coerces you into participating in a rule system you do not want to participate it.
Your capitalist||socialist country is invaded by socialist||capitalists and they change the rules of your country's bank? Your blockchain doesn't care, it is enforced at the user level, at the edge.
>either you follow the fork supported by the majority [...], or you run the risk of finding your coins worthless
Any thing is only worth what others will pay for it. This is the case regardless if you are using a blockchain or not. If the world suddenly decided USD were worthless and you held lots of USD, yes you would find that your USD are now worthless.
There are so many examples, from Canadian Tire Money https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Tire_money to Microsoft Points https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Points showing you can create private currencies granting the bearer certain privileges without a blockchain.
Massive institutions with billions of dollars at stake would rather have a predictable and stable regulatory regime to conduct transactions in the shadow of then to rely on a technical solution that supposedly obviates the need for one. Things come up -- bugs, acts of god, internal fraud, hacking, flash crashes, and so forth and so on. They want to be able to go to arbitrator and ask for a sensible and reasonable result and not be reliant on a totally inflexible mechanical rule set. Not the least of which because they can afford the very best lawyers to try to convince those arbitrators that what they want is sensible and reasonable.
With a technology like bitcoin, where receivers are pseudononymous, that would have never been possible.
Noone except for those who wish to remain pseudononymous will ever use bitcoin for any real-world scenarios. The costs are higher, the risks are higher, it doesn't scale, there are no checks and balances.
I don't want bitcoin for the same reason I don't want an AI to run national defenses.
That's a lot of energy going into a system that can commit a new block of transactions once every 10 minutes on average. It solves a problem in an interesting way, but it's nowhere near quick enough or efficient enough to solve 99% of engineering problems. That's why only 1% of engineers are working on it.
What have you found that is cheaper to proof-of-work that works on a global system?[1]
[1] "Nothing is Cheaper than Proof of Work" http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/
Cryptocurrency is backed entirely by free market incentives. You can fight the market if you want, but you will lose.
Maybe there's a happy medium where trustworthiness of central authorities is appropriately distributed, but common operations are quicker and less wasteful.
Centralized authority isn't cheaper. It trades proof of work for violence or denial of liberty.
Correct or not, your point is orthogonal to the issue mentioned.
Heck, everywhere you look there's a solution to the trust problem; it's fundamental to human interactions.
- There are courts. If you try to screw me, I can drag you into one. Nothing's perfect and there's probably a minimum amount I'd not bother Judge Judy for, but it's a solution a LOT of people rely on. And I can tack all sorts of things on to this like warranties and insurances.
- Brands. Look, we burn all this money on getting sports stars to pose for pictures. And there's reviews of our product in papers. If we did something stupid, you'd know. Again, it ain't perfect.
- Escrow. Don't trust me? Trust this guy.
What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.I’m working on this. It’s an implementation of a protocol called Stroem, which uses payment channels to transfer bitcoins from consumers to so-called issuers, who issue payments in exchange which consumers then send to merchants. Then merchants collect these off-chain payments from issuers, and redeem them into bitcoins on the blockchain when they wish.
This system compromises with the security of the payment receivers only (the merchants). Everything is trustlessness for the payment sender/consumer, while merchants need to trust issuers. But, if desired, the merchant-issuer trust can be reduced to almost nothing by the merchant redeeming very often (at the cost of higher fees).
And, importantly, the open nature of the protocol will ensure competition between issuers, since anyone can join the network.
Visa, MasterCard, AmEX, &c along with each individual bank, not to mention the intermediaries and gateways all of them use also consume a tremendous amount of power. It's not as if our current system uses a negligible amount of power, not to mention the number of steps and entities a transaction needs in order to be finalized.
The person I replied to compalined about "wasting" power to run the bitcoin network. It's only a valid comparison when compared against current usage, as our current system also "wastes" power to run the current system.
> PoW incentivizes miners to use as much power as possible because that is a necessary requirement for increasing hash output.
It also incentives them to get the most performance per Watt. I'm just saying it's meaningless to complain that bitcoin uses power, it only matters how it compares to the current system.
No, even if "the current system" was an apt comparison, there is still a fundamental difference between PoW and everything else. The power consumed in the process of facilitating a bank or any type of business is incidental to the useful work being performed. Power is burned so there are lights for people to see, power is burned so computers can perform calculations so that employees can get their jobs done faster, power is burned so that people can go back home after their shift is over; all this is incidental, the power is expended to make the business process more efficient, but the business could still run (though much less efficiently) without spending power on lights, computers and transportation. On the other hand, PoW is literally a waste of work because the nature of the work itself does not matter, the only thing that matters is that the unbounded cost of wasting energy keeps everyone honest.
> I'm just saying it's meaningless to complain that bitcoin uses power, it only matters how it compares to the current system.
The comparison is meaningless because "the current system" continues to exist regardless of any developments in bitcoin, if anything ubiquitous bitcoin would almost certainly increase the power impact of the finance industry.
If you raise the block size to put more transactions into a single block, you will end up with a normal banking system because nobody can carry the whole blockchain with them to pay and has to trust providers that manage wallets.
But is it more or less than the equivalent amount of power it would take for Bitcoin (or something like it) to scale to Visa, MC, AMEX, etc. global levels?
Our current system does in fact use a negligible amount of power. Each $2 latte you put on a credit card uses an amount of electricity so infinitesimal that it can only be measured in the aggregate.
The percentage of the power used to generate a single bitcoin block for a single transaction can power an average US household for (approximately) an entire week.
To put it in perspective: If the bitcoin network scaled up to the size of the VISA network it would require 100% of all energy used for all purposes planet-wide, from transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, etc. Everything you could possibly want to buy with bitcoin would be unavailable, as 100% of all human activity would go to powering the miners.
Those costs specifically end up being reified in the fee those processors charge to their customers, so we can determine an upper limit to how much is spent on energy in that way.
We don't really know the relationship between transaction rate and electrical usage in a mature BTC system, because mining is mainly used to prevent double-spends and the minimum required mining rate to support a given transaction rate is a game-theoretical concern and not a technical one. We can only really observe what has happened so far in the Bitcoin ecosystem.
Otherwise there will be a point where it is cost effective to attack the network.
Bitcoin is designed to be wasteful.
"I'm working on these hashes. You know I'm not taking a shortcut, because there's not yet a known way to do that with this secure hash. And because you know I'm doing the work, you should reward me with some coins."
Alternatives have been considered, like proof-of-stake.
Bitcoin network scaling has to do with transactions per second, and it is a protocol problem, and an storage problem, but it is independent of the hash capacity of the system.
We can theoretically improve the Bitcoin network capacity to handle 100x the number of transactions, while having the same hash rate.
In fact, if hash rate were halved each month, and the protocol unchanged, Bitcoin network transaction capacity would still be the same after Bitcoin difficulty is auto adjusted.
Hash rate and transaction capacity are orthogonal issues.
Now if you want a system used by 0.01% of the global population then that's a very different problem, but far less useful.
Also, everything is done via two-way payment channels in LN, which means that you need to lock X BTC in a channel in order to send it, which becomes very capital intensive for nodes close to merchants who need to lock millions of dollars worth of bitcoins to cover merchants’ monthly turnover (this is in addition to the BTC locked up by other nodes who participate in the transfer but are not directly connected to merchants). If you want to send 0.1 BTC through 10 nodes, each of these 10 nodes must have locked up 0.1 BTC on the blockchain, and you’ll pay blockchain fees if just a single channel/node in your path doesn’t have at least as much as you need to send.
A proper payment network needs two different types of nodes: senders and receivers. Using a single type of node for both doesn’t make much sense, since merchants and consumers have completely different needs. Senders need to be able to send relatively small amounts relatively frequently (a consumer making a few purchases per day), while receivers (merchants) need to redeem relatively large amounts (e.g. one week’s worth of payments) relatively rarely for bitcoins (on the blockchain).
https://medium.com/@jonaldfyookball/mathematical-proof-that-...
This is unsupported. LN is a research project, not a production-ready payment system. It has plenty of limitations (trustlessness is a huge limitation), and the topology of the network doesn’t match that of a real economy (routes to fellow consumers are practically useless, since everyone wants to pay merchants). There’s plenty of work left before LN can scale properly, if it ever manages to (again, trustlessness for both senders and receivers is setting the bar as high as it can possibly go).
Scalability is secondondary for LN, trustlessness is primary. Due to this choice I predict difficulty in scaling sufficiently.
PS: USD actually operate on a 3 tiered system that works well (Fed, Banks, cash) but doing the same thing in a *coin seems like just giving up.
What do you mean by this, exactly? Bitcoin miners look more than willing to earn money on brute forcing hard problems.
The point of proof-of-work is that it shouldn’t matter what anyone thinks about it. It’s basically impossible to ban (anyone can do a SHA256 calculation), and the difficulty automatically adjusts. In addition to this, the block reward — currently 12.5 BTC per block — halves every ~4 years, so less and less electricity will be consumed until only transaction fees provide capital for proof-of-work[1].
[1] http://www.bitcoinnotbombs.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/37...
Furthermore, the miners are here for the direct mining rewards. I think the future transaction fees approach will be significantly less attractive, so I'll be very interested to see how that change plays out once the era of rewarded mining is over.
How does that stop governments from engaging in Iran-Contra behavior?
How is that better than a government mandate requiring a list of expenditures PGP-signed by the government and their vendors?
I just have a well-paying job and I don't see any opportunities lucrative enough for me to jump away. Why? Bitcoin is an experiment. Reading through the paper, Bitcoin does not scale to general purpose commerce. All of the other technology appears to be "me too." When I first heard about Etherium, the bullshit smelt so bad that I couldn't even look at the paper.
What will get me really interested? Pay me to implement a real-world use case that fits the scalability constrains of blockchain. This isn't things like general-purpose currency, or general-purpose contracts. Someone needs to pay me to implement something that requires blockchain; instead of someone paying me to implement a blockchain and then going and finding a use for it.
Blockchain: Useful where there are groups of actors, (people, countries, companies, ect,) of a large but limited size, incomplete trust, and limited exchanges. (For example, a group of 1000) A blockchain could be used to publish who owns an asset; as long as the blockchain technology can scale to the number of assets, number of owners, and number of transactions that occur. The actors need to have sufficient motivation to provide the computing power to run the blockchain; otherwise, it makes a lot more sense to just pay a private clearinghouse.
The problem with "blockchain" is that every computer in the network has to keep a complete copy of the ledger. Useful in the above examples, but this is also highly limiting to scalability, which leads to...
Blockchain-like: I think "blockchain" will lead to blockchain-like technologies where every computer doesn't have to keep an entire copy of the ledger. Instead, the graph of computers allows for searching publicly published knowledge, and participants are encouraged to preserve facts that are in their best interest. This allows for much higher scalability because computers in the network can merely ignore most transactions. If you are a small player in the network, you might pay a larger player to monitor the network and provide you with search.
paxos.com == pets.com of blockchain Ah, feels like it is 1999 all over again. To the moon!
It's difficult to find something that requires a blockchain, because the unique distinguishing feature of blockchains is the lack of any trusted central authority.
If you have a trusted authority, then you can do anonymous currency, money transfers, smart contracts, or anything similar 1000x more efficiently with a single server, an API, and some backend logic. All the distributed effort goes into making these possible at all without any central authority who can ban or filter transactions.
And for most real-world projects, having a government agency or tech company working as the trusted authority works just fine. It's only shady to illegal businesses where the lack of one is required.
I still believe that problem will come up, and/or we'll see technologies that borrow concepts from blockchain without being true "blockchain."
The blockchain comes as the refactoring of this legacy system.
That would require those who are arguing for "blockchain technology" to admit that they are Bitcoin poor and would rather talk than trade.
When you have a general purpose globally consistent distributed database, many of the problems that look like blockchain algorithm problems turn out to be standard application programming tasks. Eg a distributed ledger is just a table in a distributed database.
[1] https://fauna.com/blog/distributed-consistency-at-scale-span...
TL;DR, it's gonna take a real long time to make blockchain useful, if it even is.
Further, I have yet to see a real production application of blockchain that isn't a crypto-currency. Everyone and their grandmothers has invested in it, or started a company or w/e. But has it actually been used to solve another problem? Blockchain was the SOLUTION to the PROBLEM of how do I make a cryptocurrency. It now seems that some folks are trying to make a PROBLEM out of a SOLUTION in every other domain.
Maersk is interested http://fortune.com/2017/03/05/maersk-tests-blockchain-based-...
Makes some sense freight shipments involve a lot of parties who don't completely trust one another, and they've got a lot of information to move back and forth between one another.
customs agents don't trust shipping companies, shipping companies don't trust their customers, shipping companies might trust most customs agents in western countries but they operate everywhere, and there are, as i understand it, a number of other middle-men involved in the process, who probably aren't trusted much either.
i don't see how a privately operated database would solve any of the problems, or appear more secure to the folks not running the database. (certainly it would be cheaper.)
Sorry, I just don't see that. There's laws, governments, clearing houses that have allowed untrustworthy parties to work together for... ever. And if they need a database, surely there's going to be a more pragmatic solution?
In this case, all the parties are well identified, so if a new node appears, it can simply be rejected by the existing participants. So there's no need for PoW, all you need is for companies to sign and publish documents to each other. The only possible fraud is publishing different documents to different parties, but that's easily fixable by having the nodes confirm each others' documents.
So yeah, that's just a signed ledger. All invoicing programs in my country had that before Bitcoin even appeared, as part of the SAF-T standard (mandated by our tax authority). It's nothing new.
If you are happy to have a trusted authority, then timestamp servers have been around since the dawn of PKI
Do
- Bitcache (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcache) - in development
- Namecoin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namecoin)
- Steemit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steemit)
- Synereo (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synereo)
count? I know, formally these can be considered as a cryptocurrencies, but I would not consider this as the central purpose of existence.
...but it's not true that nobody's working on it: quietly, Serious Engineers(tm) working for blockchain companies and you can expect big improvements in the next few years.
This rant is nearly isomorphic to the whining in the early 90s by the academics and SunRPC & CORBA fanboys vs HTTP and HTML, which its insane parsing and communications overhead. Serious Engineers(tm) showed up, made the early web work, it took off, and... you don't see many HN job posts asking for CORBA engineers.
As with the web, blockchains are exciting because they're a 'looser' and more open protocol than other systems.
Edit: not to mention that mining is an incredible waste of time and energy that can instead be put to good use.
The bit Git doesn't do: distributed consensus via Proof of Work, because it turns out that a bit of trust is fabulously more efficient.
I predict any good and useful product labeled "Blockchain" will be the cryptographically tamper-evident ledger of transactions, and not any of the stuff that makes a blockchain different to Git.
(Researching the book, I had one developer admit that his "blockchain product" was pretty much a simplified Git in terms of what it offered ;-) )
I'd be interested in working with large and boring financial institutions on those sorts of projects, because they don't offer the failure modes as above.
If we had discussed proof of stake or theorized about how some of these other hurdles like transaction rate could be leaped then sure. Otherwise it's just a list of things any distributed system has to solve for, demonstration that blockchain solves for them (inefficiently) with the undertone of "I bought in on the hype, and you can too".
Why would a distributed systems engineer work on what amounts to a really shitty database?
We live in a world where most current and future performance benefits come from understanding how to program both parallel and distributed algorithms in an age where almost everyone is either a single-threaded Java or Python programmer relying on OSS frameworks and packages to do the distributed dirty work for them.
And that's made it nearly free beer right now to have gone against the above curve and stayed current on C++ and multi-core/distributed algorithms so one can build those frameworks and packages. That will probably change now that GPUs are a hot commodity as opposed to nerdy gamer stuff, but chance favored the minority of prepared programmers here.
Further, I have zero interest in the blockchain. There's interesting technology there, but it is of zero use to me or any of my life goals. Also the hucksters and low-information sorts trying to make me believe I can't live without it are driving me even further away from it.
And before you downvote me for negativity, this thread did ask why distributed system engineers aren't interesting in this, yes?
I think it's funny the author chose to center the article around that assumption. IMO most engineers related to distributed computing (not necessarily themselves distributed systems engineers) are actually quite aware of the technology and many of the challenges.
Maybe instead of asking this, we should ask the cryptocurrency enthusiasts what area of technology won't be dropped-and-replaced by blockchains, because so far it seems apparently applicable to every single use case in every single industry... By the way, did you guys hear this thing is an immutable ledger?
There is very little overlap between cryptocurrency enthusiasts and those who think blockchain technology will take over everything.
Do you really believe that? Because from the outside, it seems that the only people talking about "blockchain technology" are those who have a significant amount of money invested in it.
This article is a blockchain banking service saying, "hey, other people should use this solve-all technology that is definitely the future too!"
The people who are into "blockchain banking" are not actually into cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency is about decentralised, trustless, permissionless, peer-to-peer networks. "Blockchain all the things" is decidedly not.
I acknowledge that this can be hard to see from the outside.
Edit: And at risk of "no true Scotsman"... the people talking about "blockchain technology" are not cryptocurrency enthusiasts.
The "killer app" of Blockchains are the trustless nature of the system. In most practical application, allowing actors without a trust relationship to interact with the log is not a significant requirement of the system. Once you remove that requirement, there are technically superior approaches to maintaining a ledger.
Happy to learn about any counterexamples and use-cases for those.
In essence, it can be used as a versioning + signing mechanism for a shared database that ensures authenticity and non-repudiation even in the absence of trust.
In other words, something like http://ledger-cli.org/ stored in a git repository with some input validation and signed commits would suffice.
Proponents call this "blockchain technology" because it sounds advanced. They can because nobody has a definition of what "blockchain technology" is. In my mind, if it could have been designed by any competent engineer prior to Bitcoin, then it isn't "blockchain technology". But that's just me.
If anyone could point to me what's the name for this fallacy. Lile when you ask a question that tricks people in assuming the premise.
The cynic in me thinks "it's a scheme by oligarchs and tyrants to get rid of troublesome /fully anonymous/ cash sold as a utopian scheme to those who are motivated by the promise of a quick rich scheme."