Comment by gwbas1c | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gwbas1c | Hacker News Reader

I work in distributed systems, and I consider blockchain very interesting. It's so interesting I click on a lot of links on Hacker News, and sometimes I take an afternoon on a weekend or vacation to read through some of the papers.

I just have a well-paying job and I don't see any opportunities lucrative enough for me to jump away. Why? Bitcoin is an experiment. Reading through the paper, Bitcoin does not scale to general purpose commerce. All of the other technology appears to be "me too." When I first heard about Etherium, the bullshit smelt so bad that I couldn't even look at the paper.

What will get me really interested? Pay me to implement a real-world use case that fits the scalability constrains of blockchain. This isn't things like general-purpose currency, or general-purpose contracts. Someone needs to pay me to implement something that requires blockchain; instead of someone paying me to implement a blockchain and then going and finding a use for it.

> Someone needs to pay me to implement something that requires blockchain

It's difficult to find something that requires a blockchain, because the unique distinguishing feature of blockchains is the lack of any trusted central authority.

If you have a trusted authority, then you can do anonymous currency, money transfers, smart contracts, or anything similar 1000x more efficiently with a single server, an API, and some backend logic. All the distributed effort goes into making these possible at all without any central authority who can ban or filter transactions.

And for most real-world projects, having a government agency or tech company working as the trusted authority works just fine. It's only shady to illegal businesses where the lack of one is required.

Which makes it look like blockchain is a solution looking for a problem.

I still believe that problem will come up, and/or we'll see technologies that borrow concepts from blockchain without being true "blockchain."

The problem exists for ages, from a libertarian point of view: the govs as oppressing power and the tax as a "legalised" theft mechanism to sustain only a few in power. And all related issues that come from it: corruption, lack of transparency and bureaucracy to name only a few.

The blockchain comes as the refactoring of this legacy system.

As a "coincidence", these guys are hiring. Although, it doesn't look like folks working there [0] will be able to explain meaning of "paxos" in their domain name

paxos.com == pets.com of blockchain Ah, feels like it is 1999 all over again. To the moon!

[0] https://www.paxos.com/our-team

>Someone needs to pay me to implement something that requires blockchain; instead of someone paying me to implement a blockchain and then going and finding a use for it.

That would require those who are arguing for "blockchain technology" to admit that they are Bitcoin poor and would rather talk than trade.

What are the real uses for blockchain you could see?

I see it going in two different directions:

Blockchain: Useful where there are groups of actors, (people, countries, companies, ect,) of a large but limited size, incomplete trust, and limited exchanges. (For example, a group of 1000) A blockchain could be used to publish who owns an asset; as long as the blockchain technology can scale to the number of assets, number of owners, and number of transactions that occur. The actors need to have sufficient motivation to provide the computing power to run the blockchain; otherwise, it makes a lot more sense to just pay a private clearinghouse.

The problem with "blockchain" is that every computer in the network has to keep a complete copy of the ledger. Useful in the above examples, but this is also highly limiting to scalability, which leads to...

Blockchain-like: I think "blockchain" will lead to blockchain-like technologies where every computer doesn't have to keep an entire copy of the ledger. Instead, the graph of computers allows for searching publicly published knowledge, and participants are encouraged to preserve facts that are in their best interest. This allows for much higher scalability because computers in the network can merely ignore most transactions. If you are a small player in the network, you might pay a larger player to monitor the network and provide you with search.

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