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Thank you for being a voice of reason in a domain that has increasingly become overrun by frauds and zealots.

As someone who has been involved in blockchain research since 2011, it’s sad to see a promising technology (in limited use cases) turn into a buzzword thrown around by the many speculators and scam artists peddling vaporware and pumping crypto prices.

Yup: it's the Big Data hype train of 2013/2014 re-liveried and stopping soon at a station near you.

According to Gartner, blockchain has just passed the "Peak of Inflated Expectations". Next phase is "Trough of Disillusionnment".

http://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/top-trends-in-the-...

This one is funny. While cryptocurrency gets most of the brickbats around here on HN, I think Deep Learning is also in the same boat.

Executives want to apply Deep Learning to everything and anything they can get their hands on. The results most of the time are underwhelming and could be had with a much simpler set of tools. Just wondering how long before Deep Learning goes into trough of disillusionment.

On the job I have to constantly shoot down big data / data mining / intelligent nn analysis crapware showeled to my bosses, and 99% of the time the answer is “you got NO data to speak of”

One day a consultant or another yesman will be able to check in and syphon precious resources with their pipe dream and I’ll watch six figures fly out of the window while my dev team struggles debugging simulated ipads with mac minis.

We're in an industry ten years behind so we're just getting into Big Data. Obviously the issue that we can't write working normal software hasn't been addressed but we'll see how it goes. I'm actually relatively optimistic.

Take a step back and look at your work conditions. Maybe you should become the consultant in that story.

No thanks will not be able to sleep at night doing that line of work (not consultancy in general, just the overselling and running with the money bit)

> One day a consultant or another yesman will be able to check in and syphon precious resources with their pipe dream and I’ll watch six figures fly out of the window while my dev team struggles debugging simulated ipads with mac minis.

Six figures? Oh sweet summer child. :)

First you'll need to burn seven figures to have a Big 3 advise your leadership that you need this tech. Then you burn the six figures implementing it with a lower tier firm.

brick·bat ˈbrikˌbat noun plural noun: brickbats a piece of brick, typically when used as a weapon. a remark or comment which is highly critical and typically insulting. "the plaudits were beginning to outnumber the brickbats"

My WotD

Mine too: I'd never heard it before and had to look it up. Now I'm just lying in wait for an opportunity to use it.

It feels like lately bots and AI are the biggest hype-train. Everybody wants bots. Bots for this, and bots for that. With natural language processing bolted on somehow.

Got a simple, defined flow that could just be a decision tree? Nope, we need natural language processing in a chatbot, we can't possibly present a menu.

I feel like I'm fighting the Infocom parser again.

Very interesting chart.

Indeed. Google "Gartner Hype Cycle" followed by the year to get a sense of the evolution of the different hype cycles.

I still remember my manager getting very excited about XBRL in 2007.

Taking over the VR hype train on the way, passing by the wreck of the 3D TV hype train, and competing with the AI hype train.

>it’s sad to see a promising technology (in limited use cases) turn into a buzzword

The same thing happened to REST. Every "web interface" is supposedly REST now, yet the client and server are even more coupled than they would have been if the interface were implemented in SOAP!

Yes REST tends to mean "web API you don't hate" or "web API written less than 5 years ago" and is heading towards just meaning "web API".

And here I thought I was the lone voice in the wilderness. From Roy Fielding's original paper:

The client-stateless-server style derives from client-server with the additional constraint that no session state is allowed on the server component. Each request from client to server must contain all of the information necessary to understand the request, and cannot take advantage of any stored context on the server. Session state is kept entirely on the client

I've heard enough verbal gymnastics to fill a book trying to excuse how modern web apps aren't violating this condition.

Not alone. I find the problem most people have is no suitable example they can think of. The examples we have online are "starbucks as REST", etc. A better example is the greatest REST client ever made: the web browser. When Facebook updates their "app", I don't even need to restart my "client" to get the updated features. These days I start all "REST: you're doing it wrong" conversations with this.

It's an industry cycle. 15 years ago it was "XML all the things!"

The tech isn't going to die, it's just not going to change the world in any sexy way.

Maersk is using it for something as boring as secure claims for containers to fight corruption in shipping.

In government we're looking into running things like the land ownership registry and other public records on the tech. Not because it's hip, but because it'll save employee resources when we have to perform less audits, and because it'll speed response times.

Property title, availability of airspace, really any complex system that requires mutual cooperation (or at least awareness) could benefit from uniform distributed ledger technology.

How would blockchains help with property title management?

For a comprehensive answer see Avi Spielman's thesis, in "Blockchain: Digitally Rebuilding the Real Estate Industry"

"The research to date leads to the following conclusions: A blockchain title recording system is the future of title record keeping and would provide immediate benefits over the current title recording system, with additional benefits accruing in the future as blockchain technology grows in acceptance. However, at the moment, these benefits do not yet outweigh the costs and challenges associated with implementing a prototype blockchain title registry system in Davidson County, or elsewhere in the country. That being said, steps can, and should be taken now to lay the foundation for a blockchain system."

dci.mit.edu/assets/papers/spielman_thesis.pdfdci.mit.edu/assets/papers/spielman_thesis.pdf

I can't find an explanation in your excerpt nor in the paper that gives specific details as to how the blockchain is uniquely beneficial for property title management. I see some examples of how certain qualities of the blockchain could be beneficial, (e.g. property owners being identified by a private key), but you don't need a blockchain to get any of those benefits.

During the subprime crisis there were reports of loans which had been flipped so many times that the chain of title could not be determined.

A blockchain is needed to solve this problem though.

can you link any property title stuff? do you mean commercial residential or both?

Sorry just seeing this now. Both, actually.

Avi Spielman, in "Blockchain: Digitally Rebuilding the Real Estate Industry" does a terrific job addressing and exploring "aspect(s)- recording property titles- by comparing the benefits and limitations of a blockchain with those of the current record keeping system."

dci.mit.edu/assets/papers/spielman_thesis.pdfdci.mit.edu/assets/papers/spielman_thesis.pdf

Aren't these already solved though?

And to the horror of most crypto-currencies enthusiasts, blockchain will likely end up being used as a tool just like SQL servers and distributed clusters, by large companies and governments instead of being the instrument of challenge to these established entities.

This progression already seems to be occurring. Recently the CEO of JP Morgan even derided Bitcoin as a scam, while JP Morgan promotes its own internally-developed blockchain Quorum.

Now why would a major financial entity want you to think external decentralized technologies are scams, and their in-house solution is fine and legitimate and secure.

Well done for sticking up for reason. I first got involved in Bitcoin in early 2011, but left the whole scene in 2015 because of the dwindling number of serious programmers and innovators and the increasing number of fraudsters and "marketers".

Like you say, there are some incredibly innovative uses for the blockchain (another excellent one is claiming and tracking digital works of art like visual arts and music), but using the blockchain as a simple database replacement is ludicrous.

The tech media (and tech startups) has this bad habit of hyping up technologies before they're ready for prime time.

They did it with 3D printing, they did it with VR, and now they're doing it with blockchain.

As well as deep learning and AI.

They did appending 'Cloud' to everything too.

To be fair, most things are moving to cloud. There is just no hype around it anymore because it is considered standard practice now.

The sceptics in the shipping industry are plenty as well, though. And it has been awfully quite around that pilot. Many wonder if the real challenge is really trust or not just incompatible data formats and plenty of non-digitized data...

Back in 2000 I was on a team of eight, digitising a freight system. (Handling about 50% IIRC of all foreign air freight to and from Sweden.)

For a "parcel" of goods, I counted 17 paper copies of the same shipping form, being sent to and fro. Back then IATA also used a custom text field format instead of a standard XML format I think they use now.

So while this was a long time ago, I too expect shipping to be fraught with lots of weird edge cases.

> incompatible data formats and plenty of non-digitized data

This is exactly what many with a cursory knowledge seem to think a blockchain will solve. Unfortunately, these are generally challenges people have to talk about and resolve via mutual agreement and compromise; you can't simply throw code at the issue.

Nah, those bad uses won't kill the tech, but the bubble will burst. But yes, I also notice a lot of companies that are riding the blockchain train in scenarios where a central server would be fine, and all they'll end up with is a needlessly complicated solution to their problem.

If you don't mind expanding a bit, could you give some examples of areas where you think it has potential - I'm not really clued in enough at the moment to distinguish between real possibilities and snake-oil.

In the long run, countries which have fast tech adoption and strong logistic infrastructure will probably be the ones that will advance the field the fastest. It's exciting technology, but I so far don't see a lot of people using it in a practical way. We may be seeing China as the forerunner of blockchain technology, since there's immediate business advantages for their (enormous) manufacturing and logistics setup.

A lie has short legs: if you dive into private blockchain projects you will realize they are mostly proof of concepts.

This is not to say that ideas behind consensus, security, and smart contracts are not useful but you need to start with a concrete problem instead of adapting a fixed solution.

Having said this, it is interesting to explore a pluggable way to make agreements between parties and follow defined workflows for interoperability. The main barrier with implementing this idea is not technical but political since it is difficult to create agreements about this architecture between companies (e.g. banks).

Thank you for your comment. What you said is the best balance I’ve found of how bitcoin (and in my opinion also AI) is a really really really cool technology with a lot of potential, but also a complete scam.

There's an easy way to not be frustrated: just buy Bitcoin independently from what you're working on. If you understand what that means to own BTC 10 years from now, you know that malinvestments won't get you frustrated.

Most of the future btc value is already inflating the current currency value.

And there’s still the risk of a crash and switch in that long of a timeframe.

I bet there’s more money to be had at cryptocurrency arbitrage

there sure is. but the marketplaces are so slow and fragile it's essentially impossible (aka too indeterministic/risky)

Shipping is a really interesting application I had never really considered! That seems like a perfect fit, like you say.

Is provenance in general a good usecase? e.g. chain of custody for evidence / drug testing / food labelling?

Isn't that main goal of Chain Link?

https://link.smartcontract.com

Still off of that project? Or did they actually admit it to you?