‘Blockchain’ is meaningless
theverge.com
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AI has forever had buzzword-complaint terms. Consider "Agent", which describes a very specific thing (namely autonomy), but that didn't stop everyone and their dog outside the field from calling their software a "database agent" or a "compiler agent" or whatnot, equating "agent" with "program". Indeed there's an entire non-AI field called "Agent Based Modeling" -- of which I am a participant -- which completely misunderstands the term. So AI gave up and switched to "Intelligent Agent", which was unfortunately an even more buzzword-compliant word. Now we started seeing "intelligent graphics agent" or "intelligent login page agent". Finally in the late '90s AI moved to "Autonomous Agent", a word straight from the Department of Redundancy Department. But it worked! Nobody outside of AI seems to use it: my theory is that most people don't really know exactly what autonomous means.
- ATMs
- eCommerce
- Foreign intelligence and signals
or any other similar field where crypto is essential started calling themselves 'crypto'. Yes, these field use crypto, but no, they're not crypto. Just like cryptocurrencies aren't crypto.
This is crytpo: https://cr.yp.to
This is crypto: https://crypto.stackexchange.com/.
Things that use crypto are not crypto.
Nuclear. Hacker. Patriot. Rubber. The audience matters. Besides, I doubt that any cryptanalyst would mind writing out cryptography any more than they'd mind writing out TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_GCM_SHA256.
And yes, words change over time, but in that case I can just refer to (all) cryptocurrency as 'Bitcoin' since that's the common definition. In fact it's far more popular to refer to cryptocurrency as Bitcoin than it is to call that 'crypto'. Short version: this one isn't settled yet.
How did nuclear, patriot and rubber change?
'patriot' means someone who stands for what is perceived to be American values. A missile being named after it doesn't change that.
Rubber is more interesting and perhaps a better comparison 'are you wearing a rubber?' during sex or 'when the rubber hits the road' in a speech, or 'do you have a rubber' during an exam.
So lets let's say someone says they 'specialise in rubber': it seems reasonable to believe they mean the material: they don't mean condoms or tyres or erasers.
I think that “Rubber” being used to indicate a condom is just a very plain synecdoche. All the other meanings are there, still. Plus, rubber’s main meaning is still referring to the material
It pretty much is. Cryptography is a niche of computer science and used the word for a while but now that humanity has chosen to use the word for the entire field of distributed and trustless systems it will now and forever mean "cryptocurrencies".
The larger group pretty much always wins and this case is no exception.
I feel like it almost is. Now even the non-technical crowd is amped up for cryptocurrency, and could really not care less about cryptography.
You just may not like how it settled.
It's questionable that these thing even use "crypto". Cryptocurrencies are named so because they use "cryptographic signatures". While the modular arithmetic used here is very similar to that used in "encryption", "hidden writing" doesn't take place, as the name might suggest. Signatures are more of a dual concept to cryptography than actual cryptography.
(One more note: applying a hashing algorithm may be considered "one-way encryption". In areas where this is used for signatures, an argument might be made that this is cryptography).
double-checks URL bar to make sure he is still on HN
Downvote me all you want but I think the tech sector is currently suffering a veritable Machine Learning craze.
'Autonomous' is an unusual enough word that you remember what it means (especially once you understand the 'auto' prefix), or look it up because it's strange.
'Agent' is so familiar though that I can imagine lots of people don't attach its literal meaning to it in the sense of 'having agency'. Popular uses are things like 'secret agent', 'cleaning agent'... "probably means like, 'person', or 'thing' or something".
Actually, the only problem illustrated in your complaint is that you are unaware of the meaning of the word "agent".
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/agent
Considering how the definition of "agent" is "A person or thing that takes an active role or produces a specified effect", it is quite clear that an agent isn't a program, but programs (or modules or components) are quite obviouly agents. In fact, each and every entity in a sequence diagram is an agent.
Imagine that! Could it be possible that as a native English speaker, I am entirely unaware that "agent" means something different in general English usage? :-)
Look, AI has a specific coined usage of the term. The outer computer science mis-usage is not derived from the traditional English meanings of agent at all, but rather is very intentionally derived from the AI usage to take advantage of its buzz. I'm sure you can appreciate the difference between coinage and intentional misappropriation.
A perceptron, the basic unit in a neural network, has one or more inputs, an algorithm for processing the input, and one or more outputs. Layers of perceptron are often used so that the original input gets transformed over each layer. The most common output for a neural network is a classification. The major variants of neural networks are ways a perceptron's algorithms change, the types of algorithms inside a perceptron, the number of layers and the number of inputs/outputs. Neural Networks are computationally heavy to train, but not computationally heavy to use once created. They are specifically good for working with image data.
I think the use of "neural networks" is because the topology of these deep learning networks is similar to what is observed in biological brains.
They’re about as related as genetic algorithms are to actual genetics.
The current practice has moved far from neuro-science, but I don’t think it’s pedantic when discussing machine learning to talk about “artificial neural networks” and acknowledge that neuroscience is still working on understanding the structure of brains. Some people, focused on their research, didn’t have that discretion. I wouldn’t imitate them.
Unfortunately, the word choice can lead to "they've gots em a neural networks and an AI singularities and them robots coming to take over"
Analogy is the concept in its full generality.
A mapping between concepts and relationships among concepts in one context to concepts and relationships among concepts in another context.
The only thing that is going to die for now is any trace of the idea from non-technicals is that if we throw $10mm at it, it's going to come alive.
I'm very pessimistic about blockchains but I'm not sure if they're going away or not, either. Regardless of regulation, there's a lot of people screaming about blockchains and that doesn't seem to be changing: “I believe what really happens in history is this: the old man is always wrong; and the young people are always wrong about what is wrong with him. The practical form it takes is this: that, while the old man may stand by some stupid custom, the young man always attacks it with some theory that turns out to be equally stupid.”
This was actually true before, AI has been useful, it has always gotten more useful over time, AI has always had limits, and AI winters occurred because expectations dramatically exceeded those limits. For there to be a winter/crash, hype just has to increase to a point that is way beyond what we can hope to accomplish in the near time. It doesn't help that the Chinese are taking the place of the Japanese, who in turn were a significant cause for the last AI winter.
My favorite truism that I see people spouting is that Bitcoin (or cryptocurrencies are) is worthless, but blockchain is a huge innovation.
Little do these people understand that the true innovation is Bitcoin's proof of work as a consensus mechanism with the economic incentive of mining. Most of these "blockchains" are just distributed databases, which are not trustless, decentralized etc.
I mean even the Wikipedia article on blockchain treats it this way [1], mentioning the consensus model in the initial blurb, and asserting that Satoshi invented the blockchain.
Satoshi is the first one to come up with a way to leverage PoW into a permissionless and global consensus mechanism instead of solely being a cryptoeconomic spam filter.
Do you have citation for that? Or even better, the patience to edit Wikipedia?
Each commit includes the hash of its parent commit. These commits form a chain. Changing the contents of any past commit would break the chain. Each user of the repository keeps a copy of the blockchain on their PC, and they can fetch new "blocks" from any other peer with `git fetch` or `git pull`. The consensus model is based on human review of the underlying code; humans get to decide whether to include a block in their version of the repository.
It's not the best nomenclature in the world, but that's just what it has come to mean.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain [2] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=blockcha...
Still sounds like git to me. The main difference is that Bitcoin's consensus model is fully automated, whereas git's relies on humans making decisions on which commits to include in their copy of the repo. (Though I suppose "trust" can indeed be one factor humans use when making such a decision.)
Except when it isn't. For example, the DAO "hack" resulted in humans overriding the automation to roll back history to bail out certain "investors". Or all the bitcoin forks. Or the fact that bitcoin mining is largely done by about three mining groups in China.
So Bitcoin is "trustless", but really believing in bitcoin involves every bit as much trust (or dare I say, faith) as any other thing in your life does.
> Though I suppose "trust" can indeed be one factor humans use when making such a decision.
Watching the bitcoin/blockchain hype-train has shown to me that humans require trust to thrive. To thrive you need to trust that you have a stable government, that you eat breakfast cereal doesn't contain lead, that you can walk past 99.99999% of people without getting stabbed.
Take away trust and suddenly the world get massively more expensive. Transaction costs go through the roof. You have to personally inspect every aspect of your breakfast cereal maker and all their vendors (eg: the folks that made the fertilizer used to grow the grain (don't want toxic chemicals), the hygiene of the employees operating the production line (don't want piss in your cereal),etc ). If you don't rigorously verify everything, you'll get fucked and die. In bitcoin this happens all the time - you can't trust anything in bitcoin--you can't trust your wallet maker, the printer used to print a paper wallet, the exchange you use, the software you use, the OS you run on, you can't trust any of it. Any break in the system will result in total loss of your bitcoin (and then you'll be called a moron by other bagholders because you didn't follow all 231 "simple" steps required to secure bitcoin)...
In short, society can't exist without trust. Bitcoin and the blockchain are attempts to remove the need to trust each other. The result is a cumbersome, non-scalable, deliberately inefficient design that still requires human trust to function. Which is why I personally think they are worthless technology in search of a problem. Every problem they try to solve still requires human trust, which renders their use pointless... Might as well just use git. It is far more efficient, can handle vastly more data, and doesn't require more electricity than many countries use in order to operate.
To be fair, bitcoin is only about 37 months younger than git.
Since git commits can easily be signed (and IMO should be most of the time), when I explain this I usually try to describe the consensus algorithm as being based on a set of known valid signers which I think further helps bridge the gap for people that understand "proof of authority" chains.
https://github.com/paritytech/parity/wiki/Proof-of-Authority...
Blockchain is a distributed ledger that guarantees consensus without any central party. It has many other properties, like making the transactions public in most cases, and many other important things that are different from centralized databases and non public databases we have been using for the last 30 years.
Except not even Blockchain guarantees consensus. If that was true we wouldn't see the hundreds of bitcoin forks. Let's not even forget Ethereum and Ethereum Classic. The "consensus" for ethereum was provided largely a few whales.
Blockchain doesn't guarantee consensus at all.
> It has many other properties, like making the transactions public in most cases, and many other important things that are different from centralized databases and non public databases we have been using for the last 30 years.
Setting aside your massive handwave of "many other things", your only concrete example is not at all unique to the blockchain. You can make any dataset public regardless of data structure used. Likewise nothing is stopping you from making a private blockchain (as stupid of an idea as that might be).
It's all just breathless hype. The blockchain is just a data structure similar to git only orders of magnitude less efficient by design. It's only good for operating things like Bitcoin or Ethereum. Outside of criminal use, Bitcoin has proven entirely useless in the real world. Ethereum used largely as a platform to build ICO scams.
The whole thing is a scam built on other scams. It's all souped up modern day penny stocks custom built to trick rubes into lining the pockets of a bunch of scammers.
You are deliberately torturing the word consensus just to make a straw man argument against crypto. The original Bitcoin block chain exists and everyone agrees where it is and how long it is. The fact that someone can create a copy and tinker with it with their own group of friends has no effect on the real chain. Anyone can fork it. That's not a technical limitation or flaw in any way even if you try to make it out to be.
Blockchains have solved the technical challenges of coming to consensus. They did not solve the political challenges of bringing Republicans and Democrats together in a consensus. Sorry about that. Maybe in the future.
It is hardly a straw man. Which Bitcoin blockchain fork is the "original" blockchain? Which one is the real Ethereum blockchain?
The article's premise that 'The term blockchain is misused and frequently misunderstood' (which is true) means 'Blockchain is meaningless' doesn't hold water and this is very typical for a Vox technology article.
Another example might be bit torrent. I personally wouldn't classify bit torrent as just the data structure. I would say its the data structure, the protocol and the end clients. However if someone used these technologies to create a different format and a different protocol, I wouldn't think of it as bit torrent.
That works for me.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-27/what-s-in...
https://www.investopedia.com/news/sec-may-crack-down-firms-u...
There is nothing fundamentally novel in distributed databases or their application in finance, we knew how to build "blockchains" since the 70`s. Satoshi's proof of work chains were the first anonymous implementation and that's what started the "crypto revolution".
If that is not enough to suppress your questioning of blockchain they will also roll out the commerce examples, e.g. the Walmart supply chain or whatever it is.
You will be told about some of these '541t coins' (as you call them) in venerated ways, as if the goals of their founders put the efforts of everyone from Mother Theresa to Elon Musk in the shade as far as noble ambition for humanity is concerned.
It is like they are trying to fool ninety percent of you for ninety percent of the time.
Maybe you work in some computing discipline that is tediously dull compared to the parsnip science that is blockchain. Perhaps you are a small cog in supply chain management or maybe you are at the cutting edge of some new 3D printing technology that is revolutionising something important, e.g. dentistry. Up until now you have felt that you may have been pleasing your clients and delivering value not just to your company but to the wider world. You think deeply about any conceivable way that blockchain technology could revolutionise things for you. Or maybe do what you are doing already but better because of the magic blockchain.
Even though you know your sector inside and out and your industry pretty well, your mind draws a blank. This is despite your code being used in many different parts of business applications. Your only conclusion is that there is no use whatsoever for blockchain in what you do.
The blockchain bore who has not spent 'a career' doing some useful industry thing will be able to declare that you are just not getting it. Clearly your mind is just too limited, you are old in the head and unable to grasp what blockchain is about, how it works and how it is going to change everything. If you can't even see one use with all that stuff you know and work with then clearly you have not understood what blockchain is all about.
By now you have also had time to think about the examples of blockchain use presented by the blockchain bore. With Wikileaks it was all a scam, it conveniently kicked off the Arab Spring, confirmed a few things we knew already, led to the Assange sideshow but lead to little change.
Plus how much does it really cost to host a few web pages? £200000 a year in hosting fees? What fools they were to sell their bitcoinz!
So what remains?
As you say, gambling on unregulated securities. Paying for illegal things online is the second use for the dreaded blockchain.
I mean, that's how language works, right? Words mean things at certain points of time and then over time those things sometimes change and new words appear to better distinguish between the new things. Or words get contextualized within a specific industry and take on different meanings depending on your perspective.
Such an evolution does not mean a word is "meaningless" it just indicates you'll have to provide more context in order to communicate your idea, which, again, is how language works.
> Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies have entered the mainstream discourse, but they’ve also been joined by a concept that is widely circulated, but poorly understood: “the blockchain” or just “blockchain.”
I fear they are learning...
It is very simple.
I guess you just have to read a bunch of different sources to get the full picture of what a blockchain is. It's kind of hard to communicate abstract ideas, so you need a variety of sources to paint the picture in your head.