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Comment by kmc059000 | Hacker News Reader

I was recently at an "Emerging Technology" conference for emerging technologies that was targeted at non-technical entrepreneurs and innovators. 90% of the conference was focused on blockchain, while the remaining was focused on AI. During the entire conference, blockchain was being touted as a silver bullet for many problems, and many of the people at the conference ate it up.

The best anecdote to summarize the conference was a speech by IBM where they covered a project which they did with major retailer to track a supply chain. The speaker mentioned some impressive results which caused a noticeable people around me to literally say "wow". However, they did not once mention specifically how blockchain was the cause of these results or give reasons why blockchain was superior. From what I could tell as an engineer, the entire application could have been built without blockchain.

I was surprised at how blockchain was being touted as the next technological revolution (and very light on the details) and was concerned at how quickly the other attendees accepted blockchain as it was being sold. I left the conference thinking that it would only be a matter of time before blockchain would be touted as a silver bullet in the larger community due to conferences like these (although I am sure they've been happening for a while, and this was my first exposure). It will not be long before a large number of software projects will be based on blockchain needlessly, and/or the engineers will be arguing with management why using blockchain is a mistake.

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Well, sir, there's nothing on earth Like a genuine, bona-fide, Electrified, blockchain. What'd I say?

Blockchain. What's it called? Blockchain. That's right! Blockchain.

Blockchain Blockchain Blockchain

I hear their energy use makes fans whir loud. It's as energy efficient as a GPU cloud. Is there a chance a fork could bring the end? Not on your life, my Nerdy friend.

What about us brain-dead slobs? You'll be given cushy MLM jobs Were you sent here by the ICO Devil? No good sir, I'm on the level.

The wheels came off my project plan. Take my ASIC, my good man. I swear it's Company's only choice. Throw up your hands and raise your voice.

Blockchain. What's it called? Blockchain. Once again. Blockchain.

But our product quality is still all broken. Sorry Bob, the mob has spoken.

Blockchain! Blockchain! Blockchain! Blockchain!

Block, d'oh!

(with apologies to The Simpsons).

You aren't far off. Remember the bitconnect guy?

Phil Hartman, you are still missed!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Hartman

I think all the hype around block chain is hilarious for the very simple reason that block chain can’t actually solve any business problem that a centrally managed service couldn’t solve (with less effort likely).

The only thing block chain adds to any problem is when you don’t want a managed good or service to be under central authority or if it can’t be under a central authority (the later situation is probably more interesting). Crypto currencies make some sense (though I like my currency backed by the full faith and credit of a government, personally). However every other situation I hear of I wonder why someone couldn’t just manage a central service. Chain of trust on crates of produce? Supply chain professionals have solved the problem of authenticating sourcing of goods quite a long time ago (especially when laws required them too). Personally I think the one benefit that people don’t talk enough about is cases where the block chain can provide its users perfect forward secrecy on their transactions against the ledger, though again you don’t really need the block chain to do that.

> The only thing block chain adds to any problem is when you don’t want a managed good or service to be under central authority or if it can’t be under a central authority (the later situation is probably more interesting).

Trust (and thus the ability to use an authority) is not black and white. There are a lot of situations where some trust is allowed up until a certain level. Right now authorities are managed through some form of government or through legal enforcement (contracts and such).

- The first one only works in specific scenarios.

- The second one is extremely expensive (especially when working across borders). It might technically be not as elegant. But generally speaking servers are a lot cheaper than lawyers. Code is designed to be extendable and reusable, contracts are not. Let's not even talk about the long process of enforcing those contracts manually with very expensive lawyers in a physical court building.

Isn't the 'trust' eroded once a single party gains 51% of compute? Then you're just a really complicated and poorly implemented centralised database.

According to some comments from the core Bitcoin devs if an attacker has 51% of the hash rate they can selectively deny other people's transactions but it takes a much higher percentage of hash to be able to rewrite the blockchain.

51% attack is an issue that people have been concerned about for awhile. But an actor having 51% of the mining doesn't equal to poorly implemented centralized database. And a lot of ppl are keeping a look out for this issue so my guess is that even if one bad actor who happens to have 51%+ tries to hardfork, the rest of the community won't move.

There are efforts to deal with this issue. One example being the whole debate around moving from PoW to PoS and other systems.

> if one bad actor who happens to have 51%+ tries to hardfork, the rest of the community won't move.

What does that mean for Walmart and tracking their inventory?

This is the problem - these blockchain ideologists only tend to see problems and solutions from the perspective of the actual cryptocurrency blockchains. Real world is sadly a little different...

Using that logic, centralized systems have zero trust since single parties own 100% of the networks.

Complete opposite - A centralised system requires you to trust the single party operating it, but that's super transparent. Either you trust it or you don't, but it's clear what you're getting yourself into.

Meanwhile, blockchain networks advocate a functional network that doesn't require trust - it's kind of predicated on the fact that you _can't_ trust anyone. But if a single party obtains 51% power, you have to trust them anyway. If you're going to require trust, you may as well just do away with the whole complicated setup and be explicit about it.

> Trust (and thus the ability to use an authority) is not black and white. There are a lot of situations where some trust is allowed up until a certain level. Right now authorities are managed through some form of government or through legal enforcement (contracts and such).

How does trust play a role in a company tracking its own inventory? What does blockchain offer in terms of trust even when working across borders?

Because for any sufficiently large company, they won't be the only entity in their inventory's supply chain. Sharing data throughout the supply chain accurately and reliably is an extremely hard problem that has yet to be solved sufficiently.

So specifically, blockchain offers a totally accurate, reliable, secure way to track and exchange data across a multitude of distinct businesses with little opportunity for corruption. I'd say that's very valuable, and NOT something that can be done with a central database.

So, you are saying sharing data through supply chain is difficult. It is difficult because data cannot be tracked in an accurate, reliable, secure way and there is corruption involved. And lastly, blockchain is the only solution to these.

How will blockchain help in tracking shipments in an accurate, reliable and secure manner and most importantly, how does it stop corruption? If possible, how about using an example for clarity? Let's say Apple shipping a new MBP from China to a customer in US. How does blockchain work in ensuring all the above features?

> How will blockchain help in tracking shipments in an accurate, reliable and secure manner and most importantly, how does it stop corruption?

We already had double entry accounting in order to establish immutable book entries but that gives us a problem of a potential multiple sets of books. The publishing of these records to the blockchain via PoW therefore establishes a sort of triple entry system where the Proof of Work idea is intending to prove a single unmodified ledger.

I work IT for a retail manufacturer. We have to track ingredients for every product we create and what products they each go into and to which customers they ship out to. I'd say it's reasonable that we trust our own database but do you? Is it reasonable for you to trust my database? What if there's a huge recall because of a tainted ingredient? What if I found out I'd lose my job or the company would fold because of this recall and maybe I was lied to and told the tainted ingredient is harmless(Im no food scientist)? I think we have enough evidence to show that companies will sometimes alter books and lie to avoid responsibility but not me no, I'd NEVER do such a thing, i'm a good boy who would never get fired for doing such a thing but maybe that's what would get me fired....fuck what do I do? Oh you meant data corruption....yea no one has double spent yet have they?

>So specifically, blockchain offers a totally accurate, reliable, secure way to track and exchange data across a multitude of distinct businesses with little opportunity for corruption.

This is genuinely amusing to me. I feel like in these discussions you can replace "blockchain" with "philosopher's stone", like it's some kind of magical element that solves problems using the power of dreams and internet memes.

Let's imagine that we're in the real world for a second (I know, lame). Now we're in a company that deals with fruit imports. We have a ton of contractors all around the world and we use the Holy Blockchain to deal with that.

One of our contractors adds a transaction to our chain saying "we're sending you the container #12 containing bananas". Then almost at the same time an other contractor in the same area says "we're sending you the container #12 containing lemons".

How does the Holy Blockchain, Peace Be Upon It, solve this issue? Do we use PoW? Does the contractor with the most powerful computer decides who's right? If it turns out that the lemon contractor wins somehow and gets its transaction on the blockchain but it turns out they lied or were mistaken, do we tell the customers that "the code is law" and they're just eating extra-bitter bananas?

I mean seriously, it's not magic, it's a bunch of data chunks linked through a SHA-256, it's not going to bring world peace and it's not going to magically make everybody in the world agree about everything. As long as bananas won't grow directly on the Holy Blockchain (May Satoshi Grant Peace and Honor on It and Its Blocks) then nothing will ever be totally accurate, reliable or secure. Unfortunately I hear that digital bananas are not very nourishing.

You are taking the argument too far, but then you probably know it.

It's just a "tamper-proof" ink for a reasonable price, nothing more, nothing less. It won't grow bananas or lemons, and GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) principle still applies.

How about if instead of coming up with the fictional scenarios that won't work, you instead learn about technology, ignore hype (and greed) and come up with the some that will work? Hint: they exist.

If its tamper proof ink can't we solve that by signing the document and emailing it?

You could, depending on your requirements. If someone needed proof that this was indeed signed and sent at that time, it gets more difficult with e-mail.

Please try to track the context of an argument. You're ignoring the part where simias was responding to a post which stated that blockchain is "totally accurate [and] reliable", which is in complete contradiction to your view that it's GIGO.

You are misquoting:

> So specifically, blockchain offers a totally accurate, reliable, secure way to track and exchange data across a multitude of distinct businesses with little opportunity for corruption.

There is nothing said there about contents of the data, so the GIGO principle still applies, as always. Attacking blockchain that it doesn't help if input is garbage is thus pointless.

I would suggest you read the quoted statement again. It is very precise and true (imho of course).

> PoW

I don't know any private blockchain solution in the supplychain space that uses PoW. There are more ways to form consensus.

> This is genuinely amusing to me. I feel like in these discussions you can replace "blockchain" with "philosopher's stone", like it's some kind of magical element that solves problems using the power of dreams and internet memes.

You can use any type of software, as long as it has one clear picture of what the current status is (a database would work, 100 different databases would not work). A bulk of commodity trading is a done on paper right now, because no one wants to trust a single party to hold this database. I am not familiar with fruits but I work in soft and hard commodities (anywhere from grains to beans to oil to metals) and everyone is looking into distributed systems to solve this exact trust issue. But maybe all these companies should hire you to build a mysql database instead I guess?

> One of our contractors adds a transaction to our chain saying "we're sending you the container #12 containing bananas". Then almost at the same time an other contractor in the same area says "we're sending you the container #12 containing lemons".

Those are two different transactions, I don't know any type of software that wouldn't compute that you get 12 bananas and 12 lemons? I guess I'm not understanding what you are trying to say.

They are saying that one party says the container with ID #12 has bananas and a different party says that container #12 has lemons, not that there are two containers, one with 12 bananas and one with 12 lemons.

Ah, well there is no system ever that will solve that problem. Blockchains are simply systems that allow for the (as much as possible) trustless formation of consensus. So as soon as you have fraudulence data entering your system you know exactly where it came from and also that everyone is relying on the same data. This removes the need for everyone to double check everything multiple times.

I am involved in commodity trade finance (the financing of supply chain) and the current process is basically a huge number of different companies all checking the same data (documents & contracts). The banks actually check these documents multiple times (4 eyes principle).

You can build an API around a mysql database that does the checking. But no company would trust your checking for compliance, legal and trust reasons. If you offer them a full node (piece of software that doesn't trust all data thrown at it) in a blockchain system that they can run on their own infra it's a different story.

> Ah, well there is no system ever that will solve that problem.

That was the parent commenter's point: the really hard problems are not ones that technology can solve.

Having said that, while I agree with that point, your extremely informed comments in this thread on the usefulness of a private blockchain for a real use case have been the best argument for the the technology that I've seen. It's an interesting space; I just wish I saw more of your kind of perspective instead of the constant hype and "crypto" speculation.

>Let's not even talk about the long process of enforcing those contracts manually with very expensive lawyers in a physical court building.

You'll still need them at the end of the day though ? Code running in a computer somewhere doesn't rule the physical social very animal side of things.

Laws and lawyers are fuzzy constructs because humans are fuzzy creatures to start with, and imo we need that flexibility in laws and in their application, hence why I don't trust the "code is law" catch phrase.

I'm not saying it applies to everything. I'm not talking about you getting into a fight with your neighbor and the blockchain will help you settle things. But when two financial companies (for example) enter in some kind of contract the majority of the work involved can be automated on a blockchain as soon as there is one they both trust. source: I've worked for banks trying to do specifically this.

Can you name a situation where the blockchain could obviate the need for lawyers?

"I think all the hype around block chain is hilarious for the very simple reason that block chain can’t actually solve any business problem that a centrally managed service couldn’t solve"

This is a very common statement on here regarding blockchain solutions, and is effectively like saying "There's no program you can't write with 1991 Visual Basic" (or build in Excel -- I've had financial sorts try to hammer every problem into an Excel workbook). Theoretically true, but outrageously off the mark given the nuance on needs of many very varied projects.

Blockchain style solutions are not relevant for many projects. They have some legitimate uses, however, and saying "But you could..." isn't a retort.

>Blockchain style solutions are not relevant for many projects. They have some legitimate uses, however, and saying "But you could..." isn't a retort.

Except you've got that backwards. Since none of those solutions actually exist yet beyond hype, it's the blockchain proponents who have to show how using blockchain technology in those situations is not only feasible but superior. Saying that you can already solve those issues with existing techniques IS the default.

Isn't it just basically triple entry accounting?

Blockchain tech is ultimately about trust. Trust that the accounting hasn't been altered. You don't quite have it solved with just a double entry ledger right?

> Blockchain tech is ultimately about trust. Trust that the accounting hasn't been altered.

A simple git repository offers this property. Really it's just any data structure where only growing it is permitted. You don't need a blockchain to get this.

https://twitter.com/whitequark/status/946886702932557824

No, I don't have it backwards. Blockchain solutions offer decentralized, trustless alternatives to existing centralized, trust-based solutions. Further, it's bizarre reading this constant claim that nothing exists beyond hype, when a number of orgs have operating or in testing blockchain solutions for industries from manufacturing to finance. Inertia is a hell of a thing, as is "the way we do things", so it isn't surprising that it didn't suddenly replace everything, but it does have uses.

Please do list a couple of useful solutions where blockchain is the right/better tool for the jobs and thats outside of crypto coins or secondary layer of payment abstraction (and even there any payment option could work better in a lot of the cases).

Property title insurance is a great example. With blockchains it should be possible to reveal the owners of all properties and all transactions in order to remove ambiguity from the system. It is true that constructing and making use of such data implies trust in some sort of organization or process, but a robust store of ownership data is currently beyond keeping of property title records as currently performed by entrusted government entities.

Why would this work better? Not to be cynical but it seems from a engineering perspective that the trade off is security for data robustness? Anyone who takes control of the network will take control of all property title insurance data. In return at least i know up time will be 100%...

>No, I don't have it backwards. Blockchain solutions offer decentralized, trustless alternatives to existing centralized, trust-based solutions.

The problem is that the more we look at potential use cases, the more we found that trust relations are necessary to handle a load of basic process requirements that cannot be solved by blockchains alone, thus requiring the addition of trusted actors, thus removing the need of blockchains to begin with.

Blockchains proponents tend to see trustlessness as a benefit by itself. In their view, Blockchains are better than traditional databases because trustlessness is better than traditional client-server models.

System designers see trustlessness as a constrain. If you are in a bad situation where no single actor can be trusted by everyone else, then you can implement a decentralized database using blockchains. It's going to cost a lot in term of performance and efficiencies, but it's doable. But as soon as this constraint of truslessness is removed, why the hell would you bother with something like blockchains? And experience show us that, well, there's actually not a lot of contexts where trustlessness is an absolute requirement.

The implicit part of this argument, though, is that blockchains are expensive: in order to have this trustless system you have to have PoW which is inherently computationally (and therefore monetarily) expensive. It's not going to be easier to write either (which is the reason why people aren't using 1991 Visual Basic).

In other words, the argument here is why would you do it this other way that is more complicated and/or expensive when you could do it the default way which is simpler and cheaper.

I was at a similar conference last week and the same thing happened and the same IBM case that tracked produce supply chain was presented. The same "wow" moment was shared when they said they can now track the origin of a product in under 2 seconds where before it took them a week.

I happen to work in a product that manages produce traceability, and I can confirm that it is quite within the realm of possibility to track produce in under 2 seconds with a simple web app and a relational database. We have been doing it for about 10 years.

To add, the produce supply chain is full of connectivity and digital literacy issues, so I would venture a guess that a blockchain implementation would generate a lot of attrition on the operations side of things. Another point of concern is performance since this is a fast moving supply chain due to the product short shelf life.

It was interesting to see how this audience thinks that blockchain somehow "solves" traceability when this has been going on in several different forms in a wide array of different industries with specific needs. They seem to also think that the right way to do it is with IoT and smart contracts, as if it were just a step away to push such a solution to an existing supply chain.

It keeps me up at night that one day a top-down decision will come that says we must a have a blockchain solution because market, or new competitors will bloom in the face of absurd amount of money being thrown at blockchain solutions and take market share. I imagine that 5 years from now, the winners of today's hype battles will be the losers when they have to maintain an overly complex inflexible solution for many years more.

> I happen to work in a product that manages produce traceability, and I can confirm that it is quite within the realm of possibility to track produce in under 2 seconds with a simple web app and a relational database. We have been doing it for about 10 years.

But now IBM can do it in 2 seconds as well! This may create a big boon for "DB2->blockchain" conversion contracts.

We still seem to be in this weird period with blockchain stuff where it's a neat idea, but the problems people are tackling with it are mostly... mild variations of solved problems so far. This may be understandable - these are problems which are known to have value, and as new companies want to solve these problems, they may opt for a blockchain-based version vs traditional "old school" relational db. But there may also be limited value there compared to old school version.

This feels a bit like "key value store" systems vs databases. There was (is?) a lot of hype around schemaless and "lightweight" KV stores, but most of the problems are also solved by intelligent use of SQL. Ditto for the XML-databases rage from ... 12-15 years ago.

"Rational Blockchain on AIX, fast deployment via Websphere", now that will sell like hot apples. IBM to the moon!

I also work with some of the big ones and their customers and partners. I don't understand how case studies like that are shown and believed without question, and not just in blockchain but other tech or processes too. Baffles me, really disappoints me. In college I expected high up business people to be discerning and no-bs but they will buy anything without thinking critically about the pitch! I don't understand it.

> It keeps me up at night that one day a top-down decision will come that says we must a have a blockchain solution because market, or new competitors will bloom in the face of absurd amount of money being thrown at blockchain solutions and take market share. I imagine that 5 years from now, the winners of today's hype battles will be the losers when they have to maintain an overly complex inflexible solution for many years more.

If the people making the calls don't understand the technology, you can just make up jargon to keep them happy. Make a regular app, call it a "blockchain solution" and call it a day.

You dont't need blockchain or databases for that. A single Kafka topic can do that.

I got to counter this sort of hype to a room full of bankers last week. It had the right effect, I'm pleased to say.

Slides: https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2018/04/19/welcome-to-t...

I enjoyed this. Nice presentation.

I wouldn’t worry too much until there is an actual use case, and if there is a use case, then why worry?

I work in the Danish public sector, and we’re sold tech by consultants who hype politicians and upper management, both ares with very little technical understanding. But while they don’t understand what tech is, they do understand change management, and if there isn’t a proven benefit, they won’t buy the hype.

We’re doing a lot of RPA these days, and from a technical standpoint that’s really fucking stupid. An API would be a gazillion times better than a screen scraping macro. In reality, however, we run 370 different IT systems and the truth is that a lot of them won’t have a decent API in the next 20 years, if ever. So while RPA is really stupid technically, it has immense value on the business end because it automated shit we couldn’t automate otherwise.

The reason I mention RPA is that I asked my engineers if it was worth looking into about 3 years ago, and they gave me a straight no. So we didn’t pay it attention until our CEO asked me what RPA projects we were doing after having attended a Deloitte conference on the business application of RPA in the public sector.

Blockchain doesn’t have a use case, and that means it won’t sell, even if it’s hyped to non-tech people.

You do see a few public block chain projects, but they are mostly poc’s that never lead anywhere and they are all run by in house enthusiasts, who were “allowed” to “run with it as long as you keep doing your regular work as well” because allowing your workforce to play with their ideas is motivational, even if it’s really just a waste of time.

>I wouldn’t worry too much until there is an actual use case, and if there is a use case, then why worry?

I don't usually worry much about over-hyped technologies that gets the executive types all fuzzy inside while the rest of us look from afar wondering if they even understand what they're talking about. Web 2.0, NoSQL, IoT, Blockchain... The list is long. And it's not all trash, there's often some value at the core of the hype once you remove all the fluff.

But Blockchain is a bit more nefarious that this IMO, because it goes hand in hand with cryptocurrencies. The huge valuation of cryptocurrencies is the only reason Blockchains got so much publicity in the first place. I'm certain that if Bitcoin hadn't recovered from it's huge crash a couple of years ago you wouldn't see nearly as much Blockchain this and Blockchain that everywhere.

Conversely if you look at cryptocurrency enthusiast forums they use these news articles about big companies investing money and resources into "the blockchain" as proof that there's some high intrinsic value to the technology and to justify a very high valuation and pump it even more, especially to newcomers. "IBM is going to create a blockchain, BUY BUY BUY!"

It results in a big spiral of hype enabling scams enabling hype enabling scams... Meanwhile as far as I can see the only practical use cases of cryptocurrencies and even "the blockchain" at large is unbridled speculation, pyramid schemes and buying illegal stuff online. All that while expanding a ridiculous amount of energy mining the damn thing.

> Meanwhile as far as I can see the only practical use cases of cryptocurrencies and even "the blockchain" at large is unbridled speculation, pyramid schemes and buying illegal stuff online.

You aren't looking very hard, then!

Presumably your engineers didn't want to move from world a where they understand why things break to world b where any change even to a landing page could cause a cascade of failures due to automation that depends on that page.

A world where such failures causing production to fail become more likely because its challenging to predict ahead of time who depends on what and it what way.

Where they presumably have to then debug the mess.

Your engineers were right and unfortunately you are probably wrong about dumb ideas not selling.

Predicting time and allocating resources is my headache, and while RPA will make that worse, it also supports our primary function in a way that gives our more possibilities than we’ve had in years.

If we can save nurses for 10.000 administrative hours a yearwith RPA, then we’ll absolutely do it, even if it comes at the cost of having more work in operations. I mean, why wouldn’t we? Supporting the business end is our sole purpose of existence.

It’s not that bad though. We mainly use it as a last resort, either as something temporary while we wait for an API or on systems that will never have an API. A lot of these systems are old, one of our mainframe interfaces haven’t changed in 16 years.

On top of that, patch notifications in the public sector are often written solely for end users. This means that it’s actually easier to predict a button changing in an interface than an API breaking.

I’ve seen REST interfaces change, and break, without warning because the REST bit was really just slapped on there by sales.

Our first RPA poc saves us around 9.000 hours a year. It helped us get our case working up to a point where we’re within the legal deadlines (something we’ve never been before) and due to the lower pressure in the department we’ve managed to turn employee satisfaction from a 4/7 to a 5.6/7 and reducing sick leave from 15% to 8.

My department had to hire an extra engineer because if it and the business end had to allocate 1/4 of a yearly position to support the process. The business case is still green financially.

My engineers have never been more wrong. Even if the tech sucks, but that’s still my headache. Because I fully realize I can’t have a CS candidate do drag-and-drop programming full time and keep them happy.

We now live in the information age. Blockchains and AI will transform everyday life as well as specific sectors such as health care and trade.

Imagine walking in to a Starbucks café, order a cup of coffee, digitally signing a payment transaction on your mobile or laptop and then wait for it to be confirmed by the Blockchain while enjoying the hot cup of coffee you have ordered.

What is more, think about AI, you will not need to talk to the staff to place an order for your coffee. The staff can relax and watch you make gestures to a camera. They will be able to read on a screen if you’d like it white or black.

I think the article is too negative and does not see the big picture of transformation that is going on (as exemplified above).

> Imagine walking in to a Starbucks café, order a cup of coffee, digitally signing a payment transaction on your mobile or laptop and then wait for it to be confirmed by the Blockchain while enjoying the hot cup of coffee you have ordered.

You could do the the exact same thing now with credit cards, except the waiting. And then you could get your money back if the coffee sucked, and you wouldn't lose all your money if someone happened to steal your private key .

Pretty sure it was sarcasm.

Probably, but it's hard to tell in this debate where believers constantly have to rely on forgetting about existing technology completely.

It's important to keep Poe's law in mind when you're posting plain-text parody; you don't have tone of voice and body language to help convey your real intent.

I think you can already pay contactless either by your mobile or credit card and without the need of Blockchain.

> What is more, think about AI, you will not need to talk to the staff to place an order for your coffee. The staff can relax and watch you make gestures to a camera. They will be able to read on a screen if you’d like it white or black.

In McDonalds you have automatic machines that you can place an order and pay, e.g., contactless, without bothering the staff. Later you only just need to pick your order up.

I'd like you to know I got the sarcasm, even if nobody else did :)

Ah, I missed it.

It could have been more evident with Random Capitalization and effecting the utilization of grandiose Vocabulary... but on second thought that would just make it harder to distinguish from the original crackpots.

Imagine opening a mobile app, ordering a cup of coffee to a nearest Starbucks, having your transaction confirmed in matters of seconds and only then walking into a Starbucks where your cup is waiting for you.

You can do that right now, with no blockchain in sight.

What is more... interesting(?) - is that starbucks might have reason to use blockchain tech for non-public systems (info sharing with suppliers/vendors/etc, currency exchange between countries, etc) but it would be completely independent of any public use of blockchain, and we'd never know (or need to know, or care).

For info sharing with suppliers etc, you have systems with trust. Calling each other's APIs with authentication credentials. Old solutions are much better than blockchains there.

I don't disagree entirely. I think there may be some ... I don't want to say completely 'new' benefit to blockchain in this respect, but as it's explored more, there may be some other benefits which go beyond current approaches to info sharing/trust.

I suspect it will end up being more like 'nosql' - appropriate as an adjunct tech to deal with specific use cases, vs a foundational mindset to build everything on top of. But... that's just my own half-coffeed-this-morning thoughts...

AI will transform everyday life.

Blockchain may be used by businesses and make early proponents wealthy

Imagine being a Venezuelan right now.

https://www.wired.com/story/where-could-bitcoin-succeed-as-a...

Everything is fine, right up until the moment it's not.

I recently went to a similar innovation conference, that was targeted at business owners. They were proposing block-chain technology as a panacea for every problem under the sun.

The funniest project involved parking meters 'on the block-chain' ...

It seems the more computational power we have access to, the quicker we find ways to waste it with inefficient systems ...

That reminds me of this IBM press release[1]:

> IBM, Walmart and Tsinghua University have piloted the use of blockchain to trace food items, including pork in China and mangoes in the U.S., as they move through the supply chain to store shelves. Recent testing by Walmart showed that applying blockchain reduced the time it took to trace a package of mangoes from the farm to the store from days or weeks to two seconds.

[1] https://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/53487.wss

The speech was about the mangos. They specifically said looking up the grower went from 7 days to 12 seconds due to blockchain and a $7b savings.

How many times will we have to debunk this "physical goods traceability through the blockchain can work and be more efficient than some random SQL database" nonsense? If you trace physical goods you need to trust people not to lie about their nature, if you have trust then you don't need a blockchain and can use something a lot cheaper and more efficient. They should put that on a banner on HN or something, it'll save everybody some time.

I assume that what IBM did was centralizing mango grower info in a database instead having to go through complicated, manual processes. They did that through a Blockchain for some reason but I'm sure you could get similar result in some PostgreSQL DB. Of course I can't know for sure because the announcement is all fluff and hype and no substance.

You can use Postgres or whatever as backend to the Blockchain if you wish. Blockchain solutions are maybe 20% Blockchain, 70% cryptography and 10% caching/traditional tech around it (percentages are my rough guess from what I’ve seen). They actually can solve some problems in large corporations relatively easily compared to centralised systems. If I had to summarise in few words why - I’d say it’s because of cryptography patterns and immutable/verifiable/temper resistant, distributed ledger that has completely different security profile from traditional systems - ie there’s nothing to hack except from stealing private keys in which case the damage is limited to areas that this key is covering (usually very small). This has implications in corporate setting because now you can deploy ambitious projects without worrying about security that much...

>If I had to summarise in few words why - I’d say it’s because of cryptography patterns and immutable/verifiable/temper resistant, distributed ledger that has completely different security profile from traditional systems

The temper resistance is not god-given, it's a consequence of the miners racing to mine new blocks. If you want the same type of resistance for a custom blockchain then you need to convince a bunch of people to mine your chain. Why would I mine MangoCoin?

So instead immutability is achieved by making a "side-chain" that eventually links to a big and secure chain like Bitcoin or Ethereum. But then it's basically the equivalent of having a SQL database, computing a checksum every day and uploading it in a custom bitcoin transaction. Effectively you could achieve the same thing by computing the checksum, signing it with your PGP key and uploading it publicly on your website for all to see. This way anybody can make copies and if you attempt to modify an old entry in your DB it'll invalidate the checksum and anybody having a copy will be able to prove it.

So with this scheme your SQL database is immutable, verifiable and temper resistant. Unfortunately if you implement it that way your announcement won't make the rounds on social media and give you a lot of free PR and a boost to your stock, so better brand it "with real bits of revolutionary Blockchain(c)(tm) technology inside" instead.

>ie there’s nothing to hack

The Blockchain runs on computers, computers can be hacked. People can forge a bad transaction saying that some mangoes are organic when they're not. People can say mangoes have been stolen when in fact they've been sold to avoid paying taxes. The blockchain isn't harder to hack than any distributed database. The Blockchain isn't magic.

PoW is never used for private/custom blockchains, I've never seen it, it doesn't make much sense. If you insist on saying it's just like sql, you'd have to say it's "just like" replicated, multi-master sql database, with publicly exposed read only access, forbidden deletes/updates, inserts restricted/enforced by triggers/whatever based on asymmetric cryptography of currently connected user.

It's just not the same thing, completely different security profile.

The only way to forge transaction is to steal private key.

Nobody is saying that blockchain will force humans to not click "organic" checkbox for non-organic mangoes, this is absurd - but it can encode digital signature of somebody who checks it so it can be later traced back and allows to write logic that signature is required for the mango to go to the next step in the supply chain for example.

I think you don't realize (most people don't) how many problems this little thing solves.

It's not replacement for sql, big data or what not - it would be silly to say that - when designing blockchain systems you actually spend a lot of time on finding the most minimal thing that has to be stored on the chain for your contracts to enforce all required logic. It allows you to trust data in it without security ceremony/setup.

> there’s nothing to hack except from stealing private keys in which case the damage is limited to areas that this key is covering (usually very small).

On the contrary. Let's say that you institute a blockchain to trace the chain of custody for evidence (not much different than tracing the chain of custody, cough supply chain cough, for mangoes). From the creation of a piece of evidence to transferring custody between different law enforcement officials, each block on the blockchain contains the private key signatures of law enforcement agents who have testified that they have taken custody of the evidence at a certain period of time. In theory, the benefit of a blockchain here is a publicly auditable record of custody which has clear value for the admissibility of evidence at public trial. Imagine that we wave away issues of latency for the sake of argument.

With cryptocurrency, actors are motivated not to share their private keys, because sharing their private key means risking irrevocably giving away all the currency in the wallet controlled by that key. What is the similar motivation here, for law enforcement agents not to share or otherwise compromise their private keys? If one cop tells another cop "hey I need you to do me a favor and sign custody of this evidence now while not actually taking it, so I can take it somewhere else and mess with it to make sure we can for sure put this guy away," or "hey do me a favor, I'm not going to sign custody on this now, but I'll do it later on" - what prevents this from happening?

Is it supposed to be the threat of perjury? Because the courts already have a problem with testimony which has been found to be false, where perjury cases are rarely subsequently prosecuted. Put it this way - just because something is auditable, who will audit it? And how do you police domain violations which are still valid blockchain transactions?

A blockchain where you have a publicly auditable, irrevocable record is meaningless if it doesn't really mean anything for blockchain actors to "act in their own interest". In this case, undermining the private keys is everything, because that's what undermines faith in the entire blockchain.

Normally you'd have independent party/institution that physically verifies and digitally signs facts.

Police officer would issue a request to that 3rd party to sign this fact.

Blockchain doesn't magically make people honest, but it can encode claims that you can verify.

But if you already have a trusted third party, then why do you need a blockchain? The whole point of a blockchain is to avoid the centralization of trusted third parties. At that point you might as well have a normal relational database / transactions with ACID gusrantees.

3rd party is just another actor in the system, they’re not running the system, they interact with it just like ordinary Joe with their private key.

> If you trace physical goods you need to trust people not to lie about their nature, if you have trust then you don't need a blockchain and can use something a lot cheaper and more efficient

I think the point is, though, that you can trust someone to be honest whilst someone is watching them, but you can't necessarily trust them not to change their minds at some point in the future. If it's all on the blockchain you have an immutable historical record.

Immutable data storage does not require blockchain, period. Using blockchain because you need immutable storage is like using a helicopter to cross the street. Yes it works, but they are way more simple, efficient and straightforward technologies that will do the same job better and without introducing a bunch of unneeded features/complexity.

> but they [sic] are way more simple, efficient and straightforward technologies

can you give examples? where all stakeholders have the same immutable "ledger"?

how about some combination of Merkle trees and HMACs? The person who writes the entry signs it with their private key. No need for PoW miners, a constant internet connection, having nodes compute the head of the blockchain, none of the extra nonsense that blockchains require.

> some combination of Merkle trees and HMACs?

...and then you could group the ledger entries into "blocks" of merkle trees and signing using HMACs, you mean?

You've basically reinvented the "blockchain". The commercially available blockchains are essentially this - they don't use proof-of-work. The enterprise blockchains are not the same as the one that underpins bitcoin.

So where's the innovation? If that's blockchain technology then Linux package managers, PGP, HTTPS and bittorent have been using "blockchain technology" for a long while now. I could've come up with this solution 10 years ago if you had asked me, and I'm really not that clever. Did IBM engineers really just discover public key cryptography?

The current blockchain craze is supposed to find its root in the Bitcoin whitepaper which is about a decentralized distributed trustless immutable ledger. If you remove any of these attributes you end up with something absolutely mundane that definitely doesn't warrant the ridiculous amount of hype, resources and money being poured into it. There are only a very small number of problems that can be solved with a decentralized distributed trustless immutable ledger. That's exactly the point of TFA.

I think this is a very important point to make because many cryptocurrency zealots ofter argue that "the blockchain technology is here to stay, ergo cryptocurrencies is here to stay". Except it turns out that the term became almost meaningless because anything sort of qualifies as a "blockchain" these days, including many centralized systems like IOTA or Ripple or systems that are de-facto centrally managed and mutable (like Ethereum).

If people realize that Blockchain is 90% hype, 9% old technology and 1% actual innovation then maybe they'll think twice about whether having a ~$400 billion market cap for cryptocurrencies is sustainable in the long term.

You sound like you are arguing against Dropbox 10 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

That's the key problem here, people can't agree on what a blockchain is, and keep re-defining it to meet their implementation needs. If you think decentralization is fundamental you won't accept the enterprise blockchains into the definition, but the B2B companies aren't going to look at it that way.

This is what usually happens when marketing around a term gets too froth (see also, AI).

You're right and I don't want to get too far down the road of defending blockchain (as I seem to have unwittingly done). The marketing most certainly is over the top.

I work on a product that does produce traceability. People put wrong input on forms every day, print labels and stick them into crates. They then ask us to make their code show correctly when searched. Having the wrong product appear on search and an irate client because the blockchain is immutable would generate immense problems.

Why not have auditable mutability? The audit log is the thing that should be immutable.

Look: isn't the same as it happened for microservices, containers, serverless and many other new tech stacks?

It could have been done even without those, but since the cool kids are using them, then they spread

I see the resemblance but I think it's somewhat different in this case.

Something like Docker brought to light tech that many developers weren't familiar with but that existed before. But it actually accomplished concrete things in a very short amount of time.

Blockchain on the other hand is attractive not necessarily to developers, and it so far has promised a lot more than it has actually delivered. We see talks of huge figures and white papers and half finished products where the important features are coming in "the next milestone".

This is draining investment from others more viable solutions and creating the possibility for any blockchain startup to somehow shoehorn the tech into a product and insert themselves in a market of their choice.

IMO this is the wrong kind of disruption where potentially everyone loses in the mid to long term.

Microservices, containers, and serverless architectures all solve cross-cutting concerns that impact scalable and distributed architectures, core SaaS & cloud-native challenges, as well as some long running highly pricey problems in the Enterprise space. They're not tech stacks, they are design approaches that tightly align with our modern computing platforms. Googles enormous investments in this space are not random, it's reflective of their relative positioning compared to the rest of the market...

Block-chain tech is awesome in distributed scenarios where actors don't necessarily have contact with, or trust for, one another. That's a very narrow band comparatively.

Yes, people jump on bandwagons. Yes, engineers are often distracted by 'the new hotness'. But when Amazon, Google, MS, and VMware all align on virtualization technology it's something a bit bigger than people simply falling for 'cool tech'.

Or the engineers will all agree that any apppend-only linked list is a [degenerate] kind of block chain.

Yeah - that is how it works! Blockchain can be solution to anything - you just need the definition of blockchain to be broad enough.

It is an empty signifier.

People believing the hype having an amazing willingness to forget about all the other technology that has already existed for decades.

Imagine talking about TCP/IP in the late 1980ies. This is great but mostly limited to academia.

The blockchain isn't interesting as a business case any more than TCP/IP was.

The blockchain is the foundation of a new decentralized infrastructure for the digital space (which physical properties), but we still haven't "opened up the internet" to the public.

Let me fix this for you - "Imagine talking about IPX in the late 1980ies. The blockchain isn't interesting as a business case any more than IPX was."

Care to elaborate? Not sure I understand.

IPX was a rather popular internet protocol in the late 80s, it was a TCP/IP competitor and during 90s it was often present in application configurations as a equivalent of TCP/IP, usually only these 2, no other choices. It wasn't really scalable and completely lost to TCP/IP soon.

You present blockchain as a new "TCP/IP" (meaning successful technology) but it might as well be a new "IPX", left on the margins of history books after a decade of struggle. Currently nobody knows for sure.

The blockchain is nearing it's 10th anniversary with no sign of slowing down when it comes to people investing time in it.

Furthermore as far as I am aware there is not BlockchainX

Thank you. That's the key acknowledgement missing from nearly all the breathless descriptions of "where this is going".

Yep, that puzzles me, why so many people just accept "blockchain helped us to do that" without asking how exactly it did. Blockchain itself is really new interesting technology which opens new opportunities, but I'm afraid its real usage and advance can be slowed by all that hype around with snake oil-like offerings.

It's even worse among start-ups. My VC friends tell me than almost every. Single. Venture they see has ai/ml bolted onto it, often with no real purpose.

>I was surprised at how blockchain was being touted as the next technological revolution (and very light on the details)

If you're surprised by this you must not have gotten online much in the last 10 years, especially on this site. Blockchain technology has been heralded as the next great revolution in human society that will transform all aspects of human existence and usher in an endless golden era of freedom and prosperity.

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