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Comment by gfs | Hacker News Reader

> In fact, it can be considered one of the biggest technology breakthroughs in recent history, similar to the advent of the Internet in the early 1990s.

If this were the case, wouldn't we see the technology in the wild more? That seems like a bold claim for something that is still being vetted and explored.

I certainly see value in blockchain but the applications that are using it today don't excite me. The hype puts me off but I am hoping to see it bloom into other areas of software that aren't ICOs or proof of concepts.

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big changes usually require more time in the adoption phases..autos did at the beginning of the 19th century.

Technologies that are actually useful tend to be aggressively adopted by military, academia, industry. Internet and IC engine were.

On the contrary, blockchain finds its activism among SQL-illiterate people, and certainly not the aforementioned groups. Mind that we're already a decade in.

What do you define as aggressively adopted? The Ethereum Enterprise Alliance has 500+ members including many Fortune 500 companies.

There is widespread experimention with blockchain technology by government, academia and industry.

For example, the majority of central banks are experimenting with blockchain/distributed-ledger technology:

https://qz.com/1083712/one-in-five-central-banks-say-they-wi...

NASA is researching using blockchain technology for spacecraft navigation:

https://www.uakron.edu/engineering/ECE/news-detail.dot?newsI...

With a SQL database, how do you achieve consensus on a proposed transaction without a middleman taking an arbitrary cut of the proceeds?

The two parties either agree, or they don't. Full stop. Blockchain, or any buzzword technology, doesn't solve this eternal problem.

Third parties have historically been pretty good at sussing out consensus from the two. Judicial systems, market exchanges, etc.

When you pay a middleman, you are literally paying for Trust-as-a-Service, among other things (brokerage, etc).

Blockchain also costs money to build and maintain as a service, but it's probably the fact that the enormous cost is socialized that makes it an easy pill for many to swallow.

Who maintains the source of truth for this record of agreement? If it is one entity, that's the unaccountable middleman. Blockchain is not right for every environment, but there are industries where the middlemen are taking more than the equivalent of every party maintaining a blockchain team.

And court cases are even more expensive.

> With a SQL database, how do you achieve consensus on a proposed transaction without a middleman taking an arbitrary cut of the proceeds?

Um, there is still a middleman taking a cut with Satoshi's Glorious Blockchain. It's called transaction fees and they go to the miners who piss away small countries worth of electricity in order to validate a pathetically small number of transactions. You didn't think proof of work was free, right?

No reasonable industry would use Bitcoin's proof of work to transact between <10 semi-trustworthy parties.

We're talking about private, permissioned blockchains.

> permissioned

I.e. "trusted". So what does this bring over existing consensus algorithms, besides the "blockchain" buzzword hype?

Which ones are you thinking of? They should support immutability and auditability as first-class citizens while being resistant to third-party manipulation/coercion.

All consensus does in bitcoin is determine whether a transaction is possible or impossible (avoid double spends).

With a SQL database, this is not an issue because SQL transactions can have constraints preventing said double spend.That is to say, the SQL database can take a lock on the row and ensure no other concurrent transaction modifies it in parallel.

Consensus solves a problem that only exists in a decentralized system.

Since SQL databases are centralized, that problem doesn't exist. Even for multi-master / distributed SQL variants, there's typically a way to wait for a write to commit across N nodes before going on, which solves the problem much more easily.

In short, I think your question makes no sense.

Not to mention that the industries that could be most transformed by adopting blockchains -- banking being the obvious one -- are among the most slow-moving and change-averse.

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