Blockchain study finds zero success rate and vendors don't call back

Consider, for example, the problem of restaurant reviews. We know that one person's review of a restaurant isn't going to be 100% accurate, because it's subjective. Socially, we've figured out ways of getting around that, like soliciting reviews from many different people, looking for reviews from people with tastes like ours, looking at the specific details they post, etc. They're also not generally incentivized to lie, because they've already eaten there and their review isn't likely to influence their service in the future.

All this falls apart if, say, the platform responsible for collecting these reviews has a business model where they are incentivized to bury negative reviews and manipulate scores upwards, but only for restaurants that have given them money. It'd be a much more trustworthy system if the reviewers could receive currency directly for the information they provide, provided by the potential customers who benefit directly from that information. Alas, basically nothing on the web works that way.

If only current blockchain implementations had acceptable performance to handle terabytes of data on mobile phones...

Game theory. Without DLT you make more money by doing these things. With DLT it just becomes the cream skimming problem, where you're just paying money to shuffle assets around but you're actually losing money because the total value of all the assets is still the same.

E.g. if you replace Wagyu beef with flank steak, A) you can only do that once rather than infinite times, like you can currently, because each asset still needs to have been originated somewhere B) you now have to either sell Wagyu beef as flank steak or else sell it into an unregulated market as a potential lemon, where you'll take a huge price hit anyway.

So it certainly doesn't eliminate all fraud, but it eliminates the vast majority of fraud by A) ensuring you can only commit fraud at most once per genuine item produced B) vastly reducing the profitability of any fraud you do commit.

Keep in mind that once DLT is common place, what's a status symbol isn't going to be the watch itself or whatever, but rather it's going to be having your purchase of the watch recorded in the DLT. This means that even if you do defeat all the tamper proof mechanisms or whatever, the original item is going to be basically worthless.

Whether it's going to eliminate 99% of fraud or only 97.5% of fraud or whatever in each industry is difficult to say, but regardless of the exact number it's going to be high enough that everything not on the DLT is going to be both considered a potential lemon and also carry substantial legal risk, and as such will priced accordingly.

There is no way to reliably (key word here: reliably) take non-cryptographically provable information and achieve consensus on it in a decentralized manner.

Let's use your beef example. The beef might come from a farm. It's certified organic. It gets shipped off to a distributor. The distributor sells it to a store. You go to a store and buy it.

In the current system, if the store is a bad actor (e.g. selling beef it claims is organic, when it's actually not) then you don't really have a way of knowing.

However, if the beef was tracked on the blockchain and transferred to you on the blockchain at the point of purchase, then you are no longer relying on just the store telling you it's organic. The claim is verified by chain of custody on the blockchain. So now multiple parties (the farm, distributor, and store) would have to cooperate to dupe you. You can still get defrauded by the store if they completely swap the beef. But, they would STILL have to purchase legitimate beef and transfer it on the blockchain to you. It would be harder to get away with it vs. just changing the label.

That's just one example of where it can minimize trust. But once more assets are tracked on the blockchain, you can start to do REALLY COOL things with them.

For example, imagine using real estate to get decentralized collateral backed loans on MakerDAO.

I can go on and on about this stuff...but it's really cool and we're just getting our feet wet with the technology.

and there are trackers for supply chain already run on centralized databases that can be tampered.

One way would be to have each "verified" transaction to be associated with an individual or entity who is providing the "verification", with legally enforceable dire penalties for "submitting" a transaction that is later found to be fraudulent.

So, if a transaction is found to be fraudulent, it can be traced back down to the first transaction in which a fraudulent transaction was submitted as "verified".

If you're operating a legal business, a centralized database hosted by an industry mutual or regulator beats a blockchain.

The thing I never understood with private blockchain tech is that the "traditional" blockchain (i.e. Bitcoin) relies on proof of work, and the only way this is viable is to have tons of resources working on these proofs so that you don't get a 51% attack (there have even been a bunch of articles about how smaller coins actually are very susceptible to a 51% attack by a decently funded attacker).

For a private blockchain, though, it never made sense to me as to who would serve the role of the miners with sufficient incentive to prevent a nefarious attacker. If on the other hand you are in a system where the participants agree as to how they will trust each other, well then you'd be back to a situation where the byzantine model isn't really necessary and you can just go back to a cryptographically signed ledger a la the Quantum Ledger DB that AWS just announced.

Would really appreciate someone explaining this one to me!

So I personally think DLT is going to be one of those multi-quadrillion dollar technologies that come around every few hundred years. The real benefit of DLT is that it enables new types of human relationships. So thinking about it in terms of what percentage of your existing databases should be replaced by it isn't going to give an especially impressive result, because by definition your existing databases are going to model your existing relationships.

Think about what percentage of the stuff in your house you would own without the invention of double entry accounting. Unless you happen to have some veggies from the farmer's market or a sweater one of your relatives knit you, the answer is probably 0.00%. It simply isn't possible to manufacture things like the iPhone without double entry accounting, because without double entry it would be impossible to form the sorts of human relationships needed to produce such a complex product. And if we asked someone to take a look at all the stuff in their house a couple hundred years from now, I'm guessing that a similar 0.00 percentage of the stuff they own will have not have been created as the result of DLT.

The fact is that once DLT becomes ubiquitous it will no longer be cost competitive to manufacture and distribute products using only the sorts of relationships and techniques enabled by double entry accounting. And if anyone even tries it's going to be like bringing a knife to a gunfight.

It also enables otherwise untrusted actors to make trustable claims, bypassing the gatekeepers that would otherwise have mediated those claims. One tangible example is ICOs bypassing not just regulators, but banks and the financial industry that would normally have had to underwrite them. Obviously this particular example has some serious kinks to work out, but the ability to bypass the corporate gatekeepers (not so much the regulators) has value, I think.

Is NIST correct?

Technology can't solve this problem.

If multiple entities need to coordinate inside a mutually used product don't trust each other, then the problem is structural and needs to be solved with interpersonal, regulatory or political action.

The problem in that area is not the previous lack of available technology, it is institutional inertia. You don't need a blockchain to speed up settlements, because the technology to do it did exist before. What you need is buy-in from a bunch of old and conservatively run institutions that do not particularly like change.

The primary fallacy of all these blockchain proponents is only seeing problems as technical in nature when they really lie somewhere else. The same applies especially to smart contracts.

As far as I know, they never won in court. Everything was settled out of court.

A case recently went to court and they lost a key argument:

https://twitter.com/msantoriesq/status/1068246911533092866?s...

Former securities lawyer Louis Cammarosano claimed back in July 2017 that 1. token sales are a threat to Silicon Valley and Wall Street, 2. that the SEC doesn't want to bring an enforcement action if their case is not ironclad because they fear that a court will disagree with their interpretation:

https://youtu.be/psqCMwhDxZo?t=12m29s

But I do think in terms of vision and coordination, blockchain has extended the horizons of what can be achieved.

I'd draw analogies to pyramid-schemes and "multi-level marketing", which are both "successful" but not in a good way.

I feel the collective "blockchain" mind-scape is absolutely dominated by nontechnical aspects, like the idea you can "get rich quick", and the assumption that you can find a "greater fool" to ensure your profit from a dodgy-product or speculative buying. This crowds out "actual engineering" and tends to corrupt whatever is left.

There were 2 parts to SDI:

1) space-based rocket-based ABM, which worked well. You can watch the SDI video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFGNo9fbf8o

2) laser missile interception, which did not work at the time.

However, with recent improvements in fiber optic transmission efficiency, this works on ships today.

The Russians have an ABM ring around Moscow based on ABM rockets.

Both Reagan and the Russian leadership did not accept the MAD doctrine, hence the above defense programs.

You see pretty fast the dissolution of values in the face of potential fortune. Its an ancient aspect of humanity - the first European explorers in the Americas would slaughter whole countries on the whisper of treasure to be had.

To be fair, it made some folks who got lucky and bought in early nice and wealthy. Which then attracted a gaggle of shysters, hucksters and fraudsters.

When you drill down the key thing that gets people sucked in to Satoshi's Blockchain, it is naked greed. Everything layered on top about the technology, or "DLT" or whatever buzzwords these people spout is just window dressing. All of them want to Get Rich Quick and drive off into the sunset in a lambo from their bitcoin gainz.

The reality of block chains is that they'll always be complicated enough that there will always be a man in the middle. Mt. Gox demonstrated that block chains will always be exploitable because the man in the middle is easily compromised. And anything that's worth going to the trouble of protecting with block chain is worth compromising.

And this assessment is cause for optimism. Look at many of the upcoming cohort of blockchain-based projects: LivePeer, Fluence, Augur, dare I say NuCypher (I'm on this team) - all of them have far more interesting things to offer than their use of blockchain tech. They render unto the blockchain what is the blockchain's, but all do way more interesting things.

https://www.questia.com/magazine/1G1-6501528/microsoft-s-thi...

The 1988 Microsoft CD-ROM Conference held in Seattle in March, attracted about 2,000 industry insiders. The tone and ambience of the conference reflect a definite change in the industry. Most companies were represented not only by top management, but by their marketing personnel. Few blue-jeaned engineers or techies were found in the crowds. CD-ROM appears to have arrived.

FINDING A PATHWAY TO THE FUTURE

In his keynote address, Bill Gates, Microsoft's founder and chairman, reiterated his goat of making computers affordable and attractive enough to be "on every desk, in every home." Gates reported that less than 50,000 CD-ROM drives are currently in the marketplace. These are either in very narrow vertical markets, such as libraries, or are being used by the industry itself. The problem of low drive sales is compounded by the high cost of developing a multimedia product. Gates estimated that it costs $1 million for each disk product, an investment that many companies have been unwilling or unable to make.

The lack of a "rich standard for audio-visual" components of CD-ROM development, and the limited tools available to developers today, are two other important reasons Gates cited for the slow growth of the CD-ROM industry.

And even oracle solutions get broken down into decentralized/centralized platforms.

Those are literally opposites. Blockchain + Tor would be the sort of complete nonsense the article is talking about.

Blockchain has nothing to do with security. It's not a security technology. It's a permanence technology. It ensures that something is never modified in the absence of a trusted authority which it does with security technology and distributed proof of work.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_chain

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle_tree

You should look at Merkle trees. They are a component of Bitcoin and many other cryptocurrencies.

What does this even mean? Its a really beautiful solution its just lacking a good problem.

Why should anyone care more than say... the adoption rate of SkipLists or Bloom Filters?

Blockchain IS a usable datastructure with some interesting properties. But so are Cuckoo Hashes. But no one is going around talking about how Cuckoo Hashes will take over the world.

Its like XML or SOAP, or any other buzzword technology. There's certainly a benefit to the technology, but ultimately the engineering of stuff that uses it is relatively boring.

I'm not sure why you focused on e-commerce as a use case, as well as the average Joe as the user. The article in question talks about them trying to find ANY industry use case. The Internet was useful pretty much from day 1. In the early 70s it already enabled digital file transfers and email communication. The use cases were easy to find...

You'll register your private keys with a PKI. In practice the worst case scenario would be needing to go to the DMV to register your new phone or something.

But of course this isn't really a blockchain, it's just a CMS with a PKI interface.