The blockchain is one of the dumbest innovations of the tech industry
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>The overwhelming consensus among programmers and technologists is that blockchain is completely useless technology for anything but speculative digital gambling on tokens.
Many Bitcoin skeptics are advocates of blockchain -- so I don't see a consensus here.
>Ok, so what do we even mean when we say “blockchain”. The answer is really that nobody knows, it’s not a term that has any precise definition and it really depends on who you talk to and the context.
Blockchain is useful and afaik does have a working definition -- it solves a very real problem of how to prevent bitrot in the long term storage of data for example.
Speaking of unsupported assertions...
(edit: yes yes, 'proof of stake' blah blah)
Plenty other projects have adapted the concept or even forked the code. The core team behind this back when it was named opencoin are without a doubt millionaires now and some even billionaires. So you are right but it way way to late now. Not to says that there could not be a even better solutions. But its already several thousand times better if you compare raw metrics like speed/TPS/energy usage etc. an even better solution would likely not make that much of a difference again.
Not really. At least, that's not the new part in cryptocurrencies. The knowledge of how to have a verifiable list of transactions which could not be tampered with existed long before bitcoin: the main challenge was to only have one which everyone could agree on just using the same set of rules without having to trust everyone follows the rules or the intent behind them (if you have a single you can trust or even just a set of parties in which you can trust the majority then it's pretty easy). And that's far more to do with designing an incentive structure which works to achieve that then it is about any fundamental cryptography.
However crypto currencies cannot exist without the blockchain.
Merkle trees were invented in 1979. If companies looking to prevent data tampering didn't make use of them until they got rebranded as "blockchain" then those companies are just bad at what they do.
I'd say "The blockchain is a Merkle tree structure with a consensus algorithm which selects a canonical path to a leaf node at any given time."
I don't think preventing double spending is a meaningful concept for non-cryptocurrency blockchains, since those have nothing to spend. Whether we accept that such things are blockchains determines whether this distinction makes any sense. Though, if all blockchains are cryptocurrencies then there's not really any need to separate the two terms.
This is certainly useful to connect entries with shared balanced like banks who cooperate. Every bank still wants to validate for themself and not blindly trust whatever another bank writes on the ledger. Moving balanced form someone else or double spend is not possible in such a system, even trough all have the same permissions.
A permissioned/private "blockchain" is still a DTL as long as the consensus enforcement is still distributed. If all participants have to trust all others to simply follow the rules then its not a DTL anymore.
That's really hard to reconcile with the "blockchain is revolutionary" meme, though. I think you've got to include distributed consensus and proof of work in the definition in order to get one that characterizes blockchain as a new invention and not just marketerspeak. Unfortunately, that definition doesn't jibe very well with the usual lists of successful uses of blockchain outside of cryptocurrency, such as corporate supply chain management, because they tend to be using blockchain where a hash chain would work just as well. Perhaps they're actually using hash chains, and just using the word "blockchain" as marketerspeak. I don't have inside knowledge and couldn't evaluate such things, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if the more commonly touted examples were doing so because distributed consensus is not a desirable thing for the problem they're trying to solve.
In the abstract, the problem is that it gets really hard to understand what everyone is actually talking about when the conversation centers on a popular buzzword.
OK, I'll bite - how does blockchain technology help prevent bit rot in a way that can't be helped more efficiently by a simpler technology?
Bitcoin is a great example of interesting tech that overcomplicates something everyone understands to fix problems most people don't have. Should we ever find a major vulnerability in a common implementation, it could be game over.
For crypto (read blockchain with PoW, PoS), other than censorship resistance - which most people don't actually care about because they are lucky enough not to need it - it doesn't really offer anything useful. Most crypto projects are Rube Goldberg machines whereby the operators of these companies are re-hashing all the same things our we've done with money before. Of course they are doing well at the moment because it's morphed into a get rich quick scheme. If there was no easy money to be made there would be little interest in it, just like there was back in 2010 when I started looking at Bitcoin.
Enterprise blockchain struggles because there's no actual need for blockchain elements like chains of provenance and smart contracts if the participants are fully identified and already have business relationships. "Blockchain" is a direct substitute for trusted third parties and good legal agreements and should only ever be used in circumstances where all other options are exhausted because the technology comes with so many bad trade-offs. Doesn't scale, very complicated, difficult to manage upgrades and versions, customers find it hard to understand, etc...
DLTs (blockchains) solve the double spending problem in a decentral (trustless) way. Thats "the definition" and what separates it from other similar tech like git or synced databases.
That's the first time I've seen "blockchain" and "bitrot" in the same sentence. And I fail to see the connection, unless you reduce "blockchain" to mean "copying data over and over", at which point there are many other, better solutions.
Central banks are all working on CBDC (Central bank digital currency). The day they will be ready, I can suppose they will eliminate the threats.
”For the last 10 years a whole cottage industry has arisen trying answer the question: Is blockchain useful for anything but gambling? After about $30b in sunk investment and a 0% success rate the industry finally has the answer: NO”
On the contrary, DLT, or distributed ledger technology, is a new kind of primitive and extraordinarily useful.
See https://aws.amazon.com/qldb/
Consider the contrast in that overview with what’s usually bucketed as blockchain.
Also its DLT not blockchain there are DLTs without chains of blocks, without PoW/PoS etc.
This is an editorial fluff piece with a very poor core argument. I'm very surprised has risen this high on HN, usually the opinion pieces here have far better formulated arguments.
e.g. "Ok, so what do we even mean when we say “blockchain”.The answer is really that nobody knows, it’s not a term that has any precise definition and it really depends on who you talk to and the context. (Source: https://threader.app/thread/1363418896301228033)"
The irony being... the author also never bothers to spell out /which/ blockchain he is ranting against.
Again, he get's sidetracked on his own strawman argument of what a blockchain is...
"Now some introductions will tell you a blockchain is a data structure from computer science which consists of a linked list of blocks which are iteratively hashed so that subsequent blocks depend on the hashes of previous blocks. (7/)However the utility of a term of art for any piece of software that includes two of the most common concepts in computer science (hashing, linked data structures) is just bad classification. (Source: https://threader.app/thread/1363418896301228033)"
He entirely misses the point that the novelty of what a blockchain is, isn't a fancy linked list, it's a mechanism for distributed consensus. Where by distributed computing algorithms from Paxos -> RAFT and private implementations of distributed databases like BigTable, Dynamo, Cassandra, and now next generation iterations like Hazelcast, Redis Grid, Spanner, etc... have enabled the greatest leaps in computing scalability of the past 10 years. However these are all privately maintained databases.
The "blockchain"... whichever implementation to which you refer, must be defined in its usability as a trusted distributed database. The mechanism of the datastructure to represent it is the least interesting or novel part of the technology.
The rest of the author's "points" regarding utility and energy consumption are equally misinformed and poorly formulated.
All in all the author just doesn't seem very informed of what blockchain is beyond the sorts of talking head gossip you'd seen on CNBC. His own limited imagination into the possible uses are akin to people from 1995 who couldn't imagine why websites would be so big or that solar panels would ever be efficient enough to generate energy.
Blockchain/distributed databases seem like really cool tech with some valuable real world applications outside of just coins and stonks but I feel like we never get into that here.
Or is this just a vocal minority thing?
I've seen some proposed vapourware nonsense about voting-on-blockchain or identity-cards-for-refugees-on-blockchain but they didn't make any sense as far as I could tell.
One particular use-case that stayed with me for a long time is what DeBeers is doing with the diamond tracing. For long time diamond certificates were faked between Afrika and Antwerp, especially on border checkpoints. This is where blood diamonds were introduced into the supply chain. Participants cannot be trusted and a common ledger (a.k.a Blockchain or DLT) is a solution. With a traditional database you'd have again a "super administrator", which is exactly what you want to avoid. This has, obviously, nothing in common with a public network like Ethereum, but it's still "Blockchain" and I believe it's still a very valuable real-world use-case. https://www.tracr.com/
Paul Brody does also a lot of real-world projects with EY.
A blockchain is a tool, like any other. All the properties of a blockchain make it the _ideal_ tool for this use case. It has all the functions literally built in to create and store and interact with a cryptographic certificate (if you will).
Imho it's the right tool for the job. The only reason to dismiss it as the tool of choice is a personal belief. You don't like, then simply don't use it, but objectively the "buzzwords" are the tech itself, it's just how it is.
Just because they are not telling you exactly how they do it, doesn't mean they don't make a good job at it. Apple and Google also don't tell you exactly how their 5G stack looks and works internally, all you get is a nice reactive UI to interact with Apps which are connected to the Internet to surf HN while sitting on the toilet...
> Just because they are not telling you exactly how they do it, doesn't mean they don't make a good job at it
It also doesn't mean they are doing a good job. Absent visible results (I have this for 5G), a technical explaination (with 5G I can read far more detail on this than I ever would want to know just from public documents even without all the internal details), or even a description of how this is intended to be used or exactly what guarantees it provides, how am I supposed to take this as evidence it works (let alone is a natural solution to the problem)? It's basically "just trust us, bro", ironic for a technology which is supposed to work in a trustless manner.
>The only reason to dismiss it as the tool of choice is a personal belief
I do think blockchains have potential, but it is a technology which is only sensible in a very narrow set of circumstances, because it is a solution with a lot of extremes owing to it attempting to solve an extreme problem (global trustless consensus).
For one, the blockchain hype train is currently used and abused by too many. It's a viable technology - at least in my opinion - but as of now, it will not "bank the unbanked", or whatever. It's way too complex and there are a lot of problems to be solved, PoW is one, scalability is another one, the learning curve is there too, and then is boulevard media who like to report on shady things, of course, putting everything in a bad light.
But! I think having basically a global copy of all data and fundamentally turning the trust model 180° is something we desperately need. All the layers and layers of auditing, risk management, risk mitigation, reporting, re-reporting, re-auditing, departments over departments in financial organizations, or the way the free-for-data model of Facebook and Google works is just disgusting to a large degree.
But, as with everything, we will see where it goes. I am strongly on the side of innovation and change. I am not considering myself a full Blockchain fanboy, but definitely more leaning towards this technology and giving it in many cases more benefit of the doubt than other people would do.
Which is good. A healthy discussion needs pros and cons.
Have a good day sir!
Ten years after the web opened for commercial use we had Google, eBay, Amazon, Facebook.
Ten years after Napster we had BitTorrent, Kazaa, a dozen others sued into irrelevance.
Ten years after the first smartphone we had...everything we do with smartphones today.
Like c'mon, if this technology is so revolutionary and transformative when are we going to see it transform something, anything, beyond illegal drug sales and ransomware!
the coordination of this effort is more akin to countries negotiating a treaty than operations inside of a silicon valley garage startup.
also, 10 years is really not a very long time.
I wouldn't rule out there being certain use cases where blockchain may turn out to be the best way to go, but at the moment that doesn't appear guaranteed to be a huge or lucrative field by itself (and yes, you can say the same about solar in 1975 or websites in 1995, but that proves nothing as there were many more ideas with similar uncertainty around them that failed alongside those). Meanwhile, the intense amount of speculation going on just smells wrong to a lot of us in light of the dearth of clear applications or industry uptake. Personally I'm skeptical, but undecided. It's mainly the speculation that gives me the willies.
I agree the author should have discussed these issues more.
Far too many people see this as a quick way to dup others and make a quick buck, because that has been profitable so far. However that in itself doesn't diminish that decentralized distributed consensus is a new class of tool that did not exist before Bitcoin. And while Bitcoin is a very inefficient implementation as we're learning, there are now new protocols with far better efficiency guarantees than proof-of-work
At this point multiple the articles on the front page are just about hating Bitcoin without any substance.
I'd consider canceling my subscription if HN was paid (though there are still many cool articles)
A lot changed. But still, 2021, most Credit Card companies will put an (more than) elevated risk score on transactions when done for crypto sales. I know this first hand, although I can't go into details, if you're a payment provider dealing with crypto companies - even with best-in-class KYC and AML checks - your rejection rate will be significantly higher than usual.
What tells us that? Many times Crypto is used to scam people, because there is no SEPA network to get the money back.
But when I was buying product with cryptocurrency at a merchant, it always went well, while I have lots of problems with credit cards (often unable to use them). I travel a lot, and I find banks disabling my cards for random reasons, then they require me to go back to the country where my bank is (which I cannot do for health reasons). I have never had problem with using Bitcoin to buy hotels and plane tickets though, it's the only way of payment I can trust to work wherever I go.