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Comment by aeturnum | Hacker News Reader

I think blockchain is an interesting technology that does have some unique qualities. It's cool that you can setup a system where the people running it don't have admin powers.

I also think that relatively few real-world problems are made easier by blockchain's strengths - and many of them are situations where you're seeking to avoid some kind of censorship. I think avoiding censorship is important and I'm glad we have a technology that is useful there - but by volume most human interactions do not have to worry about censorship.

An under-rated problem of blockchains, imo, is how the system shifts incentives for the stakeholders: if code really is law every system is one mistake away from giving away its entire value, if code isn't really law then we're just back to systems of social consensus and there's no need for all this blockchain nonsense. Very, very few people have the technical skill to implement a useful system which is fully automated. I'm extremely skeptical that we've been missing something that is going to make that dramatically easier in the future - and without several orders of magnitude decrease in programmer error smart contracts seem like a bad bet.

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> if code isn't really law then we're just back to systems of social consensus

This is one reason why I'm still cold on blockchain tech in general. When push came to shove and Ethereum was hacked, the solution was an informal social consensus to fork the chain. Which proved that as far as the flow of value is concerned, the buck stops not at the tech but at the social consensus. So all this mental effort going into fancy byzantine algorithms is effectively just smoke and mirrors and the rest is a Merkle tree.

> This is one reason why I'm still cold on blockchain tech in general. When push came to shove and Ethereum was hacked, the solution was an informal social consensus to fork the chain.

Worse than this. Code is law, but some insiders are above the law.

You realized Bitcoin was rolled back early in its history as well right (someone figured out a way to mint billions of BTC)?

It doesn't make sense to take an example of what happened in the infancy of a technological innovation like Ethereum and think that that's what still defines it.

A rollback like the one the one that happened in 2016 is almost impossible right now as the tech and the community/ecosystem has matured and grown.

As a programmer, I'm very impressed by the cleverness of blockchain and cryptocurrencies as a tech demo, much the same way I'm impressed by 64k intros from the demo scene. And at the same time I'm as horrified by the notion that people have seriously invested billions in turning the former into the basis of a new real-world economy, as I would be if the same were done with the latter. It just blows my mind that so many highly intelligent people can so thoroughly believe in something so misguided.

Maybe if so many intelligent people believe in it...

There's really something worth it, perhaps?

In this case there are intelligent people on both sides though. Who can say which side is correct?

Like most things, it's pretty obviously not black and white.

I think the same of intelligent people in the blockchain space the same that I think of intelligent people that have joined cults. Either they're in on the scam or a victim of their own naïveté and/or ignorance.

Being smart isn't an indicator of correctness.

I think the real lesson to be learned here is that it's extremely possible for a bunch of really smart people to completely miss the mark.

If there's one thing Dungeons and Dragons has taught me, it's that intelligence and wisdom are two completely different stats.

And INT is basically irrelevant outside of niche wizardy whereas nobody should be dumping wisdom.

There were and are a surprising number of people such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who studied and practiced an actual thing called ‘Magick’. I have yet to see any honest-to-God evidence of such a thing.

Just because whom you believe may be credible people might back something up doesn’t give it value. It’s value does.

Intelligent, pro-blockchain people should be relatively easily able to explain the value and utility provided by it though. It shouldn't be necessary to say "I'm intelligent and I think this is good".

Blockchain is a super simple data structure. So any bc product with a incomprehensible buzzwordy description is fraud.

Even I can name a few: uncensorable payments (especially important as I'm from an extremely corrupted country where we can't use PayPal), also super quick payments (donated to Ukrania during war ar Sunday night < 30 secs), moving the ownership of items to a decentralized system (e.g. NFTs as trading cards), smart contracts (lock your tokens and you're guaranteed, by code, that something happens like being paid an interest at some time/logic trigger). While some of those can also be implemented non-blockchain too, decentralization and having everything public and distributed is the key here. I can have my trading cards on a privately owned server too, for sure, then I'm bound to them not banning me, not crashing and losing my data, not going bankrupt, not changing the rules of the game etc. And as a bonus everyone can come and say "hey if you have this card you can play this other game I made" which empowers creative freedom.

Eventhough I consider myself above average, I'm sure there are smarter and more creative people that can come up with more use cases by time.

Just like the Internet evolved to what it is over decades, crypto space also will. We're in the "animated gifs, visitor counts, and unskippable huge flash intros" era of the crypto space.

With your last sentence, I think you're conflating the utility of blockchains as implemented today with the potential of the technology that has yet to be realized. I'm not asking for someone to point me to an incredible crypto project that exists today, but rather to explain why they think a decentralized, low-trust consensus protocol will change the world as we know it. Like, what are the killer use cases. If what you're saying is (like the early internet) we don't know what they are yet but expect it will be transformational in the long term, that's fine, but that's not really what people are saying.

Regarding your use cases.

> uncensorable payments

would your corrupt country not eventually catch up by regulating the ability to convert your BTC into fiat to buy things, or do you anticipate doing all your payments on the blockchain and never converting to fiat?

> also super quick payments (donated to Ukrania during war ar Sunday night < 30 secs)

a global payment system does seem very useful, assuming the currency is stable; not justified to the current hype though

> moving the ownership of items to a decentralized system (e.g. NFTs as trading cards)

I have failed to understand this one. If you own NFT 1 on Blockchain X, how do you enforce your ownership rights in the real world if someone else chooses not to acknowledge the authority of this decentralized system? If it's a real world asset, and I steal it from you, who do you appeal to? If it's a digital asset, and I copy and use it, who do you appeal to? Or is the utility here people who all buy into and respect the authority of this chain's ownership ledger being able to trade these things within that ecosystem?

> smart contracts (lock your tokens and you're guaranteed, by code, that something happens like being paid an interest at some time/logic trigger)

I haven't found this one that compelling, but maybe I'm missing something. Code isn't immutable, so what's to stop my "smart contract" from changing? I may be unaware of some guarantees that the blockchain provides that the code itself is also immutable.

> uncensorable payments

While it's true that you can't really censor the blockchain transfer, how much that allows someone to 'take' a payment depends a great deal on the legal circumstances where they live. I don't mean that the core transfer mechanism isn't cool - but there's a pretty big gap between a digital currency and acquiring physical goods where authorities can step in.

> super quick payments

Blockchain technology is, on average, pretty much the slowest possible way to make a payment. The slowness of other techniques are not because of any underlying technical reason - they're based on laws and policies. It's true that it can be faster than other methods in certain circumstances - but that has more to do with gaps in regulation than the technology.

I fully agree that distributed ownership is cool, but I wanted to note something about this:

> I can have my trading cards on a privately owned server too, for sure, then I'm bound to them not banning me, not crashing and losing my data, not going bankrupt, not changing the rules of the game etc

You are still bound by them not crashing, losing your data, going bankrupt or changing the rules. Many blockchains have gone down, lost history, shut down entirely, or changed the rules. There are ways that these problems are more easily addressed in a blockchain ecosystem, but it's not straightforwardly "better." If your usecase suffers from a bug, and a majority of the nodes benefit from that bug, you will likely never be able to get that bug fixed on the main chain.

I also think that copyright is the elephant in the room. Imagine two versions of...a world of warcraft sword. One is the texture & model that are included with the game - the other is, additionally, an NFT. The material reality of adding that sword to another game are identical in both cases: you can just put the sword in another game if you have the assets. That has never been a technical challenge. The challenge is legal and NFTs do not help with the legal problems.

If I sign a contract with you saying you can use the sword in another game the contract is the thing that matters. It does not matter if the contract is in an NFT or references an NFT. If anything, creating a system to manage & mint NFTs is an additional technical lift in creating multi-game assets.

I'm hard pressed think of how NFTs would be better than a centralized server that publishes daily signed database dumps of all owned assets. The cryptographic guarantees are the same and in either case the service continuing to sell assets depends on their willingness to assign copyright.

The more intelligent people are, the easier they find it to rationalise their own decisions.

midwits belive in blockchain

I worked for a blockchain startup and let me tell you, it was a ride. It was small operation not doing cryptocurrency (it had tried, failed, and pivoted). There was still a financial angle to it and the pitch enamored me enough to join them.

It turned out that the only value proposition they had was that they "used blockchain" but literally only in the sense that at some point a blockchain would have some data on it.

They were true believers too, but simultaneously didn't care that it was fakery. I have lingering PTSD from that gig.

The crazy thing (for me) is that I remain enamored with the special qualities of blockchains and would like to put them to use in a non-financial manner.

> I remain enamored with the special qualities of blockchains and would like to put them to use in a non-financial manner.

Can you think of any practical uses of a blockchain? I also think they're a fascinating concept, but I cannot think of a killer application for them.

I remember one of the original ideas was a trustless logistics system for things like shipping, but even then all the blockchain proves is that someone said they'd shipped you a box, you could still open it and find it full of rocks. And the smart contract stuff is very clever, but seems to be essentially techno-escrow except that you just have to trust your smart contract broker and the authors of the blockchain rather than your escrow agent, and also if everything goes sideways there's no legal system to interpret the contract "sensibly".

I had an opportunity to get something going on Amazon once they started hosting Hyperledger Fabric (the stack that I used). I could not come up with a commercially viable service to launch on there.

I've got some fuzzy notions on identity management and other non monetary things but it still needs thinking through.

git is a fantastic usage of blockchain, no?

Only if you redefine what is usually meant when people say "blockchain" to mean "some kind of linked data structure with checksums", then yes, git is a fantastic use of a linked data structure with checksums.

> Can you think of any practical uses of a blockchain? I also think they're a fascinating concept, but I cannot think of a killer application for them.

Identity / authenticity. As we head into a world of digital (deep) fakes, being able to authenticate the source of information/media will be very important. Block chain seems well positioned for this?

I think NFTs will settle down eventually and they'll be useful (after these short term stupids).

I'm not a fan of blockchain currencies mostly due to the preponderance of bad actors. Maybe some day, but it's a bit of a shit show atm, and not nearly as practical as originally hoped for.

> being able to authenticate the source of information/media will be very important

What would stop an actor with enough resources (Russia, China, USA) to put deepfakes onto the chain?

What would stop them from blackmailing service providers who act as gatekeepers / market platforms to put deepfakes into the chain?

Why would they even accept any single "Blockchain X" as the source of truth? Why wouldn't they just say "Oh that's the evil state Y, of course they're pretending that their fakes on their state-governed propaganda blockchain are authentical, whereas OUR blockchain tells the TRUTH!"

How would you correct honest mistakes on the chain? By a correction update? Then what would stop an evil actor (Taliban) who overturns the government, or takes over a giant corporation, from "correcting" an unpleasant truth, and rewriting history?

Once again, a social problem is attempted to be solved with technology. This never works.

> I think NFTs will settle down eventually and they'll be useful

What would be different, given some time, from now? What needs to change for NFTs to become useful?

NFTs are nothing but a scam and provide no intrinsic value (other than cover for money laundering).

I think that the way would be to use a permission-based, id-linked, reputation-maintaining mechanism. No PoW or PoS -- proof of self. It would have to be designed from the start to account for hostile manipulation. Easier said than done, of course.

> What would be different, given some time, from now? What needs to change for NFTs to become useful?

I think being able to identify and authenticate original works is a good idea that has practical uses. Practical in the same way as identifying originals in meatspace. I believe there's a ton of hype and bad actors (as usual in a new market), but suspect that'll eventually settle down. I don't see any issue with the idea of purchasing the Nyan cat original if we (society?) all agree that it as an original, same as a material painting.

Maybe NFTs are a misstep on the way to that, I don't know, and I don't care to be honest (I'm not invested in anything crypto related). There's at least a useful idea there.

> I think being able to identify and authenticate original works is a good idea that has practical uses

I agree. I don't agree that blockchain, or NFTs, can ever deliver on their promises to contribute to that matter, because of their nature. How do you think would the blockchain, or NFTs, help to identify and authenticate original works?

> I believe there's a ton of hype and bad actors (as usual in a new market)

Can you name an example of another market where this was the case - i.e. bad actors were the majority of actors, and then something (what?) happened that made the market unviable for scams?

> the idea of purchasing the Nyan cat original

What does the "original" .gif of the Nyan Cat do for you that my copy of it doesn't?

> same as a material painting

I see 2 purposes of the "original" in a material world: 1. speculation, 2. paying the original artist. Since 2. isn't possible for e.g. the Mona Lisa, what remains is that it's a pure speculation object. You could argue that experts could distinguish the orginal Mona Lisa from any copy, but that wouldn't work in the digital world, where my copy of the Nyan Cap .gif would gif just as your original would.

What is the problem statement here, and how would NFTs, or blockchain, contribute to a solution here?

What does it practically solve that a normal cryptographic signature does not?

Even distributed trust doesn't need a blockchain; web of trust is an example of that.

This is all fairly irrelevant anyway as people do not do not check things before sharing them anyway, and/or trust authenticated information from untrustworthy sources (if Fox News put their reporting on a blockchain, it doesn't suddenly become truth).

> if Fox News put their reporting on a blockchain, it doesn't suddenly become truth

There's two problems / truths here; 1) the source (E.g. Fox), which is what I think we'll need to verify, and 2) the truth of the content, which is an age old problem with no technical solution I'm aware of (or would even believe if presented with one).

Right, but for (1), what does blockchain specifically bring that, say, a normal cryptographic signature does not?

> The crazy thing (for me) is that I remain enamored with the special qualities of blockchains and would like to put them to use in a non-financial manner.

Which special qualities are you enamored with? And to what use would you like to put them?

> Which special qualities are you enamored with?

The shared ownership of state -- theoretically "serverless" in that there's not a specific server that rules them all.

> And to what use would you like to put them?

Something wiki-like, as well as service discovery.

IPFS seems like the most interesting non-financial blockchain project to me. Could be a decent way to make a decentralized backup of the internet in case the current centralized web starts falling into disrepair.

Yes it is intriguing but similarly so in how it hasn't really caught on. Perhaps some killer app will come around and change that.

there's no blockchain in IPFS, but there are cryptographic hashes

This sounds oddly like my experience with a blockchain startup for identity management…

For me blockchain is peer to peer 2.0.

Lot of hype back in the day that this technology e.g. torrent was going to revolutionise the internet and society would never be the same.

And whilst it is still widely used today and has practical use cases e.g. data distribution it wasn't transformative.

>And whilst it is still widely used today and has practical use cases e.g. data distribution it wasn't transformative.

This comment reminds me of the scene in The Social Network where Eduardo Saverin taunts Sean Parker about Napster losing to the record companies, and Parker says "you wanna buy a Tower Records, Eduardo?"

By which I mean: just because peer-to-peer didn't win as a technology, does not mean it wasn't transformative. We live in a world where the iPod could launch and we have access to $10/mo unlimited (centralized) streaming. This world exists because the mere existence of p2p technology places limits on the way that the content industry can operate.

> I also think that relatively few real-world problems are made easier by blockchain's strengths - and many of them are situations where you're seeking to avoid some kind of censorship. I think avoiding censorship is important and I'm glad we have a technology that is useful there - but by volume most human interactions do not have to worry about censorship.

What's funny about that is China is adopting blockchain technologies specifically to bind together databases for tracking social credit scores across different provinces because they've previously been silo'ed and unable to communicate with each other in a straightforward way (for whatever reason).

China is banking on blockchain technologies precisely because it's can be such a powerful censorship tool.

https://decrypt.co/39905/blockchain-now-powers-parts-of-chin...

Same question that comes up with nearly every such application of crypto-tech in business or government: Why can't they just do that with a database?

Blockchain adds a level of certainty that history hasn’t been changed, and you can at least audit any undo-type actions; it’s the same reason certificate transparency logs and git are built on blockchain-esque technology.

So when does something stop being “git” and start being “blockchain technology”? When the latter sounds better to investors?

When there are multiple actors incentivized to ignore any history-rebasing. Of course if you're running your own git repo, you know your githashes will change if you go back in history and change something, and it doesn't matter. When multiple people want to ensure that history hasn't changed, they can compare their hashes with yours, and have good evidence of who tampered with the history and ignore them / prosecute them.

`git push -f` can absolutely do the type of "history changing" that you claim it can't though. CT logs are also quite vulnerable to attacks where the root of the certificate chain gets compromised, for example because they are being threatened by their government. Even blockchains are only protected from history rewriting as long as no 51% attack takes place, and all but the largest blockchains are quite vulnerable to this.

Additionally a bit flip in a CT (cert transparency) log rendered it invalid and dead. This cannot happen in a peer to peer consensus protocol as the bad block would have been rejected by the working nodes. CT is good tech but it superficially is a private issued blockchain without most of the benefits of public peer to peer electronic cash and digital asset systems.

I question this idea of history writing and it being a huge problem.

How far down the chain could a 51% blockchain rewrite occur before consuming all of the computation power of the universe?

I have seen arguments in which the 51% steals all of the new coins but how long can that be maintained, the other 49% needs to pay their bills and audits would inevitably out the bad players. Eventually, the last bitcoin will be minted, making the whole issue mute.

51% attacks don't rewrite history, they rewrite accepted history (with accepted further narrowly defined to mean "accepted for transactional purposes"). It's not like the other 49% are under any sort of obligation to delete the alternative chain from their hard drives.

Corruption. They don’t trust their own people with data.

But how does blockchain help here, compared with other ways of syncing data?

Anti-Corruption tech. If everyone's scores are just stored in a SQL databse, people can pay off officials to change their grade, Ferris Bueller-style. Blockchain prevents any province or official from having superuser power over the data.

That would make sense if: - There weren't other methods to prevent tampering - Governments didn't want anti-corruption methods without having admin powers to exclude themselves.

This doesn't really make sense. We have SQL databases with permissions to prevent tampering, and audit logs, and myriad other solutions.

In addition, I don't see what prevents an "official" from writing a social credit transaction (disclaimer that I have no idea how China's "social credit" system works or even what it is) to the blockchain. Nodes validate to solve disagreements where one node says a transaction happened that did not. This does not appear to be the same type of dishonesty being referred to here.

You can achieve this in a SQL database with proper processes, auditing and controls.

The world has functioned up until the magical dawning of the blockchain.

You'd be stupid to use, say, ETH to do it when you can simply have multiple parties sign and publish events in a distributed append-only log, which they keep syncronised. That doesn't need PoW or to be a currency.

Without the blockchain consensus mechanism, how else can you guarantee the log has only be appended?

With a hash chain[0], an idea from 1981.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_chain

I am interested in this and I have an emotional desire for you to be right; I'm skeptical of every application I've ever seen for blockchain.

That being said, it is not clear to me how a hash chain guarantees that the data it stores hasn't been modified.

Okay, maybe I should have posted the link to the Merkle tree page[0] instead.

The basic idea is, you have a chain of 'transactions' (like in bitcoin or think git commits) und you store the hash of the content + the hash of the member before as a checksum. This way, if you alter the log file, the hash for the modified entry is suddenly different, and the chain breaks, because the next member used your hash as input to calculate their checksum. So you can not only see that the file was tampered with, you can also say which entry was modified.

Edit: Merkle trees[0] generalize this concept into trees, which are e.g. used in ZFS (the file system), git and in the blockchain.

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

It seems to me that if you have a copy of the information locally and compare it to the remote, you can see whether they diverged with or without a hash - the hash certainly makes it faster, but it's not clear to me that a hash chain or a Merkle tree offers a guarantee that's as powerful as the blockchain's promise.

(Social factors and forks to change our minds on blockchains notwithstanding)

Like git. The value isn't necessarily in that there can't be conflicts, but that conflicts are straightforward to surface and resolve.

How do you deal with multiple copies with different signing parties who claim to have the true copy?

Erm the entire point of having multiple parties sign is you get the quorum which is how you avoid this issue.

Sure, you have a limited number of participants and some tweaking to do on the quorum (in some cases you might want all parties to sign).

But hey - the blockchain cool-aid gang tried to sell it as a solution for COVID contact tracing. Which is beyond laughable. The entire industry is a shillfest.

The other ways require you to trust the operators of other nodes you sync with.

The only between-nodes trust blockchain relieves you of is trust in the history of a multiparty transaction log.

A blockchain doesn't prevent individual parties from lying about things only they would know about -- if that's what's on your chain, you still need trust.

Department of Homeland Security also likes blockchain tech, for various 'transparency' reasons:

https://www.dhs.gov/science-and-technology/blockchain-portfo...

There are many anti-fraud and enhanced supply chain tracking notions associated with blockchain tech. Of course, those are all enabled with this form of 'surveillance.'

this post makes absolutely no sense. blockchains are useful in situations where you need consensus between potentially adversarial parties. the benefits of trustless coordination have tradeoffs that make blockchains less efficient than traditional databases or computational systems. there is zero advantage and significant additional cost & complexity for a centralized body (the CCP), which has direct control over all subsidary participants, using a blockchain to collate disparate databases. this is a meaningless PR release.

> tracking social credit scores across different provinces because they've previously been silo'ed and unable to communicate with each other in a straightforward way (for whatever reason).

does this sentence mean something to you? what does a blockchain do in this situation?

China's provincial officials are potentially adversarial parties vs the central government. Officially they must do as they are told, but unofficially they have considerable independent power as long as they aren't caught.

Only a guess, but I suspect that Covid got as bad as it did partly because Wuhan officials didn't want the central government to know how bad things were (at least at first).

This is partially correct, China is not a monolithic entity that fully marches in lockstep with Beijing.

But the solution to the problem of uncooperative governors is the application of soft power (media, agitprop, appointments, rewards, threats, denunciations and disappearances, liquidation of problem people, their families, their friends, their pets, etc), not some over-engineered technological non-solution that still relies on the cooperation of all the parties in question to work.

A blockchain can't enforce that anyone actually enters data into it, or that the data that is entered isn't garbage. A snail-mail package containing data sent to Beijing has the exact same immutability property for the only party that cares about it - the national government.

Something like a blockchain is useful when peers don't trust eachother, but all care to build a shared consensus. When the peers don't care about consensus, and a central authority with the power of pit and gallows exists, none of those usecases hold.

I didn't mean to imply that a blockchain is a good solution here.

And in a system where it's considered sometimes desirable to erase inconvenient history, an immutable ledger doesn't help with that.

The 21st century in the Western world has taught us that we don't need to physically erase inconvenient history, you just need to shout the new version of history loudly enough.

George Orwell was mistaken when he thought that anyone would care about facts, figures, and how much sugar was rationed every week. You just need to tell people that it's raining while you piss on them, and they'll believe you.

A block chain doesn't help with this situation though since only the central authority matters. If a adversarial party submits false data, blockchain doesn't do anything to address that.

The situation you describe can be handled via a write-only log with cryptographic signing of each change.

I’m unable to find a single article that actually details what “blockchain technology” they’re using, and why. Every English article seems to be a rehash of the same press release - Can anybody find something better in mandarin ?

Based on what you've described, they are using blockchain for their censorship tool, but that's different from the blockchain being a censorship tool in and of itself.

> It's cool that you can setup a system where the people running it don't have admin powers.

How often is this true in practice? It seems like crypto often has centralized points where people have admin powers.

I think it's typically true? The instances I know of where transactions were undone involved convincing all the node runners to fork their nodes - they were not done "within" the blockchain system. Instead they used social consensus to create a slightly altered blockchain system. How big of a difference this makes to you is up for debate.

> I think blockchain is an interesting technology that does have some unique qualities

Blockchain has unique attributes, I don't think it has any unique quality.

Most of its "qualities" are things that you do not want under any circumstance in your systems even independently, so adding them all together turns it into a worthless technology.

Immutability? Harmful in 99% of the use cases. Trustless? Harmful in 99% of the use cases. Decentralized? A waste in 99% of the use cases. Now put all 3 together, add more "qualities" akin to those, and you've got blockchain.

>by volume most human interactions do not have to worry about censorship.

I suspect this will increase over time.

>if code isn't really law then we're just back to systems of social consensus and there's no need for all this blockchain nonsense.

Exactly, and the "code is law" thing is not going so well, given that many of the programmer error catastrophes thus far have been "solved" by the social consensus of a small clique of developers.

>>by volume most human interactions do not have to worry about censorship. >I suspect this will increase over time. Do we still have to qualify this with suspicion? In a lot of ways, it's already increasing.

> don't have admin powers

> Sent $80M a Month to Himself

In the end, it turns out that you don't need admin powers to steal lots of money.

> In the end, it turns out that you don't need admin powers to steal lots of money.

You just need to know the laws very well to steal a lot of money: this holds both in the "ordinary" world and for cryptocurrencies (there code is law).

> You just need to know the laws very well to steal a lot of money: this holds both in the "ordinary" world and for cryptocurrencies (there code is law).

With cryptocurrency, code is more like possession. The law is still law.

Reminds me a situation when all your databases are ransom-crypted, your PC is a part of a botnet, but more importantly the operating system is still safe and running.

>I think blockchain is an interesting technology that does have some unique qualities.

The way I phrase it is, blockchain offers an interesting/useful requirements document, with a poor implementation.

I think blockchain is an interesting technology that does have some unique qualities. It's cool that you can setup a system where the people running it don't have admin powers.

It’s a Merkel tree, with a distributed clock. I still don’t know where it would be useful outside of cryotocurrencies. And for currency, it’s still extremely questionable.*

Are there any systems where a majority of users simply can't agree to change the code that is running?

How would that even work? Nobody can force you to run a piece of code against your will.

EDIT: I guess you could rules-lawyer about the meaning of "majority" but like... you don't even need a majority of users to start a fork! Two people is enough to start a fork. There's nothing preventing me from starting a fork of Bitcoin today and mining/trading it among my friends. It's just that normally people feel compelled to go along with what the majority is doing

See the Etherium rollback/fork and the Bitcoin/Bitcoin Cash fork for examples.

If enough people on the blockchain decide to update their code to do something different, you either fork or move with them.

I think you're confused, I'm asking how what the GP said (a blockchain where a fork couldn't happen) could ever be possible.

Ah, you'd have to have some form of central authority that "signs" the official "code" which would defeat the point of a blockchain anyway.

That's the point. Code isn't law.

Probably not what you meant, but the US Credit Score is a very opaque system, but I would wager to say that the majority of people would like to see that code changed[1] (or more likely, abolished).

Though I suppose we're not "users" of such a system, but are rather "subjected to it"

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

No - but like...the key feature of blockchain is that you can design a system where you must do that to make a change. If you're running a 'centralized'* (let's say 'administered') system then you can just change the database with your admin credentials. You could swear up and down that you threw away your admin credentials, but you can't prove you destroyed data. Blockchain systems can be used to create systems where you can prove that no entity has admin powers. I am extremely skeptical of how useful that is - but it is unique.

* blockchains are centralized; just in a different way

How do newsgroups maintain integrity across providers without a coin? Isn’t it like a sum check? That doesn’t work as good?

I wish bitcoin were solving a real problem for the amount of energy it uses.

I think checksums can be used to verify that particular messages are the same, but ultimately I think there just aren't that many protocols for ensuring that every provider has every message. Some messages could get dropped and the solution is that providers will just check again - there's no protocol level guard against it.

Absolute integrity is a lot less important in systems which assume that inexpensive manual overrides will be possible - because you save a ton by simply deciding to build a system that 'only' works 99.9% of the time and intervening in 0.1% of cases. Obviously blockchains don't work 100% of the time but that's the premise for their increased costs.

Newsgroups were run by a secret cabal for a long time. Beyond that the system just doesn't preserve integrity; a given provider can censor some messages and that's generally something you live with or switch to a better provider.

If there's very high interdependence and dependence on a scarce shared resource, they could be locked in. An non-code example is deciding which side of the road to drive on. If 99% of the population chose to change from left to right, the remaining 1% would prevent that from working. The 99% can't just build a parallel road network for themselves because of limited space.

Depends on who instigated the change. The 1% of people being those with the authority to make the change.

Samoa changed road direction a while ago. Not everyone was on board, but it happened anyway.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/8243110.stm

If 99% of Bitcoin users/hash power switched over to a different set of rules, the 1% wouldn't matter, the 99% would ignore them. They could whinge and cry all they wanted.

I'm not sure the analogy even works, but in the case of driving, if 99% decided to switch how the roads were to be used, I assure you that literal resistance would not be tolerated. There might be some incidents, but there wouldn't be very many before the 1% were the ones getting pushed around.

"Few"? More like none. No blockchain is fully automated. The idea that Bitcoin or anything else just works by itself despite the persistent changes to the system by faceless developers is ridiculous. Crypto marketing presents this false narrative where we're meant to accept that crypto operates above social influence despite the evidence that clearly contradicts that (see the miner vs developer drama during the SegWit soft fork for instance).

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