AWS and Blockchain

Having one neutral platform, controlled by no one, with standardized API's and immutable open programs that anyone can permissionlessly build on - is amazing.

We've never had this before, and it's incredible how fast the DeFi space is moving because of it. I work for a platform (Balancer) that has had over 20 different companies (Aave, Element, CopperLaunch, Gyro, Aura, Hidden Hand) build financial applications on top of our tech stack in the last 2 years.

Then there are different wallets (Metamask, Rainbow, Ledger), aggregators (1inch, Matcha, 0x), portfolio management tools (Zapper, Zerion, DeFi Saver).

All of these work with each other mostly out of the box and without any formal partnerships between anyone. This is a radical new way of building finance and it's the fastest paced industry I've ever been a part of.

It's similar to AWS where it got exponentially more valuable as each new service was added - but the entire world can contribute to it. Like AWS people didn't understand the value initially, but over time they realized how big of a deal it was as more and more components were added.

I think we also need to specify that it's also an extremely distinct and rare type of "distributed": When you must support unrestricted and unlimited creation of new participant nodes.

That's the fundamental requirement that drives an entire cascade of other blockchain design choices, such as proof-of-work to prevent a takeover by sockpuppet-nodes, and mining to incentivize regular consistent participation by a presumed-benign majority. Without that requirement and workarounds, we're left with a kind of regular distributed database, pre-hype technology that already featured hashes and linked-lists.

This requirement ("anybody can become part of the network anonymously") also makes for a great litmus-test for whether you need blockchain.

For example, in national elections we probably don't want/need literally any number of computers anywhere in the world to jump in and deciding what happens based on their CPU power. It would be dramatically faster/easier/safer to simply define a fixed list of nodes, where each state runs a couple plus the federal government, and then rely on the fact that evildoers would have to compromise too many different systems and agencies.

The problem that bitcoin solves is that you can not prevent me from casting a million votes because the system is anonymous - or pseudonymous if you want - and therefore there is no list of participants that would prevent casting more than one vote. This is called a Sybil attack.

Bitcoin's solution - and similarly that of other block chains - is to make casting a vote expensive, either in terms of computational resources or owned tokens or whatever.

Blockchains only ensure that coins are never spent twice. They make no attempts to ensure that coins are sent to the correct recipients. At the end of the block, they only care that debits are equal to credits.

This can be confusing because the term "double spend" is also frequently used in cryptocurrency in the context of fraud prevention. In this context, you definitely do care that the coins get to the correct recipients but this concern is outside of the functional scope of the blockchain mechanism.

Instead, fraud prevention is typically satisfied through additional code, adjacent to the "blockchain stuff", which establishes signaling networks and transaction inclusion criteria.

They're very different mechanisms inside blockchain clients but, confusingly, they both make frequent use of the term "double spend".

The word Blockchain is so overloaded, people forget you can build a "blockchain" in 50 lines of code if not less. "Mining" new blocks is added on top of that, it's not a hard requirement - you can just create new blocks and link them up. You can choose to "mine" on CPU (slow) or on the GPU, if you want "mining" at all. You can then choose to persist it (file or sql or whatever) or only run it in memory. After that you can get into the concept of ledgers and currencies, and after that into making it distributed via some gossip-y protocols.

So a cleaner definition of a block chain would be, a tamper-proof daisy-chained data structure, similar to a linked list. All the stuff about ledgers, currencies, mining and consensus are separate concerns, stacked on top of a blockchain.

Also checkout: Merkle trees, linked lists, Chain of Responsibility.

Anyone agree/disagree?

Double-spend has been solved by the financial sector quite some time ago. The distributed system part - I guess this is the problem that I think the article is claiming is yet to be found.

Isn’t Blockchain just a convoluted solution to a problem nobody has?

(Which is the conclusion of the article)

I work in a hobby industry where a lot of community run ledgers are suddenly lost forever due to the death of someone in the fandom (or rarely intentional sabotage or hacking).

Would this be a good use for blockchain or are there maybe other solutions I'm not considering or aware of?

This is perhaps the simplest easiest use case for a hash based linked list. Of course this is not the complete picture of what cryptocurrencies are; the hash list is just part of the system.

company minting their own token and then using it as collateral, accounting it as if they had billions. the "stable coins" cannot produce basic accounting audits that a low level book-keeper could do on any normal business.

there has been so much fraud in crypto the past few years. and the algorithm did not help to stop that.

Take a text editor, it would be improved if edits or saves which are just transactions are stores on a blockchain if the text is being stored and shared synchronously and live between devices.

Basically, people have more devices, want to collaborate and add redundancies to important systems which means changes to data (transaction) where the historical sequence of changes is important to someone can use blockchain, but of course it isn't neccesarily the best solution, especially if there is trust between nodes or out of sync nodes causing a mess can be solves by simpler solutions.

Wow, that's next level PM cringe.

I'm glad you were able to jujitsu your way around it.

When you want to display a record, you can aggregate the data historically and allow people to see changes and attribute them to users and time but you can always see what was originally added.

However that's kinda risky for HR because anything committed to that DB will be there... forever!

It may seem so, bu then You find out what are Your governments limit's for storing workers data, and Your company lawyers forces You to make it possible to delete everything that past that limit to limit legal risk and be gdpr compliant. And at this moment You find out that world is not constant and far from Your ideal model of spherical cow.

Stomps on brake with both feet

When you're more junior you often make the mistake of wrongly dismissing ideas because you think you are very clever. I find that by the time you unlearn this, you typically should reverse direction.

Early in my career, every time something didn't make sense, it's because I had a misunderstanding of how things really worked.

Much later in my career I started to realize more and more often when I said "this doesn't make sense" I would start assuming I was the one missing something, only to time and time again uncover some one else had messed up or that something else was fundamentally wrong.

Obviously even the most expert in their field should reserve some probability that they are misunderstanding, but learning to recognize that you are an expert and that you not understanding something is in fact smoke is an important late career skill.

So it actually seems that in the logistics line of things like manufacturing / production / etc. there is a place for blockchain, mainly due to the immutability and decentralized distribution properties. What could take a whole week to track down using older methods, takes seconds if all the data is recorded on the blockchain...for example, food production. You want to find out exactly which animal your food comes from, and all the things involved (use of antibiotics? which factory? how did the product travel before ending up at your grocery store? etc.).

Some researchers working on these products repeated that they often get approached by directors and CxO level people regarding this - wondering if blockchain can "solve problems". And every time, they have to reply: Using the blockchain can solve some specialized problems, but there's no magic fairy dust involved, and it's not some general structure which will solve all their problems.

Unfortunately, it's kind of like AI. High-level directors dream of General AI, but you need to explain to them that it's all ML models which aid (replace if you're lucky) workers, and automate some tasks.

I think any CTO worth their salt should know these things, and manage the expectations of the other C-suite executives.

By analogy, sunlight and air are cheap, not expensive, even though we can't live without them. If either of these were in short supply they would become extremely expensive. But since they're abundant we don't normally dwell on their value.

In a civilized society with a stable government, we take trust for granted. That's how society is able to build skyscrapers and shipping terminals and air travel. If society collectively loses trust in itself, we will lose these nice things. Trust is a feature of living in a liberal democracy. Autocracies may manage it too, but their historical record is questionable.

So trust is precious, but I wouldn't express it as trust is expensive because it creates far more value than it costs.

Say, how would you build a skyscraper without trust? Are you going to set up an on-premises laboratory to test the quality of the concrete and steel? Are you going to personally verify the entire building's plans? Check whether the geological study was accurate? Follow every worker around to make sure they don't cut corners anywhere?

The less you can trust that the many people involved did their job, the harder and more expensive it gets to actually get the work done, until it turns out it just can't be practically done.

A lack of trust gets you a place like Afghanistan -- where the moment you stop looking stuff starts disappearing.

I worked for several years on an 'enterprise blockchain' system. We often called it distributed ledger technology because our platform didn't actually use chains of blocks or proof of work, and it didn't have a token or anything like that. It was essentially a type of database but it had a lot of ideas from Bitcoin in it and was blockchainy enough that customers accepted it as such.

I have to admit, at the very start I was skeptical about why so many large companies seemed to want this stuff. Like Tim, I also spent a lot of time talking to staff at these large institutions to understand where they were coming from. Unlike him I didn't work for AWS which is pretty much the exemplar of centralised infrastructure, so maybe it was easier to pick up on some of the more subtle issues involved.

There are a few things to understand about businesses that decided they wanted blockchain:

1. They have complicated inter-firm communication and synchronization needs.

2. They solve those needs today via creating centralized trusted intermediaries (like CLS). This comes with a world of pain and problems like the obvious "too big to fail" issue that was exposed in 2008, but there's also a lot of less obvious problems, like these institutions immediately becoming stagnant rent seekers who don't innovate.

3. They exist in markets that lack obviously dominant players who can push things forward. Many people in the tech world don't understand this because we rely so heavily on a handful of ultra-profitable, ultra-huge tech firms that spend lots of treasure on giving out freebies and standards setting, but that's abnormal.

So they heard about how Bitcoin can synchronize different companies view of a real financial object like a ledger without a SWIFT-like organization sitting in the middle, and thought "yes that sounds like what we need". And they're kind of right, as long as you think in terms of business problems rather than technology!

"Blockchain" is a concept that works for them speaking in the purely abstract social sense because it acts as a neutral rallying point. If one company in a market observes that maybe having a giant specialized too-big-to-fail clearing house like CLS isn't the ideal way to solve atomic transactions, and they go to their partners saying "hey let's use this cool thing we designed" the answer will always be no because their partners will say, why should we empower our competitor? Blockchain as a concept is owned by nobody, and the core idea is that it empowers nobody, so it acted as an enabler for conversations that would otherwise never have happened. Whether the final result actually uses proof of work or even has blocks at all actually isn't so relevant except in the sense that business owners don't want to get ripped off by people lying to them about what they built.

Tim Bray should really understand this dynamic better than most people because he created XML, which crops up in the enterprise space all over the place, often in ways that aren't really appropriate. Something like protobufs would have been a far better fit but they use XML. Why is that? Well, XML went through a massive hype wave ~20 years ago thanks to the W3C relentlessly pushing this vapourware "semantic web" concept, so for a brief period XML was the future of everything. Again, this created a socially acceptable rallying point at which complex inter-firm business problems could be solved in a relatively decentralized way. The tech got used regardless of merit simply because it was something everyone could agree on and unlike ASN.1 the protocols/tooling was free.

Back to blockchain. The platform I designed for this use case (Corda) was a competitor of the DA platform used in ASX and has done relatively well in the market - it reached number 1 by number of projects using it and unlike the ASX case actually has real deployments that are actually decentralized. Over 90% of Italian banks are using it for inter-bank reconciliation! [1] There are other projects that use it too which seem to be working (I'm not involved in any of them directly and haven't worked on Corda for several years now). You never hear about them on HN because they're too Starship Enterprise to be interesting to the crowd here, but the idea that there are no working blockchain projects isn't actually true.

We managed this partly by walking the tightrope between what people said they wanted (blockchain!) and what they were telling us they actually wanted in customer interviews (what we came to call distributed ledger technology). There was definitely a fair bit of overlap but not enough to just throw Ethereum at a problem and call it solved. What they really needed was a combination of better inter-firm messaging, signing/cryptography, atomic financial transactions without a CLS-style intermediary that actually takes custody of the assets, a robust identity framework, good developer support and training materials etc. Some of this can be found in blockchain related research like BFT algos, others were somewhat solved already, but blending them together into a coherent platform was hard.

There's lots more that can be said about this - some customer projects failed, but the reasons ran the gamut from tech to social/political/business reasons. It wasn't as simple as "blockchain is a scam", which is what Bray seems trying to imply here. There actually is a there, there. It's just really, really hard to solve these problems without a hype wave to coordinate and synchronize intent.

[1] https://www.r3.com/case-studies/spunta/

For those looking for a fun read about trust read some Francis Fukuyama.

I think in any other space, if you had millions of people (some of them wicked smart) m looking for applications of a technology without results, you’d see the space dwindle into irrelevance quickly…

Crypto is very special in this sense. Despite massive failures and frauds at scale, people keep flocking to it. Is it the promise of unlimited riches, the romantic aspects of it (“decentralization”, etc.), something else altogether?

I don’t know, but to answer your question: I get the feeling that despite the FTX case crypto still has many years ahead of it, regardless of whether it ever produces positive outcomes.

As long as money flows into it (which seems to be ending) and people accept that Bitcoin was the "killer app," as the kids say.

Everything else was just slower database apps jazzed up with buzzwords front-run by narcissists who realized they needed a new grift beyond Uber for Cats.

If an attacker came to your house, kicked your ass until you give your private key, and then transferred the land to themselves on the blockchain — the land would be fully legally theirs now! It's a valid transaction, and the courts can't reverse it — there's one source of truth, and it's cryptographically unchangeable without the private key. That's what the blockchain says, and the police will evict you from your own house.

(and then to prevent that you build enough off-chain trust systems, escrows, and side databases on top, and courts gain ability to dictate changes, and the actual blockchain becomes an irrelevant implementation detail).

I don’t know what’s would be a better outcome.

Did you expect it to be world reserve currency in a decade? Replace the 5000 years gold? Upend the global banking system? Render the IMF obsolete? Make nation-states think twice about waging war without taxation?

I mean - surely you aren’t comparing these world-shattering outcomes to a mobile app that doesn’t make money after that long!

This is the crux of the matter. In a prevailing number of cases, when people ask about a blockchain, they actually want a ledger database with the following properties:

– an immutable, tamper proof, append-only transaction log;

– cryptographically verifiable datasets;

– certification and/or compliance validation by externally accredited auditing bodies for SOC, PCI-DSS, ISO, HIPPA etc.

Use cases for ledger databases go beyond finance, and have been becoming a commonplace in health, education, supply change and inventory management, archive record management and similar. Anywhere, where compliance, strict record keeping and/or audit requirements are in place, the ledger databases provide the answer. AWS has QLDB, and Azure will soon have the Azure SQL Ledger Database (built on top of their SQL Server product).

Fully fledged blockchains are not required in most cases.

In Git users there are two schools of thought, one which advocates preservign history (even if it is messy / involves fixes) because preserving a record of what actually happened is useful [1]. The other insists that a curated version of the history is more important because it is easier to understand in retrospect.

[1] There are other downsides in Git history rewriting, such as the blow up you get when attempting to merge / join branches where one has rewritten history and the other not... and the blow up you get when two people attempt to collaborate on a branch in presence of rewriting. These might have accounting analogies too

As a NYC financial services CTO, a few years back I spoke to Jassy personally, asking him to please not make 'traditional' blockchain nonsense, but to please productize and release a distributed ledger primitive. A few weeks later, AWS got back to us and said they were willing to work on such a thing, and a few groups (perhaps such as yours) jumped on as well. In our case, we were looking to use it to help manage multiparty contracts where we as a bank were trusted by the multiple parties who didn't need to trust each other.

When AWS did eventually* announce AWS Blockchain at re:Invent, they announced QLDB alongside. One was what everyone was begging for, one was useful. I'll leave which is which as an exercise for the reader. :-)

TL;DR:

I encourage anyone serious about solving financial services problems where blockchain comes up to look at QLDB instead, but also anyone looking at security, compliance attestation, or other multi-party trust or regtech related problems.

* Note: "eventually" as in, quite late to the blockchain hype party, and dragged kicking and screaming by the sales org, as tbray describes, so that at least they'd stay in the room with "big IT" signing up for IBMs hyperledger and other failed experiments.

It sounds very interesting to me.

Another way to do this without the blockchain is open standards (think… HTML for example!) and software that lets you export. Where possible run this software open source on the desktop or as an open source web app. Think Photopea as the pinnacle here.

The blockchain or no blockchain approachable both suffer when you have a data format per app locking you into that app anyway.

The problem with all of these cockamamie blockchain arguments is that they talk about a problem, and then they talk about a (bad, expensive, difficult to use) database that might form part of that problem, but in fact the problem is always far bigger and way more complicated than the choice of the database vendor.

To register that land, they need to convince a corruptible human to accept their application, get another corruptible human to enter the data correctly in the database and get a third corruptible human to give them an authentic certificate proving that their land holding has been registered. You can already see three points where this can be trivially subverted, but it gets worse.

The hard part, you see, is defending their property rights. Local bigwig casually stomps on their land, now they need to convince the corruptible police to investigate (good luck with that when they're on the bigwig's payroll), find a lawyer willing to take this on (in exchange for what?), get the corruptible land rights registry to verify their claim, get a corruptible judge to give a true verdict, and then convince that corruptible police to carry out the verdict. If you're a poor subsistence farmer, it's nearly impossible to navigate this morass, and blockchain solves precisely zero of these problems.

Finally and most fundamentally, a land registry is by nature a centralized registry of holdings with a legal monopoly. Why on earth would you need to use a blockchain here, when an append-only database does the same job?

If I own farmland and lose my private key (or screw up a smart contract and lock it away forever, etc), should that land never be farmed again?

If a river moves and boundaries must change but the NFT isn’t aware of this, what happens?

If someone with guns takes my land, who cares about my NFT?

Maybe technology can help create a system where transactions really happen on a common-carrier basis and can’t be censored without censorship being documentable and illegal. But at the end of the day, ownership of real things isn’t something on chain and is enforced by centralized institutions, and a blockchain won’t change that.

If your property record is on a blockchain but those whose recognize such rights ignore it, it’s not a property record, for example. It’s an internet comment or public expression of opinion. Similarly, what makes your name typed on a Docusign a legally binding signature? Federal statute recognizing it as such.

> Is a smart contract better than a written contract? Maybe it is, if there is no functioning judiciary to adjudicate contractual disputes.

If there’s no functioning judiciary, then who will enforce the contract? Who will decide if one side is not acting in good faith, or if there was coercion, or deception? I claim that smart contracts solve none of the issues actually caused by having weak institutions.

There's no evidence that this is true. People have been saying this for years and there's nothing to show for it.

This doesn’t seem like it could possibly be true without something like an outside force requiring use of the blockchain. For example, if my neighbor uses some of my land, who cares if I say it’s not valid according to someone’s computer? If the local legal system is inept or corrupt, who’s going to do something about it? In almost all cases the local control of state power wins.

This is especially relevant when you think about the long history of how lane has historically been stolen by tricking or threatening people, bribing surveyors, or by making promises which aren’t kept. Blockchains not only improve none of those situations but also add new ones like tricking people into using exploitable smart contracts or phishing their transfer approvals.

Have you directly spoken to developing world farmers who have experienced these problems?

Do you think people with these problems are just clamoring for the first world to come in and solve this for them with blockchain technology?

Do you think all of the participants in the situation you described would even adopt blockchain (the small farmer, the larger farmer who wants to steal land, the corrupt central government officials open to bribes)? If so, why? It seems the only person with an incentive for change is the one least likely to have strong influence for that change.

In Thailand when you get out into the rural areas, there’s no central database you can go and argue to in regards to land ownership. You have chiefs. He mediates sales between people and ensures who owns what land. If a land dispute happens it gets resolved by the chief.

In cities it’s all controlled by local governments and paper records.

It works in the city with government and paper. It works less in rural areas where people can be bought.

Blockchain is not solving any problems here. The problem is no one managing any records.

Paper records and up to date gps records are enough.

> For me, the promise of the blockchain is that it can provide a technological framework upon which to build new kinds of institutions

You're trying to solve social and political problems with tech. And you cannot. You could spend 30 seconds thinking abuout the problem and realised why it can't.

Question: who is the rightful owner of the marked land? See my comments in this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27212564

> Is a smart contract better than a written contract? Maybe it is, if there is no well-functioning judiciary to adjudicate contractual disputes.

And who is going to enforce this smart contract?

> It's important to remember that what might seem redundant or useless to those of us who reside in the first world may not be redundant or useless to those who live elsewhere.

It's also important to remember that people who claim this (and claim blockchains are solutions to problems) also reside in the first world and have literally no clue about the problems outside their cushy bubbles.

As others have said, you can't (usefully) represent ownership in the blockchain because ownership can change or be made irrelevant outside of the blockchain.

While blockchain wouldn't be useful for this, a host of cryptographic tools would be.

If a country used signed survey data they could prevent a host of crimes and bugs changing boundaries, and if they issued signed land titled you could check their validity offline - helpful for remote areas. They could be tied together entry to entry, like a blockchain, to assure that no records "go missing". There could be a single-core proof of work stored regularly, checkpointing the data, to prevent the country's IT team from rewriting the whole database. It just doesn't need to be "a blockchain" because there is a centralized authority who we all follow, if not trust, so the decentralized thing isn't that important. And we don't need to limit publishing so we don't need a currency.

The developed world is not immune to some of the problems, namely: genuine human errors, negligence and a great uneasiness to accept the personal responsibility for making mistakes, inadvertent or out of sheer incompetence (rampant in the British culture). The latter two somewhat step into a gray area, but I digress.

Ledger databases/blockchains provide a technological solution to the problem in multiple areas where a full immutable temporal history of changes is necessary even in the developed world where the governance is strong and corruption is less frequent.

(smart) Contracts? Without institutional enforcement, doesn't matter. Maybe being all on-chain, but that hasn't really functioned.

Ownership (NFT)? Doesn't work at all without some level of institutional enforcement.

Blockchain does only one thing well.

But will those institutions be democratic or respect human rights? Proof-of-work blockchains are effectively plutocracies, controlled by those with the most computing power.

Or they could store the makers are stored in a free-tier dynomodb instance…

You missed an important point about power.

Those large land owners do not give a fuck about your blockchain. They'll take the land and farm it anyways. You can "own" the virtual stake; they're happy to cede you cyber nonsense as long as they get to control who touches the actual grass.

The large land owners, who have local authorities in their pocket, would simply quote President Andrew Jackson's apocryphal opinion on blockchain: "The blockchain has made its decision; now let the blockchain's army and police enforce it!" [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worcester_v._Georgia

In a country with a stable, effective government, you don't need a blockchain for this: you can just have a centralized database.

In a country without such a government, a blockchain wouldn't help: the government will care more about the large landholders than about the blockchain records, and will have little incentive to enforce the latter.

(Also: I won't look forward to the day when some hacker figures out how to get into a bunch of farmers' crypto wallets and takes all their land. If the government doesn't respect the hackers' claims, then the blockchain isn't really the source of truth; if it does, then a bunch of people's lives are destroyed.)

As long as you go through creepy, deregulated, fallible exchanges to obtain/trade/redeem those tokens, you are not permissionless or cryptographically secure or free from gate-keepers or anything of the sort.

In practice, to adopt crypto you usually also need to rely on intermediaries to handle parts of the process for you. Fortunately, in the crypto space, you can use trusted, non-capricious, democratic intermediaries like FTX.

Where money is concerned, no.

Having gatekeepers, boundaries, approvals, registers, participants and authorities is onerous, but it keeps things more honest and it makes them much more traceable in cases of negligence or fraud. We have ... well pretty much all of recorded history to show us how very many people will use any and every means available to remove money from others and disappear.

So no, this idea of an open fabric, in which anyone can build anything is a recipe for disaster by its very nature.

Today, corrupt powerful people use violence and intimidation to go move physical markers to change landownership.

If land ownership was on the blockchain, the same corrupt powerful people will use violence and intimidation to force digital transfer of ownership.

The same threats to the safety and wellbeing of family members works equally well to induce the desired actions in the physical word or the digital one.

This is why Tim wrote to be wary of technical solutions for political problems.

It's not.

Question: who is the rightful owner of the marked land? See my comments in this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27212564

> The wealthy and powerful could absolutely influence some levels and steal land. Even petty regional criminals are able to do it.

So the wealthy and the powerful get the person entering data on the blockchain to enter that the land belongs to them. What exactly has blockchain solved?

If the database relies on trusted nodes run by eg, the government, why can't the government use MySQL and periodically publish a dump?

Yes, there will always be a need for trust, and Bitcoin doesn't change that. What it does is actually facilitate more, rather than less, trust.

By having a rock-solid form of money with a well-known, immutable monetary policy and issuance rate, that doesn't rely on any single entity and is very difficult to corrupt, all kinds of trust-related issues (moral hazard, Cantillon effect, theft of purchasing power) are resolved.

In addition, commerce and exchange between strangers can more easily be facilitated based on such a system rather than one that relies on multiple intermediaries.

If I can have cryptographic proof of escrow in a multi-sig wallet (2 of 3, where there is a trusted (!) 3rd party), I might be willing to do a transaction with someone I might otherwise not (e.g. due to a lack of trust that they have the funds available).

That seems like the sticking point. Most likely, someone "fulfilling" the contract would try to fool the (publicly available) verification code, rather than actually providing a PostgreSQL instance. It would be hard to create a bulletproof, automated way of verifying that something is a fully functioning PostgreSQL instance with working backups. If verification code was shared across many contracts, any bug discovered in that code could allow someone to wipe out the entire market.

You also need a mechanism for preventing (or invalidating afterwards) votes made remotely under coercion/bribery - current mechanisms for handling mail-in votes implement mitigations for that, but a fully digital remote voting makes it tricky.

Also, one of the major discussion points regarding USA voting is the eligibility of voters, ensuring that certain people are prevented from voting, but that eligible people can vote without requiring a centralized ID. Again, blockchain only makes this problem more difficult.

And finally, by far the most important factor of vote counting is having the losing voters trust that the votes were counted fairly - and a formal mathematical proof is bad at that (for the majority of voters) compared to a relatively simpler, clearer physical system.

But that's a PR disaster, so the authorities proposing these things have to convince you that they're solving some more important problem -- like "all the baaad people" using money. Hopefully, you'll soon forget you used to have that liberty.

Homeopathy skeptics are all defending the mainstream medical system and big pharma, and implicitly arguing it can't be improved.

I'm not sure why you're mandating across two stock exchanges? If you want to swap two assets in a single transaction, there is a very mature market for this. This has more to do with CPAMM vs. CLOB than it does anything else.

> (2) How can I take stock held on one exchange, and use it as collateral on an unaffiliated lending platform?

Well, assets aren't held on exchanges...but again, there is a huge industry that facilitates this.

> (3) How can I launch a new financial app, as a small startup, and open it to assets held on ETrade.

This has more to do with ETrade than anything else. It's like saying how can I launch a startup and get my product in every Walmart store...well you need their cooperation.

> All of these are impossible in the current system.

Absolutely not even remotely true. Just because you don't know, doesn't mean it's not possible.

Can you give a few examples? Everything I've seen in this space are transparent scams.

My point? There are many incredible technologies, but not all are "secret weapons" that justify a seismic industry shift. Not all are suitable or able to upend existing technologies.

Fitness of purpose is contextual. Some of the most amazing innovations in computer science cannot be captured by one industry. Most do not lead to widespread disruption.

If you want to check whether an article ever appeared (even if it's no longer there), then something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_Transparency would be enough.

No that's not a blockchain, at least not for a useful definition of blockchain (see https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2019/02/theres_no_g...).

One interesting thing I have been seeing recently is newspapers quickly changing news a few hours after they posted it, in reaction to public opinion of said news (or maybe some editorial "request").

In th BBC its quite egregious, they have been posting some news, and a few hours later changing the headline and the photo, to either something meaner and an uglier photo of the same person, or the opposite, a much more neutral/flaterring headline and a PR photo of the person.

If those changes were on the blockchain, UK citizens could demand their money back for what they pay for the BBC as it is a ridiculous practice that should not be paid by taxes. But again, I doubt the Italian newspapers saves their own slanted coverage for their own users to see.

That could be a sign that developers don’t know how to architect blockchain apps but that’s probably the same as saying most people don’t need blockchains. It seems unlikely that there’s sone widespread benefit still to be discovered rather than maybe some niche applications.

IMHO, the dust has already settled and been washed away by the rain water..

But (and this is an honest question) how long should we give this? What is the appropriate amount of time before we can say "This was basically a bust"?

Because AFAICT the blockchain revolution never came. It's been talked about endlessly for over a decade, it's been hyped to hell and back, it's been oh-my-god-so-full-of-amazing-potential-just-think-of-the-uses for all this time and the only thing that ever seems to come out of it is a variety of schemes that reward early entrants and then crash into the dust, without delivering the utility that was so vaguely promised for so long.

In what way is a blockchain not a cryptographically-verified, distributed, append-only database? If you added a consensus protocol to git, you'd have a blockchain.

I'd say it's fundamentally right because the fundamentals are the same.

> After the dust settles we will see if blockchain is really useful or not.

Blockchain has been around for more than 10 years. If it had any valid use cases, we'd see them in use already, regardless of what crypto bros are doing.

This is temporary and AFAIK all the other PoS systems allow unstaking.

attacks in which one unstakes and then uses knowledge of old staked private keys to attack other parties.

These "long-range attacks" are not real. They're impossible to pull off in reality.

EDIT: So doing some googling finds that Telecom Regulatory Authority of India implemented “Distributed Ledger Technology” for fighting spam, but roll-out seems to have lasted not long (a week? A month?) because it didn’t work (didn’t scale?) and every so often tech vendors suggest they’re going to re-do it? Honestly there’s a lot of promo articles and conflicting information that I’m struggling to understand what’s going on there, my take-away is that it’s not currently being used because it didn’t work?

Do you?

> Just use given technology for what it’s designed for, and stop being full of yourself.

The point is that there has been hype after hype after hype about "blockchain" revolutionising damn near everything for years and so far it has failed to deliver on this. It's not wrong to call the phenomenon out for what it is.

Git does not include a distributed consensus algorithm. So it's a chain of blocks, but not a "Blockchain". Blockchain advocates will gladly tell you so when they want to sell you on how revolutionary Blockchain tech is.

But once you ask for actually useful use cases, all they can point to is things that are trivially done with Git and its predecessors, in the sense that they don't require distributed consensus…

https://mobile.twitter.com/timbray/status/963115533825527808

https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2021/06/26/Shorting-...

The latter property here is key to understanding where blockchain is useful. It was created to solve the "double spend problem", ie. two transitions that spend the same coin but send it to different recipients (and so they conflict and cannot both be included in the canonical list of transactions). A double spend is the result of the sender either (a) making a mistake, or (b) attempting fraud. In both cases the important property is that as long as only a single of these conflicting transactions is included, the systems works.

For all the applications you list above, this property is not present. If I create a transaction in your "shipping blockchain" that says "shipment A moved to location X" and another, conflicting transaction that says "shipment A moved to location Y", then it's obviously important which transaction we include, since it must reflect the actual, physical location of "shipment A".

Putting all those things he listed on a blockchain is the perfect example of “That's not a blockchain, that's a sequence of poor engineering decisions!”

Everything he listed can already be done with basic software engineering. Add a blockchain to these things makes it slow, adds unnecessary complexity and fake decentralization where its not even needed.

Crypto is full of Ape NFTs and casino gambling because there is nothing useful in blockchains other than removing trusted third parties.

Bitcoin added something new, crypto asked what more can we do with this? The answer is not much.

This has been a failed use case from the start because there's no effective way to control the entry point from the real world onto the blockchain. Farmer in South Carolina imports a boatload of tomatoes from China, enters them onto the blockchain as his own during harvest season, now you have a permanent indelible record of those tomatoes as they make every stop along the way to the consumer, with a completely fraudulent point of origin.

> They presented some of the systems they’d built and yep, we were impressed. Then, with the startup CTO in the room, one of my fellow engineers asked the key question: “All these systems, are there any that wouldn’t work without blockchain?” The guy didn’t even hesitate: “No, not really.”

> And that was about that.

- Storage is not the hard part of all those proposals. Standard formats and a shared ontology between all players is the actual hard part. Medical records are useless if you can't read them.

- Immutable storage is not hard to do in a centralized fashion and can be made much more efficient. Do blockchain-based systems offer the bandwidth to ingest _all_ medical records produced worldwide? I'd say the required amount of records-per-second would surprise you (as well as the potential size of those records, where some are high resolution scans and stuff like that).

- Usually you _don't_ want immutable records, even when it seems like you do. What happens when you want to advance the formats stored in the blockchain? You can't edit old records (to update them to the new format), so your only options become: create a new blockchain and/or keep the cruft forever.

- Storing anything private via encryption poses problems in many domains: sometimes you want certain third-parties to be able to access that information (e.g.: the hospital should have access to your medical records if you get there unconscious in an ambulance). I've seen no real solution to the kind of issues that arise there.

These are very serious limitations against blockchains _shining_ if you ask me. Of all your proposed use-cases the only one that I can't see hitting those issues is the company registry records one (and maybe that's because I'm not acquainted enough with that domain).

People seem to forget that you still have to trust the people and/or hardware doing data entry while tracking shipments. If you can't solve that first, there's no need to have a blockchain as a storage medium.

Registry records and title deeds and stock assets are already solved problems, and there's an important problem that blockchain is trying to solve: It is possible for the centralized services to transfer ownership without the owner's permission. This is an important feature. It is used in things like bankruptcy proceedings [1] and other law enforcement action all the time. The people trying to create the "feature" of not having that feature are called anarchists, and decent societies lock them up, shortly before or after their crimes cause actual damage.

All of these are reasons for actual cryptography - Signatures and Merkel Trees. Blockchains have no advantages in any of them.

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/18/investing/ftx-bahamas-seizure - Whether the governments doing the seizure are trustworthy is an entirely different problem with an entirely different scope of solutions, but the places that have actual anarchy going on are not typically nice places to live[2] and other governments typically do their best to insulate their population from them. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piracy_off_the_coast_of_Somali...

As opposed to normal DNS?

There have been so many tech fads. Distributed objects (e.g. CORBA), mobile code, object databases, micropayments, push, WAP, and I want to give a special lifetime achievement award to VR which is now on its third hype wave.

Rep from <NoSQL company> comes along, shows a CTO some graphs about how well it performs vs <BoringButReliableSQL>. If developers are unlucky CTO mandates a migration to NoSQL.

* To much smaller extent some core tech like NoSQL, SOA

* More recently - AR/VR bubble

I'm not claiming with certainty that that is the case here, but I know it is for some people.

Also, subways/trains are quicker for some routes, YMMV

Central Bank Digital Currencies are being implemented exclusively on systems that allow the "Central" authority to absolutely ensure that nobody except that central authority can control every transaction in those ledgers.

And I don't think you meant the "C" in "Currency".

Literally here, in every single thread to the chagrin of the enthusiasts whose defining identity became "you just don't get it, man". Blockchain stuff, by anyone who didn't have a vested financial interest in it has always been called out for what it is.

Now when the AI hype eventually dies down then you'll have a point.

You might need to define the exact period when it was "on the rise", but as far as I've seen, in the last six or seven years they (we) have been very vocal and all over the place - including on this very site.

The last few comments I made on it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29830090

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21541591

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21542591

Everywhere? I can't think of a single (or at least memorable) time I've heard blockchain and there wasn't at least someone who was skeptical.

Especially so because a large part of the HN community have this libertarian tinge which brought them philosophically close to web3/crypto generally.

Many of those people have gone quite quiet recently. And I don't want to turn this into a "told you so" moment; I think this is good. Let's try to let the hype cycle end without knives coming out.

The question is what the long-term shake-out from all of this will be for tech more broadly. Many legitimate technologies and projects have gotten themselves caught up in this hype cycle, and there could be fall-outs for people and projects that associated themselves this way -- what I'm calling "crypto-taint." I'm thinking everything from the Rust PL community (where the bulk of employers are web3 companies, it seems) through to a lot of recent novel database tech generally.

I recently quit a job in part for this reason. The product itself was not crypto, but was associating itself with the language and community around ETH. I personally don't want the taint on my resume, even if it's merely marketing.

Where VCs put their money can be fickle. And the consequences for business entities emphasizing in the wrong place can be brutal. This is the third "down cycle" I've been through in my 25ish year software career, and I have some sense of how it could shake out.

Right now, people need to focus on fundamentals.