>It feels like a get rich quick scheme - https://twitter.com/naval/status/878018839044161536
This is what it comes down to IMO. Anything cryptocurrency related is just surrounded by a cloud of shady characters and scammers, even though the tech is legit. You just can't trust anyone, nor their intentions. Living your life and working in a constant state of paranoia like that is awful.
It's a frustrating community to engage with because it has redefined a lot of longstanding terms to (in my opinion) make itself look better and smarter. It also is a constant roiling tempest of non-self-reliant-but-fantastically-dedicated-to-anarcho-capitalists-type folks, which can be terribly tedious to deal with.
For example, ask a btc engineer if they have byzantine fault tolerance. Then ask anyone else. Ask them if they have eventual consistency. Then ask anyone else.
So it's just your typical programming sub-field? (Alan Kay would say: "Field.")
The problem is that they want a system that's trustless and that's simply not what most engineers care about. We want a system that's fast and efficient.
Does it solve the problem? Or did it just make a step in the right direction?
I can't disagree too much about the immaturity, but you don't see too much more of that in the deeper technical circles than you might see on the Linux mailing list. Room for improvement? Plenty. But it's also not grossly out of line as long as you are in the right places.
The 'unwelcoming' bit though is more justified. Blockchain design is like cryptography - security is very important, and one tiny mistake means that your design is completely unviable. And if that tiny mistake occurred early in your design process, it may be too deep to be easily routed around.
Designing secure blockchains is very hard. As a result, the first year or so you try to improve on blockchain systems you usually end up with a bunch of broken stuff that nobody appreciates at all. The same is true if you are trying to make a better hashing algorithm, or doing quantum resistant cryptography. Except with blockchains people haven't learned to expect it to be this difficult to innovate yet, so it feels a lot more hostile.
That will fix with time. As more things blow up in production, people are realizing more and more that blockchains are tricky, and that good designs take a lot of expertise, a lot of collaboration, and are very rare. That will make it seem less unwelcoming when your intro to blockchains is 'well, this thing you are proposing doesn't work for at least 10 reasons, and here they are...'
The problem it seems to me is that, although the idea of trustless systems seem really cool and applicable to a lot of domains, it turns out that there are actually way fewer useful applications than people originally thought. But no one is letting go, and a lot of people are wrongly convincing themselves and others that most systems are better off trustless.
Isn't that one of the reasons blockchain came to existence?
I know you aren't using that in the same context, it just sounded funny in my head :)
Yeah I sent my first emails to a system that connected to neighboring systems via modem at a pre determined time to ftp mail bundles around.
It's the same reason that Ford doesn't build a tunnel under the US/Mexico border to ferry car parts to America.
That's a lot of energy going into a system that can commit a new block of transactions once every 10 minutes on average. It solves a problem in an interesting way, but it's nowhere near quick enough or efficient enough to solve 99% of engineering problems. That's why only 1% of engineers are working on it.
Now if you want a system used by 0.01% of the global population then that's a very different problem, but far less useful.
What have you found that is cheaper to proof-of-work that works on a global system?[1]
[1] "Nothing is Cheaper than Proof of Work" http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/
What do you mean by this, exactly? Bitcoin miners look more than willing to earn money on brute forcing hard problems.
The point of proof-of-work is that it shouldn’t matter what anyone thinks about it. It’s basically impossible to ban (anyone can do a SHA256 calculation), and the difficulty automatically adjusts. In addition to this, the block reward — currently 12.5 BTC per block — halves every ~4 years, so less and less electricity will be consumed until only transaction fees provide capital for proof-of-work[1].
[1] http://www.bitcoinnotbombs.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/37...
Visa, MasterCard, AmEX, &c along with each individual bank, not to mention the intermediaries and gateways all of them use also consume a tremendous amount of power. It's not as if our current system uses a negligible amount of power, not to mention the number of steps and entities a transaction needs in order to be finalized.
Massive institutions with billions of dollars at stake would rather have a predictable and stable regulatory regime to conduct transactions in the shadow of then to rely on a technical solution that supposedly obviates the need for one. Things come up -- bugs, acts of god, internal fraud, hacking, flash crashes, and so forth and so on. They want to be able to go to arbitrator and ask for a sensible and reasonable result and not be reliant on a totally inflexible mechanical rule set. Not the least of which because they can afford the very best lawyers to try to convince those arbitrators that what they want is sensible and reasonable.
"Let me explain why. In economic organization, we must distinguish between enforcing rules and making rules. Laws are rules enforced by state bureaucracy and made by a legislature. The SWIFT Protocol is a set of rules enforced by SWIFTNet (a centralized computational system) and made, ultimately, by SWIFT’s Board of Directors. The Bitcoin Protocol is a set of rules enforced by the Bitcoin Network (a distributed network of computers) made by — whom exactly? Who makes the rules matters at least as much as who enforces them. Blockchain technology may provide for completely impartial rule-enforcement, but that is of little comfort if the rules themselves are changed. This rule-making is what we refer to as governance."
How does that stop governments from engaging in Iran-Contra behavior?
How is that better than a government mandate requiring a list of expenditures PGP-signed by the government and their vendors?
I just have a well-paying job and I don't see any opportunities lucrative enough for me to jump away. Why? Bitcoin is an experiment. Reading through the paper, Bitcoin does not scale to general purpose commerce. All of the other technology appears to be "me too." When I first heard about Etherium, the bullshit smelt so bad that I couldn't even look at the paper.
What will get me really interested? Pay me to implement a real-world use case that fits the scalability constrains of blockchain. This isn't things like general-purpose currency, or general-purpose contracts. Someone needs to pay me to implement something that requires blockchain; instead of someone paying me to implement a blockchain and then going and finding a use for it.
It's difficult to find something that requires a blockchain, because the unique distinguishing feature of blockchains is the lack of any trusted central authority.
If you have a trusted authority, then you can do anonymous currency, money transfers, smart contracts, or anything similar 1000x more efficiently with a single server, an API, and some backend logic. All the distributed effort goes into making these possible at all without any central authority who can ban or filter transactions.
And for most real-world projects, having a government agency or tech company working as the trusted authority works just fine. It's only shady to illegal businesses where the lack of one is required.
I still believe that problem will come up, and/or we'll see technologies that borrow concepts from blockchain without being true "blockchain."
paxos.com == pets.com of blockchain Ah, feels like it is 1999 all over again. To the moon!
That would require those who are arguing for "blockchain technology" to admit that they are Bitcoin poor and would rather talk than trade.
Blockchain: Useful where there are groups of actors, (people, countries, companies, ect,) of a large but limited size, incomplete trust, and limited exchanges. (For example, a group of 1000) A blockchain could be used to publish who owns an asset; as long as the blockchain technology can scale to the number of assets, number of owners, and number of transactions that occur. The actors need to have sufficient motivation to provide the computing power to run the blockchain; otherwise, it makes a lot more sense to just pay a private clearinghouse.
The problem with "blockchain" is that every computer in the network has to keep a complete copy of the ledger. Useful in the above examples, but this is also highly limiting to scalability, which leads to...
Blockchain-like: I think "blockchain" will lead to blockchain-like technologies where every computer doesn't have to keep an entire copy of the ledger. Instead, the graph of computers allows for searching publicly published knowledge, and participants are encouraged to preserve facts that are in their best interest. This allows for much higher scalability because computers in the network can merely ignore most transactions. If you are a small player in the network, you might pay a larger player to monitor the network and provide you with search.
When you have a general purpose globally consistent distributed database, many of the problems that look like blockchain algorithm problems turn out to be standard application programming tasks. Eg a distributed ledger is just a table in a distributed database.
[1] https://fauna.com/blog/distributed-consistency-at-scale-span...
TL;DR, it's gonna take a real long time to make blockchain useful, if it even is.
Further, I have yet to see a real production application of blockchain that isn't a crypto-currency. Everyone and their grandmothers has invested in it, or started a company or w/e. But has it actually been used to solve another problem? Blockchain was the SOLUTION to the PROBLEM of how do I make a cryptocurrency. It now seems that some folks are trying to make a PROBLEM out of a SOLUTION in every other domain.
If you are happy to have a trusted authority, then timestamp servers have been around since the dawn of PKI
Maersk is interested http://fortune.com/2017/03/05/maersk-tests-blockchain-based-...
Makes some sense freight shipments involve a lot of parties who don't completely trust one another, and they've got a lot of information to move back and forth between one another.
In this case, all the parties are well identified, so if a new node appears, it can simply be rejected by the existing participants. So there's no need for PoW, all you need is for companies to sign and publish documents to each other. The only possible fraud is publishing different documents to different parties, but that's easily fixable by having the nodes confirm each others' documents.
So yeah, that's just a signed ledger. All invoicing programs in my country had that before Bitcoin even appeared, as part of the SAF-T standard (mandated by our tax authority). It's nothing new.
Do
- Bitcache (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcache) - in development
- Namecoin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namecoin)
- Steemit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steemit)
- Synereo (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synereo)
count? I know, formally these can be considered as a cryptocurrencies, but I would not consider this as the central purpose of existence.
...but it's not true that nobody's working on it: quietly, Serious Engineers(tm) working for blockchain companies and you can expect big improvements in the next few years.
This rant is nearly isomorphic to the whining in the early 90s by the academics and SunRPC & CORBA fanboys vs HTTP and HTML, which its insane parsing and communications overhead. Serious Engineers(tm) showed up, made the early web work, it took off, and... you don't see many HN job posts asking for CORBA engineers.
As with the web, blockchains are exciting because they're a 'looser' and more open protocol than other systems.
Edit: not to mention that mining is an incredible waste of time and energy that can instead be put to good use.
The bit Git doesn't do: distributed consensus via Proof of Work, because it turns out that a bit of trust is fabulously more efficient.
I predict any good and useful product labeled "Blockchain" will be the cryptographically tamper-evident ledger of transactions, and not any of the stuff that makes a blockchain different to Git.
(Researching the book, I had one developer admit that his "blockchain product" was pretty much a simplified Git in terms of what it offered ;-) )
I'd be interested in working with large and boring financial institutions on those sorts of projects, because they don't offer the failure modes as above.
If we had discussed proof of stake or theorized about how some of these other hurdles like transaction rate could be leaped then sure. Otherwise it's just a list of things any distributed system has to solve for, demonstration that blockchain solves for them (inefficiently) with the undertone of "I bought in on the hype, and you can too".
Why would a distributed systems engineer work on what amounts to a really shitty database?
I think it's funny the author chose to center the article around that assumption. IMO most engineers related to distributed computing (not necessarily themselves distributed systems engineers) are actually quite aware of the technology and many of the challenges.
Maybe instead of asking this, we should ask the cryptocurrency enthusiasts what area of technology won't be dropped-and-replaced by blockchains, because so far it seems apparently applicable to every single use case in every single industry... By the way, did you guys hear this thing is an immutable ledger?
There is very little overlap between cryptocurrency enthusiasts and those who think blockchain technology will take over everything.
Do you really believe that? Because from the outside, it seems that the only people talking about "blockchain technology" are those who have a significant amount of money invested in it.
This article is a blockchain banking service saying, "hey, other people should use this solve-all technology that is definitely the future too!"
The "killer app" of Blockchains are the trustless nature of the system. In most practical application, allowing actors without a trust relationship to interact with the log is not a significant requirement of the system. Once you remove that requirement, there are technically superior approaches to maintaining a ledger.
Happy to learn about any counterexamples and use-cases for those.
In essence, it can be used as a versioning + signing mechanism for a shared database that ensures authenticity and non-repudiation even in the absence of trust.
If anyone could point to me what's the name for this fallacy. Lile when you ask a question that tricks people in assuming the premise.
The cynic in me thinks "it's a scheme by oligarchs and tyrants to get rid of troublesome /fully anonymous/ cash sold as a utopian scheme to those who are motivated by the promise of a quick rich scheme."
