If you want us to come up with problems for you to apply blockchain to, just stop. Find problems and apply whatever solution you need for them.
This applies for any single piece of technology one may want to use. The act of reaching out to the community looking for problems and suggesting you want to use hammers is, to me, a sign that company vision is muddy and unclear.
[edit] This is in no way an endorsement of blockchain, especially how it's used today.
There already is one similar to LibreOffice and it is called Skiff [0] which is open-source and has E2EE and signs, verifies documents, mail, etc using ENS addresses [1] (for the Ethereum blockchain) and others. Much more useable than 'LibreOffice Online' which that is still a giant hack, and has little to no real-time collaboration support.
LibreOffice really is sinking into irrelevancy as online alternatives have already eaten their lunch.
One guess who reached out first.
This is entirely about credibility smuggling and attempting to force-feed crypto into spaces it has no business in.
It's insane.
It's evident that the person who wrote the blog post does not understand that they're being approached by grifters, who want to use their existing brand goodwill to expand their grift's outreach. Being approached by the Ethereum foundation should be treated like cold emails asking if you'd like to put a link to a casino in your website. I'm glad that the community was able to clarify this for them.
Yes. It's become a sort of memetic virus that causes people to lose all their critical thinking abilities and immediately start trying to turn everything into paperclips (well, turn energy into discarded hash computations). This is why it gets a response like Alien or The Thing where people who appear to be compromised by the mind virus get the flamethrowers turned on them.
original post: we're not talking about crypto
comment: they're not talking about crypto but people still just say "F them crypto is bad!"
this comment: F them because crypto is bad!
Crypto (money, nfts) is bad, I think smart contracts are a mistake too, and I don't think LO needs blockchain either, but the objection is more like the one someone else said about, if there's some feature that needs it, fine, but don't just look for some excuse to use a solution with no problem.
But also it would be absurd to say that cryptography, authentication, and povenence have no valid application with documents.
I also think it's telling that they'd rather ignore the negative feedback because they want to apparently continue on this path than actually recognize that people don't want blockchain garbage ruining what's otherwise a good project.
I'm looking forward to the next post in 6-12 months where they talk about all the "awesome" plans they have with blockchain and they'll have the comments locked from the beginning. Oh, and not to forget the ensuing fork because honestly, we just want a word processor that doesn't suck and isn't proprietary.
It's not because you can't imagine anything that nobody else can.
I think this is it or, at least, to moderate slightly, there are few valid use cases for blockchain. The top comment, from Theo Jackson, captures it really well:
"Please don’t. If there is a requested feature that _requires_ blockchain I’d be interested, but “possible ways to combine LibreOffice with blockchain technologies” sounds like a solution in search of a problem."
What are the actual problems LibreOffice are trying to solve here? It just feels like this post dropped in from 4 years ago where everyone seemed to be trying to shoehorn blockchain into everything with no clear idea of what they were actually trying to achieve.
And then there's the fact that many blockchain implementations have an absolutely horrendous energy requirement. It was always odious (or at least from about 2013 onwards) but, in 2022, in the midst of an energy crisis and rising prices, it's both ethically and environmentally indefensible. I know that Ethereum has been working to address this but the reality is that for many extant cases blockchain is horrifically compute intensive and inefficient.
Someone in the comments on LibreOffice blog expressed the same opinion. Which surprised me. Has the consensus been reached among the serious non-grifting public that blockchains are useless to represent peer-to-peer trustless money? Has bitcoin been declared a failure?
No use for it? The blockchain is a massive achievement. It's a decentralized verification system. Of course it has plenty of uses beyond crypto currencies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denuvo
I'm not trying to equate blockchain and DRM. The big question lingering over their post is "why?"
From what I can see the essence of the reaction is towards the fact they appear to be in search of a problem for their shiny solution. Maybe they find a real problem, but usually you don't have your solution before you find it.
That's how it starts everytime. "We're just talking about it" ends up in shoving blockchains where they aren't needed.
anyone care to explain to me the difference here?
Beyond that, I also cannot think of any valid use cases
There’s a separate issue of verifying and identity proofing wallets.
But I think blockchain actually helps solve the problem with pgp of trusting unknown identities and key exchange. Currently if a document is pgp signed by John Doe, I’ve got to figure out if it’s really John Doe and that’s a bit of work if I don’t already have John’s public key.
[0] https://ycharts.com/indicators/ethereum_average_transaction_...
How does this fit with zero knowledge proofs that the blog mentions? There may be signature attestations you can make that you want to be private from the receiver, but made in a way that the receiver can still verify the signature is valid.
I suppose we can stuff PGP keys into the blockchain but I don't see the additional value. Each key needs to be trusted by the receivers independently (or through a web-of-trust-like system) so I don't see the added value of a tamper proof ledger.
Public blockchains[0] are not known to scale either. I can open a Twitter account for free and publish a signature right now, and do it on several other platforms at the same time to have some kind of redundancy.
I only care about the medium being tamper-proof to be able to prove the signature is at least this old (if it's in a certain block, the signature was made before this block. If it's in a certain message on Twitter, it was made before this message).
So from first principles, blockchains brings this theoretically better time-stamping mechanism, because somebody controlling Twitter could change timestamps there, while nobody could on a blockchain. In practice though, the redundancy is enough, and it's hard to change something people care about on the Internet without people noticing.
Overall this use-case somewhat legit (more legit than most), but it's a niche within a niche.
[0]: as defined in https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2019/02/theres_no_g...
There is no such thing as free computing and data storage. Involving the group of strangers that run public decentralized ledgers requires paying transaction fees. Decentralization in itself is a dubious benefit.
A centralized service would be way cheaper to run (so cheap that it could be free for the end-users) with perhaps a one-time fee for identity verification purposes. The technology exists since decades (X509), is proven in the field and usable today.
One idea, document signing: vitalik.eth signs a PDF, everybody can verify the PDF is signed by his private key. He has to broadcast his public key for this, and probably also a content hash of the document so that we can be sure we are verifying the correct PDF. He can broadcast this on Twitter, but that is not a secure and tamper proof ledger, and it is centrally owned, and it's not a great storage mechanism for this system to scale to thousands or millions of signatures. LibreOffice could create a new service like keybase.io but that is also centralized and we saw how that went. Another alternative is these messages are broadcast through a public and decentralized ledger.
How does this fit with zero knowledge proofs that the blog mentions? There may be signature attestations you can make that you want to be private from the receiver, but made in a way that the receiver can still verify the signature is valid.
EDIT: Since I am on a throwaway account, my replies are being throttled. This could be another application of ZKP: create a proof that my main account has significant karma to post, without sacrificing my privacy.
And as you can see all over HN, most of us are quite tired of this diatribe...
This appeal to HN requiring us to be open-minded about a technology that had more than a decade to prove itself in a real world application is tiresome. I mentioned in another comment just this week, I was really excited about Bitcoin in 2012 and kept watching the whole space for opportunities to try a product that could improve my life.
Nothing has appeared, in 10 years, worse, in 10 years it all became a space filled with mumbo-jumbo, grifters and scams. In 10 years I've not seen any of these pie-in-the-sky proposals of digital attestation come to fruition.
It's a technology looking for problems, when something more exciting than Cryptokitties or pure speculation of shitcoins pops up I can definitely give it a try. Unfortunately as each day passes and more scams appear it eclipses any dreams that people like you have to sell to me, it's been thoroughly tarnished over 10 years, the space is a mess in every aspect, including information. Nowadays if you search for anything blockchain/cryptocurrency-related you will only find piles and piles of trash, of shit articles trying to peddle yet-another-scam.
It's really hard to keep any optimism when there was absolutely nothing gained from the technology in the real world.
No, remittances from developing countries is not really a gain, I personally know people that emigrated from places like Venezuela and Iran and absolutely no one is using blockchains/cryptocurrencies anymore, the few ones that tried got burnt after yet-another-crash.
A decentralised ledger might have uses, no one has shown any so far, at least none that got any traction even close to the amount of money poured into this bullshit.
You can more about the history of zero knowledge in this Wikipedia article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof#Zero-Know...
If I build weapons for freedom fighters, but they're used to massacre civilians, I'm not bravely aiding the people's revolution, I'm just an arms dealer for a terrorist group.
If I build a decentralised cryptographically verified ledger to provide trustable alternatives to traditional banking, but it's used to trick people into spending millions on digital receipts for ugly monkeys, I'm not disrupting the corrupt banking oligarchies, I'm just running an elaborate technological grift.
This stuff may look new and revolutionary to some, but if you've been here long enough you've already seen that stuff go through the hype cycle[1] and it has NOT emerged, at least so far, at the end of that curve looking good.
I am currently working on some stuff where blockchains are actually a potential solution (very related to public key cryptography, by the way), but the problems with it as a solution to anything except digital casinos are so numerous and the scams so prevalent in this space that it's next to impossible to come up with genuinely useful applications and services that rely on it. That's the reason why usages of this technology are currently extremely limited, not because there's some sort of conspiracy to stop it from succeeding!
So I don't think negative reactions to blockchain articles on HN started as some sort of kneejerk conservatism, rather HN has seen the entire lifecycle of blockchain so far and what we've seen has exhausted the opening goodwill towards the concept for many users
On the other hand: a site called "Hacker News" will likely point out business scams involving technology. ;-)
If you desire this openness towards blue sky thinking, we should unmask all those cryptocurrency con men so that the only people who stay in the cryptocurrency ecosystem are those who really are into the mathematics behind it or love blue sky thinking.
Yes, but then he also has to broadcast the transaction linking his identity and public key. He could do this on twitter, but that is not a secure and tamper proof ledger. So he creates a second blockchain to advertise the transaction. But then he needs to advertise the second blockchain's transaction in order to link his identity and public key. He could do this on twitter, but that is not a secure and tamper proof ledger. So he creates a third blockchain to advertise the second transaction...
In my opinion, it is fine to publish those signatures on a website you are known to control (or Tweet them out or whatever).
Thus we have a call for "just believe in the technology" which on it's own is fine, but it's a call that is required for all the scams that have occurred and keep on occurring to occur.
So people easily confuse the enthusiastic earnestness of blue sky thinking with crypto/blockchain with the enthusiastic earnestness of the fool that is rapidly parted with his money.
(As a note to this, I hope that the current massive crash of crypto happening right now might in a strange way increase the actual number of interesting technologists involved in it somehow, but I've not identified how)
Trouble is, the "decentralized ledger" can only reliably timestamp if there is a financial incentive that motivates peers to burn hashes, stake and vouch for blocks etc. Without that financial incentive the whole blockchain breaks down to something inferior to even the PKI distributed systems described by Lamport in the 70s and 80s.
That's the major fallacy of "blockchains" as a technology, they are always a disguise for token speculation, they require native minted tokens of speculative value to operate.
Well, so does the rest of industry and civilization (fiat money). What's the distinction there?
Everything you're describing could be done with a git repo (also a cryptographically signed tamperproof ledger), 10x faster and with 1000x less baggage of a deeply scummy industry behind it.
The core problem to solve with your idea is proving that a piece of data that represents someone electronically (eg a public key) truly actually represents them physically. Cryptocurrency backed blockchain solves none of this any more than any other technological solution does, because it does nothing to tackle the actually hard problem, of making that physical->electronic link.
Keybase did it by not truly doing it, and instead providing a plethora of different ways that all somewhat do it, and left it up to the user as to whether they trusted that. So you can link your domain, your twitter, your reddit, your crypto wallet, etc. That still didn't actually prove the physical->electronic link, but it added evidence.
Storing commits on GitHub is neither of those things; data is owned by a single company in the US, and previously published logs can be deleted to recreate a false history.
And got effectively assassinated for it.
Umm, what? Someone cannot create a PDF and sign with someone else's key. This would've defeat the purpose of public-key cryptography.
>it's not a great storage mechanism for this system to scale to thousands or millions of signatures
Not sure how recommending a system that scales not on signatures but on messages shared is better.
>Another alternative is these messages are broadcast through a public and decentralized ledger.
Okay. So suppose a message was distributed from an address. How you know to whom this address belongs? How will be different that you being shared their public key?
Just use a DHT, like we've had for decades.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33639578
Simpler than DHT is just a server hosted in the US somewhere, like what keybase.io is doing, but that goes against my goal of decentralization.
Or, you know, the author's website?
