10 ms·

Avoiding a pointless blockchain project

139 points by Hansi 11y ago

icholy 11y ago
Sometimes it's hard to know what's a good idea and what isn't until you've tried it.
- xyzzy4 11y ago
  Well part of the reason we have brains is so you can think about something before you do it.
  - swampthinker 11y ago
    HA! You mean I should think ahead? Nonsense.
schoen 11y ago
This is a helpful summary! We could also say that blockchains can be useful in principle when people are afraid of retroactive modification of history (for example because they get hacked, or because of governmental pressure to falsify their records). This is sort of an instance of this article's mutually-untrusting writers issue, but it's an interesting one because the writers are saying that they don't want to be trusted. I think this is the case now for software distributors and certificate authorities, among others (I gave a talk related to this at CCC); they are saying "it's bad for us and you if you just believe whatever we say, without at least a way to know if a larger audience has heard it and whether we're denying what we said before". So we can also say that blockchains (or perhaps another kind of distributed consensus mechanism; clearly Ben Laurie and others are claiming that blockchains are too heavyweight some or all of the time) can be useful when people are afraid that they're going to be made to emit writes that they didn't want to, or to deny writes that they previously emitted.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- zimbatm 11y ago
  For a CA they could structure their data as a log where each entry (new cert) contains the checksum of the previous entry. That way it's not possible to change the chain without unwinding it. Each person getting a new signed cert now has the new HEAD of the log and unwinding means revoking all these certificates. Now if you put multiple CAs in the game it start to become interesting to use a distributed ledger like the blockchain. If all the signed certs are distributed as part of the ledger it becomes easier to track who issues certs for what domain. Something we cannot do with the current SSL CA system.
  - schoen 11y ago
    There is already a mechanism in use for letting CAs be transparent about what they've issued. https://www.certificate-transparency.org/ https://www.certificate-transparency.org/ Sorry I didn't mention it explicitly -- I was trying to draw an analogy to show why blockchain-esque mechanisms are relevant here, and I thought readers would already be aware of this system.
ikeboy 11y ago
(2015)
- daveguy 11y ago
  November 22, 2015 ... It is less than 4 months old.
TerryADavis 11y ago
If I wanted to grow files, I'd stick with FAT32.
Terr_ 11y ago
Yeah, it's a bit like people taking "Internet Of Things" hype and declaiming that your toaster needs a wireless connection.
- nostrademons 11y ago
  If you also sold a robot that could put the toast in the toaster, I'd love a toaster with a wireless connection. I could start breakfast from my smartwatch while I'm still in bed upstairs and only go downstairs when it's ready.
  - chipperyman573 11y ago
    I know you're being sarcastic but I would legitimatly buy something like that if it was under $100
    - nostrademons 11y ago
      I wasn't being sarcastic...I actually would love a toaster that could make breakfast while I was still in bed upstairs. Although one key point that I'm sure IoT entrepreneurs will forget: I want breakfast, not a toaster with an Internet connection. If it doesn't make me breakfast, I'm not interested.
      - sharemywin 11y ago
        I want a "black box" kitchen load the groceries in one side get food on clean plates on the other side. Then, put dishes in a pile that goes in for next time. and it probably needs to be less than $1 per meal since I'm cheap.
        acveilleux 11y ago
        I'm sure Soylent 5.0 will be pretty close to that.
        11y ago
sharemywin 11y ago
seems like an encryption escrow service could meet 90% of use cases for a lot less costs. I digitally sign and timestamp then encrypt data upload it to web service and make it available to others.
- woah 11y ago
  That's what a blockchain is, but without you.
  - sharemywin 11y ago
    but why write out to 5000 copies of the database when one(maybe 2 or three) would do for most use cases.
    - vertex-four 11y ago
      Because you might not trust any individual or potentially colluding group to timestamp things according to the rules properly. Luckily, for the most part, as you say, you and the people you're interacting with can find someone you all can trust.
      - sharemywin 11y ago
        I'm not saying there aren't cases where block chain doesn't make sense.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
justsaysmthng 11y ago
I've saved a couple of potential clients months of development time and probably tens of thousand of dollars just by convincing them not to use a blockchain. So we have this great world changing idea which will transform, reinvent and disrupt ... and it uses a blockchain to keep track of .... Why the blockchain ? Because ... distributed ... anonymous ... But you have user accounts on your servers.. your project is centralized by design. Why not save yourself the trouble and use a mysql database ? People like being involved in things which sound cool and they try to bend reality so that they can find a use for a cool sounding technology.
- protomyth 11y ago
  I think this story illustrates the thinking pretty well http://thedailywtf.com/articles/The_Complicator_0x27_s_Gloves http://thedailywtf.com/articles/The_Complicator_0x27_s_Glove...
  - logicrook 11y ago
    Programmers, hackers, mathematician, often tend to fall into this trap. It was pretty well illustrated by Swift, in Gulliver's travel. When the protagonist arrive in Laputa, the city of mathematician, they take his measurements to make him a suit. But they only take one measure! Because we can compute all other measures through fancy equations... and that's how everyone in Laputa ends up with suits that are not well-adjusted.
  - wolfgke 11y ago
    The problem is not that the ideas are bad (they are not, IMHO), but the opportunity cost of working on these problems instead of the original one.
    - acdha 11y ago
      Opportunity cost is a huge problem but it seems like an even more basic issue is just the suitability for the underlying problem. The hype around blockchains lead a lot of people to suggest them as alternatives for relational databases or digital signatures, and even if a high-quality, tested, easy to use, well-secured system magically appeared it'd still be an inferior choice for any problem which can be solved with those tools: transactions take orders of magnitude longer to clear and the capacity limit is orders of magnitude smaller, customer service and fraud are hard problems rather than routine operations, etc. Even if the opportunity cost was zero, the choice wouldn't make sense unless you had a problem which cannot be solved well with mature tools.
ChemicalWarfare 11y ago
I'd also point out that there are a couple of projects out there aiming to add "blockchainish" behavior to a "regular" database without sacrificing the functionality we're all used to (try finding a tx with a specific value of the op_return on the bitcoin blockchain for example).
- SkyMarshal 11y ago
  Any chance you can provide names or links to those projects? I've been expecting this, have even heard rumor IBM is building Paxos into DB2, but would love to see real projects.
  - ChemicalWarfare 11y ago
    I was thinking along the lines of this: https://www.bigchaindb.com/whitepaper/bigchaindb-whitepaper.pdf https://www.bigchaindb.com/whitepaper/bigchaindb-whitepaper....
firmbeliever 11y ago
Question - does the incentive (or lack thereof) of the miners to create the blocks also need to be considered? There's an obvious incentive with bitcoin - you make money. What would be the incentive for me to create a block of (using one of this article's examples) entries on a shared calendar? It seems like part of the reason that this works for bitcoin is precisely because the "thing" being recorded (money) is something I also want as a miner. Why would I want to put in the computational work to create a block of calendar entries?
- wmf 11y ago
  That's why those systems shouldn't use mining. They should use something like PBFT. And the incentive to run a node is that you can catch other people cheating.
- ChemicalWarfare 11y ago
  Good question. The way this works right now is you can submit a non-payment tx into the bitcoin network and attach tx fees to it just like you would with a normal payment tx. Miner collects the fees when they mine the block with your tx in it. So from the miner's perspective the incentive is there. There's the "wasted bandwidth" angle there as well but that's a different story...
  - firmbeliever 11y ago
    I get how it works with bitcoin - that's why I was saying the incentive is obvious there. The miner makes money. I was asking what the incentive would be to go through the computational effort of creating a block in a system that doesn't involve money. The author gave the example of using blockchain to maintain a shared calendar. What incentive would I have to go through all the computational effort to create a block of calendar entries? Or let me know if I misunderstood your reply.
    - ChemicalWarfare 11y ago
      I understood you correctly you're asking what is miner's incentive to process a tx if the tx does not involve transfer of funds. There's nothing preventing the same tx fee system bitcoin is using from being implemented even if the blockchain itself is not used to transfer value. So now it is a can of worms, no doubt, as the system would have to have a way of attaching the fee to a "real world" value - along the lines of how Ether/Gas relationship works in Ethereum, but it can be done. Another thing to keep in mind is blockchains the author is talking about in the article aren't necessarily public - with a private blockchain the nodes are paid for by the organization using it in some way shape or form.
alex_hirner 11y ago
After much exposure in big data processing and running an Ethereum meetup since it wasn't yet cool, I think the main promise of this technology is more conceptual than strictly determined by a dominant protocol. These are: - Fully user owned identities - Eradicating information asymmetry in mutually beneficial ways - Transparent update rules, i.e. an evolving but never deprecated API Thus different roads will lead to those economic gains. Essentially you take mongodb, encapsulate any write access into UDFs (=smart contracts) with permission to execute based on a public/private key, a second set of keyholders able to read and validate the log and et voila, all promises of blockchain tech fulfilled.
- natrius 11y ago
  The identity part is what's really going to surprise people. We now have the tools to build IDs that are more reliable and resilient than state-issued IDs, but can be used in any application without permission. Forms? Where we're going, we don't need forms.
  - edraferi 11y ago
    Can you expand on that? As I understand it blockchains allow you to use a private key as your master identity, but don't inherently provide tools for connecting that key to a real-world identity. Are you envisioning a system like Keybase, but completely distributed?
    - natrius 11y ago
      Blockchains are decentralized cloud computers that enforce rules on a historical record. Bitcoin's rules are about managing a currency: how coins are issued, how to transfer them, etc. You can build a blockchain that enforces any rules, though, and Ethereum lets you define new rules without having to spin up your own blockchain. Your identity will no longer be a key. It will be a pointer to a program and its associated storage on a blockchain. To identify yourself, give someone a proof that you control that identity. To add a new key to the identity, use the rules you put in place to add new keys. To change the rules that control the identity, use the rules you put in place to change the rules. You can build any rules for an identity management process into a program that runs on a blockchain. Through trial and error, we will discover the most resilient patterns with the least trust required.
natrius 11y ago
This is a great article, but I disagree on one point. Blockchains aren't overhyped. Sure, people promote them for strange use cases sometimes. But I'm pretty confident that we'll look back on blockchains as underhyped. Blockchains will reshape entire industries, and some of the largest corporations on the planet will find themselves competing on a level playing field with a few kids in a garage. Has disintermediation ever been overhyped? Currency disintermediated trusted community members who you knew would do you a favor in return. The printing press disintermediated the Catholic Church, one of the most powerful entities of its day. The internet disintermediated... lots of people. Blockchains disintermediate everyone else.
- goldbrick 11y ago
  Blockchains are a horrible solution for the problem domain. Oh, you need decentralized consensus? Let's limit throughput to n / w / 0.5n. Hence bitcoin's multi-hour resolution times which are increasing geometrically. Sorry, I don't see it.
- edraferi 11y ago
  I hope your right, but I'm concerned that blockchains still rely on the core developers. Very few people really understand the protocols, and even they don't audit their nodes' code. You don't have to trust a central database, but you DO need to trust the code that runs the distributed database. This need for trust demands politics, and that's why we have Bitcoin's crisis de jur.
  - whazor 11y ago
    A solution for this problem will be general libraries which you can build blockchains with. But I agree on that maintaining a blockchain needs governance as well.
- debacle 11y ago
  You're overhyping block chains right now by comparing them to the printing press and the invention of the Internet. Block chains are a neat technology with limited application.
Matt3o12_ 11y ago
For all of you who get a connecing to the database error: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.multichain.com%2Fblog%2F2015%2F11%2Favoiding-pointless-blockchain-project%2F&oq=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.multichain.com%2Fblog%2F2015%2F11%2Favoiding-pointless-blockchain-project%2F http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%...
zump 11y ago
Blockchain idea: Decentralized LinkedIn
- mathgenius 11y ago
  Yeah, decentralized social. Who is doing this? What are the obvious problems? Spam? Other nefarious content? Who is going to delete all that crap...? So many questions...
Pyxl101 11y ago
This is a really good essay, and good frank analysis and insight. Thanks for writing it.
wslh 11y ago
I recently talk with a stock exchange team who wanted to start a blockchain project, so we asked naively: approximately, how many nodes are part of the system? Only one was their answer.
greenspot 11y ago
Excellent post. As much as I am fascinated by the Blockchain, Bitcoin and all related matters the Blockchain shows how random projects are created around some tech just for the sake to do something with this new tech. People fell in love with the Blockchain and desperately try to find a use case. Bitcoin was and I still think is a killer use case for the Blockchain. But in the last 24 months I met so many founders of blockchainy startups—exceptional smart guys, after 15 minutes of listening to them I felt so stupid like I missed the past five years of tech. But once you ask them what is the use case of their new shiny blockchainy tech they don't give a proper answer. Instead they shotgun more words with even higher confidence. Again, absolutely nothing against the Blockchain and I am highly impressed by Ethereum. And I understand that people often need to play around with new tech some while to find proper use cases. But especially with the Blockchain I feel that people do not find many more killer use cases beyond currency.
pyabo 11y ago
I work with blockchain technologies and sometimes I would like to say that the king is naked

139 points by Hansi 11y ago

icholy 11y ago

Sometimes it's hard to know what's a good idea and what isn't until you've tried it.

xyzzy4 11y ago
Well part of the reason we have brains is so you can think about something before you do it.
- swampthinker 11y ago
  HA! You mean I should think ahead? Nonsense.

schoen 11y ago

This is a helpful summary! We could also say that blockchains can be useful in principle when people are afraid of retroactive modification of history (for example because they get hacked, or because of governmental pressure to falsify their records). This is sort of an instance of this article's mutually-untrusting writers issue, but it's an interesting one because the writers are saying that they don't want to be trusted. I think this is the case now for software distributors and certificate authorities, among others (I gave a talk related to this at CCC); they are saying "it's bad for us and you if you just believe whatever we say, without at least a way to know if a larger audience has heard it and whether we're denying what we said before". So we can also say that blockchains (or perhaps another kind of distributed consensus mechanism; clearly Ben Laurie and others are claiming that blockchains are too heavyweight some or all of the time) can be useful when people are afraid that they're going to be made to emit writes that they didn't want to, or to deny writes that they previously emitted.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
zimbatm 11y ago
For a CA they could structure their data as a log where each entry (new cert) contains the checksum of the previous entry. That way it's not possible to change the chain without unwinding it. Each person getting a new signed cert now has the new HEAD of the log and unwinding means revoking all these certificates. Now if you put multiple CAs in the game it start to become interesting to use a distributed ledger like the blockchain. If all the signed certs are distributed as part of the ledger it becomes easier to track who issues certs for what domain. Something we cannot do with the current SSL CA system.
- schoen 11y ago
  There is already a mechanism in use for letting CAs be transparent about what they've issued. https://www.certificate-transparency.org/ https://www.certificate-transparency.org/ Sorry I didn't mention it explicitly -- I was trying to draw an analogy to show why blockchain-esque mechanisms are relevant here, and I thought readers would already be aware of this system.

ikeboy 11y ago

(2015)

daveguy 11y ago
November 22, 2015 ... It is less than 4 months old.

TerryADavis 11y ago

If I wanted to grow files, I'd stick with FAT32.

Terr_ 11y ago

Yeah, it's a bit like people taking "Internet Of Things" hype and declaiming that your toaster needs a wireless connection.

nostrademons 11y ago
If you also sold a robot that could put the toast in the toaster, I'd love a toaster with a wireless connection. I could start breakfast from my smartwatch while I'm still in bed upstairs and only go downstairs when it's ready.
- chipperyman573 11y ago
  I know you're being sarcastic but I would legitimatly buy something like that if it was under $100
  - nostrademons 11y ago
    I wasn't being sarcastic...I actually would love a toaster that could make breakfast while I was still in bed upstairs. Although one key point that I'm sure IoT entrepreneurs will forget: I want breakfast, not a toaster with an Internet connection. If it doesn't make me breakfast, I'm not interested.
    - sharemywin 11y ago
      I want a "black box" kitchen load the groceries in one side get food on clean plates on the other side. Then, put dishes in a pile that goes in for next time. and it probably needs to be less than $1 per meal since I'm cheap.
      - acveilleux 11y ago
        I'm sure Soylent 5.0 will be pretty close to that.
        11y ago

sharemywin 11y ago

seems like an encryption escrow service could meet 90% of use cases for a lot less costs. I digitally sign and timestamp then encrypt data upload it to web service and make it available to others.

woah 11y ago
That's what a blockchain is, but without you.
- sharemywin 11y ago
  but why write out to 5000 copies of the database when one(maybe 2 or three) would do for most use cases.
  - vertex-four 11y ago
    Because you might not trust any individual or potentially colluding group to timestamp things according to the rules properly. Luckily, for the most part, as you say, you and the people you're interacting with can find someone you all can trust.
    - sharemywin 11y ago
      I'm not saying there aren't cases where block chain doesn't make sense.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]

justsaysmthng 11y ago

I've saved a couple of potential clients months of development time and probably tens of thousand of dollars just by convincing them not to use a blockchain. So we have this great world changing idea which will transform, reinvent and disrupt ... and it uses a blockchain to keep track of .... Why the blockchain ? Because ... distributed ... anonymous ... But you have user accounts on your servers.. your project is centralized by design. Why not save yourself the trouble and use a mysql database ? People like being involved in things which sound cool and they try to bend reality so that they can find a use for a cool sounding technology.

protomyth 11y ago
I think this story illustrates the thinking pretty well http://thedailywtf.com/articles/The_Complicator_0x27_s_Gloves http://thedailywtf.com/articles/The_Complicator_0x27_s_Glove...
- logicrook 11y ago
  Programmers, hackers, mathematician, often tend to fall into this trap. It was pretty well illustrated by Swift, in Gulliver's travel. When the protagonist arrive in Laputa, the city of mathematician, they take his measurements to make him a suit. But they only take one measure! Because we can compute all other measures through fancy equations... and that's how everyone in Laputa ends up with suits that are not well-adjusted.
- wolfgke 11y ago
  The problem is not that the ideas are bad (they are not, IMHO), but the opportunity cost of working on these problems instead of the original one.
  - acdha 11y ago
    Opportunity cost is a huge problem but it seems like an even more basic issue is just the suitability for the underlying problem. The hype around blockchains lead a lot of people to suggest them as alternatives for relational databases or digital signatures, and even if a high-quality, tested, easy to use, well-secured system magically appeared it'd still be an inferior choice for any problem which can be solved with those tools: transactions take orders of magnitude longer to clear and the capacity limit is orders of magnitude smaller, customer service and fraud are hard problems rather than routine operations, etc. Even if the opportunity cost was zero, the choice wouldn't make sense unless you had a problem which cannot be solved well with mature tools.

ChemicalWarfare 11y ago

I'd also point out that there are a couple of projects out there aiming to add "blockchainish" behavior to a "regular" database without sacrificing the functionality we're all used to (try finding a tx with a specific value of the op_return on the bitcoin blockchain for example).

SkyMarshal 11y ago
Any chance you can provide names or links to those projects? I've been expecting this, have even heard rumor IBM is building Paxos into DB2, but would love to see real projects.
- ChemicalWarfare 11y ago
  I was thinking along the lines of this: https://www.bigchaindb.com/whitepaper/bigchaindb-whitepaper.pdf https://www.bigchaindb.com/whitepaper/bigchaindb-whitepaper....

firmbeliever 11y ago

Question - does the incentive (or lack thereof) of the miners to create the blocks also need to be considered? There's an obvious incentive with bitcoin - you make money. What would be the incentive for me to create a block of (using one of this article's examples) entries on a shared calendar? It seems like part of the reason that this works for bitcoin is precisely because the "thing" being recorded (money) is something I also want as a miner. Why would I want to put in the computational work to create a block of calendar entries?

wmf 11y ago
That's why those systems shouldn't use mining. They should use something like PBFT. And the incentive to run a node is that you can catch other people cheating.
ChemicalWarfare 11y ago
Good question. The way this works right now is you can submit a non-payment tx into the bitcoin network and attach tx fees to it just like you would with a normal payment tx. Miner collects the fees when they mine the block with your tx in it. So from the miner's perspective the incentive is there. There's the "wasted bandwidth" angle there as well but that's a different story...
- firmbeliever 11y ago
  I get how it works with bitcoin - that's why I was saying the incentive is obvious there. The miner makes money. I was asking what the incentive would be to go through the computational effort of creating a block in a system that doesn't involve money. The author gave the example of using blockchain to maintain a shared calendar. What incentive would I have to go through all the computational effort to create a block of calendar entries? Or let me know if I misunderstood your reply.
  - ChemicalWarfare 11y ago
    I understood you correctly you're asking what is miner's incentive to process a tx if the tx does not involve transfer of funds. There's nothing preventing the same tx fee system bitcoin is using from being implemented even if the blockchain itself is not used to transfer value. So now it is a can of worms, no doubt, as the system would have to have a way of attaching the fee to a "real world" value - along the lines of how Ether/Gas relationship works in Ethereum, but it can be done. Another thing to keep in mind is blockchains the author is talking about in the article aren't necessarily public - with a private blockchain the nodes are paid for by the organization using it in some way shape or form.

alex_hirner 11y ago

After much exposure in big data processing and running an Ethereum meetup since it wasn't yet cool, I think the main promise of this technology is more conceptual than strictly determined by a dominant protocol. These are: - Fully user owned identities - Eradicating information asymmetry in mutually beneficial ways - Transparent update rules, i.e. an evolving but never deprecated API Thus different roads will lead to those economic gains. Essentially you take mongodb, encapsulate any write access into UDFs (=smart contracts) with permission to execute based on a public/private key, a second set of keyholders able to read and validate the log and et voila, all promises of blockchain tech fulfilled.

natrius 11y ago
The identity part is what's really going to surprise people. We now have the tools to build IDs that are more reliable and resilient than state-issued IDs, but can be used in any application without permission. Forms? Where we're going, we don't need forms.
- edraferi 11y ago
  Can you expand on that? As I understand it blockchains allow you to use a private key as your master identity, but don't inherently provide tools for connecting that key to a real-world identity. Are you envisioning a system like Keybase, but completely distributed?
  - natrius 11y ago
    Blockchains are decentralized cloud computers that enforce rules on a historical record. Bitcoin's rules are about managing a currency: how coins are issued, how to transfer them, etc. You can build a blockchain that enforces any rules, though, and Ethereum lets you define new rules without having to spin up your own blockchain. Your identity will no longer be a key. It will be a pointer to a program and its associated storage on a blockchain. To identify yourself, give someone a proof that you control that identity. To add a new key to the identity, use the rules you put in place to add new keys. To change the rules that control the identity, use the rules you put in place to change the rules. You can build any rules for an identity management process into a program that runs on a blockchain. Through trial and error, we will discover the most resilient patterns with the least trust required.

natrius 11y ago

This is a great article, but I disagree on one point. Blockchains aren't overhyped. Sure, people promote them for strange use cases sometimes. But I'm pretty confident that we'll look back on blockchains as underhyped. Blockchains will reshape entire industries, and some of the largest corporations on the planet will find themselves competing on a level playing field with a few kids in a garage. Has disintermediation ever been overhyped? Currency disintermediated trusted community members who you knew would do you a favor in return. The printing press disintermediated the Catholic Church, one of the most powerful entities of its day. The internet disintermediated... lots of people. Blockchains disintermediate everyone else.

goldbrick 11y ago
Blockchains are a horrible solution for the problem domain. Oh, you need decentralized consensus? Let's limit throughput to n / w / 0.5n. Hence bitcoin's multi-hour resolution times which are increasing geometrically. Sorry, I don't see it.
edraferi 11y ago
I hope your right, but I'm concerned that blockchains still rely on the core developers. Very few people really understand the protocols, and even they don't audit their nodes' code. You don't have to trust a central database, but you DO need to trust the code that runs the distributed database. This need for trust demands politics, and that's why we have Bitcoin's crisis de jur.
- whazor 11y ago
  A solution for this problem will be general libraries which you can build blockchains with. But I agree on that maintaining a blockchain needs governance as well.
debacle 11y ago
You're overhyping block chains right now by comparing them to the printing press and the invention of the Internet. Block chains are a neat technology with limited application.

Matt3o12_ 11y ago

For all of you who get a connecing to the database error: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.multichain.com%2Fblog%2F2015%2F11%2Favoiding-pointless-blockchain-project%2F&oq=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.multichain.com%2Fblog%2F2015%2F11%2Favoiding-pointless-blockchain-project%2F http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%...

zump 11y ago

Blockchain idea: Decentralized LinkedIn

mathgenius 11y ago
Yeah, decentralized social. Who is doing this? What are the obvious problems? Spam? Other nefarious content? Who is going to delete all that crap...? So many questions...

Pyxl101 11y ago

This is a really good essay, and good frank analysis and insight. Thanks for writing it.

wslh 11y ago

I recently talk with a stock exchange team who wanted to start a blockchain project, so we asked naively: approximately, how many nodes are part of the system? Only one was their answer.

greenspot 11y ago

Excellent post. As much as I am fascinated by the Blockchain, Bitcoin and all related matters the Blockchain shows how random projects are created around some tech just for the sake to do something with this new tech. People fell in love with the Blockchain and desperately try to find a use case. Bitcoin was and I still think is a killer use case for the Blockchain. But in the last 24 months I met so many founders of blockchainy startups—exceptional smart guys, after 15 minutes of listening to them I felt so stupid like I missed the past five years of tech. But once you ask them what is the use case of their new shiny blockchainy tech they don't give a proper answer. Instead they shotgun more words with even higher confidence. Again, absolutely nothing against the Blockchain and I am highly impressed by Ethereum. And I understand that people often need to play around with new tech some while to find proper use cases. But especially with the Blockchain I feel that people do not find many more killer use cases beyond currency.

pyabo 11y ago

I work with blockchain technologies and sometimes I would like to say that the king is naked