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I am literally writing a book about this. And boy am I read up on the hype. http://davidgerard.co.uk/bitcoin/ http://davidgerard.co.uk/bitcoin/ Everything in t

I am literally writing a book about this. And boy am I read up on the hype. http://davidgerard.co.uk/bitcoin/ http://davidgerard.co.uk/bitcoin/ Everything in this article is content-free BS. "80% of banks are working on blockchain projects" - this means they've told someone to "investigate", which doesn't in any way mean a product is in the offing. And so on with all the other claimed examples. The product here is the Hyperledger initiative, run by IBM. The “IBM Blockchain – What is Blockchain?” page is a good example of content-free Blockchain hype: http://www.ibm.com/blockchain/what_is_blockchain.html http://www.ibm.com/blockchain/what_is_blockchain.html Almost every “is” on that page is a “might” or “could” – no blockchain does all the things it describes in present-day terms, and particularly not any of the code dumps at Hyperledger.org. Hyperledger.org is a corporate open source Potemkin village of the sort IBM has long favoured: the illusion of an open project, with no “there” there. I spent half an hour dredging the site and could not find one clear statement of what this software is actually intended to do, let alone differences from and similarities to existing blockchains. Even Bitcoin blog CoinDesk noted: “Among the doubts facing Hyperledger is a perceived lack of clarity on what might be ultimately produced by the initiative.” If you click long enough, you'll find a page where the participating companies have dumped their unfinished blockchain experiments. The main code contributor is Digital Asset Holdings, who dumped Hyperledger Fabric there; their joining announcement (on their own site, not hyperledger.org) gives as technical details only that Hyperledger is an append-only ledger and has an actual Bitcoin-style blockchain in it. (This makes it more "blockchain" than others. e.g., R3 Corda is a "Blockchain Product" that doesn't include a blockchain in its default configuration. The key factor to "Business Blockchain" is that any examples that work, aren't actually a blockchain. You get Merkle trees just shoving your transactions into a git repo.) As Hyperledger found out, all manner of businesses – financial institutions, beef industry, shoe brands, confectioners – don’t want to share data even with all participants in their blockchain, but only with the people the specific deal is actually with, funnily enough: https://lists.hyperledger.org/pipermail/hyperledger-requirements-wg/2016-September/000012.html https://lists.hyperledger.org/pipermail/hyperledger-requirem... https://lists.hyperledger.org/pipermail/hyperledger-technical-discuss/2016-September/000391.html https://lists.hyperledger.org/pipermail/hyperledger-technica... This was apparently news to them. It turns out that IBM set up an elaborate hammer design consortium without first finding out if there are nails.

wmf 10y ago
The lack of clarity is kind of a feature, as Hyperledger is intended to be a modular, completely general framework for building any possible blockchain you can imagine.
- davidgerard 10y ago
  Also, airy promises are not only cheap - it's a dessert wax and a floor topping! - but highly available and widely distributed in the Business Blockchain environment! The other main code dump on hyperledger.org is Intel's. Their "Sawtooth Lake" replaces the blitheringly stupid and wasteful Proof of Work with something equally stupid but less wasteful, Proof of Elapsed Time, which might as well be called Proof of Buying An Intel CPU. Rather than have miners compete to produce the next block, a timer running in an environment secured by a DRM mechanism built into your Intel CPU picks if you get to do the next block. The white paper is an extended advertisement for Intel® Software Guard Extensions™ (SGX™). Also, they only have a simulated Proof of Buying An Intel CPU mechanism as yet. https://intelledger.github.io/introduction.html https://intelledger.github.io/introduction.html This doesn’t provide any security against malicious participants; the excuse is that private blockchains need speed over security. You might think that at that point you don’t need a blockchain at all, but you’re hardly going to sell any consultant hours with that sort of thinking.
  - RustyRussell 10y ago
    OK, now I want to buy your book!
    - davidgerard 10y ago
      There's a link on my site to go on the alerts mailing list :-) It's literally not finished yet. (21,284 words of body text at this moment and I have maybe 5k-10k to add. I was targeting 15k for a quickly dashed-off Kindle short, and I appear to have turned the project into a miniature Sistine chapel.) I have excerpts from the draft up at the site. Which I just moved to http://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/ http://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/ .

wmf 10y ago

The lack of clarity is kind of a feature, as Hyperledger is intended to be a modular, completely general framework for building any possible blockchain you can imagine.

davidgerard 10y ago
Also, airy promises are not only cheap - it's a dessert wax and a floor topping! - but highly available and widely distributed in the Business Blockchain environment! The other main code dump on hyperledger.org is Intel's. Their "Sawtooth Lake" replaces the blitheringly stupid and wasteful Proof of Work with something equally stupid but less wasteful, Proof of Elapsed Time, which might as well be called Proof of Buying An Intel CPU. Rather than have miners compete to produce the next block, a timer running in an environment secured by a DRM mechanism built into your Intel CPU picks if you get to do the next block. The white paper is an extended advertisement for Intel® Software Guard Extensions™ (SGX™). Also, they only have a simulated Proof of Buying An Intel CPU mechanism as yet. https://intelledger.github.io/introduction.html https://intelledger.github.io/introduction.html This doesn’t provide any security against malicious participants; the excuse is that private blockchains need speed over security. You might think that at that point you don’t need a blockchain at all, but you’re hardly going to sell any consultant hours with that sort of thinking.
- RustyRussell 10y ago
  OK, now I want to buy your book!
  - davidgerard 10y ago
    There's a link on my site to go on the alerts mailing list :-) It's literally not finished yet. (21,284 words of body text at this moment and I have maybe 5k-10k to add. I was targeting 15k for a quickly dashed-off Kindle short, and I appear to have turned the project into a miniature Sistine chapel.) I have excerpts from the draft up at the site. Which I just moved to http://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/ http://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/ .