8 ms·

I Don’t Believe in Blockchain

83 points by samastur 9y ago

cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
It's easy to just dismiss saying "that's not happening with blockchain", a baby can say that too. But I have no idea what he's talking about when he says "And without exception, I observed that they were initially loaded in the back door by geeks, without asking permission, because they got shit done and helped people with their jobs." Is he saying Bitcoin is not being developed by geeks? Is he saying Bitcoin is not "helping people get shit done and helping people with their jobs"? There are valid criticisms, and there are really baseless rants like this. Just because you're "old" doesn't mean you know the future from your past experience. Tons of talented old people (and younger people too) with tons of experience never realized the potential of the Internet when it first came out. Oh, and when Internet first came out, it never was meant to "get shit done and help people with their jobs", for a long time. It was a fringe culture. If he's as experienced as he claims to be, he should know better.
- beaconstudios 9y ago
  I understood his point to be that the history of successful innovative techs is that they were built in from the ground up by people utilising something because it was better at a job. E.g. linux for servers, the internet (and it's ongoing growth as an app platform), and so on. Blockchains, on the other hand, have become yet another marketer buzzword like Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence, Local, Social, and so on. Not to say that these things don't solve problems, but they're picked up as an over-hyped buzzword and forced into many many applications that they just don't belong in. Blockchains are helpful in peer-to-peer consensus, that's basically it. They won't work for real-world contracts (no-one is ever going to turn their house or car deed into a cryptographic token, or honour such a token) or a few other cheesy applications they seem to be getting forced into. It's just marketers who don't understand technology selling words they don't understand to other marketers who don't understand technology.
  - cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
    What was Internet good for when it first came out? Like I said it was nothing more than a novelty fringe culture at best for a long time before it reached critical mass. It's not like I'm working on some bitcoin business or anything but I am offended that you think Bitcoin is the same type of hype as "AI, IoT, etc.". Trust me I'm the biggest hater of the AI hype in 2016-2017 (driven by VCs and BigCos for their own interest). The reason I know these are hypes is because most technical people who actually have been working in these fields know exactly what's possible and what's not, but the non-technical VCs and marketers are driving the "market" (that doesn't exist) thinking that something groundbreaking has suddenly happened. The fact is: nothing groundbreaking has happened. The technology is getting better for sure, but compared to bitcoin these are nothing new. Bitcoin is actually something new and a novel piece of technology, which is different from all the other marketing hypewords you compared it with. At this point I think the chances are 50/50 that it will succeed, but really nobody knows what will happen. Anyone claiming to know the future is being arrogant.
    - beaconstudios 9y ago
      I think you misunderstand my point - I'm not talking about bitcoin hype. I'm actually incredibly impressed by the innovation that bitcoin represents. I don't think it's found its niche yet (aside from the obvious black market applications and pointless financial speculation), but it's a real innovation. I'm talking about "X on the blockchain" type startups, e.g. some of the companies on this list: https://medium.com/the-intrepid-review/the-top-10-blockchain-startups-to-watch-in-2016-the-leaders-who-are-changing-the-game-6195606b0d70 https://medium.com/the-intrepid-review/the-top-10-blockchain.... Many of these things are perfectly possible without using blockchains (and some are just egregious users of other buzzwords) but are more likely to get VC investment because they use over-hyped technologies arbitrarily.
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- vomitcuddle 9y ago
  I don't think he is talking specifically about Bitcoin, but "the blockchain of diamonds" type of startups that used to be hyped up on HN a year or so ago.
- rictic 9y ago
  Serious question: what is block chain being used for besides trading crypto currency? Like, not building infrastructure that may be useful, for things in the future, not speculative value but stuff that's identifyably useful in and of itself today? I don't follow coins closely anymore but the main one I saw was namecoin, which hasn't yet seen much use.
  - atemerev 9y ago
    I rent cars, pay for groceries, and basically do everything else with Bitcoin. I have to use card gateways like Bitwala for that, but it works for me perfectly. My debit card can be usually loaded with Bitcoin within 10-15 minutes (it is especially helpful as I live in 2 countries and travel a lot; bank transfers take much more time). There are many companies now where you can get your salary paid in Bitcoin. In fact, it is so infinitely more convenient, I think that only the forces of mental inertia hold this approach from immediate universal adoption.
    - samastur 9y ago
      Not really. High fluctuation of bitcoin's value is the real killer when most expenses will need to be paid in a not-bitcoin currency.
      - atemerev 9y ago
        Worked for me for the last year.
        AstralStorm 9y ago
        One year is an awfully short time for a currency.
    - 6nf 9y ago
      My credit card does all of that and they actually reward me for using them, so given the choice when paying for something I will choose a credit card 100% of the time.
- nwhatt 9y ago
  I don't think this is a baseless rant - it's an accurate observation that the most disruptive technologies don't get adopted from the top-down. It's the developers on front line who learn about it and implement. Blockchain is at place right now where managers and marketers are asking "What can blockchain do for us". But where are the examples of "Big company X implemented blockchain to solve problem Y?" maybe it's too soon for those.
  - cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
    Yes maybe that's what this guy looked at and made the conclusion on. But these "top down" approaches never work. That's how it played out with Internet vs Intranet. When the Internet was first gaining traction all the bigcos thought the money was in Intranet because that was more "monetizable". MS went down that route and never recovered. I also used to be skeptical about all these VCs jumping into Bitcoin ecosystem, but now it's 2017 and if you look around, they kind of gave up on investing in "companies", and are instead trying to buy up the currencies themselves, which means everyone's on level playing ground, which is exactly what happened with the Internet. I am more annoyed at these marketer types who jump into Bitcoin than anyone, but I don't think these people will end up winning because they have no substance.
    - AstralStorm 9y ago
      Bad comparison. What is an Internet if not a way to link Intranets reliably? That is how it came to life...
- deleted 9y ago
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austenallred 9y ago
In summary: "I don't think the Blockchain will be a winner because there's too much hype, it's not being developed by geeks, and it's not helping people do their existing jobs." 1. There is a lot of hype, sure, but there was around that whole Internet thing too. 2. The idea that geeks aren't working on it is patently absurd, and 3. I'm not sure how OP missed the jobs-to-be-done of financial transactions, proof of identity, proof of ownership, etc. Those are all pretty important jobs in trillion dollar industries.
- mifeng 9y ago
  Those are all important jobs that are being done today using non blockchain methods. How does blockchain perform better at sub critical mass?
  - austenallred 9y ago
    The kinks have to be worked out, of course, the same way loading up the newspaper in 1992 wasn't exactly a superior experience to walking outside and getting the paper. But removing the friction of third-party verification changes the entire nature of financial transactions as we know it.
    - acdha 9y ago
      Getting the newspaper online had clear advantages even before the web took off: news junkies were one of the first adopters since e.g. it beat driving to the one place nearby which carried the NYT if you didn't live in NY. In contrast, BitCoin offers nothing other that risk and uncertainty vs. using a credit card to buy online unless you're hoping to avoid law enforcement.
- retube 9y ago
  Re 3., tell me one problem that blockchain solves that a regular db and authentication can't?
  - austenallred 9y ago
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clarkevans 9y ago
While perhaps not worded particularly well, I think there's a point to what Tim is saying. In many conferences targeted at non-technical people and investors, block-chain is often touted as some sort of magic wand. Financial transactions, record of provenance, and other problems were solved before block chain with centralized databases, and then digital signatures, etc. When these problems come up in a more traditional domain, centralized approach often works just fine and there's no need to make it more complex.
- sneak 9y ago
  > In many conferences targeted at non-technical people, block-chain is often touted as some sort of magic wand that will solve problems without discussing how. cf. "the web", "ecommerce", "p2p", "social media", et c. it's a tool, and a damn useful one, that enables some things no tools did before. that's it, and that's all of it.
  - acdha 9y ago
    All of those had immediate real world uses. What activity which normal people do has seen a blockchain offer significant improvements over previous practice?
    - davidgerard 9y ago
      Buying illegal drugs. That's literally it. I'm writing a book on this. (Nearly finished! Probably!) I have read thousands of pages of the worst PDF whitepapers you can imagine. I have looked all over to see if there's a "there" there. As far as I can tell: 1. The only thing blockchain does in practice that anything else can't is decentralised cryptocurrencies. 2. The only thing decentralised cryptocurrencies do in practice that ActualMoney doesn't is markets for illicit goods and services. note the "in practice" - it's had eight years of "possibilities", by now I think we can look at what it's done. also, 3. the decentralisation isn't permanent - Proof of Work benefits from economies of scale, meaning mining recentralises, and this is exactly what happened from the FPGA era on. The usual business proposition for Blockchain(tm) is supply chain management. Blockchain doesn't solve any of the actual problems (bad data - it turns out that crooks don't put careful documentation of violations into the data, and bribe local inspectors and adjudicators) but does offer a monopoly position to the company defining the blockchain in question.
lifty 9y ago
While I agree that there is a lot of hype at the moment, once the dust settles we will be left with the usescases that stuck. The geany is not going back in the bottle. And some of the projects are run by the most geeky people I have ever seen, people that are knowledgeable in multiple fields like cs, cryptography, math and economics.
SirensOfTitan 9y ago
This article is awful. Why are people upvoting it? I understand scepticism, but this touches on a lot of things and comes across as a rant more than a reasonable discussion. 1. There are not only brilliant people leading these projects (Vitalik on Ethereum in particular), but blockchain is a huge passionate discussion amongst the SWE communities I find myself in. > for example the laughably slow transactions-per-second of most real-world blockchain implementations. 2. Is he/she just talking about Bitcoin? Apparently one means 'most'. There are plenty of plans around scaling in various tech: Raiden for Ethereum is an interesting example for smaller transactions. > I could maybe get past the socio-political issues, the misguided notion that in civilized countries, you can route around the legal system with “smart contracts” > I still don’t think the world needs it. 3. Doesn't go to support their arguments at all. A simple and obvious use case here is: banks dragged down by capital obligations from Dodd-Frank regulation are looking everywhere for cost savings. Blockchain is interesting to everyone because there are fairly easy to get involved in financial instruments associated that have been doing very well lately. With that, there are plenty of nerds investing a lot of time into technologies to make these networks truly useful.
- mifeng 9y ago
  > Banks dragged down by capital obligations from Dodd-Frank regulation are looking everywhere for cost savings. Name a single bank who is using blockchain in an essential component of their operations (not just a proof of concept). Go on, I'll wait. Sure, blockchain is "interesting" and the people involved are "brilliant" but where is it delivering a 10x improvement over the status quo? Blockchain is a classic example of a solution looking for a problem.
  - SirensOfTitan 9y ago
    > Name a single bank who is using blockchain in an essential component of their operations (not just a proof of concept). Go on, I'll wait. What a ridiculous argument. With blockchain really just becoming interesting over the last 2 years, you think banks, many of which use systems 20-30 years old (bonds are still primarily traded over phone) are going to switch over to it immediately. Give me a break. > Sure, blockchain is "interesting" and the people involved are "brilliant" but where is it delivering a 10x improvement over the status quo? International bank transfers can take days, have large transaction fees, and have a non-trivial amount of book keeping error. Whenever those same transactions could take 30 minutes with no human oversight I'd say the speedup is much higher than 10x. With that, it seems like you're more interested in making claims without being properly educated on what you're talking about.
campbelltown 9y ago
This article is lazy. It sounds like the author took a cursory look at the tech and wrote it off. This has no place at the top of hackernews.
20delta 9y ago
I'm always on the lookout for an interesting criticism of blockchain technology, this isn't one of them.
kibwen 9y ago
> (optionally) a Byzantine-generals solution too! What is this referring to? In all of the ways that I've seen the Byzantine generals problem phrased, it's presented as impossible to "solve".
- wmf 9y ago
  https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1wqj8z/will_someone_explain_how_the_blockchain_solved/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1wqj8z/will_someon...
  - kibwen 9y ago
    Ah, thanks, I didn't realize that the Byzantine generals problem wasn't just a synonym for the two generals problem.
- honestlyreally 9y ago
  Bitcoin solves the Byzantine Generals problem.
jcfrei 9y ago
> And without exception, I observed that they were initially loaded in the back door by geeks, without asking permission, because they got shit done and helped people with their jobs. This is precisely what I see happening with bitcoin. Bitcoin addresses keep popping up more frequently every day (with WannaCrypt being one recent and unfortunate example). Despite the scalability issues and regulatory uncertainty there isn't an easier way to send value around the globe. And this isn't simply because banks face a huge regulatory burden. The settlement systems in place are very complex and archaic and blockchains promise a fresh start for a global settlement layer.
RichardHeart 9y ago
Darknet believes.
anon4this1 9y ago
When I got into bitcoin in 2011, it had a market cap of $20 million, and already had several killer apps: - Making darknet drug markets possible - Allowed permissionless, highly convenient storage of wealth - Allowed large, rapid, low friction money transfers anywhere in the world Now, in 2017, Ethereum has a market cap of 8 billion, yet I can't find a single use case for this technology other than enabling other scammy ponzi-like coin offerings.
- B1FF_PSUVM 9y ago
  Besides, the right people already have the art market for this role.
- honestlyreally 9y ago
  Transparent voting mechanisms, prediction markets, p2p betting, gaming micropayments, distributed computing rewards, replacing entire national currencies because of irresponsible governments,etc
  - anon4this1 9y ago
    Vague gambling stuff - is this really going to be a 10x improvement over betfair who already offers solid p2p gambling markets with <5% house take? Distributed computing rewards - maybe for a subgroup off applications (eg. illegal stuff eg. piracy), but in general terms a centralised system is easier, cheaper and quicker to develop Replacing national currencies - this is already bitcoin's killer app. Ethereum adds almost no utility to this space.
antonios 9y ago
I love the concept of a decentralized currency. Blockchains, not so much. They are inefficient, unscalable and resource-hungry. But they're the best we've got to get there now. Looking forward to Mimblewimble.
dpc_pw 9y ago
This article is just a spin of "I don't see how music on the computer is easier than in the radio" or "buying a newspaper will always be easier than reading your news on some weird website". Bitcoin and cryptotech are loaded with geeks, just not the same ones as the author associate with. And cryptotech do a lot of stuff way better than existing tech. You have to be totally blind not to see it, IMO. :D It was the same with "noone will need a personal computer" laughed by older-school engineers, or "The Internet is a funny toy with its funny packet switching, but real business-critical communication needs a reliable networking like a connection-based phone system". Cryptotech (not only blockchain-based) is disruptive, groundbreaking and as transformative as personal computers were. But it took like 30 years to get personal computing to the point where it was obvious. And it won't be much faster this time. There will be blockchains, technologies, standards, businesses going up and down, people getting rich and/or broke, with winners shaping a new world.
- ajross 9y ago
  > But it took like 30 years to get personal computing to the point where it was obvious Gotta quibble with this one. 30 years after the PET shipped we were solidly in the middle of the Web 2.0 revolution. Yes, ideas take time to mature. No, the PC in't a good reference. By 1981 it was clear where we were going.
- AstralStorm 9y ago
  And yes, internet is still a toy for real time mission critical data despite all the QoS developments that have been happening.
latenightcoding 9y ago
The blockchain hype is amazing and entertaining, I love going to blockchain events where 95% of the speakers have no idea what the hell they are talking about, I love when banks and fortune 500s send their chief innovation officers to blockchain meetups to find out how they can use the blockchain (hint: they don't need it), I love going to hackathons where all the projects are fun and cute but provide no real world value. The coolest thing is that I live in Toronto, Vitalik Buterin is from toronto, I met him for 5 seconds, a lot of my friends have met him, therefore they can call themselves blockchain experts. The thing I love the most is when entrepreneurs with past exits tell me about their "private blockchain" projects which got a verbal endorsement from Vitalik's dad.
- anon4this1 9y ago
  Also.. Vitalik (and his offsiders) created ethereum when he was like 19. This is impressive, but it also makes you wonder - what real world problems did Vitalik have experience of that he was trying to solve? Zuckerburg was trying to connect groups of friends. Was Vitalik really so driven by the need for unintermediated prediction markets and zero-trust digital contracts as a teenager?
- surak 9y ago
  Engineers don't like being told by mgmt what to do, that I agree with. To continue generalizing, engineers also hate to re-evaluate the level of their skills when having to learn a new stack.. It took msft 10-15y to get uptake for the .net stack on the back-end side, and the reason they did that was because of infighting in the Java community. Having studied the BC stack, I would say that the biggest obstacle will be to get engineers to dare try something new. To many SW-engineers on the web-side today, don't really have sufficient skills to understand BC-technology. I don't mean to offend, just state what I see. We saw the same thing with p2p-tech before that. Solidity as a programming language is an interesting abstraction and perhaps lowers the barrier somewhat, but it will take many years before the skills available match that for what is required to gain momentum on a broad scale. If you're an engineer and wonder why mgmt keeps bringing it up, its because this will potentially help them build a platform (two-sided) market. If that occurs and you constructed it correctly, your company may well be able to skip on taxes as well, as a side-effect.
DennisP 9y ago
So if his argument is that geeks in the corporate trenches aren't using it to quietly get their jobs done without involving management, I'd say the reason is that if you're just doing internal work, you're better off using a database. Blockchains are useful for reducing the overhead due to lack of trust when you're working with other companies. You can't really make that happen without management on both sides getting involved. There's no way a back office geek working on his own can make complicated auditing and settlement procedures go away, and that's the sort of thing where blockchains help. (And of course not every new technology gets adopted first by corporate geeks; iPhone apps are one example of consumers taking the lead.)
- AstralStorm 9y ago
  They don't actually help, they take away power and control from the hands of the bank. This makes blockchains in fact completely against the interest of banks. Do you see consumers commonly paying in BTC? Real offline shops accepting it? (Never mind tiny things like Ethereum.)
- acdha 9y ago
  > Blockchains are useful for reducing the overhead due to lack of trust when you're working with other companies Can you expand on what you're defining this problem as and how Bitcoin reduces costs relative to the traditional approaches with trusted third parties, PKI, etc. I've seen the marketing pitches but they're always conspicuously lacking the kind of specific “we pay X to do Y but could pay Z” pitches which I've seen used to justify bringing new tech inside.
  - DennisP 9y ago
    Not so much Bitcoin as smart contract platforms like Ethereum, or various private offshoots. Most of what I know about this comes from watching the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance conference, which had people from JP Morgan, Santander, and several other large corporations. Interbank settlement is one example. Right now it involves auditing process that take days. A blockchain implementation could reduce it to seconds. Insurance and supply chains are a couple other things they mentioned. Pretty much any time you're either doing a lot of mutual auditing, or paying someone a lot to maintain a trusted transactional database for a group of companies, there's an opportunity to reduce costs and/or speed things up with a blockchain. For now, that probably doesn't mean a public blockchain, due to privacy and scalability issues. The companies in the EEA are focusing on private versions for now; if you have a known set of nodes and trust that no more than a third of them will commit fraud, you can get away with much faster consensus mechanisms. At the EEA conference they said if Ethereum succeeds in its scaling and privacy efforts, they hope to move at least some applications to the public chain, but that's a couple years off.
KirinDave 9y ago
What's the Byzantine Generals solution he's talking about? I thought most BC implementations can't recover from worst case BG problems? That said, I know a lot of people using the tech and they're making money with it, solving real technical problems. I suspect maybe Bray doesn't know about it because it's easier to assume that it isn't than to verify it so. There are specific industries where block chain limitations don't matter, and its guarantees do.
- AstralStorm 9y ago
  Apparently those "real technical problems" have already been solved in another way that is commonly implemented or are unimportant.
  - KirinDave 9y ago
    I mean, a great example is medical records. I know because the concept if using hash blocks for history predates Bitcoin. Personally I think both the hype and the anti-hype exist because we finally gave this family of data structures a snappy name. Also, I found the BG solution he was referring to and it's rather soft.
_nalply 9y ago
Perhaps because Blockchain is about automating trust. However trust should go deep. Everyone should be able to see how something works and Blockchains are too complicated for most people to understand. These people are forced to trust someone else, some sales guy or the like. Bitcoin is growing because there are enough people on the world who are willing to risk it. They don't trust Bitcoin, they are gambling.
safek 9y ago
I wish people would drop the theatrics when writing these. Here's the same article rewritten without loss of substance: --- I looked into blockchain technologies carefully and I’ve ended up thinking it’s an overpromoted niche sideshow. I’ve seen wave after wave of landscape-shifting technology sweep through the IT space: Personal computers, Unix, C, the Internet and Web, Java, REST, mobile, public cloud. And without exception, I observed that they were initially loaded in the back door by geeks, without asking permission, because they got shit done and helped people with their jobs. That’s not happening with blockchain. Not in the slightest. Which is why I don’t believe in it.

83 points by samastur 9y ago

It's easy to just dismiss saying "that's not happening with blockchain", a baby can say that too. But I have no idea what he's talking about when he says "And without exception, I observed that they were initially loaded in the back door by geeks, without asking permission, because they got shit done and helped people with their jobs." Is he saying Bitcoin is not being developed by geeks? Is he saying Bitcoin is not "helping people get shit done and helping people with their jobs"? There are valid criticisms, and there are really baseless rants like this. Just because you're "old" doesn't mean you know the future from your past experience. Tons of talented old people (and younger people too) with tons of experience never realized the potential of the Internet when it first came out. Oh, and when Internet first came out, it never was meant to "get shit done and help people with their jobs", for a long time. It was a fringe culture. If he's as experienced as he claims to be, he should know better.

beaconstudios 9y ago
I understood his point to be that the history of successful innovative techs is that they were built in from the ground up by people utilising something because it was better at a job. E.g. linux for servers, the internet (and it's ongoing growth as an app platform), and so on. Blockchains, on the other hand, have become yet another marketer buzzword like Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence, Local, Social, and so on. Not to say that these things don't solve problems, but they're picked up as an over-hyped buzzword and forced into many many applications that they just don't belong in. Blockchains are helpful in peer-to-peer consensus, that's basically it. They won't work for real-world contracts (no-one is ever going to turn their house or car deed into a cryptographic token, or honour such a token) or a few other cheesy applications they seem to be getting forced into. It's just marketers who don't understand technology selling words they don't understand to other marketers who don't understand technology.
- cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
  What was Internet good for when it first came out? Like I said it was nothing more than a novelty fringe culture at best for a long time before it reached critical mass. It's not like I'm working on some bitcoin business or anything but I am offended that you think Bitcoin is the same type of hype as "AI, IoT, etc.". Trust me I'm the biggest hater of the AI hype in 2016-2017 (driven by VCs and BigCos for their own interest). The reason I know these are hypes is because most technical people who actually have been working in these fields know exactly what's possible and what's not, but the non-technical VCs and marketers are driving the "market" (that doesn't exist) thinking that something groundbreaking has suddenly happened. The fact is: nothing groundbreaking has happened. The technology is getting better for sure, but compared to bitcoin these are nothing new. Bitcoin is actually something new and a novel piece of technology, which is different from all the other marketing hypewords you compared it with. At this point I think the chances are 50/50 that it will succeed, but really nobody knows what will happen. Anyone claiming to know the future is being arrogant.
  - beaconstudios 9y ago
    I think you misunderstand my point - I'm not talking about bitcoin hype. I'm actually incredibly impressed by the innovation that bitcoin represents. I don't think it's found its niche yet (aside from the obvious black market applications and pointless financial speculation), but it's a real innovation. I'm talking about "X on the blockchain" type startups, e.g. some of the companies on this list: https://medium.com/the-intrepid-review/the-top-10-blockchain-startups-to-watch-in-2016-the-leaders-who-are-changing-the-game-6195606b0d70 https://medium.com/the-intrepid-review/the-top-10-blockchain.... Many of these things are perfectly possible without using blockchains (and some are just egregious users of other buzzwords) but are more likely to get VC investment because they use over-hyped technologies arbitrarily.
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vomitcuddle 9y ago
I don't think he is talking specifically about Bitcoin, but "the blockchain of diamonds" type of startups that used to be hyped up on HN a year or so ago.
rictic 9y ago
Serious question: what is block chain being used for besides trading crypto currency? Like, not building infrastructure that may be useful, for things in the future, not speculative value but stuff that's identifyably useful in and of itself today? I don't follow coins closely anymore but the main one I saw was namecoin, which hasn't yet seen much use.
- atemerev 9y ago
  I rent cars, pay for groceries, and basically do everything else with Bitcoin. I have to use card gateways like Bitwala for that, but it works for me perfectly. My debit card can be usually loaded with Bitcoin within 10-15 minutes (it is especially helpful as I live in 2 countries and travel a lot; bank transfers take much more time). There are many companies now where you can get your salary paid in Bitcoin. In fact, it is so infinitely more convenient, I think that only the forces of mental inertia hold this approach from immediate universal adoption.
  - samastur 9y ago
    Not really. High fluctuation of bitcoin's value is the real killer when most expenses will need to be paid in a not-bitcoin currency.
    - atemerev 9y ago
      Worked for me for the last year.
      - AstralStorm 9y ago
        One year is an awfully short time for a currency.
  - 6nf 9y ago
    My credit card does all of that and they actually reward me for using them, so given the choice when paying for something I will choose a credit card 100% of the time.
nwhatt 9y ago
I don't think this is a baseless rant - it's an accurate observation that the most disruptive technologies don't get adopted from the top-down. It's the developers on front line who learn about it and implement. Blockchain is at place right now where managers and marketers are asking "What can blockchain do for us". But where are the examples of "Big company X implemented blockchain to solve problem Y?" maybe it's too soon for those.
- cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
  Yes maybe that's what this guy looked at and made the conclusion on. But these "top down" approaches never work. That's how it played out with Internet vs Intranet. When the Internet was first gaining traction all the bigcos thought the money was in Intranet because that was more "monetizable". MS went down that route and never recovered. I also used to be skeptical about all these VCs jumping into Bitcoin ecosystem, but now it's 2017 and if you look around, they kind of gave up on investing in "companies", and are instead trying to buy up the currencies themselves, which means everyone's on level playing ground, which is exactly what happened with the Internet. I am more annoyed at these marketer types who jump into Bitcoin than anyone, but I don't think these people will end up winning because they have no substance.
  - AstralStorm 9y ago
    Bad comparison. What is an Internet if not a way to link Intranets reliably? That is how it came to life...
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austenallred 9y ago

In summary: "I don't think the Blockchain will be a winner because there's too much hype, it's not being developed by geeks, and it's not helping people do their existing jobs." 1. There is a lot of hype, sure, but there was around that whole Internet thing too. 2. The idea that geeks aren't working on it is patently absurd, and 3. I'm not sure how OP missed the jobs-to-be-done of financial transactions, proof of identity, proof of ownership, etc. Those are all pretty important jobs in trillion dollar industries.

mifeng 9y ago
Those are all important jobs that are being done today using non blockchain methods. How does blockchain perform better at sub critical mass?
- austenallred 9y ago
  The kinks have to be worked out, of course, the same way loading up the newspaper in 1992 wasn't exactly a superior experience to walking outside and getting the paper. But removing the friction of third-party verification changes the entire nature of financial transactions as we know it.
  - acdha 9y ago
    Getting the newspaper online had clear advantages even before the web took off: news junkies were one of the first adopters since e.g. it beat driving to the one place nearby which carried the NYT if you didn't live in NY. In contrast, BitCoin offers nothing other that risk and uncertainty vs. using a credit card to buy online unless you're hoping to avoid law enforcement.
retube 9y ago
Re 3., tell me one problem that blockchain solves that a regular db and authentication can't?
- austenallred 9y ago

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clarkevans 9y ago

While perhaps not worded particularly well, I think there's a point to what Tim is saying. In many conferences targeted at non-technical people and investors, block-chain is often touted as some sort of magic wand. Financial transactions, record of provenance, and other problems were solved before block chain with centralized databases, and then digital signatures, etc. When these problems come up in a more traditional domain, centralized approach often works just fine and there's no need to make it more complex.

sneak 9y ago
> In many conferences targeted at non-technical people, block-chain is often touted as some sort of magic wand that will solve problems without discussing how. cf. "the web", "ecommerce", "p2p", "social media", et c. it's a tool, and a damn useful one, that enables some things no tools did before. that's it, and that's all of it.
- acdha 9y ago
  All of those had immediate real world uses. What activity which normal people do has seen a blockchain offer significant improvements over previous practice?
  - davidgerard 9y ago
    Buying illegal drugs. That's literally it. I'm writing a book on this. (Nearly finished! Probably!) I have read thousands of pages of the worst PDF whitepapers you can imagine. I have looked all over to see if there's a "there" there. As far as I can tell: 1. The only thing blockchain does in practice that anything else can't is decentralised cryptocurrencies. 2. The only thing decentralised cryptocurrencies do in practice that ActualMoney doesn't is markets for illicit goods and services. note the "in practice" - it's had eight years of "possibilities", by now I think we can look at what it's done. also, 3. the decentralisation isn't permanent - Proof of Work benefits from economies of scale, meaning mining recentralises, and this is exactly what happened from the FPGA era on. The usual business proposition for Blockchain(tm) is supply chain management. Blockchain doesn't solve any of the actual problems (bad data - it turns out that crooks don't put careful documentation of violations into the data, and bribe local inspectors and adjudicators) but does offer a monopoly position to the company defining the blockchain in question.

lifty 9y ago

While I agree that there is a lot of hype at the moment, once the dust settles we will be left with the usescases that stuck. The geany is not going back in the bottle. And some of the projects are run by the most geeky people I have ever seen, people that are knowledgeable in multiple fields like cs, cryptography, math and economics.

SirensOfTitan 9y ago

This article is awful. Why are people upvoting it? I understand scepticism, but this touches on a lot of things and comes across as a rant more than a reasonable discussion. 1. There are not only brilliant people leading these projects (Vitalik on Ethereum in particular), but blockchain is a huge passionate discussion amongst the SWE communities I find myself in. > for example the laughably slow transactions-per-second of most real-world blockchain implementations. 2. Is he/she just talking about Bitcoin? Apparently one means 'most'. There are plenty of plans around scaling in various tech: Raiden for Ethereum is an interesting example for smaller transactions. > I could maybe get past the socio-political issues, the misguided notion that in civilized countries, you can route around the legal system with “smart contracts” > I still don’t think the world needs it. 3. Doesn't go to support their arguments at all. A simple and obvious use case here is: banks dragged down by capital obligations from Dodd-Frank regulation are looking everywhere for cost savings. Blockchain is interesting to everyone because there are fairly easy to get involved in financial instruments associated that have been doing very well lately. With that, there are plenty of nerds investing a lot of time into technologies to make these networks truly useful.

mifeng 9y ago
> Banks dragged down by capital obligations from Dodd-Frank regulation are looking everywhere for cost savings. Name a single bank who is using blockchain in an essential component of their operations (not just a proof of concept). Go on, I'll wait. Sure, blockchain is "interesting" and the people involved are "brilliant" but where is it delivering a 10x improvement over the status quo? Blockchain is a classic example of a solution looking for a problem.
- SirensOfTitan 9y ago
  > Name a single bank who is using blockchain in an essential component of their operations (not just a proof of concept). Go on, I'll wait. What a ridiculous argument. With blockchain really just becoming interesting over the last 2 years, you think banks, many of which use systems 20-30 years old (bonds are still primarily traded over phone) are going to switch over to it immediately. Give me a break. > Sure, blockchain is "interesting" and the people involved are "brilliant" but where is it delivering a 10x improvement over the status quo? International bank transfers can take days, have large transaction fees, and have a non-trivial amount of book keeping error. Whenever those same transactions could take 30 minutes with no human oversight I'd say the speedup is much higher than 10x. With that, it seems like you're more interested in making claims without being properly educated on what you're talking about.

campbelltown 9y ago

This article is lazy. It sounds like the author took a cursory look at the tech and wrote it off. This has no place at the top of hackernews.

20delta 9y ago

I'm always on the lookout for an interesting criticism of blockchain technology, this isn't one of them.

kibwen 9y ago

> (optionally) a Byzantine-generals solution too! What is this referring to? In all of the ways that I've seen the Byzantine generals problem phrased, it's presented as impossible to "solve".

wmf 9y ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1wqj8z/will_someone_explain_how_the_blockchain_solved/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1wqj8z/will_someon...
- kibwen 9y ago
  Ah, thanks, I didn't realize that the Byzantine generals problem wasn't just a synonym for the two generals problem.
honestlyreally 9y ago
Bitcoin solves the Byzantine Generals problem.

jcfrei 9y ago

> And without exception, I observed that they were initially loaded in the back door by geeks, without asking permission, because they got shit done and helped people with their jobs. This is precisely what I see happening with bitcoin. Bitcoin addresses keep popping up more frequently every day (with WannaCrypt being one recent and unfortunate example). Despite the scalability issues and regulatory uncertainty there isn't an easier way to send value around the globe. And this isn't simply because banks face a huge regulatory burden. The settlement systems in place are very complex and archaic and blockchains promise a fresh start for a global settlement layer.

RichardHeart 9y ago

Darknet believes.

anon4this1 9y ago

When I got into bitcoin in 2011, it had a market cap of $20 million, and already had several killer apps: - Making darknet drug markets possible - Allowed permissionless, highly convenient storage of wealth - Allowed large, rapid, low friction money transfers anywhere in the world Now, in 2017, Ethereum has a market cap of 8 billion, yet I can't find a single use case for this technology other than enabling other scammy ponzi-like coin offerings.

B1FF_PSUVM 9y ago
Besides, the right people already have the art market for this role.
honestlyreally 9y ago
Transparent voting mechanisms, prediction markets, p2p betting, gaming micropayments, distributed computing rewards, replacing entire national currencies because of irresponsible governments,etc
- anon4this1 9y ago
  Vague gambling stuff - is this really going to be a 10x improvement over betfair who already offers solid p2p gambling markets with <5% house take? Distributed computing rewards - maybe for a subgroup off applications (eg. illegal stuff eg. piracy), but in general terms a centralised system is easier, cheaper and quicker to develop Replacing national currencies - this is already bitcoin's killer app. Ethereum adds almost no utility to this space.

antonios 9y ago

I love the concept of a decentralized currency. Blockchains, not so much. They are inefficient, unscalable and resource-hungry. But they're the best we've got to get there now. Looking forward to Mimblewimble.

dpc_pw 9y ago

This article is just a spin of "I don't see how music on the computer is easier than in the radio" or "buying a newspaper will always be easier than reading your news on some weird website". Bitcoin and cryptotech are loaded with geeks, just not the same ones as the author associate with. And cryptotech do a lot of stuff way better than existing tech. You have to be totally blind not to see it, IMO. :D It was the same with "noone will need a personal computer" laughed by older-school engineers, or "The Internet is a funny toy with its funny packet switching, but real business-critical communication needs a reliable networking like a connection-based phone system". Cryptotech (not only blockchain-based) is disruptive, groundbreaking and as transformative as personal computers were. But it took like 30 years to get personal computing to the point where it was obvious. And it won't be much faster this time. There will be blockchains, technologies, standards, businesses going up and down, people getting rich and/or broke, with winners shaping a new world.

ajross 9y ago
> But it took like 30 years to get personal computing to the point where it was obvious Gotta quibble with this one. 30 years after the PET shipped we were solidly in the middle of the Web 2.0 revolution. Yes, ideas take time to mature. No, the PC in't a good reference. By 1981 it was clear where we were going.
AstralStorm 9y ago
And yes, internet is still a toy for real time mission critical data despite all the QoS developments that have been happening.

latenightcoding 9y ago

The blockchain hype is amazing and entertaining, I love going to blockchain events where 95% of the speakers have no idea what the hell they are talking about, I love when banks and fortune 500s send their chief innovation officers to blockchain meetups to find out how they can use the blockchain (hint: they don't need it), I love going to hackathons where all the projects are fun and cute but provide no real world value. The coolest thing is that I live in Toronto, Vitalik Buterin is from toronto, I met him for 5 seconds, a lot of my friends have met him, therefore they can call themselves blockchain experts. The thing I love the most is when entrepreneurs with past exits tell me about their "private blockchain" projects which got a verbal endorsement from Vitalik's dad.

anon4this1 9y ago
Also.. Vitalik (and his offsiders) created ethereum when he was like 19. This is impressive, but it also makes you wonder - what real world problems did Vitalik have experience of that he was trying to solve? Zuckerburg was trying to connect groups of friends. Was Vitalik really so driven by the need for unintermediated prediction markets and zero-trust digital contracts as a teenager?
surak 9y ago
Engineers don't like being told by mgmt what to do, that I agree with. To continue generalizing, engineers also hate to re-evaluate the level of their skills when having to learn a new stack.. It took msft 10-15y to get uptake for the .net stack on the back-end side, and the reason they did that was because of infighting in the Java community. Having studied the BC stack, I would say that the biggest obstacle will be to get engineers to dare try something new. To many SW-engineers on the web-side today, don't really have sufficient skills to understand BC-technology. I don't mean to offend, just state what I see. We saw the same thing with p2p-tech before that. Solidity as a programming language is an interesting abstraction and perhaps lowers the barrier somewhat, but it will take many years before the skills available match that for what is required to gain momentum on a broad scale. If you're an engineer and wonder why mgmt keeps bringing it up, its because this will potentially help them build a platform (two-sided) market. If that occurs and you constructed it correctly, your company may well be able to skip on taxes as well, as a side-effect.

DennisP 9y ago

So if his argument is that geeks in the corporate trenches aren't using it to quietly get their jobs done without involving management, I'd say the reason is that if you're just doing internal work, you're better off using a database. Blockchains are useful for reducing the overhead due to lack of trust when you're working with other companies. You can't really make that happen without management on both sides getting involved. There's no way a back office geek working on his own can make complicated auditing and settlement procedures go away, and that's the sort of thing where blockchains help. (And of course not every new technology gets adopted first by corporate geeks; iPhone apps are one example of consumers taking the lead.)

AstralStorm 9y ago
They don't actually help, they take away power and control from the hands of the bank. This makes blockchains in fact completely against the interest of banks. Do you see consumers commonly paying in BTC? Real offline shops accepting it? (Never mind tiny things like Ethereum.)
acdha 9y ago
> Blockchains are useful for reducing the overhead due to lack of trust when you're working with other companies Can you expand on what you're defining this problem as and how Bitcoin reduces costs relative to the traditional approaches with trusted third parties, PKI, etc. I've seen the marketing pitches but they're always conspicuously lacking the kind of specific “we pay X to do Y but could pay Z” pitches which I've seen used to justify bringing new tech inside.
- DennisP 9y ago
  Not so much Bitcoin as smart contract platforms like Ethereum, or various private offshoots. Most of what I know about this comes from watching the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance conference, which had people from JP Morgan, Santander, and several other large corporations. Interbank settlement is one example. Right now it involves auditing process that take days. A blockchain implementation could reduce it to seconds. Insurance and supply chains are a couple other things they mentioned. Pretty much any time you're either doing a lot of mutual auditing, or paying someone a lot to maintain a trusted transactional database for a group of companies, there's an opportunity to reduce costs and/or speed things up with a blockchain. For now, that probably doesn't mean a public blockchain, due to privacy and scalability issues. The companies in the EEA are focusing on private versions for now; if you have a known set of nodes and trust that no more than a third of them will commit fraud, you can get away with much faster consensus mechanisms. At the EEA conference they said if Ethereum succeeds in its scaling and privacy efforts, they hope to move at least some applications to the public chain, but that's a couple years off.

KirinDave 9y ago

What's the Byzantine Generals solution he's talking about? I thought most BC implementations can't recover from worst case BG problems? That said, I know a lot of people using the tech and they're making money with it, solving real technical problems. I suspect maybe Bray doesn't know about it because it's easier to assume that it isn't than to verify it so. There are specific industries where block chain limitations don't matter, and its guarantees do.

AstralStorm 9y ago
Apparently those "real technical problems" have already been solved in another way that is commonly implemented or are unimportant.
- KirinDave 9y ago
  I mean, a great example is medical records. I know because the concept if using hash blocks for history predates Bitcoin. Personally I think both the hype and the anti-hype exist because we finally gave this family of data structures a snappy name. Also, I found the BG solution he was referring to and it's rather soft.

_nalply 9y ago

Perhaps because Blockchain is about automating trust. However trust should go deep. Everyone should be able to see how something works and Blockchains are too complicated for most people to understand. These people are forced to trust someone else, some sales guy or the like. Bitcoin is growing because there are enough people on the world who are willing to risk it. They don't trust Bitcoin, they are gambling.

safek 9y ago

I wish people would drop the theatrics when writing these. Here's the same article rewritten without loss of substance: --- I looked into blockchain technologies carefully and I’ve ended up thinking it’s an overpromoted niche sideshow. I’ve seen wave after wave of landscape-shifting technology sweep through the IT space: Personal computers, Unix, C, the Internet and Web, Java, REST, mobile, public cloud. And without exception, I observed that they were initially loaded in the back door by geeks, without asking permission, because they got shit done and helped people with their jobs. That’s not happening with blockchain. Not in the slightest. Which is why I don’t believe in it.