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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 reasona

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.
  - tptacek 9y ago
    This is what the supporters of limping technologies always say: "it's only been seriously considered for the last year or two, so it's too early to consider the results". And yet clearly, it has not been just 2 years over which we've considered blockchains. Why are blockchains more credible than all the other failed technologies for which these kinds of arguments are made? Whatever problems you may have with international bank transfers, they work: every business in the world relies on them. For all the supposed benefits of blockchains, no blockchain solution can make that claim, or any claim close to it.
  - kjksf 9y ago
    The slowness and cost of international bank transfers has nothing to do with technology used. We could make a million of such transactions per minute using $1000/month hosted server. We have the technology. The problem is legacy infrastructure and the fact that banks benefit from high fees on international transfers. There is at least one successful business (transferwise) that makes international transfers much cheaper and faster using terribly inefficient work-arounds. If banks were at all motivated to fix the issue, they would, using Java and a database. They don't need blockchain (which, btw, is slower to settle a transaction than updating a record in a database).
  - mifeng 9y ago
    International money transfer is indeed a big problem, and TransferWise has built a billion-dollar company over the past 6 years solving it, just not with blockchain.
    - AstralStorm 9y ago
      Heck, even Paypal is a smaller scale solution to this problem. Not to mention much more broken Western Union transfers. It is not like the problem hasn't been attacked many times from different angles.
  - pron 9y ago
    Are you trying to present blockchain as a technical solution to a legacy software issue? Clearly, there are other, far simpler solutions, and clearly this is not the real motivation behind blockchain. I think Bray's main argument is that the motivation behind blockchain -- decentralized trust -- is something we don't really need. Rather than just state this as an opinion, he points out that even blockchain's supporters haven't been able to demonstrate a need.
- cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
  Maybe the confusion comes from how people are using the term "Blockchain", which actually is technically a term tied to Bitcoin but hijacked by VCs to create hype around it. But I agree with you that "Blockchain is a classic example of a solution looking for a problem" assuming you're talking about the hijacked usage of "blockchain". > 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. I think this is exactly the point. Banks trying to employ their own blockchain is the same as companies trying to employ "Intranet" when the Internet first came out. It won't work.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- tupshin 9y ago
  I don't know of any in active production, but I know of many banks and multiple banking consortiums that are investing lots of IT dollars on near-term blockchain deployments, and potentially at massive scale.
- placeybordeaux 9y ago
  For bitcoin to succeed it doesn't have to be used by banks. Banks already have a system set up that relies on trust and enforcement of contracts. I'd say that bitcoin has already succeeded, just not for the use cases that the author cares about.
  - pron 9y ago
    > I'd say that bitcoin has already succeeded, just not for the use cases that the author cares about. It's not a matter of caring. He points out that whatever uses blockchain has (or hasn't) proven successful for, don't amount to a significant economic (or social) contribution. He's talking about objective quantity, not subjective quality.
tptacek 9y ago
You haven't rebutted his central argument, which is that for all the smart people working on it and all the important supposed political ramifications of the idea, no blockchain of any sort has been scaled to any mainstream consumer financial task. He's not disputing that smart people work on it, or that there aren't variations on Bitcoin, and so pointing those things out doesn't respond to his article. You can disagree with him as you can disagree with anything, but if you want to support the argument that it's "awful", you'll need to do better.
- lunulata 9y ago
  Billions of dollars are moved around in cryptocurrency every day, this article just misses all that apparently. It's not a good article, don't recommend for any smart people it's a waste of time.
  - discodave 9y ago
    Yes, but what impact has blockchain had on the world outside of blockchain?
    - honestlyreally 9y ago
      Id suggest going to Venezuela and looking for yourself.
      - davidgerard 9y ago
        Literally all coverage of Venezuela and bitcoin has come from bitcoin promoters, interesting-sounding claims being reprinted without verification. None of it I've seen traces back to anywhere else. What we actually see: 370 BTC a week on LocalBitcoins, which is negligible in the context of the country. The closest to a verifiable claim: that miners who were stealing electricity were arrested. Of course, stealing the electricity has long been a favoured Bitcoin mining strategy.
        9y ago
Mendenhall 9y ago
I dont understand much of the "hate" that goes on with bitcoin/blockchain in tech circles. I get that people may not like the ideology/uses of some of the people involved but that to me has nothing to do with the tech. I downloaded a wallet and by using twitter I was able to have people send me coin within minutes and never had to identify etc. I know of no other medium that could do that.
pinpeliponni 9y ago
To be honest the banks do not know what to do with blockchains. Their best properties and the banks' needs are not aligned. When you add in stuff the banks need like forcible retraction of transactions, and transaction fees, you have essentially destroyed blockchains. The moment a major bank releases production ready blockchain of their own it will be such that most will not get any real value out of it. What they are doing (not what they are saying) is that they are trying to figure out how to hug the blockchain technology to death.
- notahacker 9y ago
  > What they are doing (not what they are saying) is that they are trying to figure out how to hug the blockchain technology to death. That's probably giving them too much credit for awareness of what they're trying to do. What I suspect they're doing is trying to get a handle on the hype about the glories of immutable, cryptographically secure storage technologies promised by blockchain, having conversations with blockchain startups consisting mostly of mutual misunderstanding and then hiring IBM or Accenture because they say "blockchain" a couple of times at the beginning of their presentation and then spend the rest of their time talking the bank's language and proposing to solve problems they already know banks actually have (not using a blockchain) in ways which don't create bigger theoretical problems. [yeah, the people who definitely are doing the hugging to death are the mainstream IT consultancies that know that "blockchain" is the new "cloud" for sales hype to get people to rebuild a system that was only put in a couple of years ago. But I bet some of their middle management believes they're actually embracing the technology too]
jlg23 9y ago
Where does all the hate come from? S/he never said all implementations are slow, just that most are (which is true if you count all those toy implementations done by hackers who did it just for the learning experience; I alone contributed two). Your "obvious use case" is not obvious to me. Nor are the foundations of your argument, that oversight and regulation drags viable banks down so much they need blockchain support to "save money". As you pointed out later in this thread, they are decades behind anyway. OP's point is that s/he does not see the same traction other (failed) technologies had. I agree. You disagree. So we agree to disagree. But that does make the OP's opinion or your arguments any more/less valid.

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.
- tptacek 9y ago
  This is what the supporters of limping technologies always say: "it's only been seriously considered for the last year or two, so it's too early to consider the results". And yet clearly, it has not been just 2 years over which we've considered blockchains. Why are blockchains more credible than all the other failed technologies for which these kinds of arguments are made? Whatever problems you may have with international bank transfers, they work: every business in the world relies on them. For all the supposed benefits of blockchains, no blockchain solution can make that claim, or any claim close to it.
- kjksf 9y ago
  The slowness and cost of international bank transfers has nothing to do with technology used. We could make a million of such transactions per minute using $1000/month hosted server. We have the technology. The problem is legacy infrastructure and the fact that banks benefit from high fees on international transfers. There is at least one successful business (transferwise) that makes international transfers much cheaper and faster using terribly inefficient work-arounds. If banks were at all motivated to fix the issue, they would, using Java and a database. They don't need blockchain (which, btw, is slower to settle a transaction than updating a record in a database).
- mifeng 9y ago
  International money transfer is indeed a big problem, and TransferWise has built a billion-dollar company over the past 6 years solving it, just not with blockchain.
  - AstralStorm 9y ago
    Heck, even Paypal is a smaller scale solution to this problem. Not to mention much more broken Western Union transfers. It is not like the problem hasn't been attacked many times from different angles.
- pron 9y ago
  Are you trying to present blockchain as a technical solution to a legacy software issue? Clearly, there are other, far simpler solutions, and clearly this is not the real motivation behind blockchain. I think Bray's main argument is that the motivation behind blockchain -- decentralized trust -- is something we don't really need. Rather than just state this as an opinion, he points out that even blockchain's supporters haven't been able to demonstrate a need.
cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
Maybe the confusion comes from how people are using the term "Blockchain", which actually is technically a term tied to Bitcoin but hijacked by VCs to create hype around it. But I agree with you that "Blockchain is a classic example of a solution looking for a problem" assuming you're talking about the hijacked usage of "blockchain". > 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. I think this is exactly the point. Banks trying to employ their own blockchain is the same as companies trying to employ "Intranet" when the Internet first came out. It won't work.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
tupshin 9y ago
I don't know of any in active production, but I know of many banks and multiple banking consortiums that are investing lots of IT dollars on near-term blockchain deployments, and potentially at massive scale.
placeybordeaux 9y ago
For bitcoin to succeed it doesn't have to be used by banks. Banks already have a system set up that relies on trust and enforcement of contracts. I'd say that bitcoin has already succeeded, just not for the use cases that the author cares about.
- pron 9y ago
  > I'd say that bitcoin has already succeeded, just not for the use cases that the author cares about. It's not a matter of caring. He points out that whatever uses blockchain has (or hasn't) proven successful for, don't amount to a significant economic (or social) contribution. He's talking about objective quantity, not subjective quality.

tptacek 9y ago

You haven't rebutted his central argument, which is that for all the smart people working on it and all the important supposed political ramifications of the idea, no blockchain of any sort has been scaled to any mainstream consumer financial task. He's not disputing that smart people work on it, or that there aren't variations on Bitcoin, and so pointing those things out doesn't respond to his article. You can disagree with him as you can disagree with anything, but if you want to support the argument that it's "awful", you'll need to do better.

lunulata 9y ago
Billions of dollars are moved around in cryptocurrency every day, this article just misses all that apparently. It's not a good article, don't recommend for any smart people it's a waste of time.
- discodave 9y ago
  Yes, but what impact has blockchain had on the world outside of blockchain?
  - honestlyreally 9y ago
    Id suggest going to Venezuela and looking for yourself.
    - davidgerard 9y ago
      Literally all coverage of Venezuela and bitcoin has come from bitcoin promoters, interesting-sounding claims being reprinted without verification. None of it I've seen traces back to anywhere else. What we actually see: 370 BTC a week on LocalBitcoins, which is negligible in the context of the country. The closest to a verifiable claim: that miners who were stealing electricity were arrested. Of course, stealing the electricity has long been a favoured Bitcoin mining strategy.
      - 9y ago

Mendenhall 9y ago

I dont understand much of the "hate" that goes on with bitcoin/blockchain in tech circles. I get that people may not like the ideology/uses of some of the people involved but that to me has nothing to do with the tech. I downloaded a wallet and by using twitter I was able to have people send me coin within minutes and never had to identify etc. I know of no other medium that could do that.

pinpeliponni 9y ago

To be honest the banks do not know what to do with blockchains. Their best properties and the banks' needs are not aligned. When you add in stuff the banks need like forcible retraction of transactions, and transaction fees, you have essentially destroyed blockchains. The moment a major bank releases production ready blockchain of their own it will be such that most will not get any real value out of it. What they are doing (not what they are saying) is that they are trying to figure out how to hug the blockchain technology to death.

notahacker 9y ago
> What they are doing (not what they are saying) is that they are trying to figure out how to hug the blockchain technology to death. That's probably giving them too much credit for awareness of what they're trying to do. What I suspect they're doing is trying to get a handle on the hype about the glories of immutable, cryptographically secure storage technologies promised by blockchain, having conversations with blockchain startups consisting mostly of mutual misunderstanding and then hiring IBM or Accenture because they say "blockchain" a couple of times at the beginning of their presentation and then spend the rest of their time talking the bank's language and proposing to solve problems they already know banks actually have (not using a blockchain) in ways which don't create bigger theoretical problems. [yeah, the people who definitely are doing the hugging to death are the mainstream IT consultancies that know that "blockchain" is the new "cloud" for sales hype to get people to rebuild a system that was only put in a couple of years ago. But I bet some of their middle management believes they're actually embracing the technology too]

jlg23 9y ago

Where does all the hate come from? S/he never said all implementations are slow, just that most are (which is true if you count all those toy implementations done by hackers who did it just for the learning experience; I alone contributed two). Your "obvious use case" is not obvious to me. Nor are the foundations of your argument, that oversight and regulation drags viable banks down so much they need blockchain support to "save money". As you pointed out later in this thread, they are decades behind anyway. OP's point is that s/he does not see the same traction other (failed) technologies had. I agree. You disagree. So we agree to disagree. But that does make the OP's opinion or your arguments any more/less valid.