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From the article: Can a blockchain find people offering rides, link them up with people who are trying to go somewhere, and give the two parties a transparent

From the article: Can a blockchain find people offering rides, link them up with people who are trying to go somewhere, and give the two parties a transparent platform for payment? Can a blockchain act as a repository and a replay platform for TV shows, movies, and other digital media while keeping track of royalties and paying content creators? Can a blockchain check the status of airline flights and pay travelers a previously agreed upon amount if their planes don’t take off on time? If so, then blockchain technology could get rid of Uber, Netflix, and every flight-insurance provider on the market. Really? All these applications can also be built using 'normal' systems architectures. If you build them on a blockchain, then you also get: - A very low rate of transactions - A very high computational cost to mine new blocks - A very high storage cost for each node - No way to reverse transactions in the case of error or fraud So somehow the benefit of putting these applications on the blockchain has to outweigh these costs. The only benefit I can see is transparency. When you have information that must be publicly available and immune to tampering, then a blockchain could be a nice way to achieve that. But for these examples? I don't see any reason to use Ethereum or a blockchain at all to implement them. Can someone help me out here?

flowctrl 9y ago
- There are newer blockchain dApp platforms that are WAY faster than Ethereum (i.e. EOS, Quantum...) - Proof of Work isn't the only consensus algorithm, there are ones with lower computational costs, such as Proof of Stake - See IPFS, and there are other distributed storage solutions - One can add new ledger entries that refer to previous ones, to correct them Aside from transparency (and note that privacy is also an option on some blockchains), the main benefit is that smart contracts can eliminate the need for 3rd parties, but still provide trustworthy transaction settlements. Third parties such as the Uber organization, or a bank. The tasks they perform can be provided automatically via programmable transaction handling on the blockchain (smart contracts). Another benefit of distributed software is that it is more resilient (in theory - the global architectures are still being developed), no central point of failure or high-value target for attack.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  > Proof of Work isn't the only consensus algorithm, there are ones with lower computational costs, such as Proof of Stake PoS still doesn't exist in the real world, as far as I know. > See IPFS, and there are other distributed storage solutions IPFS has nothing to do with blockchains per se, though for better or worse (IMO for worse), the team working on it is also heavily involved with the cryptocurrency world. You might be thinking of Filecoin, which looks reasonable and had probably the only ICO so far that isn't total bullshit, but while I'm hopeful, we still need to see if and when it actually gets deployed. > the main benefit is that smart contracts can eliminate the need for 3rd parties, but still provide trustworthy transaction settlements Let's not forget about the most important drawback of "trustless" systems - machines know no mercy. You'd better be sure you've covered all potential problems in the present and the future, because if you make a single mistake in the code and lose all your money, there will be - by design - literally no one to help you. (There's this idea of replacing laws with smart contracts that occasionally pops up on the Internet; it's a stupid and dangerous idea precisely because of that.)
  - flowctrl 9y ago
    > PoS still doesn't exist in the real world, as far as I know. * BitShares and Steemit both use it, and I believe the forthcoming EOS network will as well. See https://bitshares.org/technology/delegated-proof-of-stake-consensus/ https://bitshares.org/technology/delegated-proof-of-stake-co... * Ethereum has successfully tested a new hybrid PoW/PoS system and is rolling it out on the main network soon. Links in this article: https://www.coindesk.com/ethereums-big-switch-the-new-roadmap-to-proof-of-stake/ https://www.coindesk.com/ethereums-big-switch-the-new-roadma... * PoS was just an example - there are a range of consensus algorithms that are not proof of work, which was the very first one. Ripple is a "real world" blockchain that does not use proof of work: https://ripple.com/build/xrp-ledger-consensus-process/ https://ripple.com/build/xrp-ledger-consensus-process/ * Here's a few other consensus algorithms: https://www.coindesk.com/short-guide-blockchain-consensus-protocols/ https://www.coindesk.com/short-guide-blockchain-consensus-pr... > because if you make a single mistake in the code and lose all your money, there will be - by design - literally no one to help you. Actually there are, by design, roll-back mechanisms that can be deployed if the majority of the network agrees to carry it out. I believe the current controversy in the Bitcoin network is partially over the removal of such a mechanism. Various other blockchains and blockchain-like networks have correction mechanisms. Also note, its not always about storing money - thats just one use.
Naomarik 9y ago
There is no reason to use blockchain to implement every single piece of software. Blockchain's primary utility is as a cryptocurrency. There's a lot of profit being made off people's ignorance and everyone I see pushing this agenda are people who have no idea how software works and are not qualified to speak on the matter. People have a problem: the software they have is not solving their problems very well. Before it was Oracle, then SAP then more recently IBM Watson and now it's blockchain. A lot of business people don't realize they need to work closely with programmers to achieve their goals. The companies who know this are operating at global scale have nothing to do with blockchain in their architecture. I know very massive entities with huge budgets in my region that are suffering intensely from their lack of a proper software engineering team. They don't even realize it so instead they just hire more manpower to deal with their bad backend systems. Oracle, SAP, and IBM just sell them garbage that solves 30% of their problem while introducing more problems and now they're eyeing blockchain cause they don't know better. Even as a customer I recently had to convert my SIM card from post paid to prepaid with a telecom provider having revenue measuring in the billions. I go there and their system is down. Twice. They tell me this happens several times a week and have no idea when it will come back up. Ten employees that cannot do their job. I managed to catch them when their system was up and it took about an hour convert my SIM, and I had to wait there the entire time. I feel that it's a failure for the people in charge to discern something that is going to solve their issues something that isn't. Most people just either accept the lowest bid RFP from a Banglore team or pay millions just because of the name behind the company. This is a bit of a rant but I'm sick of how crappy everything is and a lot of this is very easy to fix. My credit union's website back in 2007 for a city in California was more useful and easier to use than what I have to deal with now from a bank with a yearly revenue in the hundreds of billions.
- antocv 9y ago
  Everything is shit, due to lack of transparency.
- usrusr 9y ago
  > and now they're eyeing blockchain cause they don't know better. Or because they can't be seen ignoring a hype that too many others believe in. When decisionmaking for a publicly traded company you have to at least pretend to participate in the hype even if the only reason is a sufficiently large fraction of investors thinking that a sufficiently large fraction of their peers are believing in the hype. It's almost like magic.
Iv 9y ago
This is the whole misguided overenthusiasm we have seen with BTC as well. Blockchains do change something fundamental: the ability to provide for the aforementioned services in case: - You want to stay anonymous - You can't trust a third party I would argue that a functional society would not need any blockchain services as it would provide the necessary privacy defenses to do anonymous transactions and the means to enforce trust. In the same fashion, it was argued that BTC would be useless in a correctly functioning banking ecosystem. What these systems offer is not something impossible to do otherwise, it is a lower bound on the services a society can provide (assuming internet and computers). If tomorrow a country has a Zimbabwe moment, people will switch to BTC. If taxis end up being to corrupt, an etherum service can take the relay. A lot of the blockchain enthusiasts are anarchists or libertarians. They assume society is already failing or on the verge of collapse. They often fail to see that not everyone is in that mindset.
- rando444 9y ago
  I don't think blockchains provide any anonymity. You can try to provide as little information as possible about yourself, but there is nothing in the blockchain that facilitates anonymity.
  - pja 9y ago
    Indeed - there’s no anonymity in BitCoin itself as all transactions are trackable. What anonymity there is exist because of external services like mixers/tumblers and the difficulty level of directly tying a given wallet to an individual. Monero goes further and anonymises transactions between wallets.
    - Ar-Curunir 9y ago
      Note that Montero provides a heuristic guarantee of anonymity, not a provable one.
  - wildsatchmo 9y ago
    A blockchain is like a big spreadsheet. It's not going to be anonymous if you start typing identifying information into it, but it certainly gives you the option of being anonymous if you care to do so. In contrast, you cant make a bank transaction without linking your identity. This is what people are talking about when they say blockchains give anonymity.
wildsatchmo 9y ago
Looking at all these pessimistic comments I can't help but wonder if this is what the op eds in the newspaper looked like while the internet was being built. "its too slow, and even with our best compression transferring a movie would take a month. Not gonna happen. Computers are too expensive for most households." etc. If you want to keep middle men in between most things that we could potentially do programmatically, thats cool. I'm on the hype train. - low tx rate? not for long - high computational cost? Security feature. Makes fraud/hacks very expensive. If you think energy conservation is more important, other chains don't have this cost (proof of stake). - high node storage cost? mining fees & block reward more than outweigh this. not everyone needs to run a full node (but anyone can). - no way to reverse transactions? feature. you can always add arbitration / escrow. openbazaar does this very nicely If you go the traditional route, you will always have a company in the middle, taking their cut or selling you out behind the scenes.
- zilian 9y ago
  Thank you for your comment. Looking at all the doubt and hate about blockchain & cryptocurrencies on HN lately, I personally can't help but wonder where have all innovators gone.
  - endymi0n 9y ago
    Confirmation Bias at work. You're invested, so you want it to take off. Yet none of those blockchain enthusiasts could tell me a single USP that blockchains had over storage in a normal database on any concrete use case, with the sole exception of cryptocurrencies. And the reason is simple: all those applications have none of the properties and problems the blockchain solves - which is an elegant niche solution tailor made for mutually mistrusting entities working together on a distributed ledger. That barely exists in real life. Centralized systems are what you want in 99% of cases. They're more reliable, better controlled, have infinitely more throughput and usually, you want to be able to roll back transactions under certain conditions (fraud, mistakes, etc.) Sure, you could store anything in a blockchain. Sure, something yada yada blockchain could "replace Netflix". It's just that apparently nobody can tell me _why_. My only concern right now is that I can't short Blockchain technology because the relation of hype to actual usefulness and potential is so incredibly large that it will drag a big chunk of the tech sector down the drain. In stark contrast to AI which is just as hyped, but isn't just supposed to "change everything" since years - it's actually starting to do so on a spectacular timeline.
lambdadmitry 9y ago
But there is no need for the whole mining thing if the only transparency is needed. - publish all "transactions" (of any nature) - hash (transaction | hash of previous transaction) and sign the hash - publish signed hashes along the transactions - give customers back signed hashes of their transactions This way you have a system with proovable immutability and guaranteed inclusion into the transaction log. If anyone can come up with a signed hash of a transaction not in the log, it means the system isn't trustworthy and should be punished, through legal or market means. By the way, we already have a system like this in place: Certificate Transparency. There is no way one can buy "tokens" in such model though, so there is no incentive to hype it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
AKifer 9y ago
- A very high computational cost to mine new blocks - A very high storage cost for each node Those complains are most of the time coming from free lunch seekers. The network have a value BECAUSE we inject value into it, and that's either direct investment or some energy spent during the mining.
Jasper_ 9y ago
> If so, then blockchain technology could get rid of Uber, Netflix, and every flight-insurance provider on the market. No, it can't. The hard part of Uber isn't the app and the architecture that gets cars to meet together, it's pulling all the shady under-belly moves to avoid taxi regulation or lobby it in your favor, all while being profitable. I've seen quite a few "how I made an Uber clone in a day" posts on here. The tech is boring and simple, the business model and empire is what's important. Similarly, there were dozens of streaming sites before Netflix and Spotify, but they never took off. Talking with media companies, getting licenses, negotiating royalties, hell, even funding your own productions to attract talent, that's the hard part. Blockchain tech doesn't solve this, it just replaces the MySQL in their complex tech stack. Sure, these companies can replace their database with blockchain, but that won't stop "middle men" like Netflix from existing, it just... changes their tech stack.
- CryptoPunk 9y ago
  >No, it can't. The hard part of Uber isn't the app and the architecture that gets cars to meet together, it's pulling all the shady under-belly moves to avoid taxi regulation or lobby it in your favor, all while being profitable. This is where the blockchain shines. You're not going to be able to sue a Dapp, or order it to be taken down. The only enforcement mechanism becomes going after end-users, which is much more difficult than going after the trusted third party running the service. I think increasing the cost of enforcing restrictions on trade is great from a societal perspective, given using the political system to restrict trade is highly profitable and thus overly done, but whether it's good or bad is beside the point that this is something that the blockchain architecture can do that the centralized server architecture can't.
  - acdha 9y ago
    > This is where the blockchain shines. You're not going to be able to sue a Dapp, or order it to be taken down Why not? If someone makes an app, which has to happen for a service to get users, that’s an endpoint which can be sued. The point where actual money is converted is similarly exposed, and attempts at obfuscation run into existing money laundering laws. Finally, a blockchain protocol which cannot comply with legal requirements can be banned entirely — and since they require public access, non-trivial data volumes, and regular updates blockchains are less resistant to filtering attempts.
just_one_time_ 9y ago
ahh, the anti-bitcoin sentiment is alive and well here still
stuaxo 9y ago
Just the storage requirements for these Vs a sane architecture would be insane.
sangfroid 9y ago
Hi. I'm the author of the article. Thanks for your interest. I'm glad the piece is sparking a deeper discussion of the technical trade offs of the technology. I just want to clarify that this article is one of many included in a full Spectrum issue dedicated to blockchain technology, which I had a hand in organizing. From the outset I was adamant that we acknowledge the costs and limitations of blockchains. Part of that treatment can be found in the last half of the overview. But we also try to hit those notes in a separate piece, which you can find here. https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/do-you-need-a-blockchain https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/do-you-need-a-b...
ace_of_spades 9y ago
With blockchains or distributed ledger technology in general you can replace an organization of people with code and logic. You need not dependent on people/organizations doing the right thing anymore. If you look at equifax or uber (e.g., god mode stalking) that can be a huge plus. The biggest problem I see is that developers might want to seek rents from their contracts as organizations do from their activities. That would perpetuate the problems of inequity and simply update the technology underlying our society. If contracts were all free public goods on the other hand, things could change dramatically. There would be other problems to be solved (e.g., distribution of crypto currencies, move away from centralized mining to better alternatives, etc.) but there would be hope!
- viraptor 9y ago
  > With blockchains or distributed ledger technology in general you can replace an organization of people with code and logic. I call BS on this. What application can replace people with logic attached to blockchain that also can't do the same with a simple database and code? (And I mean people doing useful work, not bureaucracy which hasn't been automated with macros yet) Blockchain is just a very slow database with distributed consensus. Apart from pure value transfer, what's the use case here where it's actually necessary?
  - ace_of_spades 9y ago
    Of course you can always use traditional databases and code to implement the functionality but then you need someone who runs the code! Even if all code is open source you need a way to verify that the code is actually running, which generally translates into trusting a third party – the company in question (e.g., uber). The third party can be completely removed with DLT — that‘s the unique feature. You don’t need companies anymore but can have direct interactions between users facilitated by a smart contract.

flowctrl 9y ago

- There are newer blockchain dApp platforms that are WAY faster than Ethereum (i.e. EOS, Quantum...) - Proof of Work isn't the only consensus algorithm, there are ones with lower computational costs, such as Proof of Stake - See IPFS, and there are other distributed storage solutions - One can add new ledger entries that refer to previous ones, to correct them Aside from transparency (and note that privacy is also an option on some blockchains), the main benefit is that smart contracts can eliminate the need for 3rd parties, but still provide trustworthy transaction settlements. Third parties such as the Uber organization, or a bank. The tasks they perform can be provided automatically via programmable transaction handling on the blockchain (smart contracts). Another benefit of distributed software is that it is more resilient (in theory - the global architectures are still being developed), no central point of failure or high-value target for attack.

TeMPOraL 9y ago
> Proof of Work isn't the only consensus algorithm, there are ones with lower computational costs, such as Proof of Stake PoS still doesn't exist in the real world, as far as I know. > See IPFS, and there are other distributed storage solutions IPFS has nothing to do with blockchains per se, though for better or worse (IMO for worse), the team working on it is also heavily involved with the cryptocurrency world. You might be thinking of Filecoin, which looks reasonable and had probably the only ICO so far that isn't total bullshit, but while I'm hopeful, we still need to see if and when it actually gets deployed. > the main benefit is that smart contracts can eliminate the need for 3rd parties, but still provide trustworthy transaction settlements Let's not forget about the most important drawback of "trustless" systems - machines know no mercy. You'd better be sure you've covered all potential problems in the present and the future, because if you make a single mistake in the code and lose all your money, there will be - by design - literally no one to help you. (There's this idea of replacing laws with smart contracts that occasionally pops up on the Internet; it's a stupid and dangerous idea precisely because of that.)
- flowctrl 9y ago
  > PoS still doesn't exist in the real world, as far as I know. * BitShares and Steemit both use it, and I believe the forthcoming EOS network will as well. See https://bitshares.org/technology/delegated-proof-of-stake-consensus/ https://bitshares.org/technology/delegated-proof-of-stake-co... * Ethereum has successfully tested a new hybrid PoW/PoS system and is rolling it out on the main network soon. Links in this article: https://www.coindesk.com/ethereums-big-switch-the-new-roadmap-to-proof-of-stake/ https://www.coindesk.com/ethereums-big-switch-the-new-roadma... * PoS was just an example - there are a range of consensus algorithms that are not proof of work, which was the very first one. Ripple is a "real world" blockchain that does not use proof of work: https://ripple.com/build/xrp-ledger-consensus-process/ https://ripple.com/build/xrp-ledger-consensus-process/ * Here's a few other consensus algorithms: https://www.coindesk.com/short-guide-blockchain-consensus-protocols/ https://www.coindesk.com/short-guide-blockchain-consensus-pr... > because if you make a single mistake in the code and lose all your money, there will be - by design - literally no one to help you. Actually there are, by design, roll-back mechanisms that can be deployed if the majority of the network agrees to carry it out. I believe the current controversy in the Bitcoin network is partially over the removal of such a mechanism. Various other blockchains and blockchain-like networks have correction mechanisms. Also note, its not always about storing money - thats just one use.

Naomarik 9y ago

There is no reason to use blockchain to implement every single piece of software. Blockchain's primary utility is as a cryptocurrency. There's a lot of profit being made off people's ignorance and everyone I see pushing this agenda are people who have no idea how software works and are not qualified to speak on the matter. People have a problem: the software they have is not solving their problems very well. Before it was Oracle, then SAP then more recently IBM Watson and now it's blockchain. A lot of business people don't realize they need to work closely with programmers to achieve their goals. The companies who know this are operating at global scale have nothing to do with blockchain in their architecture. I know very massive entities with huge budgets in my region that are suffering intensely from their lack of a proper software engineering team. They don't even realize it so instead they just hire more manpower to deal with their bad backend systems. Oracle, SAP, and IBM just sell them garbage that solves 30% of their problem while introducing more problems and now they're eyeing blockchain cause they don't know better. Even as a customer I recently had to convert my SIM card from post paid to prepaid with a telecom provider having revenue measuring in the billions. I go there and their system is down. Twice. They tell me this happens several times a week and have no idea when it will come back up. Ten employees that cannot do their job. I managed to catch them when their system was up and it took about an hour convert my SIM, and I had to wait there the entire time. I feel that it's a failure for the people in charge to discern something that is going to solve their issues something that isn't. Most people just either accept the lowest bid RFP from a Banglore team or pay millions just because of the name behind the company. This is a bit of a rant but I'm sick of how crappy everything is and a lot of this is very easy to fix. My credit union's website back in 2007 for a city in California was more useful and easier to use than what I have to deal with now from a bank with a yearly revenue in the hundreds of billions.

antocv 9y ago
Everything is shit, due to lack of transparency.
usrusr 9y ago
> and now they're eyeing blockchain cause they don't know better. Or because they can't be seen ignoring a hype that too many others believe in. When decisionmaking for a publicly traded company you have to at least pretend to participate in the hype even if the only reason is a sufficiently large fraction of investors thinking that a sufficiently large fraction of their peers are believing in the hype. It's almost like magic.

Iv 9y ago

This is the whole misguided overenthusiasm we have seen with BTC as well. Blockchains do change something fundamental: the ability to provide for the aforementioned services in case: - You want to stay anonymous - You can't trust a third party I would argue that a functional society would not need any blockchain services as it would provide the necessary privacy defenses to do anonymous transactions and the means to enforce trust. In the same fashion, it was argued that BTC would be useless in a correctly functioning banking ecosystem. What these systems offer is not something impossible to do otherwise, it is a lower bound on the services a society can provide (assuming internet and computers). If tomorrow a country has a Zimbabwe moment, people will switch to BTC. If taxis end up being to corrupt, an etherum service can take the relay. A lot of the blockchain enthusiasts are anarchists or libertarians. They assume society is already failing or on the verge of collapse. They often fail to see that not everyone is in that mindset.

rando444 9y ago
I don't think blockchains provide any anonymity. You can try to provide as little information as possible about yourself, but there is nothing in the blockchain that facilitates anonymity.
- pja 9y ago
  Indeed - there’s no anonymity in BitCoin itself as all transactions are trackable. What anonymity there is exist because of external services like mixers/tumblers and the difficulty level of directly tying a given wallet to an individual. Monero goes further and anonymises transactions between wallets.
  - Ar-Curunir 9y ago
    Note that Montero provides a heuristic guarantee of anonymity, not a provable one.
- wildsatchmo 9y ago
  A blockchain is like a big spreadsheet. It's not going to be anonymous if you start typing identifying information into it, but it certainly gives you the option of being anonymous if you care to do so. In contrast, you cant make a bank transaction without linking your identity. This is what people are talking about when they say blockchains give anonymity.

wildsatchmo 9y ago

Looking at all these pessimistic comments I can't help but wonder if this is what the op eds in the newspaper looked like while the internet was being built. "its too slow, and even with our best compression transferring a movie would take a month. Not gonna happen. Computers are too expensive for most households." etc. If you want to keep middle men in between most things that we could potentially do programmatically, thats cool. I'm on the hype train. - low tx rate? not for long - high computational cost? Security feature. Makes fraud/hacks very expensive. If you think energy conservation is more important, other chains don't have this cost (proof of stake). - high node storage cost? mining fees & block reward more than outweigh this. not everyone needs to run a full node (but anyone can). - no way to reverse transactions? feature. you can always add arbitration / escrow. openbazaar does this very nicely If you go the traditional route, you will always have a company in the middle, taking their cut or selling you out behind the scenes.

zilian 9y ago
Thank you for your comment. Looking at all the doubt and hate about blockchain & cryptocurrencies on HN lately, I personally can't help but wonder where have all innovators gone.
- endymi0n 9y ago
  Confirmation Bias at work. You're invested, so you want it to take off. Yet none of those blockchain enthusiasts could tell me a single USP that blockchains had over storage in a normal database on any concrete use case, with the sole exception of cryptocurrencies. And the reason is simple: all those applications have none of the properties and problems the blockchain solves - which is an elegant niche solution tailor made for mutually mistrusting entities working together on a distributed ledger. That barely exists in real life. Centralized systems are what you want in 99% of cases. They're more reliable, better controlled, have infinitely more throughput and usually, you want to be able to roll back transactions under certain conditions (fraud, mistakes, etc.) Sure, you could store anything in a blockchain. Sure, something yada yada blockchain could "replace Netflix". It's just that apparently nobody can tell me _why_. My only concern right now is that I can't short Blockchain technology because the relation of hype to actual usefulness and potential is so incredibly large that it will drag a big chunk of the tech sector down the drain. In stark contrast to AI which is just as hyped, but isn't just supposed to "change everything" since years - it's actually starting to do so on a spectacular timeline.

lambdadmitry 9y ago

But there is no need for the whole mining thing if the only transparency is needed. - publish all "transactions" (of any nature) - hash (transaction | hash of previous transaction) and sign the hash - publish signed hashes along the transactions - give customers back signed hashes of their transactions This way you have a system with proovable immutability and guaranteed inclusion into the transaction log. If anyone can come up with a signed hash of a transaction not in the log, it means the system isn't trustworthy and should be punished, through legal or market means. By the way, we already have a system like this in place: Certificate Transparency. There is no way one can buy "tokens" in such model though, so there is no incentive to hype it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

AKifer 9y ago

- A very high computational cost to mine new blocks - A very high storage cost for each node Those complains are most of the time coming from free lunch seekers. The network have a value BECAUSE we inject value into it, and that's either direct investment or some energy spent during the mining.

Jasper_ 9y ago

> If so, then blockchain technology could get rid of Uber, Netflix, and every flight-insurance provider on the market. No, it can't. The hard part of Uber isn't the app and the architecture that gets cars to meet together, it's pulling all the shady under-belly moves to avoid taxi regulation or lobby it in your favor, all while being profitable. I've seen quite a few "how I made an Uber clone in a day" posts on here. The tech is boring and simple, the business model and empire is what's important. Similarly, there were dozens of streaming sites before Netflix and Spotify, but they never took off. Talking with media companies, getting licenses, negotiating royalties, hell, even funding your own productions to attract talent, that's the hard part. Blockchain tech doesn't solve this, it just replaces the MySQL in their complex tech stack. Sure, these companies can replace their database with blockchain, but that won't stop "middle men" like Netflix from existing, it just... changes their tech stack.

CryptoPunk 9y ago
>No, it can't. The hard part of Uber isn't the app and the architecture that gets cars to meet together, it's pulling all the shady under-belly moves to avoid taxi regulation or lobby it in your favor, all while being profitable. This is where the blockchain shines. You're not going to be able to sue a Dapp, or order it to be taken down. The only enforcement mechanism becomes going after end-users, which is much more difficult than going after the trusted third party running the service. I think increasing the cost of enforcing restrictions on trade is great from a societal perspective, given using the political system to restrict trade is highly profitable and thus overly done, but whether it's good or bad is beside the point that this is something that the blockchain architecture can do that the centralized server architecture can't.
- acdha 9y ago
  > This is where the blockchain shines. You're not going to be able to sue a Dapp, or order it to be taken down Why not? If someone makes an app, which has to happen for a service to get users, that’s an endpoint which can be sued. The point where actual money is converted is similarly exposed, and attempts at obfuscation run into existing money laundering laws. Finally, a blockchain protocol which cannot comply with legal requirements can be banned entirely — and since they require public access, non-trivial data volumes, and regular updates blockchains are less resistant to filtering attempts.

just_one_time_ 9y ago

ahh, the anti-bitcoin sentiment is alive and well here still

stuaxo 9y ago

Just the storage requirements for these Vs a sane architecture would be insane.

sangfroid 9y ago

Hi. I'm the author of the article. Thanks for your interest. I'm glad the piece is sparking a deeper discussion of the technical trade offs of the technology. I just want to clarify that this article is one of many included in a full Spectrum issue dedicated to blockchain technology, which I had a hand in organizing. From the outset I was adamant that we acknowledge the costs and limitations of blockchains. Part of that treatment can be found in the last half of the overview. But we also try to hit those notes in a separate piece, which you can find here. https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/do-you-need-a-blockchain https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/do-you-need-a-b...

ace_of_spades 9y ago

With blockchains or distributed ledger technology in general you can replace an organization of people with code and logic. You need not dependent on people/organizations doing the right thing anymore. If you look at equifax or uber (e.g., god mode stalking) that can be a huge plus. The biggest problem I see is that developers might want to seek rents from their contracts as organizations do from their activities. That would perpetuate the problems of inequity and simply update the technology underlying our society. If contracts were all free public goods on the other hand, things could change dramatically. There would be other problems to be solved (e.g., distribution of crypto currencies, move away from centralized mining to better alternatives, etc.) but there would be hope!

viraptor 9y ago
> With blockchains or distributed ledger technology in general you can replace an organization of people with code and logic. I call BS on this. What application can replace people with logic attached to blockchain that also can't do the same with a simple database and code? (And I mean people doing useful work, not bureaucracy which hasn't been automated with macros yet) Blockchain is just a very slow database with distributed consensus. Apart from pure value transfer, what's the use case here where it's actually necessary?
- ace_of_spades 9y ago
  Of course you can always use traditional databases and code to implement the functionality but then you need someone who runs the code! Even if all code is open source you need a way to verify that the code is actually running, which generally translates into trusting a third party – the company in question (e.g., uber). The third party can be completely removed with DLT — that‘s the unique feature. You don’t need companies anymore but can have direct interactions between users facilitated by a smart contract.