12 ms·

Do you need a blockchain?

195 points by kkleindev 9y ago

tlrobinson 9y ago
A less condescending version of this that actually explained why you do or don't need a blockchain would be nice.
- howToLearnSpark 9y ago
  just scroll to the bottom of the page then https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/375.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/375.pdf
- iamben 9y ago
  I think the point of this is to be a little condescending? If it was a verbose definition of 'why' it would be 'yet-another-blockchain-article' no one would read.
emirozer 9y ago
Sorry but this is a bit dumb. If you say YES to this question: "Can you use an always online trusted third party?" Regardless of your other answers, it always says NO as a result. Can someone give me an example of an always online trusted third party, and also let me know that how can you see into the future so that this third party keeps its guarantees throughout life? Edit: flagging this post as it seems like a troll attempt to me
- elmar 9y ago
  >"Can you use an always online trusted third party?" Real life example at the moment IOTA is working like that, there is one coordinator that works as trusted party (in my honest opinion they will never be able to shut it, but let's wait and see), another example is byteballs another DAG implementation works with 12 witnesses (at the moment controlled by a single physical entity, but in the future can be distributed)
- _wmd 9y ago
  It's little surprise to find someone billing themselves as a 'distributed systems engineer' disliking a tool that helps regular people choose simple designs where appropriate. From the perspective of a regular user, many "always only trusted third parties" exist - in the western world, for all intents and purposes, they include their utility suppliers, banks, telephone companies, email providers, and chat services. This site is perfect for someone like my sister who is constantly forwarding blockchain-related junk to me, because her (non technical) job brought her to a few conferences about such things. Yet she doesn't understand the design tradeoffs of such an approach, she only sees the buzz.
- Certhas 9y ago
  Hey, this is relative to your needs obviously. An always online trusted third party could be the arxiv server for papers. Or a consortiuum of industry players that don't trust each other and set up a foundation that runs a central database. Or a central bank. Really depends on the problem domain. And yes, I have talked to people who have proposed to use block chain for storing papers. So while it might be obvious to you that blockchain is not a solution for that, it's still a good paper that lays out in detail what a blackchain does and doesn't do. https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/375.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/375.pdf
- dsacco 9y ago
  >Can someone give me an example of an always online trusted third party, and also let me know that how can you see into the future so that this third party keeps its guarantees throughout life? This question reduces to, “Can someone give me an example of a third party I’ll trust?” In general, it is correct to say that if you can trust a third party, you do not need a blockchain. “Always online” can refer to a variey of tiers of certainty. For example, it can mean infrastructure built on AWS or GCP, which is probably safe for the foreseeable future, excepting societal collapse or financial catastrophe. On the other hand, it sounds like you’re interpreting this literally (or at least, far more strongly), such that you require near epistemological certainty that a third party is both trusted and always available (more simply, will never be Byzantine). The authors are not wrong to discourage use of a blockchain if you can trust a third party, because trusting a third party is simply easier. In the abstract, trusted third parties alleviate the requirement for decentralization and permissionlessness, but different parties have different (and nuanced) risk and trust models. Whether or not you should trust a third party is a function of the value of your data and the perceived resources and incentives of the vendor. Circling back to your comment - your question is ill-posed, because your implicit requirements for a trust guarantee are likely to be significantly higher than others. For example, I backup my data to Backblaze B2 and Google GCP. Neither of them are “always online” in the literal sense, nor decentralized, so I’m trusting them in particular. Theoretically, backing up my data to a blockchain would be better for thermodynamic trust guarantees based on a distributed, mathematically hard, economically incentivized proof of work. But I don’t need that. Trust and availability are not binary concepts. Furthermore, you should assess a third party’s trustworthiness and availability based on the value of your own data, not just their capabilities and resources.
rodolphoarruda 9y ago
Any justification or argumentation below the "NO" would be very welcome. I did download the article though, if that was the takeaway behind the website idea.
- wmccullough 9y ago
  I'll give one. It comes with the disclaimer that every time I've brought this up, I've been told I don't "get" blockchain. I want a national voting system with distributed ledgers in every state, and to add to that, every state has a copy of every other states voting records by virtue of having to validate the transactions. There's obviously lots of particulars around this, such as what to do with absentee ballots that are mailed in. This is a hypothetical use, at least in my mind. Another one, more for the finance industry. A few years back, I paid my rent with a moneygram. A few weeks later, I got a phone call from the rental office telling me that moneygram rejected the payment and that I needed to call moneygram. Upon calling them, they said that they had record of me buying the moneygram (or whatever the hell it actually is), but that their system didn't have a record and there wasn't much they could do beyond give me a refund. How in the actual hell does a payments company have a problem like that? As a developer, I'm left to wonder if this was caused by some errant production release that wiped records, or a developer who ran a script from a well-known runbook that wiped out critical data (read: Amazon S3), or maybe even fraud somewhere in the pipeline. Why don't they have this data distributed and backed up in offline systems? If the government is willing to throw the book at financial fraud crimes (Unless you are Jamie Dimon), then there aught to be some kind of mandate that we have a verified ledger of electronic financial activities. The even scarier thing, to me, is that I thought they would have been doing that already... Those are a few potential uses from my perspective.
  - shawabawa3 9y ago
    Voting comes up a lot as a use for blockchain, but I've never been convinced that a regular public database wouldn't be better - generally the government has to be trusted in some way, and gets to say who can and can't vote, so blockchain's main benefits (trustless+permissionless) aren't needed. Payments is definitely something blockchain can do better in some cases
elmar 9y ago
The system you are building needs to be decentralized and censorship-resistant? yes, then you need a blockchain.
- chx 9y ago
  This is bullshit. Plain bullshit. Tor is decentralized and censorship resistant. I am not 100% whether Kademlia networks are censorship resistant but I think so.
  - wjh_ 9y ago
    > I am not 100% whether Kademlia networks are censorship resistant but I think so. Seconded. I'm almost certain they are, or at least, they're pretty damn hard to stop.
- IncRnd 9y ago
  There are many decentralized and censorship-resistant protocols. Those qualities do not require a blockchain...
  - mantas 9y ago
    And blockchain can be quasi-centralized as well as get censored by those who pool majority of resources.
    - IncRnd 9y ago
      Excellent points. Thank you! Yes, a blockchain is just a graph data structure. centralization and censorship resistance are only due to how the data structure is used not to there being a data structure. It's actually pretty similar to saying - Need to drink milk? Use a splay tree.
- chris1988 9y ago
  "Do you need a decentralized and censorship-resistent database?"
- 9y ago
philfrasty 9y ago
I get the joke „do you really need a blockchain?“ and sure there is a lot of „AirBnB on a Blockchain“ types out there that do not offer a real advantage over a centralized solution. But why not embrace all the money (and talent) flowing into this space through the hype and let natural selection run its course to leave us with some great tech that really leverages blockchain technology?
- acdha 9y ago
  Great technology solves the right problem. Throwing resources at something usually results in improvements but it still doesn’t mean that it’s solving a problem many people have or that it’s competitive with alternatives which are inherently easier. eInk might be a good example: despite a lot of interest and investment, it’s still a niche product despite having made big advances from where it was in the 90s because competing technologies had fewer hard challenges.
aiCeivi9 9y ago
Lack one question: "Is your software/infrastructure in dire need of refactoring/upgrade but management isn't willing to pay for it"
- js8 9y ago
  "Is your software/infrastructure in dire need" If you need to convince management to pay for it, then it's not yours.
Fletch137 9y ago
I might be a bit grumpy, but I'm getting really sick of these type of pages. There's no information, just a smart-arse "NO". It doesn't help anyone and it's so overdone I don't think it's funny anymore.
- smcl 9y ago
  It's not just a static bit of text, theres a decision tree you can traverse by answering some questions. They don't all lead to "NO" - my second attempt at random clicking took me to an answer like "probably"
  - Fletch137 9y ago
    I'll be honest, as I saw the big "NO", I thought "not another one of these" and closed the tab. Perhaps seemingly showing a result before I've answered questions is an anti-pattern.
- ThePadawan 9y ago
  Note for future comment readers as confused as me: The post now points to the PDF of a 7-page paper which goes into some detail. Apparently, the original link led to a snarky "No", which isn't at all as flippant as what the paper states.
  - Udik 9y ago
    Can somebody post the original link in a comment?
    - esnard 9y ago
      The link was http://doyouneedablockchain.com/ http://doyouneedablockchain.com/ The PDF is linked in the footer.
  - jaclaz 9y ago
    >The post now points to the PDF of a 7-page paper which goes into some detail. Thank you for the note, I missed the "original" link. Surely the "No" is more than a bit snarky, but it is not like the paper in itself contain that much of meaningful "news" or "ground-breaking" considerations, the conclusion (like it seems to me is happening very often on similar papers, i.e. a not-conclusion) is: "We conclude that depending on the application scenario, there are indeed valid use cases for each, permissionless and permissioned blockchains, and centralized databases that need to be determined carefully." It is not a "No", but it is a "it depends" that is not providing much more than the "No".
seanalltogether 9y ago
Do you need cryptographically signed, P2P distributed SQL statements that define order by referencing a hash of the previous statement block.
- rocqua 9y ago
  *And distributed consensus algorithm resistant to sybil attacks. That is presuming a blockchain needs something like proof of work to enforce them being append-only. One might argue semantics and claim that a blockchain only needs to be a 'chain of blocks' but I think most people expect some form of distributed consensus when something is called a 'blockchain'.
  - vertex-four 9y ago
    Unfortunately, a pile of tech companies decided to start selling "blockchain" to banks which doesn't contain any distributed consensus system at all, never mind a Sybil-resistant one. As a result, people in the finance world and people surrounding that particular subset of the tech industry have a very warped idea of what a blockchain is. Under the definition often used in finance, all modern Linux machines are powered by blockchain, because journald uses hash-linked entries to provide evidence when log entries are manipulated.
    - simias 9y ago
      To be fair the term "blockchain" is too broad and generic to give it a very specific definition. I think that's a big reason for the hype, like "cloud computing". It's so vague that nobody really knows what it's about, if you actually decide to get technical you lose 95% of the audience as soon as you utter the words "cryptographic hash" or "public key cryptography". So you can just make any bold claims without going into details and still be sort of right. I can say something like "blockchain technology is going to be big for avocado cultivators to be able to audit production year after year". Does it make any sense? Who knows. But it keeps people going. And it's probably true too. Blockchain technology is here to stay. Cryptographic hashes, public key cryptography, merkle trees, hashcash, peer-to-peer networks, all that is here to stay. Of course, all that existed before the Blockchain, in the same way that servers existed before the "Cloud" but it doesn't matter, it's all about that sweet branding.
_wmd 9y ago
mods: I think it is a deeply embarrassing indicator of the state of our industry that a balanced, well-referenced, academically framed discussion of the tradeoffs of a buzz-laden technology should be allowed to be flagged like this. At the least, replace the site with a link to the PDF. It seems the average user here is incapable of reading as far as the second link on the page. > The choice between a permissionless, permissioned or centralized database is not trivial. While this question has been discussed before [15], to the best of our knowledge, we provide in this article the first structured methodology to decide which technological solution is the most appropriate depending on which application scenario
mjfl 9y ago
do you need online payments? Blockchain is nice.
nukeop 9y ago
In other words: do you want to see your stock triple in a week?
onion-soup 9y ago
Do you need an internet? Ok, let's have a look at this diagram: Do you want to have social life? ---- Yes: you don't need internet ---- No: you need permissionless internet Clearly, you don't need an internet. It lacks coherence and autonomous smart contract decentralization cloud computing chainblocks. Case closed.
tanilama 9y ago
True
endorphone 9y ago
The definition of "trusted" is the foundation of the conclusions of this article (and of the snarky "no" pages that are so popular), and it really deserves a long and detailed exposition of its own. You may trust those third parties, but as always you also want the facility to easily verify (because your trust can be undermined by a single employee, a single malfunction, a single hack, and so on). When you add the notion of verification the whole evaluation flips.
rb808 9y ago
I prefer this one. How to decide if blockchain is right for your project? https://twitter.com/MalwareTechBlog/status/932649133256597505 https://twitter.com/MalwareTechBlog/status/93264913325659750...
chvid 9y ago
This is a reasonable paper discussing an obivous question given just how much hype is surrounding this technology. To me "true blockchain technology" in the bitcoin sense of the design is open, permission-less and only has a few real applications. The others: Private, permissioned are really just variations of a central database which is replicated multiple places.
- viach 9y ago
  How is this permission-less if in order to participate in mining you need to spend thousands of dollars nowadays?
  - shawabawa3 9y ago
    > in order to participate in mining you need to spend thousands of dollars nowadays? Because that has nothing to do with being permissionless?
    - viach 9y ago
      It depends on how do you define "permission". "Of course, you can join our club, it's free to join for everyone. Oh, small detail, the entry ticket is 100K$"
      - shawabawa3 9y ago
        A few problems with that analogy: 1) Mining isn't required to use the network 2) You don't have to pay any specific "club" to start mining. You need to be able to generate hashes efficiently, how you do that is up to you 3) It's still unrelated to what "permissionless" means in this case "Permissionless Blockchains allow anyone to participate. The transactions are validated and processed by votes / consensus. A vote does not depend on having a prior identity of any kind within the ledger and no pre-existing trust is assumed between participating nodes."
        viach 9y ago
NoGravitas 9y ago
Obviously, Betteridge's law of headlines applies here.
- wjh_ 9y ago
  I was about to comment exactly that.
xHopen 9y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RN8bnNe-Is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RN8bnNe-Is
philipodonnell 9y ago
One question I would like to see discussion on is about the process of capturing value by the builder of a blockchain. Web 1.0 was about selling stuff. Web 2.0 was about hoarding data and using it to sell stuff. If blockchains are Web 3.0, what's the model? Bitcoin was released free and the designer got nothing beyond the initial stake, which only works for coins. Ethereum is run by a foundation. Say I want to launch a blockchain startup and really hit the sweet spot according to this paper, how do I build a business on it?
- itamarst 9y ago
  1. ICO. 2. Run away. 3. PROFIT.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- kerkeslager 9y ago
  The original idea of blockchain was at least partially to prevent a central entity from centralizing the value of bitcoin and capturing its value. What you're describing is the antithesis of what Satoshi intended. Now, I'm well aware that technology isn't inherently ideological. So you could hypothetically come up with a way to hack it to make it do what you want to do. And a lot of people are trying to do this, i.e. the SegWit folks, but the way they're doing this is by breaking the fundamental decentralization of blockchain to make it more federated/centralized. It's a perversion of Satoshi's vision, but it's not unethical or technically invalid. But the question I have is, why? A business is inherently about taking money from disparate sources and putting it in a central location: your business' bank account. You might be able to do this with blockchain, but it's working against the decentralized, untrusted model, not with it. A datomic-style log handles the ledger aspects of blockchain with a fraction of the technical complexity, and you don't need the untrusted aspects of blockchain if you're running a centralized business (ostensibly, you trust yourself). If you succeed in using blockchain to run a centralized business, it's despite the model, not because of it. There's one exception, which is that the underregulated nature of the current blockchain industries and the hype around blockchain open up some opportunities (i.e. this is why the SegWit folks can make money off this). But that's more about checking the "blockchain" keyword off in your marketing/legal materials than about the actual benefits of the technology (i.e. ICOs--the only benefit blockchain actually gives is that it allows you to skirt financial regulation, which has nothing to do with the technical benefits of the technology). And as regulations are put in place and hype fades, a lot of these opportunities will dry up: most are temporary and the ones that aren't are extremely difficult technically. Blockchain IS a revolution, but it's not a revolution that can be easily coopted by rent-seekers (and make no mistake, that is what you're proposing). The rent-seekers will eventually break it (they always do) but then it will be just another financial instrument, and unless you have an in-depth technical AND social understanding of the technology (like the SegWit folks) you're unlikely to be one of the rent-seekers who benefits from this. There are a lot of lower-hanging fruit out there to build a business on.
tabeth 9y ago
This paper is similar to an idea I'm working on finalizing from a conceptual point of view. I call of "Proof of Help" (as opposed to Work or Stake). To summarize, the idea is that in a market for tutoring, people can tutor each other, however there would be some sort of way to confirm that tutoring actually took place. From there, you may receive help in exchange for the quantity of time you've helped others, represented by the Help that you have accumulated by helping. Unlike Bitcoin, this Help can never be converted for fiat and is only useful for receiving tutoring. Unlike Bitcoin, this wouldn't be decentralized though. It would effectively be a public ledger run by ideally a nonprofit. I think blockchain is a good use for this. Mainly because the quantities of Help should not be able to be manipulated by the centralized authority. Their role here is simply to confirm identities and serve as a sort of access control to the blockchain itself (e.g. They can ban people, but not change how much Help someone has).
- pavel_lishin 9y ago
  How do you prevent people from gaming the system? Alice and Bob vouch that they each tutored each other for a week straight, despite just leaving a Skype connection open facing a blank wall. Now they've got fifty Tutorbucks each, whereas I had to tutor a dozen college freshmen for a month to get the same amount.
  - kipchak 9y ago
    Maybe something like a bitcoin faucet, with people getting say 1 "help" a day might work.
    - pavel_lishin 9y ago
      Isn't that still gameable? It just means that those unfairly abusing the system are rewarded as much as the people providing the most help.
      - kipchak 9y ago
        Reading my comment again I explained rather poorly. I was thinking each user would have an income of 1 help token a day, which they could then use as a reward to those who help them, and the helper could then use the points they earned as a bounty to encourage others to help them in turn. Maybe something between Yahoo Answers and Steem? Hopefully if the tokens had a somewhat stable value, it would be somewhat difficult to convince people to give you the token versus being able to generate them easily. So say those dozen freshman have 100 tokens saved up, and give you 5 a day for a week of tutoring, you wind up with 420 and can then reward someone later for a somewhat proportional amount of help. But if I just pool my tokens together with someone else, we only generate 14 tokens over the week.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
ForHackernews 9y ago
Shorter: http://doyouneedablockchain.com/ http://doyouneedablockchain.com/
- somethingabout 9y ago
  Here is an accessibility one: http://shouldiuseacarousel.com/ http://shouldiuseacarousel.com/
jmull 9y ago
It seems to me the key here is "Can you use an always online trusted third party?" I think generally, a TTP is going to be more efficient than a system without a TTP. "Trust" at its essence is a shortcut. Without it you have to create a general enforcement mechanism which is going to cost something. E.g., the cost of incenting miners. You can slice it difference ways, but in the end you need the distributed network of nodes to exist and the people who control them to be invested in the continued existence and integrity of the system. I say "generally" for a reason, because I think it's certainly possible that there are cases where the cost of the third-party is too high or the third-party may not be reliable enough, etc. But generally, it seems to me that blockchain is an inherently inefficient mechanism. On top of that, the only effective use so far has been to create an investment bubble. Once enough money has been lost on that I think there's a good chance blockchain will get a black eye which will cause people to steer clear even if they may have a use case that's a good fit.
- lostctown 9y ago
  This is all true at the moment. Heavy research is going into making blockchains more scalable and energy efficient within the Ethereum ecosystem. If fruitful, these improvements will address the concern you have about efficiency.
  - CodeCube 9y ago
    I _think_ I'm aware of some of these things you're referring to (raiden network, etc), but I wonder if you could list some of this research ... I'm trying to keep up with the latest developments.
    - dajohnson89 9y ago
      Yeah I'm guessing he's referring to Raiden network, and the planned move to Proof of Stake.
      - skilesare 9y ago
        And scalability, and stateless transactions.
ghosttie 9y ago
Honestly expected a page that just said "No"
- ghosttie 9y ago
  Oh there it is http://doyouneedablockchain.com/ http://doyouneedablockchain.com/
adultSwim 9y ago
No

195 points by kkleindev 9y ago

tlrobinson 9y ago

A less condescending version of this that actually explained why you do or don't need a blockchain would be nice.

howToLearnSpark 9y ago
just scroll to the bottom of the page then https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/375.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/375.pdf
iamben 9y ago
I think the point of this is to be a little condescending? If it was a verbose definition of 'why' it would be 'yet-another-blockchain-article' no one would read.

emirozer 9y ago

Sorry but this is a bit dumb. If you say YES to this question: "Can you use an always online trusted third party?" Regardless of your other answers, it always says NO as a result. Can someone give me an example of an always online trusted third party, and also let me know that how can you see into the future so that this third party keeps its guarantees throughout life? Edit: flagging this post as it seems like a troll attempt to me

elmar 9y ago
>"Can you use an always online trusted third party?" Real life example at the moment IOTA is working like that, there is one coordinator that works as trusted party (in my honest opinion they will never be able to shut it, but let's wait and see), another example is byteballs another DAG implementation works with 12 witnesses (at the moment controlled by a single physical entity, but in the future can be distributed)
_wmd 9y ago
It's little surprise to find someone billing themselves as a 'distributed systems engineer' disliking a tool that helps regular people choose simple designs where appropriate. From the perspective of a regular user, many "always only trusted third parties" exist - in the western world, for all intents and purposes, they include their utility suppliers, banks, telephone companies, email providers, and chat services. This site is perfect for someone like my sister who is constantly forwarding blockchain-related junk to me, because her (non technical) job brought her to a few conferences about such things. Yet she doesn't understand the design tradeoffs of such an approach, she only sees the buzz.
Certhas 9y ago
Hey, this is relative to your needs obviously. An always online trusted third party could be the arxiv server for papers. Or a consortiuum of industry players that don't trust each other and set up a foundation that runs a central database. Or a central bank. Really depends on the problem domain. And yes, I have talked to people who have proposed to use block chain for storing papers. So while it might be obvious to you that blockchain is not a solution for that, it's still a good paper that lays out in detail what a blackchain does and doesn't do. https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/375.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/375.pdf
dsacco 9y ago
>Can someone give me an example of an always online trusted third party, and also let me know that how can you see into the future so that this third party keeps its guarantees throughout life? This question reduces to, “Can someone give me an example of a third party I’ll trust?” In general, it is correct to say that if you can trust a third party, you do not need a blockchain. “Always online” can refer to a variey of tiers of certainty. For example, it can mean infrastructure built on AWS or GCP, which is probably safe for the foreseeable future, excepting societal collapse or financial catastrophe. On the other hand, it sounds like you’re interpreting this literally (or at least, far more strongly), such that you require near epistemological certainty that a third party is both trusted and always available (more simply, will never be Byzantine). The authors are not wrong to discourage use of a blockchain if you can trust a third party, because trusting a third party is simply easier. In the abstract, trusted third parties alleviate the requirement for decentralization and permissionlessness, but different parties have different (and nuanced) risk and trust models. Whether or not you should trust a third party is a function of the value of your data and the perceived resources and incentives of the vendor. Circling back to your comment - your question is ill-posed, because your implicit requirements for a trust guarantee are likely to be significantly higher than others. For example, I backup my data to Backblaze B2 and Google GCP. Neither of them are “always online” in the literal sense, nor decentralized, so I’m trusting them in particular. Theoretically, backing up my data to a blockchain would be better for thermodynamic trust guarantees based on a distributed, mathematically hard, economically incentivized proof of work. But I don’t need that. Trust and availability are not binary concepts. Furthermore, you should assess a third party’s trustworthiness and availability based on the value of your own data, not just their capabilities and resources.

rodolphoarruda 9y ago

Any justification or argumentation below the "NO" would be very welcome. I did download the article though, if that was the takeaway behind the website idea.

wmccullough 9y ago
I'll give one. It comes with the disclaimer that every time I've brought this up, I've been told I don't "get" blockchain. I want a national voting system with distributed ledgers in every state, and to add to that, every state has a copy of every other states voting records by virtue of having to validate the transactions. There's obviously lots of particulars around this, such as what to do with absentee ballots that are mailed in. This is a hypothetical use, at least in my mind. Another one, more for the finance industry. A few years back, I paid my rent with a moneygram. A few weeks later, I got a phone call from the rental office telling me that moneygram rejected the payment and that I needed to call moneygram. Upon calling them, they said that they had record of me buying the moneygram (or whatever the hell it actually is), but that their system didn't have a record and there wasn't much they could do beyond give me a refund. How in the actual hell does a payments company have a problem like that? As a developer, I'm left to wonder if this was caused by some errant production release that wiped records, or a developer who ran a script from a well-known runbook that wiped out critical data (read: Amazon S3), or maybe even fraud somewhere in the pipeline. Why don't they have this data distributed and backed up in offline systems? If the government is willing to throw the book at financial fraud crimes (Unless you are Jamie Dimon), then there aught to be some kind of mandate that we have a verified ledger of electronic financial activities. The even scarier thing, to me, is that I thought they would have been doing that already... Those are a few potential uses from my perspective.
- shawabawa3 9y ago
  Voting comes up a lot as a use for blockchain, but I've never been convinced that a regular public database wouldn't be better - generally the government has to be trusted in some way, and gets to say who can and can't vote, so blockchain's main benefits (trustless+permissionless) aren't needed. Payments is definitely something blockchain can do better in some cases

elmar 9y ago

The system you are building needs to be decentralized and censorship-resistant? yes, then you need a blockchain.

chx 9y ago
This is bullshit. Plain bullshit. Tor is decentralized and censorship resistant. I am not 100% whether Kademlia networks are censorship resistant but I think so.
- wjh_ 9y ago
  > I am not 100% whether Kademlia networks are censorship resistant but I think so. Seconded. I'm almost certain they are, or at least, they're pretty damn hard to stop.
IncRnd 9y ago
There are many decentralized and censorship-resistant protocols. Those qualities do not require a blockchain...
- mantas 9y ago
  And blockchain can be quasi-centralized as well as get censored by those who pool majority of resources.
  - IncRnd 9y ago
    Excellent points. Thank you! Yes, a blockchain is just a graph data structure. centralization and censorship resistance are only due to how the data structure is used not to there being a data structure. It's actually pretty similar to saying - Need to drink milk? Use a splay tree.
chris1988 9y ago
"Do you need a decentralized and censorship-resistent database?"
9y ago

philfrasty 9y ago

I get the joke „do you really need a blockchain?“ and sure there is a lot of „AirBnB on a Blockchain“ types out there that do not offer a real advantage over a centralized solution. But why not embrace all the money (and talent) flowing into this space through the hype and let natural selection run its course to leave us with some great tech that really leverages blockchain technology?

acdha 9y ago
Great technology solves the right problem. Throwing resources at something usually results in improvements but it still doesn’t mean that it’s solving a problem many people have or that it’s competitive with alternatives which are inherently easier. eInk might be a good example: despite a lot of interest and investment, it’s still a niche product despite having made big advances from where it was in the 90s because competing technologies had fewer hard challenges.

aiCeivi9 9y ago

Lack one question: "Is your software/infrastructure in dire need of refactoring/upgrade but management isn't willing to pay for it"

js8 9y ago
"Is your software/infrastructure in dire need" If you need to convince management to pay for it, then it's not yours.

Fletch137 9y ago

I might be a bit grumpy, but I'm getting really sick of these type of pages. There's no information, just a smart-arse "NO". It doesn't help anyone and it's so overdone I don't think it's funny anymore.

smcl 9y ago
It's not just a static bit of text, theres a decision tree you can traverse by answering some questions. They don't all lead to "NO" - my second attempt at random clicking took me to an answer like "probably"
- Fletch137 9y ago
  I'll be honest, as I saw the big "NO", I thought "not another one of these" and closed the tab. Perhaps seemingly showing a result before I've answered questions is an anti-pattern.
ThePadawan 9y ago
Note for future comment readers as confused as me: The post now points to the PDF of a 7-page paper which goes into some detail. Apparently, the original link led to a snarky "No", which isn't at all as flippant as what the paper states.
- Udik 9y ago
  Can somebody post the original link in a comment?
  - esnard 9y ago
    The link was http://doyouneedablockchain.com/ http://doyouneedablockchain.com/ The PDF is linked in the footer.
- jaclaz 9y ago
  >The post now points to the PDF of a 7-page paper which goes into some detail. Thank you for the note, I missed the "original" link. Surely the "No" is more than a bit snarky, but it is not like the paper in itself contain that much of meaningful "news" or "ground-breaking" considerations, the conclusion (like it seems to me is happening very often on similar papers, i.e. a not-conclusion) is: "We conclude that depending on the application scenario, there are indeed valid use cases for each, permissionless and permissioned blockchains, and centralized databases that need to be determined carefully." It is not a "No", but it is a "it depends" that is not providing much more than the "No".

seanalltogether 9y ago

Do you need cryptographically signed, P2P distributed SQL statements that define order by referencing a hash of the previous statement block.

rocqua 9y ago
*And distributed consensus algorithm resistant to sybil attacks. That is presuming a blockchain needs something like proof of work to enforce them being append-only. One might argue semantics and claim that a blockchain only needs to be a 'chain of blocks' but I think most people expect some form of distributed consensus when something is called a 'blockchain'.
- vertex-four 9y ago
  Unfortunately, a pile of tech companies decided to start selling "blockchain" to banks which doesn't contain any distributed consensus system at all, never mind a Sybil-resistant one. As a result, people in the finance world and people surrounding that particular subset of the tech industry have a very warped idea of what a blockchain is. Under the definition often used in finance, all modern Linux machines are powered by blockchain, because journald uses hash-linked entries to provide evidence when log entries are manipulated.
  - simias 9y ago
    To be fair the term "blockchain" is too broad and generic to give it a very specific definition. I think that's a big reason for the hype, like "cloud computing". It's so vague that nobody really knows what it's about, if you actually decide to get technical you lose 95% of the audience as soon as you utter the words "cryptographic hash" or "public key cryptography". So you can just make any bold claims without going into details and still be sort of right. I can say something like "blockchain technology is going to be big for avocado cultivators to be able to audit production year after year". Does it make any sense? Who knows. But it keeps people going. And it's probably true too. Blockchain technology is here to stay. Cryptographic hashes, public key cryptography, merkle trees, hashcash, peer-to-peer networks, all that is here to stay. Of course, all that existed before the Blockchain, in the same way that servers existed before the "Cloud" but it doesn't matter, it's all about that sweet branding.

_wmd 9y ago

mods: I think it is a deeply embarrassing indicator of the state of our industry that a balanced, well-referenced, academically framed discussion of the tradeoffs of a buzz-laden technology should be allowed to be flagged like this. At the least, replace the site with a link to the PDF. It seems the average user here is incapable of reading as far as the second link on the page. > The choice between a permissionless, permissioned or centralized database is not trivial. While this question has been discussed before [15], to the best of our knowledge, we provide in this article the first structured methodology to decide which technological solution is the most appropriate depending on which application scenario

mjfl 9y ago

do you need online payments? Blockchain is nice.

nukeop 9y ago

In other words: do you want to see your stock triple in a week?

onion-soup 9y ago

Do you need an internet? Ok, let's have a look at this diagram: Do you want to have social life? ---- Yes: you don't need internet ---- No: you need permissionless internet Clearly, you don't need an internet. It lacks coherence and autonomous smart contract decentralization cloud computing chainblocks. Case closed.

tanilama 9y ago

True

endorphone 9y ago

The definition of "trusted" is the foundation of the conclusions of this article (and of the snarky "no" pages that are so popular), and it really deserves a long and detailed exposition of its own. You may trust those third parties, but as always you also want the facility to easily verify (because your trust can be undermined by a single employee, a single malfunction, a single hack, and so on). When you add the notion of verification the whole evaluation flips.

rb808 9y ago

I prefer this one. How to decide if blockchain is right for your project? https://twitter.com/MalwareTechBlog/status/932649133256597505 https://twitter.com/MalwareTechBlog/status/93264913325659750...

chvid 9y ago

This is a reasonable paper discussing an obivous question given just how much hype is surrounding this technology. To me "true blockchain technology" in the bitcoin sense of the design is open, permission-less and only has a few real applications. The others: Private, permissioned are really just variations of a central database which is replicated multiple places.

viach 9y ago
How is this permission-less if in order to participate in mining you need to spend thousands of dollars nowadays?
- shawabawa3 9y ago
  > in order to participate in mining you need to spend thousands of dollars nowadays? Because that has nothing to do with being permissionless?
  - viach 9y ago
    It depends on how do you define "permission". "Of course, you can join our club, it's free to join for everyone. Oh, small detail, the entry ticket is 100K$"
    - shawabawa3 9y ago
      A few problems with that analogy: 1) Mining isn't required to use the network 2) You don't have to pay any specific "club" to start mining. You need to be able to generate hashes efficiently, how you do that is up to you 3) It's still unrelated to what "permissionless" means in this case "Permissionless Blockchains allow anyone to participate. The transactions are validated and processed by votes / consensus. A vote does not depend on having a prior identity of any kind within the ledger and no pre-existing trust is assumed between participating nodes."
      - viach 9y ago

NoGravitas 9y ago

Obviously, Betteridge's law of headlines applies here.

wjh_ 9y ago
I was about to comment exactly that.

xHopen 9y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RN8bnNe-Is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RN8bnNe-Is

philipodonnell 9y ago

One question I would like to see discussion on is about the process of capturing value by the builder of a blockchain. Web 1.0 was about selling stuff. Web 2.0 was about hoarding data and using it to sell stuff. If blockchains are Web 3.0, what's the model? Bitcoin was released free and the designer got nothing beyond the initial stake, which only works for coins. Ethereum is run by a foundation. Say I want to launch a blockchain startup and really hit the sweet spot according to this paper, how do I build a business on it?

itamarst 9y ago
1. ICO. 2. Run away. 3. PROFIT.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
kerkeslager 9y ago
The original idea of blockchain was at least partially to prevent a central entity from centralizing the value of bitcoin and capturing its value. What you're describing is the antithesis of what Satoshi intended. Now, I'm well aware that technology isn't inherently ideological. So you could hypothetically come up with a way to hack it to make it do what you want to do. And a lot of people are trying to do this, i.e. the SegWit folks, but the way they're doing this is by breaking the fundamental decentralization of blockchain to make it more federated/centralized. It's a perversion of Satoshi's vision, but it's not unethical or technically invalid. But the question I have is, why? A business is inherently about taking money from disparate sources and putting it in a central location: your business' bank account. You might be able to do this with blockchain, but it's working against the decentralized, untrusted model, not with it. A datomic-style log handles the ledger aspects of blockchain with a fraction of the technical complexity, and you don't need the untrusted aspects of blockchain if you're running a centralized business (ostensibly, you trust yourself). If you succeed in using blockchain to run a centralized business, it's despite the model, not because of it. There's one exception, which is that the underregulated nature of the current blockchain industries and the hype around blockchain open up some opportunities (i.e. this is why the SegWit folks can make money off this). But that's more about checking the "blockchain" keyword off in your marketing/legal materials than about the actual benefits of the technology (i.e. ICOs--the only benefit blockchain actually gives is that it allows you to skirt financial regulation, which has nothing to do with the technical benefits of the technology). And as regulations are put in place and hype fades, a lot of these opportunities will dry up: most are temporary and the ones that aren't are extremely difficult technically. Blockchain IS a revolution, but it's not a revolution that can be easily coopted by rent-seekers (and make no mistake, that is what you're proposing). The rent-seekers will eventually break it (they always do) but then it will be just another financial instrument, and unless you have an in-depth technical AND social understanding of the technology (like the SegWit folks) you're unlikely to be one of the rent-seekers who benefits from this. There are a lot of lower-hanging fruit out there to build a business on.

tabeth 9y ago

This paper is similar to an idea I'm working on finalizing from a conceptual point of view. I call of "Proof of Help" (as opposed to Work or Stake). To summarize, the idea is that in a market for tutoring, people can tutor each other, however there would be some sort of way to confirm that tutoring actually took place. From there, you may receive help in exchange for the quantity of time you've helped others, represented by the Help that you have accumulated by helping. Unlike Bitcoin, this Help can never be converted for fiat and is only useful for receiving tutoring. Unlike Bitcoin, this wouldn't be decentralized though. It would effectively be a public ledger run by ideally a nonprofit. I think blockchain is a good use for this. Mainly because the quantities of Help should not be able to be manipulated by the centralized authority. Their role here is simply to confirm identities and serve as a sort of access control to the blockchain itself (e.g. They can ban people, but not change how much Help someone has).

pavel_lishin 9y ago
How do you prevent people from gaming the system? Alice and Bob vouch that they each tutored each other for a week straight, despite just leaving a Skype connection open facing a blank wall. Now they've got fifty Tutorbucks each, whereas I had to tutor a dozen college freshmen for a month to get the same amount.
- kipchak 9y ago
  Maybe something like a bitcoin faucet, with people getting say 1 "help" a day might work.
  - pavel_lishin 9y ago
    Isn't that still gameable? It just means that those unfairly abusing the system are rewarded as much as the people providing the most help.
    - kipchak 9y ago
      Reading my comment again I explained rather poorly. I was thinking each user would have an income of 1 help token a day, which they could then use as a reward to those who help them, and the helper could then use the points they earned as a bounty to encourage others to help them in turn. Maybe something between Yahoo Answers and Steem? Hopefully if the tokens had a somewhat stable value, it would be somewhat difficult to convince people to give you the token versus being able to generate them easily. So say those dozen freshman have 100 tokens saved up, and give you 5 a day for a week of tutoring, you wind up with 420 and can then reward someone later for a somewhat proportional amount of help. But if I just pool my tokens together with someone else, we only generate 14 tokens over the week.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

ForHackernews 9y ago

Shorter: http://doyouneedablockchain.com/ http://doyouneedablockchain.com/

somethingabout 9y ago
Here is an accessibility one: http://shouldiuseacarousel.com/ http://shouldiuseacarousel.com/

jmull 9y ago

It seems to me the key here is "Can you use an always online trusted third party?" I think generally, a TTP is going to be more efficient than a system without a TTP. "Trust" at its essence is a shortcut. Without it you have to create a general enforcement mechanism which is going to cost something. E.g., the cost of incenting miners. You can slice it difference ways, but in the end you need the distributed network of nodes to exist and the people who control them to be invested in the continued existence and integrity of the system. I say "generally" for a reason, because I think it's certainly possible that there are cases where the cost of the third-party is too high or the third-party may not be reliable enough, etc. But generally, it seems to me that blockchain is an inherently inefficient mechanism. On top of that, the only effective use so far has been to create an investment bubble. Once enough money has been lost on that I think there's a good chance blockchain will get a black eye which will cause people to steer clear even if they may have a use case that's a good fit.

lostctown 9y ago
This is all true at the moment. Heavy research is going into making blockchains more scalable and energy efficient within the Ethereum ecosystem. If fruitful, these improvements will address the concern you have about efficiency.
- CodeCube 9y ago
  I _think_ I'm aware of some of these things you're referring to (raiden network, etc), but I wonder if you could list some of this research ... I'm trying to keep up with the latest developments.
  - dajohnson89 9y ago
    Yeah I'm guessing he's referring to Raiden network, and the planned move to Proof of Stake.
    - skilesare 9y ago
      And scalability, and stateless transactions.

ghosttie 9y ago

Honestly expected a page that just said "No"

ghosttie 9y ago
Oh there it is http://doyouneedablockchain.com/ http://doyouneedablockchain.com/

adultSwim 9y ago