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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 bi

by 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
        > 1) Mining isn't required to use the network I define participate as "be able to mine and use the network". You can't do both for free anymore with Bitcoin. > 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 Sorry, but it sounds like "In order to learn how to fly you just have to flap your hands more efficiently, how you do that is up to you" > 3) It's still unrelated to what "permissionless" means in this case From your definition "Permissionless Blockchains allow anyone to participate". Okay, you can sort of participate in tsunami by jumping in the sea, but do you really do?
        shawabawa3 9y ago
        > You can't do both for free anymore with Bitcoin You never could. Mining has always had a cost and by design the cost increases to match the block rewards I'm bored of this argument. You're arguing against a different definition to me and I'm not sure what your point is - that mining is expensive?
        viach 9y ago
        I'm saying that "permission-less", in my view, should be defined as "an average person can use network and participate in mining", which is not the case with Bitcoin anymore.
        lagadu 9y ago
        The "average person" doesn't have access to a computer or stable internet connectivity, if we're arguing for what the average person should be able to do/access we have a lot more basic problems to discuss before we get to decentralised virtual networks. That aside, technically anyone with a computing device can contribute to most networks.
    - fiatjaf 9y ago
      Compare your example with: "You can't join our club."
      - viach 9y ago
        Realistically, there are no clubs you can't join if have enough money
- chvid 9y ago
  If you start a new blockchain then you probably don't need as hard proof-of-work problems as there is now in bitcoin. One thing that the article is missing to discuss is that for a blockchain to truly work there needs to be a reward system for the nodes to participate in the network (basically to cover the cost of this crazy expensive infrastructure). Ie. a cryptocurrency that can be mined.
  - fiatjaf 9y ago
    This. I always thought that any blockchain could only work if there was a reward system (otherwise you're dealing with trusted parties and thus no blockchain in the strict sense is needed), and thus it never made any sense to me to see people implementing blockchains everywhere. News: "Company X is using blockchains internally." Me: "Does that mean Company X have created a token that can be mined by its own computers, in a crazy internal competition that will waste thousands in energy consumption and hardware?"
    - lagadu 9y ago
      Cryptocurrencies don't necessarily have to be mined. Some newer ones have systems that aren't computationally intensive; they do that by effectively inverting the system of responsibility: they work by saying "if you hold our token, you have a vested interest in the integrity of the chain, therefore we trust you to validate transactions for the network" where "validate" means "vote on whether a transaction is legitimate". It's fairly interesting and still under research but on some smaller cryptocurrencies it seems to be working. Google "proof of stake" for more. edit: for a single organization that might not be very useful, as you already have one big central entity that you trust (the organization itself) but it is potentially an additional layer of security that can be tailored to the organization's needs.
- pjc50 9y ago
  You don't need to mine to make Bitcoin transactions. By "permissionless" people tend to mean that you can send money to and from another user of the system regardless of the legality and without a payment processor to intervene and forbid it.
  - chvid 9y ago
    That is not the meaning here. Here it means that new nodes can join the network without being permissioned by an authority.
- gomox 9y ago
  It's permission-less because you participate as a node in the network without anyone granting you permission to do so. You don't have to spend thousands to be a bitcoin miner. You can use any old computer. Making a profit is a different story. Still, resources can be pooled together to buy a competitive mining rig for a few grand. Even then, a few thousand dollars is realistically not a large entry fee for anything. Wiring your house for Internet access would cost around that much if it wasn't subsidized.
simias 9y ago
>To me "true blockchain technology" in the bitcoin sense of the design is open, permission-less and only has a few real applications. Beyond cryptocurrencies? Go on, I'm all ears. I'm always amazed by how often I hear that claim (on HN and elsewhere) and yet nobody seems in a rush to be specific about it. The only other use case for blockchains I'm aware of that makes sense to me is some sort of IP protection scheme (mentioned in the article too). If you make a discovery you can write down "$me has discovered this and that", hash it and put it into the blockchain. Later you can use it to prove that you actually had that information at that date without needing any trusted peer or institution. But even then it only works if the chain can't be attacked you still need the currency aspect to motivate miners (or shareholders in a PoW scheme) to protect the chain.
- endorphone 9y ago
  As someone in the finance industry, a very beneficial use would be book of records / security holdings, which is currently such a precarious stack of crazy, with a massive barrier to entry. And it is making inroads but slowly given inertia and glacial pace of change (where the industry is most people sharing CSVs). The same thing for property transactions, insurance policies, etc etc etc. "But that's just a write-only distributed database....with a layer of asymmetric cryptography". Yeah... It is aggravating when some in the industry try to champion everything as a silver bullet, but it is just as flawed when many instantly veer to being anti-that thing just because. As an aside, proof-of- schemes are not necessary in many/most alternative blockchain scenarios. The egregious inefficiency of platforms like Bitcoin is not relevant for most other uses.
  - johannes1234321 9y ago
    > As someone in the finance industry, a very beneficial use would be book of records / security holdings, which is > currently such a precarious stack of crazy, with a massive barrier to entry For some that entry barrier might be a feature :-)
  - simias 9y ago
    >"But that's just a write-only distributed database....with a layer of asymmetric cryptography". Yeah... Glad we got that out of the way. >It is aggravating when some in the industry try to champion everything as a silver bullet, but it is just as flawed when many instantly veer to being anti-that thing just because. I disagree, it's not "just because". We're not talking about whether or not Rust or your Javascript framework du jour has a future. We're talking about a highly speculative bubble where people are dumping millions because they believe that the technology has a future. If Rust fails I'll have one more useless programming skill and a few codebases to rewrite. If cryptocurrencies collapse people are going to lose their homes. The whole "blockchain tech is here to stay" argument plays into that. I've heard some close friends use it to justify their investments in cryptocurrencies. Surely if everything is going to run on blockchains 10 years from now then surely at least one of the cryptocurrencies in my portfolio is going to be worth a ton then, right? Maybe let me rephrase my question in an other way: if somebody had asked you 10 years ago to solve the problem you're describing, what would you have replied? "I'm sorry I don't think that technology exists" or "you need some kind of write-only distributed database with a layer of asymmetric cryptography"? So no, it's not just me being a contrarian naysayer, there are real consequences to all this bullshit and pixie dust surrounding cryptocurrencies. I mean look at the replies for this joke tweet somebody linked elsewhere in the thread: https://twitter.com/MalwareTechBlog/status/932649133256597505 https://twitter.com/MalwareTechBlog/status/93264913325659750... Note the number of defensive tweets claiming the author doesn't know what they're talking about and how the blockchain is actually great: >Maybe learn how the technology works before pretending to be a snarky expert. This doesn't make you look smart. >very funny, but blockchain has some interesting use cases that might make some cros domain and cross org stuff better. >No one will need/want Blockchain is today's version of no one will need more than 640k RAM. >Blockchain has applications far beyond just coining it. >That’s a pretty short sighted way of thinking. Block chain based voting is a really good idea. Because apparently block chain voting is something that exists. I like this one too: > give me an actual current non hypothetical real world use case. Reply: > I'd be more inclined to answer this publicly if I were not actively working on a related project that I am not at liberty to discuss openly I could go and and on and on. I've gone through pages of this and the only actual use case I see mentioned is: >Might be useful for monitoring chain of custody for secure documents. Not that that’s a huge use case. Which I assume is related to the use case I mentioned in my previous comment. In my experience these types of replies are common on every public discussion of anything criticizing bitcoins or cryptocurrencies. So yeah, I don't think the bullshit is on my side, and neither is the burden of proof.

by chvid 9y ago

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
      > 1) Mining isn't required to use the network I define participate as "be able to mine and use the network". You can't do both for free anymore with Bitcoin. > 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 Sorry, but it sounds like "In order to learn how to fly you just have to flap your hands more efficiently, how you do that is up to you" > 3) It's still unrelated to what "permissionless" means in this case From your definition "Permissionless Blockchains allow anyone to participate". Okay, you can sort of participate in tsunami by jumping in the sea, but do you really do?
      - shawabawa3 9y ago
        > You can't do both for free anymore with Bitcoin You never could. Mining has always had a cost and by design the cost increases to match the block rewards I'm bored of this argument. You're arguing against a different definition to me and I'm not sure what your point is - that mining is expensive?
        viach 9y ago
        I'm saying that "permission-less", in my view, should be defined as "an average person can use network and participate in mining", which is not the case with Bitcoin anymore.
        lagadu 9y ago
        The "average person" doesn't have access to a computer or stable internet connectivity, if we're arguing for what the average person should be able to do/access we have a lot more basic problems to discuss before we get to decentralised virtual networks. That aside, technically anyone with a computing device can contribute to most networks.
  - fiatjaf 9y ago
    Compare your example with: "You can't join our club."
    - viach 9y ago
      Realistically, there are no clubs you can't join if have enough money
chvid 9y ago
If you start a new blockchain then you probably don't need as hard proof-of-work problems as there is now in bitcoin. One thing that the article is missing to discuss is that for a blockchain to truly work there needs to be a reward system for the nodes to participate in the network (basically to cover the cost of this crazy expensive infrastructure). Ie. a cryptocurrency that can be mined.
- fiatjaf 9y ago
  This. I always thought that any blockchain could only work if there was a reward system (otherwise you're dealing with trusted parties and thus no blockchain in the strict sense is needed), and thus it never made any sense to me to see people implementing blockchains everywhere. News: "Company X is using blockchains internally." Me: "Does that mean Company X have created a token that can be mined by its own computers, in a crazy internal competition that will waste thousands in energy consumption and hardware?"
  - lagadu 9y ago
    Cryptocurrencies don't necessarily have to be mined. Some newer ones have systems that aren't computationally intensive; they do that by effectively inverting the system of responsibility: they work by saying "if you hold our token, you have a vested interest in the integrity of the chain, therefore we trust you to validate transactions for the network" where "validate" means "vote on whether a transaction is legitimate". It's fairly interesting and still under research but on some smaller cryptocurrencies it seems to be working. Google "proof of stake" for more. edit: for a single organization that might not be very useful, as you already have one big central entity that you trust (the organization itself) but it is potentially an additional layer of security that can be tailored to the organization's needs.
pjc50 9y ago
You don't need to mine to make Bitcoin transactions. By "permissionless" people tend to mean that you can send money to and from another user of the system regardless of the legality and without a payment processor to intervene and forbid it.
- chvid 9y ago
  That is not the meaning here. Here it means that new nodes can join the network without being permissioned by an authority.
gomox 9y ago
It's permission-less because you participate as a node in the network without anyone granting you permission to do so. You don't have to spend thousands to be a bitcoin miner. You can use any old computer. Making a profit is a different story. Still, resources can be pooled together to buy a competitive mining rig for a few grand. Even then, a few thousand dollars is realistically not a large entry fee for anything. Wiring your house for Internet access would cost around that much if it wasn't subsidized.

simias 9y ago

>To me "true blockchain technology" in the bitcoin sense of the design is open, permission-less and only has a few real applications. Beyond cryptocurrencies? Go on, I'm all ears. I'm always amazed by how often I hear that claim (on HN and elsewhere) and yet nobody seems in a rush to be specific about it. The only other use case for blockchains I'm aware of that makes sense to me is some sort of IP protection scheme (mentioned in the article too). If you make a discovery you can write down "$me has discovered this and that", hash it and put it into the blockchain. Later you can use it to prove that you actually had that information at that date without needing any trusted peer or institution. But even then it only works if the chain can't be attacked you still need the currency aspect to motivate miners (or shareholders in a PoW scheme) to protect the chain.

endorphone 9y ago
As someone in the finance industry, a very beneficial use would be book of records / security holdings, which is currently such a precarious stack of crazy, with a massive barrier to entry. And it is making inroads but slowly given inertia and glacial pace of change (where the industry is most people sharing CSVs). The same thing for property transactions, insurance policies, etc etc etc. "But that's just a write-only distributed database....with a layer of asymmetric cryptography". Yeah... It is aggravating when some in the industry try to champion everything as a silver bullet, but it is just as flawed when many instantly veer to being anti-that thing just because. As an aside, proof-of- schemes are not necessary in many/most alternative blockchain scenarios. The egregious inefficiency of platforms like Bitcoin is not relevant for most other uses.
- johannes1234321 9y ago
  > As someone in the finance industry, a very beneficial use would be book of records / security holdings, which is > currently such a precarious stack of crazy, with a massive barrier to entry For some that entry barrier might be a feature :-)
- simias 9y ago
  >"But that's just a write-only distributed database....with a layer of asymmetric cryptography". Yeah... Glad we got that out of the way. >It is aggravating when some in the industry try to champion everything as a silver bullet, but it is just as flawed when many instantly veer to being anti-that thing just because. I disagree, it's not "just because". We're not talking about whether or not Rust or your Javascript framework du jour has a future. We're talking about a highly speculative bubble where people are dumping millions because they believe that the technology has a future. If Rust fails I'll have one more useless programming skill and a few codebases to rewrite. If cryptocurrencies collapse people are going to lose their homes. The whole "blockchain tech is here to stay" argument plays into that. I've heard some close friends use it to justify their investments in cryptocurrencies. Surely if everything is going to run on blockchains 10 years from now then surely at least one of the cryptocurrencies in my portfolio is going to be worth a ton then, right? Maybe let me rephrase my question in an other way: if somebody had asked you 10 years ago to solve the problem you're describing, what would you have replied? "I'm sorry I don't think that technology exists" or "you need some kind of write-only distributed database with a layer of asymmetric cryptography"? So no, it's not just me being a contrarian naysayer, there are real consequences to all this bullshit and pixie dust surrounding cryptocurrencies. I mean look at the replies for this joke tweet somebody linked elsewhere in the thread: https://twitter.com/MalwareTechBlog/status/932649133256597505 https://twitter.com/MalwareTechBlog/status/93264913325659750... Note the number of defensive tweets claiming the author doesn't know what they're talking about and how the blockchain is actually great: >Maybe learn how the technology works before pretending to be a snarky expert. This doesn't make you look smart. >very funny, but blockchain has some interesting use cases that might make some cros domain and cross org stuff better. >No one will need/want Blockchain is today's version of no one will need more than 640k RAM. >Blockchain has applications far beyond just coining it. >That’s a pretty short sighted way of thinking. Block chain based voting is a really good idea. Because apparently block chain voting is something that exists. I like this one too: > give me an actual current non hypothetical real world use case. Reply: > I'd be more inclined to answer this publicly if I were not actively working on a related project that I am not at liberty to discuss openly I could go and and on and on. I've gone through pages of this and the only actual use case I see mentioned is: >Might be useful for monitoring chain of custody for secure documents. Not that that’s a huge use case. Which I assume is related to the use case I mentioned in my previous comment. In my experience these types of replies are common on every public discussion of anything criticizing bitcoins or cryptocurrencies. So yeah, I don't think the bullshit is on my side, and neither is the burden of proof.