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I kid you not, I had the same questions as you, so I literally applied for a bunch of blockchain jobs just so I can talk to these people on the phone to see wha

I kid you not, I had the same questions as you, so I literally applied for a bunch of blockchain jobs just so I can talk to these people on the phone to see what they're all about. I end up asking really basic questions like: "So why are you using a blockchain instead of a normal database?" or "What problem are you actually trying to solve?" It is actually embarrassing; I feel like I'm being abrasive on the phone by asking such truly basic questions, yet they always seem so startled by these kinds of questions and assume I'm somehow incredibly intelligent and perceptive to ask these basic questions. Generally what happens is as follows. Some business MBA type people watch a TED talk or read in the FT that blockchain is the next big thing, so they go out and look to hire "blockchain evangelists". Evangelists is the word they often use, and that sounds about right because it is just like a religion sometimes. Then I only end up talking to the business people about these projects, because that's all the people they have. I won't name them, but I've had conversations with huge firms or startups that both equally talk utter nonsense. One large firm told me that they're working on "permissionless and permissioned blockchains for everything from auditing to wine". While for a small startup I once asked: "why are you using a blockchain for this instead of just having a database?". The answer I got was "well... our customers aren't really technical people...". I told them perhaps they should look at something like Google's certificate transparency rather than blockchains, and they echoed back to me "Oh we are definitely looking at certificate transfer!" (Transfer, not transparency.) It's astonishing. To summarize, huge firms tend to have people who just want to get paid so they always say yes to whatever the clueless MBA person asks, while startups tend to mostly know it's bullshit but go along anyway because there is a lot of $$$ involved, particularly with ICOs. I would love to go undercover and write a book about what's actually happening.

jerf 9y ago
I salute your motivation in researching this question, and thanks for sharing. I tried to phrase my original appeal carefully, because I didn't want to entirely discount the possibility that it was all just people chasing bullshit. But there's a lot of things in life that look that way, but the people doing it actually have what they think are good reasons. But, yeah, that doesn't sound good. It seems to me that from a strictly engineering perspective, once you have a corporation involved that the pressures involved would, or at least should, inevitably turn any putative "blockchain" solution into a centralized database owned and administered by the corporation. To be concrete about it, how would WoW gold be improved by a blockchain? The answer is not only that it would have no additionally-useful features, but that it would take numerous hits. For $100, I'll share with anyone my clever plan for taking a centralized database for tokens and just calling it a blockchain. Oops, I may have given my game plan away. Well, in the spirit of things, perhaps you should still throw money at me. ("In the interests of customer convenience, we just run the blockchain for them... and our engineers have also optimized blockchains quite a bit, eliminating all the Proof of X problems... And from there we were able to optimize turnaround times and responsiveness in the system... OK, basically, it's just a Cassandra installation... but we forked Cassandra and called it Cassandra - Blockchain Edition.")
- Moodles 9y ago
  Thanks. I actually don't think blockchains are all that interesting a technology, but the hysterical mania around them is interesting from an economic and psychological perspective. When will the bubble burst? I'm serious that I would actually consider working in this field for awhile to understand exactly how insane it is. You're absolutely right that some people are honest-but-confused. In fact, I think particularly with large firms, they're all just shit scared about this newfangled blockchain thing and they all know their competitors are investigating it so they desperately want to get in on it before they're destroyed by it. Unfortunately, I think their manic pivot towards blockchain is a very bad move long-term. It would actually take more bravery on their part not to waste resources investigating it. And again, you are right. It's hilarious to watch them reinvent the wheel. Often, the penny drops that they don't want to really have a bitcoin-like blockchain, so they accidentally reinvent either a Wikipedia or a Github. Github in particular you could (and they do) argue is a chain of blocks of data, so a blockchain. It's like cutting off the hump of a camel and then calling it a next generation horse: it kinda works, but it's not originally designed for that, so why not just use a horse?
walrus01 9y ago
in summary: a bunch of MBA types who belong in the sales department at Oracle have drunk the koolaid.

jerf 9y ago

I salute your motivation in researching this question, and thanks for sharing. I tried to phrase my original appeal carefully, because I didn't want to entirely discount the possibility that it was all just people chasing bullshit. But there's a lot of things in life that look that way, but the people doing it actually have what they think are good reasons. But, yeah, that doesn't sound good. It seems to me that from a strictly engineering perspective, once you have a corporation involved that the pressures involved would, or at least should, inevitably turn any putative "blockchain" solution into a centralized database owned and administered by the corporation. To be concrete about it, how would WoW gold be improved by a blockchain? The answer is not only that it would have no additionally-useful features, but that it would take numerous hits. For $100, I'll share with anyone my clever plan for taking a centralized database for tokens and just calling it a blockchain. Oops, I may have given my game plan away. Well, in the spirit of things, perhaps you should still throw money at me. ("In the interests of customer convenience, we just run the blockchain for them... and our engineers have also optimized blockchains quite a bit, eliminating all the Proof of X problems... And from there we were able to optimize turnaround times and responsiveness in the system... OK, basically, it's just a Cassandra installation... but we forked Cassandra and called it Cassandra - Blockchain Edition.")

Moodles 9y ago
Thanks. I actually don't think blockchains are all that interesting a technology, but the hysterical mania around them is interesting from an economic and psychological perspective. When will the bubble burst? I'm serious that I would actually consider working in this field for awhile to understand exactly how insane it is. You're absolutely right that some people are honest-but-confused. In fact, I think particularly with large firms, they're all just shit scared about this newfangled blockchain thing and they all know their competitors are investigating it so they desperately want to get in on it before they're destroyed by it. Unfortunately, I think their manic pivot towards blockchain is a very bad move long-term. It would actually take more bravery on their part not to waste resources investigating it. And again, you are right. It's hilarious to watch them reinvent the wheel. Often, the penny drops that they don't want to really have a bitcoin-like blockchain, so they accidentally reinvent either a Wikipedia or a Github. Github in particular you could (and they do) argue is a chain of blocks of data, so a blockchain. It's like cutting off the hump of a camel and then calling it a next generation horse: it kinda works, but it's not originally designed for that, so why not just use a horse?

walrus01 9y ago

in summary: a bunch of MBA types who belong in the sales department at Oracle have drunk the koolaid.