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I don’t think anyone is saying blockchain tech is “tulip bulbs”. The concern is Bitcoin (an instance of blockchain tech), et al., are not all the proponents cla

I don’t think anyone is saying blockchain tech is “tulip bulbs”. The concern is Bitcoin (an instance of blockchain tech), et al., are not all the proponents claim them to be. I’m convinced the blockchain is here to stay. Bitcoin? Not so much.

colordrops 9y ago
Fair enough, but there have been a lot of disparaging words said toward blockchains as well until recently.
- Erlangolem 9y ago
  I don’t think I’ve seen any of that, just a sense of weariness and disgust with their applications in cryptocurrency. I think that the raw excitement over blockchain tech has been damped from the initial fire, given the issues around scalability, but it still seems to enjoy a lot of respect. The problem is usually that like AI, “blockchain” just gets slapped onto a lot of dogs in an attempt to get money. I wouldn’t confuse that with rejection of the blockchain tech, just the cynical implementations that have mostly emerged.
Aqueous 9y ago
actually a lot of people are saying that, mostly non-technical who have very little analogue for understanding why distributed consensus algorithms could have merit. I've been presented that analogy by several friends and my father, for instance.
admyral 9y ago
In my opinion, distributed ledgers and mutable blockchains based around trusted actors are business as usual and frankly not very interesting. Bitcoin could actually make everyone's life a little better. Isn't that what technology was meant to be?
wpietri 9y ago
Personally, I'm saying Bitcoin is tulip bulbs (or, in Sarah Jeong's excellent phrase, "math Beanie Babies"). The blockchain, on the other hand, I think is more like XML/XSLT: a really interesting technology that has almost no real-world use that couldn't be done more easily with some other technology. And that 15-20 years after its popularity will be similarly obscure. I've been looking for years, but, digital speculative pseudo-commodities aside, I still have not found an in-production, value-delivering use of blockchain technology that couldn't be done as well or better with some more well understood technology.
- quickthrower2 9y ago
  XSLT is one of those things where an XSLT ninja can be super productive in transforming XML and do things much quicker than the coder using a general purpose language. But most of us don't use XSLT enough to get that good, so for most of us XSLT is harder than just coding something.
  - mikekchar 9y ago
    Kind of off topic, but just want to chip in to say that XSLT is awesome. The average programmer can learn it quite quickly. For me, the "killer application" for XSLT is screen scraping HTML. If you want to aggregate data that is spread across a whole bunch of websites, it absolutely rocks. It is especially good if your organisation uses a SaaS that doesn't give you access to an API. Even if you have an API, it is often an order of magnitude easier to do what you need to do in XSLT. Which reminds me, I've been meaning to generate burn down charts for Trello for a long time now...
    - wpietri 9y ago
      I'm not denying that XSLT is a neat technology. But for those who don't know the history, the vision was that XML would be this amazing interchange technology, and XSLT would be used to transform the XML as needed between and within apps, without needing real programmers. For example, I know of one top-10 website circa 2004 that had their Java programmers producing only XML output. Then, XSLT specialists would transform that into HTML for rendering. In theory, this provided a clear separation between back-end and front-end programmers. In practice, it was a giant clusterfuck, because any real work required coordinated changes at multiple levels. Although in theory the front-end work was independent, the reality was absurdly convoluted XSLT trying to turn not-very-good XML into something that rendered well on screen. Nobody sensible does this today. At the time, XML/XSLT was expected to be central to a new, better way of making software. But now it's a weird niche thing, because although it was technologically cool, it was not actually better for 99% of use cases.

colordrops 9y ago

Fair enough, but there have been a lot of disparaging words said toward blockchains as well until recently.

Erlangolem 9y ago
I don’t think I’ve seen any of that, just a sense of weariness and disgust with their applications in cryptocurrency. I think that the raw excitement over blockchain tech has been damped from the initial fire, given the issues around scalability, but it still seems to enjoy a lot of respect. The problem is usually that like AI, “blockchain” just gets slapped onto a lot of dogs in an attempt to get money. I wouldn’t confuse that with rejection of the blockchain tech, just the cynical implementations that have mostly emerged.

Aqueous 9y ago

actually a lot of people are saying that, mostly non-technical who have very little analogue for understanding why distributed consensus algorithms could have merit. I've been presented that analogy by several friends and my father, for instance.

admyral 9y ago

In my opinion, distributed ledgers and mutable blockchains based around trusted actors are business as usual and frankly not very interesting. Bitcoin could actually make everyone's life a little better. Isn't that what technology was meant to be?

wpietri 9y ago

Personally, I'm saying Bitcoin is tulip bulbs (or, in Sarah Jeong's excellent phrase, "math Beanie Babies"). The blockchain, on the other hand, I think is more like XML/XSLT: a really interesting technology that has almost no real-world use that couldn't be done more easily with some other technology. And that 15-20 years after its popularity will be similarly obscure. I've been looking for years, but, digital speculative pseudo-commodities aside, I still have not found an in-production, value-delivering use of blockchain technology that couldn't be done as well or better with some more well understood technology.

quickthrower2 9y ago
XSLT is one of those things where an XSLT ninja can be super productive in transforming XML and do things much quicker than the coder using a general purpose language. But most of us don't use XSLT enough to get that good, so for most of us XSLT is harder than just coding something.
- mikekchar 9y ago
  Kind of off topic, but just want to chip in to say that XSLT is awesome. The average programmer can learn it quite quickly. For me, the "killer application" for XSLT is screen scraping HTML. If you want to aggregate data that is spread across a whole bunch of websites, it absolutely rocks. It is especially good if your organisation uses a SaaS that doesn't give you access to an API. Even if you have an API, it is often an order of magnitude easier to do what you need to do in XSLT. Which reminds me, I've been meaning to generate burn down charts for Trello for a long time now...
  - wpietri 9y ago
    I'm not denying that XSLT is a neat technology. But for those who don't know the history, the vision was that XML would be this amazing interchange technology, and XSLT would be used to transform the XML as needed between and within apps, without needing real programmers. For example, I know of one top-10 website circa 2004 that had their Java programmers producing only XML output. Then, XSLT specialists would transform that into HTML for rendering. In theory, this provided a clear separation between back-end and front-end programmers. In practice, it was a giant clusterfuck, because any real work required coordinated changes at multiple levels. Although in theory the front-end work was independent, the reality was absurdly convoluted XSLT trying to turn not-very-good XML into something that rendered well on screen. Nobody sensible does this today. At the time, XML/XSLT was expected to be central to a new, better way of making software. But now it's a weird niche thing, because although it was technologically cool, it was not actually better for 99% of use cases.