5 ms·

> I have a hard time finding people in the distributed systems platform community who believe that blockchain is even remotely as significant as the hype wants

• KirinDave 9y ago
  We already have reliable databases. Blockchains purport to offer trustless consensus. If that were true, it'd be a big deal. It's not clear that they do. But why would eBay want a trustless consensus? Their entire business model is around being that trusted arbiter and broker. Even off in darkweb land, companies exist to service and broker transactions that then fall back to the blockchain to reconcile payment. So presumably if you were correct we'd see that model emerging. I've looked, but the inside of Tor is a big place. Maybe you've seen an example I haven't?
  • snissn 9y ago
    > We already have reliable databases. not in the way that a blockchain maintains the final state and a clean audit log of every transaction.
    • KirinDave 9y ago
      Git does this, doesn't it? (Not that people here appreciate my contention that GitHub is a "white label blockchain company")
      • snissn 9y ago
        Yeah that's true, and Github is really popular, I use it every day.
        • KirinDave 9y ago
          Well then: Git is a blockchain with proof of ownership for commits and it doesn't need multiple miners or anything and you use it every day with what I guess is acceptable risk.
          • Scarblac 9y ago
            Because it uses trust. I trust that only I can access my local Git repositories, and that Github's authorization does its job. Which is absolutely great, but nothing new and not what people mean when they hype about "blockchain".
            • KirinDave 8y ago
              I find most folks don't mean anything they think they mean when they hype about blockchain, so I like to try and inject reality.
• return1 9y ago
  > the entirety of their business only part of their business. their consumer-facing business is building trust, and issuing refunds.
  • snissn 9y ago
    so the non technical parts?
• IncRnd 9y ago
  Why would eBay or Amazon want to change over to decentralized smart contract software? They already have working computer systems, so there needs to be great benefit to move to a slower less reliable system that will open them up to additional hacks as well as remove them from the intermediary positions of profit.
  • snissn 9y ago
    now we're going down an irrelevant path. it doesn't matter why an established company or bank would want to or not be based on a blockchain.
    • IncRnd 9y ago
      You're the one who said those two companies can use blockchains, so asking you why you would say something so bizarre was a perfectly reasonable question. No established company will use a blockchain for a database, when there are real databases they already use. That was the point. Other than speculation, nobody really uses blockchains, and certainly not for mission critical work handling real money or real customers.
      • snissn 9y ago
        i mean another company besides amazon or ebay could, they wouldn't change anything
• ajkjk 9y ago
  How is that significant? You can also run eBay or Amazon on filing cabinets full of paper; is that significant? in both cases the costs and complexity are insane.
  • snissn 9y ago
    No you can't. You'd need a person or people + filing cabinets full of paper.
    • ajkjk 9y ago
      You can't run a blockchain without miners either; we're both omitting things from our models.
      • snissn 9y ago
        you need the post office too - don't see your point
        • snissn 9y ago
          my original point is that there are distributed database engineers who are excited about the technology behind blockchain, hi!
      • stjohnswarts 9y ago
        If that is true what happens when all the bitcoins are basically mined out? That doesn't seem to jive.
        • Scarblac 9y ago
          Then miners need to recoup their costs entirely by transaction fees, or they stop mining and the network will be (even more) vulnerable to hostile takeover.
• acdha 9y ago
  > Take eBay or Amazon for example, the entirety of their business can be run as decentralized smart contract software. What advantage would that offer? How would that handle scams, and what reason do we have to think it would be cheaper? Reliabky recording and auditing transactions has been a solved problem for a long time so a key question would be how a proposed solution would be cheaper or more reliable in a human-meaningful manner. As an example, a common non-answer is fraud but with smart contracts that requires a trusted third party so it’d be important to show that this would be cheaper than paying Amazon to fill that role.
  • CryptoPunk 9y ago
    There would be no way to raise fees or otherwise exploit their market position for rent-seeking once they had attained market dominance.
    • acdha 9y ago
      Can you explain why you believe that would be true? The system can’t prevent normal economics from functioning and while competition can act as a check, that’s equally true now – eBay and Amazon both have tons of competition.
      • CryptoPunk 8y ago
        Because the fees, and other properties of the platform, can be encoded in immutable smart contracts where they can't be changed.
        • acdha 8y ago
          That doesn't really answer the question: that prevents you from changing a contract after accepting it but it doesn't prevent someone else from saying that they will no longer sign contracts at old rates. This is good because otherwise the system would be completely unworkable in the real world where prices and exchange rates change over time — for example, suppose that a shipping partner increases their rates to handle fuel price increases — you'd need a way to charge more for shipping as soon as that happens. The same would apply to anything involving cryptocurrencies with their wildly-fluctuating exchange rates which don't match the real money either side will need to use.