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I was recently at an "Emerging Technology" conference for emerging technologies that was targeted at non-technical entrepreneurs and innovators. 90% of the conf

I was recently at an "Emerging Technology" conference for emerging technologies that was targeted at non-technical entrepreneurs and innovators. 90% of the conference was focused on blockchain, while the remaining was focused on AI. During the entire conference, blockchain was being touted as a silver bullet for many problems, and many of the people at the conference ate it up. The best anecdote to summarize the conference was a speech by IBM where they covered a project which they did with major retailer to track a supply chain. The speaker mentioned some impressive results which caused a noticeable people around me to literally say "wow". However, they did not once mention specifically how blockchain was the cause of these results or give reasons why blockchain was superior. From what I could tell as an engineer, the entire application could have been built without blockchain. I was surprised at how blockchain was being touted as the next technological revolution (and very light on the details) and was concerned at how quickly the other attendees accepted blockchain as it was being sold. I left the conference thinking that it would only be a matter of time before blockchain would be touted as a silver bullet in the larger community due to conferences like these (although I am sure they've been happening for a while, and this was my first exposure). It will not be long before a large number of software projects will be based on blockchain needlessly, and/or the engineers will be arguing with management why using blockchain is a mistake.

systoll 8y ago
Or the engineers will all agree that any apppend-only linked list is a [degenerate] kind of block chain.
- zby 8y ago
  Yeah - that is how it works! Blockchain can be solution to anything - you just need the definition of blockchain to be broad enough. It is an empty signifier.
Chathamization 8y ago
That reminds me of this IBM press release[1]: > IBM, Walmart and Tsinghua University have piloted the use of blockchain to trace food items, including pork in China and mangoes in the U.S., as they move through the supply chain to store shelves. Recent testing by Walmart showed that applying blockchain reduced the time it took to trace a package of mangoes from the farm to the store from days or weeks to two seconds. [1] https://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/53487.wss https://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/53487.wss
- kmc059000 8y ago
  The speech was about the mangos. They specifically said looking up the grower went from 7 days to 12 seconds due to blockchain and a $7b savings.
  - simias 8y ago
    How many times will we have to debunk this "physical goods traceability through the blockchain can work and be more efficient than some random SQL database" nonsense? If you trace physical goods you need to trust people not to lie about their nature, if you have trust then you don't need a blockchain and can use something a lot cheaper and more efficient. They should put that on a banner on HN or something, it'll save everybody some time. I assume that what IBM did was centralizing mango grower info in a database instead having to go through complicated, manual processes. They did that through a Blockchain for some reason but I'm sure you could get similar result in some PostgreSQL DB. Of course I can't know for sure because the announcement is all fluff and hype and no substance.
    - mirekrusin 8y ago
      You can use Postgres or whatever as backend to the Blockchain if you wish. Blockchain solutions are maybe 20% Blockchain, 70% cryptography and 10% caching/traditional tech around it (percentages are my rough guess from what I’ve seen). They actually can solve some problems in large corporations relatively easily compared to centralised systems. If I had to summarise in few words why - I’d say it’s because of cryptography patterns and immutable/verifiable/temper resistant, distributed ledger that has completely different security profile from traditional systems - ie there’s nothing to hack except from stealing private keys in which case the damage is limited to areas that this key is covering (usually very small). This has implications in corporate setting because now you can deploy ambitious projects without worrying about security that much...
      - simias 8y ago
        >If I had to summarise in few words why - I’d say it’s because of cryptography patterns and immutable/verifiable/temper resistant, distributed ledger that has completely different security profile from traditional systems The temper resistance is not god-given, it's a consequence of the miners racing to mine new blocks. If you want the same type of resistance for a custom blockchain then you need to convince a bunch of people to mine your chain. Why would I mine MangoCoin? So instead immutability is achieved by making a "side-chain" that eventually links to a big and secure chain like Bitcoin or Ethereum. But then it's basically the equivalent of having a SQL database, computing a checksum every day and uploading it in a custom bitcoin transaction. Effectively you could achieve the same thing by computing the checksum, signing it with your PGP key and uploading it publicly on your website for all to see. This way anybody can make copies and if you attempt to modify an old entry in your DB it'll invalidate the checksum and anybody having a copy will be able to prove it. So with this scheme your SQL database is immutable, verifiable and temper resistant. Unfortunately if you implement it that way your announcement won't make the rounds on social media and give you a lot of free PR and a boost to your stock, so better brand it "with real bits of revolutionary Blockchain(c)(tm) technology inside" instead. >ie there’s nothing to hack The Blockchain runs on computers, computers can be hacked. People can forge a bad transaction saying that some mangoes are organic when they're not. People can say mangoes have been stolen when in fact they've been sold to avoid paying taxes. The blockchain isn't harder to hack than any distributed database. The Blockchain isn't magic.
IloveHN84 8y ago
Look: isn't the same as it happened for microservices, containers, serverless and many other new tech stacks? It could have been done even without those, but since the cool kids are using them, then they spread
- gldalmaso 8y ago
  I see the resemblance but I think it's somewhat different in this case. Something like Docker brought to light tech that many developers weren't familiar with but that existed before. But it actually accomplished concrete things in a very short amount of time. Blockchain on the other hand is attractive not necessarily to developers, and it so far has promised a lot more than it has actually delivered. We see talks of huge figures and white papers and half finished products where the important features are coming in "the next milestone". This is draining investment from others more viable solutions and creating the possibility for any blockchain startup to somehow shoehorn the tech into a product and insert themselves in a market of their choice. IMO this is the wrong kind of disruption where potentially everyone loses in the mid to long term.
- bonesss 8y ago
  Microservices, containers, and serverless architectures all solve cross-cutting concerns that impact scalable and distributed architectures, core SaaS & cloud-native challenges, as well as some long running highly pricey problems in the Enterprise space. They're not tech stacks, they are design approaches that tightly align with our modern computing platforms. Googles enormous investments in this space are not random, it's reflective of their relative positioning compared to the rest of the market... Block-chain tech is awesome in distributed scenarios where actors don't necessarily have contact with, or trust for, one another. That's a very narrow band comparatively. Yes, people jump on bandwagons. Yes, engineers are often distracted by 'the new hotness'. But when Amazon, Google, MS, and VMware all align on virtualization technology it's something a bit bigger than people simply falling for 'cool tech'.
gitgud 8y ago
I recently went to a similar innovation conference, that was targeted at business owners. They were proposing block-chain technology as a panacea for every problem under the sun. The funniest project involved parking meters 'on the block-chain' ... It seems the more computational power we have access to, the quicker we find ways to waste it with inefficient systems ...
hacknat 8y ago
I think all the hype around block chain is hilarious for the very simple reason that block chain can’t actually solve any business problem that a centrally managed service couldn’t solve (with less effort likely). The only thing block chain adds to any problem is when you don’t want a managed good or service to be under central authority or if it can’t be under a central authority (the later situation is probably more interesting). Crypto currencies make some sense (though I like my currency backed by the full faith and credit of a government, personally). However every other situation I hear of I wonder why someone couldn’t just manage a central service. Chain of trust on crates of produce? Supply chain professionals have solved the problem of authenticating sourcing of goods quite a long time ago (especially when laws required them too). Personally I think the one benefit that people don’t talk enough about is cases where the block chain can provide its users perfect forward secrecy on their transactions against the ledger, though again you don’t really need the block chain to do that.
- askmike 8y ago
  > The only thing block chain adds to any problem is when you don’t want a managed good or service to be under central authority or if it can’t be under a central authority (the later situation is probably more interesting). Trust (and thus the ability to use an authority) is not black and white. There are a lot of situations where some trust is allowed up until a certain level. Right now authorities are managed through some form of government or through legal enforcement (contracts and such). - The first one only works in specific scenarios. - The second one is extremely expensive (especially when working across borders). It might technically be not as elegant. But generally speaking servers are a lot cheaper than lawyers. Code is designed to be extendable and reusable, contracts are not. Let's not even talk about the long process of enforcing those contracts manually with very expensive lawyers in a physical court building.
  - madeofpalk 8y ago
    Isn't the 'trust' eroded once a single party gains 51% of compute? Then you're just a really complicated and poorly implemented centralised database.
eksemplar 8y ago
I wouldn’t worry too much until there is an actual use case, and if there is a use case, then why worry? I work in the Danish public sector, and we’re sold tech by consultants who hype politicians and upper management, both ares with very little technical understanding. But while they don’t understand what tech is, they do understand change management, and if there isn’t a proven benefit, they won’t buy the hype. We’re doing a lot of RPA these days, and from a technical standpoint that’s really fucking stupid. An API would be a gazillion times better than a screen scraping macro. In reality, however, we run 370 different IT systems and the truth is that a lot of them won’t have a decent API in the next 20 years, if ever. So while RPA is really stupid technically, it has immense value on the business end because it automated shit we couldn’t automate otherwise. The reason I mention RPA is that I asked my engineers if it was worth looking into about 3 years ago, and they gave me a straight no. So we didn’t pay it attention until our CEO asked me what RPA projects we were doing after having attended a Deloitte conference on the business application of RPA in the public sector. Blockchain doesn’t have a use case, and that means it won’t sell, even if it’s hyped to non-tech people. You do see a few public block chain projects, but they are mostly poc’s that never lead anywhere and they are all run by in house enthusiasts, who were “allowed” to “run with it as long as you keep doing your regular work as well” because allowing your workforce to play with their ideas is motivational, even if it’s really just a waste of time.
- simias 8y ago
  >I wouldn’t worry too much until there is an actual use case, and if there is a use case, then why worry? I don't usually worry much about over-hyped technologies that gets the executive types all fuzzy inside while the rest of us look from afar wondering if they even understand what they're talking about. Web 2.0, NoSQL, IoT, Blockchain... The list is long. And it's not all trash, there's often some value at the core of the hype once you remove all the fluff. But Blockchain is a bit more nefarious that this IMO, because it goes hand in hand with cryptocurrencies. The huge valuation of cryptocurrencies is the only reason Blockchains got so much publicity in the first place. I'm certain that if Bitcoin hadn't recovered from it's huge crash a couple of years ago you wouldn't see nearly as much Blockchain this and Blockchain that everywhere. Conversely if you look at cryptocurrency enthusiast forums they use these news articles about big companies investing money and resources into "the blockchain" as proof that there's some high intrinsic value to the technology and to justify a very high valuation and pump it even more, especially to newcomers. "IBM is going to create a blockchain, BUY BUY BUY!" It results in a big spiral of hype enabling scams enabling hype enabling scams... Meanwhile as far as I can see the only practical use cases of cryptocurrencies and even "the blockchain" at large is unbridled speculation, pyramid schemes and buying illegal stuff online. All that while expanding a ridiculous amount of energy mining the damn thing.
phs318u 8y ago
Well, sir, there's nothing on earth Like a genuine, bona-fide, Electrified, blockchain. What'd I say? Blockchain. What's it called? Blockchain. That's right! Blockchain. Blockchain Blockchain Blockchain I hear their energy use makes fans whir loud. It's as energy efficient as a GPU cloud. Is there a chance a fork could bring the end? Not on your life, my Nerdy friend. What about us brain-dead slobs? You'll be given cushy MLM jobs Were you sent here by the ICO Devil? No good sir, I'm on the level. The wheels came off my project plan. Take my ASIC, my good man. I swear it's Company's only choice. Throw up your hands and raise your voice. Blockchain. What's it called? Blockchain. Once again. Blockchain. But our product quality is still all broken. Sorry Bob, the mob has spoken. Blockchain! Blockchain! Blockchain! Blockchain! Block, d'oh! (with apologies to The Simpsons).
- jon_richards 8y ago
  You aren't far off. Remember the bitconnect guy?
- Balgair 8y ago
  Phil Hartman, you are still missed! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Hartman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Hartman
havkom 8y ago
We now live in the information age. Blockchains and AI will transform everyday life as well as specific sectors such as health care and trade. Imagine walking in to a Starbucks café, order a cup of coffee, digitally signing a payment transaction on your mobile or laptop and then wait for it to be confirmed by the Blockchain while enjoying the hot cup of coffee you have ordered. What is more, think about AI, you will not need to talk to the staff to place an order for your coffee. The staff can relax and watch you make gestures to a camera. They will be able to read on a screen if you’d like it white or black. I think the article is too negative and does not see the big picture of transformation that is going on (as exemplified above).
- Scarblac 8y ago
  > Imagine walking in to a Starbucks café, order a cup of coffee, digitally signing a payment transaction on your mobile or laptop and then wait for it to be confirmed by the Blockchain while enjoying the hot cup of coffee you have ordered. You could do the the exact same thing now with credit cards, except the waiting. And then you could get your money back if the coffee sucked, and you wouldn't lose all your money if someone happened to steal your private key .
  - hopfog 8y ago
    Pretty sure it was sarcasm.
    - Scarblac 8y ago
      Probably, but it's hard to tell in this debate where believers constantly have to rely on forgetting about existing technology completely.
    - wool_gather 8y ago
      It's important to keep Poe's law in mind when you're posting plain-text parody; you don't have tone of voice and body language to help convey your real intent.
- lxg 8y ago
davidgerard 8y ago
I got to counter this sort of hype to a room full of bankers last week. It had the right effect, I'm pleased to say. Slides: https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2018/04/19/welcome-to-the-blockchain-slides-from-berenbergs-blockchain-from-hype-to-reality/ https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2018/04/19/welcome-to-t...
- 55555 8y ago
  I enjoyed this. Nice presentation.
Scarblac 8y ago
People believing the hype having an amazing willingness to forget about all the other technology that has already existed for decades.
aquadrop 8y ago
Yep, that puzzles me, why so many people just accept "blockchain helped us to do that" without asking how exactly it did. Blockchain itself is really new interesting technology which opens new opportunities, but I'm afraid its real usage and advance can be slowed by all that hype around with snake oil-like offerings.
ThomPete 8y ago
Imagine talking about TCP/IP in the late 1980ies. This is great but mostly limited to academia. The blockchain isn't interesting as a business case any more than TCP/IP was. The blockchain is the foundation of a new decentralized infrastructure for the digital space (which physical properties), but we still haven't "opened up the internet" to the public.
- Yizahi 8y ago
  Let me fix this for you - "Imagine talking about IPX in the late 1980ies. The blockchain isn't interesting as a business case any more than IPX was."
  - ThomPete 8y ago
    Care to elaborate? Not sure I understand.
    - Yizahi 8y ago
      IPX was a rather popular internet protocol in the late 80s, it was a TCP/IP competitor and during 90s it was often present in application configurations as a equivalent of TCP/IP, usually only these 2, no other choices. It wasn't really scalable and completely lost to TCP/IP soon. You present blockchain as a new "TCP/IP" (meaning successful technology) but it might as well be a new "IPX", left on the margins of history books after a decade of struggle. Currently nobody knows for sure.
      - ThomPete 8y ago
        The blockchain is nearing it's 10th anniversary with no sign of slowing down when it comes to people investing time in it. Furthermore as far as I am aware there is not BlockchainX
  - ska 8y ago
    Thank you. That's the key acknowledgement missing from nearly all the breathless descriptions of "where this is going".
gldalmaso 8y ago
I was at a similar conference last week and the same thing happened and the same IBM case that tracked produce supply chain was presented. The same "wow" moment was shared when they said they can now track the origin of a product in under 2 seconds where before it took them a week. I happen to work in a product that manages produce traceability, and I can confirm that it is quite within the realm of possibility to track produce in under 2 seconds with a simple web app and a relational database. We have been doing it for about 10 years. To add, the produce supply chain is full of connectivity and digital literacy issues, so I would venture a guess that a blockchain implementation would generate a lot of attrition on the operations side of things. Another point of concern is performance since this is a fast moving supply chain due to the product short shelf life. It was interesting to see how this audience thinks that blockchain somehow "solves" traceability when this has been going on in several different forms in a wide array of different industries with specific needs. They seem to also think that the right way to do it is with IoT and smart contracts, as if it were just a step away to push such a solution to an existing supply chain. It keeps me up at night that one day a top-down decision will come that says we must a have a blockchain solution because market, or new competitors will bloom in the face of absurd amount of money being thrown at blockchain solutions and take market share. I imagine that 5 years from now, the winners of today's hype battles will be the losers when they have to maintain an overly complex inflexible solution for many years more.
- mgkimsal 8y ago
  > I happen to work in a product that manages produce traceability, and I can confirm that it is quite within the realm of possibility to track produce in under 2 seconds with a simple web app and a relational database. We have been doing it for about 10 years. But now IBM can do it in 2 seconds as well! This may create a big boon for "DB2->blockchain" conversion contracts. We still seem to be in this weird period with blockchain stuff where it's a neat idea, but the problems people are tackling with it are mostly... mild variations of solved problems so far. This may be understandable - these are problems which are known to have value, and as new companies want to solve these problems, they may opt for a blockchain-based version vs traditional "old school" relational db. But there may also be limited value there compared to old school version. This feels a bit like "key value store" systems vs databases. There was (is?) a lot of hype around schemaless and "lightweight" KV stores, but most of the problems are also solved by intelligent use of SQL. Ditto for the XML-databases rage from ... 12-15 years ago.
wemdyjreichert 8y ago
It's even worse among start-ups. My VC friends tell me than almost every. Single. Venture they see has ai/ml bolted onto it, often with no real purpose.
Sangermaine 8y ago
>I was surprised at how blockchain was being touted as the next technological revolution (and very light on the details) If you're surprised by this you must not have gotten online much in the last 10 years, especially on this site. Blockchain technology has been heralded as the next great revolution in human society that will transform all aspects of human existence and usher in an endless golden era of freedom and prosperity.

systoll 8y ago

Or the engineers will all agree that any apppend-only linked list is a [degenerate] kind of block chain.

zby 8y ago
Yeah - that is how it works! Blockchain can be solution to anything - you just need the definition of blockchain to be broad enough. It is an empty signifier.

Chathamization 8y ago

That reminds me of this IBM press release[1]: > IBM, Walmart and Tsinghua University have piloted the use of blockchain to trace food items, including pork in China and mangoes in the U.S., as they move through the supply chain to store shelves. Recent testing by Walmart showed that applying blockchain reduced the time it took to trace a package of mangoes from the farm to the store from days or weeks to two seconds. [1] https://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/53487.wss https://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/53487.wss

kmc059000 8y ago
The speech was about the mangos. They specifically said looking up the grower went from 7 days to 12 seconds due to blockchain and a $7b savings.
- simias 8y ago
  How many times will we have to debunk this "physical goods traceability through the blockchain can work and be more efficient than some random SQL database" nonsense? If you trace physical goods you need to trust people not to lie about their nature, if you have trust then you don't need a blockchain and can use something a lot cheaper and more efficient. They should put that on a banner on HN or something, it'll save everybody some time. I assume that what IBM did was centralizing mango grower info in a database instead having to go through complicated, manual processes. They did that through a Blockchain for some reason but I'm sure you could get similar result in some PostgreSQL DB. Of course I can't know for sure because the announcement is all fluff and hype and no substance.
  - mirekrusin 8y ago
    You can use Postgres or whatever as backend to the Blockchain if you wish. Blockchain solutions are maybe 20% Blockchain, 70% cryptography and 10% caching/traditional tech around it (percentages are my rough guess from what I’ve seen). They actually can solve some problems in large corporations relatively easily compared to centralised systems. If I had to summarise in few words why - I’d say it’s because of cryptography patterns and immutable/verifiable/temper resistant, distributed ledger that has completely different security profile from traditional systems - ie there’s nothing to hack except from stealing private keys in which case the damage is limited to areas that this key is covering (usually very small). This has implications in corporate setting because now you can deploy ambitious projects without worrying about security that much...
    - simias 8y ago
      >If I had to summarise in few words why - I’d say it’s because of cryptography patterns and immutable/verifiable/temper resistant, distributed ledger that has completely different security profile from traditional systems The temper resistance is not god-given, it's a consequence of the miners racing to mine new blocks. If you want the same type of resistance for a custom blockchain then you need to convince a bunch of people to mine your chain. Why would I mine MangoCoin? So instead immutability is achieved by making a "side-chain" that eventually links to a big and secure chain like Bitcoin or Ethereum. But then it's basically the equivalent of having a SQL database, computing a checksum every day and uploading it in a custom bitcoin transaction. Effectively you could achieve the same thing by computing the checksum, signing it with your PGP key and uploading it publicly on your website for all to see. This way anybody can make copies and if you attempt to modify an old entry in your DB it'll invalidate the checksum and anybody having a copy will be able to prove it. So with this scheme your SQL database is immutable, verifiable and temper resistant. Unfortunately if you implement it that way your announcement won't make the rounds on social media and give you a lot of free PR and a boost to your stock, so better brand it "with real bits of revolutionary Blockchain(c)(tm) technology inside" instead. >ie there’s nothing to hack The Blockchain runs on computers, computers can be hacked. People can forge a bad transaction saying that some mangoes are organic when they're not. People can say mangoes have been stolen when in fact they've been sold to avoid paying taxes. The blockchain isn't harder to hack than any distributed database. The Blockchain isn't magic.

IloveHN84 8y ago

Look: isn't the same as it happened for microservices, containers, serverless and many other new tech stacks? It could have been done even without those, but since the cool kids are using them, then they spread

gldalmaso 8y ago
I see the resemblance but I think it's somewhat different in this case. Something like Docker brought to light tech that many developers weren't familiar with but that existed before. But it actually accomplished concrete things in a very short amount of time. Blockchain on the other hand is attractive not necessarily to developers, and it so far has promised a lot more than it has actually delivered. We see talks of huge figures and white papers and half finished products where the important features are coming in "the next milestone". This is draining investment from others more viable solutions and creating the possibility for any blockchain startup to somehow shoehorn the tech into a product and insert themselves in a market of their choice. IMO this is the wrong kind of disruption where potentially everyone loses in the mid to long term.
bonesss 8y ago
Microservices, containers, and serverless architectures all solve cross-cutting concerns that impact scalable and distributed architectures, core SaaS & cloud-native challenges, as well as some long running highly pricey problems in the Enterprise space. They're not tech stacks, they are design approaches that tightly align with our modern computing platforms. Googles enormous investments in this space are not random, it's reflective of their relative positioning compared to the rest of the market... Block-chain tech is awesome in distributed scenarios where actors don't necessarily have contact with, or trust for, one another. That's a very narrow band comparatively. Yes, people jump on bandwagons. Yes, engineers are often distracted by 'the new hotness'. But when Amazon, Google, MS, and VMware all align on virtualization technology it's something a bit bigger than people simply falling for 'cool tech'.

gitgud 8y ago

I recently went to a similar innovation conference, that was targeted at business owners. They were proposing block-chain technology as a panacea for every problem under the sun. The funniest project involved parking meters 'on the block-chain' ... It seems the more computational power we have access to, the quicker we find ways to waste it with inefficient systems ...

hacknat 8y ago

I think all the hype around block chain is hilarious for the very simple reason that block chain can’t actually solve any business problem that a centrally managed service couldn’t solve (with less effort likely). The only thing block chain adds to any problem is when you don’t want a managed good or service to be under central authority or if it can’t be under a central authority (the later situation is probably more interesting). Crypto currencies make some sense (though I like my currency backed by the full faith and credit of a government, personally). However every other situation I hear of I wonder why someone couldn’t just manage a central service. Chain of trust on crates of produce? Supply chain professionals have solved the problem of authenticating sourcing of goods quite a long time ago (especially when laws required them too). Personally I think the one benefit that people don’t talk enough about is cases where the block chain can provide its users perfect forward secrecy on their transactions against the ledger, though again you don’t really need the block chain to do that.

askmike 8y ago
> The only thing block chain adds to any problem is when you don’t want a managed good or service to be under central authority or if it can’t be under a central authority (the later situation is probably more interesting). Trust (and thus the ability to use an authority) is not black and white. There are a lot of situations where some trust is allowed up until a certain level. Right now authorities are managed through some form of government or through legal enforcement (contracts and such). - The first one only works in specific scenarios. - The second one is extremely expensive (especially when working across borders). It might technically be not as elegant. But generally speaking servers are a lot cheaper than lawyers. Code is designed to be extendable and reusable, contracts are not. Let's not even talk about the long process of enforcing those contracts manually with very expensive lawyers in a physical court building.
- madeofpalk 8y ago
  Isn't the 'trust' eroded once a single party gains 51% of compute? Then you're just a really complicated and poorly implemented centralised database.

eksemplar 8y ago

I wouldn’t worry too much until there is an actual use case, and if there is a use case, then why worry? I work in the Danish public sector, and we’re sold tech by consultants who hype politicians and upper management, both ares with very little technical understanding. But while they don’t understand what tech is, they do understand change management, and if there isn’t a proven benefit, they won’t buy the hype. We’re doing a lot of RPA these days, and from a technical standpoint that’s really fucking stupid. An API would be a gazillion times better than a screen scraping macro. In reality, however, we run 370 different IT systems and the truth is that a lot of them won’t have a decent API in the next 20 years, if ever. So while RPA is really stupid technically, it has immense value on the business end because it automated shit we couldn’t automate otherwise. The reason I mention RPA is that I asked my engineers if it was worth looking into about 3 years ago, and they gave me a straight no. So we didn’t pay it attention until our CEO asked me what RPA projects we were doing after having attended a Deloitte conference on the business application of RPA in the public sector. Blockchain doesn’t have a use case, and that means it won’t sell, even if it’s hyped to non-tech people. You do see a few public block chain projects, but they are mostly poc’s that never lead anywhere and they are all run by in house enthusiasts, who were “allowed” to “run with it as long as you keep doing your regular work as well” because allowing your workforce to play with their ideas is motivational, even if it’s really just a waste of time.

simias 8y ago
>I wouldn’t worry too much until there is an actual use case, and if there is a use case, then why worry? I don't usually worry much about over-hyped technologies that gets the executive types all fuzzy inside while the rest of us look from afar wondering if they even understand what they're talking about. Web 2.0, NoSQL, IoT, Blockchain... The list is long. And it's not all trash, there's often some value at the core of the hype once you remove all the fluff. But Blockchain is a bit more nefarious that this IMO, because it goes hand in hand with cryptocurrencies. The huge valuation of cryptocurrencies is the only reason Blockchains got so much publicity in the first place. I'm certain that if Bitcoin hadn't recovered from it's huge crash a couple of years ago you wouldn't see nearly as much Blockchain this and Blockchain that everywhere. Conversely if you look at cryptocurrency enthusiast forums they use these news articles about big companies investing money and resources into "the blockchain" as proof that there's some high intrinsic value to the technology and to justify a very high valuation and pump it even more, especially to newcomers. "IBM is going to create a blockchain, BUY BUY BUY!" It results in a big spiral of hype enabling scams enabling hype enabling scams... Meanwhile as far as I can see the only practical use cases of cryptocurrencies and even "the blockchain" at large is unbridled speculation, pyramid schemes and buying illegal stuff online. All that while expanding a ridiculous amount of energy mining the damn thing.

phs318u 8y ago

Well, sir, there's nothing on earth Like a genuine, bona-fide, Electrified, blockchain. What'd I say? Blockchain. What's it called? Blockchain. That's right! Blockchain. Blockchain Blockchain Blockchain I hear their energy use makes fans whir loud. It's as energy efficient as a GPU cloud. Is there a chance a fork could bring the end? Not on your life, my Nerdy friend. What about us brain-dead slobs? You'll be given cushy MLM jobs Were you sent here by the ICO Devil? No good sir, I'm on the level. The wheels came off my project plan. Take my ASIC, my good man. I swear it's Company's only choice. Throw up your hands and raise your voice. Blockchain. What's it called? Blockchain. Once again. Blockchain. But our product quality is still all broken. Sorry Bob, the mob has spoken. Blockchain! Blockchain! Blockchain! Blockchain! Block, d'oh! (with apologies to The Simpsons).

jon_richards 8y ago
You aren't far off. Remember the bitconnect guy?
Balgair 8y ago
Phil Hartman, you are still missed! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Hartman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Hartman

havkom 8y ago

We now live in the information age. Blockchains and AI will transform everyday life as well as specific sectors such as health care and trade. Imagine walking in to a Starbucks café, order a cup of coffee, digitally signing a payment transaction on your mobile or laptop and then wait for it to be confirmed by the Blockchain while enjoying the hot cup of coffee you have ordered. What is more, think about AI, you will not need to talk to the staff to place an order for your coffee. The staff can relax and watch you make gestures to a camera. They will be able to read on a screen if you’d like it white or black. I think the article is too negative and does not see the big picture of transformation that is going on (as exemplified above).

Scarblac 8y ago
> Imagine walking in to a Starbucks café, order a cup of coffee, digitally signing a payment transaction on your mobile or laptop and then wait for it to be confirmed by the Blockchain while enjoying the hot cup of coffee you have ordered. You could do the the exact same thing now with credit cards, except the waiting. And then you could get your money back if the coffee sucked, and you wouldn't lose all your money if someone happened to steal your private key .
- hopfog 8y ago
  Pretty sure it was sarcasm.
  - Scarblac 8y ago
    Probably, but it's hard to tell in this debate where believers constantly have to rely on forgetting about existing technology completely.
  - wool_gather 8y ago
    It's important to keep Poe's law in mind when you're posting plain-text parody; you don't have tone of voice and body language to help convey your real intent.
lxg 8y ago

davidgerard 8y ago

I got to counter this sort of hype to a room full of bankers last week. It had the right effect, I'm pleased to say. Slides: https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2018/04/19/welcome-to-the-blockchain-slides-from-berenbergs-blockchain-from-hype-to-reality/ https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2018/04/19/welcome-to-t...

55555 8y ago
I enjoyed this. Nice presentation.

Scarblac 8y ago

People believing the hype having an amazing willingness to forget about all the other technology that has already existed for decades.

aquadrop 8y ago

Yep, that puzzles me, why so many people just accept "blockchain helped us to do that" without asking how exactly it did. Blockchain itself is really new interesting technology which opens new opportunities, but I'm afraid its real usage and advance can be slowed by all that hype around with snake oil-like offerings.

ThomPete 8y ago

Imagine talking about TCP/IP in the late 1980ies. This is great but mostly limited to academia. The blockchain isn't interesting as a business case any more than TCP/IP was. The blockchain is the foundation of a new decentralized infrastructure for the digital space (which physical properties), but we still haven't "opened up the internet" to the public.

Yizahi 8y ago
Let me fix this for you - "Imagine talking about IPX in the late 1980ies. The blockchain isn't interesting as a business case any more than IPX was."
- ThomPete 8y ago
  Care to elaborate? Not sure I understand.
  - Yizahi 8y ago
    IPX was a rather popular internet protocol in the late 80s, it was a TCP/IP competitor and during 90s it was often present in application configurations as a equivalent of TCP/IP, usually only these 2, no other choices. It wasn't really scalable and completely lost to TCP/IP soon. You present blockchain as a new "TCP/IP" (meaning successful technology) but it might as well be a new "IPX", left on the margins of history books after a decade of struggle. Currently nobody knows for sure.
    - ThomPete 8y ago
      The blockchain is nearing it's 10th anniversary with no sign of slowing down when it comes to people investing time in it. Furthermore as far as I am aware there is not BlockchainX
- ska 8y ago
  Thank you. That's the key acknowledgement missing from nearly all the breathless descriptions of "where this is going".

gldalmaso 8y ago

I was at a similar conference last week and the same thing happened and the same IBM case that tracked produce supply chain was presented. The same "wow" moment was shared when they said they can now track the origin of a product in under 2 seconds where before it took them a week. I happen to work in a product that manages produce traceability, and I can confirm that it is quite within the realm of possibility to track produce in under 2 seconds with a simple web app and a relational database. We have been doing it for about 10 years. To add, the produce supply chain is full of connectivity and digital literacy issues, so I would venture a guess that a blockchain implementation would generate a lot of attrition on the operations side of things. Another point of concern is performance since this is a fast moving supply chain due to the product short shelf life. It was interesting to see how this audience thinks that blockchain somehow "solves" traceability when this has been going on in several different forms in a wide array of different industries with specific needs. They seem to also think that the right way to do it is with IoT and smart contracts, as if it were just a step away to push such a solution to an existing supply chain. It keeps me up at night that one day a top-down decision will come that says we must a have a blockchain solution because market, or new competitors will bloom in the face of absurd amount of money being thrown at blockchain solutions and take market share. I imagine that 5 years from now, the winners of today's hype battles will be the losers when they have to maintain an overly complex inflexible solution for many years more.

mgkimsal 8y ago
> I happen to work in a product that manages produce traceability, and I can confirm that it is quite within the realm of possibility to track produce in under 2 seconds with a simple web app and a relational database. We have been doing it for about 10 years. But now IBM can do it in 2 seconds as well! This may create a big boon for "DB2->blockchain" conversion contracts. We still seem to be in this weird period with blockchain stuff where it's a neat idea, but the problems people are tackling with it are mostly... mild variations of solved problems so far. This may be understandable - these are problems which are known to have value, and as new companies want to solve these problems, they may opt for a blockchain-based version vs traditional "old school" relational db. But there may also be limited value there compared to old school version. This feels a bit like "key value store" systems vs databases. There was (is?) a lot of hype around schemaless and "lightweight" KV stores, but most of the problems are also solved by intelligent use of SQL. Ditto for the XML-databases rage from ... 12-15 years ago.

wemdyjreichert 8y ago

It's even worse among start-ups. My VC friends tell me than almost every. Single. Venture they see has ai/ml bolted onto it, often with no real purpose.

Sangermaine 8y ago

>I was surprised at how blockchain was being touted as the next technological revolution (and very light on the details) If you're surprised by this you must not have gotten online much in the last 10 years, especially on this site. Blockchain technology has been heralded as the next great revolution in human society that will transform all aspects of human existence and usher in an endless golden era of freedom and prosperity.