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I just have been at OSCON, and they were talking about blockchain all the time, blockchain this, blockchain that, private blockchain, enterprise blockchain, blo

by smsm42 8y ago

I just have been at OSCON, and they were talking about blockchain all the time, blockchain this, blockchain that, private blockchain, enterprise blockchain, blockchain plus this thing and blockchain on top of that thing. But still I couldn't figure out or find any explanation how anything of it would be useful for the member of the public, and indeed how it can work sustainably without the hype that would drive the cost sky high and makes people invest into mining hoping to cash out one day. And all hype ends eventually...

mortdeus 8y ago
blockchain is useful outside the context of cryptocurrencies because it represents a verifiable chain of custody. For example, imagine how blockchain could solve the problem of a patient who has control of their health records. In the current system we have an issue where anytime you move somewhere away from your doctor, the new doctor you see has to retrieve records directly from your doctor because there is no way to verify that the records you would present to the new doctor are the most up to date records. If your doctor gave you your records from before your last visit, and say during your last visit he wrote into your files that you no longer needed opiates for pain management, but you are addicted and want the pills still. Well if you have outdated records and take them to a new doctor you might be able to still receive the drugs, despite the fact that the doctor that initially diagnosed you took you off them. This is why most states require by law that they obtain records directly from the source. To avoid being able to scam the system. Now imagine what happens if your doctor dies, his practice is shut down for whatever reason, or for some other reason your records become virtually unobtainable. What do you do then? Go through the entire process of trying to get a doctor to re-diagnose you for an ailment that has already seen years of therapy and might no longer be as obviously in need of say pain therapy? It's a problem. And something that blockchain could fix better than just having some federally regulated centralized medical record repository that in it's very nature allows the government or any bad actor a straightforward method to hack into and invade your privacy. Blockchain allows you to maintain personal and private control of your records, while allowing a doctor to consult the blockchain network of doctors, to verify that the chain of custody of your medical history is up to date.
- s_m_t 8y ago
  Can't you do the same thing with a simple chain of hashs a la version control?? Why would you need distributed consensus on a patient's health record. My understanding is that Blockchains only make sense in a low trust distributed environment... If you have that low of trust in your doctor it doesn't even make sense to show up.
  - gibsons 8y ago
    I think it starts to make sense if you can hold your data and only it share it using hashes of that data without exposing it. For example, I could hold the private key to my DNA, where each strand would be hashed allowing me to share portions of my DNA data with companies without sharing the entire thing. And it makes sense to do that over a public ledger.
    - lvs 8y ago
      But the hash of health data isn't informative. It doesn't make sense for a doctor to view, for example, the hash of a blood test result. They need to see the actual result, not its hash. The same thing is true of DNA sequencing results. The only thing I could learn from the hash of a DNA sequence is that it's different from one I have in a database. But I need to know exactly how it is different -- precisely the clear text content of the sequence -- for that to be useful information for a patient or for research.
    - smsm42 8y ago
      > And it makes sense to do that over a public ledger. Why? It makes much more sense to keep the data to yourself, I do not see any advantage in making it public and intermingling it with data about other people.
- greggman 8y ago
  How does block chain solve this problem any more than a plain old text file with your medical history? IIUC the only thing keeping bitcoin's blockchain trustworthy is millions of people mining new coins and therefore distributively verifying the blockchain. Who would be doing that for your medical records and what would their incentive be to do it?
arisAlexis 8y ago
doesn't seem that you have done a lot of research on the subject really.
- smsm42 8y ago
  You are wrong, I did a lot of research, but you obviously did so much more that it would be easy for you to answer my questions. Hopefully, one day your busy schedule would allow you to do it. It is a pity for now it only allowed to post a content-free comment.
  - arisAlexis 8y ago
    should get you thinking why there is so much hate for blockchain and at least be a contrarian here. What can I tell you? Read books about Bitcoin and Ethereum? The "how blockchain will help people" is a huge subject. Did you spend hours/days/months thinking about how this can affect governments, global title deeds, transparent balance sheets, supply chains and well...voting too? If you think you ever in your life had to deal with corruption or simple mistakes then you can think of a blockchain solution. Is that what you wanted to hear? Asking about "how the internet will affect our lives" in 1995 would be the same, but it would be better first to read about what exactly it is. So you went to this OSCON..
    - smsm42 8y ago
      > should get you thinking why there is so much hate for blockchain Where "there"? I haven't seen hate anywhere. > Read books about Bitcoin and Ethereum? I know what Bitcoin and Ethereum are. What I don't know is what they are useful for in the real world (except, obviously, speculating on Bitcoin or ETH prices. Well, I guess buying/selling drugs with them online must be pretty good too, and malware authors love it... what else?). If you know books that cover that, you are welcome to suggest. > The "how blockchain will help people" is a huge subject I do not ask you to cover 100%. I ask you (and anybody else, of course) to start with 0.01% and then we can proceed from there. But you're not giving me even 0.01% - you tell me "read books, it's huge!". > Did you spend hours/days/months thinking about how this can affect governments, I must admit I didn't spend months thinking about it. But people who claim they know answers to these questions surely did, didn't they? So where are those answers? I want to hear them. I want to see a good substantial proof why blockchain voting is better than plain old voting and how it is sustainable on the scale of a country like the US, in the long run. > If you think you ever in your life had to deal with corruption or simple mistakes then you can think of a blockchain solution. This is a point I know somebody tries to sell me a nice vial of snake oil. Corruption is human nature, and if you think some cleverly arranged crypto is going to fix it, you have some surprises coming your way. But ok, maybe I'm just stupid and cynical and you're smart - tell me how blockchain fixes corruption. Don't give 1000 examples - give three best ones you can think of. > Asking about "how the internet will affect our lives" in 1995 would be the same If you asked me how internet will affect our lives in 1995, I could talk to you for days with specific examples. Surely, some of them would be wrong, and some of what happened I couldn't predict in my wildest dreams. But by then it was clear there's a big thing coming, even if not as big as "old economy does not apply anymore". I don't see why a series of hashes plus a good marketing strategy allowing to sell those hashes to people who hope to resell them to the next greater fool equals big thing. Maybe it's because I'm stupid - in this case, it'd be easy to show me some conclusive examples. So far I've see a lot of vague handwaving and very little specifics. Which makes me even more suspicious.

by smsm42 8y ago

mortdeus 8y ago

blockchain is useful outside the context of cryptocurrencies because it represents a verifiable chain of custody. For example, imagine how blockchain could solve the problem of a patient who has control of their health records. In the current system we have an issue where anytime you move somewhere away from your doctor, the new doctor you see has to retrieve records directly from your doctor because there is no way to verify that the records you would present to the new doctor are the most up to date records. If your doctor gave you your records from before your last visit, and say during your last visit he wrote into your files that you no longer needed opiates for pain management, but you are addicted and want the pills still. Well if you have outdated records and take them to a new doctor you might be able to still receive the drugs, despite the fact that the doctor that initially diagnosed you took you off them. This is why most states require by law that they obtain records directly from the source. To avoid being able to scam the system. Now imagine what happens if your doctor dies, his practice is shut down for whatever reason, or for some other reason your records become virtually unobtainable. What do you do then? Go through the entire process of trying to get a doctor to re-diagnose you for an ailment that has already seen years of therapy and might no longer be as obviously in need of say pain therapy? It's a problem. And something that blockchain could fix better than just having some federally regulated centralized medical record repository that in it's very nature allows the government or any bad actor a straightforward method to hack into and invade your privacy. Blockchain allows you to maintain personal and private control of your records, while allowing a doctor to consult the blockchain network of doctors, to verify that the chain of custody of your medical history is up to date.

s_m_t 8y ago
Can't you do the same thing with a simple chain of hashs a la version control?? Why would you need distributed consensus on a patient's health record. My understanding is that Blockchains only make sense in a low trust distributed environment... If you have that low of trust in your doctor it doesn't even make sense to show up.
- gibsons 8y ago
  I think it starts to make sense if you can hold your data and only it share it using hashes of that data without exposing it. For example, I could hold the private key to my DNA, where each strand would be hashed allowing me to share portions of my DNA data with companies without sharing the entire thing. And it makes sense to do that over a public ledger.
  - lvs 8y ago
    But the hash of health data isn't informative. It doesn't make sense for a doctor to view, for example, the hash of a blood test result. They need to see the actual result, not its hash. The same thing is true of DNA sequencing results. The only thing I could learn from the hash of a DNA sequence is that it's different from one I have in a database. But I need to know exactly how it is different -- precisely the clear text content of the sequence -- for that to be useful information for a patient or for research.
  - smsm42 8y ago
    > And it makes sense to do that over a public ledger. Why? It makes much more sense to keep the data to yourself, I do not see any advantage in making it public and intermingling it with data about other people.
greggman 8y ago
How does block chain solve this problem any more than a plain old text file with your medical history? IIUC the only thing keeping bitcoin's blockchain trustworthy is millions of people mining new coins and therefore distributively verifying the blockchain. Who would be doing that for your medical records and what would their incentive be to do it?

arisAlexis 8y ago

doesn't seem that you have done a lot of research on the subject really.

smsm42 8y ago
You are wrong, I did a lot of research, but you obviously did so much more that it would be easy for you to answer my questions. Hopefully, one day your busy schedule would allow you to do it. It is a pity for now it only allowed to post a content-free comment.
- arisAlexis 8y ago
  should get you thinking why there is so much hate for blockchain and at least be a contrarian here. What can I tell you? Read books about Bitcoin and Ethereum? The "how blockchain will help people" is a huge subject. Did you spend hours/days/months thinking about how this can affect governments, global title deeds, transparent balance sheets, supply chains and well...voting too? If you think you ever in your life had to deal with corruption or simple mistakes then you can think of a blockchain solution. Is that what you wanted to hear? Asking about "how the internet will affect our lives" in 1995 would be the same, but it would be better first to read about what exactly it is. So you went to this OSCON..
  - smsm42 8y ago
    > should get you thinking why there is so much hate for blockchain Where "there"? I haven't seen hate anywhere. > Read books about Bitcoin and Ethereum? I know what Bitcoin and Ethereum are. What I don't know is what they are useful for in the real world (except, obviously, speculating on Bitcoin or ETH prices. Well, I guess buying/selling drugs with them online must be pretty good too, and malware authors love it... what else?). If you know books that cover that, you are welcome to suggest. > The "how blockchain will help people" is a huge subject I do not ask you to cover 100%. I ask you (and anybody else, of course) to start with 0.01% and then we can proceed from there. But you're not giving me even 0.01% - you tell me "read books, it's huge!". > Did you spend hours/days/months thinking about how this can affect governments, I must admit I didn't spend months thinking about it. But people who claim they know answers to these questions surely did, didn't they? So where are those answers? I want to hear them. I want to see a good substantial proof why blockchain voting is better than plain old voting and how it is sustainable on the scale of a country like the US, in the long run. > If you think you ever in your life had to deal with corruption or simple mistakes then you can think of a blockchain solution. This is a point I know somebody tries to sell me a nice vial of snake oil. Corruption is human nature, and if you think some cleverly arranged crypto is going to fix it, you have some surprises coming your way. But ok, maybe I'm just stupid and cynical and you're smart - tell me how blockchain fixes corruption. Don't give 1000 examples - give three best ones you can think of. > Asking about "how the internet will affect our lives" in 1995 would be the same If you asked me how internet will affect our lives in 1995, I could talk to you for days with specific examples. Surely, some of them would be wrong, and some of what happened I couldn't predict in my wildest dreams. But by then it was clear there's a big thing coming, even if not as big as "old economy does not apply anymore". I don't see why a series of hashes plus a good marketing strategy allowing to sell those hashes to people who hope to resell them to the next greater fool equals big thing. Maybe it's because I'm stupid - in this case, it'd be easy to show me some conclusive examples. So far I've see a lot of vague handwaving and very little specifics. Which makes me even more suspicious.