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I am constantly surprised by this point of view. Blockchain is a solution to a number of problems that were previously unsolvable, yet so much of the discourse

I am constantly surprised by this point of view. Blockchain is a solution to a number of problems that were previously unsolvable, yet so much of the discourse is around the idea that decentralised trust doesn't really solve any useful problems. True many of the applications are hype, but we need to recognise these for what they are and move on to more interesting things. To me the best example is the travel industry. Decades ago a small number of companies managed to get manual back office systems moved to centralised booking and reservation systems. This had a huge impact on the ability to sell inventory and open up the world of online travel agencies. These centralised platforms are still around and they are now a huge problem. The software is bloated, complicated and slow, integrating with any GDS is painful and only ever allowed on their terms. It is amazing to me the amount of time and effort and startups that have gone into just trying to find the cheapest flight available. This is fertile ground for decentralised trust. Having a local copy of the live flight inventory or a large aggregate set of hotel inventory would revolutionise the travel industry. Sure there are also applications around settlement and financing, but to me the most exciting thing is the ability to build customer applications on large sets of provably correct, trusted data. And to do this freely in the manner you chose with the technology you chose.

JustFinishedBSG 8y ago
> Blockchain is a solution to a number of problems that were previously unsolvable, Name one.
- nannal 8y ago
  Byzantine Generals Problem?
  - spamizbad 8y ago
    Is there a formal proof of that yet? (Not being sarcastic, genuinely curious)
- dorgo 8y ago
  Paying for porn without revealing identity
edanm 8y ago
> I am constantly surprised by this point of view. Blockchain is a solution to a number of problems that were previously unsolvable, yet so much of the discourse is around the idea that decentralised trust doesn't really solve any useful problems. Those two things aren't mutually exclusive. Blockchain solved some very interesting technical problems, much like a lot of advanced math might do. But as you pointed out, the discourse is around whether or not blockchain solved any useful problems, not just interesting problems. Like others, I have yet to be convinced of a use case for which blockchain is the best solution (other than cryptocurrencies).
Theodores 8y ago
I was with you on this application for a while but then I thought back to my own experiences a long time ago supporting hotel booking systems. Regular ecommerce is a walk in the park compared to the complexity of a hotel booking system, even for a single hotel that has a modest quantity of rooms. In broad brush strokes for someone wanting to skim money off people booking hotel rooms by selling rooms cheap (e.g. lastminute.com) the holy blockchain does indeed sound like the answer to all their prayers but it does not do anything to solve the hard problems that cannot be simplified even with a simple country hotel. Only if you have been at the sharp end of fixing hotel booking systems do you appreciate some of the finer points. You really cannot double book rooms and yet every day that simple country guest house might have someone on the phone wanting the same room at the same time that there is someone at the front desk and someone trying to book through lastminute.com. Locking that record is a time critical thing even if the hotel is out in the countryside where nothing ever happens and time moves slowly. That room could also have bookings on it from people that got married there five years previously and are on the way back for their anniversary, therefore there could be a substantial amount of data tied into that slot. Furthermore, that room could be booked but if the guest does not show up before a given time then it is up for sale again. So that availability presented as yes/no on the website is not as simple as a yes/no, there are other provisional states depending on what has been paid and who has showed up. There might not even be the option to bump those guests into a more deluxe room if those more deluxe rooms have someone walk through the door and take them. Ian Dury and the Blockheads probably have better insight and knowledge than a venture capitalist and the blockchains have about how to improve upon the current state of the art when it comes to hotel inventory management. Rome was not built in a day and neither were the booking systems needed to cater for visitors to Rome. It is just not that simple. Fast broadband cannot be relied upon for a lot of hotels, so the idea of updating a blockchain and sending it out to every Tom Dick and Harry chancer on the internet hoping to sell 'cheap rate' rooms with them all being instantly updated is not the hospitality system I would want to be doing support for. If the de-facto was 'decentralized' and I worked in hospitality systems support and a new 'centralized' idea came along I would be straight on that bandwagon and you would not be able to stop me! Maybe it just depends on what end of the telescope you are on. My perspective is the business end, with the dawn starts, skipped break times and extra hours put well into the small hours, fixing real problems for real people with real expectations of service. The people I see in the blockchain space do not have any knowledge of the problem space that their change the world solutions purportedly seek to address, as mentioned I was with you at the start of what you had to say here, but, on second thoughts I don't think that blockchain is a magic bullet even for the simple task of getting a room booked in the smallest of hotels. Furthermore, the task isn't just getting a room booked as a yes/no thing, there is this bigger problem of hotel booking management and centralised systems, well trained staff, hard working staff and technical support is the glue that makes it all work as an apparently 'yes/no' thing. At best blockchain is woefully naive and, from a support perspective, a disaster if ever implemented in this seemingly simple 'use case'.
notahacker 8y ago
Your choice of "the best example" of decentralised trust solving useful problems supports the original poster's contention that the blockchain industry is desperately trying to sell itself as the solution to problems it's badly suited to. Virtually nobody in the travel industry is excited about blockchain, still less as a GDS replacement. Decentralisation and anonymity are useless to the travel industry and from the point of view of the industry players, public access to local copies of all their [current and historical] inventory and reservation data is an alarming bug, not a feature. What they actually want is for a buyer to be able to via an API (i) access the current price for each relevant item of inventory that's currently on sale from lots of providers (ii) update a single private canonical record belonging to the one [necessarily trusted] party they buy from (which may or may not affect the availability of inventory for future queries). The reason the systems are slow is because pricing and routing is incredibly complex and diverse, and the associated datasets are enormous (and often computationally expensive to process even without a layer of cryptographic crap on top). It's something of an understatement to say that turning that into thousands of local copies of an ever-growing blockchain which needs to be updated to account for a million reservations per minute is not going to be an improvement...

JustFinishedBSG 8y ago

> Blockchain is a solution to a number of problems that were previously unsolvable, Name one.

nannal 8y ago
Byzantine Generals Problem?
- spamizbad 8y ago
  Is there a formal proof of that yet? (Not being sarcastic, genuinely curious)
dorgo 8y ago
Paying for porn without revealing identity

edanm 8y ago

> I am constantly surprised by this point of view. Blockchain is a solution to a number of problems that were previously unsolvable, yet so much of the discourse is around the idea that decentralised trust doesn't really solve any useful problems. Those two things aren't mutually exclusive. Blockchain solved some very interesting technical problems, much like a lot of advanced math might do. But as you pointed out, the discourse is around whether or not blockchain solved any useful problems, not just interesting problems. Like others, I have yet to be convinced of a use case for which blockchain is the best solution (other than cryptocurrencies).

Theodores 8y ago

I was with you on this application for a while but then I thought back to my own experiences a long time ago supporting hotel booking systems. Regular ecommerce is a walk in the park compared to the complexity of a hotel booking system, even for a single hotel that has a modest quantity of rooms. In broad brush strokes for someone wanting to skim money off people booking hotel rooms by selling rooms cheap (e.g. lastminute.com) the holy blockchain does indeed sound like the answer to all their prayers but it does not do anything to solve the hard problems that cannot be simplified even with a simple country hotel. Only if you have been at the sharp end of fixing hotel booking systems do you appreciate some of the finer points. You really cannot double book rooms and yet every day that simple country guest house might have someone on the phone wanting the same room at the same time that there is someone at the front desk and someone trying to book through lastminute.com. Locking that record is a time critical thing even if the hotel is out in the countryside where nothing ever happens and time moves slowly. That room could also have bookings on it from people that got married there five years previously and are on the way back for their anniversary, therefore there could be a substantial amount of data tied into that slot. Furthermore, that room could be booked but if the guest does not show up before a given time then it is up for sale again. So that availability presented as yes/no on the website is not as simple as a yes/no, there are other provisional states depending on what has been paid and who has showed up. There might not even be the option to bump those guests into a more deluxe room if those more deluxe rooms have someone walk through the door and take them. Ian Dury and the Blockheads probably have better insight and knowledge than a venture capitalist and the blockchains have about how to improve upon the current state of the art when it comes to hotel inventory management. Rome was not built in a day and neither were the booking systems needed to cater for visitors to Rome. It is just not that simple. Fast broadband cannot be relied upon for a lot of hotels, so the idea of updating a blockchain and sending it out to every Tom Dick and Harry chancer on the internet hoping to sell 'cheap rate' rooms with them all being instantly updated is not the hospitality system I would want to be doing support for. If the de-facto was 'decentralized' and I worked in hospitality systems support and a new 'centralized' idea came along I would be straight on that bandwagon and you would not be able to stop me! Maybe it just depends on what end of the telescope you are on. My perspective is the business end, with the dawn starts, skipped break times and extra hours put well into the small hours, fixing real problems for real people with real expectations of service. The people I see in the blockchain space do not have any knowledge of the problem space that their change the world solutions purportedly seek to address, as mentioned I was with you at the start of what you had to say here, but, on second thoughts I don't think that blockchain is a magic bullet even for the simple task of getting a room booked in the smallest of hotels. Furthermore, the task isn't just getting a room booked as a yes/no thing, there is this bigger problem of hotel booking management and centralised systems, well trained staff, hard working staff and technical support is the glue that makes it all work as an apparently 'yes/no' thing. At best blockchain is woefully naive and, from a support perspective, a disaster if ever implemented in this seemingly simple 'use case'.

notahacker 8y ago

Your choice of "the best example" of decentralised trust solving useful problems supports the original poster's contention that the blockchain industry is desperately trying to sell itself as the solution to problems it's badly suited to. Virtually nobody in the travel industry is excited about blockchain, still less as a GDS replacement. Decentralisation and anonymity are useless to the travel industry and from the point of view of the industry players, public access to local copies of all their [current and historical] inventory and reservation data is an alarming bug, not a feature. What they actually want is for a buyer to be able to via an API (i) access the current price for each relevant item of inventory that's currently on sale from lots of providers (ii) update a single private canonical record belonging to the one [necessarily trusted] party they buy from (which may or may not affect the availability of inventory for future queries). The reason the systems are slow is because pricing and routing is incredibly complex and diverse, and the associated datasets are enormous (and often computationally expensive to process even without a layer of cryptographic crap on top). It's something of an understatement to say that turning that into thousands of local copies of an ever-growing blockchain which needs to be updated to account for a million reservations per minute is not going to be an improvement...