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The term “Smart contracts” (Ethereum/EOS/hyperledger) is often used with wild claims for supply chains and cross border business deals, but why would any real b

The term “Smart contracts” (Ethereum/EOS/hyperledger) is often used with wild claims for supply chains and cross border business deals, but why would any real business want to use a public blockchain? Smart contracts can’t even do anything interesting without a trusted source of data input. The threat model and legal questions of smart contracts are another huge deterrent for most businesses. Latency, throughput, security threats, and cost are all fairly understood with normal databases, yet with blockchain software all of these are measurably worse. Where are the completed successful smart contracts deployed? Why would any person or business want/need to use an existing blockchain when some bug or mining operator might cause a catastrophe of that system, who would they sue for damages? A single user who spent less than $5000 crashed the entire market for Ethereum last summer. Most of the supply of ETH, XMR, BTC and other crypto tokens are owned by a very small population of crypto-oligarchs. It all seems like a marketing scheme to sell cyber beanie babies to people who are unfamiliar with the engineering flaws in distributing computing and the marketing lies from “investors” who need to pump the price on their magic beans.

bonestamp2 8y ago
> why would any real business want to use a public blockchain? I think it is only important for a business when public trust is important. For example, a news agency could publish its articles in a public blockchain so the original article and any updates to that article would forever be auditable from that blockchain.
- chickenfries 8y ago
  Why? News sites don’t even care about maintaining an edit history. They just make minor fixes and leave editors notes when they fix things. News on the block chain is not something anyone wants.
  - simonsaidit 8y ago
    I do. Censorship resistance and removing the ability to rewrite history would be good. even if current media practice is different doesn’t mean it can’t change in the future.
  - liamzebedee 8y ago
    Forbes just recently partnered with Civil, a blockchain journalism project from Consensys Studios, which is the commercial powerhouse of Ethereum’s cofounder.
    - chickenfries 8y ago
      I've worked in publishing, this initiative sounds like many other "save journalism with technology" initiatives that I've seen go nowhere, like the Coral Project. But back to Civil. Why would I care that Forbes is going to publish SOME of their articles on this blockchain? Their site uses HTTPS, I'm always sure that the content I'm looking at actually came from Forbes. I never need to question that the person in their byline is who they say they are, and I'm not sure how a blockchain would help if I didn't: it seems like their big plan is to just put badges on articles? This sounds like a grasp at relevance via blockchain hype. I'm willing to be convinced that I'm wrong, but I feel pretty safe predicting that this will go nowhere. It doesn't solve a problem that Forbes actually has.
  - Fnoord 8y ago
    Precisely, and we already have tools at our disposal for that which also work very well in the news agency example (albeit internally): Wiki and Git. Blockchain adds nothing, and has disadvantages of wasting resources. The only thing the Blockchain has proven to be useful for is cons in the form of speculation, akin to Ponzi scheme. I've seen it argued that it allows people to move away cheaply from bad currencies. Companies like PayPal and Stripe allow for the same already, and they use real currencies.
- mynewtb 8y ago
  So what if a story or bit of information has to be retracted by law? I second my sibling, newspapers have no interest in transparency.
  - JoshTriplett 8y ago
    > So what if a story or bit of information has to be retracted by law? Then the news agency issues a retraction. It's already the case that the Internet will not forget, whether via the Internet Archive or http://www.newsdiffs.org/ http://www.newsdiffs.org/ .
    - mynewtb 8y ago
      How can data be retracted from a blockchain? Both those sites are also subject to laws and can easily retract information if necessary.
      - JoshTriplett 8y ago
        > How can data be retracted from a blockchain? In much the same way data can be retracted from printed copies of newspapers that already have widely circulated copies in both personal and institutional/library hands: by publishing a subsequent retraction later in the chain, like any other change.
        simonsaidit 8y ago
        The change and what was previously there is left for anyone to see in the blockchain.
        manojlds 8y ago
        And printed copies are not?
        simonsaidit 8y ago
- TheDong 8y ago
  Why a blockchain? ipfs [0] already provides persistent immutable links. Creating a torrent with a feed for updates [1] would also provide distributed storage and hashing of the content with the ability to publish updates. Or they could create a git repo and encourage others to mirror the git repo, such that they couldn't rebase away history without those mirrors noticing. Or, and here's a radical idea, they could physically print and deliver papers to people, which means any updates would have to be included as noted amendments in future delivered papers. However, why would any business want to do this? News sites these days are built on complex dynamic content and ads, which is antithetical to distributing the content in any such ways. If you can download just the text of the article, they're losing ad views. If you download the ads too, it now changes each time a new person purchases an ad on their ad network. This is blockchain trying to dream up a problem for publishers which those publishers don't think they have. If they did have that problem, a git repo would be the most mature and simple way to implement it, not "blockchain" which includes nothing as mature as git under its umbrella. [0]: https://ipfs.io/#uses https://ipfs.io/#uses [1]: http://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0039.html http://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0039.html
  - bonestamp2 8y ago
    > This is blockchain trying to dream up a problem for publishers which those publishers don't think they have. Fair enough, it was just an example... maybe a bad example of when public trust is needed for something. But, that level of trust and audibility would be nice in this era of conspiracies and fake news. I remember watching CNN on 9/11 and they reported that Flight 93 was shot down over Pensylvania. Maybe that was bad reporting, maybe it was accurate. But, now I can't find that footage anywhere. I would love to find that footage now. Find out exactly what they said. Find out who their source was. Find out if it was bad reporting with bad sources, or find out if it was something more. Without that footage, it's just hearse and I'm sure we'll never know the truth about it now.
    - TheDong 8y ago
      If only there was a group of people dedicated to archiving content... I dunno, maybe archive.org (aka "The Internet Archive")? They even have a CNN section including a full recording of their broadcast on the morning of 9/11 [0]. I'm not going to waste the time watching this to see if they miss-reported some detail or not because I've got better things to do. I don't see how blockchain helps here still; the problem with storing video is that copyright is complicated and there's a lot of it which costs a lot to store, not that we don't have the means to store and audit it. > that level of trust and audibility would be nice in this era of conspiracies and fake news Being able to see changes to articles doesn't actually help with those problems. Better journalistic practices help. People thinking critically helps. Removing the absurd click-bait headlines we've ended up on might help. Making news not be for-profit might help (related to the former). Changing the format of the fake news doesn't make it any less fake. It seems like blockchain is being used as this idealistic thing which surely, if implemented, would not suffer from as many or more flaws than the status quo, when in reality no blockchain based thing has reached mainstream usability or mainstream users yet (arguably excepting bitcoin). [0]: https://archive.org/details/CNN_20010911_130000_CNN_Live_This_Morning https://archive.org/details/CNN_20010911_130000_CNN_Live_Thi...
- simias 8y ago
  It's exhausting arguing with the same bogus "use cases" every other week but here goes in short: - In your scenario you're not decentralized, you have a clear authority: the news agency - The news agency can broadcast a signed merkle tree of the articles it publishes alongside the normal newspaper/news program etc... For instance through their website. - Anybody who cares about it could maintain a copy of this signed tree locally. - If the news agency censors or edits an article anybody with a copy of the original tree can prove it by showing that their tree has a valid signature from the news agency and yet the hashes don't match. There, problem solved without having to worry about proof of work, proof of stake, transaction costs, 50% attacks of what have you.
  - Slartie 8y ago
    But there's no token required in your suggestion! Don't you understand that you really need a token? How should random people not interested in news articles at all realize 10x capital profits from this if there is no token to buy in a pre-ICO and then pump-and-dump on exchanges?
  - FatalLogic 8y ago
    Or, instead of paying to implement, operate and maintain that system forever, and also hoping that someone independent will store copies forever (because without that independent third party, the news agency's whole system is irrelevant)... maybe they could permanently store a hash of published revisions on a public blockchain for $0.05 each. It's just another option that might turn out to be useful for some. Although, I feel like there are other complications in the news agency use case. For instance, many potential changes to an article are irrelevant to meaning, so they don't imply bad intentions, despite having a totally different hash. If the only copy of an article is on the newspaper's site, then a simple format update a year later could break all the hashes. [edit] I mean so it would become impossible to check whether the article had been changed. A typical hash function doesn't give any sense of edit distance. GP post doesn't seem to consider the apparent need to also keep unchanged copies of the original articles. Those would be much too expensive to store on today's typical blockchains. I'm sure those problems have been discussed before, maybe solved, but I wonder if these issues make this news agency case less suitable for a simple Blockchain implementation?
extrapickles 8y ago
The "best" use of blockchain type technology I have seen is the NIST randomness beacon, though I can't think of many applications other than a lottery or where you need to formally prove you used random numbers to pick something. [0]: https://www.nist.gov/programs-projects/nist-randomness-beacon https://www.nist.gov/programs-projects/nist-randomness-beaco... [1]: https://beacon.nist.gov/home https://beacon.nist.gov/home
xorcist 8y ago
> Smart contracts can’t even do anything interesting without a trusted source of data input At least read the writings of Szabo before you decide what smart contracts are and aren't good for. There are many several interesting applications here and now around trustless atomic swaps. Not necessarily between assets but cryptographic keys in general (for example DRM systems). > It all seems like a marketing scheme to sell cyber beanie babies Well, if it has a marketing budget then it isn't really trustless as there is some central authority to market it. Be careful out there. Rapidly increasing valuations attract scammers like sugar to flies.
dexen 8y ago
Smart contracts can’t even do anything interesting without a trusted source of data input. ...for a certain definition of "doing anything interesting", just as well as "trusted source"*. As the locus of economy shifts more and more away from physical widgets and into information, the value of information goes up in relation to physical widgets. This makes Blockchain a practical, if not all-encompassing, tool for verification. Compare a plain old car - the software onboard is a small fraction of its value - to any half-decent workstation, where the value of software can easily exceed the hardware's value several-fold. Proving I had certain information at certain time point - e.g., a license for the software, or CAD design or other valuable file I've created - can easily provide a lot of value. And in this case "trusted source of information" is the mere fact of existence of a cryptographically secured license file naming me as the licensee at certain time point. Easily securable with the Blockchain.
- judofyr 8y ago
  > Proving I had certain information at certain time point The blockchain solves the problem of proving ownership of a transferable asset. If you just want to prove that you have certain information at a certain time point there are much simpler solutions: Publicly release the hash of a message (let's say: "I created this using the licence key XXX-XXX-XXX" + signature from your private key) on Twitter/Facebook/Github/Archive.org etc. Or even better: Sign a contract and send it to your law firm. Once someone breached a licence/contract you need to involve lawyers/regulators anyway.
  - snissn 8y ago
    an interesting way of describing a crypto blockchain like bitcoin or ethereum is that it's a way of incentivizing the storage and preservation of information. In particular, the information of a transaction from one address to another is attached with it a fee for storing it. Your "much simpler solutions" require a trusted third party that has no financial incentive to keep your information around, and depending on the lifetime of your needs may not persist long enough. 10 years ago your solution may have involved myspace or further back geocities or tripod, which are defunct / have refreshed their databases. Spending under 10 cents on a miner fee to store your hash is also a much better solution and cheaper solution than the lawyer escrow. Lawyer escrows and safes are vulnerable to local information loss that bitcoin/ethereum protects against through federated datastores (lots of important papers stored in the world trade center were destroyed on 9/11).

bonestamp2 8y ago

> why would any real business want to use a public blockchain? I think it is only important for a business when public trust is important. For example, a news agency could publish its articles in a public blockchain so the original article and any updates to that article would forever be auditable from that blockchain.

chickenfries 8y ago
Why? News sites don’t even care about maintaining an edit history. They just make minor fixes and leave editors notes when they fix things. News on the block chain is not something anyone wants.
- simonsaidit 8y ago
  I do. Censorship resistance and removing the ability to rewrite history would be good. even if current media practice is different doesn’t mean it can’t change in the future.
- liamzebedee 8y ago
  Forbes just recently partnered with Civil, a blockchain journalism project from Consensys Studios, which is the commercial powerhouse of Ethereum’s cofounder.
  - chickenfries 8y ago
    I've worked in publishing, this initiative sounds like many other "save journalism with technology" initiatives that I've seen go nowhere, like the Coral Project. But back to Civil. Why would I care that Forbes is going to publish SOME of their articles on this blockchain? Their site uses HTTPS, I'm always sure that the content I'm looking at actually came from Forbes. I never need to question that the person in their byline is who they say they are, and I'm not sure how a blockchain would help if I didn't: it seems like their big plan is to just put badges on articles? This sounds like a grasp at relevance via blockchain hype. I'm willing to be convinced that I'm wrong, but I feel pretty safe predicting that this will go nowhere. It doesn't solve a problem that Forbes actually has.
- Fnoord 8y ago
  Precisely, and we already have tools at our disposal for that which also work very well in the news agency example (albeit internally): Wiki and Git. Blockchain adds nothing, and has disadvantages of wasting resources. The only thing the Blockchain has proven to be useful for is cons in the form of speculation, akin to Ponzi scheme. I've seen it argued that it allows people to move away cheaply from bad currencies. Companies like PayPal and Stripe allow for the same already, and they use real currencies.
mynewtb 8y ago
So what if a story or bit of information has to be retracted by law? I second my sibling, newspapers have no interest in transparency.
- JoshTriplett 8y ago
  > So what if a story or bit of information has to be retracted by law? Then the news agency issues a retraction. It's already the case that the Internet will not forget, whether via the Internet Archive or http://www.newsdiffs.org/ http://www.newsdiffs.org/ .
  - mynewtb 8y ago
    How can data be retracted from a blockchain? Both those sites are also subject to laws and can easily retract information if necessary.
    - JoshTriplett 8y ago
      > How can data be retracted from a blockchain? In much the same way data can be retracted from printed copies of newspapers that already have widely circulated copies in both personal and institutional/library hands: by publishing a subsequent retraction later in the chain, like any other change.
      - simonsaidit 8y ago
        The change and what was previously there is left for anyone to see in the blockchain.
        manojlds 8y ago
        And printed copies are not?
        simonsaidit 8y ago
TheDong 8y ago
Why a blockchain? ipfs [0] already provides persistent immutable links. Creating a torrent with a feed for updates [1] would also provide distributed storage and hashing of the content with the ability to publish updates. Or they could create a git repo and encourage others to mirror the git repo, such that they couldn't rebase away history without those mirrors noticing. Or, and here's a radical idea, they could physically print and deliver papers to people, which means any updates would have to be included as noted amendments in future delivered papers. However, why would any business want to do this? News sites these days are built on complex dynamic content and ads, which is antithetical to distributing the content in any such ways. If you can download just the text of the article, they're losing ad views. If you download the ads too, it now changes each time a new person purchases an ad on their ad network. This is blockchain trying to dream up a problem for publishers which those publishers don't think they have. If they did have that problem, a git repo would be the most mature and simple way to implement it, not "blockchain" which includes nothing as mature as git under its umbrella. [0]: https://ipfs.io/#uses https://ipfs.io/#uses [1]: http://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0039.html http://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0039.html
- bonestamp2 8y ago
  > This is blockchain trying to dream up a problem for publishers which those publishers don't think they have. Fair enough, it was just an example... maybe a bad example of when public trust is needed for something. But, that level of trust and audibility would be nice in this era of conspiracies and fake news. I remember watching CNN on 9/11 and they reported that Flight 93 was shot down over Pensylvania. Maybe that was bad reporting, maybe it was accurate. But, now I can't find that footage anywhere. I would love to find that footage now. Find out exactly what they said. Find out who their source was. Find out if it was bad reporting with bad sources, or find out if it was something more. Without that footage, it's just hearse and I'm sure we'll never know the truth about it now.
  - TheDong 8y ago
    If only there was a group of people dedicated to archiving content... I dunno, maybe archive.org (aka "The Internet Archive")? They even have a CNN section including a full recording of their broadcast on the morning of 9/11 [0]. I'm not going to waste the time watching this to see if they miss-reported some detail or not because I've got better things to do. I don't see how blockchain helps here still; the problem with storing video is that copyright is complicated and there's a lot of it which costs a lot to store, not that we don't have the means to store and audit it. > that level of trust and audibility would be nice in this era of conspiracies and fake news Being able to see changes to articles doesn't actually help with those problems. Better journalistic practices help. People thinking critically helps. Removing the absurd click-bait headlines we've ended up on might help. Making news not be for-profit might help (related to the former). Changing the format of the fake news doesn't make it any less fake. It seems like blockchain is being used as this idealistic thing which surely, if implemented, would not suffer from as many or more flaws than the status quo, when in reality no blockchain based thing has reached mainstream usability or mainstream users yet (arguably excepting bitcoin). [0]: https://archive.org/details/CNN_20010911_130000_CNN_Live_This_Morning https://archive.org/details/CNN_20010911_130000_CNN_Live_Thi...
simias 8y ago
It's exhausting arguing with the same bogus "use cases" every other week but here goes in short: - In your scenario you're not decentralized, you have a clear authority: the news agency - The news agency can broadcast a signed merkle tree of the articles it publishes alongside the normal newspaper/news program etc... For instance through their website. - Anybody who cares about it could maintain a copy of this signed tree locally. - If the news agency censors or edits an article anybody with a copy of the original tree can prove it by showing that their tree has a valid signature from the news agency and yet the hashes don't match. There, problem solved without having to worry about proof of work, proof of stake, transaction costs, 50% attacks of what have you.
- Slartie 8y ago
  But there's no token required in your suggestion! Don't you understand that you really need a token? How should random people not interested in news articles at all realize 10x capital profits from this if there is no token to buy in a pre-ICO and then pump-and-dump on exchanges?
- FatalLogic 8y ago
  Or, instead of paying to implement, operate and maintain that system forever, and also hoping that someone independent will store copies forever (because without that independent third party, the news agency's whole system is irrelevant)... maybe they could permanently store a hash of published revisions on a public blockchain for $0.05 each. It's just another option that might turn out to be useful for some. Although, I feel like there are other complications in the news agency use case. For instance, many potential changes to an article are irrelevant to meaning, so they don't imply bad intentions, despite having a totally different hash. If the only copy of an article is on the newspaper's site, then a simple format update a year later could break all the hashes. [edit] I mean so it would become impossible to check whether the article had been changed. A typical hash function doesn't give any sense of edit distance. GP post doesn't seem to consider the apparent need to also keep unchanged copies of the original articles. Those would be much too expensive to store on today's typical blockchains. I'm sure those problems have been discussed before, maybe solved, but I wonder if these issues make this news agency case less suitable for a simple Blockchain implementation?

extrapickles 8y ago

The "best" use of blockchain type technology I have seen is the NIST randomness beacon, though I can't think of many applications other than a lottery or where you need to formally prove you used random numbers to pick something. [0]: https://www.nist.gov/programs-projects/nist-randomness-beacon https://www.nist.gov/programs-projects/nist-randomness-beaco... [1]: https://beacon.nist.gov/home https://beacon.nist.gov/home

xorcist 8y ago

> Smart contracts can’t even do anything interesting without a trusted source of data input At least read the writings of Szabo before you decide what smart contracts are and aren't good for. There are many several interesting applications here and now around trustless atomic swaps. Not necessarily between assets but cryptographic keys in general (for example DRM systems). > It all seems like a marketing scheme to sell cyber beanie babies Well, if it has a marketing budget then it isn't really trustless as there is some central authority to market it. Be careful out there. Rapidly increasing valuations attract scammers like sugar to flies.

dexen 8y ago

Smart contracts can’t even do anything interesting without a trusted source of data input. ...for a certain definition of "doing anything interesting", just as well as "trusted source"*. As the locus of economy shifts more and more away from physical widgets and into information, the value of information goes up in relation to physical widgets. This makes Blockchain a practical, if not all-encompassing, tool for verification. Compare a plain old car - the software onboard is a small fraction of its value - to any half-decent workstation, where the value of software can easily exceed the hardware's value several-fold. Proving I had certain information at certain time point - e.g., a license for the software, or CAD design or other valuable file I've created - can easily provide a lot of value. And in this case "trusted source of information" is the mere fact of existence of a cryptographically secured license file naming me as the licensee at certain time point. Easily securable with the Blockchain.

judofyr 8y ago
> Proving I had certain information at certain time point The blockchain solves the problem of proving ownership of a transferable asset. If you just want to prove that you have certain information at a certain time point there are much simpler solutions: Publicly release the hash of a message (let's say: "I created this using the licence key XXX-XXX-XXX" + signature from your private key) on Twitter/Facebook/Github/Archive.org etc. Or even better: Sign a contract and send it to your law firm. Once someone breached a licence/contract you need to involve lawyers/regulators anyway.
- snissn 8y ago
  an interesting way of describing a crypto blockchain like bitcoin or ethereum is that it's a way of incentivizing the storage and preservation of information. In particular, the information of a transaction from one address to another is attached with it a fee for storing it. Your "much simpler solutions" require a trusted third party that has no financial incentive to keep your information around, and depending on the lifetime of your needs may not persist long enough. 10 years ago your solution may have involved myspace or further back geocities or tripod, which are defunct / have refreshed their databases. Spending under 10 cents on a miner fee to store your hash is also a much better solution and cheaper solution than the lawyer escrow. Lawyer escrows and safes are vulnerable to local information loss that bitcoin/ethereum protects against through federated datastores (lots of important papers stored in the world trade center were destroyed on 9/11).