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You can repeat it all the times you want, but it it is still a shortsighted view. “A database and a contract”... but who owns the database? And who enforces th

You can repeat it all the times you want, but it it is still a shortsighted view. “A database and a contract”... but who owns the database? And who enforces the contract? And who owns the actual data? Blockchain provides satisfactory answers to all those problems. I agree 100% with the article in that blockchain is being ‘applied’ to a whole bunch of places that don’t need it. That doesn’t mean that it can’t work well in many other (legal!) scenarios.

pavel_lishin 8y ago
> Blockchain provides satisfactory answers to all those problems. Sort of: > who owns the database? Whoever has the most computational resources, in most implementations. > who enforces the contract? Depends on the contract. If I sell my house via a blockchain contract, a computer isn't going to come and evict me. If I sell you some heroin, or an action figure, or a rare in-game skin, it's still not going to help. > who owns the actual data? Nobody, and that's a problem when data needs to be removed.
- skilgarriff 8y ago
  To be fair, I think most people who have given blockchain an honest 30 minutes of brainstorming aren't arguing for real world assets connected to a chain. I would argue that there is potentially a use case when it comes to things that can be completely represented digitally e.g. money.
  - pavel_lishin 8y ago
    That I agree with. I've seen some pretty interesting proposals for on-chain games. But it still adds new problems. Electricity use, the irrecoverability of data/auth if you lose a key, the inability to erase problematic data.
    - skilgarriff 8y ago
      I'm not sure I'd necessarily call those problems - it's a weird definition I know, but perhaps tradeoffs? 1. On Electricity - It needs to be expensive to try to cheat or steal from the system. Currently with gold you would need to hire a private army to steal from and break into vaults - that's so expensive and crazy that I don't think most people are willing to undertake that risk. Currently I think electricity is the best way to make digital native things expensive. I'm not sold on anything else yet (definitely open to new solutions, but I'm not convinced think PoS is a viable one). 2-3. I think this is an interesting tradeoff. The way I look at it you pick 1 of 2. Either you trust someone or some people to return lost funds/remove "problematic" data or you trust the system in which case those things can never be recovered/removed. I think calling those "problems" might be premature as they could actually be "benefits" depending on how you look at them.
      - arcticbull 8y ago
        Re 1: So why again are we wasting an entire country worth of electricity to secure some numbers? Because we haven't found a good replacement yet doesn't cut it. It's like saying why am I dumping dioxin in the rain gutters? Oh, well, I haven't figured out a better plan so back off, socialist :P Re 2-3: Tell that to customers of Quadriga and MtGox and the countless scammed, those who paid ransom to kidnappers. Everyone who lost their keys. It's a problem, let's face some reality here.
  - LiquidSky 8y ago
    >To be fair, I think most people who have given blockchain an honest 30 minutes of brainstorming aren't arguing for real world assets connected to a chain. The comment above says that the blockchain provides a satisfactory answer to enforcement of contracts. People really do seem to think that contracts made on the blockchain will magically enforce themselves in the real world.
    - WalterSear 8y ago
      Slightly ridiculous. Blockchains enforce the contract on the blockchain. The contracts don't, and can't, concern themselves with anything that is off the blockchain. Once the ether is in your account, the contract is complete.
      - lenticular 8y ago
        They enforce the contract on the blockchain, but that's pretty much irrelevant, since breaking a contract usually doesn't involve anything a blockchain solution would control. As an example, fradulent fish is a huge problem in the fisheries and food industry. At every step of the supply chain, there is temptation to substitute expensive for cheap fish. Most Chilean sea bass you buy isn't actually Chilean sea bass, for example. A lot of people are hyping blockchain as a solution to this serious problem, not appreciating the fact that the technology cannot actually tell different types of whitefish apart. I really would like a solid counterexample where blockchain actually would help, but I've never heard one.
  - notahacker 8y ago
    > To be fair, I think most people who have given blockchain an honest 30 minutes of brainstorming aren't arguing for real world assets connected to a chain You say that, and then look at the number of companies selling blockchain based services promising exactly that, and enterprises paying for projects... It's understandable why as well. Pure "digital world" businesses that blockchain can deliver like provably actuarially fair gambling exist, but they're pretty niche. I'd question whether money can be completely represented without recourse to the outside world - what gives money relatively stable value is the real world enforcement of contracts, debt obligations and taxes. Take those away and whilst your blockchain can validate the integrity of some numbers you hold, you can't guarantee anyone actually exchanges it for anything actually useful in future.
    - skilgarriff 8y ago
      No doubt that there are a lot of people selling those services, but I think they are capitalizing off the fact that a lot of people don't know/spend the time to understand where blockchain actually improves things - and it's no fault of those people. From my understanding, blockchain is essentially "cheap trust" . You can pay the system a fee to trust math rather than a human. Once I learned that, I realized there are very few scenarios where cheap trust is needed. So perhaps I should adjust my first statement with "people who understand blockchain" - although even that's not necessarily fair as it assumes that I "understand" it. I suppose what I'm getting at is that I think it's unfair to look at the number of scammers/people selling "blockchain" services and make an assumption on the industry as a whole. Most of the developers in the space that I know completely write off those people and don't even consider them in the industry. On whether money can be completely represented without recourse to the outside world -> Agreed, I should again amend my statement to say "value". There is no doubt that 1 Bitcoin represents a certain amount of "value" right now and that value has so far proven to be un-censorable. Whether it will be successful money is a different question.
  - sanderjd 8y ago
    I frequently see commercials that must have cost millions of dollars to create and place that make the opposite argument. If what you're saying is true, the whole industry is just selling snake-oil, and (I think?) people are buying it. The more likely scenario, it seems to me, is that lots of these people actually believe in good faith that this is actually useful technology. If you assume that's the case, it makes sense for people to continue pointing out why that may not be true.
    - briatx 8y ago
      > The whole industry is just selling snake-oil, and (I think?) people are buying it. No, not people in the sense of end user customers. The industry is selling snake oil and some investors have bought into it and subsequently promote it. 10 years down the road and they're still trying to find a mainstream use case, but they won't find it because in the end using a blockchain makes everything harder if you are a legal enterprise.
    - arcticbull 8y ago
      Just because a lot of people do something doesn't make it a good idea.
- schoen 8y ago
  > If I sell you [...] a rare in-game skin So what you're saying is, blockchains can't determine whether or not you really have skin in the game? :-)
azernik 8y ago
> who owns the database? A trusted authority with legal obligations of honesty. > And who enforces the contract? The court system. > And who owns the actual data? Ownership of data is a very ill-defined concept and not well-specified by a blockchain system either.
- adfgnionio 8y ago
  >A trusted authority with legal obligations of honesty. It doesn't even need to be that trusted. You can stipulate in the contract that they must stream the log to you and then scream bloody murder if they try to monkey with anything. A blockchain is just a trendy write-ahead-log. You could do this on pretty much any database I know of, but it's a kind of dumb idea.
nsxwolf 8y ago
The database owner owns the database. Lawyers and judges enforce the contracts. Data ownership is stipulated by statute or contract.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
adwn 8y ago
> And who enforces the contract? [...] Blockchain provides satisfactory answers to all those problems. No, it doesn't, not if the contract touches on anything outside the blockchain. At the very least this includes anything physical (physical objects or physical services) and currencies not based on that particalur blockchain.
- bunderbunder 8y ago
  Moreover, blockchain isn't even allowed to be a satisfactory answer to all those problems, except when you're operating in an extra-legal environment. Because, if a court decides that a transaction was illegal and orders you to reverse it, answering, "But the blockchain. . . !" is a great way to land yourself in jail. Which, granted, plenty of anarchists and criminals have moral or practical reasons why they would rather operate in an extra-legal environment. But here we come to the reason why skipping the "as a..." line in your user stories is such an anti-practice: Those are two very specific user profiles. Most the rest of us would like to see QuadrigaCX's clients get their money back.
  - arcticbull 8y ago
    In some respects this is particularly useful in a criminal setting due to the US legal systems doctrine of un-clean hands. You can't sue your drug dealer for failing to deliver as agreed, for instance. As such, the blockchain is effectively the stand-in as you can't get sued by your counterparty over illegal transactions anyways, and the judge won't order you to reverse them.
    - Skunkleton 8y ago
      But if you are dealing drugs, and the judge says to hand over the funds, you better believe that no amount of "blockchain" will keep those funds under your control.
      - arcticbull 8y ago
        Hahaha agreed
dnautics 8y ago
Exactly. Not every issue where you have a fuzzy notion of trust is a legal one.
adfgnionio 8y ago
>but who owns the database? And who enforces the contract? And who owns the actual data? The answer is the same to all three questions: the Chinese government.
jVinc 8y ago
> but who owns the database? And who enforces the contract? And who owns the actual data? > Blockchain provides satisfactory answers to all those problems. What problems? I mean your arguing like something like public transportation is an impossibility without blockchain backing because: "Who owns the stations, who enforces the schedules and who owns the actual busses?" Those are not problems. They are all just questions that are always insanely easy to answer in the specific case. With your banking credits, who owns the database? the bank, who enforces the contracts? the legal system? And who owns the actual data? Depending on law, there's ownership relations between yourself and the bank. You an way to many crypto proponents are arguing like ownership rights, legal systems and databases don't exist outside of blockchain based solutions.
- shepardrtc 8y ago
  But what if two banks are transferring money between themselves? Which bank owns the database? Why should the other bank trust that database?
  - toomuchtodo 8y ago
    Trusted third party owned by the banks, or providing audited services to the banks. Banks trust the third party because contracts are enforced by law as well as federal and industry regulations. Ain't no judge gonna throw up is hands and go "well, the smart contract says so, my hands are tied!". Blockchain doesn't solve anything where there is a functioning legal framework. You can't use technology to solve a problem that isn't a technology problem.
    - scott_s 8y ago
      Agreed. I phrase this as "technology does not solve civil problems" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17809559 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17809559).
    - mattkevan 8y ago
      It doesn’t solve anything if there isn’t a functioning legal framework either. You still have to trust the other party will abide by the results of the smart contract. If there is no legal framework they could just shoot you and have done with it, if they didn’t like the result. Smart contracts and blockchains are still laws, just laws for people who don’t like some of the existing ones. Numerical rather than societal. If there’s no rule of law, then blockchain laws can’t exist either.
zby 8y ago
"Blockchain provides satisfactory answers to all those problems." - mostly by hand waving. The blockchain model works in the case of cryptocurrencies - because it is subsidized massively by the block rewards. It is very elegant solution - every party can join the system and leave when it wants, no need for any contracts. It is also very surprising that this can be done and that ignited the imagination, but none of the non-currency blockchain projects that I have heard about want to use that model - because of the enormous cost. They want something called 'private blockchains' with no PoW or any other mechanism relying on coin minting - but if the blockchain maintenance is not subsidized by new coins - then you need contracts for that. And it gets much less elegant. Blockchains are also very complex systems with huge attack surfaces, because they are build around complex incentives structures. Private blockchains don't have the elegance of the public, free to access for everyone blockchains, but they still have the complexity.
kurtisc 8y ago
To go off topic: Why do you (and others) call the technology itself 'blockchain', singular? The Bitcoin blockchain and the Ethereum blockchain are fully separate so to describe a set containing both I'd say 'blockchains'. If someone asked my what technology they used, I'd say 'a blockchain'. But my usage is not what I see from advocates.

pavel_lishin 8y ago

> Blockchain provides satisfactory answers to all those problems. Sort of: > who owns the database? Whoever has the most computational resources, in most implementations. > who enforces the contract? Depends on the contract. If I sell my house via a blockchain contract, a computer isn't going to come and evict me. If I sell you some heroin, or an action figure, or a rare in-game skin, it's still not going to help. > who owns the actual data? Nobody, and that's a problem when data needs to be removed.

skilgarriff 8y ago
To be fair, I think most people who have given blockchain an honest 30 minutes of brainstorming aren't arguing for real world assets connected to a chain. I would argue that there is potentially a use case when it comes to things that can be completely represented digitally e.g. money.
- pavel_lishin 8y ago
  That I agree with. I've seen some pretty interesting proposals for on-chain games. But it still adds new problems. Electricity use, the irrecoverability of data/auth if you lose a key, the inability to erase problematic data.
  - skilgarriff 8y ago
    I'm not sure I'd necessarily call those problems - it's a weird definition I know, but perhaps tradeoffs? 1. On Electricity - It needs to be expensive to try to cheat or steal from the system. Currently with gold you would need to hire a private army to steal from and break into vaults - that's so expensive and crazy that I don't think most people are willing to undertake that risk. Currently I think electricity is the best way to make digital native things expensive. I'm not sold on anything else yet (definitely open to new solutions, but I'm not convinced think PoS is a viable one). 2-3. I think this is an interesting tradeoff. The way I look at it you pick 1 of 2. Either you trust someone or some people to return lost funds/remove "problematic" data or you trust the system in which case those things can never be recovered/removed. I think calling those "problems" might be premature as they could actually be "benefits" depending on how you look at them.
    - arcticbull 8y ago
      Re 1: So why again are we wasting an entire country worth of electricity to secure some numbers? Because we haven't found a good replacement yet doesn't cut it. It's like saying why am I dumping dioxin in the rain gutters? Oh, well, I haven't figured out a better plan so back off, socialist :P Re 2-3: Tell that to customers of Quadriga and MtGox and the countless scammed, those who paid ransom to kidnappers. Everyone who lost their keys. It's a problem, let's face some reality here.
- LiquidSky 8y ago
  >To be fair, I think most people who have given blockchain an honest 30 minutes of brainstorming aren't arguing for real world assets connected to a chain. The comment above says that the blockchain provides a satisfactory answer to enforcement of contracts. People really do seem to think that contracts made on the blockchain will magically enforce themselves in the real world.
  - WalterSear 8y ago
    Slightly ridiculous. Blockchains enforce the contract on the blockchain. The contracts don't, and can't, concern themselves with anything that is off the blockchain. Once the ether is in your account, the contract is complete.
    - lenticular 8y ago
      They enforce the contract on the blockchain, but that's pretty much irrelevant, since breaking a contract usually doesn't involve anything a blockchain solution would control. As an example, fradulent fish is a huge problem in the fisheries and food industry. At every step of the supply chain, there is temptation to substitute expensive for cheap fish. Most Chilean sea bass you buy isn't actually Chilean sea bass, for example. A lot of people are hyping blockchain as a solution to this serious problem, not appreciating the fact that the technology cannot actually tell different types of whitefish apart. I really would like a solid counterexample where blockchain actually would help, but I've never heard one.
- notahacker 8y ago
  > To be fair, I think most people who have given blockchain an honest 30 minutes of brainstorming aren't arguing for real world assets connected to a chain You say that, and then look at the number of companies selling blockchain based services promising exactly that, and enterprises paying for projects... It's understandable why as well. Pure "digital world" businesses that blockchain can deliver like provably actuarially fair gambling exist, but they're pretty niche. I'd question whether money can be completely represented without recourse to the outside world - what gives money relatively stable value is the real world enforcement of contracts, debt obligations and taxes. Take those away and whilst your blockchain can validate the integrity of some numbers you hold, you can't guarantee anyone actually exchanges it for anything actually useful in future.
  - skilgarriff 8y ago
    No doubt that there are a lot of people selling those services, but I think they are capitalizing off the fact that a lot of people don't know/spend the time to understand where blockchain actually improves things - and it's no fault of those people. From my understanding, blockchain is essentially "cheap trust" . You can pay the system a fee to trust math rather than a human. Once I learned that, I realized there are very few scenarios where cheap trust is needed. So perhaps I should adjust my first statement with "people who understand blockchain" - although even that's not necessarily fair as it assumes that I "understand" it. I suppose what I'm getting at is that I think it's unfair to look at the number of scammers/people selling "blockchain" services and make an assumption on the industry as a whole. Most of the developers in the space that I know completely write off those people and don't even consider them in the industry. On whether money can be completely represented without recourse to the outside world -> Agreed, I should again amend my statement to say "value". There is no doubt that 1 Bitcoin represents a certain amount of "value" right now and that value has so far proven to be un-censorable. Whether it will be successful money is a different question.
- sanderjd 8y ago
  I frequently see commercials that must have cost millions of dollars to create and place that make the opposite argument. If what you're saying is true, the whole industry is just selling snake-oil, and (I think?) people are buying it. The more likely scenario, it seems to me, is that lots of these people actually believe in good faith that this is actually useful technology. If you assume that's the case, it makes sense for people to continue pointing out why that may not be true.
  - briatx 8y ago
    > The whole industry is just selling snake-oil, and (I think?) people are buying it. No, not people in the sense of end user customers. The industry is selling snake oil and some investors have bought into it and subsequently promote it. 10 years down the road and they're still trying to find a mainstream use case, but they won't find it because in the end using a blockchain makes everything harder if you are a legal enterprise.
  - arcticbull 8y ago
    Just because a lot of people do something doesn't make it a good idea.
schoen 8y ago
> If I sell you [...] a rare in-game skin So what you're saying is, blockchains can't determine whether or not you really have skin in the game? :-)

azernik 8y ago

> who owns the database? A trusted authority with legal obligations of honesty. > And who enforces the contract? The court system. > And who owns the actual data? Ownership of data is a very ill-defined concept and not well-specified by a blockchain system either.

adfgnionio 8y ago
>A trusted authority with legal obligations of honesty. It doesn't even need to be that trusted. You can stipulate in the contract that they must stream the log to you and then scream bloody murder if they try to monkey with anything. A blockchain is just a trendy write-ahead-log. You could do this on pretty much any database I know of, but it's a kind of dumb idea.

nsxwolf 8y ago

The database owner owns the database. Lawyers and judges enforce the contracts. Data ownership is stipulated by statute or contract.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

adwn 8y ago

> And who enforces the contract? [...] Blockchain provides satisfactory answers to all those problems. No, it doesn't, not if the contract touches on anything outside the blockchain. At the very least this includes anything physical (physical objects or physical services) and currencies not based on that particalur blockchain.

bunderbunder 8y ago
Moreover, blockchain isn't even allowed to be a satisfactory answer to all those problems, except when you're operating in an extra-legal environment. Because, if a court decides that a transaction was illegal and orders you to reverse it, answering, "But the blockchain. . . !" is a great way to land yourself in jail. Which, granted, plenty of anarchists and criminals have moral or practical reasons why they would rather operate in an extra-legal environment. But here we come to the reason why skipping the "as a..." line in your user stories is such an anti-practice: Those are two very specific user profiles. Most the rest of us would like to see QuadrigaCX's clients get their money back.
- arcticbull 8y ago
  In some respects this is particularly useful in a criminal setting due to the US legal systems doctrine of un-clean hands. You can't sue your drug dealer for failing to deliver as agreed, for instance. As such, the blockchain is effectively the stand-in as you can't get sued by your counterparty over illegal transactions anyways, and the judge won't order you to reverse them.
  - Skunkleton 8y ago
    But if you are dealing drugs, and the judge says to hand over the funds, you better believe that no amount of "blockchain" will keep those funds under your control.
    - arcticbull 8y ago
      Hahaha agreed

dnautics 8y ago

Exactly. Not every issue where you have a fuzzy notion of trust is a legal one.

adfgnionio 8y ago

>but who owns the database? And who enforces the contract? And who owns the actual data? The answer is the same to all three questions: the Chinese government.

jVinc 8y ago

> but who owns the database? And who enforces the contract? And who owns the actual data? > Blockchain provides satisfactory answers to all those problems. What problems? I mean your arguing like something like public transportation is an impossibility without blockchain backing because: "Who owns the stations, who enforces the schedules and who owns the actual busses?" Those are not problems. They are all just questions that are always insanely easy to answer in the specific case. With your banking credits, who owns the database? the bank, who enforces the contracts? the legal system? And who owns the actual data? Depending on law, there's ownership relations between yourself and the bank. You an way to many crypto proponents are arguing like ownership rights, legal systems and databases don't exist outside of blockchain based solutions.

shepardrtc 8y ago
But what if two banks are transferring money between themselves? Which bank owns the database? Why should the other bank trust that database?
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  Trusted third party owned by the banks, or providing audited services to the banks. Banks trust the third party because contracts are enforced by law as well as federal and industry regulations. Ain't no judge gonna throw up is hands and go "well, the smart contract says so, my hands are tied!". Blockchain doesn't solve anything where there is a functioning legal framework. You can't use technology to solve a problem that isn't a technology problem.
  - scott_s 8y ago
    Agreed. I phrase this as "technology does not solve civil problems" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17809559 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17809559).
  - mattkevan 8y ago
    It doesn’t solve anything if there isn’t a functioning legal framework either. You still have to trust the other party will abide by the results of the smart contract. If there is no legal framework they could just shoot you and have done with it, if they didn’t like the result. Smart contracts and blockchains are still laws, just laws for people who don’t like some of the existing ones. Numerical rather than societal. If there’s no rule of law, then blockchain laws can’t exist either.

zby 8y ago

"Blockchain provides satisfactory answers to all those problems." - mostly by hand waving. The blockchain model works in the case of cryptocurrencies - because it is subsidized massively by the block rewards. It is very elegant solution - every party can join the system and leave when it wants, no need for any contracts. It is also very surprising that this can be done and that ignited the imagination, but none of the non-currency blockchain projects that I have heard about want to use that model - because of the enormous cost. They want something called 'private blockchains' with no PoW or any other mechanism relying on coin minting - but if the blockchain maintenance is not subsidized by new coins - then you need contracts for that. And it gets much less elegant. Blockchains are also very complex systems with huge attack surfaces, because they are build around complex incentives structures. Private blockchains don't have the elegance of the public, free to access for everyone blockchains, but they still have the complexity.

kurtisc 8y ago

To go off topic: Why do you (and others) call the technology itself 'blockchain', singular? The Bitcoin blockchain and the Ethereum blockchain are fully separate so to describe a set containing both I'd say 'blockchains'. If someone asked my what technology they used, I'd say 'a blockchain'. But my usage is not what I see from advocates.