16 ms·

In my experience - I have done a lot of pre-sales for an IT service company - the use case for blockchain can usually be solved with classical, cheaper and simp

by ToJans 6y ago

In my experience - I have done a lot of pre-sales for an IT service company - the use case for blockchain can usually be solved with classical, cheaper and simpler solutions by having a central trusted authority for storage (like a third-party service provider), and appending using digital signatures. For me personally, blockchain is a solution looking for a problem in most cases...

RicoElectrico 6y ago
Indeed - a blockchain only makes sense in decentralized trustless proof-of-X systems. Everything else could be a Git repository or variation thereof (commit chain vs blockchain).
- Qub3d 6y ago
  Specifically, a Merkle tree[0], which is the hash tree root of both Git and most blockchains. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle_tree https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle_tree
zapdrive 6y ago
In other news, water is wet. Obviously!!!! Blockchain has earned a bad name because of sales people trying to sell it for something it can't do. Blockchain is a very very very inefficient database that removes the need for a central trust authority. That's it's only selling point. You don't need it if you are storing your customer data in a central database.
- chadash 6y ago
  This. How many real use cases are there where you really need to distribute trust? For currency, there's some sense in it. But when i hear things like using blockchain for contracts or for keeping track of supply chain... it always seems like what people really want is just a well organized and reasonably trustworthy third party who can handle this stuff. Does anyone have any specific examples where blockchain would be a better solution?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - whitepaint 6y ago
    Defi
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - phailhaus 6y ago
    Filecoin appears to be an appropriate use case for distributed trust. Haven't really looked into it though.
  - throwaway3699 6y ago
    Supply chain is still reasonable, because you can't really trust any part of it.
    - JumpCrisscross 6y ago
      > Supply chain is still reasonable, because you can't really trust any part of it But the part you can't trust is in the physical realm. The fanciest blockchain won't tell you if the package's contents have been tampered with or pilfered.
    - chewzerita 6y ago
      From my limited knowledge (basically 0) of supply chains, I disagree. (Though I am neutral on the statement "you can't really trust any part of it.") The anecdote I heard was that say you have a blockchain to keep track of your goods shipping on trucks. When the trucks leave and enter a facility their payload is entered into the blockchain. The idea is that it will make sure that every party along the supply chain can say "well I got the next person what they needed" so you can easily put blame on and correct for missing/failing items. Sounds good, right? Well, not so fast. It turns out that some of the items were stolen from a truck (whether by an employee or otherwise). The truck arrives at the next facility, scans in and certifies that they have the proper items and none are the wiser! Hold on, can't they just physically check at each stop to actually make sure that they have the right cargo? Bingo! At that point, what problem does the blockchain actually solve? Blockchain works okay-ish for digital goods (cryptocurrency), but completely falls apart for physical goods.
- agumonkey 6y ago
  my knowledge is near none over the technicalities.. but I had this view that blockchains would be good for planet wide "unattended" data sources.
  - caogecym 6y ago
    something like storing a blog text for thousand years, especially after the author passed away where the blog could not be maintained by the author.
    - agumonkey 6y ago
      no this is not helpful for the flow of the system, more like supply tracking, logistics, farming..
      - jayd16 6y ago
        Except it has no power over the physical world. Just as one can lie on a ledger and say slave labor did not make these resources, so too can some one lie onto a block chain about where resources came from. The chains can only really enforce protection on their own currencies, no?
        agumonkey 6y ago
        It was not about the initial data but the overall coverage and self management. How many businesses still have their own ad-hoc half manual uninteroperable process and apps ?
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  More importantly, you don’t need it if your domain effectively creates a centralized authority. All of the examples of tracking John Deere parts on the chain were stupid, because functionally there had to be a central party controlling the list of what serial numbers were valid and which weren’t; John Deere themselves.
- rukshn 6y ago
  I recently wrote about a disaster that happened to an online ticketing service which decided to use a blockchain as a database There are lessons to be learnt who try to put everyth to a blockchain https://ruky.me/2020/12/23/somethings-are-never-meant-to-be-invented-the-story-of-blockevent/ https://ruky.me/2020/12/23/somethings-are-never-meant-to-be-...
- acdha 6y ago
  > Blockchain has earned a bad name because of sales people trying to sell it for something it can't do. Sales people in this case meaning the entire community. Bitcoin’s design meant that anyone who buys in later will be making money for early adopters, and that gave everyone a strong conflict of interest clouding their technical judgement. Subsequent blockchains might not have copied the exact deflationary model but the get-rich-quick-without-contributing-anything mentality has become universal.
  - SkyMarshal 6y ago
    > Blockchain has earned a bad name because of sales people trying to sell it for something it can't do. > Sales people in this case meaning the entire community. Not the Bitcoin community, but certainly most of the others. The Bitcoin community has been pretty clear about Bitcoin's use case since the beginning - inflation-proof digital money - and as long as it remains constrained to that scope then that's actually something it can do. Bitcoin's programmability was deliberately limited to prevent overloading the network and compromising or diluting its core use case. That also prevented the community from advertising it as a general purpose computing platform and panacea for all the world's ills. That's something all the other blockchain communities have been doing, not Bitcoin's.
    - acdha 6y ago
      Yes the Bitcoin community, more so than most others because it's built on a deflationary model which heavily favors early adopters. One of the major reasons it's failed on its goals to be a currency is that the deflationary model encourages passive speculation holding it rather than using it, but that only works as long as new money is being pumped into the system. Even cursorily following the topic will show many examples of advocates making unrealistic promises which make little sense from the perspective of building a healthy community but are entirely understandable when you realize that they are hoping to see a personal windfall from everyone they convince to use it.
- mempko 6y ago
  There are details about blockchains that are often missed. That is, not only is trust distributed, but software execution is distributed. Smart contracts in bitcoin and eth are an interesting concept. Think AWS lambda but distributed. So user centric programming abstractions where users can execute queries and directly put data in the database is interesting concept. Of course you can also do this without a blockchain too if you can deal with a trusted party.
- jpfr 6y ago
  Its even worse. In many cases blockchains still require a central authority that controls the write access to the system. A blockchain / distributed ledger can be easily flooded with spam. The only way around that is to make access expensive. That works for the "actual" blockchain because the effort to put something in the chain is the money. In applications where you don't have want expensive writes, a central gatekeeper (or at least a cabal of power-nodes) is needed to restrict access to prevent spamming.
- jayd16 6y ago
  The race to the bottom design of most blockchain tech also facilitates defacto central authorities.
- war1025 6y ago
  In my experience, when people say "blockchain" what they actually want is something closer to a Merkle tree like what Git uses for its commit hashes. It's great to be able to say "here is the list of changes, and I can re-run them and come up with the same hash, so nothing was tampered with" The "here is a random key that took a lot of work to find and when you add it to the hash chain we get X number of zeroes" part is really not that useful in most cases.
- ori_b 6y ago
  > Blockchain is a very very very inefficient database that removes the need for a central trust authority. When run at a large enough scale that 51% attacks are infeasible.
UShouldBWorking 6y ago
Inflationary fiat currencies are a problem in need of a solution
qaq 6y ago
Pretty much this. Would be interesting to know how many tens of billions were wasted on blockchain projects that nobody needs.
kolinko 6y ago
Corporate blockchain - as in a way IBM pitched it - yes of course. Most of the people from open blockchains were saying that for years now. As for open blockchains, like Ethereum, there is really no financial system like it, and the amount of innovation there is crazy. In theory you could replace it with a centralised system, but that’s like saying that you could replace Internet with AWS and just keep everything there.
Qub3d 6y ago
From an academic paper titled "Do you Need a Blockchain"[0] comes the following flowchart, which I think is a great explanation for business failures in this area: https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/DdXkPEPGlfox5LZLR94Bnxz8hqlx8ldBxSCSYNwFPu4iLdqPwelQt7cYtpf2wBZkK35u2qXQD55F9LkM2vL_I3IhY2h7Yau5aGcWEeTCIUPPrBWfr03xjMwoAvCukJDbR626EqPF https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/DdXkPEPGlfox5LZLR94Bnxz8hq... [0]:https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/375.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/375.pdf
- vidarh 6y ago
  It lacks a box for "are my potential investors gullible enough to give a higher valuation/be more likely to say yes if I mention blockchain?" It seems a fairly significant proportion of blockchain use comes down to that.
jdhzzz 6y ago
Agree, but that's how lasers were for the first 2 decades (guessing) of their existence.
redisman 6y ago
I'm still looking for blockchain-pitches where a small MySQL server wouldn't do the same job better and with less complexity.
SkyMarshal 6y ago
>the use case for blockchain can usually be solved with classical, cheaper and simpler solutions by having a central trusted authority for storage (like a third-party service provider), and appending using digital signatures. Yes, Amazon QLDB is a good example of that, and is the right solution for most use cases where a central trusted authority is acceptable. https://aws.amazon.com/qldb/ https://aws.amazon.com/qldb/
bawolff 6y ago
Yeah, this was pretty obvious even in the original bitcoin paper.
baby 6y ago
In other news a decentralized system can be replaced by a centralized system. I don’t think it’s a very useful point.
- koonsolo 6y ago
  Exactly! Why don't we let Google manage all of our email in a single database. It's a way better system! ;)
- icelancer 6y ago
  It's very "faster horse" syndrome. If people wanted to see the actual applicability of decentralized systems, they'd look into what's happening the early stages of the Ethereum platform building, specifically decentralized finance. But it's easier to just say "blockchain is a bad MySQL" and get 100 upvotes.
fasdf1122 6y ago
bitcoin /thread
vidarh 6y ago
I get to evaluate a lot of blockchain related pitchdecks, and the first thing I look for is always whether they want to insert themselves as a central clearing house in some form, and almost all the startups I see that has put blockchain somewhere does that. If they do, that's an instant huge red flag indicating it's probably there because they thought blockchain would get investors excited, not because they have a vision that need it. A very, very few are using blockchain as a way to enable something larger, by e.g. trying to create an ecosystem where they themselves are just another untrusted player, where blockchain can make sense. And of those that do that, an even smaller number has done that in a way that seems like it's creating a bigger opportunity for them instead of shooting themselves in the foot.
TearsInTheRain 6y ago
Blockchain solves trust censorship and control. We dont see problems in the US that need those solutions because our institutions are trustworthy and strong. However we literally just had a month where the president was deplatformed, a social network was deplatformed, Robinhood blocked participation in the markets and as always the Fed / Treasury are printing massive amounts of money. I think Americans are going to start valuing trustless systems a lot more after all of that.

by ToJans 6y ago

RicoElectrico 6y ago

Indeed - a blockchain only makes sense in decentralized trustless proof-of-X systems. Everything else could be a Git repository or variation thereof (commit chain vs blockchain).

Qub3d 6y ago
Specifically, a Merkle tree[0], which is the hash tree root of both Git and most blockchains. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle_tree https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle_tree

zapdrive 6y ago

In other news, water is wet. Obviously!!!! Blockchain has earned a bad name because of sales people trying to sell it for something it can't do. Blockchain is a very very very inefficient database that removes the need for a central trust authority. That's it's only selling point. You don't need it if you are storing your customer data in a central database.

chadash 6y ago
This. How many real use cases are there where you really need to distribute trust? For currency, there's some sense in it. But when i hear things like using blockchain for contracts or for keeping track of supply chain... it always seems like what people really want is just a well organized and reasonably trustworthy third party who can handle this stuff. Does anyone have any specific examples where blockchain would be a better solution?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- whitepaint 6y ago
  Defi
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- phailhaus 6y ago
  Filecoin appears to be an appropriate use case for distributed trust. Haven't really looked into it though.
- throwaway3699 6y ago
  Supply chain is still reasonable, because you can't really trust any part of it.
  - JumpCrisscross 6y ago
    > Supply chain is still reasonable, because you can't really trust any part of it But the part you can't trust is in the physical realm. The fanciest blockchain won't tell you if the package's contents have been tampered with or pilfered.
  - chewzerita 6y ago
    From my limited knowledge (basically 0) of supply chains, I disagree. (Though I am neutral on the statement "you can't really trust any part of it.") The anecdote I heard was that say you have a blockchain to keep track of your goods shipping on trucks. When the trucks leave and enter a facility their payload is entered into the blockchain. The idea is that it will make sure that every party along the supply chain can say "well I got the next person what they needed" so you can easily put blame on and correct for missing/failing items. Sounds good, right? Well, not so fast. It turns out that some of the items were stolen from a truck (whether by an employee or otherwise). The truck arrives at the next facility, scans in and certifies that they have the proper items and none are the wiser! Hold on, can't they just physically check at each stop to actually make sure that they have the right cargo? Bingo! At that point, what problem does the blockchain actually solve? Blockchain works okay-ish for digital goods (cryptocurrency), but completely falls apart for physical goods.
agumonkey 6y ago
my knowledge is near none over the technicalities.. but I had this view that blockchains would be good for planet wide "unattended" data sources.
- caogecym 6y ago
  something like storing a blog text for thousand years, especially after the author passed away where the blog could not be maintained by the author.
  - agumonkey 6y ago
    no this is not helpful for the flow of the system, more like supply tracking, logistics, farming..
    - jayd16 6y ago
      Except it has no power over the physical world. Just as one can lie on a ledger and say slave labor did not make these resources, so too can some one lie onto a block chain about where resources came from. The chains can only really enforce protection on their own currencies, no?
      - agumonkey 6y ago
        It was not about the initial data but the overall coverage and self management. How many businesses still have their own ad-hoc half manual uninteroperable process and apps ?
ashtonkem 6y ago
More importantly, you don’t need it if your domain effectively creates a centralized authority. All of the examples of tracking John Deere parts on the chain were stupid, because functionally there had to be a central party controlling the list of what serial numbers were valid and which weren’t; John Deere themselves.
rukshn 6y ago
I recently wrote about a disaster that happened to an online ticketing service which decided to use a blockchain as a database There are lessons to be learnt who try to put everyth to a blockchain https://ruky.me/2020/12/23/somethings-are-never-meant-to-be-invented-the-story-of-blockevent/ https://ruky.me/2020/12/23/somethings-are-never-meant-to-be-...
acdha 6y ago
> Blockchain has earned a bad name because of sales people trying to sell it for something it can't do. Sales people in this case meaning the entire community. Bitcoin’s design meant that anyone who buys in later will be making money for early adopters, and that gave everyone a strong conflict of interest clouding their technical judgement. Subsequent blockchains might not have copied the exact deflationary model but the get-rich-quick-without-contributing-anything mentality has become universal.
- SkyMarshal 6y ago
  > Blockchain has earned a bad name because of sales people trying to sell it for something it can't do. > Sales people in this case meaning the entire community. Not the Bitcoin community, but certainly most of the others. The Bitcoin community has been pretty clear about Bitcoin's use case since the beginning - inflation-proof digital money - and as long as it remains constrained to that scope then that's actually something it can do. Bitcoin's programmability was deliberately limited to prevent overloading the network and compromising or diluting its core use case. That also prevented the community from advertising it as a general purpose computing platform and panacea for all the world's ills. That's something all the other blockchain communities have been doing, not Bitcoin's.
  - acdha 6y ago
    Yes the Bitcoin community, more so than most others because it's built on a deflationary model which heavily favors early adopters. One of the major reasons it's failed on its goals to be a currency is that the deflationary model encourages passive speculation holding it rather than using it, but that only works as long as new money is being pumped into the system. Even cursorily following the topic will show many examples of advocates making unrealistic promises which make little sense from the perspective of building a healthy community but are entirely understandable when you realize that they are hoping to see a personal windfall from everyone they convince to use it.
mempko 6y ago
There are details about blockchains that are often missed. That is, not only is trust distributed, but software execution is distributed. Smart contracts in bitcoin and eth are an interesting concept. Think AWS lambda but distributed. So user centric programming abstractions where users can execute queries and directly put data in the database is interesting concept. Of course you can also do this without a blockchain too if you can deal with a trusted party.
jpfr 6y ago
Its even worse. In many cases blockchains still require a central authority that controls the write access to the system. A blockchain / distributed ledger can be easily flooded with spam. The only way around that is to make access expensive. That works for the "actual" blockchain because the effort to put something in the chain is the money. In applications where you don't have want expensive writes, a central gatekeeper (or at least a cabal of power-nodes) is needed to restrict access to prevent spamming.
jayd16 6y ago
The race to the bottom design of most blockchain tech also facilitates defacto central authorities.
war1025 6y ago
In my experience, when people say "blockchain" what they actually want is something closer to a Merkle tree like what Git uses for its commit hashes. It's great to be able to say "here is the list of changes, and I can re-run them and come up with the same hash, so nothing was tampered with" The "here is a random key that took a lot of work to find and when you add it to the hash chain we get X number of zeroes" part is really not that useful in most cases.
ori_b 6y ago
> Blockchain is a very very very inefficient database that removes the need for a central trust authority. When run at a large enough scale that 51% attacks are infeasible.

UShouldBWorking 6y ago

Inflationary fiat currencies are a problem in need of a solution

qaq 6y ago

Pretty much this. Would be interesting to know how many tens of billions were wasted on blockchain projects that nobody needs.

kolinko 6y ago

Corporate blockchain - as in a way IBM pitched it - yes of course. Most of the people from open blockchains were saying that for years now. As for open blockchains, like Ethereum, there is really no financial system like it, and the amount of innovation there is crazy. In theory you could replace it with a centralised system, but that’s like saying that you could replace Internet with AWS and just keep everything there.

Qub3d 6y ago

From an academic paper titled "Do you Need a Blockchain"[0] comes the following flowchart, which I think is a great explanation for business failures in this area: https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/DdXkPEPGlfox5LZLR94Bnxz8hqlx8ldBxSCSYNwFPu4iLdqPwelQt7cYtpf2wBZkK35u2qXQD55F9LkM2vL_I3IhY2h7Yau5aGcWEeTCIUPPrBWfr03xjMwoAvCukJDbR626EqPF https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/DdXkPEPGlfox5LZLR94Bnxz8hq... [0]:https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/375.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/375.pdf

vidarh 6y ago
It lacks a box for "are my potential investors gullible enough to give a higher valuation/be more likely to say yes if I mention blockchain?" It seems a fairly significant proportion of blockchain use comes down to that.

jdhzzz 6y ago

Agree, but that's how lasers were for the first 2 decades (guessing) of their existence.

redisman 6y ago

I'm still looking for blockchain-pitches where a small MySQL server wouldn't do the same job better and with less complexity.

SkyMarshal 6y ago

>the use case for blockchain can usually be solved with classical, cheaper and simpler solutions by having a central trusted authority for storage (like a third-party service provider), and appending using digital signatures. Yes, Amazon QLDB is a good example of that, and is the right solution for most use cases where a central trusted authority is acceptable. https://aws.amazon.com/qldb/ https://aws.amazon.com/qldb/

bawolff 6y ago

Yeah, this was pretty obvious even in the original bitcoin paper.

baby 6y ago

In other news a decentralized system can be replaced by a centralized system. I don’t think it’s a very useful point.

koonsolo 6y ago
Exactly! Why don't we let Google manage all of our email in a single database. It's a way better system! ;)
icelancer 6y ago
It's very "faster horse" syndrome. If people wanted to see the actual applicability of decentralized systems, they'd look into what's happening the early stages of the Ethereum platform building, specifically decentralized finance. But it's easier to just say "blockchain is a bad MySQL" and get 100 upvotes.

fasdf1122 6y ago

bitcoin /thread

vidarh 6y ago

I get to evaluate a lot of blockchain related pitchdecks, and the first thing I look for is always whether they want to insert themselves as a central clearing house in some form, and almost all the startups I see that has put blockchain somewhere does that. If they do, that's an instant huge red flag indicating it's probably there because they thought blockchain would get investors excited, not because they have a vision that need it. A very, very few are using blockchain as a way to enable something larger, by e.g. trying to create an ecosystem where they themselves are just another untrusted player, where blockchain can make sense. And of those that do that, an even smaller number has done that in a way that seems like it's creating a bigger opportunity for them instead of shooting themselves in the foot.

TearsInTheRain 6y ago

Blockchain solves trust censorship and control. We dont see problems in the US that need those solutions because our institutions are trustworthy and strong. However we literally just had a month where the president was deplatformed, a social network was deplatformed, Robinhood blocked participation in the markets and as always the Fed / Treasury are printing massive amounts of money. I think Americans are going to start valuing trustless systems a lot more after all of that.