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I think the #1 reason blockchain doesn't work is very simple - the technology is broken beyond fixability. This article is two years old, but the same variation

• lima 6y ago
  > the technology is broken beyond fixability [citation needed] Crypto ideologues are a strawman. Anyone working on the actual tech agrees that blockchains are useful if, and only if, you can't rely on a single party and need a decentralized, trustless append-only database. Otherwise, why bother with the extra complexity? That's the whole point of blockchains, after all. Technology choices are complex set of trade-offs, even within the blockchain space.
  • hobs 6y ago
    Right, the problem is that almost no one needs those features and those are mostly anti-features for modern software.
  • packetlost 6y ago
    Correct. The problem is there's virtually nothing that actually benefits from those things. A strong case case could be made for a truly decentralized global currency and maybe smart-contracts, but not "a store of value" or "revolutionizing supply chain bookkeeping".
    • mikegreenberg 6y ago
      Note that both use cases (decentralized global currency and smart contracts) rely on altruism which cannot be guaranteed by human actors but is entirely deterministic within the chaos of humanity (with a sufficient number of honest actors) using a blockchain. That is the value prop: distributed consensus with "quick" convergence toward an agreed upon truth.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • ClumsyPilot 6y ago
      Transactions between banks need clearing and settling. Many systems run on a periodict (like half an hour) net settlement, some are even slower. Blockchain is a perfect firt for those usecases. There is a reason JP morgan is developing quorum
      • jeltz 6y ago
        Or they could just start doing real time settlement, something which the banks are working on.
      • acdha 6y ago
        There are two distinct classes of system pushed under the label “blockchain”: the kind like Bitcoin are enormously complicated by trying to be used between untrusted parties. The systems which are potential viable are much less expensive because all of the parties in their system are known and trusted at least to be subject to contract law. All a bank needs is public key encryption and Merkle trees, and while that might be branded as a blockchain for marketing purposes that doesn’t make it the same.
  • oblio 6y ago
    Blockchain is like NoSQL. NoSQL was a nice buzzword to bunch up web caches and log processing tools for analytics, especially for the creepy-spying-ads corps. The blockchain niches seem to be much, much smaller than what it's sold for. Once the dust settles (~5 years from now) it's likely that not much will be left behind an all this money spent on it will have been wasted. Heck, NoSQL databases have wider applicability than blockchain and few people consider them a major technological revolution, let alone a social or economical one.
• payne92 6y ago
  > "The only good use cases that come to mind is if there is some particular reason for you to evade the conventional and easier systems of communication and storage." * Nailed it * I've long said the killer app for blockchain already exists: international money laundering and untraceable transfers. This also happens to be the precise use case where folks want to "evade conventional and easier systems".
  • pjkundert 6y ago
    Until you need international remittances or business payments. Then, Crypto at its worst is far better than international Wire Transfers, etc.
    • pavlov 6y ago
      This claim is often made and it just makes no sense to me. Let’s say I’m invoicing someone abroad for $100k USD. Today they send me a wire transfer. It costs about 25 USD (fixed fee, but in this case 0.025% of the transaction, i.e. negligible) and normally completes the same day. The payment is made in the currency of my invoice, so I’m guaranteed to receive the right amount. (Any currency exchange is the sender’s responsibility. But a lot of companies maintain accounts in various currencies, so they probably have USD at hand.) How does crypto payment improve anything here? Exchanges just add extra steps. The extreme volatility of Bitcoin means that, by the time an exchange is processing my $100k withdrawal, it might be worth $90k. It’s not a useful currency if it goes up and down 10% in a day.
      • hanniabu 6y ago
        If it wasn't an issue then this wouldn't be happening: https://news.bitcoin.com/central-bank-of-nigeria-orders-banks-to-close-accounts-of-crypto-clients-as-remittances-via-traditional-corridors-drop-by-97/ https://news.bitcoin.com/central-bank-of-nigeria-orders-bank...
        • pavlov 6y ago
          An African central bank is suspicious of cryptocurrency. How is that somehow evidence that wire transfers are difficult? I guess if the use case is “I want to send $1M from Iran to an American who will distribute the money to Nigerian accounts”... Then yes, that is presumably easier to execute in crypto. But there are also pretty good reasons why countries want to keep an eye on that kind of flows.
• jcfrei 6y ago
  This is the typical argument on a very technical board such as HN where blockchain is synonymous with a specific implementation. But that's an outdated way to think about blockchains. Yes, Bitcoin's implementation is a huge resource hog and slow. But for most newer projects "blockchain" just means an auditable trail of state changes. Whether you implement this with the shiniest newest db paradigm or some simple SQL database is irrelevant for most people in the economy. However the fact that we now have a global consensus over the ownership of digital assets that's something new and valuable. And that consensus didn't exist in a meaningful way in the past; at least not in a way that was accessible to the public - there were always gate keepers involved. In that sense blockchain is not about some fundamental technological revolution, it's about the introduction of digital ownership that's accessible to anyone.
  • davidgerard 6y ago
    > But for most newer projects "blockchain" just means an auditable trail of state changes. you mean, the 1979-model Merkle tree? I concur that in a lot of marketed "blockchains", the closest to a useful bit is the 1979-model Merkle tree.
    • jnwatson 6y ago
      Even more trivial, single-leaf Merkle trees is all that is needed.
      • mycall 6y ago
        Even less if you look at NANO and IOTA.
  • lottin 6y ago
    > ownership of digital assets that's something new and valuable Doubtful, because ownership only makes sense in a context of scarcity whereas digital assets are in infinite supply.
    • mikegreenberg 6y ago
• throw0101a 6y ago
  > https://imgur.com/a/RlUj9Ed https://imgur.com/a/RlUj9Ed This decision flow chart is Figure 6 of NISTIR 8202, "Blockchain Technology Overview": * https://csrc.nist.gov/publications/detail/nistir/8202/final https://csrc.nist.gov/publications/detail/nistir/8202/final See page 53 of the PDF ("42" at the bottom of page, 'physically'). If you need a handy guide to give to someone to explain blockchain (though not crypto currencies), it's hard to go wrong with send people this link. For a more finance-y, the CFA Institute has a useful white paper: * https://www.cfainstitute.org/en/research/foundation/2021/cryptoassets https://www.cfainstitute.org/en/research/foundation/2021/cry...
• The_rationalist 6y ago
  Immutable databases are much more interesting than Blockchain, it's time for the hype circle to move on https://adlrocha.substack.com/p/adlrocha-immutable-databases https://adlrocha.substack.com/p/adlrocha-immutable-databases
• throw0101a 6y ago
  > a huge resource hog One observation that I recently saw: > Bitcoin is such an environmental disaster it really is a crime against humanity. So what does Tesla do with their $1.5B in revenue last year from clean car credits sold to other automakers? Put it into “Destroy the Planet Inc” * https://twitter.com/ncweaver/status/1358780808144723968 https://twitter.com/ncweaver/status/1358780808144723968
  • HeadsUpHigh 6y ago
    Tesla wants to buy not mine $1.5b bitcoin. Probably as a hedge against potential inflation in the next few months, regardless of the fanfare around the investment.
• mrharrison 6y ago
  I have been in the blockchain space for about three years, and there is an explosion in tech and innovation in the last six months. Visa, Mastercard etc... are integrating, bank regulators now allow banks to connect to public networks. It just astounds me sometimes how people can be so confident in a review of a platform type and done so little research. I urge you to take a second look. Blockchain is primed to disrupt the financial industry.
  • rrrazdan 6y ago
    Disrupt but how? Can you point to a specific example or use case?
    • mrharrison 6y ago
      More transparent than the opaque financial industry. You as a user completely own your assets, with your public key. Yes blockchain wallets/public keys are bad UX, but at the same time they give you actual ownership of your securities/index funds. A person can have access to the same financial products that banks have access to, because they cost a fraction of a price to run then they normally do on CEX and instead of waiting for 3 days for a transaction to complete, it completes in 5 minutes. I could go on and on... Essentially blockchain makes financial products faster, cheaper and more accessible. No middlemen involved and a transparent audit trail.
      • UncleMeat 6y ago
        > You as a user completely own your assets, with your public key. Cool. Why is this a thing tons of people want? > A person can have access to the same financial products that banks have access to, because they cost a fraction of a price to run then they normally do on CEX and instead of waiting for 3 days for a transaction to complete, it completes in 5 minutes. Which financial products? How many people want those things? For BTC to disrupt the financial industry I'd expect there to be a huge number of people who want its features over the alternative. But where are they? Where are the billions of people who want to manage the storage of their own wealth or trade derivatives daily?
• jamemuraca 6y ago
  I think a great use case is for distributed storage and control of home automation products, with an open protocol on top of it. When I have lock in to one vendor and they go bankrupt, device has lost control but also my historical data. If this was all via a distributed model, I could grant access to a new app/company to take over control. Even if they don't close up, I could still give access to other integration partners to gain see my historical data for some kind of processing.
  • ffggvv 6y ago
    seems like you could just do this with some sort of open source or shared standard that different providers use
    • smoll 6y ago
      Yes, but this is where politics comes into play. If you're a Google/Amazon/Samsung/any big player, why would you stick to the open standard when you could just change to a proprietary standard for more lock-in and profit? With a blockchain-based standard, you could make vendor buy-in permanent and enforceable. The only way that one of the big players could win in this new normal is if the products on their proprietary standard are better (in merit) than the entire marketplace that implements the blockchain standard.
      • ffggvv 6y ago
        but why would they agree to that blockchain standard in the first place? it’s the same issue
      • hakfoo 6y ago
        You could do that with any widely-adopted standard. No blockchain required. Remember that even IBM at their late-1980s juggernaut status couldn't put the genie of the ISA bus back in the bottle. I think the trick to lasting open standards is to provide only a MVP ecosystem at launch. No one vendor is strong enough to close the platform behind them. Again, like the IBM PC, their product both needed and spawned a galaxy of add-on and compatible products, providing enough of a force to protect the open standard.
• mlthoughts2018 6y ago
  > “The only good use cases that come to mind is if there is some particular reason for you to evade the conventional and easier systems of communication and storage.” This is the number one model for valuation of Bitcoin-like cryptocurrencies. Say you live in Venezuela and dealing with custodial intermediaries in your local fiat currency is completely untenable. You can’t store money in gold or other precious metals. You can’t keep it in a bank account. You can’t transfer it (with fees) in a foreign exchange market. All these things require dependency on the local fiat currency (plus more for custodial fees if dealing with anything like gold or stocks or bonds), not even factoring in issues of the fiat currency’s own extreme volatility and transaction fees. Banks being trusted central parties or Visa being able to process 40k transactions per second sure won’t mean shit to you at that point. But with Bitcoin you can drive across the border and actually buy milk or medicine, no fiat currency involved. You’ll happily see the volatility and slow transaction process / high fees as a worthwhile overhead cost for independent purchasing power outside of your local fiat currency. Now, of course this is a rare and small use case by volume and by market cap in comparison to normal functioning fiat currencies. At any given time only a small amount of the world demand for financial transactions would fall in some destabilized government zone where independence from local fiat currency is materially important and having a preemptive stock of cryptocurrency holdings really matters. And somewhat lesser there will be some small market for people with extreme risk aversion preferences or “prepper” outlook (eg, “What if the US dollar collapses?” - most of us don’t care to hedge that extreme tail risk, but some people do care). The total demand for currency holdings like this will obviously be much lower than any total market cap of a major fiat currency. But it may still be higher than the total market cap of cryptocurrency today - that completely depends on your personal take on forecasting and speculating. In other words, there are several straightforward and uncontroversial reasons why buying and holding cryptocurrency rationally makes sense. You could happen to be wrong about the speculative future demand for this type of transaction capability. You could be wrong in the magnitude of the forecast. But being wrong doesn’t make it irrational hype or conceptually broken from first principles, as you foolishly assert. There are many very uncontroversial, directly obvious and rational reasons to speculatively buy and hold crypto, depending on your personal appraisal of that market and future demand for that transaction capability.
  • 6y ago
• trevelyan 6y ago
  > the technology is broken beyond fixability. Saito fixes it (https://saito.io/arcade https://saito.io/arcade). There is no 51% attack and no scalability trilemma. So you have a network that pays for itself and generates a quantifiable cost-of-attack in all situations. This doesn't answer your final question -- what the use cases are for a public network that cannot exclude users -- but isn't claiming there is no difference between that and permissioned networks the same as saying that Linux will never catch on because it is competing with Windows? Openness is the bazaar.
• ENGNR 6y ago
  I think the real innovation is permissionless Yes you could get permission.. but it would take time. What if you want to do some random thing over a weekend? You’re not going to want to ask permission Asking permission also opens the giver up to an implicit risk. Not just in a legal sense, but if you need to ask a mid level manager for permission they have nothing to gain and everything to lose Putting everything out there on a permissionless chain with a rock solid set of predefined rules, it’s the hacker dream
• mekster 6y ago
  I'm almost about to think people who just keep criticizing blockchain on wrong points are those who missed the investment opportunity to just get the steam off. Blockchain on Bitcoin is meant to be inefficient. That's why there's a fair distributed race because it's a waste and no one has any head start or another motivation to mine to go ahead of the others. You can come to think of something efficient and you should be able to start your blockchain and get funded well but criticizing is certainly the easy part.