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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 But that's an outdated way to t

by 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 But that's an outdated way to think about blockchains.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
  How are blockchain assets, whose scarcity is defined by the protocol and agreed upon by all participating node operators, infinite in supply? Edit: Arguing in good faith... you could suggest changing the protocol, sure, however you would need follow that particular blockchain's rules for gaining consensus about changing the rules first.
  - lottin 6y ago
    Yes, but it's an artificial scarcity. Like you say, these assets are only scarce because all the participants agree that they're scarce. This is different from physical objects, which are scarce because of the laws of nature.
    - mikegreenberg 6y ago
      I'm not sure why that distinction is important. Value is realized in use of a complete product and are not represented by the sum of its parts. (Value is not zero sum. A log and a plank together can arguably provide more value as a slope than the log and the plank can provide value on their own.) Sure, you can decompose the system to remove artificial scarcity, but that's part of the product. The market has manifested it into existence because it is valuable and users trust the protocol sufficiently that it will not be changed from underneath them. And without evidence that the protocol is brittle enough to allow rules to break, that trust in the protocol is more valuable than any human's promise.
      - lottin 6y ago
        I have no idea what you're talking about :(
        mikegreenberg 6y ago
        You could've focused on responding to my first sentence, but maybe you're not interested in engaging in honest discourse? Best of luck!
hannob 6y ago
So Blockchain is a fancy word for something like a Git repository?
- throwaway9980 6y ago
  Yes. See the sibling comment about Merkle trees.
- oblio 6y ago
  > Blockchain is a fancy word Blockchain is a funding key word. There, fixed that for you.
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  We’re now in the phase where the underlying technical term is being diluted down to meaninglessness in order to dodge around the well publicized failures of specific examples.
  - jcfrei 6y ago
    I'm absolutely aware of the shortcomings of the currently most popular blockchain technologies. But calling specific implementations (like Bitcoin or Ethereum) a failure when people are paying thousands of dollars each block to use it is pretty bold.
    - wizzwizz4 6y ago
      I don't think something's success or failure hinges on whether rich people like it.
      - thedudeabides5 6y ago
        Well, except for tradable financial assets...which are by their definition beauty contests for rich people’s saving/investment dollars.
        6y ago
canoebuilder 6y ago
>However the fact that we now have a global consensus over the ownership of digital assets that's something new and valuable. It's also completely contrived. Being digital means infinitely replicable, or thereabouts. Do we really need this game of artificial scarcity? People used to talk about things like property records, but if this realm of artificial scarcity is going to interface with the realm of actual scarcity in the real world, it's still going to need the systems of adjudication that already exist in the real world. Code is law. But law is not code, otherwise legal disputes would have long since been settled and we wouldn't need systems of courts and various legal avenues to surface new areas of contention and revisit old areas in new light. If the above wasn't an issue. How do you get past the resource hogginess? These things are currently handling a minuscule portion, if that, of what their proponents propose they take on, and they are already comically massive resource hogs. How can they scale?
- jcfrei 6y ago
  For the record, I don't think code will be law, ie. that blockchains will replace our current system of adjudication. Rather smart contracts will be changed to allow for an interface with the current system, for example via a master key held by the originator of the smart contract. Regarding your second point: Look into newer projects like Solana, Polkadot or Cardano which are already live and have much better scalability.
  - canoebuilder 6y ago
    That's an interesting idea, but in what situations is it superior or preferable to just signing a traditional contract, and taking any disputes to a court? Cross border maybe, but then what court would you go to? > Look into newer projects like Solana, Polkadot or Cardano Are these newer projects more or less built with the same vision? What is their reason for being? Censorship resistance would be nice, so would laws against private censorship in certain areas. Distributed mechanisms of censorship resistance would be more trustworthy and transparent. But people find information in centralized locations, be it a library, or Twitter, etc. Is there legit headway towards combining beneficial aspects of distribution with the efficacy of centralized platforms? What are the mechanisms that keep it running and the incentives involved?
zaphar 6y ago
If you claim that a blockchain is just an auditable trail of state changes (i.e. a Merkle tree) Then the proponents of blockchain technology chime in on how it's more than just that. It's also a matter of consensus for that technology. And in point of fact the consensus mechanisms of most blockchains are terrible. Highly inefficient, vulnerable to majority attacks for different types. The "idea" of a globally consistent audit trail for digital assets that can survive in an adversarial environment is great. The most popular implementations all seem to be terrible.
- meowkit 6y ago
  Of course its inefficient. Thats the tradeoff. I guess servers are terrible computers too because you can’t carry them in your pocket? Or phones are terrible computers because they can only stay powered for a day or two? Blockchain is horribly inefficient in almost every regard. But thats the trade off.
  - zaphar 6y ago
    Neither of your examples are tradeoffs. Both my computer and my phone are excellent at their jobs with little in the way of downsides. Bitcoin is bad at it's job with lots of downsides. It only looks better than the alternatives if you live in a place where the economy is heavily mismanaged. If you're currency is only better than the absolute worst economies in the world don't expect all the people in better economies to look favorably on it. Except perhaps as a way to further exploit those in terrible economies by speculating in that currency and driving high volatility in it's value.
    - michaelscott 6y ago
      I think you've misinterpreted what Bitcoin's "job" is. Although the initial impetus was definitely to set up a new type of currency (something I'd agree it fails at) it has long since moved to behaving as a store of value, or a commodity. At this it excels. The tradeoff GP is referring to is efficiency for security. If you have a distributed, "trustless" network you unfortunately have to trade your efficiency for more security.
xirbeosbwo1234 6y ago
Then we, as engineers, have failed in explaining things. A blockchain is a linked list where each element of the list contains the hash of the previous element. It's basically a degenerate Merkle tree. That is all that it is. It isn't a metaphor. It isn't throwing off the shackles of an overreaching government, nor is it a takeover of our society by militant right-wing conspiracy theorists. It's a data structure.
- zeroxfe 6y ago
  A Merkle tree is just one component of a blockchain. It also requires: a byzantine consensus mechanism, a p2p network stack, public key crypto, and a set of economic incentives to keep it going. You can't build a public database on a Merckle tree without being able to agree on what goes into it.
  - xirbeosbwo1234 6y ago
    That is a cryptocurrency. The work coming from the people at Hyperledger, who are also using blockchains, is an ordinary database complete with access controls. It uses the same data structure but without any of the political goals and with many different design decisions. A blockchain is just a data structure. It isn't even a very interesting one. In common parlance "blockchain" isn't well-defined: it just refers to something that's, like anarchy, dude, whoa....
    - jobigoud 6y ago
      You can't remove the consensus mechanism part and still call it a blockchain.
      - xirbeosbwo1234 6y ago
        Tell that to IBM.
- theamk 6y ago
  Maybe it meant that for some people sometimes, but the general public never knew about that meaning. Even Wikipedia claims: > The first blockchain was conceptualized by a person (or group of people) known as Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008. So "degenerate Merkle tree" is not enough, it also needs consensus mechanism, byzantine failure tolerance and so on. Insisting on meaning of "blockchain" which is different than commonly accepted will just make all arguments more confusing.

by jcfrei 6y ago

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
How are blockchain assets, whose scarcity is defined by the protocol and agreed upon by all participating node operators, infinite in supply? Edit: Arguing in good faith... you could suggest changing the protocol, sure, however you would need follow that particular blockchain's rules for gaining consensus about changing the rules first.
- lottin 6y ago
  Yes, but it's an artificial scarcity. Like you say, these assets are only scarce because all the participants agree that they're scarce. This is different from physical objects, which are scarce because of the laws of nature.
  - mikegreenberg 6y ago
    I'm not sure why that distinction is important. Value is realized in use of a complete product and are not represented by the sum of its parts. (Value is not zero sum. A log and a plank together can arguably provide more value as a slope than the log and the plank can provide value on their own.) Sure, you can decompose the system to remove artificial scarcity, but that's part of the product. The market has manifested it into existence because it is valuable and users trust the protocol sufficiently that it will not be changed from underneath them. And without evidence that the protocol is brittle enough to allow rules to break, that trust in the protocol is more valuable than any human's promise.
    - lottin 6y ago
      I have no idea what you're talking about :(
      - mikegreenberg 6y ago
        You could've focused on responding to my first sentence, but maybe you're not interested in engaging in honest discourse? Best of luck!

hannob 6y ago

So Blockchain is a fancy word for something like a Git repository?

throwaway9980 6y ago
Yes. See the sibling comment about Merkle trees.
oblio 6y ago
> Blockchain is a fancy word Blockchain is a funding key word. There, fixed that for you.
ashtonkem 6y ago
We’re now in the phase where the underlying technical term is being diluted down to meaninglessness in order to dodge around the well publicized failures of specific examples.
- jcfrei 6y ago
  I'm absolutely aware of the shortcomings of the currently most popular blockchain technologies. But calling specific implementations (like Bitcoin or Ethereum) a failure when people are paying thousands of dollars each block to use it is pretty bold.
  - wizzwizz4 6y ago
    I don't think something's success or failure hinges on whether rich people like it.
    - thedudeabides5 6y ago
      Well, except for tradable financial assets...which are by their definition beauty contests for rich people’s saving/investment dollars.
      - 6y ago

canoebuilder 6y ago

>However the fact that we now have a global consensus over the ownership of digital assets that's something new and valuable. It's also completely contrived. Being digital means infinitely replicable, or thereabouts. Do we really need this game of artificial scarcity? People used to talk about things like property records, but if this realm of artificial scarcity is going to interface with the realm of actual scarcity in the real world, it's still going to need the systems of adjudication that already exist in the real world. Code is law. But law is not code, otherwise legal disputes would have long since been settled and we wouldn't need systems of courts and various legal avenues to surface new areas of contention and revisit old areas in new light. If the above wasn't an issue. How do you get past the resource hogginess? These things are currently handling a minuscule portion, if that, of what their proponents propose they take on, and they are already comically massive resource hogs. How can they scale?

jcfrei 6y ago
For the record, I don't think code will be law, ie. that blockchains will replace our current system of adjudication. Rather smart contracts will be changed to allow for an interface with the current system, for example via a master key held by the originator of the smart contract. Regarding your second point: Look into newer projects like Solana, Polkadot or Cardano which are already live and have much better scalability.
- canoebuilder 6y ago
  That's an interesting idea, but in what situations is it superior or preferable to just signing a traditional contract, and taking any disputes to a court? Cross border maybe, but then what court would you go to? > Look into newer projects like Solana, Polkadot or Cardano Are these newer projects more or less built with the same vision? What is their reason for being? Censorship resistance would be nice, so would laws against private censorship in certain areas. Distributed mechanisms of censorship resistance would be more trustworthy and transparent. But people find information in centralized locations, be it a library, or Twitter, etc. Is there legit headway towards combining beneficial aspects of distribution with the efficacy of centralized platforms? What are the mechanisms that keep it running and the incentives involved?

zaphar 6y ago

If you claim that a blockchain is just an auditable trail of state changes (i.e. a Merkle tree) Then the proponents of blockchain technology chime in on how it's more than just that. It's also a matter of consensus for that technology. And in point of fact the consensus mechanisms of most blockchains are terrible. Highly inefficient, vulnerable to majority attacks for different types. The "idea" of a globally consistent audit trail for digital assets that can survive in an adversarial environment is great. The most popular implementations all seem to be terrible.

meowkit 6y ago
Of course its inefficient. Thats the tradeoff. I guess servers are terrible computers too because you can’t carry them in your pocket? Or phones are terrible computers because they can only stay powered for a day or two? Blockchain is horribly inefficient in almost every regard. But thats the trade off.
- zaphar 6y ago
  Neither of your examples are tradeoffs. Both my computer and my phone are excellent at their jobs with little in the way of downsides. Bitcoin is bad at it's job with lots of downsides. It only looks better than the alternatives if you live in a place where the economy is heavily mismanaged. If you're currency is only better than the absolute worst economies in the world don't expect all the people in better economies to look favorably on it. Except perhaps as a way to further exploit those in terrible economies by speculating in that currency and driving high volatility in it's value.
  - michaelscott 6y ago
    I think you've misinterpreted what Bitcoin's "job" is. Although the initial impetus was definitely to set up a new type of currency (something I'd agree it fails at) it has long since moved to behaving as a store of value, or a commodity. At this it excels. The tradeoff GP is referring to is efficiency for security. If you have a distributed, "trustless" network you unfortunately have to trade your efficiency for more security.

xirbeosbwo1234 6y ago

Then we, as engineers, have failed in explaining things. A blockchain is a linked list where each element of the list contains the hash of the previous element. It's basically a degenerate Merkle tree. That is all that it is. It isn't a metaphor. It isn't throwing off the shackles of an overreaching government, nor is it a takeover of our society by militant right-wing conspiracy theorists. It's a data structure.

zeroxfe 6y ago
A Merkle tree is just one component of a blockchain. It also requires: a byzantine consensus mechanism, a p2p network stack, public key crypto, and a set of economic incentives to keep it going. You can't build a public database on a Merckle tree without being able to agree on what goes into it.
- xirbeosbwo1234 6y ago
  That is a cryptocurrency. The work coming from the people at Hyperledger, who are also using blockchains, is an ordinary database complete with access controls. It uses the same data structure but without any of the political goals and with many different design decisions. A blockchain is just a data structure. It isn't even a very interesting one. In common parlance "blockchain" isn't well-defined: it just refers to something that's, like anarchy, dude, whoa....
  - jobigoud 6y ago
    You can't remove the consensus mechanism part and still call it a blockchain.
    - xirbeosbwo1234 6y ago
      Tell that to IBM.
theamk 6y ago
Maybe it meant that for some people sometimes, but the general public never knew about that meaning. Even Wikipedia claims: > The first blockchain was conceptualized by a person (or group of people) known as Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008. So "degenerate Merkle tree" is not enough, it also needs consensus mechanism, byzantine failure tolerance and so on. Insisting on meaning of "blockchain" which is different than commonly accepted will just make all arguments more confusing.