7 ms·

Trust in blockchain-based systems

28 points by infodocket 6y ago

arcticbull 6y ago
While interesting, it's a pretty myopic take on the issue of trust and blockchain. Blockchains can only offer their guarantees for concepts entirely encapsulated within the blockchain. As soon as a blockchain touches the real world, trust is required and the guarantees break down. Concretely: cryptocurrencies encapsulate the quantity of units within the blockchain. 1 BTC will always equal 1 BTC. This is why currencies are so far the only thing you can actually use with a blockchain. However, that doesn't mean you can trust the exchange rate (obviously, given Tether, but also, exchanges) or that you can trust the person you're transacting with. Or that you can trust the other actors not to scam you, steal from you or otherwise negatively impact your relationship with the blockchain. Or that you can rely on the legal system for remedy. Or that the key holder is the rightful key holder. Further you can't trust that everyone else will regard the blockchain you're using as the source of truth (See: every fork ever). Blockchains are an interesting thought exercise but ultimately achieve, literally, nothing. Certainly not in a way that's better, faster, or more efficient than a centralized store.
- noman-land 6y ago
  Better, faster, and more efficient isn't in the value proposition for decentralized blockchains. It's anti censorship, anti authoritarianism, and open source infrastructure.
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    Right but it doesn't do any of that either. [edit] Sorry, to be clear, in the sense that a sufficiently motivated government will simply work around any challenges it offers. For instance, I can count on 0 hands the number of non-Party members in North Korea using blockchain technology.
    - doggosphere 6y ago
      I'm going to create an address to receive at. Then I'm going to send it to someone else's address. No one can stop either of those interactions.
      - arcticbull 6y ago
        Sort of. The difficulty comes in the spending. The government can easily ban conversions from crypto to fiat, and immediately all the speculators will sell. The last crash was supposedly caused by someone trying to sell just 9000 BTC. This will drive the value towards zero. You won't be able to spend it at any legitimate merchants. The illegitimate merchants will not take it at anywhere close to today's value. So yes, but also no.
        droffel 6y ago
        > just 9000 btc For context, that is nearly half of a billion dollars worth, it is hardly a small amount. Try selling half a billion dollars of anything on short notice and you'll observe similar market reactions. I think that the fact that the market swallowed up that kind of volume is indicative of Bitcoin becoming more mature in a market sense, not less.
        doggosphere 6y ago
        The government has banned file sharing, marijuana, prostitution, etc., and all those things still occur at billions of dollars of value scale. They occur because those transactions derive value for participating parties. Any nation state that bans crypto assets just pushes development and innovation out to the more accepting countries. And so you have game theory against other competing nation states, where if you ban it and they don't, capital flight occurs and you end up losing in the long run.
  - leifg 6y ago
    More efficient business processes is the value propositions of a lot of Blockchain startups.
- arberx 6y ago
  ngmi
- intotheabyss 6y ago
  Chainlink and some Ethereum dapps have proven that you can get decentralized 'real-world' truth into smart contracts, at least from world market data. You can debate at how decentralized Chainlink's architecture might be, but it's certainly a blockchain oracle system that's been proven to work thus far.
  - leppr 6y ago
    Chainlink's model has hardly proven itself, even if the marketcap could lead one to guess otherwise. Node participation is permissioned and the economical model has not even started to be tested: queries are free and nodes are paid through inflation (i.e. from token holders). The whole model of trust in oracles depends on incentives, so in reality nothing much at all has been proven. I have pretty much given hope in seeing concrete progress from SmartContract at this point. They're now hyping off-chain computation while the simple decentralized JSON query usecase is still vaporware. If you're interested in this area, you could look towards The Graph, as they attack essentially the same fundamental problem and are launching an incentivized testnet with actual economic incentives[1]. [1]: https://thegraph.com/testnet https://thegraph.com/testnet
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    You can get decentralized world opinion from a trusted source of truth. The reality is that blockchain guarantees break down right exactly at the point a single element of trust enters the system. This invalidates the entire guarantee and therefore the costs associated with blockchain are purely superfluous.
    - arcticbull 6y ago
      Uh, s/you can/you can't.
- dogman144 6y ago
  This is a pretty interesting take on it, I like the idea of trust for the info that the blockchain is encapsulate, but nothing more. I haven’t heard it described from that angle often. It has interesting follow ones for ideas like library-incompleteness of a blockchain network. We sort of take for granted the Internet can log, store and display any type of data under the sun. It’s a library. I wonder if that is a safe assumption for a blockchain’s possible knowledge network. Fwiw, the topic of discussion on the blockchain network entrance point is “Oracles” I believe. Another side note is criticism of blockchain concepts seemed to have shift a bit towards “this will never work” to “here are the limitations of the use case.”
- jancsika 6y ago
  > Blockchains are an interesting thought exercise but ultimately achieve, literally, nothing. Without a blockchain it would not be possible to donate to Sci-hub. I'll stop listing use cases since this already disproves your statement. Note: when I think of all the other net positive extant use cases for blockchain, "literally nothing" is literally off by two.
  - leifg 6y ago
    You do realize you can donate to Sci-hub via PayPal and credit card?
  - XorNot 6y ago
    Sci-Hub's server electricity bills are not paid for in Bitcoin.
    - null0pointer 6y ago
      So what? The parent comment is about payment processors blocking transactions to SciHub.
      - XorNot 6y ago
        So how does Sci-Hub convert Bitcoin into the currency is electricity company wants?
  - jayd16 6y ago
    Was it not possible to donate to napsture or any of the share networks? You can donate to TOR by hosting a node. Blockchain isn't untraceable. The opposite in fact. So are you arguing that "happens to be the only way at the moment" is the same as "the only possible way?"
  - dumbfoundded 6y ago
    I personally have not been able to think of a strong blockchain use-case that doesn't rely on spending money in a way the government doesn't want you to or to gamble on something. Even projects like Brave as a counterexample, really make me question how necessary the blockchain part is.
- bawolff 6y ago
  > Blockchains are an interesting thought exercise but ultimately achieve, literally, nothing. You don't need to provide computational garuntees (in the sense of polynomially bound adversaries or whatever) to achieve something. Most things in the offline world don't provide these types of garuntees and still change the world. > Certainly not in a way that's better, faster, or more efficient than a centralized store. I personally think the bitcoin craze is silly, but how does one define "better". Certainly there are people who use it and get value from it. Who are we to say its not "better" to them.
  - meowkit 6y ago
    The example I always give is “which is a better computer: your smartphone or a cloud server?” The answer is neither. There are tradeoffs for each.
- for_i_in_range 6y ago
  > Blockchains can only offer their guarantees for concepts entirely encapsulated within the blockchain. As soon as a blockchain touches the real world, trust is required and the guarantees break down. This seems analogous to declaring, "numbers only offer their guarantees for concepts entirely encapsulated within mathematics; therefore, as soon as they interface with the real world, its utility breaks down."
  - leppr 6y ago
    I was agreeing with them until the very last bit where they conclude that this means blockchains achieve nothing. Then I read their nickname and remembered they troll almost every crypto/blockchain-themed thread with vaguely-related shallow quick takes. I hate to go so fast into ad-hominem, but the intention doesn't seem honest. At least their argumentation is evolving and becoming a bit more convincing, even if today's argument reduces to a false dilemma fallacy (moreover, the guarantees of a nakamoto-consensus blockchain about its internal state are not even absolutely strong).
    - arcticbull 6y ago
      Well, I do apologize if I've taken it too far towards the tail end. My argument has evolved to the extent that I've been able to pin down what my gut misgivings have been. I don't know that my position has changed so much as I continue to drive towards clarity. Thing is, I hate being wrong -- and my goal is to be wrong as little as possible. This means constantly challenging my own positions so that I can discover their limitations ASAP and change them early! You are right, I'm not a fan of cryptocurrency of course, however, I'm always open to changing my mind. I see the froth in the market, I see smart folks trying to staple blockchain to anything that moves for thirteen years (!!) and I see no solutions that achieve anything in the real world more efficiently than classical solutions. Folks will say it's fine, that it has other intangible benefits like "censorship resistance" and "decentralization" and "trustlessness" and my explorations have focused on 'given that it's slower, less efficient, etc, do it's intangible benefits make up for that.' And thus far, my conclusion is no - and I can speak to that. I learned an awful lot about the space, about cryptocurrencies, about blockchain and thus far I've found a pretty naked emperor. And a lot of really fun technical challenges! I can see why tech folks love it. Thus far what I've seen is a sea of the same old scams that traditional finance law seeks to eliminate given free reign to take advantage of the least well off. And several new kinds of crime invented along the way - like ransomware. I see an entire country of electricity wasted on hashing random numbers while the ice caps melt. I see 100g of e-waste per transaction thrown into a pile, then buried because e-waste isn't actually recyclable. And a pile of cargo-culted trivially disprovable arguments about voodoo economics. Either way, have a good day ^_^
- lazzlazzlazz 6y ago
  Blockchains are a way to design applications that cannot be stopped or interrupted unilaterally — to decouple the execution of programs from the ownership and control of the machines on which they run. This is a deep and fascinating idea that I get the impression you are motivated not to understand.
  - jayd16 6y ago
    What I get the impression you are motivated not to understand is that the protection is only to the part of the transaction within the chain. If you pay BTC for a house and the court rules you don't own the house, you do not own the house. The blockchain provided no protection.
    - lazzlazzlazz 6y ago
      Of course. I'm not sure that this is having the impact you think it does. If I hold USD on PayPal, I only own the USD and my account insofar as PayPal behaves — which is most of the time, but not always. If I hold Dai on Ethereum, nobody can take it or my account. Of course, if I want to cash out to my bank account, I must trust the banks (as I do with PayPal). But the trust assumptions are much smaller. Imagine if you could bring these improved characteristics to any arbitrary computation?
      - dmitriid 6y ago
        > If I hold Dai on Ethereum, nobody can take it or my account. But then you trust other people to even accept your Dai. There are literally thousands of cryptocurrencies. How many of them are at all viable (for any definition of viable)? > Of course, if I want to cash out to my bank account, I must trust the banks Yes. Just like you have to trust the gazillion bitcoin exchanges. Or the people who let you convert cryptocurrencies into real money. > Imagine if you could bring these improved characteristics to any arbitrary computation? I don't have to imagine. You already said it yourself: "I must trust the banks". Cryptocurrencies are trustless. To bring any of the perceived "improved characteristics" you need to painstakingly recreate all the institutions based on trust that already exist in the real world.
encryptluks2 6y ago
I'd trust the blockchain enough to use it for voting if implemented in an open-source way. Something like Monero allowing for only the individuals involved in the transaction to know who they voted for.
- plopilop 6y ago
  I would not use a blockchain (nor anything else) for e-voting to be honest. While I could get somewhat confident with some of the e-voting protocols (and that's not a given), it means that citizens should trust a protocol (and an implementation, and a machine) that only people having a doctorate in the field can assess. On the other hand, paper voting is simple, secure enough, and easy to understand by everyone. In my opinion, e-voting is a solution to a problem that never existed.
  - encryptluks2 6y ago
    Reminder that using paper ballots mean that you never can make sure your vote was counted accurately and you have thousands of people on extreme sides of both political spectrums capable of interfering with your vote in some way.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - remram 6y ago
      You can watch people open the envelopes and count the votes.
      - snug 6y ago
        Can you guarantee the supply chain, and the people watching every vote?
        bawolff 6y ago
        Yes? Just livestream the whole process.
motohagiography 6y ago
At first it was challenging to read ruminations on trust from a more critical perspective, as there is a great deal of prior art on it that I suspect this policy review journal on internet regulation is overlooking, but after realizing what they are about, I'm rather glad to see this where they are at with it. There is a fairly mature practitioners view of trust, with the benefit of a background in the top level concepts in areas like security protocols, cryptography, information theory, game theory, graph theory, functional languages, state machines, even identity concepts like identity providers and relying parties, and other tools we use in security to talk about trust that didn't seem to be on their radar. However, I am a bit concerned they could use enough of the magic words to work themselves up into a froth and organize a committee to present grievences that non-specialsts cannot reason about (but still condemn in solidarity with the strongest possible words), and that specialists would reject them so bluntly it could seem like cruelty from the outside. It's not what they've said, it's who they are and that they've said something. Looks like they're rounding on us.
ChainOfFools 6y ago
dollars: "in God we trust" blockchains: "in trust we trust" one picks the ontological paradox that lets one sleep the best, I guess?

28 points by infodocket 6y ago

While interesting, it's a pretty myopic take on the issue of trust and blockchain. Blockchains can only offer their guarantees for concepts entirely encapsulated within the blockchain. As soon as a blockchain touches the real world, trust is required and the guarantees break down. Concretely: cryptocurrencies encapsulate the quantity of units within the blockchain. 1 BTC will always equal 1 BTC. This is why currencies are so far the only thing you can actually use with a blockchain. However, that doesn't mean you can trust the exchange rate (obviously, given Tether, but also, exchanges) or that you can trust the person you're transacting with. Or that you can trust the other actors not to scam you, steal from you or otherwise negatively impact your relationship with the blockchain. Or that you can rely on the legal system for remedy. Or that the key holder is the rightful key holder. Further you can't trust that everyone else will regard the blockchain you're using as the source of truth (See: every fork ever). Blockchains are an interesting thought exercise but ultimately achieve, literally, nothing. Certainly not in a way that's better, faster, or more efficient than a centralized store.

noman-land 6y ago
Better, faster, and more efficient isn't in the value proposition for decentralized blockchains. It's anti censorship, anti authoritarianism, and open source infrastructure.
- arcticbull 6y ago
  Right but it doesn't do any of that either. [edit] Sorry, to be clear, in the sense that a sufficiently motivated government will simply work around any challenges it offers. For instance, I can count on 0 hands the number of non-Party members in North Korea using blockchain technology.
  - doggosphere 6y ago
    I'm going to create an address to receive at. Then I'm going to send it to someone else's address. No one can stop either of those interactions.
    - arcticbull 6y ago
      Sort of. The difficulty comes in the spending. The government can easily ban conversions from crypto to fiat, and immediately all the speculators will sell. The last crash was supposedly caused by someone trying to sell just 9000 BTC. This will drive the value towards zero. You won't be able to spend it at any legitimate merchants. The illegitimate merchants will not take it at anywhere close to today's value. So yes, but also no.
      - droffel 6y ago
        > just 9000 btc For context, that is nearly half of a billion dollars worth, it is hardly a small amount. Try selling half a billion dollars of anything on short notice and you'll observe similar market reactions. I think that the fact that the market swallowed up that kind of volume is indicative of Bitcoin becoming more mature in a market sense, not less.
      - doggosphere 6y ago
        The government has banned file sharing, marijuana, prostitution, etc., and all those things still occur at billions of dollars of value scale. They occur because those transactions derive value for participating parties. Any nation state that bans crypto assets just pushes development and innovation out to the more accepting countries. And so you have game theory against other competing nation states, where if you ban it and they don't, capital flight occurs and you end up losing in the long run.
- leifg 6y ago
  More efficient business processes is the value propositions of a lot of Blockchain startups.
arberx 6y ago
ngmi
intotheabyss 6y ago
Chainlink and some Ethereum dapps have proven that you can get decentralized 'real-world' truth into smart contracts, at least from world market data. You can debate at how decentralized Chainlink's architecture might be, but it's certainly a blockchain oracle system that's been proven to work thus far.
- leppr 6y ago
  Chainlink's model has hardly proven itself, even if the marketcap could lead one to guess otherwise. Node participation is permissioned and the economical model has not even started to be tested: queries are free and nodes are paid through inflation (i.e. from token holders). The whole model of trust in oracles depends on incentives, so in reality nothing much at all has been proven. I have pretty much given hope in seeing concrete progress from SmartContract at this point. They're now hyping off-chain computation while the simple decentralized JSON query usecase is still vaporware. If you're interested in this area, you could look towards The Graph, as they attack essentially the same fundamental problem and are launching an incentivized testnet with actual economic incentives[1]. [1]: https://thegraph.com/testnet https://thegraph.com/testnet
- arcticbull 6y ago
  You can get decentralized world opinion from a trusted source of truth. The reality is that blockchain guarantees break down right exactly at the point a single element of trust enters the system. This invalidates the entire guarantee and therefore the costs associated with blockchain are purely superfluous.
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    Uh, s/you can/you can't.
dogman144 6y ago
This is a pretty interesting take on it, I like the idea of trust for the info that the blockchain is encapsulate, but nothing more. I haven’t heard it described from that angle often. It has interesting follow ones for ideas like library-incompleteness of a blockchain network. We sort of take for granted the Internet can log, store and display any type of data under the sun. It’s a library. I wonder if that is a safe assumption for a blockchain’s possible knowledge network. Fwiw, the topic of discussion on the blockchain network entrance point is “Oracles” I believe. Another side note is criticism of blockchain concepts seemed to have shift a bit towards “this will never work” to “here are the limitations of the use case.”
jancsika 6y ago
> Blockchains are an interesting thought exercise but ultimately achieve, literally, nothing. Without a blockchain it would not be possible to donate to Sci-hub. I'll stop listing use cases since this already disproves your statement. Note: when I think of all the other net positive extant use cases for blockchain, "literally nothing" is literally off by two.
- leifg 6y ago
  You do realize you can donate to Sci-hub via PayPal and credit card?
- XorNot 6y ago
  Sci-Hub's server electricity bills are not paid for in Bitcoin.
  - null0pointer 6y ago
    So what? The parent comment is about payment processors blocking transactions to SciHub.
    - XorNot 6y ago
      So how does Sci-Hub convert Bitcoin into the currency is electricity company wants?
- jayd16 6y ago
  Was it not possible to donate to napsture or any of the share networks? You can donate to TOR by hosting a node. Blockchain isn't untraceable. The opposite in fact. So are you arguing that "happens to be the only way at the moment" is the same as "the only possible way?"
- dumbfoundded 6y ago
  I personally have not been able to think of a strong blockchain use-case that doesn't rely on spending money in a way the government doesn't want you to or to gamble on something. Even projects like Brave as a counterexample, really make me question how necessary the blockchain part is.
bawolff 6y ago
> Blockchains are an interesting thought exercise but ultimately achieve, literally, nothing. You don't need to provide computational garuntees (in the sense of polynomially bound adversaries or whatever) to achieve something. Most things in the offline world don't provide these types of garuntees and still change the world. > Certainly not in a way that's better, faster, or more efficient than a centralized store. I personally think the bitcoin craze is silly, but how does one define "better". Certainly there are people who use it and get value from it. Who are we to say its not "better" to them.
- meowkit 6y ago
  The example I always give is “which is a better computer: your smartphone or a cloud server?” The answer is neither. There are tradeoffs for each.
for_i_in_range 6y ago
> Blockchains can only offer their guarantees for concepts entirely encapsulated within the blockchain. As soon as a blockchain touches the real world, trust is required and the guarantees break down. This seems analogous to declaring, "numbers only offer their guarantees for concepts entirely encapsulated within mathematics; therefore, as soon as they interface with the real world, its utility breaks down."
- leppr 6y ago
  I was agreeing with them until the very last bit where they conclude that this means blockchains achieve nothing. Then I read their nickname and remembered they troll almost every crypto/blockchain-themed thread with vaguely-related shallow quick takes. I hate to go so fast into ad-hominem, but the intention doesn't seem honest. At least their argumentation is evolving and becoming a bit more convincing, even if today's argument reduces to a false dilemma fallacy (moreover, the guarantees of a nakamoto-consensus blockchain about its internal state are not even absolutely strong).
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    Well, I do apologize if I've taken it too far towards the tail end. My argument has evolved to the extent that I've been able to pin down what my gut misgivings have been. I don't know that my position has changed so much as I continue to drive towards clarity. Thing is, I hate being wrong -- and my goal is to be wrong as little as possible. This means constantly challenging my own positions so that I can discover their limitations ASAP and change them early! You are right, I'm not a fan of cryptocurrency of course, however, I'm always open to changing my mind. I see the froth in the market, I see smart folks trying to staple blockchain to anything that moves for thirteen years (!!) and I see no solutions that achieve anything in the real world more efficiently than classical solutions. Folks will say it's fine, that it has other intangible benefits like "censorship resistance" and "decentralization" and "trustlessness" and my explorations have focused on 'given that it's slower, less efficient, etc, do it's intangible benefits make up for that.' And thus far, my conclusion is no - and I can speak to that. I learned an awful lot about the space, about cryptocurrencies, about blockchain and thus far I've found a pretty naked emperor. And a lot of really fun technical challenges! I can see why tech folks love it. Thus far what I've seen is a sea of the same old scams that traditional finance law seeks to eliminate given free reign to take advantage of the least well off. And several new kinds of crime invented along the way - like ransomware. I see an entire country of electricity wasted on hashing random numbers while the ice caps melt. I see 100g of e-waste per transaction thrown into a pile, then buried because e-waste isn't actually recyclable. And a pile of cargo-culted trivially disprovable arguments about voodoo economics. Either way, have a good day ^_^
lazzlazzlazz 6y ago
Blockchains are a way to design applications that cannot be stopped or interrupted unilaterally — to decouple the execution of programs from the ownership and control of the machines on which they run. This is a deep and fascinating idea that I get the impression you are motivated not to understand.
- jayd16 6y ago
  What I get the impression you are motivated not to understand is that the protection is only to the part of the transaction within the chain. If you pay BTC for a house and the court rules you don't own the house, you do not own the house. The blockchain provided no protection.
  - lazzlazzlazz 6y ago
    Of course. I'm not sure that this is having the impact you think it does. If I hold USD on PayPal, I only own the USD and my account insofar as PayPal behaves — which is most of the time, but not always. If I hold Dai on Ethereum, nobody can take it or my account. Of course, if I want to cash out to my bank account, I must trust the banks (as I do with PayPal). But the trust assumptions are much smaller. Imagine if you could bring these improved characteristics to any arbitrary computation?
    - dmitriid 6y ago
      > If I hold Dai on Ethereum, nobody can take it or my account. But then you trust other people to even accept your Dai. There are literally thousands of cryptocurrencies. How many of them are at all viable (for any definition of viable)? > Of course, if I want to cash out to my bank account, I must trust the banks Yes. Just like you have to trust the gazillion bitcoin exchanges. Or the people who let you convert cryptocurrencies into real money. > Imagine if you could bring these improved characteristics to any arbitrary computation? I don't have to imagine. You already said it yourself: "I must trust the banks". Cryptocurrencies are trustless. To bring any of the perceived "improved characteristics" you need to painstakingly recreate all the institutions based on trust that already exist in the real world.

encryptluks2 6y ago

I'd trust the blockchain enough to use it for voting if implemented in an open-source way. Something like Monero allowing for only the individuals involved in the transaction to know who they voted for.

plopilop 6y ago
I would not use a blockchain (nor anything else) for e-voting to be honest. While I could get somewhat confident with some of the e-voting protocols (and that's not a given), it means that citizens should trust a protocol (and an implementation, and a machine) that only people having a doctorate in the field can assess. On the other hand, paper voting is simple, secure enough, and easy to understand by everyone. In my opinion, e-voting is a solution to a problem that never existed.
- encryptluks2 6y ago
  Reminder that using paper ballots mean that you never can make sure your vote was counted accurately and you have thousands of people on extreme sides of both political spectrums capable of interfering with your vote in some way.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - remram 6y ago
    You can watch people open the envelopes and count the votes.
    - snug 6y ago
      Can you guarantee the supply chain, and the people watching every vote?
      - bawolff 6y ago
        Yes? Just livestream the whole process.

motohagiography 6y ago

At first it was challenging to read ruminations on trust from a more critical perspective, as there is a great deal of prior art on it that I suspect this policy review journal on internet regulation is overlooking, but after realizing what they are about, I'm rather glad to see this where they are at with it. There is a fairly mature practitioners view of trust, with the benefit of a background in the top level concepts in areas like security protocols, cryptography, information theory, game theory, graph theory, functional languages, state machines, even identity concepts like identity providers and relying parties, and other tools we use in security to talk about trust that didn't seem to be on their radar. However, I am a bit concerned they could use enough of the magic words to work themselves up into a froth and organize a committee to present grievences that non-specialsts cannot reason about (but still condemn in solidarity with the strongest possible words), and that specialists would reject them so bluntly it could seem like cruelty from the outside. It's not what they've said, it's who they are and that they've said something. Looks like they're rounding on us.

ChainOfFools 6y ago

dollars: "in God we trust" blockchains: "in trust we trust" one picks the ontological paradox that lets one sleep the best, I guess?