9 ms·

Why blockchains won't revolutionize publishing

42 points by dangoor 5y ago

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
seibelj 5y ago
Blockchain is very experimental. It could be true that it won’t revolutionize even a single aspect of publishing. However what’s great is there are enthusiasts and entrepreneurs experimenting with many novel, unique solutions. One underappreciated aspect of blockchain tech is the ecosystem it provides. Creating a useful building block is very hard. In addition to the risk of hacks and bugs, simply developing useful software that is efficient within the constraints of a blockchain stack is difficult and time consuming. However once a building block is battle tested and useful, it dramatically increases the utility of the entire system. See Uniswap and how it enables anyone to create a market, and how its AMMs are used in a huge number of other systems. It would not surprise me if one of the experimental toys in blockchain related to publishing establishes a niche. It’s very hard to predict how this space will go. I wouldn’t count it out.
- SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
  > Blockchain is very experimental How so? "Cryptographer David Chaum first proposed a blockchain-like protocol in his 1982 dissertation ... The first blockchain was conceptualized by ... Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain#History
  - RIMR 5y ago
    Blockchain tech, as far as I can tell, is fully fleshed out. There's really no revolutionary direction I can see it going. It's influential, I'll give it that, but it's about as revolutionary as taking up a gambling habit.
    - SubiculumCode 5y ago
      I'm not so sure about that. There is quite a bit of innovation occurring in this space e.g. multichain interoperability, etc. Now if you are speaking only to the underlying mathematics, then perhaps yes, but certainly not the applications, or larger structures that can be built with these legos
    - carlosdp 5y ago
      This is a ridiculous statement for anyone even casually following crypto, I'm sorry. There's a plethora of innovations, so many it's hard to track. Just a few popular ones right now: Layer 2 solutions with smart contracts (Optimism, for example), zkRollups, Stateless smart contract-based chains, proof of stake validation, chain sharding, proof of storage, proof of X (many new consensus algos with various uses being developed). The list goes on. If crypto were the internet, we're not even at the NSF-net days imo
  - seibelj 5y ago
    The concept of the internet was formed / fleshed out in the 1960s. I would say it was experimental for a long time afterwards.
  - lacker 5y ago
    AI was first proposed many decades ago, but it's still an experimental technology, because its applications in business are still being developed. I would consider a technology no longer experimental when no startup has raised funds based on an innovation in that area of technology for years. For example, elevator technology is no longer experimental.
    - SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
      Homeopathy dates back to 1796, and is still in that liminal, "being developed" phase. I for one would not actually call it "experimental".
hasmanean 5y ago
Publishing solves the problem of how to copy information. Blockchain solves how to move information from one owner to another. Mathematically copy is an easier problem to solve than move. Physically, move is easier.
- ska 5y ago
  > Blockchain solves how to move information from one owner to another. Only if that information is completely contained in the blockchain, and even then only in a de-facto way.
wombatpm 5y ago
Lets consider the case of Allen Dean Foster. He had a contract with Lucas Arts regarding royalties for star wars novelizations. Fast forward 20+ years and Disney buys Lucas Arts and decides to stop paying royalties to Mr. Foster. How is this improved by Blockchains or smart contracts?
- carlosdp 5y ago
  Well let's say that the revenue for those novelizations all ran through a DAO (this is a naive simplification, but bare with me), and that DAO was programmed to export X% of the revenue to Disney's wallet, and Y% to Mr. Foster's. Disney wouldn't be able to undo this later arbitrarily in this example, it's just enforced by the very fact the revenues are being collected by the smart contract. Again, simplification, but the point is these technologies actually can help with some of these issues, but not simply by taking the existing way of doing things and just "doing it better", but rather by re-imagining how payments are collected, how content is accessed, etc. It's a larger picture for sure, and this technology is in it's infancy.
  - pyrale 5y ago
    > Disney wouldn't be able to undo this later arbitrarily in this example Simply stop revenue from running through a DAO. That's actually more or less what Disney did in that case ; they simply moved the books to another publisher.
    - m3kw9 5y ago
      Yeah what I thought
    - Kranar 5y ago
      The DAO is the distributer of the intellectual property. The DAO receives payments directly from the customer and redistributes the revenue. But sure, a company as big as Disney could setup an alternative distribution system and market it. So presumably a DAO for publishing would not be too effective if it represented only a single publication. But if you had a DAO that distributed a large number of works, then it would get progressively harder and harder for any single company to subvert it.
douglaswlance 5y ago
It’s sad that so many detractors lack vision. They look to the past to attack the future. It could be that the aspect of publishing that will be disrupted is the sense authorship itself. Perhaps blockchain will facilitate the ability for a single work to be generated by a large number of authors, with each contributor being compensated accordingly.
- dangoor 5y ago
  Those authors would still need to come to an agreement about how to split up the earnings, right? Once they've done that, services like Draft2Digital _right now_ will put their ebooks out into stores all over the world and split up the royalties for them.
  - douglaswlance 5y ago
    The smart contract would establish earnings split based on contribution.
lacker 5y ago
To me the most promising area of blockchains in publishing is NFTs. The author only spends a couple sentences on them: NFTs, or something similar implemented without blockchain, may be an interesting niche market, but I don’t see how it could revolutionize publishing. As of today, it looks like many creators who try NFTs don’t earn even a penny. A lot of revolutions happen when a niche gets bigger and bigger until eventually it's really big. It's pretty early for NFTs and they seem more likely to revolutionize the art market than the publishing market, but these don't seem like great criticisms of NFTs to me. It's small now, and most creators can't make money on NFTs, but those same criticisms would apply to any of the past revolutions in publishing before they happened. There's just so little funding right now for areas like short fiction. Is it really so unthinkable that NFTs could become the primary funding source for it? Or that in the future something like "new meme development" could become an important, profitable type of publishing, whereas now we just assume that it's done for free. To be fair, I do think it's more likely that Substack revolutionizes publishing than that NFTs revolutionize publishing, but I think they both have a shot.
- dangoor 5y ago
  I view NFTs as enabling "digital collectibles". NFTs for art is an extension of the fact that there have been art collectors for ages. There _are_ book collectors, but that's a tiny subset of publishing. For authors who regularly publish short fiction, I'd imagine the patronage model (Patreon) to be a bigger deal than NFTs. Maybe it's a lack of vision, but I just don't see a lot of people wanting to be able to claim "I own the first edition of Story X by Author Y."
  - lacker 5y ago
    Patreon or Kickstarter does seem better for things like a short story. NFTs might make more sense for ultra-short fiction, like something the length of a single funny tweet. Because you can't really sell that on a Patreon, but maybe you could NFT it. But yeah like any of these not-yet-existent things, it probably won't happen.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
denisnazarov 5y ago
Check out some of the experiments the users of Mirror are running. They have used Mirror to crowdfund their writing, raising almost 75 ETH so far, and are also selling NFTs to sustain their writing practices. - $ESSAY: https://j.mirror.xyz/uVGCCwwm3k341lPpxaJmHTZROESVse9Pe_rmbiuUAC0 https://j.mirror.xyz/uVGCCwwm3k341lPpxaJmHTZROESVse9Pe_rmbiu... - $VALUE: https://coopahtroopa.mirror.xyz/b3_zJsOv8vvvJsaOKyCM-KcCeA_zEbn6K1yrmnRSK8Q https://coopahtroopa.mirror.xyz/b3_zJsOv8vvvJsaOKyCM-KcCeA_z... - $GENERALIST: https://generalist.mirror.xyz/1T0h7VGDcECJuifK4TPDfRoUQ3zaO_tPwdZV-dtnNqw https://generalist.mirror.xyz/1T0h7VGDcECJuifK4TPDfRoUQ3zaO_... - $NOVEL: https://emily.mirror.xyz/0AFENlMKv9amUC1OJIZY26udpISw_raXkoEcvelPvzg https://emily.mirror.xyz/0AFENlMKv9amUC1OJIZY26udpISw_raXkoE... (Disclaimer: I am on the Mirror team.)
- x86ARMsRace 5y ago
  A little odd choice for marketing your project. This is definitely not an article that's positive towards blockchain.
- dangoor 5y ago
  How is this better than Kickstarter? Someone can put up a Kickstarter and say that "people who pledge at level X will have their name in the acknowledgements. Pledge at level Y and you'll get your name in a footnote in one of the chapters." In fact, I think there _have_ been Kickstarters for books where the author offered to write high-pledgers into the story in some fashion.
throwastrike 5y ago
Blockchain has niche utility. Yes I said it out loud.
carlosdp 5y ago
If I've learned anything from being wrong about crypto-tech for years, it's that proving negatives like this is really really hard, and it's typically the wrong way to approach a new technology. There's really nothing to gain from nay-saying a new space like this, tbh. Much better to take the attitude of "hmm, I'm skeptical, but let's see where this goes, let me try it a bit, someone convince me why X is useful." Because if you're wrong, you'll find out sooner.
- andrew_v4 5y ago
  > There's really nothing to gain from nay-saying a new space like this, tbh. Dismissing a new technology is not helpful. But I think it's valuable for people that understand the tech to debunk proposed uses of technology that are not things the tech actually does. This is closer to how I see the article. In what I see as the current big 3 - quantum computing, AI, and blockchain - there is a parallel imaginary business world claiming things they can do that at best are misunderstandings and at worst are effectively scams to get consulting money. People who understood what the tech is actually doing should not shy away from clarifying what it does and make it harder for the snake oil salesmen to do their thing.
- leifg 5y ago
  I really tried that. But to this day I have not heard a convincing argument for what Blockchain is useful for beyond cryptocurrencies. And when I see the discussions about Blockchain in the general public nobody asks for proof for statements like "It creates trust. It's safe, it's the future, etc ...". So by taking a rather radical stance ("it will not revolutionize anything") you at least create a counter narrative.
  - russdpale 5y ago
    Its biggest use case has and always will be accountability.
    - 07121941 5y ago
      I'm not familiar with any of this stuff other than surface level reading. Can you expand on use cases? Just interested
pingpongchef 5y ago
I'm most interested in the censorship or in more friendly terms, authenticity gains that blockchain can provide. In a world where works are being revised, "special edition"ed or straight removed from availability, I'm eager for blockchain technology to sidestep these dark patterns.
- acdha 5y ago
  What precisely is the mechanism by which you think a blockchain would change that? Blockchains are easily censored — trivially so in the case of digital media since the blockchains are too inefficient to host it directly. The more fundamental problem is adoption: you're talking about things which most people have convenient access to, so there's very limited demand for new distribution systems and that means that anything which doesn't give the rights-holder the ability to yank content will largely be ignored. The number of people who are going to tell their kids they're not watching a Disney movie until it's available on a blockchain is a tiny rounding error of the number of people you'd need to make those blockchains viable.
  - pingpongchef 5y ago
    > the blockchains are too inefficient to host it directly. True, this needs to be addressed before I can get what I want. In the case of media it's got to be either on-chain or strongly coupled so that once published, an artifact remains available even if comparable artifacts are produced. It probably won't happen top-down, media giants are keen to keep their content in their walled gardens. Journalism might be a good fit to start with.
    - acdha 5y ago
      This seems like a substantially non-trivial problem to solve: hosting files is not free — think about how large a film is even with modern compression — and most copyright holders are concerned with preventing unauthorized copies. A long-term durable copy requires ongoing money storage and transfer costs which have to come from somewhere but most people aren't going to pay to host something they can't use (due to encryption) or already watched / copied, and anyone trying to sell content is not going to use a service which allows unlimited unpaid distribution.
joering2 5y ago
Honest question about publishing data on the blockchain - let's say some paedo publishes a CP photo on the chain, and even if he gets caught and face the consequences, would LE ban the whole blockchain from the Internet? If enough time passed by, even miners would not be able to fork it or remove it off of the chain. So at some point having a blockchain ledger on your PC means you have CP on your computer! Would that be basically end of blockchain as we know it?
- pingpongchef 5y ago
  I've been wondering about this as well. So far there does not appear to be an accepted route to fixing this in BTC, but there are proposals. I've heard (unreliably) that there are already transactions out there containing snippets of data which can be composed into something but I have nothing concrete.
  - joering2 5y ago
    +1. Also it gives LE a beautiful ground for a false flag attack. FBI could inject CP themselves and then come back and ask Congress/lawmakers to ban the blockhain altogether, since now it carries on banned/illegal material.
cwkoss 5y ago
I have a strong aversion to buying ebook licenses because I worry that a capricious Amazon support person could make my entire library disappear in a moment with no recourse available. I think a system where I could buy an ebook NFT and that would not only grant me a license to download the ebook, but also authorize third parties to transfer the data of the ebook to me (probably for a nominal fee in crypto) would be cool. Essentially, a legal platform-agnostic torrent system as file store. I'd be much more interesting in building a digital library if it seemed like it could both have resale value and would serve as a durable mechanism for accessing that information throughout my lifetime and beyond. However, solving that issue requires building an amount of trust that will not come quickly - we are years away from this future at minimum.
- mdoms 5y ago
  I don't see how this solves any problems. Ok, so you have a NFT with a license on the blockchain. Now what? You still have to go to amazon.com / kobo.com / [wherever].com and plug your license in to download your book. They still control the keys to the castle.
  - cwkoss 5y ago
    > but also authorize third parties to transfer the data of the ebook to me This would give safe harbor for whoever wants to validate my NFT to serve the file to whoever has a valid license, which allow for greater diversity and quantity of hosts.
- dangoor 5y ago
  FWIW, I put my books on Amazon with DRM turned off, but I get what you're saying. I'm honestly not certain about the state of DRM in the other ebook stores. As I understand it, you actually can back up your ebook library using Calibre, because all DRM systems are breakable. I think more people are likely to lose access to their crypto wallet that contains their books than Amazon will cut people off from their libraries. As much as I like the vision you're presenting (and I do! there are real reader wins for that), I'd rather see BookFunnel build a full storefront. They already have their own reader/audiobook player app and keep track of books you've bought. They can transfer those books to your device of choice (Kindle, Nook, etc.), so you're not locked in. Worried about BookFunnel losing your account? None of their books have DRM. They could even make it so you can download your whole library to make a backup. Thus far, BookFunnel is an author service company. Authors pay them to distribute their books. Adding a storefront would be a big shift, but they really could put together something great. Of course, adding resale when books don't have DRM is essentially impossible. Which would you rather have? DRM and the ability for the merchant to remove books from your devices, or no DRM but the ability to resell the books?
leifg 5y ago
Seeing a lot of comments in the style of "Blockchain could ...", "there is potential" etc... Ethereum (which I see as the start of Blockchain beyond Cryptocurrencies) started in 2013. That's almost 8 years ago. At some point you gotta show receipts.
- specialist 5y ago
  Why would investors of crypto themed startups want or need to see the receipts for the founder's new Tesla?
specialist 5y ago
Omitted are consumer facing use cases. Like this, applied to everything: "Attestation for kernel patches" https://lwn.net/ml/workflows/20200226172502.q3fl67ealxsonfgp@chatter.i7.local/ https://lwn.net/ml/workflows/20200226172502.q3fl67ealxsonfgp...
- dangoor 5y ago
  Sorry, I honestly don't understand what you're getting at.
  - specialist 5y ago
    Sign original content. Publish signature to blockchain. Verify authenticity by comparing signatures.
SubiculumCode 5y ago
There are some seriously anti-blockchain moderators in this forum. Heavy downvotes for reasonable comments; not showing off what HN could be.

42 points by dangoor 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Blockchain is very experimental. It could be true that it won’t revolutionize even a single aspect of publishing. However what’s great is there are enthusiasts and entrepreneurs experimenting with many novel, unique solutions. One underappreciated aspect of blockchain tech is the ecosystem it provides. Creating a useful building block is very hard. In addition to the risk of hacks and bugs, simply developing useful software that is efficient within the constraints of a blockchain stack is difficult and time consuming. However once a building block is battle tested and useful, it dramatically increases the utility of the entire system. See Uniswap and how it enables anyone to create a market, and how its AMMs are used in a huge number of other systems. It would not surprise me if one of the experimental toys in blockchain related to publishing establishes a niche. It’s very hard to predict how this space will go. I wouldn’t count it out.

SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
> Blockchain is very experimental How so? "Cryptographer David Chaum first proposed a blockchain-like protocol in his 1982 dissertation ... The first blockchain was conceptualized by ... Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain#History
- RIMR 5y ago
  Blockchain tech, as far as I can tell, is fully fleshed out. There's really no revolutionary direction I can see it going. It's influential, I'll give it that, but it's about as revolutionary as taking up a gambling habit.
  - SubiculumCode 5y ago
    I'm not so sure about that. There is quite a bit of innovation occurring in this space e.g. multichain interoperability, etc. Now if you are speaking only to the underlying mathematics, then perhaps yes, but certainly not the applications, or larger structures that can be built with these legos
  - carlosdp 5y ago
    This is a ridiculous statement for anyone even casually following crypto, I'm sorry. There's a plethora of innovations, so many it's hard to track. Just a few popular ones right now: Layer 2 solutions with smart contracts (Optimism, for example), zkRollups, Stateless smart contract-based chains, proof of stake validation, chain sharding, proof of storage, proof of X (many new consensus algos with various uses being developed). The list goes on. If crypto were the internet, we're not even at the NSF-net days imo
- seibelj 5y ago
  The concept of the internet was formed / fleshed out in the 1960s. I would say it was experimental for a long time afterwards.
- lacker 5y ago
  AI was first proposed many decades ago, but it's still an experimental technology, because its applications in business are still being developed. I would consider a technology no longer experimental when no startup has raised funds based on an innovation in that area of technology for years. For example, elevator technology is no longer experimental.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
    Homeopathy dates back to 1796, and is still in that liminal, "being developed" phase. I for one would not actually call it "experimental".

hasmanean 5y ago

Publishing solves the problem of how to copy information. Blockchain solves how to move information from one owner to another. Mathematically copy is an easier problem to solve than move. Physically, move is easier.

ska 5y ago
> Blockchain solves how to move information from one owner to another. Only if that information is completely contained in the blockchain, and even then only in a de-facto way.

wombatpm 5y ago

Lets consider the case of Allen Dean Foster. He had a contract with Lucas Arts regarding royalties for star wars novelizations. Fast forward 20+ years and Disney buys Lucas Arts and decides to stop paying royalties to Mr. Foster. How is this improved by Blockchains or smart contracts?

carlosdp 5y ago
Well let's say that the revenue for those novelizations all ran through a DAO (this is a naive simplification, but bare with me), and that DAO was programmed to export X% of the revenue to Disney's wallet, and Y% to Mr. Foster's. Disney wouldn't be able to undo this later arbitrarily in this example, it's just enforced by the very fact the revenues are being collected by the smart contract. Again, simplification, but the point is these technologies actually can help with some of these issues, but not simply by taking the existing way of doing things and just "doing it better", but rather by re-imagining how payments are collected, how content is accessed, etc. It's a larger picture for sure, and this technology is in it's infancy.
- pyrale 5y ago
  > Disney wouldn't be able to undo this later arbitrarily in this example Simply stop revenue from running through a DAO. That's actually more or less what Disney did in that case ; they simply moved the books to another publisher.
  - m3kw9 5y ago
    Yeah what I thought
  - Kranar 5y ago
    The DAO is the distributer of the intellectual property. The DAO receives payments directly from the customer and redistributes the revenue. But sure, a company as big as Disney could setup an alternative distribution system and market it. So presumably a DAO for publishing would not be too effective if it represented only a single publication. But if you had a DAO that distributed a large number of works, then it would get progressively harder and harder for any single company to subvert it.

douglaswlance 5y ago

It’s sad that so many detractors lack vision. They look to the past to attack the future. It could be that the aspect of publishing that will be disrupted is the sense authorship itself. Perhaps blockchain will facilitate the ability for a single work to be generated by a large number of authors, with each contributor being compensated accordingly.

dangoor 5y ago
Those authors would still need to come to an agreement about how to split up the earnings, right? Once they've done that, services like Draft2Digital _right now_ will put their ebooks out into stores all over the world and split up the royalties for them.
- douglaswlance 5y ago
  The smart contract would establish earnings split based on contribution.

lacker 5y ago

To me the most promising area of blockchains in publishing is NFTs. The author only spends a couple sentences on them: NFTs, or something similar implemented without blockchain, may be an interesting niche market, but I don’t see how it could revolutionize publishing. As of today, it looks like many creators who try NFTs don’t earn even a penny. A lot of revolutions happen when a niche gets bigger and bigger until eventually it's really big. It's pretty early for NFTs and they seem more likely to revolutionize the art market than the publishing market, but these don't seem like great criticisms of NFTs to me. It's small now, and most creators can't make money on NFTs, but those same criticisms would apply to any of the past revolutions in publishing before they happened. There's just so little funding right now for areas like short fiction. Is it really so unthinkable that NFTs could become the primary funding source for it? Or that in the future something like "new meme development" could become an important, profitable type of publishing, whereas now we just assume that it's done for free. To be fair, I do think it's more likely that Substack revolutionizes publishing than that NFTs revolutionize publishing, but I think they both have a shot.

dangoor 5y ago
I view NFTs as enabling "digital collectibles". NFTs for art is an extension of the fact that there have been art collectors for ages. There _are_ book collectors, but that's a tiny subset of publishing. For authors who regularly publish short fiction, I'd imagine the patronage model (Patreon) to be a bigger deal than NFTs. Maybe it's a lack of vision, but I just don't see a lot of people wanting to be able to claim "I own the first edition of Story X by Author Y."
- lacker 5y ago
  Patreon or Kickstarter does seem better for things like a short story. NFTs might make more sense for ultra-short fiction, like something the length of a single funny tweet. Because you can't really sell that on a Patreon, but maybe you could NFT it. But yeah like any of these not-yet-existent things, it probably won't happen.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

denisnazarov 5y ago

Check out some of the experiments the users of Mirror are running. They have used Mirror to crowdfund their writing, raising almost 75 ETH so far, and are also selling NFTs to sustain their writing practices. - $ESSAY: https://j.mirror.xyz/uVGCCwwm3k341lPpxaJmHTZROESVse9Pe_rmbiuUAC0 https://j.mirror.xyz/uVGCCwwm3k341lPpxaJmHTZROESVse9Pe_rmbiu... - $VALUE: https://coopahtroopa.mirror.xyz/b3_zJsOv8vvvJsaOKyCM-KcCeA_zEbn6K1yrmnRSK8Q https://coopahtroopa.mirror.xyz/b3_zJsOv8vvvJsaOKyCM-KcCeA_z... - $GENERALIST: https://generalist.mirror.xyz/1T0h7VGDcECJuifK4TPDfRoUQ3zaO_tPwdZV-dtnNqw https://generalist.mirror.xyz/1T0h7VGDcECJuifK4TPDfRoUQ3zaO_... - $NOVEL: https://emily.mirror.xyz/0AFENlMKv9amUC1OJIZY26udpISw_raXkoEcvelPvzg https://emily.mirror.xyz/0AFENlMKv9amUC1OJIZY26udpISw_raXkoE... (Disclaimer: I am on the Mirror team.)

x86ARMsRace 5y ago
A little odd choice for marketing your project. This is definitely not an article that's positive towards blockchain.
dangoor 5y ago
How is this better than Kickstarter? Someone can put up a Kickstarter and say that "people who pledge at level X will have their name in the acknowledgements. Pledge at level Y and you'll get your name in a footnote in one of the chapters." In fact, I think there _have_ been Kickstarters for books where the author offered to write high-pledgers into the story in some fashion.

throwastrike 5y ago

Blockchain has niche utility. Yes I said it out loud.

carlosdp 5y ago

If I've learned anything from being wrong about crypto-tech for years, it's that proving negatives like this is really really hard, and it's typically the wrong way to approach a new technology. There's really nothing to gain from nay-saying a new space like this, tbh. Much better to take the attitude of "hmm, I'm skeptical, but let's see where this goes, let me try it a bit, someone convince me why X is useful." Because if you're wrong, you'll find out sooner.

andrew_v4 5y ago
> There's really nothing to gain from nay-saying a new space like this, tbh. Dismissing a new technology is not helpful. But I think it's valuable for people that understand the tech to debunk proposed uses of technology that are not things the tech actually does. This is closer to how I see the article. In what I see as the current big 3 - quantum computing, AI, and blockchain - there is a parallel imaginary business world claiming things they can do that at best are misunderstandings and at worst are effectively scams to get consulting money. People who understood what the tech is actually doing should not shy away from clarifying what it does and make it harder for the snake oil salesmen to do their thing.
leifg 5y ago
I really tried that. But to this day I have not heard a convincing argument for what Blockchain is useful for beyond cryptocurrencies. And when I see the discussions about Blockchain in the general public nobody asks for proof for statements like "It creates trust. It's safe, it's the future, etc ...". So by taking a rather radical stance ("it will not revolutionize anything") you at least create a counter narrative.
- russdpale 5y ago
  Its biggest use case has and always will be accountability.
  - 07121941 5y ago
    I'm not familiar with any of this stuff other than surface level reading. Can you expand on use cases? Just interested

pingpongchef 5y ago

I'm most interested in the censorship or in more friendly terms, authenticity gains that blockchain can provide. In a world where works are being revised, "special edition"ed or straight removed from availability, I'm eager for blockchain technology to sidestep these dark patterns.

acdha 5y ago
What precisely is the mechanism by which you think a blockchain would change that? Blockchains are easily censored — trivially so in the case of digital media since the blockchains are too inefficient to host it directly. The more fundamental problem is adoption: you're talking about things which most people have convenient access to, so there's very limited demand for new distribution systems and that means that anything which doesn't give the rights-holder the ability to yank content will largely be ignored. The number of people who are going to tell their kids they're not watching a Disney movie until it's available on a blockchain is a tiny rounding error of the number of people you'd need to make those blockchains viable.
- pingpongchef 5y ago
  > the blockchains are too inefficient to host it directly. True, this needs to be addressed before I can get what I want. In the case of media it's got to be either on-chain or strongly coupled so that once published, an artifact remains available even if comparable artifacts are produced. It probably won't happen top-down, media giants are keen to keep their content in their walled gardens. Journalism might be a good fit to start with.
  - acdha 5y ago
    This seems like a substantially non-trivial problem to solve: hosting files is not free — think about how large a film is even with modern compression — and most copyright holders are concerned with preventing unauthorized copies. A long-term durable copy requires ongoing money storage and transfer costs which have to come from somewhere but most people aren't going to pay to host something they can't use (due to encryption) or already watched / copied, and anyone trying to sell content is not going to use a service which allows unlimited unpaid distribution.

joering2 5y ago

Honest question about publishing data on the blockchain - let's say some paedo publishes a CP photo on the chain, and even if he gets caught and face the consequences, would LE ban the whole blockchain from the Internet? If enough time passed by, even miners would not be able to fork it or remove it off of the chain. So at some point having a blockchain ledger on your PC means you have CP on your computer! Would that be basically end of blockchain as we know it?

pingpongchef 5y ago
I've been wondering about this as well. So far there does not appear to be an accepted route to fixing this in BTC, but there are proposals. I've heard (unreliably) that there are already transactions out there containing snippets of data which can be composed into something but I have nothing concrete.
- joering2 5y ago
  +1. Also it gives LE a beautiful ground for a false flag attack. FBI could inject CP themselves and then come back and ask Congress/lawmakers to ban the blockhain altogether, since now it carries on banned/illegal material.

cwkoss 5y ago

I have a strong aversion to buying ebook licenses because I worry that a capricious Amazon support person could make my entire library disappear in a moment with no recourse available. I think a system where I could buy an ebook NFT and that would not only grant me a license to download the ebook, but also authorize third parties to transfer the data of the ebook to me (probably for a nominal fee in crypto) would be cool. Essentially, a legal platform-agnostic torrent system as file store. I'd be much more interesting in building a digital library if it seemed like it could both have resale value and would serve as a durable mechanism for accessing that information throughout my lifetime and beyond. However, solving that issue requires building an amount of trust that will not come quickly - we are years away from this future at minimum.

mdoms 5y ago
I don't see how this solves any problems. Ok, so you have a NFT with a license on the blockchain. Now what? You still have to go to amazon.com / kobo.com / [wherever].com and plug your license in to download your book. They still control the keys to the castle.
- cwkoss 5y ago
  > but also authorize third parties to transfer the data of the ebook to me This would give safe harbor for whoever wants to validate my NFT to serve the file to whoever has a valid license, which allow for greater diversity and quantity of hosts.
dangoor 5y ago
FWIW, I put my books on Amazon with DRM turned off, but I get what you're saying. I'm honestly not certain about the state of DRM in the other ebook stores. As I understand it, you actually can back up your ebook library using Calibre, because all DRM systems are breakable. I think more people are likely to lose access to their crypto wallet that contains their books than Amazon will cut people off from their libraries. As much as I like the vision you're presenting (and I do! there are real reader wins for that), I'd rather see BookFunnel build a full storefront. They already have their own reader/audiobook player app and keep track of books you've bought. They can transfer those books to your device of choice (Kindle, Nook, etc.), so you're not locked in. Worried about BookFunnel losing your account? None of their books have DRM. They could even make it so you can download your whole library to make a backup. Thus far, BookFunnel is an author service company. Authors pay them to distribute their books. Adding a storefront would be a big shift, but they really could put together something great. Of course, adding resale when books don't have DRM is essentially impossible. Which would you rather have? DRM and the ability for the merchant to remove books from your devices, or no DRM but the ability to resell the books?

leifg 5y ago

Seeing a lot of comments in the style of "Blockchain could ...", "there is potential" etc... Ethereum (which I see as the start of Blockchain beyond Cryptocurrencies) started in 2013. That's almost 8 years ago. At some point you gotta show receipts.

specialist 5y ago
Why would investors of crypto themed startups want or need to see the receipts for the founder's new Tesla?

specialist 5y ago

Omitted are consumer facing use cases. Like this, applied to everything: "Attestation for kernel patches" https://lwn.net/ml/workflows/20200226172502.q3fl67ealxsonfgp@chatter.i7.local/ https://lwn.net/ml/workflows/20200226172502.q3fl67ealxsonfgp...

dangoor 5y ago
Sorry, I honestly don't understand what you're getting at.
- specialist 5y ago
  Sign original content. Publish signature to blockchain. Verify authenticity by comparing signatures.

SubiculumCode 5y ago

There are some seriously anti-blockchain moderators in this forum. Heavy downvotes for reasonable comments; not showing off what HN could be.