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Similar to how "god of the gaps" arguments work, there's a "god of complexity" phenomenon in tech, where people will project infinite possibilities onto technol

• davewritescode 5y ago
  There's also the fact that small blockchain networks become less useful the smaller they become because while it's impossible to change history, 51% attacks can make a blockchain not function in optimal ways. When you have a massive network of nodes and the incentives not devalue the thing you're trying to earn it works.
  • simias 5y ago
    Meanwhile larger networks become increasingly inefficient because without trust all transactions have to be checked and rechecked and rechecked and rechecked. But fear not, $magical_solution is around the corner and will resolve all of this! It's been coming for 5 years now, so you know it's due any minute now.
  • marcosdumay 5y ago
    That. It's yet to be seen how a blockchain that required specialized hardware reacts to a shrinking user base. If there exists more hardware than what's active mining, and it can not be used for anything else, will there be enough incentives not to use it in a harmful way?
• simias 5y ago
  Some of it is that, some of it is just simple greed. Many people think they're too good to fall for pyramid schemes and MLM, yet they'll dump money into cryptocurrencies or some meme stock because they think it'll make them millionaires. I too believe that the blockchain is mostly useless outside of buying drugs online, yet I don't think cryptocurrencies are going anywhere any time soon. It's effectively become a casino for millenials and zoomers where everybody hopes to become a millionaire overnight. Some even succeeded. No amount of technical argumentation is going to change that.
  • grey-area 5y ago
    Yes I think greed is the simplest explanation for the explosion of interest in bitcoin and other similar schemes. They are constructed so that early adopters benefit, and benefit most if they shill the coin to others, and so they do, using various narratives about worldchanging technology, a new paradigm etc, etc.
    • simias 5y ago
      Weaponized FOMO in realtime at a worldwide scale. It's a tough societal problem to solve. With good old pyramid schemes it took a lot more work to it off the ground. Now you can just astroturf on Reddit, Discord and the big social networks with your fancy new "revolutionary" cryptothingy and you're making millions. I've been following the DogeCoin pump on reddit over the past couple of months, it's absolutely transparent that it's a pure pump with no fundamentals but people buy into it because they think they're early enough not to be left holding the bags. IMO the Gamestop thing is mostly exactly the same, but obviously the situation is more complex there.
    • bob33212 5y ago
      Casinos have existed for a long time and are known to be a place where a lot of people loses money, but that doesn't stop others from showing up and losing more.
  • sneak 5y ago
    > I too believe that the blockchain is mostly useless outside of buying drugs online Decentralized financial tools like Uniswap and its ilk have finally changed that.
• im3w1l 5y ago
  There is a difference between the knowledge of individuals and knowledge of institutions. Many people who seriously looked into these things said it was bogus. But the institutions didn't know it was bogus. They didn't know whether to believe the nay-sayers or not. So "our" (for some weird abstract sense of "our") knowledge increased by doing these doomed experiments.
  • kevinmchugh 5y ago
    Wal-Mart and Louis Vuitton both announced they were adopting blockchain. Walmart's was for supply chain tracking of lettuce. LV's was for authenticating genuineness and preventing sales of counterfeits. Both were to be run entirely by the company. Centralized. No distributed anything. There was no reason to use blockchain in these cases, except that writing a press release about blockchain would cause a stock price pop.
• Spooky23 5y ago
  It’s a technology that’s as easy to shit on as it is to hype! I don’t know about the Azure service, but blockchains are a useful tool for a lot of different use cases.
  • Clewza313 5y ago
    Such as?
    • rodiger 5y ago
      There's a weird insistence (especially here on HN) that if blockchain isn't doing something that can't be done in another way then it is useless. In reality just doing normal, established processes in a distributed way often is the value-add. See decentralized finance[0]. All these tools and primitives exist in traditional finance, but when it's decentralized all market participants can get a cut of the rewards instead of just the big banks. A more recent AWS-like example is Internet Computer[1]. A more open way to on-board data centers and build distributed apps. Could it be done in a centralized way? Yes, of course. Is it more fair and open if it's decentralized? Also yes. [0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.08778 https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.08778 [1] https://dfinity.org/data-centers https://dfinity.org/data-centers
      • rajin444 5y ago
        The only interesting aspect of blockchain is decentralized trust - trust being the key part. If you don't need decentralized trust you don't need blockchain. And outside of a global currency, there isn't much that needs that. DeFi is just unregulated speculation / ponzi schemes. People came up with new systems (supposedly faster than bitcoin) to send currency back and forth. People are flocking to it hoping to get rich quick, but it doesn't actually deliver anything novel outside of not being regulated. Internet Computer would be cool if it was actually decentralized. But it's not: > The Internet Computer hosts its own governance system, called the "Network Nervous System" (NNS). In order for a data center to provide compute capacity to the Internet Computer network, it must acquire a DcID (Data Center ID) by making an application to the governance system And unfortunately making a decentralized version of what Internet Computer wants to do is _very_ hard (maybe impossible). So many of the newer "blockchain" tech is considered useless is because, like Internet Computer, they cheat and introduce centralization because of the technical limitations of being decentralized. BNB/BSC is a huge example of this (one of the major new "defi" networks).
• matthewaveryusa 5y ago
  >contributing compute power is economically incentivized I think this is the aspect in blockchain that has really been stretched. Most problems are within closed networks and solved with digital signatures -- is the act of signing a record proof of work? If you squint hard enough and razzle-dazzle it enough I could see how you could call it that -- or simply call it a database with a signature column :)
  • shawnz 5y ago
    > is the act of signing a record proof of work? The idea behind proof-of-work is to add a cost to inserts, so that inserting wrong information is too costly to be profitable. Whereas inserting correct information makes you eligible for rewards that negate the cost of having inserted it.
    • mumblemumble 5y ago
      That one's always struck me. At least if you squint, that would imply that blockchain's fraud-prevention strategy hinges on nobody ever using the blockchain to handle anything too valuable or important.
      • shawnz 5y ago
        Yes, there is a limit to the security that a cryptocurrency can provide (like with anything else). The level of security provided is based on the market price: The higher the price, the higher the rewards, which increases the profitability of mining, thus leading to more miners, which then increases the amount of competition you'll have if you want to post wrong information. Since there is a fixed rate of new data which can be added, that's what defines the cost of inserting data to the blockchain. An attacker with a lot of resources (>50% of current mining power consumption) could use their resources to post wrong information, but it would need to be profitable enough to make up for the immense costs. It's unlikely there would be such a situation where an attacker could recover the costs for such an attack. At best they would be spending a lot of money to cause a temporary network disruption as the "fair players" move to a forked coin or similar.
• ipaddr 5y ago
  This is common with new technology. It was amazing what was sold under web 2.0. It was amazing what was sold before the dotcom craze. Blockchains are here to stay. Replacing money is probably not a medium term goal but allowing trustless entities to reach an agreement could be interesting. No one has explored it in smaller non-global settings like a classroom where the first one to get the answer wins. Not trusting your peers is the future.
  • Godel_unicode 5y ago
    > classroom where the first one to get the answer wins. Why on earth would you need a blockchain for this?
    • bob33212 5y ago
      If you didn't trust the teacher. The distributed ledger would prevent them from editing the database of timestamps. But then the question is, if you don't trust the teacher why are you in their class?
      • ipaddr 5y ago
        This is more about trust between peer groups like students vs students or larger groups like departments vs departments. Imagine a schoolwide project like a fundraiser. Everyone is selling chocolate bars to fund new uniforms. Whoever donates the most gets to decide which team gets a bonus amount. The proof is money received. The coins are distributed. Why do you need a teacher to manage this?
        • deleted 5y ago
          [deleted]
      • Godel_unicode 5y ago
        A useful exercise in determining whether you need a blockchain is asking yourself "why would a Google sheet with track changes not work here".
• einpoklum 5y ago
  > Blockchain is a brilliant solution It's not "brilliant". It is _a_ solution, with shortcomings even for its stated purpose.
• derefr 5y ago
  I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: It’s because “blockchain” software is a thing that already exists, but its superclass, “distributed log of signed proofs” software, isn’t a thing that already exists (except in the form of the subclass, blockchain software.) There are tons of use-cases for which a “distributed log of signed proofs” is the perfect fit. Have you got an architecture where nodes independently make “stuff” and want to publish it “somewhere” for other nodes to find — where the other nodes have some independent criterion they can apply to validate published “stuff” to decide whether to accept or ignore it for their own use? For example, have you got a sharded data warehouse, where each shard is publishing its own write-ahead log segments for replicas of that shard to use? Well, add a “distributed log of signed proofs”, and now your closed data warehouse becomes an open network where anyone can have their own “shard”, and anyone can choose to replicate from a “shard” they trust. (Yes, DHTs and/or gossip networks are sort of like this — but neither provides durability or linearization. If you want a new node to be able to look up historical “stuff” from publisher-nodes that aren’t online any more, then you need durability; and if you want your “stuff” validation algorithm to — at least within a sliding window — reject duplicate “stuff” from the log, then you need linearization.) It just so happens that all the software that exists, that offers the “distributed log of signed proofs” guarantee, also offers the additional guarantee of all the nodes doing the validation of proofs serially, reducing over each new proof against an accumulator of an existing global consensus state, to build a new global consensus state, where proofs can only be valid relative to a specific “base” global consensus state. We call such proofs-relative-to-a-state “blocks”, and we call the resulting system “a blockchain.” Most of these use-cases don’t need that additional guarantee. It doesn’t get them anything, and it costs a lot (e.g. in the inability to concurrently validate proofs; in the requirement to keep a forever-growing durable representation of global consensus state around on disk; etc.) But the people building these systems are generally practical engineers, who “buy” blockchain software (and just ignore the features they don’t need), rather than attempting to “build” their own “distributed log of signed proofs” software with no known antecedent.
  • mumblemumble 5y ago
    I am coming to think that it's precisely the "distributed" bit that nobody really wants. For example, distributed version control systems are often held up as an example of some form of precedent for blockchain-type technologies. But I've never actually seen a truly distributed (in the blockchain sense) deployment of Git. It's technically possible, but it just doesn't seem to happen. Similarly, I'm not sure people actually want immutability. They want the ability to edit history, they just want it to not be an everyday thing. In a discussion about the relative merits of different distributed version control systems, someone invariably points out that the thing Git has that makes it more usable in practice than any of the others is that it allows you to rewrite history. In the repositories I manage, I even mandate it, in the form of requiring people to rebase before merging into the main branch so that we can linearize history. As salty former Mercurial user, I used to do the opposite and ban the practice, until I realized that rebasing and squashing is more practical in the long run. I'm trying to run a software project, not an episode of Hoarders.
• axiosgunnar 5y ago
  Millions? Billions.
• mrits 5y ago
  It is really sad to me to see a comment so naive and uninformed get upvoted on this site. Besides just flat out false information such as being a shortage of use cases for incentivized distributed consensus you go on to assume we have even begun to work out the areas we can now apply to blockchain. It's fine to think cryptocurrency is a hustle. It's not ok to dismiss a large future corner of tech because of it.
  • TomSwirly 5y ago
    Some concrete examples which aren't cryptocurrency would be helpful here to evaluate your statement.
    • pragmar 5y ago
      Here are a couple. Identity. Once you log into a website a MetaMask address, a lot of things begin to come into focus. Create as many as you want, move contents around, etc. It's a lot more empowered than google/fb oauth feudalism. Physical and intellectual property registries. Could be far more efficient, accurate, and resilient to bad actors.
      • iudqnolq 5y ago
        So a bad actor gets a fraudulent invention registered. In the current system some people think really hard and then consider deleting it. This has many flaws, but the flaws are in the human bits. Where they write down their decisions is an implementation derail. How will blockchain make it better? Unless you've figured out how to have a computer figure out what inventions should qualify for protection and what infringes on them, I don't see it.
        • pragmar 5y ago
          >>> How will blockchain make it better? You're focusing on patents. Countries operate copyright offices--clerks, submission fees, red tape, human error. With blockchain, I can produce and store an md5 of a audio file, pdf, or video for next to nothing. You now have cryptographic signed proof of generation at a particular time, and a system that stores the data perpetually. Yes, you still need courts and judges to adjudicate conflicts, I never said it was a 100% solution.
• cryptica 5y ago
  >> Blockchain is a brilliant solution to an extremely rare problem It's not a rare problem. Fiat currencies don't work for the majority of people. The problem is ubiquitous. We need to separate money from state and blockchain provides a mechanism to do that. Just because fiat works for a handful of rich people, doesn't mean that it works for everyone. Everyone can see that the current system is unfair.
  • whateveracct 5y ago
    rofl you know someone is crypto-sick when they say fist currency only works for "a handful of rich people."
    • cryptica 5y ago
      Freedom from corporate wage slavery and mind-numbing bureaucracy is of critical importance to me. If you're corporate cattle and you like it, then good for you but don't tell a slave that they're sick for not wanting to be a slave.
      • whateveracct 5y ago
        i recommend you use your technical skills to get a corporate remote job for 5 years. You can make some good coin in that time and honestly you won't have to work much. Definitely not cattle. You can probably spend the majority of your mindpower on your own interests and projects but still collect big corporate checks, bonuses, and stock. I agree it grates on the soul. But it's a net win and only a temporary fleecing.
  • NicoJuicy 5y ago
    Sure, 1 random guy tweeting is way better than a state actor.
• lordlimecat 5y ago
  >Blockchain is a brilliant solution to an extremely rare problem. This is the most concise way I have seen of summarizing blockchain and its problems.
• UnpossibleJim 5y ago
  Technically, there are multiple tracking applications, but they're more easily and cheaply handled with in place technologies, is the issue. If you were designing and building tracking ultra secure shipping infrastructure from the ground up, where everyone had to be held absolutely responsible, then there's an edge case for it, maybe.... But the use cases for blockchain are pretty small. Like small batch digital art assets and the like.
• agumonkey 5y ago
  What I found interesting about Blockchain were (in case of utilitarian projects). - country agnostic scale in mind - constantly working network There's a project for supply chain tracking which wants to take care of .. well, tracking. But by attempting of being a universal solution, I'd foresee a lot of time saved for just about everybody on the planet. Maybe I'm misguided
• rbanffy 5y ago
  > That applies to cryptocurrencies, but basically nothing else. A shared append-only document is useful for a number of applications. > It's amazing how much bullshit has been pitched under the flag of "blockchain". Millions of dollars have been poured into projects that are technically unsound or that had no use for a blockchain to begin with. Capitalism is very good at extracting wealth gradients out of information ones.
• TimJRobinson 5y ago
  It's an extremely rare problem for now because it's a new technology that has barely been explored. Like all technologies once it goes more mainstream people come up with new ideas that were never thought of because they weren't possible before. Blockchains solve the problem of needing a shared database among people that don't trust each other. Most of the best use cases are removing middle men. Some examples that are being worked on right now: Trading of any financial asset - why do we need Robinhood / Fidelity etc to trade shares? If shares in companies can be listed on a blockchain then people can trade them anywhere anytime directly with each other even when they don't trust each other. Larger markets for digital goods: Many games have started putting their items on Etherum (or layer 2 solutions) so that players can easily trade them without the developers needing to run their own marketplace. This can then extend to being able to use items across multiple games, or trade items from one game with items from another. Now there's ethereum tokens that allow the original creator to get a cut of all trades of that item. This opens an interesting funding model where a company could create an open source permissionless game where you download the client, connect to the public chain, play and acquire items, trade those items with others, and the game creators gain funds based on a cut of all trade happening around the game which allows them to further development. Then because it's open source people can create forks with their own art styles and mod the game easily and people can participate in the same world with many different clients. There's so many cool things happening in the decentralized finance space and I think we're going to look back on this decade as the decade where software started to eat wall street. Many of these firms are merely middle men facilitating trades amongst untrusted parties, and blockchains can do that so much more efficiently than them.
• mrkramer 5y ago
  >Blockchain is a brilliant solution to an extremely rare problem. Trust and fraud is extremely rare problem?! Read the Bitcoin's whitepaper again and you will be in the better understanding of Bitcoin's and Blockchain's purpose. "A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution." "Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments." Decentralizing trust means not depending on one entity or group of entities to handle financial transactions or transactions of any type. "Completely non-reversible transactions are not really possible, since financial institutions cannot avoid mediating disputes. The cost of mediation increases transaction costs, limiting the minimum practical transaction size and cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions, and there is a broader cost in the loss of ability to make non-reversible payments for nonreversible services. With the possibility of reversal, the need for trust spreads. Merchants must be wary of their customers, hassling them for more information than they would otherwise need. A certain percentage of fraud is accepted as unavoidable. These costs and payment uncertainties can be avoided in person by using physical currency, but no mechanism exists to make payments over a communications channel without a trusted party." [0] Establishing trust means eradicating fraud in a sense that blockchain is transparent and open database based on decentralized cryptographic proof which enables trust. [0] https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
• beaugunderson 5y ago
  > Blockchain is a brilliant solution to an extremely rare problem. sincere apologies for the pedantry, but "blockchain" is a concrete countable noun... if you can replace "blockchain" with "cell phone" in a sentence and it sounds wrong, you should change it, e.g. "blockchains are a brilliant solution" or "blockchain technology is a brilliant solution".
• duxup 5y ago
  >It's amazing how much bullshit has been pitched under the flag of "blockchain" You can build a city based on it... https://www.forbes.com/sites/korihale/2020/08/18/akon-is-ready-to-build-a-6-billion-cryptocurrency-city/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/korihale/2020/08/18/akon-is-rea...
• cyanydeez 5y ago
  blockchain can provide a proof of time and existince of digital data. thats not what nfts are sold as, but thats whats going on.