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Right. When blockchain became mainstream in 2017, I went to a blockchain for government event, and they had a speaker essentially explaining that blockchain was

Right. When blockchain became mainstream in 2017, I went to a blockchain for government event, and they had a speaker essentially explaining that blockchain was an immutable database, and that it could be used to replace your existing databases with something that couldn't be corrupted. This was the "business" interpretation of blockchain for a long time, and people latched on to the database part and imagined all kinds of things that could come out of a more accurate database, without actually understanding how this was achieved. So we ended up with these use cases where blockchain was supposed to magically solve physical world problems, because "that's what it does", without any causal mechanism.

trutannus 5y ago
Governments are the largest perpetuators of the "blockchain for real world assets" silliness. Non technical managers tend to push for these sorts of things to get a "blockchain project" to their name. For some reason the idea of lying to the blockchain isn't something that occurs to them very often.
- version_five 5y ago
  If something is effectively "magic" to someone, even in the base case, an improvement is just another sort of magic. This is why I don't have a lot of confidence in big-picture types that don't know anything about computer science but hold some parallel business analogies in their head and think they can make decisions on that basis. On the other side, sometimes interesting and valuable things can happen when you don't have reality as a constraint. I read (but have not verified) that William Gibson's world of cyberspace and internet etc. in the Sprawl books ended up being so attractive largely because he understood almost nothing about computers.
  - trutannus 5y ago
    > hold some parallel business analogies in their head and think they can make decisions on that basis The advantage with folks like this is it becomes abundantly clear when they open their mouths that they have no idea what they are talking about most of the time. The major disadvantage though is these people tend to be the loudest in the space, and are heard more since people tend to want to hear exciting sexy ideas over the mundane reality of things.
    - version_five 5y ago
      I'm reminded of the pitch I heard from the IBM salesperson talking about the "logarithms" they had that were solving client problems. (Being charitable, maybe he was a slide rule enthusiast) I find it typically very easy to tell someone is full of crap, but trying to call it does not always work in one's favor. Definitely agree it is a good sign you should get yourself out of the situation
  - relaxing 5y ago
    > I read (but have not verified) that William Gibson's world of cyberspace and internet etc. in the Sprawl books ended up being so attractive largely because he understood almost nothing about computers. He knew enough to know that computers and computer hackers were not the stuff of noir-action-thrillers, but saw the potential in answering the question: what if they were? To quote Gibson: The only computers I’d ever seen in those days were things the size of the side of a barn. And then one day, I walked by a bus stop and there was an Apple poster. The poster was a photograph of a businessman’s jacketed, neatly cuffed arm holding a life-size representation of a real-life computer that was not much bigger than a laptop is today. Everyone is going to have one of these, I thought, and everyone is going to want to live inside them. And somehow I knew that the notional space behind all of the computer screens would be one single universe. What I had was a sticky neologism and a very vague chain of associations between the bus-stop Apple IIc advertisement, the posture of the kids playing arcade games, and something I’d heard about from these hobbyist characters from Seattle called the Internet. It was more tedious and more technical than anything I’d ever heard anybody talk about. It made ham radio sound really exciting. But I understood that, sometimes, you could send messages through it, like a telegraph. I also knew that it had begun as a project to explore how we might communicate during a really shit-hot nuclear war. … I knew that cyberspace was exciting, but none of the people I knew who were actually involved in the nascent digital industry were exciting. I wondered what it would be like if they were exciting, stylish, and sexy.
knorker 5y ago
Did these people make it clear that blockchain enthusiasts consider any action or modification by "the courts" and "the legislative body of the government" to be "corruption of the database"?
mumblemumble 5y ago
I get the impression that a lot of folks take it as an article of faith that accuracy problems in the database must be due to a shortcoming of the database itself. But if you replace the database with a spreadsheet, everyone seems to be able to intuitively understand that accuracy problems with the information in the spreadsheet aren't (necessarily) due to shortcomings in the basic idea behind Microsoft Excel. They're more often due to data entry errors, or the fact that it's fundamentally difficult to keep track of everything that happens in the messy, messy real world. (Realistically, the former is just a special case of the latter.)
dplavery92 5y ago
Ha! Was this the "Goverment Blockchain Association" that was meeting in the DC Metro area? I may be have hornswoggled into one of their meetings at the time, and despite my vague enthusiasm for the technology, I felt like I was being sold a timeshare.
- version_five 5y ago
  It was actually in Ottawa, Canada, targeting the canadian government. Same as you, I was interested in the tech, and my (non blockchain) company did business with the federal government, so I wanted to see what the hype was about. That was pretty much the end of my interest in the topic.

trutannus 5y ago

Governments are the largest perpetuators of the "blockchain for real world assets" silliness. Non technical managers tend to push for these sorts of things to get a "blockchain project" to their name. For some reason the idea of lying to the blockchain isn't something that occurs to them very often.

version_five 5y ago
If something is effectively "magic" to someone, even in the base case, an improvement is just another sort of magic. This is why I don't have a lot of confidence in big-picture types that don't know anything about computer science but hold some parallel business analogies in their head and think they can make decisions on that basis. On the other side, sometimes interesting and valuable things can happen when you don't have reality as a constraint. I read (but have not verified) that William Gibson's world of cyberspace and internet etc. in the Sprawl books ended up being so attractive largely because he understood almost nothing about computers.
- trutannus 5y ago
  > hold some parallel business analogies in their head and think they can make decisions on that basis The advantage with folks like this is it becomes abundantly clear when they open their mouths that they have no idea what they are talking about most of the time. The major disadvantage though is these people tend to be the loudest in the space, and are heard more since people tend to want to hear exciting sexy ideas over the mundane reality of things.
  - version_five 5y ago
    I'm reminded of the pitch I heard from the IBM salesperson talking about the "logarithms" they had that were solving client problems. (Being charitable, maybe he was a slide rule enthusiast) I find it typically very easy to tell someone is full of crap, but trying to call it does not always work in one's favor. Definitely agree it is a good sign you should get yourself out of the situation
- relaxing 5y ago
  > I read (but have not verified) that William Gibson's world of cyberspace and internet etc. in the Sprawl books ended up being so attractive largely because he understood almost nothing about computers. He knew enough to know that computers and computer hackers were not the stuff of noir-action-thrillers, but saw the potential in answering the question: what if they were? To quote Gibson: The only computers I’d ever seen in those days were things the size of the side of a barn. And then one day, I walked by a bus stop and there was an Apple poster. The poster was a photograph of a businessman’s jacketed, neatly cuffed arm holding a life-size representation of a real-life computer that was not much bigger than a laptop is today. Everyone is going to have one of these, I thought, and everyone is going to want to live inside them. And somehow I knew that the notional space behind all of the computer screens would be one single universe. What I had was a sticky neologism and a very vague chain of associations between the bus-stop Apple IIc advertisement, the posture of the kids playing arcade games, and something I’d heard about from these hobbyist characters from Seattle called the Internet. It was more tedious and more technical than anything I’d ever heard anybody talk about. It made ham radio sound really exciting. But I understood that, sometimes, you could send messages through it, like a telegraph. I also knew that it had begun as a project to explore how we might communicate during a really shit-hot nuclear war. … I knew that cyberspace was exciting, but none of the people I knew who were actually involved in the nascent digital industry were exciting. I wondered what it would be like if they were exciting, stylish, and sexy.

knorker 5y ago

Did these people make it clear that blockchain enthusiasts consider any action or modification by "the courts" and "the legislative body of the government" to be "corruption of the database"?

mumblemumble 5y ago

I get the impression that a lot of folks take it as an article of faith that accuracy problems in the database must be due to a shortcoming of the database itself. But if you replace the database with a spreadsheet, everyone seems to be able to intuitively understand that accuracy problems with the information in the spreadsheet aren't (necessarily) due to shortcomings in the basic idea behind Microsoft Excel. They're more often due to data entry errors, or the fact that it's fundamentally difficult to keep track of everything that happens in the messy, messy real world. (Realistically, the former is just a special case of the latter.)

dplavery92 5y ago

Ha! Was this the "Goverment Blockchain Association" that was meeting in the DC Metro area? I may be have hornswoggled into one of their meetings at the time, and despite my vague enthusiasm for the technology, I felt like I was being sold a timeshare.

version_five 5y ago
It was actually in Ottawa, Canada, targeting the canadian government. Same as you, I was interested in the tech, and my (non blockchain) company did business with the federal government, so I wanted to see what the hype was about. That was pretty much the end of my interest in the topic.