7 ms·

Sure, but a lot of early technologies move laterally in some unexpected direction, and it was reasonable to expect blockchain stuff to do the same. Maybe the or

Sure, but a lot of early technologies move laterally in some unexpected direction, and it was reasonable to expect blockchain stuff to do the same. Maybe the original idea could never fly (even in 2008 you didn't have to be a genius to see that evading financial controls would be the chief use of a working cryptocurrency). But likely someone would find a really neat twist on it and find the blockchain equivalent of VisiCalc, and that would happen again and so on. What's interesting to me is that the original idea was clearly brilliant, but never found any of those lateral steps. It's kind of a string theory for programmers now.

ashtonkem 5y ago
There was no reason to believe it would move laterally, for both technical and social reasons. First, the underpinnings of Bitcoin are ideological, namely in Austrian economics. This means that any change that caused any inflation would be socially resisted. Second, most of the issues with Bitcoin stem from the lack of a central authority to do things like chargebacks and handle conflict resolution. It is not possible to solve many of the issues of Bitcoin without a central authority, and that was not going to happen for obvious reasons.
- idlewords 5y ago
  Yeah, but when you took away the money part and just looked at the technical idea of a distributed chained ledger with no central point of trust, that was cool. At least, it was cool to me. It seemed like it might go in some interesting other direction.
  - davidgerard 5y ago
    Bitcoin was a fascinating technical trick, but it's also been a worked example of the difference between "interesting", versus "feasible" or even "a good idea". As soon as it claimed to be money, then it was all about the money. If you look at early BitcoinTalk, you'll see a pile of scams that are extremely similar to the jargon still used in crypto to this day - the scammers got in very early indeed.
  - FourthProtocol 5y ago
    I never quite understood how that might happen. I kept hearing how it was distributed when it isn't. How the blockchain was going to change the world, when not a single example beyond Bitcoin itself could be given. Healthcare was mentioned, but no application... It's right up there with all the other crazy ideas of the last decade or two (Mongo, agile, Google Glass...)
    - Clewza313 5y ago
      Augmented reality has plenty of potential commercial applications, and Glass is still quietly trying to exploit them. The problem is that delivering AR with enough fidelity to fool the eye is capital-H Hard. Michael Abrash had a good series of blog posts on this.
    - imtringued 5y ago
      It's the big problem with Bitcoin. The USD dollar exists for the US. Bitcoin only exists for itself.
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    There's one application that I always wondered why it didn't take off as a blockchain based element, a DNS replacement. It's one of the cornerstones of the internet and the web (which to many people is the internet) and the centralized control over it is definitely a drawback and a shortcoming.
    - Sargos 5y ago
      ENS has largely replaced DNS in crypto. Most dapps integrate ENS to display human readable names for addresses and it supports arbitrary TXT records so some apps are using it as a shared profile of yourself that you own.
    - ephbit 5y ago
      You're probably aware of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namecoin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namecoin
      - derefr 5y ago
        I think they meant, "why didn't Namecoin replace DNS?"
    - marcusae313 5y ago
      It's all a significant risk to the internet.
    - ashtonkem 5y ago
      It’s because DNS already has a centralized authority, which is necessary to create gTLDs and manage the sale of brand new domains. Once you have an inherent central authority, a lot of the benefits of a blockchain goes away.
  - chx 5y ago
    > the technical idea of a distributed chained ledger with no central point of trust, that was cool. So... like git?
    - ashtonkem 5y ago
      The novel thing about blockchains isn’t the Merkle tree, it’s the mechanism that’s used to “secure” the tree against double spends. And that algorithm is indeed novel! It also has a lot of drawbacks that ultimately makes the whole system not worth the trouble.
  - ashtonkem 5y ago
    I could write a bunch of words to explain why a non-financial pivot isn’t technically possible, but instead I’ll just ask this: “if the blockchain is so useful, why hasn’t anyone done anything with it beyond Ponzi schemes and fraud?”
    - ikt 5y ago
      how is defi a ponzi scheme or fraud?
    - tbrownaw 5y ago
      Technically your git repo is a blockchain. Those are pretty useful. I hear that darknet markets tend to use cryptocoins. Which while probably mostly illegal, isn't a Ponzi scheme and isn't (necessarily, depending on what's being sold) fraud.
      - bombcar 5y ago
        A merkle tree is distinguished from a blockchain (as the distributed part is effectively removed). Amusingly enough the darknet use of crypto may only be possible because of the Ponzi-beginnings. Criminals are unlikely to accept Pokémons as currency until after they see others doing it.
        still_grokking 5y ago
        Git is called a distributed VCS for a reason. And a blockchain is of course a Merkle tree. This part of the basic ideas behind crypto-coins is useful without doubt. But that's not the point. The actual interesting and novel thing about crypto-coins was solving the "trust problem" of a distributed ledger. But this solution, to be honest, is quite clumsy: PoW. But nobody ever found a better solution until now. Any other proposal is kind of centralized somewhere. The question that needs to be asked is now "Do we really want, or even need, a fully decentralized 'value moving system'"? In a world where you could ultimately trust someone else the answer would be clearly "no". But when there is on thing to learn about humans than it's "never ever trust someone ultimately as you're going to be scammed by those people eventually". Just look at what government do around the globe… As long as this fact doesn't change (and it won't change until we create a new species of intelligent beings, better than us) there will be room for something like BitCoin. And as those are distributed systems there even doesn't need to be any agreement on that point.
  - lapinot 5y ago
    Taking away the money part you'll probably want to replace "distributed chained ledger" with "distributed database" or "state-machine replication". There's actually a nice academic literature on this topic of having distributed databases that have strong notions of "commit". This is never the case with stuff that gets called "blockchain". I've yet to encounter something that isn't a variation on "rate-limit the ingest so we have time to replicate operations world-wide" or "create internal monkey-money incentives for agents not to diverge from corretness", both of which are trivial hacks that don't advance anything from a scientific point of view. Not my field tho, so here's the few refs i know. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paxos_(computer_science) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paxos_(computer_science) An old algorithm used for sharding big-data databases. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raft_(algorithm) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raft_(algorithm) A simplified version of paxos. http://www.scs.stanford.edu/~dm/home/papers/losa:stellar-instantiation.pdf http://www.scs.stanford.edu/~dm/home/papers/losa:stellar-ins... The new paper about SCP which allows replication with subjective notions of trust (no central participant-stake list like paxos/raft). ps: actually i remove "chained" from the idea. If you want to keep the whole authenticated linked-list thing and do it right you'll end up somewhere near https://irmin.org/ https://irmin.org/ (a generalization of git), which is very useful, but doesn't tackle the "strong decentralized commit". You'll probably want to either centrally manage the "lastest-hash(s)" (like git is usually done), or pair it with a state-machine replication protocol. In that last case it may seem useless to use the chained thing if you already have a real replication protocol, but it is much like using public-key crypto for encrypting small ephemeral symmetric keys and encrypting actual data with symmetric crypto: it's an optimization.
    - ashtonkem 5y ago
      There’s a reason why the blockchain algorithms are quite different from Raft et. al.; blockchain systems need to deal with the existence of hostile actors, while most consensus algorithms need to deal only with unreliable actors. The existence of hostile actors changes the requirements a lot, and goes to explain why cryptocurrencies went a different way.
      - lapinot 5y ago
- rkagerer 5y ago
  You don't need centralization to do chargebacks and conflict mediation. What is lacking is a decentralized version of a justice system.
- govcoin 5y ago
  Please dont mix Austrian economics into the picture. The few "austrians" that took the bait for BTC are either stupid or scammers at heart. I consider myself the student of Austrian economics, i work as a gold dealer, and both me and hundreds of my clients (whom many likewise are "austrians" or libertarians) believe BTC and cryptos are a scam.
Rerarom 5y ago
> string theory for programmers This is gold, I'm gonna steal it
- jjulius 5y ago
  We could get really meta with it and have @idlewords sell that phrase/post to you as an NFT.
api 5y ago
String theory for programmers is close to my take. I always think of the STTNG episode where the Federation comes up with a weapon to kill the Borg by giving them an impossible but deeply fascinating problem to ponder forever. Cryptocurrency seems like that for endless numbers of tech nerds. It’s even worse than the impossible shape they were going to use on the Borg since it plugs right into humanity’s biggest cognitive vulnerability: gambling. Maybe it’s a weapon sent by aliens to make halt our technological progress. 25 years from now cryptocurrency will have soaked up all surplus capital and locked it into a Ponzi and all our best minds will be churning out increasingly Byzantine coin hacks. Then the hypervelocity impactors start arriving…

ashtonkem 5y ago

There was no reason to believe it would move laterally, for both technical and social reasons. First, the underpinnings of Bitcoin are ideological, namely in Austrian economics. This means that any change that caused any inflation would be socially resisted. Second, most of the issues with Bitcoin stem from the lack of a central authority to do things like chargebacks and handle conflict resolution. It is not possible to solve many of the issues of Bitcoin without a central authority, and that was not going to happen for obvious reasons.

idlewords 5y ago
Yeah, but when you took away the money part and just looked at the technical idea of a distributed chained ledger with no central point of trust, that was cool. At least, it was cool to me. It seemed like it might go in some interesting other direction.
- davidgerard 5y ago
  Bitcoin was a fascinating technical trick, but it's also been a worked example of the difference between "interesting", versus "feasible" or even "a good idea". As soon as it claimed to be money, then it was all about the money. If you look at early BitcoinTalk, you'll see a pile of scams that are extremely similar to the jargon still used in crypto to this day - the scammers got in very early indeed.
- FourthProtocol 5y ago
  I never quite understood how that might happen. I kept hearing how it was distributed when it isn't. How the blockchain was going to change the world, when not a single example beyond Bitcoin itself could be given. Healthcare was mentioned, but no application... It's right up there with all the other crazy ideas of the last decade or two (Mongo, agile, Google Glass...)
  - Clewza313 5y ago
    Augmented reality has plenty of potential commercial applications, and Glass is still quietly trying to exploit them. The problem is that delivering AR with enough fidelity to fool the eye is capital-H Hard. Michael Abrash had a good series of blog posts on this.
  - imtringued 5y ago
    It's the big problem with Bitcoin. The USD dollar exists for the US. Bitcoin only exists for itself.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  There's one application that I always wondered why it didn't take off as a blockchain based element, a DNS replacement. It's one of the cornerstones of the internet and the web (which to many people is the internet) and the centralized control over it is definitely a drawback and a shortcoming.
  - Sargos 5y ago
    ENS has largely replaced DNS in crypto. Most dapps integrate ENS to display human readable names for addresses and it supports arbitrary TXT records so some apps are using it as a shared profile of yourself that you own.
  - ephbit 5y ago
    You're probably aware of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namecoin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namecoin
    - derefr 5y ago
      I think they meant, "why didn't Namecoin replace DNS?"
  - marcusae313 5y ago
    It's all a significant risk to the internet.
  - ashtonkem 5y ago
    It’s because DNS already has a centralized authority, which is necessary to create gTLDs and manage the sale of brand new domains. Once you have an inherent central authority, a lot of the benefits of a blockchain goes away.
- chx 5y ago
  > the technical idea of a distributed chained ledger with no central point of trust, that was cool. So... like git?
  - ashtonkem 5y ago
    The novel thing about blockchains isn’t the Merkle tree, it’s the mechanism that’s used to “secure” the tree against double spends. And that algorithm is indeed novel! It also has a lot of drawbacks that ultimately makes the whole system not worth the trouble.
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  I could write a bunch of words to explain why a non-financial pivot isn’t technically possible, but instead I’ll just ask this: “if the blockchain is so useful, why hasn’t anyone done anything with it beyond Ponzi schemes and fraud?”
  - ikt 5y ago
    how is defi a ponzi scheme or fraud?
  - tbrownaw 5y ago
    Technically your git repo is a blockchain. Those are pretty useful. I hear that darknet markets tend to use cryptocoins. Which while probably mostly illegal, isn't a Ponzi scheme and isn't (necessarily, depending on what's being sold) fraud.
    - bombcar 5y ago
      A merkle tree is distinguished from a blockchain (as the distributed part is effectively removed). Amusingly enough the darknet use of crypto may only be possible because of the Ponzi-beginnings. Criminals are unlikely to accept Pokémons as currency until after they see others doing it.
      - still_grokking 5y ago
        Git is called a distributed VCS for a reason. And a blockchain is of course a Merkle tree. This part of the basic ideas behind crypto-coins is useful without doubt. But that's not the point. The actual interesting and novel thing about crypto-coins was solving the "trust problem" of a distributed ledger. But this solution, to be honest, is quite clumsy: PoW. But nobody ever found a better solution until now. Any other proposal is kind of centralized somewhere. The question that needs to be asked is now "Do we really want, or even need, a fully decentralized 'value moving system'"? In a world where you could ultimately trust someone else the answer would be clearly "no". But when there is on thing to learn about humans than it's "never ever trust someone ultimately as you're going to be scammed by those people eventually". Just look at what government do around the globe… As long as this fact doesn't change (and it won't change until we create a new species of intelligent beings, better than us) there will be room for something like BitCoin. And as those are distributed systems there even doesn't need to be any agreement on that point.
- lapinot 5y ago
  Taking away the money part you'll probably want to replace "distributed chained ledger" with "distributed database" or "state-machine replication". There's actually a nice academic literature on this topic of having distributed databases that have strong notions of "commit". This is never the case with stuff that gets called "blockchain". I've yet to encounter something that isn't a variation on "rate-limit the ingest so we have time to replicate operations world-wide" or "create internal monkey-money incentives for agents not to diverge from corretness", both of which are trivial hacks that don't advance anything from a scientific point of view. Not my field tho, so here's the few refs i know. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paxos_(computer_science) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paxos_(computer_science) An old algorithm used for sharding big-data databases. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raft_(algorithm) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raft_(algorithm) A simplified version of paxos. http://www.scs.stanford.edu/~dm/home/papers/losa:stellar-instantiation.pdf http://www.scs.stanford.edu/~dm/home/papers/losa:stellar-ins... The new paper about SCP which allows replication with subjective notions of trust (no central participant-stake list like paxos/raft). ps: actually i remove "chained" from the idea. If you want to keep the whole authenticated linked-list thing and do it right you'll end up somewhere near https://irmin.org/ https://irmin.org/ (a generalization of git), which is very useful, but doesn't tackle the "strong decentralized commit". You'll probably want to either centrally manage the "lastest-hash(s)" (like git is usually done), or pair it with a state-machine replication protocol. In that last case it may seem useless to use the chained thing if you already have a real replication protocol, but it is much like using public-key crypto for encrypting small ephemeral symmetric keys and encrypting actual data with symmetric crypto: it's an optimization.
  - ashtonkem 5y ago
    There’s a reason why the blockchain algorithms are quite different from Raft et. al.; blockchain systems need to deal with the existence of hostile actors, while most consensus algorithms need to deal only with unreliable actors. The existence of hostile actors changes the requirements a lot, and goes to explain why cryptocurrencies went a different way.
    - lapinot 5y ago
rkagerer 5y ago
You don't need centralization to do chargebacks and conflict mediation. What is lacking is a decentralized version of a justice system.
govcoin 5y ago
Please dont mix Austrian economics into the picture. The few "austrians" that took the bait for BTC are either stupid or scammers at heart. I consider myself the student of Austrian economics, i work as a gold dealer, and both me and hundreds of my clients (whom many likewise are "austrians" or libertarians) believe BTC and cryptos are a scam.

Rerarom 5y ago

> string theory for programmers This is gold, I'm gonna steal it

jjulius 5y ago
We could get really meta with it and have @idlewords sell that phrase/post to you as an NFT.

api 5y ago

String theory for programmers is close to my take. I always think of the STTNG episode where the Federation comes up with a weapon to kill the Borg by giving them an impossible but deeply fascinating problem to ponder forever. Cryptocurrency seems like that for endless numbers of tech nerds. It’s even worse than the impossible shape they were going to use on the Borg since it plugs right into humanity’s biggest cognitive vulnerability: gambling. Maybe it’s a weapon sent by aliens to make halt our technological progress. 25 years from now cryptocurrency will have soaked up all surplus capital and locked it into a Ponzi and all our best minds will be churning out increasingly Byzantine coin hacks. Then the hypervelocity impactors start arriving…