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Blockchains and crypto tech does seem to provide solutions to many challenging problems: distributed ledgers, immutable and decentralized data, ownerless contra

Blockchains and crypto tech does seem to provide solutions to many challenging problems: distributed ledgers, immutable and decentralized data, ownerless contracts and program execution, secure and decentralized ownership of a digital asset (eg: owning a domain name), programmable free markets, preventing the double spend problem, etc. These may not be problems the author is interested in, but it does not mean the technology as a whole achieves nothing. For what it’s worth: I would welcome more technology and innovations that solves the above problems without the need for casino style speculation and ecologically harmful PoW algorithms.

mdoms 5y ago
> Blockchains and crypto tech does seem to provide solutions to many challenging problems: distributed ledgers, immutable and decentralized data, ownerless contracts and program execution, secure and decentralized ownership of a digital asset None of these are real problems. Each and every one was invented as a problem as a post hoc rationalisation for Blockchain technologies.
- hvidgaard 5y ago
  Many of mans greatest inventions have started like this. Just because we are not aware of a problem today, does not mean it is not there, will not come, or that it can be solved efficiently in other ways.
  - skohan 5y ago
    Blockchain is quite old at this point by technology standards, no? In 2017 there was a ton of attention and funding going into the space - it's not as if there hasn't been the opportunity to do something interesting with blockchain.
    - bhawks 5y ago
      The fine article and your comment both say crypto is 'old' tech. TFA points to iPhone's 2007 release date as if no one (even apple themselves had tried to crack the personal digital assistant before). Which is a laughable omission of history. The first PDA landed in the 80s. Apple started development in 87 on the newton and didn't have a product til 93. The iphone stands on the ashes of 2 decades of product and engineering iterations. The AI winter lasted from 80s until the 2010s. Technology takes time and innovation is a discrete not continuous function. If we all gave up after 10 years we would be sitting in caves and probably not even planting seeds. TFA is full of blustery arguments to say that crypto is a worthless dead end and should be banned deserves more reasoned arguments. Toning down the emotional levels might be a good first step.
      - skohan 5y ago
        I don't think you should conflate my comment with the TFA article. I didn't write it, and I have no interest in defending it's points. But I don't totally understand your comparison of early PDA's to the current state of cryptocurrency. Palm pilots were a successful product in their day. Blackberries were hugely successful. It's not as if the iPhone was the first example of value being created in this space. As far as blockchain, from what I can tell, the only value its creating so far is for drug dealers, those executing ransomware attacks, and people running cryptocurrency exchanges. I'm not ruling out the idea that someone will find an interesting use-case for cryptocurrency in the future. But what seems a bit strange to me is that cryptocurrency advocates seem to want us all to give a ton of attention and investment towards this space which so far has produced nothing of value. It seems to me that the rational standpoint will be to ignore it until someone can actually demonstrate the "potential" which has been promised for so many years now.
  - mdoms 5y ago
    Can you name such a technology that existed for well over a decade before any real use cases were found?
    - creshal 5y ago
      LASER, back when it was still written in all caps. It was called "the most useless invention of the century" for a while, and it took close to a decade to figure a use for it. But I think the whole discussion is missing the point. Blockchain is mostly not trying to be a solution to engineering problems, but societal, "how do we do X without a trustworthy party involved". We already know how to do any given X with someone trustworthy involved. And, fundamentally, that's how society works, no matter how much anarchists wish it didn't. It's almost always possible to agree to some party to be in charge, making blockchain mostly pointless, no matter how much money is poured in the technical details.
      - skohan 5y ago
        But this is a totally abstract argument. Can you point to a tangible example of blockchain being used to solve a real societal problem, in a way which is competitive with other, more conventional solutions?
        neolog 5y ago
        The "Git" application is a blockchain for decentralized management of the Linux kernel source code. The "Bitcoin" application is a tool useful for buying and selling recreational drugs without exposure to the physical risk posed by cash transactions. Edit: That is, the physical/financial risk posed to you by the other party or third-party robbers. Legal risk is probably also reduced: law-enforcement deanonymization attacks seem much less frequent than busting people with drugs on the street. Blockchain-based markets in general enable transactions without revealing personally identifying information to the counterparty or platform while circumventing regulatory restrictions on conventional transactions.
        deleted 5y ago
- mattdesl 5y ago
  The same could be said for many problems in computer science and on the web: these were not problems humans were trying to solve before computers. Blockchains give us new paradigms (such as ownerless & distributed program execution) that most of us weren’t thinking about before it was achievable.
  - mdoms 5y ago
    And what has that given us, tangibly?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
skohan 5y ago
Can you name an example of a tangible use-case where a blockchain has been used to create real value, and is competitive against conventional technologies in the same space? There has been a lot of talk about the potential of blockchain, but so far all I have seen it used for is crime and speculation. Would love to be shown I'm wrong on this.
- mattdesl 5y ago
  I would point to Hicetnunc as one example[1], which provides real value for many artists on the platform. I’m sure it’s possible to build a similar platform with a central database handling transactions and Stripe payouts, but I’m not sure it would be met with the same enthusiasm (and, despite the possibility of this with past tech, no pre-blockchain digital art marketplace has come close to meeting it in sales). Due to the decentralization of the art tokens (via the blockchain), the community has been able to grow and evolve in a way that a centralized platform could not. For example: while the site’s contract was paused to repair a bug, artists continued to trade tokens directly peer-to-peer (no platform needed), and even build new sites and platforms that enabled trading & auctioning on the same Hicetnunc-minted tokens. [1] https://restofworld.org/2021/inside-brazils-diy-nft-art-marketplace/ https://restofworld.org/2021/inside-brazils-diy-nft-art-mark...
  - skohan 5y ago
    So I would agree that this marketplace is creating profit for artists. Whether there is real value creation happening I would consider debatable. NFT's themselves are a highly speculative asset, and I would not count on this marketplace continuing to grow and thrive a decade from now. In other words, a lot of people probably made a very good profit operating tulip markets in Holland in the 1600's, but that doesn't mean they were creating value.
    - mattdesl 5y ago
      That’s an interesting argument. What defines “value” in your mind? The platform brings value to artists (financial freedom to create more art), value to collectors (digital ownership over a scarce conceptual artwork), and value to the art world (more digital art being created by a more diverse group of people). Not all may agree with these values, and perhaps this platform and it’s tokens will not persist after some years, but I’m not sure that means the project does not currently provide value to those participating in it. Because “NFTs are dead” (according to the media) we have hopefully past the moment of tulip mania. But perhaps it will really take some more months or years for this to truly “die” — during which time the artists have a viable marketplace to distribute their art and earn revenue on it, where no prior option existed for them. Or, perhaps it will not die so quickly, if enough people continue to see value in collecting and supporting digital artists in this way. Time will tell.
creshal 5y ago
> Blockchains and crypto tech does seem to provide solutions to many challenging problems: distributed ledgers, immutable and decentralized data, ownerless contracts and program execution, secure and decentralized ownership of a digital asset (eg: owning a domain name), programmable free markets, preventing the double spend problem, etc. Emphasis on "seem". These aren't even problems in the practical sense, but rather tools you can use to solve concrete problems. And in many cases, you can use similar tools that don't involve blockchains (merkle trees, FSS+PKI, …). And it's still not clear whether blockchains can in practice deliver on the promises of decentralization: There's no good solution to problems like 51% attacks, other than rallying behind a central authority like the chain's developers. Why even bother with a blockchain then?
- alephu5 5y ago
  This. I've read many accounts of people advocating for use of blockchains in industry or government, which mostly boil down to different entities emitting documents in a verifiable way, e.g. for property ownership. As you've said this can be handled using boring PKIs and the like.
  - creshal 5y ago
    Cynic mode: You can't handle it the boring way because nobody is funding boring solutions. We already know those won't make you a billionaire overnight.
lmm 5y ago
Append-only, log-structured datastores are useful; Merkle trees are useful; bitcoin did not invent these things though it has helped popularise them. PoW is the one unique innovation that makes bitcoin bitcoin, and I think the last 12 years have shown that its legitimate use cases are niche at best.
- mattdesl 5y ago
  I would largely agree that the use cases are niche at the moment. For example, enabling ownership of a domain name without requiring the trust of a central party. It may be worth noting, Ethereum has only been around for 6 years, and prior to it there was not a lot of focus in the blockchain space on ownerless program execution and immutable state (smart contracts).
  - lottin 5y ago
    Notice that blockchains have no notion of property rights. As far as the blockchain is concerned whoever controls the asset (i.e. has the password to the wallet) owns it. For example, if the owner loses the password, or has the password stolen, they no longer own the asset. This is a big problem. Imagine that if when someone stole your car they automatically owned it! The lack of property rights is one of the reasons blockchains are not suitable for almost anything.
    - dkshdkjshdk 5y ago
      Have you ever heard that "posession is nine-tenths of the law"? Well... this is a system in which "posession is ten-tenths of the law". This has obvious disadvantages (as you pointed out), but it also has a clear advantage: it becomes trivial to figure out who effectively owns something within the system (whoever controls/posesses the associated key). Just because a system doesn't encode/enforce "property laws", doesn't necessarily mean that it is useless. In fact, few systems (if any) formally encode property laws: that is always something imposed from the outside. If someone steals your crypto keys, you can still use the (normal) court system to get your assets back (assuming you have some way of proving that you own the assets, and you know who stole them from you). Does the Internet encode/enforce property laws? No. If someone (e.g.) copies your stuff, you're still forced to go to the court system (just like when someone "steals" crypto from you). Does that make the Internet "not suitable for almost anything", just because it doesn't automatically enforce property laws?
pgdx 5y ago
> eg: owning a domain name I just want to comment on the only tangible use case you mention. What happens the day a rogue actor gets ahold of .gov, NSA/CIA/DHS, or Google's/Microsoft's domain and sends it to /dev/null? The "no central authority" point of Blockchains is too risky. Ps, saying that Blockchains solve the double spend problem is like saying the iPhone solves the "running-out-of-battery" problem; it comes with a charger. Nowhere else do we have the double spend problem, simply because we have a CA.
RandomLensman 5y ago
I think for me the disconnect is that in developed financial systems most of these points are not a big issue or not even desirable given current regulation and supervision. Few examples: (i) immutable data can clash with privacy laws, (ii) double spend is generally not a problem in centralized systems, (iii) distributed ledgers means you don't have full control of your books and records, (iv) ownerless contracts cause problems with KYC/CFT/AML/sanctions, (v) there are still courts and government force that can compel people to do things etc. ... In order to really use these it would need a sizeable shift on how the financial structure looks like. That might happen but a lot of what I see is just a fast run through the best errors in finance over the last hundred years. For example, I see mispriced contracts because people don't understand forwards, free options being giving away etc., stuff that to me (not a lawyer) looks like ignoring securities laws, ... I am not totally bearish on some of these ideas and technologies, but right now I think they are used and envisioned too narrowly by trying just to replace things that are often poorly understood. Example: I think the idea of making market making directly investable is great (i.e. not just being shares of an investment bank or similar). There are probably real applications outside of crypto (index components vs ETF maybe). Similarly, for DeFi to really "make it", I think it needs to be able to do unsecured lending.
- jiriknesl 5y ago
  I think your points prove the motivation lots of cryptocurrency authors have. They don't want politicians and bankers to set the rules. They want developers to set the rules. So they build systems enabling ideas they stand behind. Just like with open source. I guess if there were no open source, all operating systems would have backdoors, strong cryptography would be banned, we would have very strict software patents, etc. Everyone would be in a cage built by politicians & closed source devs. As we're now in the financial system. Cryptocurrencies, in ideal situation, should serve as open source counterpart to closed source world.
janekm 5y ago
I think it would be fun for someone to write a short story / novel around a rogue AI emerging within the ecosystem created by "ownerless contracts and program execution" and "programmable free markets". Imagine a programmer creating a genetic algorithm for crypto-trading. They enable to code to purchase new VMs to execute itself when it has a positive balance (on a cloud service that allows crypto / ownerless payments). The successful variants propagate to new VMs, the unsuccessful ones die off. The code pays a certain percentage out to the creator's wallet.

mdoms 5y ago

hvidgaard 5y ago
Many of mans greatest inventions have started like this. Just because we are not aware of a problem today, does not mean it is not there, will not come, or that it can be solved efficiently in other ways.
- skohan 5y ago
  Blockchain is quite old at this point by technology standards, no? In 2017 there was a ton of attention and funding going into the space - it's not as if there hasn't been the opportunity to do something interesting with blockchain.
  - bhawks 5y ago
    The fine article and your comment both say crypto is 'old' tech. TFA points to iPhone's 2007 release date as if no one (even apple themselves had tried to crack the personal digital assistant before). Which is a laughable omission of history. The first PDA landed in the 80s. Apple started development in 87 on the newton and didn't have a product til 93. The iphone stands on the ashes of 2 decades of product and engineering iterations. The AI winter lasted from 80s until the 2010s. Technology takes time and innovation is a discrete not continuous function. If we all gave up after 10 years we would be sitting in caves and probably not even planting seeds. TFA is full of blustery arguments to say that crypto is a worthless dead end and should be banned deserves more reasoned arguments. Toning down the emotional levels might be a good first step.
    - skohan 5y ago
      I don't think you should conflate my comment with the TFA article. I didn't write it, and I have no interest in defending it's points. But I don't totally understand your comparison of early PDA's to the current state of cryptocurrency. Palm pilots were a successful product in their day. Blackberries were hugely successful. It's not as if the iPhone was the first example of value being created in this space. As far as blockchain, from what I can tell, the only value its creating so far is for drug dealers, those executing ransomware attacks, and people running cryptocurrency exchanges. I'm not ruling out the idea that someone will find an interesting use-case for cryptocurrency in the future. But what seems a bit strange to me is that cryptocurrency advocates seem to want us all to give a ton of attention and investment towards this space which so far has produced nothing of value. It seems to me that the rational standpoint will be to ignore it until someone can actually demonstrate the "potential" which has been promised for so many years now.
- mdoms 5y ago
  Can you name such a technology that existed for well over a decade before any real use cases were found?
  - creshal 5y ago
    LASER, back when it was still written in all caps. It was called "the most useless invention of the century" for a while, and it took close to a decade to figure a use for it. But I think the whole discussion is missing the point. Blockchain is mostly not trying to be a solution to engineering problems, but societal, "how do we do X without a trustworthy party involved". We already know how to do any given X with someone trustworthy involved. And, fundamentally, that's how society works, no matter how much anarchists wish it didn't. It's almost always possible to agree to some party to be in charge, making blockchain mostly pointless, no matter how much money is poured in the technical details.
    - skohan 5y ago
      But this is a totally abstract argument. Can you point to a tangible example of blockchain being used to solve a real societal problem, in a way which is competitive with other, more conventional solutions?
      - neolog 5y ago
        The "Git" application is a blockchain for decentralized management of the Linux kernel source code. The "Bitcoin" application is a tool useful for buying and selling recreational drugs without exposure to the physical risk posed by cash transactions. Edit: That is, the physical/financial risk posed to you by the other party or third-party robbers. Legal risk is probably also reduced: law-enforcement deanonymization attacks seem much less frequent than busting people with drugs on the street. Blockchain-based markets in general enable transactions without revealing personally identifying information to the counterparty or platform while circumventing regulatory restrictions on conventional transactions.
        deleted 5y ago
mattdesl 5y ago
The same could be said for many problems in computer science and on the web: these were not problems humans were trying to solve before computers. Blockchains give us new paradigms (such as ownerless & distributed program execution) that most of us weren’t thinking about before it was achievable.
- mdoms 5y ago
  And what has that given us, tangibly?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]

skohan 5y ago

Can you name an example of a tangible use-case where a blockchain has been used to create real value, and is competitive against conventional technologies in the same space? There has been a lot of talk about the potential of blockchain, but so far all I have seen it used for is crime and speculation. Would love to be shown I'm wrong on this.

mattdesl 5y ago
I would point to Hicetnunc as one example[1], which provides real value for many artists on the platform. I’m sure it’s possible to build a similar platform with a central database handling transactions and Stripe payouts, but I’m not sure it would be met with the same enthusiasm (and, despite the possibility of this with past tech, no pre-blockchain digital art marketplace has come close to meeting it in sales). Due to the decentralization of the art tokens (via the blockchain), the community has been able to grow and evolve in a way that a centralized platform could not. For example: while the site’s contract was paused to repair a bug, artists continued to trade tokens directly peer-to-peer (no platform needed), and even build new sites and platforms that enabled trading & auctioning on the same Hicetnunc-minted tokens. [1] https://restofworld.org/2021/inside-brazils-diy-nft-art-marketplace/ https://restofworld.org/2021/inside-brazils-diy-nft-art-mark...
- skohan 5y ago
  So I would agree that this marketplace is creating profit for artists. Whether there is real value creation happening I would consider debatable. NFT's themselves are a highly speculative asset, and I would not count on this marketplace continuing to grow and thrive a decade from now. In other words, a lot of people probably made a very good profit operating tulip markets in Holland in the 1600's, but that doesn't mean they were creating value.
  - mattdesl 5y ago
    That’s an interesting argument. What defines “value” in your mind? The platform brings value to artists (financial freedom to create more art), value to collectors (digital ownership over a scarce conceptual artwork), and value to the art world (more digital art being created by a more diverse group of people). Not all may agree with these values, and perhaps this platform and it’s tokens will not persist after some years, but I’m not sure that means the project does not currently provide value to those participating in it. Because “NFTs are dead” (according to the media) we have hopefully past the moment of tulip mania. But perhaps it will really take some more months or years for this to truly “die” — during which time the artists have a viable marketplace to distribute their art and earn revenue on it, where no prior option existed for them. Or, perhaps it will not die so quickly, if enough people continue to see value in collecting and supporting digital artists in this way. Time will tell.

creshal 5y ago

> Blockchains and crypto tech does seem to provide solutions to many challenging problems: distributed ledgers, immutable and decentralized data, ownerless contracts and program execution, secure and decentralized ownership of a digital asset (eg: owning a domain name), programmable free markets, preventing the double spend problem, etc. Emphasis on "seem". These aren't even problems in the practical sense, but rather tools you can use to solve concrete problems. And in many cases, you can use similar tools that don't involve blockchains (merkle trees, FSS+PKI, …). And it's still not clear whether blockchains can in practice deliver on the promises of decentralization: There's no good solution to problems like 51% attacks, other than rallying behind a central authority like the chain's developers. Why even bother with a blockchain then?

alephu5 5y ago
This. I've read many accounts of people advocating for use of blockchains in industry or government, which mostly boil down to different entities emitting documents in a verifiable way, e.g. for property ownership. As you've said this can be handled using boring PKIs and the like.
- creshal 5y ago
  Cynic mode: You can't handle it the boring way because nobody is funding boring solutions. We already know those won't make you a billionaire overnight.

lmm 5y ago

Append-only, log-structured datastores are useful; Merkle trees are useful; bitcoin did not invent these things though it has helped popularise them. PoW is the one unique innovation that makes bitcoin bitcoin, and I think the last 12 years have shown that its legitimate use cases are niche at best.

mattdesl 5y ago
I would largely agree that the use cases are niche at the moment. For example, enabling ownership of a domain name without requiring the trust of a central party. It may be worth noting, Ethereum has only been around for 6 years, and prior to it there was not a lot of focus in the blockchain space on ownerless program execution and immutable state (smart contracts).
- lottin 5y ago
  Notice that blockchains have no notion of property rights. As far as the blockchain is concerned whoever controls the asset (i.e. has the password to the wallet) owns it. For example, if the owner loses the password, or has the password stolen, they no longer own the asset. This is a big problem. Imagine that if when someone stole your car they automatically owned it! The lack of property rights is one of the reasons blockchains are not suitable for almost anything.
  - dkshdkjshdk 5y ago
    Have you ever heard that "posession is nine-tenths of the law"? Well... this is a system in which "posession is ten-tenths of the law". This has obvious disadvantages (as you pointed out), but it also has a clear advantage: it becomes trivial to figure out who effectively owns something within the system (whoever controls/posesses the associated key). Just because a system doesn't encode/enforce "property laws", doesn't necessarily mean that it is useless. In fact, few systems (if any) formally encode property laws: that is always something imposed from the outside. If someone steals your crypto keys, you can still use the (normal) court system to get your assets back (assuming you have some way of proving that you own the assets, and you know who stole them from you). Does the Internet encode/enforce property laws? No. If someone (e.g.) copies your stuff, you're still forced to go to the court system (just like when someone "steals" crypto from you). Does that make the Internet "not suitable for almost anything", just because it doesn't automatically enforce property laws?

pgdx 5y ago

> eg: owning a domain name I just want to comment on the only tangible use case you mention. What happens the day a rogue actor gets ahold of .gov, NSA/CIA/DHS, or Google's/Microsoft's domain and sends it to /dev/null? The "no central authority" point of Blockchains is too risky. Ps, saying that Blockchains solve the double spend problem is like saying the iPhone solves the "running-out-of-battery" problem; it comes with a charger. Nowhere else do we have the double spend problem, simply because we have a CA.

RandomLensman 5y ago

I think for me the disconnect is that in developed financial systems most of these points are not a big issue or not even desirable given current regulation and supervision. Few examples: (i) immutable data can clash with privacy laws, (ii) double spend is generally not a problem in centralized systems, (iii) distributed ledgers means you don't have full control of your books and records, (iv) ownerless contracts cause problems with KYC/CFT/AML/sanctions, (v) there are still courts and government force that can compel people to do things etc. ... In order to really use these it would need a sizeable shift on how the financial structure looks like. That might happen but a lot of what I see is just a fast run through the best errors in finance over the last hundred years. For example, I see mispriced contracts because people don't understand forwards, free options being giving away etc., stuff that to me (not a lawyer) looks like ignoring securities laws, ... I am not totally bearish on some of these ideas and technologies, but right now I think they are used and envisioned too narrowly by trying just to replace things that are often poorly understood. Example: I think the idea of making market making directly investable is great (i.e. not just being shares of an investment bank or similar). There are probably real applications outside of crypto (index components vs ETF maybe). Similarly, for DeFi to really "make it", I think it needs to be able to do unsecured lending.

jiriknesl 5y ago
I think your points prove the motivation lots of cryptocurrency authors have. They don't want politicians and bankers to set the rules. They want developers to set the rules. So they build systems enabling ideas they stand behind. Just like with open source. I guess if there were no open source, all operating systems would have backdoors, strong cryptography would be banned, we would have very strict software patents, etc. Everyone would be in a cage built by politicians & closed source devs. As we're now in the financial system. Cryptocurrencies, in ideal situation, should serve as open source counterpart to closed source world.

janekm 5y ago

I think it would be fun for someone to write a short story / novel around a rogue AI emerging within the ecosystem created by "ownerless contracts and program execution" and "programmable free markets". Imagine a programmer creating a genetic algorithm for crypto-trading. They enable to code to purchase new VMs to execute itself when it has a positive balance (on a cloud service that allows crypto / ownerless payments). The successful variants propagate to new VMs, the unsuccessful ones die off. The code pays a certain percentage out to the creator's wallet.