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I see a lot of these "idiots guides to blockchain" full of diagrams, analogies, and explanations. I think it really just speaks to the environment around the te

I see a lot of these "idiots guides to blockchain" full of diagrams, analogies, and explanations. I think it really just speaks to the environment around the technology itself. Blockchain is fundamentally a very simple technology, but the market for it is based on making it sound like some panacea for every problem. Obfuscating the technology, and convincing the reader that "this is really complicated, but I can dumb it down for you" is a sure fire way to get them to trust you as "the expert" when you try to pitch them on some distributed ledger. The fact that all these articles come out of consulting firms (this one too) just drives that point home even further. The goal isn't to show you what blockchain is. The goal is to convince you the writer knows a lot about this complex, spooky but oh so lucrative technology. And that the writer can help you use it for $50,000 USD base consulting fee, extra for non-standard features. It's worth it, trust me. You can put Powered by Blockchain on your website!

liuliu 5y ago
And it is not easy really! But none of these fancy "Simplest Guide" seems care about the details. I finally started to spend some time to learn how Ethereum actually works (not conceptually or principally) last weekend. While I can compile the Sol file and "deploy" the contract. I don't even know at this point what JSON-RPC call looks like if I want to invoke the contract on the testnet, nor I figured out how to transfer money between addresses with only JSON-RPC call, not coding up a new contract.
yumraj 5y ago
Exactly, at its core blockchain is very simple. What I would really like to see is a paper/article/study where Blockchain based solution is demonstrably superior, or ideally the only solution, when compared to traditional, AKA non-blockchain based, solution. I have yet to see one of those.
- trutannus 5y ago
  > I have yet to see one of those That's because a lot of the supposed benefits are ideological, as opposed to technological. You end up having to sacrifice a superior technological solution for one which better aligns with some specific ideological goal (eg: decentralization, non-state money, censorship-resilience). Really though, for any serious use case, efficacy trumps ideology every time.
  - coralreef 5y ago
    > Really though, for any serious use case, efficacy trumps ideology every time. What's that mean? If efficacy trumps ideology, then why do cryptos exist?
    - trutannus 5y ago
      Just because something exists does not negate the existence of the tradeoff. For example, not a single nation dropped their paper fiat money for cryptocurrencies as their primary exchange medium. That's because the advantage is ideological. Cryptocurrencies are superior to fiat money only if you accept the ideological basis for them. The advantage of fiat money now massively outweighs the advantages offered by crypto by orders of magnitude. For now, having actual cash in my hand trumps having tokens in a wallet in at least 99% of cases. You can't buy airline tickets with bitcoins, but with USD, or EUR, or any other fiat, you can. Even if you could buy one or two, with fiat you can buy any.
      - sjtindell 5y ago
        Ethereum is a totally open source, globally decentralized compute infrastructure that executes programs. To say that it gets its value purely from ideology doesn't seem right at all. That is a tangible, valuable development in computer science that is being leveraged more and more.
        trutannus 5y ago
        That's all fine and dandy until you have to spend $40 per transaction, whereas a $40 old computer can run billions of transaction-like operations for free. Eth is a bad example since seeing value in it requires you to focus on the abstract and ignore the real problems it has.
        TimJRobinson 5y ago
        You can already use services like DyDx, Axie Infinity, ImmutableX for free, and they all run on Ethereum. They are Layer 2's that use Ethereum for security. There's a ton of amazing technical innovation going on here, dismissing it is like dismissing the internet because "You have to pay $50 to buy 50 internet hours on a CD and dialup is soo slow".
- em3rgent0rdr 5y ago
  I recall Energy Footprint of Blockchain Consensus Mechanisms Beyond Proof-of-Work [1] showing Polkadot comparative to visa in energy efficiency, and Tezos and Hedera significantly more energy efficient than visa, and Eth. 2.0 optimistically more energy efficient than visa. Platform | Per transaction (kW h/tx) Eth. 2.0 | 0.00009 – 0.00286 (High throughput projection) Eth. 2.0 | 0.01823 – 0.55713 (Low throughput projection) Algorand | 0.00017 – 0.00534 Cardano | 0.01239 – 0.37854 Polkadot | 0.00378 – 0.11556 Tezos | 0.00036 – 0.01096 Hedera | 0.00002 – 0.00004 Bitcoin | 360.39300 – 3691.40700 VisaNet | 0.00358 [1] http://blockchain.cs.ucl.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/UCL_CBT_DPS_Q32021_updated-2.pdf http://blockchain.cs.ucl.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/UC...
- TimJRobinson 5y ago
  There's many in decentralized finance. I work for a company called Balancer. On it you can invest in/create an index fund of your favorite currencies, then traders use it to arbitrage and pay you fees for doing so. So instead of having an index fund you pay someone else to maintain, you get paid for it. Or take Alchemix - You can get a loan that pays itself back over time, rather than you pay interest. Can think of it like a term deposit account where you get the payout up front instead of at the end. Or Pool Together - a no loss lottery - you can use it as a savings account which is used to generate yield, then that yield is paid out as a prize every week. Even just providing liquidity and earning a good return on that, or using something like Aave to get leverage, are things that very few people have access to in traditional finance. There's a rabbithole of super interesting innovation going on in Decentralized Finance right now that you'll never hear about from mainstream publications because it's so hard to comprehend + explain for most people. This will go mainstream over the next decade.
  - sofixa 5y ago
    None of those sound impossible or worse without a blockchain. Alchemix and Pook Together sound like scams.
    - TimJRobinson 5y ago
      Please let me know where I can do these things outside of blockchain based systems? You can literally read the source code of these apps if you're skeptical. Almost everything in this world is open source.
      - sofixa 5y ago
        You run a random database? The fact nobody has thought to run that particular type of scam ( the Alchemix one for instance) with MySQL instead of a blockchain doesn't mean it can only possibly run on a blockchain.
        TimJRobinson 5y ago
ur-whale 5y ago
> Blockchain is fundamentally a very simple technology The merkle tree part is fairly simple, agreed. The decentralized consensus part is anything but.
- trutannus 5y ago
  The algorithm behind it is complex, but for any technical administrator or technical developer, they will never come in contact with it. Based on that, for 99% of people who are not developing blockchains from scratch, but using something like Hyperledger Burrow or another existing blockchain, it's not a visible complexity. One that can be summed up as "there's an algorithm under-the-hood which will ensure consensus, see the documentation appendix 1 to find out more".

liuliu 5y ago

And it is not easy really! But none of these fancy "Simplest Guide" seems care about the details. I finally started to spend some time to learn how Ethereum actually works (not conceptually or principally) last weekend. While I can compile the Sol file and "deploy" the contract. I don't even know at this point what JSON-RPC call looks like if I want to invoke the contract on the testnet, nor I figured out how to transfer money between addresses with only JSON-RPC call, not coding up a new contract.

yumraj 5y ago

Exactly, at its core blockchain is very simple. What I would really like to see is a paper/article/study where Blockchain based solution is demonstrably superior, or ideally the only solution, when compared to traditional, AKA non-blockchain based, solution. I have yet to see one of those.

trutannus 5y ago
> I have yet to see one of those That's because a lot of the supposed benefits are ideological, as opposed to technological. You end up having to sacrifice a superior technological solution for one which better aligns with some specific ideological goal (eg: decentralization, non-state money, censorship-resilience). Really though, for any serious use case, efficacy trumps ideology every time.
- coralreef 5y ago
  > Really though, for any serious use case, efficacy trumps ideology every time. What's that mean? If efficacy trumps ideology, then why do cryptos exist?
  - trutannus 5y ago
    Just because something exists does not negate the existence of the tradeoff. For example, not a single nation dropped their paper fiat money for cryptocurrencies as their primary exchange medium. That's because the advantage is ideological. Cryptocurrencies are superior to fiat money only if you accept the ideological basis for them. The advantage of fiat money now massively outweighs the advantages offered by crypto by orders of magnitude. For now, having actual cash in my hand trumps having tokens in a wallet in at least 99% of cases. You can't buy airline tickets with bitcoins, but with USD, or EUR, or any other fiat, you can. Even if you could buy one or two, with fiat you can buy any.
    - sjtindell 5y ago
      Ethereum is a totally open source, globally decentralized compute infrastructure that executes programs. To say that it gets its value purely from ideology doesn't seem right at all. That is a tangible, valuable development in computer science that is being leveraged more and more.
      - trutannus 5y ago
        That's all fine and dandy until you have to spend $40 per transaction, whereas a $40 old computer can run billions of transaction-like operations for free. Eth is a bad example since seeing value in it requires you to focus on the abstract and ignore the real problems it has.
        TimJRobinson 5y ago
        You can already use services like DyDx, Axie Infinity, ImmutableX for free, and they all run on Ethereum. They are Layer 2's that use Ethereum for security. There's a ton of amazing technical innovation going on here, dismissing it is like dismissing the internet because "You have to pay $50 to buy 50 internet hours on a CD and dialup is soo slow".
em3rgent0rdr 5y ago
I recall Energy Footprint of Blockchain Consensus Mechanisms Beyond Proof-of-Work [1] showing Polkadot comparative to visa in energy efficiency, and Tezos and Hedera significantly more energy efficient than visa, and Eth. 2.0 optimistically more energy efficient than visa. Platform | Per transaction (kW h/tx) Eth. 2.0 | 0.00009 – 0.00286 (High throughput projection) Eth. 2.0 | 0.01823 – 0.55713 (Low throughput projection) Algorand | 0.00017 – 0.00534 Cardano | 0.01239 – 0.37854 Polkadot | 0.00378 – 0.11556 Tezos | 0.00036 – 0.01096 Hedera | 0.00002 – 0.00004 Bitcoin | 360.39300 – 3691.40700 VisaNet | 0.00358 [1] http://blockchain.cs.ucl.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/UCL_CBT_DPS_Q32021_updated-2.pdf http://blockchain.cs.ucl.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/UC...
TimJRobinson 5y ago
There's many in decentralized finance. I work for a company called Balancer. On it you can invest in/create an index fund of your favorite currencies, then traders use it to arbitrage and pay you fees for doing so. So instead of having an index fund you pay someone else to maintain, you get paid for it. Or take Alchemix - You can get a loan that pays itself back over time, rather than you pay interest. Can think of it like a term deposit account where you get the payout up front instead of at the end. Or Pool Together - a no loss lottery - you can use it as a savings account which is used to generate yield, then that yield is paid out as a prize every week. Even just providing liquidity and earning a good return on that, or using something like Aave to get leverage, are things that very few people have access to in traditional finance. There's a rabbithole of super interesting innovation going on in Decentralized Finance right now that you'll never hear about from mainstream publications because it's so hard to comprehend + explain for most people. This will go mainstream over the next decade.
- sofixa 5y ago
  None of those sound impossible or worse without a blockchain. Alchemix and Pook Together sound like scams.
  - TimJRobinson 5y ago
    Please let me know where I can do these things outside of blockchain based systems? You can literally read the source code of these apps if you're skeptical. Almost everything in this world is open source.
    - sofixa 5y ago
      You run a random database? The fact nobody has thought to run that particular type of scam ( the Alchemix one for instance) with MySQL instead of a blockchain doesn't mean it can only possibly run on a blockchain.
      - TimJRobinson 5y ago

ur-whale 5y ago

> Blockchain is fundamentally a very simple technology The merkle tree part is fairly simple, agreed. The decentralized consensus part is anything but.

trutannus 5y ago
The algorithm behind it is complex, but for any technical administrator or technical developer, they will never come in contact with it. Based on that, for 99% of people who are not developing blockchains from scratch, but using something like Hyperledger Burrow or another existing blockchain, it's not a visible complexity. One that can be summed up as "there's an algorithm under-the-hood which will ensure consensus, see the documentation appendix 1 to find out more".