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What problem does Bitcoin (Or blockchain, if you prefer, I'll take either answer), solve? Blockchains solve an unusual problem of how to get trust between untr

What problem does Bitcoin (Or blockchain, if you prefer, I'll take either answer), solve? Blockchains solve an unusual problem of how to get trust between untrustworthy parties. The underlying problem is "how do you make a secure distributed ledger that all parties can agree on". Using the previous entries to sign new entries is a good solution. The problem is that Bitcoin has nothing to do with that problem.

Jensson 5y ago
> Blockchains solve an unusual problem of how to get trust between untrustworthy parties. People keep repeating this, but this isn't true. It doesn't solve this problem for the general case, it only solve this under very special circumstances and it has yet to be proven that these circumstances allows blockchain to be useful for anything but as a currency. This is what the crypto proponents doesn't understand, they think like you do here that you can just slap blockchain on stuff and now it is trustworthy. The interesting thing is that it is people believing that blockchain makes something trustworthy that is its real value. If you can slap blockchain on a scam to make people believe it is trustworthy, now that is worth many billions of dollars! That is the true value of blockchain. And it wont be valuable as anything other than as a scam as long as people can't tell the difference between a blockchain scam and a real blockchain business, and since it seems basically nobody who is pro-crypto can do this I don't see a bright future for it.
- onion2k 5y ago
  People keep repeating this, but this isn't true. It doesn't solve this problem for the general case Why not? A signed distributed ledger isn't a complicated thing, so it's hard to see how a blockchain would fail in. Cryptocurrencies are an application of blockchain as a technology. They may or may not need to use one. That doesn't have any impact on the use of blockchain in other areas, like supply chain validation for example.
  - Jensson 5y ago
    > A signed distributed ledger isn't a complicated thing, so it's hard to see how a blockchain would fail in. Right, but a signed distributed ledger doesn't inherently provide any trust, so that is where your thinking fails. > Cryptocurrencies are an application of blockchain as a technology. They may or may not need to use one. That doesn't have any impact on the use of blockchain in other areas, like supply chain validation for example. Certificate authorities for signing things like products or documents already exists for many things, blockchain isn't a new solution to that.
    - onion2k 5y ago
      Right, but a signed distributed ledger doesn't inherently provide any trust, so that is where your thinking fails. A blockchain does provide trust insofar as it's cryptographically impossible to tamper with the previous ledger entries. Obviously that trust only extends as far as trusting the crypto software, the ledger software and that people's entries in to the ledger are authentic at the time of entry, but that's the same as any ledger whether it's signed or not. The advantage of a blockchain is that a third party (eg someone joining the ledger at a later date) can verify the previous transactions and continue the chain with a good level of trust that the previous entries are true. So, a signed distributed ledger like a blockchain does provide a level of trust that the ledger data hasn't been modified. As that's what a ledger is for (trust in the individual parties or transactions is done outside of the ledger) it does work. Certificate authorities for signing things like products or documents already exists for many things, blockchain isn't a new solution to that. A blockchain isn't a new solution. They've been around for decades. It's a different solution to something like a signing authority though. Using a signing authority requires everyone to trust a third party. That can be difficult. A blockchain doesn't require that. Arguing that there's an alternative to a blockchain is not an indication that blockchain won't work. It's possible, and usually good, to have more than one solution to a problem.
      - Jensson 5y ago
        > The advantage of a blockchain is that a third party (eg someone joining the ledger at a later date) can verify the previous transactions and continue the chain with a good level of trust that the previous entries are true. You don't need blockchain for this. I've worked in this space (the non blockchain part of online trust), tamper proof logs is already a service provided by central Certificate Authorities. All you need to do is to continuously sign a log and the CA can keep the chain of signatures, and thus provide proof that you didn't tamper with the log. That way the CA can both validate the identity of the signer and validate that the signer didn't tamper, meaning it is a better service than blockchains. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-tamper_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-tamper_software There is great value in software signatures. But that value is already captured and used everywhere, in SSL, software signing, document signing etc, blockchains doesn't add any value at all to that space as far as I've seen. > Using a signing authority requires everyone to trust a third party. That can be difficult. Finding a third party both trust more than they trust each other is trivial in almost every transaction. When you buy from Amazon you trust your bank more than you trust Amazon, and Amazon trusts your bank more than they trust you. Your bank is the third party. Can you name any significant usecases where there isn't a third party both participants would trust more than they trust each other?
BatteryMountain 5y ago
Yeah, this can be done with a normal sql database too. Saving a representation of a linked list is not hard at all. Blockchains are not that special and can be made with less than 50 lines of code (that's with the ability to "mine" a block with x difficulty, but on the CPU). Add some persistence (flat file, sql, etc) and you end up with less than 200 lines of code. Then you can use that to build your ledger/currency system. What makes crypto currency systems interesting to me is the networked consensus and distributed parts. But blockchain itself is dead simple. It doesn't solve any problems for banks because they already have solutions to ensure data integrity and to survive audits.
- quocanh 5y ago
  A bank could theoretically rewrite your account balance with terminal command. Now this example is contrived because banks are under strong government regulations, but what about similar deals you make with your peers? When there are an infinite type of deals you can come up with and no regulation could ever keep up with every single deal that you would ever want to make, how do you trust that the other party will keep their word? Blockchains solve a human problem, not a technical one.
  - oblio 5y ago
    No, they don't. Because you need people with guns, in the end, to enforce stuff in cases of non compliance.
    - quocanh 5y ago
      I'm not sure what you mean by "they don't." But you don't need guns for compliance. If can make it so that people will lose money if they don't follow the deal, then no you don't need guns. People will comply because it's good for themselves. That's how compliance is enforced under a capitalist system and it's the main reason we live in a modern, golden age of cooperation rather than a medieval age of conflict.

Jensson 5y ago

> Blockchains solve an unusual problem of how to get trust between untrustworthy parties. People keep repeating this, but this isn't true. It doesn't solve this problem for the general case, it only solve this under very special circumstances and it has yet to be proven that these circumstances allows blockchain to be useful for anything but as a currency. This is what the crypto proponents doesn't understand, they think like you do here that you can just slap blockchain on stuff and now it is trustworthy. The interesting thing is that it is people believing that blockchain makes something trustworthy that is its real value. If you can slap blockchain on a scam to make people believe it is trustworthy, now that is worth many billions of dollars! That is the true value of blockchain. And it wont be valuable as anything other than as a scam as long as people can't tell the difference between a blockchain scam and a real blockchain business, and since it seems basically nobody who is pro-crypto can do this I don't see a bright future for it.

onion2k 5y ago
People keep repeating this, but this isn't true. It doesn't solve this problem for the general case Why not? A signed distributed ledger isn't a complicated thing, so it's hard to see how a blockchain would fail in. Cryptocurrencies are an application of blockchain as a technology. They may or may not need to use one. That doesn't have any impact on the use of blockchain in other areas, like supply chain validation for example.
- Jensson 5y ago
  > A signed distributed ledger isn't a complicated thing, so it's hard to see how a blockchain would fail in. Right, but a signed distributed ledger doesn't inherently provide any trust, so that is where your thinking fails. > Cryptocurrencies are an application of blockchain as a technology. They may or may not need to use one. That doesn't have any impact on the use of blockchain in other areas, like supply chain validation for example. Certificate authorities for signing things like products or documents already exists for many things, blockchain isn't a new solution to that.
  - onion2k 5y ago
    Right, but a signed distributed ledger doesn't inherently provide any trust, so that is where your thinking fails. A blockchain does provide trust insofar as it's cryptographically impossible to tamper with the previous ledger entries. Obviously that trust only extends as far as trusting the crypto software, the ledger software and that people's entries in to the ledger are authentic at the time of entry, but that's the same as any ledger whether it's signed or not. The advantage of a blockchain is that a third party (eg someone joining the ledger at a later date) can verify the previous transactions and continue the chain with a good level of trust that the previous entries are true. So, a signed distributed ledger like a blockchain does provide a level of trust that the ledger data hasn't been modified. As that's what a ledger is for (trust in the individual parties or transactions is done outside of the ledger) it does work. Certificate authorities for signing things like products or documents already exists for many things, blockchain isn't a new solution to that. A blockchain isn't a new solution. They've been around for decades. It's a different solution to something like a signing authority though. Using a signing authority requires everyone to trust a third party. That can be difficult. A blockchain doesn't require that. Arguing that there's an alternative to a blockchain is not an indication that blockchain won't work. It's possible, and usually good, to have more than one solution to a problem.
    - Jensson 5y ago
      > The advantage of a blockchain is that a third party (eg someone joining the ledger at a later date) can verify the previous transactions and continue the chain with a good level of trust that the previous entries are true. You don't need blockchain for this. I've worked in this space (the non blockchain part of online trust), tamper proof logs is already a service provided by central Certificate Authorities. All you need to do is to continuously sign a log and the CA can keep the chain of signatures, and thus provide proof that you didn't tamper with the log. That way the CA can both validate the identity of the signer and validate that the signer didn't tamper, meaning it is a better service than blockchains. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-tamper_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-tamper_software There is great value in software signatures. But that value is already captured and used everywhere, in SSL, software signing, document signing etc, blockchains doesn't add any value at all to that space as far as I've seen. > Using a signing authority requires everyone to trust a third party. That can be difficult. Finding a third party both trust more than they trust each other is trivial in almost every transaction. When you buy from Amazon you trust your bank more than you trust Amazon, and Amazon trusts your bank more than they trust you. Your bank is the third party. Can you name any significant usecases where there isn't a third party both participants would trust more than they trust each other?

BatteryMountain 5y ago

Yeah, this can be done with a normal sql database too. Saving a representation of a linked list is not hard at all. Blockchains are not that special and can be made with less than 50 lines of code (that's with the ability to "mine" a block with x difficulty, but on the CPU). Add some persistence (flat file, sql, etc) and you end up with less than 200 lines of code. Then you can use that to build your ledger/currency system. What makes crypto currency systems interesting to me is the networked consensus and distributed parts. But blockchain itself is dead simple. It doesn't solve any problems for banks because they already have solutions to ensure data integrity and to survive audits.

quocanh 5y ago
A bank could theoretically rewrite your account balance with terminal command. Now this example is contrived because banks are under strong government regulations, but what about similar deals you make with your peers? When there are an infinite type of deals you can come up with and no regulation could ever keep up with every single deal that you would ever want to make, how do you trust that the other party will keep their word? Blockchains solve a human problem, not a technical one.
- oblio 5y ago
  No, they don't. Because you need people with guns, in the end, to enforce stuff in cases of non compliance.
  - quocanh 5y ago
    I'm not sure what you mean by "they don't." But you don't need guns for compliance. If can make it so that people will lose money if they don't follow the deal, then no you don't need guns. People will comply because it's good for themselves. That's how compliance is enforced under a capitalist system and it's the main reason we live in a modern, golden age of cooperation rather than a medieval age of conflict.