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And what of any hidden nails which there was previously no motivation to search for?

Closi 5y ago
Well you don't look for ways to use nails, you try to work out what you want to build first and then use nails if they are the best tool for the job. i.e. work out the problem you want to solve, then see what the right technology is afterwards.
- mattwilsonn888 5y ago
  The phrase is "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." We can stretch the analogy but I'll reiterate my point literally: Longstanding problems do not have bootstrap solutions, i.e. they are longstanding because simple hard work and known strategies could not solve them. To think that you can go around looking at longstanding problems and come up with solutions top down is out of touch with how innovation drives technology. Innovations are small miracles - there is no formula for them, they don't come around often. When rare advancements are made it makes sense to test what good they can do for problems which do not give way to the old toolset. To put it back in the analogy: When you invent a hammer to drive nails, check and see what else it might be good for. You may not like the over extension of applied crypo currencies, but nobody is forcing you to invest in any of it. I for one would rather have experimentation with failure than none at all.
  - Closi 5y ago
    > To put it back in the analogy: When you invent a hammer to drive nails, check and see what else it might be good for. This is exactly what I disagree with - It's generally a bad strategy to look for things to apply crypto/blockchain to in my opinion, we should be looking for problems and defining how we want things to work in the future, and then seeing if crypto is the right technical solution to achieve that. I.e. we shouldn't start with the technology and work back to what problems it could be used to solve - this will end up discounting technical solutions and solutionizing before requirements are understood. We don't do this for other technologies - for instance it's just as valid that a NoSQL database could solve an issue, however we don't go around looking for problems NoSQL databases could solve.
    - mattwilsonn888 5y ago
      There's a distinction that we're talking past each other with, as evidenced by your NoSQL example. NoSQL is not as much a discovery as distributed consensus is - its more of a forward step in database technology (down a certain branch). Distributed consensus was not all that incremental nor precedented. Its not quite something that was imagined much before it was around in any fine detail. Considering how novel the innovation was, and how out of the blue it came, it makes sense to consider it more a 'new' thing that may have applications not easily thought of. I'm sure in the smaller domain of databses NoSQL has been discovered to be useful for businesses or processes after its invention.
      - Closi 5y ago
        The point isn't that Blockchains are or aren't more novel than a NoSQL database - it's that both are technologies and not a solution to a clearly defined problem. Basic solution design says start with a problem that needs to be solved and understand the key requirements, and then decide what technology best matches the requirements. That might be blockchain, or it might be something else. Asking 'what can we build as a blockchain' is poor engineering, lazy thought process and symptomatic of a technology bubble IMO.

Well you don't look for ways to use nails, you try to work out what you want to build first and then use nails if they are the best tool for the job. i.e. work out the problem you want to solve, then see what the right technology is afterwards.

mattwilsonn888 5y ago
The phrase is "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." We can stretch the analogy but I'll reiterate my point literally: Longstanding problems do not have bootstrap solutions, i.e. they are longstanding because simple hard work and known strategies could not solve them. To think that you can go around looking at longstanding problems and come up with solutions top down is out of touch with how innovation drives technology. Innovations are small miracles - there is no formula for them, they don't come around often. When rare advancements are made it makes sense to test what good they can do for problems which do not give way to the old toolset. To put it back in the analogy: When you invent a hammer to drive nails, check and see what else it might be good for. You may not like the over extension of applied crypo currencies, but nobody is forcing you to invest in any of it. I for one would rather have experimentation with failure than none at all.
- Closi 5y ago
  > To put it back in the analogy: When you invent a hammer to drive nails, check and see what else it might be good for. This is exactly what I disagree with - It's generally a bad strategy to look for things to apply crypto/blockchain to in my opinion, we should be looking for problems and defining how we want things to work in the future, and then seeing if crypto is the right technical solution to achieve that. I.e. we shouldn't start with the technology and work back to what problems it could be used to solve - this will end up discounting technical solutions and solutionizing before requirements are understood. We don't do this for other technologies - for instance it's just as valid that a NoSQL database could solve an issue, however we don't go around looking for problems NoSQL databases could solve.
  - mattwilsonn888 5y ago
    There's a distinction that we're talking past each other with, as evidenced by your NoSQL example. NoSQL is not as much a discovery as distributed consensus is - its more of a forward step in database technology (down a certain branch). Distributed consensus was not all that incremental nor precedented. Its not quite something that was imagined much before it was around in any fine detail. Considering how novel the innovation was, and how out of the blue it came, it makes sense to consider it more a 'new' thing that may have applications not easily thought of. I'm sure in the smaller domain of databses NoSQL has been discovered to be useful for businesses or processes after its invention.
    - Closi 5y ago
      The point isn't that Blockchains are or aren't more novel than a NoSQL database - it's that both are technologies and not a solution to a clearly defined problem. Basic solution design says start with a problem that needs to be solved and understand the key requirements, and then decide what technology best matches the requirements. That might be blockchain, or it might be something else. Asking 'what can we build as a blockchain' is poor engineering, lazy thought process and symptomatic of a technology bubble IMO.