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Blockchains exist for a reason completely other than performance. Of course a centralized database would perform better. That’s not the point. I think engine

Blockchains exist for a reason completely other than performance. Of course a centralized database would perform better. That’s not the point. I think engineers keep getting hung up on this and don’t zoom out and see the big picture.

xmprt 5y ago
I feel like even after zooming out and seeing the big picture, it's hard to imagine blockchain solving real world problems. Blockchains are good when there's a lack of trust and decentralization is absolutely necessary. There are very few problems that actually need a blockchain. Anything that has the government in the loop (like buying houses or property) is a non starter and anything that runs on centralized servers (like game NFTs) also doesn't make sense.
- anonporridge 5y ago
  You're right. And bitcoiners have been saying this from the very beginning of the crypto madness. A global, government agnostic money like bitcoin that no group of insiders and early adopters have unassailable control over, seems like the only likely candidate for something that needs a truly decentralized and trustless blockchain. The rest is hype.
  - ryandamm 5y ago
    I believe this characterization fails to engage with what money actually is and does. It sounds good in print but fails in practice. Except for bitcoin's current "monetary" uses, like money laundering and tax evasion.
    - anonporridge 5y ago
      I personally prefer a money that isn't explicitly designed to encourage hyper consumption and short term thinking. Better for the planet. But what do I know? I'm just a dumb ape.
      - ryandamm 5y ago
        I'm genuinely not sure whether this statement is pro-crypto or anti-crypto... I assume it's anti- based on the reference to it being better for the planet? Or is the "designed for hyper consumption" a reference to inflation in fiat currencies? Sorry, perhaps I've confused myself.
        anonporridge 5y ago
        Pro bitcoin. Don't confuse crypto with bitcoin. Our inflationary currencies that are in vogue in the modern era are explicitly designed to psychologically encourage people to go out and consume more than they actually need to, because their money is terrible at preserving it's value long term. Inflationary currencies might be great at keeping the economy red hot, but I'm of the opinion that they're terrible for the long term sustainability of our planet.
      - usrbinbash 5y ago
        Money isn't designed to do that. Money is just an exchange token. It has no control over what it is used for.
  - Ekaros 5y ago
    And in practise not government or central bank controlled money is not practically desirable. The gold-bugs and crypto people might think it is, but there are very good reasons why no one is using gold standard anymore. It makes modern fiscal and financial policies impossible and probably leads to massive issues for everyone.
- lunch 5y ago
  > Blockchains are good when there's a lack of trust and decentralization is absolutely necessary. There are very few problems that actually need a blockchain. How about the current status quo of the Internet? Do you think being mined, sold, and endlessly tracked is OK?
  - xmprt 5y ago
    No. But you don't need blockchain to solve that. Things like BitTorrent work perfectly fine without the needless blockchain element.
    - lunch 5y ago
      BitTorrent is wonderful for sharing information, but it's not really a platform to build on. Something like Ethereum on the other hand is literally a decentralized computer that no single entity controls. The blockchain part enables this.
      - cuteboy19 5y ago
        a "decentralized"[0] ""computer"" which is less powerful than a 9 year old rasberry pi. is this not the definition of hype? [0]: https://thenextweb.com/news/ethereum-nodes-cloud-services-amazon-web-services-blockchain-hosted-decentralization https://thenextweb.com/news/ethereum-nodes-cloud-services-am....
  - kelnos 5y ago
    It's not, but blockchains don't magically fix that. And the "web3" stuff built so far is still pretty centralized and could include that same tracking if the incumbents so chose.
    - lunch 5y ago
      Of course a blockchain doesn't magically fix anything, it's a distributed log. But a decentralized distributed log is a great building block for something that isn't owned by FAANG.
bobsomers 5y ago
Thank you for saying this, this point seems to be completely glossed over frequently, but it’s literally the point of blockchains. To be explicit, the reason blockchains exist is to have a globally consistent database that doesn’t require trusting the operator.
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  >To be explicit, the reason blockchains exist is to have a globally consistent database that doesn’t require trusting the operator. which I mean when I think of that I think - that would be really useful for crime because you don't want to trust the operator because either 1. they're a narc 2. they're a criminal. it's also useful for currency because not trusting the operator allows you to keep them from turning into paypal. but then I just draw a blank on what it is useful for after that.
  - bobsomers 5y ago
    I'll be honest, I find the "blockchain is for crime" argument to be worn out in 2022. It feels a lot like "think of the children". Of course blockchains can be used for crime, almost anything can. In fact, if you want the preferred currency of criminals the world over, look no further than the US Dollar. Most organizations, governments, businesses, etc. start with plenty of trust to go around. There's no reason to inherently distrust them, so their governance, currencies, securities, etc. work just fine. Distrust breeds over time, which is why establishing governance, currencies, securities, etc. in a way that can be cryptographically verified by anyone is a useful property to have to ensure the system remains generally trustworthy long into the future. For example, there are many reasons to distrust stock brokers, the Depository Trust Company, the spineless SEC, and other entities who run our securities exchange. If securities were traded on a blockchain instead of an opaque database that can't be audited except by a corrupt few, everyone could strongly trust in the freedom and fairness of the securities exchange markets. If I could own all my stocks on the blockchain, I would do it in heartbeat.
    - bbddg 5y ago
soperj 5y ago
Except that as Moxie pointed out just recently, the way it all is set up, everything is centralized anyway. So it's not actually being used in a different way.
- anonporridge 5y ago
  And he was right of his critique. Of course, he's saying all that after pumping and dumping his personal centralized crypto crap MobileCoin into Signal.
- shawnz 5y ago
  Some blockchain technologies are highly centralized, but even then I think it's more like an "active/passive" configuration than a truly centralized system. If the system goes wrong, it's still easy to move to a different one.
- betwixthewires 5y ago
  NFTs are set up in a centralized way. Every time there's a bull market in cryptocurrency, the charlatans jump out of the woodwork. They build a bunch of websites and scam a lot of naive people. When the market reverses, these project disappear one after another, usually with people's money, sometimes because they don't actually solve a problem. Almost every one of these NFT grift projects are going to disappear over the next year or two.
obstacle1 5y ago
The parent article doesn't say anything about performance. Therefore this comment seems like a red herring. A case of not reading the article? The parent article's point is that most currently popular technologies found an application rather quickly, whereas blockchain technologies have been around for a long time (in tech terms) and still have not made ground.
- JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
  From the article- > How long do we need to wait before someone comes up with an actual application of blockchain technologies that isn’t a transparent attempt to retroactively justify a technology that is inefficient in every sense of the word?
  - obstacle1 5y ago
    OK perfect. "Inefficient" in every sense of the word. Let's say I'm wrong and skipped over that line. What else could the various senses of "inefficient" mean in the context of this article? Probably the fact that, despite having been under development for > 10 years, we haven't seen any ground broken by any blockchain technologies for any reasons other than speculation or triviality. Which is what the other 95% of the article focuses on. The inefficiency of the development process, not necessarily the technology, although yes, the latter is a factor.
- exdsq 5y ago
  Maybe you mean that they haven’t made useful ground, where useful is specific to you. Remember that blockchain technologies have become legal tender, have over a trillion in market cap, have become financial instruments traded by people around the globe, is taught at Universities and part of the CFA accounting exam, is in the news daily, has resulted in large investments in research, etc… It’s impact has hardly been non-trivial. Just the impact on finance is substantial even if people seem to gloss over a new financial asset as “just finance stuff”.
  - ryandamm 5y ago
vmception 5y ago
Exactly, People on all extremes of this just cant seem to understand the simple reality that “the market can bear it.” The market can bear smart contract platforms whether that platform writes to a proof of work system, a faster distributed set of nodes, or on localhost with port forwarding. It doesnt matter! People like to deploy that kind of code on a platform that can be accessed that kind of way. If there isn’t a token then people DDOS it instantly, with smart contracts that take up too much processing cycles or memory. Simple. People dont want to use limited fiat payment rails to attempt to preallocate resources, it doesnt work very well at arbitrary amounts, it ceases to be permissionless and the author is agreeable here: its been 13 years of this other solution and is an international hit! Think about developers on Shopify’s app store that try to sell to ecommerce merchants. Its the same people with the same goals! Sell tools that theoretically make someone else’s life easier. Extract value because commerce exists. Thats really valuable. Thats exactly whats going on in blockchain. Just because you and your friends are taking linear bets with your capital and cant quantify why things go up way too often really has nothing to do with the people that built that tool for you who are taking little basis points here and there.
throwawaylinux 5y ago
What is the big picture then? I've never got anything concrete that doesn't sound like the usual buzz word snake oil. Blockchains solve the wrong problem for a lot of the proposed applications I've seen, like handwaving about "supply chain". The biggest difficulty is not that you don't trust the database, it's that you don't trust the connection between the electronic data and reality. How do you trust a person to have packed the correct grade of meat into the box you are buying? If they've dutifully recorded something on the blockchain and you can verify that nobody has tampered with that record, it still does not help you. And if you have regulation to ensure supply chain steps comply, then you trust the regulators, then you can have a central database. Crypto coins are unique in that you can verify them mathematically. They have no connection to anything else out in the real world so they don't have that problem. So aside from coins, where else is it that you would not trust a central database, but you can verify/trust the entries being added to that database?
- CryptoPunk 5y ago
  >>So aside from coins, where else is it that you would not trust a central database, but you can verify/trust the entries being added to that database? I would not trust a central database for any application, even those where I have to trust the verifiers of the entries to that database. E.g. I would prefer stablecoins over credit in a bank. With a decentralized database, immutability and permissionlessness are the default, until the trusted third party actively intervenes to strip you of these privileges. With a centralized database, access is by default denied, and requires active intervention from the trusted third party, in the form of a grant of permission, to acquire.
  - yashg 5y ago
    You can't trust a central database but you can trust a central blockchain? A proof of work blockchain which is trustless and permissionless and has many nodes can be trusted to be tamperproof and immutable, but it is also slow and inefficient (thanks to PoW). A PoW blockchain is inefficient by deaign, it's a feature not a bug beucase that is what gives it's trust without trusting. But when you make that blockchain private, trustful, and permissioned (only designated nodes can add blocks) you are taking away the very properties that make the blockchain immutable. And it has to be done because that is what enterprises would want. So an enterprise blockchain like Corda/Hyperledger is no different than a central database. And no serious business least of all banks would do their business on a public truly distributed open blockchain.
codebolt 5y ago
'Zooming out and seeing the big picture' seems to mean buying into a libertarian vision of the world where the current money system is horribly broken and blockchain technologies are a viable and superior alternative. I profoundly disagree on all points of that analysis.
- Mistletoe 5y ago
  I’m not libertarian at all. I see cryptocurrency as a fair and transparent way out of the extreme wealth inequality we see in the world today. Decentralization gets me excited. New ways of using technology gets me excited.
  - cuteboy19 5y ago
    cryptocurrencies are not going to solve extreme inequality. they are a transparent way to transfer wealth from new investors to early investors (aka ponzi scheme)
    - epinephrinios 5y ago
      "A Ponzi scheme is an investment fraud that pays existing investors with funds collected from new investors" Sorry to burst your bubble, but cryptocurrency does not work this way. Your reasoning can be applied to any asset, for example, a shitty house in California that is now worth $1M.
  - codebolt 5y ago
    A non-inflationary currency promotes hoarding. The biggest whales in crypto own a huge chunk of the total supply, even more so than in our current fiat system. How you think such a system does anything but worsen wealth inequality is a mystery to me.
  - bbddg 5y ago
    There's no magic bullet for solving a problem like wealth inequality. It's a political problem that requires a political solution. I'd also imagine that crypto ownership is massively concentrated in the top 10% wealthiest people anyways.
Dwolb 5y ago
I don’t think we even need to “get” web3/blockchain/whatever rebrand. No one understands what it will be (and people involved in the space barely understand what is, as in what all exists, today). But here’s something that is concrete to anchor to: there’s somewhere north of $1T floating around in blockchains today. That’s an incredible amount of money and people that have problems that need technology solutions.

xmprt 5y ago

I feel like even after zooming out and seeing the big picture, it's hard to imagine blockchain solving real world problems. Blockchains are good when there's a lack of trust and decentralization is absolutely necessary. There are very few problems that actually need a blockchain. Anything that has the government in the loop (like buying houses or property) is a non starter and anything that runs on centralized servers (like game NFTs) also doesn't make sense.

anonporridge 5y ago
You're right. And bitcoiners have been saying this from the very beginning of the crypto madness. A global, government agnostic money like bitcoin that no group of insiders and early adopters have unassailable control over, seems like the only likely candidate for something that needs a truly decentralized and trustless blockchain. The rest is hype.
- ryandamm 5y ago
  I believe this characterization fails to engage with what money actually is and does. It sounds good in print but fails in practice. Except for bitcoin's current "monetary" uses, like money laundering and tax evasion.
  - anonporridge 5y ago
    I personally prefer a money that isn't explicitly designed to encourage hyper consumption and short term thinking. Better for the planet. But what do I know? I'm just a dumb ape.
    - ryandamm 5y ago
      I'm genuinely not sure whether this statement is pro-crypto or anti-crypto... I assume it's anti- based on the reference to it being better for the planet? Or is the "designed for hyper consumption" a reference to inflation in fiat currencies? Sorry, perhaps I've confused myself.
      - anonporridge 5y ago
        Pro bitcoin. Don't confuse crypto with bitcoin. Our inflationary currencies that are in vogue in the modern era are explicitly designed to psychologically encourage people to go out and consume more than they actually need to, because their money is terrible at preserving it's value long term. Inflationary currencies might be great at keeping the economy red hot, but I'm of the opinion that they're terrible for the long term sustainability of our planet.
    - usrbinbash 5y ago
      Money isn't designed to do that. Money is just an exchange token. It has no control over what it is used for.
- Ekaros 5y ago
  And in practise not government or central bank controlled money is not practically desirable. The gold-bugs and crypto people might think it is, but there are very good reasons why no one is using gold standard anymore. It makes modern fiscal and financial policies impossible and probably leads to massive issues for everyone.
lunch 5y ago
> Blockchains are good when there's a lack of trust and decentralization is absolutely necessary. There are very few problems that actually need a blockchain. How about the current status quo of the Internet? Do you think being mined, sold, and endlessly tracked is OK?
- xmprt 5y ago
  No. But you don't need blockchain to solve that. Things like BitTorrent work perfectly fine without the needless blockchain element.
  - lunch 5y ago
    BitTorrent is wonderful for sharing information, but it's not really a platform to build on. Something like Ethereum on the other hand is literally a decentralized computer that no single entity controls. The blockchain part enables this.
    - cuteboy19 5y ago
      a "decentralized"[0] ""computer"" which is less powerful than a 9 year old rasberry pi. is this not the definition of hype? [0]: https://thenextweb.com/news/ethereum-nodes-cloud-services-amazon-web-services-blockchain-hosted-decentralization https://thenextweb.com/news/ethereum-nodes-cloud-services-am....
- kelnos 5y ago
  It's not, but blockchains don't magically fix that. And the "web3" stuff built so far is still pretty centralized and could include that same tracking if the incumbents so chose.
  - lunch 5y ago
    Of course a blockchain doesn't magically fix anything, it's a distributed log. But a decentralized distributed log is a great building block for something that isn't owned by FAANG.

bobsomers 5y ago

Thank you for saying this, this point seems to be completely glossed over frequently, but it’s literally the point of blockchains. To be explicit, the reason blockchains exist is to have a globally consistent database that doesn’t require trusting the operator.

bryanrasmussen 5y ago
>To be explicit, the reason blockchains exist is to have a globally consistent database that doesn’t require trusting the operator. which I mean when I think of that I think - that would be really useful for crime because you don't want to trust the operator because either 1. they're a narc 2. they're a criminal. it's also useful for currency because not trusting the operator allows you to keep them from turning into paypal. but then I just draw a blank on what it is useful for after that.
- bobsomers 5y ago
  I'll be honest, I find the "blockchain is for crime" argument to be worn out in 2022. It feels a lot like "think of the children". Of course blockchains can be used for crime, almost anything can. In fact, if you want the preferred currency of criminals the world over, look no further than the US Dollar. Most organizations, governments, businesses, etc. start with plenty of trust to go around. There's no reason to inherently distrust them, so their governance, currencies, securities, etc. work just fine. Distrust breeds over time, which is why establishing governance, currencies, securities, etc. in a way that can be cryptographically verified by anyone is a useful property to have to ensure the system remains generally trustworthy long into the future. For example, there are many reasons to distrust stock brokers, the Depository Trust Company, the spineless SEC, and other entities who run our securities exchange. If securities were traded on a blockchain instead of an opaque database that can't be audited except by a corrupt few, everyone could strongly trust in the freedom and fairness of the securities exchange markets. If I could own all my stocks on the blockchain, I would do it in heartbeat.
  - bbddg 5y ago

soperj 5y ago

Except that as Moxie pointed out just recently, the way it all is set up, everything is centralized anyway. So it's not actually being used in a different way.

anonporridge 5y ago
And he was right of his critique. Of course, he's saying all that after pumping and dumping his personal centralized crypto crap MobileCoin into Signal.
shawnz 5y ago
Some blockchain technologies are highly centralized, but even then I think it's more like an "active/passive" configuration than a truly centralized system. If the system goes wrong, it's still easy to move to a different one.
betwixthewires 5y ago
NFTs are set up in a centralized way. Every time there's a bull market in cryptocurrency, the charlatans jump out of the woodwork. They build a bunch of websites and scam a lot of naive people. When the market reverses, these project disappear one after another, usually with people's money, sometimes because they don't actually solve a problem. Almost every one of these NFT grift projects are going to disappear over the next year or two.

obstacle1 5y ago

The parent article doesn't say anything about performance. Therefore this comment seems like a red herring. A case of not reading the article? The parent article's point is that most currently popular technologies found an application rather quickly, whereas blockchain technologies have been around for a long time (in tech terms) and still have not made ground.

JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
From the article- > How long do we need to wait before someone comes up with an actual application of blockchain technologies that isn’t a transparent attempt to retroactively justify a technology that is inefficient in every sense of the word?
- obstacle1 5y ago
  OK perfect. "Inefficient" in every sense of the word. Let's say I'm wrong and skipped over that line. What else could the various senses of "inefficient" mean in the context of this article? Probably the fact that, despite having been under development for > 10 years, we haven't seen any ground broken by any blockchain technologies for any reasons other than speculation or triviality. Which is what the other 95% of the article focuses on. The inefficiency of the development process, not necessarily the technology, although yes, the latter is a factor.
exdsq 5y ago
Maybe you mean that they haven’t made useful ground, where useful is specific to you. Remember that blockchain technologies have become legal tender, have over a trillion in market cap, have become financial instruments traded by people around the globe, is taught at Universities and part of the CFA accounting exam, is in the news daily, has resulted in large investments in research, etc… It’s impact has hardly been non-trivial. Just the impact on finance is substantial even if people seem to gloss over a new financial asset as “just finance stuff”.
- ryandamm 5y ago

vmception 5y ago

Exactly, People on all extremes of this just cant seem to understand the simple reality that “the market can bear it.” The market can bear smart contract platforms whether that platform writes to a proof of work system, a faster distributed set of nodes, or on localhost with port forwarding. It doesnt matter! People like to deploy that kind of code on a platform that can be accessed that kind of way. If there isn’t a token then people DDOS it instantly, with smart contracts that take up too much processing cycles or memory. Simple. People dont want to use limited fiat payment rails to attempt to preallocate resources, it doesnt work very well at arbitrary amounts, it ceases to be permissionless and the author is agreeable here: its been 13 years of this other solution and is an international hit! Think about developers on Shopify’s app store that try to sell to ecommerce merchants. Its the same people with the same goals! Sell tools that theoretically make someone else’s life easier. Extract value because commerce exists. Thats really valuable. Thats exactly whats going on in blockchain. Just because you and your friends are taking linear bets with your capital and cant quantify why things go up way too often really has nothing to do with the people that built that tool for you who are taking little basis points here and there.

throwawaylinux 5y ago

What is the big picture then? I've never got anything concrete that doesn't sound like the usual buzz word snake oil. Blockchains solve the wrong problem for a lot of the proposed applications I've seen, like handwaving about "supply chain". The biggest difficulty is not that you don't trust the database, it's that you don't trust the connection between the electronic data and reality. How do you trust a person to have packed the correct grade of meat into the box you are buying? If they've dutifully recorded something on the blockchain and you can verify that nobody has tampered with that record, it still does not help you. And if you have regulation to ensure supply chain steps comply, then you trust the regulators, then you can have a central database. Crypto coins are unique in that you can verify them mathematically. They have no connection to anything else out in the real world so they don't have that problem. So aside from coins, where else is it that you would not trust a central database, but you can verify/trust the entries being added to that database?

CryptoPunk 5y ago
>>So aside from coins, where else is it that you would not trust a central database, but you can verify/trust the entries being added to that database? I would not trust a central database for any application, even those where I have to trust the verifiers of the entries to that database. E.g. I would prefer stablecoins over credit in a bank. With a decentralized database, immutability and permissionlessness are the default, until the trusted third party actively intervenes to strip you of these privileges. With a centralized database, access is by default denied, and requires active intervention from the trusted third party, in the form of a grant of permission, to acquire.
- yashg 5y ago
  You can't trust a central database but you can trust a central blockchain? A proof of work blockchain which is trustless and permissionless and has many nodes can be trusted to be tamperproof and immutable, but it is also slow and inefficient (thanks to PoW). A PoW blockchain is inefficient by deaign, it's a feature not a bug beucase that is what gives it's trust without trusting. But when you make that blockchain private, trustful, and permissioned (only designated nodes can add blocks) you are taking away the very properties that make the blockchain immutable. And it has to be done because that is what enterprises would want. So an enterprise blockchain like Corda/Hyperledger is no different than a central database. And no serious business least of all banks would do their business on a public truly distributed open blockchain.

codebolt 5y ago

'Zooming out and seeing the big picture' seems to mean buying into a libertarian vision of the world where the current money system is horribly broken and blockchain technologies are a viable and superior alternative. I profoundly disagree on all points of that analysis.

Mistletoe 5y ago
I’m not libertarian at all. I see cryptocurrency as a fair and transparent way out of the extreme wealth inequality we see in the world today. Decentralization gets me excited. New ways of using technology gets me excited.
- cuteboy19 5y ago
  cryptocurrencies are not going to solve extreme inequality. they are a transparent way to transfer wealth from new investors to early investors (aka ponzi scheme)
  - epinephrinios 5y ago
    "A Ponzi scheme is an investment fraud that pays existing investors with funds collected from new investors" Sorry to burst your bubble, but cryptocurrency does not work this way. Your reasoning can be applied to any asset, for example, a shitty house in California that is now worth $1M.
- codebolt 5y ago
  A non-inflationary currency promotes hoarding. The biggest whales in crypto own a huge chunk of the total supply, even more so than in our current fiat system. How you think such a system does anything but worsen wealth inequality is a mystery to me.
- bbddg 5y ago
  There's no magic bullet for solving a problem like wealth inequality. It's a political problem that requires a political solution. I'd also imagine that crypto ownership is massively concentrated in the top 10% wealthiest people anyways.

Dwolb 5y ago

I don’t think we even need to “get” web3/blockchain/whatever rebrand. No one understands what it will be (and people involved in the space barely understand what is, as in what all exists, today). But here’s something that is concrete to anchor to: there’s somewhere north of $1T floating around in blockchains today. That’s an incredible amount of money and people that have problems that need technology solutions.