35 ms·

Lets talk about blockchains

309 points by cmdli 4y ago

barelysapient 4y ago
When asked to build some New Thing(tm) with block chain, my first question is: "What proof of stake system were you thinking to use?" Its always lead to an interesting conversation that includes to many of the same points TFO mentions.
timerol 4y ago
I would add that Keybase solved the identity issue across logins via PKI with a very neat UI. It's a shame that Zoom bought the team and de-emphasized the product.
- nathias 4y ago
  Economic games are part of the security, Keybase demonstrates this clearly.
- 3np 4y ago
  Keybase being a traditional centralized platform was/is precisely the issue: Single point of failure and trust in one company. All it took was Zoom acquiring them to make the whole system obsolete. We need something with logical centralization but independent of any single actor or company.
  - noTooMooch 4y ago
    Like an open source operating system that ships with VPN in the kernel, and can be managed by a UI in a Docker container Blockchain development is funded by VCs looking to stay relevant. It’s software; there’s no panacea and thousands of options for solving problems; blockchain is just one.
- rvz 4y ago
  Maybe. The interface was there but in general it had created a security and usability dilemma. For convenience over security, it gave the choice of storing your private key on their servers. If Zoom was to one day shut Keybase down, your private key is now gone. Otherwise for security over convenience, if you store it on your own computer you're more likely to lose it. Those trade-offs in Keybase's key management is probably why it did not take off including that they were on a VC payroll and not making any money at all from the service. It was only a matter of time that without Zoom, they would end up shutting down.
  - davidjfelix 4y ago
    > If Zoom was to one day shut Keybase down, your private key is now gone. Otherwise for security over convenience, if you store it on your own computer you're more likely to lose it. I'm not so sure about this. Each of my devices absolutely has a key stored on it that is offline capable. Loss of keybase servers would matter but not the extent that you're claiming, from what I can tell. https://book.keybase.io/security#your-private-keys-are-only-stored-on-your-devices https://book.keybase.io/security#your-private-keys-are-only-...
pluc 4y ago
You don't need the first 10 trendy technologies you can think of
- blowski 4y ago
  What counts as a trendy technology? I’m sure tcp/ip was once trendy, as was HTML, RDBMS, etc.
  - Guest42 4y ago
    Those other examples fall under the intersection of trendy, useful across a spectrum of scenarios, widely adopted, and in hindsight changed the face of technology itself. The comparison is apples to oranges....or a handful of peanut shells to the total population of orange trees to be more accurate.
  - chitowneats 4y ago
    These are the exceptions that prove the rule.
    - thfuran 4y ago
      That's not how exceptions or rules work.
      - chitowneats 4y ago
        I was being cute with a turn of phrase. A large majority of trendy new technologies in the software industry are driven by ephemeral industry buzz. It takes time for us to collectively separate the wheat from the chaff. In the meantime it's generally wise to stick with what has worked in the past.
      - actually_a_dog 4y ago
        You're misunderstanding how the word "prove" works. In this expression, it's being used in an archaic sense meaning "to test."
  - 4y ago
andreyk 4y ago
Nicely succinct explanation of this stance. As someone who agrees, I like this bit: "One of the most promising and new developments in recent years has been a renewed interest in building decentralized systems of all types. Many people are looking into building a system of decentralized identity and giving that control back to the users." IE, decentralization is great, but blockchain type concensus building is rarely needed or useful in such systems imo.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  There is a widening gulf in technology between what could or should be built and what is being done.
  - usrn 4y ago
    That's not new. There are mountains of awful software still being used. I just got done spending hours setting up a Windows VM for a student they needed because of an arbitrary requirement at their school.
- k__ 4y ago
  I think, it's not needed in a technical sense, but in a business sense. Take IPFS, for example. Decentralized hosting without a blockchain. Pretty nifty! Now, how do you make sure your stuff stays on the network in a similar decentralized way? Pinning it in your own node and paying pinning services is still centralized, Filecoin, on the other hand, is not.
  - fwip 4y ago
    There's nothing in Filecoin to ensure that your data is stored by a reputable party. Even if you store on ten replicas, they could all be the same lowest bidder in the same datacenter.
    - SparkyMcUnicorn 4y ago
      So just make sure you're using more than one region? And they do have a reputation system.
throwaway82652 4y ago
The rest of the article is good, but this part is wrong: >This can be incredibly useful, and is necessary for some applications. There is no reason to have a system "without trust", the very idea of that makes no sense and there is no such thing as a system "without trust". Examples: To even use a computer or use a computer network you have to on some level trust the manufacturer of the systems as well as the supply chain that built it. To use any blockchain you have to trust that at some point it's not going to get 51% attacked. To use any businesses that work on the blockchain you have to trust those businesses on some level instead of just trusting "the blockchain" or a smart contract, if eventually you expect to receive a good or service that transfers into the real world, because agreements about those things can only be upheld by lawyers, not blockchains. The amount of entities you have to trust to realistically interact with any blockchain is massive. The idea that they're somehow "trustless" is simply wrong. And I've made comments about this before but I'll make it again. Blockchains are useless and are unnecessary for every application. They do nothing that isn't better achieved by another consensus mechanism. The only reason to use PoW/PoS or any of the other blockchain consensus algorithms is to use them to implement cryptocurrency, which is only useful as a form of unregulated and volatile and mostly useless money that you can pay people in those tokens for running the network. If you can come up with any other way to pay people to run a network, then you don't need cryptocurrency.
- zamadatix 4y ago
  Note your quote from the author was talking about collaboration without requiring trust in collaborators not a system without requiring trust in the system. 51% attacks are the closest to what the author was actually talking about but that has more to do with trusting and accepting how the system (and as you say, somewhat reality) works than any particular trust in a collaborator. That said it still doesn't make the list of cases this capability is needed any longer.
- thebean11 4y ago
  No safeguard is foolproof, including protections against 51% attacks. That doesn't make the precautions pointless though. It's like saying locks are useless because they can be picked.
smm11 4y ago
That went away quicker than fidget spinners.
pwdisswordfish9 4y ago
Editorialized title.
- dang 4y ago
  Yes, the submitted title ("You Don't Need a F@%!ing Blockchain") was edited from the original. The original should certainly have been edited, but not because of the profanity (we're not Bowdlers here) but rather because of the clickbait. (That's the unless in "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) In posts like this where the article begins by confessing to clickbait, the next sentence usually tells you what the real title should be. I've pinched that for the title above.
- DerekL 4y ago
  It's also misspelled.
MuffinFlavored 4y ago
> A blockchain, put simply, is a way of building distributed consensus in a trustless system. How different is a blockchain from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainline_DHT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainline_DHT? edit: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26415908/whats-the-difference-between-distributed-hashtable-technology-and-the-bitcoin-b https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26415908/whats-the-diffe...
- zamadatix 4y ago
  DHT doesn't build a consensus, most blatantly because nodes don't even have the full set of information but also because if they did they aren't validating it anyways. About the only similarities are they are distributed systems to share data that utilize cryptography in some way.
  - MuffinFlavored 4y ago
    What does "build a consensus" mean in the context of blockchain? Consensus of... whether or not the messages are correctly cryptographically signed?
    - aforwardslash 4y ago
      It means that if you fetch an update to your DHT from a node, you don't validate if that node actually has the reputation for pushing that update, and the update itself may contain spurious data that eg. rewrites part of already existing data. This is important when your data is somehow updated and/or when you append more data to a given context, hence the typical tree data structure and not a hash table.
      - MuffinFlavored 4y ago
        i feel like most blockchains are just used for pushing data: i want to send money somewhere pulling data: so and so (sometimes myself) has received money you get a list of nodes by DNS resolving seed.bitcoin.sipa.be then you connect at port 8333 and speak the "BTC" protocol or whatever and either listen for a bunch of data, or push your own data (like a transaction) where is the validation part that you are referring to?
McLaren_Ferrari 4y ago
But people with money want to throw money at blockchains, not databases. So what's the winning strategy? Raise money for blockchains and then "pivot" to databases? Then you'd also get the praise for being a "visionary" who knows where the market is going lmao
AshamedCaptain 4y ago
We have had a myriad attempts at decentralized (and/or federated) identity and all of them failed because at the end of the day MySpace^W Facebook/Apple/Google/Whatever-todays-WWW-giant-is prefers to be at the center of your online identity, not at the periphery.
- lottin 4y ago
  I don't know about "failed"... if you use a different identity for each different site it seems that your identity is pretty decentralised.
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  I'm sad I missed OpenID. Would've been fun to be able to set up my own identity provider for a while until websites would eventually stop supporting it.
  - AshamedCaptain 4y ago
    I didn't miss the OpenID days. Basically everyone was a OpenID provider (i.e. all of them offered to handle your accounts for you), but no one was an OpenID consumer. Even at its heyday, I don't remember any single service where I could login with my OpenID except for the websites I made.
    - amenod 4y ago
      StackOverflow was one such service (or still is? not sure...).
      - jeroenhd 4y ago
        StackOverflow deprecated OpenID years ago.
- NaturalPhallacy 4y ago
  This has been one of the most infuriating things about the internet maturing or whatever it's doing. All the big players trying centralize and tie all of your accounts to you. I've been rather hesitantly linking my steam/game/publisher accounts with twitch for in game loot, but I really hate doing it. What if they decide to ban me for some reason? Do I get banned from all of them? Centralization is only good for the center, not the constituents.
rvz 4y ago
> However, not all applications require a blockchain. Exactly. However: > Services such as social networks could link the user's account to their global identity by providing a signed document proving the user's public key is tied to a certain account, or users can do this on their own by providing a public cryptographic proof on their account. (Keybase) Yet Keybase kept your private key on their cloud for 'convenience' purposes. If you decide to manage the keys yourself, well you're probably more likely going to lose it. Hence, maybe that is why it didn't take off at all and even after they got acquired. As for 'blockchain application' is that also why Skiff [0] exists and supports using ENS for identities and will still work even after Skiff shuts down? [1]? [0] https://skiff.org/ https://skiff.org/ [1] https://skiff.org/blog/skiff-x-ethereum-naming https://skiff.org/blog/skiff-x-ethereum-naming
- rodonn 4y ago
  This is not true about Keybase. They do not ever store your private key on their servers https://book.keybase.io/security https://book.keybase.io/security "Your private keys are only stored on your devices. For extra security, your private keys are only stored on the device(s) you use Keybase on. They’re not even stored on Keybase’s servers. So if Keybase gets hacked, the security of your account isn’t compromised."
throwaway4good 4y ago
You do … if you want investors…
- zaik 4y ago
  Just because it gets funding doesn't mean it's any good.
  - robonerd 4y ago
    For some people, getting funding is the only real goal.
bragr 4y ago
>Why aren't we logging into everywhere with public keys, if the technology is so old? Well, it's not because we didn't have blockchain technology before, but because decentralized identity was not the goal before. Let's not gloss over that key management is a hard problem, even for technical people, and that's a major reason this has not been particularly practical. FWIW this is also a problem for most blockchain based technologies.
- kemayo 4y ago
  Yeah, there's a real benefit to identifying myself with an account tied to a big company: they can reset my password if I forget it. (Or if my laptop gets stolen and it turns out my backup is corrupted, for the passwordless private key case. And assuming widespread use of backups is already quite the reach.) Any technology that makes this impossible is not going to get mass-adoption.
baby 4y ago
Obligatory: https://cryptologie.net/article/555/my-friends-always-ask-me-what-the-heck-is-blockchain-its-simple-really/ https://cryptologie.net/article/555/my-friends-always-ask-me... The simplest abstraction is to see cryptocurrency / blockchain / distributed ledger technology as a database running on a single computer. Everybody can access this database and there’s some simple logic that allows you to debit your account and credit someone else’s account. The computer has a queue to make sure transactions are processed in order. Blockchains that support smart contracts allow for people to install programs to that computer, which will add a bit more logic than simply debiting/crediting accounts. Others can then just send transactions to this computer to make a function call to any program (smart contract) that was installed on the computer. The cool thing really is that we’re all using the same computer with the same database and the same programs. Now in practice, nobody would trust a single point of failure like that. What if the computer crashes, or burns in a fire? Distributed systems to the rescue! We use distributed system protocols to run the same database on many computers distributed around the world. These distributed system protocols effectively simulate a single database/computer so that a few computers failing doesn’t mean the end of the blockchain. On top of that, we refuse to trust the computers that participate in this protocol. They could be lying about the balance in your account. We want the computers to police one another and agree on the database they are simulating. That’s where consensus protocols are used: to make the distributed database secure even when some of the participants are malicious. And that’s it. That’s blockchain tech for you. The obvious application is money, as the secure and simulated single computer is useful to simplify a payment system, but really any distributed database that cannot trust some of its participants can benefit from the advances there.
- Ensorceled 4y ago
  "Now, imagine that you lose your password to that really cool computer. Everything belonging to you is lost forever! Neat huh!" "Also, imagine that this really cool computer might be one of the ones that uses more electricity than some countries! Really, really neat!"
  - dbmikus 4y ago
    Social recovery wallets address the first objection. Proof of Stake reduces blockchain energy consumption by a lot. I've seen people quoting that a proof of stake block production consumes about as much energy as a Google search.
bsedlm 4y ago
Maybe currency is not the best use case for blockchains. But what about the services provided by Notaries? land registries and other necessarily robust and trustworthy transactions that aren't ever going to happen at a high-volume?
- Ensorceled 4y ago
  What issues with land registries are solved by blockchain technologies? And are those issues actually bad enough that you would accept the new issues introduced by blockchain technologies? I'm imagining my property becoming forever "unowned" because some real estate lawyer lost their escrow wallet key.
  - bsedlm 4y ago
    corruption. maybe not a problem in your own country.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- zamadatix 4y ago
  Technically sure, in practice dunno. You have to have a group of people that all agree the blockchain is the controlling entity for land registries instead of their regional government which probably has better laws and dispute resolution procedures built in. You'd also have to find a way to actually run the blockchain that is both robust and trustworthy even though it's low volume but high value transactions. At that point you might be onto something but you still have yet to sell to everyone why it's worth switching to just because it's technically possible.
- aaronax 4y ago
  There is no way to link "ownership" of a physical asset to a blockchain, other than a trusted third party who ultimately has use of force as an enforcement method.
daenz 4y ago
But if investors are shoveling money at blockchain-based startups (I don't know if this is still the case), how do you convince young starry-eyed entrepreneurs that they don't need a blockchain?
- yumraj 4y ago
  Entrepreneurs don't need convincing, the investors do. Entrepreneurs will go where the money is, and if foolish investors are throwing money at blockchain-based startups, savvy entrepreneurs will take their money, and they should.
  - daenz 4y ago
    Exactly, you're getting at my point. Most of the anti-blockchain opinion pieces seem to be pointed at entrepreneurs or engineers. But how can you blame them for going where the money is.
brianvli 4y ago
Composability and open APIs are rarely talked about. Composability lets you create a token to represent anything* of value and exchange it for other tokens. ETH and BTC are tokenizations of proof of work. Open APIs exist for any verified contract on Ethereum. You can permissionlessly plug a new application into many existing ones if your application is even partially on-chain
lvl102 4y ago
You know what would be cool? Crypto without the blockchain baggage. Just a straight up virtual currency that’s not tied to central banks.
- sprkwd 4y ago
  I’d buy that for a dollar.
- lekevicius 4y ago
  So, you don't like "central banks", but you still want a centralized party to control the currency? Otherwise, you need blockchain. Blockchain is just a consensus mechanism around data entries. If you want "just a virtual currency", bitcoin is that.
  - lvl102 4y ago
    You don’t need a blockchain for that and blockchain wouldn’t solve that issue regardless.
- ben_w 4y ago
  What would you like to tie the virtual currency to, if anything, and why/not?
- hedgehog 4y ago
  A key problem to solve is how to create a reliable source of truth for the currency. If not a traditional bank or ledger built on distributed consensus, then you're into the territory of inventing something new. It's a hard problem but I'd love to see it.
- aaronax 4y ago
  So a database of some sort I suppose...who is going to be the host/arbiter? Or is there a non-blockchain way to run a currency system that has no central authority?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
lukasb 4y ago
Key management is hard. Hosted but portable might be the way to go. Blockchain is one way to do hosted but portable.
- ibz 4y ago
  Blockchain is not about key management. You still need to take care of your keys.
  - lukasb 4y ago
    A hosted service that you log into can manage on-chain identity for you, but still make it possible for you to transfer identity management to another service, maintaining portability without needing the user to do key management.
    - ibz 4y ago
      Seems like you are making a circular argument. First you claim blockchain can help with "hosed and portable". Then you claim hosted can help you manage on-chain identity and make it transferable. While your first argument was plain wrong, your second argument is true, but unrelated to a blockchain: ANY kind of identity can be "hosted and portable": see email.
      - lukasb 4y ago
        With your email argument what you're really saying is that DNS is hosted but portable. Which is true, but it's also inconvenient.
scyclow 4y ago
I feel like this article, among others, kind of misses the point on why blockchains are useful. Decentralization, IMO, is incredibly overrated. What makes blockchains useful is that you can build highly interoperable applications that won't break due to changing interfaces. If AWS or the US government built a similar general purpose, open smart contract platform, I think we'd see similar levels of activity there. But they didn't, so we're using blockchains instead.
- sofixa 4y ago
  That doesn't make much sense. There's APIs now, and API intermediaries line Zapier, IFTTT. AWS APIs are backwards compatible, as I'm sure is the case for whatever US government APIs there are. So what's missing?
  - scyclow 4y ago
    If I write some dip shit application and host it on my server, and you want to write an application that interops with mine, I can change my API (or the data itself) under your nose. You have no formal guarantees. Smart contracts make guarantees about what can change and what can't change.
    - Jasper_ 4y ago
      Ethereum makes no such guarantee after the introduction of delegatecall, where it's possible to replace one smart contract implementation with another.
      - scyclow 4y ago
        True. I'm curious what this sort of hit replacement would look like in practice. But, you can't add it in after the fact, so you at least have the option of writing contracts that give you the formal guarantee.
- panarky 4y ago
  When you identify the primary reason why corporations and governments never built built a centralized smart contract platform that's general purpose, open source, cross-border and uncensored, then you will know why decentralization is essential.
rafiki6 4y ago
We keep going through this cycle of attempting decentralization. Since the dawn of the internet. I wonder if it will stick. The most successful version of it when broadband really took off was torrents. Then we got git. Now we got cryptocurrency/blockchain. I think by the end of this hype curve/cycle, blockchain will be relegated to decentralized finance, which will likely become an interesting part of the broader financial system. I wonder what will come next. I don't see decentralized identity verification taking off. Public/Private Key encryption for ID means relying on users to not lose their private key...or storing it for them and backing it up in some form of centralized and managed storage (i.e. cloud). So not gonna happen.
- jonhohle 4y ago
  > decentralized finance, which will likely become an interesting part of the broader financial system. I’m all for decentralized finance, but abhor the idea of a public ledger except for one very specific use case: government allocation and spending. Privacy oriented blockchains may be slightly better, but if the safeguards are ever broken, they are no better than open ledgers. The CBDC proposals are even worse, imho, proposing no public ledger, but allowing blessed private entities to receive events to make rain their own private ledgers. I don’t know what digital decentralized finance looks like without public accounting, but I’d prefer something as anonymous and ephemeral as cash transactions for something that I use regularly.
- mhitza 4y ago
  There's a lot of "this or that" in the technology space. I use OAuth and classic username/passwords for authentication. For really important services, if possible I use multiple methods. Some websites are smart enough to allow you to connect one login type to another, some don't. The reason I'm saying this is because, if public key login is supported, and key management is hard, there's no reason why an alternative username/password method couldn't be also supported alongside. That way you lose one method of connection, you can fallback to another one. Would you need this for all services you use? Probably not. For example using a public key login on something like hacker news, and being required to create a new account when I lose that? No big deal. Losing my public key when trying to login to my back account, well let me fallback to a "forgotten public key flow" that uses my email address to set up a new key.
birracerveza 4y ago
>Well then, you might ask, why are we running around logging in with email+password, or god forbid, Login with Facebook? Why aren't we logging into everywhere with public keys, if the technology is so old? I'm a web3 enthusiast, and this is what cemented it for me as a proper successor to whatever we have now. Everyone agrees the legacy web auth is broken. Do you use the same password everywhere? That's low security, you must have a different password, preferably randomly generated, for each and every website, each having an arbitrary set of rules. It's a massive pain in the ass and leads to clicking a lot of "Forgot your password?", and pray to god the site you're using actually properly handles your password, or doesn't accidentally (or intentionally) log or leak your password. Yes, it's happened before, many many times. Logging in via wallet, on the other hand? Connect your wallet, choose your account, and you're in. It's stupid simple to integrate on the backend too, and incredibly secure as long as you don't leak your 12 words (but even then, you can use a ledger if you want to be safe). It also works as an unified account across different websites. It's amazing. Public key cryptography for the masses.
- oh_sigh 4y ago
  Isn't this what OAuth solves?
- tshaddox 4y ago
  You don't need any of the blockchain stuff to support logging in to websites with a public key. That's straightforward with any old public-key cryptography scheme like PGP. In fact, from what I can tell, most of the "web3 login" implementations are doing little more triggering your wallet extension (e.g. MetaMask) to sign a unique message with your private key to prove you control an Ethereum address. It works well, and I rather like it, but the login part itself could just as easily be an old-fashioned PGP key pair.
  - vmception 4y ago
    correct, PGP had 30 years to get broad user-facing adoption and failed outside of a few paranoid folks on email and setting up git or ssh on a new machine once. blockchains and their addressing namespace have very quickly propelled standardized interfaces for signing key pairs for people that don't even think about it.
matt123456789 4y ago
The IPFS link does not like to the IPFS technology but to some insurance premium financing site (“IPFS”).
Barrin92 4y ago
The one thing I think that people should get rid of is the use of the word 'decentralization' in regards to blockchains. They're just about the most centralized thing there is because they create a global, ordered and absolute record of transactions. It's one big old state machine distributed across a lot of hardware. Which explains why they're so slow. Ethereum I think used the term 'world computer' at one point, which is apt. And the author is right that very few people need a world computer. Imagine if you send your grandma a message but but every time you do so you check in with the rest of the world for confirmation. That's 'apps on the blockchain'. Local state is fine and global consensus is irrelevant for probably 99% of what you do.
justinator 4y ago
Line goes up https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g
aforwardslash 4y ago
I'd argue that PoS/PoW have nothing to do with the blockchain concept, and instead are a way of building virtual currencies on top of it. The easiest way (for me) of thinking of a blockchain is a distributed merkle tree (or a patricia trie, if you're into ethereum or whatever), with a consensus mechanism. That's it. What you put there is your own responsability - so if you decide to create a virtual currency and either reward work or reward possession, its up to you - but that's on top of the "blockchain" concept. And I've actually came across some pretty valid use cases - one good example is that blockchain could be used to enhance resiliency on systems like certificate transparency - that are already a centralized, versioned sparse merkle tree.
- SAI_Peregrinus 4y ago
  PoW/PoS are just consensus mechanisms. Otherwise I agree that a blockchain is a Merkle tree with a (distributed) consensus mechanism. I'd tend to say that only distributed consensus mechanisms count as blockchains (and thus "permissioned" blockchains aren't true blockchains), but that's nitpicking.
- kylebenzle 4y ago
- hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
  Totally disagree. The thing that was really novel about blockchain was its distributed consensus mechanism, even in the face of bad actors. Without that, just having, say, a cryptographically signed list of transactions really isn't new.
  - api 4y ago
    The novel thing was a consensus mechanism that is itself permissionless in the sense that anyone can contribute to it. There is no procedure for becoming whitelisted to mine. You just mine. If there were such a permission scheme, such as in Facebook's now likely defunct cryptocurrency idea, you would not need proof of work. You'd just have a list of authorized signers of new blocks and if someone does something bad you kick them off the list. This is basically how the web PKI system works with browser certificate whitelists. Lots of cryptocurrency critics over-argue their case by denying that this was a novel innovation, but yes it was novel. It has big downsides but it works. Personally my big issue with crypto other than the energy waste is that the cryptocurrency ecosystem itself is toxic and full of scams and other trash.
ris 4y ago
99% of things that claim to need a blockchain can do exactly the same thing with https://opentimestamps.org/ https://opentimestamps.org/ which uses an existing blockchain to do decentralized "trusted timestamping". The remaining 1% are problems that need to solve the double-spend problem.
- orwin 4y ago
  > can do exactly the same thing with https://opentimestamps.org/ https://opentimestamps.org/ Others exists, but yes, the only legitimate blockchain companies i know use it to stamp documents/emails. I also think a public blockchain can help democratizing a sort of global crypto auth like said in other comments. But those issues, while hard to truly solve, are not really important, and can be tackled quite easely with third-party trust. I understand that we are more and more individualistic, that our social contract is dying and thus for crypto bros, a third party trustee is not an adequat solution.
disadvantage 4y ago
Blockchains Are a Bad Idea (James Mickens): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15RTC22Z2xI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15RTC22Z2xI
- swalsh 4y ago
  You should try reading the article. It really isn't about Blockchains. It's saying Web3's identity system is great, with or without the blockchain attached.
msoad 4y ago
> We are entering a new world with a new focus on giving users control over their data, their identity, and their systems I don't think so. Don't listen to cryptobros telling you this is a problem everyday users have.
swalsh 4y ago
>Well then, you might ask, why are we running around logging in with email+password, or god forbid, Login with Facebook? Why aren't we logging into everywhere with public keys, if the technology is so old? I like to to think i'm not logging in with my wallet, i'm logging in with my private key. I just also happen to have a crypto wallet also attached to that same private key.
beders 4y ago
I really don't get what authors mean when they write: "giving users control over their data" The only thing that does that is enforceable laws - that are also enforced. The moment I give my date-of-birth to a site, they can store it wherever they like. I have exactly zero control over it. So what is the data that I have control over in this new distributed future?
- antisyzygy 4y ago
  Estonia has a system for this using blockchains. However, it requires a government agency and proper legislation to implement. For example, if a hospital wants your health information, you have to manually approve their access over there. The same is true for other information the government stores. Government agencies likewise have to ask for access to information, for example, the equivalent of a DMV would request some personal info before they can obtain it.
  - beders 4y ago
    Yes, nothing here requires blockchains and I do want to manually approve giving my healthcare information to a new provider. Once given though, all bets are off. They could be selling it. There's no technological solution for that. Just laws.
labrador 4y ago
Oxford: anarchy noun a state of disorder due to absence or nonrecognition of authority The punk scene of the late 70's and 80's pretty much concluded that anarchy doesn't work. No amount of blockchain is going to fix anarchy, imho.
xmeadow 4y ago
But withouth a blockchain non of these applications can premine a token and... Eh.. PROFIT!!
Jeaye 4y ago
Blockchains are a fundraising strategy for many startups. Put the tech on a blockchain, hype up the utility of the token, and secure the funding needed to build the actual product you want (which is orthogonal to blockchain). It is what it is.
arriu 4y ago
I also agree that not everything needs a blockchain or decentralized layers. And moreover agree that there is a giant amount of garbage on the chain. However, can we take a moment to acknowledge how biased the crowd here is against blockchain? I know you’re tired of the buzzwords, but the other side is also tired of the hostility towards there maybe being something useful on the chain. As the author has pointed out, things have evolved substantially over the last year and it deserves open and fair discussion.
- xigoi 4y ago
  Until they stop consuming more electricity than a big country, there is a moral right to be hostile toward them.
  - bilekas 4y ago
    While I agree, I don't think this should be a fair primary reason. Unless you also feel the same about everything else that consumes more electricity than it could. There wouldn't be a concern if all energy was green for example, that should be where the energy hostility should be pointed. Trying to complain about the blockchain and its useage on power is an XY problem for me.
    - xigoi 4y ago
      I don't know about any other thing that's literally designed to consume as much electricity as possible.
      - arriu 4y ago
        Blockchain != Bitcoin
        bilekas 4y ago
        Thank you for saying what we're all thinking. The above highlights my point in a sense.
fubb1 4y ago
I do not agree, blockchain is a perfect example of identity and logins, a log in has always occurred and should be logged and nobody should be able to reverse it.
paulsutter 4y ago
Blockchain is designed to avoid double spending without a central authority. If you're not trying to avoid double spending, or if you are happy to have a central authority, you don't need blockchain. Would be exciting to find an alternative system that can accomplish the same thing
- usrn 4y ago
  Also you could in theory have tokens without a blockchain. That's essentially the way modern fiat works.
- MacsHeadroom 4y ago
  Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) with BFT Consensus, aka hashgraphs, also solve double spending and have some nifty features blockchains don't have like paralelizability and no need for a "block time" constraint.
throw0101a 4y ago
NIST's Blockchain Technology Overview is a good explainer: * https://csrc.nist.gov/publications/detail/nistir/8202/final https://csrc.nist.gov/publications/detail/nistir/8202/final See especially Figure 6 ("p. 42", 53 of the PDF), which is a flow chart to help you decide on whether blockchain may match one's use case. Extracted: * https://imgur.com/a/RlUj9Ed https://imgur.com/a/RlUj9Ed Generally you need the conditions of needing both (i) append-only log and (ii) distributed/decentralized before considering blockchain 'technology'.
- josephg 4y ago
  That’s a nice flowchart. Also, blockchains are only applicable when you don’t know anyone you trust to run your infrastructure. I don’t think this is often true in practice. Blockchains are also only needed in situations where you need a single, global source of truth. Ie, where eventual consistency / gossip networks wouldn’t be good enough. So blockchains are needed to avoid the double spend problem, but plenty of real world software can get on just fine without a single central ledger. (Eg scuttlebutt, CRDTs, etc).
syntheweave 4y ago
Although Tony Seba hasn't posted a lecture directly addressing it AFAIK, he lists blockchains as one of the transformational technologies for the next decade. And his methodology for picking technologies going through transformational phases (which he details so well for energy, transportation, and agriculture, having made incredibly accurate projections for these years in advance) uses the conceptually simple logic of identifying a logistical function taking hold, and then extrapolating that growth instead of linear to identify a crossover point of majority adoption. What is hard to grasp about blockchains in this light is simply that when following this curve, they are projected to become relatively much cheaper and better across a range of metrics over time with hardware, software and algorithmic improvements, and therefore they will become increasingly applicable across a variety of scenarios, with consequential side effects in the same way that a shift in energy and transportation changes land use. It should be a clue that the narratives of both pro and anti keep shifting around as both are frequently proven wrong in spectacular fashion, while the amount of money and employment piled into the space keeps rising amidst these spectacular failures. The market wants to "win crypto" and keeps losing as it slips out of grasp. Meanwhile, the people working on the core tech are experiencing an onrush of new algorithmic developments and have tons of things to build that they weren't even able to conceive of a few years before. Saying "you don't need a blockchain" is a grandpa joke. Interesting times are happening.
joshfraser 4y ago
One of the more under-appreciated aspects of blockchains is how they've made public key encryption more accessible to mainstream users. For the first time in history, millions of people have setup and maintain custody of their own key pairs. These users have learned the importance of securing those keys and have a convenient way to sign or verify signatures using their crypto wallets. Not everything needs a blockchain, but consumer tools for generating and verifying cryptographic signatures would have never reached the same level of adoption as they have w/o the incentives that blockchains provide.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- k__ 4y ago
  This. It's a bit like Rust's borrow checker. Not everyone needs it, but an ecosystem where it's the default for building anything has a competitive advantage at large. Web3 uses public key cryptography by default, which is a tremendous advantage over ecosystems that need to add it later. In times of "fake news", this alone could be a killer feature, even without the money.
- kimixa 4y ago
  I would be surprised if "millions" actually handle their keys themselves. None of the crypto 'investors' I know personally do that, instead just use a trading platform, functionally identical to any traditional trading platform.
  - latchkey 4y ago
    https://www.google.com/search?q=metamask+usage+numbers https://www.google.com/search?q=metamask+usage+numbers There are now 21 million monthly active users of Metamask, which is a 38-times increase from 2020, according to Metamask statistics. Metamask is now the easiest way for people around the world to interact with unique applications that use web3. There are currently 3700 applications that use web3. Mar 27, 2022
  - TacticalCoder 4y ago
mgraczyk 4y ago
This is a pretty shallow dismissal. The ideas argued against here haven't been popular in the crypto world since ~2018. Nobody thinks you need a blockchain to sign into a website. When people talk about web3 based decentralized identity, they are usually talking about an identity that is coupled to an on-chain asset (NFT, position in a pool, etc). That does "require" blockchains for the reasons explained in the first few paragraphs of this article. I put "require" in quotes because you could definitely build this stuff without a blockchain. But nothing like that will ever become widely adopted. It's not about "requiring" a blockchain in the sense of a necessary condition. It's about blockchains enabling things in a way that they are otherwise unlikely to be enabled.
- cuteboy19 4y ago
  > enabling things in a way that they are otherwise unlikely to be enabled Why were these things unlikely to be enabled in the first place? Maybe it wasn't worth the hassle (even though it is free)? Maybe people couldn't agree on one solution (even though there are a 1000 blockchains with their mutually incompatible systems)? Or more cynically, maybe no one needed "worse SSO" in the first place and this is just attempt #245 to find a problem for our favourite solution.
russdpale 4y ago
Everyone has problems with blockchain, but what people forget is that its about extracting wealth from computations, just signing in with a public/private key does none of that, the value of the computations goes to the server manufacturers.
senjin 4y ago
There's also a standard for this called DIDs (decentralized identifiers) created by the W3C https://www.w3.org/TR/did-core/ https://www.w3.org/TR/did-core/ There is a huge community around "self sovereign identity" with a conference currently happening right now https://internetidentityworkshop.com/ https://internetidentityworkshop.com/
sytelus 4y ago
A missing thing in this article: How do I know that public key X is associated with entity Y? The answer is not “contact entity Y” because I don’t know who Y really is or how to contact Y. This is the fundamental issue which causes centralization (aka “trusted entities” who certifies a claim).
hudon 4y ago
> A blockchain […] allows multiple entities (i.e. computers) to collaborate and do computations without needing to trust in either a central authority or in each other This article seems incorrect from the very first paragraph. Bitcoin, the blockchain figurehead, has needed trust in central authority many times, from 2010 when Satoshi was around [0] to 2013 [1] and beyond. The problem with blockchain as it’s expressed in this article is that it incorrectly describes the system boundary at the software level, where in reality the human layer is very much part of the protocol, especially when it is unclear which chain should be followed (see both citations) due to unexpected software behavior. The “human judge” or “trusted central authority” is part of the blockchain system to ensure its smooth and continuous operation. Without this, the blockchain would devolve into a confused mess, as parties disagree on what is a bug and what isn’t, and what is the “best chain” (regardless of its length). Bitcoin history is filled with these confusing events, and centralized parties always publicly clarify what is Bitcoin and what isn’t, and the rest of the users follow along. Of course, if blockchain software were written perfectly from day 0 and didn’t need any further development, then you could always follow the longest chain “trustlessly”, but the problem is perfect software is impossible. As soon as the code does the tiniest thing that many users say is unexpected, you have a problem that demands centralized intervention. [0] https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/posts/bitcointalk/threads/185/ https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/posts/bitcointalk/thre... [1] https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2015/07/28/analyzing-the-2013-bitcoin-fork-centralized-decision-making-saved-the-day/ https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2015/07/28/analyzing-the-2013-...
cryptica 4y ago
This is mostly true except, critically, for the cryptocurrency use case; which happens to be one of the most important use cases in existence. Currencies make up half of every trade. It's difficult to fully appreciate how important of a use case that is.
AtNightWeCode 4y ago
Blockchains have the inherited flaw of being dependent of history. Why it will become irrelevant over time. Quote me on this in the immutable log.
jl2718 4y ago
> For almost every use case, global, trustless consensus is not needed, and thus a blockchain is not needed. This is ridiculous. Try trading stocks without consensus. Play a game, any game. Even better, try exchanging public keys on an adversarial network with no pre-shared secrets or global state. And what is ‘logging in to ethereum’? This might refer to centralized ethers.js front ends. The “you don’t need a blockchain” argument is usually either based on acceptance of trust assumptions that go mostly unnoticed, or attacking a strawman of some knavish startup. Blockchain is also not the same thing as cryptocurrency. It may be more legitimate to say “You don’t need a cryptocurrency”, in the same way that it doesn’t make sense to play Doom on an ATM terminal.

309 points by cmdli 4y ago

When asked to build some New Thing(tm) with block chain, my first question is: "What proof of stake system were you thinking to use?" Its always lead to an interesting conversation that includes to many of the same points TFO mentions.

timerol 4y ago

I would add that Keybase solved the identity issue across logins via PKI with a very neat UI. It's a shame that Zoom bought the team and de-emphasized the product.

nathias 4y ago
Economic games are part of the security, Keybase demonstrates this clearly.
3np 4y ago
Keybase being a traditional centralized platform was/is precisely the issue: Single point of failure and trust in one company. All it took was Zoom acquiring them to make the whole system obsolete. We need something with logical centralization but independent of any single actor or company.
- noTooMooch 4y ago
  Like an open source operating system that ships with VPN in the kernel, and can be managed by a UI in a Docker container Blockchain development is funded by VCs looking to stay relevant. It’s software; there’s no panacea and thousands of options for solving problems; blockchain is just one.
rvz 4y ago
Maybe. The interface was there but in general it had created a security and usability dilemma. For convenience over security, it gave the choice of storing your private key on their servers. If Zoom was to one day shut Keybase down, your private key is now gone. Otherwise for security over convenience, if you store it on your own computer you're more likely to lose it. Those trade-offs in Keybase's key management is probably why it did not take off including that they were on a VC payroll and not making any money at all from the service. It was only a matter of time that without Zoom, they would end up shutting down.
- davidjfelix 4y ago
  > If Zoom was to one day shut Keybase down, your private key is now gone. Otherwise for security over convenience, if you store it on your own computer you're more likely to lose it. I'm not so sure about this. Each of my devices absolutely has a key stored on it that is offline capable. Loss of keybase servers would matter but not the extent that you're claiming, from what I can tell. https://book.keybase.io/security#your-private-keys-are-only-stored-on-your-devices https://book.keybase.io/security#your-private-keys-are-only-...

pluc 4y ago

You don't need the first 10 trendy technologies you can think of

blowski 4y ago
What counts as a trendy technology? I’m sure tcp/ip was once trendy, as was HTML, RDBMS, etc.
- Guest42 4y ago
  Those other examples fall under the intersection of trendy, useful across a spectrum of scenarios, widely adopted, and in hindsight changed the face of technology itself. The comparison is apples to oranges....or a handful of peanut shells to the total population of orange trees to be more accurate.
- chitowneats 4y ago
  These are the exceptions that prove the rule.
  - thfuran 4y ago
    That's not how exceptions or rules work.
    - chitowneats 4y ago
      I was being cute with a turn of phrase. A large majority of trendy new technologies in the software industry are driven by ephemeral industry buzz. It takes time for us to collectively separate the wheat from the chaff. In the meantime it's generally wise to stick with what has worked in the past.
    - actually_a_dog 4y ago
      You're misunderstanding how the word "prove" works. In this expression, it's being used in an archaic sense meaning "to test."
- 4y ago

andreyk 4y ago

Nicely succinct explanation of this stance. As someone who agrees, I like this bit: "One of the most promising and new developments in recent years has been a renewed interest in building decentralized systems of all types. Many people are looking into building a system of decentralized identity and giving that control back to the users." IE, decentralization is great, but blockchain type concensus building is rarely needed or useful in such systems imo.

nonrandomstring 4y ago
There is a widening gulf in technology between what could or should be built and what is being done.
- usrn 4y ago
  That's not new. There are mountains of awful software still being used. I just got done spending hours setting up a Windows VM for a student they needed because of an arbitrary requirement at their school.
k__ 4y ago
I think, it's not needed in a technical sense, but in a business sense. Take IPFS, for example. Decentralized hosting without a blockchain. Pretty nifty! Now, how do you make sure your stuff stays on the network in a similar decentralized way? Pinning it in your own node and paying pinning services is still centralized, Filecoin, on the other hand, is not.
- fwip 4y ago
  There's nothing in Filecoin to ensure that your data is stored by a reputable party. Even if you store on ten replicas, they could all be the same lowest bidder in the same datacenter.
  - SparkyMcUnicorn 4y ago
    So just make sure you're using more than one region? And they do have a reputation system.

throwaway82652 4y ago

The rest of the article is good, but this part is wrong: >This can be incredibly useful, and is necessary for some applications. There is no reason to have a system "without trust", the very idea of that makes no sense and there is no such thing as a system "without trust". Examples: To even use a computer or use a computer network you have to on some level trust the manufacturer of the systems as well as the supply chain that built it. To use any blockchain you have to trust that at some point it's not going to get 51% attacked. To use any businesses that work on the blockchain you have to trust those businesses on some level instead of just trusting "the blockchain" or a smart contract, if eventually you expect to receive a good or service that transfers into the real world, because agreements about those things can only be upheld by lawyers, not blockchains. The amount of entities you have to trust to realistically interact with any blockchain is massive. The idea that they're somehow "trustless" is simply wrong. And I've made comments about this before but I'll make it again. Blockchains are useless and are unnecessary for every application. They do nothing that isn't better achieved by another consensus mechanism. The only reason to use PoW/PoS or any of the other blockchain consensus algorithms is to use them to implement cryptocurrency, which is only useful as a form of unregulated and volatile and mostly useless money that you can pay people in those tokens for running the network. If you can come up with any other way to pay people to run a network, then you don't need cryptocurrency.

zamadatix 4y ago
Note your quote from the author was talking about collaboration without requiring trust in collaborators not a system without requiring trust in the system. 51% attacks are the closest to what the author was actually talking about but that has more to do with trusting and accepting how the system (and as you say, somewhat reality) works than any particular trust in a collaborator. That said it still doesn't make the list of cases this capability is needed any longer.
thebean11 4y ago
No safeguard is foolproof, including protections against 51% attacks. That doesn't make the precautions pointless though. It's like saying locks are useless because they can be picked.

smm11 4y ago

That went away quicker than fidget spinners.

pwdisswordfish9 4y ago

Editorialized title.

dang 4y ago
Yes, the submitted title ("You Don't Need a F@%!ing Blockchain") was edited from the original. The original should certainly have been edited, but not because of the profanity (we're not Bowdlers here) but rather because of the clickbait. (That's the unless in "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) In posts like this where the article begins by confessing to clickbait, the next sentence usually tells you what the real title should be. I've pinched that for the title above.
DerekL 4y ago
It's also misspelled.

MuffinFlavored 4y ago

> A blockchain, put simply, is a way of building distributed consensus in a trustless system. How different is a blockchain from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainline_DHT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainline_DHT? edit: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26415908/whats-the-difference-between-distributed-hashtable-technology-and-the-bitcoin-b https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26415908/whats-the-diffe...

zamadatix 4y ago
DHT doesn't build a consensus, most blatantly because nodes don't even have the full set of information but also because if they did they aren't validating it anyways. About the only similarities are they are distributed systems to share data that utilize cryptography in some way.
- MuffinFlavored 4y ago
  What does "build a consensus" mean in the context of blockchain? Consensus of... whether or not the messages are correctly cryptographically signed?
  - aforwardslash 4y ago
    It means that if you fetch an update to your DHT from a node, you don't validate if that node actually has the reputation for pushing that update, and the update itself may contain spurious data that eg. rewrites part of already existing data. This is important when your data is somehow updated and/or when you append more data to a given context, hence the typical tree data structure and not a hash table.
    - MuffinFlavored 4y ago
      i feel like most blockchains are just used for pushing data: i want to send money somewhere pulling data: so and so (sometimes myself) has received money you get a list of nodes by DNS resolving seed.bitcoin.sipa.be then you connect at port 8333 and speak the "BTC" protocol or whatever and either listen for a bunch of data, or push your own data (like a transaction) where is the validation part that you are referring to?

McLaren_Ferrari 4y ago

But people with money want to throw money at blockchains, not databases. So what's the winning strategy? Raise money for blockchains and then "pivot" to databases? Then you'd also get the praise for being a "visionary" who knows where the market is going lmao

AshamedCaptain 4y ago

We have had a myriad attempts at decentralized (and/or federated) identity and all of them failed because at the end of the day MySpace^W Facebook/Apple/Google/Whatever-todays-WWW-giant-is prefers to be at the center of your online identity, not at the periphery.

lottin 4y ago
I don't know about "failed"... if you use a different identity for each different site it seems that your identity is pretty decentralised.
jeroenhd 4y ago
I'm sad I missed OpenID. Would've been fun to be able to set up my own identity provider for a while until websites would eventually stop supporting it.
- AshamedCaptain 4y ago
  I didn't miss the OpenID days. Basically everyone was a OpenID provider (i.e. all of them offered to handle your accounts for you), but no one was an OpenID consumer. Even at its heyday, I don't remember any single service where I could login with my OpenID except for the websites I made.
  - amenod 4y ago
    StackOverflow was one such service (or still is? not sure...).
    - jeroenhd 4y ago
      StackOverflow deprecated OpenID years ago.
NaturalPhallacy 4y ago
This has been one of the most infuriating things about the internet maturing or whatever it's doing. All the big players trying centralize and tie all of your accounts to you. I've been rather hesitantly linking my steam/game/publisher accounts with twitch for in game loot, but I really hate doing it. What if they decide to ban me for some reason? Do I get banned from all of them? Centralization is only good for the center, not the constituents.

rvz 4y ago

> However, not all applications require a blockchain. Exactly. However: > Services such as social networks could link the user's account to their global identity by providing a signed document proving the user's public key is tied to a certain account, or users can do this on their own by providing a public cryptographic proof on their account. (Keybase) Yet Keybase kept your private key on their cloud for 'convenience' purposes. If you decide to manage the keys yourself, well you're probably more likely going to lose it. Hence, maybe that is why it didn't take off at all and even after they got acquired. As for 'blockchain application' is that also why Skiff [0] exists and supports using ENS for identities and will still work even after Skiff shuts down? [1]? [0] https://skiff.org/ https://skiff.org/ [1] https://skiff.org/blog/skiff-x-ethereum-naming https://skiff.org/blog/skiff-x-ethereum-naming

rodonn 4y ago
This is not true about Keybase. They do not ever store your private key on their servers https://book.keybase.io/security https://book.keybase.io/security "Your private keys are only stored on your devices. For extra security, your private keys are only stored on the device(s) you use Keybase on. They’re not even stored on Keybase’s servers. So if Keybase gets hacked, the security of your account isn’t compromised."

throwaway4good 4y ago

You do … if you want investors…

zaik 4y ago
Just because it gets funding doesn't mean it's any good.
- robonerd 4y ago
  For some people, getting funding is the only real goal.

bragr 4y ago

>Why aren't we logging into everywhere with public keys, if the technology is so old? Well, it's not because we didn't have blockchain technology before, but because decentralized identity was not the goal before. Let's not gloss over that key management is a hard problem, even for technical people, and that's a major reason this has not been particularly practical. FWIW this is also a problem for most blockchain based technologies.

kemayo 4y ago
Yeah, there's a real benefit to identifying myself with an account tied to a big company: they can reset my password if I forget it. (Or if my laptop gets stolen and it turns out my backup is corrupted, for the passwordless private key case. And assuming widespread use of backups is already quite the reach.) Any technology that makes this impossible is not going to get mass-adoption.

baby 4y ago

Obligatory: https://cryptologie.net/article/555/my-friends-always-ask-me-what-the-heck-is-blockchain-its-simple-really/ https://cryptologie.net/article/555/my-friends-always-ask-me... The simplest abstraction is to see cryptocurrency / blockchain / distributed ledger technology as a database running on a single computer. Everybody can access this database and there’s some simple logic that allows you to debit your account and credit someone else’s account. The computer has a queue to make sure transactions are processed in order. Blockchains that support smart contracts allow for people to install programs to that computer, which will add a bit more logic than simply debiting/crediting accounts. Others can then just send transactions to this computer to make a function call to any program (smart contract) that was installed on the computer. The cool thing really is that we’re all using the same computer with the same database and the same programs. Now in practice, nobody would trust a single point of failure like that. What if the computer crashes, or burns in a fire? Distributed systems to the rescue! We use distributed system protocols to run the same database on many computers distributed around the world. These distributed system protocols effectively simulate a single database/computer so that a few computers failing doesn’t mean the end of the blockchain. On top of that, we refuse to trust the computers that participate in this protocol. They could be lying about the balance in your account. We want the computers to police one another and agree on the database they are simulating. That’s where consensus protocols are used: to make the distributed database secure even when some of the participants are malicious. And that’s it. That’s blockchain tech for you. The obvious application is money, as the secure and simulated single computer is useful to simplify a payment system, but really any distributed database that cannot trust some of its participants can benefit from the advances there.

Ensorceled 4y ago
"Now, imagine that you lose your password to that really cool computer. Everything belonging to you is lost forever! Neat huh!" "Also, imagine that this really cool computer might be one of the ones that uses more electricity than some countries! Really, really neat!"
- dbmikus 4y ago
  Social recovery wallets address the first objection. Proof of Stake reduces blockchain energy consumption by a lot. I've seen people quoting that a proof of stake block production consumes about as much energy as a Google search.

bsedlm 4y ago

Maybe currency is not the best use case for blockchains. But what about the services provided by Notaries? land registries and other necessarily robust and trustworthy transactions that aren't ever going to happen at a high-volume?

Ensorceled 4y ago
What issues with land registries are solved by blockchain technologies? And are those issues actually bad enough that you would accept the new issues introduced by blockchain technologies? I'm imagining my property becoming forever "unowned" because some real estate lawyer lost their escrow wallet key.
- bsedlm 4y ago
  corruption. maybe not a problem in your own country.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
zamadatix 4y ago
Technically sure, in practice dunno. You have to have a group of people that all agree the blockchain is the controlling entity for land registries instead of their regional government which probably has better laws and dispute resolution procedures built in. You'd also have to find a way to actually run the blockchain that is both robust and trustworthy even though it's low volume but high value transactions. At that point you might be onto something but you still have yet to sell to everyone why it's worth switching to just because it's technically possible.
aaronax 4y ago
There is no way to link "ownership" of a physical asset to a blockchain, other than a trusted third party who ultimately has use of force as an enforcement method.

daenz 4y ago

But if investors are shoveling money at blockchain-based startups (I don't know if this is still the case), how do you convince young starry-eyed entrepreneurs that they don't need a blockchain?

yumraj 4y ago
Entrepreneurs don't need convincing, the investors do. Entrepreneurs will go where the money is, and if foolish investors are throwing money at blockchain-based startups, savvy entrepreneurs will take their money, and they should.
- daenz 4y ago
  Exactly, you're getting at my point. Most of the anti-blockchain opinion pieces seem to be pointed at entrepreneurs or engineers. But how can you blame them for going where the money is.

brianvli 4y ago

Composability and open APIs are rarely talked about. Composability lets you create a token to represent anything* of value and exchange it for other tokens. ETH and BTC are tokenizations of proof of work. Open APIs exist for any verified contract on Ethereum. You can permissionlessly plug a new application into many existing ones if your application is even partially on-chain

lvl102 4y ago

You know what would be cool? Crypto without the blockchain baggage. Just a straight up virtual currency that’s not tied to central banks.

sprkwd 4y ago
I’d buy that for a dollar.
lekevicius 4y ago
So, you don't like "central banks", but you still want a centralized party to control the currency? Otherwise, you need blockchain. Blockchain is just a consensus mechanism around data entries. If you want "just a virtual currency", bitcoin is that.
- lvl102 4y ago
  You don’t need a blockchain for that and blockchain wouldn’t solve that issue regardless.
ben_w 4y ago
What would you like to tie the virtual currency to, if anything, and why/not?
hedgehog 4y ago
A key problem to solve is how to create a reliable source of truth for the currency. If not a traditional bank or ledger built on distributed consensus, then you're into the territory of inventing something new. It's a hard problem but I'd love to see it.
aaronax 4y ago
So a database of some sort I suppose...who is going to be the host/arbiter? Or is there a non-blockchain way to run a currency system that has no central authority?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

lukasb 4y ago

Key management is hard. Hosted but portable might be the way to go. Blockchain is one way to do hosted but portable.

ibz 4y ago
Blockchain is not about key management. You still need to take care of your keys.
- lukasb 4y ago
  A hosted service that you log into can manage on-chain identity for you, but still make it possible for you to transfer identity management to another service, maintaining portability without needing the user to do key management.
  - ibz 4y ago
    Seems like you are making a circular argument. First you claim blockchain can help with "hosed and portable". Then you claim hosted can help you manage on-chain identity and make it transferable. While your first argument was plain wrong, your second argument is true, but unrelated to a blockchain: ANY kind of identity can be "hosted and portable": see email.
    - lukasb 4y ago
      With your email argument what you're really saying is that DNS is hosted but portable. Which is true, but it's also inconvenient.

scyclow 4y ago

I feel like this article, among others, kind of misses the point on why blockchains are useful. Decentralization, IMO, is incredibly overrated. What makes blockchains useful is that you can build highly interoperable applications that won't break due to changing interfaces. If AWS or the US government built a similar general purpose, open smart contract platform, I think we'd see similar levels of activity there. But they didn't, so we're using blockchains instead.

sofixa 4y ago
That doesn't make much sense. There's APIs now, and API intermediaries line Zapier, IFTTT. AWS APIs are backwards compatible, as I'm sure is the case for whatever US government APIs there are. So what's missing?
- scyclow 4y ago
  If I write some dip shit application and host it on my server, and you want to write an application that interops with mine, I can change my API (or the data itself) under your nose. You have no formal guarantees. Smart contracts make guarantees about what can change and what can't change.
  - Jasper_ 4y ago
    Ethereum makes no such guarantee after the introduction of delegatecall, where it's possible to replace one smart contract implementation with another.
    - scyclow 4y ago
      True. I'm curious what this sort of hit replacement would look like in practice. But, you can't add it in after the fact, so you at least have the option of writing contracts that give you the formal guarantee.
panarky 4y ago
When you identify the primary reason why corporations and governments never built built a centralized smart contract platform that's general purpose, open source, cross-border and uncensored, then you will know why decentralization is essential.

rafiki6 4y ago

We keep going through this cycle of attempting decentralization. Since the dawn of the internet. I wonder if it will stick. The most successful version of it when broadband really took off was torrents. Then we got git. Now we got cryptocurrency/blockchain. I think by the end of this hype curve/cycle, blockchain will be relegated to decentralized finance, which will likely become an interesting part of the broader financial system. I wonder what will come next. I don't see decentralized identity verification taking off. Public/Private Key encryption for ID means relying on users to not lose their private key...or storing it for them and backing it up in some form of centralized and managed storage (i.e. cloud). So not gonna happen.

jonhohle 4y ago
> decentralized finance, which will likely become an interesting part of the broader financial system. I’m all for decentralized finance, but abhor the idea of a public ledger except for one very specific use case: government allocation and spending. Privacy oriented blockchains may be slightly better, but if the safeguards are ever broken, they are no better than open ledgers. The CBDC proposals are even worse, imho, proposing no public ledger, but allowing blessed private entities to receive events to make rain their own private ledgers. I don’t know what digital decentralized finance looks like without public accounting, but I’d prefer something as anonymous and ephemeral as cash transactions for something that I use regularly.
mhitza 4y ago
There's a lot of "this or that" in the technology space. I use OAuth and classic username/passwords for authentication. For really important services, if possible I use multiple methods. Some websites are smart enough to allow you to connect one login type to another, some don't. The reason I'm saying this is because, if public key login is supported, and key management is hard, there's no reason why an alternative username/password method couldn't be also supported alongside. That way you lose one method of connection, you can fallback to another one. Would you need this for all services you use? Probably not. For example using a public key login on something like hacker news, and being required to create a new account when I lose that? No big deal. Losing my public key when trying to login to my back account, well let me fallback to a "forgotten public key flow" that uses my email address to set up a new key.

birracerveza 4y ago

>Well then, you might ask, why are we running around logging in with email+password, or god forbid, Login with Facebook? Why aren't we logging into everywhere with public keys, if the technology is so old? I'm a web3 enthusiast, and this is what cemented it for me as a proper successor to whatever we have now. Everyone agrees the legacy web auth is broken. Do you use the same password everywhere? That's low security, you must have a different password, preferably randomly generated, for each and every website, each having an arbitrary set of rules. It's a massive pain in the ass and leads to clicking a lot of "Forgot your password?", and pray to god the site you're using actually properly handles your password, or doesn't accidentally (or intentionally) log or leak your password. Yes, it's happened before, many many times. Logging in via wallet, on the other hand? Connect your wallet, choose your account, and you're in. It's stupid simple to integrate on the backend too, and incredibly secure as long as you don't leak your 12 words (but even then, you can use a ledger if you want to be safe). It also works as an unified account across different websites. It's amazing. Public key cryptography for the masses.

oh_sigh 4y ago
Isn't this what OAuth solves?
tshaddox 4y ago
You don't need any of the blockchain stuff to support logging in to websites with a public key. That's straightforward with any old public-key cryptography scheme like PGP. In fact, from what I can tell, most of the "web3 login" implementations are doing little more triggering your wallet extension (e.g. MetaMask) to sign a unique message with your private key to prove you control an Ethereum address. It works well, and I rather like it, but the login part itself could just as easily be an old-fashioned PGP key pair.
- vmception 4y ago
  correct, PGP had 30 years to get broad user-facing adoption and failed outside of a few paranoid folks on email and setting up git or ssh on a new machine once. blockchains and their addressing namespace have very quickly propelled standardized interfaces for signing key pairs for people that don't even think about it.

matt123456789 4y ago

The IPFS link does not like to the IPFS technology but to some insurance premium financing site (“IPFS”).

Barrin92 4y ago

The one thing I think that people should get rid of is the use of the word 'decentralization' in regards to blockchains. They're just about the most centralized thing there is because they create a global, ordered and absolute record of transactions. It's one big old state machine distributed across a lot of hardware. Which explains why they're so slow. Ethereum I think used the term 'world computer' at one point, which is apt. And the author is right that very few people need a world computer. Imagine if you send your grandma a message but but every time you do so you check in with the rest of the world for confirmation. That's 'apps on the blockchain'. Local state is fine and global consensus is irrelevant for probably 99% of what you do.

justinator 4y ago

Line goes up https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g

aforwardslash 4y ago

I'd argue that PoS/PoW have nothing to do with the blockchain concept, and instead are a way of building virtual currencies on top of it. The easiest way (for me) of thinking of a blockchain is a distributed merkle tree (or a patricia trie, if you're into ethereum or whatever), with a consensus mechanism. That's it. What you put there is your own responsability - so if you decide to create a virtual currency and either reward work or reward possession, its up to you - but that's on top of the "blockchain" concept. And I've actually came across some pretty valid use cases - one good example is that blockchain could be used to enhance resiliency on systems like certificate transparency - that are already a centralized, versioned sparse merkle tree.

SAI_Peregrinus 4y ago
PoW/PoS are just consensus mechanisms. Otherwise I agree that a blockchain is a Merkle tree with a (distributed) consensus mechanism. I'd tend to say that only distributed consensus mechanisms count as blockchains (and thus "permissioned" blockchains aren't true blockchains), but that's nitpicking.
kylebenzle 4y ago
hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
Totally disagree. The thing that was really novel about blockchain was its distributed consensus mechanism, even in the face of bad actors. Without that, just having, say, a cryptographically signed list of transactions really isn't new.
- api 4y ago
  The novel thing was a consensus mechanism that is itself permissionless in the sense that anyone can contribute to it. There is no procedure for becoming whitelisted to mine. You just mine. If there were such a permission scheme, such as in Facebook's now likely defunct cryptocurrency idea, you would not need proof of work. You'd just have a list of authorized signers of new blocks and if someone does something bad you kick them off the list. This is basically how the web PKI system works with browser certificate whitelists. Lots of cryptocurrency critics over-argue their case by denying that this was a novel innovation, but yes it was novel. It has big downsides but it works. Personally my big issue with crypto other than the energy waste is that the cryptocurrency ecosystem itself is toxic and full of scams and other trash.

ris 4y ago

99% of things that claim to need a blockchain can do exactly the same thing with https://opentimestamps.org/ https://opentimestamps.org/ which uses an existing blockchain to do decentralized "trusted timestamping". The remaining 1% are problems that need to solve the double-spend problem.

orwin 4y ago
> can do exactly the same thing with https://opentimestamps.org/ https://opentimestamps.org/ Others exists, but yes, the only legitimate blockchain companies i know use it to stamp documents/emails. I also think a public blockchain can help democratizing a sort of global crypto auth like said in other comments. But those issues, while hard to truly solve, are not really important, and can be tackled quite easely with third-party trust. I understand that we are more and more individualistic, that our social contract is dying and thus for crypto bros, a third party trustee is not an adequat solution.

disadvantage 4y ago

Blockchains Are a Bad Idea (James Mickens): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15RTC22Z2xI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15RTC22Z2xI

swalsh 4y ago
You should try reading the article. It really isn't about Blockchains. It's saying Web3's identity system is great, with or without the blockchain attached.

msoad 4y ago

> We are entering a new world with a new focus on giving users control over their data, their identity, and their systems I don't think so. Don't listen to cryptobros telling you this is a problem everyday users have.

swalsh 4y ago

>Well then, you might ask, why are we running around logging in with email+password, or god forbid, Login with Facebook? Why aren't we logging into everywhere with public keys, if the technology is so old? I like to to think i'm not logging in with my wallet, i'm logging in with my private key. I just also happen to have a crypto wallet also attached to that same private key.

beders 4y ago

I really don't get what authors mean when they write: "giving users control over their data" The only thing that does that is enforceable laws - that are also enforced. The moment I give my date-of-birth to a site, they can store it wherever they like. I have exactly zero control over it. So what is the data that I have control over in this new distributed future?

antisyzygy 4y ago
Estonia has a system for this using blockchains. However, it requires a government agency and proper legislation to implement. For example, if a hospital wants your health information, you have to manually approve their access over there. The same is true for other information the government stores. Government agencies likewise have to ask for access to information, for example, the equivalent of a DMV would request some personal info before they can obtain it.
- beders 4y ago
  Yes, nothing here requires blockchains and I do want to manually approve giving my healthcare information to a new provider. Once given though, all bets are off. They could be selling it. There's no technological solution for that. Just laws.

labrador 4y ago

Oxford: anarchy noun a state of disorder due to absence or nonrecognition of authority The punk scene of the late 70's and 80's pretty much concluded that anarchy doesn't work. No amount of blockchain is going to fix anarchy, imho.

xmeadow 4y ago

But withouth a blockchain non of these applications can premine a token and... Eh.. PROFIT!!

Jeaye 4y ago

Blockchains are a fundraising strategy for many startups. Put the tech on a blockchain, hype up the utility of the token, and secure the funding needed to build the actual product you want (which is orthogonal to blockchain). It is what it is.

arriu 4y ago

I also agree that not everything needs a blockchain or decentralized layers. And moreover agree that there is a giant amount of garbage on the chain. However, can we take a moment to acknowledge how biased the crowd here is against blockchain? I know you’re tired of the buzzwords, but the other side is also tired of the hostility towards there maybe being something useful on the chain. As the author has pointed out, things have evolved substantially over the last year and it deserves open and fair discussion.

xigoi 4y ago
Until they stop consuming more electricity than a big country, there is a moral right to be hostile toward them.
- bilekas 4y ago
  While I agree, I don't think this should be a fair primary reason. Unless you also feel the same about everything else that consumes more electricity than it could. There wouldn't be a concern if all energy was green for example, that should be where the energy hostility should be pointed. Trying to complain about the blockchain and its useage on power is an XY problem for me.
  - xigoi 4y ago
    I don't know about any other thing that's literally designed to consume as much electricity as possible.
    - arriu 4y ago
      Blockchain != Bitcoin
      - bilekas 4y ago
        Thank you for saying what we're all thinking. The above highlights my point in a sense.

fubb1 4y ago

I do not agree, blockchain is a perfect example of identity and logins, a log in has always occurred and should be logged and nobody should be able to reverse it.

paulsutter 4y ago

Blockchain is designed to avoid double spending without a central authority. If you're not trying to avoid double spending, or if you are happy to have a central authority, you don't need blockchain. Would be exciting to find an alternative system that can accomplish the same thing

usrn 4y ago
Also you could in theory have tokens without a blockchain. That's essentially the way modern fiat works.
MacsHeadroom 4y ago
Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) with BFT Consensus, aka hashgraphs, also solve double spending and have some nifty features blockchains don't have like paralelizability and no need for a "block time" constraint.

throw0101a 4y ago

NIST's Blockchain Technology Overview is a good explainer: * https://csrc.nist.gov/publications/detail/nistir/8202/final https://csrc.nist.gov/publications/detail/nistir/8202/final See especially Figure 6 ("p. 42", 53 of the PDF), which is a flow chart to help you decide on whether blockchain may match one's use case. Extracted: * https://imgur.com/a/RlUj9Ed https://imgur.com/a/RlUj9Ed Generally you need the conditions of needing both (i) append-only log and (ii) distributed/decentralized before considering blockchain 'technology'.

josephg 4y ago
That’s a nice flowchart. Also, blockchains are only applicable when you don’t know anyone you trust to run your infrastructure. I don’t think this is often true in practice. Blockchains are also only needed in situations where you need a single, global source of truth. Ie, where eventual consistency / gossip networks wouldn’t be good enough. So blockchains are needed to avoid the double spend problem, but plenty of real world software can get on just fine without a single central ledger. (Eg scuttlebutt, CRDTs, etc).

syntheweave 4y ago

Although Tony Seba hasn't posted a lecture directly addressing it AFAIK, he lists blockchains as one of the transformational technologies for the next decade. And his methodology for picking technologies going through transformational phases (which he details so well for energy, transportation, and agriculture, having made incredibly accurate projections for these years in advance) uses the conceptually simple logic of identifying a logistical function taking hold, and then extrapolating that growth instead of linear to identify a crossover point of majority adoption. What is hard to grasp about blockchains in this light is simply that when following this curve, they are projected to become relatively much cheaper and better across a range of metrics over time with hardware, software and algorithmic improvements, and therefore they will become increasingly applicable across a variety of scenarios, with consequential side effects in the same way that a shift in energy and transportation changes land use. It should be a clue that the narratives of both pro and anti keep shifting around as both are frequently proven wrong in spectacular fashion, while the amount of money and employment piled into the space keeps rising amidst these spectacular failures. The market wants to "win crypto" and keeps losing as it slips out of grasp. Meanwhile, the people working on the core tech are experiencing an onrush of new algorithmic developments and have tons of things to build that they weren't even able to conceive of a few years before. Saying "you don't need a blockchain" is a grandpa joke. Interesting times are happening.

joshfraser 4y ago

One of the more under-appreciated aspects of blockchains is how they've made public key encryption more accessible to mainstream users. For the first time in history, millions of people have setup and maintain custody of their own key pairs. These users have learned the importance of securing those keys and have a convenient way to sign or verify signatures using their crypto wallets. Not everything needs a blockchain, but consumer tools for generating and verifying cryptographic signatures would have never reached the same level of adoption as they have w/o the incentives that blockchains provide.

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k__ 4y ago
This. It's a bit like Rust's borrow checker. Not everyone needs it, but an ecosystem where it's the default for building anything has a competitive advantage at large. Web3 uses public key cryptography by default, which is a tremendous advantage over ecosystems that need to add it later. In times of "fake news", this alone could be a killer feature, even without the money.
kimixa 4y ago
I would be surprised if "millions" actually handle their keys themselves. None of the crypto 'investors' I know personally do that, instead just use a trading platform, functionally identical to any traditional trading platform.
- latchkey 4y ago
  https://www.google.com/search?q=metamask+usage+numbers https://www.google.com/search?q=metamask+usage+numbers There are now 21 million monthly active users of Metamask, which is a 38-times increase from 2020, according to Metamask statistics. Metamask is now the easiest way for people around the world to interact with unique applications that use web3. There are currently 3700 applications that use web3. Mar 27, 2022
- TacticalCoder 4y ago

mgraczyk 4y ago

This is a pretty shallow dismissal. The ideas argued against here haven't been popular in the crypto world since ~2018. Nobody thinks you need a blockchain to sign into a website. When people talk about web3 based decentralized identity, they are usually talking about an identity that is coupled to an on-chain asset (NFT, position in a pool, etc). That does "require" blockchains for the reasons explained in the first few paragraphs of this article. I put "require" in quotes because you could definitely build this stuff without a blockchain. But nothing like that will ever become widely adopted. It's not about "requiring" a blockchain in the sense of a necessary condition. It's about blockchains enabling things in a way that they are otherwise unlikely to be enabled.

cuteboy19 4y ago
> enabling things in a way that they are otherwise unlikely to be enabled Why were these things unlikely to be enabled in the first place? Maybe it wasn't worth the hassle (even though it is free)? Maybe people couldn't agree on one solution (even though there are a 1000 blockchains with their mutually incompatible systems)? Or more cynically, maybe no one needed "worse SSO" in the first place and this is just attempt #245 to find a problem for our favourite solution.

russdpale 4y ago

Everyone has problems with blockchain, but what people forget is that its about extracting wealth from computations, just signing in with a public/private key does none of that, the value of the computations goes to the server manufacturers.

senjin 4y ago

There's also a standard for this called DIDs (decentralized identifiers) created by the W3C https://www.w3.org/TR/did-core/ https://www.w3.org/TR/did-core/ There is a huge community around "self sovereign identity" with a conference currently happening right now https://internetidentityworkshop.com/ https://internetidentityworkshop.com/

sytelus 4y ago

A missing thing in this article: How do I know that public key X is associated with entity Y? The answer is not “contact entity Y” because I don’t know who Y really is or how to contact Y. This is the fundamental issue which causes centralization (aka “trusted entities” who certifies a claim).

hudon 4y ago

> A blockchain […] allows multiple entities (i.e. computers) to collaborate and do computations without needing to trust in either a central authority or in each other This article seems incorrect from the very first paragraph. Bitcoin, the blockchain figurehead, has needed trust in central authority many times, from 2010 when Satoshi was around [0] to 2013 [1] and beyond. The problem with blockchain as it’s expressed in this article is that it incorrectly describes the system boundary at the software level, where in reality the human layer is very much part of the protocol, especially when it is unclear which chain should be followed (see both citations) due to unexpected software behavior. The “human judge” or “trusted central authority” is part of the blockchain system to ensure its smooth and continuous operation. Without this, the blockchain would devolve into a confused mess, as parties disagree on what is a bug and what isn’t, and what is the “best chain” (regardless of its length). Bitcoin history is filled with these confusing events, and centralized parties always publicly clarify what is Bitcoin and what isn’t, and the rest of the users follow along. Of course, if blockchain software were written perfectly from day 0 and didn’t need any further development, then you could always follow the longest chain “trustlessly”, but the problem is perfect software is impossible. As soon as the code does the tiniest thing that many users say is unexpected, you have a problem that demands centralized intervention. [0] https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/posts/bitcointalk/threads/185/ https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/posts/bitcointalk/thre... [1] https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2015/07/28/analyzing-the-2013-bitcoin-fork-centralized-decision-making-saved-the-day/ https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2015/07/28/analyzing-the-2013-...

cryptica 4y ago

This is mostly true except, critically, for the cryptocurrency use case; which happens to be one of the most important use cases in existence. Currencies make up half of every trade. It's difficult to fully appreciate how important of a use case that is.

AtNightWeCode 4y ago

Blockchains have the inherited flaw of being dependent of history. Why it will become irrelevant over time. Quote me on this in the immutable log.

jl2718 4y ago

> For almost every use case, global, trustless consensus is not needed, and thus a blockchain is not needed. This is ridiculous. Try trading stocks without consensus. Play a game, any game. Even better, try exchanging public keys on an adversarial network with no pre-shared secrets or global state. And what is ‘logging in to ethereum’? This might refer to centralized ethers.js front ends. The “you don’t need a blockchain” argument is usually either based on acceptance of trust assumptions that go mostly unnoticed, or attacking a strawman of some knavish startup. Blockchain is also not the same thing as cryptocurrency. It may be more legitimate to say “You don’t need a cryptocurrency”, in the same way that it doesn’t make sense to play Doom on an ATM terminal.