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I think blockchain is an interesting technology that does have some unique qualities. It's cool that you can setup a system where the people running it don't ha

I think blockchain is an interesting technology that does have some unique qualities. It's cool that you can setup a system where the people running it don't have admin powers. I also think that relatively few real-world problems are made easier by blockchain's strengths - and many of them are situations where you're seeking to avoid some kind of censorship. I think avoiding censorship is important and I'm glad we have a technology that is useful there - but by volume most human interactions do not have to worry about censorship. An under-rated problem of blockchains, imo, is how the system shifts incentives for the stakeholders: if code really is law every system is one mistake away from giving away its entire value, if code isn't really law then we're just back to systems of social consensus and there's no need for all this blockchain nonsense. Very, very few people have the technical skill to implement a useful system which is fully automated. I'm extremely skeptical that we've been missing something that is going to make that dramatically easier in the future - and without several orders of magnitude decrease in programmer error smart contracts seem like a bad bet.

coward123 4y ago
>I think blockchain is an interesting technology that does have some unique qualities. The way I phrase it is, blockchain offers an interesting/useful requirements document, with a poor implementation.
DantesKite 4y ago
> I also think that relatively few real-world problems are made easier by blockchain's strengths - and many of them are situations where you're seeking to avoid some kind of censorship. I think avoiding censorship is important and I'm glad we have a technology that is useful there - but by volume most human interactions do not have to worry about censorship. What's funny about that is China is adopting blockchain technologies specifically to bind together databases for tracking social credit scores across different provinces because they've previously been silo'ed and unable to communicate with each other in a straightforward way (for whatever reason). China is banking on blockchain technologies precisely because it's can be such a powerful censorship tool. https://decrypt.co/39905/blockchain-now-powers-parts-of-chinas-social-credit-system https://decrypt.co/39905/blockchain-now-powers-parts-of-chin...
- jeremyjh 4y ago
  Same question that comes up with nearly every such application of crypto-tech in business or government: Why can't they just do that with a database?
  - judge2020 4y ago
    Blockchain adds a level of certainty that history hasn’t been changed, and you can at least audit any undo-type actions; it’s the same reason certificate transparency logs and git are built on blockchain-esque technology.
    - namdnay 4y ago
      So when does something stop being “git” and start being “blockchain technology”? When the latter sounds better to investors?
      - jazzyjackson 4y ago
        When there are multiple actors incentivized to ignore any history-rebasing. Of course if you're running your own git repo, you know your githashes will change if you go back in history and change something, and it doesn't matter. When multiple people want to ensure that history hasn't changed, they can compare their hashes with yours, and have good evidence of who tampered with the history and ignore them / prosecute them.
    - WJW 4y ago
      `git push -f` can absolutely do the type of "history changing" that you claim it can't though. CT logs are also quite vulnerable to attacks where the root of the certificate chain gets compromised, for example because they are being threatened by their government. Even blockchains are only protected from history rewriting as long as no 51% attack takes place, and all but the largest blockchains are quite vulnerable to this.
      - randomhodler84 4y ago
maxerickson 4y ago
Are there any systems where a majority of users simply can't agree to change the code that is running?
- nightpool 4y ago
  How would that even work? Nobody can force you to run a piece of code against your will. EDIT: I guess you could rules-lawyer about the meaning of "majority" but like... you don't even need a majority of users to start a fork! Two people is enough to start a fork. There's nothing preventing me from starting a fork of Bitcoin today and mining/trading it among my friends. It's just that normally people feel compelled to go along with what the majority is doing
  - bombcar 4y ago
    See the Etherium rollback/fork and the Bitcoin/Bitcoin Cash fork for examples. If enough people on the blockchain decide to update their code to do something different, you either fork or move with them.
    - nightpool 4y ago
      I think you're confused, I'm asking how what the GP said (a blockchain where a fork couldn't happen) could ever be possible.
      - bombcar 4y ago
        Ah, you'd have to have some form of central authority that "signs" the official "code" which would defeat the point of a blockchain anyway.
      - maxerickson 4y ago
        That's the point. Code isn't law.
- Rychard 4y ago
  Probably not what you meant, but the US Credit Score is a very opaque system, but I would wager to say that the majority of people would like to see that code changed[1] (or more likely, abolished). Though I suppose we're not "users" of such a system, but are rather "subjected to it" [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_score_in_the_United_States#Criticism_and_controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_score_in_the_United_Sta...
sosodev 4y ago
> It's cool that you can setup a system where the people running it don't have admin powers. How often is this true in practice? It seems like crypto often has centralized points where people have admin powers.
- aeturnum 4y ago
  I think it's typically true? The instances I know of where transactions were undone involved convincing all the node runners to fork their nodes - they were not done "within" the blockchain system. Instead they used social consensus to create a slightly altered blockchain system. How big of a difference this makes to you is up for debate.
JacobThreeThree 4y ago
>by volume most human interactions do not have to worry about censorship. I suspect this will increase over time. >if code isn't really law then we're just back to systems of social consensus and there's no need for all this blockchain nonsense. Exactly, and the "code is law" thing is not going so well, given that many of the programmer error catastrophes thus far have been "solved" by the social consensus of a small clique of developers.
- sleepymoose 4y ago
  >>by volume most human interactions do not have to worry about censorship. >I suspect this will increase over time. Do we still have to qualify this with suspicion? In a lot of ways, it's already increasing.
Jabbles 4y ago
> don't have admin powers > Sent $80M a Month to Himself In the end, it turns out that you don't need admin powers to steal lots of money.
- q-big 4y ago
  > In the end, it turns out that you don't need admin powers to steal lots of money. You just need to know the laws very well to steal a lot of money: this holds both in the "ordinary" world and for cryptocurrencies (there code is law).
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > You just need to know the laws very well to steal a lot of money: this holds both in the "ordinary" world and for cryptocurrencies (there code is law). With cryptocurrency, code is more like possession. The law is still law.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- wruza 4y ago
  Reminds me a situation when all your databases are ransom-crypted, your PC is a part of a botnet, but more importantly the operating system is still safe and running.
m12k 4y ago
As a programmer, I'm very impressed by the cleverness of blockchain and cryptocurrencies as a tech demo, much the same way I'm impressed by 64k intros from the demo scene. And at the same time I'm as horrified by the notion that people have seriously invested billions in turning the former into the basis of a new real-world economy, as I would be if the same were done with the latter. It just blows my mind that so many highly intelligent people can so thoroughly believe in something so misguided.
- can16358p 4y ago
  Maybe if so many intelligent people believe in it... There's really something worth it, perhaps?
  - WJW 4y ago
    In this case there are intelligent people on both sides though. Who can say which side is correct?
    - duped 4y ago
      I think the same of intelligent people in the blockchain space the same that I think of intelligent people that have joined cults. Either they're in on the scam or a victim of their own naïveté and/or ignorance. Being smart isn't an indicator of correctness.
    - thebean11 4y ago
      Like most things, it's pretty obviously not black and white.
  - halestock 4y ago
    I think the real lesson to be learned here is that it's extremely possible for a bunch of really smart people to completely miss the mark.
    - m12k 4y ago
boh 4y ago
"Few"? More like none. No blockchain is fully automated. The idea that Bitcoin or anything else just works by itself despite the persistent changes to the system by faceless developers is ridiculous. Crypto marketing presents this false narrative where we're meant to accept that crypto operates above social influence despite the evidence that clearly contradicts that (see the miner vs developer drama during the SegWit soft fork for instance).
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
iLoveOncall 4y ago
> I think blockchain is an interesting technology that does have some unique qualities Blockchain has unique attributes, I don't think it has any unique quality. Most of its "qualities" are things that you do not want under any circumstance in your systems even independently, so adding them all together turns it into a worthless technology. Immutability? Harmful in 99% of the use cases. Trustless? Harmful in 99% of the use cases. Decentralized? A waste in 99% of the use cases. Now put all 3 together, add more "qualities" akin to those, and you've got blockchain.
chris_wot 4y ago
I think blockchain is an interesting technology that does have some unique qualities. It's cool that you can setup a system where the people running it don't have admin powers. It’s a Merkel tree, with a distributed clock. I still don’t know where it would be useful outside of cryotocurrencies. And for currency, it’s still extremely questionable.*
indigochill 4y ago
> if code isn't really law then we're just back to systems of social consensus This is one reason why I'm still cold on blockchain tech in general. When push came to shove and Ethereum was hacked, the solution was an informal social consensus to fork the chain. Which proved that as far as the flow of value is concerned, the buck stops not at the tech but at the social consensus. So all this mental effort going into fancy byzantine algorithms is effectively just smoke and mirrors and the rest is a Merkle tree.
- kristianc 4y ago
  > This is one reason why I'm still cold on blockchain tech in general. When push came to shove and Ethereum was hacked, the solution was an informal social consensus to fork the chain. Worse than this. Code is law, but some insiders are above the law.
- asenna 4y ago
  You realized Bitcoin was rolled back early in its history as well right (someone figured out a way to mint billions of BTC)? It doesn't make sense to take an example of what happened in the infancy of a technological innovation like Ethereum and think that that's what still defines it. A rollback like the one the one that happened in 2016 is almost impossible right now as the tech and the community/ecosystem has matured and grown.

coward123 4y ago

>I think blockchain is an interesting technology that does have some unique qualities. The way I phrase it is, blockchain offers an interesting/useful requirements document, with a poor implementation.

DantesKite 4y ago

> I also think that relatively few real-world problems are made easier by blockchain's strengths - and many of them are situations where you're seeking to avoid some kind of censorship. I think avoiding censorship is important and I'm glad we have a technology that is useful there - but by volume most human interactions do not have to worry about censorship. What's funny about that is China is adopting blockchain technologies specifically to bind together databases for tracking social credit scores across different provinces because they've previously been silo'ed and unable to communicate with each other in a straightforward way (for whatever reason). China is banking on blockchain technologies precisely because it's can be such a powerful censorship tool. https://decrypt.co/39905/blockchain-now-powers-parts-of-chinas-social-credit-system https://decrypt.co/39905/blockchain-now-powers-parts-of-chin...

jeremyjh 4y ago
Same question that comes up with nearly every such application of crypto-tech in business or government: Why can't they just do that with a database?
- judge2020 4y ago
  Blockchain adds a level of certainty that history hasn’t been changed, and you can at least audit any undo-type actions; it’s the same reason certificate transparency logs and git are built on blockchain-esque technology.
  - namdnay 4y ago
    So when does something stop being “git” and start being “blockchain technology”? When the latter sounds better to investors?
    - jazzyjackson 4y ago
      When there are multiple actors incentivized to ignore any history-rebasing. Of course if you're running your own git repo, you know your githashes will change if you go back in history and change something, and it doesn't matter. When multiple people want to ensure that history hasn't changed, they can compare their hashes with yours, and have good evidence of who tampered with the history and ignore them / prosecute them.
  - WJW 4y ago
    `git push -f` can absolutely do the type of "history changing" that you claim it can't though. CT logs are also quite vulnerable to attacks where the root of the certificate chain gets compromised, for example because they are being threatened by their government. Even blockchains are only protected from history rewriting as long as no 51% attack takes place, and all but the largest blockchains are quite vulnerable to this.
    - randomhodler84 4y ago

maxerickson 4y ago

Are there any systems where a majority of users simply can't agree to change the code that is running?

nightpool 4y ago
How would that even work? Nobody can force you to run a piece of code against your will. EDIT: I guess you could rules-lawyer about the meaning of "majority" but like... you don't even need a majority of users to start a fork! Two people is enough to start a fork. There's nothing preventing me from starting a fork of Bitcoin today and mining/trading it among my friends. It's just that normally people feel compelled to go along with what the majority is doing
- bombcar 4y ago
  See the Etherium rollback/fork and the Bitcoin/Bitcoin Cash fork for examples. If enough people on the blockchain decide to update their code to do something different, you either fork or move with them.
  - nightpool 4y ago
    I think you're confused, I'm asking how what the GP said (a blockchain where a fork couldn't happen) could ever be possible.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      Ah, you'd have to have some form of central authority that "signs" the official "code" which would defeat the point of a blockchain anyway.
    - maxerickson 4y ago
      That's the point. Code isn't law.
Rychard 4y ago
Probably not what you meant, but the US Credit Score is a very opaque system, but I would wager to say that the majority of people would like to see that code changed[1] (or more likely, abolished). Though I suppose we're not "users" of such a system, but are rather "subjected to it" [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_score_in_the_United_States#Criticism_and_controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_score_in_the_United_Sta...

sosodev 4y ago

> It's cool that you can setup a system where the people running it don't have admin powers. How often is this true in practice? It seems like crypto often has centralized points where people have admin powers.

aeturnum 4y ago
I think it's typically true? The instances I know of where transactions were undone involved convincing all the node runners to fork their nodes - they were not done "within" the blockchain system. Instead they used social consensus to create a slightly altered blockchain system. How big of a difference this makes to you is up for debate.

JacobThreeThree 4y ago

>by volume most human interactions do not have to worry about censorship. I suspect this will increase over time. >if code isn't really law then we're just back to systems of social consensus and there's no need for all this blockchain nonsense. Exactly, and the "code is law" thing is not going so well, given that many of the programmer error catastrophes thus far have been "solved" by the social consensus of a small clique of developers.

sleepymoose 4y ago
>>by volume most human interactions do not have to worry about censorship. >I suspect this will increase over time. Do we still have to qualify this with suspicion? In a lot of ways, it's already increasing.

Jabbles 4y ago

> don't have admin powers > Sent $80M a Month to Himself In the end, it turns out that you don't need admin powers to steal lots of money.

q-big 4y ago
> In the end, it turns out that you don't need admin powers to steal lots of money. You just need to know the laws very well to steal a lot of money: this holds both in the "ordinary" world and for cryptocurrencies (there code is law).
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > You just need to know the laws very well to steal a lot of money: this holds both in the "ordinary" world and for cryptocurrencies (there code is law). With cryptocurrency, code is more like possession. The law is still law.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
wruza 4y ago
Reminds me a situation when all your databases are ransom-crypted, your PC is a part of a botnet, but more importantly the operating system is still safe and running.

m12k 4y ago

As a programmer, I'm very impressed by the cleverness of blockchain and cryptocurrencies as a tech demo, much the same way I'm impressed by 64k intros from the demo scene. And at the same time I'm as horrified by the notion that people have seriously invested billions in turning the former into the basis of a new real-world economy, as I would be if the same were done with the latter. It just blows my mind that so many highly intelligent people can so thoroughly believe in something so misguided.

can16358p 4y ago
Maybe if so many intelligent people believe in it... There's really something worth it, perhaps?
- WJW 4y ago
  In this case there are intelligent people on both sides though. Who can say which side is correct?
  - duped 4y ago
    I think the same of intelligent people in the blockchain space the same that I think of intelligent people that have joined cults. Either they're in on the scam or a victim of their own naïveté and/or ignorance. Being smart isn't an indicator of correctness.
  - thebean11 4y ago
    Like most things, it's pretty obviously not black and white.
- halestock 4y ago
  I think the real lesson to be learned here is that it's extremely possible for a bunch of really smart people to completely miss the mark.
  - m12k 4y ago

boh 4y ago

"Few"? More like none. No blockchain is fully automated. The idea that Bitcoin or anything else just works by itself despite the persistent changes to the system by faceless developers is ridiculous. Crypto marketing presents this false narrative where we're meant to accept that crypto operates above social influence despite the evidence that clearly contradicts that (see the miner vs developer drama during the SegWit soft fork for instance).

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

iLoveOncall 4y ago

> I think blockchain is an interesting technology that does have some unique qualities Blockchain has unique attributes, I don't think it has any unique quality. Most of its "qualities" are things that you do not want under any circumstance in your systems even independently, so adding them all together turns it into a worthless technology. Immutability? Harmful in 99% of the use cases. Trustless? Harmful in 99% of the use cases. Decentralized? A waste in 99% of the use cases. Now put all 3 together, add more "qualities" akin to those, and you've got blockchain.

chris_wot 4y ago

I think blockchain is an interesting technology that does have some unique qualities. It's cool that you can setup a system where the people running it don't have admin powers. It’s a Merkel tree, with a distributed clock. I still don’t know where it would be useful outside of cryotocurrencies. And for currency, it’s still extremely questionable.*

indigochill 4y ago

> if code isn't really law then we're just back to systems of social consensus This is one reason why I'm still cold on blockchain tech in general. When push came to shove and Ethereum was hacked, the solution was an informal social consensus to fork the chain. Which proved that as far as the flow of value is concerned, the buck stops not at the tech but at the social consensus. So all this mental effort going into fancy byzantine algorithms is effectively just smoke and mirrors and the rest is a Merkle tree.

kristianc 4y ago
> This is one reason why I'm still cold on blockchain tech in general. When push came to shove and Ethereum was hacked, the solution was an informal social consensus to fork the chain. Worse than this. Code is law, but some insiders are above the law.
asenna 4y ago
You realized Bitcoin was rolled back early in its history as well right (someone figured out a way to mint billions of BTC)? It doesn't make sense to take an example of what happened in the infancy of a technological innovation like Ethereum and think that that's what still defines it. A rollback like the one the one that happened in 2016 is almost impossible right now as the tech and the community/ecosystem has matured and grown.