12 ms·

LibreOffice blogs about Blockchain, locks comments after negative user feedback

96 points by SylvieLorxu 4y ago

0xbadc0de5 4y ago
How about we keep the blockchain as far away from LibreOffice as possible. Those Venn diagrams do not overlap. Maybe instead, put some effort into making the LibreOffice experience and interoperability world-class. This is entirely about credibility smuggling and attempting to force-feed crypto into spaces it has no business in.
JohnDoe124 4y ago
> possible ways for people to combine LibreOffice with blockchain technologies. (We’re not talking about putting blockchain into LibreOffice!) anyone care to explain to me the difference here?
bankomatcm 4y ago
[flagged]
- captain_coffee 4y ago
  what does one have to do to be able to downvote comments on HN?
SylvieLorxu 4y ago
Update: LibreOffice has prepended the blog post with a note that they decided to abandon any Blockchain plans and deleted the tweet on https://twitter.com/LibreOffice/status/1592462972575952898 https://twitter.com/LibreOffice/status/1592462972575952898.
- ekianjo 4y ago
  People can't discuss words these days, because they have become taboo. What a poor state of affairs.
pyr0hu 4y ago
I don't know, talking about blockchain became such an extreme topic that one can't just talk about it, even if it's a note that "We had a chat with Eth Foundation" and people are coming with foaming mouth. The article does not mention that they are thinking about _crypto_ but _blockchain_, which, seems like not a lot of people know about, does not 100% means "im going to release a shitcoin, haha, rugpull". It's insane.
- krageon 4y ago
  In most environments this can be discussed, I think it is a specific subsection of IT professionals that are just quite militant about the subject. It is unpleasant, but just like all fundamentalists they're always going to exist. To my view, the best course of action is to politely ignore them and go on with your life.
- h4kor 4y ago
  Because there are no use cases for blockchains. Humanity spent billions (trillions?) of $ on this technology and there is no use for it. Now the people who sank their money into this, desperately try to find some fools to pass the hot potato to.
  - ekianjo 4y ago
    > there is no use for it. No use for it? The blockchain is a massive achievement. It's a decentralized verification system. Of course it has plenty of uses beyond crypto currencies.
  - emptysongglass 4y ago
    That isn't true. A blockchain powers Secure Scuttlebutt, Jami, Urbit, and has use anywhere a verified supply chain is needed. Because some people have politicized it, now all blockchains are scams or "useless". But this is demonstrably not true. It's just a technology and people have misused it but that doesn't render the technology itself useless or a scam.
    - The_Colonel 4y ago
Phelinofist 4y ago
What possible use case could this be for?
- octagons 4y ago
  It could MAYBE be used to create an open/libre clone of services like DocuSign, but there are certainly already ways of validating a signature on a document that don’t require inserting a blockchain into an office suite! Beyond that, I also cannot think of any valid use cases
  - prepend 4y ago
    Document signing is a good potential use case. The current transaction fee is $.50 [0] so that’s not too bad to securely sign a document. There’s a separate issue of verifying and identity proofing wallets. But I think blockchain actually helps solve the problem with pgp of trusting unknown identities and key exchange. Currently if a document is pgp signed by John Doe, I’ve got to figure out if it’s really John Doe and that’s a bit of work if I don’t already have John’s public key. [0] https://ycharts.com/indicators/ethereum_average_transaction_fee https://ycharts.com/indicators/ethereum_average_transaction_...
    - indigochill 4y ago
      > I’ve got to figure out if it’s really John Doe and that’s a bit of work if I don’t already have John’s public key. Maybe a dumb question, but assuming a scenario where you have a concept of "really John Doe", isn't there always some authoritative source on what that means that you could use to obtain John's public key (whether that's some user registry, direct contact with John, etc)?
      - prepend 4y ago
        I don’t know of an authoritative source. You can pay verisign or commercial entities to track this. All the blockchain serves as is an agreed upon common entity that isn’t controlled by a particular company. It would be nice if governments would issue keypairs and serve as an authoritative source. Sadly, I’ve been waiting 25 years.
web3isgoing 4y ago
You would think a message board called "hacker news" would be more open to blue sky thinking. Zero knowledge proofs and a tamper proof ledger of timestamped cryptographic signatures could open up new use cases that are different than relying on central authorities. One idea, document signing: vitalik.eth signs a PDF, everybody can verify the PDF is signed by his private key. He has to broadcast his public key for this, and probably also a content hash of the document so that we can be sure we are verifying the correct PDF. He can broadcast this on Twitter, but that is not a secure and tamper proof ledger, and it is centrally owned, and it's not a great storage mechanism for this system to scale to thousands or millions of signatures. LibreOffice could create a new service like keybase.io but that is also centralized and we saw how that went. Another alternative is these messages are broadcast through a public and decentralized ledger. How does this fit with zero knowledge proofs that the blog mentions? There may be signature attestations you can make that you want to be private from the receiver, but made in a way that the receiver can still verify the signature is valid. EDIT: Since I am on a throwaway account, my replies are being throttled. This could be another application of ZKP: create a proof that my main account has significant karma to post, without sacrificing my privacy.
- theCrowing 4y ago
  You never interacted with hackers right? Here in Germany most of the CCC members are quite the realists there isn't much bluesky thinking done without any merit.
- Macha 4y ago
  Hacker News has historically been very open to blockchain ideas. I'd wager that without HN's contribution, it would not have been well known enough to get picked up by silk road which is really when it went from toy project to normal people caring. Even after that, I think many of the early blockchain for X startups got good press here and there is a decent chunk of HNers employed in the blockchain. So I don't think negative reactions to blockchain articles on HN started as some sort of kneejerk conservatism, rather HN has seen the entire lifecycle of blockchain so far and what we've seen has exhausted the opening goodwill towards the concept for many users
laserbeam 4y ago
_sigh_... If you have a good problem to apply blockchain to, just do it. Make a startup. If you want us to come up with problems for you to apply blockchain to, just stop. Find problems and apply whatever solution you need for them. This applies for any single piece of technology one may want to use. The act of reaching out to the community looking for problems and suggesting you want to use hammers is, to me, a sign that company vision is muddy and unclear. [edit] This is in no way an endorsement of blockchain, especially how it's used today.
- rvz 4y ago
  > _sigh_... If you have a good problem to apply blockchain to, just do it. Make a startup. There already is one similar to LibreOffice and it is called Skiff [0] which is open-source and has E2EE and signs, verifies documents, mail, etc using ENS addresses [1] (for the Ethereum blockchain) and others. Much more useable than 'LibreOffice Online' which that is still a giant hack, and has little to no real-time collaboration support. LibreOffice really is sinking into irrelevancy as online alternatives have already eaten their lunch. [0] https://skiff.com https://skiff.com [1] https://ens.domains https://ens.domains
- bombcar 4y ago
  The best use of blockchain is separating people from their money, especially powerful against Venture Capitalists for awhile.
cube00 4y ago
> Recently, we had a chat with the Ethereum Foundation One guess who reached out first.
_448 4y ago
Instead of this, it will help if the doc foundation works on providing mobile-friendly and also online libreoffice via the doc foundation and not by third party.

96 points by SylvieLorxu 4y ago

How about we keep the blockchain as far away from LibreOffice as possible. Those Venn diagrams do not overlap. Maybe instead, put some effort into making the LibreOffice experience and interoperability world-class. This is entirely about credibility smuggling and attempting to force-feed crypto into spaces it has no business in.

JohnDoe124 4y ago

> possible ways for people to combine LibreOffice with blockchain technologies. (We’re not talking about putting blockchain into LibreOffice!) anyone care to explain to me the difference here?

bankomatcm 4y ago

[flagged]

captain_coffee 4y ago
what does one have to do to be able to downvote comments on HN?

SylvieLorxu 4y ago

Update: LibreOffice has prepended the blog post with a note that they decided to abandon any Blockchain plans and deleted the tweet on https://twitter.com/LibreOffice/status/1592462972575952898 https://twitter.com/LibreOffice/status/1592462972575952898.

ekianjo 4y ago
People can't discuss words these days, because they have become taboo. What a poor state of affairs.

pyr0hu 4y ago

I don't know, talking about blockchain became such an extreme topic that one can't just talk about it, even if it's a note that "We had a chat with Eth Foundation" and people are coming with foaming mouth. The article does not mention that they are thinking about _crypto_ but _blockchain_, which, seems like not a lot of people know about, does not 100% means "im going to release a shitcoin, haha, rugpull". It's insane.

krageon 4y ago
In most environments this can be discussed, I think it is a specific subsection of IT professionals that are just quite militant about the subject. It is unpleasant, but just like all fundamentalists they're always going to exist. To my view, the best course of action is to politely ignore them and go on with your life.
h4kor 4y ago
Because there are no use cases for blockchains. Humanity spent billions (trillions?) of $ on this technology and there is no use for it. Now the people who sank their money into this, desperately try to find some fools to pass the hot potato to.
- ekianjo 4y ago
  > there is no use for it. No use for it? The blockchain is a massive achievement. It's a decentralized verification system. Of course it has plenty of uses beyond crypto currencies.
- emptysongglass 4y ago
  That isn't true. A blockchain powers Secure Scuttlebutt, Jami, Urbit, and has use anywhere a verified supply chain is needed. Because some people have politicized it, now all blockchains are scams or "useless". But this is demonstrably not true. It's just a technology and people have misused it but that doesn't render the technology itself useless or a scam.
  - The_Colonel 4y ago

Phelinofist 4y ago

What possible use case could this be for?

octagons 4y ago
It could MAYBE be used to create an open/libre clone of services like DocuSign, but there are certainly already ways of validating a signature on a document that don’t require inserting a blockchain into an office suite! Beyond that, I also cannot think of any valid use cases
- prepend 4y ago
  Document signing is a good potential use case. The current transaction fee is $.50 [0] so that’s not too bad to securely sign a document. There’s a separate issue of verifying and identity proofing wallets. But I think blockchain actually helps solve the problem with pgp of trusting unknown identities and key exchange. Currently if a document is pgp signed by John Doe, I’ve got to figure out if it’s really John Doe and that’s a bit of work if I don’t already have John’s public key. [0] https://ycharts.com/indicators/ethereum_average_transaction_fee https://ycharts.com/indicators/ethereum_average_transaction_...
  - indigochill 4y ago
    > I’ve got to figure out if it’s really John Doe and that’s a bit of work if I don’t already have John’s public key. Maybe a dumb question, but assuming a scenario where you have a concept of "really John Doe", isn't there always some authoritative source on what that means that you could use to obtain John's public key (whether that's some user registry, direct contact with John, etc)?
    - prepend 4y ago
      I don’t know of an authoritative source. You can pay verisign or commercial entities to track this. All the blockchain serves as is an agreed upon common entity that isn’t controlled by a particular company. It would be nice if governments would issue keypairs and serve as an authoritative source. Sadly, I’ve been waiting 25 years.

web3isgoing 4y ago

You would think a message board called "hacker news" would be more open to blue sky thinking. Zero knowledge proofs and a tamper proof ledger of timestamped cryptographic signatures could open up new use cases that are different than relying on central authorities. One idea, document signing: vitalik.eth signs a PDF, everybody can verify the PDF is signed by his private key. He has to broadcast his public key for this, and probably also a content hash of the document so that we can be sure we are verifying the correct PDF. He can broadcast this on Twitter, but that is not a secure and tamper proof ledger, and it is centrally owned, and it's not a great storage mechanism for this system to scale to thousands or millions of signatures. LibreOffice could create a new service like keybase.io but that is also centralized and we saw how that went. Another alternative is these messages are broadcast through a public and decentralized ledger. How does this fit with zero knowledge proofs that the blog mentions? There may be signature attestations you can make that you want to be private from the receiver, but made in a way that the receiver can still verify the signature is valid. EDIT: Since I am on a throwaway account, my replies are being throttled. This could be another application of ZKP: create a proof that my main account has significant karma to post, without sacrificing my privacy.

theCrowing 4y ago
You never interacted with hackers right? Here in Germany most of the CCC members are quite the realists there isn't much bluesky thinking done without any merit.
Macha 4y ago
Hacker News has historically been very open to blockchain ideas. I'd wager that without HN's contribution, it would not have been well known enough to get picked up by silk road which is really when it went from toy project to normal people caring. Even after that, I think many of the early blockchain for X startups got good press here and there is a decent chunk of HNers employed in the blockchain. So I don't think negative reactions to blockchain articles on HN started as some sort of kneejerk conservatism, rather HN has seen the entire lifecycle of blockchain so far and what we've seen has exhausted the opening goodwill towards the concept for many users

laserbeam 4y ago

_sigh_... If you have a good problem to apply blockchain to, just do it. Make a startup. If you want us to come up with problems for you to apply blockchain to, just stop. Find problems and apply whatever solution you need for them. This applies for any single piece of technology one may want to use. The act of reaching out to the community looking for problems and suggesting you want to use hammers is, to me, a sign that company vision is muddy and unclear. [edit] This is in no way an endorsement of blockchain, especially how it's used today.

rvz 4y ago
> _sigh_... If you have a good problem to apply blockchain to, just do it. Make a startup. There already is one similar to LibreOffice and it is called Skiff [0] which is open-source and has E2EE and signs, verifies documents, mail, etc using ENS addresses [1] (for the Ethereum blockchain) and others. Much more useable than 'LibreOffice Online' which that is still a giant hack, and has little to no real-time collaboration support. LibreOffice really is sinking into irrelevancy as online alternatives have already eaten their lunch. [0] https://skiff.com https://skiff.com [1] https://ens.domains https://ens.domains
bombcar 4y ago
The best use of blockchain is separating people from their money, especially powerful against Venture Capitalists for awhile.

cube00 4y ago

> Recently, we had a chat with the Ethereum Foundation One guess who reached out first.

_448 4y ago

Instead of this, it will help if the doc foundation works on providing mobile-friendly and also online libreoffice via the doc foundation and not by third party.