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AWS and Blockchain

• saimiam 4y ago
  For whatever reason, SMS operators in India rely on blockchain to validate SMS templates and customer’s do-not-disturb settings. For a sense of scale, SMS is a 12.5 billion dollar business in India.
  • petesergeant 4y ago
    Do you have a link to more information about this? EDIT: So doing some googling finds that Telecom Regulatory Authority of India implemented “Distributed Ledger Technology” for fighting spam, but roll-out seems to have lasted not long (a week? A month?) because it didn’t work (didn’t scale?) and every so often tech vendors suggest they’re going to re-do it? Honestly there’s a lot of promo articles and conflicting information that I’m struggling to understand what’s going on there, my take-away is that it’s not currently being used because it didn’t work?
    • timbray 4y ago
      crickets
      • saimiam 4y ago
        https://www.fast2sms.com/help/dlt-sms-faq/ https://www.fast2sms.com/help/dlt-sms-faq/ Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) is a blockchain based online panel where the record of entities, sender ID and message templates will be maintained in a safe and secure manner. The whole panel entities will be interlinked with each other thereby regulating the fraudulent practices and creating a transparent SMS sending mechanism.
    • ricochet11 4y ago
      couldnt find this, but given the india connection at a guess probably something on polygon. there are other india anti-corruption uses on polygon too e.g. police complaints records https://twitter.com/firozabadpolice/status/1579470713123405825?s=20&t=-u9_H-ph8FEySBqPohqJwA https://twitter.com/firozabadpolice/status/15794707131234058...
    • saimiam 4y ago
      I work (well, serving out my notice period) for an SMS aggregator in India. All SMS operators in India use blockchain to manage SMS marketing campaigns https://dltconnect.airtel.in https://dltconnect.airtel.in - for context, Airtel is India's largest GSM provider. https://www.tanla.com https://www.tanla.com - the best known DLT-as-a-service provider in India. DLT (branded as being built on blockchain) is alive and well in India.
• obblekk 4y ago
  It's interesting to read how much research tbray did on crypto back then. Definitely doesn't seem like new entrants today were doing the same level of diligence, on average.
  • yumraj 4y ago
    • fnordpiglet 4y ago
      Clearly not
      • jollofricepeas 4y ago
        I’m lost. I think @grogenaut is actually saying he agrees with OP and that super bowl ads and stadium deals are precursors to busts, no? The big question is whether there’s any utility left. The dotcom bust wasn’t an indictment of the internet and maybe the web3/exchanges busts don’t spell doom for blockchain and related tech either.
    • dang 4y ago
      Ruh roh. Please don't do that here. "Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."" https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      • yumraj 4y ago
        Apologies. My mistake.
  • grogenaut 4y ago
    Yes I didn't see a single .com name a stadium or bowl game or have most of the super bowl ads in 1999 at all, none at all. Oh wait yes I did, literally every superbowl ad was a dot com right before the .com bust. https://www.cnbc.com/2010/01/20/The-Stadium-Curse:-Naming-Deals-Gone-Bust.html https://www.cnbc.com/2010/01/20/The-Stadium-Curse:-Naming-De... puts a nice writeup of all the comapnies that went under after naming stadiums, there's quite a few from the .com bust. Aah WorldCom how I miss thee. Pets.com as well.
• fnordpiglet 4y ago
  All true. Source: I was there.
  • anon400232 4y ago
    Sarcasm? Forgive those of us who can't tell.
• x86x87 4y ago
  I believe that putting the equal sign between a blockchain and a database is fundamentally wrong. I also think that a lot of "cryptos" were just get rich quick schemes. After the dust settles we will see if blockchain is really useful or not.
  • yumraj 4y ago
    In your opinion how long is it before the dust will settle? IMHO, the dust has already settled and been washed away by the rain water..
    • x86x87 4y ago
      I think there are 2 scenarios really: 1) btc and eth go to zero or 2) we have btc and eth gaining the full recognition and regulation Blockchain as a technology is revolutionary and will be used in niche problems outside of crypto. One thing that most people seem to miss is that money is only as good as our faith in it. No matter what instrument you use this has to apply.
      • l33t233372 4y ago
        In what sense is blockchain revolutionary? Merkle trees are many decades old.
        • x86x87 4y ago
          Distributed consensus with zero trust.
          • dale_glass 4y ago
            Only in an extremely limited sense. You have to trust the developers, for one. Also it's only trustworthy as far as everything happens on the blockchain. Once you step off it for even a second, it doesn't help. Eg, witness the absolutely amazing number of scams happening in the area, and the number of well known, and supposedly trustworthy services suddenly crashing and burning.
• legutierr 4y ago
  > He named a region in Asia and explained that the small farmers there mark their landholdings carefully, but then the annual floods sometimes wash the markers away. Then unscrupulous larger landowners use the absence of markers to cut away at the smallholdings of the poorest. “But if the boundary markers were on the blockchain,” he said, “they wouldn’t be able to do that, would they?” The developed world is distinguished from the developing world often by the strength of its institutions, by the general accessibility of legal recourse, by the prevalence of trust within the society at large. Many places in the world have none of those things. Weak institutions, corrupt legal systems, and low levels of trust undermine development and prevent people from building and maintaining wealth for themselves and their families. For me, the promise of the blockchain is that it can provide a technological framework upon which to build new kinds of institutions—institutions that function as alternatives to the institutions that we all take for granted here in the first world. Is a smart contract better than a written contract? Maybe it is, if there is no well-functioning judiciary to adjudicate contractual disputes. Is a cryptocurrency better than a national currency? Perhaps, if your national currency is subject to hyperinflation. Is an NFT representing property ownership better than property title registered with a state agency? Yes it is, if the state agency can be bribed to alter or lose records that are inconvenient to large land owners. It's important to remember that what might seem redundant or useless to those of us who reside in the first world may not be redundant or useless to those who live elsewhere.
  • wmf 4y ago
    The real promise of blockchains is that they can provide a technological framework upon which to build new institutions that are alternatives to the types of institutions that are foundational to developed economies. There's no evidence that this is true. People have been saying this for years and there's nothing to show for it.
  • toomuchtodo 4y ago
    You cannot replace illegitimate or suboptimal institutions with systems of record or value storage and transfer they don’t have to respect or acknowledge, just as a court who cannot enforce their ruling has no authority. The systems are simply tools, it is the execution layer (ie government very broadly) that determines the outcome. If your property record is on a blockchain but those whose recognize such rights ignore it, it’s not a property record, for example. It’s an internet comment or public expression of opinion. Similarly, what makes your name typed on a Docusign a legally binding signature? Federal statute recognizing it as such.
• dilyevsky 4y ago
  I think the farmers use case can totally work as long as those land parcels are also on the blockchain.
  • tootie 4y ago
    That whole story sounds a bit apocryphal but even if it's true this is some sort of semi-literate culture. If they're making marks in mud, how are they supposed to encode geographic positions with enough accuracy and write them to a computer system of any kind. And then have everyone understand and agree to what it means. Why it would it be superior to taking a picture and posting it to Whatsapp or Facebook?
  • andreareina 4y ago
    The government would have to cede control of transfers, which good luck with that. If you require the government to sign the transaction you now effectively have a permissioned database which doesn't require a blockchain to implement.
  • stephen_g 4y ago
    Armed mobs probably don't care about the blockchain though. And shall I lose the ability to sell my land if I or somebody else loses a private key? Shall my land be taken from me if a criminal is able to hack a computer and transfer it to themselves?
    • dilyevsky 4y ago
      The worst part is cryptocow's milk tastes like shit
• smt88 4y ago
  I had a real experience that perfectly reflects the research presented here (safer ledgers useful, blockchains are not). I accidentally got wrapped up in a project to automate some HR functions, and the product manager demanded that it must be blockchain because blockchains are the future. It turns out that append-only databases are well-suited for HR records, and (especially when dealing with things like background checks, immigration papers, etc.) it doesn't hurt to have a history with cryptographically-verifiable date stamps. We used an existing database that did all of the above, told everyone it was blockchain, and released the product. That was a great strategy for a few years until everyone realized blockchain was a boondoggle, and now you never need to work with anyone who still believes in it. You can just understand their mention of blockchain to be a sign that you need to avoid doing business with them.
  • WrtCdEvrydy 4y ago
    Blockchains are great for one-thing... guarantee that data is being appended and never modified. When you want to display a record, you can aggregate the data historically and allow people to see changes and attribute them to users and time but you can always see what was originally added. However that's kinda risky for HR because anything committed to that DB will be there... forever!
    • andreareina 4y ago
      That's not the full story, certificate transparency logs (and many other applications) achieve that without using a blockchain.
      • yokem55 4y ago
        This is true as long as you trust the issuer of the transparency log to not go back and re-write the history of the log. That's a trust assumption that most folks are fine with, but it should be explicitly be understood to be there. A blockchain takes that trust assumption and spreads it out amongst the social consensus of the chain, so re-witing of history could only occur if there is a consensus to do so.
• imglorp 4y ago
  Tim didn't mention a contemporary sibling tech at AWS which should not be thrown out with the bathwater: private (centralized), immutable, signed ledgers. Their version is called QLDB and does have concrete applications where you need an provable audit trail of a stream of transactions with search and index on top. I was on a team at a fintech closely engaged with AWS to prototype a money movement system using that as a central ledger. There's an open source one with similar properties on GH somewhere, also. It's not sexy like blockchain so it seems marketing had to slip in some Quantum to bump the buzzword sex count. If financial industry regulators were serious about catching laundering or book cooking, they would demand this kind of tech as a foundation of compliance reporting.
  • mariusor 4y ago
    Do you have any other clues for finding that open source project? It sounds very interesting to me.
    • inkyoto 4y ago
      Hyperledger is one such project: https://www.hyperledger.org/ https://www.hyperledger.org/ (mostly the marketing fluff) and https://github.com/hyperledger/fabric https://github.com/hyperledger/fabric
    • imglorp 4y ago
      Here's one https://github.com/codenotary/immudb/ https://github.com/codenotary/immudb/
  • inkyoto 4y ago
    > […] compliance […]. This is the crux of the matter. In a prevailing number of cases, when people ask about a blockchain, they actually want a ledger database with the following properties: – an immutable, tamper proof, append-only transaction log; – cryptographically verifiable datasets; – certification and/or compliance validation by externally accredited auditing bodies for SOC, PCI-DSS, ISO, HIPPA etc. Use cases for ledger databases go beyond finance, and have been becoming a commonplace in health, education, supply change and inventory management, archive record management and similar. Anywhere, where compliance, strict record keeping and/or audit requirements are in place, the ledger databases provide the answer. AWS has QLDB, and Azure will soon have the Azure SQL Ledger Database (built on top of their SQL Server product). Fully fledged blockchains are not required in most cases.
• arduinomancer 4y ago
  For the older devs, has there been anything in the past like this? As in some new hyped tech that people kept trying to insert into their business?
  • muglug 4y ago
    NoSQL! Rep from <NoSQL company> comes along, shows a CTO some graphs about how well it performs vs <BoringButReliableSQL>. If developers are unlucky CTO mandates a migration to NoSQL.
  • vishnugupta 4y ago
    The last hype cycle, from about 10 years ago, I remember is that of BigData and associated technologies such as MapReduce, Hadoop, NoSQL DBs, data pipelines and so on. That lasted for about 4 years I guess? Then ML took over.
  • dilyevsky 4y ago
    * Certain aspects of social networks (I remember leadership at google being convinced everyone will do online stuff on social networks in around 2011) * To much smaller extent some core tech like NoSQL, SOA * More recently - AR/VR bubble
  • wmf 4y ago
    Speaking of Tim Bray, in the 1990s people kept using XML in places where it wasn't appropriate. There have been so many tech fads. Distributed objects (e.g. CORBA), mobile code, object databases, micropayments, push, WAP, and I want to give a special lifetime achievement award to VR which is now on its third hype wave.
  • hanniabu 4y ago
    serverless
  • MrMan 4y ago
    XML is the only one that was really as egregious, iirc.
• darawk 4y ago
  The utility of decentralized blockchains is that they facilitate permissionless financial innovation. Yes, that means "regulatory arbitrage". But not just circumventing the law, more importantly, circumventing the de facto law of corporate gatekeepers. A substantial amount of de facto financial regulation comes not from democratically elected governments, but from companies that gate-keep access to the databases where financial truth resides. A great example of this is Visa and Mastercard dropping PornHub as a client. But there are many others. Building software that interfaces with money is extremely difficult, what you can and cannot do is extremely limited, and you may only do so at the pleasure of the major financial institutions that sit between your code and the traditional financial system. Right now, if you want to write code that manipulate's someone's money, you have to ask the permission of both the owner of the funds, and several intermediaries along the way. What those intermediaries choose to allow you to do can be arbitrary, capricious, and certainly is not democratic. It is true that decentralized blockchains also facilitate the flouting of the law, and that can be good or bad, depending on your point of view. But fundamentally, having an open fabric for finance, in which anyone can build any kind of application they wish, seems like a pretty cool thing to me.
  • tootie 4y ago
    Pornhub was cut off for failing to police child pornography. Why would you want to participate in a financial system that was incapable of excluding evildoers?
    • vlovich123 4y ago
      Look, I dislike crypto as much as the next guy, but I must have missed the memo. Are evildoers not perfectly capable of participating in the current financial system? https://www.thelocal.ch/20150208/hsbc-swiss-bank-helped-terrorists-and-criminals/ https://www.thelocal.ch/20150208/hsbc-swiss-bank-helped-terr... https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/business/how-the--war-on-terror--exposed-compliance-gaps-in-swiss-companies/46915746 https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/business/how-the--war-on-terror... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/apr/03/us-bank-mexico-drug-gangs https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/apr/03/us-bank-mexico... Let’s also ignore all the shadiness that the Russian Oligarchs, oil shieks, Bibi, Berlosconi all seem to engage in and yet seemingly have no limit to the financial systems. The belief that our financial system excludes evildoers is a nice fantasy that I haven’t seen be rooted in reality.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• amluto 4y ago
  > But the Eth folk managed to get proof-of-stake to work at scale; good on ’em. That’s a bit charitable IMO. It works with at least two major caveats: 1. You can’t unstake staked ETH. (This seems to have all manner of strange effects.). Fixing this is apparently a big deal, and, if nothing else, could enable attacks in which one unstakes and then uses knowledge of old staked private keys to attack other parties. 2. It hasn’t actually been that long, and the major validators likely have a strong interest in making Ethereum work well. Just working at scale does not mean it’s secure at scale.
  • ricochet11 4y ago
    One little clarifier: You can unstake and stop running your validator, the exit-validator process already exists as it is necessary for slashing. What you cant do is withdraw exited ether until withdrawals are enabled.
  • wmf 4y ago
    You can’t unstake staked ETH. This is temporary and AFAIK all the other PoS systems allow unstaking. attacks in which one unstakes and then uses knowledge of old staked private keys to attack other parties. These "long-range attacks" are not real. They're impossible to pull off in reality.
  • timbray 4y ago
    Well, they did manage to cut their energy usage by like 100x. Gotta respect that. Not that I think Eth is currently used for anything but scams.
• hahnchen 4y ago
  Unrelated, but > Which was pretty nice, except for it was stinking hot that August and we were on multiple steamy subway trips every day; got back to our hotel rooms pretty well emptied out. Upper level amazon engineers can’t take ubers through new york?
  • nixgeek 4y ago
    In 2016? It was probably going to take 2-3x longer to Uber around Manhattan. Traffic sucks.
  • TheDong 4y ago
    Some people would rather ride a train or subway over an uber in principal, even if the cost is charged to their employer and no different to them personally. I'm not claiming with certainty that that is the case here, but I know it is for some people. Also, subways/trains are quicker for some routes, YMMV
• unboxingelf 4y ago
  _Well known tech guy thinks blockchain is dumb because he can’t see its value for a private company._ There’s nothing new here. No, a blockchain isn’t a good replacement for a traditional database. It’s a distributed append only database built on zero trust. It’s extremely inefficient. Very few problems require that solution, especially one where a single party would be running all the nodes.
  • aserafini 4y ago
    Indeed, I expect the ONLY application where this combination of requirements makes sense is.. a global currency.
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
  Proof-of-Waste :) Anyone got a good one for Proof-of-Stake.
  • hanniabu 4y ago
    If it's Ethereum's Proof of Stake then the word is perfection
  • rank0 4y ago
    Plutocracy
• subradios 4y ago
  Blockchains are an incredible technology. It is obvious that their first attempted uses are contractual and monetary, because blockchain guarantees can make things better fastest in those arenas. The unfortunate part is it doesn't seem like anyone has really figured out the how yet. I am reminded of the Web, Amazon was the first company to really "get" e-commerce and made all the money - there will likely be a similar story with blockchains 10 years from now.
  • Nursie 4y ago
    We're already 14 years in. Where is the evidence it can make anything better? Why hasn't the amazon thing happened in the last ten years of blockchain?
    • everfree 4y ago
      To be fair, Amazon didn't hit their stride as a retailer until the 2000s, roughly 20 years after the internet's "big bang" date. And while we're 14 years into distributed ledger technology, we're only 7 years into turing-complete distributed ledger technology, which I would argue is the actual innovation.
      • kkielhofner 4y ago
        I don't understand setting the internet "big bang" date somewhere in the 80s. The big bang was the web which was at least 1990-1993 (CERN says 1993). In 1990-1993 and beyond for the next few years a tiny portion of US households even had a computer that was capable (modem, etc) of getting on the internet/web. Arguably until AOL it was also extremely expensive. When I got on the internet it was with an inflation adjusted $5000 computer, per minute long distance toll charges, and paying an ISP (also by the minute). For the entirety of the existence of blockchain we've had ubiquitous broadband, social media, smartphones with always available data, etc. The conditions for the first 14 years of the web were vastly different and disadvantaged compared to the last 14 years in which blockchain has had plenty of time, audience, etc for widespread adoption and yet it still hasn't happened.
• vl 4y ago
  Everyone uses Git by day and then moans how blockchain in not useful by night. Specific technologies have specific applications. Blockchains in general - immutable history. Crypto blockchains - consensus in untrusted environment. Just use given technology for what it’s designed for, and stop being full of yourself.
  • simonw 4y ago
    We understand the difference between a proof-of-work/stake/waste blockchain and a merkel tree. Do you?
  • Nursie 4y ago
    If we're including git in 'blockchain' now then that changes the nature of the discussion. But we both know that systems like git are not what's being talked about here. > Just use given technology for what it’s designed for, and stop being full of yourself. The point is that there has been hype after hype after hype about "blockchain" revolutionising damn near everything for years and so far it has failed to deliver on this. It's not wrong to call the phenomenon out for what it is.
  • arnoooooo 4y ago
    The double standard you mention is actually created by the Blockchain advocates. Git does not include a distributed consensus algorithm. So it's a chain of blocks, but not a "Blockchain". Blockchain advocates will gladly tell you so when they want to sell you on how revolutionary Blockchain tech is. But once you ask for actually useful use cases, all they can point to is things that are trivially done with Git and its predecessors, in the sense that they don't require distributed consensus…
• marcell 4y ago
  Blockchain skeptics are all defending the tech of the current financial system, and implicitly arguing it can’t be improved. They are wrong. The tech underlying the current system is really bad. For example: (1) How can I perform an atomic transaction across two stock exchanges? (2) How can I take stock held on one exchange, and use it as collateral on an unaffiliated lending platform? (3) How can I launch a new financial app, as a small startup, and open it to assets held on ETrade. All of these are impossible in the current system. In contrast they are all trivial using Ethereum’s blockchain. https://ortutay.substack.com/p/the-computer-science-case-for-web3 https://ortutay.substack.com/p/the-computer-science-case-for...
  • philliphaydon 4y ago
    I opened the site thinking it would be serious but got a popup for web3. So I closed it.
  • autotune 4y ago
    The underlying system is mostly written in COBOL and desperately needs a replacement before all the COBOL engineers die out with many large bags of money going to their descendants. Blockchain, no matter how good it might be or might have been, is clearly not that system due to its now tarnished reputation at this point in time.
    • everfree 4y ago
      > Blockchain, no matter how good it might be or might have been, is clearly not that system due to its now tarnished reputation at this point in time. I never understand how people can consider the reputation of glorified timestamped linked lists to be "tarnished". This isn't a company or even a particular piece of software, it's a class of data structures. You're trying to tell me that a particular way of structuring data has a reputation that can be tarnished?
      • autotune 4y ago
        Someone comes out with a new database called "BigBucksDB" that uses a previously unknown technology called "blockchain." Suddenly every scammer and grifter decides to pump up this new "BigBucksDB" and emphasizes how safe and secure it is, thanks to blockchain, because all transactions are public and the ledger or whatever can't be modified in any way except to append new data. Then the companies using "BigBucksDB" decide to transfer all of their customers funds into their own accounts at a real bank and declare bankruptcy. What was the point of implementing "blockchain" in the first place? What use case can it possibly have for future services that would be worth taking a risk on it to implement when its primary use case for crypto transactions just fell apart? I know practically nothing about blockchain except how it was touted in the media as something that was supposed to make it difficult to modify crypto transactions and commit fraud. That fraud has still managed to be committed. What was even the point?
• fareesh 4y ago
  From an Indian pov my take is the boundary markers use-case sounds pretty good. I don't expect an American flying around from EWR to Seattle to ever understand this intuitively without being exposed to the realities in this part of the world, but having thought about it for all of 20 seconds it sounds like a very good idea. Yes - it is a solution to the problem of power and corruption. In India there is corruption at all levels of government. The wealthy and powerful could absolutely influence some levels and steal land. Even petty regional criminals are able to do it. It has happened to my own family - imagine the odds. 1 billion people here, and I read this article and even I can personally relate to the issue of stolen land. A blockchain that stored GPS coordinates and could realistically withstand a 51% attack, would solve the problem in my view. Are there other architectures that can also solve this problem? No doubt. Is the blockchain solution perfect? No it isn't.
  • deanCommie 4y ago
    As we've learned from the "They've stolen my apes" scenarios, the very nature of blockchain as the central authority of trust means that there is no such thing as theft on the blockchain. Today, corrupt powerful people use violence and intimidation to go move physical markers to change landownership. If land ownership was on the blockchain, the same corrupt powerful people will use violence and intimidation to force digital transfer of ownership. The same threats to the safety and wellbeing of family members works equally well to induce the desired actions in the physical word or the digital one. This is why Tim wrote to be wary of technical solutions for political problems.
    • EFreethought 4y ago
      Also: Couldn't the wealthy and the powerful influence the creation of the blockchain and the first data set put on the blockchain as well?
    • brabel 4y ago
      I imagine the rich, corrupt land lords in India would be able to steal your land even easier on the blokchain by sending a gang of armed bandits to your farm, torture you until you transfer everything to their wallet... and when you go to the police to denounce the harassment, you get arrested because the police is on the land lord's pocket. The blockchain cannot and will not stop violence in the real world from working around all the cryptography in the world, and it's shocking to me that anyone actually believes that to be somehow the case.
• autotune 4y ago
  >A huge, almost incomprehensible, volume of venture capital was flowing into the sector, and that money was localized in the Finance sector, specifically in Manhattan. I think the worst part about this whole thing is there are still millions if not billions of dollars being pumped into it. I literally just got a job interview request for a crypto exchange with hundreds of millions supposedly in the bank. It's absurd.
• csomar 4y ago
  It is a shame that we are ending up here with "Blockchain technology". Beyond the financial aspect (Bitcoin/Stablecoins), here are a few use cases where a Blockchain will shine: - Tracking shipments across countries. This is an append-only operation, across multiple jurisdictions/languages/infrastructures. A blockchain ledger can play the role of standardizing operations for the tracking of shipments. - Healthcare records. - Company registry records. Once submitted, they are publicly available and immutable. - Title deeds. You wouldn't own the NFT yourself. The government could assign it to you and be the only one able to transfer it across its "subjects". - Stocks/Assets. For this one I'll blame ASE for failing to deliver. They have picked the wrong company to build such a thing while spending a gigantic sum of money in the process. - Digital Identities. There was never enough investment in this area, especially for key retrieval in the case of loss. - Decentralized DNS. The tech is there (Namecoin) and roughly functional. There was never any investment in this comparing to the billions thrown in NFTs and other crap projects. Instead of addressing any of the above points, Blockchain and Crypto degenerated into fancy websites and gifs aimed to drill money from everyone who can be influenced. We are here 5-6 years later after the Defi/Smart Contracts fever and all we have to show for it is some apes NFT. This could have been done a lot earlier with Namecoin which has a much more native support of NFT. But Namecoin never took off because the founders were never interested to make money out of this. It does seem that governments might be more fundamental than we thought. They might be protecting us more from ourselves than we see them as an imposition on our freedom. Here we have a worldwide experiment of a government-less operation at wild.
  • throw827474737 4y ago
    Total disagree and not sure why you believe why any of those woukd have value added if on blockchain. Especially, health care records, wtf??
    • csomar 4y ago
      Standardized and encrypted healthcare records. It means wherever you travel you can: 1. Access your health records at your discretion; and 2. Make sure these records are never lost and 3. These records are immutable. Encrypted records can be easily added by any doctor/clinic as your public key is publicly available.
• jacknews 4y ago
  I think the cost of trust is underestimated. All those shiny skyscrapers that the banks build? It's for trust, along with a good deal of banking licensing requirements and regulation. The example with the farmers' fields is quite valid. We forget in our relatively well-governed western nations that some governments really can't be trusted to simply keep records straight and not 'lose' vital documents, in cases where bribes abound. Another example is foreign exchange trading settlements; I can't trust that if I send you $500mn in swiss francs, you'll actually send me the equivalent settlement in USD. You might go bankrupt half way through the transaction. And so there exists an expensive jointly owned escrow bank for exactly this purpose, CLS bank. I'm sure there are many other examples, but the point is, trust is actually quite expensive.
  • asah 4y ago
    Yes, and #include cost of military, courts and police ("guys with guns")
  • dale_glass 4y ago
    Trust is expensive, lack of trust is even more so. Say, how would you build a skyscraper without trust? Are you going to set up an on-premises laboratory to test the quality of the concrete and steel? Are you going to personally verify the entire building's plans? Check whether the geological study was accurate? Follow every worker around to make sure they don't cut corners anywhere? The less you can trust that the many people involved did their job, the harder and more expensive it gets to actually get the work done, until it turns out it just can't be practically done. A lack of trust gets you a place like Afghanistan -- where the moment you stop looking stuff starts disappearing.
    • mike_hearn 4y ago
      "you going to set up an on-premises laboratory to test the quality of the concrete and steel?" This isn't a good example because there are whole infrastructures to verify that buildings are being made "to code" and quality of materials is a part of that. E.g. this lab that tests steel: https://www.leica-microsystems.com/science-lab/steel-the-all-rounder-that-has-to-pass-many-tests/ https://www.leica-microsystems.com/science-lab/steel-the-all... Now what you're getting at is, OK, now you have to trust the lab. But that's OK because the incentives are better aligned. Trust is a thing with complex shapes. Maybe you develop trust in a single lab because being trusted is their whole business, and now you can easily switch between steel suppliers depending on who can sell the cheapest with peace of mind, so you've moved the trust problem around and reshaped it. A lot of trust problems in the business world are like this. You can't eliminate it entirely everywhere, but reducing the amount you need and reshaping it/moving it around is still useful.
• pabe 4y ago
  People saying a database is as good as a blockchain are taking a look from the wrong perspective. Blockchains are more like always available, immutable logs for interfacing parties that don't trust each other or an intermediary. Blockchains are more like an API than a database.
  • j0hnM1st 4y ago
    Blockchains normally has a database and then an API. Many of the newer chains uses Rocksdb.
• runeks 4y ago
  Blockchain was invented to solve one particular problem: distributed consensus on a sequence of transactions, where the choice of which transaction to include from a set of conflicting transactions is irrelevant. The latter property here is key to understanding where blockchain is useful. It was created to solve the "double spend problem", ie. two transitions that spend the same coin but send it to different recipients (and so they conflict and cannot both be included in the canonical list of transactions). A double spend is the result of the sender either (a) making a mistake, or (b) attempting fraud. In both cases the important property is that as long as only a single of these conflicting transactions is included, the systems works. Only if your problem exhibits the above property (and it's a distributed system) does using a blockchain make sense.
  • nathias 4y ago
    the original purpose of an invention does not limit the scope of its application
    • paulgb 4y ago
      No, but ignoring the design criteria that an invention solves for is a recipe for using the wrong tool for the job.
      • nathias 4y ago
        'right tools for the right job' seems like just re-stating the original point in different terms, how right a tool is depends on the actual context a big part of that context is culture, preferences, politics etc. not just engineering concerns
        • paulgb 4y ago
          If “right tool for the job” is too hand-wavey, maybe “optimal tool given the problem constraints” is a better phrase. E.g. I’ve seen proposals for “credentials on the blockchain”, but if you assume that a credential issuer has a known public key (as these proposals do), the issuer can just sign a credential, no public ledger is needed. The complexity of using a blockchain for this is just waste.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• BenoitP 4y ago
  In case anyone needs a thorough source to explain why you don't need a Blockchain, I found the NIST paper (esp the flowchart on page 42) quite helpful: https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/ir/2018/nist.ir.8202.pdf https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/ir/2018/nist.ir.8202.pdf It worked wonderfully to cut the BS coming from a greedy manager, in a non confrontational way ("so, what do you actually need?" , "you say 'security', but which aspect do you need? immutability ? non-repudiability? confidentiality??"). I think NIST's clout helped, along that they'd have to fully understand a 65 page report. I'm sure the content of the report would have been quite eye-opening, but that wasn't needed. Greed is a feeling, not a rational process.
  • dandanua 4y ago
    That's an excellent flowchart. BTW, there is a real example of meaningful blockchain use for auditing single source data (the "caveat" in the flowchart). It's the hypercore protocol https://hypercore-protocol.org/ https://hypercore-protocol.org/
    • BenoitP 4y ago
      That's very interesting. Would you mind coming up with a concrete and detailed business case? In this example you will provide, who are the entities with write access? How do they have a hard time deciding who should be control of the data store?
      • dandanua 4y ago
        In the hypercore protocol participants control only their own data. So, no write conflicts. But they need to verify parts of data of other participants. The blockchain (specifically, the Merkle tree) helps with that. An alternative solution would be to just sign the pairs `(recordCounter, recordData)` instead of putting records in a tree and signing the root node. But the hash tree also helps to verify integrity, in addition to authenticity.
        • BenoitP 4y ago
• wodenokoto 4y ago
  With regards to the land markers. You could have a database at the government land authority. If markers in the field don't match up with records, the land authority will ask police to correct the issue. If neither police nor land authority can be trusted to keep records and uphold the law, who is going to help you when a marker in the field doesn't match up to some distributed database? Big land owner will say "I don't know anything about that record in the sky. But look at this land marker on the ground. That's reality!" and with no police, who is going to help you?
  • aaron695 4y ago
  • jeremyjh 4y ago
    Well suppose you nominally have the support of local government and police, but in practice they can bought cheaply, and suddenly the records match what the large landholder says instead of the markers you used to have. An immutable record would help solve this, but the point stands that it is not convincing that you need a blockchain or that it would solve the problem. How would you get local government to buy into it in the first place? If the national government is willing to force them, they could just manage a database with immutable records.
    • ceejayoz 4y ago
      An immutable record adds problems. What do you do when a river moves? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croatia%E2%80%93Serbia_border_dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croatia%E2%80%93Serbia_border_... Who owns new land in Hawaii when the volcano meets the sea? https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/who-owns-the-land-created-by-the-kilauea-eruption/ https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/who-owns-the-land-created-... What happens when someone makes a surveying mistake and enters that permanently into the blockchain?
      • jeremyjh 4y ago
        Sorry, by immutable records I do not mean that data is never changed, only that the records of such changes are immutable. The current state can always be computed by applying a log of changes, and when you make a change you'd be recording who made the change and why. Invalid changes could still be made, but you'd have a record to expedite appeal processes or litigation. This is why I don't think blockchain helps, because government authorities still have to be trusted to do their job when the facts are clear. So any kind of centralized cryptographic ledger (such as AWS QLDB) would work.
• ex3ndr 4y ago
  Very big article that basically buried the core difference: zero trust or some "trusted transaction manager". Moving from the second to the first is very trivial - just make it based on distributed consensus of nodes that are run by separate entities, may be even several different cloud vendors. AWS also doesn't have some interesting things from crypto-world - smart contracts, that are just like lambda functions that couldn't be altered in any way and could be trusted by third-party. They have Nitro Enclaves, this is close, but quite hard to use.
• abiro 4y ago
  The new thing with blockchain tech is that we can now enforce invariants on state transitions in a decentralized manner. Paired with non-interactive zero-knowledge cryptography, we can also enforce those invariants while keeping the confidentiality of transactions. The tech is rapidly improving and it’s pretty easy to see where things are going from here: soon we’ll have general purpose decentralized databases where data is open as open source code is open. In fact, state-of-the-art smart chains can be viewed as special (financial) purpose decentralized databases. As to why decentralized databases are desirable: imagine if you could fork databases like you can fork code in a completely permission-less manner. This is how web development would look like: You, the programmer, take a look at a public data schema (eg. a smart contract that implements the ERC-721 interface) and decide to build on top of it. Then, a user, who has already interacted with what you built on, decides that they like what you built and lets your app use their data. You, the programmer, can be sure that the data you built on remains available, and the user can be sure that they'll be able to port the data produced by your app into new apps.
  • quickthrower2 4y ago
    This somewhat assumes blockchain can also deliver on privacy. Perhaps full encryption of the data is enough. But who is paying for all the nodes? Another way to do this without the blockchain is open standards (think… HTML for example!) and software that lets you export. Where possible run this software open source on the desktop or as an open source web app. Think Photopea as the pinnacle here. The blockchain or no blockchain approachable both suffer when you have a data format per app locking you into that app anyway.
    • abiro 4y ago
      Re costs: it’s decreasing rapidly. Solana is within 100x of DynamoDB prices so costs are soon becoming negligible. At that point costs can be taken over by the app developer or paid by users on a subscription basis. There are also decentralized consensus mechanisms that don’t rely on paying fees (FBA, delay functions). Idk which will succeed. Re open standards and “software that lets you export”: we’ve had this for the past 30 years and see how it turned out. Re lock in: no, in a decentralized database, the data schema is public which means it’s trivial to write an app that works with another app’s data.
• seu 4y ago
  > Dear Reader: I think that at some point, in a civilization, there has to be trust. I think that’s maybe the main reason we have civilizations. Call me crazy. Dead on
  • andirk 4y ago
    Pure freedom is what we came from and what we don't want to go back to.
  • jcbrand 4y ago
    Disclaimer: speaking only of Bitcoin, the utility of the larger crypto space is somewhat questionable. Yes, there will always be a need for trust, and Bitcoin doesn't change that. What it does is actually facilitate more, rather than less, trust. By having a rock-solid form of money with a well-known, immutable monetary policy and issuance rate, that doesn't rely on any single entity and is very difficult to corrupt, all kinds of trust-related issues (moral hazard, Cantillon effect, theft of purchasing power) are resolved. In addition, commerce and exchange between strangers can more easily be facilitated based on such a system rather than one that relies on multiple intermediaries. If I can have cryptographic proof of escrow in a multi-sig wallet (2 of 3, where there is a trusted (!) 3rd party), I might be willing to do a transaction with someone I might otherwise not (e.g. due to a lack of trust that they have the funds available).
    • _9omd 4y ago
      Spot on. I think part of the problem is in the common framing of cryptocurrencies as trustless. At the end of the day there is trust in every human made system, blockchain or not. With Bitcoin, you're still trusting that all of the developers, miners, and users won't decided to increase the block reward at any point in the future. So what's the point of Bitcoin (and other cryptos) from a risk management perspective if it's not actually trustless. It gives you exposure to a significantly different risk profile, and one that can be better reasoned about. You're no longer at the whim of governments and corporations, but instead a loosely "organized" set of developers, miners, and users. And we can reason about what those actors will do, based on human psychology and the fact that people tend to act in their financial best interest. And Bitcoin is setup in such a way that the system operates correctly when the participants behave this way.
• roenxi 4y ago
  This situation could be contrasted with the other (successful) distributed consensus policy - democratic governance. - No applications in commercial environments. - I've seen 10-20 people in my life who can explain the details of why Democracy is a good choice. Most people, for example, fail to identify that the typical democracy is much better at fighting then winning wars than any alternative. Blockchains could turn out to be similar technology. It is still too early to write them off. There just needs to be one big application, and it'll be something simple but also something that hasn't been done before because it was impossible to organise.
• xiphias2 4y ago
  Blockchain in itself is nothing else, just a chain of blocks (linked list of bunch of data with cryptographic hash of the previous block stored in the blocks). It's an amazing data structure, but putting money in it is no different than putting money into hash maps (which is another great data structure): it doesn't make sense in itself. What some companies and VCs really want to do (and are doing) is reputation laundering: invest a bit of money in some crypto tokens, and sell them to retail investors for much higher price. Of course after FTX collapsed they have to wait a few years to do it again.
• dynjo 4y ago
  I've lost count of how many product owners have interchanged the word Database with Blockchain to try and score some PR points with their customers/bosses.
• davide_v 4y ago
  In Italy a famous news website is using blockchain since 2020 to, I quote literally: "help readers check source of news", "strengthen bonds of trust between its organization and its readers and customers", "trace the history and source of each news item." News (EN): https://www.ansa.it/english/news/science_tecnology/2020/04/06/ansa-using-blockchain-to-help-readers_af820b4f-0947-439b-843e-52e114f53318.html https://www.ansa.it/english/news/science_tecnology/2020/04/0... Example of news in the blockchain: https://blockchain.check.ansa.it/landing/b150aff9f028f7339f0c5649935e8d90/XCW7SUR847X047N https://blockchain.check.ansa.it/landing/b150aff9f028f7339f0... The first time I saw it I was quite surprised. I'd like to hear opinions about it here. Eg: it's blockchain stricly necessary here?
  • Arkhaine_kupo 4y ago
    If they add every revision on it, it could be interesting, but i doubt they do that. One interesting thing I have been seeing recently is newspapers quickly changing news a few hours after they posted it, in reaction to public opinion of said news (or maybe some editorial "request"). In th BBC its quite egregious, they have been posting some news, and a few hours later changing the headline and the photo, to either something meaner and an uglier photo of the same person, or the opposite, a much more neutral/flaterring headline and a PR photo of the person. If those changes were on the blockchain, UK citizens could demand their money back for what they pay for the BBC as it is a ridiculous practice that should not be paid by taxes. But again, I doubt the Italian newspapers saves their own slanted coverage for their own users to see.
    • anon400232 4y ago
      Share a link demonstrating the BBC's egregiousness please.
      • Arkhaine_kupo 4y ago
        I can't because stealth edits are not meant to be caught. I tried finding some on archive.org but their scrapping isnt usually fast enough. I think some of the most noticeable ones tend to be on big political news. It happened fairly quickly with Truss. All "happy" headlines and smiling photos, to ugly photos and total lack of positive adjectives as the news of her departure became more obvious. Sometimes they have done it on the same piece of content, a few hours apart as the narrative changed. The content of the piece was untouched but the photo and headline on the front page tell the opposite story all of a sudden.
• sebo2000 4y ago
  You guys have issues with elections and vote couting. I think Blockchain would solve this problem once and for all, but I'm afraid it is not a problem anyone wants to solve...
  • pjkundert 4y ago
    Just like CBDCs. The only problem they are designed to "solve" is the problem of you having liberty. But that's a PR disaster, so the authorities proposing these things have to convince you that they're solving some more important problem -- like "all the baaad people" using money. Hopefully, you'll soon forget you used to have that liberty.
  • PeterisP 4y ago
    Specifically for election security, the key problem that's not easy to solve via blockchain is ensuring a hidden ballot - namely, that after voting there must be no way for you to verify how your specific vote was counted to someone who might be coercing or bribing you, but you still want to verify that the votes were counted properly. A physical ballot box mixing up envelopes under supervision of representatives of all the parties trivially solves that, a block chain does not. You also need a mechanism for preventing (or invalidating afterwards) votes made remotely under coercion/bribery - current mechanisms for handling mail-in votes implement mitigations for that, but a fully digital remote voting makes it tricky. Also, one of the major discussion points regarding USA voting is the eligibility of voters, ensuring that certain people are prevented from voting, but that eligible people can vote without requiring a centralized ID. Again, blockchain only makes this problem more difficult. And finally, by far the most important factor of vote counting is having the losing voters trust that the votes were counted fairly - and a formal mathematical proof is bad at that (for the majority of voters) compared to a relatively simpler, clearer physical system.
• ak_111 4y ago
  reminds me of my post where i tried to understand blockchain in good faith: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31132610 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31132610
• underdeserver 4y ago
  > [Andy Jassey] said something like this: “All these leaders [CIOs and CTOs of huge enterprises] are asking me what our blockchain strategy is. They tell me that everyone’s saying it’s the future, the platform that’s going to obsolete everything else. I need to have a good answer for them. I’ll be honest, when they explain why it’s wonderful I just don’t get it. You guys got to go figure it out for us.” To me the tell is not just that Andy didn't understand. It's that all of these leaders said "everyone says it's the future", but not one of them said "I have this problem and here's how blockchain solves it for me."
  • TrackerFF 4y ago
    I recently attended a trade show, which mostly revolved around emerging ML/AI and other "hot" tech products in the market. So it actually seems that in the logistics line of things like manufacturing / production / etc. there is a place for blockchain, mainly due to the immutability and decentralized distribution properties. What could take a whole week to track down using older methods, takes seconds if all the data is recorded on the blockchain...for example, food production. You want to find out exactly which animal your food comes from, and all the things involved (use of antibiotics? which factory? how did the product travel before ending up at your grocery store? etc.). Some researchers working on these products repeated that they often get approached by directors and CxO level people regarding this - wondering if blockchain can "solve problems". And every time, they have to reply: Using the blockchain can solve some specialized problems, but there's no magic fairy dust involved, and it's not some general structure which will solve all their problems. Unfortunately, it's kind of like AI. High-level directors dream of General AI, but you need to explain to them that it's all ML models which aid (replace if you're lucky) workers, and automate some tasks. I think any CTO worth their salt should know these things, and manage the expectations of the other C-suite executives.
    • masklinn 4y ago
      > So it actually seems that in the logistics line of things like manufacturing / production / etc. there is a place for blockchain, mainly due to the immutability and decentralized distribution properties. What could take a whole week to track down using older methods, takes seconds if all the data is recorded on the blockchain...for example, food production. You want to find out exactly which animal your food comes from, and all the things involved (use of antibiotics? which factory? how did the product travel before ending up at your grocery store? etc.). Literally none of that should involve (let alone requires) a blockchain.
• pavlov 4y ago
  The events described here took place in 2016, over six years ago. That's a long time in technology! Since then additional billions of investment dollars have flowed into the space (a "VC crypto spasm" as the author calls it). Yet zero meaningful products have emerged. But we've witnessed many giant scams and endless crypto startups that happily spun their wheels producing nothing, just minting tokens so that insiders and investors can dump them onto retail investors. How long will this have to go on? There are real things to build in software. This nonsense is both an embarrassment to the profession as well as a giant distraction. Time spent thinking about cryptocurrency mindgames is time you'll never get back to use on something productive.
  • arcturus17 4y ago
    Any moment now… I think in any other space, if you had millions of people (some of them wicked smart) m looking for applications of a technology without results, you’d see the space dwindle into irrelevance quickly… Crypto is very special in this sense. Despite massive failures and frauds at scale, people keep flocking to it. Is it the promise of unlimited riches, the romantic aspects of it (“decentralization”, etc.), something else altogether? I don’t know, but to answer your question: I get the feeling that despite the FTX case crypto still has many years ahead of it, regardless of whether it ever produces positive outcomes.
    • markdestouches 4y ago
      > Crypto is very special in this sense. I noticed crypto's quality of being special is in reverse proportion to the Fed's interest rates. Just an observation. In all seriousness, the are two real drivers here: 1) speculation 2) money laundering and avoiding regulation in general. These are the things that keep crypto afloat and cryptomaniacs repeating promises of the next big thing that's gonna change everything tomorrow. The real question is what's gonna happen sooner, Tesla's fool self-driving to Mars or blockchains taking over the world.
      • ahstilde 4y ago
        A pretty direct correlation for your observation: https://twitter.com/aakashdotio/status/1593347543739441153?cxt=HHwWgoClxcXJ2pwsAAAA https://twitter.com/aakashdotio/status/1593347543739441153?c...
• tiffanyh 4y ago
  Off topic: isn’t Amazon know for forcing people to be better writers due to how they conduct meetings with written memos. I bring this up because that post could have been 1/2 the length, if not shorter, without losing any content or messaging.
  • acdha 4y ago
    Different styles for different audiences. Busy executives want concise pitches because they receive a ton of them, people reading a long-running blog are looking more for the color and background of a personal blog.
• aniijbod 4y ago
  Ironic that CBDC systems are being built on a technology exclusively aimed at eliminating the C in that acronym.
  • pjkundert 4y ago
    How so? Central Bank Digital Currencies are being implemented exclusively on systems that allow the "Central" authority to absolutely ensure that nobody except that central authority can control every transaction in those ledgers. And I don't think you meant the "C" in "Currency".
    • aniijbod 4y ago
      > Ironic that CBDC systems are being built on a technology exclusively aimed at eliminating the C in that acronym. Thanks Pjkundert, you're correct I should have said 'first C". What I meant was that it was ironic that CBDCs are being constructed using systems that use blockchain, i.e., centralised systems, designed to deliver centralised currencies, based upon technology exclusively designed to deliver decentralised currencies.
• alex440440 4y ago
  TL;DR anyone? I couldn't care less about communication skills of Andy and whether some meeting was in person, before even getting a hint of what is the point of that post.
• drdrek 4y ago
  Only thing annoying the the flood of negative articles only pop up after a crash. All that VC money made a lot of people afraid to look like fools by speaking up against the tech. Where was he (not personally, as a symbol of tech bloggers) at the height of the bubble?
  • acdha 4y ago
    Speaking up? https://mobile.twitter.com/timbray/status/963115533825527808 https://mobile.twitter.com/timbray/status/963115533825527808 https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2021/06/26/Shorting-Bitcoin https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2021/06/26/Shorting-...
• culi 4y ago
  Blockchain needs a good "winter" imo. Stuff like hashgraph and some other non-proof of work protocols have a lot of potential but there's way too much hype in the industry and way too much investment ensuring BTC's dominance for them to ever really emerge
  • gilbetron 4y ago
    Bundle up because winter seems to be here ;)
• jgreen10 4y ago
  When I was in university around 15 years ago, the idea of peer-to-peer currency was floating around as an evolution of the tit-for-tat idea in BitTorrent, which was still popular at the time. The expectation back then was that peer-to-peer would continue to evolve, especially in the area of distributed computing. Clouds did not exist yet, but projects like SETI@Home were having some success in terms of sharing compute resources. A peer-to-peer network could meter you for your consumption of compute resources through a lot of microtransactions in a virtual currency that avoided traditional banks or credit card providers. Then came the first and least efficient implementation of peer-to-peer currency: Bitcoin, which did not sell the distributed computing capacity, but used it to do meaningless computations. It was clever, since up until that point the problem of zero-cost identity had been unaddressed, but appears to have few practical applications. It is surprising to me that people view it as some kind of alternative currency or store of value and send real currency to "trusted" exchanges. You deposit money just for the pleasure of doing a transaction? Yeh, sure, you don't need to agree on a global, trusted intermediary, but you still need to trust your exchange not to screw you over. Ethereum is closer to the original ideas behind distributed computing and peer-to-peer currency, but the Internet has largely moved on from peer-to-peer networks. Today I can instantly get all the compute resources I need in a trustworthy, secure environment, and only pay for what I use. BitTorrent has also lost a lot much of its relevance with streaming services providing a greater level of convenience.
• starkd 4y ago
  Amid all this sudden blockchain skepticism, one question remains prominent in my mind: where were all these skeptics when blockchain enthusiasm was on the rise? Sure, hindsight is 20/20, but you have to wonder if this chorus of I-toldya-so's were genuinely right, or if they are merely rewriting history to boost their own credibility. Blockchain was always experimental. The chance of success on any given project was always slim, but the potential payoff huge. So, putting anything more than what you are willing to lose is reckless.
  • codexon 4y ago
    I've been here all the time, but it is hard to keep talking when you are shouted down by all the people who bought into crypto late and are trying to pump it higher. The last few comments I made on it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29830090 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29830090 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21541591 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21541591 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21542591 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21542591
  • thinkharderdev 4y ago
    I don't know if I accept the premise. I've been hearing that "blockchain is a solution in search of a problem" critique as long as I've heard about blockchains. I think that during a hype cycle, the hype is what gets signal boosted so you see a lot more "here's how blockchains are going to solve X" content than you do content repeating for the millionth time that the blockchain doesn't actually solve the problem any better than a database would.
  • atwebb 4y ago
    >where were all these skeptics when blockchain enthusiasm was on the rise? Everywhere? I can't think of a single (or at least memorable) time I've heard blockchain and there wasn't at least someone who was skeptical.
  • Barrin92 4y ago
    > where were all these skeptics when blockchain enthusiasm was on the rise? Literally here, in every single thread to the chagrin of the enthusiasts whose defining identity became "you just don't get it, man". Blockchain stuff, by anyone who didn't have a vested financial interest in it has always been called out for what it is. Now when the AI hype eventually dies down then you'll have a point.
• yieldcrv 4y ago
  from a developer perspective, “smart contract” platforms are very unique and cheap pay to write once and never pay again at any level of traffic, customers pay. no SaaS service offers this developers bring their whole communities to that platform and this keeps happening you know whats most important? I don’t care what the underlying consensus model or blockchain is, or whether there is one at all, but there is no [meaningful] smart contract platform operating any other way, and I don’t care about that being the case either. but the equilibrium in consensus mechanisms are why it is this way. its cheaper for developers and as far as customer acquisition and convincing a customer to pay, it is a highly optimized version of the web 2.0 funnel, as every call-to-action is a payment the development stack is dead simple - frontend website with a single call-to-action (possible even a static site), and a few variables stored in a smart contract - and the customers already want to pay
• bo1024 4y ago
  Very nice article. As others have alluded to, I think Tim does miss an important point about trust. He writes: > we just couldn’t convince ourselves that the real world wanted zero-trust; so there was a transaction manager you had to trust. And then later: > It seems a good idea to have a land-registry database but, blockchain or no, I wonder if the large landowners might be able to find another way to fiddle the records and still steal the land? Perhaps this is more about power than boundary markers? Yes. Blockchain is about decentralization of power. It's exactly the most interesting in situations with no trusted third party (i.e. weak rule of law) and an imbalance of power. I think Tim missed that aspect of this discussion (which is no knock on him in 2016, but should be reevaluated now). The rest I found insightful and very interesting.
  • vault_ 4y ago
    How does being able to point at a database prevent land being stolen in the absence of a trusted third party? It's not like the land itself can authenticate the farmer. For the database to have any weight, there'd need to be an authority that can enforce what it says (and won't take bribes to ignore it, or collude in extorting "voluntary" transfers). If you do have such an agency, well, there's your trusted third party.
  • thwayunion 4y ago
    No. Tim did not miss an important point about trust. You missed an important point about power. Those large land owners do not give a fuck about your blockchain. They'll take the land and farm it anyways. You can "own" the virtual stake; they're happy to cede you cyber nonsense as long as they get to control who touches the actual grass. The large land owners, who have local authorities in their pocket, would simply quote President Andrew Jackson's apocryphal opinion on blockchain: "The blockchain has made its decision; now let the blockchain's army and police enforce it!" [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worcester_v._Georgia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worcester_v._Georgia
    • bo1024 4y ago
      A central part of the quote I was responding to is "fiddle the records". I agree with what you said otherwise.
• matai_kolila 4y ago
  So is the fundamental problem with blockchain, as described here anyway, that you can basically do all of the cool parts of blockchain that people get excited about, but using a central service instead? I feel like I don't really understand that, because wouldn't that mean you'd have to re-solve a lot of problems on your own, with your own team? Wouldn't it be easier to figure out how to plug blockchain into this central service instead?
• harryf 4y ago
  The notion of smart contracts might have a perfect use-case when it comes to setting up and maintaining infrastructure on AWS. E.g. something like "I want an Amazon RDS PostgreSQL instance with such and such specs. full daily backups and 99.999% uptime and I'm will to pay $xxxx for it". From there solution providers "bid" on the contract and are paid automatically on the basis of meeting the requirements of the contract, the determination of whether requirements were met also being automated. The idea is something that grew out of blockchain platforms - Decentralized autonomous organizations - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_autonomous_organization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_autonomous_organ... - this doesn't actually require a crypto currency backing it but some kind of smart contract would be required.
  • jasonhansel 4y ago
    > the determination of whether requirements were met also being automated. That seems like the sticking point. Most likely, someone "fulfilling" the contract would try to fool the (publicly available) verification code, rather than actually providing a PostgreSQL instance. It would be hard to create a bulletproof, automated way of verifying that something is a fully functioning PostgreSQL instance with working backups. If verification code was shared across many contracts, any bug discovered in that code could allow someone to wipe out the entire market.
• sbochins 4y ago
  I used to follow the conventional wisdom (there won’t be wide base adoption of cryptocurrencies, but blockchain tech will be useful in a variety of other technologies). I never really looked to hard into blockchain or the work being done in the industry. But based on the various crypto firms collapsing and the fact that there is no place that is making any meaningful progress with blockchain at this point, I’m at the point where I’ll dismiss any crypto / blockchain project reflexively. Seems like it’s been a great way to get funding for those clued in and taking advantage of the hype.
• leifg 4y ago
  I always wonder with these things: what is the deadline after which you are allowed to say "There is no value". It has been almost 14 years since the inception of Bitcoin. There is nuance to this timeline that's why I usually use the launch of Ethereum as a starting point (~7 years If I recall correctly). Nevertheless so far nothing substantial running in production has come out of it Blockchain technology. The typical response then is "well it takes time there is a lot of potential". I mean yeah but if you compare it to something like contactless payments or ride sharing apps these products have moved a lot faster and now have high user adoption. So again: At what point can we just ignore all these Blockchain prophets that say "just wait the innovation is around the corner". 10 years, 20 years?
  • jonathan-adly 4y ago
    Something arbitrary with no value went from a random Internet forum to $300b market cap and a legal currency for a nation-state. That’s something! I don’t know what’s would be a better outcome. Did you expect it to be world reserve currency in a decade? Replace the 5000 years gold? Upend the global banking system? Render the IMF obsolete? Make nation-states think twice about waging war without taxation? I mean - surely you aren’t comparing these world-shattering outcomes to a mobile app that doesn’t make money after that long!
    • VHRanger 4y ago
      Moving the goalposts to something vague and further in the future wont help you convince anyone about usefulness
    • leifg 4y ago
      I should have said "Blockchain applications outside of cryptocurrency" but as you seem to equate the two let's talk about that. A good metric is: "people are using it". That is not the case for any cryptocurrency (yes and that includes El Salvador). I frequently wire money across borders and cryptocurrencies are still completely useless for it despite it being the number one use case that is shouted from the crypto rooftops. So you're left with: "It made a ton of money for rich and a few lucky middle class people" and "some quasi dictator implemented it as an additional currency without a mandate".
• nickstinemates 4y ago
  I am always torn when it comes to blockchain. (As an aside, I was an advisor to Storj.io, a web3 storage company. Largely because of my relationship with the CEO and less because of my enthusiasm with the space.) The leveraged, financial engineering side of Crypto as a get rich scheme never really appealed to me. I see this like any other risky investment, blurring the lines between lawful and not. Borrowing a ton of money and staking it on crypto seemed like a path to glory to many, and I am saddened by all of the people that lost their shirt in the process. There's another side of me, however, that sees web3 as an evolution of the traditional technology marketplace. A lot like early days of the internet, or of open source.. web3 seemed to be the continuation of the hacker spirit, where builders met to build cool stuff. Some of the coolest websites and communities these days are related to NFT's and minting them. Some cool thinking about persistent storage, or cloud, or storage with blockchain/coins as an incentive structure for micropayments. How to directly monetize content on the web without having to prop up the ad industry. Interesting, worthy goals. It's hard to reconcile this spectrum of thoughts and come up with a clear, personal, answer on the value of blockchain technology as a whole.
  • thwayunion 4y ago
    > Some of the coolest websites and communities these days are related to NFT's and minting them. Can you give a few examples? Everything I've seen in this space are transparent scams.
• ccorxi 4y ago
  Oh well...never mind... another fried air article which deserves only criticism...mixing rug pulls with actual good technology is a tragic error made my a newbie... here's some help free of charge...PoS = centralization or in other words no trust involved. There are a number or PoW Blockchains that literally kick ass yawning. Kadena, for instance has been founded and created by the very ppl that deployed JPM first Blockchain, their target is US stock exchanges to run on their braided chains... Hathor, another excellent example....but most importantly the point is triple entry accounting....go figure what a third accounting dimension does to accounting...
• anon400232 4y ago
  > Since I left AWS in 2020, I’ve been super-careful not to share things from behind the scenes. I can’t actually remember the details of the nondisclosure agreement, but I have strong feelings about the ethics. This story, though, doesn’t reflect poorly on anyone and I’m pretty sure nothing in it is material to any business plans at AWS or elsewhere. "Can't actually remember"? Yikes. "I'm pretty sure" ... based on...? Not working there any more? "Strong feelings about the ethics?" Dude. Contracts are not about your feelings about ethics. Mr. Bray doesn't have -- or didn't take the time to find -- a signed contract from two years ago. Not a great example to follow.