3 ms·

Or, hear me out, the technology sucks. And a great deal of software engineers here can see that the Emperor has no clothes.

p-e-w 3y ago
If you can name an alternative technology that solves the same problem (integrity consensus without centralized authority), I'm all ears.
- automatic6131 3y ago
  Try again when you can solve the problem without introducing a dozen others that make everything, overall, worse. Until then, trusting a central authority will do just fine. It works well enough now.
- bob1029 3y ago
  Why do we care about the centralized authority part so much? There are a lot of problem domains where zero trust is not desirable or understood to be a fool's errand. In a B2B setting where you have 3 parties working together on an integration project wherein 2 parties are B2B vendors and the 3rd is a B2C org, where does the centralization reside? What about vendors of the B2B vendors? I honestly don't know what we are getting at with this word anymore. If we were to apply something like SQL Server w/ Ledger tables (i.e. centralized blockchain) to this kind of problem in my shop, we would almost certainly find a solution that all parties would find agreeable. This forces you to trust 1-2 parties (i.e. Microsoft themselves), but in the above we agree that for many (most?) areas this may likely be explicitly desirable. There are also technologies (again, centralized) that provide non-repudiation through the hosting layer itself. Example of this being something like Azure Confidential Ledger. The part where this seems to get frustrating for people is the desired crystalline & immediate nature of the system. If you operate with the tiniest amount of extra flexibility you can get so much more done - E.g. perhaps the business can review a data tamper event tomorrow with their partners on the phone.
- PeterisP 3y ago
  For this particular use case all the possible benefits from integrity consensus can be obtained while still having a centralized authority. The grandparent post notes that it would be better if "several nodes have to agree for the chain to advance.", and that's true, but there's no benefit for it to be distributed, the best and most efficient way to implement that is to simply have like three nodes in a single room 'voting' in a 2-out-of-3 manner, and there is no need to bring in extra complexity required to do the same thing without centralized authority.
- AlexandrB 3y ago
  Perhaps the problem described is actually not the important one to solve. Once you leave the realm of pure digital operations and try to apply blockchain to any real-world use case you run into the same problem again and again - the inputs to the blockchain could be wrong, either through an honest mistake or malice. Blockchain does nothing to resolve this, and it seems like a much more more common issue than malicious manipulation of data on the backend. Indeed, centralized authorities are actually a kind of solution to the dirty input problem, because they can alter records to agree with reality after the fact if a mismatch is discovered.

p-e-w 3y ago

If you can name an alternative technology that solves the same problem (integrity consensus without centralized authority), I'm all ears.

automatic6131 3y ago
Try again when you can solve the problem without introducing a dozen others that make everything, overall, worse. Until then, trusting a central authority will do just fine. It works well enough now.
bob1029 3y ago
Why do we care about the centralized authority part so much? There are a lot of problem domains where zero trust is not desirable or understood to be a fool's errand. In a B2B setting where you have 3 parties working together on an integration project wherein 2 parties are B2B vendors and the 3rd is a B2C org, where does the centralization reside? What about vendors of the B2B vendors? I honestly don't know what we are getting at with this word anymore. If we were to apply something like SQL Server w/ Ledger tables (i.e. centralized blockchain) to this kind of problem in my shop, we would almost certainly find a solution that all parties would find agreeable. This forces you to trust 1-2 parties (i.e. Microsoft themselves), but in the above we agree that for many (most?) areas this may likely be explicitly desirable. There are also technologies (again, centralized) that provide non-repudiation through the hosting layer itself. Example of this being something like Azure Confidential Ledger. The part where this seems to get frustrating for people is the desired crystalline & immediate nature of the system. If you operate with the tiniest amount of extra flexibility you can get so much more done - E.g. perhaps the business can review a data tamper event tomorrow with their partners on the phone.
PeterisP 3y ago
For this particular use case all the possible benefits from integrity consensus can be obtained while still having a centralized authority. The grandparent post notes that it would be better if "several nodes have to agree for the chain to advance.", and that's true, but there's no benefit for it to be distributed, the best and most efficient way to implement that is to simply have like three nodes in a single room 'voting' in a 2-out-of-3 manner, and there is no need to bring in extra complexity required to do the same thing without centralized authority.
AlexandrB 3y ago
Perhaps the problem described is actually not the important one to solve. Once you leave the realm of pure digital operations and try to apply blockchain to any real-world use case you run into the same problem again and again - the inputs to the blockchain could be wrong, either through an honest mistake or malice. Blockchain does nothing to resolve this, and it seems like a much more more common issue than malicious manipulation of data on the backend. Indeed, centralized authorities are actually a kind of solution to the dirty input problem, because they can alter records to agree with reality after the fact if a mismatch is discovered.