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As I always do when someone pops off with a phrase like “blockchain junk” I’ll remind everyone that Barbara Liskov, who is the second female recipient of the Tu

As I always do when someone pops off with a phrase like “blockchain junk” I’ll remind everyone that Barbara Liskov, who is the second female recipient of the Turing Award (and narrowly missed being the first, Frances Allen received the honor in 2006, Professor Liskov did in 2008), the John von Neumann Medal, an honors doctorate from ETH Zurich (received alongside Donald Knuth), countless other honors, and was the doctoral advisor to Sanjay Ghemawat (with his own trophy case of stratospheric achievement) devoted much of her career to the rigorous study of Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (known colloquially as “pBFT”) which is the consensus mechanism used in a number of blockchain-style data structures many if not most of which have at least peripheral connections to what people typically mean when throwing around the term blockchain. I haven’t followed her career closely over the last few years, but long into the BitCoin era she was leading a group at MIT studying exactly this set of topics. Furthermore, she is only one example of staggeringly recognized, decorated, acknowledged pillars of computer science who either is now or recently has been doing real, substantial, academically sound, and novel research in this field: Philip Waller of functional programming and category theory fame works (or did recently) at IO/HK, a shop with more Fields/Turing/ACM-type honors than they have places to put all the plaques. So with all respect to a fellow community member, easy there with the “junk” stuff. If you want to say: “2017-era ICO exit scam junk”, or “pump-and dump altcoin junk circa 2022”, be my guest as long as you cite examples, there was plenty of fraud during those bubbles just like there is always fraud in speculative asset bubbles, and fraud is bad (whatever Greenspan and Summers are on the record as saying and they are both on the record as saying financial fraud shouldn’t be prosecuted). But even there, I’ll remind you that the conventional financial system sets no enviable record for either asset bubbles or the attendant fraud: quite the contrary, no one of any real seniority suffered so much as house arrest or community service let alone prison in 1987, 1999, 2001, 2008-2009, or whatever we’re calling this. With three notable exceptions: Sam Blankman Fried is serving 25 years for things that happen on Wall St. every day of the week, and if CZ misses serious jail time it will be by the skin of his teeth. Do Kwon is facing trial for felony market manipulation in absentia. To my untrained eye, it looks an awful lot like cryptocurrency is the one place in the modern digital financial system where fraud is investigated, prosecuted, where people who go jail, and where the victims of that fraud receive at least some of their money back (I have a friend who held significant FTT and is already sure he’s getting something back, though these proceedings are complicated and we’re frankly a bit out of practice because we stopped prosecuting financial fraud in the late-Reagan/early-Clinton era, so he’s not sure how much yet). Maybe I’m missing something here, my financial credentials are modest if that, perhaps you or another commenter could explain why the superficial analysis that indicates that crypto is the best-regulated of all the very rough financial markets in the world is deficient?

qotgalaxy 3y ago
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ongy 3y ago
This must be the weirdest call to authority I've ever seen. Consens algorithms are important in both safety and distributed (High Availibility) scenarios. There's no necessary link from research into that, and blockchain in general, and the Proof of X style crypto blockchains specifically. Can you point to some research of Waller? I've tried to find it to see if it's more directly related, but the only somewhat famous person under that name I can find is a historian, not an expert in computing related topics. There's some interesting technology blockchains lean on (remember, git storage is a blockchain) but the value proposition of crypo currency blockchains (largely 0 trust) have so far not materialized outside speculative currency. Which is partially due to misaligned incentives (the developers of e.g. game assets in the NFT case) where the party that would have to enable something do not have an incentive to give up controle.
- benreesman 3y ago
  I made a typographical error because I typed that with my thumb: the gentleman’s name is Dr. Philip Wadler FRS FRSE (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Wadler https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Wadler), I also forgot his proper title as a Fellow of the Royal Society. The contributions that merited his inclusion in a group that includes (in computing alone) people like Charles Babbage KH FRS and Alan Turing OBE FRS are too numerous for any HN comment: he’s got something like 20k citations of hundreds of papers. His contributions while working at IOHK were IIRC substantially around advanced formal proof systems for typed lambda calculus, the most recent of his IOHK papers I read was describing a System F implementation in the Agda proof system. I don’t think it’s called an appeal to authority when the topic is the merit of a field of study (I’ve never heard it referred to as a call to authority at all): when an overwhelming consensus of basically every reputable academic and scientific honor and award in the field (some among the highest honors in any field) are attached to research done over decades and reviewed, debated, cited, and recognized by a robust consensus, that’s an argument that the study was important, novel, rigorous, valuable and worthwhile. I cited the consensus of the entire reputable academic and scientific world because that’s how we codify a consensus into a formal recognition that a researcher has in the past, is currently, or is likely to again do important research. I think GP was mistaken to call this research junk or even imply it if someone is going to try to parse it that finely, and I thought that citing the ACM was a better citation than my own opinion. I agree that git is a blockchain, though not a particularly Byzantine Fault Tolerant one, along with Mercurial and Nix and many other tools many of us use daily. The broader convergence around previously disparate parts of the digital financial economy is just unambiguously happening: things like FedNow at the high end or Apple Pay / Venmo / Zelle / Wize / WeChat / etc. on a more retail level are arriving faster and faster, placing ever-greater demands on the technology involved, and similar pressures are producing related solutions: the NBBO system in US equities trading to name one example, the consolidated tape that results and the records around it used to be backed by all trades taking place on recorded phone lines, before that by taking place in a room full of witnesses, and before that in coffee shops and other gathering places. All of these systems were workable if imperfect solutions to questions of trust, escrow, reversibility or its converse, and broadly the ways in which Ricardian contracts are generally, in isolation, inadequate to promote a sufficient atmosphere of trust to admit active and reasonably efficient markets. Cryptographically durable and tamper-resistant ledgers remain in a sort of transitional state where they back non-trivial commerce and much more but still comparatively small amounts of speculation/price discovery: the jury is out on whether or not cryptography and BFT research is going to hit the truly big leagues in terms of notional value: right now they’re somewhere in the rough ballpark of equities transactions daily in the maybe mid tens to low hundreds of billions in notional USD, making both a flea on the ass of an elephant compared to say global forex at something like 5-10 trillion a day, and derivatives are just really hard to estimate, but the notional value of all derivatives contracts is like, easily in the hundreds of trillions and there are days when a lot of that moves quickly. But I wasn’t making the case that this stuff is like 100% locked-in the future, I was making a much weaker claim: that it’s dismissive and ignorant to call it “junk” and that what limited consequences fraudsters face for financial fraud are tightly clustered in this area. It’s well-understood that the mechanism design of a combination of a floating transaction fee structure (gas) and a market in that unit of account with a lot of speculative activity in it is problematic to put it mildly: transactions become too expensive to facilitate significant commerce rather often. A lot of things are being tried to improve the emergent incentives, some with more noble motives than others, but that’s finance: if you’re under any illusion that innovation in finance is a constant battle between people trying to generate better outcomes and people trying to game the thing then you can easily disabuse yourself of that notion by learning about the history of finance and I’ll recommend two excellent places to start: the emergence of massive OTC derivatives markets that began in the 1980s but really got big a decade later, and the emergence of fully-digital equities and futures markets around the turn of the millennium.

qotgalaxy 3y ago

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ongy 3y ago

This must be the weirdest call to authority I've ever seen. Consens algorithms are important in both safety and distributed (High Availibility) scenarios. There's no necessary link from research into that, and blockchain in general, and the Proof of X style crypto blockchains specifically. Can you point to some research of Waller? I've tried to find it to see if it's more directly related, but the only somewhat famous person under that name I can find is a historian, not an expert in computing related topics. There's some interesting technology blockchains lean on (remember, git storage is a blockchain) but the value proposition of crypo currency blockchains (largely 0 trust) have so far not materialized outside speculative currency. Which is partially due to misaligned incentives (the developers of e.g. game assets in the NFT case) where the party that would have to enable something do not have an incentive to give up controle.

benreesman 3y ago
I made a typographical error because I typed that with my thumb: the gentleman’s name is Dr. Philip Wadler FRS FRSE (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Wadler https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Wadler), I also forgot his proper title as a Fellow of the Royal Society. The contributions that merited his inclusion in a group that includes (in computing alone) people like Charles Babbage KH FRS and Alan Turing OBE FRS are too numerous for any HN comment: he’s got something like 20k citations of hundreds of papers. His contributions while working at IOHK were IIRC substantially around advanced formal proof systems for typed lambda calculus, the most recent of his IOHK papers I read was describing a System F implementation in the Agda proof system. I don’t think it’s called an appeal to authority when the topic is the merit of a field of study (I’ve never heard it referred to as a call to authority at all): when an overwhelming consensus of basically every reputable academic and scientific honor and award in the field (some among the highest honors in any field) are attached to research done over decades and reviewed, debated, cited, and recognized by a robust consensus, that’s an argument that the study was important, novel, rigorous, valuable and worthwhile. I cited the consensus of the entire reputable academic and scientific world because that’s how we codify a consensus into a formal recognition that a researcher has in the past, is currently, or is likely to again do important research. I think GP was mistaken to call this research junk or even imply it if someone is going to try to parse it that finely, and I thought that citing the ACM was a better citation than my own opinion. I agree that git is a blockchain, though not a particularly Byzantine Fault Tolerant one, along with Mercurial and Nix and many other tools many of us use daily. The broader convergence around previously disparate parts of the digital financial economy is just unambiguously happening: things like FedNow at the high end or Apple Pay / Venmo / Zelle / Wize / WeChat / etc. on a more retail level are arriving faster and faster, placing ever-greater demands on the technology involved, and similar pressures are producing related solutions: the NBBO system in US equities trading to name one example, the consolidated tape that results and the records around it used to be backed by all trades taking place on recorded phone lines, before that by taking place in a room full of witnesses, and before that in coffee shops and other gathering places. All of these systems were workable if imperfect solutions to questions of trust, escrow, reversibility or its converse, and broadly the ways in which Ricardian contracts are generally, in isolation, inadequate to promote a sufficient atmosphere of trust to admit active and reasonably efficient markets. Cryptographically durable and tamper-resistant ledgers remain in a sort of transitional state where they back non-trivial commerce and much more but still comparatively small amounts of speculation/price discovery: the jury is out on whether or not cryptography and BFT research is going to hit the truly big leagues in terms of notional value: right now they’re somewhere in the rough ballpark of equities transactions daily in the maybe mid tens to low hundreds of billions in notional USD, making both a flea on the ass of an elephant compared to say global forex at something like 5-10 trillion a day, and derivatives are just really hard to estimate, but the notional value of all derivatives contracts is like, easily in the hundreds of trillions and there are days when a lot of that moves quickly. But I wasn’t making the case that this stuff is like 100% locked-in the future, I was making a much weaker claim: that it’s dismissive and ignorant to call it “junk” and that what limited consequences fraudsters face for financial fraud are tightly clustered in this area. It’s well-understood that the mechanism design of a combination of a floating transaction fee structure (gas) and a market in that unit of account with a lot of speculative activity in it is problematic to put it mildly: transactions become too expensive to facilitate significant commerce rather often. A lot of things are being tried to improve the emergent incentives, some with more noble motives than others, but that’s finance: if you’re under any illusion that innovation in finance is a constant battle between people trying to generate better outcomes and people trying to game the thing then you can easily disabuse yourself of that notion by learning about the history of finance and I’ll recommend two excellent places to start: the emergence of massive OTC derivatives markets that began in the 1980s but really got big a decade later, and the emergence of fully-digital equities and futures markets around the turn of the millennium.