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> The current socio-economic environment, including rapid digitization of information and processes, the rise of machine learning (ML), and ubiquitous access to

by FabHK 2y ago

> The current socio-economic environment, including rapid digitization of information and processes, the rise of machine learning (ML), and ubiquitous access to the Internet, amplifies the need for human-human and human-machine interactions that are transparent, dependable, resilient, and operate at a global scale—without a single point of failure. This might ring a bell; the concept of distributed ledger technologies (DLT), or blockchain, refers to systems implementing these properties. I don't understand what sort of people can write rubbish like this. We need human-human interactions that are transparent, dependable, resilient, and global; and therefore blockchain? What are the authors smoking? None of this requires the specific (and pernicious) distinguishing feature of blockchain: permissionlessness (enabling the wanton abandonment of the rule of law we see in that space in practice). Good old 1990's distributed computing technology (permissioned!) allows for transparent, dependable, resilient, and global interactions (machine to machine though; I have no clue how the authors interact with other humans. Presumably with WhatsApp or iMessage, which are neither transparent nor without a single point of failure, but are just fine.)

mistrial9 2y ago
> What are the authors smoking? no mention of drinking from the money-matters-most crowd .. how convenient
aliasxneo 2y ago
I didn't really infer that meaning. It sounds more like an innocent transition sentence and not necessarily the _only_ universal solution to that problem.
somezero 2y ago
People [sadly] put a lot of "exotic" cryptography/distributed systems under the term "blockchain" eg. If you want to do byzantine agreement with sub quadratic message complexity, where do you look it up? If you want to do high throughput threshold signing, where do you look it up? An allergic reaction to the term "blockchain" is to miss the forrest for the trees... and I would imagine the authors share the same point of view.
jMyles 2y ago
> the wanton abandonment of the rule of law we see in that space in practice This applies only to the laws of the legacy states, not the laws of mathematics. Blockchains are a highly lawful place in this sense.
- LegionMammal978 2y ago
  Only insofar as those in power (whether it's soft or hard power) agree to be bound by the mathematical laws. See: the forking of Ethereum from Ethereum Classic, even if the people in charge of the project pinky-promise not to do that again. The underlying social forces can't be eliminated from the equation, as long as humans are involved.
  - jMyles 2y ago
    > The underlying social forces can't be eliminated from the equation ...nor is that desirable, or a goal of decentralization. Quite the contrary.
StableAlkyne 2y ago
> the rise of machine learning (ML) Adding to your point that we had the decentralized "future" promised by blockchains in the 90s, "Machine Learning" is a field older than computers. Every decade it gets a new buzzword painted on (now it's "AI"), but in the end it's all just applied statistics, linear algebra, and optimization.
trompetenaccoun 2y ago
"Rule of law" isn't a thing in much of the world. Not understanding is one thing but what's with the arrogance of many living in more stable economies? In a place like Nigeria, holding funds in self custody as USD-pegged stablecoins for example is one of the safest and most conservative ways to save. People would rather the US Federal Reserve take that seignorage, because they don't trust their own government. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptocurrency_in_Nigeria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptocurrency_in_Nigeria Or look at Zimbabwe just two days ago. There goes 40% of your savings in that new supposedly gold-backed fiat currency... https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8el4kgk98eo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8el4kgk98eo
- FabHK 2y ago
  The introduction of blockchain does not strengthen, or replace, the rule of law; it weakens it. Do you think that the fact that the Yahoo boys in Nigeria and the Black Axe in Nigeria are getting rich with crypto scams contributes positively to Nigerian society, or negatively? The fact that the elite in Nigeria (those that can self-custody private keys safely, e.g. on multiple electronic devices, or a safe in their house) can now also hold unregulated USD-like funds, will that increase or decrease the pressure on the government in Nigeria to provide proper money?
derefr 2y ago
For some reason, there is no current software implementation of a "globally consensus-replicated, peer-to-peer, append-only, signed-message log store, with Turing-complete programmable matviews that pump by reducing over the store's log messages as CQRS commands per some set of validity rules"... other than the ones that are also permissionless to transact upon, and thereby are "blockchains." I find that almost all (non-blockchain-space) tech people who find "blockchains" interesting as a concept, and see potential use-cases for them in system architecture design, are actually thinking about the uses of this taxonomic parent category — whether they realize it or not. But the only way to currently talk about this concept — in a way that doesn't require you to first give an extensive definition of the idea you're talking about — is to use the word "blockchain", even though that's not precisely what you mean. Since there's no software system that's just one of these things, without also being a blockchain, there's no word we've invented to talk about the set of such software systems. If someone came along and actually made a piece of software that was all the things a blockchain is, except for the "open submission of transactions, with spam control using eStamps that necessitate the introduction of a whole economy into the system that it doesn't otherwise require" part, I think it'd become a huge thing among tech crowds, and "blockchains" as infra systems would be completely forgotten about in favor of (whatever name these parent-category systems would be given once we have any to talk about.) Sadly, I think there's very little interest in doing this, for two reasons: 1. Anyone who builds such a system knows that with just a little bit of extra implementation effort, they can introduce such an economy, turning their thingy into a "blockchain", and potentially making a bajillion dollars by being the first one in the door of that new economy as it grows with usage. 2. Most blockchain node software is designed to be flexible-enough in its definition of a blockchain network, that it can be flexed toward being used in a "Proof-of-Authority" network implementation that doesn't actually have an internal economy. And, because blockchain node software has a lot of engineering effort already invested into it, vs. systems of this parent category that have none yet — it makes a lot of sense, as a systems engineer who just wants an infra component to slap into place, to use blockchain-node software for these use-cases, configured into a Proof-of-Authority mode where the economy logic is vestigial. It feels like an "overkill" solution, but the alternative would be DIYing a parent-category system and having to learn all the Hard Lessons that blockchain-software engineers already figured out about non-repudiability, storage architectures amenable to state garbage-collection, scalable consensus mechanisms that don't halt-and-catch-fire during hard-fork network upgrades, etc.

by FabHK 2y ago

mistrial9 2y ago

> What are the authors smoking? no mention of drinking from the money-matters-most crowd .. how convenient

aliasxneo 2y ago

I didn't really infer that meaning. It sounds more like an innocent transition sentence and not necessarily the _only_ universal solution to that problem.

somezero 2y ago

People [sadly] put a lot of "exotic" cryptography/distributed systems under the term "blockchain" eg. If you want to do byzantine agreement with sub quadratic message complexity, where do you look it up? If you want to do high throughput threshold signing, where do you look it up? An allergic reaction to the term "blockchain" is to miss the forrest for the trees... and I would imagine the authors share the same point of view.

jMyles 2y ago

> the wanton abandonment of the rule of law we see in that space in practice This applies only to the laws of the legacy states, not the laws of mathematics. Blockchains are a highly lawful place in this sense.

LegionMammal978 2y ago
Only insofar as those in power (whether it's soft or hard power) agree to be bound by the mathematical laws. See: the forking of Ethereum from Ethereum Classic, even if the people in charge of the project pinky-promise not to do that again. The underlying social forces can't be eliminated from the equation, as long as humans are involved.
- jMyles 2y ago
  > The underlying social forces can't be eliminated from the equation ...nor is that desirable, or a goal of decentralization. Quite the contrary.

StableAlkyne 2y ago

> the rise of machine learning (ML) Adding to your point that we had the decentralized "future" promised by blockchains in the 90s, "Machine Learning" is a field older than computers. Every decade it gets a new buzzword painted on (now it's "AI"), but in the end it's all just applied statistics, linear algebra, and optimization.

trompetenaccoun 2y ago

"Rule of law" isn't a thing in much of the world. Not understanding is one thing but what's with the arrogance of many living in more stable economies? In a place like Nigeria, holding funds in self custody as USD-pegged stablecoins for example is one of the safest and most conservative ways to save. People would rather the US Federal Reserve take that seignorage, because they don't trust their own government. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptocurrency_in_Nigeria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptocurrency_in_Nigeria Or look at Zimbabwe just two days ago. There goes 40% of your savings in that new supposedly gold-backed fiat currency... https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8el4kgk98eo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8el4kgk98eo

FabHK 2y ago
The introduction of blockchain does not strengthen, or replace, the rule of law; it weakens it. Do you think that the fact that the Yahoo boys in Nigeria and the Black Axe in Nigeria are getting rich with crypto scams contributes positively to Nigerian society, or negatively? The fact that the elite in Nigeria (those that can self-custody private keys safely, e.g. on multiple electronic devices, or a safe in their house) can now also hold unregulated USD-like funds, will that increase or decrease the pressure on the government in Nigeria to provide proper money?

derefr 2y ago

For some reason, there is no current software implementation of a "globally consensus-replicated, peer-to-peer, append-only, signed-message log store, with Turing-complete programmable matviews that pump by reducing over the store's log messages as CQRS commands per some set of validity rules"... other than the ones that are also permissionless to transact upon, and thereby are "blockchains." I find that almost all (non-blockchain-space) tech people who find "blockchains" interesting as a concept, and see potential use-cases for them in system architecture design, are actually thinking about the uses of this taxonomic parent category — whether they realize it or not. But the only way to currently talk about this concept — in a way that doesn't require you to first give an extensive definition of the idea you're talking about — is to use the word "blockchain", even though that's not precisely what you mean. Since there's no software system that's just one of these things, without also being a blockchain, there's no word we've invented to talk about the set of such software systems. If someone came along and actually made a piece of software that was all the things a blockchain is, except for the "open submission of transactions, with spam control using eStamps that necessitate the introduction of a whole economy into the system that it doesn't otherwise require" part, I think it'd become a huge thing among tech crowds, and "blockchains" as infra systems would be completely forgotten about in favor of (whatever name these parent-category systems would be given once we have any to talk about.) Sadly, I think there's very little interest in doing this, for two reasons: 1. Anyone who builds such a system knows that with just a little bit of extra implementation effort, they can introduce such an economy, turning their thingy into a "blockchain", and potentially making a bajillion dollars by being the first one in the door of that new economy as it grows with usage. 2. Most blockchain node software is designed to be flexible-enough in its definition of a blockchain network, that it can be flexed toward being used in a "Proof-of-Authority" network implementation that doesn't actually have an internal economy. And, because blockchain node software has a lot of engineering effort already invested into it, vs. systems of this parent category that have none yet — it makes a lot of sense, as a systems engineer who just wants an infra component to slap into place, to use blockchain-node software for these use-cases, configured into a Proof-of-Authority mode where the economy logic is vestigial. It feels like an "overkill" solution, but the alternative would be DIYing a parent-category system and having to learn all the Hard Lessons that blockchain-software engineers already figured out about non-repudiability, storage architectures amenable to state garbage-collection, scalable consensus mechanisms that don't halt-and-catch-fire during hard-fork network upgrades, etc.