
A blockchain is a specific set of choices suitable for a narrow set of use-cases - BerislavLopac
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/987266940887535616.html
======
kmc059000
I was recently at an "Emerging Technology" conference for emerging
technologies that was targeted at non-technical entrepreneurs and innovators.
90% of the conference was focused on blockchain, while the remaining was
focused on AI. During the entire conference, blockchain was being touted as a
silver bullet for many problems, and many of the people at the conference ate
it up.

The best anecdote to summarize the conference was a speech by IBM where they
covered a project which they did with major retailer to track a supply chain.
The speaker mentioned some impressive results which caused a noticeable people
around me to literally say "wow". However, they did not once mention
specifically how blockchain was the cause of these results or give reasons why
blockchain was superior. From what I could tell as an engineer, the entire
application could have been built without blockchain.

I was surprised at how blockchain was being touted as the next technological
revolution (and very light on the details) and was concerned at how quickly
the other attendees accepted blockchain as it was being sold. I left the
conference thinking that it would only be a matter of time before blockchain
would be touted as a silver bullet in the larger community due to conferences
like these (although I am sure they've been happening for a while, and this
was my first exposure). It will not be long before a large number of software
projects will be based on blockchain needlessly, and/or the engineers will be
arguing with management why using blockchain is a mistake.

~~~
havkom
We now live in the information age. Blockchains and AI will transform everyday
life as well as specific sectors such as health care and trade.

Imagine walking in to a Starbucks café, order a cup of coffee, digitally
signing a payment transaction on your mobile or laptop and then wait for it to
be confirmed by the Blockchain while enjoying the hot cup of coffee you have
ordered.

What is more, think about AI, you will not need to talk to the staff to place
an order for your coffee. The staff can relax and watch you make gestures to a
camera. They will be able to read on a screen if you’d like it white or black.

I think the article is too negative and does not see the big picture of
transformation that is going on (as exemplified above).

~~~
Scarblac
> Imagine walking in to a Starbucks café, order a cup of coffee, digitally
> signing a payment transaction on your mobile or laptop and then wait for it
> to be confirmed by the Blockchain while enjoying the hot cup of coffee you
> have ordered.

You could do the the exact same thing now with credit cards, except the
waiting. And then you could get your money back if the coffee sucked, and you
wouldn't lose all your money if someone happened to steal your private key .

~~~
hopfog
Pretty sure it was sarcasm.

~~~
wool_gather
It's important to keep Poe's law in mind when you're posting plain-text
parody; you don't have tone of voice and body language to help convey your
real intent.

------
KirinDave
What exactly is the specific use case where Proof of Work blockchain are
appropriate?

Consensus in that design is:

1\. Perhaps the single most expensive consensus algorithm ever designed.

2\. Deliberately one of the slowest.

3\. Does not actually provide trustless consensus once 1/3 of the miner nodes
decide to collude.

Other than "our data is a merkle tree but you have to trust us to submit
transactions to it", and "a currency system with a failed promise to deliver
either scale or trustless consensus" what, is the proper application?

~~~
ozmbie
If you can invent a reliable alternative to proof-of-work distributed
consensus there is a multi-billion dollar opportunity there. It’s inefficient,
but before bitcoin came along there was no way to even do it. An inefficient
way is better than no way at all.

Some other cryptocurrencies are trying alternatives. But none have been as
“battle hardened” as bitcoin.

Follow the core developers and you’ll see their focus is on creating an open
distributed platform. It’s up to us to figure out what to use it for.

~~~
curun1r
> An inefficient way is better than no way at all

Really, why?

IMHO, there's a pretty compelling argument to be made that Bitcoin and the
other cryptocurrencies have had a significantly net-negative impact on the
world, from facilitating scams and other illegal activity to now having to
worry that sites we visit will monetize by stealing CPU cycles to the
significant impact on climate change, these technologies have caused a lot
more harm than benefit. And all the while, they haven't even figured out how
to build a ledger that can scale to day-to-day transactions. My bet is that
the whole thing ends up being a tax on people who've forgotten their 17th
century Dutch history.

~~~
knocte
> from facilitating scams and other illegal activity

The same was said over and over on the nascent days of the internet, about how
it facilitated anonymity so easily and how it would be used by criminals.

> by stealing CPU cycles

Difficulty in bitcoin mining is raising all the time (because of the
competition among miners). This is why nobody mines nowadays with CPUs or GPUs
but with ASICs. The fact that some sites are trying to achieve some decent
mining hashrate by pulling the amount of visitors of a website is a naive move
that will soon be off-set by even more raising levels of difficulty. Soon this
will not be profitable at all, even if your website was the 1st in Google's
page rank.

> to the significant impact on climate change

I like that skeptics raise this point, because:

1) The cryptocurrency mining industry is the fastest one to chase energy-
efficient solutions. As soon as a device consumes less electricity, it's
adopted widely because of the huge incentives to do so (e.g. CPU->GPU->ASIC).

2) Compare the electricity spent by the entire banking industry with the
electricity spent by the entire crypto-mining industry. Now guess what's more
efficient.

~~~
KirinDave
> The same was said over and over on the nascent days of the internet, about
> how it facilitated anonymity so easily and how it would be used by
> criminals.

There's 2 things I want to say about this comment:

1\. Those accusations _were not wrong._ In the same sense that we have pretty
clear evidence that a lot of the value injected into bitcoin and stored there
is via money laundering.

2\. _Unlike_ proof of work currency blockchains, the internet clearly
delivered and had no direct theoretical challenges to its very existence that
people subsequently and fervently denied.

Proof of work is a bad idea. It's been discredited. It doesn't do what people
thought it did. And it's MUCH too expensive to keep doing.

~~~
siwatanejo
Proof of Work is the only way for people to transact in which they don't have
counterpary-risk problems before transacting.

Before PoW was invented, there was no way of doing this.

Now, thanks to layer2 technologies, PoW will start becoming much more (orders
of magnitude more) energy efficient.

How is that a bad idea? Make something possible, and later make it
sustainable. So long as there's demand for that something, then it's a good
idea.

~~~
skybrian
There are two sides to a trade, and typically Bitcoin only handles one of
them. Buy some food with Bitcoin and it still might taste bad or make you ill.

Even for purely financial transactions, any kind of loan or investment still
has counter-party risk.

So even if a crypocurrency worked perfectly, it doesn't solve very much.

~~~
siwatanejo
> There are two sides to a trade, and typically Bitcoin only handles one of
> them. Buy some food with Bitcoin and it still might taste bad or make you
> ill.

You have this same problem with any form of money. The problem I raised is
counterparty-risk when holding your assets (before transacting).

> Even for purely financial transactions, any kind of loan or investment still
> has counter-party risk.

Yeah, that's why maybe loans should have higher interest (right now, the low
interest is artificial, because the bank is really making more money from the
fact that it's working as a fractional reserve, not from the interest it
gathers from loaning you money).

> So even if a crypocurrency worked perfectly, it doesn't solve very much.

It solves just one thing. Granted, it's not a silver bullet. But there are
never silver bullets. Every single invention that humanity achieves, just
improves the world a little tiny bit. Cryptocurrency does this as well.

~~~
wpietri
It does not solve anything. It's true that cash and bitcoin both avoid a
narrow slice of counterparty risk. But that's not a whole problem, just part
of one. As a currency, Bitcoin is an abject failure. Even big proponents admit
that: [http://avc.com/2017/08/store-of-value-vs-payment-
system/](http://avc.com/2017/08/store-of-value-vs-payment-system/)

Bitcoin made no practical dent in existing legal financial transactions
because it's not better for the great majority of use cases.

------
olouv
While the definition is exact, it’s a pretty narrow one. I understand that
people are tired with all the hype and naturally want to counter it somehow.

But don’t let it blind you, blockchain technologies will deeply change our
societies. It’s a trust machine: it creates trust where there is none. Trust
being one of the pillar of our civilization, the scope of its applications is
wider than you would expect.

Edit: thanks for the downvotes... if your confirmation bias can’t handle a
contrarian, respectful point of view, i’d seriously question your rationality
as a member of this scientific-related community.

~~~
zakk
In most situations trust between two parties can be obtained by means of a
third party they both trust.

That’s how the banking system has worked for centuries.

The use case for a blockchain is narrower: it can be used to establish trust
between two parties in absence of a trustable third party.

~~~
olouv
Exact, and we have seen how well this third-party trust system worked during
the last financial crisis just a decade ago.

~~~
paulgb
Which system failure from that crisis does blockchain technology fix?

~~~
olouv
Sudden cascading lack of trust?

~~~
paulgb
Blockchains can reduce counterparty risk in a transaction, but there's no
technical solution to the fact that trust is required between, for example, a
lender and a borrower. The idea that you can just sprinkle some blockchain
dust and avoid financial crises is naive.

~~~
someguydave
>but there's no technical solution to the fact that trust is required between,
for example, a lender and a borrower.

No, it does not. However, if someone lends bitcoin to a borrower, it does not
involve third parties, and therefore cannot "run" like a fractional reserve
bank.

~~~
Scarblac
Of course it can.

Someone (A) can loan Bitcoin to another person (Bank), with the terms that if
he asks he can have it back at any time, and he'll also receive a small
percentage of interest each year.

Bank can then lend 90% of the money to a third person (C), betting that A will
not ask to get all his money back at the same time. To decrease this risk, he
does this with lots of people so he is covered in case only a few ask all of
it back (but still is in trouble if too many of them do at the same time).

A still has money (his assets are very liquid as he can ask for them back at
any time, very liquid assets are what we call money), C has money, the sum is
more than the initial amount, so money was created through fractional reserver
banking.

That's all fractional reserve banking is, and nothing about Blockchain
prevents it.

~~~
someguydave
>That's all fractional reserve banking is, and nothing about Blockchain
prevents it.

Implicit in my comment was the idea that it would be a bad idea to start a
fractional reserve bank which used a currency of account that wasn't available
in infinite supply from a nearby government.

Also, I merely stated a way in which Bitcoin could be used as a sound bank,
not that all possible banks which use Bitcoin are sound.

------
Moodles
It's interesting how blockchain became so incredibly hyped though isn't it?
Something to do with money (bitcoin) and some new technology perhaps?

I wanted to find out what was going on, so I literally applied for a bunch of
blockchain jobs just so I can talk to these people on the phone to see what
they're all about. I end up asking really basic questions like: "So why are
you using a blockchain instead of a normal database?" or "What problem are you
actually trying to solve?" It is actually embarrassing; I feel like I'm being
abrasive on the phone by asking such truly basic questions, yet they always
seem so startled by these kinds of questions and assume I'm somehow incredibly
intelligent and perceptive to ask these basic questions.

Generally what happens is as follows. Some business MBA type people watch a
TED talk or read in the FT that blockchain is the next big thing, so they go
out and look to hire "blockchain evangelists". Evangelists is the word they
often use, and that sounds about right because it is just like a religion
sometimes. Then I only end up talking to the business people about these
projects, because that's all the people they have. I won't name them, but I've
had conversations with huge firms or startups that both equally talk utter
nonsense. One large firm told me that they're working on "permissionless and
permissioned blockchains for everything from auditing to wine". While for a
small startup I once asked: "why are you using a blockchain for this instead
of just having a database?". The answer I got was "well... our customers
aren't really technical people...". I told them perhaps they should look at
something like Google's certificate transparency rather than blockchains, and
they echoed back to me "Oh we are definitely looking at certificate transfer!"
(Transfer, not transparency.) It's astonishing.

To summarize, huge firms tend to have people who just want to get paid so they
always say yes to whatever the clueless MBA person asks, while startups tend
to mostly know it's bullshit but go along anyway because there is a lot of $$$
involved, particularly with ICOs.

~~~
thinkingemote
I really like the idea of phoning up the recruiters to find out more about a
technology!

We have a Blockchain meetup group in my city, however its mainly about
cryptocurrency investments than any actual blockchain technological
innovation.

~~~
Moodles
To be honest I'm more onboard with cryptocurrency, even though obviously there
are way, way too many of them (Kanyre-West coin anyone?) becuase at least
blockchain actually solves a very specific problem for bitcoin: decentralized
peer-to-peer currency. It's when you get blockchains for sexual consent and
tracking your bananas in Laos that really annoys me (both real proejcts btw)

------
onetwotree
As part of my job, I often have to convince business folks that they don't
need to buy a fucking private blockchain (from IBM of course, because they're
old enough to think that no one ever got fired for buying IBM). This is very
close to the arguments I make, and adds some excellent, articulate points!

~~~
time0ut
This is happening at both of my companies now. I'm almost to the point of
telling them to buy it just so they can tell their golf buddies they're using
blockchain too.

~~~
onetwotree
Pro-tip: do an "experiment" with blockchain (built in house to keep it cheap)
so they can tell their golf buddies they're looking into it. Make sure it's
compared to a sane solution, because then they can feel superior for having
"insider knowledge" that it's pointless.

------
leifg
These are all very excellent points. I would go even further: “The only viable
application of blockchain is cryptocurrencies” (and cryprocurrencies have a
whole different set of problems).

By arguing that there is only a “narrow set of use cases” you open the door
for the counter argument “yes, but MY blockchain startup is not bullshit”.

I isually use the argument “show me the increase of profit margin specifically
by using blockchain technology”.

I so far have not gotten a satisfying answer.

~~~
snarf21
I think there are also use cases that revolve around using a blockchain as a
public database and API for the transfer and security of data.

Obviously, you could do this without using blockchain _IF_ you could get the
top 20 players in vertical X to agree on what that looks like. However, using
"blockchain" as an excuse to get the project funded and get buy-in from those
same top 20 players so they can talk about blockchain at the next board
meeting is an enabler of practical problem solving. Sometimes you have to take
the path of least resistance.

------
woah
This guy makes a lot of good points, but at heart, this is a false appeal from
authority. Every distributed system makes a set of tradeoffs. If you were to
design a distributed system with the same tradeoffs as a blockchain (single
global state, and very low trust of node operators), you would end up with
something that has similar performance characteristics as a blockchain.

Arguing that these tradeoffs are not good is perfectly valid. For instance,
this guy feels that you should be willing to trust your bank with your money,
and Microsoft with your code execution, in return for better performance.
Valid opinion.

The problem is when he comes in with this hand wavy stuff about how him and
his very smart friends think this and that and they are distributed systems
engineers so you should listen to them. It’s not a technical question, it’s a
basic question of where you want to place your trust, and a distributed
systems engineers opinion is just as valid as that of UI designer, a teacher,
or a janitor.

~~~
ajkjk
I don't think that was the point of the article at all.

The point is that distributed systems engineers know already about these sets
of tradeoffs, and many of the alternatives to them, and with that wider
perspective see few, if any, reasons to recommend blockchain.

Meanwhile many the people going around hyping up blockchain know very little
about the tradeoffs and alternatives, and are definitely _not_ recommending
blockchain because it's the right set of choices in each of the tradeoffs.

Like - picking randomly - KodakCoin[1], he would argue (and I would agree),
definitely did not choose to use blockchain because was the database that made
the most sense for their needs. Indeed, it's probably a terrible choice
compared to the alternatives.

(Except, perhaps, for optimizing for"hype factor" as seems to have worked
considering their stock price, in which case the best thing to do might
actually be to lie and _say_ you're using blockchain, and then... not.)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KodakCoin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KodakCoin)

~~~
woah
> _The point is that distributed systems engineers know already about these
> sets of tradeoffs, and many of the alternatives to them, and with that wider
> perspective see few, if any, reasons to recommend blockchain._

It's not really a technical question. People who like blockchains like them
_because_ of that set of tradeoffs. Beyond obvious scams and stupid corporate
hype (by most of the same people who misused "cloud", btw), people understand
the tradeoffs.

I don't think that distributed systems experience qualifies you to do any more
than understand the tradeoffs, and these specific tradeoffs are understood
well by a very large number of people already.

------
_bxg1
_Thank you._ This is what I've been telling people forever. Blockchain
technology is revolutionary for a very specific and narrow set of use cases,
and outside of that it ranges from a crappy solution to completely irrelevant.

------
misrab
I think people are severely underestimating the value of a single source of
digital signing and chronology, as well as the network effects of
interoperability. Time will tell ;)

also to the point of specific design decisions, there are plenty of models
that will evolve including arbitrary protocols on the Filecoin Merkle forest,
so I'm not worried about that

also find that distributed systems experts tend to fail to see things through
the lens of cryptoeconomics, which was nakamoto's fundamental innovation. it's
about provable behavioural security

~~~
mrharrison
I agree. Imagine a frontend developer connecting to the internet and with a
couple tools like truffle and his crypto wallet, that dev will immediately
have access to so much information and logic through smart contracts via one
interface, that it blows my mind. It's still young but it's going to be
ubiquitous and pervasive. At least I'm 90% sure it will be ;)

~~~
dmitriid
I'm a frontend developer. So let's assume I've connected to the internet with
"a couple of tools". Which information and logic (???) are now available to me
that were previously inaccessible?

------
DennisP
There's room for more choices than that. E.g. you can do transactions off-
chain and keep some relevant state yourself, with an exit plan to the public
chain in case of cheating. Examples include state channels and Ethereum's
Plasma.

------
zilchers
I've found my life is a lot happier and I'm a lot less frustrated if I replace
"blockchain" with "distributed database" in my mind any time these types of
discussions come up. Technically they're different, but what is actually
potentially revolutionary about everything happening right now isn't the hash
chain, it's the idea of moving apps to distributed databases, self contained
databases and away from the database tech of old. This could apply to consumer
apps, enterprise apps, pretty much anything. When I think about it that way,
I'm much more ok with the broad overuse of the term blockchain.

------
aje403
On the bright side, we can stop calling it a scam and start calling it a
religion soon

------
tbtok
There's only one use case for blockchains: creating ecosystems. Solving a
customer's problem is typically not something you do on your own, you need to
collaborate in ecosystems. Having one company dictating what rules and
technologies are in effect in the ecosystem is risky (e.g. ecosystems created
by Amazon or Facebook). A blockchain democratises the collaboration, at the
cost of efficiency. So at its core it's a governance technology, and a trade-
off between efficiency and security of your ecosystem.

Blockchains are just a technology. The point is to look at use cases that are
now viable because of the ecosystems we create.

------
Scarblac
I was recently asked to give a short presentation on "what is blockchain" at a
session with government agencies who wanted to formulate a position on whether
they should do anything with blockchains.

And my conclusion was almost exactly the same as this post: blockchain is part
of a set of specific technologies you need to solve the very specific problem
that Bitcoin solves. Another thing without which Bitcoin wouldn't work is the
PoW stuff. If your requirements are different, then many of those other
technologies are still relevant but blockchain is not. And if you are not a
digital coin, your requirements _are_ different.

------
pknerd
This happens with most of the technologies. Remember the days when AJAX was
introduced? every other site was being ajaxified. Tech companies were
promoting it as if something very unique arrived in this world. Later it was
found that Microsoft was using it in outlook for long time, it's just they
failed to coin the term for it. Same seems with blockchain and as usual IBM is
at it's best to cash this hype for enterprises who are already customer of
their products one way or other, specially Middle east countries.

------
decentralised
The blockchain enables a set of use-cases around trust, value exchange and
cryptoeconomics. With these building blocks, there are a number of companies
working on amazing projects that are truly revolutionary.

[https://vitalik.ca/general/2018/04/20/radical_markets.html](https://vitalik.ca/general/2018/04/20/radical_markets.html)

------
jernejzen
Here's my case. I have problems trusting any centralised cloud service out
there that is significant for my privacy. I have problems with Pocket, because
it knows what I read.

If data would be stored on the decentralized nodes and accessible over the
smart contracts, my zen would be way closer.

~~~
kevinwang
But wouldn't that change your data being readable by Pocket to your data being
readable by everyone?

I fail to see how that's better. And if encryption is the solution, there
could be encrypted centralized or decentralized apps.

~~~
crispyporkbites
Readable by everyone != decentralised / blockchain

Blockchain code literally runs in an open source, open memory environment.
Which means you can guarantee the execution of code without interference.

~~~
roywiggins
But that non-interference comes from exposing all the information it operates
on to the public. Otherwise, you wouldn't be able to maintain a consensus.

(if you encrypt your data, then nobody else can see it, but you can't do
anything with it on the chain and you might as well store it in S3 or
wherever)

~~~
zodiac
Technically, fully homomorphic encryption exists (and may someday be
practical)

~~~
kevinwang
But still, you could have a centralized service that involves client-side
(potentially homomorphic) encryption and stores (and in the case of
homomorphic encryption, does operations with) the data on their servers. So
that shouldn't give a privacy benefit from blockchain over centralized
servers.

~~~
zodiac
You would get a privacy benefit in the sense that the computation provider
would not learn anything about the data you gave them. However you are right
that centralized computation providers are equally constrained (ie don't learn
anything) as blockchains in this regard.

------
xmly
I am a distributed system engineer. I worked for aws... I agree with that
bitcoin blockchain is only specific for electronic payment system. But its
design concept is quite interesting, could make quite huge impact.

------
XR0CSWV3h3kZWg
The shortest I have been able to explain it as:

If you want an append only log with arbitrary (including malicious) actors
then use a blockchain. Otherwise you may want to avoid the huge costs
associated.

------
fgoldberg
Only some projects have utility in the blockchain Actually, some of the are
Augur or Cryptocup.io

------
johnx123-up
_As original link is not available, posting the content from Google Cache for
future reference_

Thread by @clemensv: "I've talked to a lot of distributed systems engineers
(who build cloud-scale stuff) from across the industry about blockchain. While
most pl […]"

I've talked to a lot of distributed systems engineers (who build cloud-scale
stuff) from across the industry about blockchain. While most platform folks I
talked to are perfectly happy to help with frameworks that help selling
product or services, ...

... and some even rode the crypto wave to make some hay, I have a hard time
finding people in the distributed systems platform community who believe that
blockchain is even remotely as significant as the hype wants to make us
believe.

Engineers at the center of the industry understand the qualities of append-
only logs, understand signatures and non-repudiation, and understand consensus
protocols. They understand that those are a few building blocks from a large
toolbox and that there are choices for each.

A "blockchain" is a specific composition of specific choices for these
building blocks that's suitable for a fairly narrow set of use-cases. The
blockchain-specific consensus models are tailored to (a) all-around lack of
trust and (b) convergence to a singular global log.

Convergence to a singular global log with many candidate writers and many
replicas makes it hard to reach consensus and for that consensus to be
propagated; PoW or PoW+PoS (cleverly) solve that by being intentionally slow.

The PoW lottery is probabilistically set up so that a singular mining winner
can emerge and its winning block can be propagated throughout the network
before another miner finds a competing solution (there can be many valid
ones). The enabler for that is a time window.

The tradeoff the "nobody is trusted" blockchain model makes, is that it
literally trades trust for time. It's slow by design. Giving consensus forming
ample time is foundational. (I'll be happy to hear arguments that prove the
contrary).

Once parties trust eachother to faithfully collaborate, the existing consensus
models that we all use to build hyper-scale cloud systems become applicable
and those can resolve even complex and contested consensus problems in a few
milliseconds, largely gated by network latency.

Even if there's no all-around trust, there's often a neutral party that can
supervise a transaction of two parties that don't trust eachother, but who
each trust that party. "Sidechains" and "Private permissioned blockchains" are
playing that trick.

However, once there's a trusted neutral party, that trusted neutral party can
already establish non-repudiation by forcing authentication/authorization
along with a content signature and only ever allowing appends. With any
regular old database that the neutral party maintains.

The world's economy today is built on the very principle that accounting
records are both safe from deletion and immutable in digital accounting
systems. There's a clear sense of order. They are written to audit logs for
non-repudiation proof.

The cryptographic chaining of records is a good idea to strengthen the
immutability of the ledger as a whole, but it's not really superior to holding
a ongoing full copy of the ledger in safe escrow. A signature chain can be
done on any existing database.

The single global log requirement and therefore the global consensus problem
completely falls apart in all cases where the problem is partitionable (FWIW
"sidechains" are partitions). Turns out, that's true for most problems,
otherwise nothing would ever scale.

Once you can use partitions, the consensus scope shrinks to the scope of the
partition. When you transfer money from your bank account, the intial scope is
just your bank, with the initial transaction to a clearing account. (FWIW, a
"sidechain" is a clearing account). Easy.

For those familiar with (shall I say "classic"?) distributed systems
architecture, it's amusing to see things like "sidechains" with local trust
relationships emerge, because they are nothing but a reaffirmation of the
partitioning principles foundational for a functional economy

Yes. The combination of decentralized operation, variable trust, and non-
repudiation is very attractive. The world already works like that. There are
easily 15,000+ banks globally and countless more businesses that maintain
various ledgers. That's hardly "centralized".

"Centralization" is not when 15000 organizations are federated such that you
can transfer funds between them. Yes, you need a banking license and audit in
the local jurisdiction to be a bank. Because, as we see, some people are happy
to separate other people from their funds.

The specific combination of well-understood architectural building blocks that
make up "blockchain" is very well applicable, but nearly exclusively
applicable to all-around trustless global ledger accounting problem (e.g.
"coins").

Any other set of requirements is likely better addressed using a different
combination of elements from the broad toolset that exists across the
distributed systems platform landscape today. /fin

PS: I'm not an ideolog on this matter. If you're convinced that you need a
blockchain, I'll surely help with the communication path if asked. I have the
finest shovels.

Clemens Vasters 🇪🇺 (@clemensv)

------
cocktailpeanuts
First, I can't stand these people who qualify their logic based on "My crypto
friends say ...", "All my start friends are saying ... ", "All my friends who
are building distributed systems say ...", instead of 100% being responsible
for their own words. I see them as lazy cowards who takes other people's words
and transforms them into attention (a.k.a. retweets, viral posts, media
mentions, ad revenue, etc.)

Second, some thoughts on this specific argument. This whole thread is based on
an assumption that "skilled distributed systems engineer" is an authority when
it comes to Bitcoin or blockchain.

Except they aren't.

I would even go further to say that the very developers who are working on
Bitcoin protocol itself cannot be trusted as an "authority". They may be very
good at cryptography and coding, but it is very difficult for one individual
who has made a career out of a single expertise suddenly become an "expert" in
all things combined (economics, coding, cryptography, game theory). Especially
the economics part, if you're coming from a programmer background. A lot of
programmers seem to THINK they understand how Bitcoin works after reading an
economics 101 book, but the thing is, even the economists are never 100%
certain about their theories. There's a good reason why there are multiple
parties of thoughts in economics.

I once read a blog post from a guy who's very well respected in the Bitcoin
community who wrote a post about "crypto keynesians" and "crypto austrians",
and it was so obvious that he had no idea what he's talking about because he
got it completely opposite. The post only made sense if you interpret what an
"austrian economist" and "keynesian economist" is on an extremely superficial
and shallow level, perhaps reading a couple of blog posts or investopedia
articles on that topic.

I think people really need to be humble when they talk about this topic
because I'm pretty sure it's really hard for one person with narrow expertise
--unless she/he is very motivated to learn everything--to understand
Bitcoin/blockchain as a whole. This is especially true for those who just have
one expertise and never really delved into the rest because they think it's a
bullshit technology even before learning about what actually powers it.

And I have yet to see a single person who's dived really far into learning
everything Bitcoin is made up of and come away thinking this whole trustless
ledger thing is a fad and a bullshit. Some may get disillusioned that the
current existing solutions don't satisfy what they were promised, but even
these people still they understand that this doesn't mean the whole idea of a
trustless ledger is a sham. They would only think there's got to be a better
solution.

~~~
lapinot
Note that blockchain and economy (or more precisely _finance_ ) are two very
different things. Do not mix up blockchains and cryptocurrencies. The first is
a distributed system creating a centralized log, the second is a class of
(very classic, mostly unregulated) financial assets (which could be
constructed on top of very different architectures). I'm pretty sure this guy
doesn't even care about the financial asset thing, he is criticizing the
blockchain from a computer-science pow.

~~~
Scarblac
> Do not mix up blockchains and cryptocurrencies. The first is a distributed
> system creating a centralized log

It's a _very specific_ distributed system creating a centralized log, namely
one that absolutely rules out using any mechanism of trust. Only
cryptocurrencies need that. It does so at huge cost in terms of security and
efficiency.

------
snissn
> I have a hard time finding people in the distributed systems platform
> community who believe that blockchain is even remotely as significant as the
> hype wants to make us believe.

Right here! Take eBay or Amazon for example, the entirety of their business
can be run as decentralized smart contract software. The blockchain is a
distributed ledger whereby storing information is incentivized. It's
unbelievably significant. The scale problems will be figured out and reliable
and auditable databases will be the defacto choice.

~~~
KirinDave
We already have reliable databases. Blockchains purport to offer _trustless_
consensus. If that were true, it'd be a big deal. It's not clear that they do.

But why would eBay want a trustless consensus? Their entire business model is
around being that trusted arbiter and broker.

Even off in darkweb land, companies exist to service and broker transactions
that then fall back to the blockchain to reconcile payment. So presumably if
you were correct we'd see that model emerging.

I've looked, but the inside of Tor is a big place. Maybe you've seen an
example I haven't?

~~~
snissn
> We already have reliable databases.

not in the way that a blockchain maintains the final state and a clean audit
log of every transaction.

~~~
KirinDave
Git does this, doesn't it?

(Not that people here appreciate my contention that GitHub is a "white label
blockchain company")

~~~
snissn
Yeah that's true, and Github is really popular, I use it every day.

~~~
KirinDave
Well then: Git is a blockchain with proof of ownership for commits and it
doesn't need multiple miners or anything and you use it every day with what I
guess is acceptable risk.

~~~
Scarblac
Because it uses trust. I trust that only I can access my local Git
repositories, and that Github's authorization does its job.

Which is absolutely great, but nothing new and not what people mean when they
hype about "blockchain".

~~~
KirinDave
I find most folks don't mean anything they think they mean when they hype
about blockchain, so I like to try and inject reality.

------
ThomPete
The Blockchain is TCP/IP with History.

That's how you think about it and once you do that a huge amount of things
open up. Some of those might not make sense to the current cohort of
developers, proponents, and critics but the next coming generations will grow
up with this normalized and will find plenty of ways to use it.

The most underappreciated part of the blockchain is its ability to create a
secondhand market (not secondary) for digital assets. This means that digital
assets will be able to increase in value if ex-owned by the right person
(think an ebook who was owned by Obama. If you think this is far out I urge
you to look at the art industry to understand how things with no inherent
value gets traded for often insane amounts.

Collectors Cards (Crypto Kiddies) this is only the beginning and when I look
at the kind of things my son care about it's fairly obvious that digital
memorabilia is going to be a huge industry.

Digital Identity this is going to be the defacto standard in a few decades,
decentralized is the future.

So hate it or love it. The blockchain is here to stay and there is nothing
wrong with us not having found any real traction for it yet outside the
speculation space, it will come because the fundamental properties are sound
and useful.

It's worth spending many more billions on this to get it to to become the 2nd
layer on top of TCP ip on the internet. That's my take on it.

Edit: I'm genuinely curious. Why the downvotes? Did I say something wrong?

~~~
ifdefdebug
> I'm genuinely curious. Why the downvotes? Did I say something wrong?

"The Blockchain is TCP/IP with History" \- this is just sound bytes, noise
without any substance, technically wrong, and could have triggered most of
your readers to stop reading right there and press the downvote button.

~~~
ThomPete
The title of the Post starter isn't technically right either so that's hardly
a reason to downvote as that's not really the purpose of the articles.

Understanding bitcoin isn't about understanding the technology any more than
understanding economics is about how you technically print money.

Analogies are very important and the analogy I use isn't that wrong and not
without substance, in fact, I provide that.

I am not the only one who think of it like that
[https://www.wired.com/2015/01/how-bitcoins-blockchain-
could-...](https://www.wired.com/2015/01/how-bitcoins-blockchain-could-power-
an-alternate-internet/)

It wasn't the creator of TCP/IP that created Google, Facebook or any of the
other big companies out there and it most likely won't be that either with
Bitcoin.

~~~
ifdefdebug
You asked a question, I provided an answer. There is no point for me to
discuss this any further.

