
Do you need a blockchain? - kkleindev
https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/375.pdf
======
jmull
It seems to me the key here is "Can you use an always online trusted third
party?"

I think generally, a TTP is going to be more efficient than a system without a
TTP. "Trust" at its essence is a shortcut. Without it you have to create a
general enforcement mechanism which is going to cost something. E.g., the cost
of incenting miners. You can slice it difference ways, but in the end you need
the distributed network of nodes to exist and the people who control them to
be invested in the continued existence and integrity of the system.

I say "generally" for a reason, because I think it's certainly possible that
there are cases where the cost of the third-party is too high or the third-
party may not be reliable enough, etc. But generally, it seems to me that
blockchain is an inherently inefficient mechanism.

On top of that, the only effective use so far has been to create an investment
bubble. Once enough money has been lost on that I think there's a good chance
blockchain will get a black eye which will cause people to steer clear even if
they may have a use case that's a good fit.

~~~
drexlspivey
We are at -70% from the ATH. At what point does it stop being a bubble?

~~~
sanderjd
For me, the answer to this is that it stops being a bubble once I see a
compelling (to me) analysis of the link between the price and some underlying
utility. I've heard one compelling (to me) use case for bitcoin - removing big
banks from large long-distance cash transfers - but I strongly doubt there is
enough value in that to support the current price.

Another meta-metric I'm watching is for mainstream media and word of mouth to
lose interest, ie. once this no longer comes up at all get-togethers with
friends and family, it will seem a lot less bubbly to me.

~~~
Yizahi
Assuming we talking only about "removing big banks from large long-distance
cash transfers" which is also one of the few sane possibilities for crypto
that I would want. I suspect that if it will ever work then in the fully
regulated marked (e.g. we are transferring from regulated country to
regulated) then the recipient will have to pay capital gain tax for cashing
out on his side. This kinda defeats the whole purpose of the system.

The more I think and read about crypto and blockchain the less practical
applications I see.

~~~
gomox
Why would you pay capital gains tax on a money transfer?

~~~
sanderjd
I think because the implication is that the way the transfer actually happens
is: 1. Buy BTC in the right amount in origin country, 2. Transfer it to
another BTC address, 3. Sell BTC in the right amount in the destination
country. I believe most countries will consider the sale in step #3 a capital
gain.

------
chvid
This is a reasonable paper discussing an obivous question given just how much
hype is surrounding this technology.

To me "true blockchain technology" in the bitcoin sense of the design is open,
permission-less and only has a few real applications. The others: Private,
permissioned are really just variations of a central database which is
replicated multiple places.

~~~
simias
>To me "true blockchain technology" in the bitcoin sense of the design is
open, permission-less and only has a few real applications.

Beyond cryptocurrencies? Go on, I'm all ears. I'm always amazed by how often I
hear that claim (on HN and elsewhere) and yet nobody seems in a rush to be
specific about it.

The only other use case for blockchains I'm aware of that makes sense to me is
some sort of IP protection scheme (mentioned in the article too). If you make
a discovery you can write down "$me has discovered this and that", hash it and
put it into the blockchain. Later you can use it to prove that you actually
had that information at that date without needing any trusted peer or
institution.

But even then it only works if the chain can't be attacked you still need the
currency aspect to motivate miners (or shareholders in a PoW scheme) to
protect the chain.

~~~
endorphone
As someone in the finance industry, a very beneficial use would be book of
records / security holdings, which is currently such a precarious stack of
crazy, with a massive barrier to entry. And it is making inroads but slowly
given inertia and glacial pace of change (where the industry is most people
sharing CSVs). The same thing for property transactions, insurance policies,
etc etc etc.

"But that's just a write-only distributed database....with a layer of
asymmetric cryptography". Yeah...

It is aggravating when some in the industry try to champion everything as a
silver bullet, but it is just as flawed when many instantly veer to being
anti-that thing just because.

As an aside, proof-of- schemes are not necessary in many/most alternative
blockchain scenarios. The egregious inefficiency of platforms like Bitcoin is
not relevant for most other uses.

~~~
simias
>"But that's just a write-only distributed database....with a layer of
asymmetric cryptography". Yeah...

Glad we got that out of the way.

>It is aggravating when some in the industry try to champion everything as a
silver bullet, but it is just as flawed when many instantly veer to being
anti-that thing just because.

I disagree, it's not "just because". We're not talking about whether or not
Rust or your Javascript framework du jour has a future. We're talking about a
highly speculative bubble where people are dumping millions because they
believe that the technology has a future. If Rust fails I'll have one more
useless programming skill and a few codebases to rewrite. If cryptocurrencies
collapse people are going to lose their homes.

The whole "blockchain tech is here to stay" argument plays into that. I've
heard some close friends use it to justify their investments in
cryptocurrencies. Surely if everything is going to run on blockchains 10 years
from now then surely at least one of the cryptocurrencies in my portfolio is
going to be worth a ton then, right?

Maybe let me rephrase my question in an other way: if somebody had asked you
10 years ago to solve the problem you're describing, what would you have
replied? "I'm sorry I don't think that technology exists" or "you need some
kind of write-only distributed database with a layer of asymmetric
cryptography"?

So no, it's not just me being a contrarian naysayer, there are real
consequences to all this bullshit and pixie dust surrounding cryptocurrencies.
I mean look at the replies for this joke tweet somebody linked elsewhere in
the thread:
[https://twitter.com/MalwareTechBlog/status/93264913325659750...](https://twitter.com/MalwareTechBlog/status/932649133256597505)

Note the number of defensive tweets claiming the author doesn't know what
they're talking about and how the blockchain is actually great:

>Maybe learn how the technology works before pretending to be a snarky expert.
This doesn't make you look smart.

>very funny, but blockchain has some interesting use cases that might make
some cros domain and cross org stuff better.

>No one will need/want Blockchain is today's version of no one will need more
than 640k RAM.

>Blockchain has applications far beyond just coining it.

>That’s a pretty short sighted way of thinking. Block chain based voting is a
really good idea.

Because apparently block chain voting is something that exists.

I like this one too:

> give me an actual current non hypothetical real world use case.

Reply:

> I'd be more inclined to answer this publicly if I were not actively working
> on a related project that I am not at liberty to discuss openly

I could go and and on and on. I've gone through pages of this and the only
actual use case I see mentioned is:

>Might be useful for monitoring chain of custody for secure documents. Not
that that’s a huge use case.

Which I assume is related to the use case I mentioned in my previous comment.

In my experience these types of replies are common on every public discussion
of anything criticizing bitcoins or cryptocurrencies.

So yeah, I don't think the bullshit is on my side, and neither is the burden
of proof.

~~~
endorphone
The discussion about whether or not blockchain technology is useful has
literally _nothing_ to do with cryptocurrency bubbles. Further, I gave
_specific_ examples, and you reply with a joke tweet (which, as an aside, no
one has any duty or obligation wasting their time replying to, and is the sort
of thing that yields an insular bubble of groupthink) and then more hand
waving.

Neat.

The rest of us are just busy building solutions as the industry evolves.

~~~
simias
>The discussion about whether or not blockchain technology is useful has
literally nothing to do with cryptocurrency bubbles.

You really think people would be talking about "blockchains" if bitcoins
wasn't worth thousands of dollars? Is there currently any notable application
of this technology beyond cryptocurrencies?

>Further, I gave specific examples

That you immediately dismissed yourself as "just a write-only distributed
database....with a layer of asymmetric cryptography".

>you reply with a joke tweet (which, as an aside, no one has any duty or
obligation wasting their time replying to

It's true, but they did reply nonetheless, wouldn't have hurt to actually come
up with a decent argument while they were at it.

Still, it's really a common pattern in bitcoin discussions in my experience
(just say that the author doesn't know what they're talking about without
coming with any counterargument). You can find plenty of examples in the
comments of this very much non-joke article:
[https://medium.com/@thedrbits/why-i-also-find-iota-deeply-
al...](https://medium.com/@thedrbits/why-i-also-find-iota-deeply-
alarming-99d4f2da3282)

I could probably come up with other examples but I don't have any duty or
obligation to waste my time doing that so...

> then more hand waving.

Who's waving hands at whom in this scenario?

>The rest of us are just busy building solutions as the industry evolves.

Godspeed. I don't have any problem with that. I just wish the discussion
around these technologies revolved more around technical arguments than
ambiguous terminology.

~~~
dsacco
_> You really think people would be talking about "blockchains" if bitcoins
wasn't worth thousands of dollars? Is there currently any notable application
of this technology beyond cryptocurrencies?_

Academic cryptographers and computer scientists specializing in Byzantine
fault-tolerant distributed systems have been working on blockchain technology
for several years now - since one Bitcoin was worth merely hundreds of
dollars.

To put this gently: you're being very snarky and combative in this thread, but
you do not appear to be familiar with the basic academic literature and
engineering that has gone into very legitimate blockchain technology research.
Obviously there has been an influx of uninformed, trend-following funding
recently, but it's a serious mistake to conflate those parties with the
totality of work in the field. In fact, I gave two specific examples in a
reply to another of your comments.

------
seanalltogether
Do you need cryptographically signed, P2P distributed SQL statements that
define order by referencing a hash of the previous statement block.

~~~
rocqua
*And distributed consensus algorithm resistant to sybil attacks.

That is presuming a blockchain needs something like proof of work to enforce
them being append-only. One might argue semantics and claim that a blockchain
only needs to be a 'chain of blocks' but I think most people expect some form
of distributed consensus when something is called a 'blockchain'.

~~~
vertex-four
Unfortunately, a pile of tech companies decided to start selling "blockchain"
to banks which doesn't contain any distributed consensus system at all, never
mind a Sybil-resistant one. As a result, people in the finance world and
people surrounding that particular subset of the tech industry have a very
warped idea of what a blockchain is.

Under the definition often used in finance, all modern Linux machines are
powered by blockchain, because journald uses hash-linked entries to provide
evidence when log entries are manipulated.

~~~
simias
To be fair the term "blockchain" is too broad and generic to give it a very
specific definition. I think that's a big reason for the hype, like "cloud
computing". It's so vague that nobody really knows what it's about, if you
actually decide to get technical you lose 95% of the audience as soon as you
utter the words "cryptographic hash" or "public key cryptography". So you can
just make any bold claims without going into details and still be sort of
right. I can say something like "blockchain technology is going to be big for
avocado cultivators to be able to audit production year after year". Does it
make any sense? Who knows. But it keeps people going.

And it's probably true too. Blockchain technology is here to stay.
Cryptographic hashes, public key cryptography, merkle trees, hashcash, peer-
to-peer networks, all that is here to stay. Of course, all that existed before
the Blockchain, in the same way that servers existed before the "Cloud" but it
doesn't matter, it's all about that sweet branding.

~~~
vertex-four
As a really quick hint, if somebody pushes blockchains as a solution for
anything but cryptocurrency and managing cryptocurrency based on the state of
other cryptocurrency, or a solution for Zooko's Triangle, they're selling a
lie.

EDIT: the reason for this is that if the chain ever needs to touch something
that isn't entirely stored within the chain - for example, the number of
avocados picked on a certain day - it needs a trusted oracle to tell it that.
If you have a trusted oracle, you can trust that oracle to host a bog-standard
SQL database and avoid this whole mess, unless your boss is breathing down
your neck about using "blockchain" so your company can look cool and hip to
its investors/clients.

~~~
rocqua
What about a registry of land ownership?

That could be tracked fully on a blockchain with the added advantage of no
longer needing to trust some centralized office to 1) correctly track
ownership and 2) properly store their records.

A similar idea exists for tracking ownership of domain names.

There are other cases where you trust the oracle but want some form of non-
equivocation. A nice example is a notary. In that case, just an SQL database
doesn't suffice. Sometimes, something like a pgp-signed statement could work
for that.

If you want some more resilience against the claim 'that was signed with a
fake key' you could mandate all signatures be published on an actual block-
chain. This time-stamps them so you can see whether they happened before a key
compromise, and allows the requirement that the counter-party audits the
blockchain to ensure that no signatures are published that they did not know
of. This audit would mean that signatures published with a compromised key
would quickly be detected.

This way, the records of the notary are publicaly checkable. You now only need
to trust the notary at the time of publishing their signature on the
blockchain (with some extra time to ensure they can't claim to not have
audited yet).

~~~
mythrwy
Public records does seem like a reasonable use case. Birth, death, marriage,
ownership etc. Not sure it's a lot better than what we have now but it might
be cheaper. (Or the reverse.)

~~~
rocqua
With public records, a big question is whether you need some form of
distributed Sybil resistant consensus.

------
ForHackernews
Shorter: [http://doyouneedablockchain.com/](http://doyouneedablockchain.com/)

~~~
somethingabout
Here is an accessibility one:

[http://shouldiuseacarousel.com/](http://shouldiuseacarousel.com/)

------
ghosttie
Honestly expected a page that just said "No"

~~~
ghosttie
Oh there it is
[http://doyouneedablockchain.com/](http://doyouneedablockchain.com/)

------
tabeth
This paper is similar to an idea I'm working on finalizing from a conceptual
point of view.

I call of "Proof of Help" (as opposed to Work or Stake). To summarize, the
idea is that in a market for tutoring, people can tutor each other, however
there would be some sort of way to confirm that tutoring actually took place.

From there, you may receive help in exchange for the quantity of time you've
helped others, represented by the Help that you have accumulated by helping.
Unlike Bitcoin, this Help can never be converted for fiat and is only useful
for receiving tutoring.

Unlike Bitcoin, this wouldn't be decentralized though. It would effectively be
a public ledger run by ideally a nonprofit. I think blockchain is a good use
for this. Mainly because the quantities of Help should not be able to be
manipulated by the centralized authority. Their role here is simply to confirm
identities and serve as a sort of access control to the blockchain itself
(e.g. They can ban people, but not change how much Help someone has).

~~~
pavel_lishin
How do you prevent people from gaming the system?

Alice and Bob vouch that they each tutored each other for a week straight,
despite just leaving a Skype connection open facing a blank wall. Now they've
got fifty Tutorbucks each, whereas I had to tutor a dozen college freshmen for
a month to get the same amount.

~~~
tabeth
This is where centralization would come into play -- all sessions are recorded
and publicly available. The situation you pose could occur, but could also be
quickly identified, resulting in the banning of both Alice and Bob.

Such a deterrent would hopefully prevent people from attempting to game the
system.

The point of recording and publishing the sessions, by the way, is to prevent
repeated tutoring sessions surrounding the same question or content, ideally.

~~~
joosters
Once you add any centralization, the rest of the blockchain becomes pointless.
If you rely on one database/oracle/trusted service, you might as well let them
do all the rest of the work and scrap all the chain building, as it would be
more efficient.

~~~
tabeth
How do you _guarantee_ that the data in question is not changed without
blockchain?

~~~
joosters
You can't, but that is irrelevant if the centralized service is required. You
can point at the blockchain data all you like, but if the centralized service
that you rely on chooses to ignore the blockchain data, you're out of luck.
Hence, you either need no centralized points, or just ditch the blockchain and
put all your faith in the central resource. If it is trustworthy, great,
everything has become much more efficient. If it isn't, you're screwed,
regardless of whether or not there's a blockchain.

------
philipodonnell
One question I would like to see discussion on is about the process of
capturing value by the builder of a blockchain.

Web 1.0 was about selling stuff. Web 2.0 was about hoarding data and using it
to sell stuff. If blockchains are Web 3.0, what's the model?

Bitcoin was released free and the designer got nothing beyond the initial
stake, which only works for coins. Ethereum is run by a foundation.

Say I want to launch a blockchain startup and really hit the sweet spot
according to this paper, how do I build a business on it?

~~~
kerkeslager
The original idea of blockchain was at least partially to prevent a central
entity from centralizing the value of bitcoin and capturing its value. What
you're describing is the antithesis of what Satoshi intended.

Now, I'm well aware that technology isn't inherently ideological. So you could
hypothetically come up with a way to hack it to make it do what you want to
do. And a lot of people are trying to do this, i.e. the SegWit folks, but the
way they're doing this is by breaking the fundamental decentralization of
blockchain to make it more federated/centralized. It's a perversion of
Satoshi's vision, but it's not unethical or technically invalid.

But the question I have is, why? A business is inherently about taking money
from disparate sources and putting it in a central location: your business'
bank account. You might be able to do this with blockchain, but it's working
against the decentralized, untrusted model, not with it. A datomic-style log
handles the ledger aspects of blockchain with a fraction of the technical
complexity, and you don't need the untrusted aspects of blockchain if you're
running a centralized business (ostensibly, you trust yourself). If you
succeed in using blockchain to run a centralized business, it's _despite_ the
model, not _because_ of it.

There's one exception, which is that the underregulated nature of the current
blockchain industries and the hype around blockchain open up some
opportunities (i.e. this is why the SegWit folks can make money off this). But
that's more about checking the "blockchain" keyword off in your
marketing/legal materials than about the actual benefits of the technology
(i.e. ICOs--the only benefit blockchain actually gives is that it allows you
to skirt financial regulation, which has nothing to do with the technical
benefits of the technology). And as regulations are put in place and hype
fades, a lot of these opportunities will dry up: most are temporary and the
ones that aren't are extremely difficult technically.

Blockchain IS a revolution, but it's not a revolution that can be easily
coopted by rent-seekers (and make no mistake, that _is_ what you're
proposing). The rent-seekers will eventually break it (they always do) but
then it will be just another financial instrument, and unless you have an in-
depth technical AND social understanding of the technology (like the SegWit
folks) you're unlikely to be one of the rent-seekers who benefits from this.
There are a lot of lower-hanging fruit out there to build a business on.

~~~
philipodonnell
No objection to the term "rent-seeking", that's just another term for
"business". :-) The trick is to add economic value beyond the rent being
collected and then capture a portion of that value in the form of rent. Rent-
seeking is used in a negative context when it implies capturing rent _without_
adding value.

"You can't add value just by forking Bitcoin" may be what you are trying to
say here, and I agree. I'm trying to think past that to what value could be
added to the blockchain to justify collecting rent while preserving the
decentralized trustless nature of the vision.

~~~
kerkeslager
> Rent-seeking is used in a negative context when it implies capturing rent
> _without_ adding value.

Yes, that's exactly what I mean. And I'll explicitly say that SegWit is run by
rent-seekers. Yes, they do add value in the sense that they allow bitcoin to
scale, but they do so by making it federated: at which point they're an
immature, lower-value implementation of the traditional banking system. If
you're okay with federation, just use traditional finance. If you're not okay
with federation, then you aren't okay with SegWit. In neither case does SegWit
add value.

> I'm trying to think past that to what value could be added to the blockchain
> to justify collecting rent while preserving the decentralized trustless
> nature of the vision.

But why though? If your goals are to centralize money in your pocket, using a
decentralized structure and keeping it decentralized is like using a
screwdriver to catch butterflies. It's the wrong tool for the job. It's using
a decentralized, untrusted structure to achieve a centralized, trusted goal.

All the existing models I know of for making money off developing a blockchain
involve some form of centralization. Either centralized mining (premining,
ICOs) or breaking decentralization entirely (SegWit, Ripple).

~~~
philipodonnell
> But why though?

Because that's generally what really drives adoption, investors willing to
fund innovation that adds value.

> All the existing models I know of for making money off developing a
> blockchain involve some form of centralization.

Lets be creative! Build a 'siphon' into the blockchain to capture small bits
of each transaction and re-sell that to generate income? Or treat it as a
traditional open source project and position yourself as the best
implementation because you designed it.

There are also different types of centralization that don't necessarily
involve interfering with the blockchain. You can decentralize the ledger but
centralize the transaction entry. Or centralize the reporting (anyone can make
entries but only the authority can verify them, subject to auditing).

~~~
kerkeslager
I'll add to my previous response to this post:

Bitcoin users fall into basically two camps:

1\. Users who want to ride the hype to make money (be it through speculation
or through a centralized service).

2\. Users who want untrusted decentralization as an ideological benefit.

If you're in the first camp, you have no reason to care about
decentralization. And frankly, if you're in this camp, you're more likely to
be taken by one of the more knowledgeable users in this camp who is running a
scam of some sort than to make money yourself. The traditional banking system
might be better for you. Not because you're not welcome, but because untrusted
decentralization doesn't fit your goals.

If you're in the second camp, you have little reason to want adoption beyond a
certain point. Obviously adoption increases value and utility of your coins,
but it also pushes regulation (i.e. recent Chinese policy changes) and
centralization (like SegWit). Large-scale adoption has not been a good thing
for ideological proponents of Bitcoin.

It sounds like you're in the first camp, and you're not going to understand
why the ideas you're posing don't work until you understand the second camp.
Bitcoin was created for the goals of the second camp and if those goals aren't
your goals, using it is probably counterproductive.

------
endorphone
The definition of "trusted" is the foundation of the conclusions of this
article (and of the snarky "no" pages that are so popular), and it really
deserves a long and detailed exposition of its own.

You may _trust_ those third parties, but as always you also want the facility
to easily verify (because your trust can be undermined by a single employee, a
single malfunction, a single hack, and so on). When you add the notion of
verification the whole evaluation flips.

------
rodolphoarruda
Any justification or argumentation below the "NO" would be very welcome. I did
download the article though, if that was the takeaway behind the website idea.

~~~
wmccullough
I'll give one. It comes with the disclaimer that every time I've brought this
up, I've been told I don't "get" blockchain.

I want a national voting system with distributed ledgers in every state, and
to add to that, every state has a copy of every other states voting records by
virtue of having to validate the transactions. There's obviously lots of
particulars around this, such as what to do with absentee ballots that are
mailed in. This is a hypothetical use, at least in my mind.

Another one, more for the finance industry. A few years back, I paid my rent
with a moneygram. A few weeks later, I got a phone call from the rental office
telling me that moneygram rejected the payment and that I needed to call
moneygram. Upon calling them, they said that they had record of me buying the
moneygram (or whatever the hell it actually is), but that their system didn't
have a record and there wasn't much they could do beyond give me a refund. How
in the actual hell does a payments company have a problem like that? As a
developer, I'm left to wonder if this was caused by some errant production
release that wiped records, or a developer who ran a script from a well-known
runbook that wiped out critical data (read: Amazon S3), or maybe even fraud
somewhere in the pipeline. Why don't they have this data distributed and
backed up in offline systems? If the government is willing to throw the book
at financial fraud crimes (Unless you are Jamie Dimon), then there aught to be
some kind of mandate that we have a verified ledger of electronic financial
activities. The even scarier thing, to me, is that I thought they would have
been doing that already...

Those are a few potential uses from my perspective.

~~~
shawabawa3
Voting comes up a lot as a use for blockchain, but I've never been convinced
that a regular public database wouldn't be better - generally the government
has to be trusted in some way, and gets to say who can and can't vote, so
blockchain's main benefits (trustless+permissionless) aren't needed.

Payments is definitely something blockchain _can_ do better in some cases

~~~
scott_s
Verifiability by an individual voter - given their receipt (hash) they would
be able to verify that their vote (transaction) was in the chain that produced
the final tally.

I am in general a blockchain skeptic - I think in most cases, there’s just
enough trust to just use a centralized database - but voting seems like a good
usecase for blockchain, as it provides voters with a receipt and it’s designed
for auditing provenance.

~~~
AlexandrB
> Verifiability by an individual voter

This is, in fact, undesirable. If verifiability is possible by an individual
someone can ask you (under thread of violence) to verify that you did or did
not vote a certain way. It's especially undesirable if verification can be
performed a long time after the vote is completed because laws and social
mores can change turning a previously innocent vote into a black mark.

~~~
filoeleven
My linked comment(1) should be a way to verify that a vote was recorded as
cast while at the polling place, and to provide a receipt to allow later
checking that nothing was tampered with that doesn’t reveal ballot choices.
This would stop anyone except the government itself from getting proof of how
someone voted, and if the latter situation arises you have bigger problems,
but burning your receipt is easy.

There are probably even better methods to further protect both anonymity and
verifiability. I don’t know if the group at (2) is still active, but the
graphic presented there looks like a good setup—-though I think they are after
vote-from-home, while my linked comment still makes use of polling places.

(1)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14921442](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14921442)

(2) [https://followmyvote.com/cryptographically-secure-
voting/](https://followmyvote.com/cryptographically-secure-voting/)

------
aiCeivi9
Lack one question: "Is your software/infrastructure in dire need of
refactoring/upgrade but management isn't willing to pay for it"

~~~
js8
"Is your software/infrastructure in dire need"

If you need to convince management to pay for it, then it's not yours.

------
xHopen
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RN8bnNe-
Is](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RN8bnNe-Is)

------
adultSwim
No

------
Fletch137
I might be a bit grumpy, but I'm getting really sick of these type of pages.
There's no information, just a smart-arse "NO". It doesn't help anyone and
it's so overdone I don't think it's funny anymore.

~~~
ThePadawan
Note for future comment readers as confused as me:

The post now points to the PDF of a 7-page paper which goes into some detail.

Apparently, the original link led to a snarky "No", which isn't at all as
flippant as what the paper states.

~~~
Udik
Can somebody post the original link in a comment?

~~~
esnard
The link was
[http://doyouneedablockchain.com/](http://doyouneedablockchain.com/)

The PDF is linked in the footer.

------
rb808
I prefer this one.

How to decide if blockchain is right for your project?

[https://twitter.com/MalwareTechBlog/status/93264913325659750...](https://twitter.com/MalwareTechBlog/status/932649133256597505)

------
_wmd
mods: I think it is a deeply embarrassing indicator of the state of our
industry that a balanced, well-referenced, academically framed discussion of
the tradeoffs of a buzz-laden technology should be allowed to be flagged like
this.

At the least, replace the site with a link to the PDF. It seems the average
user here is incapable of reading as far as the second link on the page.

> The choice between a permissionless, permissioned or centralized database is
> not trivial. While this question has been discussed before [15], to the best
> of our knowledge, we provide in this article the first structured
> methodology to decide which technological solution is the most appropriate
> depending on which application scenario

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emirozer
Sorry but this is a bit dumb. If you say YES to this question: "Can you use an
always online trusted third party?" Regardless of your other answers, it
always says NO as a result.

Can someone give me an example of an always online trusted third party, and
also let me know that how can you see into the future so that this third party
keeps its guarantees throughout life?

Edit: flagging this post as it seems like a troll attempt to me

~~~
_wmd
It's little surprise to find someone billing themselves as a 'distributed
systems engineer' disliking a tool that helps regular people choose simple
designs where appropriate.

From the perspective of a regular user, many "always only trusted third
parties" exist - in the western world, for all intents and purposes, they
include their utility suppliers, banks, telephone companies, email providers,
and chat services.

This site is perfect for someone like my sister who is constantly forwarding
blockchain-related junk to me, because her (non technical) job brought her to
a few conferences about such things. Yet she doesn't understand the design
tradeoffs of such an approach, she only sees the buzz.

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philfrasty
I get the joke „do you really need a blockchain?“ and sure there is a lot of
„AirBnB on a Blockchain“ types out there that do not offer a real advantage
over a centralized solution.

But why not embrace all the money (and talent) flowing into this space through
the hype and let natural selection run its course to leave us with some great
tech that really leverages blockchain technology?

~~~
acdha
Great technology solves the right problem. Throwing resources at something
usually results in improvements but it still doesn’t mean that it’s solving a
problem many people have or that it’s competitive with alternatives which are
inherently easier.

eInk might be a good example: despite a lot of interest and investment, it’s
still a niche product despite having made big advances from where it was in
the 90s because competing technologies had fewer hard challenges.

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tlrobinson
A less condescending version of this that actually explained why you do or
don't need a blockchain would be nice.

~~~
howToLearnSpark
just scroll to the bottom of the page then
[https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/375.pdf](https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/375.pdf)

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NoGravitas
Obviously, Betteridge's law of headlines applies here.

~~~
wjh_
I was about to comment exactly that.

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nukeop
In other words: do you want to see your stock triple in a week?

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tanilama
True

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mjfl
do you need online payments? Blockchain is nice.

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elmar
The system you are building needs to be decentralized and censorship-
resistant? yes, then you need a blockchain.

~~~
chx
This is bullshit. Plain bullshit. Tor is decentralized and censorship
resistant. I am not 100% whether Kademlia networks are censorship resistant
but I think so.

~~~
wjh_
> I am not 100% whether Kademlia networks are censorship resistant but I think
> so.

Seconded. I'm almost certain they are, or at least, they're pretty damn hard
to stop.

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onion-soup
Do you need an internet? Ok, let's have a look at this diagram:

Do you want to have social life? \---- Yes: you don't need internet \---- No:
you need permissionless internet

Clearly, you don't need an internet. It lacks coherence and autonomous smart
contract decentralization cloud computing chainblocks. Case closed.

