
Parity founder demos Substrate, live launches a blockchain in minutes - dboreham
https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/23/parity-founder-demos-substrate-live-launches-a-blockchain-in-minutes-instead-of-days-or-weeks/
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esotericn
Launch your own blockchain in 0.01 seconds:

$ bitcoind -regtest

Please, can we kill this nonsense?

Blockchain is a Semantic Wasteland
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18267585](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18267585)

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noddy1w
No mention of gavin woods' sloppy code resulting in 150,000 ether worth of
investor funds being lost forever after the polkadot ico?

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gcb0
> investor

isn't there a better substantive for someone betting in a game of chance?

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radus
Crypto investor?

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nikolay
Should we rebrand TechCrunch into CryptoCrunch?!

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pavlov
_”... demoed launching a blockchain in under 60 minutes, a previously unheard-
of feat.”_

Or you could, you know, just use a database. Installing PostgreSQL takes
considerably less time than 60 minutes and is a much better solution for
anything where you might be tempted to use a “custom blockchain” (a.k.a.
clunky distributed database with very slow consensus and a crap scripting
language that’s called “smart contracts” to hide how bad it is for actual
programming).

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joshmn
That's not how you get to the top of HN.

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omarchowdhury
But being contrarian to anything to do with blockchain/crypto is definitely a
way to get comment upvotes on HN.

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pavlov
“Contrarian” implies there’s some kind of consensus that blockchain projects
are useful. They’re not, as evidenced by the minuscule numbers of actual
users. All the talk of “crypto Web 3.0” is total bullshit with no plausible
path to executing on any of the promises made.

But of course there’s thousands of people who still hope to make rich like the
2017 ICO scammers, so the hype train rolls on with these pointless expensive
conferences around the world where the faithful console themselves that
another boom is surely coming. The crypto-faithful are the contrarians.

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codyb
I'm not particularly pro blockchain although I think the tech is pretty neat.
The only example of a blockchain being useful I've seen was Estonia's cross
roads. They use it for their citizens, so things like medical records are
stored on there somehow, and then every view of them is recorded. This way you
can see who is looking at your info, and punish bad actors for doing so.

I think they use it for other aspects too, maybe voting? Not sure.

But of course that's totally centralized.

No idea what the hell web 3.0 is or how that'd work.

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pavlov
Storing medical records on an immutable multi-party blockchain is not only a
terrible idea but also clearly illegal in the EU (of which Estonia is a
member).

So most likely it's a regular database -- and then we're back to my original
comment: where's the use case for "custom blockchain" over PostgreSQL?

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phillux
use cases that require the functionality of reaching distributed consensus on
what should be added, removed, stored on that DB.

in blockchains, how consensus is reached is also formalized so that there is a
verifiable and distributed audit trail for every user. blockchains also
automatically backup everything in a more distributed fashion, allow for
higher participation, enable incentive mechanism experimentation,
tokenization, useful ZK-proofs... all without the NEED to trust trust a
centralized DB.

if it doesn't have any of the above features, then a reason for using a
centralized, private blockchain is to more easily distribute/decentralize that
consensus-reaching DB in the future.

... also, blockchains aren't immutable if the consensus agrees to change
something inherent in the protocol. this happens with every hard fork.

