
Blockchains are the new Linux, not the new Internet - gk1
https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/28/double-double-cryptocoin-bubble/
======
abalone
Lots of words, not a lot of concrete use cases.

If you scroll way down this is what you get:

 _- "a reserve/settlement currency"_ \- Why?? certainly not for stability.

 _- "replacements for huge swathes of today’s financial industry"_ \- Still
not concrete!

 _- "namespaces (such as domain names)"_ \- Also vague what it would improve.

 _- "implementations of distributed storage systems"_ \- To which he adds "the
centralized solution works just fine".

So... still waiting to hear a concrete, specific, cogent use case.

~~~
Taek
Blockchains in their original design were special because they could resist
contentious changes in the event of political turmoil. Bitcoin protects users
against hyperinflation chosen by a ruling elite trying to fund a war, for
example.

Bitcoin is a money that doesn't grant massive economic power to a controlling
authority. The US has massive global influence derived from its status as the
global reserve currency. Using bitcoin does not grant that power to anyone,
and therefore could be argued as a better base for a global currency.

Namespace stuff is exciting for the same reason. Today there are powers and
squatters and authorities that can decide if you get the right to a domain.
This is inherently political for contentious names and sites. Decentralization
isolates you from these risks.

Blockchain 2.0 has spoiled this quite a bit by running things like a startup
and essentially giving full control to the founding team. I think most people
who are newer to the blockchain space completely miss the advantages of a
system that is extremely difficult to change.

~~~
shandor
I keep hearing about an inherent problem in this capability to "resist
contentious changes". In dark corners it keeps whispered that if any one
entity gets control over 50% of the mining capacity, they can essentially
decide the "immutable truth" in the blockchain. Is there any merit to that
scenario, or is it complete bogus? And if it's true, how come it's not more
openly discussed?

I guess what I'm asking is if things like the hard fork of The DAO Ethereum
blockchain are actually a fundamentally solved problem. Stuff like that
happening when our banking infrastructure has moved to a blockchain sounds
like a disaster.

~~~
doomrobo
You listed two forms of control: social and computational. The latter is baked
into Bitcoin and we rely on the assumption that no single entity will control
>50% of the computing power of the network. This situation being "bad" is
purely a consequence of the construction of the blockchain.

On the other hand, the DAO fork was a result of centralized control due to
social factors. As with bitcoin, a >50% consensus is necessary to fork a
blockchain. But because there is a single overwhelmingly popular ethereum
client, the developers had the ability to make the software obey the fork by
default. A referendum was conducted in good faith, and the devs flipped the
switch. But again, this was only possible because everyone was using the same
client to begin with, and few people bother to change the default behavior.

~~~
shandor
> the DAO fork was a result of centralized control due to social factors. As
> with bitcoin, a >50% consensus is necessary to fork a blockchain

I'm not very well-versed in computational power requirements on this scale,
but it doesn't sound at all infeasible that a nation state (or a couple in
unison) could setup a "51% attack", thus reducing the social form of control
back to only the computational one. And if anything, that threat is only going
to become worse with ever-increasing computational capability, advent of
quantum computers at some point, etc. Nations (and other _huge_ players) have
the resources to tap into all that new power, while the individuals ideally
making up the bulk of a blockchain's computing power would most probably not,
at least not in big enough scale.

I don't see how that could be prevented, and that leaves me somewhat confused
on why the blockchain is advertised as "immutable" as it is.

------
shea256
> Today there’s a lot of work going into decentralized distributed storage
> keyed on blockchain indexes; Storj, Sia, Blockstack, et al. This is amazing,
> groundbreaking work… but why would an ordinary person, one already
> comfortable with Box or Dropbox, switch over to Storj or Blockstack? The
> centralized solution works just fine for them, and, because it’s
> centralized, they know who to call if something goes wrong. Blockstack in
> particular is more than “just” storage … but what compelling pain point is
> it solving for the average user?

Ryan here from Blockstack. Our goal with storage is to allow users to bring
their own storage (e.g. Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud, etc). We believe in re-
using the best infrastructure out there and not reinventing the wheel.

The key is that Blockstack delivers a thin layer on top of all of these
storage providers with a common interface and end-to-end encryption, reducing
them all to dumb drives. This (1) removes the potential for vendor lock-in (2)
puts pressure on all the providers to be more competitively priced (3) enables
greater data security.

Additionally, Blockstack isn't just about storage. It's a full stack for an
entirely new kind of internet and a new way of building applications.
Developers can work with a new blockchain-based domain name system (BNS), a
new user-owned identity system, and a new BYOS storage system. The dream is
for developers to be able to create a decentralized twitter by simply
publishing a bundle of html, css and JS. The app folder runs as a single page
application in your browser and can exist and replicate and live beyond the
developer without the need for server or database maintenance. Servers could
be relied upon for push notifications and feed aggregation, but they wouldn't
be critical for operation and they'd be throwaway.

All this represents a pretty massive shift away from the model today. Instead
of users revolving around applications, applications will revolve around
users.

~~~
yeukhon
Is Blockstack built on your proposed infrastructure and how the fullstack is
built? In another words, are you currently dogfooding?

~~~
devrandomguy
[https://github.com/blockstack/blockstack#architecture](https://github.com/blockstack/blockstack#architecture)

------
lumberjack
I'm not very well versed in the world of banking and finance. What would banks
use a blockchain for?

All I can think of is a trustless clearing house. That would make sense on one
hand, but it would also divulge a lot of possibly sensitive information to the
public.

Other that that I know there have been a lot of hackathons about Bitcoin
organised by banks but I never heard anything coming out of them.

~~~
runeks
> I'm not very well versed in the world of banking and finance. What would
> banks use a blockchain for?

Nothing, in my opinion. The value of a blockchain stems from the fact that,
combined with proof-of-work, a single history of transactions can be agreed
upon without a central party. This is the same feature that prevents
alteration of history, because it would require recalculating the proof-of-
work. This comes at a very high cost, however, since energy is literally burnt
off just to reach this distributed consensus. Therefore, it only makes sense
for the utmost valuable applications, like digital money.

I mean, right now Bitcoin miners are paid over a million USD per day in order
for the network to reach distributed consensus. Please, anyone, let me know
which kinds of applications can bear even a tiny fraction of this cost, except
digital money. Even at 1% of this cost, a blockchain-based clearing protocol
would be both more expensive and orders of magnitudes slower than using a
central party -- and the purpose of clearing is to increase efficiency/reduce
costs in the first place.

Banks are in the business of taking in deposits and lending them out, while
taking a cut. Trustless lending makes no sense; you need to trust whoever you
lend money to, or you'll be lending a lot of money to gambling addicts, with
little chance of repayment.

~~~
pjmorris
> I mean, right now Bitcoin miners are paid over a million USD per day in
> order for the network to reach distributed consensus. Please, anyone, let me
> know which kinds of applications can bear even a tiny fraction of this cost,
> except digital money.

Real estate sales. US residential market, ~188K average house price, 5M house
sales annually, 6% commission + 1-2% fees per sale. A blockchain record
tracking the transfer of title, perhaps in parallel to the existing county
appraiser records, and to the MERS system [0], would be worth something. At a
flat fee of $100 (less than the property appraiser fee), that's 500M annually,
clearing your bar of 365M. At a percentage of the sale, anything over 0.005%
would do.

You're looking at tracking currency, but tracking assets and their ownership
is another important function of banks, one that blockchains can help
implement.

[0] [https://www.mersinc.org/](https://www.mersinc.org/)

~~~
mter
Wouldn't a 51% attack means I could lose my house?

I seem to be missing how this would work or why this would be desirable.

~~~
literallycancer
Anyone could fake your signature on a few papers, bribe the guy at the land
registry or whatever bureau handles property transactions and you could lose
your house. It doesn't have to be a house, it can be a company or anything
else. All at a fraction of the cost of 51% attack.

~~~
paulmd
However, with a 51% the attacker now authoritatively owns my house. If someone
tries to land-snatch my house in the real world, I go to court and get it
back.

Meatspace resolution is a feature, not a bug. Including for cryptocurrency, as
the ETH/ETC hardfork has definitively shown (comparing the relative values of
the two). Everyone _talks_ a big talk about immutability... but nobody
actually wants to live on the "authoritative" blockchain where somebody made
off with 15% of the money supply.

If your assumption here is that you live in a war-torn country where a warlord
can use guns to take away your property, or another situation with no real
rule of law... the warlord is not going to care about what some "blockchain"
says. Or they'll use their guns to force you to transfer it to them for a
penny. Get real.

~~~
avar
You and so many other people in this thread misunderstand how a 51% attack
would work in this context.

You buy a house, the transaction gets on the blockchain network. Just like you
wait for confirmations with Bitcoin you'd wait e.g. for 1 day or for 1 week
confirmations, this would be agreed upon by both the seller and buyer.

Now, let's say someone with deep pockets re-computes the last 1 week of
transactions in a 51% attack and "undoes" that transaction. The branch of the
blockchain that got replaced doesn't just disappear, it has your house in it,
thousands of other houses will have been sold through that branch of the
chain, and thousands of people will have that full public record.

At this point you and the rest of the owners could obviously go to a court and
get your houses back, just as you could if the deeds got lost through a fire
today but you had other evidence to prove they existed.

Nobody's suggesting that the entire court system be replaced by a blockchain
and we ignore all other mitigating evidence, it's just being suggested that
storing e.g. deeds in such a system is more reliable than storing them in a
couple of filing cabinets somewhere.

------
apozem
I think the author has hit the nail on the head here. Blockchains offer two
useful things:

* Decentralized authority

* A way to make digital goods scarce

To my knowledge, no one has created a business that takes maximum advantage of
these strengths to provide value to the user. I can't imagine what kind of
business could do this. Someone who can will make a lot of money.

~~~
runeks
What offers distributed consensus is proof-of-work, not blockchains
themselves. The append-only list of blocks, that is a blockchain, is designed
the way it is such that past blocks accumulate work performed on later blocks.

And the only "digital good" a blockchain can make scarce is the token which
exists on the blockchain itself, which is completely useless unless it's
supposed to act as a store of value. And, arguably, if a blockchain token is
valuable because it's scarce, it makes little sense to have an unlimited
number of blockchains even if each of them only have a limited number of
tokens.

~~~
paulrd
Yes, but block chains are also integral to proof-of-stake or general byzantine
fault-tolerant consensus algorithms. Do you mind me asking: Do you have a lot
invested in Bitcoin?

~~~
TD-Linux
I don't know of any working non-proof-of-work cryptocurrencies ("byzantine
fault-tolerant" sounds like a federated or centralized system to me, hardly a
cryptocurrency IMO).

------
jgalt212
Now that people are making money in bitcoin again, you'd think folks would
relax on these "everything looks like a nail" unnecessary blockchain
solutions.

------
jcfrei
In order for a decentralized and autonomous blockchain to live up to it's name
it needs to provide value to those who verify the transactions on it (ie. the
miners or those who hold a stake in case of PoS). So the two extreme outcomes
are: Truly decentralized and autonomous blockchains will disappear an be
replaced by private, regulated versions and the value of most current
implementations (ethereum, bitcoin) will go towards zero. Or people really
value blockchains which can't be controlled by any government and prices will
remain high. Most likely we'll see the emergence of both kinds of blockchains
- depending on the use case. So to me this is where the analogy to Linux
breaks down. Linux became one of the most important - if not the most
important - operating system because it was free, open source and had a non-
restrictive licence. Truly autonomous blockchains on the other hand can only
prevail if they are exclusive and not free.

------
koonsolo
Funny how lots of technical people are looking for the "killer app" of
blockchain, while cryptocurrency is right under their nose.

I'm a firm believer that cryptocurrency (and no other blockchain application)
is going to have a huge impact on the world.

To me it always sounds like "Wikipedia is nice, but wiki software is going to
have a huge application one day, we just don't know yet what".

Cryptocurrency has a chance of replacing a (huge part) of fiat money. Which
will have a huge impact on the currently existing systems.

And there is a pretty straightforward way towards it:

\- If you have a smartphone, you can accept payments.

\- Everyone has smartphones these days, including small shop owners in
developing countries.

\- No more currency exchanges when traveling, just pay with bitcoins.

------
lsobral
interesting read, still if the author is correct and blockchain becomes the
defacto standard for decentralized server structure for banks, etc it is a
huge position to take and will open up space for a lot of innovative
applications on top of it.

------
thinkloop
Consumers don't use the internet any more than they use Linux. They interact
with Google, Dropbox, Facebook, etc., not tcp, ip and ssl. Only only engineers
use the internet, just like Linux. Maybe I always saw it different than the
author, but to me the analogy of Bitcoin being like the internet in 1996, has
always been about infrastructure.

------
sengork
Few years ago the same argument went for OpenStack which was dubbed "the new
Linux".

------
none_to_remain
I don't even get how this is supposed to be a criticism? Like this guy
considers Linux an also-ran OS overall because it is only a bit player in one
niche of "desktop OS"?

~~~
jpatokal
His point is that people are investing in blockchain technology like it's the
next Microsoft/Facebook (read: headlock on a monopoly source of thousandfold
profits), when it's actually more like Canonical/SuSE/Red Hat (competitive
services business with low margins).

------
lngnmn
Nope. It is a new XML, CORBA, J2EE - the-only-right-thing-to-do kind of shit.

------
aqsheehy
Blockchains are the new south seas, not the new Linux

------
wcr3
blockchains are the new microsoft of itunes if apple googled AI IoT-QL with as
do many look like data.

~~~
drdeca
What?

------
mootothemax
Like Linux, still not ready for the desktop?

And... on to the next analogy.

~~~
tehlike
But you dont want it to be the desktop. You said want it to be your serving
infrastructure where things run on.

~~~
tdy721
If I want to drive my kids to school in a tank, I damn well have the right to
do it.

