[jMyles]

How did this become religion on HN?

Interesting things in crypto-blockchain tech, today:

* Origin

* NuCypher (disclaimer: I'm on this team)

* Loki

* New version of web3.py / other python tooling becoming mature

* Trustless Quorums

* Distributed validation

I can go on and on. But I just don't see how anybody can think that these are uninteresting times for this tech.

[wpietri]

Would you be so kind as to show a few of those technologies in some practical use where they're sufficiently better than existing technologies that they are displacing existing businesses?

> But I just don't see how anybody can think that these are uninteresting times for this tech.

Really? For me it's the almost-a-decade of hype but seeing very little in practical utility beyond speculation, ransomware, and some light crime. As an example a New York Times writer just tried to spend the weekend living on Bitcoin and failed egregiously: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/16/nyregion/new-york-today-l...

I'm happy to admit that there's more activity in the space than I could possibly keep track of, so there could definitely be a pony in there somewhere. [1] But it shouldn't be any surprise that after so much hype resulting in no apparent useful effect on the rest of the world many people are skeptical that the cryptocurrency world will ever produce anything more than dubious claims, Ponzi schemes, and million-dollar thefts.

[1] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/12/13/pony-somewhere/

[jMyles]

I'm head-down in writing NuCypher as we speak, but it's obvious to me how to do what we're doing without a distributed consensus mechanism, and I do think that the real world use cases will be pretty rad.

Our system allows an actor (Alice) to select any number of recipients (Bob) in a Policy. Alice can disappear from the network forever, and subsequently, any DataSource can encrypt data, using Alice's public key, which can then be decrypted by all of the Bobs.

That's pretty cool to me. I do think that medical devices / IoT are an obvious use case. I also hope that our tech is used to build selected consortiums of journalists, whom whistle-blowers can then encrypt for only by knowing the policy key.

Another interesting use case is for distributed ops: if you have a number of streams of operational data that you want to share only with a certain number of watchers, presently you need to trust a centralized service to do that.

I'll admit: I'm not really the use case guy. But I am waist-deep in the python over here, and I can tell you we have a good thing going.

[wpietri]

So I'm sure you mean well this is an exact example of my problem with the cryptocurrency/blockchain space.

For years and years I've said, "Yes, that is a pretty cool technology, but what real-world value is it currently providing?" One common answer is, "But it's a really cool technology!" No argument, but that seems to miss the point. Another is, "I'm sure it will be amazing!" Which again, misses the point. A third is, "It might be great for X," but without any real proof that people doing X want the technology, without demonstration that the current alternatives are inadequate, and without apparent recognition that a future hypothetical does not in any way satisfy somebody looking for traction.

Plenty of technologists think they have a good thing going. Right up until the investor money runs out and customers have failed to show up.

As an example, look at 3D movies and TV. 3D has been about to change the way we see things since the 1950s. There is no denying the technology is very neat to technologists. Early adopters even get excited! And then it turns out once again that customers don't really care. This pattern goes at least as far back as the Brewster stereoscope in the 1850s.

So please, don't be shocked that people are tired of blockchain/cryptocurrency hype. That you find the technology interesting does not mean that anybody else will find the (lack of) actual deployed use interesting.

[acjohnson55]

> A third is, "It might be great for X," but without any real proof that people doing X want the technology, [...]

It often seems to me that the mathematical purity of many crypto techs are a poor match for the fuzzy real world requirements. The result ends up being a big pile of abstractions with poor usability and major holes. After all this time, this still applies to basic payments for tangible goods.

[wpietri]

100% agreed. Somebody elsewhere in this thread just did the "blame the user" thing again just now:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16854568

Blaming the user only works (for some value of "works") in a situation where a power relationship constrains the user. E.g., we've all seen customer service agents dealing with shitty in-house software. They can't easily quit, so they will just accept being told they're "doing it wrong".

But that doesn't fly when the user can easily make other choices. People who get blamed for "not doing enough research" when they have trouble using Bitcoin will probably not work harder. They'll just go back to using credit cards and Paypal and Venmo, which a) work much better, and b) have people who are trying hard to make that work well for them. People whose Bitcoins get stolen mostly aren't going to go and become security experts. They're going to use existing methods, which they generally understand how to secure, and which often have security and anti-theft measures built in.

Sure, they may pay a little more in transaction fees. (Although those fees are often hidden, so they may not notice.) But in effect, those fees are buying insurance. They're buying security teams. They're buying user interface designers who work hard to make things easy. For many people, that's worth it.

[jMyles]

Hmm - it seems, though, that you haven't responded to the use cases I've outlined above. What say you?

[wpietri]

They are hypothetical. I asked for "some practical use where they're sufficiently better than existing technologies that they are displacing existing businesses," which is pretty clearly not hypothetical.

Cryptocurrency and blockchain proponents always have hypothetical use cases. The original Bitcoin paper [1] gives a hypothetical use case, a "purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution." This still remains basically hypothetical; even prominent Bitcoin boosters have given up on that vision. [2]

I'm done taking hypotheticals seriously in this space; I've seen too much hype and approximately nothing in the way of results. Maybe someday you'll be proved right about your use case. Maybe you'll have customers who not only buy it but keep using it and come back to buy more. But until then, you should expect people to be skeptical. Previous blockchain/cryptocurrency promoters have, for me and many others, used up all the reasonable benefit of the doubt and more.

[1] https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

[2] https://avc.com/2017/08/store-of-value-vs-payment-system/

[querulous]

how is this better than pgp? what does it do that keybase can't already do?

[jMyles]

With PGP (for that matter, PKE generally), you always need the original recipient to stay alive and use her private key to decrypt.

With proxy re-encryption, you don't. So any use cases that involve Alice disappearing while others continue to be able to encrypt for Bob (even without knowing who Bob is or what his public key is) are good ones for NuCypher.

[jonnydubowsky]

I've been using my bitpay card for over a year to handle every type of payment that you would want to make using fiat money. I know this isn't viable as a total replacement for dollars yet, due to the sometimes wild fluctuations in the price, but that is stabilizing over time. It is reasonable to think that the price of btc will eventually reach a more stable base, as more money (including institutional money) enters the space and options for shorting become more accessible. The NY times writer just didn't do enough research to figure out how to spend bitcoin. It's not that hard. These are early days, and this is still experimental technology, but is becoming more practical by the minute.

[wpietri]

The NYT writer did more research than most people would. If you're blaming the user for not teching correctly, you've already lost.

If the review I read is correct, that's an ordinary debit card that one refills by selling bitcoin. Which has approximately no value to most people, because they already have debit cards that work just fine.

It could be that bitcoin will eventually end up being useful as a currency, but its high volatility means that day hasn't come yet, and won't come soon. Prominent bitcoin advocates are happy to give up on it as a currency altogether. E.g.: http://avc.com/2017/08/store-of-value-vs-payment-system/

[osteele]

Claims that a previously-hyped technology is now uninteresting are pretty standard for this phase of the hype cycle.[1]

Of course, the fact that other technologies have gone through both a peak and trough before settling between them isn't confirmation that any particular technology will. (I bet Theranos won't rebound.) It should cause one to discount the sheer volume of disillusionment, where not accompanied by evidence, just as one should previously have discounted the volume of hype.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle

[tdb7893]

Cryptocurrencies right now are at the point where there has been lots of hype for years now but very little actual use (it's mostly just for speculation right now). I'm just burned out of the hype around it without it really delivering on a large scale.

[notyourwork]

Especially when you have things like this https://www.ibm.com/blockchain/

Buzz buzz.

[degenerate]

The video on the IBM blockchain site is one of the most generic, non-descriptive product videos I think I ever saw! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRgWvJ6eTiY

[bduerst]

Or this: https://www.kodak.com/US/en/kodakone/default.htm

[amasad]

I would frame it as lots of interesting theoritcal and PoC things but very little applications that provides value for end-users.

[woah]

It's what's known as a mid-brow dismissal. The average HN commenter feels a gratifying sensation of intelligence when they point out that "a blockchain is just a database". They can feel that they are debunking a con with their razor-like intelligence, like Neo, escaping from the matrix.

[wdewind]

The "blockchain is just a database" critique is an application of Conway's Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law). The basic critique is: the problem being solved with the overwhelming majority of blockchain tech seems to be a political, not a technical problem. It's a critique that says the issue with this thing you are fixing isn't actually that the data layer doesn't match the existing political structure, it's that the political structure doesn't actually seem to support a demand for this kind of data layer.

The reason this critique is so prevalent on HN is because a lot of us just watched the last 10 years of the internet go from "that thing that is going to democratize technology and knowledge" to "a centralized management system for privacy invasion." The reason for this seems to be, loosely stated: "no one wants to run their own mail server." Because no one wants to put the effort in to dealing with running an email service, we allow Google, Facebook etc. to run them for us. The reason for this is because our economy is based on specialization of labor: it's by design. I can choose to spend my time running a server, but allowing someone to do it for me is orders of magnitude cheaper due to economies of scale, so unless I have a really strong demand it's probably not going to happen.

The blockchain allows for us the same effect as "running our own email servers," and most of us really don't think it's likely that people are going to want to host their own nodes in the blockchain, because, referring back to Conway's law, there are fundamental political aspects to our culture that do not support this architecture.

[asymmetric]

> The blockchain allows for us the same effect as "running our own email servers," and most of us really don't think it's likely that people are going to want to host their own nodes in the blockchain

The way I see it, one of the big assumptions of the technologies in this space is that participants are only acting out of self-interest. Meaning, that there's a strong push towards designing systems where behaviours that are beneficial to the network are also economically rewarding.

Meaning that in theory, cryptoeconomics could be seen as an attempt at finding a solution to the problem you mention.

[wdewind]

I'm saying the technology is derivative of the economics and politics of our culture, and it is unlikely that this relationship will invert itself. Tons of political science and economic thought has gone into designing systems where behaviors that are beneficial to the network are also economically rewarding, you're basically describing market economics. Nothing about cryptocurrency is novel from a political or economic theory standpoint.

[asymmetric]

It's precisely the application of market economics to fields of technology, communication and society that previously were mostly voluntaristic that is one of the main opportunities for blockchains (whether that's a good thing or not is an interesting discussion that I wish were had more often).

Think of the incentivization layer built into something like Filecoin vs the voluntaristic approach of Freenet.

Which leads us back to your point:

> Because no one wants to put the effort in to dealing with running an email service, we allow Google, Facebook etc. to run them for us.

Because until now, you'd have to do it for free.

[wdewind]

> It's precisely the application of market economics to fields of technology, communication and society that previously were mostly voluntaristic that is one of the main opportunities for blockchains

We don't actually let markets make decisions for the big stuff. Take banking: in fact by a lot of measures it's the most highly regulated industry, and most of the fundamentals (like the interest rates) are not set via markets, but via elected (or sometimes not) officials. We don't actually want market economics to run the vast majority of our systems, which is why we've never built frameworks for it before, not because it's particularly complicated.

> Because until now, you'd have to do it for free.

Why wont specialization of labor take over again, and make it so crypto just turns into a different set of centralized players running the infrastructure with a ton of consumers? What happens when it turns out the vast majority of people don't actually want to be involved in running their own banking infrastructure?

> (whether that's a good thing or not is an interesting discussion that I wish were had more often).

Totally agree, upvoted :)

[hudon]

How is your comment not a mid-brow dismissal?

There are so many projects that promised the world and did not deliver, as well as so many projects that ended up being outright scams, that it's not surprising that when someone says "but what about Blockchain X, Blockchain Y and Blockchain Z projects?", we all roll our eyes and think "I'll believe it when I see it."

It's not as if any blockchain project has provided a long lasting use case beyond speculation, in which case you calling us all idiots would be warranted. After 10 years of flops, the burden to show how interesting these technologies are is on you now.

[jMyles]

> It's not as if any blockchain project has provided a long lasting use case beyond speculation

I don't understand this assessment either. How do you square this with, for example, people who have been able to obtain psychoactive compounds and other medicines that were previously unavailable to them?

[hudon]

Once we all agree that you can't do anything useful with the blockchain except buy drugs, there will be little resistance when a bill gets proposed that bans the purchase and/or mining of bitcoin, "the payment currency for illegal drugs that uses more electricity than Ireland". And then that final use case is also gone, hence why I said "no long lasting use case".

And nice try with calling this contraband "medicines". The way to get legitimate medicinal drugs legalized is through careful analysis and discussions, and then you use democracy to make it happen. See California. What you DON'T do is invent some tech that wastes our planet's resources and invent some story about a decentralized future to fool regulators and then enable all kinds of illegal transactions, from human trafficking to terrorism, just so you can smoke a joint effortlessly.

[aianus]

> Once we all agree that you can't do anything useful with the blockchain except buy drugs

There are plenty of legal things that are difficult to purchase with conventional reversible electronic payments. Off the top of my head:

Gambling deposits (yes, these are legal in most of the world but plagued by chargebacks from losing punters)

porn/sex toys (legal, but people don't want it showing up on their CC statements and don't trust these sites with their CC number)

"Suspicious" purchases with too much chargeback risk (eg. someone wants to buy a Macbook online with a US credit card and a Nigerian shipping address)

"Cash-like purchases" like buying a gold bar or some foreign cash online and having it shipped to your house. The margins on these types of purchases are too small to cover the credit card fees and the chargeback risk is too high because it attracts carders.

I could probably go on, but if you don't think irreversible electronic cash has any legitimate applications, you're not thinking hard enough.

[hudon]

> if you don't think irreversible electronic cash has any legitimate applications, you're not thinking hard enough

I actually don't think blockchain-based ledgers are irreversible. The most exhaustive account for how these ledgers are reversible is captured in the Blockchain Folk Theorem paper [0]. We can brainstorm all kinds of fun use cases for irreversible digital cash, but given the growing evidence, I don't believe such digital cash exists.

[0] https://www.tse-fr.eu/sites/default/files/TSE/documents/doc/...

[jMyles]

Well, needless to say, I see it a bit differently.

Drug prohibition is not the future of humankind.

If blockchain tech can more quickly undermine it, then I don't think it's reasonable to say that it has no role in making the world a better place.

Additionally, if blockchain tech can substantially undermine a policy entrenched with corruption and enforced by violence, I think it's reasonable to surmise that it has other, less controversial use-cases as well.

The current state of development in this field suggests that I'm right - again, see the technologies above; it's not obvious how they're possible without a distributed consensus mechanism.

I also think that the remark "smoke a joint effortlessly" is both a silly ad-hominen and a red herring. I have been effortlessly smoking joints in all sorts of jurisdictions for the past decade; the change in law really didn't do much to enable that any more than it was already trivial.

However, if I were a member of a less privileged class and wanted to retain some anonymity, or if I wanted access to a more esoteric plant or compound and didn't have the social connectivity to obtain it, then I think that I'd find a mechanism to subvert these prohibitions very helpful.

Not everyone has the same opportunities and protections as you. Your implicit suggestion that everyone simply live in California is very insensitive. Technologies that tend to smooth this disparity are reasonable to celebrate.

[jonnydubowsky]

Jmyles, your reasoned and compassionate tone and plea to consider the benefits of blockchain which might effect those less fortunate is right on. How about the thousands of people who have already sent millions of dollars back home to developing nations where they previously had to rely on western union and their exorbitant commission fees. For the unbanked, blockchain provides significant savings in remittance costs. Even with the higher costs of sending bitcoin and ETH, with a little ingenuity, use of lightning, and buying into the book on GDAX, these fees can be significantly reduced to a point much lower then western union. On the opposite side of the spectrum, for the ultra-wealthy, cryptocurrencies offer the ability to place a portion of one's capital in accounts which are not seizable by any means. This is a significant feature of the technology, and coupled with the level of encryption, already represents a small, yet sizable place in the world banking system. It is expected that the many offshore banking havens like Guernsey, Jersey, Isle of Mann, will continue to expand this feature in providing protection for people's assets.

[hudon]

I did not argue that everyone should live in California, I argued that to declare that we need the blockchain, as if free speech and democracy were foregone conclusions, is anti-social and destructive. And I used California as an example of how legalization can happen.

You're right that some nations will be more oppressive than others, but you're forgetting that those places will more easily ban public blockchains than in places you've hinted don't need it. See Pakistan, Bangladesh, or China as examples.

So you either live in a place where you can fight for your right at a political and social level, and don't need the blockchain (eg. USA), or you live in a place where you cannot easily affect policy, in which case your government has probably also decided you cannot use tools that would circumvent their enforcement... such as the blockchain.

[jonnydubowsky]

Ethereum is still essentially in its "live demo" phase. The release of dApps and user-friendly-ish products in the blockchain space has had about 2 years of traction. Your application of skepticism is appropriate, the burden of proof is on the developers to show the value of these projects, but it typically takes a decade or so for disintermediating technology to reach the point of ready adoption. We are in the single prop plane phase not too far from kitty hawk.

[wdewind]

What's the dApp equivalent of the space shuttle?

[hk__2]

I’ve checked NuCypher’s homepage and I find a bit strange to have that much emphasis on the blockchain on your homepage and at the same time only 5 occurrences of the word "blockchain" in your 21-pages whitepaper. Am I missing something?

[jMyles]

Two things:

1) The whitepaper describes the nature of our network and how Alice and Bob use it. It does not describe (and isn't meant to describe) node operation except as Alice and Bob need to understand it. We'll have an additional node operation whitepaper that describes the smart contracts in more detail. We - and I know this may sound strange - decided to build our cryptography and network first and foremost rather than race to build "something, anything, as long as it's blockchain."

2) Do you think that the whitepaper insufficiently describes how Alice and Bob use the blockchain? If so, do you have suggestions for how we can do this better? I think our whitepaper is pretty solid, FWIW. If you are Alice or Bob, I think this gives you exactly the understanding of the blockchain application that you need.

[hk__2]

Thank you for the clarification. Re 2), I didn’t read the whitepaper in full but rather grep’d "blockchain" to understand how you used it.

[nikanj]

VCs read pitch decks, not whitepapers

[jMyles]

This strikes me as needlessly mean.

Our website is not designed to appeal to VCs per se; we are not raising money right now and, frankly, if we were, we don't need a website to do it. Our team and our repos speak for themselves, IMO.

As I explained in our other comment, our whitepaper mentions the blockchain integration in all the places that matter. I'm surprised to hear that 5 is not enough.

[nikanj]

You're right, I was more curt and that came across pretty asshol-ish.

In general, whitepapers mention the blockchain in all the places that matter. Contrast websites and pitch decks mentioning it in all the places it can possibly be mentioned - as it's perceived to increase the odds of getting attention.

[john_moscow]

It basically looks like a smart contract-powered decentralized escrow service, but the impression I got from their main page is that there isn't a specific end user or market for this yet, although that didn't stop the VCs from funding it.

[tuxxy]

> smart contract-powered decentralized escrow service

That's actually not quite right. I'm one of the engineers here, but allow me to put my evangelism hat on a bit here. We're building a decentralized key management system similar to AWS KMS or Google Cloud KMS -- except decentralized.

We use proxy re-encryption to do this. You can read about how it works in our Umbral blog post[0].

Several large applications are within the healthcare world. This allows patients to be in control of their own medical data and to share/revoke their data at will with other doctors, hospitals, etc. This lets them retain their own encryption keys without trusting another party.

Its market/end user is specifically anyone who has a need for a KMS. I Would also like to point out that NuCypher can be used as a consumer grade KMS -- something that I am exceptionally excited about.

[0] - https://blog.nucypher.com/unveiling-umbral-3d9d4423cd71

[paulie_a]

I honestly think those are the two worst possible examples.

I would never trust my secret management to some random block chain. And for medical records? That is laughable at best with severe HIPPA compliance issues.

[tuxxy]

> I would never trust my secret management to some random block chain.

Me neither. ;)

[leppr]

You would not trust a cryptographic system to manage your cryptographic keys?

And you think regulations are set in stone with no room for innovation?

Empty, politically motivated arguments.

[paulie_a]

No I am simply pragmatic. Blockchain is an empty promise