[Alex3917]

> I'm not sure how append only lists allow idea sharing in ways a database does not.

So at the software developer level of the stack, what we get are new tools for managing reputation, identity, authentication, transparency, accountability, etc.

If you think of people as a graph of nodes, these tools enable novel patterns of trust and collaboration between individuals that aren't possible today. What this means is that every institution will ultimately have to reimagine itself so as to be cost competitive in the new paradigm, HT Carlota Perez.

To give a more concrete example, think of the 2008 real estate collapse. The reason the market failed isn't because people didn't have the data, it's because no one one going to read through a 3,000 page paper print out to figure out what was actually in whatever debt tranche they happened to buy. But when you can just run a simple Python script to analyze the contents of all that debt and get updates on payments in real time, suddenly those types of systematic market failures can no longer happen. And because a big portion of the lemon market problem is ameliorated, that creates new ways to finance big capital investments that would be completely impossible today.

Think about why we weren't able to have large corporations before double entry was invented/popularized in Florence in the late 1400s, because there was no way to really know if you were making or losing money once you got beyond a certain scale. Because blockchain reduces the costs of double entry accounting by 10,000x, we can (and will) restructure all aspects of society in ways that just aren't possible currently, everything from supply chains to social networks. I think it stands to reason that blockchain is going to be the most financially important technology of the last 500 years, since imho it's the biggest innovation since double entry accounting.

[shawn]

There's just one small problem: Blockchains are massive, slow, and it takes new users hours or days to join an old blockchain. Once those miiiinor problems are solved, I'll agree.

It makes sense as a store of value. But a realtime database that requires rapid, possibly millisecond-accurate entries? It just hasn't happened yet. Not on a scale that works in practice, anyway.

Example: I tried to use Namecoin a couple days ago. I got bored and quit after a few hours of "Synchronizing network". It seems to have consumed several GB. I just wanted to register a .bit domain. I didn't even get to "How do I acquire namecoin?" because (a) there is no clear "go here and pay this dude" service, and (b) you have to have GBs of free space just to try it. Such experiences are typical of blockchain, and this seems to murder consumer adoption.

[Alex3917]

> it takes new users hours or days to join an old blockchain

The main reason for decentralization is to prevent collusion. But the risk of collusion decreases very quickly even with relatively limited amounts of decentralization. E.g. a consortium of even 10 independent banks would be much less likely to steal your money than Wells Fargo alone. So while there will always be some use cases where power users will want to validate the entire chain, in practice I think we can get 99% of the benefits of decentralization with even a handful of nodes. Bitcoin wouldn't be trustworthy under this model since anyone can jump in and mine, but it's possible to create networks that are trustworthy in this way.

In terms of scalability, the three main contenders right now to be the next generation general purpose blockchain are Hashgraph, DFINITY, and RChain, with a couple dozen other dark horse contenders as well (protocol labs, eos, tezos, etc.) We don't know if any of them actually work yet, in the same way we didn't know whether or not Bitcoin was actually secure in 2010. But there is a bunch of stuff that will be launching in the next couple years and then slowly battle tested over the next decade while we figure out what really works.

Most consumer apps are still going to be driven just by Postgres or whatever, with data only validated on the chain when it actually needs to be. E.g. if you're buying a house, it's probably fine to take Zillow's word on the transaction history if you're just casually browsing, but then if you're getting serious about buying you can always hit the button to go directly to the chain explorer or whatever.

[shawn]

Yes! This is an important point, and I completely agree that decentralization is the main driving force here, not necessarily blockchains. Blockchains are a nice fallback mechanism to enforce trust, but Bittorrent proves that you can have happy ecosystems that work just fine without it.

The corollary is that I'm most interested in services that are focusing on decentralization, not merely trying to be a general purpose blockchain. One of the most important unsolved problems seems to be "I want to put this file up on the internet, but I don't want it to be taken down," plus "I want to request this file, but I don't want it to be traceable back to me," plus "I want to distribute this file, but I don't want it traceable back to me." Tor solves some of these concerns, but it remains a specialized niche. I can't just do it for any old file at any time; might as well use Dropbox for that. And why? There's no reason. It should all just be decentralized. After all, I'm online most of the time, and I'd happily upload the file to whoever wants it.

This all sounds quite shady, but the motives here are mostly pure: I'd like to distribute old ROMs and anime. Such things will get you kicked offline just as quickly as the more nefarious stuff. But this seems like a net negative for society. Society is at its healthiest when you're free to remix other people's ideas.

(More specifically, I want to write a service that lets you play whatever old ROM you want, whenever you want. There still is no Netflix of this area, and the game companies that could make it happen seem too inept. May as well force their hand with some decentralization. But that requires being able to write the equivalent of <img src="http://foo.com/img.jpg">, but for distributed binaries keyed by sha256. Blockchain could help here, but I look at this and go "Y'know, this is a perfect decentralization problem. Why aren't blockchains solving it already?")

[Karrot_Kream]

You can already put ROMs on IPFS, and if you use a JS Emulator and point it at a ROM in IPFS, well there you go.

[shawn]

Good idea; I tried that. Unfortunately IPFS doesn't yet seem reliable. Or at least I couldn't get it to work very well. I'll try again though.

Wanna collab? Shoot me an email and we can work it out. I'm really interested in getting this concept running. If only IPFS were low latency and easy for average gamers to upload files to, that seems a perfect fit.

I was hoping that as users play games, they would also upload the games to other people who want to play. That way there's no scarcity of server resources. You could fit ~40 n64 games into 1GB, so it's not a lot of bandwidth.

[Karrot_Kream]

IPFS definitely has high latency, but you might be able to combine this with the Web Storage API [1] to compress and then store the ROM data for local use. I'd be interested in a collab, is your email in your profile?

1: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Storage

[adwn]

> Because blockchain reduces the costs of double entry accounting by 10,000x [...]

Wat.

There is no aspect of double entry bookkeeping that would lead to a cost reduction when combined with blockchains, even less a reduction of an order of magnitude (or four!).

[lev99]

> If you think of people as a graph of nodes, these tools enable novel patterns of trust and collaboration between individuals that aren't possible today. What this means is that every institution will ultimately have to reimagine itself so as to be cost competitive in the new paradigm, HT Carlota Perez.

That is a logical fallacy. Every new dna mutation is 'novel' and some mutations are even solutions to real problems, but not every novel solution is the most competitive. Just because blockchain gives you new tools that solve problems doesn't mean it is the best way to solve that problem. (EDIT: To defend your statement you have the burden of proof to show that your paradigm is significantly more competitive than current paradigms. I suspect time will prove me correct.)

> when you can just run a simple Python script to analyze the contents of all that debt and get updates on payments in real time, suddenly those types of systematic market failures can no longer happen

There are many, many factors that went into The Great Rescission. Repackaging subprime mortgages was bad for investors. Maybe python could have helped that by giving investors better insight into what they were buying. The housing market declined, fundamentally, because many families were unable to pay their mortgages. Python wouldn't have helped people be able to pay their mortgage.

[sethrin]

While the 2008 crash can be described as an informational failure, my understanding was that this information was deliberately omitted, not just unread; it was fraud, not just a systemic failure. Also, you seem to be describing blockchain costs as being minimal in some sense. My suspicion is that this is less true than you think. Currently, blockchains have very high energy usage. If you are saying we need to structure society around this, then you are asking us to absorb whatever externalities go with it. The people who live around the Colombia River, where the cheap hydro power is, are getting a bit tired of BitCoin mining. I'm sure there are things which can ameliorate this issue. I'm willing to be convinced that the problems of blockchains are surmountable, but your argument seems more enthusiastic than credible.

[Alex3917]

> my understanding was that this information was deliberately omitted, not just unread; it was fraud

Debt was fraudulently misrated, so you'd have junk bonds rated as AAA or whatever. But the primary data was all there, so you could actually go visit all of the properties and talk to the owners like they did in The Big Short, it's just that no one did. The people who approved the mortgages also weren't verifying people's incomes, and in some cases were even encouraging them to lie about their incomes. But the primary data was all there, the reason no one audited the primary data was that it was too expensive relative to the payoff. Blockchains can fix this. (The residential real estate market is pretty fragmented so it's unlikely to be one of the first industries to get transformed, it's just an easy to understand example.)

> Currently, blockchains have very high energy usage.

This is really only true for Bitcoin and things modeled after it, where the integrity of the chain is secured by wasting an amount of electricity that's directly proportional to the expected future price. This clearly isn't sustainable so BTC will have to change their POW if they want to be successful. But it's also not an inherent property of blockchains, there are many other blockchains that are already secured differently or are working on novel security mechanisms, but as I said they just need to be proven out over the next few years.

[sethrin]

I did indicate that the power issues are not inherent, even in the quoted sentence. I am disappointed in your response to the degree that it does not address other externalities. In some ways the general lack of exactitude in human affairs is a feature. There are also two sides to the issue of privacy, which is not impossible to achieve for an immutable distributed ledger, but not necessarily the natural tendency. Further issues may occur to you.