[seibelj]

No, but it isn’t about lying as a matter of business, that would easily be detected and caught in most cases, and a large amount of work to continually lie effectively. If you have employees and machines writing lots of data it’s infeasible to tamper with it in real-time.

The tampering comes after the fact when a legal issue arises. The immutable nature of the ledger makes it an improvement over the past by preventing later tampering.

[asynchrony]

So why not use a central database and allow all stakeholders to replicate and keep their own logs of edits. It would be far more efficient. It would lack a certain buzzword though.

[seibelj]

A blockchain is a database optimized for that use case. Your desire to avoid the word blockchain is because you don’t like the connotations.

[asynchrony]

A blockchain isn't optimal for anything. If it was there should be some evidence of it improving something in the real world, no? Something other than a cult of buzzwords and speculation.

[tim333]

What was probably the original blockchain was created for bitcoin and is good for that. Though the paper didn't coin the word blockchain, it described it "As later blocks are chained after it, the work to change the block would include redoing all the blocks after it."

Then after bitcoin had gone up the marketing guys saw visions of billions in free money and started saying blockchain, blockchain!

[seibelj]

It is optimal for situations where you don’t want to trust a central institution. An asset worth $70bil from zero in a decade (Bitcoin) should be considered a successful experiment even if it disappeared tomorrow. Pure computer science, math, and game theory created it, and it’s quite impressive.

[asynchrony]

I’m not sure that the creation of an asset bubble is a good metric for success. How do you feel about pets.com and tulips?

[seibelj]

We are far beyond anyone reading this thread other than us, and I am happy to continue discussing because I hope I can convince you that novel technology is being created to solve real problems. It isn't the panacea that fraudsters have been pushing, but I believe interesting solutions and companies will come of this.

If you look at Bitcoin and the Proof of Work mining algorithm that was created to solve its BFT problem, what you have is a globally dispersed group of participants driving the cost of SHA2 hashing to as close to zero as possible. Electricity combined with computers can be converted to Bitcoin, which has value because a group of people believe it has value. You are optimizing everyone to solve that problem, and people are responding naturally to economic incentives.

I believe other problems can be reduced to a Proof of Work distributed problem to drive the cost to zero. LivePeer ( https://livepeer.org/ ) is a recently launched protocol built on Ethereum to drive down the cost of transcoding live video. This is a computationally intensive process full of proprietary technology and patents that forces video streamers to become beholden to centralized third-parties such as YouTube, Twitch, etc. LivePeer solves this problem by incentivizing global participants to commit transcoding resources to an open network, ultimately driving the cost of this to zero. This will reduce censorship and costs.

Beyond computationally intensive work and protocols, I believe that smart contracts will open up a range on novel use cases. For starters, pure digital assets will become a way to fund development of videogames. Free to play games like League of Legends and Fortnite sell in-game assets, but these are not unique - they sell as many copies as people buy. While this works for big players as a business model, I believe new, novel games will come from making game assets provably unique.

These are just a few examples, but many very smart, non-crazy non-scammy people are working in this industry and creating new technologies. It's sad that the fraud has poisoned the conversation so much, especially on tech places like HN.