[lars]

Similar to how "god of the gaps" arguments work, there's a "god of complexity" phenomenon in tech, where people will project infinite possibilities onto technology they don't understand.

Blockchain is a brilliant solution to an extremely rare problem. It lets you do distributed consensus among untrusted nodes in a setting where contributing compute power is economically incentivized (e.g. where there's mining). That applies to cryptocurrencies, but basically nothing else.

It's amazing how much bullshit has been pitched under the flag of "blockchain". Millions of dollars have been poured into projects that are technically unsound or that had no use for a blockchain to begin with. This has been going on for years.

[derefr]

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again:

It’s because “blockchain” software is a thing that already exists, but its superclass, “distributed log of signed proofs” software, isn’t a thing that already exists (except in the form of the subclass, blockchain software.)

There are tons of use-cases for which a “distributed log of signed proofs” is the perfect fit. Have you got an architecture where nodes independently make “stuff” and want to publish it “somewhere” for other nodes to find — where the other nodes have some independent criterion they can apply to validate published “stuff” to decide whether to accept or ignore it for their own use? For example, have you got a sharded data warehouse, where each shard is publishing its own write-ahead log segments for replicas of that shard to use? Well, add a “distributed log of signed proofs”, and now your closed data warehouse becomes an open network where anyone can have their own “shard”, and anyone can choose to replicate from a “shard” they trust.

(Yes, DHTs and/or gossip networks are sort of like this — but neither provides durability or linearization. If you want a new node to be able to look up historical “stuff” from publisher-nodes that aren’t online any more, then you need durability; and if you want your “stuff” validation algorithm to — at least within a sliding window — reject duplicate “stuff” from the log, then you need linearization.)

It just so happens that all the software that exists, that offers the “distributed log of signed proofs” guarantee, also offers the additional guarantee of all the nodes doing the validation of proofs serially, reducing over each new proof against an accumulator of an existing global consensus state, to build a new global consensus state, where proofs can only be valid relative to a specific “base” global consensus state. We call such proofs-relative-to-a-state “blocks”, and we call the resulting system “a blockchain.”

Most of these use-cases don’t need that additional guarantee. It doesn’t get them anything, and it costs a lot (e.g. in the inability to concurrently validate proofs; in the requirement to keep a forever-growing durable representation of global consensus state around on disk; etc.)

But the people building these systems are generally practical engineers, who “buy” blockchain software (and just ignore the features they don’t need), rather than attempting to “build” their own “distributed log of signed proofs” software with no known antecedent.

[mumblemumble]

I am coming to think that it's precisely the "distributed" bit that nobody really wants.

For example, distributed version control systems are often held up as an example of some form of precedent for blockchain-type technologies. But I've never actually seen a truly distributed (in the blockchain sense) deployment of Git. It's technically possible, but it just doesn't seem to happen.

Similarly, I'm not sure people actually want immutability. They want the ability to edit history, they just want it to not be an everyday thing. In a discussion about the relative merits of different distributed version control systems, someone invariably points out that the thing Git has that makes it more usable in practice than any of the others is that it allows you to rewrite history. In the repositories I manage, I even mandate it, in the form of requiring people to rebase before merging into the main branch so that we can linearize history. As salty former Mercurial user, I used to do the opposite and ban the practice, until I realized that rebasing and squashing is more practical in the long run. I'm trying to run a software project, not an episode of Hoarders.

[Terretta]

Distributed immutable ledger is astonishingly relevant in a variety of security and financial (and financial security) areas, but good luck explaining to the non-tech execs why they should fund projects using that rather than FOMO on “but blockchain!!!”

For purposes of talking w/ execs or boards, there are something like seven yes/no reasonably explainable properties of chains of blocks that toggled some ways give you alt coins and in one particular other way give you a fantastically high performance distributed ledger a trusted authority can keep an eye on — you can have your cake and eat it too if you aren’t being a coin.

Businesses often want that outcome, but they verbalize what they want as “bLoCkChAiN!!! to the moon!!!” and it’s tech’s job to say wait, what are you trying to do?

Quite probably, they actually could benefit from something like QLDB:

https://aws.amazon.com/qldb/

[mumblemumble]

> Distributed immutable ledger is astonishingly relevant in a variety of security and financial (and financial security) areas

I'm not so sure about that. IANAL, but I suspect that, at least under US law, a distributed immutable ledger would actually be illegal in many cases. The entire legal environment is set up around the idea that there is a system of record, and that system of record has a single custodian, and that custodian is not just responsible for tending to it, but also someone to whom you can appeal (or sue) for remediation if something goes wrong.

The immutable bit is also often incompatible. There are laws and contracts out there laying out cases where data needs to be deleted - not reverted, not being flagged as no longer relevant, actually deleted - from the record. In the US, the Fair Credit Reporting Act is probably the most familiar example, but there are others.

Yes, we can say that it hasn't taken off because people just don't understand it because it's a complex technical topic. But we should also consider the possibility that the business environment in which we are trying to ininuate ourselves is a complex technical topic, too. And also watch out for Chesterton's Fence.

[derefr]

I think you're talking about different use-cases than the person you're replying to.

A distributed immutable ledger has many uses other than recording voluntary transactions, or even recording things to do with specific people.

For example, such a ledger can be used to create a tamper-proof security-camera footage log. Just hashes of exported video files, locked into a chain at time of export. You can redact the videos themselves (i.e. make all copies of the referenced video unavailable), but you can't change the hash, and so there's no party you can collude with to substitute one video for another. Even if you're a state actor. You either have the videos — which can be proven to be the right videos — or you don't; but you'll never be able to present the wrong videos.

Or, in the same vein, a chain-of-custody log for the contents of a safety deposit box at a bank. Any time someone opens the box, an entry is automatically appended to the log saying what authorization (e.g. access card) was used to open the box. Once again, the fact that the log is distributed on a wider multi-party-controlled system, makes it impossible (or at least impractical) for the bank itself to tamper with the logs to steal something from your box.

These are "finance" / "security" / "financial security" use-cases. But they're not PII. There's no point at which any of this data would ever legally require redaction or purging, because it doesn't relate to a specific client profile. It relates either to metadata of public-point-of-view sensory data capture; or it relates to employee actions against customer accounts, where the mapping back to an individual isn't given in the public log but rather exists in a private database.

[sangnoir]

> For example, such a ledger can be used to create a tamper-proof security-camera footage log.

What's the use-case here - who are the untrustworthy individuals that society needs to protect itself against? Societal trust is currently rooted in people - it will not be switched over to machines/distributed ledgers any time soon. This is why people can write affidavits/get sworn in to say "That video's legit" under pain of perjury. Frankly, there's little money in turning over trust to a blockchain when there is an individual/organization that can be interrogated. It's not perfect, but trying to perfect it has (evidently) diminishing returns

[rektide]

> For example, distributed version control systems are often held up as an example of some form of precedent for blockchain-type technologies. But I've never actually seen a truly distributed (in the blockchain sense) deployment of Git. It's technically possible, but it just doesn't seem to happen.

The truth is, git provides only a narrow set of capabilities we use for development. Git being decentralized is insufficient. That is why the world uses github (and to lesser degrees bitbucket & gitlab): they provide the collaborative experience, they provide regulation/control/flow across the distributed systems.

There is ongoing & active work to build many of these social protocols ("Pull requests", code comments, issues, &c) in a distributed fashion, under the ForgeFed[1] project. Popular git workspace applications such as Gitea are working towards implementations.

It's been long overdue, but we're filling in the gaps, to make a distributed git possible & interesting. Historically, one of the few & only successful models of distributed/decentralized development has been the Linux kernel itself, which has stuck to using patches sent by email to coordinate the distributed work. But that status quo will soon be changing, or at least, there will be other options, than github or email.

[1] https://forgefed.peers.community/

[tim333]

>"distributed" bit that nobody really wants

Distributed adds complexity but is pretty much essential for illegal activities which is why it is needed for cryptocurrencies which would otherwise be shut down for not KYCing everything and bittorrent which would be shut for copyright infringement. Otherwise centralized is usually easier.

[throwawaygh]

Git is used almost exclusively in a centralized fashion. The use patterns really aren't all that different from SVN, even if having a local copy is kinda nice. But, like you said, having a local copy isn't really the same thing as decentralized. "master" is still a thing.

More importantly, the next big shift in version control technology is/will be back toward centralization.

You already see this with eg Google Docs. Far inferior to Word, but preferred by many because of the free and highly functional live-multi-collaborator-editing feature.

Someday we'll look back and wonder why merge hell lasted so long into the age of ubiquitous gigabit internet. Not that there won't sometimes be merges, but far rarer.

[dale_glass]

Git is very much used in a distributed fashion. Eg, on github.

Right now, I'm working on one of the forks of a dead commercial project.

Our fork in turn has 61 forks right now, some of which may diverge further and have multiple people working on them, which at some point may or not contribute things upstream.

[aeturnum]

I think it is worth thinking about systems which do not have (or need) a single source of truth (i.e. git) v.s. systems which include a mechanism for an arbitrarily number of nodes arriving at a single source of truth (i.e. blockchain).

I agree that there are often many versions of a git repo at different places and the system gets much of its utility from that quality. But this strength actually comes from git eschewing the idea of a central truth. You can have one or more remote git repo with different sets of commits. You can freely integrate whatever changes you want. That flexibility allows the free movement and sharing of code, but it is key in that movement that the system does not force a single idea of truth.

The blockchain allows new and old nodes to participate in a process of agreeing on a central truth. This is actually very cool from a technical perspective, but I think it's pretty rare that we want it in a technical system. Most things, like git, benefit from the ability to branch when needed and use social organization to handle centralization (e.x: linux development centralizes on the linux kernel git because the kernel development community has agreed to use that particular git, there are no protocol requirements to do so, and various branches are independently created in various places to the benefit of all).

[mumblemumble]

But not in the blockchain sense. All those forks aren't independently contributing to a single source of truth in a peer-to-peer manner.

In practice, those forks generally serve one of two purposes. Either they're for working separately on changes that you intend to submit upstream to the agreed-upon central repository, or you're intending to legitimately fork the project and create your own new central repository that's relatively independent of the original.

Despite from the fact that, thanks to our industry's love for overloading technical jargon, we happen to use the word "distributed" to describe both use cases, they're really quite different in practice.

[dale_glass]

They kind of are. I mean, the hierarchical structure is mostly fictional. In git any fork is as valid as any other. This is very much unlike any SVN setup. Any of those forks could conceivably become the main one, if the former official repo died, or somebody just started developing their fork faster.

[throwawaygh]

I think mumblemumble hit the nail on the head -- this isn't really distributed in the same sense as, e.g., blockchain. There is no peer-to-peer distributed ledger, no consensus mechanism, etc.

In addition to what they said, I'll also point out something else that's perhaps even more important -- you just measured "number of forks" in terms of the number of forks on github (as opposed to eg the number of people who have git cloned the repo).

[dale_glass]

A peer-to-peer distributed ledger isn't needed for decentralization. It's just how Bitcoin does it.

Also, I used github and its number of forks because it's the number I can easily work with. I have no clue how many copies of our tree are floating out there, nor is there a way of finding out.

[groby_b]

The very notion that you are a fork, and that you have forks, implies a hierarchical sense of authority. And I think that's the thing that confuses a lot of these debates: "Distributed" can mean "independent nodes", and it can mean "hierarchical authority".

Almost everybody is OK with the latter, and that's the only issue that blockchain meaningfully addresses.

[velcrovan]

Github is not an example of decentralization. Github is the center hub for the vast majority of git-managed projects. The fact that you can fork a repo is not the kind of distributed use we're talking about. Github is still the "default" host for those forked repos, and the identity provider for people working on most software projects. That's centralization.

[dale_glass]

Github is a completely optional thing though. If it were to die tomorrow, everyone still has the code locally, and code sharing is still very much possible.

[jayd16]

Bit of a nitpick but even in a team with a central origin, I think git is still mostly used in a decentralized way. Try to use Perforce on spotty internet vs git. There's a big difference.

Merge is a fundamental issue across all source control. Its not going away.

[guenthert]

> You already see this with eg Google Docs. Far inferior to Word, but preferred by many because of the free and highly functional live-multi-collaborator-editing feature.

Only for those in (roughly) the same time zone, which appears to be less often the case today.

I've seen a lot of different VCS, all the way back to RCS. I don't want to go back to the awful scheme of versioned virtual filesystem like the one of ClearCase. You can pry git from my cold, dead fingers.

[simias]

Some of it is that, some of it is just simple greed. Many people think they're too good to fall for pyramid schemes and MLM, yet they'll dump money into cryptocurrencies or some meme stock because they think it'll make them millionaires.

I too believe that the blockchain is mostly useless outside of buying drugs online, yet I don't think cryptocurrencies are going anywhere any time soon. It's effectively become a casino for millenials and zoomers where everybody hopes to become a millionaire overnight. Some even succeeded.

No amount of technical argumentation is going to change that.

[grey-area]

Yes I think greed is the simplest explanation for the explosion of interest in bitcoin and other similar schemes. They are constructed so that early adopters benefit, and benefit most if they shill the coin to others, and so they do, using various narratives about worldchanging technology, a new paradigm etc, etc.

[simias]

Weaponized FOMO in realtime at a worldwide scale. It's a tough societal problem to solve.

With good old pyramid schemes it took a lot more work to it off the ground. Now you can just astroturf on Reddit, Discord and the big social networks with your fancy new "revolutionary" cryptothingy and you're making millions.

I've been following the DogeCoin pump on reddit over the past couple of months, it's absolutely transparent that it's a pure pump with no fundamentals but people buy into it because they think they're early enough not to be left holding the bags. IMO the Gamestop thing is mostly exactly the same, but obviously the situation is more complex there.

[bob33212]

Casinos have existed for a long time and are known to be a place where a lot of people loses money, but that doesn't stop others from showing up and losing more.

[sneak]

> I too believe that the blockchain is mostly useless outside of buying drugs online

Decentralized financial tools like Uniswap and its ilk have finally changed that.

[ac29]

How? My best understanding of Uniswap is that it provides liquidity to exchange between cryptocurrency pairs. There is no evidence that it is providing liquidity for anything actually useful - with traditional finance, companies issue shares or debt to increase production lines, fund new R&D, etc.

[agumonkey]

It's also the most profitable trading category for old traders who know how to ride cycles safely. Not advocating, just adding another bit of info

[enumjorge]

> It's effectively become a casino for millenials and zoomers

Mark Cuban and Elon Musk are also investing in cryptocurrencies and neither of them fall into those age groups.

[simias]

Please don't be obtuse, I obviously wasn't implying that 100% of cryptocurrency enthusiasts are in a specific age range, I'm just saying that culturally they probably have more of a following in a younger crowd.

[enumjorge]

I wasn’t being obtuse, but I can see why it came across that way. Crypto definitely got started among the younger more indie crowd, but I think that has slowly changed over time and will continue to do so. Bitcoin was introduced almost as a way for the little guy to fight “the system”, but I think people underestimate how much influence the old players like Wall Street, billionaires (hence my previous comment) and governments are starting to have on it.

[tnzm]

They invest on behalf of the house.

[matthewaveryusa]

>contributing compute power is economically incentivized

I think this is the aspect in blockchain that has really been stretched. Most problems are within closed networks and solved with digital signatures -- is the act of signing a record proof of work? If you squint hard enough and razzle-dazzle it enough I could see how you could call it that -- or simply call it a database with a signature column :)

[shawnz]

> is the act of signing a record proof of work?

The idea behind proof-of-work is to add a cost to inserts, so that inserting wrong information is too costly to be profitable. Whereas inserting correct information makes you eligible for rewards that negate the cost of having inserted it.

[mumblemumble]

That one's always struck me. At least if you squint, that would imply that blockchain's fraud-prevention strategy hinges on nobody ever using the blockchain to handle anything too valuable or important.

[shawnz]

Yes, there is a limit to the security that a cryptocurrency can provide (like with anything else). The level of security provided is based on the market price: The higher the price, the higher the rewards, which increases the profitability of mining, thus leading to more miners, which then increases the amount of competition you'll have if you want to post wrong information. Since there is a fixed rate of new data which can be added, that's what defines the cost of inserting data to the blockchain.

An attacker with a lot of resources (>50% of current mining power consumption) could use their resources to post wrong information, but it would need to be profitable enough to make up for the immense costs. It's unlikely there would be such a situation where an attacker could recover the costs for such an attack. At best they would be spending a lot of money to cause a temporary network disruption as the "fair players" move to a forked coin or similar.

[mumblemumble]

So, I can see that argument following for something like Bitcoin. Though I think that part of that is because cryptocurrency doesn't actually have any intrinsic value. So an attack on, say, the Bitcoin network would also have the effect of devaluing the very thing you're trying to compromise.

But it does seem to be something you need to contend with when looking for new uses. Most new ideas people are thinking up have to do with something that exists outside the blockchain itself. And that, not Bitcoin, is what Azure Blockchain Service was really about. The merits of cryptocurrency as an application of blockchain are largely irrelevant to this discussion.

My sense is that the general pattern for most other uses is that the number of potential legitimate participants in the blockchain system is likely be inversely proportional to the overall importance of the thing the blockchain is trying to manage. Everyone can get in on something like CryptoKitties, but there are probably very few natural participants in a blockchain network for managing nuclear fuel resources.

[thebean11]

You can use it to handle anything whose value to an attacker is less than the cost of attacking the network as a whole right? May not be following though.

[this_user]

That is true, but it's also useless for almost all applications. Because in the real world agreements, contracts, and laws exist to create trusted relationships between parties. Relying on an inefficient technical solution instead is neither necessary nor desirable.

[jandrese]

I'm always saddened that the energy that goes into those blockchain signatures is basically wasted.

Why couldn't bitcoin work by having the miners fold proteins or something? Proof of work comes from advancing the state of the art just a hair each time. Imagine if all of the computation power being used to prop up bitcoin were also doing something productive?

[motohagiography]

Arguably, it's doing something very desirable. Maybe invent a protein coin?

[hackinthebochs]

These already exist, e.g. foldingcoin. One problem is that they require a centralized authority to approve and distribute workloads, and so this entity has undesirable power over the network. I do believe there are some cryptocurrencies where you can submit arbitrary workloads and you pay for it with the currency of the network. But they never took off, probably because they don't match the efficiency and/or data privacy of AWS.

[jandrese]

Even if you think the Blockchain itself is valuable, the "proof of work" is almost entirely wasted in the end. Some trillions of hash computations are thrown away for each one that is used.

[motohagiography]

Even as a blockchain non-fan, those computations are necessary to produce the desirable thing, and the same could be said for protein folding. There are a lot of great and devastating criticisms of blockchains, but the environmental concern is more of a proxy or even dogwhistle for a general political objection to cryptocurrencies - even reasonable objections in the context of their worldview. Greenwashing those objections seems like a canard.

[squeaky-clean]

I think you two are disagreeing on what "the desirable thing" means. You're saying it's creating the bitcoin/blockchain which is the desirable result. But they're saying that "desirable result" here is actually just computing a SHA-256 below a certain threshold. Sure you get the blockchain as a result, but does it really need to be SHA-256? As long as you have a "hash" function with a statistically predictable amount of CPU usage to generate a "successful" result, that function could maybe be something more meaningful. I have no idea if you could quantify protein folding into some sort of statistically predictable successful/unsuccessful CPU process.

[SubiculumCode]

Proof of Stake is taking over, in Ethereal, Polygon, and other alt coins.

[davewritescode]

There's also the fact that small blockchain networks become less useful the smaller they become because while it's impossible to change history, 51% attacks can make a blockchain not function in optimal ways. When you have a massive network of nodes and the incentives not devalue the thing you're trying to earn it works.

[simias]

Meanwhile larger networks become increasingly inefficient because without trust all transactions have to be checked and rechecked and rechecked and rechecked. But fear not, $magical_solution is around the corner and will resolve all of this! It's been coming for 5 years now, so you know it's due any minute now.

[marcosdumay]

That. It's yet to be seen how a blockchain that required specialized hardware reacts to a shrinking user base.

If there exists more hardware than what's active mining, and it can not be used for anything else, will there be enough incentives not to use it in a harmful way?

[UnpossibleJim]

Technically, there are multiple tracking applications, but they're more easily and cheaply handled with in place technologies, is the issue. If you were designing and building tracking ultra secure shipping infrastructure from the ground up, where everyone had to be held absolutely responsible, then there's an edge case for it, maybe.... But the use cases for blockchain are pretty small. Like small batch digital art assets and the like.

[mrkramer]

>Blockchain is a brilliant solution to an extremely rare problem.

Trust and fraud is extremely rare problem?! Read the Bitcoin's whitepaper again and you will be in the better understanding of Bitcoin's and Blockchain's purpose.

"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."

"Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments."

Decentralizing trust means not depending on one entity or group of entities to handle financial transactions or transactions of any type.

"Completely non-reversible transactions are not really possible, since financial institutions cannot avoid mediating disputes. The cost of mediation increases transaction costs, limiting the minimum practical transaction size and cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions, and there is a broader cost in the loss of ability to make non-reversible payments for nonreversible services. With the possibility of reversal, the need for trust spreads. Merchants must be wary of their customers, hassling them for more information than they would otherwise need. A certain percentage of fraud is accepted as unavoidable. These costs and payment uncertainties can be avoided in person by using physical currency, but no mechanism exists to make payments over a communications channel without a trusted party." [0]

Establishing trust means eradicating fraud in a sense that blockchain is transparent and open database based on decentralized cryptographic proof which enables trust.

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

[TimJRobinson]

It's an extremely rare problem for now because it's a new technology that has barely been explored. Like all technologies once it goes more mainstream people come up with new ideas that were never thought of because they weren't possible before.

Blockchains solve the problem of needing a shared database among people that don't trust each other. Most of the best use cases are removing middle men.

Some examples that are being worked on right now:

Trading of any financial asset - why do we need Robinhood / Fidelity etc to trade shares? If shares in companies can be listed on a blockchain then people can trade them anywhere anytime directly with each other even when they don't trust each other.

Larger markets for digital goods: Many games have started putting their items on Etherum (or layer 2 solutions) so that players can easily trade them without the developers needing to run their own marketplace. This can then extend to being able to use items across multiple games, or trade items from one game with items from another.

Now there's ethereum tokens that allow the original creator to get a cut of all trades of that item. This opens an interesting funding model where a company could create an open source permissionless game where you download the client, connect to the public chain, play and acquire items, trade those items with others, and the game creators gain funds based on a cut of all trade happening around the game which allows them to further development. Then because it's open source people can create forks with their own art styles and mod the game easily and people can participate in the same world with many different clients.

There's so many cool things happening in the decentralized finance space and I think we're going to look back on this decade as the decade where software started to eat wall street. Many of these firms are merely middle men facilitating trades amongst untrusted parties, and blockchains can do that so much more efficiently than them.

[duxup]

>It's amazing how much bullshit has been pitched under the flag of "blockchain"

You can build a city based on it... https://www.forbes.com/sites/korihale/2020/08/18/akon-is-rea...

[beaugunderson]

> Blockchain is a brilliant solution to an extremely rare problem.

sincere apologies for the pedantry, but "blockchain" is a concrete countable noun... if you can replace "blockchain" with "cell phone" in a sentence and it sounds wrong, you should change it, e.g. "blockchains are a brilliant solution" or "blockchain technology is a brilliant solution".

[im3w1l]

There is a difference between the knowledge of individuals and knowledge of institutions. Many people who seriously looked into these things said it was bogus. But the institutions didn't know it was bogus. They didn't know whether to believe the nay-sayers or not. So "our" (for some weird abstract sense of "our") knowledge increased by doing these doomed experiments.

[kevinmchugh]

Wal-Mart and Louis Vuitton both announced they were adopting blockchain. Walmart's was for supply chain tracking of lettuce. LV's was for authenticating genuineness and preventing sales of counterfeits. Both were to be run entirely by the company. Centralized. No distributed anything.

There was no reason to use blockchain in these cases, except that writing a press release about blockchain would cause a stock price pop.

[agumonkey]

What I found interesting about Blockchain were (in case of utilitarian projects).

- country agnostic scale in mind

- constantly working network

There's a project for supply chain tracking which wants to take care of .. well, tracking. But by attempting of being a universal solution, I'd foresee a lot of time saved for just about everybody on the planet.

Maybe I'm misguided

[Spooky23]

It’s a technology that’s as easy to shit on as it is to hype!

I don’t know about the Azure service, but blockchains are a useful tool for a lot of different use cases.

[Clewza313]

Such as?

[rodiger]

There's a weird insistence (especially here on HN) that if blockchain isn't doing something that can't be done in another way then it is useless.

In reality just doing normal, established processes in a distributed way often is the value-add. See decentralized finance[0]. All these tools and primitives exist in traditional finance, but when it's decentralized all market participants can get a cut of the rewards instead of just the big banks.

A more recent AWS-like example is Internet Computer[1]. A more open way to on-board data centers and build distributed apps. Could it be done in a centralized way? Yes, of course. Is it more fair and open if it's decentralized? Also yes.

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.08778

[1] https://dfinity.org/data-centers

[rajin444]

The only interesting aspect of blockchain is decentralized trust - trust being the key part. If you don't need decentralized trust you don't need blockchain. And outside of a global currency, there isn't much that needs that.

DeFi is just unregulated speculation / ponzi schemes. People came up with new systems (supposedly faster than bitcoin) to send currency back and forth. People are flocking to it hoping to get rich quick, but it doesn't actually deliver anything novel outside of not being regulated.

Internet Computer would be cool if it was actually decentralized. But it's not:

> The Internet Computer hosts its own governance system, called the "Network Nervous System" (NNS). In order for a data center to provide compute capacity to the Internet Computer network, it must acquire a DcID (Data Center ID) by making an application to the governance system

And unfortunately making a decentralized version of what Internet Computer wants to do is _very_ hard (maybe impossible).

So many of the newer "blockchain" tech is considered useless is because, like Internet Computer, they cheat and introduce centralization because of the technical limitations of being decentralized. BNB/BSC is a huge example of this (one of the major new "defi" networks).

[rodiger]

I can be a market maker for an exchange with just $100... not sure how that isn't anything new. I can get a flash loan for $10,000,000 with zero credit to profit off of arbitrage opportunities. Yes, this is all focused on money but nothing to do with speculation or ponzi schemes.

DeFi is sort of billed as an "internet of money," so it makes sense that it's focused on financial systems. Unfortunately many do just dump their life savings and hope to get rich quick. A similar thing happened during the dot com boom in the traditional markets. I imagine a lot of this will settle over time (and there will still be scams and pump and dumps, just as there are in penny stocks / the wider internet in general).

As for Internet Computer, the application to the governance system is decentralized and votes are made by token holders on-chain. It's decentralized in that the votes are open and auditable.

BSC sucks, agree with you there but they're far from the norm. I'm really just shocked that there's so little interest in the tech behind all the protocols here given the wider hacker ethos.

[Spooky23]

The pump and dump hype around cryptocurrency turns a lot of people off.

[remeq]

I agree with you that the only interesting aspect of blockchain is decentralized trust. But decentralized trust is a big thing. It is actually such a massive thing and people will sooner or later realize that. The magnitude of this thing is actually on a level of invention of democracy in social systems. It will change everything. And the application of decentralized trust (read - institution-less systems) goes far beyond decentralized finance.

If we look at the tendency of every single centralized system or organization to end up being either sub-optimal or evil or screwing individual we really have to ask whether there isn't a better way. Consider evolution of centralized political powers, dictatorships etc., consider evolution of big tech companies like google or facebook, consider evolution of big products.

If blockchain provides decentralized trust this can be used for almost evertyhing. And it doesn't really mean that you will run your trustless version of AWS directly on blockchain. For many applications the blockchain is there for trust and system of economy incentives for the actors in the systems (as these two things go hand by hand). The blockchain is not there to do the "business logic"

[whateveracct]

dfinity is pretty centralized. they cut corners and basically hand-pick their mining data centers. they only qualify as "decentralized" because they work with multiple unrelated data centers. i am pretty sure multiple hard problems that they need to solve to reach true decentralization have been punted because they hand pick their miners.

also, more than decentralization, they mostly sell their dev-friendly programming model (Motoko, wasm) but a centralized version hosted by AWS would be cheaper faster better. Lunch waiting to be eaten.

most people making cloud software don't need the decentralization. Dfinity papers over this by having their president go pontificate to make it seem like the fate of the world depends on it.

[rodiger]

They don't hand-pick miners at the end of the day- it's an on-chain vote (by token-holders and I'm sure they own a large sum so point taken).

Maybe not the best example- I'm not too familiar with the structure and they definitely over-hype everything about the project. Still the parallel is there of making a centralized thing more accessible / open to more market participants.

[Spooky23]

Exactly. Think about the downsides of online connectivity with things like say pipelines or IoT. The answer to every problem in the last 30 years has been to plug an Ethernet cable to it, and the consequences of that are coming home to roost!

The ability to have a trusted source of data to validate instructions or other content alone is very useful. Blockchain is no more “stupid” than PGP or PKI.

[lordlimecat]

>Blockchain is a brilliant solution to an extremely rare problem.

This is the most concise way I have seen of summarizing blockchain and its problems.

[cyanydeez]

blockchain can provide a proof of time and existince of digital data. thats not what nfts are sold as, but thats whats going on.

[axiosgunnar]

Millions? Billions.

[rbanffy]

> That applies to cryptocurrencies, but basically nothing else.

A shared append-only document is useful for a number of applications.

> It's amazing how much bullshit has been pitched under the flag of "blockchain". Millions of dollars have been poured into projects that are technically unsound or that had no use for a blockchain to begin with.

Capitalism is very good at extracting wealth gradients out of information ones.

[einpoklum]

> Blockchain is a brilliant solution

It's not "brilliant". It is _a_ solution, with shortcomings even for its stated purpose.

[cryptica]

>> Blockchain is a brilliant solution to an extremely rare problem

It's not a rare problem. Fiat currencies don't work for the majority of people. The problem is ubiquitous. We need to separate money from state and blockchain provides a mechanism to do that.

Just because fiat works for a handful of rich people, doesn't mean that it works for everyone. Everyone can see that the current system is unfair.

[whateveracct]

rofl you know someone is crypto-sick when they say fist currency only works for "a handful of rich people."

[cryptica]

Freedom from corporate wage slavery and mind-numbing bureaucracy is of critical importance to me.

If you're corporate cattle and you like it, then good for you but don't tell a slave that they're sick for not wanting to be a slave.

[whateveracct]

i recommend you use your technical skills to get a corporate remote job for 5 years. You can make some good coin in that time and honestly you won't have to work much. Definitely not cattle. You can probably spend the majority of your mindpower on your own interests and projects but still collect big corporate checks, bonuses, and stock.

I agree it grates on the soul. But it's a net win and only a temporary fleecing.

[NicoJuicy]

Sure, 1 random guy tweeting is way better than a state actor.

[ipaddr]

This is common with new technology. It was amazing what was sold under web 2.0. It was amazing what was sold before the dotcom craze.

Blockchains are here to stay. Replacing money is probably not a medium term goal but allowing trustless entities to reach an agreement could be interesting. No one has explored it in smaller non-global settings like a classroom where the first one to get the answer wins.

Not trusting your peers is the future.

[reificator]

A classroom has a trusted central authority. Even assuming some kind of educational benefit from students racing to be first, how on earth does blockchain accomplish anything there?

I really really hope that all the blockchain hype is from people who got in early and want to pump up the value before they get out. Because otherwise the invented solutions and worse invented problems are too absurd for me to handle.

[ipaddr]

We see examples already where a central authority is not necessary like peer grading.

The race condition could work in a bonus question where the first person to answer correctly takes the bonus marks. Students would have the opportunity to submit answers, get confirmed correct without the teacher needing to manage this.

That central authority is a bottleneck and at times corrupt. We don't trust central authority in government so three different levels of government have to reach an alignment for a law to be passed. Police powers are separate from judigical powers for a reason. Decentralization balances interests.

[reificator]

> That central authority is a bottleneck and at times corrupt. We don't trust central authority in government so three different levels of government have to reach an alignment for a law to be passed. Police powers are separate from judigical powers for a reason. Decentralization balances interests.

That is a hell of a lot to write about checks and balances to try to defend the absurd concept of a blockchain classroom quiz. This is exactly what I mean when I say I hope people are just trying to pump up the value and don't actually think this is a solution that provides any value.

If you have a corrupt teacher that can't be trusted/abuses their power somehow, the blockchain is not going to magically improve your education. The concept is absurd.

If you're writing a classroom quiz where students race to finish, a server to handle grading and track scores is the way to go. Or if the device is locked down do the grading there and just take a timestamp.

Hello dystopian future where I get quoted like the famous Dropbox post. I hope I'm not still there amongst you.

[Godel_unicode]

> classroom where the first one to get the answer wins.

Why on earth would you need a blockchain for this?

[bob33212]

If you didn't trust the teacher. The distributed ledger would prevent them from editing the database of timestamps. But then the question is, if you don't trust the teacher why are you in their class?

[Godel_unicode]

A useful exercise in determining whether you need a blockchain is asking yourself "why would a Google sheet with track changes not work here".

[ipaddr]

This is more about trust between peer groups like students vs students or larger groups like departments vs departments.

Imagine a schoolwide project like a fundraiser. Everyone is selling chocolate bars to fund new uniforms. Whoever donates the most gets to decide which team gets a bonus amount. The proof is money received. The coins are distributed.

Why do you need a teacher to manage this?

[viraptor]

In a classroom you only need a proof of something happening. A separate answer-checking (or even just timestamping) service is a few times easier to create and operate.

[newacct583]

> A separate [...] service is a few times easier to create and operate

Because it relies on trust in the service. Blockchains don't. You can run a validation regime for anything you want on a blockchain: legal, illegal, anonymous, public, anything. Store any data you want and you can verify for all of posterity that it was stored before the block timestamp.

That's the feature, anyway. But you're right, in practice (1) it's generally trivial to find a trusted service for what you want to do (trust is cheap for almost everything) and (2) actually implementing this kind of thing on a blockchain is a huge mess (bitcoin et. al. are EXTREMELY expensive vs. just trusting someone).

Maybe (2) will be addressed at some point by improved technology. But really (1) is the thing that makes this a failing proposition. Libertarian fantasy-spinning notwithstanding, the only people who really need the blockchain are doing shit the rest of us don't want them to do.

[Godel_unicode]

Except they do. Blockchains rely on a majority of actors not getting together to commit fraud. This is somewhat reasonable but still a real concern at the kind of scale Bitcoin has; getting 51% of the children in a class to gang up on someone for the lolz is trivial.

They rely on the mechanism which converts from physical to digital being reliable and trusted. Vaccine passports on a blockchain provide exactly 0 assurance that the pharmacist wasn't bribed.

They rely on the blockchain software being free from bugs and no-one-but-us trapdoors. Ask the OpenSSL community how easy verifying crypto code is.

Blockchains are not a magic solution to all trust problems.

[newdude116]

I don't see many applications for blockchain. The only application is where you don't want to have a trusted central party, be it a company or a government.

I see many start-ups advertising and betting on a blockchain technology by something that could be easier solved with a regular, central database. Are they just bullshitting?

Digital vaccination passports it an example. Why do you need the blockchain? A central government signature/database solves this problem.

[dcolkitt]

For vaccination passports, I don’t think you even need a database. Public key signatures work fine. “John Smith is officially vaccinated. Love, Cook County Health Department”. No persistent service even necessary. John can just keep that QR code on his phone.

Blockchain or trusted database authority is only necessary when there’s the risk of double spend. Like I try to sell my house to two different people at the same time. With vaccine passports there’s no risk. Either you’re vaccinated or not.

[yrro]

You need a service that verifiers can query to determine if the signature has been revoked too...

[srmarm]

That's the bit that gets me confused, with cryptocurrencies there is a clear link between the computer processing and the 'thing' you're representing (i.e crypto hashes).

With say a digital vaccination passport the 'thing' you're wanting to prove is that someone is vaccinated and the interface between the blockchain and the real world still requires a trusted central party(s) - whoever certifies the efficacy and safety of the vaccine, that the batch is legit and that it was actually administered competently and to the person in this case.

As with many of these applications there doesn't seem to be an existing problem with a trusted central party or immutability to solve

[rchaud]

Can you provide an example of Web 2.0 snake oil? I remember the shift from 1.0 to a more JS/AJAX based web. It was still the web, something hundreds of millions used.

>No one has explored it in smaller non-global settings like a classroom where the first one to get the answer wins.

What?

[ipaddr]

Here is an article written on techcrunch years ago. The snakeoil is still alive in many services we all use: facebook, youtube, tiktok, instagram..

It seems quaint to imagine now but the original vision for the web was not an information superhighway. Instead, it was a newspaper that fed us only the news we wanted. This was the central thesis brought forward in the late 1990s and prophesied by thinkers like Bill Gates – who expected a beautiful, customized “road ahead” – and Clifford Stoll who saw only snake oil. At the time, it was the most compelling use of the Internet those thinkers thought possible. This concept – that we were to be coddled by a hive brain designed to show us exactly what we needed to know when we needed to know it – continued apace until it was supplanted by the concept of User Generated Content – UGC – a related movement that tore down gatekeepers and all but destroyed propriety in the online world.

That was the arc of Web 2.0: the move from one-to-one conversations in Usenet or IRC and into the global newspaper. Further, this created a million one-to-many conversations targeted at tailor-made audiences of fans, supporters, and, more often, trolls. This change gave us what we have today: a broken prism that refracts humanity into none of the colors except black or white. UGC, that once-great idea that anyone could be as popular as a rock star, fell away to an unmonetizable free-for-all that forced brands and advertisers to rethink how they reached audiences. After all, on a UGC site it’s not a lot of fun for Procter & Gamble to have Downy Fabric Softener advertised next to someone’s racist rant against Muslims in a Starbucks.

Still the Valley took these concepts and built monetized cesspools of self-expression. Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter are the biggest beneficiaries of outrage culture and the eyeballs brought in by its continuous refreshment feed their further growth. These sites are Web 2.0 at its darkest epitome, a quiver of arrows that strikes at our deepest, most cherished institutions and bleeds us of kindness and forethought.

[srmarm]

I thought web 2.0 was more about communication flow, i.e rather than a bunch of people publishing a website for others to consume we have more of a two way communication (i.e social media). There was a bunch of tech that enabled it and came along at the same time and a very clear style that accompanied it though.

[rchaud]

There are good articles that talk about what the difference between 1.0 and 2.0 were. The transition was definitely more fluid than what numbers like "1.0" might indicate.

Web 2.0 for me was dynamic web apps like Google Docs that refreshed in real-time. Streaming video and web games were also a big part of this. The early Youtube and Dailymotion sites used Flash until HTML5 support was widespread enough to deprecate it.

[Clubber]

I remember making a website for someone back in 2008 or so. He asked if it would be Web 2.0 compatible.

[bydlocoder]

As far as I remember, Web 2.0 was about platforms enabling P2P interaction between users and we have tons of this stuff - social networks, marketplaces, gig apps...

[mrits]

It is really sad to me to see a comment so naive and uninformed get upvoted on this site. Besides just flat out false information such as being a shortage of use cases for incentivized distributed consensus you go on to assume we have even begun to work out the areas we can now apply to blockchain. It's fine to think cryptocurrency is a hustle. It's not ok to dismiss a large future corner of tech because of it.

[TomSwirly]

Some concrete examples which aren't cryptocurrency would be helpful here to evaluate your statement.

[lstamour]

I personally agree that Blockchain or distributed ledgers are overhyped for use cases where simple, centralized approaches to trust would go a lot farther.

The one example I can point to where maybe existing systems were improved through blockchain-like technology would be Certificate Transparency https://certificate.transparency.dev/howctworks/ yet even then there's a lot of trust in browsers run by centralized actors to ensure the system works as expected. The system is further documented in https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/refs/heads/... and https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6962.html Also, https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-certificate-transpar... is a good read.

[pragmar]

Here are a couple.

Identity. Once you log into a website a MetaMask address, a lot of things begin to come into focus. Create as many as you want, move contents around, etc. It's a lot more empowered than google/fb oauth feudalism.

Physical and intellectual property registries. Could be far more efficient, accurate, and resilient to bad actors.

[pornel]

Property registries are one of those stupid ideas for blockchain. If someone was going to steal your property, they're not going to care what some blockchain says about it.

If you only need an informational registry for well-behaved cooperating parties, you don't need it to be completely trustless. There are many other ways to decentralize storage and ensure consensus when you don't require mexican-standoff level of distrust.

[dragonwriter]

>Property registries are one of those stupid ideas for blockchain.

Specifically, the thing that is essential for most property registries is recognition and enforcement by a meat-space government. So, while a digital ledger is a good idea compared to, well, lots of existing property registries, decentralization/trustlessness isn’t important, adoption by a trustworthy and capable enforcer is.

[iudqnolq]

So a bad actor gets a fraudulent invention registered. In the current system some people think really hard and then consider deleting it. This has many flaws, but the flaws are in the human bits. Where they write down their decisions is an implementation derail.

How will blockchain make it better? Unless you've figured out how to have a computer figure out what inventions should qualify for protection and what infringes on them, I don't see it.

[pragmar]

>>> How will blockchain make it better?

You're focusing on patents. Countries operate copyright offices--clerks, submission fees, red tape, human error. With blockchain, I can produce and store an md5 of a audio file, pdf, or video for next to nothing. You now have cryptographic signed proof of generation at a particular time, and a system that stores the data perpetually. Yes, you still need courts and judges to adjudicate conflicts, I never said it was a 100% solution.

[iudqnolq]

But if I trust the courts they could just have md5s.sqlite?

[simonw]

Physical property registries: if you guess my password (or extort it from me with a crowbar) you get to keep my house.

[pragmar]

I'd prefer my deed committed to blockchain (by a government registrar) than held in a local instance of filemaker pro, or in a paper file cabinet, is where I was going.