[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...