[pyr0hu]

I don't know, talking about blockchain became such an extreme topic that one can't just talk about it, even if it's a note that "We had a chat with Eth Foundation" and people are coming with foaming mouth. The article does not mention that they are thinking about _crypto_ but _blockchain_, which, seems like not a lot of people know about, does not 100% means "im going to release a shitcoin, haha, rugpull".

It's insane.

[sdiacom]

Good. The mere mention of "combining existing successful open-source product with blockchain" should get about the same reaction as "combining fruit bowls with metal spikes". This is a good thing, it means that people are waking up to what crypto actually is. There is no successful or interesting combination of "useful thing" and "blockchain", unless your definition of success is siphoning money from technologically illiterate people to grifters' pockets.

It's evident that the person who wrote the blog post does not understand that they're being approached by grifters, who want to use their existing brand goodwill to expand their grift's outreach. Being approached by the Ethereum foundation should be treated like cold emails asking if you'd like to put a link to a casino in your website. I'm glad that the community was able to clarify this for them.

[pjc50]

> Being approached by the Ethereum foundation should be treated like cold emails asking if you'd like to put a link to a casino in your website.

Yes. It's become a sort of memetic virus that causes people to lose all their critical thinking abilities and immediately start trying to turn everything into paperclips (well, turn energy into discarded hash computations). This is why it gets a response like Alien or The Thing where people who appear to be compromised by the mind virus get the flamethrowers turned on them.

[pyr0hu]

But why can't we talk about it like normal people? Everyone is coming against each other, it became such a taboo that one can't have a normal conversation with an other person for like a minute before they start going against each other's throat. It's starting to become like talking about politics.

[sdiacom]

This is a good thing. The more outwardly toxic the reaction against cryptocurrency grifts becomes, the less outreach these ideas will have, and the less people will be affected by them.

At its core, it's a form of herd immunity. You don't drink bleach, not because you know personally what drinking bleach does to your body, but because society has told you what the consequences of drinking bleach are, immunizing you against the idea of drinking bleach.

[QuadmasterXLII]

less like talking about politics, more like emails about boner pills

[Brian_K_White]

You just exemplified their point.

original post: we're not talking about crypto

comment: they're not talking about crypto but people still just say "F them crypto is bad!"

this comment: F them because crypto is bad!

Crypto (money, nfts) is bad, I think smart contracts are a mistake too, and I don't think LO needs blockchain either, but the objection is more like the one someone else said about, if there's some feature that needs it, fine, but don't just look for some excuse to use a solution with no problem.

But also it would be absurd to say that cryptography, authentication, and povenence have no valid application with documents.

[sdiacom]

They are talking about crypto, though. What do you think the Ethereum foundation does? Wax poetry about Merkle trees?

[miohtama]

You can find out what Ethereum Foundation does e.g. here

https://esp.ethereum.foundation/about

“ ESP focuses on strengthening Ethereum's foundations and enabling future builders: improving infrastructure, expanding the range of tools available to those building on Ethereum, deepening our understanding of cryptographic primitives, and growing the builder ecosystem through education and community development. The work we support is open source, non-commercial and built for positive sum outcomes.”

[sdiacom]

So do you believe they opened talks with the people working on a word processor in order to "[deepen] their understanding of cryptographic primitives"? Is that what the LibreOffice blog post is about? Cryptographic primitives?

It seems more likely to me that they were looking into "growing the [grifter] ecosystem through [...] community development" instead.

[miohtama]

Cryptographic research makes sense for LibreOffice. There is no any reason for LibreOffice to grow grifter ecosystem - this assumption sounds more fueled by feelings than based on factual discussion. E.g. using zero-knowledge proofs to confirm facts about the document content without revealing the full document is much more sensible research topic for LibreOffice.

[JumpCrisscross]

> building on Ethereum

[manholio]

The only revolutionary thing blockchains enable is decentralized electronic cash and financial assets, which are fundamentally bad ideas, and the reaction is justified.

Any other "blockchain" related innovation is just a solution in search of a problem with the real purpose of pumping some virtual asset and selling it off in volume to other speculators. Anything you claim can be done with blockchains (other than decentralized finance) can be more easily done with databases, PKI, hashtrees, ZKPs and other technologies that exist for decades, and that includes smart contracts and anonymous & decentralized communication.

[MarkPNeyer]

This is a first world perspective.

You clearly live with a political stable government you can trust not to steal from you or imprison you for engaging in political protests.

People in such places are using decentralized assets to protect themselves. What do you think they should do instead?

[manholio]

> What do you think they should do instead?

How about... they, and everybody else around the world, should work hard for good governance for all people of Earth?

It's simply obscene to claim that a speculative token peddled by SV venture capitalists could somehow magically solve things like disease, violence, corruption and lack of basic infrastructure keeping these nations down. It's so self serving and detached from developmental realities of poor countries - which I experienced fist hand in my life - that it makes my blood boil in disgust for the crypto bros.

[fsflover]

> How about... they, and everybody else around the world, should work hard for good governance for all people of Earth?

Easy to say. Try to go protesting in Iran now.

[dhdgrygev]

There are no real world use cases of blockchain tech besides crypto. Or can you demonstrate one?

[zimpenfish]

Maersk uses blockchain for cargo tracking[1].[2]

[1] https://merehead.com/blog/maersk-blockchain-use-case/

[2] Entirely possible this could be done without a blockchain, yes.

[free652]

99.99% is done without blockchain, that's a pilot project with little adoption.

[Brian_K_White]

"can you demonstrate one?"

Blockchain is just bookkeeping. I don't know, can you demonstrate a use case for accounting or book keeping?

Up to now we always had to do accounting in books that can be cooked and have to be trusted.

Blockchain is accounting with books that can't be cooked and don't have to be trusted.

It has other problems which are real, but so what? Everything has some kind of problem.

With blockchain the problem is if you go for convenience and use a centralizing key custodian, then someone else controls your keys and everything they protect, and if you don't, then it's too easy to lose your keys and everything they protected with no recovery.

Well those are real problems but they are no different from the problems of using a plain database that can be copied, modified, hidden, stolen, has to be trusted even though you know you actually can't trust the owner, etc...

[JumpCrisscross]

> Blockchain is accounting with books that can't be cooked and don't have to be trusted

Not really. It’s books that a couple people tediously agree on.

[heather45879]

Blockchain has pretty powerful use cases in the enterprise. Ethereum provides one such solution which allows companies to have a private blockchain and programmable smart contracts in place—and with that a nice internal audit trail as well.

Blockchains can use proof-of-authority or proof-of-stake not as a means to accumulate “wealth” but firstly to secure the network from tampering while facilitating the resilient, chain of transaction records.

Ethereum is a distributed Turing machine (completely programmable)—first and foremost—and that is much more powerful than a simple coin.

[sdiacom]

Distributed programmable Turing machines are indeed very powerful. We're talking through a network of distributed programmable Turing machines right now. It does not involve a blockchain.

[heather45879]

Thank God it’s not—lest your tasteless sarcasm would be trapped for all eternity. ;)

[joao_lopes]

Academia is currently exploring multiple use cases, and some are already being used in real world scenarios. Permissioned blockchains for example can have multiple use cases in enterprise.

An example is supply chain management [0] and supply chain traceability, which is already in use at Walmart [1].

[0] https://scholar.google.pt/scholar?q=blockchain+supply+chain+... [1] https://jbba.scholasticahq.com/article/3712.pdf

[mkmk3]

The Matter IoT protocol uses a blockchain for device attestation

[pclmulqdq]

A few more that havent been mentioned: Source control, public cryptographic beacons (eg randomness beacons, beacons containing public keys). Chaining blocks with cryptography is actually very useful.

[JumpCrisscross]

Context matters. This wasn’t LibreOffice talking to a researcher. It was a conversation started by the Ethereum folks. They’re crypto.

[chopin]

The OP is about talking with Ether and I rather associate crypto with that than blockchain.

[pyr0hu]

Thanks, the person really just proved my point. We cannot talk about it properly and having a civilized discussion.

[Sakos]

I'm open to the idea that blockchain might somehow be useful for something somehow in the future. I don't see what LibreOffice could gain from blockchain.

I also think it's telling that they'd rather ignore the negative feedback because they want to apparently continue on this path than actually recognize that people don't want blockchain garbage ruining what's otherwise a good project.

I'm looking forward to the next post in 6-12 months where they talk about all the "awesome" plans they have with blockchain and they'll have the comments locked from the beginning. Oh, and not to forget the ensuing fork because honestly, we just want a word processor that doesn't suck and isn't proprietary.

[ekianjo]

> I'm open to the idea that blockchain might somehow be useful for something somehow in the future. I don't see what LibreOffice could gain from blockchain.

It's not because you can't imagine anything that nobody else can.

[mavhc]

Why shouldn't you ignore feedback that's ill informed, reactionary, or just wrong?

[DemocracyFTW2]

Are we already at the point where saying that crypto is a scam and the blockchain won't serve a useful purpose in a word processor is—"reactionary"? Dude get a grip.

[mavhc]

The article was very specific about it not being crypto and not being used in a word processor, so yes.

[actually_a_dog]

Maybe because it's coming from the people who read your blog and use your software?

[mavhc]

Most of your users are idiots though, they'll just ask for a faster horse

[DemocracyFTW2]

Aren't you the guy who tried to sell a faster blockchain to me last week so I can keep better track of all the horses in my stable?

[h4kor]

Because there are no use cases for blockchains. Humanity spent billions (trillions?) of $ on this technology and there is no use for it. Now the people who sank their money into this, desperately try to find some fools to pass the hot potato to.

[bartread]

> Because there are no use cases for blockchains.

I think this is it or, at least, to moderate slightly, there are few valid use cases for blockchain. The top comment, from Theo Jackson, captures it really well:

"Please don’t. If there is a requested feature that _requires_ blockchain I’d be interested, but “possible ways to combine LibreOffice with blockchain technologies” sounds like a solution in search of a problem."

What are the actual problems LibreOffice are trying to solve here? It just feels like this post dropped in from 4 years ago where everyone seemed to be trying to shoehorn blockchain into everything with no clear idea of what they were actually trying to achieve.

And then there's the fact that many blockchain implementations have an absolutely horrendous energy requirement. It was always odious (or at least from about 2013 onwards) but, in 2022, in the midst of an energy crisis and rising prices, it's both ethically and environmentally indefensible. I know that Ethereum has been working to address this but the reality is that for many extant cases blockchain is horrifically compute intensive and inefficient.

[web3isgoing]

Ethereum energy consumption is now negligible:

https://ethereum.org/en/energy-consumption

[xigoi]

…due to proof of stake, which requires cryptocurrency. So much for “it has nothing to do with cryptocurrency”.

[azangru]

> Because there are no use cases for blockchains.

Someone in the comments on LibreOffice blog expressed the same opinion. Which surprised me. Has the consensus been reached among the serious non-grifting public that blockchains are useless to represent peer-to-peer trustless money? Has bitcoin been declared a failure?

[soco]

I'm not sure how a word processor uses peer-to-peer trustless money. The discussion shouldn't even be about crypto and blockchains, but about how crypto and blockchain can benefit LibreOffice. Given we cannot identify how crypto and blockchain can benefit anybody (well, except scammers and those 11 folks who actually transferred assets to third world countries) I believe the topic should have quickly died off but yeah...

[azangru]

> I'm not sure how a word processor uses peer-to-peer trustless money

The parent (and the commenter on the site) weren't saying that an office suite has no use for blockchains; they were making a far broader claim that there are no use cases for blockchains.

[xigoi]

Bitcoin is wasting humongous amounts of energy during a climate and energy crisis, which makes it morally unacceptable.

[azangru]

That's not the argument the parent is making. They say, no use cases.

[fsflover]

Banks also require a lot of energy.

[DemocracyFTW2]

And so does heating swimming pools, baking bread and enjoying one's night at the movie theater, none of which excuses or justifies wasting energy for whatever real or imagined purpose.

[xigoi]

Not nearly as much.

[input_sh]

If it didn't find its way into everyday person's pocket in 14 years since Bitcoin's whitepaper (even with all the money and attention thrown its way), I think it's fair to say it's unlikely that'll happen in the next 14 years as well.

[ekianjo]

> there is no use for it.

No use for it? The blockchain is a massive achievement. It's a decentralized verification system. Of course it has plenty of uses beyond crypto currencies.

[emptysongglass]

That isn't true. A blockchain powers Secure Scuttlebutt, Jami, Urbit, and has use anywhere a verified supply chain is needed. Because some people have politicized it, now all blockchains are scams or "useless". But this is demonstrably not true. It's just a technology and people have misused it but that doesn't render the technology itself useless or a scam.

[sdiacom]

Correct, but the word "blockchain" has two meanings. You're talking about the technology known as blockchain. The blogpost is not about the technology known as blockchain, it's about the grift known as blockchain. Here's how you tell the difference:

When a project has a problem that needs solving, and they look for a solution to that problem, and the right solution happens to be a blockchain-like system, then we're talking about the technology known as blockchain.

If the problem these projects are trying to solve isn't how to scam people, the project will usually intentionally avoid using the word "blockchain", like Scuttlebutt and Jami do, and instead refer to their solution with terms such as "cryptographically-verified append-only ledger"

They do this because, when other people hear "blockchain", they usually either hear "this will be used to scam me" or "I can use this to scam others". Because they're thinking about the grift known as blockchain, not about the (relatively obscure by comparison) technology known as blockchain.

When a project says they're looking into how a combination of blockchain and their project could be useful, they're not trying to solve any problem. They've decided they want to transform their existing project into a scam, using the grift known as blockchain.

If they are interested in solving a problem, they'll talk about the problem, and how they solve it using something similar to the technology known as blockchain. If they're interested in scamming you, they'll talk about the grift known as blockchain, and ask you to use your imagination to envision for them how the technology known as blockchain will help the project, while they stick their hands in your pockets.

[hiq]

> A blockchain powers Secure Scuttlebutt

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Scuttlebutt doesn't have the word blockchain on it, and from reading the protocol section, I don't think it uses a public blockchain as defined there: https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2019/02/theres_no_g...

So you're just talking about something else, but as Schneier argues, anything other than a public blockchain is nothing new and has little to do with all the hype beyond the confusing names.

[sdiacom]

Per the Wikipedia article:

> User content in SSB is organized as an append-only sequence of immutable messages, where messages cryptographically sign adjacent messages for the purpose of guaranteeing unforgeabilitity of the sequences as they are replicated to other peers.

That's pretty much a blockchain. Of course, they don't call it a blockchain themselves, because the Scuttlebutt people are not running a grift, they're creating a communication protocol that happens to use cryptographic primitives similarly to how blockchains use them.

[hiq]

That's using a specific definition of a blockchain that differs significantly from e.g. Bitcoin and Ethereum which are two of the most popular ones and the ones commonly referred to, along with their decentralization properties. The Schneier post I linked explains fairly how these are not novel and have nothing to do with the current hype beyond the confusing naming.

Concretely, if Scuttlebutt uses a blockchain, then Git also uses a blockchain by a similar reasoning. I don't think the original post claiming that "there are no use cases for blockchains" was implicitly claiming that Git (or Scuttlebut) is not relevant software, just that they don't use a blockchain, because indeed they don't for any interesting definition of "blockchain".

[sdiacom]

I agree with you completely, the "blockchain" term is confusing, and by the definition I'm using, Git would also be a sort of blockchain. The more that blockchain (the grift) expands, the more that the meaning of blockchain (the technology) is diluted.

A key difference to me between Git and Scuttlebutt, which in my (most likely flawed) view makes Scuttlebutt "blockchain-er", is the distributed nature of it. You add a friend on Scuttlebutt, and this will fetch their content from any node, and all their friends' contents. It has an "automatic replication across nodes" aspect which Git does not have.

[Disclaimer: I haven't used Scuttlebutt in a long while, so I may be getting the technical details of the friends-of-friends-replication thing wrong.]

[maccard]

> That's pretty much a blockchain

Only if you remove all of the parts of a blockchain that make it a blockchain. The definition from wikipedia isn't a blockchain, it's a Merkle Tree. They're not the same thing - a blockchain _uses_ a merkle tree. The bits that are bolted onto the merkle tree are what make it a blockchain, and are the bits that don't provide value.

[xigoi]

Do the messages require computationally expensive proofs?

[sdiacom]

Thankfully, no. I don't think that's a requirement for a blockchain, though.

[emptysongglass]

I am not talking about something else. SSB is powered by a blockchain.

[hiq]

We're just arguing about definitions, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33637623

This is fully addressed in Schneier's article.

[maccard]

> has use anywhere a verified supply chain is needed.

Sure, in the same way that a hammer can be used for a screw, or an HGV can be used for commuting to work - i.e. it _will_ do the job, but there were plenty of other alternatives available. The thing that a blockchain does is a _decentralised_ verifiable supply chain. A verifiable supply chain has existed since we've been doing digital signatures, and RSA has existed since the 70's.

The problem with using blockchain for supply chains is what happens if someone claims that the original source is wrong? Say I'm Maersk, and one of my ships says "no, I did deliver that". Are Maersk's customers going to say "no, we believe that guy, we're forking the blockchain?" Or are they going to say "That sucks, guess you shoiuld have delivered it" and claim the loss on their shipping insurance? We both know it's the latter.

> But this is demonstrably not true.

Is it? I've yet to see a demonstrable use case for blockchains that actually solves a problem. We've been doing this for almost 15 years now, and we're still waiting for it.

> It's just a technology and people have misused it but that doesn't render the technology itself useless or a scam.

People misusing technology doesn't make it useless, but if the _only_ use case is useless or a scam, then the tech is useless.

[emptysongglass]

You may think you're being well meaning but you aren't Maersk and can't speak for them. Maersk believes it's an advantage to them to use a blockchain. Maybe we ought to ask Maersk why they chose it.

Everything I read in this thread is dripping with vehemence, hate, ridicule, or certitude (your I haven't seen a demonstrable use case in 15 years).

If the kind of echo chamber you want to build is the one where you've won and any even smallest proffering of a tilt toward blockchain as useful is crushed congratulations you're doing it: nobody who even wants to give one inch to blockchain will come around here. When I try and point out one useful thing is a blockchain, oh that thing is a different kind of blockchain. It's astounding the mental acrobatics people will go to to stand victors over their tiny corner of the internet.

This is frankly culty, repressive behavior that's not at all in the spirit of curiosity.

[maccard]

I don't think your reading of my comment is fair at all. I think I was perfectly reasonable and avoided using words like culty and repressive. Instead of talking about the issues youve gone straight for a personal attack.

You're right, I can't speak for maersk, but given this is a pseudonymous internet forum where in this thread they are touted as legitimising the tech, I think it's fair game to speculate based on knowledge.

> When I try and point out one useful thing is a blockchain, oh that thing is a different kind of blockchain.

Meanwhile, everytime I ask for a problem that a blockchain solves, I get back problems that are better solved _without_ blockchains, or solutions that don't actually solve the problem in the first place.

I'm open to having my mind changed, I really am (it's happened many times on this forum), so please, feel free to share some of the problems that are being solved.

[DemocracyFTW2]

> dripping with vehemence, hate, ridicule, or certitude (your I haven't seen a demonstrable use case in 15 years).

> spirit of curiosity

I'm curious: what useful application of the blockchain have we seen in the past 15 years (outside of cryptocurrencies whose usefulness is apparently largely confined to pyramid schemes and paying for crimes)?

[The_Colonel]

I get your point, but ...

> A blockchain powers Secure Scuttlebutt, Jami, Urbit

I've honestly never heard about any of these. But I have heard/read about many other "uses" of blockchain, which ultimately boil down to scam. There are possible use cases, they just drown in the sea of scams.

[h4kor]

> verified supply chain

How does a blockchain verify the data being entered into it?

[maccard]

It doesn't, it verifies who it came from. Someone else mentioned Maersk above for supply chains, but a blockchain allows both Maersk and I to verify independently, without trusting each other, that a third party has made a change. If the third party says Maersk has it, and Maersk say the third party have it, the blockchain will have a record of it if Maersk accepted it, and I can independently verify that.

Unfortunately this isn't actually a property of a blockchain, this is a property of a ledger. I'm still trusting Maersk in this situation, because if I don't, what do I do, fork the blockchain and pretend that Maersk has the item?

[nkrisc]

The post itself is bizarre. Imagine they had said: "we had a discussion with Denuvo about DRM (We’re not talking about putting DRM into LibreOffice!). In what ways could people find a combination of LibreOffice Technology and DRM be useful?"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denuvo

I'm not trying to equate blockchain and DRM. The big question lingering over their post is "why?"

From what I can see the essence of the reaction is towards the fact they appear to be in search of a problem for their shiny solution. Maybe they find a real problem, but usually you don't have your solution before you find it.

[willeh]

It is not insane, far too many orgs are asking how can we shoehorn blockchain into X. The end-result is usually some vaporware, some weird commercialisation, or outright fraud. Libreoffice is a foundation, it should act in accordance with its charter. The public, likewise, should hold its officers accountable for acting in a way best serves these ends.

[belter]

Maybe because nobody else has seen other use than shitcoins. Arguing this is not about crypto, but blockchain, when nobody has seen other use cases is the disingenuous part of all this.

[forgotpwd16]

>even if it's a note that "We had a chat with Eth Foundation"

That's how it starts everytime. "We're just talking about it" ends up in shoving blockchains where they aren't needed.

[krageon]

In most environments this can be discussed, I think it is a specific subsection of IT professionals that are just quite militant about the subject. It is unpleasant, but just like all fundamentalists they're always going to exist. To my view, the best course of action is to politely ignore them and go on with your life.