[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.