I once pitched a blockchain project that there was grant money available for, but we didn't land it because they noticed that my design minimized the involvement of an actual blockchain in the project.
Yeah, I think a lot of tech people are really politically primed to think "what if there was a tech solution so you didn't need to rely on society existing," and that makes them suckers for blockchain. It's not just overkill, it's techno-anarchy-cyberpunk-I'm-making-this-string-of-adjectives-up overkill, which is seductively attractive.
Currency blockchain is getting bigger (not a distributed ledger though, but one with a central authority for authentication): https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/12/china-digital-currency-trial-over-1-million-handed-out-in-lottery.html
Minivet's right that most of the standards being proposed for non-currency blockchain don't exist in usable form, much less implementations of them. Also a lot of them are indeed not blockchain-specific, but could be implemented just as well with an api and one of the many document-oriented noSQL datastores that have been written and in the last 10 years used pretty widely; some distributed, some not.
IMO sharing the whole dataset has the social but not technical advantage that the datastore owner can't quietly make changes that hurt someone else's work or that hide previous error.
It's a shame that the Netherlands seems to have gone so far spending money on this. I blame Davos.
She's fucking up schools in America too.
2: Tech people and money people. I don't spend all that much time around tech people, but they seem concerned with boring stuff like air gap security, thinking hard about who has access to every subpage of every page of the site, and long, unique passwords, not fancy stuff like blockchain.
Unless money people is what you meant by tech people. There's a lot of overlap...
I still don't get blockchain currency. Wasting electricity to make something harder to spend than cash.
4,5: He did persuade the Iron Bank to fund Stannis.
I guess if you want to get pot mailed to you it makes sense. But that still seems less safe than asking the neighbor's kid when they come back from college.
Blockchain doesn't have to burn energy ("proof of work") to function, that's just the easiest way to do it.
But more energy-efficient schemes don't gain more real-world applications. Aside from inefficiency, the problem is that humans just don't do irrevocable. They think they want irrevocable transactions, but they don't. Mistakes are made, people change their minds, circumstances change.
Even supposedly "pure" applications like distributed sensor readings are bad fits; situations where you have multiple, mutually-distrustful parties watching readings in a hostile comms environment are rare, and solved with much simpler protocols.
Blockchains are for buying drugs, and maybe interplanetary coordination. But probably not that second one.
That's exactly it. I'm not exactly fond of my credit card company, but I do rely on the fact that if something goes wrong or gets stolen by somebody who isn't them, I can undo it.
Even for buying and selling drugs, isn't the fact that you're creating a permanent record of transactions going to get you totally fucked if someone (law enforcement, or someone willing to knock you over the head and steal your money) just figures out your account numbers?
Or am I misunderstanding the way it works?
12: Nope, you're not misunderstanding. From the link:
A number of researchers from Qatar University were able to ascertain the identities of tens of thousands of bitcoin users fairly easily through social networking sites.
I, for one, am not very happy with our new tech overlords.
Sorry but you're all wrong and blockchain is going to be huge. Get your BTC now before it goes to 25K.
13 Right, I saw that. Like the man said 'are you taking notes on a criminal fucking conspiracy?'
I started to read the article but couldn't get past the word "blockchainger." At first I thought it was a typo. I may try again later.
It's like that Stevie Wonder song, "When you believe in things that you don't understand, then you suffer-Blockchain ain't the way"
Cyrus @ 6 has it right. Sure, there are a few actual techies with actual chops, involved in blockchain. But mostly, it's posers and chancers, and money people who believe they see a chance to disintermediate the banks and other current set of financial intermediaries. And then there are people who see bitcoin and think to themselves: "gee, if they can run a global financial system on that tech, why can't I run my database application on that tech?" not realizing that the global financial system they're running is (a) insanely expensive per transaction and (b) barely runs at all.
TL;DR it's all populated by knaves and fools. And utter tools.
For any use where you might want a public record, it is *completely* feasible to take the database log of almost any modern relational database and (a) convert it to a neutral independently-comprehensible form, that (b) can be time-stamped, chain-hashed, and stored in a public repository. Indeed, the #a is what a current set of products "database replicators" do -- this isn't just known tech, it's existing products.
I have to admit, I've never really understood the issue with irrevocability. If you have a genuine fat finger on the blockchain, you can reverse it, you just have to do the equal but opposite transaction. It's not like non-blockchain transactions are inherently revocable, post-settlement, as thousands of fraud victims have discovered over the years. The issue isn't with the blockchain, it's with the nonsense of trustless commerce.
To be clear, there are lots and lots of other issues with blockchain. This one just seems like a non-issue to me.
I'm a bit hesitant to recommend this, because it is pretty incomprehensible if you're not familiar with Ethereum. But, here is a somewhat florid description of attempting to undo a mistake there:
https://medium.com/@danrobinson/ethereum-is-a-dark-forest-ecc5f0505dff
It isn't just that irrevocability is inherent to the protocols being built, it is inherent to the culture of the people building these things. I don't see how you shoehorn something like that into a modern legal framework other than by moating it off, let alone add customer service on top.
22: From what I can make out of the link, it makes me wonder why anyone puts money into Ethereum at all. It seems like playing it at a roulette table where all the other players as well as the croupiers have guns and will mug you.
3: I don't understand what using a blockchain is buying DCEP, from the party's perspective, that a regular centralized database wouldn't get them. Sounds like management has specified an implementation detail, which never goes well.
My pension plan is adopting blockchain to keep track of its beneficiaries, for some reason. I mean, its nice that they have an app, but not at all clear why its a blockchain app, except for the general idea that public-sector pensions are a fertile testing ground for hokey new experiments.
TIAA wants me to give them my email address, but I don't want them to get lazy, so I still get paper statements.
The issue isn't with the blockchain, it's with the nonsense of trustless commerce.This is just one of the fatal pitfalls of blockchain. I mean, their idea is that somehow, everybody's going to be running their own server which can check that their transactions actually "commit" (appear in the log, followed by enough other trans, that they can be regarded as irrevocable)? Ha! No way my mom (or me, for that matter) does that. No. Way. We (and the vast majority of humans who have other things to spend our neurons on) will reply on some trusted intermediary to do that for us. And since we have to, y'know, *trust* that intermediary, we're back to where we were in 1929, and needing a -government- to both regulate and backstop those intermediaries. And at that point, what's the point of a blockchain again?
Oh and also, heh, all these cryptocurrency exchanges (like Coinbase) -- when you buy and sell bitcoin and keep it in your Coinbase account, you aren't actually making bitcoin trans, and you don't actually own that bitcoin: Coinbase does (ditto with the dollars in your Coinbase account). So you're trusting Coinbase. Oh, and (HAHAHA) the database they use to keep track of our accounts? HAHA, not a blockchain, nosirree! How do we know? Well, the various exchanges publish feeds of orders, and there are companies that try to make money trading various cryptocurrencies. All those companies (as of a year ago) were investing in millisecond-latency systems (so, not high-frequency trading) b/c that was around the frequency at which exchanges' quotes for orders were changing. And since we know that all the public cryptocurrencies have transaction latencies on the order of *minutes*, we can safely conclude that the orders being published are *not* being settled on any blockchain.
It's all a farce.
you aren't actually making bitcoin trans
Wait, what were we talking about again?
Well, without the obvious example of bitcoin and ethereum and the other cryptocurrencies, no non-currency blockchain project would have ever *ever* got funded. I was there, and the argument was based on pointing at bitcoin. So when you start to realize that much of the trading activity isn't "on" the blockchain, it's .... a sign that maybe that stuff isn't actually real. I mean, it's like when bitcoin futures stated trading at the CBOE (IIRC). They sure weren't using the blockchain to settle those trades *grin*.
Thanks, Chetan. That is one anti-blockchain argument I had never heard and I thought I knew all of them.
Eh, most "money" isn't actual physical money, but only exists a separate ledger of intermediaries, i.e. banks.
Sure, but bitcoin's whole point is that it avoids the need for a ledger held by a trusted intermediary, right? The fact that for most real world transactions it actually doesn't seems relevant.
27.1: I agree completely that blockchain is pretty useless. The big software providers such as [redacted] and [redacted] aren't trying to do "trustless" blockchain, though. Most are based on multiple designated authorities who can approve transactions. Lots of variance in how many and how they approve, but the "traditional" do-an-expensive-calculation version is not on the table with any of them. (Because it's stupid.) So essentially they are all no more revolutionary than empowering certificate authorities on the internet, or requiring approval to commit to a database.
Blockchain (as mentioned above) is just another form of database, like MongoDB or Postgres or Oracle.
(Note: I haven't been doing anything with blockchain in the last year or so, so things may have changed.)
Blockchain (as mentioned above) is just another form of database, like MongoDB or Postgres or Oracle.Right: anybody who's doing BFT is just doing a replicated centrally-managed database that can handle more failures than ... y'know ... Oracle RAC. And there's a good paper by Lamport titled "Byzantinizing Paxos" that makes this clear: that BFT consensus can be reduced to Paxos in a particular and systematic way.
The upshot is a scientific way of stating that a BFT blockchain is just the same as a replicated distributed database.
Concretely, if you really wanted a blockchain, there's a perfectly cromulent way to make one out of Google Spanner.
34 actually causes me pain when reading. Congratulations.
Did the thing about blockchain being compromised if one mining consortium ever held 50+% come true?
Did the thing about blockchain being compromised if one mining consortium ever held 50+% come true?
Not for Bitcoin but there are lesser coins that have gotten wrecked like that. "Ethereum Classic" comes to mind.
Sure, it's fatally compromised, but New Ethereum tastes just like Pepsi.
Given the lack of transparency of the mining pools, is it conceivable that in 10 years we'll learn that the top ones were colluding or even shared ownership and nobody realized?
From the link in 38, Ethereum Classic people were moving towards a consensus algorithm with the acronym PoS (proof of stake). So confidence-inspiring!
I'd like to say that I've never deliberately named something so that the acronym would be stupid or obscene, but I don't think either of us would believe it.
Given the lack of transparency of the mining pools, is it conceivable that in 10 years we'll learn that the top ones were colluding or even shared ownership and nobody realized?
Two of the top four have been owned by the same company for years and nobody cares.
The main users of bitcoin are survivalists who have Immortan Joe fantasies and think they'll have the last server running at their watering hole centrally located between the Refinery and the Bullet Factory. The others are people doing illegal transactions who don't want Imperial involvement.
The latest I gather is blockchain chicken. Since China is a low trust society, wealthier sorts concerned about the quality of their poultry now have access to an app that lets them buy blockchain certified chickens at $35 a bird, presumably ready to roast, possibly using the heat of a blockchain processor. It's not really clear what the blockchain adds since the chicken farm is out in the sticks while the customers tend to be based in low chicken count big cities. Living in a medium trust society, I rely on reputation in my chicken supply chain. One source has chickens running around whenever I visit, and I assume that, given the turnover in the chicken population, that the ones I buy in plastic bags were likely wandering about the yard on some previous visit.
I trust Bell and Evans implicitly. Never even tried to see their farm.
40: I seriously think they're trying to come up with names that sound as unreliable as possible.
44: But the beauty of blockchain is that you don't even have to take possession of the chicken. Just buy a chicken token and hold onto it. You will be glad you did when the price of virtual chickens tokens goes to $10K.
Counterpoint: chicken is delicious.
Since China is a low trust society, wealthier sorts concerned about the quality of their poultry now have access to an app that lets them buy blockchain certified chickens at $35 a bird, presumably ready to roast, possibly using the heat of a blockchain processor.
Come to think of it, this use case is actually not so different from the blockchain app I was pitching in 1, except mine was to certify Trinidadian mangos as green, not Chinese chickens as healthy. I guess what they both have in common is that the agricultural markets are highly decentralized and not necessarily trustworthy.
In theory, blockchain can be used in combination with smartphones to trace deliveries and certifications of green practices among the varies elements of the food supply chain, and then use that information to market your product to rich people at higher prices.
Of course, its way more practical to do that with a regular database instead of a blockchain.
Counterpoint: chicken is delicious.
If you eat your chicken you won't be able to get rich when the price goes up. You've got to HODL.
The person I know who routinely makes the worst decisions told us in our last Zoom chat that she "decided to get into investing." Does this mean, like, an IRA? No, she's dedicating N% of her income every month to buying Ripple. "It's only $0.30 now, I'm not saying it'll go to $20k like Bitcoin...but it could." Too many fallacies to unpack. She didn't have a clear story as to how Ripple would get picked up by banks or whatever. I recommended she invest in an asset that has an underlying income stream, but she wasn't interested. Oh well. We all handle the pandemic in our own ways.
I suppose it's a generational marker that my first (and so far only) thought was that this involved the low end wine -- and, as we see here there money in that.
Yes, that's a link to drunkard.com.
For those of you not clicking through, Ripple make an appearance, but he article is primarily about Thunderbird. Here's an excerpt about the marketing:
Gallo spent lavishly on a media blitz announcing the rollout of Thunderbird. Actor Cesar Romero, famous as The Cisco Kid (and later as The Joker on TV's "Batman"), pitched Thunderbird in television commercials. The ads were filmed at the Thunderbird Hotel in Las Vegas. Thunderbird, the ad implied, was the drink that movie stars and high-rollers asked for.
The radio spots, featuring the now-famous "What's the word?" jingle, played in every major market in the country. For live promotions, a girl in a skimpy Indian outfit, billed as "Princess Thunderbird," schmoozed with retailers and handed out free drinks.
Gallo didn't neglect any potential market niche, including the homeless who were not likely to be reached by television, radio or Princess Thunderbird. According to Ellen Hawkes, author of "Blood and Wine: The Unauthorized Story of the Gallo Wine Empire," Gallo salesmen deposited Thunderbird empties in the streets of skid-row neighborhoods, to build brand awareness among the wino population.
I didn't know they did Boone's Farm too. We wouldn't have touched Thunderbird or Ripple. But Boone's was a thing. A horrible thing, tasted worse than Hamm's, but one that got you drunk.
Perfect illustration of 27 (Free registration needed)
Ginger, you missed a trick. One click further from yours is this magnificent takedown of Farage's newest grift. I'd say he'd been reduced to that level, but it's a more sober judgment that he never left it, and that in 2016 the whole country sank to join him there.