[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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?

[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?

[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."

[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.

[Godel_unicode]

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

Why on earth would you need a blockchain for 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.

[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.

[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?

[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.