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Ask HN: Why is the community so negative towards blockchain technology?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Ask HN: Why is the community so negative towards blockchain technology?

#41

Post by davidgerard »

wheelerwj wrote: post #34
patio11 wrote: post #12

Well since you asked. Blockchain is the world's worst database, created entirely to maintain the reputations of venture capital firms who injected hundreds of millions of dollars into a technology whose core defining insight was "You can improve on a Ponzi scam by making it self-organizing and distributed; that gets vastly more distribution, reduces the single point of failure, and makes it censorship-resistant." Tha…

Thanks for that thorough and articulate response! It seems funny to me that a person who works at stripe doesn't see the value in a fraudulent-transaction-free processing network, but hey, it's cool. I tried to pick apart the rest of your post but damn if you're not an eloquent writer. You pretty much covered every angle. My only real complaint is your point that "Bitcoin is claimed to be a global financial network a…

> a fraudulent-transaction-free processing network

except, of course, for all the fraud, thefts, exchange collapses, "hacks" and sorry-for-your-loss events in every other part of how Bitcoin works in practice. Except for the fraud, it's completely free of fraud!

Re: Ask HN: Why is the community so negative towards blockchain technology?

#42

Post by valarauca1 »

alexjarvis wrote: post #39
arethuza wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"So, a database which history could be cryptographically audited." Doesn't git already meet that requirement?

No because it's cheap to produce hashes for git.

It is cheap to make GIT hashes but it remains impossible to day to generate git collisions.

The cost of hashing only has to do with the creation of blocks. Which blocks are not required to be cryptographically verifiable.

Re: Ask HN: Why is the community so negative towards blockchain technology?

#43

Post by TheDong »

alexjarvis wrote: post #38
patio11 wrote: post #12

Well since you asked. Blockchain is the world's worst database, created entirely to maintain the reputations of venture capital firms who injected hundreds of millions of dollars into a technology whose core defining insight was "You can improve on a Ponzi scam by making it self-organizing and distributed; that gets vastly more distribution, reduces the single point of failure, and makes it censorship-resistant." Tha…

Postgres doesn't do distributed consensus though does it.

Yes it does, via configuring multiple postgres servers with synchrnous and streaming replication options.

https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.2/static/warm-standby.html...

https://github.com/sorintlab/stolon

Re: Ask HN: Why is the community so negative towards blockchain technology?

#44

Post by davidgerard »

arethuza wrote: post #30
baby wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two things: 1) It seems like the term "block chain" as used by block chain companies is pointing to what the bitcoin blockchain is but without the proof of work. So, a database which history could be cryptographically audited. 2) I don't think those are necessarily bad points for Bitcoin. Maybe it is run by speculators or gold diggers but in the end many people (including me and friends) have used/are using bitcoin f…

"So, a database which history could be cryptographically audited." Doesn't git already meet that requirement?

Yes. I predict that in 2017 there will be many "business Blockchain" products that will be a transaction ledger in a Merkle tree - because this is actually really good and a useful idea! - and that developers will be able to tell buzzword-prone management "oh, we've been using, ahh, blockchain-related technologies since 2005!" cos they use git.

Re: Ask HN: Why is the community so negative towards blockchain technology?

#45

Post by TheDong »

zokier wrote: post #33
patio11 wrote: post #12

Well since you asked. Blockchain is the world's worst database, created entirely to maintain the reputations of venture capital firms who injected hundreds of millions of dollars into a technology whose core defining insight was "You can improve on a Ponzi scam by making it self-organizing and distributed; that gets vastly more distribution, reduces the single point of failure, and makes it censorship-resistant." Tha…

So where does Certificate Transparency fit in? It is definitely meaningful application, very much not horrible, and large part of it is just blockchain.

Certificate transparency fits right on top of postgres, see crt.sh https://github.com/crtsh

Or on top of LevelDB or sqlite if you look at google's implementation of it:

https://github.com/google/certificate-transparency#software-...

The source of truth for certificates is certificate authorities. Certificate authorities by definition must trust the claims other authorities make about what they issued. There's no need for "proof of work". There's not even any distrust.

There's a need for an audit log, an append-only database, replication, and distribution of data.

There is no need for solving the generals problem, for hashing, for confirmations, for any of the blockchain really.

Re: Ask HN: Why is the community so negative towards blockchain technology?

#46

Post by TeMPOraL »

davidgerard wrote: post #41
wheelerwj wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for that thorough and articulate response! It seems funny to me that a person who works at stripe doesn't see the value in a fraudulent-transaction-free processing network, but hey, it's cool. I tried to pick apart the rest of your post but damn if you're not an eloquent writer. You pretty much covered every angle. My only real complaint is your point that "Bitcoin is claimed to be a global financial network a…

> a fraudulent-transaction-free processing network except, of course, for all the fraud, thefts, exchange collapses, "hacks" and sorry-for-your-loss events in every other part of how Bitcoin works in practice. Except for the fraud, it's completely free of fraud!

Bitcoin may very well be fraudlent-transaction-free. It has plenty of fraud elsewhere in the ecosystem though.

Re: Ask HN: Why is the community so negative towards blockchain technology?

#47

Post by cbhl »

wheelerwj wrote: post #35
vacri wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An addendum from the UX side: bitcoin is not usable by anyone who hasn't spent a lot of time learning about it. It basically requires users to understand what the blockchain is and the limitations of it, whereas other currencies don't require regular users to understand the backend machinery. It can't ever be more than a niche tool, because the general public isn't interested in learning backend machinery for currenc…

You've never met a bitcoin user or tried to use it yourself. Most people whose bitcoin are not incredibly tech savy and set it up in minutes on their smart phones.

Or, maybe they have. Maybe they lost some non-trivial amount of money from one of the half dozen former exchanges that had coins stolen out of their hot wallets. Or had someone hijack their AWS account credentials from GitHub to spin up hundreds of dollars of EC2 instance-hours to generate pennies of bitcoin.

Re: Ask HN: Why is the community so negative towards blockchain technology?

#48

Post by sametmax »

throaway_388483 wrote: post #26
patio11 wrote: post #12

Well since you asked. Blockchain is the world's worst database, created entirely to maintain the reputations of venture capital firms who injected hundreds of millions of dollars into a technology whose core defining insight was "You can improve on a Ponzi scam by making it self-organizing and distributed; that gets vastly more distribution, reduces the single point of failure, and makes it censorship-resistant." Tha…

The biggest challenge I notice in this community is a lack of imagination. At the risk of being critical of HN royalty, Patrick just showed that it's far easier to be snarky than imaginative. Any implementation of a blockchain where a blockchain simply replaces a database is lazy at best, and most likely completely pointless. Almost all blockchain stories that make it on HN are financial implementations that fall in…

I'll +1 this. Dismissing the block-chain concept because the current implementations are not good replacement pour our best existing techs is like saying to not investigate electrical powered transportations because the solar plane projects we tried sucked.

Re: Ask HN: Why is the community so negative towards blockchain technology?

#49

Post by vectorpush »

wheelerwj wrote: post #35
vacri wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An addendum from the UX side: bitcoin is not usable by anyone who hasn't spent a lot of time learning about it. It basically requires users to understand what the blockchain is and the limitations of it, whereas other currencies don't require regular users to understand the backend machinery. It can't ever be more than a niche tool, because the general public isn't interested in learning backend machinery for currenc…

You've never met a bitcoin user or tried to use it yourself. Most people whose bitcoin are not incredibly tech savy and set it up in minutes on their smart phones.

And thousands of them lose their money due to bugs or simple mistakes.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/search?q=lost+wallet+help&r...

Re: Ask HN: Why is the community so negative towards blockchain technology?

#50

Post by detaro »

sametmax wrote: post #48
throaway_388483 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest challenge I notice in this community is a lack of imagination. At the risk of being critical of HN royalty, Patrick just showed that it's far easier to be snarky than imaginative. Any implementation of a blockchain where a blockchain simply replaces a database is lazy at best, and most likely completely pointless. Almost all blockchain stories that make it on HN are financial implementations that fall in…

I'll +1 this. Dismissing the block-chain concept because the current implementations are not good replacement pour our best existing techs is like saying to not investigate electrical powered transportations because the solar plane projects we tried sucked.

I think most people here pretty clearly see that blockchains can be useful. But tons of relatively unsuccessful projects or worse, projects with grand claims and no details and evidence behind it cause widespread skepticism against new projects that don't clearly argue why they don't fit the pattern. Serious blockchain projects have a lot of "allies" that make them look pretty bad there.

Projects that clearly fit the pattern of good use cases get a lot less flak than startups or initiatives that do further out things and don't talk about details.

Unclear definitions (e.g. is a distributed ledger without expensive proof-of-work a blockchain or not?) are another issue.

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