Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 100 posts

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

#51

Post by abhinavkulkarni »

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…

You know, some of your points are valid. But as another reply to this post stated, there are uses of blockchains outside mainstream industries.

In fact, lets talk about faxes. We still have these relics of the past generation in our offices. Why? Because it acts as a mechanism to collect and store timestamp events. Blockchain precisely does that.

How about a blockchain implementation that solves this problem?

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

#52

Post by theamk »

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…

> Unfortunately the comments are a pile-on of negativity, rather than a discussion of possibilities.

I don't think that how the community is supposed to work. HN is all about discussion of existing content. It is simply a bad form to go to discussion of "blockchan for big banks" article and start talking about "blockchain for ad networks".

Yes, maybe someone out there is making something where blockchain is genuinely a right technology; if you find such a project, submit it to HN and there may be actual positive comments on the blockchain idea.

Or even better: write a blog post about real-life problems which are best being solved by the bitcoin blockchain, and submit it. I am sure people will read it with interest! (I am not being sarcastic here -- I am genuinely interested about useful bitcoin applications)

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

#53

Post by trcollinson »

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.

I'll assume this isn't a joke and that you just aren't well versed in computer science nor in database theory. While Postgres doesn't use distributed consensus it does use distributed transactions to maintain consistency (a major tenet of ACID compliance).

In a distributed consensus environment a substantial number of proofs of work (in Bitcoins case a hash) must be performed to gradually ensure that a block in the chain is consistent and thus come to a consensus that it is in fact valid.

In Postgres a transaction can be verified and guaranteed to be consistent among nodes using a two phase commit protocol. Essentially a transaction is attempted, verified, and then committed by the nodes of the network in a guaranteed, and very secure, manner.

The upside to the Postgres method is you do not need a substantial number of individual processors to perform proof of work to securely verify consistency.

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

#54

Post by arethuza »

abhinavkulkarni wrote: post #51
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…

You know, some of your points are valid. But as another reply to this post stated, there are uses of blockchains outside mainstream industries. In fact, lets talk about faxes. We still have these relics of the past generation in our offices. Why? Because it acts as a mechanism to collect and store timestamp events. Blockchain precisely does that. How about a blockchain implementation that solves this problem?

There have been schemes for trusted timestamping (e.g. based on PKI) around for a long time:

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

NB Having worked in the area I find document security (particularly authenticity) to be a fascinating subject and its not inconceivable that a blockchain based solution could be interesting but I'd love to see how such a thing would actually work in practice and some kind of idea why it is better than earlier approaches.

"because blockchain" isn't really an argument.

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

#55

Post by wheelerwj »

vectorpush wrote: post #49
wheelerwj wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

thousands of people lose cash and misplace car keys too.

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

#56

Post by detaro »

baby wrote: post #23
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…

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…

1) IMHO then supports that they use the term because it is trendy to use, not for technical reasons. (FWIW other blockchain enthusiasts insist that proof-of-work is an elementary part of the concept, and I think that is a useful distinction to make in comparison to other distributed or cryptographic data structures)

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

#57

Post by wheelerwj »

cbhl wrote: post #47
wheelerwj wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, those are definitely use cases for the average user.

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

#59

Post by bryceweiner »

These comments are beyond simplistic and illustrate only a basic understanding of Bitcoin and less about how it works.

A distributed ledger is a decentralized data store in which the data contained therein is cryptographically validated as true and correct (read: unaltered) as the protocols for communicating that data are Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT).

A blockchain is a distributed ledger where the transactions are committed to the ledger in batches.

That's it. It's that simple.

In the financial realm this is beyond valuable in that FI's no longer need trust their employees, not their customers. The means by which the data is secured precludes the need for complex security systems at the network level, reducing entry and operating costs to that of simple disk space.

These systems have existed for literally decades but they have languished in obscurity until Bitcoin demonstrated exactly how powerful such systems could be.

Edit to add: The benefits become much clearer and simpler to understand once you spit out the Bitcoin koolade.

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

#60

Post by detaro »

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.

Those are "simple" signed logs, not a blockchain.
Post reply on HN