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

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

#61

Post by this_user »

kneel wrote: post #14
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…

Bitcoin allows you to buy all sorts of exotic drugs from strangers, safely and securely from your couch.

Plus operating ransomware.

The problem with Bitcoin is the costs associated with using it. Due to its decentralised nature it will always be more costly than centralised solutions. Therefore, Bitcoin simply cannot compete unless illegal activities are involved. The economics simply do not work out.

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

#62

Post by zamalek »

chollida1 wrote: post #2

As someone in finance, where blockchain gets brought up alot, this one is easy. Blockchain is the proverbial solution looking for a problem. As has been pointed out ad nauseam, the blockchain is often just a euphemism for database. And that's where the backlash comes from, someone says Blockchain for settlement, or blockchain for recording startup up option tracking, or blockchain for tracking, well anything physical…

> supremely hyped up and over sold.

Which results in "hype recoil." There are some interesting use-cases for the technology, but the hype in areas where it is not applicable (e.g. as a liquid currency) severely erode the overall perception. Fanatic belligerence when the flaws are discussed enrich angst toward the technology.

In many ways the issue is not the technology itself; rather the evangelists of it.

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

#63

Post by kneel »

acdha wrote: post #37
kneel wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can be as simple as scanning qr codes with your phone wallet. Aaron Voisine has done an incredible job with breadwallet, highly recommended.

How do you protect your wallet from theft? Back it up so losing your phone isn't catastrophic? Maintain separate wallets so one accident or compromise doesn't cost you everything? Confirm that a transaction was committed before exchanging anything of value? Almost everyone knows how to handle real-life concerns like that with traditional currency. If you want something new to get any sort of adoption, people are goin…

Literally the first thing that happens when you create a wallet in breadwallet is you are given a seed phrase with instructions. Many wallets use this technique (BIP38)

If you ever lose your phone you can recover your wallet with this phrase.

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

#64

Post by fauria »

wmf wrote: post #28
fauria wrote: post #17

As I see it, Blockchain technology is based on some premises that are not easily achievable. This are the two I find most relevant: 1. A large user base (computational power) is needed to successfully run a blockchain backed product. If the network is small, a malicious attacker with enough resources could manipulate past transactions or prevent new ones (51% attack). 2. Blockchain was designed to be a trustless (no…

Bankchains solve #1 by not using mining; they use something like BFT (which is basically Paxos for liars) so that only 51% of the companies in the consortium need to be honest at any one time.

I guess that invalidates by definition #2.

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

#65

Post by sayurichick »

phpnode wrote: post #22
sayurichick wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

really? I read that post as "writing a ToDo app using the blockchain as your datastore versus a traditional database is bad". Well yeah, there are different tools for each job. If everything is a nail and you're only used to a hammer, then of course trying to use this new tool as a hammer will sound silly. I obviously can't predict the future use cases, but an example off the top of my head might be something like a…

Why is that particular use case solved better with blockchain than e.g. incrementing a counter in an actual database?

again, the use case I made up is not important. And to argue the use case would be missing the point.

However, for argument's sake. People can counterfeit drivers licenses, or passports. Good luck trying to counterfeit something on the blockchain.

Edit: to expand on this, think of a poor country who doesn't have their technology up to par as a 1st world country. To build the infrastructure to even have that government database is costly versus using an already existing infrastructure to do most of the heavy lifting.

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

#66

Post by wmf »

fauria wrote: post #64
wmf wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bankchains solve #1 by not using mining; they use something like BFT (which is basically Paxos for liars) so that only 51% of the companies in the consortium need to be honest at any one time.

I guess that invalidates by definition #2.

Ah, I forgot to mention that. Bitcoin is totally trustless, while bankchains require the participants to trust each other's identities but not their behavior. Whether this trust model is applicable in any real-world situation is debatable.

And yes, if you're using blockchain to track something like gold in a vault you might as well just have a database that is run by the same entity that runs the vault.

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

#67

Post by kneel »

this_user wrote: post #61
kneel wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin allows you to buy all sorts of exotic drugs from strangers, safely and securely from your couch.

Plus operating ransomware. The problem with Bitcoin is the costs associated with using it. Due to its decentralised nature it will always be more costly than centralised solutions. Therefore, Bitcoin simply cannot compete unless illegal activities are involved. The economics simply do not work out.

>Due to its decentralised nature it will always be more costly than centralised solutions.

That's a really sweeping claim and I'd argue that it's too soon to really claim one way or another.

The security of bitcoin is inherited from it's decentralization. The massive proof of work operations in Bitcoin (and the resulting costs) are part of bitcoin's security.

Centralized solutions will always be vulnerable as long as security bugs exist (have you ever heard of a completely secure database?) And fraud will always be part of the equation.

So what's better? Currently no one knows. But interestingly enough the direction of bitcoin right now is to build centralized networks on top of a decentralized network.

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

#68

Post by dang »

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…

Please don't make up generalizations about the HN community to score rhetorical points in an argument. That's never substantive.

Also, that bit about Patrick was needlessly personal. He has the same right to offer an opinion as anybody else does, and your 'royalty' bit is just posturing.

If you want to teach us something about how to be more imaginative, that's great, but the best way to do so is simply to convey information.

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

#69

Post by acdha »

kneel wrote: post #63
acdha wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you protect your wallet from theft? Back it up so losing your phone isn't catastrophic? Maintain separate wallets so one accident or compromise doesn't cost you everything? Confirm that a transaction was committed before exchanging anything of value? Almost everyone knows how to handle real-life concerns like that with traditional currency. If you want something new to get any sort of adoption, people are goin…

Literally the first thing that happens when you create a wallet in breadwallet is you are given a seed phrase with instructions. Many wallets use this technique (BIP38) If you ever lose your phone you can recover your wallet with this phrase.

That's a partial answer to only one question which, if a quick google search is correct, ignores all but the easiest problem: BIP38 appears to offer a way to backup a primary key using a printout and a memorized passphrase. That doesn't answer what happens if they lose one of those two things, much less what happens if someone malicious gets either the primary or the backup.

Remember that I didn't say your favorite toy sucks, only that not everyone else has your level of appreciation for it. Most people aren't going to put serious amounts of money into something which they don't trust and the status quo works fairly well for the average person: increasingly few people carry significant amounts of cash, most people use bank accounts and credit cards, etc. which means that the maximum cost is usually either capped or otherwise (e.g. you lose your ATM card but the recovery cost is only the time it takes to go to the bank with photo ID).

Bitcoin can do interesting things but getting non-aficionados to use it will depend on getting to a comparable degree of confidence, especially since most people don't share the [over-]confidence that the typical Bitcoin advocate has regarding their personal info-sec footing.

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

#70

Post by davidgerard »

kneel wrote: post #67
this_user wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plus operating ransomware. The problem with Bitcoin is the costs associated with using it. Due to its decentralised nature it will always be more costly than centralised solutions. Therefore, Bitcoin simply cannot compete unless illegal activities are involved. The economics simply do not work out.

>Due to its decentralised nature it will always be more costly than centralised solutions. That's a really sweeping claim and I'd argue that it's too soon to really claim one way or another. The security of bitcoin is inherited from it's decentralization. The massive proof of work operations in Bitcoin (and the resulting costs) are part of bitcoin's security. Centralized solutions will always be vulnerable as long as…

This follows from basic computer science. (Something I increasingly find Bitcoin advocates handwaving away.) If decentralisation were more efficient than centralisation, systems aiming for efficiency would naturally centralise; this is not what we observe.

The decentralisation is stupendously inefficient, Proof of Work is 47kg of carbon per transaction literally wasted, and it all centralises anyway - the code is controlled by just a few people, the mining is controlled by four miners (and there is no guarantee they are owned separately), most of the mining is in one country and 75% is about to be in one building.

Bitcoin decentralises things that don't need to be decentralised, wastefully, then naturally recentralises anyway.

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