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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?

#71

Post by davidgerard »

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 are uses of blockchains outside mainstream industries.

I have seen zero actually feasible use cases for blockchain outside cryptocurrencies, and those only have a use case for illicit transactions.

The usual proposal I see put forward for non-cryptocurrency blockchains is a general coordinated database of everything in an industry, so all players can see what's happening.

The problem here is having common data standards at all, which is not a problem that storing it in a blockchain will solve.

The first barrier to common data standards is business models built on obscurantism; the second is that nobody wants to make the body setting the standard into the natural monopoly it will become, which is not a problem that a blockchain will solve.

The solution is for a player to come up with an open royalty-free data standard so naturally compelling that everyone adopts it, and eventually your regulator says "you know what, use this one."

This does not involve a blockchain.

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

#72

Post by cbhl »

wheelerwj wrote: post #57
cbhl wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They're not use cases, they're failure modes.

One of the great things about banks is that the transactions are reversible. People click the wrong button all the time, and they call up their bank and say "oops, please fix it".

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

#73

Post by flukus »

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.

Which doesn't really help when the actual transfer of the product has to be done in meatspace, so doing the cash transfer securely from my couch doesn't seem to add much value to me.

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

#74

Post by davidgerard »

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 dismissing it because the current implementations are still startlingly awful after several years, with really obvious feasibility problems for their posited use cases, is fair enough really.

At this point the burden of proof really is pretty much entirely on the blockchain advocates. Bring a technically feasible use case to the table.

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

#75

Post by kneel »

acdha wrote: post #69
kneel wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

>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.

Bitcoin's slogan is 'be your own bank' which means you're ultimately responsible for your own security. If you're hacked, you're hacked. This is no different from modern day identity theft.

>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 isn't ready for the average user, much like computers in the 80s weren't ready for the average user. That isn't stopping developers who can see the writing on the wall.

I think there is a very good argument to be made that traditional currencies are not as safe as they once were as the federal reserve continues it's historically unprecedented experiments.

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

#76

Post by vectorpush »

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…

This post is a quintessential example of why blockchain discussions are met with negativity. Your response to criticism is to castigate the critics as unimaginative and averse to "out group" technologies rather than counter the criticism with substance. It's also telling that you suggest people use their imagination to find uses for blockchains; no other technology has such backwards expectations. When you start with a solution and have to brainstorm imaginative ways to discover a problem that fits your solution, you know you're dealing with a cargo-cult instead of an effective tool.

> I've recently had conversations with companies working on solving two big problems in large media buying agencies - bot-based fraud, and auditability of programmatic trading. These problems are being solved using the bitcoin blockchain.

How is the bitcoin blockchain solving these problems? Please offer some kind of details or explanation. I could be wrong, but I'm betting that you're going to offer an example of how the blockchain could, in theory, maybe solve some of these problems but there are practical barriers to implementation and no real solution to be seen. That is exactly what creates a negative response towards blockchains, big talk and nothing to show for it. Cryptocurrency is literally the only thing that blockchains have been demonstrated to be useful for yet we're constantly bombarded with claims that blockchains are going to solve countless problems and it never pans out.

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

#77

Post by kneel »

flukus wrote: post #73
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.

Which doesn't really help when the actual transfer of the product has to be done in meatspace, so doing the cash transfer securely from my couch doesn't seem to add much value to me.

Would you prefer teleportation?

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

#78

Post by wc23 »

codexon wrote: post #11

Regarding bitcoin, the main problem is that a lot of people have large amounts of bitcoin horded from early days and they tend to be biased and start spamming forums about how great it is as it will make them very rich if the adoption increases. This is despite there being very major flaws with the system. As someone that has actually tried to sell things with bitcoin, there are major flaws with it, and they will nev…

The term confirmation is a bad one. It gives people the impression that they have to wait 10 might.s to an hour to know if they have their money. The moment you see a transaction in you wallet, you have it, you just have to wait 10 mins to an hour to spend it. So to compare this to legacy systems which take 3-5 days and claim its too slow seems unfair.

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

#79

Post by kneel »

davidgerard wrote: post #70
kneel wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 con…

>If decentralisation were more efficient than centralisation, systems aiming for efficiency would naturally centralise; this is not what we observe.

I'm going to assume you mixed up your words there. I'd argue that we see lots of decentralization on the web. I don't see why it has to be one or the other, they seem to work fine in a hybrid state.

>the code is controlled by just a few people, the mining is controlled by four miners

Code is available on github and you can fork it. Mining centralization was the result of competition and some ambitious Chinese living next to dams. There is nothing preventing this from changing in the future.

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

I'd say that money should definitely be decentralized.

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

#80

Post by vectorpush »

sayurichick wrote: post #65
phpnode wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 governmen…

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

This is precisely the point. Blockchains are met with negativity because enthusiasts keep trying to evangelize their merits without having anything to show for it. If blockchains have uses besides cryptocurrencies, point to a practical example or build something and Show HN, but the incessant proselytizing of blockchain vaporware is tiring and makes non-enthusiasts roll their eyes whenever the topic comes up.

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

This is another example of how blockchain enthusiasts commonly misunderstand how their technology interacts with the real world. Creating a counterfeit driver's license or passport has nothing to do with computer systems. Today's counterfeiters don't hack into a mutable database and modify identification records, they simply create a physical passport or ID that looks authentic enough to fool a human being who doesn't exist on a blockchain.

The blockchain phenomenon is akin to when a star-eyed developer writes a 10 page blog post about their FPS-RPG-RTS-MMO hybrid with a physics and chemistry simulation system that offers unlimited possibilities! Except the project usually fails after debuting a few misleading demos, and if the project ever escapes the alpha phase, the reality is hugely underwhelming and not at all resembling anything close to what was advertised. That is the blockchain in a nutshell.

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