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

Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 216 posts

Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain

#71

Post by mythrwy »

Unsuitable parallels are the bread and butter of hypers and shills.

Just imagine it's 1893 and no one can see how big cars are going to be. Well this gizmo XYZ is just like cars were then! You'll wanna get in on this now! And so this gets internalized and repeated to friends and family regardless of objective merit. Because it sounds "truthy".

The parallels between blockchain and the Internet are similarly contrived. They are different phenomenon and the line "X is like Y thus what happened to X will happen to Y" doesn't have objective merit in this case near as I can tell. (Apologies to the half a dozen or more posters who have probably posted something to this effect on the thread).

The _potential_ uses for blockchain are much more limited than potential uses for the Internet for instance. (And there are a number of other differences).

That being said I have no doubt there are uses for blockchain technology. Making people rich with cryptocurrency for one. And hey, I'm all in favor. Let's just don't get carried away with the parallels.

Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain

#72

Post by wallacoloo »

Cyberdog wrote: post #50
jackfoxy wrote: post #31

The folks at https://sweetbridge.com/ make a case for supply chain being a natural fit. Some of the low hanging fruit here is international trade between less developed countries, where settlement has to be done in dollars, and independent truckers. The thesis is that huge amounts of capital is tied up in invoice settlement all along the supply chain. (And supply chain refers to every thing from the dirt -- grown or…

What about a blockchain/distributed ledger improves supply chains in ways that a standard centralized database could not? Explain like I'm five.

I suspect it boils down to the international trade part. Which party would have control over the centralized database? Each participating nationality might prefer to not have that database under the control of any of the other nations. In any case, the centralization represents a single point of failure with potentially a fairly large risk.

Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain

#73

Post by meri_dian »

Blockchain may have some legitimate uses in which it's an improvement over a traditional centralized database, but they are very few and niche. It would be silly to say blockchain has no use, but I can't help but laugh at people who talk about it being "the next Internet"

Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain

#76

Post by ThomPete »

mutteraloo wrote: post #42
ThomPete wrote: post #29

People always overestimate the short term and underestimate the long term. Go to any country perhaps with the exception of Estonia and you will see that digitalization was supposed to change governments for the better. Instead they mostly have created very sporadic successes but a lot of failed implementation sometimes even making it worse. Yet there is no doubt that in the long run things are changing for the better…

So 10-15 more years? In the meantime we can use blockchain/bitcoin to scam money from grandmas, retired folks, and millenials. So they can hate us technologists even more. Oh, and cause global warming and destroy the planet. That way humans will have to come up with a non-government backed currency.

The internet was based on a foundational protocol built to withstand nuclear attacks and is 50 years old.

Either you understand this perspective or you don't.

We are talking about blockchain not one of the ways it can be realized, bitcoin.

Furthermore, I gave a couple of examples of how the blockchain can be used no one is being scammed with that. In fact it allows for things that have never been possible before because you will not see nation-states work together in any meaningful way to solve these problems.

Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain

#77

Post by claudiulodro »

ThomPete wrote: post #29

People always overestimate the short term and underestimate the long term. Go to any country perhaps with the exception of Estonia and you will see that digitalization was supposed to change governments for the better. Instead they mostly have created very sporadic successes but a lot of failed implementation sometimes even making it worse. Yet there is no doubt that in the long run things are changing for the better…

> digital art certification

Interesting. So you have an original piece of digital art and the owner of the art is verified on the blockchain? How would that work? Can't I just take a screenshot or something of the art and have a copy? What's the advantage of having one "true" piece of digital art and is it feasable?

Genuinely curious how this would work. It's a very intriguing idea.

Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain

#78

Post by dang »

mutteraloo wrote: post #42
ThomPete wrote: post #29

People always overestimate the short term and underestimate the long term. Go to any country perhaps with the exception of Estonia and you will see that digitalization was supposed to change governments for the better. Instead they mostly have created very sporadic successes but a lot of failed implementation sometimes even making it worse. Yet there is no doubt that in the long run things are changing for the better…

So 10-15 more years? In the meantime we can use blockchain/bitcoin to scam money from grandmas, retired folks, and millenials. So they can hate us technologists even more. Oh, and cause global warming and destroy the planet. That way humans will have to come up with a non-government backed currency.

We've banned this account for repeatedly violating the HN guidelines. Would you please stop creating accounts to do that with? Ideological battle, flamewars, and personal attacks are not wanted here.

Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain

#79

Post by wallacoloo »

richardwhiuk wrote: post #60
wallacoloo wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to write a good counterargument to this. The article goes in so many directions that it could never cover all his points. Any counterargument I can construct boils down to a difference of opinion & values. The author trusts his bank and his government to (a) handle his money in the way that he thinks is responsible and (b) handle disputes in a way that benefits him . On the other hand, I trust myself to han…

Sure they can - put you in prison with no internet access.

Sure, but there are plenty of dissenters that manage to escape being in the physical custody of their government. One might reasonably decide to leave the country before dissenting, in some scenarios.

You can bet that Edward Snowden had all his US assets seized, for example. But if he had any cryptocurrency, he may have been able to take those with him.

Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain

#80

Post by wslh »

I think the author is right with the current state of the affairs and the insane pumped hype but he misses the core issues serious engineers and researchers want to solve.

First, private blockchains is a misleading term since they don't share the core innovation behind Bitcoin: solving (under certain assumptions) the double spend/transaction problem in a decentralized way. This is the start of a series of computer science innovations playing with game theory, cryptography, politics, and finances. The nature of public blockchains makes it difficult, if not impossible, to significantly scale and speed up them (without losing some of its original features).

Second, the core ideas behind private blockchains predates Bitcoin. Nick Szabo’s smart contracts concept is from 1994 [1] and if we go back in time we can find the AMIX project in 1988 [2][3]. The focus of these ideas is having a way to specify and plug contracts between different entities. Ad-hoc APIs are the natural solution for this problem but in the future there can be ways to quickly specify interactions and agreements with smart contracts.

Also ideas of log immutability can be traced back to a 1995 Spanish article titled “VCR y PEO, dos protocolos criptográficos simples” [4]. Bruce Schneier also published similar works in 1997 with Automatic Event-Stream Notorization Using Digital Signatures and in 1998 as “Cryptographic Support for Secure Logs on Untrusted Machines” [5].

Regarding private blockchains/distributed ledgers performance, the top achievement is 80000 tps using BFT-SMaRt consensus with an security tolerance of [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_contract#History

[2] http://erights.org/smart-contracts/index.html

[3] http://erights.org/smart-contracts/history/index.html

[4] https://www.coresecurity.com/system/files/publications/2016/...

[5] https://www.schneier.com/academic/paperfiles/paper-secure-lo...

[6] https://github.com/bft-smart/library

Post reply on HN