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Building for the Blockchain

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: Building for the Blockchain

#81

Post by ericb »

elmar wrote: post #65
CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #11

People are trying to solve a lot of interesting problems with blockchain, but I fear it's become the ultimate shoehorn solution for the modern era. See also: https://tonyarcieri.com/on-the-dangers-of-a-blockchain-monoc... I've had meetings with prospective clients that opened with, "We have $problem, can we use blockchain to solve it?" where anything that doesn't qualify as a blockchain is cast to the wayside because…

Does your problem gets easier/solved with a permissionless ownerless database, if "yes" then you need a public blockchain, if "no" you need something else.

I agree, although I might add "trustless" in there.

Re: Building for the Blockchain

#82

Post by jgh »

woah wrote: post #26
arkona wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A distributed, append-only cryptographic ledger Pardon my ignorance, but isn’t that what a blockchain is?

I agree that blockchain is overhyped right now, but I don't understand the common sentiment on HN that "you don't need a blockchain, just an append-only decentralized database with Merkel root logs", as if that's something easy to build. What is this hypothetical non-blockchain, where are you going to get it, and why not just use a blockchain if that's what you need?

I see some of the siblings have named different solutions, Datomic also exists as a database with immutable facts and time-travel.

Re: Building for the Blockchain

#83

Post by vec »

snitko wrote: post #63

It's all the same thing every year on HN. People trying to find all sorts of excuses for Bitcoin existence - blockchains, smart contracts, ICOs - as long as they don't have to accept that Bitcoin's main purpose is and always was to have an alternative to the financial system, crippling regulations, government control and taxes. In other words, everything people hate about libertarians, they try to ignore in Bitcoin.…

I agree. "Bitcoin as anarcho-capitalist proof of concept" does seem to be the correct framework for understanding why it exists, why it works the way it does, and what one might find valuable about it. On that front it's been at least a partial success. I can't buy a cup of coffee with Bitcoin, and I doubt I ever will, but the fact that it works at all is a lot more than I suspected we would see at this point. It's definitely caused me to rethink quite a few of my assumptions about macroeconomics.

That doesn't justify why anyone else should be shoehorning blockchains into their projects.

Earlier today I saw that Kodak is going to be launching KODAKCoin later this month as a mechanism to somehow assist photographers in selling and distributing their work. Presumably Kodak trusts Kodak. Any photographer who wants to use Kodak's tools to control the distribution of their work has to trust Kodak. Kodak has an IT department. They don't need trustless or decentralized. What they need is a boring ol' SQL database.

Maybe cryptocurrencies are a good idea, maybe they're not. That's more of a political and economic question than a technical one. Either way, they clearly do work more or less as advertised. What I'm still waiting to see is someone who is not a libertarian bent on the destruction of the global financial system using the blockchain to successfully solve any other previously intractable problem.

Re: Building for the Blockchain

#84

Post by ptk921 »

api wrote: post #6
goodroot wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hello, api. You might want to check this page out: https://www.stateofthedapps.com There are 938 projects listed that leverage Ethereum/Solidity. One of my personal favourites is: https://colony.io . The whitepaper is a fun read.

What I'm really looking for (and I've been asking this question in a lot of places recently) is some concrete examples of real world cases where this tech is being... you know... used as something other than just novelty or tinkering. Block chain centric use cases don't count since those just reinforce my worst case hypothesis-- that cryptocurrency is a financial MMORPG and a pure value-free bubble. What's an actual…

Hi Api. Your questions are _spot_ on!

Speculative investing + skyrocketing valuations does encourage highly motivated reasoning-- a unique kind of confirmation bias:

"This technology MUST be the answer to all the problems of the future because I'm getting wealthier TODAY!"

Irrational exuberance is rampant.

That said -- the recent New Yorker article on Estonia's digital society [1] covered that country's usage of a blockchain to manage patient healthcare records.

> the backbone of Estonia’s digital security is a blockchain technology called K.S.I.

K.S.I. from Guardtime [2] is an enterprise permissioned blockchain that is less decentralized than bitcoin and ethereum. Still, its exciting to see that Estonia is leveraging immutability and (some) decentralization to build a secure persistence layer that provides data provenance and a log of data access for management of their citizens' personal data, including healthcare records.

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/18/estonia-the-di... [2] https://guardtime.com/technology

Re: Building for the Blockchain

#85

Post by wcarron »

symlinkk wrote: post #80
albertgoeswoof wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can solve this by using multiple oracles and a stake-based consensus algorithm to de-incentivize malicious reporting.

> stake-based consensus algorithm What do you mean by this?

Proof-of-stake as opposed to Proof-of-work

Re: Building for the Blockchain

#86

Post by tstactplsignore »

snitko wrote: post #63

It's all the same thing every year on HN. People trying to find all sorts of excuses for Bitcoin existence - blockchains, smart contracts, ICOs - as long as they don't have to accept that Bitcoin's main purpose is and always was to have an alternative to the financial system, crippling regulations, government control and taxes. In other words, everything people hate about libertarians, they try to ignore in Bitcoin.…

>Bitcoin's main purpose is and always was to have an alternative to the financial system, crippling regulations, government control and taxes.

Does bitcoin really do any of those things? Right now, btc core is not an alternative to cash- a problem that maybe will be fixed in time, but currently only seems to be getting worse. If bitcoin really did take off as a global currency, the IRS would audit unreported bitcoin transactions- and it'd have your financial records because the corporations and individuals you interact act with would cooperate, and it'd only need a few to start to deanonymize you. It seems like the blockchain would almost make the tax job easier, because all transactions are public unless people move from bitcoin to a zerocoin model. Even then, the IRS would pursue those who didn't report and have transaction information from vendors to work to identify fraud.

So, bitcoin doesn't seem like an alternative to taxes. Also have no idea what it has to do with most government regulation. And, is it really an alternative to the financial system? Yes, people can use bitcoin instead of a checkings or savings account- but still need to use traditional services to invest in the market, and the financial system will continue humming along making more money from money and making gobs of money profiting off everyone else's market inefficiency whether it's working in usd or btc.

So, what are we left with? It seems like core btc is only an alternative to a speculative investment in something that the federal reserve cannot print. And believe it or not, the vast majority of this country either doesn't care about quantitative easing, or believes in basic macroeconomics. Core right now seems to just be a LARP fantasy for libertarians convinced that "this time we can finally get rid of the evil Fed and their evil money printing". It'll never happen, and if it does offfer any kind of freedom, it's the freedom to go back to pre-fiat boom and bust cycles of economic hell detached from modern macroeconomic theory.

Re: Building for the Blockchain

#87

Post by symlinkk »

wcarron wrote: post #85
symlinkk wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> stake-based consensus algorithm What do you mean by this?

Proof-of-stake as opposed to Proof-of-work

So the oracle is incentivized to tell the truth because lying will hurt the value of their tokens? What happens when someone offers them more than their tokens are worth if they lie?

Re: Building for the Blockchain

#88

Post by jhwang5 »

patrickaljord wrote: post #37
nileshtrivedi wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need blockchain only when you want to prevent double spending of _something_. A linked list where only one node can have a valid pointer to the previous node. For checksum hashes, unless double spending is a problem, IPFS will suffoce.

You don't need a blockchain to prevent double spending. You only need a blockchain if you want the double spending prevention to happen between trustless distributed peers.

You are right, and I think this aptly captures just how misunderstood Blockchain is even on this forum.

Re: Building for the Blockchain

#90

Post by jhwang5 »

ojr wrote: post #74
spookthesunset wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a solved problem. All interested parties form an independent business entity and assign ownership to that. All problems related to inter-company collaboration are people and organizational problems not technical problems. Blockchain solves nothing in this space.

it cost on average around $1 USD to perform an average blockchain transaction and millions of transaction are made a day, the demand is transparent and the data is available for everyone to see. If it was a solved problem I would expect the demand for decentralized ledgers to be a lot lower

You are confounding the demand for decentralized ledgers with the demand for currency that's recorded on the ledgers.
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