‘Blockchain’ is meaningless • Hacker News Board

Re: ‘Blockchain’ is meaningless

#31

Post by cal5k » Thu, Mar 08, 2018, 4:38 PM UTC

sheepz wrote: post #14

The blockchain hype is crazy. My favorite truism that I see people spouting is that Bitcoin (or cryptocurrencies are) is worthless, but blockchain is a huge innovation. Little do these people understand that the true innovation is Bitcoin's proof of work as a consensus mechanism with the economic incentive of mining. Most of these "blockchains" are just distributed databases, which are not trustless, decentralized et…

Most of the people who spout such nonsense have no idea what they're talking about.

Re: ‘Blockchain’ is meaningless

#32

Post by rs86 » Thu, Mar 08, 2018, 4:39 PM UTC

empath75 wrote: post #3

It's interesting that an article that provides at least 6 different meanings for it says that it's meaningless.

Journalists suck

Re: ‘Blockchain’ is meaningless

#33

Post by wuliwong » Thu, Mar 08, 2018, 4:39 PM UTC

ouid wrote: post #29

SeanLuke wrote: post #8

Cryptocurrency, welcome to AI's long nightmare. AI has forever had buzzword-complaint terms. Consider "Agent", which describes a very specific thing (namely autonomy), but that didn't stop everyone and their dog outside the field from calling their software a "database agent" or a "compiler agent" or whatnot, equating "agent" with "program". Indeed there's an entire non-AI field called "Agent Based Modeling" -- of wh…

AI even has this problem among it's researchers. What the fuck is a neural network?

I was also curious about the use of 'neural networks' in deep learning or whatever. My PhD research was working on problems in computational neuroscience.

I think the use of "neural networks" is because the topology of these deep learning networks is similar to what is observed in biological brains.

Re: ‘Blockchain’ is meaningless

#34

Post by CodexArcanum » Thu, Mar 08, 2018, 4:42 PM UTC

"Blockchain" is a data structure, a pretty well defined one. The buzzword is basically a synonym for "distributed (, decentralized?) system." Buzzwords arr usually annoying and misused. Object-Oriented Programming as practiced isn't really what was intended by the term. Memes with cat pictures are only vaguely a subset of Dawkins' memes. "The Cloud," ugh, let's not even.

Re: ‘Blockchain’ is meaningless

#35

Post by tylersmith » Thu, Mar 08, 2018, 4:43 PM UTC

sheepz wrote: post #14

The blockchain hype is crazy. My favorite truism that I see people spouting is that Bitcoin (or cryptocurrencies are) is worthless, but blockchain is a huge innovation. Little do these people understand that the true innovation is Bitcoin's proof of work as a consensus mechanism with the economic incentive of mining. Most of these "blockchains" are just distributed databases, which are not trustless, decentralized et…

Yeah it's really weird to me because while you can do cool things with blockchains, on their own they're just a data structure. Without a trustless, decentralized, and permissionless consensus model it's basically just a big git repo. The blockcahin data structure, a tree of blocks of state changes, is not at all a recent innovation. And not something that would typically get hyped by the average non-programming related media.

Re: ‘Blockchain’ is meaningless

#36

Post by brwsr » Thu, Mar 08, 2018, 4:44 PM UTC

Well, at least less meaningless than the widely used word "Economy" representing our financial system of waste, where consumers have to keep buying stuff to keep the system intact.

Re: ‘Blockchain’ is meaningless

#37

Post by lev99 » Thu, Mar 08, 2018, 4:45 PM UTC

ouid wrote: post #29

SeanLuke wrote: post #8

Cryptocurrency, welcome to AI's long nightmare. AI has forever had buzzword-complaint terms. Consider "Agent", which describes a very specific thing (namely autonomy), but that didn't stop everyone and their dog outside the field from calling their software a "database agent" or a "compiler agent" or whatnot, equating "agent" with "program". Indeed there's an entire non-AI field called "Agent Based Modeling" -- of wh…

AI even has this problem among it's researchers. What the fuck is a neural network?

Neural Network describes a class of algorithms. It's often misused in marketing (buzzword), but there is an engineering definition used by people that practice machine learning.

A perceptron, the basic unit in a neural network, has one or more inputs, an algorithm for processing the input, and one or more outputs. Layers of perceptron are often used so that the original input gets transformed over each layer. The most common output for a neural network is a classification. The major variants of neural networks are ways a perceptron's algorithms change, the types of algorithms inside a perceptron, the number of layers and the number of inputs/outputs. Neural Networks are computationally heavy to train, but not computationally heavy to use once created. They are specifically good for working with image data.

http://natureofcode.com/book/chapter-10-neural-networks/

Re: ‘Blockchain’ is meaningless

#38

Post by jgh » Thu, Mar 08, 2018, 4:45 PM UTC

nailer wrote: post #25

wintom wrote: post #5

It’s not meaningless. Saying Blockchain is meaningless is like saying the web is meaningless or the internet is meaningless. Just because you either don’t understand it or you feel it’s too broad does not make it meaningless. Blockchain is a distributed ledger that guarantees consensus without any central party. It has many other properties, like making the transactions public in most cases, and many other important…

I don't know why you're being downvoted. That seems a reasonable definition of blockchain, in much the same way one could give a reasonable definition of an array as a sequence of items. The article's premise that 'The term blockchain is misused and frequently misunderstood' (which is true) means 'Blockchain is meaningless' doesn't hold water and this is very typical for a Vox technology article.

I think gp's definition is still too broad. Consensus is not an inherent property of blockchains, for example. You can make blockchains without any consensus at all, or with some central authority prescribing reality. A blockchain is simply a kind of data structure, like a linked list or a hash map or an array.

Re: ‘Blockchain’ is meaningless

#39

Post by mayank » Thu, Mar 08, 2018, 4:45 PM UTC

wuliwong wrote: post #33

ouid wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI even has this problem among it's researchers. What the fuck is a neural network?

I was also curious about the use of 'neural networks' in deep learning or whatever. My PhD research was working on problems in computational neuroscience. I think the use of "neural networks" is because the topology of these deep learning networks is similar to what is observed in biological brains.

Brain networks and neural networks are not similar in structure or function, other than the superficial abstraction of “nodes and connections” (graphs).

They’re about as related as genetic algorithms are to actual genetics.

Re: ‘Blockchain’ is meaningless

#40

Post by jgh » Thu, Mar 08, 2018, 4:49 PM UTC

sheepz wrote: post #14

The blockchain hype is crazy. My favorite truism that I see people spouting is that Bitcoin (or cryptocurrencies are) is worthless, but blockchain is a huge innovation. Little do these people understand that the true innovation is Bitcoin's proof of work as a consensus mechanism with the economic incentive of mining. Most of these "blockchains" are just distributed databases, which are not trustless, decentralized et…

It wasn't even Satoshi who came up with the proof of work mechanism, it's from Hashcash which was invented in the 90s. What he did do though was have the good sense to connect the two concepts!