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‘Blockchain’ is meaningless
71–80 of 108 posts
Re: ‘Blockchain’ is meaningless
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
The meaning of words change when the rest of humanity takes it for their own. Claiming "crypto are not crypto" will just leave you behind as the guy with his fist in the air cursing the world. Nuclear. Hacker. Patriot. Rubber. The audience matters. Besides, I doubt that any cryptanalyst would mind writing out cryptography any more than they'd mind writing out TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_GCM_SHA256.
I'm stating crypto is cryptography. There's not multiple cryptographies as far as I'm aware so 'crypto are' doesn't make sense. And yes, words change over time, but in that case I can just refer to (all) cryptocurrency as 'Bitcoin' since that's the common definition. In fact it's far more popular to refer to cryptocurrency as Bitcoin than it is to call that 'crypto'. Short version: this one isn't settled yet. How did…
Judging from the mad rush into investing in “cryptos” I disagree that this isn’t settled.
You just may not like how it settled.
Re: ‘Blockchain’ is meaningless
#73Cryptocurrency, 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…
I mean... "crypto" !!! Can you imagine what cryptographers had to witness every day for a couple of years now, while the term was increasingly skewing towards a completely misleading meaning?
Cryptozoologists are also feeling the pain.
Re: ‘Blockchain’ is meaningless
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
>long before Bitcoin To be fair, bitcoin is only about 37 months younger than git. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin
Other version control systems existed decades before git with similar principles (like CVS).
CVS and its precursor RCS are in no way like git other than that they're version control systems.
Re: ‘Blockchain’ is meaningless
#75Re: ‘Blockchain’ is meaningless
#76It’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.
It's meaningless because it's become just another buzzword.
Re: ‘Blockchain’ is meaningless
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean... "crypto" !!! Can you imagine what cryptographers had to witness every day for a couple of years now, while the term was increasingly skewing towards a completely misleading meaning?
It's like if people involved in: - ATMs - eCommerce - Foreign intelligence and signals or any other similar field where crypto is essential started calling themselves 'crypto'. Yes, these field use crypto, but no, they're not crypto. Just like cryptocurrencies aren't crypto. This is crytpo: https://cr.yp.to This is crypto: https://crypto.stackexchange.com/ . Things that use crypto are not crypto.
> Things that use crypto are not crypto.
It's questionable that these thing even use "crypto". Cryptocurrencies are named so because they use "cryptographic signatures". While the modular arithmetic used here is very similar to that used in "encryption", "hidden writing" doesn't take place, as the name might suggest. Signatures are more of a dual concept to cryptography than actual cryptography.
(One more note: applying a hashing algorithm may be considered "one-way encryption". In areas where this is used for signatures, an argument might be made that this is cryptography).
Re: ‘Blockchain’ is meaningless
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Common usage of the term blockchain implies a trustless, distributed consensus model. Even the Wikipedia article on blockchain references this in it's opening blurb, and asserts that Satoshi invented the blockchain [1]. Google trends also shows that the term practically didn't exist prior to widespread recognition of Bitcoin (even if you adjust the window to hide the recent spike, it was virtually unused) [2]. It's n…
> trustless, distributed consensus model Still sounds like git to me. The main difference is that Bitcoin's consensus model is fully automated, whereas git's relies on humans making decisions on which commits to include in their copy of the repo. (Though I suppose "trust" can indeed be one factor humans use when making such a decision.)
> The main difference is that Bitcoin's consensus model is fully automated
Except when it isn't. For example, the DAO "hack" resulted in humans overriding the automation to roll back history to bail out certain "investors". Or all the bitcoin forks. Or the fact that bitcoin mining is largely done by about three mining groups in China.
So Bitcoin is "trustless", but really believing in bitcoin involves every bit as much trust (or dare I say, faith) as any other thing in your life does.
> Though I suppose "trust" can indeed be one factor humans use when making such a decision.
Watching the bitcoin/blockchain hype-train has shown to me that humans require trust to thrive. To thrive you need to trust that you have a stable government, that you eat breakfast cereal doesn't contain lead, that you can walk past 99.99999% of people without getting stabbed.
Take away trust and suddenly the world get massively more expensive. Transaction costs go through the roof. You have to personally inspect every aspect of your breakfast cereal maker and all their vendors (eg: the folks that made the fertilizer used to grow the grain (don't want toxic chemicals), the hygiene of the employees operating the production line (don't want piss in your cereal),etc ). If you don't rigorously verify everything, you'll get fucked and die. In bitcoin this happens all the time - you can't trust anything in bitcoin--you can't trust your wallet maker, the printer used to print a paper wallet, the exchange you use, the software you use, the OS you run on, you can't trust any of it. Any break in the system will result in total loss of your bitcoin (and then you'll be called a moron by other bagholders because you didn't follow all 231 "simple" steps required to secure bitcoin)...
In short, society can't exist without trust. Bitcoin and the blockchain are attempts to remove the need to trust each other. The result is a cumbersome, non-scalable, deliberately inefficient design that still requires human trust to function. Which is why I personally think they are worthless technology in search of a problem. Every problem they try to solve still requires human trust, which renders their use pointless... Might as well just use git. It is far more efficient, can handle vastly more data, and doesn't require more electricity than many countries use in order to operate.
Re: ‘Blockchain’ is meaningless
#79Cryptocurrency, 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…
Your comment sounds as if you thought that AI researchers had invented the term “agent”.
They didn't? Next you'll be telling me the word dates from Middle English. :-)
Re: ‘Blockchain’ is meaningless
#80It’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…
> Blockchain is a distributed ledger that guarantees consensus without any central party
Except not even Blockchain guarantees consensus. If that was true we wouldn't see the hundreds of bitcoin forks. Let's not even forget Ethereum and Ethereum Classic. The "consensus" for ethereum was provided largely a few whales.
Blockchain doesn't guarantee consensus at all.
> It has many other properties, like making the transactions public in most cases, and many other important things that are different from centralized databases and non public databases we have been using for the last 30 years.
Setting aside your massive handwave of "many other things", your only concrete example is not at all unique to the blockchain. You can make any dataset public regardless of data structure used. Likewise nothing is stopping you from making a private blockchain (as stupid of an idea as that might be).
It's all just breathless hype. The blockchain is just a data structure similar to git only orders of magnitude less efficient by design. It's only good for operating things like Bitcoin or Ethereum. Outside of criminal use, Bitcoin has proven entirely useless in the real world. Ethereum used largely as a platform to build ICO scams.
The whole thing is a scam built on other scams. It's all souped up modern day penny stocks custom built to trick rubes into lining the pockets of a bunch of scammers.