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‘Blockchain’ is meaningless

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Re: ‘Blockchain’ is meaningless

#81

Post by seanmcdirmid »

aje403 wrote: post #68
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big hype cycles typically have lower low point as well as higher high points. I don't know if another AI winter is around the corner, I hope not, but it is definitely a possibility. I am much more pessimistic about blockchains.

There won't be because it still actually is useful governments and businesses. They can tangibly use it to increase their functioning/profits - that was not the case during the AI winter. Computers sucked, data sucked, and there was no internet. I hope you're right in that the attention it is getting decreases. A reasonable limit of what we can actually do with what we currently have is probably within the next 15 ye…

> There won't be because it still actually is useful governments and businesses.

This was actually true before, AI has been useful, it has always gotten more useful over time, AI has always had limits, and AI winters occurred because expectations dramatically exceeded those limits. For there to be a winter/crash, hype just has to increase to a point that is way beyond what we can hope to accomplish in the near time. It doesn't help that the Chinese are taking the place of the Japanese, who in turn were a significant cause for the last AI winter.

Re: ‘Blockchain’ is meaningless

#82

Post by juanmirocks »

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…

To me that's the key for sth to be called blockchain: it has to be decentralized. In a way that the truth is not mandated by a dictator or oligarchy, but by the own rules written in the blockchain and accepted by all.

Re: ‘Blockchain’ is meaningless

#83

Post by wan23 »

spookthesunset wrote: post #78
Ajedi32 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 mu…

This is sort of a strawman. No one is saying that trust should be removed from society in general. Bitcoin proponents think it's desirable to have a way to store and transfer money without having to trust a single party. Anyone who has had Paypal freeze their funds or had a customer request a chargeback after receiving service could tell you why that might be desirable.

Re: ‘Blockchain’ is meaningless

#84

Post by firmgently »

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…

I'd guess it's the other way around.

'Autonomous' is an unusual enough word that you remember what it means (especially once you understand the 'auto' prefix), or look it up because it's strange.

'Agent' is so familiar though that I can imagine lots of people don't attach its literal meaning to it in the sense of 'having agency'. Popular uses are things like 'secret agent', 'cleaning agent'... "probably means like, 'person', or 'thing' or something".

Re: ‘Blockchain’ is meaningless

#85

Post by Maybestring »

aje403 wrote: post #45
mayank wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which is what he's saying, the use of the term is because of the extremely-vague-homeomorphism implied by the structure Unfortunately, the word choice can lead to "they've gots em a neural networks and an AI singularities and them robots coming to take over"

>extremely-vague-homeomorphism

Analogy is the concept in its full generality.

Re: ‘Blockchain’ is meaningless

#86

Post by Sargos »

nailer wrote: post #53
bdamm wrote: post #49

Earlier 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…

> this one isn't settled yet

It pretty much is. Cryptography is a niche of computer science and used the word for a while but now that humanity has chosen to use the word for the entire field of distributed and trustless systems it will now and forever mean "cryptocurrencies".

The larger group pretty much always wins and this case is no exception.

Re: ‘Blockchain’ is meaningless

#88

Post by Sargos »

spookthesunset wrote: post #80
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…

> 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 transa…

> 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.

You are deliberately torturing the word consensus just to make a straw man argument against crypto. The original Bitcoin block chain exists and everyone agrees where it is and how long it is. The fact that someone can create a copy and tinker with it with their own group of friends has no effect on the real chain. Anyone can fork it. That's not a technical limitation or flaw in any way even if you try to make it out to be.

Blockchains have solved the technical challenges of coming to consensus. They did not solve the political challenges of bringing Republicans and Democrats together in a consensus. Sorry about that. Maybe in the future.

Re: ‘Blockchain’ is meaningless

#89

Post by aje403 »

Maybestring wrote: post #85
aje403 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is what he's saying, the use of the term is because of the extremely-vague-homeomorphism implied by the structure Unfortunately, the word choice can lead to "they've gots em a neural networks and an AI singularities and them robots coming to take over"

>extremely-vague-homeomorphism Analogy is the concept in its full generality.

If only. Analogy is more like the bastardization of an Ideal Form

Re: ‘Blockchain’ is meaningless

#90

Post by geezerjay »

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…

> 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".

Actually, the only problem illustrated in your complaint is that you are unaware of the meaning of the word "agent".

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/agent

Considering how the definition of "agent" is "A person or thing that takes an active role or produces a specified effect", it is quite clear that an agent isn't a program, but programs (or modules or components) are quite obviouly agents. In fact, each and every entity in a sequence diagram is an agent.

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