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Blockchain study finds zero success rate and vendors don't call back

theregister.co.uk

91–100 of 247 posts

Re: Blockchain study finds zero success rate and vendors don't call back

#91
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can’t tell if you are being sarcastic or not, so I assume this is a serious comment. Can you share some examples of use cases where DLT is going to be transformative?

I mean a good example of the need for DLT is the fact that no one in the country can buy romaine lettuce right now. Does it really make any sense whatsoever that no one in the country can eat lettuce for the next couple months just because one farm got contaminated with E. coli?

You seem to be suggesting that a distributed ledger would have made it possible for regulators or buyers to track the specific source of the contamination and pull it out of the food system. DLTs are starting to be used for that level of tracking for diamonds, but key to that system is the ability to establish a "fingerprint" for each diamond that involves a laser-inscribed serial number on each diamond.

So to apply that, wouldn't we have to somehow register each individual head of lettuce with a tamperproof fingerprint? Just registering the bags the lettuce came in isn't good enough; the "farm" selling you their romaine might actually be selling you romaine from somewhere else that they've repackaged. (If that wasn't the case, we wouldn't be having this lettuce problem to start with.) And this is setting aside the possibility that lettuce might be leaved/shredded before packing and shipping, because now we have to put that tamperproof fingerprint on each and every leaf.

Oh, also there's the thing about all the leaves actually being in contact with one another as they're shipped, so by the time the consumer actually eats the leaf and gets sick, the best you could possibly do is say "we think it's from one of these packagers."

Maybe you're envisioning some other way entirely for Distributed Lettuce Technology* to solve this problem, I dunno. But I have trouble seeing it.

*I'm sorry, but cut me some slack, the joke is RIGHT THERE

Re: Blockchain study finds zero success rate and vendors don't call back

#92
post #3

I'm really not surprised. The most interesting thing about your business shouldn't be your choice in data-store.

But what about the Emerging CD-ROM Industry? (I want to know more about Bill Gate's goat!) https://www.questia.com/magazine/1G1-6501528/microsoft-s-thi... The 1988 Microsoft CD-ROM Conference held in Seattle in March, attracted about 2,000 industry insiders. The tone and ambience of the conference reflect a definite change in the industry. Most companies were represented not only by top management, but by their marke…

Bill Gates' current goat is indeed… goats: https://www.ifad.org/web/latest/news-detail/asset/40266618

Re: Blockchain study finds zero success rate and vendors don't call back

#93
This study is clearly flawed because they didn't consider the real use case of blockchain: illegal activity.

Blockchain has truly transformed the fields of child pornography, ransomware, drug markets, and ponzi schemes. Regardless of your opinions of those fields, you simply have to accept that those areas wouldn't be possible to the extent they are now without Blockchain based cryptocurrencies.

Re: Blockchain study finds zero success rate and vendors don't call back

#94
post #79

Blockchains make no sense when the "asset" they are tracking have to be imported from the outside world because they lose the trustless property which is the whole point. For example supply line tracking blockchains. "Look this piece of beef was at place X on time Y with temperature Z, I have a hash and everything". Yes but how do I know that you didn't swap the barcodes or you didn't fiddle with the GPS or the therm…

I always say "the moment you need to verify that a human did something outside the system, your blockchain is broken."

I extend it further: the moment you need to verify that something happened outside the system, your blockchain is broken.

Re: Blockchain study finds zero success rate and vendors don't call back

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean a good example of the need for DLT is the fact that no one in the country can buy romaine lettuce right now. Does it really make any sense whatsoever that no one in the country can eat lettuce for the next couple months just because one farm got contaminated with E. coli?

You seem to be suggesting that a distributed ledger would have made it possible for regulators or buyers to track the specific source of the contamination and pull it out of the food system. DLTs are starting to be used for that level of tracking for diamonds, but key to that system is the ability to establish a "fingerprint" for each diamond that involves a laser-inscribed serial number on each diamond. So to apply…

> the "farm" selling you their romaine might actually be selling you romaine from somewhere else that they've repackaged.

Think about it from a game theory perspective. Under the status quo, each party in the supply chain maximizes their profit by lying about where their supplies came from. Whereas with DLT, each party maximizes their profit by being honest about where their supplies came from.

As an example, let's say you hijack you a truck and swap out expensive lettuce for cheap lettuce in a way that circumvents whatever tamper proofing technology has been applied. Stuff like this happens all the time currently, and is wildly profitable. (That's why if you go to a sushi restaurant and get a bunch of assorted sushi pieces or rolls, there is roughly a 0% chance that your meal will actually consist of what you ordered.)

With DLT though this is no longer profitable, because if you sell the cheap lettuce as expensive lettuce then you now have to sell the expensive lettuce as cheap lettuce, because each head or crate or whatever still needs to be traceable back to the source. This means that your total profit from the transaction is just whatever you would have made without cheating, plus your costs of hijacking the truck. So all in all, a substantial net loss.

Re: Blockchain study finds zero success rate and vendors don't call back

#96
post #19

I said this in another thread but I'll say it again here. I am downright shocked at just how much of a failure this technology has turned out to be. How can this many brilliant people work on an area for this long and produce almost nothing of value? I suppose it happens in areas of "pathological science" like infinite energy machines, but those are areas where the tech doesn't work and probably violates laws of phys…

[deleted]

Re: Blockchain study finds zero success rate and vendors don't call back

#97
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depending on how you define "blockchain", it's either the same thing as a merkle tree or most non-bitcoin things that claim to be using blockchains actually are just using merkle trees.

> Depending on how you define "blockchain" i.e.: Depending on whether the person saying "blockchain" is lying to make a quick buck from the hype-train.

Sometimes they're just genuinely unaware of the prior art and think that chained hashing is a new thing.

Re: Blockchain study finds zero success rate and vendors don't call back

#98

Blockchains make no sense when the "asset" they are tracking have to be imported from the outside world because they lose the trustless property which is the whole point. For example supply line tracking blockchains. "Look this piece of beef was at place X on time Y with temperature Z, I have a hash and everything". Yes but how do I know that you didn't swap the barcodes or you didn't fiddle with the GPS or the therm…

They make sense when the primary vulnerability isn't the person doing the recording but the possibility that the data might be tampered with or misrepresented before it gets to the consumer. Consider, for example, the problem of restaurant reviews. We know that one person's review of a restaurant isn't going to be 100% accurate, because it's subjective. Socially, we've figured out ways of getting around that, like so…

Also doesn't address astroturfing or spam, which are more of a problem without a gatekeeper.

Re: Blockchain study finds zero success rate and vendors don't call back

#99

Blockchains make no sense when the "asset" they are tracking have to be imported from the outside world because they lose the trustless property which is the whole point. For example supply line tracking blockchains. "Look this piece of beef was at place X on time Y with temperature Z, I have a hash and everything". Yes but how do I know that you didn't swap the barcodes or you didn't fiddle with the GPS or the therm…

They make sense when the primary vulnerability isn't the person doing the recording but the possibility that the data might be tampered with or misrepresented before it gets to the consumer. Consider, for example, the problem of restaurant reviews. We know that one person's review of a restaurant isn't going to be 100% accurate, because it's subjective. Socially, we've figured out ways of getting around that, like so…

What makes your proposed system immune from abuse?

"reviewers could receive currency directly for the information they provide, provided by the potential customers who benefit directly"

The greatest benefit goes to restaurants with positive reviews, which are thereby incentivized to game the system.

Blockchain might have solved the problem of trustless consensus with proof-of-work, but you are now introducing a new situation in which any number of fake, anonymous contributors can distort the review system. If the review reader pays the review writer directly, upvoting their own phony reviews doesn't cost the corrupt restaurant anything.

Re: Blockchain study finds zero success rate and vendors don't call back

#100
I met a blockchain researcher this summer, I was asking her what sort of stuff she was working on and she started talking about supply chains. Like drexlspivey mentioned there are a whole host of problems with relying on data from the real world. My first thought was just... why do you need an immutable ledger for that? Not to throw buzzwords out, but why not just store transaction data in a database that scales well? If you're willing to spend all of these resources on developing some insane database for your supply chain you must have some real trust issues with your suppliers. I've never worked in an industry like that but I feel like being able to trust your suppliers is pretty important, and provided that you do trust them you could just use a conventional database for all of this and save tons of time and effort.
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