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

theregister.co.uk

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

#111

Post by sfescape »

jacobr1 wrote: post #73
JackC wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A useful term here is "Nakamoto consensus," which I think refers to the proof of X thing you're talking about -- consensus schemes that are resistant to sybil attacks among anonymous validators. And I think you're right -- adding Nakamoto consensus to private blockchains makes no sense, because by definition they don't have arbitrary validators. And without Nakamoto consensus, "blockchain" is just rebranding of old a…

> rebranding of old and boring tech A distributed merkle-chain database is still pretty innovative. A good example is git. I think what many private groups want is a "binary git for transaction data". Everybody can review their own copy of the shared chain with signing of new links in the chain. Now that isn't really a full blockchain, but is a different kind of thing from a central RDMS.

That is a blockchain, and provides the validation and history integrity that is core to (and where the name 'blockchain') comes from.

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

#112

Post by frogperson »

Tim Bray made a comment at re:invent this week that most of Amazon's internal work loads rely on DynamoDB and a ledger database that is the pre-cursor to the new QLDB service Amazon released this week.

To qualify this, when Tim used the word 'most' I don't know if he meant "most data stored" or "most DB instances". He also didn't give any percentages, so it very well could be 99% Dynamo and 1% ledger DB. Lastly, Bray didn't include Aurora or Redshift in that list of "most used database at Amazon", but Dr Vogel's keynote alluded to a ton of internal Aurora usage.

So, at least some people are claiming successful usage of blockchain in production. It's just not clear how much. Amazon seems to think there is a future in it, since they just released 2 new blockchain related services this week.

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

#113

Post by lalaland1125 »

Alex3917 wrote: post #95
chipotle_coyote wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

Doesn't this require you to trust the source? And if you trust the source, there is no need for a blockchain?

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

#114

Post by tuxxy »

drexlspivey wrote: post #55

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 alluded to this problem in my comment. This is the crux of the oracle-problem.

There is no way to reliably (key word here: reliably) take non-cryptographically provable information and achieve consensus on it in a decentralized manner.

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

#115

Post by theoh »

nostrademons wrote: post #109
theoh wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

It's not immune from abuse. It's immune from abuse of the particular sort I describe . I'm not so naive as to think that all problems are magically fixed by blockchain, but given the number of posts on HN and elsewhere who complain about the power of big tech companies and assume they're tampering with or misrepresenting data for their own profit, it seems like people consider this problem to be important.

Blockchain can't fix the problem of lack of trust, where it is trust that is desired.

The trustless consensus idea is inherently abstract and paranoid, for better or worse. But life in human society requires constant acts of concrete trust and mutual consideration.

The cypherpunks who invented the blockchain don't seem to have explored the idea taken to its "logical" conclusion of ripping out all trusted entities and (somehow) replacing them with exchange of anonymous cryptographic tokens. The blatant truth is that doing away with trust altogether would paralyse every aspect of civilization.

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

#117

Post by AndrewKemendo »

manmanic wrote: post #8

I've been working on DLT / enterprise blockchain technologies since 2014 and have insight into hundreds of projects, a small number of which made it to live production. Here is the bottom line: yes, it's mostly hype, but this technology does have genuine use cases - when you want to build an interparty database-driven application, and cannot find a suitable place to put the database, because of business concerns or r…

when you want to build an interparty database-driven application, and cannot find a suitable place to put the database, because of business concerns or regulation

Technology can't solve this problem.

If multiple entities need to coordinate inside a mutually used product don't trust each other, then the problem is structural and needs to be solved with interpersonal, regulatory or political action.

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

#118

Post by ghaff »

Alex3917 wrote: post #105
drexlspivey wrote: post #55

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…

> Yes but how do I know that you didn't swap the barcodes or you didn't fiddle with the GPS or the thermometer was working or a million other things? Game theory. Without DLT you make more money by doing these things. With DLT it just becomes the cream skimming problem, where you're just paying money to shuffle assets around but you're actually losing money because the total value of all the assets is still the same.…

The fact that a blockchain can’t always be guaranteed to always represent the ground truth about physical assets is certainly a limitation. But I agree with you. This isn’t about 100% guarantees. It’s about making fraud harder and more expensive, increasing visibility, and streamlining the whole process. I remain something of a skeptic but there’s certainly a lot of interest in and money for things like provenance and supply chain tracking. Just reducing fraud and otherwise cutting costs could be a big win.

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

#119

Post by tuxxy »

kllrnohj wrote: post #82
tuxxy wrote: post #12

Not really surprising, to be honest. I'm really tired of the overused "blockchains are really slow databases" phrase. They're not, and if you're using one as that, you're doing it wrong almost 90% of the time. Here's a great question to ask yourself if you need a blockchain: Do I need game theoretical enforced security? There are many networks and protocols that can be improved with such security mechanisms. There ar…

The singular point of blockchain is to establish a paper trail. The singular point of Tor is not to have a paper trail. Those are literally opposites. Blockchain + Tor would be the sort of complete nonsense the article is talking about. Blockchain has nothing to do with security. It's not a security technology. It's a permanence technology. It ensures that something is never modified in the absence of a trusted autho…

You've completely missed the point. There are people who are using Onion routing with nodes who are economically incentivized to behave in a non-malicious fashion. If caught acting malicious, then your node can be penalized. It's not like you're actively putting all traffic on the blockchain. You're arguing a strawman here.

I'm not going to speak for these projects directly because I know very little about them, but I can speak as to how you would incentivize non-malicious behavior.

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

#120

Post by AndrewKemendo »

narrator wrote: post #43
manmanic wrote: post #8

I've been working on DLT / enterprise blockchain technologies since 2014 and have insight into hundreds of projects, a small number of which made it to live production. Here is the bottom line: yes, it's mostly hype, but this technology does have genuine use cases - when you want to build an interparty database-driven application, and cannot find a suitable place to put the database, because of business concerns or r…

The only successful applications of business blockchain I've seen is in businesses where nobody trusts the brokers. For example, the diamond business has to keep track of where the diamonds came from and nobody trusts the brokers to not lie, so blockchain works here.

I've never encountered a system where an un-trusted middleman didn't get out-competed, driven out by the buyers or (in one case) actually killed.

Hasidim don't seem like they have that problem.

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