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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

#131

Post by spookthesunset »

Alex3917 wrote: post #121
ghaff wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

> Just reducing fraud and otherwise cutting costs could be a big win. I mean that alone is a several trillion dollar a year improvement that will continue on indefinitely, and that's only one of the many applications for blockchain. Consider that roughly 75% of American adults of working age are either unemployed or underemployed, and in most countries it's vastly worse than that. The reason most of them are unemploy…

Mind telling the world what the hell “DLT” means?

Dynamic link tracking? Database Local Transformation?

And let’s be honest here, I’m gonna assume it is a clever buzzword designed to sell the failed blockchain technology to a new set of rubes, right?

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

#132

Post by spookthesunset »

Alex3917 wrote: post #124
tomrod wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s about making fraud harder and more expensive, increasing visibility, and streamlining the whole process It may cut fraud costs, but there are other ways to do that. Blockchain replicates computing costs relative to centralized data stores, so implementations have non-zero scaling costs.

> Blockchain replicates computing costs. Which is about as relevant as the cost of tea in china. Or, to steal another analogy, counting on database efficiency as the competitive advantage for your business is like picking up nickels in front of a steamroller. Especially since DLT efficiency will eventually be figured out. Even if it takes another five or ten years or even twenty years, that's nothing in the grand sch…

> Especially since DLT efficiency will eventually be figured out.

Lol. The BlockChain is inefficient by design! It is that exact inefficiency that makes it trustless.

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

#133

Post by Alex3917 »

spookthesunset wrote: post #131
Alex3917 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just reducing fraud and otherwise cutting costs could be a big win. I mean that alone is a several trillion dollar a year improvement that will continue on indefinitely, and that's only one of the many applications for blockchain. Consider that roughly 75% of American adults of working age are either unemployed or underemployed, and in most countries it's vastly worse than that. The reason most of them are unemploy…

Mind telling the world what the hell “DLT” means? Dynamic link tracking? Database Local Transformation? And let’s be honest here, I’m gonna assume it is a clever buzzword designed to sell the failed blockchain technology to a new set of rubes, right?

Distributed ledger technology. This is the preferred industry term because there are many newer systems that offer or claim to offer the same guarantees as blockchains but that are implemented in different ways under the hood.

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

#134

Post by dnautics »

osrec wrote: post #94
joshwa wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are ideas around trusted oracles and consensus recommendation ratings for oracles that aren't terrible and may work (no comment on scalability, of course).

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

#135

Post by wslh »

dlubarov wrote: post #127
wslh wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that having a non-BFT consensus is the same that using database nodes and if you use BFT consensus you don't have the performance required for most use cases. BFT-SMaRT supposely achieve 80k tps for a few nodes but when you scale to more nodes the performance degrades substantially. Another issue against the DLT hype is that the blockchain does not provide security where 90% of the whole architecture i…

There might be some constant factor penalty, but we can shard BFT systems much like we do with Paxos etc. See Shasper for example -- it won't have any practical limits on throughput.

Shasper[1] "Note: This is an experimental project. Everything will break, and it may disappear without any notice!" (sic).

Until we don't see a community working on adversarial attacks, we will not know if it is secure of not. There is concrete research about BFT since 1982.

[1] https://github.com/paritytech/shasper

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

#136

Post by mathnmusic »

joshwa wrote: post #79
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 always say "the moment you need to verify that a human did something outside the system, your blockchain is broken."

This is not necessarily true. You can create a marketplace for facts (eg: oracles or prediction markets) and therefore create incentives for bystanders to bring facts to blockchain. Sure, it doesn't have 100% guarantees, but it might improve on the current scenario in certain cases.

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

#137

Post by dnautics »

tuxxy wrote: post #114
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.

To some degree the block chain is not 100% reliable, there is a vanishing but nonzero likelihood that you are not on the correct chain of maximal likelihood. You can calculate this likelihood and feel settled that your ledger transaction is "secure enough" after some time has passed. One could imagine a trusted oracle system that operates on similar "eventually vanishing lack of confidence" principle if the oracle's actions are generally, independently verifiable.

It will of course be less scalable than the blockchain itself as a generalization.

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

#138

Post by mathnmusic »

jacobr1 wrote: post #75
derefr wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about a thing that's almost-but-not-quite a blockchain? E.g. a decentralized multi-master Event Sourcing datastore. No proof-of-work, no mining, no ledger. Anyone who can connect to the network (i.e. is whitelisted) can append whatever they like, and it'll get replicated to everybody. But nobody can delete/overwrite (without losing consensus); and every event is signed by its emitter. It's just an append-only log…

so ... sort of like git?

Git is a DAG where each child of a hashed node is equally valid. For transactions and assets, what we need is a linked list (a chain) and therefore, some rule like "the longest chain is the TRUE chain".

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

#139

Post by spookthesunset »

api wrote: 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…

> How can this many brilliant people work on an area for this long and produce almost nothing of value?

To be fair, it made some folks who got lucky and bought in early nice and wealthy. Which then attracted a gaggle of shysters, hucksters and fraudsters.

When you drill down the key thing that gets people sucked in to Satoshi's Blockchain, it is naked greed. Everything layered on top about the technology, or "DLT" or whatever buzzwords these people spout is just window dressing. All of them want to Get Rich Quick and drive off into the sunset in a lambo from their bitcoin gainz.

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

#140

Post by Alex3917 »

simonw wrote: post #88

My favourite terrible blockchain idea is real estate on the blockchain. Because presumably that means that if someone guesses or steals my password, they now own my house.

> Because presumably that means that if someone guesses or steals my password, they now own my house.

You'll register your private keys with a PKI. In practice the worst case scenario would be needing to go to the DMV to register your new phone or something.

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