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> The whole proof-of-work, decentralization, ledger, ... are in no way necessary steps in this. If you know of a ledger that's (1) permissionless and (2) avoids the double-spending problem and (3) _does not_ involve those things you mentioned ...then please, do tell me about it. I'd love to know your breakthrough solution.
Ethereum's Proof of Stake?
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You are quibbling with semantics. What you have quoted is the definition of a blockchain. Any "centralized" database with these properties is a blockchain, for all intents and purposes.
A system with all those properties is a git repository containing all this data. Which would also scale to more operations per second than a block chain, is much more battle-hardened than any blockchain... And decidedly isn't a blockchain. It's just a merkle tree that can easily be replicated / updated via "git clone" / "git fetch". Your definition of a blockchain seems to be different than what most people use, thou…
So what is the specific problem that you have? You just don't like the fact that blockchain data mutations are bundled into periodically-generated blocks that incorporate changes from multiple users, rather than being pushed by individual users on an ad hoc basis? Is it a problem for you that blockchain nodes maintain network connections with each other, and have a protocol for ensuring that they all remain in sync, rather than relying on individual users to pull and manually merge changes explicitly?
A typical feature of religious disputes is that the smallest distinction takes on the most momentous significance. Is that not what's going on here?
Tim didn't mention a contemporary sibling tech at AWS which should not be thrown out with the bathwater: private (centralized), immutable, signed ledgers. Their version is called QLDB and does have concrete applications where you need an provable audit trail of a stream of transactions with search and index on top. I was on a team at a fintech closely engaged with AWS to prototype a money movement system using that a…
> […] compliance […]. This is the crux of the matter. In a prevailing number of cases, when people ask about a blockchain, they actually want a ledger database with the following properties: – an immutable, tamper proof, append-only transaction log; – cryptographically verifiable datasets; – certification and/or compliance validation by externally accredited auditing bodies for SOC, PCI-DSS, ISO, HIPPA etc. Use cases…
The utility of decentralized blockchains is that they facilitate permissionless financial innovation. Yes, that means "regulatory arbitrage". But not just circumventing the law, more importantly, circumventing the de facto law of corporate gatekeepers. A substantial amount of de facto financial regulation comes not from democratically elected governments, but from companies that gate-keep access to the databases wher…
> fundamentally, having an open fabric for finance, in which anyone can build any kind of application they wish, seems like a pretty cool thing to me. Where money is concerned, no. Having gatekeepers, boundaries, approvals, registers, participants and authorities is onerous, but it keeps things more honest and it makes them much more traceable in cases of negligence or fraud. We have ... well pretty much all of recor…
https://mashable.com/article/biggest-crypto-scams-2022
https://mashable.com/article/biggest-cryptocurrency-scams-20...
https://www.zdnet.com/article/2020s-worst-cryptocurrency-bre...
https://www.zdnet.com/article/bitcoin-battered-the-worst-cry...
Proof-of-Waste :) Anyone got a good one for Proof-of-Stake.
For the older devs, has there been anything in the past like this? As in some new hyped tech that people kept trying to insert into their business?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A system with all those properties is a git repository containing all this data. Which would also scale to more operations per second than a block chain, is much more battle-hardened than any blockchain... And decidedly isn't a blockchain. It's just a merkle tree that can easily be replicated / updated via "git clone" / "git fetch". Your definition of a blockchain seems to be different than what most people use, thou…
Your comment makes me believe that you don't think very highly of "blockchain advocates". But you don't seem to have much of a problem with using a replicated git repository in this manner. So what is the specific problem that you have? You just don't like the fact that blockchain data mutations are bundled into periodically-generated blocks that incorporate changes from multiple users, rather than being pushed by in…
This distinction is not the one that actually matters and does not have huge significance in my frustration with blockchain advocates.
To me, the large issue seems to be that people advocating for blockchain _stuff_ usually seem to be ignoring reality and trying to paint a libertarian dream that is simply entirely divorced from how real governments and societies currently function.
The exact definition of blockchain doesn't matter. The use of a blockchain technology also doesn't matter (like, I don't care if my doctor is saving my records in Oracle SQL, some private blockchain, or whatever, never have cared, as long as the data is still there next time my doctor needs it, and it's compliant with legal privacy requirements).
What matters is that "blockchain" always seems to be coupled with "and by using it, it will fix this social problem somehow" when that problem is inevitably social or political, not technical.
I'm all for fixing these problems, but switching databases ain't it when the problem is several layers off, so it seems like at best a distraction from useful action, and at worst a grift to extract money from various entities by promising an easy solution to a difficult problem, which cannot realistically be delivered on.
> He named a region in Asia and explained that the small farmers there mark their landholdings carefully, but then the annual floods sometimes wash the markers away. Then unscrupulous larger landowners use the absence of markers to cut away at the smallholdings of the poorest. “But if the boundary markers were on the blockchain,” he said, “they wouldn’t be able to do that, would they?” The developed world is distingu…
An NFT representing ownership of farmland is, frankly, absurd. If I own farmland and lose my private key (or screw up a smart contract and lock it away forever, etc), should that land never be farmed again? If a river moves and boundaries must change but the NFT isn’t aware of this, what happens? If someone with guns takes my land, who cares about my NFT? Maybe technology can help create a system where transactions r…
These crypto crazies absolutely crack me up. Can you imagine some dirt poor farmer in the arse end of nowhere confronting the local constabulary that were bribed by their rich neighbour?
"You see here in my wallet how my Landz Titles NFT clearly states that this parcel of land is mine?"
Cue: a bunch of uniformed thugs glance at each other and smirk before proceeding to pummel the life out of the farmer that paid in Bitcoin for a few thousand bits that won't protect him from fists, batons, or bullets.
Some people are so naive and clueless that it's a parody of entitlement.
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> The only way to guard against that risk is to replicate and publicize the data, make sure all data modifications are cryptographically signed and valid according the logic of the application, and incorporate into each new version of the data a hash of prior versions of the data, in order to guard against data deletions. In other words, to implement a blockchain. nothing you’ve described here requires the decentrali…
You are quibbling with semantics. What you have quoted is the definition of a blockchain. Any "centralized" database with these properties is a blockchain, for all intents and purposes.
i also don’t know why you put “centralized in quotes”. amazon qldb has all of the qualities you describe and is 100% centralized.
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Blockchains are great for one-thing... guarantee that data is being appended and never modified. When you want to display a record, you can aggregate the data historically and allow people to see changes and attribute them to users and time but you can always see what was originally added. However that's kinda risky for HR because anything committed to that DB will be there... forever!
> Blockchains are great for one-thing... guarantee that data is being appended and never modified. in a distributed, trustless fashion If it's not distributed or trustless, you can do the same without the blockchain.