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Why aren’t distributed systems engineers working on blockchain technology?

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Re: Why aren’t distributed systems engineers working on blockchain technology?

#121
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if the tech is "legit" it's encredibly inefficient. We're spewing off tons of CO2 just to verify the block chain, but we have plenty of technologies that can do the same with a minuscule amount of energy. The problem is that they want a system that's trustless and that's simply not what most engineers care about. We want a system that's fast and efficient.

There are solutions to that though, like Proof of Stake. If distributed systems really cared about that, then that's exactly why they ought to be working on blockchains, to make them more efficient.

In part because this is trodden ground for distributed systems engineers and we know that, on balance, the correct solutions all involve massive centralization.

You don't want that. So we're at a bit of an impasse.

Distributed systems these days mostly argue that you do your trusting up front, outside of the protocol itself. You then validate that the actors share the secrets you all agreed upon, and then optimize the agreement process. Only the most robust systems actually consider "active" dissent; most distributed systems engineers consider this a special case that is most often focused on the idea of "incorrectness" as opposed to "maliciousness."

You can see elements of these assumptions in more modern data structures used for eventual consistency, like CRDTs. CRDTs are amazing and fast and often abstract-able to a trivial programming model. Anyone can use them, but they have to be monotonic, so we can't ever forget bad input, just try and cancel it out.

Re: Why aren’t distributed systems engineers working on blockchain technology?

#122

>The blockchain community is immature and historically unwelcoming. >It feels like a get rich quick scheme - https://twitter.com/naval/status/878018839044161536 This is what it comes down to IMO. Anything cryptocurrency related is just surrounded by a cloud of shady characters and scammers, even though the tech is legit. You just can't trust anyone, nor their intentions. Living your life and working in a constant sta…

This is true of any new burgeoning technology. Were you around for the Internet boom in the 90s?

Re: Why aren’t distributed systems engineers working on blockchain technology?

#123

Proof-of-work blockchains were developed to solve a problem that only exists in a small percentage of distributed engineering use-cases. Unless you need to build a "censorship-free" peer-to-peer ledger distributed among untrusted, anonymous participants, the complexity costs and latency and computation costs simply aren't worth it. It's the same reason that Ford doesn't build a tunnel under the US/Mexico border to fe…

Proof-of-work is simply not sustainable (energy-wise), IMO, for the foundation of a global system. The stability of whole ecosystems is predicated upon those ecosystems being attractive to people who want to make money by competing to solve hard problems by brute force. That's a lot of energy going into a system that can commit a new block of transactions once every 10 minutes on average. It solves a problem in an in…

Once most of the coins are mined doesn't bitcoin basically become a global settlement network for other crypto currencies. Although ethereum might do that easier.

Re: Why aren’t distributed systems engineers working on blockchain technology?

#124
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proof-of-work is simply not sustainable (energy-wise), IMO, for the foundation of a global system. The stability of whole ecosystems is predicated upon those ecosystems being attractive to people who want to make money by competing to solve hard problems by brute force. That's a lot of energy going into a system that can commit a new block of transactions once every 10 minutes on average. It solves a problem in an in…

IMO, the core problem is if you want a global transaction system to become popular it needs to process and store ~TB / day of new transactions. Which means you quickly get into EB territory for the full database which is not something distributed systems can really handle without scaling issues. Now if you want a system used by 0.01% of the global population then that's a very different problem, but far less useful.

unless it's really just s global settlement system for an unregulated global banking system for world trade.

Re: Why aren’t distributed systems engineers working on blockchain technology?

#125

>The blockchain community is immature and historically unwelcoming. >It feels like a get rich quick scheme - https://twitter.com/naval/status/878018839044161536 This is what it comes down to IMO. Anything cryptocurrency related is just surrounded by a cloud of shady characters and scammers, even though the tech is legit. You just can't trust anyone, nor their intentions. Living your life and working in a constant sta…

> You just can't trust anyone Isn't that one of the reasons blockchain came to existence? I know you aren't using that in the same context, it just sounded funny in my head :)

[deleted]

Re: Why aren’t distributed systems engineers working on blockchain technology?

#126
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the amount of energy needed will always be enormous as their is a direct linkage between the value of bitcoin and the amount of energy required to secure the network. Otherwise there will be a point where it is cost effective to attack the network. Bitcoin is designed to be wasteful.

I guess I was asking for a hypothetical, new crypto coin. Does proof-of-work have to be costly compute-wise in order to be proof-of-worky?

Yes. Think about what it is.

"I'm working on these hashes. You know I'm not taking a shortcut, because there's not yet a known way to do that with this secure hash. And because you know I'm doing the work, you should reward me with some coins."

Alternatives have been considered, like proof-of-stake.

Re: Why aren’t distributed systems engineers working on blockchain technology?

#127

>The blockchain community is immature and historically unwelcoming. >It feels like a get rich quick scheme - https://twitter.com/naval/status/878018839044161536 This is what it comes down to IMO. Anything cryptocurrency related is just surrounded by a cloud of shady characters and scammers, even though the tech is legit. You just can't trust anyone, nor their intentions. Living your life and working in a constant sta…

I've spent a decent amount of time understanding blockchain at this point. Am I wrong in saying that it's really just a data structure for solving a problem (like a tree or array), but a lot of the hype seems to be people trying to find commercial applications to use the specific data structure? I mean, no one says 'lets go find a good use for an array,' you sort of pick the array after you have an idea

Re: Why aren’t distributed systems engineers working on blockchain technology?

#128
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, your argument is: "you say our thing sucks at X, but if you really think so, why aren't you trying to fix it?" Filling in the variables differently, we could construct an argument like "If civil engineers really cared about structural stability, then that's exactly why they ought to be working on my bridge made out of playing cards." It's not their job to fix someone else's bad idea.

Cryptocurrencies aren't going away. Which means that if your primary motivation to not work on cryptocurrency is that it wastes energy, then there's a whole lot of room for you to be making it better, and that is a stupid motivation. I'm not saying that they are obligated to work on it because it wastes energy. But the comment I was responding to implied that distributed systems engineers didn't want to work on block…

No that's not illogical, Why would I work to bend something like block chain, that was designed to be inefficent, to my will when I can just start from scratch using projects that were designed to be efficient first? That's very logical, the kind of decision that an engineer that's getting paid the make the best distributed system for the least money would make.

Re: Why aren’t distributed systems engineers working on blockchain technology?

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ethereum has not shown a particularly strong track record when it comes to security, so I think the comment stands until they address that or get replaced by the next hotness.

I think that statement is a little disingenuous. There haven't been any attacks that target Etherium proper, only bugs in smart contracts riding on top of Eth.

Only a 31MM dollar bug, nothing to see here, we're secure.

WAT?

Re: Why aren’t distributed systems engineers working on blockchain technology?

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Centralized authority. With the obvious tradeoffs. :-/ Maybe there's a happy medium where trustworthiness of central authorities is appropriately distributed, but common operations are quicker and less wasteful.

>Centralized authority. Centralized authority isn't cheaper. It trades proof of work for violence or denial of liberty.

>(energy-wise)

Correct or not, your point is orthogonal to the issue mentioned.

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