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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?

#131

Post by darawk »

jethro_tell wrote: post #128
darawk wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not designed to be inefficient. It's designed to solve the distributed consensus problem in an adversarial environment. There are other now proposed mechanisms of doing that (e.g. PoS) that are quite efficient. Working on those would be extremely beneficial to the cause of environmental efficiency.

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

#132

Post by darawk »

indigochill wrote: post #94
billmalarky wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Ethereum team is serious about proof of stake.

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.

Ethereum actually has a better security track record than Bitcoin does [1]. It's the contracts on top of Ethereum that are the problem. Calling those incidents Ethereum security problems is like calling a Windows 0day an Intel security problem.

1. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Value_overflow_incident

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

#133

Post by lordnacho »

andrewstuart2 wrote: post #26
DINKDINK wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Proof-of-work is simply not sustainable (energy-wise), IMO, for the foundation of a global system. What have you found that is cheaper to proof-of-work that works on a global system?[1] [1] "Nothing is Cheaper than Proof of Work" http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/

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.

The happy medium has been found already. Would people trust Visa and MasterCard if they allowed double spending? I'm guessing not. So by virtue of having a very large investment in their corporate brands, the old economy already came up with a solution to the trust problem.

Heck, everywhere you look there's a solution to the trust problem; it's fundamental to human interactions.

- There are courts. If you try to screw me, I can drag you into one. Nothing's perfect and there's probably a minimum amount I'd not bother Judge Judy for, but it's a solution a LOT of people rely on. And I can tack all sorts of things on to this like warranties and insurances.

- Brands. Look, we burn all this money on getting sports stars to pose for pictures. And there's reviews of our product in papers. If we did something stupid, you'd know. Again, it ain't perfect.

- Escrow. Don't trust me? Trust this guy.

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

#134

Post by jtmarmon »

edge17 wrote: post #127
aphextron wrote: post #3

>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

It's an approach to solving a problem that allows problems to be solved in totally new ways. I think it's understandable to be on a search for opportunities to apply it.

The problem it seems to me is that, although the idea of trustless systems seem really cool and applicable to a lot of domains, it turns out that there are actually way fewer useful applications than people originally thought. But no one is letting go, and a lot of people are wrongly convincing themselves and others that most systems are better off trustless.

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

#135

Post by tekromancr »

jethro_tell wrote: post #129
tekromancr wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Again, the bug was in the application layer, not the protocol layer. That's like saying that HTTPS is broken because you can do SQLi against someone's poorly coded website.

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

#136

Post by jethro_tell »

jliptzin wrote: post #122
aphextron wrote: post #3

>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?

I keep hearing this is like the internet from 30 years ago. Thirty years ago, there was no good way to do ecommerce or send an email. Today, there is a good way to pay for things and do all financial transactions in a simple low hastle way. The internet was sending instant, asyncronious communication vs letters (async) or phone (instant). Bitcoin is creating phone calls and post mail in the email age and using a metal envelope as an upgrade.

Yeah I sent my first emails to a system that connected to neighboring systems via modem at a pre determined time to ftp mail bundles around.

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

#137

Post by wmf »

matt_wulfeck wrote: post #41
aphextron wrote: post #3

>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…

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's a lot of work on non-mining private blockchains that you're ignoring.

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

#138

Post by gwbas1c »

I work in distributed systems, and I consider blockchain very interesting. It's so interesting I click on a lot of links on Hacker News, and sometimes I take an afternoon on a weekend or vacation to read through some of the papers.

I just have a well-paying job and I don't see any opportunities lucrative enough for me to jump away. Why? Bitcoin is an experiment. Reading through the paper, Bitcoin does not scale to general purpose commerce. All of the other technology appears to be "me too." When I first heard about Etherium, the bullshit smelt so bad that I couldn't even look at the paper.

What will get me really interested? Pay me to implement a real-world use case that fits the scalability constrains of blockchain. This isn't things like general-purpose currency, or general-purpose contracts. Someone needs to pay me to implement something that requires blockchain; instead of someone paying me to implement a blockchain and then going and finding a use for it.

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

#139

Post by jethro_tell »

DINKDINK wrote: post #17
andrewstuart2 wrote: post #9

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…

>Proof-of-work is simply not sustainable (energy-wise), IMO, for the foundation of a global system. What have you found that is cheaper to proof-of-work that works on a global system?[1] [1] "Nothing is Cheaper than Proof of Work" http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/

It's funny that proof of work still doesn't seem to protect from people loosing 31MM a while ago, or the Mt.Gox hack. I can't remember the last time my bank fucked up like that. That problem may be more solved then we are letting on. I know, I know, fuck the man.

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

#140

Post by JohnJamesRambo »

gwbas1c wrote: post #138

I work in distributed systems, and I consider blockchain very interesting. It's so interesting I click on a lot of links on Hacker News, and sometimes I take an afternoon on a weekend or vacation to read through some of the papers. I just have a well-paying job and I don't see any opportunities lucrative enough for me to jump away. Why? Bitcoin is an experiment. Reading through the paper, Bitcoin does not scale to ge…

What are the real uses for blockchain you could see?
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