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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?

#151

Post by mikeschmatz »

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…

As a "coincidence", these guys are hiring. Although, it doesn't look like folks working there [0] will be able to explain meaning of "paxos" in their domain name

paxos.com == pets.com of blockchain Ah, feels like it is 1999 all over again. To the moon!

[0] https://www.paxos.com/our-team

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

#152

Post by ProblemFactory »

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…

> Someone needs to pay me to implement something that requires blockchain

It's difficult to find something that requires a blockchain, because the unique distinguishing feature of blockchains is the lack of any trusted central authority.

If you have a trusted authority, then you can do anonymous currency, money transfers, smart contracts, or anything similar 1000x more efficiently with a single server, an API, and some backend logic. All the distributed effort goes into making these possible at all without any central authority who can ban or filter transactions.

And for most real-world projects, having a government agency or tech company working as the trusted authority works just fine. It's only shady to illegal businesses where the lack of one is required.

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

#153

Post by richardwhiuk »

cperciva wrote: post #52
rafiki6 wrote: post #39

Here's one take DLT and Blockchain: https://hbr.org/2017/01/the-truth-about-blockchain TL;DR, it's gonna take a real long time to make blockchain useful, if it even is. Further, I have yet to see a real production application of blockchain that isn't a crypto-currency. Everyone and their grandmothers has invested in it, or started a company or w/e. But has it actually been used to solve another problem? Blockchain wa…

Blockchain is not the solution to the problem of how to make a crypto currency. Blockchain is the solution to the problem of how to cooperatively timestamp documents.

co-operatively with no trusted authority.

If you are happy to have a trusted authority, then timestamp servers have been around since the dawn of PKI

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

#154

Post by stcredzero »

KirinDave wrote: post #108
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…

It's also surrounded by a ton of cargo cultism, poorly considered engineering, people who don't understand the math but claim to be gurus, and strange parasitic political views. It's a frustrating community to engage with because it has redefined a lot of longstanding terms to (in my opinion) make itself look better and smarter. It also is a constant roiling tempest of non-self-reliant-but-fantastically-dedicated-to-…

It's also surrounded by a ton of cargo cultism, poorly considered engineering, people who don't understand the math but claim to be gurus, and strange parasitic political views.

So it's just your typical programming sub-field? (Alan Kay would say: "Field.")

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

#155

Post by KirinDave »

stcredzero wrote: post #154
KirinDave wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also surrounded by a ton of cargo cultism, poorly considered engineering, people who don't understand the math but claim to be gurus, and strange parasitic political views. It's a frustrating community to engage with because it has redefined a lot of longstanding terms to (in my opinion) make itself look better and smarter. It also is a constant roiling tempest of non-self-reliant-but-fantastically-dedicated-to-…

It's also surrounded by a ton of cargo cultism, poorly considered engineering, people who don't understand the math but claim to be gurus, and strange parasitic political views. So it's just your typical programming sub-field? (Alan Kay would say: "Field.")

Pessimistically yes, but in my opinion its problems are magnified.

In part because bitcoin is a technology that so many people ascribe political superpowers to. This brings in a lot of people that normally don't push deeply into a high-complexity tech field.

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

#156

Post by PeterisP »

vocatus_gate wrote: post #105
srdev wrote: post #99

My observation is this: The "killer app" of Blockchains are the trustless nature of the system. In most practical application, allowing actors without a trust relationship to interact with the log is not a significant requirement of the system. Once you remove that requirement, there are technically superior approaches to maintaining a ledger.

That's why I've never understood all this talk about "private blockchains." Why? What's the point? We already have distributed database systems that are light years faster than blockchains. The ONLY benefits of a blockchain-based approach are censorship resistance and not having to trust the actors in the system. If you don't need either of those two benefits, then there are far better existing solutions for record k…

Private blockchains have a use case where you have a central authority coordinating many participants that don't trust each other - if the central authority periodically publishes the signed blockchain ledger/update, it enables "shared truth" that every participant can use, and each of them can verify that noone has "altered history", that particular constraints have been met, etc.

In essence, it can be used as a versioning + signing mechanism for a shared database that ensures authenticity and non-repudiation even in the absence of trust.

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

#158

Post by Retric »

sharemywin wrote: post #124
Retric wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Two points, first if you abandon the system for something else then you have to solve all the original problems again making the first system more or less useless. Second, even just 2 transactions / month * ~7 billion people is a lot of data.

PS: USD actually operate on a 3 tiered system that works well (Fed, Banks, cash) but doing the same thing in a *coin seems like just giving up.

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

#159

Post by strgrd »

jstanley wrote: post #29
strgrd wrote: post #10

Why isn't X working on blockchain technology? Maybe instead of asking this, we should ask the cryptocurrency enthusiasts what area of technology won't be dropped-and-replaced by blockchains, because so far it seems apparently applicable to every single use case in every single industry... By the way, did you guys hear this thing is an immutable ledger?

That's a complete strawman. There is very little overlap between cryptocurrency enthusiasts and those who think blockchain technology will take over everything .

> There is very little overlap between cryptocurrency enthusiasts and those who think blockchain technology will take over everything.

Do you really believe that? Because from the outside, it seems that the only people talking about "blockchain technology" are those who have a significant amount of money invested in it.

This article is a blockchain banking service saying, "hey, other people should use this solve-all technology that is definitely the future too!"

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

#160

Post by roywiggins »

DINKDINK wrote: post #98
roywiggins wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if there's a fork? As I see it, either you follow the fork supported by the majority of miners, or you run the risk of finding your coins worthless, because everyone else is on the other fork.

>And if there's a fork? If someone proposes to violate the rules of your blockchain, you ignore them. Only when users support rule changes does the market value them. >either you follow the fork supported by the majority [...], or you run the risk of finding your coins worthless Any thing is only worth what others will pay for it. This is the case regardless if you are using a blockchain or not. If the world suddenly…

The problem seems to me that users and miners have different priorities, and it's the miners who decide what the consensus is, not people who actually hold bitcoin. Of course, miners hold BTC too, and presumably want BTC to hold its value, so they wouldn't, say, intentionally inflate BTC (unlike a government-backed currency). But there's still a disconnect there. Consensus is consensus of miners, not consensus of users.
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