Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theregister.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 247 posts

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

#161

Post by thisisit »

mathnmusic wrote: post #136
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."

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.

That is assuming everyone is moved by money and everything works in perfectly rational way. The problem is - humans are irrational.

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

#162

Post by [deleted] »

anongraddebt wrote: post #44
hudon wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in 1999, even though the internet had been out a while and there had been lots of talk about e-commerce no one had really solved the problem particularly well in terms of providing a platform to the average Joe I'm not sure why you focused on e-commerce as a use case, as well as the average Joe as the user. The article in question talks about them trying to find ANY industry use case. The Internet was useful pretty…

The percentage of people saying blockchain doesn't have a substantial use case, is about the same percentage as there were in the late 70's or early 80's saying the internet didn't have a substantial use case. Initially, few people thought file transfer over the internet was a substantive use case because the transmission speed was too slow. Then throughput capacity picked up, but people then shifted the argument to…

[deleted]

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

#163

Post by joshwa »

sk221 wrote: post #156
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 think blockchains can help minimize trust even if it's dealing with assets outside the blockchain. Let's use your beef example. The beef might come from a farm. It's certified organic. It gets shipped off to a distributor. The distributor sells it to a store. You go to a store and buy it. In the current system, if the store is a bad actor (e.g. selling beef it claims is organic, when it's actually not) then you don…

Nothing about the blockchain can tell you whether somebody switched the labels, or who did it. And the not-guilty parties probably have no way of verifying what they received, either.

Having movements logged in a federated database has all the same properties.

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

#164

Post by lilbobbytables »

sk221 wrote: post #156
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 think blockchains can help minimize trust even if it's dealing with assets outside the blockchain. Let's use your beef example. The beef might come from a farm. It's certified organic. It gets shipped off to a distributor. The distributor sells it to a store. You go to a store and buy it. In the current system, if the store is a bad actor (e.g. selling beef it claims is organic, when it's actually not) then you don…

Could you elaborate on the real estate one. Sounds like you're talking about home equity loans.

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

#165

Post by marssaxman »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #117
manmanic wrote: post #8

I've been working on DLT / enterprise blockchain technologies since 2014 and have insight into hundreds of projects, a small number of which made it to live production. Here is the bottom line: yes, it's mostly hype, but this technology does have genuine use cases - when you want to build an interparty database-driven application, and cannot find a suitable place to put the database, because of business concerns or r…

when you want to build an interparty database-driven application, and cannot find a suitable place to put the database, because of business concerns or regulation Technology can't solve this problem. If multiple entities need to coordinate inside a mutually used product don't trust each other, then the problem is structural and needs to be solved with interpersonal, regulatory or political action.

Annnnd... if you have a structural problem which cannot be corrected via interpersonal, regulatory, or political action, then what do you do?

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

#166

Post by Obi_Juan_Kenobi »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #25
manmanic wrote: post #8

I've been working on DLT / enterprise blockchain technologies since 2014 and have insight into hundreds of projects, a small number of which made it to live production. Here is the bottom line: yes, it's mostly hype, but this technology does have genuine use cases - when you want to build an interparty database-driven application, and cannot find a suitable place to put the database, because of business concerns or r…

Can you let me know how these "private" blockchains utilize proof of X to determine consensus? E.g. proof of work, or proof of stake, or something else? The thing I never understood with private blockchain tech is that the "traditional" blockchain (i.e. Bitcoin) relies on proof of work, and the only way this is viable is to have tons of resources working on these proofs so that you don't get a 51% attack (there have…

The 'corporate blockchain' described above would probably be a federated one. Participants would use private keys to sign and validate transactions, with full knowledge about who else is in the network. It's a simple quorum mechanism, or some elaboration thereof.

It is not 'trustless', but it is decentralized. You're basically relying on a majority of participants to behave ethically and not collude. In a situation where collusion is impractical or has little reward, this can function fine.

An example of this is Blockstream's 'Liquid' crypto which is validated by crypto exchanges. The security model of this coin isn't great compared to Bitcoin, but it arguably has advantages over the simple custodian model.

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

#167

Post by rplst8 »

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.

The way it works now is you rely on a third party to guarantee the property isn't owned by someone else, and then you buy insurance to protect the lender in case the third party screwed up.

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

#168

Post by ChrisLomont »

Alex3917 wrote: post #141
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…

It's only been ten years and it takes on average around 40 years for a new technology to become useful. And this technology is much bigger and more complicated than the average new breakthrough technology, like the semiconductor or whatever.

Where did you get your 40 year claim? Plenty of research claims otherwise, e.g., https://hbr.org/2013/11/the-pace-of-technology-adoption-is-s...

Even your semiconductor example was immediately adopted and used. A decade into Blockchain and it's still all claim and no adoption, as this study found.

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

#169

Post by godDLL »

lalaland1125 wrote: post #93

This study is clearly flawed because they didn't consider the real use case of blockchain: illegal activity. Blockchain has truly transformed the fields of child pornography, ransomware, drug markets, and ponzi schemes. Regardless of your opinions of those fields, you simply have to accept that those areas wouldn't be possible to the extent they are now without Blockchain based cryptocurrencies.

All that operated just fine before, with WebMoney, Paypal and some turkish mules that would take the prison time to cash it all out.

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

#170

Post by AndrewKemendo »

marssaxman wrote: post #165
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

when you want to build an interparty database-driven application, and cannot find a suitable place to put the database, because of business concerns or regulation Technology can't solve this problem. If multiple entities need to coordinate inside a mutually used product don't trust each other, then the problem is structural and needs to be solved with interpersonal, regulatory or political action.

Annnnd... if you have a structural problem which cannot be corrected via interpersonal, regulatory, or political action, then what do you do?

Quit and start over, or move. That's why people migrate between countries or quit jobs.
Post reply on HN