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

theregister.co.uk

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

#191

Post by InfinityLoop »

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…

You do make a valid point - however, there are ways to ameliorate (or even eliminate) this risk introduced into the blockchain, by relying on external verification.

One way would be to have each "verified" transaction to be associated with an individual or entity who is providing the "verification", with legally enforceable dire penalties for "submitting" a transaction that is later found to be fraudulent.

So, if a transaction is found to be fraudulent, it can be traced back down to the first transaction in which a fraudulent transaction was submitted as "verified".

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

#192

Post by atq2119 »

lalaland1125 wrote: post #113
Alex3917 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the "farm" selling you their romaine might actually be selling you romaine from somewhere else that they've repackaged. Think about it from a game theory perspective. Under the status quo, each party in the supply chain maximizes their profit by lying about where their supplies came from. Whereas with DLT, each party maximizes their profit by being honest about where their supplies came from. As an example, let's s…

Doesn't this require you to trust the source? And if you trust the source, there is no need for a blockchain?

Well, even if you trust the source, you still need to be able to access the transaction records.

You don't really need a distributed ledger for that,a centralised database run by an industry clearinghouse could serve the purpose just fine.

But maybe there are cases where a distributed ledger is easier or cheaper to establish than such a clearinghouse.

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

#193

Post by arez »

qyv wrote: post #175
sk221 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Replace the word blockchain with database and describe how your example works any differently. I'll give you a hint: it doesn't. There is nothing in your example that requires the use of a blockchain. If that beef was tracked in a standard database they would still need to buy beef that was "legit" as far as the database is concerned if they wanted to make a legit claim. Tracking external assets requires trust, perio…

actually it does, in a blockchain it's theoretical impossible to change past values, in a database one or many actors could easily change past events and nobody could proof that they did (If you say, ok then let's apply checksums or hashes to past events you just ended up with making it (kind of) a blockchain again

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

#194

Post by InfinityLoop »

Alex3917 wrote: post #105
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…

> Yes but how do I know that you didn't swap the barcodes or you didn't fiddle with the GPS or the thermometer was working or a million other things? Game theory. Without DLT you make more money by doing these things. With DLT it just becomes the cream skimming problem, where you're just paying money to shuffle assets around but you're actually losing money because the total value of all the assets is still the same.…

What does DLT stand for?

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

#195

Post by kthejoker2 »

Alex3917 wrote: post #121
ghaff wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that a blockchain can’t always be guaranteed to always represent the ground truth about physical assets is certainly a limitation. But I agree with you. This isn’t about 100% guarantees. It’s about making fraud harder and more expensive, increasing visibility, and streamlining the whole process. I remain something of a skeptic but there’s certainly a lot of interest in and money for things like provenance an…

> Just reducing fraud and otherwise cutting costs could be a big win. I mean that alone is a several trillion dollar a year improvement that will continue on indefinitely, and that's only one of the many applications for blockchain. Consider that roughly 75% of American adults of working age are either unemployed or underemployed, and in most countries it's vastly worse than that. The reason most of them are unemploy…

Wait, you think 75% of working age adults are unemployed or underemployed? Where'd you come up with that?

And from the naked eye it definitely doesn't look like "most" middle class jobs are accounting - I see teachers, engineers, architects, healthcare, legal workers, protective services ..

https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/emp-by-detailed-occupation.ht...

So my skepticism about your assessment of our labor situation and needs bleeds over to your enthusiasm about DLT.

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

#196

Post by Dylan16807 »

arisAlexis wrote: post #188
qyv wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Replace the word blockchain with database and describe how your example works any differently. I'll give you a hint: it doesn't. There is nothing in your example that requires the use of a blockchain. If that beef was tracked in a standard database they would still need to buy beef that was "legit" as far as the database is concerned if they wanted to make a legit claim. Tracking external assets requires trust, perio…

"I'll give you a hint: it doesn't" It surprises me how much anger and claims of authority people that don't like blockchain show. Just be modest and open to potential uses of a technology. Are you a coder? Have you ever used Javascript? If yes then it's creator is a big proponent of blockchains. Take a moment to think about this. Numerous other examples too.

Answering a rhetorical question to the detriment of the other person's argument isn't anger.

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

#197

Post by Dylan16807 »

arez wrote: post #193
qyv wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Replace the word blockchain with database and describe how your example works any differently. I'll give you a hint: it doesn't. There is nothing in your example that requires the use of a blockchain. If that beef was tracked in a standard database they would still need to buy beef that was "legit" as far as the database is concerned if they wanted to make a legit claim. Tracking external assets requires trust, perio…

actually it does, in a blockchain it's theoretical impossible to change past values, in a database one or many actors could easily change past events and nobody could proof that they did (If you say, ok then let's apply checksums or hashes to past events you just ended up with making it (kind of) a blockchain again

There are people that will argue any form of sequential data signing is a "blockchain". But now secure messengers are blockchaining, ZFS is blockchaining, bitcoin had no technical novelty... I think it's a bad definition. If the system can still run without a consensus algorithm, it's far from being a blockchain.

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

#198

Post by Brahma111 »

Oh Boy!! Another case of pre-determined surveys. CLS has already moved to production on blockchain. De Beers has done the same with Diamonds. Multiple insurance companies including our start-up are leveraging BC for direct claims settlement. Is it really difficult to understand that BC technology is not a hammer and all the use cases are not nails. You are trying to get rid of Big intermediaries, people. They are not going to make it easy. Every interaction between parties is going to be more difficult than the previous until critical mass is attained. But succeed it will and will most likely happen before we die.

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

#199

Post by tim333 »

lilbobbytables wrote: post #164
sk221 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The idea of real estate on the blockchain runs into a bunch of problems interfacing with the real world. For example if Russian hackers get your private keys do you now have to move out of your house so they can let it? If you are lending against property tokens how do you know if the person in physical possession of the property has not quietly sold it or mortgaged it or burnt it down and so on? Not that it's impossible but there are a lot of complications.

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

#200

Post by marcosdumay »

derefr wrote: post #68
marcosdumay wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's just an append-only log file that happens to exist in several (geographically distant) places at once. That's the idea. Just add a proof of causality for the transactions that span more than one peer, and you've got a blockchain.

No. A log file under Paxos, for example, is not a blockchain. A blockchain is a chain of blocks . A block is a persistent record of all the information required for the consensus process, which is held onto by a node after the consensus process has completed for that node. A new blockchain node bootstrap-syncs to the network by just receiving blocks at random from peers and then evaluating the consensus rules against…

> No. A log file under Paxos, for example, is not a blockchain.

Ok, it's not. It also does not have verifiable causality, because it's formed by a set of registries with no explicit relation between them.

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