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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?

#21

Post by bradleyjg »

tostitos1979 wrote: post #8
random023987 wrote: post #4

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…

Very good points. In complex financial transactions (at least within regulatory domains), my understanding is that rollbacks can and do happen. I initially thought across borders/regulatory domains, blockchain will shine. I haven't seen a killer application just yet. It is a bit frustrating because the tech is indeed interesting .. we just don't have multi-billion dollar real (as opposed to imagined) use-cases beyond…

"I initially thought across borders/regulatory domains, blockchain will shine."

Massive institutions with billions of dollars at stake would rather have a predictable and stable regulatory regime to conduct transactions in the shadow of then to rely on a technical solution that supposedly obviates the need for one. Things come up -- bugs, acts of god, internal fraud, hacking, flash crashes, and so forth and so on. They want to be able to go to arbitrator and ask for a sensible and reasonable result and not be reliant on a totally inflexible mechanical rule set. Not the least of which because they can afford the very best lawyers to try to convince those arbitrators that what they want is sensible and reasonable.

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

#22

Post by DINKDINK »

JackFr wrote: post #14
tostitos1979 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very good points. In complex financial transactions (at least within regulatory domains), my understanding is that rollbacks can and do happen. I initially thought across borders/regulatory domains, blockchain will shine. I haven't seen a killer application just yet. It is a bit frustrating because the tech is indeed interesting .. we just don't have multi-billion dollar real (as opposed to imagined) use-cases beyond…

https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/blog/the-blockchain-paradox-why-dis... "Let me explain why. In economic organization, we must distinguish between enforcing rules and making rules. Laws are rules enforced by state bureaucracy and made by a legislature. The SWIFT Protocol is a set of rules enforced by SWIFTNet (a centralized computational system) and made, ultimately, by SWIFT’s Board of Directors. The Bitcoin Protocol is a s…

>The Bitcoin Protocol is a set of rules enforced by the Bitcoin Network (a distributed network of computers) made by — whom exactly?

Bitcoin and Blockchains are an opt-in rule system. You literally subscribe to the rule set (called consensus) that you wish to participate in. No one coerces you into participating in a rule system you do not want to participate it.

Your capitalist||socialist country is invaded by socialist||capitalists and they change the rules of your country's bank? Your blockchain doesn't care, it is enforced at the user level, at the edge.

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

#23

Post by Retric »

andrewstuart2 wrote: post #9
random023987 wrote: post #4

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…

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.

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

#24

Post by zzzcpan »

varelse wrote: post #6
highpark wrote: post #2

DLT strips away almost everything that makes blockchain compelling. Why would a distributed systems engineer work on what amounts to a really shitty database?

See also the crazy cash they can make building distributed machine learning/big data systems at next to zero risk...

This is just incorrect. Making money on a distributed product is just as hard as on anything else if not harder and riskier, because everything takes more time.

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

#25

Post by xyzzyz »

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/

If there's nothing cheaper solution to cryptocurrency than proof of work, it seems to me that we just have to ban cryptocurrency altogether at the legislature level.

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

#26

Post by andrewstuart2 »

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/

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.

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

#27

Post by nihonde »

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 guess it's not surprising that untrustworthy people would flock to technologies that eliminate the need for trust.

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

#28

Post by jstanley »

xyzzyz wrote: post #25
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/

If there's nothing cheaper solution to cryptocurrency than proof of work, it seems to me that we just have to ban cryptocurrency altogether at the legislature level.

If you ban it in your country, your country will fall behind.

Cryptocurrency is backed entirely by free market incentives. You can fight the market if you want, but you will lose.

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

#29

Post by jstanley »

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.

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

#30

Post by root_axis »

jimktrains2 wrote: post #20
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. Visa, MasterCard, AmEX, &c along with each individual bank, not to mention the intermediaries and gateways all of them use also consume a tremendous amount of power. It's not as if our current system uses a negligible amount of power, not to mention the number of steps and entities a transaction needs in order to be f…

So what? That's a totally meaningless comparison because the ubiquity of cryptocurrencies would not obviate the need for financial services. Besides, market forces incentivize businesses to use as little power as possible because it costs them money, PoW incentivizes miners to use as much power as possible because that is a necessary requirement for increasing hash output.
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