Blockchain study finds zero success rate and vendors don't call back • Hacker News Board

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

#201

Post by tim333 » Sat, Dec 01, 2018, 1:15 PM UTC

dnautics wrote: post #134

osrec wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I extend it further: the moment you need to verify that something happened outside the system, your blockchain is broken.

There are ideas around trusted oracles and consensus recommendation ratings for oracles that aren't terrible and may work (no comment on scalability, of course).

It's worked so far for the Dai, a USD tethered stablecoin based on Ethereum. Smart contracts buy or sell Dai against ETH to keep the price around US$1, the oracles feed in the USD/ETH rate from various exchanges. No actual USD are bought or sold by the Dai contracts.

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/dai/

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

#202

Post by davidgerard » Sat, Dec 01, 2018, 1:21 PM UTC

hndamien wrote: post #178

therein wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot trust a system that trusts an oracle.

What if it is a trustless Oracle? Augur kind of tries to be this, and appears to do well within a limited scope.

Very limited, i.e. they're down to a few tens of people bothering to vote daily.

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

#203

Post by davidgerard » Sat, Dec 01, 2018, 1:22 PM UTC

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.

Your claim is remarkably hypothetical and lacking in details.

That said, even then - when would it be cheaper just to bribe the voters?

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

#204

Post by davidgerard » Sat, Dec 01, 2018, 1:27 PM UTC

api wrote: post #148

Alex3917 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think you can compare Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency to semiconductors at all. Cryptocurrency is really not all that complex a technology. Once you grasp it it's pretty simple, especially if you understand cryptography and a little bit of game theory. I do still hold out some hope that the tech will evolve and eventually catch on, or that it will lead to something else, but the first big incarnation cycl…

There is no tech to evolve.

Bitcoin was made of old, already-existing pieces. All the parts existed by 2001, but it wasn't until 2008 that someone put them together to make a system that could exchange unique tokens without a central authority.

Trouble is, the term "blockchain technology" is a way of fudging the fact that none of the good bits are new. And whether the new bits are good, well, there's a 10-year track record of not a lot so far apart from asset bubbles.

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

#205

Post by davidgerard » Sat, Dec 01, 2018, 1:31 PM UTC

ellius wrote: post #15

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…

I've only worked on a single blockchain application, but this was my experience too. I was actually pretty skeptical when I was told we'd be working on it and figured it was just a hype thing, but the use case involved a B2B process that was well-established and used a paid intermediary to correlate data across businesses. We were pretty happy with the result. I doubt we'll ever see a middleman-free decentralized uto…

What was it and where? If what you're saying is true, then this is noteworthy and I'd love to look more closely at the details.

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

#206

Post by davidgerard » Sat, Dec 01, 2018, 1:39 PM UTC

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…

> 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.

Cite some numbers.

Even claiming the Internet is a reasonable comparison is a leap you haven't justified.

Why is it comparable to, ooh, let's just pick a completely random example, this HUGELY SUCCESSFUL THING?

Why not some other technology? e.g.

* blockchain: the Apple e-World of distributed databases

* blockchain: the Ford Pinto gas tank of distributed databases

* blockchain: the cold fusion of distributed databases

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

#207

Post by asynchrony » Sat, Dec 01, 2018, 3:13 PM UTC

seibelj wrote: post #101

asynchrony wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Putting lies into a blockchain doesn't make them true. Lettuce can still kill you in a post-blockchain society.

No, but it isn’t about lying as a matter of business, that would easily be detected and caught in most cases, and a large amount of work to continually lie effectively. If you have employees and machines writing lots of data it’s infeasible to tamper with it in real-time. The tampering comes after the fact when a legal issue arises. The immutable nature of the ledger makes it an improvement over the past by preventin…

So why not use a central database and allow all stakeholders to replicate and keep their own logs of edits. It would be far more efficient. It would lack a certain buzzword though.

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

#208

Post by seibelj » Sat, Dec 01, 2018, 3:50 PM UTC

asynchrony wrote: post #207

seibelj wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, but it isn’t about lying as a matter of business, that would easily be detected and caught in most cases, and a large amount of work to continually lie effectively. If you have employees and machines writing lots of data it’s infeasible to tamper with it in real-time. The tampering comes after the fact when a legal issue arises. The immutable nature of the ledger makes it an improvement over the past by preventin…

So why not use a central database and allow all stakeholders to replicate and keep their own logs of edits. It would be far more efficient. It would lack a certain buzzword though.

A blockchain is a database optimized for that use case. Your desire to avoid the word blockchain is because you don’t like the connotations.

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

#209

Post by mcguire » Sat, Dec 01, 2018, 3:55 PM UTC

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #171

sfescape wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a blockchain, and provides the validation and history integrity that is core to (and where the name 'blockchain') comes from.

Except the issue is that Git, which includes validation and history integrity, was invented in 2005 and predates the publication of the bitcoin whitepaper by 3 years. The point being that all the hype about "blockchain everywhere" came about because of bitcoin. If people are now starting to refer to just the "hash of blocks with previous blocks" (i.e. the "Timestamp Server" section of the original bitcoin whitepaper)…

Can someone correct me if I'm wrong?

Proof of work is required for distributed consensus; without that you need a centralized repository like GitHub or Linus to bless the current state of the database?

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

#210

Post by api » Sat, Dec 01, 2018, 4:13 PM UTC

Alex3917 wrote: post #157

api wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you can compare Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency to semiconductors at all. Cryptocurrency is really not all that complex a technology. Once you grasp it it's pretty simple, especially if you understand cryptography and a little bit of game theory. I do still hold out some hope that the tech will evolve and eventually catch on, or that it will lead to something else, but the first big incarnation cycl…

> I do still hold out some hope that the tech will evolve and eventually catch on I'd posit it's not possible for DLT to fail any more than it was possible for email to fail. Yeah adoption could have been slower if the first email clients were shittier or whatever, but at the end of the day one-to-one or one-to-many instant written communication solves a real problem and I just don't see any possible universe where t…

Part of the problem though is that the algorithm is fantastically expensive, possibly more so than managing, policing, and occasionally replacing central organizations.