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

#241

Post by theamk » Mon, Dec 03, 2018, 5:41 AM UTC

arisAlexis wrote: post #187

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…

If (there are trackers for supply chains already) then { blockchain is surely better because it is immutable and can have multiple validators } and there are trackers for supply chain already run on centralized databases that can be tampered.

You don't need blockchain for immutable log with multiple validators, you just need system like the one Certificate Transparency does [1].

It looks pretty similar to blockchain, but it has lots of advantages for supply chain tracking: much better scaleability, no energy waste, no need for full chain, ability to only care about specific subset of entries, and so on.

There are a number of current CT servers, and they are generally free -- they are so cheap that a large company can run one as a public service. For supply chain, have a few competing companies and govt's of US, Russia and EU run it, and you would have very tamper-proof system.

[1] http://www.certificate-transparency.org/log-proofs-work

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

#242

Post by theamk » Mon, Dec 03, 2018, 6:29 AM UTC

Alex3917 wrote: post #140

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.

> Because presumably that means that if someone guesses or steals my password, they now own my house. You'll register your private keys with a PKI. In practice the worst case scenario would be needing to go to the DMV to register your new phone or something.

So if government can change my private keys, this is no longer decentralized system. How is it different from current system, where county office has a big database of all the documents?

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

#243

Post by theamk » Mon, Dec 03, 2018, 6:32 AM UTC

godDLL wrote: post #169

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.

I feel that ransomware at least would not be possible without Bitcoin. Before Bitcoin, there were no safe way to get ransom -- Paypal/Western Union would get blocked real fast, and physical transactions were detected in an old-fashioned way.

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

#244

Post by m-i-l » Mon, Dec 03, 2018, 12:32 PM UTC

davidgerard wrote: post #205

ellius wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The source for the article's "Blockchain study finds 0.00% success rate" headline is "We documented 43 blockchain use-cases through internet searches ... we found no documentation or evidence of the results blockchain was purported to have achieved"[0]. That isn't a huge sample size, and "internet searches" may have skewed the results towards the more dubious projects spending large amounts on SEO.

But never-the-less I'd echo the interest in reading details of a successfully implemented use-case for public blockchain technology, beyond cryptocurrencies. Based on some of the comments here hinting that there might be some, and assuming they do indeed exist, I suspect that they are not solutions that could be achieved only with blockchain technology (like cryptocurrencies), or even solutions that are significantly better (in terms of cost, effort, time to market or some other metric) with blockchain technology, but simply solutions where blockchain has been made to work (i.e. other approaches could have been too and some of those may have been as good if not better).

[0] http://merltech.org/blockchain-for-international-development...

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

#245

Post by marmadukester39 » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 4:02 PM UTC

tim333 wrote: post #216

mcguire wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Well proof of work is used to get consensus and prevent double spend in cryptocurrency though there are other mechanisms being tried like proof of stake. With Git for code you don't really need consensus - I can have my fork and you can have yours.

Unless what you're trying to do is actually achieve and maintain consensus without a single entity controlling the database?

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

#246

Post by pas » Wed, Dec 05, 2018, 11:00 AM UTC

theamk wrote: post #240

pas wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why people stake claims, and the more money they put up, the more they bet on what they claim, the more you can be sure that it's not just a troll, not a hoax, not someone trying to move the market, not someone bought and paid for (so not a Sybil attack).

But staking is naturally limited by the amount of money one has -- so it would be a great advantage for big corps with PR budgets and a disadvantage for individuals. Do we really want that? Hypothetical example: - The Citizen (on blockchain): EvilCorp is dumping toxic waste on my property! They are making millions of dollars from my ruin! I stake all of my available money -- $20,000 -- on this statement. - EvilCorp (…

Good example, and that's why the last few years in block-graph land comprised of going from "just stake it man" to token-curated-registries-of-oracles and other kinds of governance problems modeled and explored. Game theory, handling adversarial edge cases, the good old sharding and securing problem (irrevocable staking to secure "side chains" and whatever Ethereum/Vitalik is working on, but maybe called Casper: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1029900695925706753.html )

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

#247

Post by theamk » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 2:00 PM UTC

pas wrote: post #246

theamk wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But staking is naturally limited by the amount of money one has -- so it would be a great advantage for big corps with PR budgets and a disadvantage for individuals. Do we really want that? Hypothetical example: - The Citizen (on blockchain): EvilCorp is dumping toxic waste on my property! They are making millions of dollars from my ruin! I stake all of my available money -- $20,000 -- on this statement. - EvilCorp (…

Good example, and that's why the last few years in block-graph land comprised of going from "just stake it man" to token-curated-registries-of-oracles and other kinds of governance problems modeled and explored. Game theory, handling adversarial edge cases, the good old sharding and securing problem (irrevocable staking to secure "side chains" and whatever Ethereum/Vitalik is working on, but maybe called Casper: http…

I have not read this very carefully, but these conversations seem to be worried about classical cryptocurrency attacks -- we have rational agents who try to maximize their money. A threat of someone loosing all of their money will prevent one from doing something.

However, in my example, this is not the case at all. A PR firm or EvilCorp does not care about success of cryptocurrency, they just want to make sure that "The Citizen" will fail. For example, your link talks about "penalizing both sides hard" like it is unavoidable -- but this is exactly what EvilCorp would want.

I don't think I have seen analysis of the prediction markets which assumes actors who are willing to lose money to get the desired results.