Why aren’t distributed systems engineers working on blockchain technology? • Hacker News Board

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

#31

Post by wyager » Tue, Aug 01, 2017, 4:32 PM UTC

Retric wrote: post #23

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…

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.

Look up "Lightning Network". This is a solved problem. You can build on top of bitcoin to scale basically as large as you want, trustlessly. The software is being developed as we speak.

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

#32

Post by varelse » Tue, Aug 01, 2017, 4:32 PM UTC

zzzcpan wrote: post #24

varelse wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Tell that to my bank account.

We live in a world where most current and future performance benefits come from understanding how to program both parallel and distributed algorithms in an age where almost everyone is either a single-threaded Java or Python programmer relying on OSS frameworks and packages to do the distributed dirty work for them.

And that's made it nearly free beer right now to have gone against the above curve and stayed current on C++ and multi-core/distributed algorithms so one can build those frameworks and packages. That will probably change now that GPUs are a hot commodity as opposed to nerdy gamer stuff, but chance favored the minority of prepared programmers here.

Further, I have zero interest in the blockchain. There's interesting technology there, but it is of zero use to me or any of my life goals. Also the hucksters and low-information sorts trying to make me believe I can't live without it are driving me even further away from it.

And before you downvote me for negativity, this thread did ask why distributed system engineers aren't interesting in this, yes?

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

#33

Post by foepys » Tue, Aug 01, 2017, 4:32 PM UTC

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…

You try to equate the current Visa, Mastercard, etc. to the current Bitcoin. This is not possible because Visa alone handles like 100,000 times the volume of Bitcoin. As soon as Bitcoin&Co. become serious currencies, the incentives for manipulation rise. When eventually no new Bitcoins will be generated, all miner incentives come from mining blocks for the transaction fees. How do you want to protect the chain? How much will a single transaction cost to pay for the power to prevent this manipulation by working faster than the "enemy"?

If you raise the block size to put more transactions into a single block, you will end up with a normal banking system because nobody can carry the whole blockchain with them to pay and has to trust providers that manage wallets.

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

#34

Post by pavel_lishin » Tue, Aug 01, 2017, 4:32 PM UTC

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…

> 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.

But is it more or less than the equivalent amount of power it would take for Bitcoin (or something like it) to scale to Visa, MC, AMEX, etc. global levels?

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

#35

Post by random023987 » Tue, Aug 01, 2017, 4:33 PM UTC

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…

> It's not as if our current system uses a negligible amount of power

Our current system does in fact use a negligible amount of power. Each $2 latte you put on a credit card uses an amount of electricity so infinitesimal that it can only be measured in the aggregate.

The percentage of the power used to generate a single bitcoin block for a single transaction can power an average US household for (approximately) an entire week.

To put it in perspective: If the bitcoin network scaled up to the size of the VISA network it would require 100% of all energy used for all purposes planet-wide, from transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, etc. Everything you could possibly want to buy with bitcoin would be unavailable, as 100% of all human activity would go to powering the miners.

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

#36

Post by rpod » Tue, Aug 01, 2017, 4:34 PM UTC

nihonde wrote: post #27

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.

It's not necessarily the people who can benefit from a trustless network that cloud the ecosystem, it's shady people who want in on the hype solely to make money and apply blockchain to every conceivable use case just for the sake of applying blockchain. It's the kind of people who are an expert on fintech, blockchain, AI/machine learning and IoT all at the same time and seem to use the terms interchangeably.

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

#37

Post by wyager » Tue, Aug 01, 2017, 4:34 PM UTC

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…

Using bidirectional off-chain payment channels, you can build trustless payment networks that use Bitcoin as a backend (see "lightning network"). It's almost as good as normal bitcoin, and it's much faster and cheaper. This is perhaps what most transactions will end up using.

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

#38

Post by roywiggins » Tue, Aug 01, 2017, 4:34 PM UTC

DINKDINK wrote: post #22

JackFr wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 socia…

And if there's a fork? As I see it, either you follow the fork supported by the majority of miners, or you run the risk of finding your coins worthless, because everyone else is on the other fork.

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

#39

Post by rafiki6 » Tue, Aug 01, 2017, 4:35 PM UTC

Here's one take DLT and Blockchain: https://hbr.org/2017/01/the-truth-about-blockchain

TL;DR, it's gonna take a real long time to make blockchain useful, if it even is.

Further, I have yet to see a real production application of blockchain that isn't a crypto-currency. Everyone and their grandmothers has invested in it, or started a company or w/e. But has it actually been used to solve another problem? Blockchain was the SOLUTION to the PROBLEM of how do I make a cryptocurrency. It now seems that some folks are trying to make a PROBLEM out of a SOLUTION in every other domain.

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

#40

Post by Patrick_Devine » Tue, Aug 01, 2017, 4:36 PM UTC

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…

Came here to say essentially the same thing. One possibility would be a government mandate that financial transactions are done with a blockchain in order to have transparency. I don't see that as likely though as the use case is pretty tenuous.