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LibreOffice blogs about Blockchain, locks comments after negative user feedback

blog.documentfoundation.org

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Re: LibreOffice blogs about Blockchain, locks comments after negative user feedback

#31

Post by emptysongglass »

hiq wrote: post #17
emptysongglass wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That isn't true. A blockchain powers Secure Scuttlebutt, Jami, Urbit, and has use anywhere a verified supply chain is needed. Because some people have politicized it, now all blockchains are scams or "useless". But this is demonstrably not true. It's just a technology and people have misused it but that doesn't render the technology itself useless or a scam.

> A blockchain powers Secure Scuttlebutt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Scuttlebutt doesn't have the word blockchain on it, and from reading the protocol section, I don't think it uses a public blockchain as defined there: https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2019/02/theres_no_g... So you're just talking about something else, but as Schneier argues, anything other than a public blockchain is nothing new and…

I am not talking about something else. SSB is powered by a blockchain.

Re: LibreOffice blogs about Blockchain, locks comments after negative user feedback

#32

Post by piva00 »

web3isgoing wrote: post #18

You would think a message board called "hacker news" would be more open to blue sky thinking. Zero knowledge proofs and a tamper proof ledger of timestamped cryptographic signatures could open up new use cases that are different than relying on central authorities. One idea, document signing: vitalik.eth signs a PDF, everybody can verify the PDF is signed by his private key. He has to broadcast his public key for thi…

> You would think a message board called "hacker news" would be more open to blue sky thinking.

And as you can see all over HN, most of us are quite tired of this diatribe...

This appeal to HN requiring us to be open-minded about a technology that had more than a decade to prove itself in a real world application is tiresome. I mentioned in another comment just this week, I was really excited about Bitcoin in 2012 and kept watching the whole space for opportunities to try a product that could improve my life.

Nothing has appeared, in 10 years, worse, in 10 years it all became a space filled with mumbo-jumbo, grifters and scams. In 10 years I've not seen any of these pie-in-the-sky proposals of digital attestation come to fruition.

It's a technology looking for problems, when something more exciting than Cryptokitties or pure speculation of shitcoins pops up I can definitely give it a try. Unfortunately as each day passes and more scams appear it eclipses any dreams that people like you have to sell to me, it's been thoroughly tarnished over 10 years, the space is a mess in every aspect, including information. Nowadays if you search for anything blockchain/cryptocurrency-related you will only find piles and piles of trash, of shit articles trying to peddle yet-another-scam.

It's really hard to keep any optimism when there was absolutely nothing gained from the technology in the real world.

No, remittances from developing countries is not really a gain, I personally know people that emigrated from places like Venezuela and Iran and absolutely no one is using blockchains/cryptocurrencies anymore, the few ones that tried got burnt after yet-another-crash.

A decentralised ledger might have uses, no one has shown any so far, at least none that got any traction even close to the amount of money poured into this bullshit.

Re: LibreOffice blogs about Blockchain, locks comments after negative user feedback

#33

Post by hiq »

web3isgoing wrote: post #13
Phelinofist wrote: post #4

What possible use case could this be for?

Document signing: vitalik.eth signs a PDF, everybody can verify the PDF is signed by his private key. He has to broadcast his public key for this, and probably also a content hash of the document so that we can be sure we are verifying the correct PDF. He can broadcast this on Twitter, but that is not a secure and tamper proof ledger, and it is centrally owned, and it's not a great storage mechanism for this system t…

> He can broadcast this on Twitter, but that is not a secure and tamper proof ledger, and it is centrally owned, and it's not a great storage mechanism for this system to scale to thousands or millions of signatures.

Public blockchains[0] are not known to scale either. I can open a Twitter account for free and publish a signature right now, and do it on several other platforms at the same time to have some kind of redundancy.

I only care about the medium being tamper-proof to be able to prove the signature is at least this old (if it's in a certain block, the signature was made before this block. If it's in a certain message on Twitter, it was made before this message).

So from first principles, blockchains brings this theoretically better time-stamping mechanism, because somebody controlling Twitter could change timestamps there, while nobody could on a blockchain. In practice though, the redundancy is enough, and it's hard to change something people care about on the Internet without people noticing.

Overall this use-case somewhat legit (more legit than most), but it's a niche within a niche.

[0]: as defined in https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2019/02/theres_no_g...

Re: LibreOffice blogs about Blockchain, locks comments after negative user feedback

#34

Post by web3isgoing »

Macha wrote: post #30
web3isgoing wrote: post #18

You would think a message board called "hacker news" would be more open to blue sky thinking. Zero knowledge proofs and a tamper proof ledger of timestamped cryptographic signatures could open up new use cases that are different than relying on central authorities. One idea, document signing: vitalik.eth signs a PDF, everybody can verify the PDF is signed by his private key. He has to broadcast his public key for thi…

Hacker News has historically been very open to blockchain ideas. I'd wager that without HN's contribution, it would not have been well known enough to get picked up by silk road which is really when it went from toy project to normal people caring. Even after that, I think many of the early blockchain for X startups got good press here and there is a decent chunk of HNers employed in the blockchain. So I don't think…

Most of the negative comments on this thread read like knee-jerk reactions. I'd wager that many of them see blockchain as Bitcoin, and they are not cognisant of newer developments like zero knowledge proofs, verifiable computation, and smart contracts running on a zk rollup.

Re: LibreOffice blogs about Blockchain, locks comments after negative user feedback

#35

Post by sdiacom »

miohtama wrote: post #29
sdiacom wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are talking about crypto, though. What do you think the Ethereum foundation does? Wax poetry about Merkle trees?

You can find out what Ethereum Foundation does e.g. here https://esp.ethereum.foundation/about “ ESP focuses on strengthening Ethereum's foundations and enabling future builders: improving infrastructure, expanding the range of tools available to those building on Ethereum, deepening our understanding of cryptographic primitives, and growing the builder ecosystem through education and community development. The work…

So do you believe they opened talks with the people working on a word processor in order to "[deepen] their understanding of cryptographic primitives"? Is that what the LibreOffice blog post is about? Cryptographic primitives?

It seems more likely to me that they were looking into "growing the [grifter] ecosystem through [...] community development" instead.

Re: LibreOffice blogs about Blockchain, locks comments after negative user feedback

#36

Post by azangru »

h4kor wrote: post #3
pyr0hu wrote: post #2

I don't know, talking about blockchain became such an extreme topic that one can't just talk about it, even if it's a note that "We had a chat with Eth Foundation" and people are coming with foaming mouth. The article does not mention that they are thinking about _crypto_ but _blockchain_, which, seems like not a lot of people know about, does not 100% means "im going to release a shitcoin, haha, rugpull". It's insan…

Because there are no use cases for blockchains. Humanity spent billions (trillions?) of $ on this technology and there is no use for it. Now the people who sank their money into this, desperately try to find some fools to pass the hot potato to.

> Because there are no use cases for blockchains.

Someone in the comments on LibreOffice blog expressed the same opinion. Which surprised me. Has the consensus been reached among the serious non-grifting public that blockchains are useless to represent peer-to-peer trustless money? Has bitcoin been declared a failure?

Re: LibreOffice blogs about Blockchain, locks comments after negative user feedback

#37

Post by manholio »

web3isgoing wrote: post #18

You would think a message board called "hacker news" would be more open to blue sky thinking. Zero knowledge proofs and a tamper proof ledger of timestamped cryptographic signatures could open up new use cases that are different than relying on central authorities. One idea, document signing: vitalik.eth signs a PDF, everybody can verify the PDF is signed by his private key. He has to broadcast his public key for thi…

> Another alternative is these messages are broadcast through a public and decentralized ledger.

Trouble is, the "decentralized ledger" can only reliably timestamp if there is a financial incentive that motivates peers to burn hashes, stake and vouch for blocks etc. Without that financial incentive the whole blockchain breaks down to something inferior to even the PKI distributed systems described by Lamport in the 70s and 80s.

That's the major fallacy of "blockchains" as a technology, they are always a disguise for token speculation, they require native minted tokens of speculative value to operate.

Re: LibreOffice blogs about Blockchain, locks comments after negative user feedback

#38

Post by jeroenhd »

web3isgoing wrote: post #13
Phelinofist wrote: post #4

What possible use case could this be for?

Document signing: vitalik.eth signs a PDF, everybody can verify the PDF is signed by his private key. He has to broadcast his public key for this, and probably also a content hash of the document so that we can be sure we are verifying the correct PDF. He can broadcast this on Twitter, but that is not a secure and tamper proof ledger, and it is centrally owned, and it's not a great storage mechanism for this system t…

LibreOffice already has PGP support for signing documents, which is the standard mechanism for distributing trust among open source projects.

I suppose we can stuff PGP keys into the blockchain but I don't see the additional value. Each key needs to be trusted by the receivers independently (or through a web-of-trust-like system) so I don't see the added value of a tamper proof ledger.

Re: LibreOffice blogs about Blockchain, locks comments after negative user feedback

#39

Post by forgotpwd16 »

web3isgoing wrote: post #18

You would think a message board called "hacker news" would be more open to blue sky thinking. Zero knowledge proofs and a tamper proof ledger of timestamped cryptographic signatures could open up new use cases that are different than relying on central authorities. One idea, document signing: vitalik.eth signs a PDF, everybody can verify the PDF is signed by his private key. He has to broadcast his public key for thi…

>so that we can be sure we are verifying the correct PDF

Umm, what? Someone cannot create a PDF and sign with someone else's key. This would've defeat the purpose of public-key cryptography.

>it's not a great storage mechanism for this system to scale to thousands or millions of signatures

Not sure how recommending a system that scales not on signatures but on messages shared is better.

>Another alternative is these messages are broadcast through a public and decentralized ledger.

Okay. So suppose a message was distributed from an address. How you know to whom this address belongs? How will be different that you being shared their public key?

Re: LibreOffice blogs about Blockchain, locks comments after negative user feedback

#40

Post by zimpenfish »

dhdgrygev wrote: post #19
Brian_K_White wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just exemplified their point. original post: we're not talking about crypto comment: they're not talking about crypto but people still just say "F them crypto is bad!" this comment: F them because crypto is bad! Crypto (money, nfts) is bad, I think smart contracts are a mistake too, and I don't think LO needs blockchain either, but the objection is more like the one someone else said about, if there's some featur…

There are no real world use cases of blockchain tech besides crypto. Or can you demonstrate one?

Maersk uses blockchain for cargo tracking[1].[2]

[1] https://merehead.com/blog/maersk-blockchain-use-case/

[2] Entirely possible this could be done without a blockchain, yes.

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