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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

#71

Post by QuadmasterXLII »

pyr0hu wrote: post #60
sdiacom wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good. The mere mention of "combining existing successful open-source product with blockchain" should get about the same reaction as "combining fruit bowls with metal spikes". This is a good thing, it means that people are waking up to what crypto actually is. There is no successful or interesting combination of "useful thing" and "blockchain", unless your definition of success is siphoning money from technologically…

But why can't we talk about it like normal people? Everyone is coming against each other, it became such a taboo that one can't have a normal conversation with an other person for like a minute before they start going against each other's throat. It's starting to become like talking about politics.

less like talking about politics, more like emails about boner pills

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

#72

Post by input_sh »

azangru wrote: post #36
h4kor wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If it didn't find its way into everyday person's pocket in 14 years since Bitcoin's whitepaper (even with all the money and attention thrown its way), I think it's fair to say it's unlikely that'll happen in the next 14 years as well.

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

#73

Post by pclmulqdq »

miohtama wrote: post #59
piva00 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 an…

It is incorrect to say nothing has happened during the last 10 years. Zero-knowledge proofs, as discussed in the potential research collaboration between Ethereum Foundation and LibreOffice, are more recent. The most useful, or compact, zero-knowledge proof systems have been created during the last few years. This can be partially contributed to the blockchain research. You can more about the history of zero knowledg…

Zero-knowledge proofs do not need a blockchain. They are "old crypto" (cryptography, not cryptocurrency) and actually predate blockchains by several decades.

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

#74

Post by maccard »

h4kor wrote: post #50
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.

> verified supply chain How does a blockchain verify the data being entered into it?

It doesn't, it verifies who it came from. Someone else mentioned Maersk above for supply chains, but a blockchain allows both Maersk and I to verify independently, without trusting each other, that a third party has made a change. If the third party says Maersk has it, and Maersk say the third party have it, the blockchain will have a record of it if Maersk accepted it, and I can independently verify that.

Unfortunately this isn't actually a property of a blockchain, this is a property of a ledger. I'm still trusting Maersk in this situation, because if I don't, what do I do, fork the blockchain and pretend that Maersk has the item?

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

#75

Post by pclmulqdq »

glacambre wrote: post #65
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…

>He has to broadcast his public key for this [...] through a public and decentralized ledger. Yes, but then he also has to broadcast the transaction linking his identity and public key. He could do this on twitter, but that is not a secure and tamper proof ledger. So he creates a second blockchain to advertise the transaction. But then he needs to advertise the second blockchain's transaction in order to link his ide…

Herein lies the problem of linking the chain to the world. At some point, you have to trust someone to do something.

In my opinion, it is fine to publish those signatures on a website you are known to control (or Tweet them out or whatever).

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

#76

Post by web3isgoing »

forgotpwd16 wrote: post #39
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…

Vitalik, or maybe a charitable non profit organization, signs two PDFs: one says "our new public key is X" and the other says "our new public key is Y." Both of these documents verify correctly, but how do you know which is the latest? One approach is to use Twitter as your append-only timestamped ledger, and broadcast a link to the latest file on IPFS. Another is to build a new centralized service and promise it is secure and will not get hacked or mutated. Another is to rely on a public distributed ledger that is verifiably secure and strongly resistant to modification.

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

#77

Post by pclmulqdq »

web3isgoing wrote: post #34
Macha wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Zero knowledge proofs were first invented/described in the 90's. Verifiable computation is older than blockchains and zero-knowledge proofs. Neither of these have anything to do with blockchains.

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

#78

Post by chippy »

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…

Lets try to understand this central point some more: blue sky thinking is a kind of enthusiastic faith in the future. The same kind of enthusiasm that scams, pumps and dumps require in order to succeed.

Thus we have a call for "just believe in the technology" which on it's own is fine, but it's a call that is required for all the scams that have occurred and keep on occurring to occur.

So people easily confuse the enthusiastic earnestness of blue sky thinking with crypto/blockchain with the enthusiastic earnestness of the fool that is rapidly parted with his money.

(As a note to this, I hope that the current massive crash of crypto happening right now might in a strange way increase the actual number of interesting technologists involved in it somehow, but I've not identified how)

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

#79

Post by manholio »

MarkPNeyer wrote: post #51
manholio wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only revolutionary thing blockchains enable is decentralized electronic cash and financial assets, which are fundamentally bad ideas, and the reaction is justified. Any other "blockchain" related innovation is just a solution in search of a problem with the real purpose of pumping some virtual asset and selling it off in volume to other speculators. Anything you claim can be done with blockchains (other than dece…

This is a first world perspective. You clearly live with a political stable government you can trust not to steal from you or imprison you for engaging in political protests. People in such places are using decentralized assets to protect themselves. What do you think they should do instead?

> What do you think they should do instead?

How about... they, and everybody else around the world, should work hard for good governance for all people of Earth?

It's simply obscene to claim that a speculative token peddled by SV venture capitalists could somehow magically solve things like disease, violence, corruption and lack of basic infrastructure keeping these nations down. It's so self serving and detached from developmental realities of poor countries - which I experienced fist hand in my life - that it makes my blood boil in disgust for the crypto bros.

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

#80

Post by sdiacom »

xigoi wrote: post #45
sdiacom wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Per the Wikipedia article: > User content in SSB is organized as an append-only sequence of immutable messages, where messages cryptographically sign adjacent messages for the purpose of guaranteeing unforgeabilitity of the sequences as they are replicated to other peers. That's pretty much a blockchain. Of course, they don't call it a blockchain themselves, because the Scuttlebutt people are not running a grift, the…

Do the messages require computationally expensive proofs?

Thankfully, no. I don't think that's a requirement for a blockchain, though.
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