[HN Gopher] IBM has cut its blockchain team down to almost nothi...
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IBM has cut its blockchain team down to almost nothing - sources
Author : walterbell
Score : 254 points
Date : 2021-02-03 13:48 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.coindesk.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.coindesk.com)
| kthejoker2 wrote:
| Not here to talk about IBM Blockchain in particular, but to just
| offer a "meta" take on the difference between blockchain and
| other technological innovations.
|
| In our world, we have problems and solutions.
|
| Most technologies are created to provide new solutions to
| existing problems.
|
| The problem? It's dark.
|
| The solution? Fire, and then the light bulb, and now LEDs and so
| on.
|
| As we've gone digital, we've found that many of the problems of
| the physical world found their way into the digital world, and
| needed a "digital equivalent" solution, so those solutions were
| "ported over".
|
| The problem? Pictures needed to be touched up for publication.
|
| The physical solution? Retouching kits, gelatin, paintbrushes,
| patience.
|
| The digital solution? Photo editing tools with (at a minimum) the
| same capabilities and results.
|
| If you go back and read Satoshi's original paper, he does
| something relatively novel - it may even be a first - in that he:
|
| * proposes a solution
|
| * to a digital problem
|
| * where no such solution exists in the physical world, and
|
| * no one is even sure it's a problem in the physical world
|
| And by doing so, he set off a firestorm, because now the
| wrangling isn't "is his solution better than other solutions for
| this problem" but "is this really a problem at all?"
|
| It is (for once!) a genuine example of begging the question. It
| says "remove these premises and this is the only mechanism that
| makes sense."
|
| Two of the key premises being removed are "trust in others" and
| "adjudication of transactional disputes" - here's from the
| original whitepaper:
|
| > Completely non-reversible transactions are not really possible,
| since financial institutions cannot avoid mediating disputes. The
| cost of mediation increases transaction costs, limiting the
| minimum practical transaction size and cutting off the
| possibility for small casual transactions, and there is a broader
| cost in the loss of ability to make non-reversible payments for
| nonreversible services. With the possibility of reversal, the
| need for trust spreads. Merchants must be wary of their
| customers, hassling them for more information than they would
| otherwise need. A certain percentage of fraud is accepted as
| unavoidable. These costs and payment uncertainties can be avoided
| in person by using physical currency, but no mechanism exists to
| make payments over a communications channel without a trusted
| party.
|
| If you see trust and mediation only as costs and with no
| benefits, the worldview of blockchain is appealing. But clearly
| some of the benefits of the existing system are transparency (or
| at least, the ability to have your day in court) and stability -
| being able to prevent bank runs is a _good thing._
|
| And of course, for the wider applications of blockchain, again,
| you have to consider the premises under which you're operating to
| define a "problem" such that blockchain is a solution.
|
| We joke that blockchain is a "solution in search of a problem",
| but that's not the case - it just declares a broad swath of
| social norms to be "the problem" it's solving, and makes no
| attempt at a countercase ("Why you shouldn't use Blockchain")
|
| I think we are all largely better served by spending our efforts
| creating solutions to problems everyone agrees we have and need
| solving.
| seibelj wrote:
| Enterprise blockchain only makes sense if you have multiple
| industry partners that don't trust each other, compete, but agree
| standardization on protocols make sense. But even if you get to
| that point, probably you don't need blockchain, although the
| buzzword may help decision-makers approve the standardization
| project.
|
| That said I am enormously bullish on the crypto / blockchain
| space. Decentralized finance just makes so much sense. But I am
| an individualist and a strong believer in decentralization, so
| that biases me.
|
| We are still in very, very early days, but what has been
| accomplished has been incredible, and you see it reflected in the
| prices of major assets like BTC and ETH but if you care to look
| deeper beneath the prices and actually see the tech, what's going
| on in the Ethereum space is incredible.
| dralley wrote:
| Probably for the best.
|
| > IBM is now 100% focused on hybrid cloud, so everything that
| doesn't support that is deprioritized.
| superbcarrot wrote:
| I wonder what happens when hybrid cloud doesn't work out. Also,
| what about AI and quantum - are they also getting dropped in
| favor of hybrid cloud?
| zaat wrote:
| By hybrid cloud they mean Red Hat. If it doesn't work out the
| crisis will impact much more than IBM.
| peterkelly wrote:
| February 2024: "IBM has cut its hybrid cloud team down to
| almost nothing - sources"
| bonzini wrote:
| Quantum computers are going to be so expensive that they are
| unlikely to be on premises. So it does fit hybrid cloud.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| I don't think there's any AI at IBM.
|
| As for Quantum, I can see it being very lucrative as they'll
| end up licensing their patents.
| rrdharan wrote:
| > I don't think there's any AI at IBM.
|
| A dozen misinformed CTOs who signed large Watson checks
| just felt a great disturbance...
| pasttense01 wrote:
| Watson. "How IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on
| AI Health Care"
|
| https://spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/diagnostics/how-ibm-
| wat...
| ToJans wrote:
| In my experience - I have done a lot of pre-sales for an IT
| service company - the use case for blockchain can usually be
| solved with classical, cheaper and simpler solutions by having a
| central trusted authority for storage (like a third-party service
| provider), and appending using digital signatures.
|
| For me personally, blockchain is a solution looking for a problem
| in most cases...
| Qub3d wrote:
| From an academic paper titled "Do you Need a Blockchain"[0]
| comes the following flowchart, which I think is a great
| explanation for business failures in this area:
| https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/DdXkPEPGlfox5LZLR94Bnxz8hq...
|
| [0]:https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/375.pdf
| vidarh wrote:
| It lacks a box for "are my potential investors gullible
| enough to give a higher valuation/be more likely to say yes
| if I mention blockchain?"
|
| It seems a fairly significant proportion of blockchain use
| comes down to that.
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| Indeed - a blockchain only makes sense in decentralized
| trustless proof-of-X systems.
|
| Everything else could be a Git repository or variation thereof
| (commit chain vs blockchain).
| Qub3d wrote:
| Specifically, a Merkle tree[0], which is the hash tree root
| of both Git _and_ most blockchains.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle_tree
| jdhzzz wrote:
| Agree, but that's how lasers were for the first 2 decades
| (guessing) of their existence.
| qaq wrote:
| Pretty much this. Would be interesting to know how many tens of
| billions were wasted on blockchain projects that nobody needs.
| baby wrote:
| In other news a decentralized system can be replaced by a
| centralized system. I don't think it's a very useful point.
| icelancer wrote:
| It's very "faster horse" syndrome. If people wanted to see
| the actual applicability of decentralized systems, they'd
| look into what's happening the early stages of the Ethereum
| platform building, specifically decentralized finance. But
| it's easier to just say "blockchain is a bad MySQL" and get
| 100 upvotes.
| koonsolo wrote:
| Exactly! Why don't we let Google manage all of our email in a
| single database. It's a way better system! ;)
| redisman wrote:
| I'm still looking for blockchain-pitches where a small MySQL
| server wouldn't do the same job better and with less
| complexity.
| kolinko wrote:
| Corporate blockchain - as in a way IBM pitched it - yes of
| course. Most of the people from open blockchains were saying
| that for years now.
|
| As for open blockchains, like Ethereum, there is really no
| financial system like it, and the amount of innovation there is
| crazy. In theory you could replace it with a centralised
| system, but that's like saying that you could replace Internet
| with AWS and just keep everything there.
| bawolff wrote:
| Yeah, this was pretty obvious even in the original bitcoin
| paper.
| fasdf1122 wrote:
| bitcoin /thread
| zapdrive wrote:
| In other news, water is wet. Obviously!!!! Blockchain has
| earned a bad name because of sales people trying to sell it for
| something it can't do. Blockchain is a very very very
| inefficient database that removes the need for a central trust
| authority. That's it's only selling point. You don't need it if
| you are storing your customer data in a central database.
| mempko wrote:
| There are details about blockchains that are often missed.
| That is, not only is trust distributed, but software
| execution is distributed. Smart contracts in bitcoin and eth
| are an interesting concept. Think AWS lambda but distributed.
|
| So user centric programming abstractions where users can
| execute queries and directly put data in the database is
| interesting concept. Of course you can also do this without a
| blockchain too if you can deal with a trusted party.
| chadash wrote:
| This. How many _real_ use cases are there where you really
| need to distribute trust? For currency, there 's some sense
| in it.
|
| But when i hear things like using blockchain for contracts or
| for keeping track of supply chain... it always seems like
| what people really want is just a well organized and
| reasonably trustworthy third party who can handle this stuff.
| Does anyone have any specific examples where blockchain would
| be a better solution?
| Animats wrote:
| Even if you need to distribute trust, you may just need a
| system where half a dozen or so players maintain replicated
| databases with duplicate transaction logs and a way to
| compare them.
| dnautics wrote:
| exactly. A database with a running hash is probably good
| for like 99% of "blockchain" use cases.
| worik wrote:
| Currency?
|
| Money is a lot of things, but one of these things is it is
| a web of trust.
|
| What a currency needs is a central bank. Historically we
| have tried a lot of things, and the most stable, reliable,
| and trustworthy turns out to be fiat currency with a
| central bank.
|
| The "crypto currency", using blockchains, experiment has
| been a colossal failure. Trust matters, and it needs a
| source.
| madmax96 wrote:
| in what ways have crypto currencies been colossal
| failures?
| worik wrote:
| Transaction capacity is far too low. Bitcoin is
| essentially unusable when transactions take over a hour
| to complete
|
| Volatility. Currency must be vaguely stable. Bitcoin is
| all over the place, most of the others have very low
| liquidity.
|
| The waste of energy.
|
| Scams galore. What in this space is not a scam? There
| have been so many scams.
|
| Enough?
| PHGamer wrote:
| if the internet is to be decentralized this it should all
| be block chain but i digress not going to happen.
| duxup wrote:
| Even beyond that, how often do you want to do business with
| / complete a transaction with someone who you trust THAT
| little?
|
| I suspect there is a lot more trust involved in every day
| things than maybe Blockchain assumes.
| Tenoke wrote:
| >Even beyond that, how often do you want to do business
| with / complete a transaction with someone who you trust
| THAT little?
|
| Not often precisely because of the risks but if those
| risks are minimized it can expand your range of potential
| business partners.
| throwaway9870 wrote:
| How does a blockchain ensure they ship the materials I
| requested? Did they harden the metal properly? Were the
| electronic parts purchased from a reliable supply chain
| so I don't get reclaimed ones? Did they use the right PSI
| steel? Did they test to known and documented quality
| standards, or do they ship me the ones that work, but
| fail quality checks that they reserve for their big
| customers?
|
| I have manufactured a lot of electronic and physical
| products, and have had a lot of supply chain issues, but
| not one of them would have been solved with a blockchain.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| Meanwhile the concept of escrow has exited for millenia
| and already solves that problem. 99% of the proposed
| usecases for blockchain can be done much more effectively
| with tech, infrastructure, and systems that have existed
| forever.
|
| It's a lot like all the hype over NoSQL, when the
| principles underlying traditional relational databases
| have already been a solved problem since the 70's and
| work for 99% of use cases.
| duxup wrote:
| I'm not sure there would be a desire to do so. I think
| that often trust to some extent is a baseline requirement
| for most people to do business in the first place.
| Tenoke wrote:
| It isn't. One of the reasons why e.g. the stock market is
| so huge is that participants rarely need to trust each
| other as the guarantees are provided elsewhere. Imagine
| if every buyer had to trust every seller (and vice versa)
| on every transaction.
| duxup wrote:
| Because they trust the exchange who does more than
| blockchain though. That example seems off.
| Tenoke wrote:
| ..And here you can trust the blockchain instead of the
| other party.
| duxup wrote:
| I don't think Blockchain provides what an exchange
| provides.
| rglullis wrote:
| You are getting it backwards.
|
| Do you know always who is on the other side of a purchase
| that you do online? I can bet you don't, yet you still do
| business because you trust the intermediary (credit card
| provider, Amazon, whoever) to ensure that both parties
| are getting what they want.
|
| Blockchain and "trustless" systems are there for people
| who want to make business but do not have these
| intermediaries, or when the intermediaries themselves are
| not trustworthy (corrupt governments, inefficient
| companies, etc).
| throwaway9870 wrote:
| It is fine to buy a few things from an untrusted supplier
| off Amazon. It is a whole other issue to run production
| based on unreliable or untrusted suppliers. I have yet to
| ever see a company serious about production that would do
| this.
|
| Are you in production? Or just think this is a good idea?
| rglullis wrote:
| Until 2017, I haven't seen anyone that could raise
| capital from total strangers and start a company. In 2019
| I was working at one of the many companies that did just
| that.
|
| Until last year, I haven't seen anyone so investing in
| derivatives without a bunch of capital and access to a
| reliable brokerage. Today, you can do it without even
| having a bank account on your name.
|
| > Are you in production? Or just think this is a good
| idea?
|
| I am not in production, but the thought of creating
| business and opportunities that do not _require_ trust
| between parties seems _amazing_ to me.
| rglullis wrote:
| How many friends do you have that you would be willing to
| pay a round of beers or cover their tab at a restaurant?
|
| How many of those friends would you put to invest in a
| house with you?
|
| Hell, how many of those friends do you trust to give you
| a backup key to your house for emergencies?
|
| Trust is not binary.
| duxup wrote:
| I'm not sure I understand the point of the questions. Why
| wouldn't I do those things if someone is a friend?
|
| I think the level of trust at the point you do business
| may in fact mostly be binary. The scale of 'so little
| trust I need to use blockchain' is pretty high, I'm not
| sure there are that many reasons to do so.
| rglullis wrote:
| Really? Of all of the people you have some kind of
| friendly relationship, you wouldn't hesitate to put a
| more significant amount of resources at risk with any of
| them?
|
| > The scale of 'so little trust I need to use blockchain'
| is pretty high.
|
| Let's say a family member comes to you and say: "hey
| duxup, I have some medical bills to pay but I am short of
| a couple of grand. If I go on my credit card they will
| charge me 10% interest/year. So I was thinking of
| borrowing it from you and pay you 5% interest. By the
| way, here is the key to my car which is worth double the
| debt, the car is yours if I don't pay in time. It's a
| good deal for me, it's a good deal for you and you have
| no risk of losing your money"
|
| You might say "Oh, it's a family member, so I trust you.
| You can have the money, pay back whenever you can". Which
| is fine. Or you can actually say "Alright, I will take
| the deal" and just hope that he gets to pay you back
| without any incident. In any case, no legal entities
| involved (every one is just going by the word) and the
| cost of settling a dispute is more of social capital
| (family troubles) than actual money.
|
| Now, suppose that instead of a family member, it is a co-
| worker that you know for just a short while. You don't
| know if the person really had medical issues and you have
| no personal reason to be connected to the person. But you
| can get the keys for the car and you got some kind of
| legally-binding document regarding the conditions of the
| loan. It seems like a good deal, so why not take it? Not
| to mention the social capital, is a couple of hundred
| dollars "profit" worth the risk of having to deal with an
| someone you don't really know and all the potential
| troubles?
|
| Now, supposed that instead of a co-worker, it is a total
| stranger online. You have no clue if the person needs the
| money for medical bills or if the money is for cosmetic
| surgery. In fact, it could be just for them to spend on
| drugs. Still, whoever is proposing the deal has placed a
| token that controls ownership of a car under a smart
| contract. If the loan is not paid, you get the token and
| you can easily sell the car on a distributed marketplace.
| And by the way, the token keeps a verifiable record of
| the car history, so any potential buyer can be sure of
| its value. All of this (giving the loan, checking the car
| value, signing on the deal, enforcing the rules and
| resolving potential conflict) can be done on a
| web3-enabled browser and costs maybe ~$10 in transaction
| fees. Why _wouldn 't_ you take such a deal?
| rebuilder wrote:
| Storing contracts on the blockchain does seem a bit
| pointless. Smart contracts, OTOH, would actually enable new
| kinds of business if they can beade workable. That's a
| pretty big if, IMO, but in theory at least they seem like a
| valid use of blockchain.
| coredog64 wrote:
| A former coworker has been using blockchain for seafood
| catch reporting in the Pacific. It's a complicated legal
| situation (EEZs, treaties, illegal fishing, monitoring for
| habitat collapse) made more difficult by expensive/slow
| internet connectivity.
| zamfi wrote:
| > it always seems like what people really want is just a
| well organized and reasonably trustworthy third party who
| can handle this stuff.
|
| And _also_ a third party to _sue_ when things go south, or
| to _correct errors_ (at scale, humans always make errors!),
| or to be subpoenaed to provide information, etc.
|
| These are all advantages in some contexts, and
| disadvantages in others.
|
| But those specific examples of when blockchain is better
| should probably also be better because there's no one to
| sue, no changes to make ever, and an information-hiding
| advantage.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| If you had a few traders who sit underneath a buttonwood
| tree and don't trade with anyone else (e.g. the founders of
| the New York Stock Exchange) it might be OK.
|
| Say you have a consortium of five banks: 5 copies of the
| database is not a crazy price to pay for a high level of
| resilience.
|
| Make that 5000 banks and you are paying 1000x as much but
| not getting 1000x the resilience.
|
| So many people are obsessed with peer-to-peer solutions, I
| could also see a blockchain as an answer to (say) having a
| book lending database for a few friends.
| rglullis wrote:
| You might be interested in https://trustlines.network
| [deleted]
| whitepaint wrote:
| Defi
| [deleted]
| Xelbair wrote:
| Real estate deed ownership database - immutable distributed
| database spread around regional government offices.
|
| Speaking from my experience, the records are being kept
| horribly over here, there were many projects to cenralize
| it but the original data is in such sorry state that it is
| basically impossible. Not to mention that it is very
| profitable for some that it is in such sorry state.
|
| They key idea is that you are unable to modify who owned
| what in the past, only change ownership in the current
| time, and the records, as per current system, are spread
| all over the local government entities.
|
| Same thing for financial ledgers - immutable record of
| transactions to which only banks can write to.
|
| I think that stocks are too volatile, but it is a such
| shock to me that you can only find out who actually owns a
| specific stock at T-2 ..
|
| In both cases there is no competition for who solves the
| next block faster, so costs of computation costs can be
| kept low. I'm more attached to immutability of such
| databases, than distributed trust, but one cannot exist
| without other in blockchain.
| darkerside wrote:
| If you were rebuilding government from scratch as a
| decentralized entity, then sure. But all the living
| spaces on earth already have a jurisdiction, and they're
| not looking to disrupt themselves.
| dnautics wrote:
| that's not a blockchain though. That's just a linked list
| or (low tx/sec) timeseries database with a hash.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _you are unable to modify who owned what in the past_
|
| So we throw out the entire body of law around fraudulent
| conveyance?
| Xelbair wrote:
| In local laws over here only the current state of deed
| book matters.
|
| Whatever gets there, input by trusted and certified
| notary, IS the current legal standard of law. No
| exceptions.
|
| If legal proceeding happens that wants to restore
| ownership, a new state is written into that book - it
| does not return to the previous state.
|
| if fraud happens you can clearly see who, when did it,
| and can do another change restoring it to proper current
| state.
|
| While also recording who fixed that mistake.
| MockObject wrote:
| > In local laws over here
|
| Pet peeve: posts in a global forum that mention "here".
| Which one did you mean?
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Yes. Many proponents of blockchain speak with glee at how
| doing so will "cut lawyers out of the process". Lol. In
| every generation there is someone who thinks they can do
| away with the legal profession. Lawyers have walked the
| earth for thousands of years and shall continue to do so
| for many more.
| tehlike wrote:
| This very much like the back and forth we have on
| microservices vs monolith. Every generation likes the
| cool thing only to revert back to mean.
|
| People will go decentralized, then centralized, then
| decentralized, etc.
|
| We built centralized government bodies for a reason.
|
| The aspect of blockchain + bitcoin that's pretty
| appealing is limited supply & formulated inflation &
| cryptographic guarantees.
|
| Applying this to all other domains is stretching it a
| bit.
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| >the original data is in such sorry state
|
| How does Blockchain solve that problem?
|
| It's the same issue with using it for supply chain
| verification, it's dependent upon the point of initial
| data entry. The Central American farmer enters the
| tomatoes that he just received via container ship from
| China into the Blockchain application as "organically
| grown domestic produce" and from that point forward
| consumers can rest assured about the tomatoes'
| authenticity and provenance. Or not.
| Xelbair wrote:
| It actually solves it quite well.
|
| It enforces you to input it properly, and not do half
| assed job due to immutability, because whatever you input
| in there will stay there, attached with
| credentials/metadata of whoever entered it.
|
| Currently the main problem is that docs are in sorry
| state, it was a rush job - and that state is very
| profitable for some people making dubious claims to old
| property.
|
| It would be easy to notice fraud, and all real estate
| deals need to go through proper notary anyways - would
| they risk their license if their failures would be
| visible - for ever?
|
| Mind you I'm not trying to propose a global solution, I'm
| proposing blockchain use for government entities and
| entities that work closely with them.
|
| It is just that governments aren't centralized on modern
| world, and you can leverage decentralized nature of
| blockchain to have a common dataset and standard
| available to all of those entities.
| perl4ever wrote:
| >all real estate deals need to go through proper notary
| anyways
|
| I don't know if you are American or familiar with how
| real estate works here. It is decentralized in a way that
| most countries are not, and there is insurance that
| people buy against mistakes and problems with
| transferring property. In a way, you could argue that a
| single blockchain to track real property would be _more_
| centralized than the current system.
|
| "the vast majority of U.S. states have opted for a system
| of document recording in which no governmental official
| makes any determination of who owns the title or whether
| the instruments transferring it are valid"
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_insurance
|
| "A recording system combined with title insurance
| decentralizes records, creating redundancy. For example,
| when many records were destroyed in San Francisco's 1906
| earthquake, out-of-town title companies maintained
| records that allowed landowners to prove ownership of
| their property."
| stonogo wrote:
| It doesn't enforce anything. People can just transcribe
| wrong things into blockchains, then have to append
| patches to the information. Unless you can prove
| malfeasance nobody is going to lose a license over a
| mistake. I think you're vastly overestimating how much
| anyone would care just because blockchains are involved.
| Notary records are already "forever," no computers
| required, and there's nothing inherent to blockchains
| that causes people to type more carefully.
|
| Plus there are lots of situations in real estate law
| (like ground rent where the freeholder is not
| identifiable) which don't fit into cute little data
| structures. This isn't a problem with documentation being
| a rush job, it's a problem with some of the records of
| ownership being hundreds of years old. Seeing as how I
| would have to hire a special archivist just to access
| data on an 8" floppy disk, I'm not confident that the
| blockchain is a long-term (i.e. centuries) solution to
| any of these problems.
| majormajor wrote:
| > It enforces you to input it properly, and not do half
| assed job due to immutability, because whatever you input
| in there will stay there, attached with
| credentials/metadata of whoever entered it.
|
| This is an unrealistic level of infallibility to ask of
| people. Like taking the backspace key off a keyboard to
| enforce people not making typos.
| simias wrote:
| Right, authority-less blockchain is only intrinsically
| trustworthy for purely digital goods. If you want to
| track software licenses it might work (although 99% of
| the time a centralized solution will be simpler and
| vastly more efficient).
|
| And this immutability can arguably be a detriment. Laws
| and rules are messy and can be exploited, not having any
| recourse if you get scammed is not necessarily a huge
| pro.
|
| The whole idea that you could import all the rules, laws
| and regulations of the real world into a computer program
| without any bug or unforeseen issue is probably one of
| the most ridiculous aspect of that whole blockchain
| industry. Especially since we already have a fairly
| consequential list of "smart contracts" that have been
| exploited in the wild despite being fairly basic compared
| to IRL regulations.
|
| "Oh you lost your house because somebody found a weird
| edge case between two smart contracts that let them buy
| it for $1? Ah man, that sucks, but then THE CODE IS LAW
| so... Tough luck. Maybe try buying DOGE coins? I hear
| it's gonna moon soon. They used rocket emojis, so you
| know it's serious."
| mason55 wrote:
| > _Laws and rules are messy and can be exploited, not
| having any recourse if you get scammed is not necessarily
| a huge pro._
|
| Yes, many times things like T+2 settlements on trades or
| taking three days for a transfer to fully clear are a
| feature, not a bug.
|
| You start with Bitcoin being like cash, where once it's
| gone it's gone, unless a court can find the person and
| get it back. Then you don't want grandma to get scammed,
| so you build bank-like entities on top of the blockchain
| who re-create the three day window for transfers. In
| theory you could have different entities that have
| different settlement times as a tradeoff, but the modern
| system could do that now. The reason they don't is you
| need both parties to have the same rules or else your
| bank will get bogged down trying to figure out the rules
| of every other bank. Maybe you add an instant, non-
| revocable transfer like a SWIFT equivalent to go along
| with your 3-day ACH equivalent and, congrats, you've
| recreated the modern banking system.
| spiderxxxx wrote:
| Immutability of past transactions is just an artifact of
| an append-only database. Blockchain gives you nothing
| that an append-only database couldn't provide for that
| guarantee. Combine that with some server sharding, and
| there's not really a point to having blockchain do
| anything at all. The wholly designed inefficiency of
| "mining coins" is not necessary to having a distributed
| ledger.
| HelloNurse wrote:
| In other situations, the initial data entry depends on a
| trusted authority rather than a trusted other party. For
| example, real estate ownership deeds depend on qualified
| legals who write them correctly: you need to trust them
| to do their job, without mistakes, collusions, etc. at
| which point there's little practical difference between
| buyers and sellers trusting them to keep a public,
| official record with paper and electronic documents in
| their archives and trusting them to enter your transfer
| into a public blockchain system.
| totalZero wrote:
| I don't think it would work for physically settled
| commodity futures because contract specifications require
| a particular quality of product, and that's part of the
| motivation to trade via an exchange.
|
| But it would work for securities that have no
| distinguishable attributes from one another, especially
| if the extant problem with trading those securities is
| market access.
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| It doesn't work. But, I clearly remember this being
| something IBM advertised extensively.
| hertzrat wrote:
| It's only immutable if you get the whole world burning
| energy 24/7 to avoid a 51% attack. That solution is a
| little bit unreasonable, isn't it?
|
| Apparently there has already been 51% attacks:
| https://btcmanager.com/privacy-coin-firo-51-attack/
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| seems like with state actors owning more and more of it,
| as well as the mining hardware that they could pull this
| off at some point in the future. Namely China right now.
| Xelbair wrote:
| If you read closely i'm proposing government use only,
| where each governing body participating in the system has
| access to it.
|
| You can keep compute systems down - i'm more interested
| in immutability and distributed nature than the trust
| issue of blockchain.
| scott_s wrote:
| Then you don't need blockchain. Once you have trust among
| the participants, you don't need blockchain.
| kindofajsdev wrote:
| Isn't that why some coins are moving to proof of stake
| instead of proof of work? Solves the energy crisis. Idk
| if proof of stake prevents 51% attacks though.
| thesz wrote:
| Proof of stake does not offer any resistance to Cybil
| attack or (part time) collusion of stake holders.
|
| In the case of such attacks the victims will find
| themselves in a situation that can be described as
| "shadow ban" - their transactions are not accepted or
| accepted too late, etc.
| madmax96 wrote:
| Proof of stake doesn't prevent 51% attacks. It eliminates
| the incentive. If an attacker controls 51% of coins, why
| would they attack the network? That would be attacking
| _their own wealth._
| Jasper_ wrote:
| Not if they can attack the network without anybody
| knowing. If an attacker secretly controls 51% of the
| coins (by, say, having three separate entities that each
| control 15-20%) and can manipulate the market in their
| favor by rejecting transactions that would hurt them,
| that's a big incentive.
| nradov wrote:
| There's no valid reason to claim that stocks in general
| are too volatile. Or you could equally say that stocks
| aren't volatile enough. What's the optimal level of
| volatility?
|
| Reducing stock settlement times below 2 days wouldn't
| impact volatility. Those are orthogonal issues. And
| current blockchain technology isn't scalable enough to
| handle even a fraction of stock transactions.
| poulsbohemian wrote:
| >Real estate deed ownership database
|
| Real estate broker and former software developer here...
| I recall having this conversation with an investor type
| about three years ago. We could find no scenario where
| Blockchain was a meaningful improvement over a generic
| _database._ Same goes for every asset management scenario
| I 've discussed with similar people over the years. This
| is not to say there aren't tons of opportunities to fix
| many of these real-world problems, just that Blockchain
| doesn't appear to add anything but does add to the
| complexity of the solution.
| phailhaus wrote:
| Filecoin appears to be an appropriate use case for
| distributed trust. Haven't really looked into it though.
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| Supply chain is still reasonable, because you can't really
| trust any part of it.
| lottin wrote:
| You can't trust it but somehow your entire business
| already depends on it?
| hef19898 wrote:
| You can very much trust it. Mostly, that is. The issues
| usually occur when data flows and physical flows get
| disconnected. No way blockchain will solve that.
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| Most companies aren't completely aligned with all their
| suppliers. Just look at Apple trying to root out child
| labour. A formally verified supply chain has some limited
| use cases because you can prove some pieces aren't lying
| to you (e.g. that you're actually not sourcing your parts
| from conflict materials, and they are coming from
| somebody reputable).
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Supply chain is still reasonable, because you can 't
| really trust any part of it_
|
| But the part you can't trust is in the physical realm.
| The fanciest blockchain won't tell you if the package's
| contents have been tampered with or pilfered.
| chewzerita wrote:
| From my limited knowledge (basically 0) of supply chains,
| I disagree. (Though I am neutral on the statement "you
| can't really trust any part of it.")
|
| The anecdote I heard was that say you have a blockchain
| to keep track of your goods shipping on trucks. When the
| trucks leave and enter a facility their payload is
| entered into the blockchain. The idea is that it will
| make sure that every party along the supply chain can say
| "well I got the next person what they needed" so you can
| easily put blame on and correct for missing/failing
| items.
|
| Sounds good, right? Well, not so fast. It turns out that
| some of the items were stolen from a truck (whether by an
| employee or otherwise). The truck arrives at the next
| facility, scans in and certifies that they have the
| proper items and none are the wiser!
|
| Hold on, can't they just physically check at each stop to
| actually make sure that they have the right cargo?
|
| Bingo! At that point, what problem does the blockchain
| actually solve? Blockchain works okay-ish for digital
| goods (cryptocurrency), but completely falls apart for
| physical goods.
| koonsolo wrote:
| Sometimes I don't get the hackernews community. Internet
| moving from protocols to monopolies is bad. But when we
| have a cool protocol for ledgers, then no, we want a
| monopoly.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| There are already technologies that work similarly to
| blockchain (such as Git) without needing blockchain to
| work. You can have distributed, immutable databases
| without blockchain.
|
| Blockchain's only real advantage is that it eliminates
| the need for trust. If your system doesn't need to be
| trustless, there are far more efficient (energy and
| otherwise) tools that already exist and accomplish
| everything else that blockchain does.
| mason55 wrote:
| The problem is that the cool protocol for ledgers doesn't
| actually address many of the business needs _while
| simultaneously being pitched as if it does._
|
| Very few people are arguing that blockchain has no
| benefit. But it also has costs and in many cases the
| costs outweigh the benefits. Tracking the provenance of
| your tomatoes on a blockchain has real costs over putting
| the data in a database, and you still need to have
| someone you trust who can vouch that the tomatoes were
| grown where they said they were. If you're already
| trusting someone to say "these tomatoes are authentic,
| Nebraska-grown tomatoes" then you might as well have them
| manage the whole supply chain.
|
| Also, I don't think many people would complain about a
| monopoly that had open data access and open protocols and
| allowed interoperability. If your tomato-supply-chain-
| management company told you that you couldn't export the
| data about your tomatoes or you could only access it via
| their terrible app then THAT would be the argument for
| moving to a blockchain. If at any time they could inflate
| the supply of Nebraska-grown tomatoes by clicking a
| button then that would be an argument for blockchain.
|
| The need for trust is a necessary but not sufficient
| requirement for putting something on a blockchain. Too
| often it's presented as sufficient.
| [deleted]
| koonsolo wrote:
| History of second hand cars. (Repairs, accidents,
| maintenance, original options, paint, etc)
|
| Currently, there are various parties that try to collect
| this info, but it's still full of holes. Plus, it's not a
| single party, even for the same area (eg EU). It gets more
| complicated for import/export.
|
| Let's say you can "solve" this by having a single worldwide
| party that handles it. Do you really want such a monopoly?
| How much will you pay then to get the data?
|
| Why not solve it with a ledger protocol?
| hectormalot wrote:
| Since there currently is no such world-wide central
| party, why would a blockchain based solution be
| successful if the central party is (apparently) not?
|
| In this specific example: are car dealers not
| participating because they don't trust the central party
| (case for blockchain) or because (lazy|not in their
| interest|inconvenient|...)? If the latter, then
| blockchain is not solving the actual problem.
| koonsolo wrote:
| You have a few parties now that collect this info and
| sell it. They are pretty successful. But as a buyer, you
| pay around $50, and the amount of info highly depends on
| the car and the party collecting it.
|
| Right now, selling a car with an official maintenance
| book is always a benefit.
|
| The real benefit is of course on the buyer side, who
| wants to verify what he is buying. So a car with an
| "official" log would be more valuable than without. When
| this is the case, it of course is better for the seller
| to have such a log.
|
| I've been in this space for a short while, and I can
| definitely see it working.
| totalZero wrote:
| > a well organized and reasonably trustworthy third party
| who can handle this stuff
|
| You hit the nail on the head. In the US we can trust our
| third parties. Europe too. But that's not always the case
| elsewhere.
|
| I am reminded of a friend who told me he wanted to sell
| some stock held in a bank in his country in Latin America,
| but the bank refused to process his transaction for a few
| weeks. By the time he was finally able to sell, the price
| had fallen greatly. It later turned out that the owner of
| the bank was selling his own shares during that time.
|
| Blockchain is good for systems where there are few
| transactions and energy is cheap, but there is no one
| single trustworthy actor. That's often the case in the
| third world.
|
| Third world equities exchanges (not places like Brazil and
| Chile but other countries with very undeveloped financial
| markets) would benefit from blockchain. There's not much
| liquidity there and the individual investor ends up getting
| pushed to the side when the large players want to trade.
| Even if you have a central clearinghouse and a liquid
| exchange, corruption is a factor.
|
| I don't pretend to know how best to implement blockchain
| for electronic exchanges, but I suppose the starting point
| would be to build a settlement system that has the
| imprimatur of a coalition of different governments (like
| Mercosur or Comunidad Andina), hold the shares in trust
| somewhere, and use the settlement system to process
| exchange-traded transactions from the constituent
| countries. Eventually, exchanges don't have to be the
| origination points of transactions, and you could
| presumably just get bids and offers directly from other
| participants over the internet. No guarantees that you are
| getting the best ones, but that doesn't matter as much for
| third world markets because the prices are wide and slow-
| moving anyway.
| redisman wrote:
| If you can't trust the government then what are the
| chances they'll buy into using a blockchain that takes
| away their corruption powers? The only way you could
| adopt it is if it's developed in a trusted country, but
| then you'd be pitching your corrupt government to use a
| (possibly) hostile countries system to manage property.
| Or that they will actually use the blockchain to resolve
| disputes rather than just telling you to piss off?
| totalZero wrote:
| > If you can't trust the government then what are the
| chances they'll buy into using a blockchain that takes
| away their corruption powers?
|
| OK well I can't speak for Asia or Africa but I am
| familiar with the Americas...
|
| Aside from the fact that governments always look for PR
| campaigns that make them look fair, they also know they
| aren't going to be in power forever, and they suffer (get
| fired, thrown in jail, you name it) when power changes
| hands. If you can insulate the financial system from
| those shocks then it's beneficial for both parties
| because they each protect their financial downside. Also,
| the country as a whole grows when markets get healthier
| and can attract more investment. That's good for
| everyone.
|
| It's not that you can't get the government to set up and
| use a particular system. It's that individual
| corporations within the country affiliate with a
| particular faction/party and try to bend the system to
| take advantage of other participants. The corruption
| happens under the skin. You can establish a competent
| central actor but you can't trust him not to bend the
| rules, like a horny professor when an attractive student
| with a B asks for a low A. The third world is one big
| hackathon for the misuse of institutions. Look at
| Morales' successful efforts to wriggle out from the grasp
| of term limits; he went to the Supreme Court and asked
| his buddies there to declare him eligible due to "human
| rights." He didn't say "I don't care about the
| Constitution," even though he wanted to violate its
| rules. They don't want the institution to look like it's
| crumbling, even when they're the ones chipping away at
| it.
|
| If you elevate the exchange to a multinational blockchain
| then you have competing factions, lots of ebb and flow,
| and the potential for outside participants. And you get
| the "i don't have to trust the others" aspect of
| blockchain.
|
| The whole point of developing robust systems is to make
| them failure tolerant in the face of perturbations, so we
| should apply them to the perturbed applications instead
| of building blockchain for rideshare/dildoes/whatever
| that helps nobody with an actual problem.
| honest_guy wrote:
| > Does anyone have any specific examples where blockchain
| would be a better solution?
|
| Currency, payment processing and banking are definitely the
| primary use cases - which is nothing short of
| revolutionary, in my opinion. In less stable/poorer
| societies, access to banking, trustless payments, and an
| immutable ledger are immensely valuable.
|
| Even here in the west, I would kill for an alternative to
| PayPal for international payments. I was recently forced to
| receive payment via PayPal. Between their 'generous'
| exchange rates and fees, I lost out on hundreds of dollars.
| Shortly after, they locked my funds for 25 days while they
| reviewed my account. I had zero recourse and just had to
| wait them out. The same transaction on Cardano would've
| cost 7c plus the cost of exchanging it back to fiat.
| bluesign wrote:
| I think when people thinking blockchain they are thinking
| in line of bitcoin, so it is confusing.
|
| Better to think as "signing messages". also better to think
| as offline on some steps.
| tal8d wrote:
| Property deeds. It is amazing how bad counties are at such
| a simple charge, I know three people (in three different
| counties) who had to deal with the local government losing
| records - one of them only learning this after a neighbor
| tried to annex a chunk of his land.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _one of them only learning this after a neighbor tried
| to annex a chunk of his land_
|
| Property rights are messy.
|
| How do you create a new category of mineral rights a
| hundred years into the blockchain?
|
| Also: Rule change! City is changing parcel sizes by
| narrowing sidewalks. Another rule change! Single-family
| home neighborhood rezoned to multi-family; two plots are
| mostly (but not completely) combining to create a multi-
| family plot with air rights bought from the church next
| door. Rule change! Everything east of this line of
| longitude in those two towns (but not unincorported
| county land as of the 2009 geological survey) is now
| federal property per eminent domain.
| aeturnum wrote:
| Generally I think the blockchain is dumb, but I think
| recording property ownership would be a good usecase.
| Don't think about it as a highly structured database,
| think about it like a filing cabinet that can be accessed
| from the internet and anyone can contribute to the
| maintenance of.
|
| > How do you create a new category of mineral rights a
| hundred years into the blockchain?
|
| Same way you add a category of mineral rights now - you
| pass a law and you add a category name. Then you start
| recording documents that track those rights.
|
| I actually think blockchain would be an interesting model
| for media ownership. Buying movies or other things online
| is sketchy because your 'property' basically gets tied up
| in the fortunes of a particular company. 'Buy' a movie
| from StreamIt.com and they go under? No more movie. I'd
| love to see a consortium that agrees to use a blockchain
| system to issue movie rights - the media companies agrees
| that anyone who has control of a wallet with a
| 'moviecoin' minted by them has the right to watch that
| movie. Even if all the original companies go out of
| buisness, new companies could keep running the network
| and charge smaller fees for bandwidth to stream you the
| movie you already own.
| tal8d wrote:
| That might be a concern if you try to cram every possible
| property of the legal code into the blockchain. So maybe
| don't do that. But if you do, the whole thing is
| extensible - so it is possible. But don't.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _maybe don 't do that_
|
| A partial log of property rights is no longer a property
| rights register. It's reference material. Annotations.
| tal8d wrote:
| Pack it up Identrust, digitally signed documents and
| timestamping are is just annotations.
| robin_reala wrote:
| OK, but you don't need blockchain for that, any sort of
| Merkle tree will work.
| Tenoke wrote:
| You don't _need_ a blockchain but a blockchain can
| potentially give the public guarantees that an opaque
| government solution usually does not.
| robin_reala wrote:
| How about a transparent government solution?
| https://www.registers.service.gov.uk/
| tal8d wrote:
| The question wasn't "What is the ideal data structure?"
| GavinMcG wrote:
| Is it really that amazing when getting funding for
| anything takes pulling teeth? Voters have been convinced
| that investing in government operations is theft.
| tal8d wrote:
| > Voters
|
| Just the two? Because it has been a while since I heard
| anyone ask "Who is John Galt?"
| hef19898 wrote:
| This is actually a problem I have a hard time to
| understand. In Germany, these records are kept by a
| government maintained registry. Every patch of land has a
| number and a record, and an owner. Changes need
| certification by a Notary. Records go back to, what
| feels, eternity. I never heard of any problems with the
| records themselves, problems usually arise regarding the
| agreements between parties to change said documents. No
| idea how blockchain would beat simple, court maintained
| paper.
| baby wrote:
| The supply chain stuff always sounds to me like a scam, and
| every time I had someone pitch me a blockchain supply chain
| startup it was indeed a scam (and I told them so). Now
| maybe there's an element I'm missing, but there's still a
| fundamental problem in linking a real world object to
| something on the chain. Digital currency works because it
| is only on the chain, and we manage to agree that it has
| value, or we use trusted third parties to move that value
| to the real world in something we can tell is real USD
| (although the banking system is so opaque that...)
| allie1 wrote:
| Govt records, registries of people born, death
| certificates, deeds on land, swift for banking, any sort of
| info of public interest like procurement agreements, notary
| documents, licenses (govt level, like drivers license etc)
| eterm wrote:
| The very first thing in your list is literally a central
| authority.
| allie1 wrote:
| It certainly should be, and this is no problem in
| developed democracies. Not so much in the developing
| world - leaves room for corruption.
|
| and btw look at Estonia - implemented blockchain for most
| of its govt stuff - including judiciary, and they are
| among the fastest in the world in terms of time to
| resolve matters once they reach the courts
|
| ref: https://e-estonia.com/solutions/security-and-
| safety/e-justic...
| hertzrat wrote:
| Imagine how impossible it becomes fix a wrongful
| conviction. You could never fully clear that persons name
| because the "crime" would forever be on the books
| publicly
| allie1 wrote:
| True, it's not something you can apply everywhere. But
| there are use cases where the downside is virtually nil.
| Sargos wrote:
| Well yeah, blockchains are inherently doing what
| governments historically have done but in a safer, more
| scalable way. Anything that is just a public record that
| needs to be kept is a slam dunk for blockchains.
| worik wrote:
| What is "safer, more scalable way" about blockchain?
|
| Safe? There are many solutions to maintaining reliable
| records. Blockchains are one, but no better than many
| others
|
| Scalable? I cannot understand how it is possible to think
| that scalability is a attribute of blockchains. A
| centralised blockchain is no less scalable than many
| other cryptographic solutions, but a lot more bother.
| Distributed blockchains are not scalable at all, are
| they?
| Sargos wrote:
| On Safe: Smart contracts ensure only the right people
| have read and write access to the data with no way to
| cheat. The records are also safe in case of hardware
| failures so there's no way the data can be lost in an
| accident.
|
| Scalable: There are a few aspects of scalability. The one
| you are referring to and what most people think of is
| number of transactions which is indeed limited right now
| but for most data is good enough, especially with L2s
| like Optimism and zero knowledge rollups. The other
| aspect is social scalability. If you want a system of
| records to be available to more people then the
| organization running it is the ceiling for how widespread
| adoption will be. A birth records system for Peru will
| never be used by Brazil, the US, or anyone else. For a
| system to scale larger than a single country then it
| needs to be credibly neutral where no person or
| organization controls it and everyone can trust that the
| system is fair. That's the kind of scalability that smart
| contracts offer. Worldwide systems that scale to anyone
| who needs to use them.
| rglullis wrote:
| As another pointed out: supply chain does make sense.
|
| There are plenty of cases where it's better to not have to
| trust on any particular entity. Examples:
|
| - Marketing and advertisement campaigns. How much ad fraud
| exist and how much money is spent by advertisers without
| knowing if they are actually reaching their customers. Do
| you trust Google to actually mitigate these problems?
|
| - Health care: remember Google Health and Microsoft Health
| Vault? Nowadays Apple/Google/Samsung wants to collect that
| data. Wouldn't you rather have it in a way that only
| doctors had access to it?
| detaro wrote:
| > _Wouldn 't you rather have it in a way that only
| doctors had access to it?_
|
| How is a blockchain the answer here? The "distribute all
| data" and "keep history forever" attributes seem actively
| bad for healthcare use cases.
| rglullis wrote:
| That is a good question. The answer is that you don't put
| the data in the blockchain, you just keep the log of who
| is interacting with the patient and who needs access to
| the records. ;)
| hertzrat wrote:
| A public immutable and distributed log saying somebody
| sees various psychology specialists, or disease
| specialists over the course of a few years... this
| metadata is almost as personal as the raw data in many
| cases.
| josefx wrote:
| I am almost surprised that companies don't get into more
| trouble over location tracking. Your smartphone knows
| exactly when and how often you see a doctor.
| hertzrat wrote:
| All the doctors websites around here, including for
| specialists, use google fonts and google maps etc. I
| assume there is some metadata involved there too
| rglullis wrote:
| I guess HN's pedantism will make me write a whole paper
| about what was supposed to be a simple example...
|
| Anyway, both the example of advertisement and health care
| data need to also provide privacy. In both cases the data
| should be considered sensitive and not public. In both
| cases, the data can be protected through blind
| signatures.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_signature
| detaro wrote:
| Even which doctor someone visited is confidential data
| one ideally would not preserve when not needed anymore
| (and "ideally" might very well be law). Health data is
| messy, and I have trouble imagining a solution that puts
| it on a blockchain but allows only private access to
| everything and has a chance of fixing instances of leaked
| credentials while still getting value from the fact that
| there is a blockchain. (If there is prior work on this
| that actually goes into detail I'd be happy about
| pointers - sadly a lot of this stuff seems to end at the
| stage of whitepapers when it comes to public information)
| willcipriano wrote:
| >Even which doctor someone visited is confidential data
| one ideally would not preserve when not needed anymore.
|
| Indeed, for example "John Smith went to see a HIV
| specialist on Monday" is protected information and would
| be a HIPAA violation if leaked. Its much simpler to throw
| it in a relational database and only let the HIV
| specialist and staff see the appointment.
| rglullis wrote:
| https://brave.com/themis/ should be a good pointer about
| how to get an advertisement network that can avoid fraud
| and report views accurately _while_ preserving privacy.
| The same principles could be applied to a permissioned
| blockchain that could be used by physicians and
| healthcare providers.
| Jasper_ wrote:
| I don't understand the supply chain use case. You can't
| trust the third party to enter "shipping container #123
| has 10,000 bananas" into a centralized database, but you
| can trust them to enter "shipping container #123 has
| 10,000 bananas" into a blockchain? They can still lie
| about what they put into the blockchain, it isn't magic.
| rglullis wrote:
| Of course they can lie, but with blockchain it is much
| easier to detect the lie. If the banana producer has a
| receipt from the shipping company that says "10,000
| bananas in the container for Jasper" and the shipping
| company only has 8,000 to put at your door, you can be
| sure it who was malicious.
|
| Without a blockchain, if the shipping company and banana
| producers were colluding to skim you of 2,000 bananas,
| it's much easier for them to do.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| If the shipping company and producer are colluding,
| blockchain does nothing to stop that.
| rglullis wrote:
| No, but if the producer has a record saying they put 10
| bananas and the shipping company only delivers 8, it will
| be undoubtedly on the shipping company to bear the costs
| of the difference.
| Jasper_ wrote:
| OK. But what if the producer said they put 10 bananas,
| but they lied and actually put 8? When it finally gets to
| the recipient, nobody knows whether the shipping company
| stole them or whether the producer lied. The blockchain
| did not help.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| So why wouldn't a central database work, with the
| producer entering how much they sent to the shipping
| company, and the shipping company entering how much they
| sent?
|
| What in the world does the use of blockchain enable in
| this case?
| madmax96 wrote:
| It doesn't eliminate that. But it gathers evidence. Where
| did they acquire the 10,000 bananas? Multiple parties
| must collude -- and then that collusion is on record.
|
| I'm interested in if that data is useful to anyone?
|
| Also, why not trust a central entity with that data?
| HideousKojima wrote:
| >Also, why not trust a central entity with that data?
|
| I.E. blockchain does nothing to solve this potential
| issue
| bluesign wrote:
| Imagine like you trust edges but not middleman.
| rukshn wrote:
| I recently wrote about a disaster that happened to an online
| ticketing service which decided to use a blockchain as a
| database
|
| There are lessons to be learnt who try to put everyth to a
| blockchain https://ruky.me/2020/12/23/somethings-are-never-
| meant-to-be-...
| agumonkey wrote:
| my knowledge is near none over the technicalities.. but I had
| this view that blockchains would be good for planet wide
| "unattended" data sources.
| caogecym wrote:
| something like storing a blog text for thousand years,
| especially after the author passed away where the blog
| could not be maintained by the author.
| agumonkey wrote:
| no this is not helpful for the flow of the system, more
| like supply tracking, logistics, farming..
| jayd16 wrote:
| Except it has no power over the physical world. Just as
| one can lie on a ledger and say slave labor did not make
| these resources, so too can some one lie onto a block
| chain about where resources came from.
|
| The chains can only really enforce protection on their
| own currencies, no?
| agumonkey wrote:
| It was not about the initial data but the overall
| coverage and self management. How many businesses still
| have their own ad-hoc half manual uninteroperable process
| and apps ?
| war1025 wrote:
| In my experience, when people say "blockchain" what they
| actually want is something closer to a Merkle tree like what
| Git uses for its commit hashes.
|
| It's great to be able to say "here is the list of changes,
| and I can re-run them and come up with the same hash, so
| nothing was tampered with"
|
| The "here is a random key that took a lot of work to find and
| when you add it to the hash chain we get X number of zeroes"
| part is really not that useful in most cases.
| ori_b wrote:
| > Blockchain is a very very very inefficient database that
| removes the need for a central trust authority.
|
| When run at a large enough scale that 51% attacks are
| infeasible.
| acdha wrote:
| > Blockchain has earned a bad name because of sales people
| trying to sell it for something it can't do.
|
| Sales people in this case meaning the entire community.
| Bitcoin's design meant that anyone who buys in later will be
| making money for early adopters, and that gave everyone a
| strong conflict of interest clouding their technical
| judgement. Subsequent blockchains might not have copied the
| exact deflationary model but the get-rich-quick-without-
| contributing-anything mentality has become universal.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| _> Blockchain has earned a bad name because of sales people
| trying to sell it for something it can 't do._
|
| _> Sales people in this case meaning the entire
| community._
|
| Not the Bitcoin community, but certainly most of the
| others. The Bitcoin community has been pretty clear about
| Bitcoin's use case since the beginning - inflation-proof
| digital money - and as long as it remains constrained to
| that scope then that's actually something it _can_ do.
|
| Bitcoin's programmability was deliberately limited to
| prevent overloading the network and compromising or
| diluting its core use case. That also prevented the
| community from advertising it as a general purpose
| computing platform and panacea for all the world's ills.
| That's something all the other blockchain communities have
| been doing, not Bitcoin's.
| acdha wrote:
| Yes the Bitcoin community, more so than most others
| because it's built on a deflationary model which heavily
| favors early adopters. One of the major reasons it's
| failed on its goals to be a currency is that the
| deflationary model encourages passive speculation holding
| it rather than using it, but that only works as long as
| new money is being pumped into the system. Even cursorily
| following the topic will show many examples of advocates
| making unrealistic promises which make little sense from
| the perspective of building a healthy community but are
| entirely understandable when you realize that they are
| hoping to see a personal windfall from everyone they
| convince to use it.
| jpfr wrote:
| Its even worse. In many cases blockchains still require a
| central authority that controls the write access to the
| system.
|
| A blockchain / distributed ledger can be easily flooded with
| spam. The only way around that is to make access expensive.
| That works for the "actual" blockchain because the effort to
| put something in the chain _is the money_.
|
| In applications where you don't have want expensive writes, a
| central gatekeeper (or at least a cabal of power-nodes) is
| needed to restrict access to prevent spamming.
| jayd16 wrote:
| The race to the bottom design of most blockchain tech also
| facilitates defacto central authorities.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| More importantly, you don't need it if your domain
| effectively creates a centralized authority. All of the
| examples of tracking John Deere parts on the chain were
| stupid, because functionally there had to be a central party
| controlling the list of what serial numbers were valid and
| which weren't; John Deere themselves.
| vidarh wrote:
| I get to evaluate a lot of blockchain related pitchdecks, and
| the first thing I look for is always whether they want to
| insert themselves as a central clearing house in some form, and
| almost all the startups I see that has put blockchain somewhere
| does that.
|
| If they do, that's an instant huge red flag indicating it's
| probably there because they thought blockchain would get
| investors excited, not because they have a vision that need it.
|
| A very, very few are using blockchain as a way to enable
| something larger, by e.g. trying to create an ecosystem where
| they themselves are just another untrusted player, where
| blockchain can make sense. And of those that do that, an even
| smaller number has done that in a way that seems like it's
| creating a bigger opportunity for them instead of shooting
| themselves in the foot.
| UShouldBWorking wrote:
| Inflationary fiat currencies are a problem in need of a
| solution
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| _> the use case for blockchain can usually be solved with
| classical, cheaper and simpler solutions by having a central
| trusted authority for storage (like a third-party service
| provider), and appending using digital signatures._
|
| Yes, Amazon QLDB is a good example of that, and is the right
| solution for most use cases where a central trusted authority
| is acceptable.
|
| https://aws.amazon.com/qldb/
| mkl95 wrote:
| I wrote a couple of hobby projects with Solidity (Ethereum) years
| ago. At the time, I found the language to be ugly and amateurish
| at best. I'd expect any corporate project that uses such tools to
| eventually reach technical bankruptcy.
| intotheabyss wrote:
| So you used a language years ago when it was in its infancy.
| Have you used it recently?
| worik wrote:
| A lot of the comments here are about trust. About how there is a
| technical solution to mistrust.
|
| I am a bit confused: Trust really matters. It is one of the most
| important distinguishing features between societies. Societies
| with higher levels of trust tend to do better than others. SO
| they taught me when I studied development economics.
|
| Trust is between people, it is a complex fabric. How can some
| technological solution replace that?
|
| Put on your black hat (temporarily) and analyse every use case of
| technology to replace trust and think How could I subvert this?
| Will not take you long.
|
| We all need to be kind to one another, be trustworthy ourselves,
| and verify where possible, and be confident in each other.
|
| There is no technological replacement for that
| baby wrote:
| The answer is transparency: in a cryptographic decentralized
| system you still have human interactions, but they are in the
| open (in most systems) and can be verified. This is better than
| relying on gossiping alone.
| Jasper_ wrote:
| No, they're not? You can still have backroom deals with a
| blockchain, you just don't put the backroom deals on the
| blockchain.
| baby wrote:
| It depends what you're doing, and what you're allowing in
| your system. You're talking about an omnibus account[1] or
| a trade that hasn't been settled (but will be settled at
| some point).
|
| Depending on your system, there are ways to be less
| transparent. You also lose the transparency that you could
| benefit from the system yourself, and there's some
| limitation to it (the amount of the omnibus account is
| still visible, and money still moves between omnibus
| accounts).
|
| On the other hand, wherever you are on the spectrum, it is
| still a more transparent system compared to a blackbox
| centralized system, or a multitude of blackbox systems
| trying to settle between one another all the time.
|
| [1]: https://www.google.com/search?q=omnibus+account&oq=omn
| ibus+a...
| Jasper_ wrote:
| You do know that events can happen outside of the system,
| right? Adding more steps to the system won't help.
| rorykoehler wrote:
| The $GME situation is a perfect example of where trust broke
| down which a blockchain solution could solve.
| scott_s wrote:
| How?
| nickthemagicman wrote:
| Haven't they just invested heavily in Stella Lumens?
|
| Why have in house blockchain when you got a whole team working on
| it?
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| The average Bitcoin transaction fee right now is $15, up almost
| 3000% from a year ago. I can't really imagine any database that
| cost you $15 a transaction and took 10 minutes to commit/confirm.
|
| Bitcoin is, was, and will probably forever be about low
| transaction wealth storage.
| allie1 wrote:
| More a - still somewhat anonymous crime method of payment,
| cheap/easy way to move money across borders, an easy way to
| fund things that should not be funded.
|
| Ref: https://www.coindesk.com/north-korea-stole-2-billion-in-
| cryp...
|
| Ref: https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-is-aiding-the-ransomware-
| in...
|
| Would love to see what good it has done so far.
| allie1 wrote:
| So downvotes and no comments? Nice
| Tenoke wrote:
| You wouldn't need the massive amount of compute going into
| bitcoin for this hypothetical database. Something a few orders
| of magnitude cheaper on a separate blockchain or on top of a
| blockchain can be viable for that use case even if bitcoin
| specifically isn't.
| anjc wrote:
| Every top level comment seems to be making a joke that blockchain
| has no use, or that IBM have no real use for it.
|
| Look at how quickly funds in defi projects (i.e. non-speculative,
| useful projects) are growing, and please explain how you will
| create trustless, accessible financial products (e.g. lending and
| exchange) using databases. Then please tell me why it's
| inappropriate that IBM, who consult for competitors to these
| decentralised finance products, shouldn't have a big interest in
| blockchain.
| anon98356 wrote:
| Serious question. What is the business case for trustless
| financial products? If there's money involved 90% of people are
| going to need to trust something in the process, whether that's
| the counter party or the middleman.
| anjc wrote:
| Do you always need to trust something in the process, for
| every product? You have a secure trustless mechanism for
| consensus, and can assess counterparty risk for a given
| product by auditing the smart contract (e.g. for Compound,
| borrowers have to deposit collateral).
|
| A simple business case might be interest earned by lending.
| Could you use traditional banking for this? Can any lay
| person lend? Is traditional banking accessible to anybody in
| the entire world with just an Ethereum wallet? This is just
| the beginning of defi and deposits have gone from ~0 to $30B
| in a year. Not much, in the grand scheme, but there's clearly
| demand for the products.
|
| No doubt this market will be regulated in due course, but I
| think this bell can't be un-rung.
| earthtolazlo wrote:
| The business case is that people will buy their tokens/invest
| on their platform which will increase in value which will
| cause more people to buy in etc. If you look closely enough
| just about every successful blockchain project is a ponzi
| scheme on some level.
| anjc wrote:
| Defi works regardless of the price of the underlying asset
| earthtolazlo wrote:
| As far as I can tell, any defi project that isn't an
| outright scam is just providing credit to people to
| speculate on cryptocurrencies. I'd be curious to see any
| counter examples. Otherwise it's just turtles all the way
| down.
| MR4D wrote:
| I've said this before and I'll say it again: blockchain's killer
| app is creating trust where there otherwise wouldn't be. This is
| similar to how RSA enabled trusted security/communication on an
| untrusted network.
|
| Applying blockchain to situations where trust already exists is a
| waste (maybe a great learning experience, but provides no other
| value).
| mark4 wrote:
| From IBM's whitepaper on blockchains in 2017:
| https://www.ibm.com/downloads/cas/REGBVG7J "7 in 10 consumer
| industry executives expect to have a blockchain production
| network by 2020"
| ChicagoBoy11 wrote:
| The insane disconnect between the actual engineering (which often
| exists, can actually be useful, and DOES have real-world
| applications) and their marketing department is so absolutely
| cringe-worthy. I can't imagine that there was a single
| technically minded person who saw some of those blockchain TV ads
| and didn't want to look away.
| diegocg wrote:
| Every once in a while people rediscovers asymmetric cryptography,
| and try to apply it to EVERYTHING while ignoring the difficulties
| of PKI. Meanwhile in the real world we still don't have E2E
| encrypted email by default fire everybody.
| the-dude wrote:
| Or spellchecking for that matter.
| haalia wrote:
| I read that as written: fire everybody and start the whole
| show over from scratch.
| motohagiography wrote:
| IBM can hire and outsource most technical blockchain development
| anyway, so the I'd argue the company only needs a product
| manager, a couple of sales engineers, and an engineering manager
| to run the outsourced teams.
| dandanua wrote:
| IBM needs at least one man in this team. He will explain to the
| others why they don't need blockchain.
| spoonjim wrote:
| The real question is why their blockchain team wasn't already the
| same size as their perpetual motion machine team.
| bob33212 wrote:
| I have plenty of criticism of the blockchain hype, but IBM does
| this for all buzzwords regardless of how useful the underlying
| technology is. It is all marketing to get executives at large
| companies to cut large checks. Once those checks are cashed they
| drop everyone and move on to the next buzzword.
|
| The current buzzword is hybrid cloud. Which is awesome for IBM
| because most large companies already have some on-prem and cloud
| resources. So IBM inserts a bunch of people into existing
| processes and resources and claims credit for creating a hybrid
| cloud for their customers.
| zzzeek wrote:
| Red Hat employee here. Contrary to your "inserts a bunch of
| people" characterization, IBM wanted to get into hybrid cloud
| so they acquired Red Hat in one of the largest tech
| acquisitions in history, and we create hybrid clouds for our
| customers. As we are part of IBM now, IBM is in fact providing
| hybrid cloud to its customers from start to finish in a
| substantive way. So there's really no comparison to be made to
| technologies for which IBM has not made substantive investment.
| anewaccount2021 wrote:
| Give it five years
| jaywalk wrote:
| I don't think the OP was claiming that IBM doesn't create
| hybrid clouds, because they clearly do. But "hybrid cloud" is
| definitely a buzzword right now.
| adolph wrote:
| Some buzzwords have stronger underlying value than others.
| Hybrid Cloud is very critical for orgs that want to migrate
| or partly use cloud resources, say for moving capital
| expense to operating expense or for burst uses, but don't
| want two different tool chains. IBM/RH's offer is more
| flexible then Azure Stack or pieces of Google like Anthos,
| but the flexibility comes at a higher cost.
|
| In any case, is buzzword but not the same variant of buzz
| as blockchain.
| zzzeek wrote:
| Sure it's a "buzzword" but OP was claiming "Once those
| checks are cashed they drop everyone and move on to the
| next buzzword", as though IBM does not have substantive
| capabilities and investment in the hybrid cloud area. This
| is the opposite of reality. The phrase "inserts a bunch of
| people into existing processes and resources and claims
| credit " suggests IBM is not actually providing the service
| as well, also not the reality.
| monsieurbanana wrote:
| I somehow missed/forgot IBM bought Red Hat. Reading OP's
| comment, I certainly didn't had the impression we were
| talking about a _34 billion dollars acquisition_.
| neurotixz wrote:
| I'm working on many projects with RedHat, and have heavily
| dealt with IBM in the past.
|
| I can definitely confirm that the IBM statement is true.
| Execs signed on many projects, and we were always stuck with
| a blue pile of unusable garbage at the end. For twice the
| price orginally agreed to...
|
| Working with RedHat as of today is still, well, working with
| RedHat. Highly competent people building things that will run
| well for a long time, and (so far) still at a reasonable
| cost. I do start to see some changes on pricing (high
| increases are on the horizon...), and more red tape around
| things that don't fit in the standard boxes. So i'm trying to
| decouple some areas from being fully dependant to more
| standardized/vendor agnostic models to keep options opened
| (mainly in container space).
| bob33212 wrote:
| My Condolences. RedHat was an awesome company and helped make
| Linux and open source a success. I hope the bluewashing goes
| slow and you are able to have a good experience there for
| quite a while.
| jacques_chester wrote:
| As an outsider interacting with folks from IBM and Red Hat,
| if I didn't know about the acquisition, I wouldn't have
| noticed any major change in their behaviours. So far IBM-
| in-the-large have been admirably hands off.
| mindcrime wrote:
| _So far IBM-in-the-large have been admirably hands off._
|
| Key words "so far". I'm sure people from Truven and all
| the other acquired companies that make (made?) up Watson
| Health would have said the same thing initially as well.
| Right up until they all got laid off...
| jacques_chester wrote:
| Sure, but "yesterday's weather" is about a good a
| prediction as can be made.
| rsq32 wrote:
| One could argue it's already finished. I was hearing almost
| identical versions of "no, really, IBM is serious about
| cloud and that's obvious from buying us" about a month
| after SoftLayer closed their deal. I'm starting to wonder
| if that messaging is in the acquisition welcome packet
| because the similarities to what my SoftLayer friends
| argued is remarkable (implying the next step, if history is
| predictive, is for half of Red Hat to leave and IBM to
| rename cloud offerings again).
|
| I overheard that Rackspace exited the hybrid market
| entirely rather than accept IBM terms, which says a lot if
| true, but it's watercooler chat and not worth much. It's
| plausible because in an "architecture by strategic
| acquisition" endeavor one courts the cheap options first.
| Sylamore wrote:
| It always takes about 2 years for the corporate hegemony
| to take over a major acquisition, during which time they
| have been keeping the new staff under the impression that
| they bought them to change the acquirers culture not the
| other way around... then the real re-orgs start.
| rubbsdecvik wrote:
| Different Red Hat employee here, that said, this opinion is
| my own and I have no real authority to say anything beyond
| my experience. I, in my job, have a lot of contact with IBM
| folks now for obvious reasons, but I think it's a slow Red
| washing rather than the other way around. The independence
| of Red Hat is fiercely defended and is largely respected,
| even by IBM. I think we all want this to work as it is,
| rather than make huge changes, especially culturally.
| cfcosta wrote:
| Red Hat employee here as well. Didn't feel any
| difference, it's still a great place to work, but I don't
| usually interact with IBM folks.
| cptnapalm wrote:
| So it's becoming Big Red instead of Blue Hat? That's
| encouraging.
| tyingq wrote:
| I'm sure RedHat can stave it off longer, but a fair
| amount of the Softlayer folks were optimistic at first
| too.
| stuff4ben wrote:
| IBM employee here, can confirm (the Red-washing) after
| having developed a product that HAS to be running on
| OpenShift and HAS to go through RedHat's horrible
| scanning and catalog system. Of course this is in
| addition to IBM's existing horrible scanning and catalog
| registries. It's a red layer on top of existing blue
| layers of tape. It's multi-colored bureaucratic tape all
| the way down.
| krona wrote:
| In terms of Hybrid cloud (launched in 2011 if memory serves)
| it's more of a 'connect the tech to the buzzword' process, one
| in which IBM assignes a buzzword to tech its had for decades.
| Same process with 'cyber' and 'cognitive computing'.
|
| IBM is too slow to actually develop anything ahead of the
| market without acquisitions.
| duxup wrote:
| Buddy of mine worked at a company who was tied to IBM closely.
| IBM was rolling out its first 'cloud' options and he was so
| excited to get some on demand type resources.
|
| IBM guys walked him through the process. Then he got an email
| that it would be a few weeks while IBM installed some more
| servers in their data center.... he looked closer and realized
| all his actions on the website was just generating emails to
| someone else who went and did the thing and emailed them back
| if they were done or not or had to wait.
|
| Later the process resembled an actual cloud solution, albeit a
| year or two behind everyone else in terms of features and
| workflow.
| jacques_chester wrote:
| Call it "lean startup MVP" and you should be able to raise a
| few million bucks.
| coredog64 wrote:
| IaaS: Infrastructure as a ServiceNow ticket
| war1025 wrote:
| We interact with IBM from time to time at my work and in
| general they don't seem like the most competent people in the
| world. But also it varies quite a bit depending on which sub-
| group within IBM you are interacting with.
|
| The nice thing about IBM is that they have an army of lawyers
| and industry connections that a small company like mine can
| piggy-back off of now and again.
| Sylamore wrote:
| We had a meeting when I was with IBM where MCMP (https://www.
| ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/en/SSJP6K_191218...) was
| introduced as the target front-door for all cloud project
| requests.
|
| The initial integration is literally just firing off
| ServiceNow tickets or emails to the appropriate work teams
| until further automation is created.
|
| The object being to train the end-users to go to the portal
| instead of contacting people directly or to go directly to
| the cloud vendor MCMP may be front ending.
| geodel wrote:
| There goes my hope for verifying provenance of heirloom tomatoes
| for dinner salad. [1]
|
| 1. https://innotechtoday.com/blockchain-agriculture/
| jayonsoftware1 wrote:
| I was one of the first customers when http://softlayer.com/
| started, loved the company, low prices and best technology. IBM
| buys it and drag it down. Now I am with Digital Ocean.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Is there a wide spread use yet as much as transferring currency?
| intotheabyss wrote:
| Decentralized finance
| [deleted]
| haltingproblem wrote:
| IBM's hyped initiatives are almost a sell signal. Blockchain,
| Watson,.... whatever IBM gets into and sinks huge resources into
| invariably fails. How can a company with so many smart people and
| technical managers lead to so much failure. Failure not of the
| "portfolio of small bets most of which go nowhere" but rather a
| few major hyped initiatives that almost all fail.
| hehehaha wrote:
| Do quantum next.
|
| I actually think quantum could save IBM if they some how manage
| to pull it off.
| haltingproblem wrote:
| I totally forgot about quantum. Highly suspicious that
| Quantum will go anywhere - reminds me of 5th generation
| computing around the mid-90s which then sank without a trace
| taking billions of dollars with it.
|
| Scott's rant below on it is epic. Even if quantum does go
| somewhere, IBM is the last company of earth I would bet on to
| monetize it ;)
|
| https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2019/01/15/quantum-
| comput...
| jake_morrison wrote:
| I keep a small collection of applications where I think
| blockchain applications actually make sense. So far, most involve
| things where transparency in a distributed network is very
| important:
|
| 1. Running a lottery over the Internet. There are a lot of people
| who would be happy to buy a share in a typical national lottery
| as long as they could be sure they were not getting cheated. I
| don't care if e.g. 10% of the money goes to fund schools, as long
| as it's fair and transparent.
|
| 2. Internet gambling. If I bet on something, I want the odds to
| accurately reflect the bets of all the players, and I want to be
| able to get my money out if I win.
|
| 3. A currency for use in online advertising. A lot of the money
| that advertisers pay mysteriously disappears into the hands of
| middlemen before it gets to the sites that host the ads. There is
| also a lot of fraud. Having a transparent and accountable system
| would make it more effective for people who are not parasites.
|
| Anything else?
| pjmorris wrote:
| Compliance and regulatory audits (e.g. ISO certification, SOC
| 2, the list goes on) seem like a candidate to me. There is
| typically a standard set by one organization, that has to be
| complied with by (multiple departments within) another
| organization, and verified by an auditor external to the first
| two organization (as well as to auditors within each of the
| organizations.) A database managed by any of the three players
| wouldn't be trusted by the others, so it seems like a candidate
| for multi-party distributed trust.
| qaq wrote:
| and you specifically need proof of work to solve this?
| scsilver wrote:
| Does it make audits, faster, cheaper, more comprehensive,
| and more accessible by stakeholders? If so, thats the
| killer app.
| eli wrote:
| no?
| qaq wrote:
| It's orthogonal to all of the above
| Jasper_ wrote:
| How would it?
| warkdarrior wrote:
| A central database with records signed by each of the
| organizations would solve the problem. Those records are
| independent of each other (my compliance status is
| independent of your compliance status) so do you no have the
| need for a consensus algorithm across all of the parties.
| snarf21 wrote:
| Sorry, but none of these need or can use a blockchain.
|
| 1) Powerball seems fine and well. How do you make sure that the
| records on this blockchain were put there legitimately? (if you
| use crypto, you are saying crypto is the only use case) How do
| you generate a winner fairly?
|
| 2) Again, how do you make sure _all_ the bets are on this
| chain? How do you know that all the bets are on the chain
| legitimately? How do you get the money in and out of this
| chain? (if you use crypto, you are saying crypto is the only
| use case) How do you fairly reflect the outcome so people get
| paid appropriately?
|
| 3) You are saying that you just want an ad network that is
| focused on making the minimum amount of money. The bigger
| problem with online ads is that most are never even viewed by
| real people. People don't need a blockchain to chase the $$.
| Either the advertisers sees results or not and then they stop
| paying. If a hoster doesn't make any $$, they try a different
| service to make more. They absolutely don't want to track money
| from the advertiser through X stops for each ad.
| lm28469 wrote:
| > where I think blockchain applications actually make sense.
|
| Blockchain (may) make sense for these applications but did you
| stop to think if the applications themselves made sense ?
|
| Lotteries, internet gambling and internet advertising are three
| cancers in my book, I have no interest in solving their
| problems.
| Jasper_ wrote:
| Internet gambling has the problem that you have to trust the
| "oracle" deciding the dice rolls. You give all your money to an
| anonymous address that promises you'll get your money back. You
| still need trust.
| kerng wrote:
| In code we trust, and code is law.
|
| The good thing smart contracts are inspectable, so there is
| at least the open source aspect to help mitigate concerns.
| this_user wrote:
| > In code we trust, and code is law.
|
| Which means any and all bugs or exploits are also law. And
| we know for certain that there will be bugs and exploits,
| which is why smart contracts are such an exceedingly daft
| idea.
| charcircuit wrote:
| This is why contracts implement functionality so they can
| be paused or even upgraded. There are other things you
| can do to mitigate risk like adding tests, using static
| analyzers, having the code be audited, following best
| practices, etc.
| Jasper_ wrote:
| How do you perform validatable RNG in a smart contract,
| without an untrustable oracle service? The problem with
| smart contracts is that they can't deal with outside
| interfaces.
|
| The only gambling smart contract I'm aware of is the
| Mayweather/McGregor one, which broke because the API they
| used to report the win changed from reporting 'w' for win
| and 'l' for loss to 'W' for win and 'L' for loss, and
| nobody could update it.
|
| Thankfully the author was trustable, after all, and put a
| refund method in it, otherwise it that money would have
| been gone forever. [0]
|
| So, the use cases have been tried and they've all failed.
|
| [0] https://www.removeddit.com/r/ethtrader/comments/6w5wcn/
| impor...
| charcircuit wrote:
| By having the users themselves provide the random input.
| For example there could be a two player game where each
| person provides a number and if the sum of those numbers
| is even player 1 wins and if it's odd player 2 wins. To
| prevent the second person who submits a number from
| cheating, both players instead commit to their number by
| first sending a hash of it. Once both people have
| submitted their hash, then they both reveal the number
| they committed to and those get added together. If you
| fail to reveal your number within a reasonable amount of
| time, then you lose.
| pluc wrote:
| I've seen proposals for Digital Governments platforms using
| blockchain-based democracy that sounded promising.. but because
| blockchain space is saturated with fintech people, these
| projects most of the time get run into the ground when
| colliding with crypto/ico/tokenization philosophies.
| Tenoke wrote:
| Decentralized exchanges (e.g. uniswap) - users provide all the
| liquidity, get all the profit, has guarantees etc. Currently
| eth has high fees (this wasnt the case until recently and wont
| be in the future with layer 2) so it might look less great but
| it already has huge traction especially for smaller coins who
| you'd otherwise have to trade through tiny exchanges that are
| harder to trust.
|
| Similar for non-currency exchanges (like synthetix) which
| provide a comparable ways to trade near-arbitrary assets,
| though admittedly that is less proven to be a clear winner so
| far.
| qaq wrote:
| And where does proof of work comes into play here?
| hertzrat wrote:
| Do people with gambling addictions really deserve a public
| record of all their behaviour to exist for people (including
| coworkers, family, and future employers) to read for all time,
| including your descendants?
| tialaramex wrote:
| > Internet gambling. If I bet on something, I want the odds to
| accurately reflect the bets of all the players, and I want to
| be able to get my money out if I win.
|
| I can't see why a blockchain would help here.
|
| I don't like risk, but I do have recent experience with
| Internet "gambling" because the previous President of the
| United States of America persuaded his followers to bet that
| he'd actually won an election he lost, so I was able to make
| money answering trivia questions like "Did Donald Trump win the
| US presidential election in November?" (No).
|
| Although there were some conventional bookies offering this
| bet, most of the money (as I understand it) went on exchanges,
| there were hundreds of millions of dollars in the exchange I
| used. On an exchange they're matching bids against offers, as
| you would on a stock market, you can either propose odds
| yourself or you can take the best existing odds somebody else
| has proposed on the other side of the bet. As with the stock
| market, when things are liquid enough it's possible to
| establish a small range of odds in which matches will occur
| right now, and over time that range changes.
|
| It seemed to me that this offers everything you'd want, the
| assurance you'll get your money comes down to the institution
| offering the exchange, and its regulators, but it seems to me
| this would also be a problem for a hypothetical "blockchain"
| gambling system.
| honest_guy wrote:
| > but it seems to me this would also be a problem for a
| hypothetical "blockchain" gambling system.
|
| It depends what form of gambling you're referring to.
|
| A blockchain based roulette smart contract could provide
| absolute transparency to anyone placing a bet. The exact
| process which determines the outcome is known, and it cannot
| be changed. The assurance that you get your money is the
| smart contract.
|
| A smart contract based prediction market, such as Augur, can
| offer similar transparency. You have the assurance that,
| should the market be resolved in your favour, you will get
| your money. The main concern is the governance structure
| which determines the outcomes.
| johnward wrote:
| I'm not sure that IBM leadership really understands what
| direction they want to go. They seem to pivot all-in on a tech
| sector and then abandon it a few years later. Rinse and repeat.
| It was AI/Watson, then a cloud platform, now its "hybrid cloud"
| because they can't compete with the established cloud providers.
| What will be the all-in bet next week? I also have to mention
| their strategy of trying to cut their way to prosperity.
| skywhopper wrote:
| Turns out, blockchain is not actually a solution to all that many
| problems. All the things that make it work for Bitcoin are big
| downsides in most other contexts.
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| The core concept is being trustless. Any situation where only
| trusted parties are going to be present... litterally defeats
| the purpose. There is a lot of mechanism that is only justified
| in being trustless.
|
| I could image block chain could be useful if you had digital
| cash off-grid, like a food truck that visited a logging camp.
| Collect the transactions, and then validate them when you get
| back to town/within signal range.
| tomku wrote:
| Validate them when you get to town... and find that you just
| donated lunch to a bunch of clever loggers who knew you could
| not check the validity of their payments until hours after
| they ate the food you gave them.
|
| You seem to have a very strange definition of "trustless."
| MrMan wrote:
| I want more trust not less
| iso8859-1 wrote:
| But what do you want to trust in? Your fellow citizen? Luck
| in hashing?
|
| If you wanna trust your fellow citizen: You could go down
| on the street and deposit your cash with strangers walking
| by.
|
| If you wanna trust luck in hashing: You should be mining
| Bitcoin. If you are lucky, every single attempt at mining a
| block will be successful. You'd become rich pretty fast.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Sure where are the actual apps that are used widely?
| gruturo wrote:
| Or, any concept where the centralized trusted ledger is
| bulletproof, but you can't be sure that the data entered is
| any good. You may as well not bother with the whole thing.
| bena wrote:
| So what happens when a transaction doesn't validate?
| swagtricker wrote:
| Wow! That almost sounds as bad as when they ramped down their
| Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) team when they figured out the
| logging example was the best thing you could do with it:) Seems
| like blockchain is a technology that's been overhyped, just like
| AOP. If you're not familiar with AOP, welcome to the post-dot.com
| Internet & enjoy what's left of your youth.
| perardi wrote:
| I asked this downthread, but to rephrase: are there any semi-
| objective case studies on blockchains being useful for physical
| items, such as the food supply tracking that IBM is doing?
|
| (I mean, I see plenty of blockchain startups promoting this use
| case, but they inevitably end up with a pitch to get on a
| blockchain.)
|
| I do not understand how, in the case of food supply, that a
| blockchain is somehow better than a good ol' database. You can
| verify the ledger, but I don't see how that's the primary issue.
| It seems like the issue would be getting everyone up and down the
| supply chain _to get on board with tracking everything_ , and not
| the integrity of the ledger. If a meat packing plant is going to
| adulterate the pork, the problem is going to be getting any
| verification _at all_ , and not them hiring some hackers to mess
| with a database.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| The issue with tracking physical things on the blockchain is
| that humans can lie to computers about the state of the
| physical world. Solving that with cryptography is attacking the
| wrong failing link; it's actually a social issue and not a
| technical one.
| castlecrasher2 wrote:
| This right here. Whenever I see proponents of blockchain
| listing ways it could be used, every single one I read has
| second and third-order consequences they clearly haven't
| thought much about.
| yenwel wrote:
| well you could validate data integrity based on - feedback from
| consumers of the commodity - some kind of built in monitoring
| with growth model benchmarking the different suppliers and
| instead of proof work do a decentralized/federated machine
| learning competition as a hard to falsify computation which
| uses private data for training and verification
| bena wrote:
| Exactly, Blockchain is only useful when you can't trust the
| store of information.
|
| Blockchain does not prevent people from just lying. Or people
| being lazy.
| king_magic wrote:
| Yep. Blockchain is a joke for all of the ridiculous use cases
| outside of digital currency.
| koolk3ychain wrote:
| If there was ever an answer to the question of "is there
| commercial or enterprise value in blockchain technology" this is
| the indicator of all indicators. Hyperledger / Corda were always
| shit, but this really takes the cake.
|
| Even as someone who loves ethereum and has been active in the
| community since the early days - I still maintain that the
| technology, other than distributed DNS and the advent of IPFS
| (not in itself a blockchain technology) are the only productive
| _real_ products of current blockchain "tech".
|
| If you meet someone at a party (god forbid we have those anymore)
| and they espouse the "value" of blockchain, please immediately
| move on and ignore them.
| tyingq wrote:
| The trough of disillusionment. Finally.
| iramiller wrote:
| Having built a Hyperledger Fabric blockchain platform inside a
| fintech startup over the last three years I am completely
| unsurprised by this announcement.
|
| From the start the HLF platform appeared to be extremely
| optimized for demos and quick start tutorials but fell flat for
| any production use. The operational complexity of the Hyperledger
| Fabric spirals uncontrollably with the tight 'enterprise style'
| control layered on top (the extensive use of certificate
| authorities--an external chain of trust at conflict with the
| blockchain) resulted in extensive administration overhead.
|
| Early on we would joke occasionally that the platform seemed to
| be designed around an idea that customers should be overwhelmed
| and just choose to have IBM host the network instead. I
| absolutely do not regret our decision to move off of the platform
| in the slightest.
| coding123 wrote:
| I'm in the same boat. I was put on a hyperledger project last
| year. The configuration was like 4 maybe 5 certs or private
| keys. We were using the AWS blockchain stuff and it uses a
| version that's like a year or two behind. The code, samples,
| everything felt super enterprise level crazy. I would be super
| surprised if I hear a company puts Hyperledger into production
| beyond some silly PR stunt.
|
| TG I'm off that project...
| JCM9 wrote:
| Not a surprise. Blockchain is an interesting concept but a
| terrible solution for most problems that people pitch it for.
|
| IBM feeds off executives that hear buzzwords but don't understand
| the fundamentals to make sound decisions. They tried it with "AI"
| and Watson, "blockchain" and this stuff... What's next?
| warkdarrior wrote:
| I bet they're going to look into this "cloud" thing.
| x86_64Ubuntu wrote:
| Is there an example of a blockchain implementation that is tried
| and true outside of cryptocurrency? I remember seeing when large
| tech firms were jumping on the bandwagon and proposing things
| that blockchain could do. Everyone was like "so, that problem has
| already been solved for years with X, blockchain provides no
| advantages".
| mgoetzke wrote:
| In our system (has event-sourcing parallels) we can optionally
| use it by chaining subsequent event hashes to each other and
| letting blocks of such events be signed by an external signing
| server.
|
| This does not require a bitcoin de-centralized signing process
| though and is better done via a normal external authority.
|
| It is now harder to falsify server data, since you not only
| have to recreate all hashes from the moment of change in the
| event log, but also have them be authenticated by the external
| source. In addition to the underlying ZFS snapshots a lot needs
| to be compromised to change data without detection
| teepo wrote:
| from the article: "Big Blue's major blockchain networks are
| FoodTrust, a farm-to-supermarket tracking system backed by
| Walmart; and TradeLens, a shipping container logistics
| blockchain backed by Maersk. IBM has also added the Trust Your
| Supplier network and previously had a go at payments via World
| Wire."
| x86_64Ubuntu wrote:
| But since IBM is canning the blockchain group, it's safe to
| say that those implementations are far from tried-and-true.
| perardi wrote:
| Is there any analysis out there about how well these systems
| work, and why a blockchain works better than a traditional
| inventory management system?
|
| All I can find on these implementations are by blockchain
| startups who have a pretty obvious interest in making
| blockchain solution look good. But...how is this better than
| a good old database? They say "trust", and I guess that's
| true in the sense you can verify the changes to the ledger.
| But isn't the lack of trust _in the original producers_? How
| is it more trustworthy if they catalog this with a blockchain
| versus a database?
| teknopurge wrote:
| IMO, Storj (storj.io) is the most mature in terms of viability.
| The project uses blockchain for metering and economics of the
| ecosystem but uses a more traditional and practical
| architecture that make's sense for apps and companies to use.
|
| They seem to be taking a more performant and practical(read:
| usable) hybrid blockchain approach.
|
| I do like what Filecoin is doing albeit Filecoin is more
| academic/provocative and a few years away from viability, IMO.
| DenseComet wrote:
| The main thing I like about Filecoin is how Filecoin is tied
| to IPFS, but IPFS is not tied to Filecoin. It provides useful
| functions to applications building on IPFS and uses proven
| tech, but if I just want to use IPFS, I don't have to touch
| any crypto.
| arsome wrote:
| There's some really cool stuff going on in the distributed
| storage space thanks to this - blockchains have provided a way
| to pay for, prove you've stored data and provide collateral
| should you fail to store it, establishing the whole contract
| without the need for a centralized party, allowing anyone to
| sell excess storage. Sia is probably the most mature
| implementation at the moment, but there's a number of
| competitors in the space.
|
| But as you can see even this is pretty cryptocurrency adjacent.
| For anything that doesn't rely on distributed trust you're much
| better off making a database, perhaps with a hash chain glued
| to it if you need to prevent reversion.
| phil21 wrote:
| I _really_ want this concept to work, but I still cannot ever
| get someone involved in these projects to really give me a
| realistic (paying) customer base that scales.
|
| I'm ready and willing to stand up a rack full of spinning
| rust for such a concept to be a provider, I just have yet to
| make the model work or trust there is a customer base willing
| to store their data in such a manner.
| redis_mlc wrote:
| > I'm ready and willing to stand up a rack full of spinning
| rust for such a concept to be a provider,
|
| So ... you're really not that committed financially.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| Ironically, tying a cryptocurrency to a real-world use case
| like paying for storage is the fastest way to throw cold
| water on price speculation.
|
| Once people can price a coin in terms of real-world assets
| like storage, it becomes easy to see when the coin is
| overvalued.
|
| IMO, this is why Bitcoiners aren't actually interested in
| making Bitcoin easy to use for payments. They only want two
| use cases: Buying and holding. Selling or spending will only
| drive the price down.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _this is why Bitcoiners aren't actually interested in
| making Bitcoin easy to use for payments. They only want two
| use cases: Buying and holding._
|
| TL; DR The political history of deflationary currencies,
| which until modern times meant any metal-based currency
| that wasn't being mined at a rate similar to or faster than
| economic growth.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| The cryptosphere is trying to push a populist narrative
| for cryptocurrencies. Calling it the people's money or
| democratized banking.
|
| This seems doomed to backfire when people realize that
| the vast majority of crypto is held by lucky early
| adopters. A hypothetical Bitcoin dominated economy would
| be nearly the polar opposite of fair or democratized. I
| expect the populist angle to fail as people catch on to
| the incentives of early adopters, both private and
| institutional.
| MockObject wrote:
| I don't quite see why the existence of very rich people
| make a currency unfair, or non-democratized. I don't
| think the selling points for populists included "...and
| everyone will have roughly the same amount of money,
| too!"
|
| The best I can think of are the possible governance
| challenges if the major holders have interests that run
| counter to those of small spenders, say, when arguing
| over block size or other structural changes.
| [deleted]
| fny wrote:
| Ethereum?
| UShouldBWorking wrote:
| Ive used and built ethereum contacts and for me it's a failed
| project. Today it costs $11 to get a transaction through.
| That alone makes the project useless for most people.
|
| Even just reansering money is expensive.
|
| BTC and ethereum have both failed. Bitcoin Cash and Monero
| are doing well but basically ignored because they work so
| well they are boeing.
| ericcholis wrote:
| Agriculture Supply chain?
| ThePowerOfDirge wrote:
| Decentralized derivatives trading
| https://injectiveprotocol.com/
| baby wrote:
| Corda? Hyperledger? Fabric?
| sodafountan wrote:
| IPFS: https://ipfs.io/ Filecoin: https://filecoin.io/
|
| blockchains are all about decentralization which will make more
| and more sense in the age of de-platforming (facebook,
| robinhood, twitter, AWS with Parler.. you name it), it makes
| sense why nobody would want to work on this technology for IBM,
| completely defeats the purpose.
|
| There's so many other interesting applications for
| cryptocurrency too. In terms of gaming could you imagine in-
| game tokenized economies? What if Blizzard built a World of
| Warcraft token and had a real-time in game economy. What if
| Rockstar did it with Grand Theft Auto? All of a sudden these
| IP's have real world value tied to them in the form of a
| cryptocurrency - it really is interesting if you think it
| through.
| ssmiler wrote:
| A lot of ex-IBM famous crypto researchers (Craig Gentry, Shai
| Halevi ...) are with Algorand foundation now, which I found
| suprising considering their scientific career.
|
| IBM should be an important stakeholder in Algorand foundation...
| Taek wrote:
| IBM having a blockchain team makes about as much sense as
| Nintendo having a self driving car team.
| zzzeek wrote:
| > Nintendo having a self driving car team.
|
| im sorry that makes TOTAL sense, where can I buy one?
| mrcartmenez wrote:
| Mario Cart is self driving on the easiest settings. So
| there's that
| bena wrote:
| It does it in a different way though. The AI in Mario Kart
| _knows_ the track, including obstacles, it doesn 't have to
| really navigate based on input.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Super /VES
| GizmoSwan wrote:
| Block chain is just a frozen link list database. It has its
| uses and every big software company has it and can offer it.
|
| It can support all sort of permanent registry stuff and protect
| against tampering.
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