AWS and Blockchain

https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2022/11/19/AWS-Blockchain

625 708 4 years ago

saimiam3• 4 years ago

For whatever reason, SMS operators in India rely on blockchain to validate SMS templates and customer’s do-not-disturb settings.

For a sense of scale, SMS is a 12.5 billion dollar business in India.

petesergeant• 4 years ago

Do you have a link to more information about this?

EDIT: So doing some googling finds that Telecom Regulatory Authority of India implemented “Distributed Ledger Technology” for fighting spam, but roll-out seems to have lasted not long (a week? A month?) because it didn’t work (didn’t scale?) and every so often tech vendors suggest they’re going to re-do it? Honestly there’s a lot of promo articles and conflicting information that I’m struggling to understand what’s going on there, my take-away is that it’s not currently being used because it didn’t work?

timbray2• 4 years ago

crickets

ricochet112• 4 years ago

couldnt find this, but given the india connection at a guess probably something on polygon. there are other india anti-corruption uses on polygon too e.g. police complaints records https://twitter.com/firozabadpolice/status/15794707131234058...

saimiam3• 4 years ago

I work (well, serving out my notice period) for an SMS aggregator in India. All SMS operators in India use blockchain to manage SMS marketing campaigns

https://dltconnect.airtel.in - for context, Airtel is India's largest GSM provider. https://www.tanla.com - the best known DLT-as-a-service provider in India.

DLT (branded as being built on blockchain) is alive and well in India.

obblekk• 4 years ago

It's interesting to read how much research tbray did on crypto back then. Definitely doesn't seem like new entrants today were doing the same level of diligence, on average.

grogenaut• 4 years ago

Yes I didn't see a single .com name a stadium or bowl game or have most of the super bowl ads in 1999 at all, none at all. Oh wait yes I did, literally every superbowl ad was a dot com right before the .com bust. https://www.cnbc.com/2010/01/20/The-Stadium-Curse:-Naming-De... puts a nice writeup of all the comapnies that went under after naming stadiums, there's quite a few from the .com bust. Aah WorldCom how I miss thee. Pets.com as well.

Ancapistani• 4 years ago

Playing Devil’s Advocate here a bit: what’s the size of the tech industry today, compared to the heights just before the “.com bust”?

Maybe there is room for one more boom cycle.

Spooky234• 4 years ago

Good point. Most of the B2B sites that died in 1999 are valid ideas that were too early. Intel tried cloud computing. Online grocery is a thing now, etc.

fnordpiglet• 4 years ago

All true. Source: I was there.

anon4002325• 4 years ago

Sarcasm? Forgive those of us who can't tell.

x86x879• 4 years ago

I believe that putting the equal sign between a blockchain and a database is fundamentally wrong. I also think that a lot of "cryptos" were just get rich quick schemes. After the dust settles we will see if blockchain is really useful or not.

yumraj2• 4 years ago

In your opinion how long is it before the dust will settle?

IMHO, the dust has already settled and been washed away by the rain water..

x86x879• 4 years ago

I think there are 2 scenarios really: 1) btc and eth go to zero or 2) we have btc and eth gaining the full recognition and regulation

Blockchain as a technology is revolutionary and will be used in niche problems outside of crypto.

One thing that most people seem to miss is that money is only as good as our faith in it. No matter what instrument you use this has to apply.

acdha12• 4 years ago

Note that he wasn’t saying that it was identical to a classic database but rather that the applications being built were treating it like one. I’ve seen a number of hypotheticals batted around and it was clear that most of them could have been a database, perhaps with signatures on certain records, because they didn’t need any of the anonymous aspects.

That could be a sign that developers don’t know how to architect blockchain apps but that’s probably the same as saying most people don’t need blockchains. It seems unlikely that there’s sone widespread benefit still to be discovered rather than maybe some niche applications.

x86x879• 4 years ago

Imho blockchain == distributed consensus in a low trust environment. When you are talking about a database and managing it you are by default outside of the low trust zone (or there exists an authority that everyone trusts)

smt884• 4 years ago

I believe that putting the equal sign between a blockchain and a database is fundamentally wrong

In what way is a blockchain not a cryptographically-verified, distributed, append-only database? If you added a consensus protocol to git, you'd have a blockchain.

I'd say it's fundamentally right because the fundamentals are the same.

After the dust settles we will see if blockchain is really useful or not.

Blockchain has been around for more than 10 years. If it had any valid use cases, we'd see them in use already, regardless of what crypto bros are doing.

x86x879• 4 years ago

Focus on the distributed aspect of it. What does distributed mean to you? In fact if you look at blockchain itself it's not dostributed in the sense that you need all the blocks to verify current state.

The innovation is that 2 parties that don't know each other and don't trust each other can transact without a central authority and without trusting eachother.

Has blockchain been around for 10 years? Most of this time was spent in obscurity or making it super hard for the average joe to distinguish useful tech from scams.

Also think about neural nets. How long have neural nets been around? Did we figure interesting new ways to use them in the current AI/ML cycle?

tbrownaw3• 4 years ago

Blockchain has been around for more than 10 years. If it had any valid use cases, we'd see them in use already

I think modern darknet markets use smart contracts for escrow, so that you don't have to trust the escrow arbiter to not run off with your cryptocoins.

Nursie11• 4 years ago

We're 14 years in. I think the dust settled some years ago, personally.

But (and this is an honest question) how long should we give this? What is the appropriate amount of time before we can say "This was basically a bust"?

Because AFAICT the blockchain revolution never came. It's been talked about endlessly for over a decade, it's been hyped to hell and back, it's been oh-my-god-so-full-of-amazing-potential-just-think-of-the-uses for all this time and the only thing that ever seems to come out of it is a variety of schemes that reward early entrants and then crash into the dust, without delivering the utility that was so vaguely promised for so long.

x86x879• 4 years ago

If the dust settled why are we still talking about this?

If you want my personal opinion: blockchain had/has great potential but once bitcoin exploded the whole crypto world was hijacked by snake oil salesmen whose only goal was to get rich. People have been scammed (and continue to be scammed) by these techno babble and the dream of getting rich.

legutierr9• 4 years ago

He named a region in Asia and explained that the small farmers there mark their landholdings carefully, but then the annual floods sometimes wash the markers away. Then unscrupulous larger landowners use the absence of markers to cut away at the smallholdings of the poorest. “But if the boundary markers were on the blockchain,” he said, “they wouldn’t be able to do that, would they?”

The developed world is distinguished from the developing world often by the strength of its institutions, by the general accessibility of legal recourse, by the prevalence of trust within the society at large.

Many places in the world have none of those things. Weak institutions, corrupt legal systems, and low levels of trust undermine development and prevent people from building and maintaining wealth for themselves and their families.

For me, the promise of the blockchain is that it can provide a technological framework upon which to build new kinds of institutions—institutions that function as alternatives to the institutions that we all take for granted here in the first world.

Is a smart contract better than a written contract? Maybe it is, if there is no well-functioning judiciary to adjudicate contractual disputes. Is a cryptocurrency better than a national currency? Perhaps, if your national currency is subject to hyperinflation. Is an NFT representing property ownership better than property title registered with a state agency? Yes it is, if the state agency can be bribed to alter or lose records that are inconvenient to large land owners.

It's important to remember that what might seem redundant or useless to those of us who reside in the first world may not be redundant or useless to those who live elsewhere.

wmf3• 4 years ago

The real promise of blockchains is that they can provide a technological framework upon which to build new institutions that are alternatives to the types of institutions that are foundational to developed economies.

There's no evidence that this is true. People have been saying this for years and there's nothing to show for it.

toomuchtodo• 4 years ago

You cannot replace illegitimate or suboptimal institutions with systems of record or value storage and transfer they don’t have to respect or acknowledge, just as a court who cannot enforce their ruling has no authority. The systems are simply tools, it is the execution layer (ie government very broadly) that determines the outcome.

If your property record is on a blockchain but those whose recognize such rights ignore it, it’s not a property record, for example. It’s an internet comment or public expression of opinion. Similarly, what makes your name typed on a Docusign a legally binding signature? Federal statute recognizing it as such.

legutierr9• 4 years ago

I don't disagree with you. My point is that blockchains can reduce the cost and complexity of enforcing property rights and adjudicating contractual disputes to a meaningful extent such that many of the institutional deficiencies that exist in the developing world in this regard can be overcome.

You couldn't realize such a reform, however, without buy-in from the government itself.

l33t2333722• 4 years ago

I have some serious problems believing your argument. For example, this:

Is a smart contract better than a written contract? Maybe it is, if there is no functioning judiciary to adjudicate contractual disputes.

If there’s no functioning judiciary, then who will enforce the contract? Who will decide if one side is not acting in good faith, or if there was coercion, or deception? I claim that smart contracts solve none of the issues actually caused by having weak institutions.

x86x879• 4 years ago

You cannot enforce the physical world through virtual means. It does not work.

What you can enforce is digital goods via virtual means. Depending of what you want to enforce the presence of a central authority in the physical world may still be needed

tbrownaw3• 4 years ago

They're public in a way that written contracts usually aren't. I can at least imagine scenarios where that might matter (even if I'm not at all certain they're realistic).

felixgallo• 4 years ago

If there's no functioning judiciary to adjudicate contractual disputes, then who is going to effectively and durably tell someone who won and enforce that with the threat of state-level punishment? If a state agency can be bribed, what's claiming to have an NFT going to do for the holder, besides radically increase their property ownership risk if they actually rely on that to be true?

The problem with all of these cockamamie blockchain arguments is that they talk about a problem, and then they talk about a (bad, expensive, difficult to use) database that might form part of that problem, but in fact the problem is always far bigger and way more complicated than the choice of the database vendor.

Spooky234• 4 years ago

One of the interesting aspects of blockchain for many scenarios is that it makes the ledger of ownership or whatever universally available.

Hopefully with some of the charlatans going bust this will transform back into a technology instead of some bizarre religion.

Gigachad• 4 years ago

There is also a problem of what happens when the farmers computer gets hacked and their land NFT stolen. Are the police meant to roll in and kick out the farmer who clearly still owns the land? Or do they just ignore the blockchain record as it's obviously wrong but not fixable.

legutierr9• 4 years ago

The effectiveness of institutions cannot be measured in black and white. There is a continuum of effectiveness. It is very rare in the developing world that the courts are completely ineffective—it's often just that they are slow, expensive, subject to corrupt influence, etc. They function, to an extent—but they function poorly. How poorly depends on where you are.

In addition, bribery and corruption themselves also operate on a continuum. In the example cited in the article, the rich landowners don't just remove the property markers—they wait for flooding to wash them away before illegally expanding their claims. In other words, even in a society where official corruption is rampant, there are still societal limits within which corruption is possible.

The impact that blockchains can have is to simplify the tasks that systems of adjudication must undertake in order to enforce property rights and contracts. They also remove individual judgement from most decisions, and make it impossible to alter or destroy records.

I'm not saying that blockchains can entirely replace all human governance systems. Rather, blockchains can make it cheaper and easier to maintain functioning and accessible systems for adjudication. They reduce the surface area for the use of individual judgement, and thereby reduce costs and opportunities for the injection of corrupt influence.

Yes, many of the things that blockchains can do can also be done by centralized database applications—maintaining property records, for example. Those centralized databases still need to be maintained by trusted parties, however—trusted parties who themselves may be subject to corrupt influence.

By moving title records from paper to a centralized database all you are doing is changing who becomes the bribery target—the Postgres DBA instead of the clerk at the records office. With a public blockchain, there is no one you can bribe.

franklampard• 4 years ago

But if the boundary markers were on the blockchain,” he said, “they wouldn’t be able to do that, would they?

Or they could store the makers are stored in a free-tier dynomodb instance…

rippercushions• 4 years ago

The technology here is the least of that small shareholder's problems.

To register that land, they need to convince a corruptible human to accept their application, get another corruptible human to enter the data correctly in the database and get a third corruptible human to give them an authentic certificate proving that their land holding has been registered. You can already see three points where this can be trivially subverted, but it gets worse.

The hard part, you see, is defending their property rights. Local bigwig casually stomps on their land, now they need to convince the corruptible police to investigate (good luck with that when they're on the bigwig's payroll), find a lawyer willing to take this on (in exchange for what?), get the corruptible land rights registry to verify their claim, get a corruptible judge to give a true verdict, and then convince that corruptible police to carry out the verdict. If you're a poor subsistence farmer, it's nearly impossible to navigate this morass, and blockchain solves precisely zero of these problems.

Finally and most fundamentally, a land registry is by nature a centralized registry of holdings with a legal monopoly. Why on earth would you need to use a blockchain here, when an append-only database does the same job?

legutierr9• 4 years ago

Finally and most fundamentally, a land registry is by nature a centralized registry of holdings with a legal monopoly. Why on earth would you need to use a blockchain here, when an append-only database does the same job?

Records within an append-only database running on a central server can be altered or deleted by whomever has the root password to that server.

The only way to guard against that risk is to replicate and publicize the data, make sure all data modifications are cryptographically signed and valid according the logic of the application, and incorporate into each new version of the data a hash of prior versions of the data, in order to guard against data deletions. In other words, to implement a blockchain.

The hard part, you see, is defending their property rights. Local bigwig casually stomps on their land, now they need to convince the corruptible police to investigate (good luck with that when they're on the bigwig's payroll), find a lawyer willing to take this on (in exchange for what?), get the corruptible land rights registry to verify their claim, get a corruptible judge to give a true verdict, and then convince that corruptible police to carry out the verdict. If you're a poor subsistence farmer, it's nearly impossible to navigate this morass, and blockchain solves precisely zero of these problems.

You have described a horribly corrupt and oppressive society. It's not what most of the developing world looks like. You are right that there is unlikely to be a technical solution to this level of oppression, except that it would be harder to implement in the first place in a society where property records were managed via a blockchain.

jasonwatkinspdx2• 4 years ago

This.

A friend of mine moved down to Mexico and bought land on a beach to build his dream off grid eco airbnb.

After he'd been there a while and had completed some construction, a bunch of police came walking up his drive armed with assault rifles. They were with a local politician's sister that's known in the area for various land scams. They tried to kick him off his land under some pretext. My friend stood his ground despite them threatening to shoot him. After a standoff they left.

Now in my friend's case he's a remote tech worker with plenty of income as well as a bunch of social/professional connections to a bunch of wealthy business owners in Mexico city. So he was able to get connected up with the right kind of lawyer to go intimidate the captain of the police office the goons came from.

What was recorded on the deed in the county office mattered not one bit in this scenario.

acdha12• 4 years ago

Is a smart contract better than a written contract? Maybe it is, if there is no functioning judiciary to adjudicate contractual disputes.

This doesn’t seem like it could possibly be true without something like an outside force requiring use of the blockchain. For example, if my neighbor uses some of my land, who cares if I say it’s not valid according to someone’s computer? If the local legal system is inept or corrupt, who’s going to do something about it? In almost all cases the local control of state power wins.

This is especially relevant when you think about the long history of how lane has historically been stolen by tricking or threatening people, bribing surveyors, or by making promises which aren’t kept. Blockchains not only improve none of those situations but also add new ones like tricking people into using exploitable smart contracts or phishing their transfer approvals.

dkokelley• 4 years ago

Why would a corrupt state agree to use a system resistant to their influence? And if they did, why wouldn't they use violence to force the owner to transfer the property?

dmitriid16• 4 years ago

Why would a corrupt state agree to use a system resistant to their influence?

Blockchain isn't resistant to their influence. Case in point: courts still exist. What's to stop me to get a court order showing I'm the rightful owner of something? How can blockchain prevent that?

Moreover, what if I actually am the rightful owner, and the original record was incorrect?

amluto2• 4 years ago

An NFT representing ownership of farmland is, frankly, absurd.

If I own farmland and lose my private key (or screw up a smart contract and lock it away forever, etc), should that land never be farmed again?

If a river moves and boundaries must change but the NFT isn’t aware of this, what happens?

If someone with guns takes my land, who cares about my NFT?

Maybe technology can help create a system where transactions really happen on a common-carrier basis and can’t be censored without censorship being documentable and illegal. But at the end of the day, ownership of real things isn’t something on chain and is enforced by centralized institutions, and a blockchain won’t change that.

jiggawatts3• 4 years ago

Not to mention that the only thing that actually matters is what's in the government's land title ledger. They're the ones with the guns that enforce (or don't enforce) ownership.

These crypto crazies absolutely crack me up. Can you imagine some dirt poor farmer in the arse end of nowhere confronting the local constabulary that were bribed by their rich neighbour?

"You see here in my wallet how my Landz Titles NFT clearly states that this parcel of land is mine?"

Cue: a bunch of uniformed thugs glance at each other and smirk before proceeding to pummel the life out of the farmer that paid in Bitcoin for a few thousand bits that won't protect him from fists, batons, or bullets.

Some people are so naive and clueless that it's a parody of entitlement.

Finbarr• 4 years ago

Arguments like this one strike me as extremely condescending.

Have you directly spoken to developing world farmers who have experienced these problems?

Do you think people with these problems are just clamoring for the first world to come in and solve this for them with blockchain technology?

Do you think all of the participants in the situation you described would even adopt blockchain (the small farmer, the larger farmer who wants to steal land, the corrupt central government officials open to bribes)? If so, why? It seems the only person with an incentive for change is the one least likely to have strong influence for that change.

acdha12• 4 years ago

Do you think people with these problems are just clamoring for the first world to come in and solve this for them with blockchain technology?

Especially in this case where the pitch is “commit now to paying me and friends first world transaction fees on everything you do, and maybe we’ll figure out how to help with the actual hard problems in the future”. If the real goal is helping small farmers I’d expect the answer to involve things like paying for accurate surveying and working with big agricultural buyers so the calculation changes from “bribe local official to ignore this small farmer’s deed; profit!” to include things like major buyers not buying from any of your farms.

philliphaydon2• 4 years ago

This a solved problem that isn’t solved using blockchain.

In Thailand when you get out into the rural areas, there’s no central database you can go and argue to in regards to land ownership. You have chiefs. He mediates sales between people and ensures who owns what land. If a land dispute happens it gets resolved by the chief.

In cities it’s all controlled by local governments and paper records.

It works in the city with government and paper. It works less in rural areas where people can be bought.

Blockchain is not solving any problems here. The problem is no one managing any records.

Paper records and up to date gps records are enough.

inkyoto9• 4 years ago

The developed world is distinguished from the developing world often by the strength of its institutions, by the general accessibility of legal recourse, by the prevalence of trust within the society at large.

The developed world is not immune to some of the problems, namely: genuine human errors, negligence and a great uneasiness to accept the personal responsibility for making mistakes, inadvertent or out of sheer incompetence (rampant in the British culture). The latter two somewhat step into a gray area, but I digress.

Ledger databases/blockchains provide a technological solution to the problem in multiple areas where a full immutable temporal history of changes is necessary even in the developed world where the governance is strong and corruption is less frequent.

dmitriid16• 4 years ago

Weak institutions, corrupt legal systems, and low levels of trust undermine development and prevent people from building and maintaining wealth for themselves and their families.
For me, the promise of the blockchain is that it can provide a technological framework upon which to build new kinds of institutions

You're trying to solve social and political problems with tech. And you cannot. You could spend 30 seconds thinking abuout the problem and realised why it can't.

Question: who is the rightful owner of the marked land? See my comments in this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27212564

Is a smart contract better than a written contract? Maybe it is, if there is no well-functioning judiciary to adjudicate contractual disputes.

And who is going to enforce this smart contract?

It's important to remember that what might seem redundant or useless to those of us who reside in the first world may not be redundant or useless to those who live elsewhere.

It's also important to remember that people who claim this (and claim blockchains are solutions to problems) also reside in the first world and have literally no clue about the problems outside their cushy bubbles.

BackBlast• 4 years ago

Currency is the only one of those that actually works within the corrupt legal system because it doesn't require any action on the part of the corrupt system. You can use it directly with other parties.

(smart) Contracts? Without institutional enforcement, doesn't matter. Maybe being all on-chain, but that hasn't really functioned.

Ownership (NFT)? Doesn't work at all without some level of institutional enforcement.

Blockchain does only one thing well.

LawTalkingGuy• 4 years ago

They simply need to record the location of the property markers. They could even use paper. The problem is that they don't have surveying equipment and the training to use it so all they have is the sticks.

As others have said, you can't (usefully) represent ownership in the blockchain because ownership can change or be made irrelevant outside of the blockchain.

While blockchain wouldn't be useful for this, a host of cryptographic tools would be.

If a country used signed survey data they could prevent a host of crimes and bugs changing boundaries, and if they issued signed land titled you could check their validity offline - helpful for remote areas. They could be tied together entry to entry, like a blockchain, to assure that no records "go missing". There could be a single-core proof of work stored regularly, checkpointing the data, to prevent the country's IT team from rewriting the whole database. It just doesn't need to be "a blockchain" because there is a centralized authority who we all follow, if not trust, so the decentralized thing isn't that important. And we don't need to limit publishing so we don't need a currency.

jasonhansel6• 4 years ago

it can provide a technological framework upon which to build new kinds of institutions

But will those institutions be democratic or respect human rights? Proof-of-work blockchains are effectively plutocracies, controlled by those with the most computing power.

dilyevsky4• 4 years ago

I think the farmers use case can totally work as long as those land parcels are also on the blockchain.

tootie3• 4 years ago

That whole story sounds a bit apocryphal but even if it's true this is some sort of semi-literate culture. If they're making marks in mud, how are they supposed to encode geographic positions with enough accuracy and write them to a computer system of any kind. And then have everyone understand and agree to what it means. Why it would it be superior to taking a picture and posting it to Whatsapp or Facebook?

andreareina2• 4 years ago

The government would have to cede control of transfers, which good luck with that. If you require the government to sign the transaction you now effectively have a permissioned database which doesn't require a blockchain to implement.

stephen_g2• 4 years ago

Armed mobs probably don't care about the blockchain though. And shall I lose the ability to sell my land if I or somebody else loses a private key? Shall my land be taken from me if a criminal is able to hack a computer and transfer it to themselves?

dilyevsky4• 4 years ago

The worst part is cryptocow's milk tastes like shit

smt884• 4 years ago

I had a real experience that perfectly reflects the research presented here (safer ledgers useful, blockchains are not).

I accidentally got wrapped up in a project to automate some HR functions, and the product manager demanded that it must be blockchain because blockchains are the future.

It turns out that append-only databases are well-suited for HR records, and (especially when dealing with things like background checks, immigration papers, etc.) it doesn't hurt to have a history with cryptographically-verifiable date stamps.

We used an existing database that did all of the above, told everyone it was blockchain, and released the product.

That was a great strategy for a few years until everyone realized blockchain was a boondoggle, and now you never need to work with anyone who still believes in it. You can just understand their mention of blockchain to be a sign that you need to avoid doing business with them.

WrtCdEvrydy2• 4 years ago

Blockchains are great for one-thing... guarantee that data is being appended and never modified.

When you want to display a record, you can aggregate the data historically and allow people to see changes and attribute them to users and time but you can always see what was originally added.

However that's kinda risky for HR because anything committed to that DB will be there... forever!

andreareina2• 4 years ago

That's not the full story, certificate transparency logs (and many other applications) achieve that without using a blockchain.

Nursie11• 4 years ago

Blockchains are great for one-thing... guarantee that data is being appended and never modified.

in a distributed, trustless fashion

If it's not distributed or trustless, you can do the same without the blockchain.

mnd9992• 4 years ago

That’s an event sourcing architecture, and something like Kafka will do it much better than a blockchain.

The forever problem can be, ironically, resolved with crypto. If you encrypt each employer record with an employee key then, if the employee data needs to be deleted you just delete the key and the data is gone.

kenniskrag2• 4 years ago

Can be removed/rewinded if you are in a shorter chain of the fork while the block was mined.

namdnay2• 4 years ago

Kind of off-topic: in what kind of weird organisation is a product manager dictating engineering decisions?!

deanCommie5• 4 years ago

In most of them.

It's not difficult: You simply dictate requirements that can be only solved by one engineering solution.

But that, in essence, is part of the challenge with blockchain. People treat it as a self-describing requirement. ("This must be on the blockchain") rather than a technical solution for a dubious set of problems most people don't have.

smt884• 4 years ago

It was a small startup, so "product manager" wasn't a narrow role with clear boundaries. Their job was to bridge the clients and the software team, and they insisted that clients would jump at the chance to have a blockchain vendor.

v-erne2• 4 years ago

>It turns out that append-only databases are well-suited for HR records

It may seem so, bu then You find out what are Your governments limit's for storing workers data, and Your company lawyers forces You to make it possible to delete everything that past that limit to limit legal risk and be gdpr compliant. And at this moment You find out that world is not constant and far from Your ideal model of spherical cow.

function_seven2• 4 years ago

Can we design an append-only database that also allows for deletions if you replace those deletions with a direct reference to the hash that was once computed at that point in the chain?

Yes, I know this isn’t strictly “append only”, but it still gives the ability to prevent silent updates and silent deletes. Any record that’s deleted must be replaced with something that indicates that it was deleted.

oblio18• 4 years ago

Small nitpick: "You" and "Your" don't need to be capitalized. It makes reading the text a bit weird.

jasmer• 4 years ago

" it must be blockchain because blockchains are the future."

Wow, that's next level PM cringe.

I'm glad you were able to jujitsu your way around it.

truemotive• 4 years ago

I accidentally got wrapped up in a project to automate some HR functions, and the product manager demanded that it must be blockchain because blockchains are the future.

Stomps on brake with both feet

imglorp2• 4 years ago

Tim didn't mention a contemporary sibling tech at AWS which should not be thrown out with the bathwater: private (centralized), immutable, signed ledgers. Their version is called QLDB and does have concrete applications where you need an provable audit trail of a stream of transactions with search and index on top. I was on a team at a fintech closely engaged with AWS to prototype a money movement system using that as a central ledger. There's an open source one with similar properties on GH somewhere, also.

It's not sexy like blockchain so it seems marketing had to slip in some Quantum to bump the buzzword sex count.

If financial industry regulators were serious about catching laundering or book cooking, they would demand this kind of tech as a foundation of compliance reporting.

mariusor• 4 years ago

Do you have any other clues for finding that open source project?

It sounds very interesting to me.

inkyoto9• 4 years ago

Hyperledger is one such project: https://www.hyperledger.org/ (mostly the marketing fluff) and https://github.com/hyperledger/fabric

imglorp2• 4 years ago

Here's one https://github.com/codenotary/immudb/

inkyoto9• 4 years ago

[…] compliance […].

This is the crux of the matter. In a prevailing number of cases, when people ask about a blockchain, they actually want a ledger database with the following properties:

– an immutable, tamper proof, append-only transaction log;

– cryptographically verifiable datasets;

– certification and/or compliance validation by externally accredited auditing bodies for SOC, PCI-DSS, ISO, HIPPA etc.

Use cases for ledger databases go beyond finance, and have been becoming a commonplace in health, education, supply change and inventory management, archive record management and similar. Anywhere, where compliance, strict record keeping and/or audit requirements are in place, the ledger databases provide the answer. AWS has QLDB, and Azure will soon have the Azure SQL Ledger Database (built on top of their SQL Server product).

Fully fledged blockchains are not required in most cases.

hanniabu5• 4 years ago

We want permissionless, which requires decentralization, which requires blockchain

jillesvangurp4• 4 years ago

Ledgers are quite easy to build. Git is a ledger. It doesn't use a block chain but it does link commits via their hashes; which makes it an audit proof ledger. Unless you can break the hashes, you can't modify its history.

And git is used between many different developers and companies working on the same projects. It was actually designed for this use case. The reason git doesn't need blockchains for this is because it funnels all the commits and pull requests through trusted code owners: people. The consensus model is very simple: a mutually respected developer has looked at the thing and gave their thumbs up.

Banks, insurers, etc. use ledgers. But mostly they lack cryptographic safety. And they use a similar reputation based consensus model. Auditors, regulators, accountants, etc. It's good enough but the failure modes can be somewhat expensive. And of course the flaky nature of the whole system actually represents a business opportunity in it self. Banking is a very lucrative business.

Blockchains are potentially a nicer/cheaper technical alternative for all this. But so far not an essential or very practical one. And of course most block chains have scaling challenges. Ethereum is a non starter for running anything at scale. Transactions are too slow, too costly and the throughput sucks. Even with the new version it's still nowhere good enough to run even a small bank. Highly unsuitable for running millions of accounts on where the cost of each transaction would far exceed the value of that transaction.

fulafel2• 4 years ago

The analogy to git comes to mind. To match the above you'd need to be using it with signed commits. In the Git world there's the debate about rewriting vs preserving history. The similarities might be actually interesting.

In Git users there are two schools of thought, one which advocates preservign history (even if it is messy / involves fixes) because preserving a record of what actually happened is useful [1]. The other insists that a curated version of the history is more important because it is easier to understand in retrospect.

[1] There are other downsides in Git history rewriting, such as the blow up you get when attempting to merge / join branches where one has rewritten history and the other not... and the blow up you get when two people attempt to collaborate on a branch in presence of rewriting. These might have accounting analogies too

Terretta• 4 years ago

Read tbray's article looking for QLDB. There were keywords along the way suggesting the possibility, but it didn't get there.

As a NYC financial services CTO, a few years back I spoke to Jassy personally, asking him to please not make 'traditional' blockchain nonsense, but to please productize and release a distributed ledger primitive. A few weeks later, AWS got back to us and said they were willing to work on such a thing, and a few groups (perhaps such as yours) jumped on as well. In our case, we were looking to use it to help manage multiparty contracts where we as a bank were trusted by the multiple parties who didn't need to trust each other.

When AWS did eventually* announce AWS Blockchain at re:Invent, they announced QLDB alongside. One was what everyone was begging for, one was useful. I'll leave which is which as an exercise for the reader. :-)

TL;DR:

I encourage anyone serious about solving financial services problems where blockchain comes up to look at QLDB instead, but also anyone looking at security, compliance attestation, or other multi-party trust or regtech related problems.

* Note: "eventually" as in, quite late to the blockchain hype party, and dragged kicking and screaming by the sales org, as tbray describes, so that at least they'd stay in the room with "big IT" signing up for IBMs hyperledger and other failed experiments.

jiggawatts3• 4 years ago

Azure has something similar as well: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/s...

arduinomancer• 4 years ago

For the older devs, has there been anything in the past like this?

As in some new hyped tech that people kept trying to insert into their business?

muglug• 4 years ago

NoSQL!

Rep from <NoSQL company> comes along, shows a CTO some graphs about how well it performs vs <BoringButReliableSQL>. If developers are unlucky CTO mandates a migration to NoSQL.

vishnugupta• 4 years ago

The last hype cycle, from about 10 years ago, I remember is that of BigData and associated technologies such as MapReduce, Hadoop, NoSQL DBs, data pipelines and so on. That lasted for about 4 years I guess? Then ML took over.

dilyevsky4• 4 years ago

* Certain aspects of social networks (I remember leadership at google being convinced everyone will do online stuff on social networks in around 2011)

* To much smaller extent some core tech like NoSQL, SOA

* More recently - AR/VR bubble

wmf3• 4 years ago

Speaking of Tim Bray, in the 1990s people kept using XML in places where it wasn't appropriate.

There have been so many tech fads. Distributed objects (e.g. CORBA), mobile code, object databases, micropayments, push, WAP, and I want to give a special lifetime achievement award to VR which is now on its third hype wave.

hanniabu5• 4 years ago

serverless

MrMan2• 4 years ago

XML is the only one that was really as egregious, iirc.

darawk3• 4 years ago

The utility of decentralized blockchains is that they facilitate permissionless financial innovation. Yes, that means "regulatory arbitrage". But not just circumventing the law, more importantly, circumventing the de facto law of corporate gatekeepers.

A substantial amount of de facto financial regulation comes not from democratically elected governments, but from companies that gate-keep access to the databases where financial truth resides. A great example of this is Visa and Mastercard dropping PornHub as a client. But there are many others. Building software that interfaces with money is extremely difficult, what you can and cannot do is extremely limited, and you may only do so at the pleasure of the major financial institutions that sit between your code and the traditional financial system.

Right now, if you want to write code that manipulate's someone's money, you have to ask the permission of both the owner of the funds, and several intermediaries along the way. What those intermediaries choose to allow you to do can be arbitrary, capricious, and certainly is not democratic.

It is true that decentralized blockchains also facilitate the flouting of the law, and that can be good or bad, depending on your point of view. But fundamentally, having an open fabric for finance, in which anyone can build any kind of application they wish, seems like a pretty cool thing to me.

tootie3• 4 years ago

Pornhub was cut off for failing to police child pornography. Why would you want to participate in a financial system that was incapable of excluding evildoers?

vlovich123• 4 years ago

Look, I dislike crypto as much as the next guy, but I must have missed the memo. Are evildoers not perfectly capable of participating in the current financial system?

https://www.thelocal.ch/20150208/hsbc-swiss-bank-helped-terr...

https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/business/how-the--war-on-terror...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/apr/03/us-bank-mexico...

Let’s also ignore all the shadiness that the Russian Oligarchs, oil shieks, Bibi, Berlosconi all seem to engage in and yet seemingly have no limit to the financial systems. The belief that our financial system excludes evildoers is a nice fantasy that I haven’t seen be rooted in reality.

cypress66• 4 years ago

That should be dealt with by the justice system, not some corporations.

dangero• 4 years ago

why would you want to participate in an internet that is incapable of excluding evildoers?

Dylan168074• 4 years ago

My understanding is they policed it a lot better than facebook does.

And the solution they were pushed into was extreme overkill.

Either way, I don't want a financial system to punish a Canadian company for breaking the law, I want the government to do it.

remram4• 4 years ago

But that's not even true. You can always get people's money and turn them into some tokens. You can run whatever code you want to manipulate those tokens, then at the end of each day you tell them their new balance of tokens. The whole proof-of-work, decentralization, ledger, ... are in no way necessary steps in this.

As long as you go through creepy, deregulated, fallible exchanges to obtain/trade/redeem those tokens, you are not permissionless or cryptographically secure or free from gate-keepers or anything of the sort.

siftrics2• 4 years ago

The whole proof-of-work, decentralization, ledger, ... are in no way necessary steps in this.

If you know of a ledger that's

(1) permissionless and

(2) avoids the double-spending problem and

(3) _does not_ involve those things you mentioned

...then please, do tell me about it. I'd love to know your breakthrough solution.

darawk3• 4 years ago

What, precisely, are you saying is not true? You need a decentralized consensus mechanism in order to solve the double-spend problem, unless you've come up with something novel.

Nursie11• 4 years ago

fundamentally, having an open fabric for finance, in which anyone can build any kind of application they wish, seems like a pretty cool thing to me.

Where money is concerned, no.

Having gatekeepers, boundaries, approvals, registers, participants and authorities is onerous, but it keeps things more honest and it makes them much more traceable in cases of negligence or fraud. We have ... well pretty much all of recorded history to show us how very many people will use any and every means available to remove money from others and disappear.

So no, this idea of an open fabric, in which anyone can build anything is a recipe for disaster by its very nature.

jiggawatts3• 4 years ago

I was going to simply paste a list of notable crypto scams, but... heh... other people have already put together annual "top-10" lists of scams:

https://mashable.com/article/biggest-crypto-scams-2022

https://mashable.com/article/biggest-cryptocurrency-scams-20...

https://www.zdnet.com/article/2020s-worst-cryptocurrency-bre...

https://www.zdnet.com/article/bitcoin-battered-the-worst-cry...

darawk3• 4 years ago

That's certainly a valid point on the trade-off curve to choose. But you could make a similarly reductionist argument about free speech, guns, home chemistry sets, etc. I think the position that "money is too important to be open" is a potentially reasonable one!

But what I don't think is particularly defensible is the position that the gatekeepers of our monetary system should be the corporations who happen to occupy the current choke points. And I think if you wanted to build a democratically controlled financial system that doesn't have corporate gatekeepers, you'd actually want to start with something very much like a decentralized open blockchain. That is, if you want to build a democratically controlled permissioned system, you need to start with an open fabric, and place the gatekeepers and choke points with intention.

Personally I prefer an open fabric, but I do understand the appeal of walled gardens.

jasonhansel6• 4 years ago

What those intermediaries choose to allow you to do can be arbitrary, capricious, and certainly is not democratic.

In practice, to adopt crypto you usually also need to rely on intermediaries to handle parts of the process for you. Fortunately, in the crypto space, you can use trusted, non-capricious, democratic intermediaries like FTX.

amluto2• 4 years ago

But the Eth folk managed to get proof-of-stake to work at scale; good on ’em. That’s a bit charitable IMO. It works with at least two major caveats:

1. You can’t unstake staked ETH. (This seems to have all manner of strange effects.). Fixing this is apparently a big deal, and, if nothing else, could enable attacks in which one unstakes and then uses knowledge of old staked private keys to attack other parties.

2. It hasn’t actually been that long, and the major validators likely have a strong interest in making Ethereum work well. Just working at scale does not mean it’s secure at scale.

wmf3• 4 years ago

You can’t unstake staked ETH.

This is temporary and AFAIK all the other PoS systems allow unstaking.

attacks in which one unstakes and then uses knowledge of old staked private keys to attack other parties.

These "long-range attacks" are not real. They're impossible to pull off in reality.

timbray2• 4 years ago

Well, they did manage to cut their energy usage by like 100x. Gotta respect that. Not that I think Eth is currently used for anything but scams.

ricochet112• 4 years ago

One little clarifier: You can unstake and stop running your validator, the exit-validator process already exists as it is necessary for slashing. What you cant do is withdraw exited ether until withdrawals are enabled.

hahnchen• 4 years ago

Unrelated, but

Which was pretty nice, except for it was stinking hot that August and we were on multiple steamy subway trips every day; got back to our hotel rooms pretty well emptied out.

Upper level amazon engineers can’t take ubers through new york?

nixgeek• 4 years ago

In 2016? It was probably going to take 2-3x longer to Uber around Manhattan. Traffic sucks.

TheDong4• 4 years ago

Some people would rather ride a train or subway over an uber in principal, even if the cost is charged to their employer and no different to them personally.

I'm not claiming with certainty that that is the case here, but I know it is for some people.

Also, subways/trains are quicker for some routes, YMMV

unboxingelf• 4 years ago

_Well known tech guy thinks blockchain is dumb because he can’t see its value for a private company._

There’s nothing new here. No, a blockchain isn’t a good replacement for a traditional database. It’s a distributed append only database built on zero trust. It’s extremely inefficient. Very few problems require that solution, especially one where a single party would be running all the nodes.

aserafini• 4 years ago

Indeed, I expect the ONLY application where this combination of requirements makes sense is.. a global currency.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 4 years ago

Proof-of-Waste :)

Anyone got a good one for Proof-of-Stake.

hanniabu5• 4 years ago

If it's Ethereum's Proof of Stake then the word is perfection

rank0• 4 years ago

Plutocracy

subradios3• 4 years ago

Blockchains are an incredible technology. It is obvious that their first attempted uses are contractual and monetary, because blockchain guarantees can make things better fastest in those arenas. The unfortunate part is it doesn't seem like anyone has really figured out the how yet.

I am reminded of the Web, Amazon was the first company to really "get" e-commerce and made all the money - there will likely be a similar story with blockchains 10 years from now.

Nursie11• 4 years ago

We're already 14 years in. Where is the evidence it can make anything better? Why hasn't the amazon thing happened in the last ten years of blockchain?

everfree15• 4 years ago

To be fair, Amazon didn't hit their stride as a retailer until the 2000s, roughly 20 years after the internet's "big bang" date.

And while we're 14 years into distributed ledger technology, we're only 7 years into turing-complete distributed ledger technology, which I would argue is the actual innovation.

subradios3• 4 years ago

The biggest reason is social, or occasionally legal. There are tons of barriers in place to getting the legal system to agree that smart contracts are legitimate - which creates a barrier to real world, because regulators of real world business want to see contracts and legal language. (And you can't get away from if if you're operating a physical store with physical employees)

The only group that has managed to beat this was early Uber, and their political lobbying arm was legendary.

anon4002325• 4 years ago

Merkle trees are an incredible technology too.

My point? There are many incredible technologies, but not all are "secret weapons" that justify a seismic industry shift. Not all are suitable or able to upend existing technologies.

Fitness of purpose is contextual. Some of the most amazing innovations in computer science cannot be captured by one industry. Most do not lead to widespread disruption.

vl• 4 years ago

Everyone uses Git by day and then moans how blockchain in not useful by night.

Specific technologies have specific applications. Blockchains in general - immutable history. Crypto blockchains - consensus in untrusted environment. Just use given technology for what it’s designed for, and stop being full of yourself.

simonw• 4 years ago

We understand the difference between a proof-of-work/stake/waste blockchain and a merkel tree.

Do you?

Nursie11• 4 years ago

If we're including git in 'blockchain' now then that changes the nature of the discussion. But we both know that systems like git are not what's being talked about here.

Just use given technology for what it’s designed for, and stop being full of yourself.

The point is that there has been hype after hype after hype about "blockchain" revolutionising damn near everything for years and so far it has failed to deliver on this. It's not wrong to call the phenomenon out for what it is.

arnoooooo• 4 years ago

The double standard you mention is actually created by the Blockchain advocates.

Git does not include a distributed consensus algorithm. So it's a chain of blocks, but not a "Blockchain". Blockchain advocates will gladly tell you so when they want to sell you on how revolutionary Blockchain tech is.

But once you ask for actually useful use cases, all they can point to is things that are trivially done with Git and its predecessors, in the sense that they don't require distributed consensus…

fareesh3• 4 years ago

From an Indian pov my take is the boundary markers use-case sounds pretty good. I don't expect an American flying around from EWR to Seattle to ever understand this intuitively without being exposed to the realities in this part of the world, but having thought about it for all of 20 seconds it sounds like a very good idea.

Yes - it is a solution to the problem of power and corruption. In India there is corruption at all levels of government. The wealthy and powerful could absolutely influence some levels and steal land. Even petty regional criminals are able to do it. It has happened to my own family - imagine the odds. 1 billion people here, and I read this article and even I can personally relate to the issue of stolen land.

A blockchain that stored GPS coordinates and could realistically withstand a 51% attack, would solve the problem in my view. Are there other architectures that can also solve this problem? No doubt. Is the blockchain solution perfect? No it isn't.

deanCommie5• 4 years ago

As we've learned from the "They've stolen my apes" scenarios, the very nature of blockchain as the central authority of trust means that there is no such thing as theft on the blockchain.

Today, corrupt powerful people use violence and intimidation to go move physical markers to change landownership.

If land ownership was on the blockchain, the same corrupt powerful people will use violence and intimidation to force digital transfer of ownership.

The same threats to the safety and wellbeing of family members works equally well to induce the desired actions in the physical word or the digital one.

This is why Tim wrote to be wary of technical solutions for political problems.

EFreethought4• 4 years ago

Also: Couldn't the wealthy and the powerful influence the creation of the blockchain and the first data set put on the blockchain as well?

brabel• 4 years ago

I imagine the rich, corrupt land lords in India would be able to steal your land even easier on the blokchain by sending a gang of armed bandits to your farm, torture you until you transfer everything to their wallet... and when you go to the police to denounce the harassment, you get arrested because the police is on the land lord's pocket. The blockchain cannot and will not stop violence in the real world from working around all the cryptography in the world, and it's shocking to me that anyone actually believes that to be somehow the case.

alexjurkiewicz• 4 years ago

But how will poor people own enough computation to ensure rich people can't mount a 51% attack?

If the database relies on trusted nodes run by eg, the government, why can't the government use MySQL and periodically publish a dump?

fareesh3• 4 years ago

It would have to be a mix of government and non government nodes for it to work.

giaour• 4 years ago

In the US, property records are maintained by a local government authority. That alone doesn’t stop squatters or unauthorized encroachment on your property. Normally, the boundaries of a parcel of land are not a mystery, but enforcing them requires more than just knowing their location

Renevith• 4 years ago

Can you help me understand how this would help? The way I see it: if the government were on board with recording property boundaries in a public ledger, it could do it without a blockchain. And if it's not on board, then I don't see how a random third-party ledger would help, since the government wouldn't defer to it.

fareesh3• 4 years ago

It would have to be a solution that involves the government

PeterisP2• 4 years ago

Not the parent post, but a reasonable implication would be that the government-as-a-whole could be forced to enforce the property boundaries as long as it is difficult for individual government officials to make undetected illegitimate changes to the ledger; such a mechanism would be disempowering the specific officials and force them to follow the rules enforced by the system.

Kwpolska• 4 years ago

A petty criminal visits your farm with a gun in his hands. You tell him that the blockchain says this land belongs to you. What happens then? Does he say "oh, sorry to bother you, have a nice day" and go away? Or does he just shoot you and take over the land?

grey-area• 4 years ago

Or worse, steal your only phone and take over the land, as ownership of the keys is now ownership of the land.

Blockchain would actually make property theft easier in a poor area where people only have a phone.

dmitriid16• 4 years ago

Yes - it is a solution to the problem of power and corruption.

It's not.

Question: who is the rightful owner of the marked land? See my comments in this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27212564

The wealthy and powerful could absolutely influence some levels and steal land. Even petty regional criminals are able to do it.

So the wealthy and the powerful get the person entering data on the blockchain to enter that the land belongs to them. What exactly has blockchain solved?

marcell2• 4 years ago

Blockchain skeptics are all defending the tech of the current financial system, and implicitly arguing it can’t be improved. They are wrong. The tech underlying the current system is really bad. For example:

(1) How can I perform an atomic transaction across two stock exchanges?

(2) How can I take stock held on one exchange, and use it as collateral on an unaffiliated lending platform?

(3) How can I launch a new financial app, as a small startup, and open it to assets held on ETrade.

All of these are impossible in the current system. In contrast they are all trivial using Ethereum’s blockchain.

https://ortutay.substack.com/p/the-computer-science-case-for...

philliphaydon2• 4 years ago

I opened the site thinking it would be serious but got a popup for web3. So I closed it.

autotune4• 4 years ago

The underlying system is mostly written in COBOL and desperately needs a replacement before all the COBOL engineers die out with many large bags of money going to their descendants. Blockchain, no matter how good it might be or might have been, is clearly not that system due to its now tarnished reputation at this point in time.

everfree15• 4 years ago

Blockchain, no matter how good it might be or might have been, is clearly not that system due to its now tarnished reputation at this point in time.

I never understand how people can consider the reputation of glorified timestamped linked lists to be "tarnished". This isn't a company or even a particular piece of software, it's a class of data structures. You're trying to tell me that a particular way of structuring data has a reputation that can be tarnished?

Nursie11• 4 years ago

Blockchain skeptics are all defending the tech of the current financial system, and implicitly arguing it can’t be improved.

Homeopathy skeptics are all defending the mainstream medical system and big pharma, and implicitly arguing it can't be improved.

qeternity• 4 years ago

(1) How can I perform an atomic transaction across two stock exchanges?

I'm not sure why you're mandating across two stock exchanges? If you want to swap two assets in a single transaction, there is a very mature market for this. This has more to do with CPAMM vs. CLOB than it does anything else.

(2) How can I take stock held on one exchange, and use it as collateral on an unaffiliated lending platform?

Well, assets aren't held on exchanges...but again, there is a huge industry that facilitates this.

(3) How can I launch a new financial app, as a small startup, and open it to assets held on ETrade.

This has more to do with ETrade than anything else. It's like saying how can I launch a startup and get my product in every Walmart store...well you need their cooperation.

All of these are impossible in the current system.

Absolutely not even remotely true. Just because you don't know, doesn't mean it's not possible.

marcell2• 4 years ago

I'm not sure why you're mandating across two stock exchanges? If you want to swap two assets in a single transaction, there is a very mature market for this. This has more to do with CPAMM vs. CLOB than it does anything else.

If you want to do arbitrage across two exchanges, it is helpful to have an atomic transaction that's all or nothing across them.

This has more to do with ETrade than anything else. It's like saying how can I launch a startup and get my product in every Walmart store...well you need their cooperation.

In web3/defi, I can do this without even talking to the defi equivalent of ETrade. It makes it a lot easier to start a startup.

adrr• 4 years ago

Never once as a retail investor have i needed any of those features. Blockchain a solution looking for a problem.

autotune4• 4 years ago

A huge, almost incomprehensible, volume of venture capital was flowing into the sector, and that money was localized in the Finance sector, specifically in Manhattan.

I think the worst part about this whole thing is there are still millions if not billions of dollars being pumped into it. I literally just got a job interview request for a crypto exchange with hundreds of millions supposedly in the bank. It's absurd.

csomar3• 4 years ago

It is a shame that we are ending up here with "Blockchain technology". Beyond the financial aspect (Bitcoin/Stablecoins), here are a few use cases where a Blockchain will shine:

- Tracking shipments across countries. This is an append-only operation, across multiple jurisdictions/languages/infrastructures. A blockchain ledger can play the role of standardizing operations for the tracking of shipments.

- Healthcare records.

- Company registry records. Once submitted, they are publicly available and immutable.

- Title deeds. You wouldn't own the NFT yourself. The government could assign it to you and be the only one able to transfer it across its "subjects".

- Stocks/Assets. For this one I'll blame ASE for failing to deliver. They have picked the wrong company to build such a thing while spending a gigantic sum of money in the process.

- Digital Identities. There was never enough investment in this area, especially for key retrieval in the case of loss.

- Decentralized DNS. The tech is there (Namecoin) and roughly functional. There was never any investment in this comparing to the billions thrown in NFTs and other crap projects.

Instead of addressing any of the above points, Blockchain and Crypto degenerated into fancy websites and gifs aimed to drill money from everyone who can be influenced. We are here 5-6 years later after the Defi/Smart Contracts fever and all we have to show for it is some apes NFT. This could have been done a lot earlier with Namecoin which has a much more native support of NFT. But Namecoin never took off because the founders were never interested to make money out of this.

It does seem that governments might be more fundamental than we thought. They might be protecting us more from ourselves than we see them as an imposition on our freedom. Here we have a worldwide experiment of a government-less operation at wild.

throw8274747372• 4 years ago

Total disagree and not sure why you believe why any of those woukd have value added if on blockchain. Especially, health care records, wtf??

csomar3• 4 years ago

Standardized and encrypted healthcare records. It means wherever you travel you can: 1. Access your health records at your discretion; and 2. Make sure these records are never lost and 3. These records are immutable.

Encrypted records can be easily added by any doctor/clinic as your public key is publicly available.

dilyevsky4• 4 years ago

Distributed DNS

As opposed to normal DNS?

csomar3• 4 years ago

Edited to decentralized.

GauntletWizard3• 4 years ago

Garbage in, garbage out. Tracking shipments only works if you have proof that the shipment wasn't tampered with. Tracking shipments is only as reliable as the carrier not mucking with it, and we already have tamper-proof tape for solving that one. It doesn't prove anything, though. It's merely a tool in our arsenal of confirming trust, that makes it easier to tell where the problem lies if someone along the chain is lying. If someone along the chain is lying, their blockchain record is no more meaningful than any other document they'd produce.

Registry records and title deeds and stock assets are already solved problems, and there's an important problem that blockchain is trying to solve: It is possible for the centralized services to transfer ownership without the owner's permission. This is an important feature. It is used in things like bankruptcy proceedings [1] and other law enforcement action all the time. The people trying to create the "feature" of not having that feature are called anarchists, and decent societies lock them up, shortly before or after their crimes cause actual damage.

All of these are reasons for actual cryptography - Signatures and Merkel Trees. Blockchains have no advantages in any of them.

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/18/investing/ftx-bahamas-seizure - Whether the governments doing the seizure are trustworthy is an entirely different problem with an entirely different scope of solutions, but the places that have actual anarchy going on are not typically nice places to live[2] and other governments typically do their best to insulate their population from them. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piracy_off_the_coast_of_Somali...

everfree15• 4 years ago

It's merely a tool in our arsenal of confirming trust, that makes it easier to tell where the problem lies if someone along the chain is lying.

That makes it a useful tool, no?

people trying to create the "feature" of not having that feature are called anarchists

Smart contracts are partial to neither law nor anarchy. It's trivial to write token code that allows a centralized service to transfer said token without the owner's permission. And that token still enjoys the benefits of being interoperable by default with other tokens and contracts that may not be under that same centralized service's control, yet are written to the same protocol standard.

All of these are reasons for actual cryptography - Signatures and Merkel Trees. Blockchains have no advantages in any of them.

Blockchains provide reliable ordering and timestamping, something that cryptography itself cannot provide. Cryptographic shipment signing/tracking isn't very useful if the company can retroactively create a conflicting chain of backdated signatures and purport it to be the canonical one.

fabian2k• 4 years ago

From the blog post:

They presented some of the systems they’d built and yep, we were impressed. Then, with the startup CTO in the room, one of my fellow engineers asked the key question: “All these systems, are there any that wouldn’t work without blockchain?” The guy didn’t even hesitate: “No, not really.”
And that was about that.

runeks2• 4 years ago

No. Blockchain was invented to solve one particular problem: distributed consensus on a sequence of transactions, where the choice of which transaction to include from a set of conflicting transactions is irrelevant.

The latter property here is key to understanding where blockchain is useful. It was created to solve the "double spend problem", ie. two transitions that spend the same coin but send it to different recipients (and so they conflict and cannot both be included in the canonical list of transactions). A double spend is the result of the sender either (a) making a mistake, or (b) attempting fraud. In both cases the important property is that as long as only a single of these conflicting transactions is included, the systems works.

For all the applications you list above, this property is not present. If I create a transaction in your "shipping blockchain" that says "shipment A moved to location X" and another, conflicting transaction that says "shipment A moved to location Y", then it's obviously important which transaction we include, since it must reflect the actual, physical location of "shipment A".

EFreethought4• 4 years ago

Is there a double spend problem in fiat currencies? Honestly, I do not think there is. So what is the point of cryptocurrency?

kilburn• 4 years ago

What I see missing in most of those is that decentralized immutable storage is the only part solved by blockchain technologies, and:

- Storage is not the hard part of all those proposals. Standard formats and a shared ontology between all players is the actual hard part. Medical records are useless if you can't read them.

- Immutable storage is not hard to do in a centralized fashion and can be made much more efficient. Do blockchain-based systems offer the bandwidth to ingest _all_ medical records produced worldwide? I'd say the required amount of records-per-second would surprise you (as well as the potential size of those records, where some are high resolution scans and stuff like that).

- Usually you _don't_ want immutable records, even when it seems like you do. What happens when you want to advance the formats stored in the blockchain? You can't edit old records (to update them to the new format), so your only options become: create a new blockchain and/or keep the cruft forever.

- Storing anything private via encryption poses problems in many domains: sometimes you want certain third-parties to be able to access that information (e.g.: the hospital should have access to your medical records if you get there unconscious in an ambulance). I've seen no real solution to the kind of issues that arise there.

These are very serious limitations against blockchains _shining_ if you ask me. Of all your proposed use-cases the only one that I can't see hitting those issues is the company registry records one (and maybe that's because I'm not acquainted enough with that domain).

fabianfabian4• 4 years ago

This guy is exactly what's wrong with the crypto space. It's a fundamental misunderstanding of the strengths and weaknesses of blockchains.

Putting all those things he listed on a blockchain is the perfect example of “That's not a blockchain, that's a sequence of poor engineering decisions!”

Everything he listed can already be done with basic software engineering. Add a blockchain to these things makes it slow, adds unnecessary complexity and fake decentralization where its not even needed.

Crypto is full of Ape NFTs and casino gambling because there is nothing useful in blockchains other than removing trusted third parties.

Bitcoin added something new, crypto asked what more can we do with this? The answer is not much.

chinathrow• 4 years ago

Tracking shipments across countries. This is an append-only operation, across multiple jurisdictions/languages/infrastructures. A blockchain ledger can play the role of standardizing operations for the tracking of shipments.

People seem to forget that you still have to trust the people and/or hardware doing data entry while tracking shipments. If you can't solve that first, there's no need to have a blockchain as a storage medium.

DebtDeflation• 4 years ago

Tracking shipments across countries.

This has been a failed use case from the start because there's no effective way to control the entry point from the real world onto the blockchain. Farmer in South Carolina imports a boatload of tomatoes from China, enters them onto the blockchain as his own during harvest season, now you have a permanent indelible record of those tomatoes as they make every stop along the way to the consumer, with a completely fraudulent point of origin.

jacknews2• 4 years ago

I think the cost of trust is underestimated.

All those shiny skyscrapers that the banks build? It's for trust, along with a good deal of banking licensing requirements and regulation.

The example with the farmers' fields is quite valid. We forget in our relatively well-governed western nations that some governments really can't be trusted to simply keep records straight and not 'lose' vital documents, in cases where bribes abound.

Another example is foreign exchange trading settlements; I can't trust that if I send you $500mn in swiss francs, you'll actually send me the equivalent settlement in USD. You might go bankrupt half way through the transaction. And so there exists an expensive jointly owned escrow bank for exactly this purpose, CLS bank.

I'm sure there are many other examples, but the point is, trust is actually quite expensive.

asah• 4 years ago

Yes, and #include cost of military, courts and police ("guys with guns")

dale_glass4• 4 years ago

Trust is expensive, lack of trust is even more so.

Say, how would you build a skyscraper without trust? Are you going to set up an on-premises laboratory to test the quality of the concrete and steel? Are you going to personally verify the entire building's plans? Check whether the geological study was accurate? Follow every worker around to make sure they don't cut corners anywhere?

The less you can trust that the many people involved did their job, the harder and more expensive it gets to actually get the work done, until it turns out it just can't be practically done.

A lack of trust gets you a place like Afghanistan -- where the moment you stop looking stuff starts disappearing.

mike_hearn5• 4 years ago

"you going to set up an on-premises laboratory to test the quality of the concrete and steel?"

This isn't a good example because there are whole infrastructures to verify that buildings are being made "to code" and quality of materials is a part of that. E.g. this lab that tests steel: https://www.leica-microsystems.com/science-lab/steel-the-all...

Now what you're getting at is, OK, now you have to trust the lab. But that's OK because the incentives are better aligned. Trust is a thing with complex shapes. Maybe you develop trust in a single lab because being trusted is their whole business, and now you can easily switch between steel suppliers depending on who can sell the cheapest with peace of mind, so you've moved the trust problem around and reshaped it.

A lot of trust problems in the business world are like this. You can't eliminate it entirely everywhere, but reducing the amount you need and reshaping it/moving it around is still useful.

jacknews2• 4 years ago

I think what you mean by trust here is just a thin layer over a vast system of enforced checks and balances.

Materials standards, building codes, fair contract law, etc, etc, etc, and the courts and police to back it all up.

intrasight• 4 years ago

Trust is expensive

Trust is free. Trust plus verification plus enforcement is expensive. If all we needed was trust, we could save ourselves trillions per year. When our machine overlords arrive, we'll be able to get buy on trust alone ;)

mike_hearn5• 4 years ago

You actually know something about the finance industry, not sure this is the thread for you ;) You're absolutely right about the core problem.

I worked for several years on an 'enterprise blockchain' system. We often called it distributed ledger technology because our platform didn't actually use chains of blocks or proof of work, and it didn't have a token or anything like that. It was essentially a type of database but it had a lot of ideas from Bitcoin in it and was blockchainy enough that customers accepted it as such.

I have to admit, at the very start I was skeptical about why so many large companies seemed to want this stuff. Like Tim, I also spent a lot of time talking to staff at these large institutions to understand where they were coming from. Unlike him I didn't work for AWS which is pretty much the exemplar of centralised infrastructure, so maybe it was easier to pick up on some of the more subtle issues involved.

There are a few things to understand about businesses that decided they wanted blockchain:

1. They have complicated inter-firm communication and synchronization needs.

2. They solve those needs today via creating centralized trusted intermediaries (like CLS). This comes with a world of pain and problems like the obvious "too big to fail" issue that was exposed in 2008, but there's also a lot of less obvious problems, like these institutions immediately becoming stagnant rent seekers who don't innovate.

3. They exist in markets that lack obviously dominant players who can push things forward. Many people in the tech world don't understand this because we rely so heavily on a handful of ultra-profitable, ultra-huge tech firms that spend lots of treasure on giving out freebies and standards setting, but that's abnormal.

So they heard about how Bitcoin can synchronize different companies view of a real financial object like a ledger without a SWIFT-like organization sitting in the middle, and thought "yes that sounds like what we need". And they're kind of right, as long as you think in terms of business problems rather than technology!

"Blockchain" is a concept that works for them speaking in the purely abstract social sense because it acts as a neutral rallying point. If one company in a market observes that maybe having a giant specialized too-big-to-fail clearing house like CLS isn't the ideal way to solve atomic transactions, and they go to their partners saying "hey let's use this cool thing we designed" the answer will always be no because their partners will say, why should we empower our competitor? Blockchain as a concept is owned by nobody, and the core idea is that it empowers nobody, so it acted as an enabler for conversations that would otherwise never have happened. Whether the final result actually uses proof of work or even has blocks at all actually isn't so relevant except in the sense that business owners don't want to get ripped off by people lying to them about what they built.

Tim Bray should really understand this dynamic better than most people because he created XML, which crops up in the enterprise space all over the place, often in ways that aren't really appropriate. Something like protobufs would have been a far better fit but they use XML. Why is that? Well, XML went through a massive hype wave ~20 years ago thanks to the W3C relentlessly pushing this vapourware "semantic web" concept, so for a brief period XML was the future of everything. Again, this created a socially acceptable rallying point at which complex inter-firm business problems could be solved in a relatively decentralized way. The tech got used regardless of merit simply because it was something everyone could agree on and unlike ASN.1 the protocols/tooling was free.

Back to blockchain. The platform I designed for this use case (Corda) was a competitor of the DA platform used in ASX and has done relatively well in the market - it reached number 1 by number of projects using it and unlike the ASX case actually has real deployments that are actually decentralized. Over 90% of Italian banks are using it for inter-bank reconciliation! [1] There are other projects that use it too which seem to be working (I'm not involved in any of them directly and haven't worked on Corda for several years now). You never hear about them on HN because they're too Starship Enterprise to be interesting to the crowd here, but the idea that there are no working blockchain projects isn't actually true.

We managed this partly by walking the tightrope between what people said they wanted (blockchain!) and what they were telling us they actually wanted in customer interviews (what we came to call distributed ledger technology). There was definitely a fair bit of overlap but not enough to just throw Ethereum at a problem and call it solved. What they really needed was a combination of better inter-firm messaging, signing/cryptography, atomic financial transactions without a CLS-style intermediary that actually takes custody of the assets, a robust identity framework, good developer support and training materials etc. Some of this can be found in blockchain related research like BFT algos, others were somewhat solved already, but blending them together into a coherent platform was hard.

There's lots more that can be said about this - some customer projects failed, but the reasons ran the gamut from tech to social/political/business reasons. It wasn't as simple as "blockchain is a scam", which is what Bray seems trying to imply here. There actually is a there, there. It's just really, really hard to solve these problems without a hype wave to coordinate and synchronize intent.

[1] https://www.r3.com/case-studies/spunta/

piaste• 4 years ago

Haha, this beginning was eerie to read:

We often called it distributed ledger technology because our platform didn't actually use chains of blocks or proof of work, and it didn't have a token or anything like that. It was essentially a type of database but it had a lot of ideas from Bitcoin in it and was blockchainy enough that customers accepted it as such.

because it was actually how I selected Corda as the infrastructure for a project a few years ago. The customers and managers wanted Blockchain®, and I wanted to deliver something that actually added some kind of value, and I found Corda which - as I told my CEO - was "close enough to a blockchain that our marketing splash wasn't lying".

(Whereas to my fellow devs, I said more or less "look, it's Spring Boot with a replicated event-sourced database and a funny CLI admin panel")

Unfortunately the project never got past the test stage because - this is gonna shock you - the very first, extremely basic smart contract we encoded in Corda was immediately violated by the customer's processes, and they absolutely refused to change.

Still, I want to thank you because your platform enabled me to retain my dignity without pissing off my boss for a half year or so.

gendal2• 4 years ago

Hi everybody... Richard Brown, CTO of R3, the firm behind Corda, here.

As Mike says, we're somewhat unusual in that there are many live, successful Corda deployments around the world. Mike's comment about how Corda is blockchain-like but not, strictly speaking, a chain of blocks is at the heart of this I think. Here's what I mean:

How many 'introductory' presentations have you been to (or, worse, given) to semi-technical people, where Bitcoin and other public blockchains are 'explained' by describing the components? You probably know the sort of pitch I mean: they laboriously build up the concepts - transactions, signatures, hashes, blocks, chains of blocks, mining, etc, etc. Such presentation are usually correct. But they impart almost no intuition. It's little wonder that so many 'business people' come away from them thinking that a blockchain is some sort of mysterious and magical technology.

There's a presentation I like to give where I go the other way. I give a one-line description of the problem Bitcoin solves [1] and then I help the audience 'invent' Bitcoin for themselves from first principles. There's an old blog post of mine that gives the rough idea [2]. The point is that successful architectures solve well-stated problems. Cargo culting never works.

Where I think many corporate deployments of blockchain went wrong was that they saw the huge enthusiasm for 'blockchain tech', had a vague intuition that 'inter-firm' or 'market-level' problems were ripe to be solved, but they never fully internalised that Bitcoin's (or Ethereum's) architecture isn't some sort of inviolable, handed-down-from-high blueprint... it's merely a very elegant engineering solution to a well-stated 'business problem'.

Yet many 'enterprise blockchain' platforms seemed to begin with the architecture of a public blockchain, and then tweaked it to make it palatable to businesses (eg engineering cumbersome privacy solutions on top to work around the inherently broadcast nature of the public chains). This always felt a bit weird to me.

With Corda, we were fortunate to have been given the time and space by our backers to write down our equivalent of the Bitcoin problem statement, and then to engineer a solution to that problem. Yes - of course, we knew we were in the 'inter-firm business process' space, and we knew the problem we were trying to solve was in some way 'blockchainy' But we did try really quite hard to write down the problem statement [3] and then go forward from there, rather than starting with a pre-existing architecture and then modifying it.

Yes - as Mike says, architecturally it looks a lot like Bitcoin (eg it has an unspent-transaction output data model). But it also has a bunch of other things that, to this day, no other Blockchain has... eg the Flow Framework that allows decentralised inter-firm workflows to be modelled (think temporal.io but without any centralised infrastructure). And, like Mike says, Corda passes data point-to-point and confirms each transaction one at a time - no blocks, no broadcast.

You would not believe HOW MUCH GRIEF we got from the blockchain community for that design in the early days. Yet - several years on, it seems to be working.

[1] I claim that the 'requirement' for which Bitcoin is the solution is: "build me a system of un-censorable digital cash."

[2] https://gendal.me/2014/05/21/bitcoin-mining-the-first-techno...

[3] Our problem statement? "Build me a platform that enables multiple firms to record and manage the lifecycle of the business contracts they have with each other, minimising the need for any new third parties." At least, that's what I thought I was building. Mike might disagree, however... I know he likes the "decentralised database" interpretation of Corda.

loudmax• 4 years ago

Rather than saying trust is expensive, I would express it as trust is precious.

By analogy, sunlight and air are cheap, not expensive, even though we can't live without them. If either of these were in short supply they would become extremely expensive. But since they're abundant we don't normally dwell on their value.

In a civilized society with a stable government, we take trust for granted. That's how society is able to build skyscrapers and shipping terminals and air travel. If society collectively loses trust in itself, we will lose these nice things. Trust is a feature of living in a liberal democracy. Autocracies may manage it too, but their historical record is questionable.

So trust is precious, but I wouldn't express it as trust is expensive because it creates far more value than it costs.

buttersbrian• 4 years ago

Trust is arguably the most expensive thing in society.

For those looking for a fun read about trust read some Francis Fukuyama.

pabe• 4 years ago

People saying a database is as good as a blockchain are taking a look from the wrong perspective.

Blockchains are more like always available, immutable logs for interfacing parties that don't trust each other or an intermediary.

Blockchains are more like an API than a database.

j0hnM1st• 4 years ago

Blockchains normally has a database and then an API. Many of the newer chains uses Rocksdb.

runeks2• 4 years ago

Blockchain was invented to solve one particular problem: distributed consensus on a sequence of transactions, where the choice of which transaction to include from a set of conflicting transactions is irrelevant.

Only if your problem exhibits the above property (and it's a distributed system) does using a blockchain make sense.

Traubenfuchs• 4 years ago

You can just solve this with locking or a (self referencing) unique foreign key constraint on any mainstream SQL db though. If we include programming langues as well, the possible amount of solutions multiplies.

Vespasian3• 4 years ago

As the article's author says at some point society is always built on trust in another entity.

Crypto fully shifts this from the database operator to the software developer and is willing to accept significant trade offs to do so.

Most of the unique complexity and challenges in blockchain technology originates from this.

Terr_2• 4 years ago

Only if your problem exhibits the above property (and it's a distributed system) does using a blockchain make sense.

I think we also need to specify that it's also an extremely distinct and rare type of "distributed": When you must support unrestricted and unlimited creation of new participant nodes.

That's the fundamental requirement that drives an entire cascade of other blockchain design choices, such as proof-of-work to prevent a takeover by sockpuppet-nodes, and mining to incentivize regular consistent participation by a presumed-benign majority. Without that requirement and workarounds, we're left with a kind of regular distributed database, pre-hype technology that already featured hashes and linked-lists.

This requirement ("anybody can become part of the network anonymously") also makes for a great litmus-test for whether you need blockchain.

For example, in national elections we probably don't want/need literally any number of computers anywhere in the world to jump in and deciding what happens based on their CPU power. It would be dramatically faster/easier/safer to simply define a fixed list of nodes, where each state runs a couple plus the federal government, and then rely on the fact that evildoers would have to compromise too many different systems and agencies.

akrymski• 4 years ago

I think the word is "decentralised" rather than distributed: no single authority that controls membership of a distributed system, in a P2P style

pid-1• 4 years ago

I think Byzantine Fault Tolerance is the name of such propriety (being resilient to a limited number of adversarial nodes).

BatteryMountain• 4 years ago

What you are referring to is a distributed ledger, built on top of a blockchain data structure.

The word Blockchain is so overloaded, people forget you can build a "blockchain" in 50 lines of code if not less. "Mining" new blocks is added on top of that, it's not a hard requirement - you can just create new blocks and link them up. You can choose to "mine" on CPU (slow) or on the GPU, if you want "mining" at all. You can then choose to persist it (file or sql or whatever) or only run it in memory. After that you can get into the concept of ledgers and currencies, and after that into making it distributed via some gossip-y protocols.

So a cleaner definition of a block chain would be, a tamper-proof daisy-chained data structure, similar to a linked list. All the stuff about ledgers, currencies, mining and consensus are separate concerns, stacked on top of a blockchain.

Also checkout: Merkle trees, linked lists, Chain of Responsibility.

Anyone agree/disagree?

Nursie11• 4 years ago

Yeah, basically everyone. "Blockchain" as commonly understood was brought into being by Bitcoin, and encapsulates far more than just a linked list with a cryptographic component.

If it doesn't contain a mechanism for trustless, distributed consensus, then it's not really a blockchain in the sense that HN or the wider industry understands it.

Your definition is wide enough to cover a lot of things that are well outside of normal discussion of blockchains. I'm not insinuating this is your goal, but it is a common argumentation tactic of people desperately trying to defend the sector, to widen the definition until they can include within it things like git, and then say "so of course blockchain tech is useful! You're using it!"

cmckn• 4 years ago

I think you’re just describing merkle trees; and “blockchain” in popular usage includes the consensus mechanism (mining or otherwise).

hiq2• 4 years ago

https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2019/02/theres_no_g... explains why talking about "blockchain" for anything but a public blockchain (including consensus etc.) is uninteresting.

iterateofen3• 4 years ago

Git has nothing to do with blockchain and is essentially what you are describing.

There’s already a word for that: distributed version control. We don’t need to move the goal posts on what blockchain is to make it have an interesting use case.

Blockchain is more specific to the consensus part not really about the self proving data structure part.

uncletammy2• 4 years ago

Although I take slight issue with how you've worded it, I think I'm in agreement. I'll attempt to add clarification to the parts I find difficult to parse.

Blockchains only ensure that coins are never spent twice. They make no attempts to ensure that coins are sent to the correct recipients. At the end of the block, they only care that debits are equal to credits.

This can be confusing because the term "double spend" is also frequently used in cryptocurrency in the context of fraud prevention. In this context, you definitely do care that the coins get to the correct recipients but this concern is outside of the functional scope of the blockchain mechanism.

Instead, fraud prevention is typically satisfied through additional code, adjacent to the "blockchain stuff", which establishes signaling networks and transaction inclusion criteria.

They're very different mechanisms inside blockchain clients but, confusingly, they both make frequent use of the term "double spend".

bongobingo1• 4 years ago

Blockchains only ensure that coins are never spent twice. They make no attempts to ensure that coins are sent to the correct recipients. At the end of the block, they only care that debits are equal to credits.

I know the origin is tightly linked to bitcoin, but I feel like even this muddies the definition.

Blockchains are not implicitly related to "coins", more facts? contracts? Maybe that's a useless nit to pick, or only useful in this thread where the GP was trying to layout where blockchains are useful (eg: distributed facts - that happen to often be wealth transfer).

Or do I have it all wrong? I admit to not having much experience with them, but from the few random (non-btc) meet up groups talks I saw a decade ago, it was all about consensus more than anything. Ironically before the current NFT craze, the talk I remember most was one about using NFTs to authenticate stuff like (non-programatically-generated) album/artwork ownership and allowing users to resell in a second hand digital market.

I assume you could build a mastodon like that distributes and "authenticates" posts via a blockchain - perhaps with terrible performance though.

louwrentius2• 4 years ago

What real life use case - that resonates with regular people - would this solve?

Isn’t Blockchain just a convoluted solution to a problem nobody has?

(Which is the conclusion of the article)

oblio18• 4 years ago

What real life use case - that resonates with regular people - would this solve?

The problem that some people really, really hate authority, and frankly, really hate other people, and would like a magical machine to do away with all that messiness.

So they put a million barriers between themselves and that messiness and hope it all works out in the end.

It's like a sort of niche religion.

After the first believers announced their faith, a much, much larger group of grifters realized that they could shout: "FREEDOM! PROFIT! FREEDOM! PROFIT!" and make a ton of money.

Like a real religion, basically, just read up about incense and Christianity to see the real believer versus grifter dichotomy happen in another case.

Anyway, so here we are now :-)

rswail4• 4 years ago

Title conveyancing.

When purchasing a property, there is a dance between the seller and the purchaser (and intermediaries) that effectively perform the necessary transactions to: a) ensure the seller gets paid b) ensure the purchaser gets the property c) ensure that the record of ownership of the property is correctly updated.

This all has to be done simultaneously and atomically.

Moving the records of ownership (ie "title") to the blockchain and then having the appropriate contracts/transactions to ensure the points above solve the conveyancing problems.

But, given that for the most part, the title that declares ownership is essentially a legal document, and that legal documents only have power because of the laws that are enforced, there's no advantage to blockchain that can't be also solved by a central trust registry that maintains the records.

netfortius• 4 years ago

I am sorry, but I think I am missing something here: isn't the "double spend problem" actually needing to be resolved by the choice of including one specific transaction (and no others), from a set of conflicting ones, truly relevant (vs. irrelevant)?

nosianu2• 4 years ago

The point is that it does not matter which one is included, only that it's only one of the choices that all agree on. Which one that is is not relevant, there is no part of the algorithm that determines one transaction to be "more valid" than another one. There is no ranking of transactions, one of them has to be picked but which one it is can be random, as long as there is agreement.

Also see the response from and sub-thread from uncletammy.

paulgb3• 4 years ago

Yes, a specific transaction needs to be chosen as the consensus transaction. But if there are multiple to choose from (e.g. in the case of an attempted double spend), the miner can choose either one.

The blockchain doesn’t guarantee, for example, that the transaction which appeared earlier will always be chosen (in practice, it’s likely the one with the highest transaction fee)

nathias5• 4 years ago

the original purpose of an invention does not limit the scope of its application

paulgb3• 4 years ago

No, but ignoring the design criteria that an invention solves for is a recipe for using the wrong tool for the job.

crypot• 4 years ago

The book How Innovation Works by Matt Ridley changed my perspective on this. Originally I thought all innovation was like the dotcom era. Ridley attempts to show that there are times when it is not always clear what the final innovation will be.

danbruc• 4 years ago

No, that its not the problem that bitcoin solves. You can do distributed consensus just fine without a block chain - if you have to make a choice between two options, everyone broadcasts a vote for one of the options and the option with the most votes is the accepted option.

The problem that bitcoin solves is that you can not prevent me from casting a million votes because the system is anonymous - or pseudonymous if you want - and therefore there is no list of participants that would prevent casting more than one vote. This is called a Sybil attack.

Bitcoin's solution - and similarly that of other block chains - is to make casting a vote expensive, either in terms of computational resources or owned tokens or whatever.

CPLX2• 4 years ago

Compared to paper ballots it makes casting a ballot cheaper, more opaque, and less accountable.

TimJRobinson12• 4 years ago

I used to think this, but working with DeFi on Ethereum for a while I've realized the killer feature is actually permissionless composability. Which is why enterprise block chains make little sense.

Having one neutral platform, controlled by no one, with standardized API's and immutable open programs that anyone can permissionlessly build on - is amazing.

We've never had this before, and it's incredible how fast the DeFi space is moving because of it. I work for a platform (Balancer) that has had over 20 different companies (Aave, Element, CopperLaunch, Gyro, Aura, Hidden Hand) build financial applications on top of our tech stack in the last 2 years.

Then there are different wallets (Metamask, Rainbow, Ledger), aggregators (1inch, Matcha, 0x), portfolio management tools (Zapper, Zerion, DeFi Saver).

All of these work with each other mostly out of the box and without any formal partnerships between anyone. This is a radical new way of building finance and it's the fastest paced industry I've ever been a part of.

It's similar to AWS where it got exponentially more valuable as each new service was added - but the entire world can contribute to it. Like AWS people didn't understand the value initially, but over time they realized how big of a deal it was as more and more components were added.

delaaxe2• 4 years ago

Completely agree

dsco• 4 years ago

See this is where HN has fallen off a cliff, the top commented Runeks supplies a highly theoretical and nonchalant answer to what blockchains _can_ be. That’s been the majority of HNs take on the technology. But the Internet was made for text communication and here we are decades later with social media and streaming video.

TimJRobinson at least states something which is rare on HN, a take on blockchain technology with experimental instead of theoretical knowledge on the subject matter.

dtoma• 4 years ago

Having one neutral platform, controlled by no one, with standardized API's and immutable open programs that anyone can permissionlessly build on - is amazing.

Isn't that also an open door to bad actors?

RandomLensman3• 4 years ago

My best guess is that unless the rules around large-scale finance change, in the end permissionless composability will go away and the platforms will get controls of some sort, e.g, who can do what, reporting requirements, KYC, ... And that also does not have to come just from direct rules, but could come via capital requirements when touching such systems or users of such systems.

candiddevmike• 4 years ago

What is the benefit of deploying something on a platform controlled by no one? Why not just run all of those things on a server you own?

anonymousDan• 4 years ago

Good comment. While a lot of the complaints about blockchain are valid issues, the argument that it is useless and could be replaced with a database always makes me roll my eyes given the fundamental benefit is the open nature of the platform. Nonetheless, I think the key issue is scalability/performance.

super256• 4 years ago

It's similar to AWS where it got exponentially more valuable as each new service was added

But... I have yet to see a service which really adds value. All I've seen so far are:

A) collection games, which are not different from collecting Pokémon for real money.

B) liquidity PvP, where users open leveraged bets to hunt other market participants' stops/liquidations, so the hunter can reduce their position for cheap, which the hunted takes a loss (this is not different from tradfi).

I am looking at Aave right now, and all I see is a speculation platform with tokens instead of currencies. So basically, you guys are re-inventing what tradfi had years ago, just with worthless(?) tokens instead of debt backed assets. I am assuming they are worthless because every project you have mentioned is optimized for USD cash inflow, as you have "buy crypto with fiat"-buttons on almost every project[1][2][3], but no way to cash out to fiat. Furthermore, the staking feature from AAVE seems to only artificially decrease supply, so prices rise. What's the value proposition here?

Anyway, I don't really think that this stuff is even remotely comparable to AWS.

[1] https://app.aave.com/ (press "more" on the nav bar)

[2] https://zerion.io/ (FAQ > "just tap the blue button in the center of your screen, select ‘Buy’, and you will be taken to the dialogue window where you can buy crypto with a credit or debit card.")

[3] https://blog.1inch.io/transak-fiat-on-ramp-provider-is-integ...

pjkundert23• 4 years ago

You're dead on. It's staggering in its power -- permissionless composability, even if most of the data is not on-chain, and the programs are very limited in size/complexity due to the expense of running them.

Now, imagine a system where all of the data is also on-chain, and the programs you can compose are full-complexity applications... All while maintaining every independent program's data invariant in a completely decentralized manner, with transaction rates that grow linearly with the DHT size.

Such a system is now in public beta. It could be world-changing (at least for programmers).

dmitriid16• 4 years ago

controlled by no one, with standardized API's

Controlled by no one, but suddenly standardized APIs exist. Who standardized them?

Controlled by no one, but suddenly everyone is going to use those standardized APIs that appeared by magic. And even those entities that never ever used open or standardized APIs will rush to use them because blockchain.

We've never had this before, and it's incredible how fast the DeFi space is moving because of it

Theres nothing amazing about companies busy reinventing flash loans and currency speculation.

This is a radical new way of building finance and it's the fastest paced industry I've ever been a part of.

It's only fast because it deals in fantasy tokens in a very limited scope with zero oversight or regulation. And this space is busy re-discovering why these regulations exist in the first place.

Like AWS people didn't understand the value initially

Most people understood AWS value initially. 2-3 years after launch everyone understood AWS. Now everyone uses it.

AWS provided, and still provides, a multitude of services that are actually useful. Where as the "fast moving space" offers nothing outside the "buy low sell high flash loan" hamster wheel that is "defi"?

I think a lot of HN doesn't get it because they don't work in finance, but everyone I've talked to who works in finance (or has to deal with their archaic systems) is really excited about the possibilities.

There are very very few people in finance who are excited about it. For many, many, many reasons.

Those who are excited are excited for all the wrong reasons: scams, speculations, unlimited investor money. The last one will probably go away soon. Speculations are only valuable as long as the fictional tokens are valuable for some definition of value. There's almost nothing else in the crypto space.

kranke1554• 4 years ago

Thank you. I feel like the tide is finally turning on this. The Ethereum VM (and its derivatives) is one of the biggest innovations in recent history.

I've been yelling at the top of my lungs why NFTs have revolutionized digital art and happy to see the top comment nails it - a zero trust verification environment makes it possible to sell it on an open global market. This just wasn't there before.

Blockchains are useless takes are already out of date.

cactus2093• 4 years ago

It is a neat property but lines like this trip me up: "it's incredible how fast the DeFi space is moving because of it".

The crypto/dapp/defi/etc spaces have supposedly been "moving incredibly fast" and "all the smartest people are working on it" for ~5 years now. That's a long time to be moving really fast without really getting anywhere. Where's the payoff?

To me this space feels like a solution without a real problem. The decentralized part is a neat trick, but on the margin a centralized authority to mediate financial platforms is more good than bad.

_9omd3• 4 years ago

the killer feature is actually permissionless composability

This right here is it! Everyone is always focused on the main feature being decentralization, but decentralization isn't a feature, it's an implementation detail. Decentralization is certainly a requirement for these goals, but permissionlessness is the goal. I'll note that permisionless for users, in the ability to create accounts and send transactions is every bit as import as permisionless building.

This is why I think the term DeFi misses the mark a bit, because it's a nod to the implementation (decentralized) rather than the features (open and permissionless). But at the end of the day I think it's catchier than something like OpenFi, and the terminology is set at this point.

rightttttt• 4 years ago

The issue with this story is this:

Governments will not protect something they have no control over. When they regulate it, that control will come in. Some of the things you speak about will disappear.

Kinda like if you have a wife and you care about her if she is loyal. But once she cheats you don't care anymore. Similar situation between unregulated financial systems and the government.

primax• 4 years ago

The main problem is when weighing these things is not blockchain advocate honestly asks the question: "why is this better than using a simple relational database, in a way that makes all the extra complexity worthwhile?"

deanCommie5• 4 years ago

Hidden Hand is a marketplace for governance incentives, commonly referred to as "bribes". Protocols can leverage Hidden Hand to enable more efficient governance processes and to engage their voters, while users can earn extra yield on their favorite vote escrowed governance tokens through bribes.

https://hiddenhand.finance/

I...i mean this just speaks for itself doesn't it?

onetrickwolf2• 4 years ago

A reason I have been interested in blockchain is that it seems like a good way to make a decentralized application that could exist beyond the life of the company or person that creates it.

I work in a hobby industry where a lot of community run ledgers are suddenly lost forever due to the death of someone in the fandom (or rarely intentional sabotage or hacking).

Would this be a good use for blockchain or are there maybe other solutions I'm not considering or aware of?

constantcrying• 4 years ago

A blockchain requires significant, persistent and consistent community effort.

If you can not have one guy taking up the mantle and doing the hosting, how can you get hundreds to do the same?

A reason I have been interested in blockchain is that it seems like a good way to make a decentralized application that could exist beyond the life of the company or person that creates it.

Community run projects have existed for decades on the internet. They never needed a blockchain to persist. If they died, they died due to lack of interest and effort by their communities. A blockchain can not prevent that.

maybe other solutions I'm not considering or aware of? IPFS potentially.

atypeoferror• 4 years ago

Maybe I am a confused luddite, but it seems telling that this argument immediately launches into the solution space of a problem that is itself created by the presence of a blockchain.

Double-spend has been solved by the financial sector quite some time ago. The distributed system part - I guess this is the problem that I think the article is claiming is yet to be found.

politician• 4 years ago

Double-spend has been solved by the financial sector.

Traditional finance offers “at-most-one spend”while blockchain protocols offer “one spend up to 1/3 malicious nodes”.

The limit on the former is government, and Byzantine Fault Tolerance sets the limit on the latter.

Government can unilaterally seize “your” funds in traditional banking, while a substantial computational attack is required to cause a loss of confidence event (double spend) on a particular blockchain.

_9omd3• 4 years ago

I think the confusion is the parent is talking about an implementation detail (blockchain), rather than the main problem cryptocurrency actually solves. Cryptocurrency solves for internet based financial sovereignty. Whether or not you think that's important to the world is a different discussion.

rswail4• 4 years ago

Double spend was solved by the use of cash money, not the financial sector.

If I give you a coin (or paper money), then by definition I don't have it any more. I can't spend it twice.

Accounting with transactions netting to zero ("double entry") solved the problem of recording transactions in an immutable way on a ledger, assuming you control the ledger.

Clearing houses solved the problem of interparty risk when settling (by using an intermediary that controls the ledger of transactions between parties).

Title registries solved the problem of "ownership" by creating the concept of a "title" (ie a government backed identification of property that is recognized by law that the bearer "owns"). Title registries (like "Torrens titles" invented in Australia) solve the bearer problem by having a central ledger of title holding.

Blockchain can "solve" the ledger parts of these elements. But the ledger being immutable doesn't solve the problem of recognition of title (see NFTs). By adding the machinations of "mining" and "proof of stake/work", blockchains can be extended to include the "title" as part of the ledger itself. The mining transaction effectively creates something that is initially owned by the miner.

Ethereum adds to the "intelligence" of the transactions stored on the ledger, adding elements of computation to each one.

All the rest of it, all the invented coins etc, the "exchanges", etc etc ad infinitum are attempts to map these ledgers back to fiat currencies so that "actual" money can be made.

api• 4 years ago

There is one other case where a structure like a block chain can make sense. It’s an easy way to build an unalterable log. If you give me hash 200000 in the chain I know that log entries 0-200000 are all unaltered.

This is perhaps the simplest easiest use case for a hash based linked list. Of course this is not the complete picture of what cryptocurrencies are; the hash list is just part of the system.

iterateofen3• 4 years ago

That tech exists without blockchain in a distributed way. Look at Git or GitHub.

Saying that is a unique feature or reason to use blockchain is similar to saying blockchain can add two numbers together so we should use it to build a calculator.

ninepoints• 4 years ago

This is such a narrow view on the problem because you also have to restrict the "make sense" part to the set of problems where it's ok to have the entire ledger in public view, not to mention that there are other mechanisms to accomplish the double spend issue

badrabbit5• 4 years ago

A lot of applications have that problem though.

Take a text editor, it would be improved if edits or saves which are just transactions are stores on a blockchain if the text is being stored and shared synchronously and live between devices.

Basically, people have more devices, want to collaborate and add redundancies to important systems which means changes to data (transaction) where the historical sequence of changes is important to someone can use blockchain, but of course it isn't neccesarily the best solution, especially if there is trust between nodes or out of sync nodes causing a mess can be solves by simpler solutions.

smoldesu5• 4 years ago

Blockchains wouldn't fix anything here, though. The last-connected device doesn't necessarily have the canonical file, and the blockchain doesn't have any way to resolve syncing conflicts. Git is a much better choice for transactional history, and it didn't need a blockchain to implement this concept.

la647103• 4 years ago

This problem has been solved in numerous prior computer architecture most notably in the algorithms around leader selection in clusters or very wide distributed systems. The implementation varies from one use case to another but the point is the problem or solution is not new at all and blockchain is certainly not the earliest and most elegant solution for this.

avereveard• 4 years ago

Out of curiosity which solution operate in a zero trust environment?

QuantumGood• 4 years ago

"Absolute power corrupts absolutely", and blockchain has activated absolute greed in most, hence blockchain not really being developed for anything that is not Ponzi-like.

fatneckbeardz• 4 years ago

reading this, it struck me how ironic crypto was built to "stop the doublespend" but here we have all these crypto exchanges doing things way worse than that.

company minting their own token and then using it as collateral, accounting it as if they had billions. the "stable coins" cannot produce basic accounting audits that a low level book-keeper could do on any normal business.

there has been so much fraud in crypto the past few years. and the algorithm did not help to stop that.

BenoitP3• 4 years ago

In case anyone needs a thorough source to explain why you don't need a Blockchain, I found the NIST paper (esp the flowchart on page 42) quite helpful:

https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/ir/2018/nist.ir.8202.pdf

It worked wonderfully to cut the BS coming from a greedy manager, in a non confrontational way ("so, what do you actually need?" , "you say 'security', but which aspect do you need? immutability ? non-repudiability? confidentiality??"). I think NIST's clout helped, along that they'd have to fully understand a 65 page report. I'm sure the content of the report would have been quite eye-opening, but that wasn't needed. Greed is a feeling, not a rational process.

dandanua2• 4 years ago

That's an excellent flowchart. BTW, there is a real example of meaningful blockchain use for auditing single source data (the "caveat" in the flowchart). It's the hypercore protocol https://hypercore-protocol.org/

BenoitP3• 4 years ago

That's very interesting. Would you mind coming up with a concrete and detailed business case? In this example you will provide, who are the entities with write access? How do they have a hard time deciding who should be control of the data store?

wodenokoto• 4 years ago

With regards to the land markers.

You could have a database at the government land authority. If markers in the field don't match up with records, the land authority will ask police to correct the issue.

If neither police nor land authority can be trusted to keep records and uphold the law, who is going to help you when a marker in the field doesn't match up to some distributed database?

Big land owner will say "I don't know anything about that record in the sky. But look at this land marker on the ground. That's reality!" and with no police, who is going to help you?

jeremyjh2• 4 years ago

Well suppose you nominally have the support of local government and police, but in practice they can bought cheaply, and suddenly the records match what the large landholder says instead of the markers you used to have. An immutable record would help solve this, but the point stands that it is not convincing that you need a blockchain or that it would solve the problem. How would you get local government to buy into it in the first place? If the national government is willing to force them, they could just manage a database with immutable records.

ceejayoz2• 4 years ago

An immutable record adds problems.

What do you do when a river moves? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croatia%E2%80%93Serbia_border_...

Who owns new land in Hawaii when the volcano meets the sea? https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/who-owns-the-land-created-...

What happens when someone makes a surveying mistake and enters that permanently into the blockchain?

jasonhansel6• 4 years ago

You don't even need a database with immutable records. You just need to make the contents of the database public, so that people can archive a copy and thus easily tell when the data has been altered.

pornel• 4 years ago

Imagine that the govt and the police actually treated the blockchain record as the infallible final source of truth, without any ifs and buts, without any traditional database on the side overriding what the blockchain says.

If an attacker came to your house, kicked your ass until you give your private key, and then transferred the land to themselves on the blockchain — the land would be fully legally theirs now! It's a valid transaction, and the courts can't reverse it — there's one source of truth, and it's cryptographically unchangeable without the private key. That's what the blockchain says, and the police will evict you from your own house.

(and then to prevent that you build enough off-chain trust systems, escrows, and side databases on top, and courts gain ability to dictate changes, and the actual blockchain becomes an irrelevant implementation detail).

ex3ndr2• 4 years ago

Very big article that basically buried the core difference: zero trust or some "trusted transaction manager".

Moving from the second to the first is very trivial - just make it based on distributed consensus of nodes that are run by separate entities, may be even several different cloud vendors.

AWS also doesn't have some interesting things from crypto-world - smart contracts, that are just like lambda functions that couldn't be altered in any way and could be trusted by third-party. They have Nitro Enclaves, this is close, but quite hard to use.

abiro2• 4 years ago

The new thing with blockchain tech is that we can now enforce invariants on state transitions in a decentralized manner. Paired with non-interactive zero-knowledge cryptography, we can also enforce those invariants while keeping the confidentiality of transactions.

The tech is rapidly improving and it’s pretty easy to see where things are going from here: soon we’ll have general purpose decentralized databases where data is open as open source code is open. In fact, state-of-the-art smart chains can be viewed as special (financial) purpose decentralized databases.

As to why decentralized databases are desirable: imagine if you could fork databases like you can fork code in a completely permission-less manner. This is how web development would look like:

You, the programmer, take a look at a public data schema (eg. a smart contract that implements the ERC-721 interface) and decide to build on top of it. Then, a user, who has already interacted with what you built on, decides that they like what you built and lets your app use their data. You, the programmer, can be sure that the data you built on remains available, and the user can be sure that they'll be able to port the data produced by your app into new apps.

quickthrower22• 4 years ago

This somewhat assumes blockchain can also deliver on privacy. Perhaps full encryption of the data is enough. But who is paying for all the nodes?

Another way to do this without the blockchain is open standards (think… HTML for example!) and software that lets you export. Where possible run this software open source on the desktop or as an open source web app. Think Photopea as the pinnacle here.

The blockchain or no blockchain approachable both suffer when you have a data format per app locking you into that app anyway.

abiro2• 4 years ago

Re costs: it’s decreasing rapidly. Solana is within 100x of DynamoDB prices so costs are soon becoming negligible. At that point costs can be taken over by the app developer or paid by users on a subscription basis. There are also decentralized consensus mechanisms that don’t rely on paying fees (FBA, delay functions). Idk which will succeed.

Re open standards and “software that lets you export”: we’ve had this for the past 30 years and see how it turned out.

Re lock in: no, in a decentralized database, the data schema is public which means it’s trivial to write an app that works with another app’s data.

seu• 4 years ago

Dear Reader: I think that at some point, in a civilization, there has to be trust. I think that’s maybe the main reason we have civilizations. Call me crazy.

Dead on

andirk• 4 years ago

Pure freedom is what we came from and what we don't want to go back to.

jcbrand• 4 years ago

Disclaimer: speaking only of Bitcoin, the utility of the larger crypto space is somewhat questionable.

Yes, there will always be a need for trust, and Bitcoin doesn't change that. What it does is actually facilitate more, rather than less, trust.

By having a rock-solid form of money with a well-known, immutable monetary policy and issuance rate, that doesn't rely on any single entity and is very difficult to corrupt, all kinds of trust-related issues (moral hazard, Cantillon effect, theft of purchasing power) are resolved.

In addition, commerce and exchange between strangers can more easily be facilitated based on such a system rather than one that relies on multiple intermediaries.

If I can have cryptographic proof of escrow in a multi-sig wallet (2 of 3, where there is a trusted (!) 3rd party), I might be willing to do a transaction with someone I might otherwise not (e.g. due to a lack of trust that they have the funds available).

_9omd3• 4 years ago

Spot on. I think part of the problem is in the common framing of cryptocurrencies as trustless. At the end of the day there is trust in every human made system, blockchain or not. With Bitcoin, you're still trusting that all of the developers, miners, and users won't decided to increase the block reward at any point in the future.

So what's the point of Bitcoin (and other cryptos) from a risk management perspective if it's not actually trustless. It gives you exposure to a significantly different risk profile, and one that can be better reasoned about. You're no longer at the whim of governments and corporations, but instead a loosely "organized" set of developers, miners, and users. And we can reason about what those actors will do, based on human psychology and the fact that people tend to act in their financial best interest. And Bitcoin is setup in such a way that the system operates correctly when the participants behave this way.

roenxi• 4 years ago

This situation could be contrasted with the other (successful) distributed consensus policy - democratic governance.

- No applications in commercial environments.

- I've seen 10-20 people in my life who can explain the details of why Democracy is a good choice. Most people, for example, fail to identify that the typical democracy is much better at fighting then winning wars than any alternative.

Blockchains could turn out to be similar technology. It is still too early to write them off. There just needs to be one big application, and it'll be something simple but also something that hasn't been done before because it was impossible to organise.

xiphias2• 4 years ago

Blockchain in itself is nothing else, just a chain of blocks (linked list of bunch of data with cryptographic hash of the previous block stored in the blocks).

It's an amazing data structure, but putting money in it is no different than putting money into hash maps (which is another great data structure): it doesn't make sense in itself.

What some companies and VCs really want to do (and are doing) is reputation laundering: invest a bit of money in some crypto tokens, and sell them to retail investors for much higher price.

Of course after FTX collapsed they have to wait a few years to do it again.

dynjo• 4 years ago

I've lost count of how many product owners have interchanged the word Database with Blockchain to try and score some PR points with their customers/bosses.

davide_v• 4 years ago

In Italy a famous news website is using blockchain since 2020 to, I quote literally: "help readers check source of news", "strengthen bonds of trust between its organization and its readers and customers", "trace the history and source of each news item."

News (EN): https://www.ansa.it/english/news/science_tecnology/2020/04/0...

Example of news in the blockchain: https://blockchain.check.ansa.it/landing/b150aff9f028f7339f0...

The first time I saw it I was quite surprised. I'd like to hear opinions about it here. Eg: it's blockchain stricly necessary here?

Arkhaine_kupo2• 4 years ago

If they add every revision on it, it could be interesting, but i doubt they do that.

One interesting thing I have been seeing recently is newspapers quickly changing news a few hours after they posted it, in reaction to public opinion of said news (or maybe some editorial "request").

In th BBC its quite egregious, they have been posting some news, and a few hours later changing the headline and the photo, to either something meaner and an uglier photo of the same person, or the opposite, a much more neutral/flaterring headline and a PR photo of the person.

If those changes were on the blockchain, UK citizens could demand their money back for what they pay for the BBC as it is a ridiculous practice that should not be paid by taxes. But again, I doubt the Italian newspapers saves their own slanted coverage for their own users to see.

anon4002325• 4 years ago

Share a link demonstrating the BBC's egregiousness please.

hiq2• 4 years ago

What does that bring on top of TLS?

If you want to check whether an article ever appeared (even if it's no longer there), then something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_Transparency would be enough.

No that's not a blockchain, at least not for a useful definition of blockchain (see https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2019/02/theres_no_g...).

sebo2000• 4 years ago

You guys have issues with elections and vote couting. I think Blockchain would solve this problem once and for all, but I'm afraid it is not a problem anyone wants to solve...

pjkundert23• 4 years ago

Just like CBDCs. The only problem they are designed to "solve" is the problem of you having liberty.

But that's a PR disaster, so the authorities proposing these things have to convince you that they're solving some more important problem -- like "all the baaad people" using money. Hopefully, you'll soon forget you used to have that liberty.

PeterisP2• 4 years ago

Specifically for election security, the key problem that's not easy to solve via blockchain is ensuring a hidden ballot - namely, that after voting there must be no way for you to verify how your specific vote was counted to someone who might be coercing or bribing you, but you still want to verify that the votes were counted properly. A physical ballot box mixing up envelopes under supervision of representatives of all the parties trivially solves that, a block chain does not.

You also need a mechanism for preventing (or invalidating afterwards) votes made remotely under coercion/bribery - current mechanisms for handling mail-in votes implement mitigations for that, but a fully digital remote voting makes it tricky.

Also, one of the major discussion points regarding USA voting is the eligibility of voters, ensuring that certain people are prevented from voting, but that eligible people can vote without requiring a centralized ID. Again, blockchain only makes this problem more difficult.

And finally, by far the most important factor of vote counting is having the losing voters trust that the votes were counted fairly - and a formal mathematical proof is bad at that (for the majority of voters) compared to a relatively simpler, clearer physical system.

ak_111• 4 years ago

reminds me of my post where i tried to understand blockchain in good faith:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31132610

underdeserver• 4 years ago

[Andy Jassey] said something like this: “All these leaders [CIOs and CTOs of huge enterprises] are asking me what our blockchain strategy is. They tell me that everyone’s saying it’s the future, the platform that’s going to obsolete everything else. I need to have a good answer for them. I’ll be honest, when they explain why it’s wonderful I just don’t get it. You guys got to go figure it out for us.”

To me the tell is not just that Andy didn't understand.

It's that all of these leaders said "everyone says it's the future", but not one of them said "I have this problem and here's how blockchain solves it for me."

TrackerFF3• 4 years ago

I recently attended a trade show, which mostly revolved around emerging ML/AI and other "hot" tech products in the market.

So it actually seems that in the logistics line of things like manufacturing / production / etc. there is a place for blockchain, mainly due to the immutability and decentralized distribution properties. What could take a whole week to track down using older methods, takes seconds if all the data is recorded on the blockchain...for example, food production. You want to find out exactly which animal your food comes from, and all the things involved (use of antibiotics? which factory? how did the product travel before ending up at your grocery store? etc.).

Some researchers working on these products repeated that they often get approached by directors and CxO level people regarding this - wondering if blockchain can "solve problems". And every time, they have to reply: Using the blockchain can solve some specialized problems, but there's no magic fairy dust involved, and it's not some general structure which will solve all their problems.

Unfortunately, it's kind of like AI. High-level directors dream of General AI, but you need to explain to them that it's all ML models which aid (replace if you're lucky) workers, and automate some tasks.

I think any CTO worth their salt should know these things, and manage the expectations of the other C-suite executives.

masklinn3• 4 years ago

So it actually seems that in the logistics line of things like manufacturing / production / etc. there is a place for blockchain, mainly due to the immutability and decentralized distribution properties. What could take a whole week to track down using older methods, takes seconds if all the data is recorded on the blockchain...for example, food production. You want to find out exactly which animal your food comes from, and all the things involved (use of antibiotics? which factory? how did the product travel before ending up at your grocery store? etc.).

Literally none of that should involve (let alone requires) a blockchain.

throwoutway2• 4 years ago

they’ve been talking about that agtech solution for over 5 years and no one has built it? They could do the same with a database

Karunamon8• 4 years ago

So it actually seems that in the logistics line of things like manufacturing / production / etc. there is a place for blockchain, mainly due to the immutability and decentralized distribution properties. What could take a whole week to track down using older methods, takes seconds if all the data is recorded on the blockchain...for example, food production. You want to find out exactly which animal your food comes from, and all the things involved (use of antibiotics? which factory? how did the product travel before ending up at your grocery store? etc.).

The usual shitty dismissive HN response to this would be something like "but that doesn't require a block chain it could just be a database".

To those people I would ask who is running that database? What are their incentives?

Forget about the currency uses of block chains for a moment. The fact that you have this distributed network, controlled by nobody in particular but with their incentives aligned to keep it running and keep it secure, means that you have a platform you can build other stuff on top of.

An Ethereum smart contract is a type of append only database, the code of which is strongly open source and very battle tested (basically everyone is using openzeppelin), where you do not have to care about where or by who it is being hosted, with an uptime that puts every hosting provider in existence today to shame.

Chico75• 4 years ago

I'm not sure I see why or how would blockchain solve this information centralization problem better than other "classic" tools?

diseasedyak• 4 years ago

I'm still trying to wrap my head around how a blockchain would be helpful, even in your example. How is tracking say, a cow, from farm to lot to slaughterhouse, and knowing what all was done to said cow, not simply something that could be done easily and fast with a database?

Is the portability of the blockchain the thing? I could see maybe how that would help, if there wasn't a standard across the databases involved or something.

Honestly just trying to understand, thanks!

UncleMeat• 4 years ago

Published transparency records work without blockchains. Certificate Transparency is an example of a project that does this without all the mess of blockchains. And that also works well because it operates on purely digital things - once you start having to unify a physical object with a digital record all the usual supply-chain-management problems re-emerge.

FlacoJones• 4 years ago

most of the problems blockchain attempts to solve are public coordination problems in adversarial environments rather than corporate problems the CTOs/CIOs are likely to have.

time_to_smile• 4 years ago

I think one of the hardest parts of becoming an expert in a technical area is the transition from "I don't understand so I must be wrong" to "I don't understand so something must be wrong or I'm not seeing something".

When you're more junior you often make the mistake of wrongly dismissing ideas because you think you are very clever. I find that by the time you unlearn this, you typically should reverse direction.

Early in my career, every time something didn't make sense, it's because I had a misunderstanding of how things really worked.

Much later in my career I started to realize more and more often when I said "this doesn't make sense" I would start assuming I was the one missing something, only to time and time again uncover some one else had messed up or that something else was fundamentally wrong.

Obviously even the most expert in their field should reserve some probability that they are misunderstanding, but learning to recognize that you are an expert and that you not understanding something is in fact smoke is an important late career skill.

pavlov• 4 years ago

The events described here took place in 2016, over six years ago. That's a long time in technology!

Since then additional billions of investment dollars have flowed into the space (a "VC crypto spasm" as the author calls it). Yet zero meaningful products have emerged. But we've witnessed many giant scams and endless crypto startups that happily spun their wheels producing nothing, just minting tokens so that insiders and investors can dump them onto retail investors.

How long will this have to go on? There are real things to build in software. This nonsense is both an embarrassment to the profession as well as a giant distraction. Time spent thinking about cryptocurrency mindgames is time you'll never get back to use on something productive.

arcturus172• 4 years ago

Any moment now…

I think in any other space, if you had millions of people (some of them wicked smart) m looking for applications of a technology without results, you’d see the space dwindle into irrelevance quickly…

Crypto is very special in this sense. Despite massive failures and frauds at scale, people keep flocking to it. Is it the promise of unlimited riches, the romantic aspects of it (“decentralization”, etc.), something else altogether?

I don’t know, but to answer your question: I get the feeling that despite the FTX case crypto still has many years ahead of it, regardless of whether it ever produces positive outcomes.

markdestouches7• 4 years ago

Crypto is very special in this sense.

I noticed crypto's quality of being special is in reverse proportion to the Fed's interest rates. Just an observation.

In all seriousness, the are two real drivers here: 1) speculation 2) money laundering and avoiding regulation in general. These are the things that keep crypto afloat and cryptomaniacs repeating promises of the next big thing that's gonna change everything tomorrow. The real question is what's gonna happen sooner, Tesla's fool self-driving to Mars or blockchains taking over the world.

matai_kolila2• 4 years ago

I was able to circumvent my state's betting laws using Litecoin, so that feels meaningful, heh...

rglover• 4 years ago

How long will this have to go on?

As long as money flows into it (which seems to be ending) and people accept that Bitcoin was the "killer app," as the kids say.

Everything else was just slower database apps jazzed up with buzzwords front-run by narcissists who realized they needed a new grift beyond Uber for Cats.

tiffanyh• 4 years ago

Off topic: isn’t Amazon know for forcing people to be better writers due to how they conduct meetings with written memos.

I bring this up because that post could have been 1/2 the length, if not shorter, without losing any content or messaging.

acdha12• 4 years ago

Different styles for different audiences. Busy executives want concise pitches because they receive a ton of them, people reading a long-running blog are looking more for the color and background of a personal blog.

aniijbod2• 4 years ago

Ironic that CBDC systems are being built on a technology exclusively aimed at eliminating the C in that acronym.

pjkundert23• 4 years ago

How so?

Central Bank Digital Currencies are being implemented exclusively on systems that allow the "Central" authority to absolutely ensure that nobody except that central authority can control every transaction in those ledgers.

And I don't think you meant the "C" in "Currency".

aniijbod2• 4 years ago

Ironic that CBDC systems are being built on a technology exclusively aimed at eliminating the C in that acronym.

Thanks Pjkundert, you're correct I should have said 'first C".

What I meant was that it was ironic that CBDCs are being constructed using systems that use blockchain, i.e., centralised systems, designed to deliver centralised currencies, based upon technology exclusively designed to deliver decentralised currencies.

alex440440• 4 years ago

TL;DR anyone? I couldn't care less about communication skills of Andy and whether some meeting was in person, before even getting a hint of what is the point of that post.

drdrek• 4 years ago

Only thing annoying the the flood of negative articles only pop up after a crash. All that VC money made a lot of people afraid to look like fools by speaking up against the tech. Where was he (not personally, as a symbol of tech bloggers) at the height of the bubble?

acdha12• 4 years ago

Speaking up?

https://mobile.twitter.com/timbray/status/963115533825527808

https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2021/06/26/Shorting-...

culi• 4 years ago

Blockchain needs a good "winter" imo. Stuff like hashgraph and some other non-proof of work protocols have a lot of potential but there's way too much hype in the industry and way too much investment ensuring BTC's dominance for them to ever really emerge

gilbetron• 4 years ago

Bundle up because winter seems to be here ;)

jgreen10• 4 years ago

When I was in university around 15 years ago, the idea of peer-to-peer currency was floating around as an evolution of the tit-for-tat idea in BitTorrent, which was still popular at the time.

The expectation back then was that peer-to-peer would continue to evolve, especially in the area of distributed computing. Clouds did not exist yet, but projects like SETI@Home were having some success in terms of sharing compute resources. A peer-to-peer network could meter you for your consumption of compute resources through a lot of microtransactions in a virtual currency that avoided traditional banks or credit card providers.

Then came the first and least efficient implementation of peer-to-peer currency: Bitcoin, which did not sell the distributed computing capacity, but used it to do meaningless computations. It was clever, since up until that point the problem of zero-cost identity had been unaddressed, but appears to have few practical applications. It is surprising to me that people view it as some kind of alternative currency or store of value and send real currency to "trusted" exchanges. You deposit money just for the pleasure of doing a transaction? Yeh, sure, you don't need to agree on a global, trusted intermediary, but you still need to trust your exchange not to screw you over.

Ethereum is closer to the original ideas behind distributed computing and peer-to-peer currency, but the Internet has largely moved on from peer-to-peer networks. Today I can instantly get all the compute resources I need in a trustworthy, secure environment, and only pay for what I use. BitTorrent has also lost a lot much of its relevance with streaming services providing a greater level of convenience.

starkd• 4 years ago

Amid all this sudden blockchain skepticism, one question remains prominent in my mind: where were all these skeptics when blockchain enthusiasm was on the rise?

Sure, hindsight is 20/20, but you have to wonder if this chorus of I-toldya-so's were genuinely right, or if they are merely rewriting history to boost their own credibility.

Blockchain was always experimental. The chance of success on any given project was always slim, but the potential payoff huge. So, putting anything more than what you are willing to lose is reckless.

thinkharderdev• 4 years ago

I don't know if I accept the premise. I've been hearing that "blockchain is a solution in search of a problem" critique as long as I've heard about blockchains. I think that during a hype cycle, the hype is what gets signal boosted so you see a lot more "here's how blockchains are going to solve X" content than you do content repeating for the millionth time that the blockchain doesn't actually solve the problem any better than a database would.

atwebb• 4 years ago

where were all these skeptics when blockchain enthusiasm was on the rise?

Everywhere? I can't think of a single (or at least memorable) time I've heard blockchain and there wasn't at least someone who was skeptical.

Barrin92• 4 years ago

where were all these skeptics when blockchain enthusiasm was on the rise?

Literally here, in every single thread to the chagrin of the enthusiasts whose defining identity became "you just don't get it, man". Blockchain stuff, by anyone who didn't have a vested financial interest in it has always been called out for what it is.

Now when the AI hype eventually dies down then you'll have a point.

arcturus172• 4 years ago

where were all these skeptics when blockchain enthusiasm was on the rise

You might need to define the exact period when it was "on the rise", but as far as I've seen, in the last six or seven years they (we) have been very vocal and all over the place - including on this very site.

cmrdporcupine• 4 years ago

As others have pointed out, there was always debate. But I think what's changed is that the down-shouters have backed off. When we'd say "there's nothing here, and what is here is likely semi-criminal" there was almost always a vigorous thread of people who would argue back.

Especially so because a large part of the HN community have this libertarian tinge which brought them philosophically close to web3/crypto generally.

Many of those people have gone quite quiet recently. And I don't want to turn this into a "told you so" moment; I think this is good. Let's try to let the hype cycle end without knives coming out.

The question is what the long-term shake-out from all of this will be for tech more broadly. Many legitimate technologies and projects have gotten themselves caught up in this hype cycle, and there could be fall-outs for people and projects that associated themselves this way -- what I'm calling "crypto-taint." I'm thinking everything from the Rust PL community (where the bulk of employers are web3 companies, it seems) through to a lot of recent novel database tech generally.

I recently quit a job in part for this reason. The product itself was not crypto, but was associating itself with the language and community around ETH. I personally don't want the taint on my resume, even if it's merely marketing.

Where VCs put their money can be fickle. And the consequences for business entities emphasizing in the wrong place can be brutal. This is the third "down cycle" I've been through in my 25ish year software career, and I have some sense of how it could shake out.

Right now, people need to focus on fundamentals.

_whiteCaps_• 4 years ago

https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2013/04/09/I-bought-... https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2017/05/13/Not-Belie...

codexon• 4 years ago

I've been here all the time, but it is hard to keep talking when you are shouted down by all the people who bought into crypto late and are trying to pump it higher.

The last few comments I made on it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29830090

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21541591

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21542591

yieldcrv• 4 years ago

from a developer perspective, “smart contract” platforms are very unique and cheap

pay to write once and never pay again at any level of traffic, customers pay. no SaaS service offers this

developers bring their whole communities to that platform and this keeps happening

you know whats most important? I don’t care what the underlying consensus model or blockchain is, or whether there is one at all, but there is no [meaningful] smart contract platform operating any other way, and I don’t care about that being the case either. but the equilibrium in consensus mechanisms are why it is this way.

its cheaper for developers and as far as customer acquisition and convincing a customer to pay, it is a highly optimized version of the web 2.0 funnel, as every call-to-action is a payment

the development stack is dead simple - frontend website with a single call-to-action (possible even a static site), and a few variables stored in a smart contract - and the customers already want to pay

bo10242• 4 years ago

Very nice article. As others have alluded to, I think Tim does miss an important point about trust. He writes:

we just couldn’t convince ourselves that the real world wanted zero-trust; so there was a transaction manager you had to trust.

And then later:

It seems a good idea to have a land-registry database but, blockchain or no, I wonder if the large landowners might be able to find another way to fiddle the records and still steal the land? Perhaps this is more about power than boundary markers?

Yes. Blockchain is about decentralization of power. It's exactly the most interesting in situations with no trusted third party (i.e. weak rule of law) and an imbalance of power. I think Tim missed that aspect of this discussion (which is no knock on him in 2016, but should be reevaluated now). The rest I found insightful and very interesting.

vault_• 4 years ago

How does being able to point at a database prevent land being stolen in the absence of a trusted third party? It's not like the land itself can authenticate the farmer. For the database to have any weight, there'd need to be an authority that can enforce what it says (and won't take bribes to ignore it, or collude in extorting "voluntary" transfers). If you do have such an agency, well, there's your trusted third party.

thwayunion2• 4 years ago

No. Tim did not miss an important point about trust.

You missed an important point about power.

Those large land owners do not give a fuck about your blockchain. They'll take the land and farm it anyways. You can "own" the virtual stake; they're happy to cede you cyber nonsense as long as they get to control who touches the actual grass.

The large land owners, who have local authorities in their pocket, would simply quote President Andrew Jackson's apocryphal opinion on blockchain: "The blockchain has made its decision; now let the blockchain's army and police enforce it!" [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worcester_v._Georgia

bo10242• 4 years ago

A central part of the quote I was responding to is "fiddle the records". I agree with what you said otherwise.

jasonhansel6• 4 years ago

Here's the issue.

In a country with a stable, effective government, you don't need a blockchain for this: you can just have a centralized database.

In a country without such a government, a blockchain wouldn't help: the government will care more about the large landholders than about the blockchain records, and will have little incentive to enforce the latter.

(Also: I won't look forward to the day when some hacker figures out how to get into a bunch of farmers' crypto wallets and takes all their land. If the government doesn't respect the hackers' claims, then the blockchain isn't really the source of truth; if it does, then a bunch of people's lives are destroyed.)

matai_kolila2• 4 years ago

So is the fundamental problem with blockchain, as described here anyway, that you can basically do all of the cool parts of blockchain that people get excited about, but using a central service instead?

I feel like I don't really understand that, because wouldn't that mean you'd have to re-solve a lot of problems on your own, with your own team? Wouldn't it be easier to figure out how to plug blockchain into this central service instead?

harryf• 4 years ago

The notion of smart contracts might have a perfect use-case when it comes to setting up and maintaining infrastructure on AWS. E.g. something like "I want an Amazon RDS PostgreSQL instance with such and such specs. full daily backups and 99.999% uptime and I'm will to pay $xxxx for it". From there solution providers "bid" on the contract and are paid automatically on the basis of meeting the requirements of the contract, the determination of whether requirements were met also being automated.

The idea is something that grew out of blockchain platforms - Decentralized autonomous organizations - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_autonomous_organ... - this doesn't actually require a crypto currency backing it but some kind of smart contract would be required.

jasonhansel6• 4 years ago

the determination of whether requirements were met also being automated.

That seems like the sticking point. Most likely, someone "fulfilling" the contract would try to fool the (publicly available) verification code, rather than actually providing a PostgreSQL instance. It would be hard to create a bulletproof, automated way of verifying that something is a fully functioning PostgreSQL instance with working backups. If verification code was shared across many contracts, any bug discovered in that code could allow someone to wipe out the entire market.

sbochins• 4 years ago

I used to follow the conventional wisdom (there won’t be wide base adoption of cryptocurrencies, but blockchain tech will be useful in a variety of other technologies). I never really looked to hard into blockchain or the work being done in the industry. But based on the various crypto firms collapsing and the fact that there is no place that is making any meaningful progress with blockchain at this point, I’m at the point where I’ll dismiss any crypto / blockchain project reflexively. Seems like it’s been a great way to get funding for those clued in and taking advantage of the hype.

leifg2• 4 years ago

I always wonder with these things: what is the deadline after which you are allowed to say "There is no value".

It has been almost 14 years since the inception of Bitcoin. There is nuance to this timeline that's why I usually use the launch of Ethereum as a starting point (~7 years If I recall correctly). Nevertheless so far nothing substantial running in production has come out of it Blockchain technology.

The typical response then is "well it takes time there is a lot of potential". I mean yeah but if you compare it to something like contactless payments or ride sharing apps these products have moved a lot faster and now have high user adoption.

So again: At what point can we just ignore all these Blockchain prophets that say "just wait the innovation is around the corner". 10 years, 20 years?

jonathan-adly• 4 years ago

Something arbitrary with no value went from a random Internet forum to $300b market cap and a legal currency for a nation-state. That’s something!

I don’t know what’s would be a better outcome.

Did you expect it to be world reserve currency in a decade? Replace the 5000 years gold? Upend the global banking system? Render the IMF obsolete? Make nation-states think twice about waging war without taxation?

I mean - surely you aren’t comparing these world-shattering outcomes to a mobile app that doesn’t make money after that long!

VHRanger• 4 years ago

Moving the goalposts to something vague and further in the future wont help you convince anyone about usefulness

leifg2• 4 years ago

I should have said "Blockchain applications outside of cryptocurrency" but as you seem to equate the two let's talk about that.

A good metric is: "people are using it".

That is not the case for any cryptocurrency (yes and that includes El Salvador). I frequently wire money across borders and cryptocurrencies are still completely useless for it despite it being the number one use case that is shouted from the crypto rooftops.

So you're left with: "It made a ton of money for rich and a few lucky middle class people" and "some quasi dictator implemented it as an additional currency without a mandate".

nonameiguess• 4 years ago

Technically 25 years since Hashcash was first proposed. I'd argue it could have had value sticking to that original application in preventing network spam, but instead it turns out people are more interested in storing the proof-of-work tokens on a blockchain and selling them, as if collecting and trading postage stamps had become more widespread than actually sending mail with them, to the extent that at least some people and a few entire countries proposed replacing currency with postage stamps.

nickstinemates• 4 years ago

I am always torn when it comes to blockchain.

(As an aside, I was an advisor to Storj.io, a web3 storage company. Largely because of my relationship with the CEO and less because of my enthusiasm with the space.)

The leveraged, financial engineering side of Crypto as a get rich scheme never really appealed to me. I see this like any other risky investment, blurring the lines between lawful and not. Borrowing a ton of money and staking it on crypto seemed like a path to glory to many, and I am saddened by all of the people that lost their shirt in the process.

There's another side of me, however, that sees web3 as an evolution of the traditional technology marketplace. A lot like early days of the internet, or of open source.. web3 seemed to be the continuation of the hacker spirit, where builders met to build cool stuff.

Some of the coolest websites and communities these days are related to NFT's and minting them. Some cool thinking about persistent storage, or cloud, or storage with blockchain/coins as an incentive structure for micropayments. How to directly monetize content on the web without having to prop up the ad industry. Interesting, worthy goals.

It's hard to reconcile this spectrum of thoughts and come up with a clear, personal, answer on the value of blockchain technology as a whole.

thwayunion2• 4 years ago

Some of the coolest websites and communities these days are related to NFT's and minting them.

Can you give a few examples? Everything I've seen in this space are transparent scams.

ccorxi• 4 years ago

Oh well...never mind... another fried air article which deserves only criticism...mixing rug pulls with actual good technology is a tragic error made my a newbie... here's some help free of charge...PoS = centralization or in other words no trust involved. There are a number or PoW Blockchains that literally kick ass yawning. Kadena, for instance has been founded and created by the very ppl that deployed JPM first Blockchain, their target is US stock exchanges to run on their braided chains... Hathor, another excellent example....but most importantly the point is triple entry accounting....go figure what a third accounting dimension does to accounting...

anon4002325• 4 years ago

Since I left AWS in 2020, I’ve been super-careful not to share things from behind the scenes. I can’t actually remember the details of the nondisclosure agreement, but I have strong feelings about the ethics. This story, though, doesn’t reflect poorly on anyone and I’m pretty sure nothing in it is material to any business plans at AWS or elsewhere.

"Can't actually remember"? Yikes.

"I'm pretty sure" ... based on...? Not working there any more?

"Strong feelings about the ethics?" Dude. Contracts are not about your feelings about ethics.

Mr. Bray doesn't have -- or didn't take the time to find -- a signed contract from two years ago.

Not a great example to follow.

AWS and Blockchain

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