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

179 points by midas 9y ago

highpark 9y ago
DLT strips away almost everything that makes blockchain compelling. Why would a distributed systems engineer work on what amounts to a really shitty database?
- varelse 9y ago
  See also the crazy cash they can make building distributed machine learning/big data systems at next to zero risk...
  - zzzcpan 9y ago
    This is just incorrect. Making money on a distributed product is just as hard as on anything else if not harder and riskier, because everything takes more time.
    - varelse 9y ago
      Tell that to my bank account. We live in a world where most current and future performance benefits come from understanding how to program both parallel and distributed algorithms in an age where almost everyone is either a single-threaded Java or Python programmer relying on OSS frameworks and packages to do the distributed dirty work for them. And that's made it nearly free beer right now to have gone against the above curve and stayed current on C++ and multi-core/distributed algorithms so one can build those frameworks and packages. That will probably change now that GPUs are a hot commodity as opposed to nerdy gamer stuff, but chance favored the minority of prepared programmers here. Further, I have zero interest in the blockchain. There's interesting technology there, but it is of zero use to me or any of my life goals. Also the hucksters and low-information sorts trying to make me believe I can't live without it are driving me even further away from it. And before you downvote me for negativity, this thread did ask why distributed system engineers aren't interesting in this, yes?
- lmm 9y ago
  Append-only, log-structured databases are a great, genuinely useful thing. Zero-trust through proof-of-work is expensive and irrelevant for most use cases.
aphextron 9y ago
>The blockchain community is immature and historically unwelcoming. >It feels like a get rich quick scheme - https://twitter.com/naval/status/878018839044161536 https://twitter.com/naval/status/878018839044161536 This is what it comes down to IMO. Anything cryptocurrency related is just surrounded by a cloud of shady characters and scammers, even though the tech is legit. You just can't trust anyone, nor their intentions. Living your life and working in a constant state of paranoia like that is awful.
- nihonde 9y ago
  I guess it's not surprising that untrustworthy people would flock to technologies that eliminate the need for trust.
  - rpod 9y ago
    It's not necessarily the people who can benefit from a trustless network that cloud the ecosystem, it's shady people who want in on the hype solely to make money and apply blockchain to every conceivable use case just for the sake of applying blockchain. It's the kind of people who are an expert on fintech, blockchain, AI/machine learning and IoT all at the same time and seem to use the terms interchangeably.
  - duxup 9y ago
    Anonymous and irreversible transactions help too.
- matt_wulfeck 9y ago
  Even if the tech is "legit" it's encredibly inefficient. We're spewing off tons of CO2 just to verify the block chain, but we have plenty of technologies that can do the same with a minuscule amount of energy. The problem is that they want a system that's trustless and that's simply not what most engineers care about. We want a system that's fast and efficient.
  - darawk 9y ago
    There are solutions to that though, like Proof of Stake. If distributed systems really cared about that, then that's exactly why they ought to be working on blockchains, to make them more efficient.
random023987 9y ago
Proof-of-work blockchains were developed to solve a problem that only exists in a small percentage of distributed engineering use-cases. Unless you need to build a "censorship-free" peer-to-peer ledger distributed among untrusted, anonymous participants, the complexity costs and latency and computation costs simply aren't worth it. It's the same reason that Ford doesn't build a tunnel under the US/Mexico border to ferry car parts to America.
- tostitos1979 9y ago
  Very good points. In complex financial transactions (at least within regulatory domains), my understanding is that rollbacks can and do happen. I initially thought across borders/regulatory domains, blockchain will shine. I haven't seen a killer application just yet. It is a bit frustrating because the tech is indeed interesting .. we just don't have multi-billion dollar real (as opposed to imagined) use-cases beyond the distributed ledger.
  - JackFr 9y ago
    https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/blog/the-blockchain-paradox-why-distributed-ledger-technologies-may-do-little-to-transform-the-economy/ https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/blog/the-blockchain-paradox-why-dis... "Let me explain why. In economic organization, we must distinguish between enforcing rules and making rules. Laws are rules enforced by state bureaucracy and made by a legislature. The SWIFT Protocol is a set of rules enforced by SWIFTNet (a centralized computational system) and made, ultimately, by SWIFT’s Board of Directors. The Bitcoin Protocol is a set of rules enforced by the Bitcoin Network (a distributed network of computers) made by — whom exactly? Who makes the rules matters at least as much as who enforces them. Blockchain technology may provide for completely impartial rule-enforcement, but that is of little comfort if the rules themselves are changed. This rule-making is what we refer to as governance."
    - DINKDINK 9y ago
      >The Bitcoin Protocol is a set of rules enforced by the Bitcoin Network (a distributed network of computers) made by — whom exactly? Bitcoin and Blockchains are an opt-in rule system. You literally subscribe to the rule set (called consensus) that you wish to participate in. No one coerces you into participating in a rule system you do not want to participate it. Your capitalist||socialist country is invaded by socialist||capitalists and they change the rules of your country's bank? Your blockchain doesn't care, it is enforced at the user level, at the edge.
bmurphy1976 9y ago
The choice of font and lack of contrast make this nearly unreadable for me...
- notzorbo3 9y ago
  The text is #0 on a #F background for me?
  - bmurphy1976 9y ago
    I was reading on Android. Perhaps the colors are different there.
eternalban 9y ago
From OP: https://twitter.com/naval/status/878018839044161536 https://twitter.com/naval/status/878018839044161536 The cynic in me thinks "it's a scheme by oligarchs and tyrants to get rid of troublesome /fully anonymous/ cash sold as a utopian scheme to those who are motivated by the promise of a quick rich scheme."
strgrd 9y ago
Why isn't X working on blockchain technology? Maybe instead of asking this, we should ask the cryptocurrency enthusiasts what area of technology won't be dropped-and-replaced by blockchains, because so far it seems apparently applicable to every single use case in every single industry... By the way, did you guys hear this thing is an immutable ledger?
- jstanley 9y ago
  That's a complete strawman. There is very little overlap between cryptocurrency enthusiasts and those who think blockchain technology will take over everything.
  - strgrd 9y ago
    > There is very little overlap between cryptocurrency enthusiasts and those who think blockchain technology will take over everything. Do you really believe that? Because from the outside, it seems that the only people talking about "blockchain technology" are those who have a significant amount of money invested in it. This article is a blockchain banking service saying, "hey, other people should use this solve-all technology that is definitely the future too!"
    - jstanley 9y ago
      Yes, I really believe that. The people who are into "blockchain banking" are not actually into cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency is about decentralised, trustless, permissionless, peer-to-peer networks. "Blockchain all the things" is decidedly not. I acknowledge that this can be hard to see from the outside. Edit: And at risk of "no true Scotsman"... the people talking about "blockchain technology" are not cryptocurrency enthusiasts.
jchanimal 9y ago
Distributed consensus algorithms are super interesting, but most distributed databases run in a trusted context. So instead of spending time optimizing a trustless system, database engineers optimize commit protocols like Calvin[1], because high-throughput scalable consistency solves so many business problems. When you have a general purpose globally consistent distributed database, many of the problems that look like blockchain algorithm problems turn out to be standard application programming tasks. Eg a distributed ledger is just a table in a distributed database. [1] https://fauna.com/blog/distributed-consistency-at-scale-spanner-vs-calvin https://fauna.com/blog/distributed-consistency-at-scale-span...
- stephenitis 9y ago
  I just wanted to drop appreciation for this answer. I never thought to see the blockchain from this perspective.
lotyrin 9y ago
I don't really get this article. The transaction rate limit and the wastefulness and limitations of PoW as a fault-tolerance mechanism are brought up but then just hand-waved away. If we had discussed proof of stake or theorized about how some of these other hurdles like transaction rate could be leaped then sure. Otherwise it's just a list of things any distributed system has to solve for, demonstration that blockchain solves for them (inefficiently) with the undertone of "I bought in on the hype, and you can too".
random3 9y ago
The goal of the article is to get distributed systems engineers excited about blockchain and invite them to explore positions at Paxos. Ironically none of the open positions are actually for distributed systems engineers :) I think it's funny the author chose to center the article around that assumption. IMO most engineers related to distributed computing (not necessarily themselves distributed systems engineers) are actually quite aware of the technology and many of the challenges.
pnathan 9y ago
Too many crooks. Too much hype. Too much ignorance of how the real world works. I'd be interested in working with large and boring financial institutions on those sorts of projects, because they don't offer the failure modes as above.
davidgerard 9y ago
Because it turns out the good bits are the ledger of transactions made tamper-evident in a Merkle tree, and we had that with Git in 2005 and it works great thanks. The bit Git doesn't do: distributed consensus via Proof of Work, because it turns out that a bit of trust is fabulously more efficient. I predict any good and useful product labeled "Blockchain" will be the cryptographically tamper-evident ledger of transactions, and not any of the stuff that makes a blockchain different to Git. (Researching the book, I had one developer admit that his "blockchain product" was pretty much a simplified Git in terms of what it offered ;-) )
rafiki6 9y ago
Here's one take DLT and Blockchain: https://hbr.org/2017/01/the-truth-about-blockchain https://hbr.org/2017/01/the-truth-about-blockchain TL;DR, it's gonna take a real long time to make blockchain useful, if it even is. Further, I have yet to see a real production application of blockchain that isn't a crypto-currency. Everyone and their grandmothers has invested in it, or started a company or w/e. But has it actually been used to solve another problem? Blockchain was the SOLUTION to the PROBLEM of how do I make a cryptocurrency. It now seems that some folks are trying to make a PROBLEM out of a SOLUTION in every other domain.
- devrandomguy 9y ago
  If by "real production" you mean "implemented profitably by classic corporations", then you're not really getting the crypto-anarchist philosophy that espouses the view that blockchains are a generally useful tool. The long-term crypo-anarchist plan (lol) is to replace corporations with ephemeral networks of strangers who, as a group, accomplish the tasks traditionally handled by corporations and governments.
- sigstoat 9y ago
  > But has it actually been used to solve another problem? Maersk is interested http://fortune.com/2017/03/05/maersk-tests-blockchain-based-freight-tracking/ http://fortune.com/2017/03/05/maersk-tests-blockchain-based-... Makes some sense freight shipments involve a lot of parties who don't completely trust one another, and they've got a lot of information to move back and forth between one another.
  - notzorbo3 9y ago
    The article doesn't explain why a public distributed ledger such as the blockchain would make sense. A privately run ledger would probably also solve their problems, be cheaper and it would be a lot more secure against tampering.
    - sigstoat 9y ago
      which of the mutually untrustworthy parties will operate the ledger? customs agents don't trust shipping companies, shipping companies don't trust their customers, shipping companies might trust most customs agents in western countries but they operate everywhere, and there are, as i understand it, a number of other middle-men involved in the process, who probably aren't trusted much either. i don't see how a privately operated database would solve any of the problems, or appear more secure to the folks not running the database. (certainly it would be cheaper.)
Rjevski 9y ago
Because I have yet to find an actual legitimate use-case for a blockchain. Every task in our modern business world actually requires a central trusted authority. Edit: not to mention that mining is an incredible waste of time and energy that can instead be put to good use.
- Rmilb 9y ago
  Good use is subjective, plenty of people are using the blockchain as a speculative asset and willing to pay transaction fees for it.
  - gwbas1c 9y ago
    It's a great way to hide a pump-and-dump scheme. Although blockchain is a legitimate undertaking, if you're good at surfing hype, you'll know when to get in, get out at a profit, and then leave all the other suckers holding worthless bitcoin.
draw_down 9y ago
I mean, you read the most ridiculous things happening in those circles. Not sure why most talented engineers would be interested in associating themselves with that.
asah 9y ago
I had the same observation that the blockchain is "just" a distributed log database with horrific performance overhead... ...but it's not true that nobody's working on it: quietly, Serious Engineers(tm) working for blockchain companies and you can expect big improvements in the next few years. This rant is nearly isomorphic to the whining in the early 90s by the academics and SunRPC & CORBA fanboys vs HTTP and HTML, which its insane parsing and communications overhead. Serious Engineers(tm) showed up, made the early web work, it took off, and... you don't see many HN job posts asking for CORBA engineers. As with the web, blockchains are exciting because they're a 'looser' and more open protocol than other systems.
- vocatus_gate 9y ago
  Can't remember how I stumbled across this article, but I thought it was a good summary of Bitcoin works in spite of some glaring flaws. https://www.gwern.net/Bitcoin%20is%20Worse%20is%20Better https://www.gwern.net/Bitcoin%20is%20Worse%20is%20Better
didibus 9y ago
Where's the data, or at least arguments suggesting that no distributed systems engineer is working on blockchain technology? If anyone could point to me what's the name for this fallacy. Lile when you ask a question that tricks people in assuming the premise.
srdev 9y ago
My observation is this: The "killer app" of Blockchains are the trustless nature of the system. In most practical application, allowing actors without a trust relationship to interact with the log is not a significant requirement of the system. Once you remove that requirement, there are technically superior approaches to maintaining a ledger.
- vocatus_gate 9y ago
  That's why I've never understood all this talk about "private blockchains." Why? What's the point? We already have distributed database systems that are light years faster than blockchains. The ONLY benefits of a blockchain-based approach are censorship resistance and not having to trust the actors in the system. If you don't need either of those two benefits, then there are far better existing solutions for record keeping.
  - svara 9y ago
    As far as I've seen, the point is mainly PR. These private blockchains are usually not bitcoin-style proof of work chains, but would more accurately just be called distributed databases. For example, look at https://www.openchain.org/ https://www.openchain.org/, "How does it work" section. A lot of altcoins actually are the same, with explicit "trusted nodes", such as Stellar (https://www.stellarcoin.org https://www.stellarcoin.org). Happy to learn about any counterexamples and use-cases for those.
  - PeterisP 9y ago
    Private blockchains have a use case where you have a central authority coordinating many participants that don't trust each other - if the central authority periodically publishes the signed blockchain ledger/update, it enables "shared truth" that every participant can use, and each of them can verify that noone has "altered history", that particular constraints have been met, etc. In essence, it can be used as a versioning + signing mechanism for a shared database that ensures authenticity and non-repudiation even in the absence of trust.
    - 9y ago
gwbas1c 9y ago
I work in distributed systems, and I consider blockchain very interesting. It's so interesting I click on a lot of links on Hacker News, and sometimes I take an afternoon on a weekend or vacation to read through some of the papers. I just have a well-paying job and I don't see any opportunities lucrative enough for me to jump away. Why? Bitcoin is an experiment. Reading through the paper, Bitcoin does not scale to general purpose commerce. All of the other technology appears to be "me too." When I first heard about Etherium, the bullshit smelt so bad that I couldn't even look at the paper. What will get me really interested? Pay me to implement a real-world use case that fits the scalability constrains of blockchain. This isn't things like general-purpose currency, or general-purpose contracts. Someone needs to pay me to implement something that requires blockchain; instead of someone paying me to implement a blockchain and then going and finding a use for it.
- JohnJamesRambo 9y ago
  What are the real uses for blockchain you could see?
  - gwbas1c 9y ago
    I see it going in two different directions: Blockchain: Useful where there are groups of actors, (people, countries, companies, ect,) of a large but limited size, incomplete trust, and limited exchanges. (For example, a group of 1000) A blockchain could be used to publish who owns an asset; as long as the blockchain technology can scale to the number of assets, number of owners, and number of transactions that occur. The actors need to have sufficient motivation to provide the computing power to run the blockchain; otherwise, it makes a lot more sense to just pay a private clearinghouse. The problem with "blockchain" is that every computer in the network has to keep a complete copy of the ledger. Useful in the above examples, but this is also highly limiting to scalability, which leads to... Blockchain-like: I think "blockchain" will lead to blockchain-like technologies where every computer doesn't have to keep an entire copy of the ledger. Instead, the graph of computers allows for searching publicly published knowledge, and participants are encouraged to preserve facts that are in their best interest. This allows for much higher scalability because computers in the network can merely ignore most transactions. If you are a small player in the network, you might pay a larger player to monitor the network and provide you with search.
mikeschmatz 9y ago
Because we got better things to do than wasting time on bullshit blockchain tech in a bullshit company filled with suits [0] who can produce only... bullshit https://www.paxos.com/our-team https://www.paxos.com/our-team
pietrod 9y ago
https://github.com/kadena-io/juno https://github.com/kadena-io/juno actually this is poc research from jp morgan into using another bft algo: raft.
- jaseemabid 9y ago
  RAFT is not BFT. You need nodes to cooperate. If the nodes lie, the system will collapse.
hossbeast 9y ago
Answer: because most distributed systems are operated by a single entity and don't need to solve the trustless consensus problem.

179 points by midas 9y ago

DLT strips away almost everything that makes blockchain compelling. Why would a distributed systems engineer work on what amounts to a really shitty database?

varelse 9y ago
See also the crazy cash they can make building distributed machine learning/big data systems at next to zero risk...
- zzzcpan 9y ago
  This is just incorrect. Making money on a distributed product is just as hard as on anything else if not harder and riskier, because everything takes more time.
  - varelse 9y ago
    Tell that to my bank account. We live in a world where most current and future performance benefits come from understanding how to program both parallel and distributed algorithms in an age where almost everyone is either a single-threaded Java or Python programmer relying on OSS frameworks and packages to do the distributed dirty work for them. And that's made it nearly free beer right now to have gone against the above curve and stayed current on C++ and multi-core/distributed algorithms so one can build those frameworks and packages. That will probably change now that GPUs are a hot commodity as opposed to nerdy gamer stuff, but chance favored the minority of prepared programmers here. Further, I have zero interest in the blockchain. There's interesting technology there, but it is of zero use to me or any of my life goals. Also the hucksters and low-information sorts trying to make me believe I can't live without it are driving me even further away from it. And before you downvote me for negativity, this thread did ask why distributed system engineers aren't interesting in this, yes?
lmm 9y ago
Append-only, log-structured databases are a great, genuinely useful thing. Zero-trust through proof-of-work is expensive and irrelevant for most use cases.

aphextron 9y ago

>The blockchain community is immature and historically unwelcoming. >It feels like a get rich quick scheme - https://twitter.com/naval/status/878018839044161536 https://twitter.com/naval/status/878018839044161536 This is what it comes down to IMO. Anything cryptocurrency related is just surrounded by a cloud of shady characters and scammers, even though the tech is legit. You just can't trust anyone, nor their intentions. Living your life and working in a constant state of paranoia like that is awful.

nihonde 9y ago
I guess it's not surprising that untrustworthy people would flock to technologies that eliminate the need for trust.
- rpod 9y ago
  It's not necessarily the people who can benefit from a trustless network that cloud the ecosystem, it's shady people who want in on the hype solely to make money and apply blockchain to every conceivable use case just for the sake of applying blockchain. It's the kind of people who are an expert on fintech, blockchain, AI/machine learning and IoT all at the same time and seem to use the terms interchangeably.
- duxup 9y ago
  Anonymous and irreversible transactions help too.
matt_wulfeck 9y ago
Even if the tech is "legit" it's encredibly inefficient. We're spewing off tons of CO2 just to verify the block chain, but we have plenty of technologies that can do the same with a minuscule amount of energy. The problem is that they want a system that's trustless and that's simply not what most engineers care about. We want a system that's fast and efficient.
- darawk 9y ago
  There are solutions to that though, like Proof of Stake. If distributed systems really cared about that, then that's exactly why they ought to be working on blockchains, to make them more efficient.

random023987 9y ago

Proof-of-work blockchains were developed to solve a problem that only exists in a small percentage of distributed engineering use-cases. Unless you need to build a "censorship-free" peer-to-peer ledger distributed among untrusted, anonymous participants, the complexity costs and latency and computation costs simply aren't worth it. It's the same reason that Ford doesn't build a tunnel under the US/Mexico border to ferry car parts to America.

tostitos1979 9y ago
Very good points. In complex financial transactions (at least within regulatory domains), my understanding is that rollbacks can and do happen. I initially thought across borders/regulatory domains, blockchain will shine. I haven't seen a killer application just yet. It is a bit frustrating because the tech is indeed interesting .. we just don't have multi-billion dollar real (as opposed to imagined) use-cases beyond the distributed ledger.
- JackFr 9y ago
  https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/blog/the-blockchain-paradox-why-distributed-ledger-technologies-may-do-little-to-transform-the-economy/ https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/blog/the-blockchain-paradox-why-dis... "Let me explain why. In economic organization, we must distinguish between enforcing rules and making rules. Laws are rules enforced by state bureaucracy and made by a legislature. The SWIFT Protocol is a set of rules enforced by SWIFTNet (a centralized computational system) and made, ultimately, by SWIFT’s Board of Directors. The Bitcoin Protocol is a set of rules enforced by the Bitcoin Network (a distributed network of computers) made by — whom exactly? Who makes the rules matters at least as much as who enforces them. Blockchain technology may provide for completely impartial rule-enforcement, but that is of little comfort if the rules themselves are changed. This rule-making is what we refer to as governance."
  - DINKDINK 9y ago
    >The Bitcoin Protocol is a set of rules enforced by the Bitcoin Network (a distributed network of computers) made by — whom exactly? Bitcoin and Blockchains are an opt-in rule system. You literally subscribe to the rule set (called consensus) that you wish to participate in. No one coerces you into participating in a rule system you do not want to participate it. Your capitalist||socialist country is invaded by socialist||capitalists and they change the rules of your country's bank? Your blockchain doesn't care, it is enforced at the user level, at the edge.

bmurphy1976 9y ago

The choice of font and lack of contrast make this nearly unreadable for me...

notzorbo3 9y ago
The text is #0 on a #F background for me?
- bmurphy1976 9y ago
  I was reading on Android. Perhaps the colors are different there.

eternalban 9y ago

From OP: https://twitter.com/naval/status/878018839044161536 https://twitter.com/naval/status/878018839044161536 The cynic in me thinks "it's a scheme by oligarchs and tyrants to get rid of troublesome /fully anonymous/ cash sold as a utopian scheme to those who are motivated by the promise of a quick rich scheme."

strgrd 9y ago

Why isn't X working on blockchain technology? Maybe instead of asking this, we should ask the cryptocurrency enthusiasts what area of technology won't be dropped-and-replaced by blockchains, because so far it seems apparently applicable to every single use case in every single industry... By the way, did you guys hear this thing is an immutable ledger?

jstanley 9y ago
That's a complete strawman. There is very little overlap between cryptocurrency enthusiasts and those who think blockchain technology will take over everything.
- strgrd 9y ago
  > There is very little overlap between cryptocurrency enthusiasts and those who think blockchain technology will take over everything. Do you really believe that? Because from the outside, it seems that the only people talking about "blockchain technology" are those who have a significant amount of money invested in it. This article is a blockchain banking service saying, "hey, other people should use this solve-all technology that is definitely the future too!"
  - jstanley 9y ago
    Yes, I really believe that. The people who are into "blockchain banking" are not actually into cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency is about decentralised, trustless, permissionless, peer-to-peer networks. "Blockchain all the things" is decidedly not. I acknowledge that this can be hard to see from the outside. Edit: And at risk of "no true Scotsman"... the people talking about "blockchain technology" are not cryptocurrency enthusiasts.

jchanimal 9y ago

Distributed consensus algorithms are super interesting, but most distributed databases run in a trusted context. So instead of spending time optimizing a trustless system, database engineers optimize commit protocols like Calvin[1], because high-throughput scalable consistency solves so many business problems. When you have a general purpose globally consistent distributed database, many of the problems that look like blockchain algorithm problems turn out to be standard application programming tasks. Eg a distributed ledger is just a table in a distributed database. [1] https://fauna.com/blog/distributed-consistency-at-scale-spanner-vs-calvin https://fauna.com/blog/distributed-consistency-at-scale-span...

stephenitis 9y ago
I just wanted to drop appreciation for this answer. I never thought to see the blockchain from this perspective.

lotyrin 9y ago

I don't really get this article. The transaction rate limit and the wastefulness and limitations of PoW as a fault-tolerance mechanism are brought up but then just hand-waved away. If we had discussed proof of stake or theorized about how some of these other hurdles like transaction rate could be leaped then sure. Otherwise it's just a list of things any distributed system has to solve for, demonstration that blockchain solves for them (inefficiently) with the undertone of "I bought in on the hype, and you can too".

random3 9y ago

The goal of the article is to get distributed systems engineers excited about blockchain and invite them to explore positions at Paxos. Ironically none of the open positions are actually for distributed systems engineers :) I think it's funny the author chose to center the article around that assumption. IMO most engineers related to distributed computing (not necessarily themselves distributed systems engineers) are actually quite aware of the technology and many of the challenges.

pnathan 9y ago

Too many crooks. Too much hype. Too much ignorance of how the real world works. I'd be interested in working with large and boring financial institutions on those sorts of projects, because they don't offer the failure modes as above.

davidgerard 9y ago

Because it turns out the good bits are the ledger of transactions made tamper-evident in a Merkle tree, and we had that with Git in 2005 and it works great thanks. The bit Git doesn't do: distributed consensus via Proof of Work, because it turns out that a bit of trust is fabulously more efficient. I predict any good and useful product labeled "Blockchain" will be the cryptographically tamper-evident ledger of transactions, and not any of the stuff that makes a blockchain different to Git. (Researching the book, I had one developer admit that his "blockchain product" was pretty much a simplified Git in terms of what it offered ;-) )

rafiki6 9y ago

Here's one take DLT and Blockchain: https://hbr.org/2017/01/the-truth-about-blockchain https://hbr.org/2017/01/the-truth-about-blockchain TL;DR, it's gonna take a real long time to make blockchain useful, if it even is. Further, I have yet to see a real production application of blockchain that isn't a crypto-currency. Everyone and their grandmothers has invested in it, or started a company or w/e. But has it actually been used to solve another problem? Blockchain was the SOLUTION to the PROBLEM of how do I make a cryptocurrency. It now seems that some folks are trying to make a PROBLEM out of a SOLUTION in every other domain.

devrandomguy 9y ago
If by "real production" you mean "implemented profitably by classic corporations", then you're not really getting the crypto-anarchist philosophy that espouses the view that blockchains are a generally useful tool. The long-term crypo-anarchist plan (lol) is to replace corporations with ephemeral networks of strangers who, as a group, accomplish the tasks traditionally handled by corporations and governments.
sigstoat 9y ago
> But has it actually been used to solve another problem? Maersk is interested http://fortune.com/2017/03/05/maersk-tests-blockchain-based-freight-tracking/ http://fortune.com/2017/03/05/maersk-tests-blockchain-based-... Makes some sense freight shipments involve a lot of parties who don't completely trust one another, and they've got a lot of information to move back and forth between one another.
- notzorbo3 9y ago
  The article doesn't explain why a public distributed ledger such as the blockchain would make sense. A privately run ledger would probably also solve their problems, be cheaper and it would be a lot more secure against tampering.
  - sigstoat 9y ago
    which of the mutually untrustworthy parties will operate the ledger? customs agents don't trust shipping companies, shipping companies don't trust their customers, shipping companies might trust most customs agents in western countries but they operate everywhere, and there are, as i understand it, a number of other middle-men involved in the process, who probably aren't trusted much either. i don't see how a privately operated database would solve any of the problems, or appear more secure to the folks not running the database. (certainly it would be cheaper.)

Rjevski 9y ago

Because I have yet to find an actual legitimate use-case for a blockchain. Every task in our modern business world actually requires a central trusted authority. Edit: not to mention that mining is an incredible waste of time and energy that can instead be put to good use.

Rmilb 9y ago
Good use is subjective, plenty of people are using the blockchain as a speculative asset and willing to pay transaction fees for it.
- gwbas1c 9y ago
  It's a great way to hide a pump-and-dump scheme. Although blockchain is a legitimate undertaking, if you're good at surfing hype, you'll know when to get in, get out at a profit, and then leave all the other suckers holding worthless bitcoin.

draw_down 9y ago

I mean, you read the most ridiculous things happening in those circles. Not sure why most talented engineers would be interested in associating themselves with that.

asah 9y ago

I had the same observation that the blockchain is "just" a distributed log database with horrific performance overhead... ...but it's not true that nobody's working on it: quietly, Serious Engineers(tm) working for blockchain companies and you can expect big improvements in the next few years. This rant is nearly isomorphic to the whining in the early 90s by the academics and SunRPC & CORBA fanboys vs HTTP and HTML, which its insane parsing and communications overhead. Serious Engineers(tm) showed up, made the early web work, it took off, and... you don't see many HN job posts asking for CORBA engineers. As with the web, blockchains are exciting because they're a 'looser' and more open protocol than other systems.

vocatus_gate 9y ago
Can't remember how I stumbled across this article, but I thought it was a good summary of Bitcoin works in spite of some glaring flaws. https://www.gwern.net/Bitcoin%20is%20Worse%20is%20Better https://www.gwern.net/Bitcoin%20is%20Worse%20is%20Better

didibus 9y ago

Where's the data, or at least arguments suggesting that no distributed systems engineer is working on blockchain technology? If anyone could point to me what's the name for this fallacy. Lile when you ask a question that tricks people in assuming the premise.

srdev 9y ago

My observation is this: The "killer app" of Blockchains are the trustless nature of the system. In most practical application, allowing actors without a trust relationship to interact with the log is not a significant requirement of the system. Once you remove that requirement, there are technically superior approaches to maintaining a ledger.

vocatus_gate 9y ago
That's why I've never understood all this talk about "private blockchains." Why? What's the point? We already have distributed database systems that are light years faster than blockchains. The ONLY benefits of a blockchain-based approach are censorship resistance and not having to trust the actors in the system. If you don't need either of those two benefits, then there are far better existing solutions for record keeping.
- svara 9y ago
  As far as I've seen, the point is mainly PR. These private blockchains are usually not bitcoin-style proof of work chains, but would more accurately just be called distributed databases. For example, look at https://www.openchain.org/ https://www.openchain.org/, "How does it work" section. A lot of altcoins actually are the same, with explicit "trusted nodes", such as Stellar (https://www.stellarcoin.org https://www.stellarcoin.org). Happy to learn about any counterexamples and use-cases for those.
- PeterisP 9y ago
  Private blockchains have a use case where you have a central authority coordinating many participants that don't trust each other - if the central authority periodically publishes the signed blockchain ledger/update, it enables "shared truth" that every participant can use, and each of them can verify that noone has "altered history", that particular constraints have been met, etc. In essence, it can be used as a versioning + signing mechanism for a shared database that ensures authenticity and non-repudiation even in the absence of trust.
  - 9y ago

gwbas1c 9y ago

I work in distributed systems, and I consider blockchain very interesting. It's so interesting I click on a lot of links on Hacker News, and sometimes I take an afternoon on a weekend or vacation to read through some of the papers. I just have a well-paying job and I don't see any opportunities lucrative enough for me to jump away. Why? Bitcoin is an experiment. Reading through the paper, Bitcoin does not scale to general purpose commerce. All of the other technology appears to be "me too." When I first heard about Etherium, the bullshit smelt so bad that I couldn't even look at the paper. What will get me really interested? Pay me to implement a real-world use case that fits the scalability constrains of blockchain. This isn't things like general-purpose currency, or general-purpose contracts. Someone needs to pay me to implement something that requires blockchain; instead of someone paying me to implement a blockchain and then going and finding a use for it.

JohnJamesRambo 9y ago
What are the real uses for blockchain you could see?
- gwbas1c 9y ago
  I see it going in two different directions: Blockchain: Useful where there are groups of actors, (people, countries, companies, ect,) of a large but limited size, incomplete trust, and limited exchanges. (For example, a group of 1000) A blockchain could be used to publish who owns an asset; as long as the blockchain technology can scale to the number of assets, number of owners, and number of transactions that occur. The actors need to have sufficient motivation to provide the computing power to run the blockchain; otherwise, it makes a lot more sense to just pay a private clearinghouse. The problem with "blockchain" is that every computer in the network has to keep a complete copy of the ledger. Useful in the above examples, but this is also highly limiting to scalability, which leads to... Blockchain-like: I think "blockchain" will lead to blockchain-like technologies where every computer doesn't have to keep an entire copy of the ledger. Instead, the graph of computers allows for searching publicly published knowledge, and participants are encouraged to preserve facts that are in their best interest. This allows for much higher scalability because computers in the network can merely ignore most transactions. If you are a small player in the network, you might pay a larger player to monitor the network and provide you with search.

mikeschmatz 9y ago

Because we got better things to do than wasting time on bullshit blockchain tech in a bullshit company filled with suits [0] who can produce only... bullshit https://www.paxos.com/our-team https://www.paxos.com/our-team

pietrod 9y ago

https://github.com/kadena-io/juno https://github.com/kadena-io/juno actually this is poc research from jp morgan into using another bft algo: raft.

jaseemabid 9y ago
RAFT is not BFT. You need nodes to cooperate. If the nodes lie, the system will collapse.

hossbeast 9y ago

Answer: because most distributed systems are operated by a single entity and don't need to solve the trustless consensus problem.