Is Blockchain 'the Amazing Solution for Almost Nothing'? (thecorrespondent.com) 155
Long-time Slashdot reader leathered shares an investigation from the Correspondent about blockchain -- and " what's so terribly revolutionary about it? What problem does it solve...? I can tell you upfront, it's a bizarre journey to nowhere. I've never seen so much incomprehensible jargon to describe so little... And I've never seen so many people searching so hard for a problem to go with their solution...."
[Y]ou can't do much with bitcoin. But blockchain, on the other hand: it's the technology behind bitcoin, which makes it cool. Blockchain generalises the bitcoin pitch: let's not just get rid of banks, but also the land registry, voting machines, insurance companies, Facebook, Uber, Amazon, the Lung Foundation, the porn industry and government and businesses in general. They are superfluous, thanks to the blockchain. Power to the users...!
The only thing is that there's a huge gap between promise and reality. It seems that blockchain sounds best in a PowerPoint slide. Most blockchain projects don't make it past a press release, an inventory by Bloomberg showed... Out of over 86,000 blockchain projects that had been launched, 92% had been abandoned by the end of 2017, according to consultancy firm Deloitte. Why are they deciding to stop? Enlightened — and thus former — blockchain developer Mark van Cuijk explained: "You could also use a forklift to put a six-pack of beer on your kitchen counter. But it's just not very efficient...."
[I]nformation and communications technology is like the rest of the world — a big old mess. And that's something that we — outsiders, laypeople, non-tech geeks — simply refuse to accept. Councillors and managers think that problems — however large and fundamental they are — evaporate instantaneously thanks to technology they've heard about in a fancy PowerPoint presentation. How will it work? Who cares! Don't try to understand it, just reap the benefits!
This is the market for magic, and that market is big. Whether it's about blockchain, big data, cloud computing, AI or other buzzwords...
Maybe this is blockchain's greatest merit: it's an awareness campaign, albeit an expensive one. "Back-office management" isn't an item on the agenda in board meetings, but "blockchain" and "innovation" are... Yes, it took a few wild, unmet promises, but the result is that administrators are now interested in the boring subjects that help make the world run a bit more efficiently — nothing spectacular, just a bit better.
The only thing is that there's a huge gap between promise and reality. It seems that blockchain sounds best in a PowerPoint slide. Most blockchain projects don't make it past a press release, an inventory by Bloomberg showed... Out of over 86,000 blockchain projects that had been launched, 92% had been abandoned by the end of 2017, according to consultancy firm Deloitte. Why are they deciding to stop? Enlightened — and thus former — blockchain developer Mark van Cuijk explained: "You could also use a forklift to put a six-pack of beer on your kitchen counter. But it's just not very efficient...."
[I]nformation and communications technology is like the rest of the world — a big old mess. And that's something that we — outsiders, laypeople, non-tech geeks — simply refuse to accept. Councillors and managers think that problems — however large and fundamental they are — evaporate instantaneously thanks to technology they've heard about in a fancy PowerPoint presentation. How will it work? Who cares! Don't try to understand it, just reap the benefits!
This is the market for magic, and that market is big. Whether it's about blockchain, big data, cloud computing, AI or other buzzwords...
Maybe this is blockchain's greatest merit: it's an awareness campaign, albeit an expensive one. "Back-office management" isn't an item on the agenda in board meetings, but "blockchain" and "innovation" are... Yes, it took a few wild, unmet promises, but the result is that administrators are now interested in the boring subjects that help make the world run a bit more efficiently — nothing spectacular, just a bit better.
There is something it's very good for (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: There is something it's very good for (Score:2)
Currency of the future!
Not quite (Score:3)
The best part about this is you can send S/MIME signed emails around and accomplish the same thing as what the buttcoin guys call signing.
Not quite exactly. S/MIME helps securely cipher the communication between two individuals and relies on a central authority (the key-signing certificate authority, remember that unlike PGP, S/MIME is CA cert based).
- Blockchains and bitcoin protocols, are designed to help transfer of owenership of virtual tokens without possibility of duplication, the same way you can had out physical cash (or any other object) to someone IRL and unlike how bugs in virtual wolrds like RPGs allows to duplicate object
Re: Not quite (Score:2)
A public blockchain can be useful for vote confirmation. The ballots would be held in an independent system.
Re: Not quite (Score:2)
Yes, you would use a publicly verifiable secret sharing system. Vsss allows aanyone to determine the shares are valid and not altered by the dealer or receiptients.
Blockchain can be used to protect the votes stored as shares making the process auditable.
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"Not quite exactly. S/MIME helps securely cipher the communication between two individuals and relies on a central authority (the key-signing certificate authority, remember that unlike PGP, S/MIME is CA cert based)."
This is manifestly untrue. S/MIME is merely a description of a protocol for embedding encrypted "blobs" into an e-mail message. It has nothing whatsoever to do with CA cert's in any way. In fact, it works quite peachy without any "third party" involvement beyond the sender and receiver of th
In practice: S/MIME vs PGP (Score:2)
In practice, most of the e-mail agent I've seen, use "S/MIME" for CA-cert based encryption and use "PGP" for OpenGPG based WoT enryption.
So my point stand. If you're using the S/MIME option in your mail client, it's going to use the CA cert based PKI.
You click a different option for decentralized encryption.
But yes, technically the S/MIME refers to a way to embed blobs, not to a precise way said blob can be deciphered. So from a definition point of view "S/MIME" doesn't imply any peculiar encryption scheme.
PGP WoT (Score:2)
The best part about this is you can send S/MIME signed emails around and accomplish the same thing as what the buttcoin guys call signing.
To expand upon my other answer in this thread [slashdot.org], the kind of signing that is used by some of the "use a blockchain for some signing business" kind of start-up is closer to PGP implementation (such as OpenGPG) which *do not* have a central authority but rely on a "Web of Trust": of people trusting each other, of putting setting into who they trust and to which extent.
WoT can achiever already a lot: it could already be usable for some form of distributed signing.
And from of view, blockchain are nothing more tha
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No no, everybody can send as many e-mails as they want, and they can sign them just like they do now. The *magic* is that you all agree to only *read* the e-mail that's signed by the guy who came up with a hash that ends in a bunch of zeros.
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Hey, you're right! Getting people to invest in a hyperbole-driven thing like Nazis is another good example!
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He'll just create a new one.
Re: There is something it's very good for (Score:2)
Like onecoin?
Bitcoin not Blockchain! (2017 is over) (Score:2)
What we expected happened; con artists digitized Fool's Gold:
This bubble is a safe space for noobs that don’t yet understand Eth, one coin, lite coin, XRP are all scams often run by serial scammers that would otherwise be selling homeopathic remedies to cancer or high frequency rodent deterrents.
https://twitter.com/JWWeatherm... [twitter.com]
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Stupid Bitcoin maximalist.
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And we haven't even gotten into politicians threatening to make Bitcoin illegal in their countries, or doing so, or undoing it, all the while they and their friends are buying it, as direct market manipulatiom nobody will ever go to jail for.
I didn't think it could exist! (Score:5, Insightful)
...but apparently, there *is* an exception to Betteridge's law of headlines.
Re:I didn't think it could exist! (Score:4, Insightful)
Is Blockchain 'the Amazing Solution for Almost Nothing'?
...but apparently, there *is* an exception to Betteridge's law of headlines.
Nope, the answer is STILL no. The reason is the addition of that word "Almost". Delete that, and I'd completely agree with you.
What have the Romans ever done for us? (Score:2)
This sounds like a solution to many problems that need open information that is secure. Perhaps one that is in the headlines right now. Voting data?
What has Quantum Theory ever given us? Well this is now well known.
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Citations? You may think the blockchains have been "hacked", but that's not really the case . . .
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What was that danger where if one actor had > 50% of the blockchain computing power, they could indeed hack it because majority rules by feat of running with the calculations?
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That wouldn't be a hack, per se. That's a "51% attack", and it has never been successful on any of the major PoW chains. One failed example:
https://www.coindesk.com/attem... [coindesk.com]
A "hack" would be cracking the cryptographic algorithm used to sign transactions and rewrite the ledger effortlessly.
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The blockchain technology itsself has so far resisted hacking, but there have been plenty of implimentation hacks. Wallet-emptying malware, IP or DNS redirection to divert mining resources, CPU-power-stealing malware or javascript, https-stripping attacks on wallet sites, and the good old-fashioned 'take the money and run' by wallet site operators.
The Secret Ballot is Essential (Score:3)
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Yeah, but if you accept mass mail-in voting you might as well accept the secret ballot as dead.
Still no need for block-chain in this case though. It is just a computationally inefficient encryption.
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"Yeah, but if you accept mass mail-in voting you might as well accept the secret ballot as dead."
I do not like mass mail-in voting, however compared to the mess US elections are, mass mail-in voting is much better than a personal vote you have to stand in for hours on a workday before using an opaque voting machine which often is a Windows PC. Compared to that pen and paper mail-in votes are downright perfect.
Secret ballots are comparatively simple to achieve in mail-in voting. You simply have 2 envelopes.
Re: The Secret Ballot is Essential (Score:2)
Paper ballots are also just as opaque as the electronic machine.
I fill in some bubbles, take my vote to the machine, feed it in... and then what happens? Does it get counted? Is that machine a paper shredder?
At least in my state I have an online system to inform that they received the absentee ballot. I still donâ(TM)t know that it was included in the final tally.
I also donâ(TM)t know that a bunch of extra votes werenâ(TM)t included in the final count.
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I think you are missunderstanding how pen and paper voting works.
There are no machines involved. You have a box which you can check at the start that it's empty. Then it will be locked. You can check that nobody throws in 2 ballots, and at the evening those ballots will be publicly counted by hand, the result will be written down. Then they will be sorted and the sorted ballots will be counted. There are no computers involved except for some rare very complex elections. Even then the disputed areas will be
Re: The Secret Ballot is Essential (Score:2)
Fair enough, but in the US, what I described is a common interpretation for paper ballots. This includes mail voting, where the Scantron ballot is inserted in the nested envelopes. (The election manager, not the voter, inserts them into the machine.) Recounts are often done by hand for either in-person or absentee votes.
There are certainly improvements they can be made and some states are more transparent with their process than others. But in my state, I really donâ(TM)t know if there is any way to
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Maybe they're opqaue in USA, but they're adjacent to at least one country that has no issues with paper ballots. People in said country can sign up as a scrutineer just to see how it works.
The only opaque bit is why people vote against their own best interests.
Another weird data structure (Score:5, Interesting)
How, exactly, do block chains help with voting?
I have no doubt there will be some uses for block chains, similar to how there are uses for other unusual data structures. Skip lists and bloom filters have their uses, for example. You probably don't know or care what skip lists are used for, they are more efficient data structures for certain programming tasks. (Tasks that can also be done in other ways). I think in 20 years block chains will be the same - some programmers will find a few useful things to do with them, to make certain things more efficient.
Closely related to a block chain is a rainbow table. Rainbow tables have been put to exactly one use over the last 17 years that I know of - cracking weak hashes of passwords. More generally, they could be used anywhere you want to "reverse" a short hash such as md5. They aren't so useful for SHA2.
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"I think in 20 years block chains will be the same - some programmers will find a few useful things to do with them, to make certain things more efficient."
Well actually ZFS uses something rather similar since (at least) 2006. They check sum everything so for any given file you have a chain of check sums you can check to find out if your data is corrupted or not.
However it doesn't make much sense if you want cryptological security as even if you use a PKI signing algorithm, whoever has the key can simply st
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Hash trees were invented in the early nineties, with less developed versions preceding that. They're used all over the place, not just in ZFS. Git for example.
Blockchain uses stunted hash trees plus bog standard encryption plus a simple hashing problem to do uh, magic stuff nobody understands. Give me money.
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How, exactly, do block chains help with voting?
You have listed alternatives that are somewhat in line with blockchain's original promise: Independent data integrity verification.
The whole point of blockchain was to remove a central authority from the validation process. If you live in a country where you can't trust the election system, then blockchains can help with verification as it removes the central power.
The reason blockchain fundamentally fails in many other cases is that the central authorities (or *a* central authority) are not as untrustworth
Blockchain without Bitcoin = Regular database (Score:2, Insightful)
Forking Bitcoin is like forking the game of chess; you get a new game, and you play alone. You can't copy the decentralization. The decentralization is the consequence of the paranoid mindset of the Bitcoin crowd. Money and trust are incompatible!
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Bitcoin relies on incentives; these incentives can't operate outside Bitcoin.
Not every decentralised system requires incentives. Bitcoin ran on incentives due to it being necessary in a general purpose system. Special purpose systems solving a single problem, especially one of short duration like tracking an outcome of an election can run perfectly well on volunteer basis.
Saying blockchain without bitcoin = regular database shows a gross misunderstanding of either blockchains or databases.
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The Crypto (!= Bitcoin) model: is a leader, and some software code. You should trust the leader, and you should trust the software. This model doesn't generate anything decentralized. The main goal was to promote a pump and dump scheme:
https://medium.com/@jimmysong/... [medium.com]
https://unchained-capital.com/... [unchained-capital.com]
The blockchain hype is over.
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I started writing bittorrent in my response, but then I backed off. Bittorrent has an incentive in that the sharing of data back and forth builds the network. You have a direct relationship with another node for the benefit of both (you get the file, the provider gets to offload part of the upload to you). What makes bitcoin different here is that the incentive needs to be provided to do work arbitrarily for 2 third parties with whom no relationship is built.
A better example may be ToR. People who run ToR n
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If you live in a country where you can't trust the electoral system, then even assuming that blockchain technology would introduce more trust, what is the incentive for any party that might become the ruling party (and thus benefit from the status quo) to introduce the technology?
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what is the incentive for any party that might become the ruling party (and thus benefit from the status quo) to introduce the technology?
Zero. The question was if the technology could find a purpose, not if there's a hope in hell of it ever being adopted for that purpose.
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>> They aren't so useful for SHA2.
> Why do you say that?
A 1/1,000 rainbow table for md5 is 32 TB. A 1/1,000,000 one is 32 GB. Those are reasonable sizes - I have a 32 GB md5 table. What that means is that I only have to do one million md5 operations to find an 8-character string that has a given hash, or determine that I don't have one that matches.
A SHA256 table at 1/1,000,000 isn't 32 GB, it's 64 EXABYTES. That's 64,000,000 GB. For a one in a million table, over 8-character inputs.
> Rai
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Well first of all, the blockchain isn't really anything new. It just got lots of hype with Bitcoin.
Immutable transactions are nothing new as mentioned here before.
Voting poses a whole different set of problems than blockchains aim to solve. For example voting requires every voter to be able to understand the system regardless of their education. That essentially rules out using computers in the counting part of the voting process as not everybody is able to read the data of an EPROM in a voting computer and
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But thats the thing. Why use a really expensive (coputational) and frankly insecure (The 51% problem) solution when a much older and vastly more secure solution, Public key signing, hsa been around for deades, is completely verifiable, and comes with all the required tools in almost any modern OS by default.
There is almost no use case for blockchains that older and more established technologies cant do better.
Even its flagship usecase, currency has demonstrated that its a comprehensively less safe store of
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Definitely. Except blockchain doesn't do that.
A stange game (Score:4, Funny)
The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?
The Authoritarian State (Score:4, Insightful)
Block chain will allow the authoritarian state to continuously track all expenditures in the entire economic system at every single transaction. What every spends, what they spend, who they spend it with, all of the, the entire trail of expenditures for the life of the blockchain. So that is what it is really useful for, an authoritarian state controlling everything an individual can spend their blockchain, hard real currency will be illegal. In Capitalism, the corporations controlling the blockchain are the authoritarian state, quite capable of publicly starving you to death, living on the street until you die, unable to purchase anything and unless they want to join you, no one able to provide you any block chain to spend. Living on the charity of others, till they join you as punishment for them.
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I feel dumberer for reading this.
I am hoping you were going for irony?
As per the article, blockchain isn't as good as what they already have, so why bother?
Re:The Authoritarian State (Score:4, Insightful)
You can have mechanisms built in a blockchain like ring signatures or DC nets to ensure privacy is maintained. Monero does quite a good job at this.
There are good uses for blockchains. They are way overhyped, but the concept of one has been around since the 1990s when Chaum was doing his eCash.
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They can do that anyway, just go to a bank and ask for the entire transaction history. When everything is done by card rather than cash, the government knows exactly how you purchase, no blockchain required.
The only difference is t
Money. (Score:3, Insightful)
I do think this article is about right (Score:4)
Well, the summary anyway. No, I didn't read the article.
The thing is that blockchain hasn't yet found its niche. A distributed ledger is great, but it has a few requirements:
1. A need to be distributed (i.e. existing centralized solutions are suboptimal).
2. A group of people willing to keep at least a partial copy.
3. The distributed ledger being a superior method to something that already exists.
It's not a long list, but there aren't too many problems that fit this particular scope. Centralized solutions work pretty well in many cases. Other cases where an entry on a blockchain would be useful are already adequately met with legal document and other storage to that effect. Bitcoin had its rush because it was, very directly, a way for people to make money, and supposedly be a currency to be easier than cash...but that problem was better solved with Venmo if the difference between 'the number of friends I have with Bitcoin wallets' and 'the number of friends who have Venmo installed' is any indication.
I feel like Blockchain will eventually solve a problem, or maybe it's a precursor that's just well ahead of its time...but for right now, it's probably the 2010's most poignant example of 'a solution in search of a problem'.
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The twelve year search continues......
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The thing is that blockchain hasn't yet found its niche.
To be fair, it's kind of great at its original purpose, allowing transactions that can't be prevented by government action.
Re: I do think this article is about right (Score:3)
But they can, provided the government owns half the nodes.
Blockchain requires more than half be free of interference, as per the Byzantine General's Problem.
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Blockchain is easier. Run VMs with the Blockchain code over your computers plus a botnet, then have a "brief" network partition. Or a permanent one, if you're Russia, America or China.
You don't have to match the global nodes, just the nodes talking. You've now doubled the number of nodes that match your version of events. Double the number of nodes talking. You still control N+1, so you still decide the version of events.
If this had happened in Russia or China already, you wouldn't know. If it had happened
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You don't have to match the global nodes, just the nodes talking. You've now doubled the number of nodes that match your version of events. Double the number of nodes talking. You still control N+1, so you still decide the version of events.
It's not about the number of nodes talking, it's about the number of nodes calculating. If a bitcoin node is connected to 10 other nodes, and nine of them are in agreement but the tenth has a longer blockchain, then your node will choose to believe the one with the longer (correctly calculated) blockchain.
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They could mainly shutdown some sectors to power something else. Building new electrical power plants take years.
The NSA already has huge data centers and lots of electricity.
The most memorable historical attack was against Gold: The executive order 6102. Most of the Gold was confiscated back then.
Well if they're going that route they can just start arresting bitcoin users.
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That or a regular datacenter plus a DDOS botnet.
A few bombs would probably do just fine if you can't find a botnet.
Re: I do think this article is about right (Score:2)
How would it actually help with those things? Is there something the blockchain would do better than alternatives?
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It could be any company that's using blockchain is the result of a new CTO trying to prove himself. Nobody hires a new C-level to do the same as his predecessor.
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People are easily targeted by scammers, like the post above, people don't understand the value proposition of Gold as money; Thay can't apprehend the value proposition of Bitcoin, which is the successor of the Gold Standard.
https://unchained-capital.com/... [unchained-capital.com]
ehm...so far I've managed to elude being scammed...also, I know the difference between 'apprehend' and 'comprehend', and know that the fundamental issue with Bitcoin needs to be addressed, but never is.
That problem is deciding how much a bitcoin is actually worth, reliably and with stability. If anyone accomplishes that, they're the existing centralization with extra steps and several metric tons of CO2 to show for it. Without that, it's nearly impossible to utilize bitcoin as actual currency.
Oh, and as a s
Blockchain and the Standard Model of Physics (Score:5, Funny)
Dissociated Press (DP) — FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Physicists identify new fundamental particle
May herald a new particle family and restructuring of the Standard Model
Geneva, Switzerland — August 2018
Keywords: hypino, shinyon, blockchain
High energy particle physicists at the CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nullité) facility have confirmed the existence of the long-conjectured hypino (hy-PEE-no). It is thought to be the first member of a new class of particles known as shinyons (SHY-nee-ons), distinct from bosons and fermions.
Unlike other subatomic particles, hypinos carry no charge, and have neither rest nor relativistic mass. Their only defining quantum property is spin. Hypinos are thought to be the fundamental unit of marketing hyperbole. To date, hypinos are the only known members of the proposed class of shinyons, which are of especial interest to tech investors and holders of the MBA degree. Dr. Martin Waugh, of the Institute for Advanced Squander, further posits that the hypino may be the carrier of the so-called “weak-minded force”, a mutual repulsion between fools and their money. It is theorized that, upon sufficiently accelerated spin, hypinos transform into super-excited hyperinos, detectable only by Chief Information Officers.
The discovery of the hypino is recounted by Drs. Robert Crawford and Robert Jensen as follows:
“It was a Friday afternoon, and we and our colleagues were returning from a long lunch. Maintenance on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was scheduled to start Saturday morning, and the apparatus would be unavailable for two months. We were in a ‘what the hell’ kind of mood, so we thought we'd take a fantasy shot, just for grins and giggles.
“We had a few leftover Higgs Bosons from 2012 on the shelf, so our lowly lab technician, Garth Dennis, breech-loaded them into the beast , set up a blockchain for the target, positioned the extremely sensitive Swindleometer at the intended point of collision, energized the superconducting electromagnets, and let it rip. Upon collision, the blockchain shattered into a shower of the elusive hypinos. Examination of the debris field revealed that the blockchain and all of our cash were gone! Apparently the hypinos were entangled with our funding.”
There may be natural sources of hypinos. The strongest natural emitters appear to be located in Redmond, Washington, and Armonk, New York.
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This post has been permanently bookmarked for future reference. Thanks for making my Sunday morning great.
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I assume the need for restructuring of the Standard Model comes from having no theory as to how the spin-only particles generate such excitation in the surrounding particles.
Long Blockchain Iced Tea? (Score:2)
Long Blockchain Iced Tea?
Seriously? [yahoo.com]
The solution is obvious .... (Score:2)
The blockchain will be used to control nuclear fusion reactors ... thirty years from now.
Re: The solution is obvious .... (Score:2)
Fusion is easy. That's why they've got as far as they have with less than a thousandth of a percent of the expenditure on fossil fuels.
A solution for nothing? Hardly (Score:5, Interesting)
Also REAL ransoms (Score:5, Insightful)
The main problem with the old-school kidnapping is that it's very hard to get paid - bank transfers are out and even banknotes can be traced these days. And punishments for kidnapping are usually the same as for murder, so serious criminals won't risk it for a few tens of thousands dollars.
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And in the longer term, it could displace national currencies as the wealth depository of choice for billionaires
Nah. It’s not a liquid asset. It’s exactly like a stock, in that it’s only worth something when someone else is willing to trade real money for it. Just as with stocks, if you try to sell too much at once, you might discover you’ve depleted the pool of highest buyers and caused the market to take a dip.
The news media gets this wrong all the time, by saying “$X worth of Bitcon (stolen, lost, gained through fraud, take your pick)!”, where X is the current bid price multi
The Chinese are using it to move money out (Score:2)
Emperor Xi has blocked all outgoing money transfers from China for years, so people have been using cryptocurrencies to secretly move their money out. I would do the same.
New Database now Available! (Score:5, Funny)
Available immediately:
- new database
- stores records forever
- no purging of old records, obsolete records
- guaranteed to grow in size forever
- can't edit records
- sequential processing with complex calculations so it's not Order(1) or O(n) or even O(n^x) but a complex polynomial that grows by yet another O(n^y) each time another entry is added
- guaranteed to always get slower over time -- it's the nature of cumulative calculations to verify the data each and every time it's accessed
This new database is available immediately. It currently underperforms
- SQlite
- MysQL
- MariaDB
- Oracle
- MSSQL
- NOSQL
- a flat text file
- an SOS written with a stick on a deserted desert island to attract air rescue
Welcome to Blockchain, the database worse in every respect except one -- authentication.
So if you believe that the only way to do authentication properly is to accept all the above,
then it's a good thing you're not a security researcher.
Ehud Gavron
Find me on the blockchain.
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Re: New Database now Available! (Score:2)
WORM (Write Once Read Many) databases have a value where you absolutely need to prove a sequence, but it's extremely rare.
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I notice you didn't mention MongoDB. Does it not underperform MongoDB because MongoDB is webscale?
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I recall an early programming course where the TA listed various sorting algorithms. He got to bubble sort, "Don't use this one. It's...dumb."
Internet Notary service. (Score:2)
Best use I can think of for Blockchain is to have proof of creation of digital media.
If a security camera logged a cryptographically secure hash of each video segment recorded it would be near-absolute proof that if the hash matches, the video has not been altered, edited, deep-faked, etc. since the time the hash was added to the blockchain.
Could also be used to distribute hashes of official releases of software for download; singed with the authors key, submitted to a major chain; otherwise the hash shown
Blockchain is for when you trust no one (Score:2)
Re: Blockchain is for when you trust no one (Score:2)
If you trust noone, then you have no reason to trust the majority. But if the majority lie, blockchain lies.
Amazing solution for almost nothing? (Score:2)
I thought that was Quantum Computing...
Crypto-currency (Score:2)
It works pretty well for crypto-currencies. Other creative uses might exist around gaming and transferable digital assets. DNS replacement is another good use, though the first attempt Namecoin was unwieldy. It might be a good replacement for reward points if say several small retailers or chains wish to pool their efforts.
What they are, what they're good for (Score:3)
Blockchains are a decentralized public ledger. If you don't need a ledger, or you don't need it to be decentralized, or you don't want it public, you don't want blockchains. It's that simple.
In short, blockchains aren't good for voting machines (ballots are supposed to be secret), they're not desired by governments and financial institutions (they like secret, centralized operations) and they have nothing to do with computer games, video cameras, cars or coffee machines.
Re: What they are, what they're good for (Score:2)
Financial institutions were fine with mondex cards, where you could move cash to a card and move cash between cards.
No central ledger, no central broker, no central management.
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That was before Big Data. Nowadays the money is in tracking the shit out of the card wearer using a proprietary system, and a fully controlled network of payment terminals.
One and only use (Score:3)
I was always very sceptical of the blockchain hype (Score:2)
You can't replace reliable institutions with mere bits, no matter how sophisticated your methods and mathematical functions are. A web of trust can't replace a well managed seperation-of-concern-and-power mint. (Sidenote: The US Fed might not be the best example for that). And once you have a proper mint, you needn't build your digital currency on energy consuming blockchain stuff with ever-increasing transactional load, but can use more simple and way less processing-intensive crypto-tech for transaction a
Failure rate doesn't actually tell us too much (Score:2)
92% failure rate in a year sounds bad on paper. But ... restaurants have a 60% failure rate within one year. "Restaurants" are largely a solved problem, and we don't hold this up as evidence that this "food" thing isn't all its cracked up to be. For any new thing, you'd expect the failure rate to be high. But "high" is relative to that 60% of new businesses that fail in well-established product segments, not high relative to a 0% failure rate.
So yeah, I'm not beating any drum here for blockchain, but agains
Re: (Score:2)
92% failure rate in a year sounds bad on paper. But ... restaurants have a 60% failure rate within one year. "Restaurants" are largely a solved problem, and we don't hold this up as evidence that this "food" thing isn't all its cracked up to be.
No, but we do hold it up as a reason not to invest in every new restaurant that comes along beyond maybe a single meal to see if the place is any good.
Well, I'm using it ... (Score:2)
that's news (Score:2, Informative)
That is maybe the first time in human history that a journalist has written a headline question that can be answered with "yes". Amazing.
I've been involved in a bunch of projects that had "blockchain" somewhere in them, including a government research group that was all about blockchain and possible projects.
IMHO, the lessons learnt from all those was that blockchain is almost never the answer, and almost always a solution in desperate search of a problem.
The technology is nifty, and there are a few edge ca
Not at all (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Bitcoin is actually worse than nothing.
It takes something that has intrinsic value (electricity) and turns it into something that does not. The only value a Bitcoin has is whatever other Bitcoin people think it is worth. It is basically a Ponzi scheme.
Re: (Score:2)