I think generally, a TTP is going to be more efficient than a system without a TTP. "Trust" at its essence is a shortcut. Without it you have to create a general enforcement mechanism which is going to cost something. E.g., the cost of incenting miners. You can slice it difference ways, but in the end you need the distributed network of nodes to exist and the people who control them to be invested in the continued existence and integrity of the system.
I say "generally" for a reason, because I think it's certainly possible that there are cases where the cost of the third-party is too high or the third-party may not be reliable enough, etc. But generally, it seems to me that blockchain is an inherently inefficient mechanism.
On top of that, the only effective use so far has been to create an investment bubble. Once enough money has been lost on that I think there's a good chance blockchain will get a black eye which will cause people to steer clear even if they may have a use case that's a good fit.
Hmmm, which gives me an idea. Gluten free, Paleo Blockchain.
Another meta-metric I'm watching is for mainstream media and word of mouth to lose interest, ie. once this no longer comes up at all get-togethers with friends and family, it will seem a lot less bubbly to me.
The problem with crypto in general is that it's such a different type of market that the models for figuring out its valuation are wildly speculative at best.
In other words: all I can offer about it not being a bubble anymore is a soft maybe :)
A crash does not necessarily indicates a bubble a crash without recovery does.
To me "true blockchain technology" in the bitcoin sense of the design is open, permission-less and only has a few real applications. The others: Private, permissioned are really just variations of a central database which is replicated multiple places.
Beyond cryptocurrencies? Go on, I'm all ears. I'm always amazed by how often I hear that claim (on HN and elsewhere) and yet nobody seems in a rush to be specific about it.
The only other use case for blockchains I'm aware of that makes sense to me is some sort of IP protection scheme (mentioned in the article too). If you make a discovery you can write down "$me has discovered this and that", hash it and put it into the blockchain. Later you can use it to prove that you actually had that information at that date without needing any trusted peer or institution.
But even then it only works if the chain can't be attacked you still need the currency aspect to motivate miners (or shareholders in a PoW scheme) to protect the chain.
"But that's just a write-only distributed database....with a layer of asymmetric cryptography". Yeah...
It is aggravating when some in the industry try to champion everything as a silver bullet, but it is just as flawed when many instantly veer to being anti-that thing just because.
As an aside, proof-of- schemes are not necessary in many/most alternative blockchain scenarios. The egregious inefficiency of platforms like Bitcoin is not relevant for most other uses.
A Byzantine fault-tolerant, distributed NTP protocol that does not rely on a trusted third party. That is a concrete, legitimate use case for a blockchain that meaningfully improves through a trustless, permissionless and decentralized system. For example, this could augment Google's RoughTime NTP protocol.[1]
More abstractly, blockchains resolve many hard problems in cryptographic protocols that would otherwise require trusted third parties. There has been nontrivial academic attention for this particular possibility, including support from DARPA and the NSF.[2]
Now you have heard someone making this claim and being specific about it on HN.
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https://www.blogs.conduent.com/2017/12/05/the-possibilities-...
https://www.blogs.conduent.com/2018/01/29/how-blockchain-cou...
One thing that the article is missing to discuss is that for a blockchain to truly work there needs to be a reward system for the nodes to participate in the network (basically to cover the cost of this crazy expensive infrastructure). Ie. a cryptocurrency that can be mined.
Because that has nothing to do with being permissionless?
You don't have to spend thousands to be a bitcoin miner. You can use any old computer. Making a profit is a different story. Still, resources can be pooled together to buy a competitive mining rig for a few grand.
Even then, a few thousand dollars is realistically not a large entry fee for anything. Wiring your house for Internet access would cost around that much if it wasn't subsidized.
Web 1.0 was about selling stuff. Web 2.0 was about hoarding data and using it to sell stuff. If blockchains are Web 3.0, what's the model?
Bitcoin was released free and the designer got nothing beyond the initial stake, which only works for coins. Ethereum is run by a foundation.
Say I want to launch a blockchain startup and really hit the sweet spot according to this paper, how do I build a business on it?
This model isn't as exciting as "disrupting X with blockchain" but it's certainly possible to build a profitable business with it.
Now, I'm well aware that technology isn't inherently ideological. So you could hypothetically come up with a way to hack it to make it do what you want to do. And a lot of people are trying to do this, i.e. the SegWit folks, but the way they're doing this is by breaking the fundamental decentralization of blockchain to make it more federated/centralized. It's a perversion of Satoshi's vision, but it's not unethical or technically invalid.
But the question I have is, why? A business is inherently about taking money from disparate sources and putting it in a central location: your business' bank account. You might be able to do this with blockchain, but it's working against the decentralized, untrusted model, not with it. A datomic-style log handles the ledger aspects of blockchain with a fraction of the technical complexity, and you don't need the untrusted aspects of blockchain if you're running a centralized business (ostensibly, you trust yourself). If you succeed in using blockchain to run a centralized business, it's despite the model, not because of it.
There's one exception, which is that the underregulated nature of the current blockchain industries and the hype around blockchain open up some opportunities (i.e. this is why the SegWit folks can make money off this). But that's more about checking the "blockchain" keyword off in your marketing/legal materials than about the actual benefits of the technology (i.e. ICOs--the only benefit blockchain actually gives is that it allows you to skirt financial regulation, which has nothing to do with the technical benefits of the technology). And as regulations are put in place and hype fades, a lot of these opportunities will dry up: most are temporary and the ones that aren't are extremely difficult technically.
Blockchain IS a revolution, but it's not a revolution that can be easily coopted by rent-seekers (and make no mistake, that is what you're proposing). The rent-seekers will eventually break it (they always do) but then it will be just another financial instrument, and unless you have an in-depth technical AND social understanding of the technology (like the SegWit folks) you're unlikely to be one of the rent-seekers who benefits from this. There are a lot of lower-hanging fruit out there to build a business on.
"You can't add value just by forking Bitcoin" may be what you are trying to say here, and I agree. I'm trying to think past that to what value could be added to the blockchain to justify collecting rent while preserving the decentralized trustless nature of the vision.
But there could still be economic incentives. For example, if GNU Taler succeeds as a payment system and manages to replace Visa, that could mean less fees for both customers and merchants which would be incentive enough for the merchants and customers to adopt the system.
Basically you cannot think in terms of traditional business models. You need to think of it as a free software project that might potentially be a massive cost saving for enough people to adopt it.
The way this reads now, the only products built on blockchains will be industry consortiums trying to "cut out the middlemen", which they will then use to limit competition by excluding new entrants.
The post now points to the PDF of a 7-page paper which goes into some detail.
Apparently, the original link led to a snarky "No", which isn't at all as flippant as what the paper states.
Thank you for the note, I missed the "original" link.
Surely the "No" is more than a bit snarky, but it is not like the paper in itself contain that much of meaningful "news" or "ground-breaking" considerations, the conclusion (like it seems to me is happening very often on similar papers, i.e. a not-conclusion) is:
"We conclude that depending on the application scenario, there are indeed valid use cases for each, permissionless and permissioned blockchains, and centralized databases that need to be determined carefully."
It is not a "No", but it is a "it depends" that is not providing much more than the "No".
Perhaps seemingly showing a result before I've answered questions is an anti-pattern.
Seconded. I'm almost certain they are, or at least, they're pretty damn hard to stop.
It's just not persistent the way Bitcoin's blockchain is.
I call of "Proof of Help" (as opposed to Work or Stake). To summarize, the idea is that in a market for tutoring, people can tutor each other, however there would be some sort of way to confirm that tutoring actually took place.
From there, you may receive help in exchange for the quantity of time you've helped others, represented by the Help that you have accumulated by helping. Unlike Bitcoin, this Help can never be converted for fiat and is only useful for receiving tutoring.
Unlike Bitcoin, this wouldn't be decentralized though. It would effectively be a public ledger run by ideally a nonprofit. I think blockchain is a good use for this. Mainly because the quantities of Help should not be able to be manipulated by the centralized authority. Their role here is simply to confirm identities and serve as a sort of access control to the blockchain itself (e.g. They can ban people, but not change how much Help someone has).
Alice and Bob vouch that they each tutored each other for a week straight, despite just leaving a Skype connection open facing a blank wall. Now they've got fifty Tutorbucks each, whereas I had to tutor a dozen college freshmen for a month to get the same amount.
Such a deterrent would hopefully prevent people from attempting to game the system.
The point of recording and publishing the sessions, by the way, is to prevent repeated tutoring sessions surrounding the same question or content, ideally.
Here, your "help" is the object you want to have on the blockchain that is trustlessly secure. The analogous object in bitcoin is money.
Can someone give me an example of an always online trusted third party, and also let me know that how can you see into the future so that this third party keeps its guarantees throughout life?
Edit: flagging this post as it seems like a troll attempt to me
From the perspective of a regular user, many "always only trusted third parties" exist - in the western world, for all intents and purposes, they include their utility suppliers, banks, telephone companies, email providers, and chat services.
This site is perfect for someone like my sister who is constantly forwarding blockchain-related junk to me, because her (non technical) job brought her to a few conferences about such things. Yet she doesn't understand the design tradeoffs of such an approach, she only sees the buzz.
And yes, I have talked to people who have proposed to use block chain for storing papers. So while it might be obvious to you that blockchain is not a solution for that, it's still a good paper that lays out in detail what a blackchain does and doesn't do.
This question reduces to, “Can someone give me an example of a third party I’ll trust?”
In general, it is correct to say that if you can trust a third party, you do not need a blockchain. “Always online” can refer to a variey of tiers of certainty. For example, it can mean infrastructure built on AWS or GCP, which is probably safe for the foreseeable future, excepting societal collapse or financial catastrophe. On the other hand, it sounds like you’re interpreting this literally (or at least, far more strongly), such that you require near epistemological certainty that a third party is both trusted and always available (more simply, will never be Byzantine).
The authors are not wrong to discourage use of a blockchain if you can trust a third party, because trusting a third party is simply easier. In the abstract, trusted third parties alleviate the requirement for decentralization and permissionlessness, but different parties have different (and nuanced) risk and trust models. Whether or not you should trust a third party is a function of the value of your data and the perceived resources and incentives of the vendor.
Circling back to your comment - your question is ill-posed, because your implicit requirements for a trust guarantee are likely to be significantly higher than others. For example, I backup my data to Backblaze B2 and Google GCP. Neither of them are “always online” in the literal sense, nor decentralized, so I’m trusting them in particular. Theoretically, backing up my data to a blockchain would be better for thermodynamic trust guarantees based on a distributed, mathematically hard, economically incentivized proof of work. But I don’t need that.
Trust and availability are not binary concepts. Furthermore, you should assess a third party’s trustworthiness and availability based on the value of your own data, not just their capabilities and resources.
Real life example at the moment IOTA is working like that, there is one coordinator that works as trusted party (in my honest opinion they will never be able to shut it, but let's wait and see), another example is byteballs another DAG implementation works with 12 witnesses (at the moment controlled by a single physical entity, but in the future can be distributed)
That is presuming a blockchain needs something like proof of work to enforce them being append-only. One might argue semantics and claim that a blockchain only needs to be a 'chain of blocks' but I think most people expect some form of distributed consensus when something is called a 'blockchain'.
Under the definition often used in finance, all modern Linux machines are powered by blockchain, because journald uses hash-linked entries to provide evidence when log entries are manipulated.
I want a national voting system with distributed ledgers in every state, and to add to that, every state has a copy of every other states voting records by virtue of having to validate the transactions. There's obviously lots of particulars around this, such as what to do with absentee ballots that are mailed in. This is a hypothetical use, at least in my mind.
Another one, more for the finance industry. A few years back, I paid my rent with a moneygram. A few weeks later, I got a phone call from the rental office telling me that moneygram rejected the payment and that I needed to call moneygram. Upon calling them, they said that they had record of me buying the moneygram (or whatever the hell it actually is), but that their system didn't have a record and there wasn't much they could do beyond give me a refund. How in the actual hell does a payments company have a problem like that? As a developer, I'm left to wonder if this was caused by some errant production release that wiped records, or a developer who ran a script from a well-known runbook that wiped out critical data (read: Amazon S3), or maybe even fraud somewhere in the pipeline. Why don't they have this data distributed and backed up in offline systems? If the government is willing to throw the book at financial fraud crimes (Unless you are Jamie Dimon), then there aught to be some kind of mandate that we have a verified ledger of electronic financial activities. The even scarier thing, to me, is that I thought they would have been doing that already...
Those are a few potential uses from my perspective.
Payments is definitely something blockchain can do better in some cases
Despite being so simple, the paper ballot is quite hard to improve upon without making mistakes. Moreover, a democracy should probably have the requirement that the voting process is transparent and understandable for all citizens.
The first attempts at electronic voting (if at all) should probably be made in countries like Estonia where all citizens have e-ID cards with cryptographic key pairs you can use for some oldschool cryptographic voting schemes.
If you need to convince management to pay for it, then it's not yours.
But why not embrace all the money (and talent) flowing into this space through the hype and let natural selection run its course to leave us with some great tech that really leverages blockchain technology?
eInk might be a good example: despite a lot of interest and investment, it’s still a niche product despite having made big advances from where it was in the 90s because competing technologies had fewer hard challenges.
You may trust those third parties, but as always you also want the facility to easily verify (because your trust can be undermined by a single employee, a single malfunction, a single hack, and so on). When you add the notion of verification the whole evaluation flips.
How to decide if blockchain is right for your project?
https://twitter.com/MalwareTechBlog/status/93264913325659750...
At the least, replace the site with a link to the PDF. It seems the average user here is incapable of reading as far as the second link on the page.
> The choice between a permissionless, permissioned or centralized database is not trivial. While this question has been discussed before [15], to the best of our knowledge, we provide in this article the first structured methodology to decide which technological solution is the most appropriate depending on which application scenario
Do you want to have social life? ---- Yes: you don't need internet ---- No: you need permissionless internet
Clearly, you don't need an internet. It lacks coherence and autonomous smart contract decentralization cloud computing chainblocks. Case closed.
