Yeah I've basically stopped talking about bitcoin for this reason. The conversation is just too unsophisticated and there's really no point or interest in educating random people on this.

For example I still often hear people say the blockchain is cool but the value token isn't. When I tell them blockchain without a value token doesn't incentivise decentralised mining and it's just a regular old database, there's just no real response because their point was a talking point they read somewhere.

I stopped talking about it around 2015, I just got bored of having the same conversations.

I stopped around the time that 'Smart Contracts' were entering the mainstream as a buzzword (Late 2016? Early 2017?).

The moment that was, in retrospect, pivotal was being summoned to a meeting with some of our sales guys and an industry analyst as an 'authority' on blockchain (when really I'm just someone who had an interest in it). The analyst went on a long rant about how 'Smart Contracts' were going to revolutionise the insurance industry by being able to execute payouts automatically and how agreements were all going to be automated etc. etc. I tried to explain that 'Smart Contracts' weren't really 'smart' or 'contracts' and that what she was thinking about would probably be better described as 'Ricardian Contracts' (which don't require a blockchain to exist), but I could tell by the glazed over expression in her eyes that she was so sold on her notion of Smart Contracts that there was little to no chance that I was going to be able to dissuade her in a 15 minute discussion.

Yes, that's exactly it. It feels like a discussion about religion, astrology, alien probing, or homeopathic medicine. They have a shiny idea, and they are just not interested in hearing that it's not going to work.

I think it's interesting to consider whether a value token is the only possible incentive. There might well be other workable alternatives, possibly better from certain points of view if you can avoid or limit the mining arms race problem.

How do you check that this real-time transaction log was not altered? I think that blockchain concept is a neat way to implement that check. Client need to store a single hash and move on to the latest transaction verifying each block. If something is altered in the past, client will notice that immediately.

You can easily provide a log of most databases and clients can hash that. So, block chain adds nothing there.

Really, you can keep adding hashes to your log, but a client needs to save old hashes and have some access to old logs before they can verify anything.

IMO, a large reason everything went blockchain is you can tack it in without changing anything. Just setup a process to modify your logs and boom another buzzword.

At the point where we are talking about a distributed log with cryptographic hashes, it is hard not to introduce the buzzword "blockchain" back in, as that is the original design.

Having global consensus (PoW) is a different matter, but that doesn't mean what you are saying isn't a blockchain.

There is a good conversation me and @geofft had the other day, would love your thoughts on it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17000401

With the important exception that there are no blocks. If you're doing transactions one at a time, it's just a long ledger with checksums. Which are just a timesaving techinque so you don't have to replay log segments and compare with snapshots.

In practice, many of these organizations talking about using in-house blockchains have legal trust relationships and systems of laws in common, and they won't only be relying on a transaction log to make sure the record isn't getting fiddled.

And often the threat model isn't related to changing the historical ledger anyhow; there is a lot of fraud, embezzlement, and other financial crime that attacks other points in the system. That requires a significant system of financial controls, which will be sufficient to catch ledger tampering as well. Meaning that the checksums become a modest nice-to-have, not a significant anti-fraud technique.

Okay, that is an interesting and fair point.

You are saying because these types of verified logs can't control for other variables, they do not represent a "complete" set of the system, and therefore aren't as useful for fraud analysis? Hmm.

But this is where I feel like calling a cryptocurrency economic model a "blockchain" is just a silly misappropriation of a word. To me, clearly "blockchain" is not like "capital" or "communes", a blockchain is a cryptographically verified data structure. However, I do hear a lot of people throwing around the word "blockchain" just to reference an economic model, which seems excessive.

I like your point though, and well described.

People used DB logs with hashes for verification at least as far back as the 70's. Blockchain on it's own is just a slightly different form of the same thing.

So, while Blockchain has nothing directly to do with being distributed, that's just a useful feature but requires proof of work of some kind, or someone can quickly manufacture several blocks.

Right, the only "new" thing is using PoW as an /economic incentive/ because PoW was previously used for plenty of things during the cipherpunk movement as well.

Fair point about it being distributed

The Proof of Work solves a separate problem, that of Double-Spending. The Proof of Work here isn't arbitrarily to slow the system itself down, just to slow non-canonical histories.

But that itself is not the "blockchain" (thus the "how do you define it?" question, I'm curious to hear your take), I'm just playing devil's advocate: A lot of people who weren't around in the 70s are now calling verified logs a "blockchain", now it is a stupid buzzword, but at what point do we consolidate the word for an idea, versus argue there are semantic differences?

Your proposed system would not be censorship resistant: The central control point could decide (or be forced to) to block MrControversialGuy's from sending and receiving money. This point is not just theorethical, e.g. wikileaks got booted of the normal bank system when they dropped their big leaks, but they could still take bitcoin.

The same is true for a blockchain where the same organisation controls all the nodes, which is the scenario at hand.

If they know which addresses belong to Wikileaks

That's a feature of anonymity, not the blockchain.

But that's not a bad thing from the perspective of most of these "OMG blockchain" uses that are internal or with a controlled set of partners. In practice, very few people want to be forced to do business with somebody they later decide they don't want to do business with.

Even if they did want that for some reason, most countries have anti money-laundering laws where you have to be able to stop doing business with certain parties.

Wikileaks was never "booted off the normal bank system", only a few US banks (BoA, VISA, MasterCard, PayPal, Western Union) refused to send money to them. Bank transfers from anywhere else always worked fine.

When 90%+ of your income is routed through VISA, MasterCard and PayPal, getting booted off those is a sufficiently fatal blow. I don't know (or care) if this was the case with Wikileaks, but if it happens to your retail business you are toast.

These private institutions have way too much arbitrary power to decide the fates of others with opaque & inconsistent reasoning-- I see nearly anything providing a check against that power as useful. I'm no longer convinced blockchain tech is a viable answer, but I do think having a variety of non-consolidated payment processors to choose from is a good thing.

The bottom line is that this isn't a real problem for legitimate businesses. If you're a business owner who's been shut out of the western banking system then your business is DOA whether or not the business accepts bitcoin. Yes, bitcoin is great if you're a rogue political organization like wikileaks, but this is a very uncommon scenario.

There have been numerous, widely varied reports of legitimate businesses having their funds completely frozen for an unspecified amount of time - often long enough to sink a fledgling startup - simply because they were new and "made too much money too fast".

Payment processors have also been known to discriminate against perfectly legal businesses for a long list of random things some old jackass in a suit decided were too 'unsavory'.

I think these organizations are wrong to meddle so much rather than being passive facilitators as originally envisioned. They have a right to exclude things which put their assets at risk, as well as a legal obligation to assist law enforcement where appropriate, but beyond that neutrality and privacy should be the rule.

> Payment processors have also been known to discriminate against perfectly legal businesses for a long list of random things some old jackass in a suit decided were too 'unsavory'.

Typically, it's because of fraud, not unsavory-ness. Fraud on the customer's side, not the business'.

The solution to that is not making every transaction put the weight of fraud solely on the customer.

Definitely fine where legal relationships exist, but the whole concept of law as trust is being challenged right now, as our own countries break the very laws they exist to enforce.

Edit: help me understand why you disagree

Then the discussion revolves back to how insane it is that the central authorities in these schemes control the nodes. Either you can trust them (in which case they should use a normal database) or you can't (in which case you can use a coin that they don't control).

I agree, that is insane, and defeats the purpose of using block chain at all.

I think the issue people are taking is that they think you are overestimating exactly how much society has declined. The ABCs have special authorizations to essentially break the law, but that practice has not yet trickled down to the local politburo. It is not quite the time to call the stability of US-style contract law in to question. (Even though the attitude behind the special authorizations, namely "I don't care what happens just do something," will be what undermines it if ever anything does.)