AFAIK this was a well-known problem for digital currencies. I think it was "eCash" that went the furthest ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecash ), with "blind signatures" to prevent transactions being linked to the same user, but couldn't solve the centralised trust problem.
BitCoin's "solution" is to share a ledger, pick the longest in case of forks, prevent spam using Hashcash and keep the hashcash barrier high by turning mining into a lottery.
This is a pretty cool hack, since it addresses not only technical security concerns, but also economic and social aspects. Yet I see it as a pathological, brute-force edge-case: technically a solution, but less "this problem is now solved" and more "ha, I hadn't thought of that; we'll need to specify the problem better".
I agree though that further discussion would be necessary to find that nail for blockchain, but the elephant in the room (Bitcoin) has people who are personally and financially invested, leading to incessant noise being constantly generated around anything related to blockchain.
100% agree. If you look at all of the current blockchain "use-cases" you will find that many of them (e.g. Ripple and Corda) are simply centralized/semi-centralized solutions that have been around for years (in the distributed-systems literature) masquerading a blockchain solutions.
In a sense the blockchain craze is good as it's getting institutions such as banks to modernize their systems and make it so that a regional bank doesn't need to wait 5-7 days to transfer money, but examples like this are few and far between and for the most part people are using the idea to drain money from undereducated/uncritical people.
The mentality that you need to have a problem to solve in order to justify your company has some real value to it. However, somehow this has expanded into the notion that every piece of tech that doesn't solve an explicit problem has no value. The existence of the gaming industry shows that this is not the case.
It was a quick introduction to 'how the world works' for a lot of us.
Adding insult to injury, some of us joined the marketers for the scraps and gave them undue legitimacy. This was on HN a few weeks ago, explains the whole phenomenon based on three types: Geeks, Mops, Sociopaths. https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths (And we're mostly all 'geeks' here, by his definition.)
And this is not sour grapes — I first heard of Bitcoin in 2010, when it was 3 cents. I didn't make any money out of it, but I've not 'missed out' in any real sense.
I also like quicksort and fibonacci numbers but would I try to start a business based on this? Probably not. I want to see legit tech being built that uses blockchains but as soon as it ends up being on a business plan or mentioned in marketing material my gagging reflex sets in.
For example, the recent BitTorrent ICO disappointed me, although it pumped 10x from ICO price in the past week which will keep the speculators interested, thanks to Binance supporting it.
I wasn't there during the dot-com era, but from what I read it was the same situation: lots of scammers and cool kids raising millions from investors driven by FOMO (fear of missing out), and lots of money ending up in the wrong hands.
The big difference is that with dot-coms the scams and shady characters were in a minority, whereas with blockchain they are the vast majority (so much so that it is hard to separate the signal, if there is indeed any, from the noise). Don't think anyone would debate that point. Another (albeit more debatable) difference is that dot-coms were pretty focussed on users, while blockchain development seems to put very little genuine thought into how ordinary people would benefit from any of it - it is mostly about "building out the ecosystem" (which sounds suspiciously like "recruiting new members to our multi-level marketing scheme"). In my view these differences are because the dot-coms were driven primarily by the technology and the exciting new things you could do with it, while blockchain development is driven primarily by money (to make matters worse, psuedo anonymised money which was originally used almost exclusively for illicit purposes) hence bringing out the worst elements of human nature.
As a human being, I would prefer the lottery winner though because they don't have as many false ideas about what kind of person they are and what kind of world we live in.
VHS/betamax, for instance.
imo, blockchain as we know it today can't survive the wilding of these platforms, the stories around the cretins and thieves involved.
it'll have to evolve to something that doesn't resemble "blockchain" as we talk about it today (cloud versus devops versus sysadmins, etc).
a new keystone of this technology will have to carry it far away and make it kind of different for this to be the thing we're still talking about 10 years from now.
Don't sea lion.
The "Just Asking Questions" faux civility is sometimes referred to as JAQing off.
Is that some kind of hyper progressive safe space thing?
Please explain. I'd like to be a good citizen.
I just note that you have no idea what you are talking about and therefore discount your opinion accordingly.
"You know nothing, your opinion is invalid" is a classic "crypto" talking point.
"You don't understand Bitcoin," they shriek while failing to comprehend the precarious position their beloved asset is in. "Bitcoin can't have bubbles, it's mathematically impossible," yell their cheerleaders.
And I question your claim about enthusiastic people being the least informed. I'd say the people who work on it and dedicate their lives to improving the infrastructure are both enthusiastic and informed. Of course there are also enthusiastic people who are misinformed.
I hate it too for the same reason but at least I'm honest about it.
I hate it because so many good people have been scammed and because it is dreadful for the environment. Wasting power for seemingly no purpose.
Reason being the ignorant hype, even greater inequality, and the support of criminals, terrorists, and bad actors built into the very nature of public blockchain.
Private blockchain is a different story, but I see that more like a choice between SQL and NoSQL. Just need to wait a decade or so for the tech to mature.
While it does have a shared, immutable ledger and chaincode, what is really interesting is the coordination and integration of business entities and processes. This is something a database does not facilitate like a blockchain.
I'm currently in a bet with a friend.
- If you use a curse word, $1 to the other
- If you can convince someone the h#$@ should be one of the banned four letter words, $10 recoup
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h#$@ should be a banned for letter word! Do you agree?
Not sure if this setup was to easy, or you taking your bet too serious scanning the interwebs for such opportunities :-)
We don't go around preaching, rather bring it up when someone uses the "H-word." It's far more interesting IRL because it almost always sparks an inspiring conversation.