It's evident that the person who wrote the blog post does not understand that they're being approached by grifters, who want to use their existing brand goodwill to expand their grift's outreach. Being approached by the Ethereum foundation should be treated like cold emails asking if you'd like to put a link to a casino in your website. I'm glad that the community was able to clarify this for them.
original post: we're not talking about crypto
comment: they're not talking about crypto but people still just say "F them crypto is bad!"
you: F them because crypto is bad!
https://esp.ethereum.foundation/about
“ ESP focuses on strengthening Ethereum's foundations and enabling future builders: improving infrastructure, expanding the range of tools available to those building on Ethereum, deepening our understanding of cryptographic primitives, and growing the builder ecosystem through education and community development. The work we support is open source, non-commercial and built for positive sum outcomes.”
It seems more likely to me that they were looking into "growing the [grifter] ecosystem through [...] community development" instead.
[1] https://merehead.com/blog/maersk-blockchain-use-case/
[2] Entirely possible this could be done without a blockchain, yes.
An example is supply chain management [0] and supply chain traceability, which is already in use at Walmart [1].
[0] https://scholar.google.pt/scholar?q=blockchain+supply+chain+... [1] https://jbba.scholasticahq.com/article/3712.pdf
Blockchains can use proof-of-authority or proof-of-stake not as a means to accumulate “wealth” but firstly to secure the network from tampering while facilitating the resilient, chain of transaction records.
Ethereum is a distributed Turing machine (completely programmable)—first and foremost—and that is much more powerful than a simple coin.
Blockchain is just bookkeeping. I don't know, can you demonstrate a use case for accounting or book keeping?
Up to now we always had to do accounting in books that can be cooked and have to be trusted.
Blockchain is accounting with books that can't be cooked and don't have to be trusted.
It has other problems which are real, but so what? Everything has some kind of problem.
With blockchain the problem is if you go for convenience and use a centralizing key custodian, then someone else controls your keys and everything they protect, and if you don't, then it's too easy to lose your keys and everything they protected with no recovery.
Well those are real problems but they are no different from the problems of using a plain database that can be copied, modified, hidden, stolen, has to be trusted even though you know you actually can't trust the owner, etc...
Not really. It’s books that a couple people tediously agree on.
Any other "blockchain" related innovation is just a solution in search of a problem with the real purpose of pumping some virtual asset and selling it off in volume to other speculators. Anything you claim can be done with blockchains (other than decentralized finance) can be more easily done with databases, PKI, hashtrees, ZKPs and other technologies that exist for decades, and that includes smart contracts and anonymous & decentralized communication.
You clearly live with a political stable government you can trust not to steal from you or imprison you for engaging in political protests.
People in such places are using decentralized assets to protect themselves. What do you think they should do instead?
How about... they, and everybody else around the world, should work hard for good governance for all people of Earth?
It's simply obscene to claim that a speculative token peddled by SV venture capitalists could somehow magically solve things like disease, violence, corruption and lack of basic infrastructure keeping these nations down. It's so self serving and detached from developmental realities of poor countries - which I experienced fist hand in my life - that it makes my blood boil in disgust for the crypto bros.
Easy to say. Try to go protesting in Iran now.
At its core, it's a form of herd immunity. You don't drink bleach, not because you know personally what drinking bleach does to your body, but because society has told you what the consequences of drinking bleach are, immunizing you against the idea of drinking bleach.
Yes. It's become a sort of memetic virus that causes people to lose all their critical thinking abilities and immediately start trying to turn everything into paperclips (well, turn energy into discarded hash computations). This is why it gets a response like Alien or The Thing where people who appear to be compromised by the mind virus get the flamethrowers turned on them.
I also think it's telling that they'd rather ignore the negative feedback because they want to apparently continue on this path than actually recognize that people don't want blockchain garbage ruining what's otherwise a good project.
I'm looking forward to the next post in 6-12 months where they talk about all the "awesome" plans they have with blockchain and they'll have the comments locked from the beginning. Oh, and not to forget the ensuing fork because honestly, we just want a word processor that doesn't suck and isn't proprietary.
It's not because you can't imagine anything that nobody else can.
I think this is it or, at least, to moderate slightly, there are few valid use cases for blockchain. The top comment, from Theo Jackson, captures it really well:
"Please don’t. If there is a requested feature that _requires_ blockchain I’d be interested, but “possible ways to combine LibreOffice with blockchain technologies” sounds like a solution in search of a problem."
What are the actual problems LibreOffice are trying to solve here? It just feels like this post dropped in from 4 years ago where everyone seemed to be trying to shoehorn blockchain into everything with no clear idea of what they were actually trying to achieve.
And then there's the fact that many block chain implementations have an absolutely horrendous energy requirement. It was always odious (or at least from about 2013 onwards) but, in 2022, in the midst of an energy crisis and rising prices, it's both ethically and environmentally indefensible. I know that Ethereum has been working to address this but the reality is that for many extant cases blockchain is horrifically compute intensive and inefficient.
Someone in the comments on LibreOffice blog expressed the same opinion. Which surprised me. Has the consensus been reached among the serious non-grifting public that blockchains are useless to represent peer-to-peer trustless money? Has bitcoin been declared a failure?
The parent (and the commenter on the site) weren't saying that an office suite has no use for blockchains; they were making a far broader claim that there are no use cases for blockchains.
When a project has a problem that needs solving, and they look for a solution to that problem, and the right solution happens to be a blockchain-like system, then we're talking about the technology known as blockchain.
If the problem these projects are trying to solve isn't how to scam people, the project will usually intentionally avoid using the word "blockchain", like Scuttlebutt and Jami do, and instead refer to their solution with terms such as "cryptographically-verified append-only ledger"
They do this because, when other people hear "blockchain", they usually either hear "this will be used to scam me" or "I can use this to scam others". Because they're thinking about the grift known as blockchain, not about the (relatively obscure by comparison) technology known as blockchain.
When a project says they're looking into how a combination of blockchain and their project could be useful, they're not trying to solve any problem. They've decided they want to transform their existing project into a scam, using the grift known as blockchain.
If they are interested in solving a problem, they'll talk about the problem, and how they solve it using something similar to the technology known as blockchain. If they're interested in scamming you, they'll talk about the grift known as blockchain, and ask you to use your imagination to envision for them how the technology known as blockchain will help the project, while they stick their hands in your pockets.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Scuttlebutt doesn't have the word blockchain on it, and from reading the protocol section, I don't think it uses a public blockchain as defined there: https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2019/02/theres_no_g...
So you're just talking about something else, but as Schneier argues, anything other than a public blockchain is nothing new and has little to do with all the hype beyond the confusing names.
> User content in SSB is organized as an append-only sequence of immutable messages, where messages cryptographically sign adjacent messages for the purpose of guaranteeing unforgeabilitity of the sequences as they are replicated to other peers.
That's pretty much a blockchain. Of course, they don't call it a blockchain themselves, because the Scuttlebutt people are not running a grift, they're creating a communication protocol that happens to use cryptographic primitives similarly to how blockchains use them.
Concretely, if Scuttlebutt uses a blockchain, then Git also uses a blockchain by a similar reasoning. I don't think the original post claiming that "there are no use cases for blockchains" was implicitly claiming that Git (or Scuttlebut) is not relevant software, just that they don't use a blockchain, because indeed they don't for any interesting definition of "blockchain".
A key difference to me between Git and Scuttlebutt, which in my (most likely flawed) view makes Scuttlebutt "blockchain-er", is the distributed nature of it. You add a friend on Scuttlebutt, and this will fetch their content from any node, and all their friends' contents. It has an "automatic replication across nodes" aspect which Git does not have.
[Disclaimer: I haven't used Scuttlebutt in a long while, so I may be getting the technical details of the friends-of-friends-replication thing wrong.]
Only if you remove all of the parts of a blockchain that make it a blockchain. The definition from wikipedia isn't a blockchain, it's a Merkle Tree. They're not the same thing - a blockchain _uses_ a merkle tree. The bits that are bolted onto the merkle tree are what make it a blockchain, and are the bits that don't provide value.
This is fully addressed in Schneier's article.
> A blockchain powers Secure Scuttlebutt, Jami, Urbit
I've honestly never heard about any of these. But I have heard/read about many other "uses" of blockchain, which ultimately boil down to scam. There are possible use cases, they just drown in the sea of scams.
How does a blockchain verify the data being entered into it?
Unfortunately this isn't actually a property of a blockchain, this is a property of a ledger. I'm still trusting Maersk in this situation, because if I don't, what do I do, fork the blockchain and pretend that Maersk has the item?
Sure, in the same way that a hammer can be used for a screw, or an HGV can be used for commuting to work - i.e. it _will_ do the job, but there were plenty of other alternatives available. The thing that a blockchain does is a _decentralised_ verifiable supply chain. A verifiable supply chain has existed since we've been doing digital signatures, and RSA has existed since the 70's.
The problem with using blockchain for supply chains is what happens if someone claims that the original source is wrong? Say I'm Maersk, and one of my ships says "no, I did deliver that". Are Maersk's customers going to say "no, we believe that guy, we're forking the blockchain?" Or are they going to say "That sucks, guess you shoiuld have delivered it" and claim the loss on their shipping insurance? We both know it's the latter.
> But this is demonstrably not true.
Is it? I've yet to see a demonstrable use case for blockchains that actually solves a problem. We've been doing this for almost 15 years now, and we're still waiting for it.
> It's just a technology and people have misused it but that doesn't render the technology itself useless or a scam.
People misusing technology doesn't make it useless, but if the _only_ use case is useless or a scam, then the tech is useless.
Everything I read in this thread is dripping with vehemence, hate, ridicule, or certitude (your I haven't seen a demonstrable use case in 15 years).
If the kind of echo chamber you want to build is the one where you've won and any even smallest proffering of a tilt toward blockchain as useful is crushed congratulations you're doing it: nobody who even wants to give one inch to blockchain will come around here. When I try and point out one useful thing is a blockchain, oh that thing is a different kind of blockchain. It's astounding the mental acrobatics people will go to to stand victors over their tiny corner of the internet.
This is frankly culty, repressive behavior that's not at all in the spirit of curiosity.
You're right, I can't speak for maersk, but given this is a pseudonymous internet forum where in this thread they are touted as legitimising the tech, I think it's fair game to speculate based on knowledge.
> When I try and point out one useful thing is a blockchain, oh that thing is a different kind of blockchain.
Meanwhile, everytime I ask for a problem that a blockchain solves, I get back problems that are better solved _without_ blockchains, or solutions that don't actually solve the problem in the first place.
I'm open to having my mind changed, I really am (it's happened many times on this forum), so please, feel free to share some of the problems that are being solved.
> spirit of curiosity
I'm curious: what useful application of the blockchain have we seen in the past 15 years (outside of cryptocurrencies whose usefulness is apparently largely confined to pyramid schemes and paying for crimes)?
No use for it? The blockchain is a massive achievement. It's a decentralized verification system. Of course it has plenty of uses beyond crypto currencies.
That's how it starts everytime. "We're just talking about it" ends up in shoving blockchains where they aren't needed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denuvo
I'm not trying to equate blockchain and DRM. The big question lingering over their post is "why?"
From what I can see the essence of the reaction is towards the fact they appear to be in search of a problem for their shiny solution. Maybe they find a real problem, but usually you don't have your solution before you find it.
It's insane.