I was recently at an "Emerging Technology" conference for emerging technologies that was targeted at non-technical entrepreneurs and innovators. 90% of the conference was focused on blockchain, while the remaining was focused on AI. During the entire conference, blockchain was being touted as a silver bullet for many problems, and many of the people at the conference ate it up.
The best anecdote to summarize the conference was a speech by IBM where they covered a project which they did with major retailer to track a supply chain. The speaker mentioned some impressive results which caused a noticeable people around me to literally say "wow". However, they did not once mention specifically how blockchain was the cause of these results or give reasons why blockchain was superior. From what I could tell as an engineer, the entire application could have been built without blockchain.
I was surprised at how blockchain was being touted as the next technological revolution (and very light on the details) and was concerned at how quickly the other attendees accepted blockchain as it was being sold. I left the conference thinking that it would only be a matter of time before blockchain would be touted as a silver bullet in the larger community due to conferences like these (although I am sure they've been happening for a while, and this was my first exposure). It will not be long before a large number of software projects will be based on blockchain needlessly, and/or the engineers will be arguing with management why using blockchain is a mistake.
Well, sir, there's nothing on earth
Like a genuine, bona-fide,
Electrified, blockchain.
What'd I say?
Blockchain.
What's it called?
Blockchain.
That's right! Blockchain.
Blockchain
Blockchain
Blockchain
I hear their energy use makes fans whir loud.
It's as energy efficient as a GPU cloud.
Is there a chance a fork could bring the end?
Not on your life, my Nerdy friend.
What about us brain-dead slobs?
You'll be given cushy MLM jobs
Were you sent here by the ICO Devil?
No good sir, I'm on the level.
The wheels came off my project plan.
Take my ASIC, my good man.
I swear it's Company's only choice.
Throw up your hands and raise your voice.
Blockchain.
What's it called?
Blockchain.
Once again.
Blockchain.
But our product quality is still all broken.
Sorry Bob, the mob has spoken.
I think all the hype around block chain is hilarious for the very simple reason that block chain can’t actually solve any business problem that a centrally managed service couldn’t solve (with less effort likely).
The only thing block chain adds to any problem is when you don’t want a managed good or service to be under central authority or if it can’t be under a central authority (the later situation is probably more interesting). Crypto currencies make some sense (though I like my currency backed by the full faith and credit of a government, personally). However every other situation I hear of I wonder why someone couldn’t just manage a central service. Chain of trust on crates of produce? Supply chain professionals have solved the problem of authenticating sourcing of goods quite a long time ago (especially when laws required them too). Personally I think the one benefit that people don’t talk enough about is cases where the block chain can provide its users perfect forward secrecy on their transactions against the ledger, though again you don’t really need the block chain to do that.
> The only thing block chain adds to any problem is when you don’t want a managed good or service to be under central authority or if it can’t be under a central authority (the later situation is probably more interesting).
Trust (and thus the ability to use an authority) is not black and white. There are a lot of situations where some trust is allowed up until a certain level. Right now authorities are managed through some form of government or through legal enforcement (contracts and such).
- The first one only works in specific scenarios.
- The second one is extremely expensive (especially when working across borders). It might technically be not as elegant. But generally speaking servers are a lot cheaper than lawyers. Code is designed to be extendable and reusable, contracts are not. Let's not even talk about the long process of enforcing those contracts manually with very expensive lawyers in a physical court building.
"I think all the hype around block chain is hilarious for the very simple reason that block chain can’t actually solve any business problem that a centrally managed service couldn’t solve"
This is a very common statement on here regarding blockchain solutions, and is effectively like saying "There's no program you can't write with 1991 Visual Basic" (or build in Excel -- I've had financial sorts try to hammer every problem into an Excel workbook). Theoretically true, but outrageously off the mark given the nuance on needs of many very varied projects.
Blockchain style solutions are not relevant for many projects. They have some legitimate uses, however, and saying "But you could..." isn't a retort.
I was at a similar conference last week and the same thing happened and the same IBM case that tracked produce supply chain was presented. The same "wow" moment was shared when they said they can now track the origin of a product in under 2 seconds where before it took them a week.
I happen to work in a product that manages produce traceability, and I can confirm that it is quite within the realm of possibility to track produce in under 2 seconds with a simple web app and a relational database. We have been doing it for about 10 years.
To add, the produce supply chain is full of connectivity and digital literacy issues, so I would venture a guess that a blockchain implementation would generate a lot of attrition on the operations side of things. Another point of concern is performance since this is a fast moving supply chain due to the product short shelf life.
It was interesting to see how this audience thinks that blockchain somehow "solves" traceability when this has been going on in several different forms in a wide array of different industries with specific needs. They seem to also think that the right way to do it is with IoT and smart contracts, as if it were just a step away to push such a solution to an existing supply chain.
It keeps me up at night that one day a top-down decision will come that says we must a have a blockchain solution because market, or new competitors will bloom in the face of absurd amount of money being thrown at blockchain solutions and take market share. I imagine that 5 years from now, the winners of today's hype battles will be the losers when they have to maintain an overly complex inflexible solution for many years more.
> I happen to work in a product that manages produce traceability, and I can confirm that it is quite within the realm of possibility to track produce in under 2 seconds with a simple web app and a relational database. We have been doing it for about 10 years.
But now IBM can do it in 2 seconds as well! This may create a big boon for "DB2->blockchain" conversion contracts.
We still seem to be in this weird period with blockchain stuff where it's a neat idea, but the problems people are tackling with it are mostly... mild variations of solved problems so far. This may be understandable - these are problems which are known to have value, and as new companies want to solve these problems, they may opt for a blockchain-based version vs traditional "old school" relational db. But there may also be limited value there compared to old school version.
This feels a bit like "key value store" systems vs databases. There was (is?) a lot of hype around schemaless and "lightweight" KV stores, but most of the problems are also solved by intelligent use of SQL. Ditto for the XML-databases rage from ... 12-15 years ago.
I also work with some of the big ones and their customers and partners. I don't understand how case studies like that are shown and believed without question, and not just in blockchain but other tech or processes too. Baffles me, really disappoints me. In college I expected high up business people to be discerning and no-bs but they will buy anything without thinking critically about the pitch! I don't understand it.
> It keeps me up at night that one day a top-down decision will come that says we must a have a blockchain solution because market, or new competitors will bloom in the face of absurd amount of money being thrown at blockchain solutions and take market share. I imagine that 5 years from now, the winners of today's hype battles will be the losers when they have to maintain an overly complex inflexible solution for many years more.
If the people making the calls don't understand the technology, you can just make up jargon to keep them happy. Make a regular app, call it a "blockchain solution" and call it a day.
I wouldn’t worry too much until there is an actual use case, and if there is a use case, then why worry?
I work in the Danish public sector, and we’re sold tech by consultants who hype politicians and upper management, both ares with very little technical understanding. But while they don’t understand what tech is, they do understand change management, and if there isn’t a proven benefit, they won’t buy the hype.
We’re doing a lot of RPA these days, and from a technical standpoint that’s really fucking stupid. An API would be a gazillion times better than a screen scraping macro. In reality, however, we run 370 different IT systems and the truth is that a lot of them won’t have a decent API in the next 20 years, if ever. So while RPA is really stupid technically, it has immense value on the business end because it automated shit we couldn’t automate otherwise.
The reason I mention RPA is that I asked my engineers if it was worth looking into about 3 years ago, and they gave me a straight no. So we didn’t pay it attention until our CEO asked me what RPA projects we were doing after having attended a Deloitte conference on the business application of RPA in the public sector.
Blockchain doesn’t have a use case, and that means it won’t sell, even if it’s hyped to non-tech people.
You do see a few public block chain projects, but they are mostly poc’s that never lead anywhere and they are all run by in house enthusiasts, who were “allowed” to “run with it as long as you keep doing your regular work as well” because allowing your workforce to play with their ideas is motivational, even if it’s really just a waste of time.
>I wouldn’t worry too much until there is an actual use case, and if there is a use case, then why worry?
I don't usually worry much about over-hyped technologies that gets the executive types all fuzzy inside while the rest of us look from afar wondering if they even understand what they're talking about. Web 2.0, NoSQL, IoT, Blockchain... The list is long. And it's not all trash, there's often some value at the core of the hype once you remove all the fluff.
But Blockchain is a bit more nefarious that this IMO, because it goes hand in hand with cryptocurrencies. The huge valuation of cryptocurrencies is the only reason Blockchains got so much publicity in the first place. I'm certain that if Bitcoin hadn't recovered from it's huge crash a couple of years ago you wouldn't see nearly as much Blockchain this and Blockchain that everywhere.
Conversely if you look at cryptocurrency enthusiast forums they use these news articles about big companies investing money and resources into "the blockchain" as proof that there's some high intrinsic value to the technology and to justify a very high valuation and pump it even more, especially to newcomers. "IBM is going to create a blockchain, BUY BUY BUY!"
It results in a big spiral of hype enabling scams enabling hype enabling scams... Meanwhile as far as I can see the only practical use cases of cryptocurrencies and even "the blockchain" at large is unbridled speculation, pyramid schemes and buying illegal stuff online. All that while expanding a ridiculous amount of energy mining the damn thing.
Presumably your engineers didn't want to move from world a where they understand why things break to world b where any change even to a landing page could cause a cascade of failures due to automation that depends on that page.
A world where such failures causing production to fail become more likely because its challenging to predict ahead of time who depends on what and it what way.
Where they presumably have to then debug the mess.
Your engineers were right and unfortunately you are probably wrong about dumb ideas not selling.
We now live in the information age. Blockchains and AI will transform everyday life as well as specific sectors such as health care and trade.
Imagine walking in to a Starbucks café, order a cup of coffee, digitally signing a payment transaction on your mobile or laptop and then wait for it to be confirmed by the Blockchain while enjoying the hot cup of coffee you have ordered.
What is more, think about AI, you will not need to talk to the staff to place an order for your coffee. The staff can relax and watch you make gestures to a camera. They will be able to read on a screen if you’d like it white or black.
I think the article is too negative and does not see the big picture of transformation that is going on (as exemplified above).
> Imagine walking in to a Starbucks café, order a cup of coffee, digitally signing a payment transaction on your mobile or laptop and then wait for it to be confirmed by the Blockchain while enjoying the hot cup of coffee you have ordered.
You could do the the exact same thing now with credit cards, except the waiting. And then you could get your money back if the coffee sucked, and you wouldn't lose all your money if someone happened to steal your private key .
> Imagine walking in to a Starbucks café, order a cup of coffee, digitally signing a payment transaction on your mobile or laptop and then wait for it to be confirmed by the Blockchain while enjoying the hot cup of coffee you have ordered.
I think you can already pay contactless either by your mobile or credit card and without the need of Blockchain.
> What is more, think about AI, you will not need to talk to the staff to place an order for your coffee. The staff can relax and watch you make gestures to a camera. They will be able to read on a screen if you’d like it white or black.
In McDonalds you have automatic machines that you can place an order and pay, e.g., contactless, without bothering the staff. Later you only just need to pick your order up.
Imagine opening a mobile app, ordering a cup of coffee to a nearest Starbucks, having your transaction confirmed in matters of seconds and only then walking into a Starbucks where your cup is waiting for you.
You can do that right now, with no blockchain in sight.
I recently went to a similar innovation conference, that was targeted at business owners. They were proposing block-chain technology as a panacea for every problem under the sun.
The funniest project involved parking meters 'on the block-chain' ...
It seems the more computational power we have access to, the quicker we find ways to waste it with inefficient systems ...
> IBM, Walmart and Tsinghua University have piloted the use of blockchain to trace food items, including pork in China and mangoes in the U.S., as they move through the supply chain to store shelves. Recent testing by Walmart showed that applying blockchain reduced the time it took to trace a package of mangoes from the farm to the store from days or weeks to two seconds.
Microservices, containers, and serverless architectures all solve cross-cutting concerns that impact scalable and distributed architectures, core SaaS & cloud-native challenges, as well as some long running highly pricey problems in the Enterprise space. They're not tech stacks, they are design approaches that tightly align with our modern computing platforms. Googles enormous investments in this space are not random, it's reflective of their relative positioning compared to the rest of the market...
Block-chain tech is awesome in distributed scenarios where actors don't necessarily have contact with, or trust for, one another. That's a very narrow band comparatively.
Yes, people jump on bandwagons. Yes, engineers are often distracted by 'the new hotness'. But when Amazon, Google, MS, and VMware all align on virtualization technology it's something a bit bigger than people simply falling for 'cool tech'.
I see the resemblance but I think it's somewhat different in this case.
Something like Docker brought to light tech that many developers weren't familiar with but that existed before. But it actually accomplished concrete things in a very short amount of time.
Blockchain on the other hand is attractive not necessarily to developers, and it so far has promised a lot more than it has actually delivered. We see talks of huge figures and white papers and half finished products where the important features are coming in "the next milestone".
This is draining investment from others more viable solutions and creating the possibility for any blockchain startup to somehow shoehorn the tech into a product and insert themselves in a market of their choice.
IMO this is the wrong kind of disruption where potentially everyone loses in the mid to long term.
Imagine talking about TCP/IP in the late 1980ies. This is great but mostly limited to academia.
The blockchain isn't interesting as a business case any more than TCP/IP was.
The blockchain is the foundation of a new decentralized infrastructure for the digital space (which physical properties), but we still haven't "opened up the internet" to the public.
Yep, that puzzles me, why so many people just accept "blockchain helped us to do that" without asking how exactly it did.
Blockchain itself is really new interesting technology which opens new opportunities, but I'm afraid its real usage and advance can be slowed by all that hype around with snake oil-like offerings.
It's even worse among start-ups. My VC friends tell me than almost every. Single. Venture they see has ai/ml bolted onto it, often with no real purpose.
>I was surprised at how blockchain was being touted as the next technological revolution (and very light on the details)
If you're surprised by this you must not have gotten online much in the last 10 years, especially on this site. Blockchain technology has been heralded as the next great revolution in human society that will transform all aspects of human existence and usher in an endless golden era of freedom and prosperity.
What exactly is the specific use case where Proof of Work blockchain are appropriate?
Consensus in that design is:
1. Perhaps the single most expensive consensus algorithm ever designed.
2. Deliberately one of the slowest.
3. Does not actually provide trustless consensus once 1/3 of the miner nodes decide to collude.
Other than "our data is a merkle tree but you have to trust us to submit transactions to it", and "a currency system with a failed promise to deliver either scale or trustless consensus" what, is the proper application?
This reads like a rhetorical question – 'what could possibly be the application for something this deliberately bad?'
I won't speak for what "blockchain" can or will become, but you might see the hype more clearly by considering the ideology inherent in asking specifically for the "proper application." You imply that you or someone in a position you understand might "apply blockchain" to a "problem," as you commonly understand it.
I see "blockchain" more as a movement, which completely evades "application" in the common sense. People building these technologies, and organizations around them, live in a separate world that makes little reference to the broader world of which most of us are a part. They start with distinct priors, which rule out most existing solutions on the grounds that they demand political centralization (see: https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/the-meaning-of-decentrali...).
You can summarize this ideology as: 'if there's a sysadmin, the system is broken.'
It may very well be the case that they are creating a new world that will be marginalized and outcompeted by incumbent systems and organizations, but that's how I understand what's 'actually going on'.
I think a world where multiple, visible sysadmins compete is much better than a world that pretends to have none when in fact their technology enables invisible, undetectable but exceptionally powerful groups to form out of self interest. Wouldn't you agree?
I admire the principles of decentralization, but I think it's rather like "serverless" - it moves the functionality around in order to pretend. All the cryptocurrencies have pretty "centralized" dev teams; as with Etherum they can fork to decide what history is and most miners will go with that. History is written by whoever has the github.
Am sysadmin, is this best practice or just us being reciprocally lazy again?
> It may very well be the case that they are creating a new world that will be marginalized and outcompeted by incumbent systems and organizations, but that's how I understand what's 'actually going on'.
I keep telling people exactly this! Just because X makes sense or is the best doesn't mean the crowd will agree with it's application. See also all politics ever as an example. I feel like I can say it because I identify as one but, It's just another libertarian fantasy.
I have been asking that for years without getting a good answer. It's a really cool technology! I wanted to use it for something!
But cryptotulips aside, every real-world use case I've looked at can be solved some other way (e.g., real-time published transaction logs). Humans are pretty good at creating trust contexts (see, e.g., 99% of commerce), and they're quite averse to doing anything significant in truly trustless contexts.
Almost nothing is a unique solution to a set of problems. Just because the problems that distributed ledger technologies address can be solved in a different way doesn't mean that to do so is the right business decision.
If you can invent a reliable alternative to proof-of-work distributed consensus there is a multi-billion dollar opportunity there. It’s inefficient, but before bitcoin came along there was no way to even do it. An inefficient way is better than no way at all.
Some other cryptocurrencies are trying alternatives. But none have been as “battle hardened” as bitcoin.
Follow the core developers and you’ll see their focus is on creating an open distributed platform. It’s up to us to figure out what to use it for.
IMHO, there's a pretty compelling argument to be made that Bitcoin and the other cryptocurrencies have had a significantly net-negative impact on the world, from facilitating scams and other illegal activity to now having to worry that sites we visit will monetize by stealing CPU cycles to the significant impact on climate change, these technologies have caused a lot more harm than benefit. And all the while, they haven't even figured out how to build a ledger that can scale to day-to-day transactions. My bet is that the whole thing ends up being a tax on people who've forgotten their 17th century Dutch history.
> If you can invent a reliable alternative to proof-of-work distributed consensus there is a multi-billion dollar opportunity there.
Trust.
Just use any authentication/authorization solution, contracts, the rule of law, reputation, everything we've always used to deal with varying degrees of trust.
Utter lack of trust is not a problem people have.
If you want to apply blockchain technology to anything real world (as opposed to coins that only exist _in_ the blockchain), then you need trust anyway whenever there is interaction (e.g. when someone inputs data, you need to trust its true anyway).
It's really only useful for coins, that are themselves less useful than existing money.
It was an interesting mathematical puzzle to solve, shouldn't have been made reality.
> creating an open distributed platform. It’s up to us to figure out what to use it for.
This is putting the cart very much before the horse.
I have no objection to people researching, experimenting, playing. Godspeed. Spending billions creating a technology that sounds cool but may be useless, though, is absurd.
We didn't get the Internet because somebody said, "Hey, let's spend billions wiring up a lot of computers and see if it's good for anything." The Internet's growth was driven by an expanding set of very specific use cases.
Just to restate because I was not expecting to have to have this post pop up to top of thread: The selfish mining paper shows a significantly worse result than 1/3. I feel the need to lay this out very plainly because folks may not be in on that joke.
It's a joke at 1/3rd because that's sort of a naive threshold of for the BGP anyways.
Bitcoin was supposed to provide a stable solution where distributed actors could come to consensus on a ledger. That's how it was sold in the original paper. Majority attacks against the system will always exist, but the paper mentioned proves that the Bitcoin proof of work algorithm is much worse than we realized, and (more troublingly) that bad actors are harder to detect than it was passively assumed.
In my opinion, the most notable innovation of Bitcoin is the incentive and PoW-reward for the continued upkeep and health of the network, and I often wonder why so much of the literature around blockchains misses or glosses over this fact.
The scheme neatly solves the free-rider problem that plagues other distributed systems, where your continued usage of the network can be ensured by your active participation within it.
>The scheme neatly solves the free-rider problem that plagues other permissionless systems.
FTFY
A parallel example would be various P2P filesharing protocols which was plagued by freeloaders from day 1, and had to come up with various schemes to regulate the user's contribution. The simpler solutions are not exactly Byzantine fault tolerant (user profiles in ed2k) whereas the more elaborate mechanism typically requires a centralised record keeper(private trackers, etc).
A lot of the inefficiencies of PoW are necessary to keep the network permissionless, and conversely you don't need PoW if the system has any kind of entry requirement.
I think blockstack is one such application: to register an identity without relying on any central party for that. Basically anything where you need to make a very small number of transactions to store information that will be cryptographically secured in a decentralized manner.
I mean, you can call it bad, but it provely works for the thing that it intended to solve.
That thing being sending censorship resistant, electronic financial transactions.
If you don't believe me that this worked, then please go back to 2010 and tell me a better way to donate money to Wikileaks.
At the end if the day, I could send money to Wikileaks, and there were no other options that worked at the time.
The points that you brought up don't really matter, because Bitcoin has been around for 8+ years and we don't see those attacks happening.
I don't care about the theoretical. I care about the practical. Come back to me with that attack vector once it actually happens on the live network, and money going to Wikileaks or whoever ACTUALLY gets censored.
> I mean, you can call it bad, but it provely works for the thing that it intended to solve. That thing being sending censorship resistant, electronic financial transactions.
But it doesn't appear to do so.
1. It cannot meet demand, so folks are recreating existing point to point financial networks and then using the chain in the event of reconciliation. These define a new topology as surely as credit card companies redefined the topology of modern digital economies.
2. It appears that it is very easy to gain a secret majority and do all sorts of nasty things, in addition to freezing out miners.
P.S., if I had a magic wand that could make WikiLeaks disappear in a sweeping curtain of sulphuric fire, I'd stick a bell on the top and wave it happily until my doctor informed me my RSI was fatal.
The problem is that entry points in the network (exchanges) are censored or will be and you need exchange to actually extract money to spend, living in a authoritarian country. You can argue that people can use pure bitcoins by themselves, without fiat money, but that means that there should be an infrastructure where organizations accept and process btc, and they aren't doing it due to technical limitations of blockchain. It will only function as a "resistance coin" until there are some unaudited exchanges or some freedom in movement to go to other country for your money etc. If/when country will go "full dictatorship" btc won't be able to provide any useful utility.
> Consensus in [proof of work blockchain] design is:
> 1. Perhaps the single most expensive consensus algorithm ever designed.
It's like arguing that bubblesort is one of the most expensive graph traversal
algorithms. It's not, because it's a protocol for document timestamping, not
establishing a consensus.
> 2. Deliberately one of the slowest.
Indeed. It was designed so verification of the timestamps is much, much faster
than producing them. In previous work, with trusted third party operating
a timestamping service, it was enough to control a single service, so there
was no need to design this into the very data structure.
> 3. Does not actually provide trustless consensus once 1/3 of the miner nodes decide to collude.
Indeed it does not, because it was never designed as a consensus protocol.
> [...] what, is the proper application [of blockchain]?
When you need to establish an order in a sequence of related documents, like
with trade contracts. Outside of this very narrow purpose, blockchain is
pretty much useless.
The PoW blockchain is slow to propagate updates but design. If you don't know how proof of work blockchains work, I advice you to Google around for a nice technical breakdown. Suffice to say, it is fundamental and a property people specifically code in to make blocks take a specific amount of time to complete.
As OP article alludes, bitcoin difficulty is tuned for a very long interval between blocks, to reduce the risk of nearly-simultaneous "uncle" blocks.
Other blockchains such as Ethereum have seemingly successful alternative approaches. IMO the article has a very limited perspective on blockchain technology. It's understandable, since the space is exploding and very hard to keep a handle on, but I think it should be less sweeping in its claims.
While the definition is exact, it’s a pretty narrow one. I understand that people are tired with all the hype and naturally want to counter it somehow.
But don’t let it blind you, blockchain technologies will deeply change our societies. It’s a trust machine: it creates trust where there is none. Trust being one of the pillar of our civilization, the scope of its applications is wider than you would expect.
Edit: thanks for the downvotes... if your confirmation bias can’t handle a contrarian, respectful point of view, i’d seriously question your rationality as a member of this scientific-related community.
>The use case for a blockchain is narrower: it can be used to establish trust between two parties in absence of a trustable third party.
It doesn't though. Now you're requiring a trusted (not a given) block chain that involves at least one third party but most likely many more at a high cost with more waste than traditional means.
Third party trust has been the best solution in the past to establish trust. Blockchain tech has introduced a new solution that has been proven. As a business, if you have to choose between using a third party for trust or using a distributed trust-less system, and both are comparable in cost, what would you do?
Successfully trading value with an anonymous third party over the internet, without fear if them renegging, seems to be all that's required to demonstrate this.
Before bitcoin this wasn't possible without trust in a third party, as far as I'm aware.
> Trust being one of the pillar of our civilization
Very true. But I would argue that blockchain is a technology that obviates the need for trust between humans (by delegating it to a technology), and therefore erodes civilization.
I would argue that double-entry accounting is a technology that obviates the need for trust between humans (by delegating it to books and arithmetic), and therefore erodes civilization.
Interesting. I trust my bank waaay more than I trust any of the cryptocurrencies. So I am not sure your premise about creating trust where there is none holds.
> It’s a trust machine: it creates trust where there is none.
Can you describe to me a situation where blockchain actually does this. Please be as detailed and specific as possible.
I keep hearing this claim, but everytime I look into cryptocurrencies, I see a wild west full of scams and snake oil, so I'm not sure I understand what is meant by 'trustless' in this case.
This is largely what I would have said if nobody had posted it yet. That "narrow set of problems" are still extremely influential problems that will have a powerful impact on society.
There is no rationalizing with people so blinded by the promise of getting rich quick from Satoshi’s glorious bitcoin. People who have drunk the koolaid can’t be reasoned with.
It's interesting how blockchain became so incredibly hyped though isn't it? Something to do with money (bitcoin) and some new technology perhaps?
I wanted to find out what was going on, so I literally applied for a bunch of blockchain jobs just so I can talk to these people on the phone to see what they're all about. I end up asking really basic questions like: "So why are you using a blockchain instead of a normal database?" or "What problem are you actually trying to solve?" It is actually embarrassing; I feel like I'm being abrasive on the phone by asking such truly basic questions, yet they always seem so startled by these kinds of questions and assume I'm somehow incredibly intelligent and perceptive to ask these basic questions.
Generally what happens is as follows. Some business MBA type people watch a TED talk or read in the FT that blockchain is the next big thing, so they go out and look to hire "blockchain evangelists". Evangelists is the word they often use, and that sounds about right because it is just like a religion sometimes. Then I only end up talking to the business people about these projects, because that's all the people they have. I won't name them, but I've had conversations with huge firms or startups that both equally talk utter nonsense. One large firm told me that they're working on "permissionless and permissioned blockchains for everything from auditing to wine". While for a small startup I once asked: "why are you using a blockchain for this instead of just having a database?". The answer I got was "well... our customers aren't really technical people...". I told them perhaps they should look at something like Google's certificate transparency rather than blockchains, and they echoed back to me "Oh we are definitely looking at certificate transfer!" (Transfer, not transparency.) It's astonishing.
To summarize, huge firms tend to have people who just want to get paid so they always say yes to whatever the clueless MBA person asks, while startups tend to mostly know it's bullshit but go along anyway because there is a lot of $$$ involved, particularly with ICOs.
To be honest I'm more onboard with cryptocurrency, even though obviously there are way, way too many of them (Kanyre-West coin anyone?) becuase at least blockchain actually solves a very specific problem for bitcoin: decentralized peer-to-peer currency. It's when you get blockchains for sexual consent and tracking your bananas in Laos that really annoys me (both real proejcts btw)
As part of my job, I often have to convince business folks that they don't need to buy a fucking private blockchain (from IBM of course, because they're old enough to think that no one ever got fired for buying IBM). This is very close to the arguments I make, and adds some excellent, articulate points!
This is happening at both of my companies now. I'm almost to the point of telling them to buy it just so they can tell their golf buddies they're using blockchain too.
Pro-tip: do an "experiment" with blockchain (built in house to keep it cheap) so they can tell their golf buddies they're looking into it. Make sure it's compared to a sane solution, because then they can feel superior for having "insider knowledge" that it's pointless.
These are all very excellent points. I would go even further: “The only viable application of blockchain is cryptocurrencies” (and cryprocurrencies have a whole different set of problems).
By arguing that there is only a “narrow set of use cases” you open the door for the counter argument “yes, but MY blockchain startup is not bullshit”.
I isually use the argument “show me the increase of profit margin specifically by using blockchain technology”.
I think there are also use cases that revolve around using a blockchain as a public database and API for the transfer and security of data.
Obviously, you could do this without using blockchain IF you could get the top 20 players in vertical X to agree on what that looks like. However, using "blockchain" as an excuse to get the project funded and get buy-in from those same top 20 players so they can talk about blockchain at the next board meeting is an enabler of practical problem solving. Sometimes you have to take the path of least resistance.
This guy makes a lot of good points, but at heart, this is a false appeal from authority. Every distributed system makes a set of tradeoffs. If you were to design a distributed system with the same tradeoffs as a blockchain (single global state, and very low trust of node operators), you would end up with something that has similar performance characteristics as a blockchain.
Arguing that these tradeoffs are not good is perfectly valid. For instance, this guy feels that you should be willing to trust your bank with your money, and Microsoft with your code execution, in return for better performance. Valid opinion.
The problem is when he comes in with this hand wavy stuff about how him and his very smart friends think this and that and they are distributed systems engineers so you should listen to them. It’s not a technical question, it’s a basic question of where you want to place your trust, and a distributed systems engineers opinion is just as valid as that of UI designer, a teacher, or a janitor.
I don't think that was the point of the article at all.
The point is that distributed systems engineers know already about these sets of tradeoffs, and many of the alternatives to them, and with that wider perspective see few, if any, reasons to recommend blockchain.
Meanwhile many the people going around hyping up blockchain know very little about the tradeoffs and alternatives, and are definitely _not_ recommending blockchain because it's the right set of choices in each of the tradeoffs.
Like - picking randomly - KodakCoin[1], he would argue (and I would agree), definitely did not choose to use blockchain because was the database that made the most sense for their needs. Indeed, it's probably a terrible choice compared to the alternatives.
(Except, perhaps, for optimizing for"hype factor" as seems to have worked considering their stock price, in which case the best thing to do might actually be to lie and _say_ you're using blockchain, and then... not.)
> The point is that distributed systems engineers know already about these sets of tradeoffs, and many of the alternatives to them, and with that wider perspective see few, if any, reasons to recommend blockchain.
It's not really a technical question. People who like blockchains like them because of that set of tradeoffs. Beyond obvious scams and stupid corporate hype (by most of the same people who misused "cloud", btw), people understand the tradeoffs.
I don't think that distributed systems experience qualifies you to do any more than understand the tradeoffs, and these specific tradeoffs are understood well by a very large number of people already.
Thank you. This is what I've been telling people forever. Blockchain technology is revolutionary for a very specific and narrow set of use cases, and outside of that it ranges from a crappy solution to completely irrelevant.
Readit News
The best anecdote to summarize the conference was a speech by IBM where they covered a project which they did with major retailer to track a supply chain. The speaker mentioned some impressive results which caused a noticeable people around me to literally say "wow". However, they did not once mention specifically how blockchain was the cause of these results or give reasons why blockchain was superior. From what I could tell as an engineer, the entire application could have been built without blockchain.
I was surprised at how blockchain was being touted as the next technological revolution (and very light on the details) and was concerned at how quickly the other attendees accepted blockchain as it was being sold. I left the conference thinking that it would only be a matter of time before blockchain would be touted as a silver bullet in the larger community due to conferences like these (although I am sure they've been happening for a while, and this was my first exposure). It will not be long before a large number of software projects will be based on blockchain needlessly, and/or the engineers will be arguing with management why using blockchain is a mistake.
Blockchain. What's it called? Blockchain. That's right! Blockchain.
Blockchain Blockchain Blockchain
I hear their energy use makes fans whir loud. It's as energy efficient as a GPU cloud. Is there a chance a fork could bring the end? Not on your life, my Nerdy friend.
What about us brain-dead slobs? You'll be given cushy MLM jobs Were you sent here by the ICO Devil? No good sir, I'm on the level.
The wheels came off my project plan. Take my ASIC, my good man. I swear it's Company's only choice. Throw up your hands and raise your voice.
Blockchain. What's it called? Blockchain. Once again. Blockchain.
But our product quality is still all broken. Sorry Bob, the mob has spoken.
Blockchain! Blockchain! Blockchain! Blockchain!
Block, d'oh!
(with apologies to The Simpsons).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Hartman
The only thing block chain adds to any problem is when you don’t want a managed good or service to be under central authority or if it can’t be under a central authority (the later situation is probably more interesting). Crypto currencies make some sense (though I like my currency backed by the full faith and credit of a government, personally). However every other situation I hear of I wonder why someone couldn’t just manage a central service. Chain of trust on crates of produce? Supply chain professionals have solved the problem of authenticating sourcing of goods quite a long time ago (especially when laws required them too). Personally I think the one benefit that people don’t talk enough about is cases where the block chain can provide its users perfect forward secrecy on their transactions against the ledger, though again you don’t really need the block chain to do that.
Trust (and thus the ability to use an authority) is not black and white. There are a lot of situations where some trust is allowed up until a certain level. Right now authorities are managed through some form of government or through legal enforcement (contracts and such).
- The first one only works in specific scenarios.
- The second one is extremely expensive (especially when working across borders). It might technically be not as elegant. But generally speaking servers are a lot cheaper than lawyers. Code is designed to be extendable and reusable, contracts are not. Let's not even talk about the long process of enforcing those contracts manually with very expensive lawyers in a physical court building.
This is a very common statement on here regarding blockchain solutions, and is effectively like saying "There's no program you can't write with 1991 Visual Basic" (or build in Excel -- I've had financial sorts try to hammer every problem into an Excel workbook). Theoretically true, but outrageously off the mark given the nuance on needs of many very varied projects.
Blockchain style solutions are not relevant for many projects. They have some legitimate uses, however, and saying "But you could..." isn't a retort.
I happen to work in a product that manages produce traceability, and I can confirm that it is quite within the realm of possibility to track produce in under 2 seconds with a simple web app and a relational database. We have been doing it for about 10 years.
To add, the produce supply chain is full of connectivity and digital literacy issues, so I would venture a guess that a blockchain implementation would generate a lot of attrition on the operations side of things. Another point of concern is performance since this is a fast moving supply chain due to the product short shelf life.
It was interesting to see how this audience thinks that blockchain somehow "solves" traceability when this has been going on in several different forms in a wide array of different industries with specific needs. They seem to also think that the right way to do it is with IoT and smart contracts, as if it were just a step away to push such a solution to an existing supply chain.
It keeps me up at night that one day a top-down decision will come that says we must a have a blockchain solution because market, or new competitors will bloom in the face of absurd amount of money being thrown at blockchain solutions and take market share. I imagine that 5 years from now, the winners of today's hype battles will be the losers when they have to maintain an overly complex inflexible solution for many years more.
But now IBM can do it in 2 seconds as well! This may create a big boon for "DB2->blockchain" conversion contracts.
We still seem to be in this weird period with blockchain stuff where it's a neat idea, but the problems people are tackling with it are mostly... mild variations of solved problems so far. This may be understandable - these are problems which are known to have value, and as new companies want to solve these problems, they may opt for a blockchain-based version vs traditional "old school" relational db. But there may also be limited value there compared to old school version.
This feels a bit like "key value store" systems vs databases. There was (is?) a lot of hype around schemaless and "lightweight" KV stores, but most of the problems are also solved by intelligent use of SQL. Ditto for the XML-databases rage from ... 12-15 years ago.
If the people making the calls don't understand the technology, you can just make up jargon to keep them happy. Make a regular app, call it a "blockchain solution" and call it a day.
Slides: https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2018/04/19/welcome-to-t...
I work in the Danish public sector, and we’re sold tech by consultants who hype politicians and upper management, both ares with very little technical understanding. But while they don’t understand what tech is, they do understand change management, and if there isn’t a proven benefit, they won’t buy the hype.
We’re doing a lot of RPA these days, and from a technical standpoint that’s really fucking stupid. An API would be a gazillion times better than a screen scraping macro. In reality, however, we run 370 different IT systems and the truth is that a lot of them won’t have a decent API in the next 20 years, if ever. So while RPA is really stupid technically, it has immense value on the business end because it automated shit we couldn’t automate otherwise.
The reason I mention RPA is that I asked my engineers if it was worth looking into about 3 years ago, and they gave me a straight no. So we didn’t pay it attention until our CEO asked me what RPA projects we were doing after having attended a Deloitte conference on the business application of RPA in the public sector.
Blockchain doesn’t have a use case, and that means it won’t sell, even if it’s hyped to non-tech people.
You do see a few public block chain projects, but they are mostly poc’s that never lead anywhere and they are all run by in house enthusiasts, who were “allowed” to “run with it as long as you keep doing your regular work as well” because allowing your workforce to play with their ideas is motivational, even if it’s really just a waste of time.
I don't usually worry much about over-hyped technologies that gets the executive types all fuzzy inside while the rest of us look from afar wondering if they even understand what they're talking about. Web 2.0, NoSQL, IoT, Blockchain... The list is long. And it's not all trash, there's often some value at the core of the hype once you remove all the fluff.
But Blockchain is a bit more nefarious that this IMO, because it goes hand in hand with cryptocurrencies. The huge valuation of cryptocurrencies is the only reason Blockchains got so much publicity in the first place. I'm certain that if Bitcoin hadn't recovered from it's huge crash a couple of years ago you wouldn't see nearly as much Blockchain this and Blockchain that everywhere.
Conversely if you look at cryptocurrency enthusiast forums they use these news articles about big companies investing money and resources into "the blockchain" as proof that there's some high intrinsic value to the technology and to justify a very high valuation and pump it even more, especially to newcomers. "IBM is going to create a blockchain, BUY BUY BUY!"
It results in a big spiral of hype enabling scams enabling hype enabling scams... Meanwhile as far as I can see the only practical use cases of cryptocurrencies and even "the blockchain" at large is unbridled speculation, pyramid schemes and buying illegal stuff online. All that while expanding a ridiculous amount of energy mining the damn thing.
A world where such failures causing production to fail become more likely because its challenging to predict ahead of time who depends on what and it what way.
Where they presumably have to then debug the mess.
Your engineers were right and unfortunately you are probably wrong about dumb ideas not selling.
Imagine walking in to a Starbucks café, order a cup of coffee, digitally signing a payment transaction on your mobile or laptop and then wait for it to be confirmed by the Blockchain while enjoying the hot cup of coffee you have ordered.
What is more, think about AI, you will not need to talk to the staff to place an order for your coffee. The staff can relax and watch you make gestures to a camera. They will be able to read on a screen if you’d like it white or black.
I think the article is too negative and does not see the big picture of transformation that is going on (as exemplified above).
You could do the the exact same thing now with credit cards, except the waiting. And then you could get your money back if the coffee sucked, and you wouldn't lose all your money if someone happened to steal your private key .
I think you can already pay contactless either by your mobile or credit card and without the need of Blockchain.
> What is more, think about AI, you will not need to talk to the staff to place an order for your coffee. The staff can relax and watch you make gestures to a camera. They will be able to read on a screen if you’d like it white or black.
In McDonalds you have automatic machines that you can place an order and pay, e.g., contactless, without bothering the staff. Later you only just need to pick your order up.
You can do that right now, with no blockchain in sight.
https://www.wired.com/story/where-could-bitcoin-succeed-as-a...
Everything is fine, right up until the moment it's not.
Blockchain may be used by businesses and make early proponents wealthy
Dead Comment
The funniest project involved parking meters 'on the block-chain' ...
It seems the more computational power we have access to, the quicker we find ways to waste it with inefficient systems ...
> IBM, Walmart and Tsinghua University have piloted the use of blockchain to trace food items, including pork in China and mangoes in the U.S., as they move through the supply chain to store shelves. Recent testing by Walmart showed that applying blockchain reduced the time it took to trace a package of mangoes from the farm to the store from days or weeks to two seconds.
[1] https://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/53487.wss
It could have been done even without those, but since the cool kids are using them, then they spread
Block-chain tech is awesome in distributed scenarios where actors don't necessarily have contact with, or trust for, one another. That's a very narrow band comparatively.
Yes, people jump on bandwagons. Yes, engineers are often distracted by 'the new hotness'. But when Amazon, Google, MS, and VMware all align on virtualization technology it's something a bit bigger than people simply falling for 'cool tech'.
Something like Docker brought to light tech that many developers weren't familiar with but that existed before. But it actually accomplished concrete things in a very short amount of time.
Blockchain on the other hand is attractive not necessarily to developers, and it so far has promised a lot more than it has actually delivered. We see talks of huge figures and white papers and half finished products where the important features are coming in "the next milestone".
This is draining investment from others more viable solutions and creating the possibility for any blockchain startup to somehow shoehorn the tech into a product and insert themselves in a market of their choice.
IMO this is the wrong kind of disruption where potentially everyone loses in the mid to long term.
It is an empty signifier.
The blockchain isn't interesting as a business case any more than TCP/IP was.
The blockchain is the foundation of a new decentralized infrastructure for the digital space (which physical properties), but we still haven't "opened up the internet" to the public.
If you're surprised by this you must not have gotten online much in the last 10 years, especially on this site. Blockchain technology has been heralded as the next great revolution in human society that will transform all aspects of human existence and usher in an endless golden era of freedom and prosperity.
Consensus in that design is:
1. Perhaps the single most expensive consensus algorithm ever designed.
2. Deliberately one of the slowest.
3. Does not actually provide trustless consensus once 1/3 of the miner nodes decide to collude.
Other than "our data is a merkle tree but you have to trust us to submit transactions to it", and "a currency system with a failed promise to deliver either scale or trustless consensus" what, is the proper application?
I won't speak for what "blockchain" can or will become, but you might see the hype more clearly by considering the ideology inherent in asking specifically for the "proper application." You imply that you or someone in a position you understand might "apply blockchain" to a "problem," as you commonly understand it.
I see "blockchain" more as a movement, which completely evades "application" in the common sense. People building these technologies, and organizations around them, live in a separate world that makes little reference to the broader world of which most of us are a part. They start with distinct priors, which rule out most existing solutions on the grounds that they demand political centralization (see: https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/the-meaning-of-decentrali...).
You can summarize this ideology as: 'if there's a sysadmin, the system is broken.'
It may very well be the case that they are creating a new world that will be marginalized and outcompeted by incumbent systems and organizations, but that's how I understand what's 'actually going on'.
Am sysadmin, is this best practice or just us being reciprocally lazy again?
> It may very well be the case that they are creating a new world that will be marginalized and outcompeted by incumbent systems and organizations, but that's how I understand what's 'actually going on'.
I keep telling people exactly this! Just because X makes sense or is the best doesn't mean the crowd will agree with it's application. See also all politics ever as an example. I feel like I can say it because I identify as one but, It's just another libertarian fantasy.
But cryptotulips aside, every real-world use case I've looked at can be solved some other way (e.g., real-time published transaction logs). Humans are pretty good at creating trust contexts (see, e.g., 99% of commerce), and they're quite averse to doing anything significant in truly trustless contexts.
Some other cryptocurrencies are trying alternatives. But none have been as “battle hardened” as bitcoin.
Follow the core developers and you’ll see their focus is on creating an open distributed platform. It’s up to us to figure out what to use it for.
Really, why?
IMHO, there's a pretty compelling argument to be made that Bitcoin and the other cryptocurrencies have had a significantly net-negative impact on the world, from facilitating scams and other illegal activity to now having to worry that sites we visit will monetize by stealing CPU cycles to the significant impact on climate change, these technologies have caused a lot more harm than benefit. And all the while, they haven't even figured out how to build a ledger that can scale to day-to-day transactions. My bet is that the whole thing ends up being a tax on people who've forgotten their 17th century Dutch history.
Trust.
Just use any authentication/authorization solution, contracts, the rule of law, reputation, everything we've always used to deal with varying degrees of trust.
Utter lack of trust is not a problem people have.
If you want to apply blockchain technology to anything real world (as opposed to coins that only exist _in_ the blockchain), then you need trust anyway whenever there is interaction (e.g. when someone inputs data, you need to trust its true anyway).
It's really only useful for coins, that are themselves less useful than existing money.
It was an interesting mathematical puzzle to solve, shouldn't have been made reality.
This is putting the cart very much before the horse.
I have no objection to people researching, experimenting, playing. Godspeed. Spending billions creating a technology that sounds cool but may be useless, though, is absurd.
We didn't get the Internet because somebody said, "Hey, let's spend billions wiring up a lot of computers and see if it's good for anything." The Internet's growth was driven by an expanding set of very specific use cases.
[1] http://kadena.io/docs/chainweb.pdf
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1OFJOrgRWw
If so, I've got a thrilling investment opportunity for you.
Dead Comment
It's a joke at 1/3rd because that's sort of a naive threshold of for the BGP anyways.
Bitcoin was supposed to provide a stable solution where distributed actors could come to consensus on a ledger. That's how it was sold in the original paper. Majority attacks against the system will always exist, but the paper mentioned proves that the Bitcoin proof of work algorithm is much worse than we realized, and (more troublingly) that bad actors are harder to detect than it was passively assumed.
Dead Comment
The scheme neatly solves the free-rider problem that plagues other distributed systems, where your continued usage of the network can be ensured by your active participation within it.
FTFY
A parallel example would be various P2P filesharing protocols which was plagued by freeloaders from day 1, and had to come up with various schemes to regulate the user's contribution. The simpler solutions are not exactly Byzantine fault tolerant (user profiles in ed2k) whereas the more elaborate mechanism typically requires a centralised record keeper(private trackers, etc).
A lot of the inefficiencies of PoW are necessary to keep the network permissionless, and conversely you don't need PoW if the system has any kind of entry requirement.
Source? This does not match my understanding of POW blockchains.
Deleted Comment
That thing being sending censorship resistant, electronic financial transactions.
If you don't believe me that this worked, then please go back to 2010 and tell me a better way to donate money to Wikileaks.
At the end if the day, I could send money to Wikileaks, and there were no other options that worked at the time.
The points that you brought up don't really matter, because Bitcoin has been around for 8+ years and we don't see those attacks happening.
I don't care about the theoretical. I care about the practical. Come back to me with that attack vector once it actually happens on the live network, and money going to Wikileaks or whoever ACTUALLY gets censored.
But it doesn't appear to do so.
1. It cannot meet demand, so folks are recreating existing point to point financial networks and then using the chain in the event of reconciliation. These define a new topology as surely as credit card companies redefined the topology of modern digital economies.
2. It appears that it is very easy to gain a secret majority and do all sorts of nasty things, in addition to freezing out miners.
P.S., if I had a magic wand that could make WikiLeaks disappear in a sweeping curtain of sulphuric fire, I'd stick a bell on the top and wave it happily until my doctor informed me my RSI was fatal.
Regular SWIFT wire transfer always worked. The blockade applied to VISA/MasterCard/PayPal/Western Union.
> 1. Perhaps the single most expensive consensus algorithm ever designed.
It's like arguing that bubblesort is one of the most expensive graph traversal algorithms. It's not, because it's a protocol for document timestamping, not establishing a consensus.
> 2. Deliberately one of the slowest.
Indeed. It was designed so verification of the timestamps is much, much faster than producing them. In previous work, with trusted third party operating a timestamping service, it was enough to control a single service, so there was no need to design this into the very data structure.
> 3. Does not actually provide trustless consensus once 1/3 of the miner nodes decide to collude.
Indeed it does not, because it was never designed as a consensus protocol.
> [...] what, is the proper application [of blockchain]?
When you need to establish an order in a sequence of related documents, like with trade contracts. Outside of this very narrow purpose, blockchain is pretty much useless.
What exactly do you think a distributed ledger is other than a normal ledger and a trustless consensus protocol?
* Deliberate slowness.
* Comparative slowness (given the problem space).
* 1/3 collusion breaking trust-less consensus.
* A definition of "us", "trust" and "scale" for your 6th line.
As for the 1/3 citation, I guess that's slightly less known: "Selfish Mining". Citation: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1311.0243
Of course "1/3" is a joke. It's actually closer to 1/4.
As OP article alludes, bitcoin difficulty is tuned for a very long interval between blocks, to reduce the risk of nearly-simultaneous "uncle" blocks.
Other blockchains such as Ethereum have seemingly successful alternative approaches. IMO the article has a very limited perspective on blockchain technology. It's understandable, since the space is exploding and very hard to keep a handle on, but I think it should be less sweeping in its claims.
But don’t let it blind you, blockchain technologies will deeply change our societies. It’s a trust machine: it creates trust where there is none. Trust being one of the pillar of our civilization, the scope of its applications is wider than you would expect.
Edit: thanks for the downvotes... if your confirmation bias can’t handle a contrarian, respectful point of view, i’d seriously question your rationality as a member of this scientific-related community.
That’s how the banking system has worked for centuries.
The use case for a blockchain is narrower: it can be used to establish trust between two parties in absence of a trustable third party.
It doesn't though. Now you're requiring a trusted (not a given) block chain that involves at least one third party but most likely many more at a high cost with more waste than traditional means.
Ah yes, it's turtles all the way down.
Speaking of science, do you know of any peer reviewed paper that concludes that the blockchain “creates trust where there is none”?
Before bitcoin this wasn't possible without trust in a third party, as far as I'm aware.
No paper needed.
Very true. But I would argue that blockchain is a technology that obviates the need for trust between humans (by delegating it to a technology), and therefore erodes civilization.
Can you describe to me a situation where blockchain actually does this. Please be as detailed and specific as possible.
I keep hearing this claim, but everytime I look into cryptocurrencies, I see a wild west full of scams and snake oil, so I'm not sure I understand what is meant by 'trustless' in this case.
I wanted to find out what was going on, so I literally applied for a bunch of blockchain jobs just so I can talk to these people on the phone to see what they're all about. I end up asking really basic questions like: "So why are you using a blockchain instead of a normal database?" or "What problem are you actually trying to solve?" It is actually embarrassing; I feel like I'm being abrasive on the phone by asking such truly basic questions, yet they always seem so startled by these kinds of questions and assume I'm somehow incredibly intelligent and perceptive to ask these basic questions.
Generally what happens is as follows. Some business MBA type people watch a TED talk or read in the FT that blockchain is the next big thing, so they go out and look to hire "blockchain evangelists". Evangelists is the word they often use, and that sounds about right because it is just like a religion sometimes. Then I only end up talking to the business people about these projects, because that's all the people they have. I won't name them, but I've had conversations with huge firms or startups that both equally talk utter nonsense. One large firm told me that they're working on "permissionless and permissioned blockchains for everything from auditing to wine". While for a small startup I once asked: "why are you using a blockchain for this instead of just having a database?". The answer I got was "well... our customers aren't really technical people...". I told them perhaps they should look at something like Google's certificate transparency rather than blockchains, and they echoed back to me "Oh we are definitely looking at certificate transfer!" (Transfer, not transparency.) It's astonishing.
To summarize, huge firms tend to have people who just want to get paid so they always say yes to whatever the clueless MBA person asks, while startups tend to mostly know it's bullshit but go along anyway because there is a lot of $$$ involved, particularly with ICOs.
We have a Blockchain meetup group in my city, however its mainly about cryptocurrency investments than any actual blockchain technological innovation.
By arguing that there is only a “narrow set of use cases” you open the door for the counter argument “yes, but MY blockchain startup is not bullshit”.
I isually use the argument “show me the increase of profit margin specifically by using blockchain technology”.
I so far have not gotten a satisfying answer.
Obviously, you could do this without using blockchain IF you could get the top 20 players in vertical X to agree on what that looks like. However, using "blockchain" as an excuse to get the project funded and get buy-in from those same top 20 players so they can talk about blockchain at the next board meeting is an enabler of practical problem solving. Sometimes you have to take the path of least resistance.
Arguing that these tradeoffs are not good is perfectly valid. For instance, this guy feels that you should be willing to trust your bank with your money, and Microsoft with your code execution, in return for better performance. Valid opinion.
The problem is when he comes in with this hand wavy stuff about how him and his very smart friends think this and that and they are distributed systems engineers so you should listen to them. It’s not a technical question, it’s a basic question of where you want to place your trust, and a distributed systems engineers opinion is just as valid as that of UI designer, a teacher, or a janitor.
The point is that distributed systems engineers know already about these sets of tradeoffs, and many of the alternatives to them, and with that wider perspective see few, if any, reasons to recommend blockchain.
Meanwhile many the people going around hyping up blockchain know very little about the tradeoffs and alternatives, and are definitely _not_ recommending blockchain because it's the right set of choices in each of the tradeoffs.
Like - picking randomly - KodakCoin[1], he would argue (and I would agree), definitely did not choose to use blockchain because was the database that made the most sense for their needs. Indeed, it's probably a terrible choice compared to the alternatives.
(Except, perhaps, for optimizing for"hype factor" as seems to have worked considering their stock price, in which case the best thing to do might actually be to lie and _say_ you're using blockchain, and then... not.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KodakCoin
It's not really a technical question. People who like blockchains like them because of that set of tradeoffs. Beyond obvious scams and stupid corporate hype (by most of the same people who misused "cloud", btw), people understand the tradeoffs.
I don't think that distributed systems experience qualifies you to do any more than understand the tradeoffs, and these specific tradeoffs are understood well by a very large number of people already.