[GTALUG] Blockchain, the solution to nothing

[Mauro Souza]

It's really funny. It's more the result of "lets use blockchain!" on
everything that creates those issues.

And blockchain is hyper-overhyped... It can help in a few specific
problems, but not on every single problem without exception. But everyone
liked the concept and ran away screaming blockchain all over the place.
Blockchain on email. Blockchain to rent a car. Blockchain-powered lettuce
salad... that's insanity. I like the technology, I study it and sometimes I
answer things on forums, but all the time when people ask me if I believe
blockchain would help them, I say NO

The "everybody must have everyone's data" is an issue. As the solution
grows, the ledger grows, increasing the storage and processing
requirements. With less people connected, you need an intermediary to
access the blockchain, and those intermediaries can be attacked and take
down the network. And there's few solutions to that.

One solution is the blockchain used by former Raiblocks (now Nano). It's a
DAG (directed acyclic graph), so any client will have only his own
transactions, and not the entire ledger. That allows one to run a client on
an ESP32, for example. there will be special nodes that store the entire
ledger (like the Dash supernodes), but the clients don't need that.
Who/what would use it? No idea... crypto coins, and not much else.

And the smart contract solution... They aren't smart, they aren't
contracts, and they aren't solutions. One mistake and everything crashes
down instantly.The Ethereum DAO disaster, the Parity multi-signature
contract, and that new DeFi that melted down in a day because people
realized they made a mistake on the code, and nobody would ever have enough
tokens to decide anything because of an arithmetic mistake. And many more
examples.

If the "contract" can be changed after creation, you cannot trust it
because it can be useful now (like tokens on a web game that you pay to
play), but later the owner changes the contract, pockets all tokens, and
takes down the game. If it cannot be changed, any error on the contract is
set on stone forever with deadly consequences. There are some
countermeasures to that, like proxy contracts: a main contract references
secondary contracts with the functions, but the main contract holds the
data and the tokens. if a secondary contract is found to have an error, you
deploy an amended version, call a function on the main contract to
reference the next one, and done. The downside is that it is more expensive
to run this contract, and the owner can, you know, replace the secondary
contracts and steal everything. You can add multi-signatures, quorum,
external oracles, but those only increase the cost and put a little
protection against a rogue owner.

There are very few things that blockchain can be useful, and one of them is
distributed storage. Siacoin and Storj, for example, let you rent the extra
space on that 4tb disk you already have for some coins. It is not
profitable enough to make you buy storage just for that purpose, but you
already have the space, right? And you can rent some space on the network
for backing up things when you will reformat your computer, and want to
store your data in case something breaks. It's cheaper than anything else,
even cheaper than amazon glacier.

Those supply chain management things are useful too, if you can integrate
it correctly (and that's a BIG if). If you own a bakery, for example, you
scan all the ingredients you have, store them all on your wallet (or have
your purchasing software do that automagically) and any time any of your
suppliers have any recall on something you got, you are warned. And
everything down the line gets warned that they bought a recalled bread from
you. Your customers don't even need to get back to you so you reimburse
them, the next time they come to buy something they already have a credit
for that contaminated bread you sold to them last week. But to integrate
everyone is a nightmare, there are lots of privacy issues, industrial
secrets issues... on a limited scale, it can work. Too limited and doesn't
solve anything. Too broad and all that privacy issues get into your face.

The fact is that there are very few cases that blockchain can be used that
a database cannot. And databases are here since a long time ago, everyone
knows how to build them, operate them, backup them, and extend them.

But just wait for the AI-generated, solar-powered, graphene-based
multi-cloud stored 6G-capable IPv8-addressing blockchain...

Mauro
http://mauro.limeiratem.com - registered Linux User: 294521
Scripture is both history, and a love letter from God.


Em qua., 26 de ago. de 2020 às 13:29, Christopher Browne via talk <
talk at gtalug.org> escreveu:

>
> https://thecorrespondent.com/655/blockchain-the-amazing-solution-for-almost-nothing/86714927310-8f431cae
>
> I found it particularly hilarious when the writer of the article asked the
> maker of the childrens' aid app if he had noticed that the app didn't
> actually need blockchain at all.
>
> "That's right."
>
> But the punch line was even better...
>
> Isn't it strange that you won all these awards despite not really using
> blockchain?
>
> "We keep trying to tell people, but it doesn’t seem to stick. You’re
> calling me about it again now … ”
> --
> When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the
> question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"
> ---
> Post to this mailing list talk at gtalug.org
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> https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
>
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