I appreciate that at an individual level it's reasonable to "close the tab" on a whole space when you're fed up with it, that's your prerogative.
But in terms of trashing the work of everyone who has worked on a blockchain in a public forum: `git` is a blockchain by any reasonable "degenerate Merkle tree" definition. Barbara Liskov who is the first female Turing winner (and would have gotten her Turing a lot sooner if it weren't for sexism) has been running a research group at MIT on PBFT for like 10 years. IO-HK has more Turning/Able/Fields-type folks than fucking Google per capita and might be pushing RenTech per-capita.
In 1995 the Internet had like three massive use cases: Usenet, penis pill spam, and porn, and by egress, mostly porn. Nothing wrong with porn, but but nothing wrong with some idiots trading Pokemon cards of monkeys for too much money either if this is a free country.
Tulip-scam Level 1 blockchains with a clear incentive for the treasury holders to make transactions expensive because they want to pump the fuck out of some stupid token and skip town before the bill comes due? Yeah, I think we're over that now.
But take it up with Linus and all the fucking Turing winners if you think the tech never has and never will have any legitimate application.
Neither [1] nor [2] contain the word "blockchain". I don't think you get to retroactively claim those projects & research as part of the blockchain movement. It was a nice try, though ;)
IO-HK's products page is just a list of 2020-era buzzwordy wallet & smart contract junk I've never heard of that all smells like dead fish.
There's nothing retroactive about it: I've been in the distributed systems space since I met the former Akamai guys who founded Basho and built Riak in 2008.
so cool it with the "nice try" stuff and read up:
"Hash trees are used in hash-based cryptography. Hash trees are also used in the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), Btrfs and ZFS file systems[4] (to counter data degradation[5]); Dat protocol; Apache Wave protocol;[6] Git and Mercurial distributed revision control systems; the Tahoe-LAFS backup system; Zeronet; the Bitcoin and Ethereum peer-to-peer networks;[7] the Certificate Transparency framework; the Nix package manager and descendants like GNU Guix;[8] and a number of NoSQL systems such as Apache Cassandra, Riak, and Dynamo.[9] Suggestions have been made to use hash trees in trusted computing systems.[10]" [1], and if you still have a difference of opinion, get Wikipedia edited if you can.
You know, all those dead fish smelly things from the 2020/2021 hype bubble, just like this junk from Paypal, and whatever IO-HK is faffing around with. You don't get to claim all possible usages of a tree data structure as retroactively part of the blockchain movement.
There's a limit to how deeply I'm going to nest a thread with someone who seems to have already made up their mind: after 15 years on this site, I'm starting to get it into my head that "winning" an HN fight might be fun in the moment, but as my grandma used to say: ain't no money in it.
And I think we agree about the failure of what used to be called "Web 3": it was an experiment that became a hype cycle that got hijacked by the unscrupulous and my bet is that history will mark the spectacular collapse of FTX last fall as the "end of Web 3".
But behind all the headlines and scandals and shit, a lot of serious distributed systems pros were doing real research and writing real code, and that stuff represents a bunch of tools in our toolbox as engineers that we didn't have 5 or 10 or 15 years ago, and I think it's foolish to throw the baby (tools) out with the bathwater (exit scam scandals).
All you have to do is pick up a newspaper on either side of the blood/crip political knife fight and you'll see a bunch of problems that the Internet created directly or indirectly and haven't solved yet, and many if not most of them are related to "proving things".
- We're having arguments about vote tallies, and who "double spent" their vote
- We're having arguments about who created a piece of IP that got vacuumed up by a big AI model
- We're having arguments about who should be able to post their views on the Internet (i.e. at all) and how to prevent political grand mal seizures from censoring dissenting opinion
- The story on international remittances is still a nightmare, and wildly impacts some of the most vulnerable members of our global community
- USDC or something is still the only way I know about to get paid by an overseas employer in any kind of timely way without a nightmare set of bank interactions and also be totally above-board regarding e.g. taxes and stuff
The list goes on, and while I don't think this is totally demonstrated yet, as a long-time distributed systems guy, I think it's at least plausible demonstrably (and in my opinion even pretty likely) that some of the tools that went in the toolbox in the last 10 years (and got inadvertently funded by token scam assholes: win) are pretty friggin adjacent to any solution I can think of to any of these.
> Neither [1] nor [2] contain the word "blockchain". I don't think you get to retroactively claim those projects & research as part of the blockchain movement.
Curiously, Crypto-critics like to do the same, aka Ben McKenzie / Stephen Diehl "it's 30y old technology".
I agree that it isn't helpful to use "blockchain" to mean git.
But in terms of trashing the work of everyone who has worked on a blockchain in a public forum: `git` is a blockchain by any reasonable "degenerate Merkle tree" definition. Barbara Liskov who is the first female Turing winner (and would have gotten her Turing a lot sooner if it weren't for sexism) has been running a research group at MIT on PBFT for like 10 years. IO-HK has more Turning/Able/Fields-type folks than fucking Google per capita and might be pushing RenTech per-capita.
In 1995 the Internet had like three massive use cases: Usenet, penis pill spam, and porn, and by egress, mostly porn. Nothing wrong with porn, but but nothing wrong with some idiots trading Pokemon cards of monkeys for too much money either if this is a free country.
Tulip-scam Level 1 blockchains with a clear incentive for the treasury holders to make transactions expensive because they want to pump the fuck out of some stupid token and skip town before the bill comes due? Yeah, I think we're over that now.
But take it up with Linus and all the fucking Turing winners if you think the tech never has and never will have any legitimate application.