Is Blockchain the Most Important IT Invention of Our Age? (theguardian.com)

mspohr writes: This article makes a fairly persuasive argument for the utility of the blockchain. It discusses a wide variety of companies and government exploring blockchain to maintain secure records which cannot be altered. One interesting application is to use blockchain to maintain property records in many countries where these records are often incomplete and are easily corrupted (intentionally or unintentionally). A linked article in The Economist expands the thought and discusses changes to the blockchain to improve performance, reduce overhead and accommodate different uses. (See also this related poll.)

Comments

answer: no

[turkeydance]

and any other post that ends with a question mark

Re:answer: no

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that right?

Re:answer: no

[Applehu Akbar]

Does he mean that blockchain that is already having trouble scaling in a Bitcoin market of meth dealers and Russian ransomware jockeys? What would happen if we tried using it to, say, keep track of the world's Visa transactions?

Re:answer: no

[penguinoid]

I'd grant it "most important invention of October 31, 2008".

Re:answer: no

[i_ate_god]

This is a discussion forum. Questions are typically a good mechanism for starting a discussion. Perhaps this is not a good place for you.

Re:answer: no

[alvinrod]

I don't use Bitcoin, but from what little I've read from previous stories here or elsewhere is that the scaling issue at current is due to conflicts within the community and not an inherent problem with the blockchain concept. Someone who was in favor of increasing the size even used a similar example that it would need to be larger in order to handle all of the transactions for a major credit card company.

Re:answer: no

[Anonymous Coward]

No. It's accurate. There ya go.

Re:answer: no

[MrKrillls]

If "Our Age" means the last three minutes, maybe.

Re:answer: no

[Anonymous Coward]

Is oxygen important to humans?

Re:answer: no

[the_Bionic_lemming]

So to boil it down, there is a parent server that is tracking all uses and exchanges of the bit of pertinent data.

And that can never ever get compromised. Because nobody has ever lost bitcoins?

Sorry about the sarcasm.

Re:answer: no

[davester666]

you can't embezzle numbers.

Re:answer: no

[NotInHere]

The great thing about the blockchain concept is that it is distributed. There is no central server you can compromise. As long as a given percentage of the miners aren't hostile, everything is fine. The idea is great, but in practice its dead. A majority of the bitcoin hashing power is provided by very few people. They of course have a high interest in bitcoin still being trusted, otherwise the bitcoin price crashes and goes close to 0$, and all their expensive rigs are worthless. But its not at all a system anymore where the "small guys" control everything.

Bitcoin has been designed so that if you own the private keys for a wallet, nobody can steal your bitcoins. This is even provided if the blockchain gets compromised or controlled 99% by entities hostile to you. Your bitcoins remain yours. But the moment you use some website which knows the private key for the wallet, you fully trust them. And if the website gets hacked, they can of course get stolen. So its not a problem of bitcoin itself.

Re:answer: no

[sg_oneill]

Does he mean that blockchain that is already having trouble scaling in a Bitcoin market of meth dealers and Russian ransomware jockeys? What would happen if we tried using it to, say, keep track of the world's Visa transactions?

Internet humor is defined as tragedy that ends with the words "and then I lost my bitcoins".

Pray that doesn't become "and then I lost my visa".

Re:answer: no

[ender-]

No, there is not a parent server "tracking" things. It's a whole peer-to-peer network that tracks things and only the blocks that the network as a whole agrees on become part of the chain. One would have to compromise a large percentage of the nodes on the network to directly "mess with" the data.

This is why the people who really want bitcoin to be successful want as many miners and full nodes as possible.

Re: answer: no

[WarJolt]

The great thing about the blockchain concept is that it is distributed. There is no central server you can compromise.

Unfortunately if you own a significant portion of the compute power in the network you can comprise it. Additionally the proof of work function used by bitcoin can be easily computed by special purpose hardware. There are countries and corporations with enough resources to take over bitcoin. One way to make that harder is use a memory-hard proof of work function, because memory is always expensive no matter how efficiently you can do the computation.

If it ever became worthwhile for a government to compromise these systems, they will.

Re:answer: no

[ls671]

That's OK you don't need a worker visa to work in US anyway...

Re:answer: no

[meadow]

I've used drbd distributed block device before in redundancy/failover setups, but didn't know about this which is entirely different. Just found a site with some better info on the whole distributed ledger thing. It seems really cool.

Re:answer: no

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

>Internet humor is defined as tragedy that ends with the words "and then I lost my bitcoins".

They hacked my Nest thermostat, and then I lost my bitcoins.

They hacked my web-enabled refrigerator, and then I lost my bitcoins.

They hacked my television, and then I lost my bitcoins.

Sing along, now.....something something something, "and then I lost my bitcoins."

Re:answer: no

[Anonymous Coward]

You could do this. Hash all of Visa's transactions every day, use it to keep DB admins of Visa honest. Job done!

Re: answer: no

[Zontar The Mindless]

If it ever became worthwhile for a government to compromise these systems, they will.

When it became worthwhile for a government to compromise these systems, they did.

TFTFY.

Re:answer: no

[dns_server]

Invoking Betteridge's law of headlines:
"Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:answer: no

[thegarbz]

You're right, except for the bits where you are wrong:

So to boil it down,

Cryptography doesn't boil down. You learn to understand it in full or you end up with a broken view of how you think it doesn't work.

there is a parent server

No there's not, the blockchain is distributed amongst all users, that's how you verify someone who sends you something owns it in the first place

that is tracking all uses and exchanges of the bit of pertinent data.

Yes

And that can never ever get compromised.

Unless the people who verify the data cryptographically can control more than 51% of the efforts to verify it.

Because nobody has ever lost bitcoins?

Correct, you can't lose bitcoins. Think of it as money that is only ever tied to your wallet. Everyone in the world knows the exact concept of that wallet. You can lose the wallet, someone can even pick it up and spend the contents, but you can never just magically lose money out of it. It has to go somewhere, and the blockchain tracks its movement.

Sorry about the sarcasm.

Don't be sorry, simply learn about the technology and then you won't have a need for it.

Re: answer: no

[Anonymous Coward]

You really do not understand anything about this tech. Bitcoins are basically tokens as a proof of work, or a key into the chains. Transactions are recorded and set up for everyone to view-in fact you have to have a local copy of the register otherwise you can't verify the transactions. Trust no one, and that's how it works roughly. Read a bit before you comment please.

Re:answer: no

[Chas]

While some of the uses are ingenious, it's essentially just a new take on "the logfile".

Re:answer: no

[Anonymous Coward]

Bitcoin has been designed so that if you own the private keys for a wallet, and you manage to keep those private keys secret, nobody can steal your bitcoins. This is even provided if the blockchain gets compromised or controlled 99% by entities hostile to you. Your bitcoins remain yours.

Corrected that for you.

Re:answer: no

[Anonymous Coward]

A logfile can be edited though

Re: answer: no

[Anonymous Coward]

Memory hard proof is only hard when you don't have special purpose hardware.
If you're making ASIC designs for bitcoins, you can make ASIC designs for some other function as well.
It's just a matter of how much you want to pay.
I think right now we're at $20000 for a small ASIC design at relative large feature sizes.

Re:answer: no

[Anonymous Coward]

This is partially true. However, to scale to current visa levels of transactions per second, you'd need block sizes in the GB range. 1MB blocks gives 2 transaction/second in the real world. You're gonna needing around 4k/second to do Visa, probably more at peaks times. Each block is gonna end up being around 2GB for that. Bigger if you wanna account for growth. And that doesn't even begin to touch on the size of the block chain. I hear they have a solution to that too, but it seems unsafe since it relies on people no attempting to fool chains and the merchant just hoping his stuff gets in the chain at a later date.

Re:answer: no

[Anonymous Coward]

>Unless the people who verify the data cryptographically can control more than 51% of the efforts to verify it.

Like when Hash.io got 51%? Something BTC evangelicals claimed was impossible?

>Correct, you can't lose bitcoins

Yes you can. Lose the files with the keys in them, and your coins are gone forever. There is no way to get them back. This is why the end game for BTC is a deflationary currency.

Re:answer: no

[Anonymous Coward]

And you can't irrevocably steal millions of dollars from a bank account with just a private key. Blockchain: empowering hackers to steal your savings since two thousand AND IT'S GONE

Re:answer: no

[GLMDesigns]

There isn't any parent server that is tracking all uses. There is a distributed ledger that is cryptographically secure until, perhaps/probably/maybe/who knows, the arrival of quantum computers.

Re:answer: no

[Anonymous Coward]

In theory yes, in practice no.

Information theory throws up some pretty hard roadblocks that affect the utility of a purely decentralized system. Sure you can have a completely decentralized authority but what use it when verifying a transaction can take 15 minutes? Hours? Weeks?

Bitcoin, in fact, uses a whole lot of centralized functions as a crutch to function.

Everyone downloads the blockchain from basically one hosting service, and that guy is going to yank that access soon.

Pretty much everyone uses exchanges and other bank-like entities as an intermediary because transaction verification is slow and escrow is needed. (And just about every day one of these closes, with all the bitcoins stored within vanishing with them)

Bitcoin is only useful if it has utility. So what if you have your coins and nobody can take them if they're not useful?

Re:answer: no

[Chas]

Technically a blockchain can be "edited" too. Adding transactions to a blockchain is an edit function.

No, you CANNOT go back in and twiddle previous transactions (it'd break the blockchain). That still doesn't stop a blockchain from essentially being a logfile though.

Re:answer: no

[Wraithlyn]

Can Betteridge's Law Of Headlines Be Applied 100% of the Time?

Re: answer: no

[Anonymous Coward]

"One way to make that harder is use a memory-hard proof of work function, because memory is always expensive no matter how efficiently you can do the computation."

Famous last words. Over the decades CPU and memory have swapped places several times as computational bottlenecks.

Anyhow, these work-factor algorithms rely on _exponential_ differences in costs--work vs verification. Some of the newer memory-hard work functions, like scrypt and Argon 2, only provide linear improvements in relative costs. As I like to tell people, if your user's password is "abc123", you gain exactly nothing by using something like scrypt.

Blockchain is problematic because no cryptographer ever doubted the viability of the so-called Sybil attack (>50% network node control). It's made worse by the fact that blockchain, or any similar protocol that relies on distributed, replicated storage (i.e. you can't shard and isolate each transaction to a tiny minority of nodes), is fundamentally a tradeoff between latency on the one hand, and reliability & security on the other. The more participating independent nodes there are on the network, the greater the security, but the also the greater the bandwidth required and the lower the latency. Even with continued advancements in server and network hardware, Bitcoin will _never_ be able to scale in the same manner as VISA.

(Indeed, I think it was David Wheeler who proved over 20 years ago that any P2P protocol that involves multiple hops, even one that doesn't do M:N or 1:M replication, has diminishing returns for each new node you add. That is, in the best possible scenario, while each new node to the network can perpetually increase the load factor of the network, the increased improvement asymptotically approaches 0. Which means that as a practical matter, every possible P2P network has a built-in limiting factor to how large it can scale and still be useable, considering that at some point a new node will add less throughput to the network than the fixed cost of adding the node itself.)

Bitcoin will be successful, but not because it brings some kind of anarchist utopia. Rather, it's going to be adopted by big banks and other institutions for backend transaction management and auditing. In other words, Bitcoin will succeed precisely because it appeals to cartels. Not that I think this is a bad thing. For hundred of years banks have always functioned as a kind of global cartel. And the system mostly works, and works well.

Re:answer: no

[Anonymous Coward]

Correct, you can't lose bitcoins. Think of it as money that is only ever tied to your wallet. Everyone in the world knows the exact concept of that wallet. You can lose the wallet, someone can even pick it up and spend the contents, but you can never just magically lose money out of it. It has to go somewhere, and the blockchain tracks its movement.

This is absolutely false.

If you lose your private key you lose your Bitcoins.

Re: answer: no

[Anonymous Coward]

Correct me if I'm wong, but isn't there still a certain admin type power that lets it make changes to how the chain functions? Dont they do patches from time to time? Wasn't oneven critical for some timing function between nodes?

Re: answer: no

[Gliscameria]

Correct me if I'm wong, but isn't there still a certain admin type power that lets it make changes to how the chain functions? Dont they do patches from time to time? Wasn't oneven critical for some timing function between nodes?

There's no evidence it's even sustainable

[Anonymous Coward]

Currently, the blockchain market has been cornered by what appears to be a natural monopoly resulting from economies of scale. The people most endowed with capital that needs to be expatriated from capital controls can corner the market on mining and then obstruct efforts to increase the blocksize resulting increasingly abusive transactions fees.

Re:There's no evidence it's even sustainable

[Dahamma]

Blockchain != bitcoin. Currency is just one use of it. RTFA, it makes this exact point...

Re:There's no evidence it's even sustainable

[Anonymous Coward]

The blockchain is only useful because it is used as a currency. When there is no financial incentive to waste electricity making heat the blockchain can be easily circumvented with a 51% attack.

Without Bitcoin as a currency, all that is left is a massively inefficient distributed file store with a layer of cryptography.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_distributed_file_systems

Re:There's no evidence it's even sustainable

[shutdown -p now]

When there is no financial incentive to waste electricity making heat the blockchain can be easily circumvented with a 51% attack.

The financial incentive doesn't have to come from the blockchain directly in the form of currency. It can come from the desire to not see the blockchain compromised (e.g. when your economy depends on it).

Re:There's no evidence it's even sustainable

[JaredOfEuropa]

Sure, but it doesn't make a compelling case for the blockchain being the most important discovery of our age. Is it important in being a new fundamental insight or method that opens up a whole new area of business or research? No. Is it important because of the impact it has on the field of computing or another sector, or on society as a whole? No. The potential uses mentioned in the article are all incremental improvements rather that revolutionary: doing what we already are doing, but slightly better. Blockchains and distributed trust have the potential to transform the way we handle money or land registries, but in and of themselves they are insufficient to solve the problems with centralised solutions. When they start transforming our world, we can name them the greatest IT invention. Such things are better done in hindsight.

Re:There's no evidence it's even sustainable

[Sique]

The blockchain within Bitcoin is useful because Bitcoin is used as a currency.

But that doesn't mean that any blockchain used outside of Bitcoin has to be useless. There are other cases where having a distributed ledger of events (or transactions) is very useful. One is for instance recordings of ownership for real estate. Everytime, some piece of real estate changes owners, you update the blockchain of that real estate. This would amount to a tamper proof way of recording real estate transactions. It's of no use anymore for someone to bribe an official to quietly change the real estate records in your favour, as every change is recorded and can be backtracked, and every real estate owner has a wallet which does not contain Bitcoins, but real estate certificates, which can't change owners without his consent (e.g. with his private key). Obligations are part of the wallet of the obligee, and only if the obligee signalizes fulfillment, the obligation can be erased from the real estate etc.pp.

Re: There's no evidence it's even sustainable

[Anonymous Coward]

If your private key gets lost or destroyed, you can't sell you house?

Re: There's no evidence it's even sustainable

[Sique]

If that happens, you still could do those transactions, if enough controlling nodes agree. And that's the point. A single rogue node or even a large group of nodes can't manipulate the blockchain, you need a certain amount of nodes to agree, and it's just a decision of design, how high the number of nodes has to be. You could even design a blockchain with 5x9 (99.999) agreement.

If for instance you have a court decision that the wallet is rightfully yours, you could get all transaction nodes agree to perform those transaction, gaining control over your wallet even if you lost your private key (and then transfer the contents into a new wallet you still own the private key).

No, C and C++ are the most important.

[Anonymous Coward]

C and C++ are the most important technological inventions of our age. They're the foundation for all important software today, including the fad programming languages that people mistakenly think will replace C and C++ (I'm looking at you, Rust).

Re:No, C and C++ are the most important.

[Dahamma]

C and C++ are only the foundation because the happened to become popular due to a bunch of misc. factors, not because they are inherently great inventions in themselves. Also, they (and their standard libraries) evolved over time to their current state.

It's like saying English and Spanish are the most important languages because they are fundamentally the "best-invented" ones, not because of the accidents of fate that were colonial expansion, WWII, and the Internet.

Re:No, C and C++ are the most important.

[NotInHere]

Rust, is shaping up to be a massive failure, in my opinion.

Why do you think that?

They give you the utmost of power and flexibility. But contrary to what some fools think, they can be used very safely.

Yes, they can be used "safely", of course. But still there are major problems connected with C++. One is their exception system. They had to add lots of complexity in order to run destructors when the stack gets unrolled and similar. Its really a mess.

Modern C++ actually makes it trivial to write safe and secure code, yet still have it run extremely quickly with little overhead.

If you know what you are doing then C itself can be used to write safe and secure code. But if somebody writes code by copying some answer from stackexchange, they'll end up with a big mess. With C++, you can shoot yourself into the foot quite easily, or introduce bad practices. Rust has (almost?) no undefined behaviour. C++ has tons of it, and there is where the danger lurks.

Re:No, C and C++ are the most important.

[Wycliffe]

C and C++ are only the foundation because the happened to become popular due to a bunch of misc. factors, not because they are inherently great inventions in themselves. Also, they (and their standard libraries) evolved over time to their current state.

It's like saying English and Spanish are the most important languages because they are fundamentally the "best-invented" ones, not because of the accidents of fate that were colonial expansion, WWII, and the Internet.

C and C++ are the foundation because they give you the power to talk directly to the hardware with relative ease and flexibility. You cannot compare C/C++ to Perl, Python, PHP, or even to Java. Yes, C++ is harder to use than higher level languages but that's kindof the point of the higher level languages. The point of C++ is to be an intermediate language that straddles both worlds. There are really no other languages that can switch between machine code, assembly, and high level concepts with the ease and flexibility of C++. That's the reason C++ has the staying power it does.

Re:No, C and C++ are the most important.

[Dutch Gun]

If you know what you are doing then C itself can be used to write safe and secure code.

The difference between writing safe code in C and C++ is how the language (and by extension, the compiler) can help to keep you safe. A well-designed C++ class is almost impossible to use incorrectly or unsafely. Saying you can write safe code in C is like saying you can be safe while riding a motorcycle - you're perfectly safe until you make a mistake, and then you're not.

Back on topic, this sentence caught my eye:

"...in so far as Joe Public thinks about distributed ledgers at all, it is in the context of Bitcoin, money laundering and online drug dealing..."

I was about to laugh this off, and then I see this comment below the article:

"The problem with all this is that anyone who controls 50%+1 of the blockchain controls all of the block chain. Thus the only thing guaranteeing the integrity is that the bad guys cant control more than half. And thats the problem , for a block chain to be effective it needs to be widely decentralized, and if its widely decentralized, it has the potential to be hijacked and then bot netted. Next thing you know, your block chain belongs to someone else, and with 50%+1 control, they can start editing that blockchain."

Whelp, the author sure called it. People apparently can't distinguish between the concept of a distributed ledger and a specific implementation of one (i.e. Bitcoin). The underlying encrypting technology of preserving a history is the most important part of this system. Any alteration affects every transaction going forward, so making surreptitious changes to the transaction history are impossible.

I've always heard the mantra "electronic records can be altered", spoken as an absolute truism. I guess the proper counter is "yes, but it can't necessarily go undetected". It will be interesting to see how many ways this technology can be used when you need to guarantee the integrity of a set of data and related transactions.

Re:No, C and C++ are the most important.

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

C has been around for over 40 years. C++ has been around for over 30 years. In all that time we haven't seen even one single other language seriously compete with either of them.

Oh c'mon, what about Javascript? Wait, why are you laughing??

Re:No, C and C++ are the most important.

[Opportunist]

I'm not laughing. I'm pointing at the exit. You can toss your geek card into the /dev/null provided next to it.

Re:No, C and C++ are the most important.

[Rockoon]

C and C++ are the foundation because they give you the power to talk directly to the hardware with relative ease and flexibility.

You seem to be confusing pointers with something low level (even BASIC can read and write arbitrary memory.)

Do explain to us, which language feature of C or C++ gives you the power to talk to the hardware directly. All you noob C and C++ programmers that werent banging keys 30 years ago dont seem to have any idea what a phrase like "talk to the hardware" means but you guys sure seem to use it a lot when referring to your favorite language.

Let me explain things for you. The magic of C is that the myriad of algorithms and data structures a simple operating system needs can be expressed succinctly in it, making it a good but still unnecessary choice for writing an operating system. What you think is low level is actually just C's abstract machine, what C programmers target, which you incorrectly think is "hardware."

"Standard" libraries such as io implement common low level functionality through mixed-language measures (frequently inline-assembler) because the C abstract machine, the thing C code is targeting, doesn't have anything low level in it, and for good reason as otherwise it wouldnt be hardware agnostic like its supposed to be.

Re:No, C and C++ are the most important.

[Anonymous Coward]

C: giving you all the power and speed of machine code with all the legibility and programming safeguards of machine code! The best of both worlds!

Re:No, C and C++ are the most important.

[Rockoon]

A well-designed C++ class is almost impossible to use incorrectly or unsafely.

Code you guarantee Safe is Safe. Gotcha.

You've just moved the problem to the other side of the class wall and willed it away.

Re:No, C and C++ are the most important.

[Anonymous Coward]

>explain to us, which language feature of C or C++ gives you the power to talk to the hardware directly.

extern Really good for compilers to drop into a header to define a variable that can correspond to memory mapped IO or something like it
register Duh.
volitle Again, mostly for special variables whose value is hardware generated

I mean, Duff's Device was originally copying from memory mapped IO, so it's hardly a new concept.

This hardly gets into things like __m128 and other, widely adopted, compiler specific extensions.

>All you noob C and C++ programmers that werent banging keys 30 years ago

Fuck off. You're about 1/10th as good as you think you are. Maybe senility is setting in and you're forgetting basic shit?

Re:No, C and C++ are the most important.

[Anonymous Coward]

> Do explain to us, which language feature of C or C++ gives you the power to talk to the hardware directly.
Probably the fact that it has a simple ABI.
Simple enough that it's possible to write assembly functions by hand and link them with whatever you're writing in C.
I guess it would be possible to do the same for Python, but it would be a lot more work I think.
I don't know, I've never tried, so I don't know exactly what would be involved.
Also, I'm not 100% sure how you'd go about implementing a memory management unit without access to pointers.
(I'm thinking Python here, in case you were wondering)
And lastly, the fact that C has one of the smallest run-time requirements of any language.
If I want to run Python on a new arch, I need to somehow build the interpreter, which requires the C standard library, and other libraries.
For C, I don't even need the C standard library. Sure, it would be useful, but I can run code without it.
For java I would first need to compile the JVM, which is probably also written in C.

Re:No, C and C++ are the most important.

[Anonymous Coward]

Inline assembly, Preprocessor Macros, manual memory allocation, Type (ab)use, Native calls and data structures to/from the kernel.

If it were that easy, userland drivers written in java or even python would be a common thing wouldn't they?

Re:No, C and C++ are the most important.

[Dutch Gun]

Yes, you move your code inside a small, easily testable component that encapsulates both a set of discrete data and the functions which operate on that data. And then you build larger objects out of those smaller, well-tested components. It's called "object oriented programming". You may not have heard of it, given that it was invented a mere fifty years ago or so.

Re:No, C and C++ are the most important.

[TangoMargarine]

What if you go with your family on a trip and your a self driving car suddenly

Do you often have a problem with suddenly becoming a self-driving car? Sounds like you should see a doctor about that.

Re:No, C and C++ are the most important.

[Anonymous Coward]

" People apparently can't distinguish between the concept of a distributed ledger and a specific implementation of one"

Permissionless distributed databases have been around for ages.

THEY FUCKING SUCK BY DESIGN.

And yet every decade, someone else comes around thinking they're the bee's knees and tries to reintroduce it as a 'new concept.'

Much like thin client computing is now essentially called 'cloud computing.' It's not new, WYSE did that shit for AGES.

Learn from history and quit letting marketing terms like "Distributed Ledger' fool you.

Re:No, C and C++ are the most important.

[Anonymous Coward]

You sound like an individual who doesn't know what he's talking about when referring to "talk to hardware directly". Let me explain. In most systems, we use memory mapped IO. In other words, certain wires of the hardware are literally mapped to a specific address in memory. Say an IO bus is mapped to 0x00003500 and is a 16 bit register. In C, I can do

short *IOBus = (shart*)0x00003500;
*IOBus = 0x1F8D;

And I have literally written to the hardware, directly. This is something you cannot do in things like java, perl, python, etc. as I've never been allowed to assign the value of a pointer. Now, you're going to say that in you can't do that in C or C++, but that's only because the OS puts additional layers of protection in place which forbids you from doing that. But I assure you, the OS itself is doing code very similar to that, though the addresses probably aren't hardcoded and have to be populated by doing hardware queries. But when you get in to microcontroller programming, where you don't have the abstraction, you use the exact C code I put above to control hardware. Hell, in a PIC, for doing I2C and SPI communication, you actually set a timer to manually wiggle a clock pin to put data down the bus. All done in C. If you don't consider that low level and controlling hardware directly, then I honestly don't know what to say.

Re:No, C and C++ are the most important.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm way more comfortable writing C++ than JavaScript but there is no denying that JavaScript is the language to know if you can only learn one. I used to believe that was Python but I've now seen the light..

Re:No, C and C++ are the most important.

[tepples]

And lastly, the fact that C has one of the smallest run-time requirements of any language.

Forth diehards will claim that Forth's runtime is even smaller.

Re: No, C and C++ are the most important.

[Anonymous Coward]

Most systems use memory mapped I/O? That seems a little broad.

Not that i disagree with your premise, but even GW-BASIC had peek, poke, inp and out. And I program my PICs in assembly.

Re:No, C and C++ are the most important.

[mike.mondy]

C and C++ are only the foundation because the happened to become popular due to a bunch of misc. factors, not because they are inherently great inventions in themselves. [ ... ]

No, C *was* a great invention. That there are other choices today doesn't change that. It was perhaps the first HLL (high level language) that was small, efficient, and yet also usable for low-level tasks. It was "small" in the sense that that it provided a minimal number of constructs and didn't provide any hard to parse features (unlike, for example, Ada). The fact that it was small was probably a big factor in C having one of the very first machine independent compilers, the Portable C Compiler.

From the Wikipeda C entry:

C is a general-purpose, imperative computer programming language, supporting structured programming, lexical variable scope and recursion, while a static type system prevents many unintended operations. By design, C provides constructs that map efficiently to typical machine instructions, and therefore it has found lasting use in applications that had formerly been coded in assembly language, including operating systems, as well as various application software for computers ranging from supercomputers to embedded systems.

Re:No, C and C++ are the most important.

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

I'm not laughing. I'm pointing at the exit. You can toss your geek card into the /dev/null provided next to it.

Dude, relax. It was something called a "joke", look it up. :)

Re:No, C and C++ are the most important.

[Dahamma]

Geek card, nothing. He's right. I HATE Javascript but these days ridiculous things - from 3D game programming to MP4 video parsing/demuxing - are being implemented in it. And that's just the *client* side. If you are scared of Javascript don't even start looking into Node.js. Yesterday's geek is today's useless graybeard...

Re:No, C and C++ are the most important.

[Dahamma]

I would consider myself foremost a C/C++ programmer. But in the 90's I wrote software that interfaced with custom built ECL-based muon detectors in Turbo Pascal for Fermilab's D0. C is not the only language that can easily access memory mapped IO, and certainly not the first.

Re:No, C and C++ are the most important.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not the languages that are important, it's the very idea of a compiler.

Re:No, C and C++ are the most important.

[hoggoth]

Yes, C and C++ allow you to directly access hardware if that hardware uses memory mapped registers. Any language that allows direct memory access does.

*(volatile unsigned short *)(0x0c030) = 1; // toggle the speaker

Nope

[Anonymous Coward]

Most important is Cheetos.

No

[Anonymous Coward]

Clearly not.

Next question...

Re:No

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

This is Slashdot. We don't do discussin, we do arguin! Give us something to wave our pitchforks at or we'll just go "meh".

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

Meh.

Re:No

[NotInHere]

You are doing it wrong. Its "meh." not "Meh.".

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember when it came out! It used to be such a pain collecting my shit and throwing the bag in the dumpster.

Re:No

[phantomfive]

It's not too bad, just put seran wrap under the toilet seat.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

Subject is the most important IT invention.

> flush toilet

I see what you did there. News for nerds, and all. :D

p.s. IMO, Blockchain doesn't even rate the in the top 100 IT inventions of the decade, much less our age. There only novel part is how the bitcoin founders fooled so many people into wasting so much electricity on a flawed concept.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

m'Eh!

Re:No

[Opportunist]

Oh you kids with your fancy way of typing simple words.

Re:No

[Opportunist]

It sure helped with my core dumps and, unless some resources are blocking, prevents overflow errors.

Re:No

[sociocapitalist]

I'd say it was the flush toilet.

The flush toilet is not an 'IT invention'...

Of course not

[NotInHere]

You can achieve similar things with a gossip protocol. Blockchains are just one step in the evolution of distributed and public logs. Blockchains are in fact a very very wasteful, with all that proof-of-work. Most of bitcoin is controlled by china, and most of china's energy comes from old-fashioned coal. So, Blockchains as of now are a very very dirty technology.

But I'm really looking forward in seeing newer approaches emerge which don't need this kind of proof of work but are still safe against spam. Bitcoin has done one very important thing IMO, it has put attention to this topic. There are tons of startups everywhere. One really has to fear that "blockchain" becomes a new buzzword.

Re:Of course not

[0100010001010011]

and most of china's energy comes from old-fashioned coal.

The thing I 'like' about China is they get stuff done. They could announce tomorrow they were going to be 100% nuclear in 10 years and I believe they'd actually do it.

Meanwhile all the locals around here are all up in arms over our coal plant shutting and whining how the EPA 'ruins' Murica. I couldn't imagine the shitstorm that would happen if a "Muslim" suggested that.

Re:Of course not

[NotInHere]

Yeah, democracies are slow in this regard, and even the chinese government criticises the slowness as problem of the democratic approach. But still, its the best proven system guaranteeing individual freedoms, so no way we should chose another one.

China has a big problem with regional party bosses playing "little god". Bejing has to keep them all under control.

Re:Of course not

[dbIII]

Meanwhile all the locals around here are all up in arms over our coal plant shutting and whining how the EPA 'ruins' Murica

Reality is probably that it's thirty years old and has been run like a car stolen by a teenage speed freak. Any sort of failure you can think of happening in a conventional thermal power station has happened in an American power plant somewhere due to sheer neglect - but it does provide good case studies into how bad things can get. At least one place had everything on the boiler and turbine side corrode in six units to the point of uselessness just because they didn't hire anyone to consider the water. They may have thrown away hundreds of millions in gear but they did save paying the wages of a recent chemistry graduate or an even cheaper technician.

Re:Of course not

[narcc]

The obvious solution, naturally, is to have several high-profile Muslims start a campaign to expand energy production via coal, while simultaneously lobbying to end nuclear, wind, and solar initiatives.

We'll see either an end to the irrational fear of Muslims, a redneck push toward clean energy, or their heads will explode. In any case, it'll solve at least one problem.

Re:Of course not

[TheDarkMaster]

It is because democracy to work perfectly depends on collaborative participants. But in practice the human being is concerned only with himself and at most with their immediate relatives. Hell, I still see around people arrogantly spreading that everyone should use the "survival of the fittest" or the "law of the jungle", which are completely incompatible with democracy.

Re:Of course not

[drinkypoo]

The thing I 'like' about China is they get stuff done. They could announce tomorrow they were going to be 100% nuclear in 10 years and I believe they'd actually do it.

Haha, sucker. They also claimed they'd be fully industrial by now but they have cities lying around empty because they won't let their people come up fast enough to fill them and they are building more. If China said they were going to build 30 nuclear reactors, I would assume they were going to break ground on 20 and finish 5

Re:Of course not

[awol]

Distributed ledgers have some value, but there are not many applications where the cost of the bitcoin approach is justified. All this talk of the blockchain in the finance industry is interesting but frankly smacks a bit too much of "me too" bandwagonism for my liking. I really struggle to understand the benefits of a distributed ledger in most financial transactions. Certainly can't understand the value with latency and volume constraints like the current bitcoin implementation.

I think public key cryptography is _vastly_ more important than the blockchain to name just one.

Re:Of course not

[epine]

Most of bitcoin is controlled by china, and most of china's energy comes from old-fashioned coal. So, Blockchains as of now are a very very dirty technology.

Congratulations. You are now the proud owner of a double F minus in Fungibility 101.

Plus, bonus!

An exclusive membership is now heading your way to an elite social club which includes former Canadian politicians who asserted than none of the Canadian tritium headed to America was making its way into nuclear warheads (fine print: as America was very carefully devoting 100% of their own inadequate stockpile to that very purpose—but no worries, we've got clean tritium from Canada to satisfy all the rest of the demand).

Betcha didn't know that a double F minus in Fungibility 101 paves the road to a highly lucrative career on K street.

Re:Of course not

[sjames]

And yet, they haven't. We'll see how that plays out in a few years when they have a massive population on early medical retirement because their lungs wore out faster than the rest of them.

One last land grab

[NotQuiteReal]

Once the "permanent, incorruptible" begins, nothing before then will matter.

Finally, once and for all, it will bring peace to the world wherever their is a land dispute!

Define "Age"

[sunderland56]

Normal definition is 99 million years. So, no; most important IT invention is probably the digital computer.

Blockchain problems

[mveloso]

The main problem with the blockchain is that it's a consensus. That's OK as long as anyone isn't actively trying to subvert it. If someone does actively attempt to subvert it, would anyone actually notice?

The other issue with it is, of course, trust. At some point you have to trust someone, which leads to the normal theft, fraud, etc issues. That's not really a blockchain problem per se, it's more of an operationalization issue.

Re:Blockchain problems

[NotInHere]

In fact, the blockchain has been designed with distrust in mind. Unlike most other systems, it isn't the usual "just add a 3rd party everyone trusts, and lets call the problem solved" (like with TLS certificates, there you even have hundreds of parties everyone trusts), but it gives you a real hard number of people you can assume to act "hostile" and the system is still stable, without having a trusted third party. Its all real nice, in theory, except for the question of how to bring information about the current hashing speed of the network to the client. This is the only information you as non-hashing party have to trust.

Re:Blockchain problems

[BradleyUffner]

My understanding is that the blockchain can be forged if more than half of the network agrees ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ). What would happen if the groups that control the massive botnets got together and decided to forge the blockchain? I don't know exactly how all the numbers play out, but would that be enough processing power to take control of the blockchain?

Re:Blockchain problems

[NotInHere]

Yeah, if more than half of the miners are hostile e.g. if the big miners band together they might start to do double spend. But they likely won't do: If they try to actually introduce a double spend, they might make some money in the short term, but the moment the public finds out about it, which, due to the already quite well connected nature of the internet, can and will happen, bitcoin will lose a lot of trust, as basically its broken, and the bitcoin prices will sink rapidly. So their rigs would be worthless.

But yeah you are right, bitcoin can be considered broken.

Re:Blockchain problems

[Rockoon]

My understanding is that the blockchain can be forged if more than half of the network agrees

To be succinct, the blockchain that you currently see can be a forged if more than half the network that you can currently see conspires.

I think this distinction is just glossed over. Even if its hard to topple the global belief in the blockchain, its still possible to temporarily manipulate local beliefs.

No

[PPH]

I'd say it was the flush toilet.

Yes

[AHuxley]

Watch as a lot of traditional services try and become all edgy with a new cyber front end. Same old brand and profits, but now nationally unregulated, online and very global.
The new selected gatekeepers of allowable cyber fund movements for a fee and tracking.
What the Vice, Master Race, American Excess credit cards allowed past generations to enjoy will now be presented in a new digital front, one branding hop away from a big bank.
Same big gov tracking back to you if you try to support a whistleblower :)

No.

[Anonymous Coward]

No nowhere near. For hardware, probably the transistor is the most important IT invention, and for software, probably the TCP/IP - DNS communications system/stack (upon which the blockchain depends on in order to work)

Re:You bitcoin groupies aren't even trying anymore

[Anonymous Coward]

U mad bro?

Re:You bitcoin groupies aren't even trying anymore

[Anonymous Coward]

they see me tradin, they hatin

As a database

[Billly Gates]

Would it be possible to store data this way?

Re:As a database

[Teancum]

It isn't so much a way to store data, which can be done with any peer to peer network like a TOR network, and is in fact where the concept of "cloud storage" comes from. What a block chain does is to timestamp and certify that the data integrity is maintained in such a peer to peer data network.

It is a time stamp so far as you can also demonstrate a chronological sequence between each block and point to one block and certify that it came before another block. You can also establish "ownership" of a chunk of data so far as to authenticate who created that data in the first place. That is also one directional so far as it is hard to prove any one person specifically created that data if they want to stay anonymous, but it is easy for somebody deliberately wanting to claim a piece of data to certify that it is in fact "their" data.

I could see it being used as a way to stamp patent applications, to give another example not typically used.

Re:As a database

[Anonymous Coward]

I could see it being used as a way to stamp patent applications, to give another example not typically used.

Here's what I can't believe: no one has tried to patent the block chain. That itself is a miracle.

nope, it's still the router

[Gravis Zero]

If anything is the most important IT invention of our age, it's the invention of the router. routers are the fundamental building block of what we consider to be the internet. they can be software or hardware based but they are what tie many computers together so that they can communicate quickly. without routers, bitcoin could not have even existed beyond an idea.

Re:nope, it's still the router

[Teancum]

Block chains don't need routers to exist, although it certainly is a useful feature. You can easily (or with modest difficulty) run a block chain network strictly through a sneaker network (aka with just thumb drives/floppy discs (yes... they still exist)/optical storage/etc.) moving data physically from one computer to the next. That is also true of sending transactions for cryptocurrency as well, although at some point you need to get those transactions folded into the primary block chain.

I would agree with your sentiment on the relative importance of the two ideas though, where the idea of a router is definitely something which impacts far more lives and is far more basic to modern computing than a block chain.

Re:nope, it's still the router

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh huh. You can run the whole internet through a sneaker net, but the lag times would make it impractical. Waiting for the first pair of syn/ack packets would take minutes at best. It takes quite a strange viewpoint to put blockchain technology over the technology that makes the internet practical. The router is multiple orders of magnitude more important than blockchains and likely will be as long as we have communication networks (which I would guess is as long as we have civilization). It's like saying the jet engine is more important to flight than the wing. Which would you rather have removed or would rather do without? Jet Engine or Wings? Blockchains or Routers? Give me wings and routers any day.

Re:nope, it's still the router

[Anonymous Coward]

nope, it's still the TRANSISTOR

If anything is the most important IT invention of our age, it's the invention of the TRANSISTOR. TRANSISTORs are the fundamental building block of what we consider to be the internet. they can be SILICON or GERMANIUM based but they are what tie many ROUTERS together so that they can communicate quickly. without TRANSISTORS, ROUTERS could not have even existed beyond an idea.

I left the caps so this shitty argument can be re extrapolated to your wish ;-)

Re:nope, it's still the router

[Teancum]

Blockchains can have lag times of up to about 10 minutes per data exchange or longer, and building chains on separated nodes that on independent networks or computers only makes a difference when one has a longer chain than another... and the longer chain wins anyway. That is just for mining. You need zero syn/ack packets at all in that situation as they aren't needed to synch one block chain miner to another.

As for transaction data, you can pass data around on something like Fidonet... which may have a "router" look up table software so far as passing messages, doesn't really need a dedicated router either.

Seriously, this isn't like IP over avian carrier, I'm saying that TCP/IP is irrelevant to the concept of a blockchain or any other lower level protocol. It helps to automate the process no doubt and adds convenience, but I'm pointing out that it is unnecessary and you can definitely connect locations that are on separate networks for whatever reason that may be or even off-grid entirely for the purposes of a block chain concept. It is also a practical solution in those more unusual situations where network access is limited.

Re:nope, it's still the router

[Anonymous Coward]

You say routers, i say packetized communication.

How about integrated circuits...

[Anonymous Coward]

Try to compute your blockchain without an integrated circuit....

Re:How about integrated circuits...

[gweihir]

Possible, but will take a while ;-)

Bittards

[Anonymous Coward]

religiously suckers

Is a hashtable a rainbow?

[Anonymous Coward]

No.

Mom

[Anonymous Coward]

Is Your Mom the most important IT invention of our age?

Is this a bitcoin puff piece or just stupid?

[dbIII]

Is this a bitcoin puff piece or just stupid? In terms of getting things done, do blockchains even show up on people's radar to make it to a top 50 of useful things in IT?

Re:You bitcoin groupies aren't even trying anymore

[ender-]

Heard a lot of similar arguments about the internet in the early days.

Not to say bitcoin will definitely be successful at all, let alone as successful as the internet, but a lot of people see a lot of potential in bitcoin and blockchain technologies so I'm keen on watching how it all pans out. /feeding the troll

capitalism centric question

[Anonymous Coward]

Block chain wouldn't be needed if we trusted one another :) /communism advocate

No. Fully homomorphic encryption is.

[Anonymous Coward]

Fully homomorphic encryption has a bright future as more efficient implementations are found. It's possibly already more efficient for a distributed ledger than Bitcoin; just too new for its various implementations to gain sufficient trust by cryptographic experts.

Environmental regulations are severely biased...

[Anonymous Coward]

For example, see the exemptions for fracking in the US. Or the EPA fear-mongering over radon, or the selective application of regulations based on the discredited LNT theory. No gas, coal, or hydrothermal plants would be allowed to operate, if they were held to the same unreasonable radiation standards applied to nuclear. For an idea of just how absurd the EPA's regulations are, the limits are set below what is found in a person, owing to the natural occurring yet radioactive potassium.

Why bother?

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

>> companies and government exploring blockchain to maintain secure records which cannot be altered

Why bother? The most important information and most important decisions usually have no paper trail. After all, it just takes a phone call to make a hard drive disappear, and once people reach a particular level they seem to be completely immune to restrictions on handling classified information.

Blockchain != Bitcoin

[Idou]

Blockchain != Bitcoin. Now that you know that fact, you can start posting comments relevant and beneficial to the topic of discussion. . .

Wait. . . I must be new here. . .

Re:Blockchain != Bitcoin

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, they say that dunning-krueger doesn't really apply to loudmouth idiots - that such an interpretation is not what the two scientists were really talking about. But maybe applying it that way on the net is really more useful than D&K realize. Rebelwhatever sure fits the bill.

Re:Blockchain != Bitcoin

[Anonymous Coward]

So what you mean then is Ethereum. :-D

easy answer

[bloodhawk]

Is Blockchain the Most Important IT Invention of Our Age? No!

more complete Answer "FUCK NO, to think it is laughable"

Double entry

[Anonymous Coward]

The interesting thing about block chain is that it could replace double entry system of accounting. If debt and assets can be perfectly assigned and tracked, it eliminates the need for traditional ledgers (and ledger balancing).

Perl. Seriously, perl.

[goombah99]

I think the answer to the question depends on what one means by "our age", youngster. But the early internet and almost all of the early bioinformatics work (which was the first science to really truly give data bases and the internet a workout.) was really built on perl. This certainly is not the case now. But in the 90s it was. And that sort of changed everything. First scientific collaboration and federated data became a whole new paridigm. The first science were no one had or cold have the whole data set or tool chain in their own lab. Perl could keep up with internet speeds and it was easy to use so the websites got built on it. And luckily for perl, bioinformatics is "all" string parsing not number crunching. So it was one tool to rule both the internet and the data.

No one would think of doing that now. Though whenever I run into a text file reformatting issue I still reach for perl. It's basically a text based wood chipper and nothing beats it at that game in terms of getting the job done in one line.

Re:You bitcoin groupies aren't even trying anymore

[caseih]

Doesn't look like the mods understood what the article was talking about anymore than you did! This isn't about bitcoins. It's about the technology for doing a trustrworthy and tamper-proof ledger of transactions between parties that need not have any trust for each other. The article contains at least one good use for the blockchain: land deeds.

It will be amusing

[Anonymous Coward]

when the blockchain hype dies and Bitcoin keeps rolling right along.

Yes, it changes everything and here's why

[Anonymous Coward]

Bitcoin is a distraction. What the underlying technology, the blockchain, is actually enabling is a new internet.

This is part of a larger trend that covers things like serverless architecture (e.g. AWS Lambda, public cloud computing) and peer-to-peer storage systems (e.g. IPFS, Storj). We are moving increasingly towards a web that will be "decentralized".

These are not buzz words or utopian fantasies. This is a continuation of the internet's development. What started from widely distributed networks has long since been concentrated into enormous data silos and processing farms under the tight control of a handful of megacorps. We've been complaining about that for over a decade now. But it's only over the past year or two that we starting to witness a swing of the pendulum back in the other direction.

With the advent of new blockchain-based platforms, most notably Ethereum, but perhaps also Tao chain and MaidSafe, we are going to see the business models of the current web come under threat in a serious way. Just like piracy disintermediated media giants and news publishers, just like open source disintermediated proprietary software. and just like Bitcoin and Uber have been attempting to disintermediate the financial sector and taxi industry, there is no question that a large segment of top tech companies are going to evaporate under the coming weight of this movement.

They will never be able to compete with organizations that have become entirely decentralized. These organizations, which are in the making as we speak, are going to drastically lower transactions costs, stimulate greater public participation, support more efficient governance, and promote more incentives for average web users. All these organizations need to do is replicate current models like Airbnb, Amazon, Uber, Reddit, Twitter, and so on, with the new tech.

That will rapidly destabilize whatever you might think is a stable landscape. I can't predict precisely what will happen, but if my research on this subject is worth anything at all, then it's likely that we'll be seeing a transformation on the scale of the internet itself, if not greater.

Do some in-depth reading on this before letting your complacency and skepticism get the better of you. Bitcoin is a joke compared to what's coming.

Re:Yes, it changes everything and here's why

[DerekLyons]

if my research on this subject is worth anything at all

Since all you have is airy handwaving, buzzwords, more buzzwords, and yet more buzzwords... I'd say your research is less than valueless.

Re:Yes, it changes everything and here's why

[Anonymous Coward]

You say that because he said something you didn't like. Bitcoin is a joke. A joke you've clearly fallen for.

Re:Yes, it changes everything and here's why

[Anonymous Coward]

" We are moving increasingly towards a web that will be "decentralized"."

You have no idea how wrong you are.

Do you even know what the original fucking purpose of the internet was? A decentralized network that could withstand having a majority of its nodes wiped out and yet still be able to operate.

The blockchain as it exists right now is garbage. Permissionless databases have existed before my nearly 35 years of life. Guess why they never took off? Too many inherent risks.

Re:Yes, it changes everything and here's why

[Anonymous Coward]

>Bitcoin is a distraction.

What?!

>most notably Ethereum

Ah, yet another premined altcoin pumper.

Re:Yes, it changes everything and here's why

[Anonymous Coward]

>Bitcoin is a distraction.

What?!

>With the advent of new blockchain-based platforms, most notably Ethereum, but perhaps also Tao chain and MaidSafe

Oh good, another altcoin pumper. The world needs more of you. /s

Re:Yes, it changes everything and here's why

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not going to educate the whole slashdot community about a subject this complicated. My point of view that is quite common for those working in this space. What sounds like buzzwords to you is, believe or not, your groundless skepticism and ignorance of what these terms actually mean. Again, I'm not going to write an article to enlighten you. I've stated the case in a very straightforward manner. You could easily take what I said and do your own research. Of course, I doubt you will.

And frankly, Slashdot, you rated this a 4 for insightful? He doesn't provide any reasons whatsoever for his empty rhetoric. "Airy hand waving", "buzzwords" x 3, and my supposedly "valueless" research. Very impressive. What exactly has this commenter said to back up those accusations? Nothing. There is no evidence he even understood the first word in what I communicated. And apparently, neither do the moderators of this site. I suggest you all come back to this thread in 1-2 years.

Re:Yes, it changes everything and here's why

[Anonymous Coward]

It's astonishing you would censor my rebuttal to this commenter. There was no vulgarity, hate speech, or swearing in what I said. You've blocked my response simply because I made an off-hand remark criticizing the moderators for their bad judgment. That is inane and irresponsible.

Re:Yes, it changes everything and here's why

[Anonymous Coward]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship

Re:Yes, it changes everything and here's why

[Anonymous Coward]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_police
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_rights

Re:Yes, it changes everything and here's why

[bazorg]

I suggest you all come back to this thread in 1-2 years.

Sometimes I do that, I actually bookmark authors and posts to read them again in 5 years. It's funny when the calendar reminder pops up and I have to think "why was this interesting?". Now, in your case, can I please have some directions to the research, rather than having to search for whatever is filed under "research" and "anonymous coward"?

Re:Yes, it changes everything and here's why

[Anonymous Coward]

The blockchain is a great idea and the current top implementation of it is Bitcoin.

In the future it may not be Bitcoin. It could be one of the variant coins. But in my opinion the blockchain will always be defined by cryptocurrency.

A crypto currency blockchain is a ledger. A simple ledger of numbers. And we buy things and do things in order to move the numbers in the accounts on this ledger. What could be more pure? Crypto currency is the simplest usage for a blockchain and right now the most powerful implementation of that is Bitcoin.

You can dream about what might be the next blockchain bang. But it is hard to deny the success of Bitcoin on a Blockchain. And the only things that even come close are basically Bitcoin variations.

Bitcoin has a total market cap over 5 billion. From nothing.

Not even on the list

[Tony Isaac]

The blockchain isn't even on the list of important inventions of our age.

To ask whether it's the most important, is like asking if Ryan Hoyer is the most important quarterback in the NFL. He's really important to one city, but he couldn't handle prime time.

Re:You bitcoin groupies aren't even trying anymore

[Anonymous Coward]

shit if i woulda ignored the haters on here in the early days id be rich

Tolkein - Has Prior Art

[Anonymous Coward]

One Ring to Bind them All

Re:You bitcoin groupies aren't even trying anymore

[shutdown -p now]

Few people care about Bitcoin. A lot more care about blockchain technology, including major banks and IT firms.

Re:You bitcoin groupies aren't even trying anymore

[thegarbz]

Bitcoin? Who's talking about bitcoin? From what I gather the article is about the concept of a cryptographical block chain that can be used to verify all sorts of things, the initial stupid attempt to use it for money not withstanding.

All sorts of companies are looking into the technology from the legal system or governments looking to certify paperwork, to oil companies.

Not by a large margin

[gweihir]

Email, the WWW, computers, computer networks, etc. are all a much, mucg more important than this specialized solution for a problem that has other solutions as well.

The question can be answered with a resounding "No, and why are you asking stupid questions?"

Re:No. Fully homomorphic encryption is.

[gweihir]

One problem: It is not possible for most calculations and it is unknown whether it ever will be.
And another problem: Even if possible with a sufficiently general set of operations, its impact will be rather limited.

Re: You bitcoin groupies aren't even trying anymor

[qbast]

They see you losing everything after another exchange hack, they laughin.

Re: You bitcoin groupies aren't even trying anymor

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like somebody doesn't understand how bitcoin works!

Whay are slashdoters hating Bitcoin?

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought you guys can recognise and have functioning grey matter to understand new and revolutionary technology. Looks like I am wrong.
Has /. crowd changed over time and replaced by libtard hipsters and SJW with few exceptions?

I have read /. for about 14-15 years now and I can tell the average /. reader has become more and more clueless over the years.

Maybe you guys need to rename this site to slashtwatt and concentrate more on how to force women into STEM aka let them do the men's job.

Re:Whay are slashdoters hating Bitcoin?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry but I'm not going to get all hard over a fucking ponzi scheme. Your nerdcoin bullshit isn't going to fucking help a damn thing other than separate you from your money.

Otherwise, why don't you get out of your mother's basement and actually have sex with a REAL WOMAN!

Re: Whay are slashdoters hating Bitcoin?

[mspohr]

It's not about Bitcoin.

nope

[Anonymous Coward]

And now go and never post a slashdot article again.

I disagree based on job postings I receive

[sciengin]

Yes bitcoin itself is, or at least was, somewhat hyped more than it should. This is of course completely different with other new and innovative technologies in the IT world [/sarcasm]
Nonetheless the blockchain technology itself is pretty solid and does open many new venues in the are of finances.
At least this seems to be what most banks and other global players in the financial industry seem to thing based on the number of positions which require blockchain expertise that are currently open at the moment.
Source: out of curiosity for Haskell jobs I subscribed to a few job opening newsletter from sites that specialize in placing people in the finance industry.

Hell No!

[supremebob]

I'm getting pretty old now, so "My Age" has brought me technological advances like Linux, broadband and mobile Internet, and Smartphones.

Compared to those, electronic funny money like Bitcoin isn't even on the radar. Hell... Bitcoin has supposedly been "popular" for 5 years now and most brick and mortar stores still don't take it.

But, hey... I know that a few Slashdot editors got in early and made some money. Good for them, I guess, but they probably should have cashed out when the price was briefly above $1,000 a coin.

Re: Hell No!

[mspohr]

Blockchain is not Bitcoin!

Re: Hell No!

[supremebob]

OK, then please tell me what other large/popular open source projects are using Blockchain technology that Aren't cryptocurrencies.

My hunch is that none of the replies that I'll get currently have 1/10th the number of users of Bitcoin at the moment. It's just too early to consider this technology to be super "important" at this point.

Re: Hell No!

[mspohr]

I think it's more about the potential of the blockchain rather than actual use today. The idea that you can have a publicly available trusted ledger without trusting anyone has a lot of potential uses and there are a lot of people developing different applications.
Here's a few more articles from MIT:
http://www.technologyreview.co...
http://www.technologyreview.co...
http://www.technologyreview.co...
This MIT syllabus gives some idea of the potential:
http://blockchain.media.mit.ed...

Blockchain logging

[MobyDisk]

Could a blockchain be used to create a tamper-proof log file?

Re: Blockchain logging

[mspohr]

Yes! You got it

Re: Blockchain logging

[MobyDisk]

How about online voting?

e-Voting

[Parker Lewis]

Why are we not using it for eletronic voting systems?

Re: e-Voting

[mspohr]

Yes it could. TFA mentions that application.

Re:e-Voting

[Anonymous Coward]

Because it's too reliable.

Re: e-Voting

[Parker Lewis]

My English is a bit bad and I didn't read the entire article (while I've read a bunch of blockchain articles in the last months). But in a quick search, I was not able to find mention to this (using the keywords that came to my mind). So, this is a truth question: can you point me where? I mean, a sentence/keyword that I can search in the text.

Re: e-Voting

[mspohr]

Sorry. It's a bit buried.
You have to go to The Economist article and look at the comments where voting is discussed.
http://www.economist.com/node/...

Re: e-Voting

[Parker Lewis]

Thanks, good sir! Nice to see this idea spreading! I'm from Brazil, and we have e-voting system here, but we have serious concerns with current used system. Interestingly, most of people here prefers the e-voting due results speed, even with these concerns.

Re:e-Voting

[radarskiy]

You can't implement a secret ballot since all transactions are public.

Re:You bitcoin groupies aren't even trying anymore

[Anonymous Coward]

We already have a good solution to land deeds, and its a lot less technological complex.... Sheets of paper....

Re:You bitcoin groupies aren't even trying anymore

[gstoddart]

Well, let's point out that you can't have trustworthy and tamper-proof records of transactions if you can't have cryptography free of back doors.

Those two things are incompatible. Either you have robust encryption technologies which allow for such things, or you haven't got a damned thing.

The problem is we increasingly have things which are built on top of encryption, and we increasingly have governments who want to undermine that for reasons of "security" ... and none of them grasp that all of the rest of the security goes away when you poke holes in encryption.

Re: You bitcoin groupies aren't even trying anymor

[Anonymous Coward]

feel free to explain

Re: answer: no: A Neumonic Device for It's vs Its

[Anonymous Coward]

Just remember that the possessive-belongs to it-does not posses an apostrophe.
Tod Germanica

The blockchain alone is worthless

[indy]

It's all about giving a large (and thereby trustworthy) number of users the incentive to participate in a blockchain. It's about the economical system a blockchain exists in. Just having a blockchain guarantees nothing. Having a blockchain with a difficulty as high as Bitcoin's makes all the difference.

I don't believe in the hype around blockchain "technology". Those who advocate "private" blockchains have, in my opinion, misunderstood the whole concept.

Two miners control a majority

[tepples]

One would have to compromise a large percentage of the nodes on the network to directly "mess with" the data.

Last time we discussed Bitcoin scalability, two Chinese miners controlled the majority of hashing power. And they have a vested interest in seeing transaction costs skyrocket as more network users try to fit their transactions into a single block.

Re:You bitcoin groupies aren't even trying anymore

[tepples]

The Bitcoin blockchain grants transaction fees and minted coins to nodes that process and verify transactions. If a blockchain does not represent currency, what will be the reward for operating a node?

Re:You bitcoin groupies aren't even trying anymore

[thegarbz]

You're assuming that one is using a blockchain for external public use and that someone needs a reward to run a system. Shit I wish I got a reward for running the servers I do at work, but no something called business needs is the reason for that.

The Virtual Machine

[ka9dgx]

The introduction of virtual machines was a huge step forward for computer utilization and security. The ability for a single physical server to serve a diverse set of workloads in a secure and efficient manner made mainframes far more versatile and is a cornerstone of cloud computing.

Pokes larger than 8 bits

[tepples]

PEEK and POKE in BASIC are designed for use with MMIO, but in the form that I remember them, they're not designed for MMIO ports that need writes larger than a byte. INP and OUT are present on 8080-descended architectures (Z80, x86, x86-64), but other popular architectures tend to have only MMIO. And even on x86 and x86-64, the trend has been away from INP and OUT and toward MMIO.

MasterCard master race

[tepples]

What the Vice, Master Race, American Excess credit cards allowed past generations to enjoy

So are you saying cash is for console peasants and MasterCard is for the PC Master Race?

Re: I can recommend a professional Hacker

[Anonymous Coward]

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