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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.)
and any other post that ends with a question mark
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.
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".
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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!
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Normal definition is 99 million years. So, no; most important IT invention is probably the digital computer.
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.
I'd say it was the flush toilet.
Have gnu, will travel.
You are doing it wrong. Its "meh." not "Meh.".
I remember when it came out! It used to be such a pain collecting my shit and throwing the bag in the dumpster.
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
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
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.
they see me tradin, they hatin
Would it be possible to store data this way?
http://saveie6.com/
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.
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.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
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?
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
Nothing to see here
It's not too bad, just put seran wrap under the toilet seat.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
>> 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. 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. . .
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
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.
Is Blockchain the Most Important IT Invention of Our Age? No!
more complete Answer "FUCK NO, to think it is laughable"
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.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
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.
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.
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??
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
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.
Few people care about Bitcoin. A lot more care about blockchain technology, including major banks and IT firms.
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.
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?"
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Possible, but will take a while ;-)
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
They see you losing everything after another exchange hack, they laughin.
I'm not laughing. I'm pointing at the exit. You can toss your geek card into the /dev/null provided next to it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Oh you kids with your fancy way of typing simple words.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It sure helped with my core dumps and, unless some resources are blocking, prevents overflow errors.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I'd say it was the flush toilet.
The flush toilet is not an 'IT invention'...
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
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.
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.
"His name was James Damore."
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.
"His name was James Damore."
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.
Could a blockchain be used to create a tamper-proof log file?
Why are we not using it for eletronic voting systems?
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.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
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.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
It's not about Bitcoin.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
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.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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. :)
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
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.
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...
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.
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.
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?
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
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat