Slashdot Mirror
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.)
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.
Normal definition is 99 million years. So, no; most important IT invention is probably the digital computer.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
While some of the uses are ingenious, it's essentially just a new take on "the logfile".
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!