"Though Blockchain has been touted as the answer to everything, a study of 43 solutions advanced in the international development sector has found exactly no evidence of success.
Three practitioners including erstwhile blockchain enthusiast John Burg, a Fellow at the US Agency for International Development (USAID), looked at instances of the distributed crypto ledger being used in a wide range of situations by NGOs, contractors and agencies. But they drew a complete blank.
'We found a proliferation of press releases, white papers, and persuasively written articles,' Burg et al wrote on Thursday. 'However, we found no documentation or evidence of the results blockchain was purported to have achieved in these claims. We also did not find lessons learned or practical insights, as are available for other technologies in development.'
Blockchain vendors were keen to puff the merits of the technology, but when the three asked for proof of success in the field, it all went very quiet."
The difference between then and now is that they have given up attempting to use blockchains for anything, and simply now claim it is a "store of value." In other words, they've embraced that it is a ponzi scheme, and learned to love it for what it is.
If you had looked into the space with even just a small amount of depth, you’d find there are numerous applications. Decentralized finance, games, art, cdn networks, music distribution, video streaming alternatives.
Some of them are promising and would address many issues we face; like the Audius project which aims to compete with Spotify and SoundCloud, but actually paying artists for their work.
I think it’s fair to be sceptical and critical of speculative investments and get rich quick schemes, and eventually I imagine it will die down, and hopefully by the end of it all, we will have a more decentralised world.
That's can be only said by ignoring the giant blind spot of intermediaries skimming off the payment, traditional banks making it hard to process payments with automation, and foreign currency exchange.
I think paying an artist is not so straight forward. The artist must set up a bank account. Now they must sign somewhere to accept credit cards. Now they must have art that is friendly to said card processor, or else you get deplatformed. Seems we found one use case.
You still need a bank account to get actual cash out of cryptocurrency. From the perspective of an artist, cryptocurrency is indistinguishable from PayPal, Venmo, Cashapp, Transferwise, Zelle, Google Pay, or any of the other readily available ways to send money.
Unless you're literally selling art by emailing photos of the art and accepting payments to your bitcoin wallet directly, you're still using a platform, and you're still able to be kicked off the platform.
Sorry my point wasn't very clear before but I don't fully agree with your point. Yes your right, still need the bank account to transfer btc to currency. But there is the possibility maybe someday that the account is not required (if something can be purchased with btc - and not saying that is ideal). And let's not pretend that a bank account and an agreement with a credit card processor has the same risk of deplatforming. See pornhub. One more note is that none of those payment methods you listed are available in my country except google pay which is literally just a credit card in a Google acct.
I think it’s more about control. Artists are exploited because they have no alternative and no power to do anything about it. Audius gives the power back to the people because the governance system is decentralized. The way money is distributed is fair, transparent and a clear innovation on the current status quo
Last time I looked into Audius (6-12 months ago), my impression was that they fell into the solution in search of a problem camp of blockchain developers. Good on them for getting some users, but the burden of programming a blockchain and competing against Spotify is very high. Nonetheless they do have users.
Do you have any examples of something which solves a real problem better than mature, scalable technologies? There's a lot of speculator money floating around which can give the illusion of something being promising until you do the math and realize that it's more expensive and slower than the alternatives or cannot grow outside of a small ideological community.
For example, nothing is preventing paying artists more for music — that's been a solved problem since the late 1990s — but the problem comes back to licensing: people use services which have the music they want and it's brutally hard to bootstrap an indie-only business to the point where you can the deals you need to satisfy popular demand.
> Do you have any examples of something which solves a real problem better than mature, scalable technologies?
The same could be said of the Internet when it was first invented. It was far from mature and took two decades, but it revolutionised the delivery of information. Cryptocurrency is revolutionising delivery of cash. It will take a while to work out the development of it, but we didn't have a ready made plan for the internet either.
People were using the internet for useful things from pretty much day 1, and technology adoption curves have only compressed over time. It may have took a decade or two for the internet to become popular, but it only took a few years for smartphones to become popular, or social media, or for ridesharing to usurp the taxi industry.
> The same could be said of the Internet when it was first invented. It was far from mature and took two decades, but it revolutionised the delivery of information.
This is a standard talking point but it's not an accurate comparison because it ignores the barriers to adoption related to computing in general. Internet adoption in the very early years was constrained by the need to use expensive computers and network connections. Despite that, in the 1980s many people paid for commercial services like CompuServ, GEnie, or later AOL which were popular enough to be profitable despite the limitations of dialup non-general access because those provided useful ways to chat, research, or shop.
By the time the Web arrived in the early 1990s, GUIs were becoming common and internet connectivity was still limited in speed and availability (modems weren't just slow, they also incurred long-distance charges if you didn't have a local ISP, which most people didn't) but that situation was improving. By 1995 or so businesses were jumping online because it had already changed how they reached customers, took orders, and provided support. If you weren't around back then, there was tons of popular media discussion about how this was changing everything — news, education, shopping, travel, job hunting, etc. — and while there was certainly plenty of hype there were also real changes affecting all kinds of businesses, not just people trying to sell the technology to each other. People you knew who weren't computer fans would still be talking about checking sports coverage, trading stocks, making travel plans, etc. because it was faster, easier, and/or cheaper.
In contrast, by the time blockchains were introduced computers were cheap and ubiquitous, and software was much easier to build and install. Adoption has never been easier — but only if you make something which provides actual value. Bitcoin has been around for 12 years and failed so hard at the original “revolutionising delivery of cash” goals that proponents switched to claiming the goal was being a “store of value” despite having nothing but fiat value. Despite all of that time and money, if it disappeared tomorrow nobody whose business isn't speculating in Bitcoin would have reason to care because it doesn't give any significant advantage for anything.
Maybe we could write that off as an early failure except that nobody has come up with a successor which a) does anything normal people want at a competitive rate and b) doesn't share its problems with scalability. The use-cases most people come up with are all better served by other technologies and purveyors have had a hard time making the case that you should spend more to give control of your business to them.
This is completely unlike the early web era, where so many people saw an opportunity to make a business which was using the technology to do something else and were able to be profitable against competing industries (e.g. Amazon started selling books in 1995 and was profitable in that sector a couple of years later despite having substantial brick-and-mortar competition).
The flood of speculator money definitely hurt: anyone thinking carefully about real problems is going to have trouble getting support or even users in a space full of hucksters yelling about amazing things they can’t deliver.
Decentralized exchanges allow users to exchange funds without ever entrusting their asset to a third party while other users are the ones who provide the liquidity and take the profit from the fees, again without anyone having to trust anyone else beyond some publicly deployed code.
I'd say that at least some of of the advantages cannot be recreated by a traditional service.
It’s not that simple, however, since the inherent inefficiency means you have higher transaction costs to operate the network and since there’s no fraud protection you still need trusted third parties to broker any exchange where fraud is a possibility. As an expensive way to transfer money to your drinking buddy it works but if you’re buying or selling with strangers those third parties are necessary and still need to be paid.
Similarly, you aren’t getting rid of trust: power recentralizes in a handful of users who control the most mining power and the developers (Ethereum classic comes to mind). Very few people have the time or skills to audit that constantly so they either end up trusting strangers or relying on a trusted third-party who ends up being a bank in all but name.
> since there’s no fraud protection you still need trusted third parties to broker any exchange where fraud is a possibility.
The whole point of DEXes is that you dont need that.
>Similarly, you aren’t getting rid of trust: power recentralizes in a handful of users who control the most mining power and the developers
Maybe in ETH's case but highly decentralized non-mining networks already exist. Cardano for example is Proof of Stake and has rules in place where the more a pool has the less it earns so centralization is disincentivized.
> The whole point of DEXes is that you dont need that.
Okay, so if I sell you a new laptop and you receive a box with an old one, how do you get your money back? Do you have the option of reporting fraud and getting your money back even though I gave the promised good?
The ~300% jump in stock prices seen when the Long Island Iced Tea Corp. changed its name to Long Blockchain Corp. [1] shows that the word "blockchain" is all that's required. I imagine some of these 43 solutions were playing the same angle.
I can achieve “don’t edit history” with a Merkel Tree; It’s what powers Git. Git also doesn’t consume the power requirements of a large developing nation.
Git also allows you to push --force if so you wish, something that would require a 51% attack if you were to do it in a blockchain-based ledger.
I really don't think blockchains are a panacea and in many cases they're a solution looking for a problem, but that doesn't mean they're necessarily useless.
EDIT: Also as a sibling parent said, it's just proof of work what gets the bad rap about power consumption, and there's nothing inherently costly in blockchains themselves.
I don’t claim to have any insight whatsoever, but I can’t help but think about all those decades old (now hilarious) articles about how the internet is a buzz word and hasn’t really lived up to its hype.
Could you link one of these? Would love to relive the sentiment.
There is a distinction: the birth of the Internet saw many seriously useful improvements for its users - instant information, infinite retail stores, unlimited selections, connecting to others effortlessly, and so on. As far as I’ve seen, there isn’t any companies I can think of achieving similar improvements because of the blockchain other than speculation with cryptocurrencies.
I try to be very open minded and search for contrarian opportunities, but I really don’t see where those are here. I hear “decentralized” and “trustless”, but these are cultural terms like “privacy” that matter only when people want them to matter. If the culture doesn’t value “decentralized”, then the technology isn’t very useful. By contrast, all the skepticism in the world couldn’t stop the fact that Amazon.com was a massive improvement.
I think these types of articles are the harbinger of greatness for a technology to have impact in society. This shows that 43 companies found it valuable to invest in understanding blockchain technology. It means that millions of people are imagining a decentralized world, and how that would upend institutional. By detracting the present over-hype, the dangers of the gold rush to the miners but not marketers, they acknowledge that we’re living in the birth of a new California. Give it some time. Sure blockchain has poor performance characteristics relative to other databases. They all do. Not all databases have the rather remarkable characteristics that globally-shared ledgers can have.
When technology is nascent there is a void of history with it, there are no bounds for expectations. It’s inevitable that most early technology is coupled with broken expectations, as they are formed without substance.
Most blockchain should be understood as a social technology that is predicated on internet technology. It’s also built for the assumption that brokers aren’t trustworthy and extract too much value. Whether that turns out to be true or not will take a generation or two to sort out.
> his shows that 43 companies found it valuable to invest in understanding blockchain technology. It means that millions of people are imagining a decentralized world ...
59 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 128 ms ] threadThree practitioners including erstwhile blockchain enthusiast John Burg, a Fellow at the US Agency for International Development (USAID), looked at instances of the distributed crypto ledger being used in a wide range of situations by NGOs, contractors and agencies. But they drew a complete blank.
'We found a proliferation of press releases, white papers, and persuasively written articles,' Burg et al wrote on Thursday. 'However, we found no documentation or evidence of the results blockchain was purported to have achieved in these claims. We also did not find lessons learned or practical insights, as are available for other technologies in development.'
Blockchain vendors were keen to puff the merits of the technology, but when the three asked for proof of success in the field, it all went very quiet."
Never heard of it. But I can show you proof of work – as demonstrated by the papers – or proof of stake.
Sounds more like Stockholm syndrome rather than a loving embrace.
I think it’s fair to be sceptical and critical of speculative investments and get rich quick schemes, and eventually I imagine it will die down, and hopefully by the end of it all, we will have a more decentralised world.
Unlike crypto?
Unless you're literally selling art by emailing photos of the art and accepting payments to your bitcoin wallet directly, you're still using a platform, and you're still able to be kicked off the platform.
Please provide one other example of a functioning app or service that uses blockchain to do something it can't do just as well without blockchain.
... and apply it to this, and wonder ...
... what is it that -it- and only -it- can do?
A good write-up of how they are missing the mark from the music end is here: https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/9/20905384/audius-blockchai...
For example, nothing is preventing paying artists more for music — that's been a solved problem since the late 1990s — but the problem comes back to licensing: people use services which have the music they want and it's brutally hard to bootstrap an indie-only business to the point where you can the deals you need to satisfy popular demand.
The same could be said of the Internet when it was first invented. It was far from mature and took two decades, but it revolutionised the delivery of information. Cryptocurrency is revolutionising delivery of cash. It will take a while to work out the development of it, but we didn't have a ready made plan for the internet either.
I see this repeated often, but it doesn’t seem remotely true.
Look back to Englebart and the work done at Parc. The applications were very clear.
This is a standard talking point but it's not an accurate comparison because it ignores the barriers to adoption related to computing in general. Internet adoption in the very early years was constrained by the need to use expensive computers and network connections. Despite that, in the 1980s many people paid for commercial services like CompuServ, GEnie, or later AOL which were popular enough to be profitable despite the limitations of dialup non-general access because those provided useful ways to chat, research, or shop.
By the time the Web arrived in the early 1990s, GUIs were becoming common and internet connectivity was still limited in speed and availability (modems weren't just slow, they also incurred long-distance charges if you didn't have a local ISP, which most people didn't) but that situation was improving. By 1995 or so businesses were jumping online because it had already changed how they reached customers, took orders, and provided support. If you weren't around back then, there was tons of popular media discussion about how this was changing everything — news, education, shopping, travel, job hunting, etc. — and while there was certainly plenty of hype there were also real changes affecting all kinds of businesses, not just people trying to sell the technology to each other. People you knew who weren't computer fans would still be talking about checking sports coverage, trading stocks, making travel plans, etc. because it was faster, easier, and/or cheaper.
In contrast, by the time blockchains were introduced computers were cheap and ubiquitous, and software was much easier to build and install. Adoption has never been easier — but only if you make something which provides actual value. Bitcoin has been around for 12 years and failed so hard at the original “revolutionising delivery of cash” goals that proponents switched to claiming the goal was being a “store of value” despite having nothing but fiat value. Despite all of that time and money, if it disappeared tomorrow nobody whose business isn't speculating in Bitcoin would have reason to care because it doesn't give any significant advantage for anything.
Maybe we could write that off as an early failure except that nobody has come up with a successor which a) does anything normal people want at a competitive rate and b) doesn't share its problems with scalability. The use-cases most people come up with are all better served by other technologies and purveyors have had a hard time making the case that you should spend more to give control of your business to them.
This is completely unlike the early web era, where so many people saw an opportunity to make a business which was using the technology to do something else and were able to be profitable against competing industries (e.g. Amazon started selling books in 1995 and was profitable in that sector a couple of years later despite having substantial brick-and-mortar competition).
It’s possible that this is actually because Bitcoin.
The effect it has had of making early owners rich despite not solving other problems, has made this the goal of most new crypto schemes.
I'd say that at least some of of the advantages cannot be recreated by a traditional service.
Similarly, you aren’t getting rid of trust: power recentralizes in a handful of users who control the most mining power and the developers (Ethereum classic comes to mind). Very few people have the time or skills to audit that constantly so they either end up trusting strangers or relying on a trusted third-party who ends up being a bank in all but name.
The whole point of DEXes is that you dont need that.
>Similarly, you aren’t getting rid of trust: power recentralizes in a handful of users who control the most mining power and the developers
Maybe in ETH's case but highly decentralized non-mining networks already exist. Cardano for example is Proof of Stake and has rules in place where the more a pool has the less it earns so centralization is disincentivized.
Okay, so if I sell you a new laptop and you receive a box with an old one, how do you get your money back? Do you have the option of reporting fraud and getting your money back even though I gave the promised good?
I thought the then/now comparison interesting ...
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/21/long-island-iced-tea-micro-c...
(It is the silence - as the article says - when pressed for further, perhaps useful, instructive, thoughts, experiences, best-practices ...
... that I find horrifying ...)
I really don't think blockchains are a panacea and in many cases they're a solution looking for a problem, but that doesn't mean they're necessarily useless.
EDIT: Also as a sibling parent said, it's just proof of work what gets the bad rap about power consumption, and there's nothing inherently costly in blockchains themselves.
I grumble at the time limit on edits for HN comments sometimes, even if I do understand why it's there.
There is a distinction: the birth of the Internet saw many seriously useful improvements for its users - instant information, infinite retail stores, unlimited selections, connecting to others effortlessly, and so on. As far as I’ve seen, there isn’t any companies I can think of achieving similar improvements because of the blockchain other than speculation with cryptocurrencies.
I try to be very open minded and search for contrarian opportunities, but I really don’t see where those are here. I hear “decentralized” and “trustless”, but these are cultural terms like “privacy” that matter only when people want them to matter. If the culture doesn’t value “decentralized”, then the technology isn’t very useful. By contrast, all the skepticism in the world couldn’t stop the fact that Amazon.com was a massive improvement.
When technology is nascent there is a void of history with it, there are no bounds for expectations. It’s inevitable that most early technology is coupled with broken expectations, as they are formed without substance.
Most blockchain should be understood as a social technology that is predicated on internet technology. It’s also built for the assumption that brokers aren’t trustworthy and extract too much value. Whether that turns out to be true or not will take a generation or two to sort out.
That's another way of looking at it ...
Here's plenty of prior discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18572482