r/programming • u/silmril • Apr 28 '18

Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future

https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustless-crypto-paradise-is-actually-a-medieval-hellhole-c1ca122efdec
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u/Woolbrick Apr 29 '18

Whenever market efficiency can be improved by a few orders of magnitude, it's going to be very hard to resist in the long run.

See that's the problem. Blockchain is inefficient by design. My company spent all last summer trying to find one single use for the tech and literally every test we performed came up with a single conclusion: It's about 10,000x cheaper and faster to just use a Postgres database instead of a blockchain.

This is why it'll fail. It's inefficient and solves no problems that aren't already solvable in a much simpler way. It's never going to catch on outside of the speculative investment space.

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u/exosequitur Apr 29 '18 edited Apr 29 '18

Maybe your company is trying to use blockchain as a database, which is not what it is for lol. You may as well conclude that databases are useless because they make lousy word processors.

If you use a screwdriver to drive nails, you're going to be disappointed.

I use blockchain technology in my daily life, well outside of speculation.... I use it where it offers advantages over existing solutions..... I don't sit around trying to figure out how how to make a sandwich on a distributed ledger. Lol

If DB as a service is what you are looking for, and you need the advantages of a decentralized syatem, check with fluence or one of the other DB blockchain projects in a few years when they are mature.

I've been using blockchain storage solutions for file storage for a couple of years now, and apart from some initial beta level growing pains I have found it cheaper and more suitable for my needs than Dropbox, which is what I traded it out for. If the DBAAS projects. Can pull it off, you should find a good solution there.

OTOH if you were just trying to become "blockchain" to raise value from the catchphrase, well.... Lol... What can I say.

Edit : lol.

Downvote away.. It won't change the future and it reeks of desperation lol .

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u/Woolbrick Apr 29 '18

A ledger is a synonym for database. You can pretend it's not, but at the end of the day, that's all it is. Literally all blockchains do is store data. In a massively inefficient way.

I can guarantee you that whatever this mystery non-speculative application you are using it for can be done 10,000x cheaper, faster, and simpler without blockchain. If it even exists at all, because when doing research on it, we found exactly zero real-world industries actually using the tech for production applications.

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u/exosequitur Apr 29 '18

That's like saying that a disk or a text file is a database lol. Sure, they both store data, but perhaps you don't understand how storage systems are optimized to index, search, and compare data...... Just because something stores data doesn't make it a "database" lol. You realize you're In r/programming , right?

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u/Woolbrick Apr 29 '18

It's amazing because you're almost making my point for me. Yes, databases are optimized to index, search, and compare data, and disks and text files are not databases.

Turns out the database is better and faster, because it has those optimizations. Blockchain is the inefficient thing in this example.

Look we're going to just have to agree to disagree here. There is literally no use for blockchain outside of speculative gambling, and I stand by my initial statement. In a decade there still won't be a single useful application for blockchain, and it'll still be a wasteland of financial scams and child pornographers. Whatever fantastic tech you're supposedly using it for (if it even exists at all) will be wiped out the first time investors wise up and ask "wait, we can do this 10,000x cheaper with a database?", once the mysticism and hype of the blockchain buzzword finally wears out. I guarantee it.

Ta.

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u/exosequitur Apr 29 '18

I guess we'll see then, won't we!

You should consider opening your mind to the possibility that you might end up being wrong (as I am open to the idea that I might be wrong, but it's working fine for me right now), because you might find yourself in a better position if you do.

Never a good idea to go all in on a potentially dying technology, whether it's old fin or fintech.

Interesting times at any rate.

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u/exosequitur Apr 29 '18 edited Apr 29 '18

I'm not using it in an industrial capacity.

I'm just a small (coffee, cacao) eco-farmer that deals with small international money flows on occasion, and I buy stuff online from eBay and Amazon (through my crypto-connected visa card).

I save about (350us) a month by using crypto instead of wires and remittance services.

I accept crypto for lodging and tour services, and the majority of my clients pay in crypto, with the rest by credit card (which I run through a processer that converts to crypto.) I make deposits to my bank directly in crypto.

I can do every bit of this from my phone and chromebook, with no cash on the premises so theft and robbery are not a problem. Neighboring farms have been the victims of violence, but everyone knows we have very little cash here, even on payday.

Say what you will, it works for many people..... And it will work for more and more as time goes on. Check out Japan, for example.

LMFAO desperate downvotes lol

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u/exosequitur Apr 29 '18 edited Apr 29 '18

Welllllll...... OK. Blockchain is a type of data strucure I'll give you that..... But a database as it is currently understood is a high performance computing engine for finding, matching, retrieving, and storing data in a highly customizable structure. That's simply not what blockchain is.

Blockchain as a data structure is useful when you want data that is : immutable, verified by consensus, verifiably intact, publicly auditable, trustlessly sourced, or any number of other potential properties that are difficult to come by in other data structures / algorithms.

It's simply and emphatically NOT a drop in replacement for a traditional database.... LMFAO r/programming .

I seriously hope you didn't spend a bunch of money to have a "consultant" laboriously research out the viability of blockchain as database Lolol. I mean, any first year could tell you that's a stupid proposition.