Because there are no use cases for blockchains. Humanity spent billions (trillions?) of $ on this technology and there is no use for it. Now the people who sank their money into this, desperately try to find some fools to pass the hot potato to.
I think this is it or, at least, to moderate slightly, there are few valid use cases for blockchain. The top comment, from Theo Jackson, captures it really well:
"Please don’t. If there is a requested feature that _requires_ blockchain I’d be interested, but “possible ways to combine LibreOffice with blockchain technologies” sounds like a solution in search of a problem."
What are the actual problems LibreOffice are trying to solve here? It just feels like this post dropped in from 4 years ago where everyone seemed to be trying to shoehorn blockchain into everything with no clear idea of what they were actually trying to achieve.
And then there's the fact that many blockchain implementations have an absolutely horrendous energy requirement. It was always odious (or at least from about 2013 onwards) but, in 2022, in the midst of an energy crisis and rising prices, it's both ethically and environmentally indefensible. I know that Ethereum has been working to address this but the reality is that for many extant cases blockchain is horrifically compute intensive and inefficient.
Someone in the comments on LibreOffice blog expressed the same opinion. Which surprised me. Has the consensus been reached among the serious non-grifting public that blockchains are useless to represent peer-to-peer trustless money? Has bitcoin been declared a failure?
I'm not sure how a word processor uses peer-to-peer trustless money. The discussion shouldn't even be about crypto and blockchains, but about how crypto and blockchain can benefit LibreOffice. Given we cannot identify how crypto and blockchain can benefit anybody (well, except scammers and those 11 folks who actually transferred assets to third world countries) I believe the topic should have quickly died off but yeah...
> I'm not sure how a word processor uses peer-to-peer trustless money
The parent (and the commenter on the site) weren't saying that an office suite has no use for blockchains; they were making a far broader claim that there are no use cases for blockchains.
And so does heating swimming pools, baking bread and enjoying one's night at the movie theater, none of which excuses or justifies wasting energy for whatever real or imagined purpose.
If it didn't find its way into everyday person's pocket in 14 years since Bitcoin's whitepaper (even with all the money and attention thrown its way), I think it's fair to say it's unlikely that'll happen in the next 14 years as well.
No use for it? The blockchain is a massive achievement. It's a decentralized verification system. Of course it has plenty of uses beyond crypto currencies.
That isn't true. A blockchain powers Secure Scuttlebutt, Jami, Urbit, and has use anywhere a verified supply chain is needed. Because some people have politicized it, now all blockchains are scams or "useless". But this is demonstrably not true. It's just a technology and people have misused it but that doesn't render the technology itself useless or a scam.
Correct, but the word "blockchain" has two meanings. You're talking about the technology known as blockchain. The blogpost is not about the technology known as blockchain, it's about the grift known as blockchain. Here's how you tell the difference:
When a project has a problem that needs solving, and they look for a solution to that problem, and the right solution happens to be a blockchain-like system, then we're talking about the technology known as blockchain.
If the problem these projects are trying to solve isn't how to scam people, the project will usually intentionally avoid using the word "blockchain", like Scuttlebutt and Jami do, and instead refer to their solution with terms such as "cryptographically-verified append-only ledger"
They do this because, when other people hear "blockchain", they usually either hear "this will be used to scam me" or "I can use this to scam others". Because they're thinking about the grift known as blockchain, not about the (relatively obscure by comparison) technology known as blockchain.
When a project says they're looking into how a combination of blockchain and their project could be useful, they're not trying to solve any problem. They've decided they want to transform their existing project into a scam, using the grift known as blockchain.
If they are interested in solving a problem, they'll talk about the problem, and how they solve it using something similar to the technology known as blockchain. If they're interested in scamming you, they'll talk about the grift known as blockchain, and ask you to use your imagination to envision for them how the technology known as blockchain will help the project, while they stick their hands in your pockets.
So you're just talking about something else, but as Schneier argues, anything other than a public blockchain is nothing new and has little to do with all the hype beyond the confusing names.
> User content in SSB is organized as an append-only sequence of immutable messages, where messages cryptographically sign adjacent messages for the purpose of guaranteeing unforgeabilitity of the sequences as they are replicated to other peers.
That's pretty much a blockchain. Of course, they don't call it a blockchain themselves, because the Scuttlebutt people are not running a grift, they're creating a communication protocol that happens to use cryptographic primitives similarly to how blockchains use them.
That's using a specific definition of a blockchain that differs significantly from e.g. Bitcoin and Ethereum which are two of the most popular ones and the ones commonly referred to, along with their decentralization properties. The Schneier post I linked explains fairly how these are not novel and have nothing to do with the current hype beyond the confusing naming.
Concretely, if Scuttlebutt uses a blockchain, then Git also uses a blockchain by a similar reasoning. I don't think the original post claiming that "there are no use cases for blockchains" was implicitly claiming that Git (or Scuttlebut) is not relevant software, just that they don't use a blockchain, because indeed they don't for any interesting definition of "blockchain".
I agree with you completely, the "blockchain" term is confusing, and by the definition I'm using, Git would also be a sort of blockchain. The more that blockchain (the grift) expands, the more that the meaning of blockchain (the technology) is diluted.
A key difference to me between Git and Scuttlebutt, which in my (most likely flawed) view makes Scuttlebutt "blockchain-er", is the distributed nature of it. You add a friend on Scuttlebutt, and this will fetch their content from any node, and all their friends' contents. It has an "automatic replication across nodes" aspect which Git does not have.
[Disclaimer: I haven't used Scuttlebutt in a long while, so I may be getting the technical details of the friends-of-friends-replication thing wrong.]
Only if you remove all of the parts of a blockchain that make it a blockchain. The definition from wikipedia isn't a blockchain, it's a Merkle Tree. They're not the same thing - a blockchain _uses_ a merkle tree. The bits that are bolted onto the merkle tree are what make it a blockchain, and are the bits that don't provide value.
> has use anywhere a verified supply chain is needed.
Sure, in the same way that a hammer can be used for a screw, or an HGV can be used for commuting to work - i.e. it _will_ do the job, but there were plenty of other alternatives available. The thing that a blockchain does is a _decentralised_ verifiable supply chain. A verifiable supply chain has existed since we've been doing digital signatures, and RSA has existed since the 70's.
The problem with using blockchain for supply chains is what happens if someone claims that the original source is wrong? Say I'm Maersk, and one of my ships says "no, I did deliver that". Are Maersk's customers going to say "no, we believe that guy, we're forking the blockchain?" Or are they going to say "That sucks, guess you shoiuld have delivered it" and claim the loss on their shipping insurance? We both know it's the latter.
> But this is demonstrably not true.
Is it? I've yet to see a demonstrable use case for blockchains that actually solves a problem. We've been doing this for almost 15 years now, and we're still waiting for it.
> It's just a technology and people have misused it but that doesn't render the technology itself useless or a scam.
People misusing technology doesn't make it useless, but if the _only_ use case is useless or a scam, then the tech is useless.
You may think you're being well meaning but you aren't Maersk and can't speak for them. Maersk believes it's an advantage to them to use a blockchain. Maybe we ought to ask Maersk why they chose it.
Everything I read in this thread is dripping with vehemence, hate, ridicule, or certitude (your I haven't seen a demonstrable use case in 15 years).
If the kind of echo chamber you want to build is the one where you've won and any even smallest proffering of a tilt toward blockchain as useful is crushed congratulations you're doing it: nobody who even wants to give one inch to blockchain will come around here. When I try and point out one useful thing is a blockchain, oh that thing is a different kind of blockchain. It's astounding the mental acrobatics people will go to to stand victors over their tiny corner of the internet.
This is frankly culty, repressive behavior that's not at all in the spirit of curiosity.
I don't think your reading of my comment is fair at all. I think I was perfectly reasonable and avoided using words like culty and repressive. Instead of talking about the issues youve gone straight for a personal attack.
You're right, I can't speak for maersk, but given this is a pseudonymous internet forum where in this thread they are touted as legitimising the tech, I think it's fair game to speculate based on knowledge.
> When I try and point out one useful thing is a blockchain, oh that thing is a different kind of blockchain.
Meanwhile, everytime I ask for a problem that a blockchain solves, I get back problems that are better solved _without_ blockchains, or solutions that don't actually solve the problem in the first place.
I'm open to having my mind changed, I really am (it's happened many times on this forum), so please, feel free to share some of the problems that are being solved.
> dripping with vehemence, hate, ridicule, or certitude (your I haven't seen a demonstrable use case in 15 years).
> spirit of curiosity
I'm curious: what useful application of the blockchain have we seen in the past 15 years (outside of cryptocurrencies whose usefulness is apparently largely confined to pyramid schemes and paying for crimes)?
> A blockchain powers Secure Scuttlebutt, Jami, Urbit
I've honestly never heard about any of these. But I have heard/read about many other "uses" of blockchain, which ultimately boil down to scam. There are possible use cases, they just drown in the sea of scams.
It doesn't, it verifies who it came from. Someone else mentioned Maersk above for supply chains, but a blockchain allows both Maersk and I to verify independently, without trusting each other, that a third party has made a change. If the third party says Maersk has it, and Maersk say the third party have it, the blockchain will have a record of it if Maersk accepted it, and I can independently verify that.
Unfortunately this isn't actually a property of a blockchain, this is a property of a ledger. I'm still trusting Maersk in this situation, because if I don't, what do I do, fork the blockchain and pretend that Maersk has the item?
