It's an interesting article, but also feels like peak buzzword with use-case 1 essentially being "machine learning in the cloud using blockchain and big data"
yes it's hard to read. If the goal of technology is to make things simpler and more efficient and to remove barriers, all these blockchain solutions don't do a very good job of conveying how they're doing that.
I also still don't understand one part the article jumped over:
>But none of this addresses a fundamental issue: where to get the variables with which the contract is evaluated. If the data are not derived from recently added on-chain data, a trusted source of external data is required. Such a source is called an oracle.
I and my landlord don't live on the blockchain, if he claims that I broke the door and need to pay the damages, how does the immutable blockchain help me? This sounds to me like the semantic web. When people asked "well and what if someone puts wrong data into the system?" the answer was just ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Yeah, it's the one question blockchain enthusiasts never have an answer for: What if I lie?
The issue was never the mutability of the record. The issue is reconciling the record with reality.
Let's say I'm ordering 5 widgets. Along the way, 3 go missing. I receive 2. The blockchain says that all 5 made it from the warehouse to the final destination.
Blockchain does nothing to prevent shitty record keeping.
It's called the oracle problem, and was identified for blockchain apps as early as 2011. It's a difficult problem to solve, but it is solvable for certain applications. For example, MakerDAO solves their price oracle problem by using a set of whitelisted ETH/USD price API's. The whitelist is controlled via governance through the MKR token.
Philosophically speaking, immutability is an important component in a perfect record keeping system. You don’t ever want anyone to be able to doctor a document without being able to see the prior document and who made the change.
Practically speaking, there are a number of other hurdles for implementing a perfect record keeping system, like accurately reconciling the record with reality.
What people really want is a record keeping system that’s hard to cheat. Blockchain technology makes certain types of cheating harder, but not others. So it’s not exactly what people want, but it looks like it’s a step in the right direction.
With a public blockchain, you have no "holder of the records." This makes them useful for situations where you need multilateral cooperation between mutually hostile parties, e.g. people on either side of an illegal drug deal living in different countries with no treaty extradition obligations.
well, don’t trust or don’t have a holder of the records per se. in the case of escrow, it also may be that you don’t trust the holder of some large amount of money, but you do trust them to arbitrate disputes.
That's not the problem that blockchain is designed to solve. It is, however, the problem that purveyors of centralized blockchains would like you think it solves.
The problem that blockchains solve is centralization. In other words - google cloud computing.
To revisit your example: let's say you are ordering 5 widgets.
* A lookup on the Widget Market Blockchain tells you that vendor X has completed a large number of 5-star transactions, with a verified number of clients that have all sufficient 5 star transactions with the rest of the network to be considered genuine accounts, while vendor Y has a history of shipments that are reported as not arriving. You can examine each transaction, though automated verification tools are already in place to make cheating unprofitable. You can examine the code of those tools, along with the blockchain contracts themselves, should you so choose.
Or:
* Amazon's Widget product page shows the Amazon Choice item (neither the cheapest, nor most appropriate product), followed by a list of sponsored products. Many of the reviews are clearly fake, or appear to refer to a different product, with no way to verify that an actual transaction between genuine widget trading parties took place.
That's a rather contrived example and completely fictional.
How do you get that verified number of clients that "have all sufficient 5 star transactions with the rest of the network"? What if a 5 star company doesn't want to treat with a no-star client? How does a no-star client become a 5 star client?
Do no-star clients just have to hope and pray with no/low-star vendors? Or hope a 5 star vendor takes pity on them?
Also, what's the difference between a "5 star transaction" and a "4 star" one? Why not just "Successful" and "Unsuccessful"?
You just make the claim that "the automated verification tools are already in place to make cheating unprofitable."
That's a huge leap already. I don't grant you the assumption that they would exist. How do we even get there?
It's basically: "Assume a perfect system. See, it's perfect!"
Assume an auditable, anonymized transaction system. See, now all your objections are merely implementation details!
In the previous toy example, I was refering to 'already implemented' in the fictional Widget Market transaction system - things that could feasibly be created, rather than existing tools, iow.
There are, fwiw, thriving anonymous reputation systems in the real world, though none directly implementing blockchains, afaik. The Dark Web is full of them
I think the ability for anyone to audit smart contracts hosted on blockchains is underrated by a lot of skeptics. Gambling, for example, is a multi-billion dollar industry, and prior to Ethereum there was no way to gamble online and verify that you're playing with honest odds.
Why do you think they would ever accept that? That's like saying that snake-oil salesmen will one day "accept" that their products do nothing, and so quit selling them.
Snake-oil salesmen knew what they were peddling the start; the (lack of) true efficacy of the product was never in question. That fact was just entirely irrelevant to them.
The accounts' transaction histories, and the transaction histories of their transactants is all that anyone - even Amazon - has to go on - in both toy scenarios.
The difference here is the transparency, and the resulting web of trust that can emerge.
You may not have done business with company X, but you can observe that many users who successully transacted with companies Y, Z and W (with whom you have also successfully transacted) have all left good purchase reviews for company X.
The idea would be that the 3 missing widgets would be impossible to replace with fakes, and other mechanisms for reporting undelivered merchandise would fill in the rest of the gap.
None of which is relevant to the solution being implemented with "blockchain".
It's like blockchain enthusiasts are trying to convince everybody the world is simply chaos and nothing works when we've been handling trust and transactions for centuries now.
that’s true, we have been handling trust transactions for centuries, but they’re largely enforced by the government of a country. blockchain allows us to extend certain kinds of that trust out indefinitely, across national boundaries.
It's hard to believe Google actually hop onto the blockchain bandwagon as well, given the father of the Internet and their Chief Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf[1] famously said "No" to blockchain [2].
It is a ceremonial position, but this guy kinda deserves it. He literally invented the Internet - not in the Al Gore sense, but as in the "co-designed the initial version of TCP/IP" sense.
I don't think he actually did much at Google besides being a big hiring/advocacy/PR draw, but Google's entire market wouldn't exist without him. His tech talks were pretty fascinating too, while I was there.
If you didn't know who Vint Cerf is, consider asking your old college program to spend less time being a FAANG feeder, and more time on a well-rounded CS engineering education.
"Service Providers like Amazon/IBM have nothing to lose to give ‘Block-chain-as-a-service’ for any one willing to fork their money for such things. They are happy to take your money. Just like a stock broker, the more you use their compute power to do utterly useless things the more profitable they are."
Did you just quote yourself? Is this a thinly veiled attempt at promoting your own blogposts?
Either way I don't know why your opinion on cryptocurrencies is so harshly negative. Of course it is currently hyped up and of course it doesn't solve all problems as a magic cure-all. BUT there are several real world use cases and dismissing them all just because some people are trying to get rich in the ecosystem isn't warranted.
Well, yeah, private blockchains are practically useless unless they are a consortium chain, but even then the usefulness is questionable. Public blockchains are an entirely different beast, and I kind of just dismiss people now when they claim that public blockchains like Ethereum are useless because it's quite clear that they haven't done enough research.
Indeed, public blockchains aren't useless, they're extremely useful for one specific thing: censorship resistance. Evading the law, that is.
Now, of course the law isn't always just, it sucks that most countries ban drugs, it sucks that governments don't want anti-government activists to get donations, but the terrible things done with buttcoins vastly outnumber the non-terrible things.
Cryptocurrencies have largely fueled the rise of ransomware, extortion and scams.
People are literally burning energy on hash bruteforcing just so that scammers and malware authors could get paid.
Google is such a large company, with so many different teams and goals, that it is hard to believe that the words of someone, even as high as the CEO, represent the practices of all the employees.
> Below, we'll demonstrate how a specific smart contract platform (Ethereum) can interoperate with our enterprise cloud data warehouse (BigQuery) via oracle middleware (Chainlink).
Given that Google Cloud's recently hired new CEO is a former President from Oracle [1], I guess this is nothing more than a nod at Oracle to maintain on friendly terms?
Hard to imagine Google Cloud promoting an Oracle blockchain middleware 6 months ago..
