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Comment by nickpsecurity | Hacker News Reader

Refreshing to see a critique talking alternatives instead of another fanboy post on Bitcoin's blockchain. Monoculture is a good word for it. Almost all the research and attention is going in one direction when there are many valid directions worth exploring with fewer issues than Bitcoin. Some leverage proven approaches in finance, databases, or transaction processing. Just need extensions, more analysis, open implementations, etc.

So, I look forward to more articles like this to draw attention to solutions other than Bitcoin architecture. Another thing I look forward to are links to interesting alternatives like SCP and Interledger in this. I haven't reviewed them yet but brief descriptions seemed more exciting than "Cut-and-Pasted-Coin launched yesterday while promising to change the world."

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> Another thing I look forward to are links to interesting alternatives like SCP

Some "see also" on that topic, then ....

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3u1m36/why_arent_w...

http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/scalingbitcoin/sharding-th...

https://github.com/vbuterin/scalability_paper/blob/master/sc...

(Unless you don't mean the SCP that was presented during Scaling Bitcoin Hong Kong, and rather the other more widely known SCP....)

Appreciate the links. Those are interesting ideas on reducing the load and increasing the speed. NatanealL's idea is closer to how I'm looking at it because I'm starting with our current model and trying to improve its deficiencies. Banks already manage their own transactions and records while interbank operations deal in huge chunks. Prevents need of global verification of individual transactions.

Plus, knocking out the miners and leveraging stored value in an existing currency can simplify things by removing some obstacles they discuss. Bitcoin's problem is a lot harder than the general problem of decentralized payments and contracts on cash-backed currency. I prefer to stick to the latter as it solves todays problems pretty well.

If there's no work - it's not a blockchain. Distributed ledgers are a completely parrallel movement that was taken up by those who wanted to leverage the marketing momentum of blockchain, for their own database projects. Which is fine, but shouldn't get confused with blockchain innovations.

There can be proof-of-stake blockchains, proof-of-use, proof-of-minimum-aged-time, etc. etc. The blockchain is just a chain of blocks, there are innumerable ways to protect it, verify it, and distribute the data.

But a bunch of the "blockchain blockchain blockchain" startups don't use proof of anything.

If the blockchain is just a chain of blocks, then every database designed after 1985 is also a blockchain. Is that what you believe?

Also- proof of stake always forks due to work attacks, so that's probably not a secured database.

I think the core value of a blockchain (as opposed to any general database) is that the most recent blocks contain a hash of the state of the system up to that point. This provides a tamper-resistant historical record of what's occurred previously.

I think your second point is what some of the critics of the bitcoin obsession are talking about. Not every blockchain needs to be as attack-resistant as the bitcoin network. Many of the speculative blockchain uses like for the Internet of Things could benefit from a history of all transactions but don't depend on it. Proof-of-stake might work fine for many cases.

What you are describing has been a core of any ledger/immutable database. It isn't new and in fact has been around for ages. You don't really think a bank keeps all you money in a sacred database cell do you?

Plenty of banks use pretty horrifying technology. Append-only databases have been a cool research project for ages but I've never seen one in production.

They're more likely to use mainframe database systems with the verification done in apps that interface with it or do batch runs on it. The mainframes and databases themselves cover the integrity and availability portions. So, it's a ledger in practice but not directly stored as one.

Matter of fact, storing it as one is incredibly wasteful. Banking systems have shown it's not necessary. Just need the transactions, timing, sources, and verification of them.

You can find some here: http://www.datomic.com/customers.html

Are any of those dividend-paying companies? At the risk of no true scotsmanning, I wouldn't count it as "production" if the company isn't making money off it yet.

> This provides a tamper-resistant historical record of what's occurred previously.

So git basically. Maybe instead of blockchain technology they could call it version control tech.

Maybe instead of version control tech they should call it a Merkle Tree https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle_tree

Or a series of files with numbers that go up and a data structure tracking their dependencies. Git and others might use Merkle Trees but they're not even necessary. Good, but not necessary. Lot of ways to represent these basic concepts with so many tradeoffs.

That's why it's exciting when people break away from the crowd dictating specific approaches and start asking themselves questions about alternative techniques. :)

All those "proof-of"s have a money origin problem.

That problem was solved back when we started putting money into banks and using it with computerized transactions. Variations on that model with nonprofits and distributed transactions could go far as alternative go current system.

Yes it's parallel but you got it backward. The use of distributed transactions, fault-tolerance, etc predates Bitcoin by over a decade. Bitcoin built on it and proof-of-work. As usual, people started re-discovering stuff they ignored in the process.

Proof-of-waste is far too environmentally damaging to use at scale.

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