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Comment by chrisco255 | Hacker News Reader

I totally agree with A16Z here. Blockchain skepticism is not hard to find on HN and beyond. First, the ecosystem is vast and evolving quickly. If you've "tuned out" by dismissing blockchain, then don't be surprised when your industry gets disrupted in 5-10 years. I think we'll begin to see business logic open-sourced on the blockchain. For example, existing SaaS model incentivizes closed-source, centrally managed repositories. For example, a CRM-focused blockchain might place the business logic for managing customer relations and sales on-chain and enable competing clients to build on the protocol. A CRM built in this way might enable multiple "thin clients" to build and an ecosystem to develop around it. I think we're a ways off, but that sort of thing is just one of the use-cases that excites me about it.

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> a CRM-focused blockchain might place the business logic for managing customer relations and sales on-chain and enable competing clients to build on the protocol

Why.. would you need to put those on a blockchain across a bunch of disparate consumers? In theory isn't my business logic fairly, you know, secret sauce?

Blockchain is vaguely "A spreadsheet everyone gets a copy of." There are some cases where that can be useful - usually for verification. There are also some issues with that - there are no takebacksies if somebody say, publishes illegal content.

If I want to prove to everyone in Minecraft that I hold a million minecraft points, a blockchain might be a good answer. If I want to store my secret, frequently updated business rules with tons of private details about my clients... why in the world would I use a blockchain?

Traditionally, yes. But in the same way that Windows OS logic is Microsoft's secret sauce and yet thriving companies build products and services around Linux...so too will business-logic be open sourced and compete directly with existing SaaS players.

Just because you use blockchain to power the engine and business logic of your application, does not mean you also have to use it to store data. Data can be stored anywhere else (IPFS, Sia, or even personal PostgreSQL instance). Blockchains also need not be public. They can be private sidechains that occasionally interact with the main chain.

Why would you? Because it allows communities of smaller open-source contributors to effectively compete with big, established players. Also, through crypto, you could incentivize domain experts to contribute to the business logic rules.

Microsoft explicitly sells a license to use their ‘secret sauce’. That’s their business.

I’m not licensing the ‘secret sauce’ that runs my business, so I don’t want it exposed in the blockchain by my CRM software.

Why in the world would I want everyone to be able to see who my hot leads are anyway? Wouldn’t that put me at a huge disadvantage?

Maybe I'm too stupid, but you sound like a salesman trying to pull a fast one using fancy language... "incentivize domain experts"? Come on!

Let's see, a 3rd party can benefit from SaaS by offering interesting add-ons, for example a web-based photo editor that works with Google's cloud storage of your photos. A domain expert could offer add-ons to enhance your SaaS-hosted business data, but the blockchain needs to be there because... why exactly?

What value does storing the data on such a private blockchain add?

Or since you actually said that using the blockchain "does not mean you also have to use it to store data", what are you using it for in that scenario?

Wait, if the blockchain isn't storing the customer data, then what's the point of it? Exactly what is it doing?

"They can be private sidechains that occasionally interact with the main chain."

Again, why do I want any of my business logic interacting with the public at any time?

"Why would you? Because it allows communities of smaller open-source contributors to effectively compete with big, established players."

But as the maker of the CRM, why do I want this?

"Also, through crypto, you could incentivize domain experts to contribute to the business logic rules."

How? Literally how? Like, those two things are completely orthogonal.

you don't need block chain to share and build on each other. just use github, node js, etc. I don't see the point.

> there are no takebacksies if somebody say, publishes illegal content.

Or when privacy is breached (examples: right to forget, GDPR).

Most of the people on hacker news, myself included, aren’t skeptical of the technologicy of block chain. I grant Block Chain’s central technical premise, no other medium/platform/whatever can create decentralized trust wherein all you have to trust is the network. Where I think most of the criticism comes from is that many of us don’t see why this decentralization is actually all that valuable. Currency seems like the most likely candidate, but even it has proven finicky. What efficiencies are gained from decentralized trust. I’m skeptical that decentralized trust creates that much of an improvement.

Case-in-point: Block chain for supply chain problems was touted and hyped a few years ago, only to fall flat on its face. Why? For most companies decentralized trust in their supply chain didn’t provide that much of a benefit. I know a bit about supply chains, and from what I have heard from most supply chain experts (yes I know a fair number of supply chain experts) centrally managed trust works fine for them.

That’s the extrapolated crux of the issue. I am open to being proven wrong, but so far no one has ever been able to calmly explain to me what fields would see a 10x improvement from decentralized trust.

We’ve been dealing with centrally authenticated trust and decentralized unauthenticated trust for 100k+ years as a species. Block chain promises decentralized authenticated trust and it delivers, but why should I care? Is it actually going to be beneficial. No one can argue that the jury is still out.

Decentralized trust is a way to "open source" a customer/merchant database. If centralized trust is required the company controlling it can charge people to use it, for example think of listing fees as ebay charging people for access to their seller ratings. Or uber charging people to access its driver ratings.

With decentralized trust we could create a decentralized uber, where drivers get 99% of the money and 1% going to developers and providers of decentralized insurance.

One alternative to decentralized trust would be setting up a nonprofit to control the trust database, but then you are relying on the government to enforce that the nonprofit doesn't gouge the customers, manipulate the ratings, or embezzle the funds. You are basically just pushing the trust onto courts and law enforcement.

I would question the viability of a decentralized uber when non-idealistic consumers need to use it. In a decentralized uber where do consumers go if they feel that they were charged in error, or their driver took too long of a route, or... It's not enough for a lot of people to just give someone bad feedback, they want to know that there's a (hopefully) reasonable human on the other end that they can reach out to in case things go sideways.

"With decentralized trust we could create a decentralized uber, where drivers get 99% of the money and 1% going to developers and providers of decentralized insurance."

Why do we want decentralized Uber? Do we not want some basic vetting of the people who are driving us around? I imagine decentralized Uber isn't going to be too quick to remove drivers who sexually harass riders, if it does so at all.

It's not about if we want it. If it's more efficient, it's bound to replace the decentralized one.

Why would decentralized Uber be more efficient?

There's no middleman.

Have you heard of GDPR? Customer data must be deletable and only shared with third parties based on user consent.

A blockchain is an immutable data structure that unknown third parties can copy. It's literally the exact opposite of what you should be using for customer data. How does this CRM-focused blockchain make any sense at all?

I'm not OP and I shake my head at the "blockchain will be the future of software!" cultists, but I can imagine storing hashes of private operations (just the hashes, not the data themselves) on data in a publicized blockchain, for auditing purposes.

So one can probably suspect that a business whose ledger is totally different to the publicized hashes might be laundering money. And to make sure the publicized hashes aren't faked in the first place, somehow one would need to combine it with the hash of a receipt.

Just thinking out loud: taxman-sanctioned smartphone software that takes as input the time, business ID, and the purchased products, and generates a hash as an output. A shopper can compare the hash to the hash on the receipt she got, and later on she can check if the hash is in the blockchain.

I think the crm concept is terrible, but I don't give a crap about GDPR...I don't follow it now and never will.

> For example, a CRM-focused blockchain might place the business logic for managing customer relations and sales on-chain and enable competing clients to build on the protocol.

We can already do this with traditional APIs. The only benefit of blockchain code, or smart contracts, is trust. It assures users that the code they think is running is in fact running.

For most existing apps, including CRM, users can trust their provider because incentives are aligned.

I've got this smart friend (hi Shaun!) who over malted beverages made the statement that Blockchain could replace the Big 5 accounting firms, because everyone's books would be out in the open at any time, and gee wiz wouldn't that be a great thing. I see a parallel between what he was saying and what you've written about how great it would be if we had all this open business logic from which we could all benefit.

Except that's not how the world works at all. Having those contacts in one's own Rolodex is exactly how many top salespeople get hired; they have a direct disincentive in sharing. Same for business logic and processes. Accounting? Companies _do not_ want to make it obvious how hard they have to work to make the books look good those last few days of the quarter in order to appease the street, thus there is zero incentive to sharing that data.

I like your ideas. There are a lot of nifty ideas floating around in Blockchain world. But so many go against market incentives, making them non-starters. Likewise, so many of these big ideas are better accomplished technically using other technology than Blockchain. The point of trust pops up a lot but... we have a legal system for that, and the track record of security issues does not give me hope that Blockchain is really the answer.

> A CRM built in this way might enable multiple "thin clients" to build and an ecosystem to develop around it.

Let's parse this.

CRM = customer relationship management, usually in the context of sales. The sales relationship is often hard won and closely guarded, because it makes people money.

You're proposing putting information about this relationship on a public blockchain (because a "private blockchain" here is just an internal database), so not only is this highly guarded customer data now public, but it's also open to other relationship management platforms to manipulate?

What am I missing? Because this seems like a spectacularly bad idea for anyone who has actually done any sales.

I think you owe it to yourself as a blockchain "believer" to play your own devil's advocate and try to first figure out conventional solutions to the problems you believe that the blockchain solves.

I did not say public. Private blockchains are a thing. And it's not just an internal database. They are forkable and potentially run by the customer themselves or in their own AWS private cloud or wherever. But by following the protocol, they could easily switch providers, or integrate several clients that provide different features around the same data. The customer can truly own their data and the side chain can interact with the main chain where it makes sense.

Lots of technical problems there, that's why I say it's a ways off. But it's all doable.

Why would a customer fork their own blockchain?

If it’s not public what’s the point of using a blockchain? How is it not just a secured database?

Databases can be moved between providers. You can choose where/how to interact with them.

> But by following the protocol, they could easily switch providers, or integrate several clients that provide different features around the same data.

What you're suggesting is solvable by an open data standard and export/import features on software. A blockchain provides none of those by virtue of being a blockchain.

> I think we'll begin to see business logic open-sourced on the blockchain.

Business logic is open-sourced now. Why would this matter?

> For example, existing SaaS model incentivizes closed-source, centrally managed repositories.

How? Nobody would care if a SaaS used a blockchain, assuming that ever makes sense. For users, it's invisible plumbing.

Business logic is not commonly open-sourced for SaaS products. Salesforce, Workday, etc, do they open source their code base? No. Ecosystem, portability and that it's an audited code base will gradually produce benefits that exceed the established SaaS players.

It has already been 10 years. Bitcoin was released the same year as Android. Which one has had more impact?

99% of smartphone use is not impactful, as it's mostly a gamified addiction-driven surveillance machine. I'd say that smartphones have generally set us back a few decades. Bitcoin, on the other hand, has already freed more people than any other technology before it, and has shown the path for a better future.

" For example, a CRM-focused blockchain might place the business logic for managing customer relations and sales on-chain and enable competing clients to build on the protocol."

If I'm making a CRM, why do I want this?

"A CRM built in this way might enable multiple "thin clients" to build and an ecosystem to develop around it."

Ok. How do I, the CRM maker, make money off this?

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