random023987

> If your problem justifies a Hadoop cluster, you probably have the team that can properly set it up.

95% of the installations of a Hadoop cluster do not have a problem that justifies a Hadoop cluster.

Rust has an explicit goal of zero-cost abstractions, while Go will allow more expensive abstractions in the service of simplicity.

> The answer I got to this problem was "design middleware that handles this for you" which has to be a joke

It's not a joke.

The couch security model doesn't match the requirements of multi-user untrusted clients typical of internet distributed applications. But then most database have a similar limitation, it's only more visible in CouchDB because you can read/write documents directly from a browser without an application server, so the next logical step is to just let clients read/write directly to CouchDB over the internet without an app server.

If your data is in postgres, you will need an application server handing access control, business logic, and serialization.

If your data is in CouchDB, you need a proxy server that handles access control, whitelisting certain URL patterns and body content based on user entitlements.

> Come to think of it, I should at least consider that he's making it up, but I've met him several time and he's well versed in crypto and way ahead of the curve in learning about this stuff. Who knows?

If you poll people after a presidential election, a higher percentage of people claim to have voted for the winning candidate than voted for the winning candidate.

It's a lot easier to be well-versed in crypto and claim you won some big bets, than it is to be well-versed in crypto and actually have won enough big bets to "comfortably retire". The former requires hindsight, and the latter requires immense luck and timing.

> One possibility would be a government mandate that financial transactions are done with a blockchain in order to have transparency.

How does that stop governments from engaging in Iran-Contra behavior?

How is that better than a government mandate requiring a list of expenditures PGP-signed by the government and their vendors?

> It's not as if our current system uses a negligible amount of power

Our current system does in fact use a negligible amount of power. Each $2 latte you put on a credit card uses an amount of electricity so infinitesimal that it can only be measured in the aggregate.

The percentage of the power used to generate a single bitcoin block for a single transaction can power an average US household for (approximately) an entire week.

To put it in perspective: If the bitcoin network scaled up to the size of the VISA network it would require 100% of all energy used for all purposes planet-wide, from transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, etc. Everything you could possibly want to buy with bitcoin would be unavailable, as 100% of all human activity would go to powering the miners.

> In my opinion, the ICO is the blockchain killer app.

There are so many examples, from Canadian Tire Money https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Tire_money to Microsoft Points https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Points showing you can create private currencies granting the bearer certain privileges without a blockchain.

Proof-of-work blockchains were developed to solve a problem that only exists in a small percentage of distributed engineering use-cases. Unless you need to build a "censorship-free" peer-to-peer ledger distributed among untrusted, anonymous participants, the complexity costs and latency and computation costs simply aren't worth it.

It's the same reason that Ford doesn't build a tunnel under the US/Mexico border to ferry car parts to America.