Sort of. It's a similar cryptographic hash chain type structure. I believe it's a DAG.
Block chain skepticism has gotten as silly as block chain hype. A block chain is a perfectly valid and sometimes useful structure with some very interesting properties, but it won't cure cancer and make a unicorn fly out of every nose.
> Block chain skepticism has gotten as silly as block chain hype.
Naw. Technologies that are ecological disasters whose only purpose in the last 10+ years is to serve as a platform for fraud and enrichment of early adopters.... they deserve heaps of criticism.
> Block chain skepticism has gotten as silly as block chain hype.
Is it though?
My admittedly simple understanding is that blockchain is a distributed ledger that suffers from consensus based attacks; as in it's pretty much useless unless the cluster is massive and shared between lots of parties that couldn't really out-compute each other.
Thus the criticisms aren't really "this can never work" but simply, this is usually a waste of compute power and energy compared to a non-distributed version, especially when it's one of these singular company examples.
Would be interested in hearing what's the use cases are.
> especially when it's one of these singular company examples.
Blockchain is most useful in situations where there is a lack of trust between parties. Seems like a lot of people on HN distrust PayPal because of being bitten by frozen accounts or having their earned money revoked. That’s why money is a good use case for blockchain.
Voting is another - maybe you don’t trust that your vote for the radical will be counted correctly.
Smart contracts are another. If the other party decides they don’t like the current state of affairs (they are losing) then it’s much easier and less expensive to have the contract auto-enforced than using a army of law enforcement and lawyers.
If HSBC is actually using this to create an immutable record of transactions that ensures integrity of the logs then it would be a good use case, but I have my doubts.
The trust issue is far overblown. Blockchain is much more about digital ownership of assets. You own your Facebook, your Google search results, etc, etc. You may not physically host it, but own the data that is generated from it and can decide to co-opt it into a larger tray for money if you wish or to remain private. It's much more about freedom on a conceptual level if we zoom out then about simple immutable ledgers; which are just shared key-value pair databases across many nodes, nothing special.
The immutable ledger and consensus algorithm is the basis for allowing ownership of digital assets and freedom.
Solving the trust issue is what an immutable ledger and consensus algorithm is all about.
Without a way to agree on who owns what and a way to enforce that then there is no way to have digital ownership or freedom without an army of lawyers and law enforcement, or trust.
You probably already have ownership of digital assets without blockchain: it’s called a bank account, equities, bonds, and maybe a title or deed to a car or home. But that ownership is all enforced by an entire system of laws, attorneys, law enforcement, and other fallible human beings. If you remove the reliance on that system and fallible human beings, you then begin to enable a greater amount of ownership and freedom than previously possible.
"Cotten, it turns out, was a serial operator of “exit scams: Ponzis that, after reaching a critical volume, abruptly close up shop.” He ran his first pyramid scheme at age 15. Cotten and his partner in Quadriga, Michael Patryn—an alias!—met on a message board for Ponzi schemers, where they bonded by running Ponzi schemes on each other"
I'm well aware of the multitude of scams, hacks, etc. involving [centralized] cryptocurrency exchanges, but it doesn't actually have much to do with blockchain technologies itself, at least not in the context being discussed here.
If you give over control to cryptocurrency by sending your cryptocurrency to some entity that exists outside of a trust-less blockchain system (centralized exchange or otherwise) then that entity can do whatever they want with it (technically-speaking), and you are essentially then reverting back to and relying on non-blockchain technologies at that point (The exchange was probably just a typical web app built with some common web framework and RDBMS). Obviously, ponzi schemes are possible without blockchain technologies and in a purely blockchain world, because of the transparency of transactions, it would be very difficult to pull off without having willing-participants.
There is a separate discussion to be had of how to use blockchain with "legacy" centralized systems and how to make it user-friendly for non-experts, but it's not an actual problem with blockchain technologies itself, but more of a second-order problem.
The main thing being discussed was digital assets, so if you have 2 pure digital assets that are compatible with smart contracts, you can exchange without any trust and it prevents things like ponzi schemes. Government money, like in the example, really is more of a "legacy" centralized system, which allows for this. That's partly why you are seeing entities like Coinbase try to create "stable" cryptocurrencies [1] that try to mirror the value of government money.
"you are essentially then reverting back to and relying on non-blockchain technologies at that point"
Yes, my point is that's not a choice. It's like making the "choice" to fall down after you free yourself from the shackles of the "conventional crutch system".
Clearly this is not an actual problem with walking without crutches - millions of people handle walking that way all the time!
If you use git as intended having a single source of truth (a branch that represents master / deployment) and allows others to submit patches that are then approved to master the data model is very similar to a blockchain.
One could say it’s PoA (Proof of Authority) which is basically saying there are specific authorities that choose to validate it. In github, for example, it would be whoever controls the master branch. Of course, this is needlessly complicating things since 99% of software today is this authority model except its implicit.
