One of the world's most prominent blockchain apps looks like being binned The Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) has signalled it will abandon plans to rebuild its core platforms on blockchain technology. In 2017 the ASX decided to replace its core app, named CHESS, with a system based on blockchain and Digital Asset Modelling Language (DAML). The Exchange hoped to allow market participants to run …
There are certainly many good applications for Merkle graphs in general, such as some types of filesystems, git,1 some database systems, and so on. And there are applications which are of theoretical interest even if they're not practical, such as hash-based signature schemes.
But blockchain is just a dumbed-down, degenerate Merkle graph, and I've yet to see a good use case for it. The one where it supposedly provides something useful – as an append-only ledger in a Byzantine environment – fails all over the place in practice (e.g. partitioning attacks) while consuming egregious amounts of resources.
1Well, git is a popular application of a Merkle tree. I'll leave the question of whether it's a good one to the side.
Blockchain is not at fault in this case.
The fault lies on the idiots who decided to chase the latest buzzword without investigating if it's actually suitable for their needs. I must admit blockchain sounds interesting, but I don't think it will be of use in most places. Maybe in some very specific niches it will find a role.
Just cos you hear how great a hammer is, it does not mean it fits every role you may throw at it.
I must admit blockchain sounds interesting, but I don't think it will be of use in most places.
The USP of blockchain is that it gives an untamperable(*) record in an environment where absolutely nobody can be trusted. There are only two situations where that applies – cut throat criminal circles of the worst sort and paranoid fantasies. Many crypto bros seem to exist mentally in the latter, and nobody in their right mind would want to get involved in the former. For all sane uses a trusted third party ledger is more efficient than blockchain.
(*) Sort of, presuming no implementation errors and no chance of anybody getting a 51% concentration of compute power.
You've never dealt with copyright claims on artwork then!
When you've had people take your images, start making money and you don't see a penny despite you selling your images yourself, then you have to spend 3 months fighting to get their shop stopped in one place only to have it pop up somewhere else, all the time the websites and marketplaces make you jump through hoops to prove you own something all the time watching money your owed trickle away. Blockchain is not a miracle cure but lodging your images and artwork in an untamperable "record" somewhere sounds promising, you can just point at it say "There's my proof I own XYZ artwork.".
Sadly they won't let we photographers and artists cut the goolies of art thieves...yet!!
Blockchain is not a miracle cure but lodging your images and artwork in an untamperable "record" somewhere sounds promising, you can just point at it say "There's my proof I own XYZ artwork.".
You seem to have missed my point that a trusted third party is more efficient than blockchain. I'm not saying blockchain technology can't be used, just that I've seen no convincing argument that it's any better than conventional techniques. "sounds promising" doesn't hack it and there really is a need for protection for creators like you.
Sadly they won't let we photographers and artists cut the goolies of art thieves...yet!!
:-)
I've seen copyright assertion by the image big boys like Getty who helped write current legislation. The answer every time is: pay now before it gets worse.
Oh, you're a small time artist? Well, hard luck because the laws weren't written for you. Assign your copyright to one of the big boys and, for a fee, they'll be more than happy to pursue the matter.
That aside, how on earth can something as dumb as blockchain ever be expected to enforce copyright? Minimal changes to anything digital would immediately invalidate any kind of hash upon which a chain could be built.
You would need to actually host the image on-chain. Which is beyond expensive for anything bigger than a pixelpunk.
What the current system does is attach a receipt to a link to your image. Your buyer doesn't own the image (it's on someone else's server), they don't own the link (it's pointing at someone else's server), they only own the receipt which doesn't stop anyone from copying the image, hosting it on a different server, minting it on a different chain and calling it their own with all the same digital 'proof of ownership' as your buyer can produce.
Textbook example of an organisation being lured onto the rocks of money-wasting pointlessness by foolishly succumbing to the sirens of a stupidly overhyped tech fashion that's a solution in search of a problem.
For an industry that's meant to be analytical and have a keen insight into productive uses of new ideas, it has an overabundance of people who do little more than act like youngsters chasing after the latest hip new thing, encouraged of course by too many influential "thought leaders" keen to jump on any opportunity to profit from the silliness. If only all this noise could be ignored, and more attention paid to things that have proven themselves in practice, we'd all be better off in the end.
Given the premise: The Exchange hoped to allow market participants to run their own nodes of a blockchain that would record their transactions, before rippling out over the blockchain so that all other stakeholders would also have a record of the transaction.”
It should have been obvious from the outset blockchain wasn’t an appropriate technology.
Basic maths says a block chain solution would add significant transaction overhead and latency compared to the current system, plus given the number of transactions a significant storage overhead on all other stakeholders.
Interestingly, from what has been written about blockchain logs, I suspect “other stakeholders” would develop tools to analysis the blockchain metadata to better understand their competition and trade accordingly.
A big advantage is that it puts "off market" transactions "on market". So it's not all "low latency". And by distributing the market and the record, it makes both the market and the record more robust.
But actually, latency is a plus for market operators like the ASX. Low-latency trading is where the money is, but it destroys the value of the marketplace, so there has to be the balance. Hence the other markets with guaranteed latency. (Or attempted guarantee)
--For an industry that's meant to be analytical and have a keen insight into productive uses of new ideas--
Never observed the follow the herd mentality of the "masters of the universe" (ie stockbrokers etc) then.
Also, I don't think the ASX appreciated something fundamental: in the best possible outcome (i.e. it actually worked), it would have made the ASX redundant.
What were they actually trying to achieve? For example, did they want people to make faster local trades? Then set up little outreach branches of the ASX, have them broker local trades, and send them back to a central ledger for permanent notarisation.
I am the CISO of a large UK company and I've been interested in crypto for decades. Earlier in my career, PKI was the "next big thing" and I narrowly avoided nailing my career colours to that mast. It quickly became apparent that clever and interesting are not the same as practical and useful. It never lived up to the wild claims of some crypto enthusiasts.
Decades later, along came blockchain. Again it was clever and interesting and again, it was not practical or useful. Numerous vendors tried to persuade me that we needed blockchain this, that or the other. Working in cybersecurity you develop a good nose for snake oil and wildly optimistic claims from vendors. It was immediately clear to me that blockchain is largely snake oil. Yes, it works but its usefulness is limited to some quite narrow situations.
ASX has finally come to its senses. I hope whichever idiot kicked this off isn't still working (either at ASX or anywhere else).
35 years in IT and we're still using SFTP or file copy utils, the stores might be filesystems or they might objects on cloud stores, it's the same stuff I was coding 35 years ago when i started my career! Nothing changes, lots of interesting ideas have come and gone ( anyone still using webdav?! ) and we're still doing the same stuff.
Let's all sing the mantra, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it!".
There's a pretty simple approach to a novel technology like this, and a project of this type, which is to invest a little bit of cash into putting a small dev team onto building a working prototype and testing how viable it is. Organisations seem oddly reluctant to take this kind of experimental approach even when the alternative is a huge, overhyped, mess like we see here.
It won't satisfy the true believers, but "we tried it and it didn't work" is a pretty good answer to "why aren't you using technology X?"
"We have to have something to announce" is an approach that does not seem well correlated to success in any field I have seen it applied.
Blockchain looks like it might be one of those things that's easy on a toy scale, and exponentially more difficult as it scales up. Here at $bigcorp it's often the case the prototype works (more or less), passes UAT (or close enough given the schedule overrun). When they flip the switch on production it instantly falls over. That's when they realize the same resources that served a few testers cannot serve even hundreds of simultaneous actual keyboarders, when in fact there should be a thousand. Different novel, same old plot.
As was first mentioned here about 8 months ago, blockchain is about a ledger, which is a type of log, which trivially and reversibly transforms into a database, to which the CAP theorem applies.
Since every form of usable blockchain requires CP, A is flying in the wind.
Choose your potential projects accordingly.
I used to work in a firm that runs back-end processing connecting to the current ASX system, and it is well designed and engineered. Not sure what the goal was in this redesign.
Hey, the ASX only had to write off $250 million of investment, and as for another estimated $100 million spent by participants building to this scrapped model, well ...
All seems rather deja vu. Was working in a London software firm in the 90s when the Bank of England scrapped its stock exchange project, I think we lost a million quid on that.
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