Why aren’t distributed systems engineers working on blockchain technology?

&gt;The blockchain community is immature and historically unwelcoming.<p>&gt;It feels like a get rich quick scheme - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;naval&#x2F;status&#x2F;878018839044161536" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;naval&#x2F;status&#x2F;878018839044161536</a><p>This is what it comes down to IMO. Anything cryptocurrency related is just surrounded by a cloud of shady characters and scammers, even though the tech is legit. You just can&#x27;t trust anyone, nor their intentions. Living your life and working in a constant state of paranoia like that is awful.

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 &quot;censorship-free&quot; peer-to-peer ledger distributed among untrusted, anonymous participants, the complexity costs and latency and computation costs simply aren&#x27;t worth it.<p>It&#x27;s the same reason that Ford doesn&#x27;t build a tunnel under the US&#x2F;Mexico border to ferry car parts to America.

I work in distributed systems, and I consider blockchain very interesting. It&#x27;s so interesting I click on a lot of links on Hacker News, and sometimes I take an afternoon on a weekend or vacation to read through some of the papers.<p>I just have a well-paying job and I don&#x27;t see any opportunities lucrative enough for me to jump away. Why? Bitcoin is an <i>experiment.</i> Reading through the paper, Bitcoin does not scale to general purpose commerce. All of the other technology appears to be &quot;me too.&quot; When I first heard about Etherium, the bullshit smelt so bad that I couldn&#x27;t even look at the paper.<p>What will get me really interested? Pay me to implement a real-world use case that fits the scalability constrains of blockchain. This isn&#x27;t things like general-purpose currency, or general-purpose contracts. Someone needs to pay me to implement something that requires blockchain; instead of someone paying me to implement a blockchain and then going and finding a use for it.

Distributed consensus algorithms are super interesting, but most distributed databases run in a trusted context. So instead of spending time optimizing a trustless system, database engineers optimize commit protocols like Calvin[1], because high-throughput scalable consistency solves so many business problems.<p>When you have a general purpose globally consistent distributed database, many of the problems that look like blockchain algorithm problems turn out to be standard application programming tasks. Eg a distributed ledger is just a table in a distributed database.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fauna.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;distributed-consistency-at-scale-spanner-vs-calvin" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fauna.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;distributed-consistency-at-scale-span...</a>

Here&#x27;s one take DLT and Blockchain: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hbr.org&#x2F;2017&#x2F;01&#x2F;the-truth-about-blockchain" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hbr.org&#x2F;2017&#x2F;01&#x2F;the-truth-about-blockchain</a><p>TL;DR, it&#x27;s gonna take a real long time to make blockchain useful, if it even is.<p>Further, I have yet to see a real production application of blockchain that isn&#x27;t a crypto-currency. Everyone and their grandmothers has invested in it, or started a company or w&#x2F;e. But has it actually been used to solve another problem? Blockchain was the SOLUTION to the PROBLEM of how do I make a cryptocurrency. It now seems that some folks are trying to make a PROBLEM out of a SOLUTION in every other domain.

I had the same observation that the blockchain is &quot;just&quot; a distributed log database with horrific performance overhead...<p>...but it&#x27;s not true that nobody&#x27;s working on it: quietly, Serious Engineers(tm) working for blockchain companies and you can expect big improvements in the next few years.<p>This rant is nearly isomorphic to the whining in the early 90s by the academics and SunRPC &amp; CORBA fanboys vs HTTP and HTML, which its insane parsing and communications overhead. Serious Engineers(tm) showed up, made the early web work, it took off, and... you don&#x27;t see many HN job posts asking for CORBA engineers.<p>As with the web, blockchains are exciting because they&#x27;re a &#x27;looser&#x27; and more open protocol than other systems.

Because I have yet to find an actual legitimate use-case for a blockchain. Every task in our modern business world actually <i>requires</i> a central trusted authority.<p>Edit: not to mention that mining is an incredible waste of time and energy that can instead be put to good use.

Because it turns out the good bits are the ledger of transactions made tamper-evident in a Merkle tree, and we had that with Git in 2005 and it works great thanks.<p>The bit Git doesn&#x27;t do: distributed consensus via Proof of Work, because it turns out that a bit of trust is fabulously more efficient.<p>I predict any good and useful product labeled &quot;Blockchain&quot; will be the cryptographically tamper-evident ledger of transactions, and not any of the stuff that makes a blockchain different to Git.<p>(Researching the book, I had one developer admit that his &quot;blockchain product&quot; was pretty much a simplified Git in terms of what it offered ;-) )

Too many crooks. Too much hype. Too much ignorance of how the real world works.<p>I&#x27;d be interested in working with large and boring financial institutions on those sorts of projects, because they don&#x27;t offer the failure modes as above.

I don&#x27;t really get this article. The transaction rate limit and the wastefulness and limitations of PoW as a fault-tolerance mechanism are brought up but then just hand-waved away.<p>If we had discussed proof of stake or theorized about how some of these other hurdles like transaction rate could be leaped then sure. Otherwise it&#x27;s just a list of things any distributed system has to solve for, demonstration that blockchain solves for them (inefficiently) with the undertone of &quot;I bought in on the hype, and you can too&quot;.

DLT strips away almost everything that makes blockchain compelling.<p>Why would a distributed systems engineer work on what amounts to a really shitty database?

The goal of the article is to get distributed systems engineers excited about blockchain and invite them to explore positions at Paxos. Ironically none of the open positions are actually for distributed systems engineers :)<p>I think it&#x27;s funny the author chose to center the article around that assumption. IMO most engineers related to distributed computing (not necessarily themselves distributed systems engineers) are actually quite aware of the technology and many of the challenges.

Why isn&#x27;t X working on blockchain technology?<p>Maybe instead of asking this, we should ask the cryptocurrency enthusiasts what area of technology <i>won&#x27;t</i> be dropped-and-replaced by blockchains, because so far it seems apparently applicable to every single use case in every single industry... By the way, did you guys hear this thing is an immutable ledger?

My observation is this:<p>The &quot;killer app&quot; of Blockchains are the trustless nature of the system. In most practical application, allowing actors without a trust relationship to interact with the log is not a significant requirement of the system. Once you remove that requirement, there are technically superior approaches to maintaining a ledger.

Because we got better things to do than wasting time on bullshit blockchain tech in a bullshit company filled with suits [0] who can produce only... bullshit<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paxos.com&#x2F;our-team" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paxos.com&#x2F;our-team</a>

Where&#x27;s the data, or at least arguments suggesting that no distributed systems engineer is working on blockchain technology?<p>If anyone could point to me what&#x27;s the name for this fallacy. Lile when you ask a question that tricks people in assuming the premise.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;kadena-io&#x2F;juno" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;kadena-io&#x2F;juno</a> actually this is poc research from jp morgan into using another bft algo: raft.

Answer: because most distributed systems are operated by a single entity and don&#x27;t need to solve the trustless consensus problem.

From OP: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;naval&#x2F;status&#x2F;878018839044161536" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;naval&#x2F;status&#x2F;878018839044161536</a><p>The cynic in me thinks &quot;it&#x27;s a scheme by oligarchs and tyrants to get rid of troublesome &#x2F;fully anonymous&#x2F; cash sold as a utopian scheme to those who are motivated by the promise of a quick rich scheme.&quot;

The choice of font and lack of contrast make this nearly unreadable for me...

I mean, you read the most ridiculous things happening in those circles. Not sure why most talented engineers would be interested in associating themselves with that.