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Blockchain Study Finds 0% Success Rate and Vendors Don't Call Back When Asked For Evidence (theregister.co.uk) 145

Posted by msmash from the reality-check dept.
Though Blockchain has been touted as the answer to everything, a study of 43 solutions advanced in the international development sector has found exactly no evidence of success. From a report: Three practitioners including erstwhile blockchain enthusiast John Burg, a Fellow at the US Agency for International Development (USAID), looked at instances of the distributed crypto ledger being used in a wide range of situations by NGOs, contractors and agencies. But they drew a complete blank. "We found a proliferation of press releases, white papers, and persuasively written articles," Burg et al wrote. "However, we found no documentation or evidence of the results blockchain was purported to have achieved in these claims. We also did not find lessons learned or practical insights, as are available for other technologies in development."

Blockchain vendors were keen to puff the merits of the technology, but when the three asked for proof of success in the field, it all went very quiet. "We fared no better when we reached out directly to several blockchain firms, via email, phone, and in person. Not one was willing to share data on program results, MERL [monitoring, evaluation, research and learning] processes, or adaptive management for potential scale-up. Despite all the hype about how blockchain will bring unheralded transparency to processes and operations in low-trust environments, the industry is itself opaque." Burg was an enthusiastic advocate for blockchain until recently -- as he explained in this Medium post.
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Blockchain Study Finds 0% Success Rate and Vendors Don't Call Back When Asked For Evidence More

Blockchain Study Finds 0% Success Rate and Vendors Don't Call Back When Asked For Evidence

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  • I have similar results (Score:4, Insightful)

    by 110010001000 ( 697113 ) on Monday December 03, 2018 @06:04PM (#57743076) Homepage Journal
    I have similar results for "AI". A lot of press releases and white papers but nothing that is really more than computers running algorithms.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by zlives ( 2009072 )

      you must take it on faith... err...

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      That's because "AI" is a catch-all term for "things computers can't do yet". When it starts to work, it's called "machine vision" or "autopilot" or "Alexa" instead.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

      Deep Fakes and porn. Paste the face of your preferred female onto the porn actress of your choice for maximum viewing pleasure.

    • most folks say "AI" as a catch all of "Automation informed by large datasets" because it's easier for laypersons to understand. But if you consider that then there's a mountain of "AI" going on right now. Sure, that's not strictly speaking AI, but when lost your job to a bot or some other clever form of automation do you really care?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Almost every example I have seen of supposed AI, AKA machine learning, is toy AI at best.
      Absolutely NONE of it should ever go near ANY mission critical stuff, or shit like self-driving cars and such.
      It is trivial to break these algorithms.
      Of course, someone will think "but what if we just make the system learn from its mistakes??". Good luck with that.
      A system that can adapt can adapt wrong. Nobody would trust a system that cannot reason.
      I'd say "imagine pushing that to the shareholders", but I remember

      • A system that can adapt can adapt wrong.

        The technical term is "adversarial machine learning". We've only just come up with the term for it, and are in the process of discovering how easy it is to defeat any machine learning system. In terms of fixing it, we haven't even got to the point of the "fucked if I know" realisation.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      In the olden days we used to call it statistical modelling ...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      But unlike the Blockchain, there is no technological replacement for AI. People can do it (well, some can), but machines cannot.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by f3rret ( 1776822 )

      ...yes. What else would they be doing? Do you expect an AI system to somehow involve the researchers imbuing a computer with some kind of magical electronic soul?

    • I have similar results for "AI". A lot of press releases and white papers but nothing that is really more than computers running algorithms.

      Sorry my porn collection disagrees with you. Unless it is you think that Keira Knightley actually did do 2 guys at once on camera.

      I mean you have to be a special kind of ignorant to claim something doesn't exist on Slashdot when there's examples of it existing currently on the front page of Slashdot itself.

  • was found in the people looking to buy this amazing new synergistic disruptive technology to use in their business. (Yeah, I know there's probably some good use for the tech out there somewhere, but I have yet to find one where other tech can't do the same thing just as good, if not better.)

  • nope (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 03, 2018 @06:10PM (#57743116)

    Similarly, blockchain will give you greater choice and clarity when it comes to how your taxes are spent and the government goods and services you can benefit from...Blockchain is like a loom that can weave together multiple strands of separate things, including these technologies I mentioned above, into an integrated fabric where you can see what the data means and adjust resources in response.

    Blockchain does none of this actually.

    • And if it did, the problem with blockchain is that you have to wait a week before you know whether the transaction actually took place.

      • People always conflate blockchain with bitcoin.

        Yes, bitcoin sucks, it's slow and crap. There are many other currencies and blockchains out there that don't suffer bitcoin's shortcomings.

        For example XRP transactions can be settled in 4 seconds.

        • People always conflate blockchain with something worthwhile.

          Yes, XRP sucks, it's vulnerable and doesn't solve any issues with money or payments. There are many other methods of spending money out there that don't suffer XRP's shortcomings.

          For example Verified by Visa transactions can be settled in 4 seconds.

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday December 03, 2018 @06:18PM (#57743180)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • So, what's an example of a "nail"? (That can't be hammered in by a traditional database, that is.) Nobody's answered that question to my satisfaction yet, other than exchanging things without government oversight (i.e. crime).

      • So, what's an example of a "nail"? (That can't be hammered in by a traditional database, that is.)

        It's for the few corner cases when you don't want the drawback of a database :
        - it's *a* databaase (singular) and all actors have to trust this one single database. Also that database represent a single point of failure.

        Usually the answer against single point of failure is to do replication.

        Blockchain when you squint at it is replication taken to the extreme, where every single node on the network have their own copy of the database, forming a distributed trust instead of the classical central auth

  • I guess it depends on your definition of "success", but isn't bitcoin built on blockchain technology? Wouldn't that count as a success?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Zocalo ( 252965 )
      Not really. *People* have been successful at various ventures involving trading BTC, but they've either cashed out at a profit (e.g. are betting it won't go up any more), are acting as a brokerage so they make money either way as long as it doesn't collapse entirely, or have used it as marketing fluff to pump investment money (above board or not). None of those are really strong indicators of the tech itself being successful.

      At best, the jury is still out - if it significantly recovers in value and sta
      • I don't follow. Blockchain has only every promised to be a way to keep records public, with no central point of management. It's done that. But I've taken what you said to mean something along the lines of "well yeah, humans have been successful using it, but the technology itself has achieved nothing." Hopefully I'm just misinterpreting your point, but using that same logic, electricity has done nothing, cans (for canning food) have done nothing, automobiles, etc...

        Could you please elaborate?

        • Electricity is widely used to power things that do work. Cans are widely used to store food for later consumption. Autombiles are widely used to transport people and goods around the place.

          Bitcoin is not widely used for anything. It just exists. It's value is only because it was the first cryptocurrency, other than that it has no intrinsic value. Other cryptocurrencies do everything that bitcoin does better.

        • I believe their point is that there have been roughly zero stressful projects based on block chains.

          The sole possible exception would be crypto currency, but let's have a look at that. A currency is supposed to be a medium of exchange (a way to set prices and pay for things) and a store of value (a way to keep money in the bank for later).

          With Bitcoin's value having dropped about 80% over the last year, it's hardly a store of value. So it fails as a currency. You can price things in Euros or dollars, nobod

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Zocalo ( 252965 )
          OP specifically gave Bitcoin as a potential example of blockchain's success ("wouldn't that [BTC] count as a success?"), but I think it's pretty clear that at the current time you'd be very hard pressed to call BTC a success, ergo it can't be used as an exemplar for a blockchain success story. The sad part is that the two seem like they are joined at the hip, especially to those outside the tech field, and if BTC crashes and burns then it'll potentially kill blockchain as well.

          Personally, I think crypto

          • OP specifically gave Bitcoin as a potential example of blockchain's success ("wouldn't that [BTC] count as a success?")

            Thank you, yes. Regardless of how successful bitcoin is/was, blockchain is the subject here. I guess I was trying to ask, "What other applications, other than bitcoin, would be able to utilize blockchain?"

  • Well color me surprised. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by hey! ( 33014 ) on Monday December 03, 2018 @06:30PM (#57743274) Homepage Journal

    In a world where despite the importance most people can barely manage to deal with http certificates, attempts to adopt a much more complicated technology for much more dubious use cases fell short.

    • In a world where despite the importance most people can barely manage to deal with http certificates, attempts to adopt a much more complicated technology for much more dubious use cases fell short.

      False equivalency. Just because most people can't deal with a http certificate doesn't mean that field experts can't. Yet that is precisely the claim here, even the experts provide no evidence of doing anything useful with blockchain.

  • And crypto currencies. If you choose to ignore the two biggest uses today then I wonder how many others they "missed" https://www.certificate-transp... [certificat...arency.org]

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      CT doesn't use blockchain at the moment, but it has some similar concepts. So far, merely been proposed by some people to use blockchain as a way of implementing revocation transparency. Currently revocation transparency it uses trillian : https://github.com/google/trillian

    • Since no browsers use Certificate Transparency to warn against fake certs, I'm not sure it's a huge success.

      Google created Certificate Transparency, yet when I go to a site with a cert that isn't using CT, I get no warning in Chrome. My Chrome is a couple months old, but I haven't heard that this has changed. When even the creator of the system doesn't use it, is it a big success?

      • Chrome does "use" Certificate Transparency [certificat...arency.org], just not in the particular way you believe they should. (BTW, with a road map for the kind of implementation you want.)

        • The "roadmap" you linked to consists of this statement:

          --
          Certificates issued in October 2017 or later will be expected to comply with Chromeâ(TM)s Certificate Transparency policy in order to be trusted by Chrome
          --

          I notice it is is December 2018. Chrome still trusts certs that don't have CT. They could not implement it as planned, because people weren't and aren't using it.

          I make security scanning tools for a living. My team checks at least a dozen things for each certificate. CT isn't something we ch

          • OK, thanks for the info that they are behind on the roadmap. What about EV?

            > I make security scanning tools for a living. My team checks at least a dozen things for each certificate. CT isn't something we check, because nobody cares.

            Well, I would care. It seems stupid that you wouldn't check CT, considering that it exists, and even seems to be a good idea. I suppose there's some downside I am unaware of? What is it?

            • > considering that it exists, and even seems to be a good idea. I suppose there's some downside I am unaware of? What is it?

              It may be a good idea, or not. I'm reserving judgement on that and just saying it hasn't caught on. There are two issues I see immediately, obvious downsides. There may be more.

              The first step for a targeted attack is surveillance, checking out the target environment and finding which systems one wants to compromise, what software they are running, which version, etc. Then the same

  • Blockchain and the Standard Model of physics (Score:5, Funny)

    by thragnet ( 5502618 ) on Monday December 03, 2018 @07:02PM (#57743468)
    Dissociated Press (DP) — FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Physicists identify new fundamental particle May herald a new particle family and restructuring of the Standard Model Geneva, Switzerland — December 3, 2018 Keywords: hypino, shinyon, blockchain High energy particle physicists at the CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nullité) facility have confirmed the existence of the long-conjectured hypino (hy-PEE-no). It is thought to be the first member of a new class of particles known as shinyons (SHY-nee-ons), distinct from bosons and fermions. Unlike other subatomic particles, hypinos carry no charge, and have neither rest nor relativistic mass. Their only defining quantum property is spin. Hypinos are thought to be the fundamental unit of marketing hyperbole. To date, hypinos are the only known members of the proposed class of shinyons, which are of especial interest to tech investors and holders of the MBA degree. Dr. Martin Waugh, of the Institute for Advanced Squander, further posits that the hypino may be the carrier of the so-called “weak-minded force”, a mutual repulsion between fools and their money. It is theorized that, upon sufficiently accelerated spin, hypinos transform into super-excited hyperinos, detectable only by Chief Information Officers. The discovery of the hypino is recounted by Drs. Robert Crawford and Robert Jensen as follows: “It was a Friday afternoon, and we and our colleagues were returning from a long lunch. Maintenance on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was scheduled to start Saturday morning, and the apparatus would be unavailable for two months. We were in a ‘what the hell’ kind of mood, so we thought we'd take a fantasy shot, just for grins and giggles. “We had a few leftover Higgs Bosons from 2012 on the shelf, so our lowly lab technician, Garth Dennis, breech-loaded them into the beast , set up a blockchain for the target, positioned the extremely sensitive Swindleometer at the intended point of collision, energized the superconducting electromagnets, and let it rip. Upon collision, the blockchain shattered into a shower of the elusive hypinos. Examination of the debris field revealed that the blockchain and all of our cash were gone! Apparently the hypinos were entangled with our funding.” There may be natural sources of hypinos. The strongest natural emitters appear to be located in Redmond, Washington, and Armonk, New York.
  • Feels like a Rube Goldberg machine [wikipedia.org] with the way it is turning out, or worse, like a perpetual motion machine, or snake oil, etc.

  • The text of the study is available via Blockchain.

  • Check out Ripple. They signed contracts with banks all over the world months ago.

  • IBM (Score:2)

    by brunes69 ( 86786 )

    Maybe the problem is this article is looking at "Blockchain vendors" (aka tiny startups). One of the biggest problems in having a successful blockchain use case is it requires PARTNERSHIP with many external companies, who are usually competitors. This is not something easily brokered by startups.

    IBM Food Trust (IBM / Walmart / Dole / Kroger / Carrefour ) Expands Blockchain Network to Foster a Safer, More Transparent and Efficient Global Food System

    https://newsroom.ibm.com/2018-... [ibm.com]

    --

    Maersk and IBM Introduce

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