Dirk Hohndel, Early Linux Contributor, Joins Foundation Supporting Blockchain Platform Cardano (phoronix.com) 38
Dirk Hohndel gets frequently mentioned on Slashdot. He was a very early contributor to Linux (and for the last five years the chief open source officer and vice president at VMware). But he's also the guy who interviews Linus Torvalds in the keynote sessions of Open Source Summits.
Hohndel "has a well known track record with Linux going back to the 1990's," reports Phoronix, and was even a member of the Linux Foundation Board of Directors.
But they add that now Hohndel has "somewhat surprisingly has moved on to promoting a blockchain effort."
Dirk Hohndel was CTO at SUSE going back to the mid-90's before joining Intel for a fifteen year run that ended in 2016 where he was Intel's Chief Linux and Open-Source Technologist...
When Dirk left VMware unexpectedly at the beginning of the year, he wrote on LinkedIn that he felt he completed his job at the company in driving open-source transformation. He was leaving to go "look for the next opportunity, the next step in my career" and now it apparently is with blockchain. The surprising news today is that he's joined the Cardano Foundation. The Cardano Foundation is a Swiss-based foundation built around the Cardano public blockchain platform. Cardano is open-source and is the most notable proof-of-stake blockchain that was started by Ethereum co-founder Charles Hoskinson. Cardano has its own cryptocurrency, ADA....
Dirk will be serving as the Cardano Foundation's Chief Open-Source Officer.
Interestingly, Linus Torvalds appears to be less enthralled with blockchain technologies. Last year ZDNet reported on the reaction when Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin suggested Torvalds sell an NFT of the 1991 email that first announced Linux to the world.
"An amused and appalled Torvalds replied, "I'm staying out of the whole craziness with crypto and NFTs. Those people are cuckoo!"
Hohndel "has a well known track record with Linux going back to the 1990's," reports Phoronix, and was even a member of the Linux Foundation Board of Directors.
But they add that now Hohndel has "somewhat surprisingly has moved on to promoting a blockchain effort."
Dirk Hohndel was CTO at SUSE going back to the mid-90's before joining Intel for a fifteen year run that ended in 2016 where he was Intel's Chief Linux and Open-Source Technologist...
When Dirk left VMware unexpectedly at the beginning of the year, he wrote on LinkedIn that he felt he completed his job at the company in driving open-source transformation. He was leaving to go "look for the next opportunity, the next step in my career" and now it apparently is with blockchain. The surprising news today is that he's joined the Cardano Foundation. The Cardano Foundation is a Swiss-based foundation built around the Cardano public blockchain platform. Cardano is open-source and is the most notable proof-of-stake blockchain that was started by Ethereum co-founder Charles Hoskinson. Cardano has its own cryptocurrency, ADA....
Dirk will be serving as the Cardano Foundation's Chief Open-Source Officer.
Interestingly, Linus Torvalds appears to be less enthralled with blockchain technologies. Last year ZDNet reported on the reaction when Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin suggested Torvalds sell an NFT of the 1991 email that first announced Linux to the world.
"An amused and appalled Torvalds replied, "I'm staying out of the whole craziness with crypto and NFTs. Those people are cuckoo!"
"Those people are cuckoo!" (Score:3, Funny)
That nicely sums it up. Also one of the reasons Linus could get the most successful software project ever off the ground and keeps it running. Cannot do such a thing is you are disconnected from reality and disregard facts.
Re:"Those people are cuckoo!" (Score:4, Interesting)
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Indeed. Even Ether is struggling to find any real applications, despite the people behind it really trying. At the moment, the greed and stupidity pervading anything to do with crapcoins (and NFTs) kills everything. ETH may eventually have some limited use if they can get rid of the greedy morons. Proof-of-stake will be critical for that but may not be enough.
Also, _some_ people are not complete scum and will not even defraud others if they are begging for it.
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Re: "Those people are cuckoo!" (Score:2)
It becomes blockchain-worthy if you can exchange the sword with other games, from different publishers, in various countries, and the publishers don't trust each other to not mint new items willy-nilly. But not if it's just one company.
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Indeed. That _is_ the state-of-the-art at the moment. If you have a trusted party, a distributed blockchain is just nonsense. If you do not have that trusted partner, a blockchain may or may not represent a valid alternatrive. But it must not be a blockchain used for gambling, those have no value at all or rather negative value as they produce nothing but consume resources.
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but you cant trust gaming companies though.. there's no such thing as a 'trusted actor' .. we cant trust banks, we cant trust governments, this is where the value of blockchain lives
https://comicbook.com/gaming/n... [comicbook.com]
Re: "Those people are cuckoo!" (Score:2)
But refusing to take their money because "they're cuckoo" is not a hardheaded fact-based sort of approach.
Says the sociopath with no ethics or morals.
Well, Linus once worked for Transmeta... (Score:3)
Maybe now its time for Dirk to try a company that has a good chance of proving their concept is flawed. Can still move on to a different enterprise, afterwards. It's not like he's betting his life savings on their success, like some HODLers do with crypto-stuff, right?
Dirk Hohndel drank the Hoskinson coolaid ... (Score:3)
Yeah, I guess Hoskinson can sound super convincing - I've watched a little of his YouTube output - it is ... :grimace: ... very substantial.
A great deal of it, features Hoskinson in "guru mode", waxing lyrical about all manners of societal, environmental, existential concerns - and believing, I guess, that his blockchain solution, his consensus mechanisms can "save humanity".
It is easy to get drawn into his hubris, his ego - exceptionally clever guy.
But it remains ... a flawed concept.
No matter _what_ mechanisms are put in place, greed and humanity will thwart those mechanisms, or just collectively say "sorry, don't want this..."
There's a place for blockchain tech, I guess, but it needs to be as far away from the concept of money as possible.
The idea that it could bring back the anonymity and freedom of paper money, is now laughable.
Every single solution to date, bar the "big daddy", BTC, is simply not decentralised enough - not even close to being decentralised enough.
The idea of "consensus" is equally laughable, as laughable as expecting human nature to somehow suddenly change - news report! - it isn't going to.
Cryptocurrency, after over a decade on the scene, is a steaming cesspit of charlatans, snake oil salesmen, bullshit artists, evangelists and near cult-like figure heads - such as Hoskinson.
He paints some incredible pictures, but once you've watched a few of his videos, it becomes clear the hubris and ego far outstrip the actual offering in place - massively so.
Cardano is DEEPLY flawed.
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There's a place for blockchain tech, I guess
What would it be?
I've been following it since the beginning and I still don't understand what "blockchain tech" is or how it's better than an old-fashioned checksum.
nb. I understand that a publicly created ledger with associated proof-of-work (ie. Bitcoin) needs a chain of blocks to ensure integrity. A private company or individual though? Beats me. (shrug)
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A simple "checksum" does not implement a globally synchronized, verifiable, decentralized, distributed, immutable ledger.
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Neither does blockchain, not unless you need bitcoin-levels of computing power to sign each block.
Surely an old-fashioned digital signature can do it much more easily.
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There are many other ways of doing consensus than PoW
No, a digital signature alone does not provide distributed consensus.
Amateur (Score:4, Funny)
Everyone knows to do a real blockchain you have to go artisanal [imgur.com].
Where are the applications?! (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe Dirk could then answer this challenge no one have been able to. Blockchain is claimed to be broadly transformative in many areas of business and IT, not just cryptocurrencies. It's often claimed blockchain has an amazing value and can unlock the business potential that is not accessible using normal methods or at least vastly cheaper or somehow better. So the challenge is: provide at least one (1) application where blockchain provides a tangible benefit compared to other technologies. If such cases existed I would imagine it was easy - like a blog-posted sized amount of text at most that could be written in 15 minutes. The only thing I require is that it's not enough to appeal to properties like being "distributed", "trustless" etc. The benefit must be precisely prescribed. A full system realizing the practical use case needs to be described. The trust model and threat actors must be described and locked down and naturally the same trust model must be used when analyzing the blockchain solution and the alternative solution. It of course doesn't need to be described in all the low-level technical details. Also some justification of how the benefit is 'transformative' (at least a little bit in proportion to the hype although everyone realizes hype is hype).
No one has answered this challenge over the years! In fact, no one has even attempted. All talk about it is either deeply technical (with no look to applications) or extremely flimsy where it's not even possible to imagine what the solution looks like, other than it is awesome.
To me, blockchain is like a disease that infects various personalities. Most are just gold diggers ("investors"), others are (often young) tech interested people wanting to be part of the hype, but then again others are people who somehow get infatuated with the technological aspects: with the crypto, "the chains", the "oh so distributed aspects" etc. I also suspect some cryptographers get attracted because it's one of the only games in town if you want to work in cryptography since the things that worked 20 years ago (AES-256, RSA-2048, SHA-256) still work. Which is also why there are people scaremongering about quantum computers (even though the daunting challenges identified 20 years ago are the same today - progess is made in comparatively minor areas). Basically a cryptographer has to go into blockchain, post-quantum or some more flimsy MPC or other esoteric areas, but even that seems to dry up.
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+5 Elephant in the room.
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The trust model and threat actors must be described and locked down and naturally the same trust model must be used when analyzing the blockchain solution and the alternative solution.
One big aspect of this is the trust model and threat actors shouldn't simply be substituted. What we've seen recently with bitcoin and other finances is that rather than being free from any control we are really only substituting one central authority for another.
And trust is key. The big problem with business is that it is fundamentally impossible to run a business without trusting your business partners, even if that trust simply extends to the threat of legal action for not following a contract. The real
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Frequently... (Score:2)
Twice in 15 years on a platform which has been around for 24 years is hardly fitting of the definition "frequently".
Charles Hoskinson is a crook (Score:2)
Sad to see Dirk associated with Charles's latest scam.
joke (Score:2)
Still has no JSONRPC or REST. The only way to talk to your node is via Haskell SERDES to a local socket file. Idiotic.
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Also you have to *restart* your node to rotate keys or notify it that its peer file (yes, a static file containing a list of peers) has changed.
Idiotic design from top to bottom; simple things that should have been there from the start are considered "features".
Like Johanna Rutkowska (Score:2)
Line goes up (Score:2)
Best crypto/nft Video Iâ(TM)ve seen in awhile
https://youtu.be/YQ_xWvX1n9g [youtu.be]
Where careers go to die (Score:1)
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BlockChain ... Noun....
After this article, I've realized that "Blockchained" works great as a verb. To blockchain a company is the act of using your technical expertise to part said company from its money without ever having to produce anything even remotely useful.