Be fired || deal with customers
😰
Your meetings have agendas? That must be nice.
I was in a meeting with an external company once that sells NFTs. Yes, it was fun. Yes, the only reason I was there is 'cause I thought I’d be hilarious. Yes, I wrote money laundering into their interactive word cloud, and others wrote similar thoughts. Plz buy this jewelry for $500 so that you can use that virtually in Zoom. Some are convinced that Blockchain is the future. Others not so much.
Oh look ! A programmers meme thread has descended into a technical argument.
What does the title have to do with the post…?
Well, customers will sometimes ask for certain solutions to be used. Solutions for problems they don’t have…
Solutions that make no sense to the problem they think they have.
Customers fall for every hype and want dumb things that don’t make sense to be implemented.
Real talk, if this is happening to you often you’ve gotta decline more meetings.
What even is this job? 😂
honestly a distributed ledger makes alot of sense for backups, having a swarm of backup nodes which replicate your backup data… good resiliency and geographic distribution.
What you want in that situation is called a “replicated database”, not a “distributed ledger” and certainly not a “blockchain”.
99.999% of the time what people imagine when they say blockchain is good is effectively just the matrix protocol, which can be summarized as federated eventually consistent databases (and that’s pretty dang neato).
If a single organization owns all the servers, there’s not even in theory a reason to prefer blockchain over a plain replicated database. And in practice anyone who’s pushing blockchain is either an ideologue or a scammer; either way they don’t have the user’s best interests at heart.
that’s my point, most of the time people don’t even know what a blockchain actually is, and the reason they think it’s good is because in their head they imagine something less shit
Could not have said it better myself
I haven’t seen a replicated database that operates over the same scale of failure domains as distrubuted ledgers, do you have good examples of that?
They don’t have to. If you don’t have database replicas that are actively trying to subvert the system, inject bogus transactions, etc. then you don’t have the set of failure domains for which blockchains are in theory useful for.
If you’re running backups for an organization you just need replicated data storage on servers owned and operated by that organization.
It’s pretty reasonable not to implicitly trust an organization to always get things right or always be honest about what they are doing. Couldn’t there be theoretical value in spreading backups across multiple organizations and having cryptographic evidence they are all doing their jobs correctly, to reduce the need for that trust?
Theoretically? Sure. But in reality, blockchain pushers are fanatics, scammers, or both, so no real organization should trust them.
IMO that’s a pretty limiting perspective. The existence of a lot of noise around a technology isn’t a great reason to take a hard stance against ever using it.
If you think you’ve found the one honest snake-oil salesman, you’re almost certainly wrong. That’s part of reality.
I am not talking about back ups but more of dealing with the problems of distributed data in general. I.E. How do you, across a network of intermittent reliability (at a certain scale this is a guarantee not a choice), in sure that a piece of data written to and read by multiple actors is constant and available across the system?
Cloud only and closed source, right?
That’s just ceph with extra steps.