Blockchain's Numbers Don't Add Up
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
I think the problem so far is that while they talk about blockchains (which in my opinion and in the banking context is an immutable P2P database that no-one owns but everyone obeys) they still are afraid of such concept because of the loss of control compared to the current models.
They found a nice golden engine but can't decide what kind of vehicle they want to make due to tradeoffs.
Banking context aside, the FOMO also happened with countless of clueless "entrepreneurs" that jump on the blockchain-wagon without a clear and most of all fitting purpose.
For the legit cases, you have legacy laws and systems being the challenge which always takes a horrible amount of time.
The issues with the blockchain are it's unpredictable and, as someone else mentioned, difficult to trace responsibility on. That matters in a legal system with a concept of fault.
Blockchain finance doesn't yet make sense somewhere like the UK or America because our systems are too deep and storied. They could have a leg up on existing institutions in places like India or Italy or Russia, where the current system is crap. That said, I'm still waiting for a blockchain start-up to run its cap table on a blockchain.
I think the bigger issue is loss of control over whether there will be a particular blockchain in the future. The current system relies on enough independent parties being willing to participate. If participation is subject to the whims of tech fancy, a financial institution could be left holding the bag on a suddenly worthless chain.
The article also misses a key point about the finance industry. You "only" need to convince a dozen organisations that what you're doing is valuable and they'll effectively force the rest to follow. It's also quite incestuous, get a couple of big players interested and the rest will come looking pretty quickly. Not only that, once they start relying on a technology they are very good at ensuring that it gets backed well.
Now, I'm not suggesting that that's easy and I'm sure a lot of companies will try and fail. But it most definitely does not need billions to get started.
Right, so the article establishes that clearing systems currently are eyewateringly expensive!
> It would be a miracle if blockchain could repeat this feat in a fraction of the time without similar backing or funding.
Well maybe - but the whole point of disruptive technologies (mobile phones, uber, etc) is that they can do what existing technologies do at a fraction of the cost.
Not to say that there isn't any hype in this space, but the pie is worth so much that it's surely worth a decent chunk of R&D budget!
The original theory was specifically exploring why market leaders can be overtaken by a new player. "Disruption" is not just a revolutionary tech -- cars and the iphone don't qualify as disruptive, in the original theory's definition. Disruption occurs when you find a niche market that's too low-revenue for the current leader to engage. The niche is often a small market that doesn't need the leader's full solution ("low-end") or which simply wasn't targeted at all ("new-market"). A disruptor will engage those niches because they can survive on the low revenue, win their markets, and use that to sustain growth into larger markets, until they become a new leader.
(The Wikipedia summary is pretty good: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_innovation#Theory)
If you're looking for the Blockchain to disrupt, by the original idea of disruption, you shouldn't be looking at serving the same market that a bank does. You should be looking for a low-end or unserved niche -- which is especially smart for FinTech, which is inherently risk-sensitive, and so needs a lower-risk market to mature.
I don't think any of their regular readers were click-baited into thinking this article was about some deep issue in the blockchain math, I don't think that many of them have much understanding of what the blockchain, or "duping" is. This article wasn't written for the HN crowd.
(To be clear, my very initial reaction was the same as yours, but then I saw the context, bloomberg.com, and it was clear what it was saying.)
A settlement platform that can't instantly answer questions about what happened, why it isn't doing what the user expects, how the API documentation governs a specific version and you have a mismatch... is a settlement platform that is not going to be adopted. Hopefully the customers discover this during the integration phase, rather than being bullied by tech-ignorant executives into using the trendiest thing.
This situation is aggravated by language barriers.
I am not referring to any specific settlement platform or tech-ignorant executives, just to the general problem.
If by "blockchain" we mean "distributed peer-to-peer append-only transaction databases", then that corresponds to #7 on Dan's list, "Getting your act together with respect to an industry standard where the industry has conspicuously failed to do so". The use of a blockchain system for handling certain kinds of money transmission transaction might be viable. The irrevocability is still a problem for all blockchain systems: what happens when a mistake is made or a key is leaked or lost?
+ consensus.
I have also a company in this sector. In our talks with banks, stock exchanges, and government they say they want a blockchain. When we ask how many nodes they will run, the answer is usually one.
I also believe the cryptocurrencies and blockchain concepts have a lot of applications in Internet, but currently they mainly offer solutions for the dark and lighter nets.
The blockchain should only be used for non-financial applications.
Do you really mean it shouldn't be used in any financial applications or just not to replace fiat currencies? If the former could you elaborate on why? I'd be very interested in your opinion.
So any purposefully decentralized/distributed system used for financial (centralized) purposes becomes corrupted by default.
I'm on board with the idea of a DNS replacement using a distributed hash table but I'm not clear on why Bitcoin specifically or a blockchain generally need to be involved.
* Locality-unaware routing. Your lookups can bounce around the planet a few times before reaching the right key, leading to extremely high and extremely variable latency. This can be mitigated with DSHTs (e.g. CoralCDN from NYU) and/or with some clever key/value distribution schemes (e.g. Beehive from Cornell).
* Route censorship attacks. DHTs are vulnerable to sybils, which can take over all the routes for a particular set of keys and censor them.
* DDoS attacks. Nothing stops you from inserting a bunch of junk key/value pairs and overwhelming the DHT nodes.
* Churn attacks. A few sybils can add a bunch of nodes, stay online for a while, and then disappear over a phased withdrawal period. This leading to high node churn, which leads to content unavailability and network partitions.
* Content attacks. Unless the DHT's key is the cryptographic hash of its value (not the case in DHT-based DNS), nothing stops you from inserting invalid routes for the same name. Signing the value with a keypair doesn't help either, since that simply changes the name-to-IP lookup problem into a name-to-key lookup problem (i.e. how do you know the "right" key produced the signature?).
* Route hijacking. Again, if your DHT isn't content-addressed, sybils can simply take over routes for a set of keys and serve you the wrong values intentionally.
The reason Blockstack uses a blockchain to bind a human-meaningful names to hashes is because blockchains are decentralized, inimitable, and totally ordered. Each blockchain peer has a 100% replica of the system state, so the above limitations do not apply. Since they're expensive to imitate and since they're totally ordered, they can be used to enforce name acquisition on a first-come first-serve basis.
But of course, the trade-offs are that writes are slow, writes require PoW, and space requirements grow linearly. Blockstack in particular addresses this by using a blockchain to bootstrap name/key bindings, and then storing signed data off-chain in commodity storage providers (peer-reviewed paper at https://blockstack.org/blockstack.pdf).
Disclaimer: I'm one of the authors.
Of course, this is a totally different discussion than the idea of a sort of democratic public blockchain like bitcoin. Although the main challenge there also is cooperation. Eventually that stuff will quite possibly put many of these banks out of business.
Lots of buzzword-toting entrepreneurs lined their pockets with VC money in 2014-15. Many of those investments will have been bad ones (as with most VC bets). Yet the engine of capitalism and innovation rolls on. The Bitcoin genie is out of the lamp.
Time to settle in for $N months/years of negative PR & industry consolidation after which we should see some very interesting things emerge :-)