Can anyone name a single success story about the use of blockchain technology to solve a specific problem, and how this problem was solved using blockchain technology (besides Bitcoin)?
"OCBC Bank said Monday (Nov 14) it became the first bank in Southeast Asia to use blockchain technology to make local and cross-border inter-bank fund transfers."
Textbook use case for blockchain IMO.
It's always marketing speak, with reference to all the wonderful properties of "blockchain technology", and diagrams like [1], which could have simply been summed up in three words: "no payment intermediary". Although... doesn't that diagram look like they just changed the intermediary's name from "Payment Intermediaries" to "BCSIS Blockchain platform", plus added some cool-looking server icons?
But the source code will almost certainly never see the light of day, so we will never really know how they use blockchain technology. At the end of the day, I think it's a lot more likely that this bank's software provider created a new solution and just said it has "blockchain technology" because it's a vague buzzword, and then the bank released a press release based on this, again because of the buzzword effect.
[1] http://www.straitstimes.com/sites/default/files/blockchain.p...
STORJ - (storage in a southern dialect combined with startup lingo) - A Counterparty asset that is used as fuel for a decentralized unlimited cloud storage platform. Farmers offer storage, consumers upload shards of their files to a variety of different farmers. Encrypted, unlimited, redundant. I believe the STORJ company now has VC funding as well.
OMNI - create and register assets. Create secondary markets for those assets. (Counterparty and OMNI compete for market share)
Tether - An OMNI asset which is used to create stable value cryptocurrencies that are representations of national currencies. The Tether company has a centralized account of USD and EUROs, but this enables people to hold stable value cryptocurrencies, or "cash out", but not have to worry about the long delay of getting national currency from a bank. Primarily used for trading.
All of the above metalayers create transactions on the bitcoin network, and settle on that blockchain, so if that disqualifies them all because they use bitcoin underneath, then Dogecoin has a Counterparty layer as well :)
My point was precisely that you cannot, as far as I can see, separate blockchain technology from Bitcoin. My argument is that it's not blockchain technology that's useful, but rather a blockchain, in itself, that's useful. And it's useful because it's a distributed, proof-of-work timestamp server.
The value of Bitcoin comes not from the technology it uses, but from its incentive structure. An increase in the value of bitcoins feeds back into the system, resulting in an increase in security (hash rate) by way of an increase in the profitability of mining. Since Bitcoin's value comes from its time-stamping ability, and since this time-stamping is done using proof-of-work, it makes sense for an increase in the hash rate to also cause an increase in value, at least up to a certain point (provided no changes to the protocol are made to take advantage of the enormous hash rate of the current network).
Your question was vague.
So you might have as well said "Signal".
Hasn't come out yet, but they're clearly a boring company that isn't chasing trends. We'll know in a year or so whether this is all smoke.
I believe this is the timeless state of all big Blockchain projects: ready one year from now.
I specifically asked for success stories because I know everyone is throwing money after blockchain stuff. So I don't doubt that there are tons of planned projects. However, I haven't yet heard of blockchain technology being applied to solve an actual problem, except Bitcoin.
CME Group and the UK Royal Mint are planning to launch a blockchain-based product [1] -- also in 2017. But according to the article, it seems to be a simple digital promissory note, with the bearer owning the right to a certain amount of gold. Since we already have a central creditor, upon which the entire system depends (the Royal Mint), there is zero reason to use a distributed database to store anything.
Just put the database in the same safe as the gold.
[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/us-gold-blockchain-royal-mint...
It is possible there's just too much hype to find the existing use cases, that's one of the weaknesses of Google.
Investment banks have chosen to pursue 'blockchain technologies' rather than bitcoin because they don't like bitcoin's transparency.
Here's the problem. Bitcoin is secure and fast because of it's transparency.
Much faster than ACH payments, wire tranfers.
I realize I'm starting to sound like a crackpot so I'll just recommend the writings of a more well-respected crackpot Dee Hock (founder of Visa Inc.)
These numbers will not change until the blocksize is increased, which still looks unlikely.
It'll be interesting to see what happens when(if?) Bitcoin upgrades to SegWit. This infrastructure is designed to support off-chain transactions while settling on the chain.