Every crypto article makes the same vague claims about the potential of non-specific blockchain technology. I'm surprised there was no mention of replacing Visa in this one as well.
I can forgive all the business guys for that thinking given articles like these, but the tech guys who were fanning the fires of that fantasy and telling me I didn't understand blockchain....
I got the distinct impression that there is a growing cottage industry of tech consultants and outsource companies that realize that if they can get their clients to "do it on the blockchain" they will be able to bill 10x as much for a project that has a current very good solution (and relatively fast to implement solution). And for which blockchain won't be a benefit. But the client may very well be able to get more VC money, so it's starting to turn blockchain 'skeptics' into martyrs.
And the most frustrating thing is that the innovation in Satoshi's paper (bringing together in a unique way prior known solutions) is really exciting and there are very good uses for blockchain. The international shipping companies using blockchain to track shipping container provenance strikes me as really, really perfect.
The bad uses of blockchain is going to kill the tech before it's had time to mature naturally and find its place.
As someone who has been involved in blockchain research since 2011, it’s sad to see a promising technology (in limited use cases) turn into a buzzword thrown around by the many speculators and scam artists peddling vaporware and pumping crypto prices.
http://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/top-trends-in-the-...
Executives want to apply Deep Learning to everything and anything they can get their hands on. The results most of the time are underwhelming and could be had with a much simpler set of tools. Just wondering how long before Deep Learning goes into trough of disillusionment.
One day a consultant or another yesman will be able to check in and syphon precious resources with their pipe dream and I’ll watch six figures fly out of the window while my dev team struggles debugging simulated ipads with mac minis.
Six figures? Oh sweet summer child. :)
First you'll need to burn seven figures to have a Big 3 advise your leadership that you need this tech. Then you burn the six figures implementing it with a lower tier firm.
My WotD
Got a simple, defined flow that could just be a decision tree? Nope, we need natural language processing in a chatbot, we can't possibly present a menu.
I feel like I'm fighting the Infocom parser again.
I still remember my manager getting very excited about XBRL in 2007.
The same thing happened to REST. Every "web interface" is supposedly REST now, yet the client and server are even more coupled than they would have been if the interface were implemented in SOAP!
The client-stateless-server style derives from client-server with the additional constraint that no session state is allowed on the server component. Each request from client to server must contain all of the information necessary to understand the request, and cannot take advantage of any stored context on the server. Session state is kept entirely on the client
I've heard enough verbal gymnastics to fill a book trying to excuse how modern web apps aren't violating this condition.
Maersk is using it for something as boring as secure claims for containers to fight corruption in shipping.
In government we're looking into running things like the land ownership registry and other public records on the tech. Not because it's hip, but because it'll save employee resources when we have to perform less audits, and because it'll speed response times.
"The research to date leads to the following conclusions: A blockchain title recording system is the future of title record keeping and would provide immediate benefits over the current title recording system, with additional benefits accruing in the future as blockchain technology grows in acceptance. However, at the moment, these benefits do not yet outweigh the costs and challenges associated with implementing a prototype blockchain title registry system in Davidson County, or elsewhere in the country. That being said, steps can, and should be taken now to lay the foundation for a blockchain system."
dci.mit.edu/assets/papers/spielman_thesis.pdfdci.mit.edu/assets/papers/spielman_thesis.pdf
Avi Spielman, in "Blockchain: Digitally Rebuilding the Real Estate Industry" does a terrific job addressing and exploring "aspect(s)- recording property titles- by comparing the benefits and limitations of a blockchain with those of the current record keeping system."
dci.mit.edu/assets/papers/spielman_thesis.pdfdci.mit.edu/assets/papers/spielman_thesis.pdf
Now why would a major financial entity want you to think external decentralized technologies are scams, and their in-house solution is fine and legitimate and secure.
They did it with 3D printing, they did it with VR, and now they're doing it with blockchain.
And there’s still the risk of a crash and switch in that long of a timeframe.
I bet there’s more money to be had at cryptocurrency arbitrage
For a "parcel" of goods, I counted 17 paper copies of the same shipping form, being sent to and fro. Back then IATA also used a custom text field format instead of a standard XML format I think they use now.
So while this was a long time ago, I too expect shipping to be fraught with lots of weird edge cases.
This is exactly what many with a cursory knowledge seem to think a blockchain will solve. Unfortunately, these are generally challenges people have to talk about and resolve via mutual agreement and compromise; you can't simply throw code at the issue.
Is provenance in general a good usecase? e.g. chain of custody for evidence / drug testing / food labelling?
This is not to say that ideas behind consensus, security, and smart contracts are not useful but you need to start with a concrete problem instead of adapting a fixed solution.
Having said this, it is interesting to explore a pluggable way to make agreements between parties and follow defined workflows for interoperability. The main barrier with implementing this idea is not technical but political since it is difficult to create agreements about this architecture between companies (e.g. banks).
Like you say, there are some incredibly innovative uses for the blockchain (another excellent one is claiming and tracking digital works of art like visual arts and music), but using the blockchain as a simple database replacement is ludicrous.
With Ripple, realtime clearing and settlement happens automatically even between currencies. If my bank and the vendors bank both use ripple, I can use USD to pay the vendor EUR in real time, and the transaction completes in seconds.
The chief value in blockchain seems to be in getting people to agree to do something at all.
Yes... as far as I'm aware, most (all?) other non-blockchain distributed ledgers require complete trust between parties. Its hard enough for two banks to trust each other completely, let alone all banks to trust all other banks. The old way of doing things is to either trust a central bank completely, which is easier to do, but far from distributed, or to trust a third party with a days worth of transfers and settling at the end of the day. Still not distributed, but requires less trust.
> The chief value in blockchain seems to be in getting people to agree to do something at all.
Exactly!
Blockchain technology is essentially nothing more than a cryptographically secure distributed ledger. There's probably other ways of having a secured distributed ledger without technically being a blockchain, and I'd be interested in hearing about them, but I'm not aware of their existence at the moment. Either way, I'm not sure why there's so much pushback on blockchains?
Doesn't it just require trust of a single party for settlements (or any number of independent settlements parties)? Which you still sort of require in the ripple model because ripple owns a crap ton of it's own coinage (60% of the pot).
If you're talking about two banks... There are thousands of banks out there all with varying levels of trust, and those banks all need to transfer funds between each other on a daily basis. Most banks only have direct relationships with a handful of other banks.
> Which you still sort of require in the ripple model because ripple owns a crap ton of it's own coinage (60% of the pot).
Yes, they own 60% of XRP available, but if you're settling a transfer between USD/EUR then you only need to trust ripple for the length of time for that settlement to happen.
Which for a bank would be all the damn day because they wouldn't just be doing one transaction every 2 months.
I know for a fact that Bitcoin's transaction time is not "real time," so why would Ripple's be?
Ripple doesn't use proof of work, it relies on a web of trust. So, in order to transfer money from Bank A to Bank B, it relies on Bank A to have some path to Bank B that is trusted. If Bank A and Bank B don't trust each other, but both trust Bank C, then the money is routed through Bank C.
Not sure what you mean by identity verification, if you're talking about for the customers, then they'd still need to have their identity verified at the bank (for purposes of Ripple, a bank is a ripple Gateway, but not all gateways are banks). Honestly, I'm an armchair expert in money transfer systems -- pretty familiar with Ripple, but less familiar with other systems.