Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality
reuters.com
reuters.com
If we strip away the consensus mechanism, all that is left is a trivial data structure that anyone with a CS background could come up with. So, the question becomes where the real value proposition is in "blockchain technology" outside of the realm of crypto currencies. What are the things you can only do with "blockchain technology" that cannot be achieved with existing technology? It looks more like a marketing buzzword than anything that has actual merit for the average use case.
Mathy Database, and yea just buzzwords and hype.
The next big thing, won’t have people standing around looking at it and wondering where it goes.
- Seamless global payments
- Store of value
- File storage
- Decentralized exchanges
- DNS lookup
- Prediction markets
- International contracts
- Untraceable payments
- e-Voting
- Copyright or proof of ownership
- Distributed computing
It simply gets tiring for people to argue ad infinitum about this with every non-believer.
Your language is inadvertently quite revealing: “non-believer” isn’t how you talk about technical issues with well understood tradeoffs. It’s how you talk about something which you’d like to be true but isn’t.
https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/1043.pdf
Also, https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/375.pdf Section 4.4.2
>storage
https://filecoin.io/filecoin.pdf
^ Detailed analyses that explain why blockchain is an appropriate solution
But please do elaborate how they are "known to be worse." By whom and can you cite the analysis that proved so? Certainly not known by Google if they invested in a blockchain-based storage solution?
>well understood tradeoffs
That's definitely not the case if you take the time to read any blockchain-related thread on HN. But, please, feel free to tell me what are better solutions for the cases I mentioned.
File storage is similar: lots of people want you to buy their pet project but if you want reliable, secure, and cost effective it’s all “maybe sometime in the future when we have something different”. Talk about it as an advantage when it’s competitive for most people.
I thought the point was that "they are known to be worse."
>Every solution proposed so far is a huge regression for privacy or coercion
Can you please elaborate how is the solution proposed in the paper linked in the first URL a regression over non-blockchain solutions?
>it’s dishonest to claim that
I replied to the question of "what problem is this technology solving," and the paper you mentioned claims that "it seems reasonable that blockchain technology can help to achieve some of the desired properties." What exactly am I being dishonest with? I cited a paper where a protocol is proposed to help solving the eVoting problem. It directly answers the question I was aiming to answer--I never said my list was about already working, deployed, tested solutions.
>File storage is similar: lots of people want you to buy their pet project but if you want reliable, secure, and cost effective it’s all “maybe sometime in the future when we have something different”. Talk about it as an advantage when it’s competitive for most people.
Right... so your counter-argument is that "it's not yet ready" despite claiming that "they are known to be worse." No one said they're ready. They're using experimental technology and they're small teams. They already have beta implementations out if you want to test them. Yes, they're not polished and ready for consumers, is this your entire point?
Yes, for example, here's the full quote about voting including the sentence immediately after the one you quoted:
> Due to the requirements, it seems reasonable that blockchain technology can help to achieve some of the desired properties. However, to the best of our knowledge, so far no solution has been proposed that has been shown to be secure, verifiable, and private and there are still many open challenges.
There's simply no proposed system which is not worse than the status quo, and that's ignoring the additional challenge that even in the event of a major academic advance you'd have the additional concerns of having to be cost-competitive and establishing public trustworthiness before you could call it better. That kind of work is measured in decades.
The situation is less severe for file storage since you don't have as many attacks but, again, there just isn't something which is comparable on cost, performance, or reliability. I'm comfortable saying that's “known to be worse”.
And the true believers are the ones who will be lambo rich as long as they keep buying and holding, right? Just keep hyping up all these empty promises... some rube out there will buy into it.
Can you please support your position? Bitcoin promised a digital decentralized payment solution, and it delivered the first solution in history.
Monero promised anonymized payments, and they delivered the most private solution for untraceable digital currency.
Can you point me to the superior non-blockchain alternatives?
Credit cards, p2p payments in various countries, and cash.
All digital currencies in one form or another are inferior to existing financial instruments.
Not anonymous nor decentralized
> p2p payments in various countries
Such as?
>cash
Not digital.
>All digital currencies in one form or another are inferior to existing financial instruments.
Then please explain to me how do I make an anonymous payment online without a third party using existing financial instruments.
Random examples:
- Brendan Eich was purged for being found to have donated to anti-gay marriage campaigns. Therefore, donating anonymously is obviously desirable for many people as your current beliefs may affect your career when the general rhetoric changes. Similarly, anonymous donations, which are very common, may be your preferred choice simply because you don't want the receiver or anyone else to know
- You were diagnosed with a mental disorder in your home country, and you move to a different country. In the new country, the medication you were prescribed is not available for pharmacies to sell. All the alternative medications you tried do not work, and it's illegal to buy your medication that was legal in the other country. With non-anonymous payments, buying the medication through financial services would put you at a high risk, so you would be forced to sacrifice your wellbeing/mental health.
- Your government is aggressively hyperinflating your national currency or capital controls limit the amount that you can cash out daily to $X. Use of credit or debit to pay out of the country is banned. You want to use a decentralized currency that need not be approved by the government or any other third party that you need to trust. Anonymity is optional, but perhaps you don't want to risk having your digital wealth traced back to your real ID.
- You value your privacy. Maybe because you don't want companies to sell your data for machine learning algorithms to track your payment behavior and apply "price discrimination" algorithms to you. Maybe you believe that it is only your business who you pay and what you pay for, and you don't trust that any of these will not be used against you in the future if used via a centralized entity.
All based on real events.
>I think that's where we disagree
We disagree that situations that are not relevant to you may be relevant to others?
I love how the takeaway from this is always, "We need more private ways to exchange money!" rather than, "You know, maybe you should have opinions that respect the human rights of others."
It's a very good point.
A mere 10 years later you are insulting someone you likely don't know for 'not respecting human rights'!
Example 1: It's possible that eating non-labgrown meat will be considered a crime within fifty years. Who knows? Are you sure you want all of your current actions judged by some unknown future values?
Example 2: How sure are you that future society will agree with the current 'clump of cells' argument? Would you want to be on the record forever donating to abortion clinics? Your political ideology may not always be in charge either (Mike Pence).
Example 3: Society in a decade might consider us brutes for driving cars manually. How do we accept ~1/X000 high school students dying in car crashes, mostly by preventable causes (drinking, distractions, speeding, seat belt, etc).
We have not reached moral perfection as a society. Future society practicing moral relativism is not guaranteed. So, protect your future self, and protect your privacy.
E.g., courts can transfer ownership of your car from you to someone else for a variety of reasons, without your consent. How does this work in a blockchain world?
Your answer might be that the State (or the judicial system, I suppose) should have some special private key that lets them sign transactions transferring anything to anyone, even if the previous owner doesn't consent.
If so, why is that better than just having a plain old centrally controlled, publicly accessible database that the State signs with their private key? What does blockchain technology give you over that?
blockchain are immutable and public. therefore the government can’t be corrupt and steal/funnel people’s property like they do in the real world now. we can all scrutinize the transactions.
How does that work in a blockchain world? If I stole the car's digital title (via hacking, coercion, etc.) and after getting caught, I refuse to cough up my private key... I can effectively prevent any transaction returning the car to its rightful owner. At that point either the ledger is broken and useless OR you need a judge to be able to force a hard fork, and system is no longer decentralized.
Your second paragraph about having an immutable public record to prevent corruption seems like it could be solved more simply by just having the government continually publish a record of transactions, which anyone can archive or mirror to verify the government never tries to secretly rewrite the past. I.e., a public git repo could solve that, no?
Currently, if you want to buy or sell real-estate, you have to record that transaction on a central government database. These "databases" used to be paper documents, but are now slowly moving to electronic systems. But they are still centrally controlled, and often even new systems are horribly out-of-date and require specialized real-estate companies to record transactions and pull transaction history, with hefty service fees, often several thousand dollars per sale.
If this real-estate system was based on the blockcahin, it could remove the government as a central source of trust and title companies that specialize in interacting with it would face far more competition. In theory, it could reduce transaction costs to buy and sell real-estate. Admittedly, this may solve some problems but create others, but the benefit is quite clear.
You need to connect that transaction to a contract and the contract in turn needs to be verified by some third-party and some process. In a develop country, that process is going to be tied to government.
That said, you should take a look at the current system. In many counties, it's still a large ledger of transactions in pencil and paper. In "modernized" counties, but with with extremely restricted access, made intentionally hard-to-access to keep title insurance companies in business.
Title insurance companies charge thousands of dollars on every sale to insure legal claims to property. Any trustworthy publicly accessible database, crypto-based or not, would be a huge improvement over the current system.
It's not perfect for that either. There have already been cases where tokens were stolen and blockchains were forked to recover them. The very last thing I want for my money is for errors and/or malicious acts to be permanent and uncorrectable.
EDIT: it also protects you in cases where someone holds a gun to your head and forces you to make a transaction.
Best takedown of cryptocurrencies that I've seen. Explains, as succinctly as possible, the fatal flaw in the idea. I'm gonna steal this line for the future.
> and guess what, someone can hold a gun to your head and take it.
Those are contradictory statements. The government can absolutely reverse a criminal taking your money by arresting them and returning the stolen cash.
It is important to note that "they" is usually the company that charged the card, not the bank or merchant processor. It is very similar to receiving a refund.
No. The only case when someone ever threatened to hold gun to my head and demanded money was taxation. With cryptocurrency it's possible to avoid that, because they don't know how much money you have. And even when they do know, it's much harder for them to take it, they need to know password.
Tax evasion is a crime and you should go to jail (you are exploiting the benefits you have received from society). But big companies find tax loopholes all the time and they go to white-collar prisons or get away with it anyways.
No reason why this can't be implemented on top of a cryptocurrency for anyone who wants it.
Just like banks were able to add that feature on top of gold and cash.
I had professional experience in an industry where we had to go to the plants to ensure rolls of paper certified from suppliers using responsibly-managed forests were physically separated from the non-certified ones. We needed the paperwork coming from China, then another one from the transformation plant in Morocco, then in customer warehouses across Europe.
An external protocol that would provide universal tracability, usable by any actor of the chain, seem like a great solution to a real problem. Blockchain provides some "neutrality", ie no need for each actor to find its own certificate provider (I imagine that service shops would help larger companies set up their systems, but the back-end would be common across all actors).
I'm not very convinced by pseudo-decentralized apps in most domains, but in logistics... very bullish !
Say you want to trace eco paper rolls around the globe. What could the blockchain do for you? Who are the nodes/miners/coins in this application?
When you suspect some intermediate in the paper chain to exchange eco paper for cheaper ordinary paper, how does distributing the information that he has X rolls on store prevent this scenario.
Another feature is not related to inventory. Ledgers that have acute accountability features attached, where some stakeholders may have incentives to fake the records.
Like, for example transport truck driving schedules. Drivers are allowed only to drive so much, and there are penalties involved if the drivers don't rest enough. The main accountability measure here is the driving ledger. Whose maintainer has incentives to fudge it (the driver or the employer of the driver).
To understand this, first you have to understand why we structure mining. In the case of Bitcoin or Ethereum, you need a method that allows any arbitrary computational device to verify and add to a given blockchain. In lieu of trusting that device, the blockchain makes it do a massive amount of busywork, called mining, to prove it isn't bullshitting the network. Different implementations have different busywork, but it's designed to make it hard to change the network by arbitrary devices. This is why we can allow any untrusted device on the network.
In the case of logistics, we are already operating under some amount of trust. This is through a mechanism of certification of goods, suppliers, verifying the goods are what they say they are, and the verification of those approvals and certifications. Even in a trusted environment, managing that coordination of certifying and verifying is slow, bureaucratic, and grows with the size of the logistic network. Additionally, many supply chains generally certify new entrants before allowing them to contribute. This creates a barrier to entry when establishing trust in the same way busywork creates a barrier for devices. Then there are whole units of auditors that go through and recheck all those certifications to make sure the whole chain is authentic with regards to the goods moving through it.
Blockchain technology is a mechanism of creating certifications (signing a transaction) and verifying those certifications (miners/verifiers on a chain) that can operate in a decentralized but coordinated way. It allows for the whole system to better coordinate information and certification that used to be done manually.
Did you notice I never mentioned tokens?
How do you verify that the physical objects the digital certificate is attached to, is actually attached to the things it is meant to certify, and not replacement counterfeit?
At it's heart logistics is a global concurrency problem. The "locks" we use now are large sprawling bureaucracies that manually coordinate the transfer of information among many independently moving agents. Getting information into and out of this organization is a tedious, labor-intensive, and time consuming process. The technology that empowers cryptotokens is an alternate computerized concurrency management for this kind of information transfer and lookup that doesn't rely on a central organization or system.
In this model, I'll refer to it as Proof of Reputation (PoR), an actor might be a certified as a reputable party in the network. You might be a certified producer of bananas, verified and certified as fair trade and humane organic hand-crafted conditions by other organizations. I'm a buyer of bananas, but I want to make sure I'm buying fair trade bananas. I can look at your certification-of-origin and verify that you are reputable as fair trade. A port authority can confirm that I bought your bananas and put them on the USS Boaty McBoatface destined for Los Angeles to meet the huge banana split market. You as a consumer can check these certifications at the store.
As it stands, all of these processes operate haphazardly and it's insanely difficult for major countries to coordinate and verify what is going on. The coordination technologies, like Ethereum's GHOST implementation, combined with public-key infrastructure helps reduce the "deadlock" time of coordinating these large public and private bureaucracies.
I know I'm not explaining this well. I'm still working on a more concrete model. In my mind the process of creating, signing, and verifying a cryptotoken transaction is eerily similar to what logistics management is all about. You need to prove the origin, verify they made the transaction, and then have a reputable actor process said transaction. There's still a lot of manual work, but the system of sharing and coordinating that work is also painful and manual. The technologies that power cryptotokens can help with the latter problem.
Now how do you get "the blockchain" to know which paper rolls went into which shipping container.
The blockchain would be a decentralized papertrail accessible to all actors of the supply chain, down to the end consumer ideally, instead of the current nightmare of shipment papers, siloed ERPs and so on
bad actor: I manufacture the cheaper rolls, and stick labels for the expensive ones on, and scan them
How will "the blockchain" prevent either scenario
Bad actor: unless you intend to use rolls by yourself, what do you gain? You can't sell the better rolls as such, because you have broken chain of trust.
But such arguments lead nowhere. Of course you can come up with scenarios which can be misused. The real challenge (and one that is being solved by lots of people in crypto world - well, at least those that aren't consumed by greed) is finding scenarios that work. The ability to store information cheaply and immutably can change many industries, but technology must be deployed in such way that it makes sense.
More generally, modern blockchain technology brings a lot of capabilities besides this replicated, ownerless consensus that personally I see as building blocks for your architecture. Most of them are not necessarily exclusive to blockchain, in fact lots are cryptography capabilities, but are enabled or facilitated by blockchain architecture or by each other. These are things like:
- Immutability, which is the guarantee that you have a historical record of data stored, and it won't be further changed, accidentally or maliciously.
- Notarization, which is the ability to record and identify the authencity of the originator of the information, even if you don't want to reveal the infromation or the originator identity.
- The balance between transparency, anonimity and privacy: you have tools when designing your solution to make all transactions and information trackable or not. For example you can design it so you can record transactions without revealing sender, receiver and values and still guarantee the consistency of the whole, that there's no double spending or creation of resources. Or you can design it so you can track the whole history of a resource from its creation to its consumption.
- And the coins/tokens per se, particularly when you are not looking at them as general currency or toll tokens that you simply buy and spend somewhere but when you look at them as incentives where you can control how they are created, distributed, deposited, what it means to hold/deposit them, and how to spend them. You can change who the stakeholder is and monetize user's attention, his data, behaviour. I don't think people quite figured it out yet how to properly apply this for things like social networks, journalism or creative work ("patreonism"), but it's being explored and moving along.
Everything is still quite immature and moving at breakneck speed with uncountable new projects and ideas appearing all the time, which I see them as proof of concepts of the capabilities above, variations of them, of even new different ones. And lots of scams or profiteers wanting to get into the blockchain/ICO hype.
It's quite hard to find the balance between the exagerated hype and the naysayers (which I feel lots are just an exagerated reaction against the hype), but I assure you, it's way more than just what anyone with a CS background can come up with.
To paraphrase -- "if you discount everything a blockchain does, what can you only do with a blockchain". This is not a reasonable approach.
Yes, blockchains are (now, at least), trivial. A merkle tree or simile distributed database with multiple writers and time-based consensus...a lot like git, really. There are an enormous number of potential uses of such a technology -- security and land ownership, contracts, etc. Virtually anything where you want an auditable, immutable historical record and where the data has many interested parties. This historically was accomplished via a centralized trusted database, but that doesn't mean that's the only solution.
HN, in many ways, is overly cynical at times, and is too eager to try to knock down the hypesters, throwing the baby out with the bath water to make a point.
At what point are the fundamental assumptions going to be questioned?
I have no idea why a company would use blockchain for logistics or file storage considering how its massively expensive to constantly pay miners for transactions.
My centralized server can do everything needed for logistics or file storage.
Benefits of blockchain are overblown. There are uses, but centralized servers are really good.
Now I agree that a lot of ideas for how blockchain will be used are just unnecessary and stupid, but there are some good ones as well.
You mentioned file storage but actually I think blockchain could be useful for this. Allow me to elaborate.
I don’t want to rely on Dropbox or Google or any other single company for the long-term storageof my data. And I don’t want to accidentally upload unencrypted data. And I don’t want a single company to decide what platforms they will support.
I want an open protocol and a nice open source client. Different people have different wishes. For me that would be far more attractive than the centralized storage you are suggesting, because it’s not just about the servers and the storage it’s also about the people and the software ecosystem around it.
And besides, if I gave like hundreds of GB of data to one company then they could easily start charging me more in the future and I might not be able to do much about it. With a distributed system I think there is a better chance that competition might drive prices down more.
And that’s just one kind of use-case. There are more as well.
I think blockchain in general is cool and also I like projects that aim to make worldwide payment be really fast and cheap and for the banks to hold less power over my money.
What's the point of the blockchain?
Dropbox got a similar response, no? That it can be replaced by rsync.
The point of the blockchain is to allow me to rent storage space on other people’s computers.
Wasabi and B2 are pretty much the only commercial services which could even attempt to compete on price with something like Sia today (Filecoin and others in the future potentially), but they're only in single DCs and if they lose your data you have no one to go after. In the cryptocurrency-based systems, this is all automated.
For as many incredibly stupid and useless applications of blockchains as there are, this isn't one of them in my opinion. It may not be unique, but it's actually something that could have a competitive edge over a centralized service.
You're missing OVH, which has multiple DCs.
Automating the upload to different endpoints is not exactly something exclusive to the blockchain, I already have that with git-annex.
It would be nice to see Sia/Filecoin provide some basic DB metrics like availability, durability, latency, bandwidth... things that any prospective client would absolutely need to know.
Or any entity? Sure you can trust that once it is in the blockchain it won't get tampered with but you still have to trust the source of that record.
... which is where all these stupid "do your inventory management on the blockchain" things fall apart with even an ounce of thought. Who gives a crap if the blockchain trustlessly says the wine was made with grapes from peru if a corruptible human had to enter it...
At some point, all data comes from humans and you have to trust those humans to do the right thing. And when those humans breech that trust, you need meatspace based institutions to sort out the mess...
Two things: this statement is so vague it borders on meaningless. What assets? Who will put it in there? The president? Why would a government do that? Is it free to do or is there budget? Etc.
Secondly, even if we could surmount the vagueness that plagues not just this idea but all blockchain ideas, the Herculean effort required to move governments which can barely move themselves seems like it would delay the whole thing by decades.
It all starts with how vague the ideas are. It really requires simply staring at the ceiling and figuring out precisely what you mean when you talk about blockchain ideas.
Citation needed. The Arizona senate barely passed one such bill, but it would still need to pass the House and the governor. Arizona's government is known to do silly things in a vain attempt to be tech relevant.
How the hell does blockchain solve any problem in these spaces?
Rinse and repeat for Big Data, ML, AI, Bockchain, and whatever the next fad will be.
Many companies are making a lot of money from implementing or integrating "Cloud", "Big Data" and "ML". They're not fad technologies. Blockchain hasn't done anything yet so should not be lumped in with them.
Bitcoin and Ethereum are "almost no fruit"? Combined they're sitting at ~$165 billion dollars in created value.
Huh? Bitcoin and Ehtereum are purely speculative assets, they have not enabled any new production or efficient distribution, they have not increased economic activity. They aren't even marginally useful in electronics production like gold is.
This is like saying printing dollars creates value (though the dollar is at least useful as an instrument of trade).
You know of another way to transfer massive amounts of money around the globe without middle men? This claim that cryptocurrency offers no value is completely ignorant of the most basic and fundamental properties of the technology.
No, because I have to go through various middlemen to transfer Bitcoin and turn them into real money.
The question is whether Bitcoin and Ethereum have provided value. "Have" means in the past up to and including the present.
You are implicitly agreeing with the statement that Bitcoin is only speculative, by admitting that it will only be useful without middlemen in a hypothetical future where it achieves wide adoption.
Bitcoin is useless for any legitimate business. The costs of using it vastly exceed any benefits.
A lot of dopes who think they’re smarter than the tax-man because they’ve been evading taxes by using bitcoin are going to have a ‘Martin Shkreli’ moment in the next few years.
The only interesting feature of bitcoin is the trustless consensus but it's not as useful or revolutionary as the hype would have you believe. In particular it's only working as intended as long as you remain withing the digital world, as soon as meatspace is involved you need trusted third parties and arbiters. "Blochain technology" whatever that is, is a solution in search of a problem.
>Command Query Responsibility Segregation is a software pattern that divides the system into two distinct parts, an append-optimised command side and a read-optimised query side.
My point was about the "append-optimised" part. Of course the blockchain can be arbitrarily fast to query but you can only make about 5 transactions (or "inserts") per second on the bitcoin blockchain on average. Not very impressive as far as DBs are concerned.
hackernoon.com/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-a-use-case-for-blockchain-ee98c180100
Why you don’t want a blockchain https://twitter.com/jimmysong/status/964172100054417409
Do you need a blockchain? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16315456
Avoiding the pointless blockchain project: How to determine if you’ve found a real blockchain use case https://www.multichain.com/blog/2015/11/avoiding-pointless-b...
The reason is that the institutions that created these things are extremely well insulated from competition. They are well insulated from competition, in part, because they have acquired the public's trust, through a long track record of not stealing everyone's money.
Solutions to the distributed adversarial consensus problem provide a way to give new businesses access to the same, or even greater, levels of public trust. Now - obviously there are still scams in this space. When I say 'trust', what I mean is, in the sense that two counterparties can transact in a way that doesn't require intermediation to ensure the completion of the transaction.
This really is a fundamentally novel and socially significant innovation. It really does reshape the competitive landscape of a number of industries. At least, it has the potential to. But it is also true that there is an enormous amount of greed and hype floating around. And this isn't in any way intended to justify the ICO scams, or the sky high prices of the existing currencies. It's not clear that anyone has yet figured out the right interface and set of practices for actually realizing all these economic gains. Nobody has yet made the iPhone of blockchain.
But the basic technical problem - distributed adversarial consensus was indeed solved by Satoshi. And that really does have substantial, positive social implications for the future. And I fear that people here are losing sight of that because of the gyrations of these silly markets.
It absolutely does no such thing. Trust has nothing to do with technology and you'll never escape the need to trust real world, meatspace based institutions and humans. At the end of the day you are arguing "code is law", which is a pile of fresh horse manure, clear to anybody who saw what happened to The DAO.
Technology is created and governed by humans and you have to trust those humans. You need human meatspace based institutions in place to deal with when that trust is broken. No technology will replace this--at least in any kind of world I'd want to live in.
Satoshi's Glorious Blockchain will never succeed because it is a technological solution to a problem that can never be solved by technology.
Anecdotes are not arguments. You keep making statements, but providing no justification for them. You could say all of the things you just said about the internet in the mid 90s. And people did. And then in 2001, those people felt vindicated. But today, they look like the fools that they were.
Ya, that's distributed adversarial consensus. Decentralized currencies are an excellent instance of such conditions. They really are a useful and interesting application. That doesn't mean they deserve all this hype in the form of investment from the average person, but if they weren't so hyped, they'd have a serious use-case as a world reserve currency and they'd make a very nice international settlement layer. Because all of the countries in the world would know that the currency was politically neutral. I think that's a pretty sweet/useful property to have.
There are definitely a few other cases where adversarial consensus problems exist too. I think decentralized prediction markets are a pretty great application of smart contracts, for instance. But yes, a lot of these things are way way over-hyped and being pushed for things way beyond their useful scope.
"Permissioned blockchains" is like someone thought "what if we took the radios out of cellphones and connected them by cables" and proceeded to call that a brand new invention.
What people don't realize is that Satoshi's solution only works if two assumptions hold true:
1. Mining is decentralized: If mining is centralized than relying on proof-of-work for consensus is waste since the centralized entity controls the blockchain anyway.
2. Consensus rules don't change: If you see the threat of #1 and so take power away from miners (like Bitcoin has done), then you cannot ever change the consensus ruleset because aside from proof-of-work, Satoshi did not give any solution to the problem of choosing between 2 chains that have slightly different consensus rules. If you change the consensus ruleset (ie. make any changes where 2 nodes disagree on if a block is valid or not), then you need an oracle to tell you which chain to choose. We've seen this when Core developers chose the 0.7 Bitcoin chain in 2013 and when Vitalik chose the forked Ethereum chain in 2016.
At the end of the day, the blockchain's decentralization is a myth because it relies on false assumptions. Satoshi invented a Rube Goldberg machine that is currently using as much electricity as a medium-sized country (and also enabling things like money laundering, drug trafficking, etc.).
No, because blockchain is not a consensus protocol.
The principle value of Bitcoin as a protocol is its incredible (even detrimental, from a technical perspective) simplicity.
They also think that it's Proof of Work that provides a lack of trust. While that's involved, what's actually more meaningful is the demand to quickly select a "profitable" branch to mine and re-mine on. That can exist in PoS as well.
It’s still early days, unfortunately the hype got far ahead of the tech but progress is being made everyday. I think the same of VR/AR.
If only. If Only. IF ONLY. iF oNLY. If OnLy. iF oNlY.
The other two possible environments being multi-administrative (permissioned DLT deployed among a consortium of banks or entities sharing administrative privileges) or no-administrative (public permissionless blockchains like Bitcoin/Ethereum). The hard problem is developing consensus algos for the latter that scale while maintaining security of the shared ledger.
1) Non-technical friendly overview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzWiiOLv96I
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/hedera-hashgraph-co...
[1] https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2018/03/26/consensus-sy...
What are you talking about? The rule to choose the correct chain is well defined and simple. The longest chain, i.e. the one with the most work done, is the correct chain.
Some developers would agree with you though, like Gavin Andresen [0].
Either way, you end up with either centralized miners deciding the fate of the chain, or centralized developers deciding the fate of the chain. Both outcomes are contrary to what Satoshi envisioned.
Useless pedantry that doesn't even map into real world use. The real world has shown your definition is incorrect.
Ethereum forked. Which ethereum fork is the "correct" one? Bitcoin forked. Which one is the correct one? Depends on who you ask...
My understanding is that the danger of miner control is not "double-spending" but making multiple spends and being able to pick the most favorable one after the fact.
As a non-controller if you try to double-spend, you can't know which one of your attempted transactions will be recorded in the ledger and which will be rejected. As a 51% controlling miner, you can choose the 'correct' transaction.
This allows the 51% controlling miner to engage in futures arbitrage.
If it wasn't clear, my comment was referring to a double-spend that would result in an invalid block i.e. both transactions are on the same chain. I simply used an example to argue that it's always been the case that invalid chains are rejected by honest nodes.
Taken to the logical conclusion, a supernode that is issuing algorithm changes is no different from a supernode that is signing blocks directly, just vastly more inefficient. Since you are already centralized, there is no reason to have miners at all. It becomes a ponzi scheme where the rewards are paid out randomly to participants.
Cryptocurrency mining is as close as one can get to a theoretical free market in the real world. Free markets have known modes of failure [1]. One of these is where first-mover advantage and economies of scale combine to produce a barrier to entry; the result is oligopoly or monopoly.
This is ultimately what I think will sink blockchain as a medium of exchange (not necessarily as a store of value). By its very nature it cannot be cheap, so TTPs will always be able to beat it on price.
If things do end up being an oligopoly, then any one of the members of that oligopoly will only have a relatively small sprint between their current position and a 51% attack. And quite a few options for how to attempt such a sprint.
Work needs to be approximately the same difficulty for everyone
Edit: It seems this thread has gone off on a tangent. I was adding to the discussion of flawed assumptions, not ethics.
Perhaps it would diminish the ability for early users to extract wealth and capital from later users?
Bitcoin cash is trying an other route with bigger blocks but it remains to be seen if it scales well enough to real-world currency usage. And of course there's the big problem of cryptocurrencies being useless as currencies because they're not stable enough. Which itself can be largely blamed on their limited supply and inflationary nature which is necessary to bootstrap them (there's an incentive to get in early) but seems to turn against them in the long run since nobody wants to spend something that's by design supposed to become scarcer and scarcer.
It might be theoretically free but it doesn't work great so far. And of course we could discuss whether a completely free market is a good or a bad thing, but that's a whole different debate.
The centralization narrative involving LN is somewhat mischaracterized IMHO. Given that source-routing puts control of payments into the the payer, you can choose to mitigate the custodial risk of a single hop holding up your funds in their payment channel a number of ways. For instance, there is no reason one payment from person A to person B needs to involve only one route.
Intelligent wallet software, on the order of tens of milliseconds, could break up one payment of $10 into 100 different routes across numerous payment channels. In addition to giving you custodial risk mitigation, its also beneficial for privacy as well.
That gives well connected "bank" nodes a lot of power because they can decide who they connect with (you could imagine paying a "bank" node to connect with you to enable cheaper transactions for your customers) and as a user you have an incentive to host your coins in one of these bank nodes so that it remains easily and cheaply available for purchases. Meanwhile a small indie shop (or some guy selling socks on ebay) won't have any channel so transacting with them will end up more expensive than buying from a popular store.
Basically you've reinvented Visa without the insurance, regulations and customer protection. At least that's how it looks like to me.
I guess we'll know soon enough which one of us is right. Maybe the truth is somewhere in between.
I think it ends up being more nuanced than that, with plenty of gradations of all of those factors.
If it means, "Literally nobody can know whether I prefer pads or tampons, and where I get them, not even the person I buy pads or tampons from", then I'm going to lean toward paying cash at some random drug store. A brick and mortar because getting things shipped to me requires giving them identifying information, and cash because it has literally zero fees and leaves no paper trail.
If I have to buy something online, then I already have to give them my name and address so I can get it shipped to me. At that point I may not care if my bank and the credit card processing agency also have a record of the transaction, because the info's already out there. At that point it's just a question of whether there are privacy laws that prevent parties from selling too much information or not - either way, I'm guessing 1 and 3 parties will ultimately fall in roughly the same equivalence class, on the privacy front.
Personally, I don't see a middle path where blockchain is preferable to either of those options. If I want complete privacy, then I don't want that transaction appearing on the blockchain, either. If I don't, well, might as well get some consumer protection.
Only the subset of privacy concerned consumers who don't want anyone to know whether they prefer pads or tampons will go out of their way to visit a random drug store.
Deflationary currencies worked well for literally thousands of years, when people used precious metals for their currency.
Inflationary monotary policy is a fairly recent invention of the 20th century.
But the point is to give people choices.
Some people do indeed prefer deflationary currencies, and that's OK.
The point of a small limited inflation is to encourage a healthy flow of capital into services, workers, and development of activities.
And those of us who prefer deflationary ones should be free to use those as well.
I don't get why the mere existence of alternatives pisses off economists and the like so much.
If inflationary currencies are so great, then that's fine, feel free to go use those, and those of us that disagree will choose something else.
And the majority chose inflationary monetary systems.
Each of us is free to offer to pay for goods and services with, say, for example, gold, and each of us is free to ask you trade your gold for legal tender and give us that instead - yeah, the one the tax agency accepts.
The only thing stopping deflationary currency from being used by most people is that most people are too busy surfing / skiing / rock climbing / recovering from a hang over / what have you to care much about how monetary value is exchanged. People, on the whole, only seem to really care about convenience. And more specifically, the more convenient it is to spend money, your own or credit, the better.
Unless you want to be able to force others to accept whatever you want to give as payment, sure.
Except that Bitcoin is (with consensual upgrade) infinitely divisible. (E.g. the network can [vote to] move to 16 decimal places, and so on).
It's zero sum (minus the cost wasted in maintaining the network), and the game theory Satoshi designed will inevitably disincentive new users from adopting it as the barrier to entry increases and alternative options will likely obsolete BTC.
>You could then still increase the virtual money supply through fractional reserve banking
You can't do fractional reserve banking on-chain as far as I know so that would mean having your money managed by 3rd party banks who would take ownership of your coins, pool them with other people's coins and manage them for you. So... Back to the start?
Furthermore I don't think it solves the problem of deflation, even with a fractional reserve the bank has no incentive to invest the money if the expected return are less than what it would end up with by not doing anything at all (and therefore not taking any risks either). If you have inflation of, say, 2% then any investment expected to create value or even lose less than 2% is a good one. If you have deflation of 2% then an investment that managed to generate 1% of additional value over your investment actually made you lose money because you'd have been better off not doing anything.
Therefore deflation will make it a lot harder to loan money, fractional reserve or not. Interest rates will be a lot higher to make up for it. The poor will pay the price for being poor, the rich will reap the reward for being rich.
>“investing” is a lot more like hoarding than it is spending…
Depends what you invest into I suppose, if you "invest" in gold bullions then you're right, if you're investing in a startup or loaning money to people buying houses then you're powering the economy.
If you have $100 on your bank account today then you've got incentives to spend or invest it soon because it's slowly losing value because of inflation, your $100 will probably buy you fewer goods and services in the future that it does now.
Now if you have BTC100 on your wallet and you believe that Bitcoin will succeed as a currency then you know for a fact that these bitcoins will be more valuable in the future than they are now (because the demand will grow but the supply is capped). Ergo you have strong incentives to hoard your bitcoins and not spend or invest them. Your savings gain value without actually being invested in anything. They don't contribute to the economy, they don't fund anything.
I don't understand why most cryptocurrency enthusiasts don't see a huge problem in this. How will you get a loan to start your company in the bitcoin world? Who would want to take such a risk when they'll keep getting richer by not doing anything at all? You'd have to promise them ridiculously high returns (higher than bitcoin's deflation at least). The rich gets richer by virtue of being rich, the poor needs to buy food and basic utilities so they can't save their coins to become rich. Basically what we have today, only worse.
That said, there's no guarantee that BTC or any crypto will appreciate indefinitely; in fact quite the opposite. It can (and does) lose value.
This also overlooks the benefits of a non-fiat currency, such as protection against things like hyper-inflation (most of us don't think about this right now, but if you have any friends in Venezuela ask them how important this protection is).
Begging the question.
Its the problem that the advocates for larger blocksizes in BTC ran into. So long as the ecosystem itself was predominantly going to stay on the bitcoin core implementation, the advocates for change couldn't force it. Eventually they just hard forked into BCH, while the more popular original chain keeps on going.
That also means that nothing is really decentralized unless you can cause sea change amongst all participants in a cryptocurrency - if you disagree with what the most common implementation is doing, you can't do squat about it, and commit access is never decentralized or democratized. Theres always someone with the master key to the repo. And we have seen plenty of evidence that once established unseating a popular implementation of any crypto is nigh-impossible, regardless of what the developers do.
Blockchain may have value as a decentralized ledger in other areas, but “lots of blockchain based currencies” aren’t really one of them since it’s self-sabotaging.
Don't we? I can think of a dozen or more social networks of one sort or another that I've belonged to in the last decade or so.
Past performance does not beget future success.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2007/feb/08/business....
And by prospered I mean, never made money, never became self-sustaining at all.
Facebook is still expanding in its 15th year.
MySpace never earned a profit pre Fox acquisition (the Google deal gave it a one time bump).
In historical terms, MySpace is barely a bump in the road, about the size of an Ask.fm type service (ie trivial in today's hyper scale). It's like looking back and thinking Excite was a juggernaut and therefore a supporting piece of evidence that Google is going to die soon.
Facebook will earn ~$20 billion in 2018 and will end the year with $50 billion in cash. That's 86 times what MySpace sold to Fox for.
MySpace peaked in size at a mere 75 million monthly active users. Facebook is nearly 30 times larger.
MySpace then is to Facebook now, what AltaVista at its peak is to Google today.
One important point: if we actually include all 7 billion
people on the earth, most of whom have zero BTC or
Ethereum, the Gini coefficient is essentially 0.99+. And
if we just include all balances, we include many dust
balances which would again put the Gini coefficient at
0.99+. Thus, we need some kind of threshold here. The
imperfect threshold we picked was the Gini coefficient
among accounts with ≥185 BTC per address, and ≥2477 ETH
per address. So this is the distribution of ownership
among the Bitcoin and Ethereum rich with $500k as of July
2017.
In what kind of situation would a thresholded metric like
this be interesting? Perhaps in a scenario similar to the
ongoing IRS Coinbase issue, where the IRS is seeking
information on all holders with balances >$20,000.
Conceptualized in terms of an attack, a high Gini
coefficient would mean that a government would only need
to round up a few large holders in order to acquire a
large percentage of outstanding cryptocurrency — and with
it the ability to tank the price.
With that said, two points. First, while one would not
want a Gini coefficient of exactly 1.0 for BTC or ETH (as
then only one person would have all of the digital
currency, and no one would have an incentive to help boost
the network), in practice it appears that a very high
level of wealth centralization is still compatible with
the operation of a decentralized protocol. Second, as we
show below, we think the Nakamoto coefficient is a better
metric than the Gini coefficient for measuring holder
concentration in particular as it obviates the issue of
arbitrarily choosing a threshold.
...However, the maximum Gini coefficient has one obvious
issue: while a high value tracks with our intuitive notion
of a “more centralized” system, the fact that each Gini
coefficient is restricted to a 0–1 scale means that it
does not directly measure the number of individuals or
entities required to compromise a system.
Specifically, for a given blockchain suppose you have a
subsystem of exchanges with 1000 actors with a Gini
coefficient of 0.8, and another subsystem of 10 miners
with a Gini coefficient of 0.7. It may turn out that
compromising only 3 miners rather than 57 exchanges may be
sufficient to compromise this system, which would mean the
maximum Gini coefficient would have pointed to exchanges
rather than miners as the decentralization bottleneck.
Conversely, if one considers “number of distinct countries
with substantial mining capacity” an essential subsystem,
then the minimum Nakamoto coefficient for Bitcoin would
again be 1, as the compromise of China (in the sense of a
Chinese government crackdown on mining) would result in
>51% of mining being compromised.
Any type of currency that doesn't have something limiting the supply (not fixed, but at least constrained) becomes valueless by default.
Even if Bitcoin is limited, if cryptocurrencies themselves are not then we're all just giving people a license to print money.
At least with the Federal Reserve there is a governing body limiting the supply of new dollars entering into the system.
And that is bad?
If you're trying to take a dig at blockchain technology for its decentralized nature and ability to circumvent government controls, you should be aware that this is considered a good thing. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16702684, for instance. The recent SESTA/FOSTA debacle is one example of why such decentralized networks are needed.
And this very assumption is so untrue. What Satoshi invented is document timestamping protocol, not consensus protocol.
"Darknet markets are no longer a major use of Bitcoin, accounting for less than 1% of Bitcoin transactions in 2017"
I think that even if decentralized consensus is workable, it's irrelevant for Wall Street projects because these organizations already have experience creating strong trust relationships and useful governance for collaboration (e.g., traditional contracts).
At this point, I don't worry about those; criminals would operate with or without Bitcoin and we have government agencies dealing with those; I'm more concern about suicide rate that will spike due to BTC/altcoins losing 80% of value.
I have too many acquaintances on my Twitter that last summer were showing me "this cool blue app that helps make 15% a day" and now they remain silent. I tried to contact two of them via cell and it goes nowhere.
Looking at BTC/ETH/altcoins charts, I can only image brain-halt it caused so many people that we putting second/third mortage on their house just to "invest in a blue iphone app" and many cashing out their 401k just to be lest with 5% of their money not even year later.
The social question is the more interesting one. Tech history has suggested that people slowly but surely gravitate to more open systems, but asking folks to hold their life savings in digital currencies that rely on mathamatical promises completly foreign to the average user seems like quite a stretch. It does not exactly help that just about day there is a news article of some new data breach of an online system.
the sizzle of blockchain is enticing, it solves huge problems that are darn well intractable without "disruption".
for example in finance the global clearing system is an embarrassing hodge podge that only benefits the fraudulent and the incompetent - and replacing that completely over night has enormous attractions for pretty much every actor. but ... it is really a silver bullet - if it was so easy to replace global clearing, to get everyone agreeing on one representation of a trade or an instrument or a hundred other things i honestly never understood, if it was that easy it would have happened.
this sort of sector wide cohesion comes with either one dominant player or many years of government level negotiations
The web only blew past everyone in most areas because there were no global communications between parties at all in the areas the web now dominates (cf social media vs international shipping documentation)
Let's take settlements. Some instruments are (still, in this day and age) ultimately issued in bearer form (ie, if you have the piece of paper, you own the bond/shares/title to the land/whatever, just like cash). This has a number of problems (you'd be surprised how many people lose bearer instruments). There's a similar, but less serious, problem with requirements for paper certificates in registered form.
The only real way to fix those is to change the law so that instruments can be dealt with in purely electronic registered form and the bearer instruments don't exist to start with.
Some jurisdictions haven't changed the law to allow this so we are stuck with legal title being bearer or paper certificate based. Blockchain by itself as such can't fix the problem of "what happens if you lose the instrument" and can't fix the problem of "what happens if you refuse to hand over the instrument in performance of a valid contract".
A trusted third party (nominee/custodian/etc), by contrast, can fix some of this pretty well (trusted third party keeps the instrument in a vault and issues its own electronic registered form instruments which confer "good enough" title most of the time).
i was trying to say that the sizzle was more than the reality - a trusted (neutral) third party will solve all the claimed issues - it's just that the reason this has not happened in many sectors is because the issues the third party / blockchain can solve are not the issues preventing adoption - it's like car manufacturers would like to dump their dealers and sell direct - but no one is prepared to risk a huge downside. Tesla might be "disruptive" but no one seriously thinks Tesla will replace all other car sales - and so dealer networks will remain (for a while).
i think the analogy holds :-)
I dont know any commercial usage outside of cryptocurrencies.
Bitcoin has had problems with both the investment, and the deposit arms. Most ICOs are pure fraud, and i've lost count of the number of robbed exchanges.
In Mexico for example: http://iireporter.com/amis-and-ibm-collaborate-on-blockchain...
I saw a very good presentation regarding this HyperLedger project, and IMO this kind of projects are the ones that will form the future of blockchain technology.
I'm all for people trying things out; prototypes are how we learn. So good for them for trying it and seeing what happens; maybe one day it will be useful. But it's maddening that people keep confusing marketing-driven press releases for actual delivered utility.
Don't be dense.
You were responding in a contradictory fashion to somebody saying, "Innumerable efforts have been attempted, yielding almost no fruit." The only thing that could usefully contradict that is proof of something yielding fruit. A press release isn't. Neither is the fact that they've managed to get the prototype running. There are a lot of blockchain prototypes running. Many of them are proposed and built by consulting companies that get paid by the hour, whether or not any actual business value is delivered. IBM has such an enormous conflict of interest here that they're just not a reliable source.
I'm sure you're friend's sincere, but there are plenty of sincere blockchain proponents. There were plenty of smart, sincere people who believed in 3D TV, Google Glass, and the Zune as well.
TCP was created in the mid 70's. The internet as we know it didn't offer the average user much value until the mid 90's and even then it was a very small amount of the population capable of using it / benefiting from it.
Electric cars were around in the late 1800's. In the early 1900's they were on a par with gasoline / steam powered car sales. It has taken us well over 100 years to get to a stage where they're considered a viable option again for most people again...
Bottom line - technology morphs over time so long as there are people passionate about it and continuously working to improve it. There are literally thousands of developers working full time in the blockchain space and it's one of the hottest growth areas around in technology in terms of developer mindshare.
It's not going to die any time soon, regardless of what price Bitcoin is.
The Internet was useful to academic, financial, government and military users in the 1970s [1]. It was built and iterated to solve real problems. Real users' inputs, many of whom were experts in their fields, were incorporated into its design.
Using it directly.
I don't personally own any equipment that speaks ATM, but I benefit from the existence of networks that use that protocol all time.
Heck, I doubt I'll ever touch a Bloomberg terminal, and I'm not entirely sure if their existence really benefits me at all, directly or indirectly, but that doesn't mean financial companies can't easily find uses for them.
No it's not. It took double entry accounting hundreds of years to spread around the world, why would you expect triple entry accounting to take over any faster? We already know it's going to succeed because it's objectively better by a very significant margin, but that doesn't mean it's not going to take decades to do so.
Here in modern times information moves orders of magnitude faster than when double entry accounting was invented.
By modern standards, blockchain is ancient and has yet to move beyond its current use as the world's greatest platform for financial fraud ever invented.
The speed of information is about as relevant as the cost of tea in China. What matters is how fast people actually change their minds, which isn't any faster. All of the older generation basically just has to die before the new best practices can get widely adopted. If anything change likely happens more slowly these days because people are living longer.
Doubtful. In what sense is it 'old'?
In the words of Roy Amara: We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.
Really? This doesn't seem true at all. I feel like it takes decades for many good ideas in tech to get traction, usually going through many, many failed iterations.
I mean, the question is not "Is Bitcoin as implemented by following the original whitepaper going to be the future of mankind?" It is whether or not there is something big in that whole area (blockchains, decentralized tokens of exchange, PoW/PoS/etc) and, if so, how big?
Of course, for a lot of people, the question is "By, say 2025, is my BTC going to make me rich or is it is not even going to be worth the bits it is encoded in?" Equally hard question to answer, but much less interesting.
The current cycle of blockchain furor could all end up badly (I hope it doesn't, but who knows), and yet that won't mean the tech has no future. Now, it could be like VR/AR/AGI, which are always the future, of course ;)
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m...
[2] McCulloch, Warren; Walter Pitts (1943). "A Logical Calculus of Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity". Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics
Linus started working on Linux in 1991.
Red Hat went public in 1999.
In technological terms, it is actually quite young.
https://www.google.com/search?q=trough+of+disillusionment&sa...
I had professional experience in an industry where we had to go to the plants to ensure rolls of paper certified from suppliers using responsibly-managed forests were physically separated from the non-certified ones. We needed the paperwork coming from China, then another one from the transformation plant in Morocco, then in customer warehouses across Europe.
An external protocol that would provide universal tracability, usable by any actor of the chain, seem like a great solution to a real problem. Blockchain provides some "neutrality", ie no need for each actor to find its own certificate provider (I imagine that service shops would help larger companies set up their systems, but the back-end would be common across all actors).
I'm not very convinced by pseudo-decentralized apps in most domains, but in logistics... very bullish !
If they throw out a signature they don't like, the system works perfectly fine - it's treated like any other untrusted product.
No one should trust a system that has a "don't trust this, it's bad" flag, it should always be "trust this, it's clean".
Courts. Laws. Governments.
For example, we could have had an identity verification protocol, bound to our browsers, that would have logged us in websites. We would not have needed FB oauth for ex. But it was not prioritized, and now that the Web has been taken over by closed garden, individual companies have very little incentive to contribute to these general-benefits protocols.
Token can be seen a way to incentivize adoption of these general-benefits protocols
The answer is that you need some kind of vetting and certification of the people contributing to your traceability database. So you need a trusted 3rd party to coordinate all that. So you don't need a blockchain. Instead why not just have the trusted 3rd party issue certificates like a CA on the web for instance? People would digitally sign the paperwork and you could collect the documents and their signatures in a central database. If somebody notices something wrong you can show that somebody made a fake or erroneous document and hold them responsible. Then you can publish dump of the database at regular intervals for people to mirror so that they can see if you attempt to rewrite history. There, problem solved using good old 1990's technology.
>very bullish !
Interesting that you finish your technical argument with trading lingo. Hodl, am I right?
I could generate a PGP key for Bill Gates right now, distribute it to the keyservers and sign a message saying that "I owe simias on hacker news one billion dollars". You could verify that the message was signed by my key beyond a doubt but so what?
Bitcoin doesn't have this problem thanks to PoW, when a miner submits a newly mined block the network doesn't need to check the miner's credentials, the block itself proves (statistically) that the miner did a certain amount of work to come up with the block. That's all that matters and the coins/fees are credited to the miner's address. That works because all the data necessary to create the consensus are available "objectively" on the blockchain for all to see. It doesn't matter if the miner pretends to be Abraham Lincoln, that's not what the blockchain works with.
Most problems don't have these properties, if I tell the blockchain "I have a brand new PS4 and I'm going to send it to X in exchange for n bitcoins" the blockchain has no objective way to track this transaction.
I think people raising these objections have not worked in a physical supply chain in the floor plant? I don't know, I have a difficulty to wrap my head around the objection. I am receiving a truckload of parts that I ordered - these parts have a barcode or a RFID identifier that tracks their provenance - the only change in the system would be that when I acknowledge the reception of the truckload, another block is appened to the blockchain-based history of the parts : Supplier + me the manufacturer. And so on across the supply chain.
I don't understand, are we talking about a scenario where a rogue actor would send me for fere a truckload of parts I have not ordered or something like that ?
Take for instance the blockchain De Beers (the diamond cartel) says it wants to create to track diamonds. Things like country of origin, quality etc... Tracking diamonds is especially important because you want to make sure that the diamonds you buy are not from a conflict zone, the so-called "blood diamonds".
Now imagine that you have a completely trustless bitcoin-like blockchain to track this. What prevents an African warlord from pretending to be Canadian and create fake entries for its diamonds into the blockchain pretending that they were mined in America? Then he can trade them without issue. The blockchain is unable to detect that a user hasn't the right nationality, nor can it track the physical origin and location of a diamond without having to trust somebody to tell it. Ergo your trustless blockchain is no more valuable than a random file on pastebin.com.
To solve this issue you'd need some trusted certification authority that would audit miners and grant them access to the blockchain once they've asserted that they are who they pretend to be. But if you do this then you have a trusted 3rd party and the blockchain can advantageously be replaced by any regular database of your choice managed by this 3rd party.
You can apply this reasoning to any physical good, from organic produce (how do you make sure that the producer isn't lying about making organic oranges?) to paper rolls (how do you know the producer isn't lying about using sustainable foresting techniques?). You need trusted third parties certifying and controlling these things to weed out cheaters.
I do not have the answers to your objections. I was replying to the common theme of "this is a solution is search for a problem". I am stating that there is a problem in search for a solution
Anyhow. I do think you are right. The integrity of the data has to be questioned. But I question why we have to assume that its useless just because it cannot be trusted? This paper trail is immutable. That is valuable. Future evidence can expose prior lies. Once you know that you have to maintain a lie for life, suddenly you are questioning if its really worth making.
You mean Kickstarter, which has nothing to do with blockchain?
"Anyhow. I do think you are right. The integrity of the data has to be questioned. But I question why we have to assume that its useless just because it cannot be trusted? This paper trail is immutable. That is valuable. Future evidence can expose prior lies. Once you know that you have to maintain a lie for life, suddenly you are questioning if its really worth making."
Says who? Both Bitcoin and Etherium have gone through forks of their chains.
Blockchain is having all of the functionality (and more) of Kickstarter with 10-20x more reach. Also, explain how you would use kickstarter to crowd-fund a gold-backed digital currency without Blockchain?
>Says who? Both Bitcoin and Etherium have gone through forks of their chains
The whole point if a Blockchain is you can tell if it's been forked, and really forks are just the exception proving the rule of immutability. Meaningful forks have happened a handful of times and they've been heavily publicized. How many times has a bank issued a chargeback?
It is only valuable on the blockchain if its cost to maintain is less than, say, a mid-sized country worth of electricity.
Who will be the miners required for this blockchain? Who will pay for the mining? Who will ensure there is no 51% attack on the blockchain?
Or just use a merkle hash tree like CT logs do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_Transparency#Certi...
Funnily enough, CT was devised around four years after bitcoin and mentions it in their introduction article: https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2668154
You can amend it and publish new versions but you can be sure that somebody somewhere will have a copy. You want to make your paper trail immutable? Sign it and publish it widely using any medium you want. Burn it on CDs and mail them to random addresses. Tie them to balloons and release them.
Do you really want an immutable ledger for that? Fat fingers and data entry errors can happen.
https://medium.com/@jimbreyer/announcing-our-vechain-advisor...
It's the only one where the substantial additional overhead and complexity of blockchain is actually still less than the alternative, as your example clearly illustrates.
To attempt to answer a question from sibling comments: these systems are private or closed blockchains, not public. You have a traditional credentials database (the blockchain itself could also be used for this, but that won't usually have inherent benefits) to track who is allowed access to read or submit transactions. Those parties may run a node or you may have one independent third party run all the nodes. It's so different from cryptocurrency setup that it's hard to apply too much of the stuff we've learned from Bitcoin et al to these setups.
At least that's my understanding.
To express it in an analogy with current services, I would like the blockchain to be a database, exposing a universal API. I don't really see a private blockchain allowing this, but I may be wrong. And indeed there will be the thorny authentication issue... I don't know the solution, really !
When receiving an item you want to check the provenance of, you need some way to securely identify the product in the log. Otherwise some bad actor along the way could unlink the actual product from the ID in the log, for example by duplicating and stealing a known-good ID, yielding all the provenance information useless.
I guess this could work for electronic products where you could deeply embed something like a TPM that could provide this ID securely (which would be to expensive to extract to make it worth duplicating), but for something like a shipment of steel or even worse coal/oil/grain etc, I don't see how this would work.
The problem is, how do you know I didn't ship you a fake replica and keep the original for myself, sell it to someone else on the sly, etc.? Sure, you could have a TPM which securely holds some data linking the physical smart card to the blockchain provenance record... but what links the physical smart card to the physical painting? Couldn't I just give you the fake painting + real smart card?
You could get an art expert to authenticate the physical painting, of course -- but that's exactly the same reliance on a trusted third party that art collectors have today, and blockchain has done nothing to improve the situation...
If you need to prove that life-saving drugs have been kept at the correct temperature throughout their shelf-life, you can probably afford a RFID tag per pack, with a unique ID.
On the other end of the spectrum, if you are talking about low-criticality tracability of shipments of bulk materials, you can probably admit supplier-defined batch numbers. You could imagine that a rogue manufacturer would try to cheat and re-use a batch number from a "premium" raw material while using a cheaper one. Blockchain would not provide a protection against false declaration, it would on the other end provide an immutable papertrail in case of later legal investigation / certification audit (ie "you purchased X premium parts and Y inferior parts, but you logged using X+Y premium parts, how do you explain that?")
I'm not saying that blockchain is not a valid solution to a problem, but as a veteran of the online industry, I can say I've seen a lot of hype around new technology, actual effort being put into it, and then the realization that the effort was for nothing. Either the solution is no better than the old solution, just different, or the solution is so obscure, that the cost of maintaining it is greater than the value it generates.
In the end, the costs of the choices of these institutions are being paid for by you and I, and I hope they don't go too deep into their project before realizing: “Basically, it became a solution in search of a problem,”
That strikes me as a very rich question that would be interesting to investigate. Yes, we know people can get involved in hype cycles, but what was it about this technology that made it the thing that got hyped exactly?
Perhaps a subconscious association with BitCoin and getting rich quick hit the people most prone to hype? Some of the blockchain projects being proposed, I honestly couldn't see how they were planning on profiting from it. I don't just mean profiting enough, but profiting at all; what was the mechanism by which money is transferred from some set of customers to the blockchain creators? Preferably with the transfer of some valuable good or service in the other direction, but, you know, technically that's optional from a business perspective.
I understand the answer for new cryptocurrencies; the creators start with more of it than the incoming users and that becomes valuable as the currency becomes valuable. The non-currencies I didn't always see an answer. Which is why my best guess is some sort of subconscious belief that anything that has a blockchain will automatically somehow become wildly valuable via (underpants gnomes step 2 here). It's kinda a copout answer but it's the best I've got. Improvements? (Again, beyond just "people do hype." Why this hype and not something else?)
Brick-and-mortar plus mail-order was a viable business model for decades. Building the network infrastructure and software interconnections to move from that state to today’s online commerce and delivery model took years to accomplish and was (is) filled with hyped innovations.
Blockchains may never reach their hyped potential, or we may simply be attempting to evaluate at very early stages vs. the point where utilities are clear.
I try to keep a measured view of the optimisic hype and the pessimistic nay-saying, and don’t expect clarity for a few more years regarding blockchains’ potential.
In general this philosophy towards technology has served me well enough. I miss out on the bleeding edge, but don’t fall into the trap of being “all in” before realizing a concept’s promise was oversold.
As to decentralized, there seems to be a wonderful libritarian ideal around cryptocommodities but I’m reality they are much more centralized than anyone wants to admit. There are probably 10 people that if they wanted to could absolutely demolish bitcoin.
Too much hype around all of this. Not even getting into the massive waste of power and potential.
Having worked in computational finance the entirety of my career, I still don't totally understand how this combination of Dunning-Kruger and Libertarian leanings somehow became a thing.
The financial times while back had an interesting take: there's a structural reason why VC throws money at seemingly non-nonsensical ideas (Theranos, wireless charging etc) - many have a policy portfolio mandate to shoot for 100x returns and as such they will throw money at impossible things as part of their fiduciary duty. So, especially in the climate of free money, funding a slightly-better-widget-startup takes a backseat to things with lottery odds that may not make any sense at all.
It is the fatal flaw of POW. It is like just pretending that the power cost is not part of the cost of a transaction.
That is why it takes time to get approved on coinbase and other exchanges that try to follow the law.
BTC is just a widely distributed set of middlemen imposing delays and costs (both mining rewards and transaction fees are costs to everyone holding or using BTC that run from holders/users to miners.)
At some point I will exchange to USD to pay whatever I owe in taxes and to pay any vendor that does not take crypto. I imagine if I were an unscrupulous actor I would skip the tax step and avoid vendors that don't accept crypto.
https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees...
https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-confirmation-time
Who knows what they would be if bitcoin was actually used to buy things.
For less than $5,000 it is free and instantaneous in the United States (e.g. Zelle). For more, it is free and instantaneous (wire; my bank waves the fee; most charge $15 to $35).
The number one thing holding back the blockchain from becoming a proper database technology is its proponents insistence on applying it to problems that already work faster and cheaper.
I take the point that in other places the norm is a lot worse and blockchain systems are producing better results, but it won't be long before banks get their act together and improve their services to match modern expectations (for fear of becoming obsolete), and then the blockchain competitive advantage is gone.
Decentralisation is the selling point of blockchain technology.
Anyone building on a blockchain that doesn't think decentralisation is beneficial in and of itself is a conman.
The sad part is that the blockchain is the least interesting part of this hype. The interesting part is making all mutations of state require signed inputs which has given a really needed push to the PKC UX. Metamask is fucking amazing and interacting with applications that utilize metamask as the source of identity is so simple, something that you'd be hard pressed to find before all this hype.
For big amounts, transfers of money are either slow (big wire transfers between banks) or unsecure (cash, how do you know if those bills are real?). Therefore either the money or ownership stays insecurely in limbo on one side.
Therefore escrow services currently provide a solution for this, or notaries. But in the end they are still not atomic, and not free either.
If both money and proof of ownership are both on blockchain, you can do a REAL atomic transaction. This could work for selling cars, houses, etc, on an international level without much fuzz.
Not being left behind if you're wrong.
I'm in a tech-adjacent industry and see it all the time. Competitor A comes out with "shiny new technology" and markets the hell out of it. My company panics because we're suddenly lagging behind and rushes a competing project into development. Competitor B sees all of this and hops in too. All of a sudden it's the new direction of the industry and dominating trade shows, despite the origin being a mediocre product with some clever marketing. 5 years later it's never spoken of again.
I'm not familiar enough to say for sure this is what happened with "blockchain", but from a distance it has a lot of familiar markers.
In 2018 it's still hanging around but realizing a 20% speedup on certain classes of problems. Maybe.
I'm definitely not an expert so I'm maybe missing something here.
I'm sure there are other disciplines that have seen a larger benefit.
> it's still hanging around but realizing a 20% speedup on certain classes of problems
It really varies though. In grad school I felt like god when some molecular dynamics simulations running on my pair of GTX 760s finished faster than the same thing running on my advisor's 96-core CPU cluster.
Point taken, though, that it was over-hyped. There were lots of conference presentations with GPU-acceleration in the title (kind of like deep learning is now).
I was part of a group that developed signal processing algorithms and my boss's boss pulled me aside and asked me what we ought to do about this stuff. I told him that there are a few applications where this works very well, but it's pretty niche overall and we shouldn't do more than what we'd already done. He was a bit surprised because he thought I'd be one of the kool-aid drinkers given how much I knew about and liked playing with the tech. But he deferred to my judgement.
It turned out to be one of the most significant conversations I've had. I was still a junior engineer fresh out of college, but my bosses realized that I could be trusted put aside naive enthusiasm about the tech and make cool-headed decisions about what was strategically important. And I learned to trust my intuition about what was useful and what was just hype.
"IT" has for long been this back-office area where specialists get to dictate business policies because they know computers. (A classic on this genre is the Bastard Operator from Hell [0]) -- but now lusers bring their own computers and phones to work, and hell if they don't have technological ideas of their own. IT has been commoditized, cloudified, outsourced.
If "digital transformation" sounds bogus is because management consultants are bogus. But in practice it can be a real thing that's not as much about new sexy tech (in the sense of blockchains, RISC chips and so on) as about putting what's already available into operation using business knowledge.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bastard_Operator_From_Hell
And still, it takes up to 5 days to receive a payment from USA in the EU and the sender pays 40$ for the wire transfer.
The blockchain technologies will disrupt the banks themselves, because they are the intermediaries in this industry. I can receive the equivalent of $1 mil in BTC from oversea in less than 10 minutes and the sender pays fractions of a dollar in fees.
The banks will be in a tough position the more people accept payments for their services and products in BTC. We're not there yet, of course, but who knows where we'll be in 5-10-20 years.
A lot of banks allow customers to do instant transfers between customers of that bank, but for this to be a killer feature, you have to have enough customers that this is significant. In NYC, Chase is almost there--they have enough of a share of NYC that it's worth asking if the person you're transferring to has Chase so you can use their instant transfer system.
But the vast majority of transactions are still between customers of different banks, and there's not much reason for a bank to process a competitor's payment quickly--it doesn't give you a competitive advantage, while processing slowly allows you to collect interest on the money while it's in transit.
But they're doing exactly this now with Zelle.
3 separate experiences:
1. My friend was sending me $750, and had to structure it as 4 separate payments each 24 hours apart due to some sending limit that either Zelle or his bank imposes.
2. I sent my brother money, and for whatever reason he had trouble accepting the transfer, so I had to resend it a week later when it failed.
3. Someone sent money to me, and it was my first time using Zelle, so I had to login to my bank after clicking a link in a text. But after logging in, nothing happened... It didn't tell me where the funds went, and they weren't in my account. 3 days later they magically showed up. I think the transaction was pending??
In Australia, you must pay using the normal way (which is pretty much always free), and if it’s the same bank it’s processed instantly and if it’s not it’s processed generally overnight.
Pretty much everybody’s moving to a new real-time payments platform in the next few months too, so it should just always be instant for domestic transfers.
Only if you use a wire transfer. Payment by credit card is instant and costs about 1% for the merchant and maybe another 1% in change fees if there is a currency conversion needed.
Hardly. Chargebacks on credit cards can occur up to 3 months after payment. Good for customers who need that dispute feature but bad for others because those costs are socialized onto merchants and other consumers.
If that was the case a merchant could withdraw cash immediately after someone paid them with a credit card. Which patently isn't the case. So no, Payment cards are not instant.
Let's say that merchant accepts payment via Visa on Day 1. On Day 2, Visa goes out of business. The merchant will never receive the payment. So no the payment is not instantaneous. The merchant receives an IOU from Visa that settles in a few days. IOUs != settled payments.
This article has a good explanation of that concern, among others: https://hackernoon.com/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-...
U.S. dollar Fedwires are “immediate, final, and irrevocable“ [1] regardless of from where they are initiated. If your EU bank takes 5 business days to swap between the world’s two most liquid currencies, you have a uniquely shitty bank.
[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/fedfunds_about...
seems like maybe the crux of this discussion is that, all of the sudden the features of banking have been automated. that’s definitely not the same as “the features of banks, regulation, etc...” have been automated.
But certainly, we can see that the Fedwire is not a consumer product, where BTC clearly is
To be a Fedwire participant you have to be a Federal Reserve member, i.e. a bank. Consumers arrange Fedwires through their banks. When I send a wire, I'm not a Fedwire participant--my bank is. If you have a U.S. dollar bank account, you have access to the international Fedwire system.
Transferwise
This is more or less the curse of the almighty blockchain; it's very hard to think of a plausible, actually useful, application which can't be accomplished far more cheaply and simply using conventional means.
The problem HN has with blockchain is that a lot of HN users are the problem which decentralization solves. The basic startup monetization strategies these days revolve around centralizing user data and then collecting rent (usually in the form of ads) or centralizing transactions and then collecting a percentage. Decentralization is the antithesis of these models: you can't collect rent or percentages if you don't have centralized control of the platform. The problem blockchain solves is that it cuts out a lot of middle men and what middle men it leaves (miners) have to compete.
For the vast majority of HN users, blockchain doesn't solve problems you want to solve, but that shouldn't be mistaken for meaning that blockchain isn't a revolutionary technology that solves a lot of problems. If anything, the technology is important because it affects your future. Data and transaction middle men are the problem that blockchain solves, and as middle men you should be paying attention.
I don't hold any resentment toward people trying to run a centralized business, but I do find it amusing when people are pushing blockchain forward to their own detriment.
Then please list some useful, concrete applications of blockchain that would not be solved better and cheaper by a normal database.
"A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution."
Except it failed completely at that. The blockchain has proven through real world use that it is unusable as a currency. By its very design, it is fundamentally impossible to scale it to even serve even a moderate sized city worth of transactions.
Scaling is a separate issue. I don't believe scaling is even mentioned in the original white paper.
1. This is far from proven. Scaling is definitely a problem, but I don't think it's at all been proven to be impossible.
2. You still have to admit that bitcoin has solved this problem at a small scale, which isn't nothing. Transactions without a trusted central authority are literally impossible with previous technologies.
- Financial transactions without a trusted authority
- Elections without a trusted authority
- Anonymous messaging (this is admittedly solved by federation if the federation is distributed enough, i.e. Tor).
Anything where decentralized trust is useful: money, anonymous messaging, voting, etc.
Cheaper/better isn't really relevant, because these things can't be done by a centralized method without trusting a central authority, period.
I completely disagree with your examples: trust in money is centralized because I trust a central government will ensure it is legal tender, and that a central bank will act in the best interest of stability. If there's no centralized trusted party in messaging - how can I trust the messages? Trust has to be rooted somewhere - when a newspaper quotes anonymous sources, I'm implicitly trusting the newspaper and its source-vetting process. When it comes to voting - confidence in the vote counter is essential.
I suspect our difference is more fundamental - I assume that just like any other system - decentralized systems can be subverted, and there will be parties who will subvert it. The only difference is that for centralized system, I usually will trust the central authority to fix/mitigate problems. When "decentralized" systems are subverted, you will discover that they were centralized after all when it emerges that someone (unilaterally or by way of some vote) can make "fixes" that affect the entire system (forking the blockchain, dropping some "rogue" transactions, changing the algorithm, etc).
That doesn't change the fact that many people don't trust the central authorities, often because their situation differs from yours such that it is not rational for them to trust the central authorities. In some cases blockchain solves their problems.
Blockchain solves real problems. They just aren't problems you (or most people on HN) have.
Right tool for the right job.
We tend to think of large companies as either these monolithic beasts that act according to their own best interests, or as emergent hiveminds that move in a direction because they smell money. These have the advantage of allowing us to presume that the actions taken by these organizations were vetted by many people and arrived at via consensus.
However, there is a third, less popular, way to view organizations, and that's as an organ of a handful of people, if not one person. This is an important framing because it allows us to consider the actions of these large companies as reflecting the foibles of the individuals at the helm. Viewed this way, Apple under Steve Jobs was an extension of one man's vision and design priorities. Microsoft under Ballmer was an extension of one man's putting the MBA approave above the tech approach.
I can't help but wonder if, within these Wall Street companies as well as throughout SV, there wasn't a single person or a handful of people who swallowed the blockchain coolaid and started these projects. Pitched high hopes to developers. Hired developers. Set goals. Failed to meet goals. Made their developers' lives miserable. Gave up. Blamed their subordinates. Moved on.
This is a tale as old as tech itself, but somehow it just keeps happening. To all young developers deciding where to invest their time and talent: be very careful choosing to follow an individual, because individuals are stupid enough to fall for nonsense like "blockchain for banking."
[1] https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2018/03/change-my-mind-abo...
[2] https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2018/02/blockchains-from-d...
The applications of full p2p decentralization are also not clear:
[3] https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2018/03/blockchain-applica...
[4] https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2018/02/paper-review-ipfs-...
If there was a scenario where blockchain-based solution was cheaper to operate than their current database tech, you'd think they'd be all over it.
None of these people have any idea what they're talking about.
https://altcoinreport.co/morgan-stanley-clear-bitcoin-future...
But there is still interest in peer to peer usage. When each bank keeps their own version(s) of the truth, the cost of reconciling, resolving disputes etc is huge.
The most interesting features, in this scenario, are the mutable->immutable and time ordering aspects. The literal blockchain, in other words. The consensus and transparency aspects aren’t particularly interesting though.
And the key (excuse the pun) to these useful aspects is the cryptography used in interesting ways. Blockchains didn’t invent any of this stuff but they did open people’s eyes to the possibilities.
I'm not a banker, but I'm not sure I entirely believe this. There is undoubtedly a cost of reconciliation, but is it "huge"? Seems low on the totem poll.
Thay have large totem poles.
Edit. That’s not including the op risk of screwing up. That has costs too and can easily reach millions
I have never understood why financial instruments like derivates like options etc. exists. I understand what they do but I do not understand what value they add to the economy specifically.
That said, on the flip side, a lot of people have been considering Blockchain as some kind of magic solution to all of the world’s problems, and that is also very far from reality. If it takes an article in Reuters for people to realize this than so be it.
I have believed for a while that Blockchain technology in the context that many big companies refer to it is not very useful. Usually these are the same people who claim that Bitcoin is useless and Blockchain technology is where the real value is. I think they are either mistaken or misinformed.
In my opinion, anyone who plans to build a centrally controlled Blockchain is making a mistake. Even if the data is signed/hashed and distributed, it only takes one bad actor inside the organization who has access to the nodes to alter the Blockchain by performing a 51% attack (changing the transaction data on more than half of the nodes). Therefore the entire idea of a Blockchain being immutable is thrown out the window. You would be much better off using an open source database like MySQL or Postgres or Mongo. Blockchains are expensive to run and operate and are extremely slow.
However, the idea that Blockchains are a solution in search of a problem that the article suggests is also a bit misleading. I think it’s more likely that these companies are trying to find solutions for things that aren’t problems in the first place which isn’t the fault of Blockchain technology itself. I feel pretty strongly that blockchains have already solved a few problems.
- They solve the double spending problem (the idea that the same tokens can be spent more than once)
- They allow people to store value without depending on any third party (such as a bank)
- They remove all the intermediaries required for sending payments/data from one person to another.
- They make it cheaper and faster to send any amount of money to anyone in the world
To me, those are all transformative properties of blockchains, and anyone who overlooks them is somewhat missing the point. That said, in order to check off all these bullet points, you need to have a peer to peer, decentralized network where peers are rewarded with crypto currencies for securing the network, not just a few servers running inside of a company as a replacement for a centralized database.
Will there be good Blockchain applications outside of crypto currencies? I’m not sure, but to me, there is nothing wrong with that. If, in the future, banks and cash become obsolete and everyone stores their money on their own secure, digital wallets, then I would say that Blockchain technology changed the world for the better.
There's a wave of this sentiment lately— which is funny timing. Goldman Sachs apparently will have an operational cryptocurrency trading desk by the end of June.[0]
The TSX is slated to have a cryptocurrency brokerage desk with backing of the Bank of Montreal over the coming months sometime as well.[1] This came out days after BMO blocked all cryptocurrency purchases with consumer credit and debit cards.[2]
The more cynical side of me wants to guess that they're trying to establish a gatekeeping initiative. Knock everybody about, then when they want back in they have to come through you.
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-21/goldman-i...
[1] https://www.newswire.ca/news-releases/tmxs-shorcan-announces...
[2] http://business.financialpost.com/pmn/business-pmn/bmo-stops...
It actually makes a lot of sense cause the SEC has also been going pretty hard lately to try to shut down trading of tokens that had ICOs and to make life difficult for current exchanges.
I have always believed that Wall Street does not like the fact that the regular public got first stab at crypto currencies, and they didn’t. This could be their way to try to rectify that.
If projects we're based on the technical features of a block chain architecture then the decline of euphoria is irrelevant.