At what point are the fundamental assumptions going to be questioned?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :-)
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
I dont know any commercial usage outside of cryptocurrencies.