JPMorgan's Blockchain Chief Is Setting Out on Her Own | Hacker News Reader

JPMorgan's Blockchain Chief Is Setting Out on Her Own

fortune.com

51 pointswglb27 comments

One datapoint: I've started seeing small dev shops who offer to their clients that they can do things "on the blockchain". "Bitcoin is hype, but blockchain is the underlying technology."

Seems like MySQL could solve the problem just as well.

One can't "Roll back" in mysql. Mysql also can't easily create N master-master replication nodes.

I am not sure it would be practically feasible for a "rollback" in a blockchain based system.

Miners would lose a lot of their reward if you suddenly say that this chain is invalid and all data has to be entered again.

It would use a lot of computing resources as well.

Rollback is typically only discussed with regard to private or closed blockchain implementations. Which just highlights the root "why blockchain?" question even further when discussing private implementations.

It is, in fact, fairly simple to track every change in a traditional db, who did it, and what the prior and subsequent state were. You can rollback such transactions without rewriting the whole db (as you'd have to do with a blockchain).

Devs push updates to the nodes. They can do whatever they want with it.

I've been getting more serious about Hyperledger Fabric, and with time, I can't seem to see any use case that can't be solved by a typical distributed app. I see the utility of permissionless blockchains, but private blockchains, I don't get it.

A blockchain is a database with virtue.

  utility of permissionless blockchains

Is there actually any purpose of a 'permissionless blockchain' other than turning the security model into an x-threshold of capital needed to compromise the system type threat model?

So far all iterations of permissionless blockchains have been subject to take over from any modestly funded entity.

This a million times this. At the same time, if we compare this to the past when shops would offer any thing with a pulse to build a website - maybe that is a teaser to the future ubiquitousness of Blockchain technology.

It's a fair read, the private blockchain market is underserved/misserved by the "widely" used platforms (IBM Fabric/R3 Corda). The thing that most everyone misses (including IBM and R3) is that the point of a private blockchain isn't the blockchain... it's smart contracts.

REST APIs + a DB can replace most "private blockchains as a time-stamper" usecases but here's the thing they can't do: replicate and trustlessly execute user logic. It's almost like you said _we're fixing SQL injection by making it irrelevant and making SQL into a full language_.

The blockchain itself just provides the trustless/high assurance substrate to then have trustless logic execution.

I feel like most meaningful contracts probably already involve some level of trust though - so it's not much of a stretch to add a little more.

I had the pleasure of meeting Amber at a conference recently and am not surprised she is going out on her own. With her knowledge and contact list, I'd expect her next venture to be a success.

This has been a common occurrence across many of the large classic players of the financial space. Keeping talent is difficult when a startup can be substantially more agile and effective. I know this isn't unique to the blockchain space, but it is certainly very prevalent. Potentially due to the fact that many leaders in the space were early investors in the technology too and a stable salary isn't top of mind compared to freedom and a challenge.

This comment is so generic.

Probably like most people on HN, I have no idea how effective permissioned blockchain will end up being.

I took the edX Blockchain for Business class last year, and was sipping the coolaid, but now I am not as optimistic. For small groups of people and organizations, a permissioned blockchain might be over engineering when a distributed and secure shared database would be fine. For very large scale applications like health care records or smart contracts involving many thousands of individuals it makes more sense, but good luck getting off the ground.

I am still experimenting with two frameworks, one written in Rust and the other Haskell, but I am starting to think I am investing too much time.

I've come to this same realization, except I'm also still quite on the fence for big corp use cases. I feel like RPC APIs or REST could do as good as a enterprise blockchain with better performance.

May I ask what are the Rust and Haskell based frameworks you are looking at? I've been experimenting with Hyperledger Fabric and might try out BigchainDb.

Exonum is written in Rust and Pact (and Juno) are written in Haskell.

I was very enthusiastic last fall about setting up, on a very small scale, what my friend Ben Goertzel did with SingularityNet.io. I set up a placeholder web site http://hyperledgerai.com/ but have been too busy with my day job to put enough effort into it.

Is one of them Juno? https://github.com/kadena-io/juno. If so, I was lead eng on it so let me know if you have any questions.

FYI we're hiring haskell devs to work on our private consensus layer (based off of Juno), our public consensus protocol (http://kadena.io/docs/chainweb-v15.pdf) and our smart contract language https://github.com/kadena-io/pact + formal verification system. hiring+hn@kadena.io.

Indeed, it is the Pact language I have been playing with. Good stuff. I have also been watching your company Kadena.

One has to wonder if it's related to: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-blockchain-jpmorgan/jpmor...

(In that maybe the bank decided not to, or will but wants someone else to lead it, or the spinoff will prove worthless, or...)

Banks are very political places too. Not the ideal home for a hacker.

And if you print all the policies and procedures, you can easily build a decent wall with all that paper.

Not just policies, but a lot of backstabbing too.

She's a very interesting speaker. Gave a talk at Def Con [0] on ways of talking to friends who are feeling very depressed and suicidal.

[0]: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bfYJE-qCVaM

Most of the so called "emerging tech" projects at JPM are being phased out due to not delivering the promised returns on investment (lots of money for expensive developers to build out moonshot projects with little concrete deliverables).

The same is true for startups :)

I wonder at what point blockchain will hit a make or break moment in finance companies. At some point, it will have to provide direct, tangible value-add or it might get funding pulled from non-tech companies

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