Lately it's frequent noise from ICOs (though perhaps I deserve it because I recall opting in to a cryptocoin interest group on earn.com).
Interesting things in crypto-blockchain tech, today:
* Origin
* NuCypher (disclaimer: I'm on this team)
* Loki
* New version of web3.py / other python tooling becoming mature
* Trustless Quorums
* Distributed validation
I can go on and on. But I just don't see how anybody can think that these are uninteresting times for this tech.
Buzz buzz.
Our website is not designed to appeal to VCs per se; we are not raising money right now and, frankly, if we were, we don't need a website to do it. Our team and our repos speak for themselves, IMO.
As I explained in our other comment, our whitepaper mentions the blockchain integration in all the places that matter. I'm surprised to hear that 5 is not enough.
In general, whitepapers mention the blockchain in all the places that matter. Contrast websites and pitch decks mentioning it in all the places it can possibly be mentioned - as it's perceived to increase the odds of getting attention.
1) The whitepaper describes the nature of our network and how Alice and Bob use it. It does not describe (and isn't meant to describe) node operation except as Alice and Bob need to understand it. We'll have an additional node operation whitepaper that describes the smart contracts in more detail. We - and I know this may sound strange - decided to build our cryptography and network first and foremost rather than race to build "something, anything, as long as it's blockchain."
2) Do you think that the whitepaper insufficiently describes how Alice and Bob use the blockchain? If so, do you have suggestions for how we can do this better? I think our whitepaper is pretty solid, FWIW. If you are Alice or Bob, I think this gives you exactly the understanding of the blockchain application that you need.
That's actually not quite right. I'm one of the engineers here, but allow me to put my evangelism hat on a bit here. We're building a decentralized key management system similar to AWS KMS or Google Cloud KMS -- except decentralized.
We use proxy re-encryption to do this. You can read about how it works in our Umbral blog post[0].
Several large applications are within the healthcare world. This allows patients to be in control of their own medical data and to share/revoke their data at will with other doctors, hospitals, etc. This lets them retain their own encryption keys without trusting another party.
Its market/end user is specifically anyone who has a need for a KMS. I Would also like to point out that NuCypher can be used as a consumer grade KMS -- something that I am exceptionally excited about.
[0] - https://blog.nucypher.com/unveiling-umbral-3d9d4423cd71
I would never trust my secret management to some random block chain. And for medical records? That is laughable at best with severe HIPPA compliance issues.
And you think regulations are set in stone with no room for innovation?
Empty, politically motivated arguments.
Me neither. ;)
Of course, the fact that other technologies have gone through both a peak and trough before settling between them isn't confirmation that any particular technology will. (I bet Theranos won't rebound.) It should cause one to discount the sheer volume of disillusionment, where not accompanied by evidence, just as one should previously have discounted the volume of hype.
There are so many projects that promised the world and did not deliver, as well as so many projects that ended up being outright scams, that it's not surprising that when someone says "but what about Blockchain X, Blockchain Y and Blockchain Z projects?", we all roll our eyes and think "I'll believe it when I see it."
It's not as if any blockchain project has provided a long lasting use case beyond speculation, in which case you calling us all idiots would be warranted. After 10 years of flops, the burden to show how interesting these technologies are is on you now.
I don't understand this assessment either. How do you square this with, for example, people who have been able to obtain psychoactive compounds and other medicines that were previously unavailable to them?
And nice try with calling this contraband "medicines". The way to get legitimate medicinal drugs legalized is through careful analysis and discussions, and then you use democracy to make it happen. See California. What you DON'T do is invent some tech that wastes our planet's resources and invent some story about a decentralized future to fool regulators and then enable all kinds of illegal transactions, from human trafficking to terrorism, just so you can smoke a joint effortlessly.
Drug prohibition is not the future of humankind.
If blockchain tech can more quickly undermine it, then I don't think it's reasonable to say that it has no role in making the world a better place.
Additionally, if blockchain tech can substantially undermine a policy entrenched with corruption and enforced by violence, I think it's reasonable to surmise that it has other, less controversial use-cases as well.
The current state of development in this field suggests that I'm right - again, see the technologies above; it's not obvious how they're possible without a distributed consensus mechanism.
I also think that the remark "smoke a joint effortlessly" is both a silly ad-hominen and a red herring. I have been effortlessly smoking joints in all sorts of jurisdictions for the past decade; the change in law really didn't do much to enable that any more than it was already trivial.
However, if I were a member of a less privileged class and wanted to retain some anonymity, or if I wanted access to a more esoteric plant or compound and didn't have the social connectivity to obtain it, then I think that I'd find a mechanism to subvert these prohibitions very helpful.
Not everyone has the same opportunities and protections as you. Your implicit suggestion that everyone simply live in California is very insensitive. Technologies that tend to smooth this disparity are reasonable to celebrate.
You're right that some nations will be more oppressive than others, but you're forgetting that those places will more easily ban public blockchains than in places you've hinted don't need it. See Pakistan, Bangladesh, or China as examples.
So you either live in a place where you can fight for your right at a political and social level, and don't need the blockchain (eg. USA), or you live in a place where you cannot easily affect policy, in which case your government has probably also decided you cannot use tools that would circumvent their enforcement... such as the blockchain.
Fair enough. I still don't think that "see California" is a great argument to make to people who are suffering at the hands of the state throughout, for example, the rest of the USA. We have 2 million people in prison; nobody thinks that's OK.
> we need the blockchain, as if free speech and democracy were foregone conclusions
If you are sitting in a prison cell because you had a skin color which the state regards as the wrong one to use a particular plant or compound, then you might indeed feel forsaken by democracy.
> So you either live in a place where you can fight for your right at a political and social level, and don't need the blockchain (eg. USA), or you live in a place where you cannot easily affect policy
Do you think it's literally only those two possibilities? If that's true, then I understand and agree with your argument.
If instead, however, much of the world is in some gray area in the middle, then technologies which tend toward subversion of illegitimate state activity seem to me to be a welcome evolution for those who wish to help the political configuration in which they find themselves toward the former and away from the latter.
Sorry to be that guy but do you have a citation for this? I hear it all the time but it makes no sense to me. Can you explain what happens when people receive the bitcoin? For one thing there are frequently 20% spreads in countries that do not have good ways to export their fiat currency, like India, so bitcoin actually doesn't usually end up being cheaper when you consider conversion costs.
> On the opposite side of the spectrum, for the ultra-wealthy, cryptocurrencies offer the ability to place a portion of one's capital in accounts which are not seizable by any means. This is a significant feature of the technology, and coupled with the level of encryption, already represents a small, yet sizable place in the world banking system.
I don't have a dog in the fight of whether or not this is a Good ThingTM, but a lot of people would call this a bug not a feature.
There are plenty of legal things that are difficult to purchase with conventional reversible electronic payments. Off the top of my head:
Gambling deposits (yes, these are legal in most of the world but plagued by chargebacks from losing punters)
porn/sex toys (legal, but people don't want it showing up on their CC statements and don't trust these sites with their CC number)
"Suspicious" purchases with too much chargeback risk (eg. someone wants to buy a Macbook online with a US credit card and a Nigerian shipping address)
"Cash-like purchases" like buying a gold bar or some foreign cash online and having it shipped to your house. The margins on these types of purchases are too small to cover the credit card fees and the chargeback risk is too high because it attracts carders.
I could probably go on, but if you don't think irreversible electronic cash has any legitimate applications, you're not thinking hard enough.
I actually don't think blockchain-based ledgers are irreversible. The most exhaustive account for how these ledgers are reversible is captured in the Blockchain Folk Theorem paper [0]. We can brainstorm all kinds of fun use cases for irreversible digital cash, but given the growing evidence, I don't believe such digital cash exists.
[0] https://www.tse-fr.eu/sites/default/files/TSE/documents/doc/...
The reason this critique is so prevalent on HN is because a lot of us just watched the last 10 years of the internet go from "that thing that is going to democratize technology and knowledge" to "a centralized management system for privacy invasion." The reason for this seems to be, loosely stated: "no one wants to run their own mail server." Because no one wants to put the effort in to dealing with running an email service, we allow Google, Facebook etc. to run them for us. The reason for this is because our economy is based on specialization of labor: it's by design. I can choose to spend my time running a server, but allowing someone to do it for me is orders of magnitude cheaper due to economies of scale, so unless I have a really strong demand it's probably not going to happen.
The blockchain allows for us the same effect as "running our own email servers," and most of us really don't think it's likely that people are going to want to host their own nodes in the blockchain, because, referring back to Conway's law, there are fundamental political aspects to our culture that do not support this architecture.
The way I see it, one of the big assumptions of the technologies in this space is that participants are only acting out of self-interest. Meaning, that there's a strong push towards designing systems where behaviours that are beneficial to the network are also economically rewarding.
Meaning that in theory, cryptoeconomics could be seen as an attempt at finding a solution to the problem you mention.
Think of the incentivization layer built into something like Filecoin vs the voluntaristic approach of Freenet.
Which leads us back to your point:
> Because no one wants to put the effort in to dealing with running an email service, we allow Google, Facebook etc. to run them for us.
Because until now, you'd have to do it for free.
We don't actually let markets make decisions for the big stuff. Take banking: in fact by a lot of measures it's the most highly regulated industry, and most of the fundamentals (like the interest rates) are not set via markets, but via elected (or sometimes not) officials. We don't actually want market economics to run the vast majority of our systems, which is why we've never built frameworks for it before, not because it's particularly complicated.
> Because until now, you'd have to do it for free.
Why wont specialization of labor take over again, and make it so crypto just turns into a different set of centralized players running the infrastructure with a ton of consumers? What happens when it turns out the vast majority of people don't actually want to be involved in running their own banking infrastructure?
> (whether that's a good thing or not is an interesting discussion that I wish were had more often).
Totally agree, upvoted :)
I agree with you on this point and it's what scares me the most about the whole blockchain "revolution".
If you look at the people who actually started it though, it was mostly anarcho-capitalists/rightwing libertarians, so that isn't surprising.
> Why wont specialization of labor take over again
That could happen. But what could also happen is that people start relying less exclusively on one relatively massive source of income, and instead start relying on several, parallel smaller ones.
I think that's already the case in non-Western parts of the world, and one of the reasons why it hasn't taken place (at least in Europe) is regulation - think of how you can't just sell food on the side of the road in Paris, which you can do in, e.g. Bangkok.
> But I just don't see how anybody can think that these are uninteresting times for this tech.
Really? For me it's the almost-a-decade of hype but seeing very little in practical utility beyond speculation, ransomware, and some light crime. As an example a New York Times writer just tried to spend the weekend living on Bitcoin and failed egregiously: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/16/nyregion/new-york-today-l...
I'm happy to admit that there's more activity in the space than I could possibly keep track of, so there could definitely be a pony in there somewhere. [1] But it shouldn't be any surprise that after so much hype resulting in no apparent useful effect on the rest of the world many people are skeptical that the cryptocurrency world will ever produce anything more than dubious claims, Ponzi schemes, and million-dollar thefts.
[1] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/12/13/pony-somewhere/
Our system allows an actor (Alice) to select any number of recipients (Bob) in a Policy. Alice can disappear from the network forever, and subsequently, any DataSource can encrypt data, using Alice's public key, which can then be decrypted by all of the Bobs.
That's pretty cool to me. I do think that medical devices / IoT are an obvious use case. I also hope that our tech is used to build selected consortiums of journalists, whom whistle-blowers can then encrypt for only by knowing the policy key.
Another interesting use case is for distributed ops: if you have a number of streams of operational data that you want to share only with a certain number of watchers, presently you need to trust a centralized service to do that.
I'll admit: I'm not really the use case guy. But I am waist-deep in the python over here, and I can tell you we have a good thing going.
For years and years I've said, "Yes, that is a pretty cool technology, but what real-world value is it currently providing?" One common answer is, "But it's a really cool technology!" No argument, but that seems to miss the point. Another is, "I'm sure it will be amazing!" Which again, misses the point. A third is, "It might be great for X," but without any real proof that people doing X want the technology, without demonstration that the current alternatives are inadequate, and without apparent recognition that a future hypothetical does not in any way satisfy somebody looking for traction.
Plenty of technologists think they have a good thing going. Right up until the investor money runs out and customers have failed to show up.
As an example, look at 3D movies and TV. 3D has been about to change the way we see things since the 1950s. There is no denying the technology is very neat to technologists. Early adopters even get excited! And then it turns out once again that customers don't really care. This pattern goes at least as far back as the Brewster stereoscope in the 1850s.
So please, don't be shocked that people are tired of blockchain/cryptocurrency hype. That you find the technology interesting does not mean that anybody else will find the (lack of) actual deployed use interesting.
It often seems to me that the mathematical purity of many crypto techs are a poor match for the fuzzy real world requirements. The result ends up being a big pile of abstractions with poor usability and major holes. After all this time, this still applies to basic payments for tangible goods.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16854568
Blaming the user only works (for some value of "works") in a situation where a power relationship constrains the user. E.g., we've all seen customer service agents dealing with shitty in-house software. They can't easily quit, so they will just accept being told they're "doing it wrong".
But that doesn't fly when the user can easily make other choices. People who get blamed for "not doing enough research" when they have trouble using Bitcoin will probably not work harder. They'll just go back to using credit cards and Paypal and Venmo, which a) work much better, and b) have people who are trying hard to make that work well for them. People whose Bitcoins get stolen mostly aren't going to go and become security experts. They're going to use existing methods, which they generally understand how to secure, and which often have security and anti-theft measures built in.
Sure, they may pay a little more in transaction fees. (Although those fees are often hidden, so they may not notice.) But in effect, those fees are buying insurance. They're buying security teams. They're buying user interface designers who work hard to make things easy. For many people, that's worth it.
Cryptocurrency and blockchain proponents always have hypothetical use cases. The original Bitcoin paper [1] gives a hypothetical use case, 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." This still remains basically hypothetical; even prominent Bitcoin boosters have given up on that vision. [2]
I'm done taking hypotheticals seriously in this space; I've seen too much hype and approximately nothing in the way of results. Maybe someday you'll be proved right about your use case. Maybe you'll have customers who not only buy it but keep using it and come back to buy more. But until then, you should expect people to be skeptical. Previous blockchain/cryptocurrency promoters have, for me and many others, used up all the reasonable benefit of the doubt and more.
[1] https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
[2] https://avc.com/2017/08/store-of-value-vs-payment-system/
With proxy re-encryption, you don't. So any use cases that involve Alice disappearing while others continue to be able to encrypt for Bob (even without knowing who Bob is or what his public key is) are good ones for NuCypher.
If the review I read is correct, that's an ordinary debit card that one refills by selling bitcoin. Which has approximately no value to most people, because they already have debit cards that work just fine.
It could be that bitcoin will eventually end up being useful as a currency, but its high volatility means that day hasn't come yet, and won't come soon. Prominent bitcoin advocates are happy to give up on it as a currency altogether. E.g.: http://avc.com/2017/08/store-of-value-vs-payment-system/