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XML is useful, if cumbersome. Blockchains have not shown themselves to be useful for anything at scale.

XML quietly dropped? If blockchains are dropped in the same manner, it will be around forever and ever. It will outlive Cobol.

Fair point. I haven't seen any new use it in years, and it's down to 12% of its peak interest:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=x...

(Or less, perhaps, in that I suspect the peak was earlier.)

But yes, I'm sure it's in plenty of Y2K-ish enterprise systems, spreading like kudzu.

There are many widely used data formats, such as OpenDocument files, that are XML underneath, often packaged up as .zip files. Much engineering data, such as KiCAD printed circuit board layout info, is in XML. COLLADA, for 3D animation and robotics, is XML. Open Street Map is XML. If you need to represent a large, complex tree-structured data object portably, XML is still usually the way to go.

I agree that it's a decent approach for that extremely narrow use case.

My point is the extent to which that is different from the peak of XML's hype cycle, which was circa 2000. Then, XML was everywhere. E.g., eBay circa 2004 would render data internally as XML, which would get passed off to multiple Rube Goldbergian XSLT transformation layers on its way to becoming HTML. Or I did some work at a bank around then, and their internal architecture was very XML-heavy. There was no good reason for this, and from what I see JSON now dominates.

I note though that your examples were all created when XML's hype cycle was in full swing, and many have enterprise roots. I'll be interested to see if projects created today end up using XML even for the document-creation cases for which it was intended. JSON is also a way to represent large tree-structured data, and I wouldn't be shocked to see it take over most of the data sharing just because that's what everybody knows.

JSON tools tend not to scale. See [1] A 1MB JSON file will blow up some tools. Engineering models of real-world objects are much larger than that. There's sort of an assumption with JSON that you'll read it into a JSON tree and work on that, not process it sequentially.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12063626

I'm willing to believe that's currently true, but that doesn't strike me as much of a moat for XML.

> It does not. In 1995 the Internet was useful for 30m people. In 1985 it was useful for 30,000. Email was better than paper mail from the get-go.

You see that now. But in 1985 most people thought email was silly, if they knew about it at all. Why replace the mail? The mail is fine. It's only when you look back on it, with modern eyes, that you see how great it was.

> Not really. I ask regularly here, and so far there's approximately no commercial use case where blockchains are better than some other technology. The main exceptions being hype, fraud, speculation, and some light financial crime like money laundering and capital control evasion. If you have some examples, I'll of course read them with interest.

I stated some above. But i'll copy/paste:

  - Value transfer
  - Prediction markets
  - Asset trading/custody (not just cryptoassets, I mean, potentially real estate, equities, etc. can be tokenized)
  - Venture capital that is more transparent and open (the ICO space is obviously not there yet, but I think it can move in that direction)

Now, you may counter that existing institutions do these things just fine. But blockchains do them in a different way, with different properties. Just like email did the same thing as mail, in a different way, with different properties. For instance, decentralized exchanges exist - exchanges that don't require you to provide custody of your assets to the exchange. That is a true revolution, and it doesn't just have to be for crypto tokens. Those tokens can represent real life goods, property, etc. You can tokenize anything, in principle.

Having lived through 1985, most people did not think email was silly. Even we primitives of that dark age could tell that instant delivery was generally better than waiting a few days.

Moreover, the "most people" standard does not apply. I'm not asking what "most people" think about Bitcoin. I'm asking for evidence of delivered value to early-adopter audiences. In 1985 any crowd of tech people could tell you why email was better. It would have been easy to find non-technical academic staff who were excited about email, as many of them had been using (mostly non-Internet) email for years at that point. Neutral observers could easily be shown that it was valuable.

> I stated some above. But i'll copy/paste:

No, what you stated above was hypothetical. None of those are areas where blockchains are demonstrated to be better than commercial alternatives for any significant audience.

Ten years ago, even five years ago, I would have given you a pass for selling the amazing possibility rather than any actual facts. Sorry, but time's up on that. I'm asking for proof of traction, not further hype.

I believe the most common reason some people don't see the utility of cryptocurrency is that they have a real or perceived vested interest in the status quo around money not being disturbed.

It is often the case that:

Securities lawyers and traditional venture capitalists don't want a world where regulatory agencies and traditional venture capital can be routed around.

Those in financial law enforcement don't want the trend toward total financial surveillence, euphemistically called instituting anti-money-laundering controls, reversed.

More generally, those with a major economic or ideological investment in government-funded programs don't want people to have financial privacy that makes enforcement of the income tax more difficult, or to see an alternative to central bank issued currency, which gives governments the power of seignoriage, gain traction.

The utility of cryptocurrency is clear: sending value from point A to point B electronically without depending on an intermediary that can extract rent or surveil/censor the transaction.

The problem with this line of thinking is that the people most strongly interested in keeping financial transactions away from the prying eyes of government are criminals. Criminality is strongly correlated with negative-sum interactions with society, and that tends to provoke a response.

So if the best cryptocurrency early-adopter audience is people who are harming society, then you've pretty much guaranteed that cryptocurrencies will remain societally marginal.

That's a different debate. My point is that there is real utility in cryptocurrency. The denial of that utility of motivated not by a sincere belief that the utility is not there, but by an aversion to what that utility enables.

No, I'm denying that facilitating crime is generally "real utility".

In the case where criminals profit from harm, the criminals may personally experience utility from Bitcoin, but the total net utility is negative. E.g., if I steal your new $30k car and sell it to a fence for $10k paid in Bitcoin, I have experienced a $10k gain. But since you experienced a $30k loss, net utility is negative. Ransomware, often seen using Bitcoin, is another example of net negative utility.

In the case where the exchange in question is low harm, we generally see society evolving toward legality. E.g., marijuana has been declining in illegality, so the need for evading state detection declines too. There are now multiple marijuana storefronts within walking distance of my house. Bitcoin doesn't help them.

I suppose you could say I have an investment in government, which I call "being part of a modern, civilized community". So I do object to Bitcoin's money-laundering potential on those grounds, and also deny that aiding freeloaders in tax evasion is much in the way of "real utility", any more than any other tax evasion scheme.

Even if we're willing to call Bitcoin's financial crime usage "real utility", I don't think it's "real" for the purposes of this discussion, which is about comparison with the early days of the Internet. The comparison is only meaningful if the early "real utility" is indicative of future utility for a broader audience. That was obviously the case for something like email (which 90% of Americans now use) or online shopping (80%). But there's no particular reason to think 80-90% of people will be excited about risking IRS penalties and jail time for tax evasion or money laundering.

>>In the case where criminals profit from harm, the criminals may personally experience utility from Bitcoin, but the total net utility is negative.

In the context that you made the argument in, which is consumer demand for cryptocurrency, the type of utility we're talking about is utility for the user.

>>In the case where the exchange in question is low harm, we generally see society evolving toward legality. E.g., marijuana has been declining in illegality, so the need for evading state detection declines too. There are now multiple marijuana storefronts within walking distance of my house. Bitcoin doesn't help them.

Marijauna stores would benefit tremendously from a widely used cryptocurrency. Legal marijuana shops have enormous difficulty getting bank accounts.

The government pressured payment intermediaries into stopping donations to Wikileaks a few years ago. Cryptocurrency was a vital lifeline for the organization during the blockade.

Craigslists recently shut down its personals section, due to FOSTA. Adult entertainers are having their PayPal and Patreon accounts closed. Venezuela's economy has been totally destroyed by its government's interventions. Areas of China are being turned into an Orwellian dystopia: https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/02/26/china-big-data-fuels-cra...

Your claim that ways of circumventing centralized control of financial transactions is growing unnecessary is totally unfounded.

>>I suppose you could say I have an investment in government, which I call "being part of a modern, civilized community".

So to clarify, you're not part of any of the groups I mentioned earlier?

>>But there's no particular reason to think 80-90% of people will be excited about risking IRS penalties and jail time for tax evasion or money laundering.

Filesharing is used by millions of people, and it is illegal. There are many countries in which taxes are widely avoided, so we also know that happens. In some countries circumventing govermment control is a matter of survival.

Cash, by its very nature of being fungible and untrackable, makes anti money laundering laws almost useless, and cash is used the world over.

Your idea of a global surveillance state to enforce taxes on private transactions and to track criminals as the only way to coordinate the use of resources and prevent crime is not the only future open to mankind, and you yourself obviously don't believe it is or else you wouldn't put so much effort in trying to discourage the use of cryptocurrency.

We could go to a future where law enforcement needs a warrant to know the content of a transaction, and where taxes are levied on immovable property, instead of being tied to private economic activity, and a strong civil liberties and economic argument could be made that this would have total net utility.

And it's not just circumventing centralized control by governments. Private financial intermediaries track their users' financial activity extensively.

On top of all of this, simply having a mechanism to transfer value electronically through an immutable protocol provides utility in avoiding rent-seeking by large trusted third party intermediaries who've attained large network effects.

The idea that there is no conceivable utility in avoiding payment intermediaries that can censor/surveil you, except to commit crime, let alone crime that is socially harmful, is preposterous.

I'm not putting much energy into discouraging the use of cryptocurrency. The main energy I'm putting in is to pointing out that approximately nobody uses it as a currency. The Bitcoin emperor may not be entirely unclothed, but it's at best a shopworn thong.

I agree some governments do bad things and would also like less of that. I just don't think Bitcoin solves any of those problems. China may indeed be turning into a digital surveillance state, but that makes digital currencies like Bitcoin ineffective given that they depend on a free and open internet.

I also agree that some countries are only haphazardly governed, with tax evasion as common. But I don't think there are many countries like that that a) don't have perfectly good ways already to evade taxes, b) have reliable electrical grids and internet grids, and c) have sufficient economic activity to make them trendsetters for the global economy. Is Bitcoin used beyond the level of anecdote in Venezuela? Possibly. Will that matter to the adoption of Bitcoin in most of the world? No.

I'm definitely not saying that there's no conceivable utility in cryptocurrencies. I'm saying that there's approximately no practical, demonstrated utility aside from some light financial and commercial crime. My main problem with the Bitcoin promoters is that the only thing they have is theoretical, imagined, conceptual utility. Selling the dream was fine 10 years ago. But at this point the reality is pretty clear.

>>I agree some governments do bad things and would also like less of that. I just don't think Bitcoin solves any of those problems. China may indeed be turning into a digital surveillance state, but that makes digital currencies like Bitcoin ineffective given that they depend on a free and open internet.

China can't stop people in its borders from using cryptocurrency. Neither can Venezuela, where it is currently helping at least some people survive. Electronically transmittable information is just too hard to contain, even without an open internet.

With the greater utility that comes from a larger userbase and greater liquidity, and technological upgrades like better scalability, it's easy to imagine cryptocurrency helping a lot of people, who are currently repressed by major institutions like governments, protect and increase their wealth, leading to a free-er and more prosperous world.

>>My main problem with the Bitcoin promoters is that the only thing they have is theoretical, imagined, conceptual utility.

There are other, better cryptocurrencies than Bitcoin. But I do agree that much of the utility of cryptocurrency is imagined and theoretical.

>>Selling the dream was fine 10 years ago. But at this point the reality is pretty clear.

Cryptocurrency was a totally new paradigm when Bitcoin launched 9 years ago. It needs more time to be developed and tested before a verdict can be passed about the technology's inherent utility.

You could say the same thing about any form of privacy.

> You see that now. But in 1985 most people thought email was silly, if they knew about it at all.

> Why replace the mail? The mail is fine. It's only when you look back on it, with modern eyes, that you see how great it was.

These statements may support your argument, but they have no basis in reality.

Prediction markets work just fine already, thanks. The blockchain equivalents are a terrible use of the technology, since they need to use external sources to get the results of markets. This means either trusting a centralized service (and so negating all of the advantages of a blockchain) or some complicated web of voting for the results (open to manipulation and over-the-top complexity)

Meanwhile, existing systems like Betfair's betting exchange have been working for over a decade.

My personal bet is that blockchains will be like XML: a technology that was going to be The FUTURE for a while, got put into a bunch of things...

That's an outstanding analogy, one I had not considered before, but certainly XML is far less..err...includable is perhaps the word(?)... into a software project then a blockchain-based datastore and verification would be, right?

Let's just hope a XSLT-like companion to the blockchain is never developed...

Intresting! They strike me as equally includable. It's easy enough to do XML-based persistence, or XML-based messaging between nodes of a distributed system.

Indeed, Jabber, an XML-based protocol, is seeing new life as a big IOT protocol. My cheap robot vacuum spends its day hanging out in a chatroom and communicating via XML, for example.