JPMorgan in talks to merge blockchain unit Quorum with startup ConsenSys | Hacker News Reader

JPMorgan in talks to merge blockchain unit Quorum with startup ConsenSys

reuters.com

24 pointspbhowmic9 comments

I was at Consensys briefly in 2017. From my perspective (inside the venture half), it was more of a playground than a workplace. I was vaguely aware of the "consulting" half, and that they were working with banks who wanted into crypto at this period of peak hype.

There were some incredibly smart people working on interesting problems, but a significant portion of the people working there seemed (to me) detached from reality – solving problems of their own creation. That's not necessarily a bad thing, the let a thousand flowers bloom approach, but it doesn't strike me as something that JP Morgan would touch? It must have sobered up since 2017.

“but a significant portion of the people working there seemed (to me) detached from reality – solving problems of their own creation.“

This describes blockchain work in general. It has always been a clumsy solution looking for a problem.

Rather, a problem so broad (don't tell me there's not a money problem), that tackling it will take a lot longer than people anticipate.

This communication doesn’t cite a source. Or an official press release. It’s a huge no no to publicly release private business information when employed at a bank.

I just slowly work on puzzling out how to build a nice federated known participant replicated db with a pleasant service discovery / pki and sane interpreter/programming language on top by day (with some bits and pieces ossed when stable over time , with the occasional wee tech talk at workshops etc), and too much oss Haskell maintainership on my weekends and evenings when I’m not fried :)

leaks are frowned upon by literally every organization

When it involves banking it’s worse. Cause financial laws. And regulators.

Anyways I should get back to building genuinely nice replicated dbs with normal / actually good db perf and nice programming tools. This whole blockchain nonsense is kinda like the first data science fad wave. Educating folks about a set of vocabulary they didn’t realize they lacked before. In this case how to do nice transactional effect deterministic composable programming with first class identity, ownership and authorization. Juggling how to attack closed membership federated generalized paxos and nicely marrying linear logic with Dependent types for the internal rep plus how to do humane pki is a lot ;)

Fred Wilson said it was the end of a 2 year crypto winter [1] and I tend to agree. With JPMorgan merging Quorum and ConsenSys, and Google announcing support for Hashgraph [2], I'm optimistic about the widespread adoption of distributed, decentralized ledger consensus technologies.

[1] https://avc.com/2020/02/usdc/

[2] https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/working-with-hede...

Not sure what to make of Wilson's post, but I can say that the Hedera news is much ado about nothing.

Hedera raised $100M from investors in 2018. They are now down to $30M in the bank and the market value of their HBAR token continues its push towards zero.

Google has agreed to be a member of the Hedera council, that is true. However, all that this amounts to is:

"...Google Cloud will operate a Hedera network node, and make the ledger data available for analytics alongside GCP's other public DLT datasets..."

So, GCP spun up a single server and will also now allow you to compare data between the Hedera network and 8 other blockchain networks (I went and counted the ones that GCP said they provide datasets for).

If I was a high schooler, then it might be kind of neat that I spun up a server and hosted datasets for 9 different networks. Seems a bit different if I do that while being the world's 3rd largest player in the cloud-computing market.

seems like their coin got pumped by this news,

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/hedera-hashgraph/

interesting marketing move?

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