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The blockchain paradox: Why DLTs may do little to transform the economy

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Re: The blockchain paradox: Why DLTs may do little to transform the economy

#311

Post by snowwrestler »

moduspol wrote: post #148
root_axis wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tire of the internet comparison. You're drawing a surface-level comparison between the greatest communication and economic innovation in human history and blockchain software, because people were skeptical of both. And? That doesn't prove anything except that people were skeptical of both; nothing in that comparison speaks to the underlying nature of either things being compared. They are not the same.

Well it's in response to your rebuttal. > Where is the revolution? A common thread among cryptocurrency enthusiasts is that the revolution is coming... except it never does. A technology doesn't need to have all of its potential realized in the first few years of its existence. > Where is the disruption? Bitcoin is a smidgeon of a fraction of the commerce activity happening on the internet The Internet was a fraction…

The "Internet" is not really a good comparison. The Internet existed for decades before it took off in the late 90s. And blockchain is part of the Internet--just another protocol.

What you're really talking about is the Web. That's the inflection point. Even email, a non-Web-based technology, saw a huge surge in adoption after free webmail services like Hotmail and Yahoo came on the scene.

The big difference between the early Web and early blockchain is the barrier to entry. It was easy to set up websites--still is. That's how you got so many super young people finding huge success out of nowhere.

In comparison, blockchain has an incredibly hard barrier to entry. Not to use it--to build it. If you want to build a robust reliable blockchain, you need very solid cryptography skills. Very few people have that.

The structure of the growth has inverted. In the late 90s you had a lot of people you never heard of, and who were routinely dismissed by industry leaders. But they were building real products that took real business away from old established companies. The Web grew ground-up.

Today, the biggest pushers of blockchain are big established companies. Goldman Sachs. IBM. JP Morgan. The New York Stock Exchange. Big banks, big lawyers, big investors, etc.

Re: The blockchain paradox: Why DLTs may do little to transform the economy

#312

Post by wayn3 »

nradov wrote: post #115
wayn3 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i think its a fair argument to claim that bleeding edge technology is inefficient during its invention phase. the very first fusion reactors arent all that efficient, either.

The very latest fusion reactors aren't efficient either, still under unity. Maybe we'll have commercial fusion power in 30 years...

I used present tense for a reason.

Re: The blockchain paradox: Why DLTs may do little to transform the economy

#313

Post by SkyMarshal »

anothercomment wrote: post #250
SkyMarshal wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But it is also not true that it would be a huge problem if there were forks. Why would it be? People will simply use what works best for them, controlled by market forces (they need other people to use the same fork). It's a problem for any tech that aspires to go mainstream and thus must contend with the already high cognitive loads on the majority of people who don't follow the tech in detail, don't know what a ha…

Maybe true, but in a way, classical investments are even more complicated. Some of them are even deliberately complicated to obfuscate their risky nature to naive investors.

If by classical investments you mean vanilla stocks and bonds, those are heavily regulated with strict disclosure and transparency requirements, heavy penalties for cheating (insider trading), and standardized reporting for de-obfuscation as much as possible.

If you're referring to more exotic instruments, those are off limits to mainstream folks, only available (in the US at least) to accredited investors with enough discretionary wealth they won't go homeless if they lose their investment.

In either case, a lot of effort goes into mitigating the cognitive load for mainstream non-expert investors.

Re: The blockchain paradox: Why DLTs may do little to transform the economy

#314

Post by bryanbuckley »

Taek wrote: post #305
anothercomment wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, and it is a reason why I am holding back on Etherium so far. I don't know if they have a proposed solution to that, tbh, but it seems pretty impossible to solve. Although, to be fair, "classic" contracts also need that someone to enforce them. Maybe Etherium & the likes only replace one aspect of it, not the whole process. If company X publicly announces that they'll adhere to a certain contract in the blockc…

You'd only be able to use a blockchain for land ownership of the government agreed to unconditionally honor whatever appeared in the blockchain. And even then, the government found change its mind at any moment. So really, it would not work well unless your whole government was also properly decentralized.

agreed on land (to an extant, I think a digital contract would be a good legal basis if things go to court), but what about virtual land? Or digital tokens that control access to things like a house, car, logins, etc for that matter? Now must there be M:N escrow keys etc.?

Re: The blockchain paradox: Why DLTs may do little to transform the economy

#315

Post by rspeer »

nosuchthing wrote: post #282
MarkPNeyer wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is a proposed solution to mob rule: https://github.com/neyer/dewdrop With a much simpler version of the same concept here https://github.com/neyer/respect I think it's doable.

Filtering out everything but the users you have established relationships with will just push you into a filter bubble echo chamber.

After skimming the "respect" idea, I am convinced that echo chambers are the dominant strategy.

In fact, make a complete subgraph of order 9 or more of people who respect each other. That subgraph has order-N respect that goes to infinity for anyone who has any respect for any of its members, even transitively.

Re: The blockchain paradox: Why DLTs may do little to transform the economy

#316

Post by whiskers08xmt »

coldtea wrote: post #206
mr_spothawk wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Because people absolutely would have jumped at the chance to go from a place to another faster (and more comfortably) and had myriads of reasons to want to do so at any time in history. The first cars were incredibly noisy, smelly, and actually killed a lot of folks. Yet somehow, here we are something like 100 years later, evaluating how many more years we'll have to wait before we can get go place to place without…

> The first cars were incredibly noisy, smelly, and actually killed a lot of folks. And despite that their utility was evident, and adoption very fast. Even so, bitcoin is not supposed to improve with time. It is an invention that is delivered as is (technology and algorithm wise). At best they can make better exchanges. But there are also very real possibilities of regression to those (stricter regulations imposed,…

What do you mean by bitcoin is not supposed to improve over time? There's active development going on, even with bitcoin. It's currently hampered by politics, but if you look at the crypto currency space as a whole, developers are constantly trying out new things and improvements.

Re: The blockchain paradox: Why DLTs may do little to transform the economy

#317

Post by Naomarik »

snowwrestler wrote: post #311
moduspol wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well it's in response to your rebuttal. > Where is the revolution? A common thread among cryptocurrency enthusiasts is that the revolution is coming... except it never does. A technology doesn't need to have all of its potential realized in the first few years of its existence. > Where is the disruption? Bitcoin is a smidgeon of a fraction of the commerce activity happening on the internet The Internet was a fraction…

The "Internet" is not really a good comparison. The Internet existed for decades before it took off in the late 90s. And blockchain is part of the Internet--just another protocol. What you're really talking about is the Web. That's the inflection point. Even email, a non-Web-based technology, saw a huge surge in adoption after free webmail services like Hotmail and Yahoo came on the scene. The big difference between…

To add to this,

I've been meeting with government entities in a country who IBM is heavily influencing with marketing. There are very low hanging fruit kind of technical problems that can be easily solved by mediocre CRUD app developers but due to the money in this region, companies like Oracle and more recently IBM has swooped in and sold them a bunch of things they don't need and have no idea how to integrate to solve the problems they're facing. Don't know how to build REST APIs? Buy our middleware!

Sitting down with people in charge of making these decisions and it's apparent they haven't the slightest clue what they're getting into. Their teams don't have the technical ability to build REST APIs to integrate with each others services, and now they've bought into IBM's message queue without a single developer on their side with the competence or experience to know what it is.

They've sold them solutions without taking into consideration the problem.

Now blockchain is the newest buzzword, spoken about like some magic IT pixie dust that was just invented to solve any technical problem -- "NOW you can go paperless, can make transactions, can store health records, provide government services" as if before it wasn't possible. Somehow people with no technical background are profiting immensely by holding conferences and speaking about things they don't understand. People are literally conversing with each other without having any idea what they're saying.

We got an email recently from an entity that is very interested in our platform stating "we want your product, and all new software must be blockchain enabled," whatever that means.

I recently went to a tech event first person I met was pitching his blockchain company about to launch next month. When questioned, within a few minutes he relented that they were not using blockchain at all.

Re: The blockchain paradox: Why DLTs may do little to transform the economy

#318

Post by Naomarik »

moduspol wrote: post #172
root_axis wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Literally every dismissal of cryptocurrencies you made would have applied exactly to the Internet in the early '90s or prior. It seems I'm not getting through to you. Just because two things have something in common doesn't mean that they're the same thing. Showing that people were skeptical of the internet and blockchains does not demonstrate that blockchains will be as successful as the internet. There is no conn…

I guess I just feel like your rebuttal would be stronger if its only points weren't the same, yet ultimately irrelevant in the case of a prior technology with many similarities. Of course they're not the same thing. That doesn't mean it's now totally valid to claim that it won't be successful due to the same roadblocks that the Internet overcame easily. Do you have any arguments against cryptocurrencies that don't mi…

Other than being a cryptocurrency, everything people are using blockchain based solutions for can be solved in a much more robust, complete, and scalable way using conventional software tools.

This is why it's not the revolutionary thing everyone is saying it is. As a cryptocurrency blockchain is the killer implementation. For anything else it just becomes a ridiculously bloated, clumsy, and slow database that hardly anyone understands and wastes electricity.

Re: The blockchain paradox: Why DLTs may do little to transform the economy

#319

Post by dobin »

rockmeamedee wrote: post #85

I agree with this article. Proponents of blockchain tech argue its revolutionary quality is its ability to act as a decentralized and trustless database. But I don't ever hear them sort through the issue of how to agree on the schema for this trustless database. For a group of people to use a decentralized DB, they have to agree as to what to store in it, and how to store it. They need to form consensus about how the…

Decentralized trustless databases can also be implemented with Merkle Trees (as it is done with certificate transparency). I dont understand why people choose blockchains instead.

Re: The blockchain paradox: Why DLTs may do little to transform the economy

#320

Post by davidgerard »

wyc wrote: post #54
davidgerard wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "Look at the popularity of Bitcoin in [country]" argument always turns out to be made-up rubbish. I did actually try tracking the Venezuela hype to its source. You have linked the Reason article as a reference, but if you actually read the thing, its title is "The Secret, Dangerous World of Venezuelan Bitcoin Mining: How cryptocurrency is turning socialism against itself" and the article itself is an unhinged lib…

Thank you for your research into this! I found it difficult to locate good sources too, and that fact is worthy of more disclaimer than I gave. I think you're right in giving any claimed causality in new territory a good hard knock. The rate of usage growth could give more insights than just current volumes: https://coin.dance/volume/localbitcoins/VEF It could indeed be just a blip, but would you agree that there exi…

> It could indeed be just a blip, but would you agree that there exist reasonable incentives for usage of DLTs in unstable economies?

tl;dr no. Cryptocurrencies (we're not talking about the general euphemism "DLT", your question is about cryptocurrencies and specifically Bitcoin) don't solve any of the problems people have in that situation. When every story about "Bitcoin in [troubled country]" has turned out to be made-up rubbish, this leads me to consider all such claims wishful thinking on the part of holders.

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