11–20 of 239 posts
This is the story with basically any startup in a hot space. This could be just as easily about AI / Machine Learning.
In the US, the financial system is about 10% of GDP. (The number depends on your definitions of financial system, US, GDP, and "is"). It also consumes vast amounts of resources ranging from gasoline to drive mortgage brokers to and from work, to the cost of mailing out free low-introductory rate credit cards. It's a fair criticism of Bitcoin that it uses a lot of energy, but it's hard to predict whether it will ultim…
In general I agree, though. Turning energy into trust is definitely worth it, and we're in a price discovery phase to find out what "it" is.
He's probably trying to not offend the company by not being more specific, but given the information offered -- why even apply/interview for a blockchain job if these are his objections (too much hype, PoW is bad)?
I kind of agree with this notion, but it is not limited to blockchains or cryptocurrencies. I had discussions about using deep learning on a problem that was very ill suited for machine learning approaches (in the end it was solved by regular expressions and some simple statistics). Other overhyped technologies include: microservices, nosql-databases, rdf/sparql/semantic web and IoT-devices. Some items on this list were overhyped in the past, but have found a reasonable technological ecosystem in fields that are suited to it, like rdf. I think the same will happen with the blockchain.
I just accepted a generous blockchain job offer with a fortune 500 company. But they are not interested in building a new blockchain implementation, but rather exploring smart contracts and their possible relevance to their business.
I just accepted a generous blockchain job offer with a fortune 500 company. But they are not interested in building a new blockchain implementation, but rather exploring smart contracts and their possible relevance to their business.
I disagree, although the ecosystem is filled with scams, and evangelists have financial interests in promoting their believes, there are some promising advantages. Also the energy requirements for PoW systems are cheap compared to its gains as pointed out by Nick Szabo: "We need more socially scalable ways to securely count nodes, or to put it another way to with as much robustness against corruption as possible, ass…
Yeah but... the crypto algorithm chosen for Bitcoin is about as energy intensive as they come. Other algorithms which are more equipment intensive - scrypt etc - provide the same benefits but without the same disgusting externality of power consumption. I wish I grasped proof of stake better. I’m not yet convinced it can be made to work as well as PoW.