Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality • Hacker News Board

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#151

Post by xapata » Thu, Mar 29, 2018, 4:30 PM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #110

hudon wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the fundamental assumption is that "Satoshi invented a useful solution to decentralized consensus". What people don't realize is that Satoshi's solution only works if two assumptions hold true: 1. Mining is decentralized: If mining is centralized than relying on proof-of-work for consensus is waste since the centralized entity controls the blockchain anyway. 2. Consensus rules don't change: If you see the thr…

> Mining is decentralized Cryptocurrency mining is as close as one can get to a theoretical free market in the real world. Free markets have known modes of failure [1]. One of these is where first-mover advantage and economies of scale combine to produce a barrier to entry; the result is oligopoly or monopoly. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_failure

And availability of cheap inputs, like cheap electricity.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#152

Post by ppeetteerr » Thu, Mar 29, 2018, 4:30 PM UTC

onion-soup wrote: post #9

rambossa wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My major questions have always been: where is the business value in blockchain applications? what can a blockchain app do that can't be done by non-blockchain (beyond decentralization - bc I don't think this produces much business value)?

Sending money without fees and delay? Have you ever tried a normal bank transfer? How long did it take? Have you ever tried, say, nano? It literally takes seconds and 0 fees. Here is some value.

In Canada, the gov'ment told the banks they had to offer cheap, instant transfers. Today, it's free to send money to anyone in the country and it takes minutes.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#153

Post by bringtheaction » Thu, Mar 29, 2018, 4:30 PM UTC

throwawaylolx wrote: post #115

bringtheaction wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can have a blockchain without miners. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-stake Now I agree that a lot of ideas for how blockchain will be used are just unnecessary and stupid, but there are some good ones as well. You mentioned file storage but actually I think blockchain could be useful for this. Allow me to elaborate. I don’t want to rely on Dropbox or Google or any other single company for the long-term st…

Funnily, Google invested in a file storage blockchain solution.

That’s fine by me. I don’t care who specifically is hosting my encrypted files as long as they are just one of several nodes in a distributed network.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#154

Post by icebraining » Thu, Mar 29, 2018, 4:31 PM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #94

darawk wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blockchain is a shit database concept. It's use as a currency is one of its best uses. This idea that blockchains are a good database is an absurd myth. Blockchains are useful specifically for doing distributed consensus, and almost nothing else. Currencies are one of the best applications of distributed adversarial consensus. There are others, but currency is pretty near the top of the list.

I think this paper [1] made a decent case for permissioned blockchains ( i.e. "where the participants are limited to a predefined set") in cases where one must store state, accommodate multiple writers who do not trust each other and does not have access to an always-online trusted third party. The number of cases where the final condition applies is small, but positive. [1] https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/375.pdf

The Blockchain is a clever combination of two preexisting concepts: distributed merkel trees, and a consensus algorithm. If you remove one of them, you no longer have a Blockchain, you just have one of its preexisting components.

"Permissioned blockchains" is like someone thought "what if we took the radios out of cellphones and connected them by cables" and proceeded to call that a brand new invention.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#155

Post by loceng » Thu, Mar 29, 2018, 4:32 PM UTC

this_user wrote: post #22

What does "blockchain" even mean in this generalised context? When we are talking about crypto currencies, it is a distributed database with a consensus mechanism that is extremely costly to run. But this is not something you would need or want in most other situations, because there is always some degree of trust with your counterparties (and legal recourse if necessary). If we strip away the consensus mechanism, al…

The other part to talk about relating to trust is that do you want to be on a system with people that you are blind to knowing, and especially on a system that is designed to allow manipulation of it; there's research that could be referenced showing a few different efforts to boost the value of incentivized crypto-assets.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#156

Post by thanatropism » Thu, Mar 29, 2018, 4:33 PM UTC

sndean wrote: post #67

scrooched_moose wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPU acceleration in scientific computing. My god in 2011 it was the only thing anyone talked about. Every COTS solver package cobbled together support in less than a year and were promising order of magnitude speedups. In 2018 it's still hanging around but realizing a 20% speedup on certain classes of problems. Maybe.

> GPU acceleration in scientific computing > it's still hanging around but realizing a 20% speedup on certain classes of problems It really varies though. In grad school I felt like god when some molecular dynamics simulations running on my pair of GTX 760s finished faster than the same thing running on my advisor's 96-core CPU cluster. Point taken, though, that it was over-hyped. There were lots of conference presen…

Wasn't your advisor just using a smaller, more conservative value for h?

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#157

Post by atomical » Thu, Mar 29, 2018, 4:33 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #60

debt wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“governmemts are thinking of putting assets and laws on Blockchain” Two things: this statement is so vague it borders on meaningless. What assets? Who will put it in there? The president? Why would a government do that? Is it free to do or is there budget? Etc. Secondly, even if we could surmount the vagueness that plagues not just this idea but all blockchain ideas, the Herculean effort required to move governments…

The vagueness of Blockchain reminds me of the same “Cloud” vagueness. CEOs and CIOs read these articles about how great “Cloud” is and how everything is moving to “Cloud” and they turn around and declare things like “I want Cloud” and “We need to work on Cloud!” and “Invest in Cloud”. Just parroting what they read in HBR or what some IBM consultant told them. Then a whole bunch of money is spent on “Cloud” with often…

The value proposition of the cloud was that it saves time and sometimes money because of usage pricing. The only advantage of blockchain is that it's supposedly more secure against tampering.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#158

Post by hapnin » Thu, Mar 29, 2018, 4:34 PM UTC

I've been hearing about imminent death of Bitcoin and the pointlessness of blockchain since 2010. I predict that won't change in the future.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#159

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Mar 29, 2018, 4:35 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#160

Post by piracykills » Thu, Mar 29, 2018, 4:38 PM UTC

icebraining wrote: post #119

bringtheaction wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can have a blockchain without miners. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-stake Now I agree that a lot of ideas for how blockchain will be used are just unnecessary and stupid, but there are some good ones as well. You mentioned file storage but actually I think blockchain could be useful for this. Allow me to elaborate. I don’t want to rely on Dropbox or Google or any other single company for the long-term st…

There are already open file storage protocols, and open source clients that supports many storage providers. I use git-annex, which supports about a dozen commercial services, plus any machine that supports SFTP, SMB, Webdav or rsync, among others. And of course, it encrypts everything locally before uploading. What's the point of the blockchain?

Sure, you can sync to your own drives or to several commercial storage providers, but it's not as cheap as it should be. We're talking geographically distributed storage on an open marketplace, cryptographically enforced for extremely cheap prices.

Wasabi and B2 are pretty much the only commercial services which could even attempt to compete on price with something like Sia today (Filecoin and others in the future potentially), but they're only in single DCs and if they lose your data you have no one to go after. In the cryptocurrency-based systems, this is all automated.

For as many incredibly stupid and useless applications of blockchains as there are, this isn't one of them in my opinion. It may not be unique, but it's actually something that could have a competitive edge over a centralized service.