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Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

reuters.com

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Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#171

Post by SkyMarshal »

asimpletune wrote: post #83
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.

Can you elaborate why you think it’s a terrible DB?

These cover it pretty well:

Why you don’t want a blockchain https://twitter.com/jimmysong/status/964172100054417409

Do you need a blockchain? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16315456

Avoiding the pointless blockchain project: How to determine if you’ve found a real blockchain use case https://www.multichain.com/blog/2015/11/avoiding-pointless-b...

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#172

Post by icebraining »

xtracto wrote: post #138
nwah1 wrote: post #7

It is interesting that even in an article like this that they still say things like "for all its potential, blockchain is still in its early days." It is sticking with the unfounded assumption that it will be a success in the future, if only it is given more time. In technological terms, it is old. Innumerable efforts have been attempted, yielding almost no fruit. At what point are the fundamental assumptions going t…

I think about 70% of blockchain related stuff is hype. However, there have been blockchain related projects that have been useful: In Mexico for example: http://iireporter.com/amis-and-ibm-collaborate-on-blockchain... I saw a very good presentation regarding this HyperLedger project, and IMO this kind of projects are the ones that will form the future of blockchain technology.

There's zero need for a blockchain in that case; all you need is for each insurance company to public a hash-chained log of their policies. The closest example is the CT logs, but every single invoicing software in my country was doing that before the Bitcoin paper was published, as part of the mandatory implementation of SAF-T: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAF-T

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#173

Post by thanatropism »

namdnay wrote: post #26
johnchristopher wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An example from the top of your head ?

"Digital Transformation"

Well, "digital transformation" is not a technology -- it's this strategic paradigm of how technology is diffused across an organization. The opposite of "digital transformation" is "IT infrastructure" -- the idea that technology works as an infrastructural layer supporting business operations, rather than dispersed across operations themselves.

"IT" has for long been this back-office area where specialists get to dictate business policies because they know computers. (A classic on this genre is the Bastard Operator from Hell [0]) -- but now lusers bring their own computers and phones to work, and hell if they don't have technological ideas of their own. IT has been commoditized, cloudified, outsourced.

If "digital transformation" sounds bogus is because management consultants are bogus. But in practice it can be a real thing that's not as much about new sexy tech (in the sense of blockchains, RISC chips and so on) as about putting what's already available into operation using business knowledge.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bastard_Operator_From_Hell

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#174

Post by throwawaylolx »

RyanShook wrote: post #78
toomuchtodo wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blockchain is simply a sexy term for a distributed ledger, which has its place in a limited set of use cases.

The question that no one bothers to ask is, "What problem is this technology solving that can't be solved cheaper and just as effectively with 'traditional' technology?" When you look at it this way I think the realistic use cases go way down.

People have been asking and answering these questions for almost ten years. Brief list off the top of my head:

- Seamless global payments

- Store of value

- File storage

- Decentralized exchanges

- DNS lookup

- Prediction markets

- International contracts

- Untraceable payments

- e-Voting

- Copyright or proof of ownership

- Distributed computing

It simply gets tiring for people to argue ad infinitum about this with every non-believer.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#175

Post by tCfD »

nwah1 wrote: post #7

It is interesting that even in an article like this that they still say things like "for all its potential, blockchain is still in its early days." It is sticking with the unfounded assumption that it will be a success in the future, if only it is given more time. In technological terms, it is old. Innumerable efforts have been attempted, yielding almost no fruit. At what point are the fundamental assumptions going t…

It took centuries for the fundamental hermetic assumptions of alchemy to be questioned, and it had to come from 'insiders' (like Boyle and Newton) rather than total skeptics. Even then it was never refuted in any official sense, it just sort of faded out of fashion as its surrogate children, the sciences, took over more and more of its academic spotlight. Blockchain-ism, the alchemy of the internet age, will probably have to follow the same arc, though sped up by an order of magnitude thanks to the much improved knowledge-sharing network of the present day.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#176

Post by xur17 »

bpicolo wrote: post #102
kerkeslager wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's stopping them is a simple question: who are you transferring the money to? A lot of banks allow customers to do instant transfers between customers of that bank, but for this to be a killer feature, you have to have enough customers that this is significant. In NYC, Chase is almost there--they have enough of a share of NYC that it's worth asking if the person you're transferring to has Chase so you can use the…

> But the vast majority of transactions are still between customers of different banks, and there's not much reason for a bank to process a competitor's payment quickly But they're doing exactly this now with Zelle.

Zelle sounds great, and I really want it to work, but my experiences with it so far have been really frustrating.

3 separate experiences:

1. My friend was sending me $750, and had to structure it as 4 separate payments each 24 hours apart due to some sending limit that either Zelle or his bank imposes.

2. I sent my brother money, and for whatever reason he had trouble accepting the transfer, so I had to resend it a week later when it failed.

3. Someone sent money to me, and it was my first time using Zelle, so I had to login to my bank after clicking a link in a text. But after logging in, nothing happened... It didn't tell me where the funds went, and they weren't in my account. 3 days later they magically showed up. I think the transaction was pending??

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#177

Post by woah »

jfasi wrote: post #163

I get suspicious whenever I read about companies piling on to technology trends, not least because of the damage it does to the rank and file developers who work on it. The short version is: leaders got bamboozled and their subordinates suffered, but it's a little more nuanced than that. We tend to think of large companies as either these monolithic beasts that act according to their own best interests, or as emergen…

What is the supposed persecution of developers you’re alluding to here?

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#178

Post by throwawaylolx »

the_new_guy_29 wrote: post #84
discoMAN wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crypto does not equal blockchain. Blockchain has a huge number of potential industry uses other than cryptocurrency. IBM has done a lot of work with companies making blockchain products that don't involve cryptocurrencies. When multiple companies are in a shared relationship they can benefit greatly from the tech. There are government regulation opportunities keeping track of sales and trades on regulated public mark…

Examples ? Blockchain is a technology in need of a problem to solve.. I dont know any commercial usage outside of cryptocurrencies.

Examples: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16708567

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#179

Post by icebraining »

darawk wrote: post #170
icebraining wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's not actually true. Git is a blockchain, for instance. Permissioned blockchains are a real thing. Even centralized blockchains can be useful (e.g. a government publishing property record transactions, the blockchain aspect would be useful to ensure retroactive modifications weren't made, even if the gov. was still in full control of the chain itself).

No, they're just merkel trees! The attempt to co-opt them to make "blockchains" seem more useful than they really are - and to justify all the money dumped in these projects - is disgraceful.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#180

Post by jesusthatsgreat »

nwah1 wrote: post #7

It is interesting that even in an article like this that they still say things like "for all its potential, blockchain is still in its early days." It is sticking with the unfounded assumption that it will be a success in the future, if only it is given more time. In technological terms, it is old. Innumerable efforts have been attempted, yielding almost no fruit. At what point are the fundamental assumptions going t…

> In technological terms, it is old.

TCP was created in the mid 70's. The internet as we know it didn't offer the average user much value until the mid 90's and even then it was a very small amount of the population capable of using it / benefiting from it.

Electric cars were around in the late 1800's. In the early 1900's they were on a par with gasoline / steam powered car sales. It has taken us well over 100 years to get to a stage where they're considered a viable option again for most people again...

Bottom line - technology morphs over time so long as there are people passionate about it and continuously working to improve it. There are literally thousands of developers working full time in the blockchain space and it's one of the hottest growth areas around in technology in terms of developer mindshare.

It's not going to die any time soon, regardless of what price Bitcoin is.

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