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

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#181

Post by phpnode » Thu, Mar 29, 2018, 4:53 PM UTC

kerkeslager wrote: post #161

rsynnott wrote: post #97

> The project, which had successfully tested with startup Digital Asset Holdings (DA), was shelved because banks and other potential users believed the same results could be achieved more cheaply using current technology, he said. This is more or less the curse of the almighty blockchain; it's very hard to think of a plausible, actually useful, application which can't be accomplished far more cheaply and simply using…

It's really not hard to think of useful applications for blockchain. The problem HN has with blockchain is that a lot of HN users are the problem which decentralization solves. The basic startup monetization strategies these days revolve around centralizing user data and then collecting rent (usually in the form of ads) or centralizing transactions and then collecting a percentage. Decentralization is the antithesis…

> It's really not hard to think of useful applications for blockchain.

Then please list some useful, concrete applications of blockchain that would not be solved better and cheaper by a normal database.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#182

Post by narrator » Thu, Mar 29, 2018, 4:53 PM UTC

SkyMarshal wrote: post #167

KirinDave wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If distributed trustless consensus is useful, there are cheaper ways to get it than PoW mining. It's just that most folks don't understand them. The principle value of Bitcoin as a protocol is its incredible (even detrimental, from a technical perspective) simplicity.

Are there other means of distributed trustless consensus as secure as PoW? Secure being the operative word here. Lots of attempts, but none yet convincingly as or more secure.

People who are not crypto-anarchists don't realize that the only reason for proof of work is so you don't have to trust anyone. If there is trust, a centralized database is better in every way vs. Blockchain.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#183

Post by alexbeloi » Thu, Mar 29, 2018, 4:59 PM UTC

KirinDave wrote: post #118

yxhuvud wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the fundamental assumption is that distributed consensus in itself is useful. So far, there are some applications (databases), but for the stuff they are using the blockchain for, not so much.

If distributed trustless consensus is useful, there are cheaper ways to get it than PoW mining. It's just that most folks don't understand them. The principle value of Bitcoin as a protocol is its incredible (even detrimental, from a technical perspective) simplicity.

Could you provide a couple sources please, I believe many of us are not well read on blockchain literature.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#184

Post by majewsky » Thu, Mar 29, 2018, 4:59 PM UTC

dilyevsky wrote: post #101

hudon wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your definition of "blockchain" is any distributed database with signed rows and a public read-only API, it's miles away from what Satoshi was talking about... Why don't you just call it a "distributed database with signed entries" or something.

or simply "git"

When meeting my company's Head of Blockchain (not sure if the pun is intended) a while ago, I asked him if git would qualify as blockchain technology. He replied that "blockchain is not a technology, It's a paradigm shift". Literally. That statement was so absurd I didn't even know what to say, so it worked out well for him.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#185

Post by JumpCrisscross » Thu, Mar 29, 2018, 4:59 PM UTC

jesusthatsgreat wrote: post #180

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…

> The internet as we know it didn't offer the average user much value until the mid 90's

The Internet was useful to academic, financial, government and military users in the 1970s [1]. It was built and iterated to solve real problems. Real users' inputs, many of whom were experts in their fields, were incorporated into its design.

[1] http://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1970s/

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#186

Post by mjmj » Thu, Mar 29, 2018, 5:02 PM UTC

michaelchisari wrote: post #168

chrisco255 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did 2008 teach us nothing?

By cryptocurrency standards, 2008 was any given Tuesday.

Trusting banks, not comparing crashes.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#187

Post by lern_too_spel » Thu, Mar 29, 2018, 5:02 PM UTC

mr_spothawk wrote: post #89

SirLJ wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What government? I hope mine do not do that, this information should remine private...

Several states in the US are accepting tax payments in bitcoin. Additionally ever out of counties in the US which are putting real estate transactions on a block chain

> Several states in the US are accepting tax payments in bitcoin.

Citation needed. The Arizona senate barely passed one such bill, but it would still need to pass the House and the governor. Arizona's government is known to do silly things in a vain attempt to be tech relevant.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#188

Post by donmatito » Thu, Mar 29, 2018, 5:04 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…

Coming from a logistics background, coordinating tracability data is painful within a company, even with help of ERP like SAP. But when you need tracability across an industry, it becomes almost impossible.

I had professional experience in an industry where we had to go to the plants to ensure rolls of paper certified from suppliers using responsibly-managed forests were physically separated from the non-certified ones. We needed the paperwork coming from China, then another one from the transformation plant in Morocco, then in customer warehouses across Europe.

An external protocol that would provide universal tracability, usable by any actor of the chain, seem like a great solution to a real problem. Blockchain provides some "neutrality", ie no need for each actor to find its own certificate provider (I imagine that service shops would help larger companies set up their systems, but the back-end would be common across all actors).

I'm not very convinced by pseudo-decentralized apps in most domains, but in logistics... very bullish !

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#189

Post by donmatito » Thu, Mar 29, 2018, 5:05 PM UTC

Coming from a logistics background, coordinating tracability data is painful within a company, even with help of ERP like SAP. But when you need tracability across an industry, it becomes almost impossible.

I had professional experience in an industry where we had to go to the plants to ensure rolls of paper certified from suppliers using responsibly-managed forests were physically separated from the non-certified ones. We needed the paperwork coming from China, then another one from the transformation plant in Morocco, then in customer warehouses across Europe.

An external protocol that would provide universal tracability, usable by any actor of the chain, seem like a great solution to a real problem. Blockchain provides some "neutrality", ie no need for each actor to find its own certificate provider (I imagine that service shops would help larger companies set up their systems, but the back-end would be common across all actors).

I'm not very convinced by pseudo-decentralized apps in most domains, but in logistics... very bullish !

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#190

Post by bunderbunder » Thu, Mar 29, 2018, 5:06 PM UTC

lisper wrote: post #165

xapata wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And availability of cheap inputs, like cheap electricity.

Actually, it's the exact opposite. The security of a blockchain is fundamentally dependent on mining being expensive. That is the only defense against a 51% attack. Cheap energy just drives up consumption to the point where mining is expensive enough to deter attacks. This is ultimately what I think will sink blockchain as a medium of exchange (not necessarily as a store of value). By its very nature it cannot be che…

I'm not even sure that mining being expensive is a great defense against a 51% attack.

If things do end up being an oligopoly, then any one of the members of that oligopoly will only have a relatively small sprint between their current position and a 51% attack. And quite a few options for how to attempt such a sprint.