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Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

reuters.com

201–210 of 487 posts

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#201
post #198

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…

wouldn't a simple system of signatures certified by a certificate authority (like for the web) solve this problem in a much more direct way?

What's to keep a party from chucking out a signed document that they don't like?

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#202
Wall Street only cares about money extraction. Blockchain projects are currently milked dry with no where to squeeze out money. It's no surprise that they are "rethinking" it. If it should start growing fat again with lots of opportunities to extract money, Wall street will jump right back in.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#203

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…

> usable by any actor of the chain

Do you really want an immutable ledger for that? Fat fingers and data entry errors can happen.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#204
post #199

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…

If anybody can enter and add entries to your blockchain, how do you ensure that they don't insert bogus data? If you're tracing a roll of paper what prevents somebody from adding an entry saying "the shipment got stolen" then immediately making a new entry for it with different attributes pretending it's something else? Or simply at the source pretending that something is of a higher quality than it is? The answer is…

This is generally my main source of skepticism relating to blockchain solutions. The ledger is 100% trustable as long as it describes digital assets that are entirely confined within the distributed ledger, but a digital token doesn't stop men with guns from taking your house. Just like a digital signature provides no guarantees that the associated information is true.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The first sentence of the Bitcoin white paper describes a problem that can't be solved by a normal DB.

"A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution."

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#206
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By cryptocurrency standards, 2008 was any given Tuesday.

Trusting banks, not comparing crashes.

2008 was not really a question of trusting banks in a way that our savings were harmed. It was more that our investments were harmed. Separating bank liability for either of those things is hard, but it is not a simple case to assign all the blame on them.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#207
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…

But one of the biggest selling points of Bitcoin itself was mathematically limited supply. A new cryptocurrency appearing every day fundamentally undermines the value proposition. Blockchain may have value as a decentralized ledger in other areas, but “lots of blockchain based currencies” aren’t really one of them since it’s self-sabotaging.

The limited supply was really only a value proposition for a small group of people. Most are not interested in deflationary currencies.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#208
post #199

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…

If anybody can enter and add entries to your blockchain, how do you ensure that they don't insert bogus data? If you're tracing a roll of paper what prevents somebody from adding an entry saying "the shipment got stolen" then immediately making a new entry for it with different attributes pretending it's something else? Or simply at the source pretending that something is of a higher quality than it is? The answer is…

Haha no I initially purchased all the tokens in supply-chain related fields, but I sold them a while ago at a loss. It doesn't matter - I still think these projects are very relevant for the future.

I do not have the answers to your objections. I was replying to the common theme of "this is a solution is search for a problem". I am stating that there is a problem in search for a solution

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#209

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…

You might want to look into VeChain then, which is a blockchain platform aimed at solving that exact problem, and is already being used by large customers such as DVG NL and China Tobacco. Jim Breyer and DFJ are both strong backers.

https://medium.com/@jimbreyer/announcing-our-vechain-advisor...

https://www.vechain.org/

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#210
post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anybody can enter and add entries to your blockchain, how do you ensure that they don't insert bogus data? If you're tracing a roll of paper what prevents somebody from adding an entry saying "the shipment got stolen" then immediately making a new entry for it with different attributes pretending it's something else? Or simply at the source pretending that something is of a higher quality than it is? The answer is…

This is generally my main source of skepticism relating to blockchain solutions. The ledger is 100% trustable as long as it describes digital assets that are entirely confined within the distributed ledger, but a digital token doesn't stop men with guns from taking your house. Just like a digital signature provides no guarantees that the associated information is true.

No but it certifies who has entered the info, right? That might be part of the solution here
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