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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

#211

Post by s73v3r_ »

bringtheaction wrote: post #75
mkirklions wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin needs blockchain to verify that a bitcoin is authentic. I have no idea why a company would use blockchain for logistics or file storage considering how its massively expensive to constantly pay miners for transactions. My centralized server can do everything needed for logistics or file storage. Benefits of blockchain are overblown. There are uses, but centralized servers are really good.

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…

A centralized server, just instead of Dropbox or Amazon, one you rent, is still better at that.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#212

Post by ballenf »

donmatito wrote: post #189

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…

What you've described is provenance I believe. And that is the only, imho, use case for blockchain that makes any sense.

It's the only one where the substantial additional overhead and complexity of blockchain is actually still less than the alternative, as your example clearly illustrates.

To attempt to answer a question from sibling comments: these systems are private or closed blockchains, not public. You have a traditional credentials database (the blockchain itself could also be used for this, but that won't usually have inherent benefits) to track who is allowed access to read or submit transactions. Those parties may run a node or you may have one independent third party run all the nodes. It's so different from cryptocurrency setup that it's hard to apply too much of the stuff we've learned from Bitcoin et al to these setups.

At least that's my understanding.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#213

Post by donmatito »

cm2187 wrote: post #198
donmatito wrote: post #189

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?

I have read somewhere else a very interesting way to look at token projects. There are merely incentive for protocols that could have been baked into our browser.

For example, we could have had an identity verification protocol, bound to our browsers, that would have logged us in websites. We would not have needed FB oauth for ex. But it was not prioritized, and now that the Web has been taken over by closed garden, individual companies have very little incentive to contribute to these general-benefits protocols.

Token can be seen a way to incentivize adoption of these general-benefits protocols

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#214

Post by dragonwriter »

hapnin wrote: post #205
phpnode wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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."

But that problem isn't solved by Bitcoin (not can it be solved by any digital currency); Bitcoin doesn't allow online payments to be sent from one party to another without the need for third party clearance, it just increases the number of parties required for clearance.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#215

Post by alexbeloi »

throwawaylolx wrote: post #162
hudon wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if you've spoken to any Bitcoin developers recently, but they'll tell you you're wrong and that it is the valid chain with the most work, not the chain with the most work. They'll then tell you what valid means. Some developers would agree with you though, like Gavin Andresen [0]. Either way, you end up with either centralized miners deciding the fate of the chain, or centralized developers deciding the…

It has always been the longest valid chain though. If miners were to introduce double-spending transactions in a block, full nodes would--by default--reject the blocks, regardless of how much work the chain contains. This also highlights why miners don't control the network and never had.

I'm no expert so bear with me.

My understanding is that the danger of miner control is not "double-spending" but making multiple spends and being able to pick the most favorable one after the fact.

As a non-controller if you try to double-spend, you can't know which one of your attempted transactions will be recorded in the ledger and which will be rejected. As a 51% controlling miner, you can choose the 'correct' transaction.

This allows the 51% controlling miner to engage in futures arbitrage.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#216

Post by prostoalex »

segmondy wrote: post #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.

They're fairly receptive to technologies that decrease their operating costs.

If there was a scenario where blockchain-based solution was cheaper to operate than their current database tech, you'd think they'd be all over it.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#217

Post by donmatito »

prostoalex wrote: post #203
donmatito wrote: post #189

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.

I don't know. What about Git ? Errors happen, then you correct them, but you can see the error and its correction, and it's considered quite healthy, right?

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#218

Post by donmatito »

Cookingboy wrote: post #209
donmatito wrote: post #189

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/

no need to shill here. I don't know which projects will end up successful, I am however convinced that some of them will be

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#219

Post by hapnin »

dragonwriter wrote: post #214
hapnin wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

But that problem isn't solved by Bitcoin (not can it be solved by any digital currency); Bitcoin doesn't allow online payments to be sent from one party to another without the need for third party clearance, it just increases the number of parties required for clearance.

That's a different point altogether. The original question was what does a blockchain solve that a normal DB can't.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#220

Post by DSingularity »

simias wrote: post #199
donmatito wrote: post #189

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…

Hehe. Thats actually a nice artifact, thanks bitcoin. Now individuals can consider the potential of ideas to pan out and participate in funding them. Sure, sounds good -- I'll throw in 1,000$. Suddenly 1,000 like-minded individuals can satisfy the need of projects. Of course thats not always so popular here ;-). I should just mind my own business and focus on the coding right?

Anyhow. I do think you are right. The integrity of the data has to be questioned. But I question why we have to assume that its useless just because it cannot be trusted? This paper trail is immutable. That is valuable. Future evidence can expose prior lies. Once you know that you have to maintain a lie for life, suddenly you are questioning if its really worth making.

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