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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

#251

Post by pnathan »

bringtheaction wrote: post #149
icebraining wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 but I don’t want to own the storage drives myself. Also I want it to be simple as Dropbox. I have other things to do than to dick around with storage and syncing and all that — believe me I did spend a lot of time on it already. The point of the blockchain is to allow me to rent storage space on other people’s computers.

s3 does this really nicely, for pennies per gig

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#252

Post by hyprCoin »

s73v3r_ wrote: post #245
hyprCoin wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is literally no place to tack on a middleman with nano/btc. Yes it will take some rethinking of how we combat what society conceives as improper use of funds.

So the people I have to go through to convert my crypto to real money aren't middlemen?

I plan on only accepting crypto for consulting this year, it filters out clients and I have limited time.

At some point I will exchange to USD to pay whatever I owe in taxes and to pay any vendor that does not take crypto. I imagine if I were an unscrupulous actor I would skip the tax step and avoid vendors that don't accept crypto.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#253

Post by spookthesunset »

darawk wrote: post #113
Joeboy wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But irrespective of its conceptual quality, why should anybody care, outside of compsci? Why doesn't the doubly linked list get to be a household name or a hotly tipped investment buzzword?

Because at a fundamental level, distributed adversarial consensus commoditizes trust . Institutional trust is an enormous bottleneck in our economy. It is a virtuous cycle that ossifies industries, e.g. banking, and consumer finance. Why does it still take longer to send money to someone in another country than it does to mail them a package? Why are credit cards a pull architecture, even though that is pretty obviou…

> distributed adversarial consensus commoditizes trust....

It absolutely does no such thing. Trust has nothing to do with technology and you'll never escape the need to trust real world, meatspace based institutions and humans. At the end of the day you are arguing "code is law", which is a pile of fresh horse manure, clear to anybody who saw what happened to The DAO.

Technology is created and governed by humans and you have to trust those humans. You need human meatspace based institutions in place to deal with when that trust is broken. No technology will replace this--at least in any kind of world I'd want to live in.

Satoshi's Glorious Blockchain will never succeed because it is a technological solution to a problem that can never be solved by technology.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#254

Post by icebraining »

piracykills wrote: post #160
icebraining wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 po…

Wasabi and B2 are pretty much the only commercial services

You're missing OVH, which has multiple DCs.

Automating the upload to different endpoints is not exactly something exclusive to the blockchain, I already have that with git-annex.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#255

Post by dilyevsky »

majewsky wrote: post #184
dilyevsky wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’m with on that but i feel like the punchline of that story should be “my company has a Head of Blockchain”.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#256

Post by spookthesunset »

s73v3r_ wrote: post #225
arisAlexis wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes very little corruption in governments worldwide and records are never counterfeited. I agree

And how would a blockchain stop a government from putting a counterfeit record in to start?

> And how would a blockchain stop a government from putting a counterfeit record in to start?

Or any entity? Sure you can trust that once it is in the blockchain it won't get tampered with but you still have to trust the source of that record.

... which is where all these stupid "do your inventory management on the blockchain" things fall apart with even an ounce of thought. Who gives a crap if the blockchain trustlessly says the wine was made with grapes from peru if a corruptible human had to enter it...

At some point, all data comes from humans and you have to trust those humans to do the right thing. And when those humans breech that trust, you need meatspace based institutions to sort out the mess...

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#257

Post by spookthesunset »

arisAlexis wrote: post #38
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…

assets like everything from real estate records to money to corporate stocks to car ownership to birth certificates. What you call vagueness I call short sightedness and failing to see the big picture. It has been done before with all major breakthroughs since the applications are not immediately obvious to everyone.

> assets like everything from real estate records to money to corporate stocks to car ownership to birth certificates.

How the hell does blockchain solve any problem in these spaces?

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#258

Post by spookthesunset »

DSingularity wrote: post #220
simias wrote: 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…

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 in…

> This paper trail is immutable. That is valuable.

It is only valuable on the blockchain if its cost to maintain is less than, say, a mid-sized country worth of electricity.

Who will be the miners required for this blockchain? Who will pay for the mining? Who will ensure there is no 51% attack on the blockchain?

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#259

Post by spookthesunset »

ravenstine wrote: post #201
cm2187 wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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

Courts. Laws. Governments.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#260

Post by captn3m0 »

DSingularity wrote: post #220
simias wrote: 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…

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 in…

You an achieve the same results from writing things to a git repo and publishing it. Any edits on previous commits would result in the entire repo being changed. Publish it to the world, push every commit hash on twitter/RSS/Email. Done.

Or just use a merkle hash tree like CT logs do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_Transparency#Certi...

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