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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

#271

Post by smacktoward »

dilyevsky wrote: post #255
majewsky wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”.

In their defense, they tried the title "Blockhead" first but that didn't look as good on the résumé.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#272

Post by simias »

spmurrayzzz wrote: post #232
simias wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that so far it remains to be seen if that can work at scale. Bitcoin is moving towards the lightning network which changes things quite a bit, in particular potentially adding some centralization and giving some nodes advantages over others (well connected nodes with large open channels will have an advantage over a newcomer without connections for instance). Bitcoin cash is trying an other route with bigger b…

>Bitcoin is moving towards the lightning network which changes things quite a bit, in particular potentially adding some centralization and giving some nodes advantages over others (well connected nodes with large open channels will have an advantage over a newcomer without connections for instance). The centralization narrative involving LN is somewhat mischaracterized IMHO. Given that source-routing puts control of…

I think the average human being values convenience and low fees much more than privacy (otherwise Facebook and credit cards wouldn't be quite as popular). That means that I expect that wallets and stores that offer the smallest fee will be the ones people use most. A well connected node will be cheaper to transact with by virtue of not having to open a new channel.

That gives well connected "bank" nodes a lot of power because they can decide who they connect with (you could imagine paying a "bank" node to connect with you to enable cheaper transactions for your customers) and as a user you have an incentive to host your coins in one of these bank nodes so that it remains easily and cheaply available for purchases. Meanwhile a small indie shop (or some guy selling socks on ebay) won't have any channel so transacting with them will end up more expensive than buying from a popular store.

Basically you've reinvented Visa without the insurance, regulations and customer protection. At least that's how it looks like to me.

I guess we'll know soon enough which one of us is right. Maybe the truth is somewhere in between.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#273

Post by stale2002 »

simias wrote: post #224
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mining is decentralized Cryptocurrency mining is as close as one can get to a theoretical free market in the real world. Free markets have known modes of failure [1]. One of these is where first-mover advantage and economies of scale combine to produce a barrier to entry; the result is oligopoly or monopoly. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_failure

Except that so far it remains to be seen if that can work at scale. Bitcoin is moving towards the lightning network which changes things quite a bit, in particular potentially adding some centralization and giving some nodes advantages over others (well connected nodes with large open channels will have an advantage over a newcomer without connections for instance). Bitcoin cash is trying an other route with bigger b…

I take issue with your criticism of deflationary currencies.

Deflationary currencies worked well for literally thousands of years, when people used precious metals for their currency.

Inflationary monotary policy is a fairly recent invention of the 20th century.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#274

Post by kerkeslager »

phpnode wrote: post #181
kerkeslager wrote: post #161

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.

Better/cheaper don't enter the equation for things that can't be implemented on a centralized data structure:

- Financial transactions without a trusted authority

- Elections without a trusted authority

- Anonymous messaging (this is admittedly solved by federation if the federation is distributed enough, i.e. Tor).

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#275

Post by [deleted] »

icebraining wrote: post #254
piracykills wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#276

Post by simias »

donmatito wrote: post #243
s73v3r_ wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how do you know that's the actual person, or that such a person/entity exists?

Isn't that EXACTLY the problem solved by cryptography, ie I can reliably know that only supplier X could have signed the message with the public key of supplier X ?

Cryptography lets you make signatures that can't be falsified by anybody not having your key but that's it. It doesn't mean much if you have no way to know who is actually behind the signature.

I could generate a PGP key for Bill Gates right now, distribute it to the keyservers and sign a message saying that "I owe simias on hacker news one billion dollars". You could verify that the message was signed by my key beyond a doubt but so what?

Bitcoin doesn't have this problem thanks to PoW, when a miner submits a newly mined block the network doesn't need to check the miner's credentials, the block itself proves (statistically) that the miner did a certain amount of work to come up with the block. That's all that matters and the coins/fees are credited to the miner's address. That works because all the data necessary to create the consensus are available "objectively" on the blockchain for all to see. It doesn't matter if the miner pretends to be Abraham Lincoln, that's not what the blockchain works with.

Most problems don't have these properties, if I tell the blockchain "I have a brand new PS4 and I'm going to send it to X in exchange for n bitcoins" the blockchain has no objective way to track this transaction.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#277

Post by Alex3917 »

spookthesunset wrote: post #248
Alex3917 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In technological terms, it is old. No it's not. It took double entry accounting hundreds of years to spread around the world, why would you expect triple entry accounting to take over any faster? We already know it's going to succeed because it's objectively better by a very significant margin, but that doesn't mean it's not going to take decades to do so.

> It took double entry accounting hundreds of years to spread around the world, why would you expect triple entry accounting to take over any faster? Here in modern times information moves orders of magnitude faster than when double entry accounting was invented. By modern standards, blockchain is ancient and has yet to move beyond its current use as the world's greatest platform for financial fraud ever invented.

> Here in modern times information moves orders of magnitude faster than when double entry accounting was invented.

The speed of information is about as relevant as the cost of tea in China. What matters is how fast people actually change their minds, which isn't any faster. All of the older generation basically just has to die before the new best practices can get widely adopted. If anything change likely happens more slowly these days because people are living longer.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#278

Post by filleokus »

ballenf wrote: post #212
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 t…

If we imagine the best-case scenario, where all actors are handling their keys with care, and a system works to somehow produce an immutable, always consistent log of all actions, I still don't see how this will be usable for most products. You basically also need an immutable link between the physical product and some kind of cryptographically provable ID in this magic log.

When receiving an item you want to check the provenance of, you need some way to securely identify the product in the log. Otherwise some bad actor along the way could unlink the actual product from the ID in the log, for example by duplicating and stealing a known-good ID, yielding all the provenance information useless.

I guess this could work for electronic products where you could deeply embed something like a TPM that could provide this ID securely (which would be to expensive to extract to make it worth duplicating), but for something like a shipment of steel or even worse coal/oil/grain etc, I don't see how this would work.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#279

Post by simias »

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…

Immutability is easy to achieve. Anything distributed widely enough is effectively immutable. Anything published on the cover of Time magazine is immutable. Anything commited to the linux kernel is immutable. Anything distributed on thepiratebay is immutable. Anything put in the Ubuntu package repository is immutable.

You can amend it and publish new versions but you can be sure that somebody somewhere will have a copy. You want to make your paper trail immutable? Sign it and publish it widely using any medium you want. Burn it on CDs and mail them to random addresses. Tie them to balloons and release them.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#280

Post by 52-6F-62 »

craigc wrote: post #222

I would take any article like this with a grain of salt. There is not a lot of useful or technical information here, and I believe it is more designed as click bait and FUD to create shock value and hurt the public sentiment about Blockchain technology and investing in crypto currencies. That said, on the flip side, a lot of people have been considering Blockchain as some kind of magic solution to all of the world’s…

> I would take any article like this with a grain of salt. There is not a lot of useful or technical information here, and I believe it is more designed as click bait and FUD to create shock value and hurt the public sentiment about Blockchain technology and investing in crypto currencies.

There's a wave of this sentiment lately— which is funny timing. Goldman Sachs apparently will have an operational cryptocurrency trading desk by the end of June.[0]

The TSX is slated to have a cryptocurrency brokerage desk with backing of the Bank of Montreal over the coming months sometime as well.[1] This came out days after BMO blocked all cryptocurrency purchases with consumer credit and debit cards.[2]

The more cynical side of me wants to guess that they're trying to establish a gatekeeping initiative. Knock everybody about, then when they want back in they have to come through you.

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-21/goldman-i...

[1] https://www.newswire.ca/news-releases/tmxs-shorcan-announces...

[2] http://business.financialpost.com/pmn/business-pmn/bmo-stops...

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