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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

#291

Post by saas_co_de »

stale2002 wrote: post #273
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…

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.

If you compare the thousands of years where deflationary currencies were working well to the modern Era I think most would prefer an inflationary currency.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#292

Post by wsxcde »

scrooched_moose wrote: post #11
johnchristopher wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An example from the top of your head ?

GPU acceleration in scientific computing. My god in 2011 it was the only thing anyone talked about. Every COTS solver package cobbled together support in less than a year and were promising order of magnitude speedups. In 2018 it's still hanging around but realizing a 20% speedup on certain classes of problems. Maybe.

Relevant war story: I was one of the engineers who initially started looking at GPGPU computing at one of my former employers. This was circa 2007 and people were getting really excited thanks largely to NVIDIA's hype machine. 2007 BTW, was when the first Teslas were making their way into the wild.

I was part of a group that developed signal processing algorithms and my boss's boss pulled me aside and asked me what we ought to do about this stuff. I told him that there are a few applications where this works very well, but it's pretty niche overall and we shouldn't do more than what we'd already done. He was a bit surprised because he thought I'd be one of the kool-aid drinkers given how much I knew about and liked playing with the tech. But he deferred to my judgement.

It turned out to be one of the most significant conversations I've had. I was still a junior engineer fresh out of college, but my bosses realized that I could be trusted put aside naive enthusiasm about the tech and make cool-headed decisions about what was strategically important. And I learned to trust my intuition about what was useful and what was just hype.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#293

Post by [deleted] »

s73v3r_ wrote: post #239
donmatito wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I can go back and rewrite history pretty easily in Git.

[deleted]

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#294

Post by sangnoir »

kerkeslager wrote: post #269
s73v3r_ wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it is quite hard to think of a useful application for blockchain that isn't done better and cheaper by existing methods.

No, not really. Anything where decentralized trust is useful: money, anonymous messaging, voting, etc. Cheaper/better isn't really relevant, because these things can't be done by a centralized method without trusting a central authority, period.

> Anything where decentralized trust is useful: money, anonymous messaging, voting, etc.

I completely disagree with your examples: trust in money is centralized because I trust a central government will ensure it is legal tender, and that a central bank will act in the best interest of stability. If there's no centralized trusted party in messaging - how can I trust the messages? Trust has to be rooted somewhere - when a newspaper quotes anonymous sources, I'm implicitly trusting the newspaper and its source-vetting process. When it comes to voting - confidence in the vote counter is essential.

I suspect our difference is more fundamental - I assume that just like any other system - decentralized systems can be subverted, and there will be parties who will subvert it. The only difference is that for centralized system, I usually will trust the central authority to fix/mitigate problems. When "decentralized" systems are subverted, you will discover that they were centralized after all when it emerges that someone (unilaterally or by way of some vote) can make "fixes" that affect the entire system (forking the blockchain, dropping some "rogue" transactions, changing the algorithm, etc).

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#295

Post by stale2002 »

saas_co_de wrote: post #291
stale2002 wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you compare the thousands of years where deflationary currencies were working well to the modern Era I think most would prefer an inflationary currency.

Many would, sure. It has advantages and disadvantages.

But the point is to give people choices.

Some people do indeed prefer deflationary currencies, and that's OK.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#296

Post by [deleted] »

hudon wrote: post #79
mirekrusin wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PoW is just one of available consensus algorithms. Blockchain doesn’t imply decentralised consensus, you can run it on paxos, raft, authority round or something else, especially for internal, private or semi-private networks. What you get is trail log with proofs that’s immutable and strongly protected against temper.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#297

Post by celdon25 »

simias wrote: post #108
asimpletune wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate why you think it’s a terrible DB?

Why is it not? It's slow, expensive and wasteful. You could host a regular MySQL on commodity hardware that could handle ten times the rate of transactions of the bitcoin blockchain. You could publish signed dumps publicly for people to replicate and monitor as they see fit. The only interesting feature of bitcoin is the trustless consensus but it's not as useful or revolutionary as the hype would have you believe. I…

I guess you've never heard of CQRS then. Blockchains are not on-demand databases, but rather sources of truth from which derived, queryable databases can be constructed.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#298

Post by celdon25 »

Frondo wrote: post #116
asimpletune wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate why you think it’s a terrible DB?

This is a good read: hackernoon.com/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-a-use-case-for-blockchain-ee98c180100

30 Non-Financial Use Cases of Blockchain Technology. https://imgur.com/a/ShRoW

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#299

Post by dozzie »

hudon wrote: post #45
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…

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…

> I think the fundamental assumption is that "Satoshi invented a useful solution to decentralized consensus".

And this very assumption is so untrue. What Satoshi invented is document timestamping protocol, not consensus protocol.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#300

Post by dozzie »

mirekrusin wrote: post #72
hudon wrote: 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…

PoW is just one of available consensus algorithms. Blockchain doesn’t imply decentralised consensus, you can run it on paxos, raft, authority round or something else, especially for internal, private or semi-private networks. What you get is trail log with proofs that’s immutable and strongly protected against temper.

> PoW is just one of available consensus algorithms.

No, because blockchain is not a consensus protocol.

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