blockchains have been on their way out since 2009.
Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality
301–310 of 487 posts
Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
And how many of those have the market cap of Facebook?
From 2007: "Will MySpace Ever Lose Its Monopoly?"[1] Past performance does not beget future success. [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2007/feb/08/business....
2007 was 11 years ago. That's glacial on tech timescale.
Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality
#303It 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…
There are some fruits that are technically impressive and expandable even without much mainstream use or attention: e.g. Time stamping.
Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality
#304Earlier quoted context omitted.
Crypto does not equal blockchain. Blockchain has a huge number of potential industry uses other than cryptocurrency. IBM has done a lot of work with companies making blockchain products that don't involve cryptocurrencies. When multiple companies are in a shared relationship they can benefit greatly from the tech. There are government regulation opportunities keeping track of sales and trades on regulated public mark…
Examples ? Blockchain is a technology in need of a problem to solve.. I dont know any commercial usage outside of cryptocurrencies.
Here's a graphic that lists some examples. Most of them will fail, but these are still good-faith projects nonetheless. https://imgur.com/a/ShRoW
Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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 powe…
> I think the average human being values convenience and low fees much more than privacy
I think it ends up being more nuanced than that, with plenty of gradations of all of those factors.
If it means, "Literally nobody can know whether I prefer pads or tampons, and where I get them, not even the person I buy pads or tampons from", then I'm going to lean toward paying cash at some random drug store. A brick and mortar because getting things shipped to me requires giving them identifying information, and cash because it has literally zero fees and leaves no paper trail.
If I have to buy something online, then I already have to give them my name and address so I can get it shipped to me. At that point I may not care if my bank and the credit card processing agency also have a record of the transaction, because the info's already out there. At that point it's just a question of whether there are privacy laws that prevent parties from selling too much information or not - either way, I'm guessing 1 and 3 parties will ultimately fall in roughly the same equivalence class, on the privacy front.
Personally, I don't see a middle path where blockchain is preferable to either of those options. If I want complete privacy, then I don't want that transaction appearing on the blockchain, either. If I don't, well, might as well get some consumer protection.
Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality
#306Earlier 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…
> nobody wants to spend something that's by design supposed to become scarcer and scarcer.
Except that Bitcoin is (with consensual upgrade) infinitely divisible. (E.g. the network can [vote to] move to 16 decimal places, and so on).
Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality
#307Earlier 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 ?
What if someone else gets their hands on supplier X's keys?
Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Good for you. I have rent to pay, so I need to be paid in USD. That brings us back to my original question: Are the people I have to go through to exchange crypto to USD not middlemen?
Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality
#309Earlier 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 ?
And how do I know that person actually exists? How would I track them down if they lied?
Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I fail to see the relevance of your comment.
>Command Query Responsibility Segregation is a software pattern that divides the system into two distinct parts, an append-optimised command side and a read-optimised query side.
My point was about the "append-optimised" part. Of course the blockchain can be arbitrarily fast to query but you can only make about 5 transactions (or "inserts") per second on the bitcoin blockchain on average. Not very impressive as far as DBs are concerned.