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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

#391

Post by as300 »

s73v3r_ wrote: post #235
DSingularity wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

" 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." You mean Kickstarter, which has nothing to do with blockchain? "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…

>You mean Kickstarter, which has nothing to do with blockchain?

Blockchain is having all of the functionality (and more) of Kickstarter with 10-20x more reach. Also, explain how you would use kickstarter to crowd-fund a gold-backed digital currency without Blockchain?

>Says who? Both Bitcoin and Etherium have gone through forks of their chains

The whole point if a Blockchain is you can tell if it's been forked, and really forks are just the exception proving the rule of immutability. Meaningful forks have happened a handful of times and they've been heavily publicized. How many times has a bank issued a chargeback?

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#392

Post by droidist2 »

croon wrote: post #386
hammock wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Monopoly has never occurred in a free market. https://mises.org/library/myth-natural-monopoly

There has never been a "free market" to begin with.

So then, nothing has ever occured in a free market?

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#393

Post by acdha »

throwawaylolx wrote: post #351
acdha wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your second link discusses the problems with voting and correctly votes that they are unsolved, which was the entire point. Every solution proposed so far is a huge regression for privacy or coercion, so it’s dishonest to claim that as anything other than an area which could become not-worse if future fundamental breakthroughs occur. File storage is similar: lots of people want you to buy their pet project but if you…

>they are unsolved, which was the entire point. I thought the point was that "they are known to be worse." >Every solution proposed so far is a huge regression for privacy or coercion Can you please elaborate how is the solution proposed in the paper linked in the first URL a regression over non-blockchain solutions? >it’s dishonest to claim that I replied to the question of "what problem is this technology solving,"…

> I thought the point was that "they are known to be worse."

Yes, for example, here's the full quote about voting including the sentence immediately after the one you quoted:

> Due to the requirements, it seems reasonable that blockchain technology can help to achieve some of the desired properties. However, to the best of our knowledge, so far no solution has been proposed that has been shown to be secure, verifiable, and private and there are still many open challenges.

There's simply no proposed system which is not worse than the status quo, and that's ignoring the additional challenge that even in the event of a major academic advance you'd have the additional concerns of having to be cost-competitive and establishing public trustworthiness before you could call it better. That kind of work is measured in decades.

The situation is less severe for file storage since you don't have as many attacks but, again, there just isn't something which is comparable on cost, performance, or reliability. I'm comfortable saying that's “known to be worse”.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#394

Post by base698 »

s73v3r_ wrote: post #389
throwawaylolx wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Explain to me where this is a valid use case Random examples: - Brendan Eich was purged for being found to have donated to anti-gay marriage campaigns. Therefore, donating anonymously is obviously desirable for many people as your current beliefs may affect your career when the general rhetoric changes. Similarly, anonymous donations, which are very common, may be your preferred choice simply because you don't want…

"Brendan Eich was purged for being found to have donated to anti-gay marriage campaigns. " I love how the takeaway from this is always, "We need more private ways to exchange money!" rather than, "You know, maybe you should have opinions that respect the human rights of others."

It was an example. Change it to pro civil rights in the south in the 60s or something you agree with that becomes unpopular when political opinions change.

It's a very good point.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#395

Post by neom »

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 cannot agree with you more. I'd actually love to chat more about this so feel free to reach out if you're interested. I work on building new technology for municipal governments, and the last 9 months have consisted of cities asking me about my blockchain strategy. I'm still struggling to explain a distributed ledger does not solve any of the problem they describe. Yet "cutting edge technologists" have told them it's the most important thing for distributed data. I ask what they think about SQLite and they ask me what SQL is.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#396

Post by FireBeyond »

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.

Whenever I hear someone say that, I'm reminded of this Dilbert strip: http://dilbert.com/strip/1995-08-25

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#397

Post by not_kurt_godel »

freedomben wrote: post #385
simias wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not the argument. The idea is that if a given amount of bitcoins is set to increase in value as time passes (as is supposed to happen if the currency is successful) you don't have a lot of incentive to invest or spend your money. If you have $100 on your bank account today then you've got incentives to spend or invest it soon because it's slowly losing value because of inflation, your $100 will probably buy yo…

I am a big supporter of crypto currencies, and I do see a problem in that. However, the current volatility will level off significantly once there is wider adoption. That will help reduce incentive to hold. I would never recommend somebody give/accept loans in crypto currencies right now. The time will come though (unless governments squash crypto through regulation or outright banning). That said, there's no guarant…

Ask someone in Venezuela how useful a Bitcoin is when you have no way to get food.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#398

Post by drak0n1c »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #167
KirinDave wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If distributed trustless consensus is useful, there are cheaper ways to get it than PoW mining. It's just that most folks don't understand them. The principle value of Bitcoin as a protocol is its incredible (even detrimental, from a technical perspective) simplicity.

Are there other means of distributed trustless consensus as secure as PoW? Secure being the operative word here. Lots of attempts, but none yet convincingly as or more secure.

Hedera Hashgraph recently revealed that it supports more than a million transactions per second based on current usage by developers, that's enough to support decentralized servers and open source MMO environments. It uses gossip protocol and a form of voting protocol.

1) Non-technical friendly overview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzWiiOLv96I

2) https://www.hederahashgraph.com

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#399

Post by toomuchtodo »

s73v3r_ wrote: post #389
throwawaylolx wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Explain to me where this is a valid use case Random examples: - Brendan Eich was purged for being found to have donated to anti-gay marriage campaigns. Therefore, donating anonymously is obviously desirable for many people as your current beliefs may affect your career when the general rhetoric changes. Similarly, anonymous donations, which are very common, may be your preferred choice simply because you don't want…

"Brendan Eich was purged for being found to have donated to anti-gay marriage campaigns. " I love how the takeaway from this is always, "We need more private ways to exchange money!" rather than, "You know, maybe you should have opinions that respect the human rights of others."

A free society is one where the laws require equality but you may still hold a dissenting opinion.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#400

Post by 0xFFFF0000 »

kerng wrote: post #144
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…

BTC alone has a market cap of more then 100 billion USD, hence your statement and premisse is inaccurate. Wall Street firms just attempt to use it in places where it's not useful and where there are simple alternatives.

Yeah, I agree the way Wall Street approaches this seemed rather defensive. They are trying to appear on top of things, while in reality still are not sure how to tackle bitcoin long term.
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