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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

#421

Post by oculusthrift »

School-Cotton wrote: post #384
kosievdmerwe wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup being able to undo transactions is a feature not a bug of the modern financial system. EDIT: it also protects you in cases where someone holds a gun to your head and forces you to make a transaction.

> being able to undo transactions is a feature not a bug of the modern financial system. Best takedown of cryptocurrencies that I've seen. Explains, as succinctly as possible, the fatal flaw in the idea. I'm gonna steal this line for the future.

yeah that’s also why cash and gold are worthless XD. who in the world would take cold hard cash or gold bullion in exchange for goods??!! you can’t reverse it!! and guess what, someone can hold a gun to your head and take it.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#422

Post by 2FC00C733A55 »

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."

At the time, neither Hillary or Obama supported gay marriage. No political view can stand the wind of time. Should Hillary have been a viable candidate in 2016, given that she "didn't respect the human rights of others" in her 2008 run for the dem nomination?

A mere 10 years later you are insulting someone you likely don't know for 'not respecting human rights'!

Example 1: It's possible that eating non-labgrown meat will be considered a crime within fifty years. Who knows? Are you sure you want all of your current actions judged by some unknown future values?

Example 2: How sure are you that future society will agree with the current 'clump of cells' argument? Would you want to be on the record forever donating to abortion clinics? Your political ideology may not always be in charge either (Mike Pence).

Example 3: Society in a decade might consider us brutes for driving cars manually. How do we accept ~1/X000 high school students dying in car crashes, mostly by preventable causes (drinking, distractions, speeding, seat belt, etc).

We have not reached moral perfection as a society. Future society practicing moral relativism is not guaranteed. So, protect your future self, and protect your privacy.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#423

Post by ytpete »

oculusthrift wrote: post #418
School-Cotton wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the real world, ownership is more complicated than that, which is why the law is interpreted by judges and not computers. E.g., courts can transfer ownership of your car from you to someone else for a variety of reasons, without your consent. How does this work in a blockchain world? Your answer might be that the State (or the judicial system, I suppose) should have some special private key that lets them sign tra…

why should the state have any claim to my property? that’s your best argument. regardless, i’ll answer your question. blockchain are immutable and public. therefore the government can’t be corrupt and steal/funnel people’s property like they do in the real world now. we can all scrutinize the transactions.

That sounds like you're arguing against the idea of the government having a judicial system... If I steal someone's car, and the police catch me and have proof it's stolen, the justice system can take the car away from me and return it to its rightful owner.

How does that work in a blockchain world? If I stole the car's digital title (via hacking, coercion, etc.) and after getting caught, I refuse to cough up my private key... I can effectively prevent any transaction returning the car to its rightful owner. At that point either the ledger is broken and useless OR you need a judge to be able to force a hard fork, and system is no longer decentralized.

Your second paragraph about having an immutable public record to prevent corruption seems like it could be solved more simply by just having the government continually publish a record of transactions, which anyone can archive or mirror to verify the government never tries to secretly rewrite the past. I.e., a public git repo could solve that, no?

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#424

Post by chrisco255 »

kosievdmerwe wrote: post #362
atomicUpdate wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Blockchain is perfect for a digital currency It's not perfect for that either. There have already been cases where tokens were stolen and blockchains were forked to recover them. The very last thing I want for my money is for errors and/or malicious acts to be permanent and uncorrectable.

Yup being able to undo transactions is a feature not a bug of the modern financial system. EDIT: it also protects you in cases where someone holds a gun to your head and forces you to make a transaction.

Transactions aren't "undone". In the event of fraudulent charges to your bank account, they simply eat the cost and comp you. As a result, some portion of the fees that you pay to bank are dedicated to these fraudulent charges.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#425

Post by ytpete »

glitch003 wrote: post #401
filleokus wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

A simple SIM card or smart card is a suitable TPM for this, and can be obtained for pennies on the dollar.

The poster's point is that the link between that and the actual object of value is a huge weak point. Let's use expensive art as an example since it's such a commonly cited use case. Blockchain says I own an original Picasso painting. You pay me 1 BTC in exchange for me transferring ownership of the painting to you: blockchain says the painting is now yours, _and_ I have to ship you the physical painting so you can hang it in your house / art gallery / whatever rich people do with art.

The problem is, how do you know I didn't ship you a fake replica and keep the original for myself, sell it to someone else on the sly, etc.? Sure, you could have a TPM which securely holds some data linking the physical smart card to the blockchain provenance record... but what links the physical smart card to the physical painting? Couldn't I just give you the fake painting + real smart card?

You could get an art expert to authenticate the physical painting, of course -- but that's exactly the same reliance on a trusted third party that art collectors have today, and blockchain has done nothing to improve the situation...

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#426

Post by ytpete »

DINKDINK wrote: post #87
namdnay wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it takes up to 5 days to receive a payment from USA in the EU and the sender pays 40$ for the wire transfer Only if you use a wire transfer. Payment by credit card is instant and costs about 1% for the merchant and maybe another 1% in change fees if there is a currency conversion needed.

>Payment by credit card is instant Hardly. Chargebacks on credit cards can occur up to 3 months after payment. Good for customers who need that dispute feature but bad for others because those costs are socialized onto merchants and other consumers.

This is one of the problems with cryptocurrencies though. Consumers are unlikely to accept a system where they can't contest charges, either through a trusted large institution (e.g. Visa) nor through the courts. I haven't heard an explanation yet of how to solve that without layering on central authorities, which undermines the decentralization that's supposed to be crypto's #1 advantage.

This article has a good explanation of that concern, among others: https://hackernoon.com/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-...

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#427

Post by donmatito »

simias wrote: post #276
donmatito wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 beyo…

I know that, but I don't understand why it is seen as such a roadblock. A supplier would add its tag on thousands of parts each day, which would find their way into thousands of products and thousands of end-consumers each day. The suppliers would be well identified by their physical location and the physical products they produce.

I think people raising these objections have not worked in a physical supply chain in the floor plant? I don't know, I have a difficulty to wrap my head around the objection. I am receiving a truckload of parts that I ordered - these parts have a barcode or a RFID identifier that tracks their provenance - the only change in the system would be that when I acknowledge the reception of the truckload, another block is appened to the blockchain-based history of the parts : Supplier + me the manufacturer. And so on across the supply chain.

I don't understand, are we talking about a scenario where a rogue actor would send me for fere a truckload of parts I have not ordered or something like that ?

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#428

Post by donmatito »

s73v3r_ wrote: post #309
donmatito wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Because you have sent them a purchase order and they have sent you a truckload of parts that you ordered? I'm sorry I don't understand the objection here

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#429

Post by donmatito »

filleokus wrote: post #278
ballenf wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I agree, that's the issue. I suppose it will depend on the application need, and the criticality.

If you need to prove that life-saving drugs have been kept at the correct temperature throughout their shelf-life, you can probably afford a RFID tag per pack, with a unique ID.

On the other end of the spectrum, if you are talking about low-criticality tracability of shipments of bulk materials, you can probably admit supplier-defined batch numbers. You could imagine that a rogue manufacturer would try to cheat and re-use a batch number from a "premium" raw material while using a cheaper one. Blockchain would not provide a protection against false declaration, it would on the other end provide an immutable papertrail in case of later legal investigation / certification audit (ie "you purchased X premium parts and Y inferior parts, but you logged using X+Y premium parts, how do you explain that?")

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#430

Post by donmatito »

CPLX wrote: post #327
donmatito wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

OK great. Now how do you get "the blockchain" to know which paper rolls went into which shipping container.

how about scanning a barcode or a RFID reader ? This information is already read and stored in ERP. Is it such a technological step to imagine a RFID reader or an ERP module that would write the information in a blockchain? I don't see the objection here.

The blockchain would be a decentralized papertrail accessible to all actors of the supply chain, down to the end consumer ideally, instead of the current nightmare of shipment papers, siloed ERPs and so on

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