Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

471–480 of 487 posts

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#471

Post by KirinDave »

narrator wrote: post #182
SkyMarshal wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People who are not crypto-anarchists don't realize that the only reason for proof of work is so you don't have to trust anyone. If there is trust, a centralized database is better in every way vs. Blockchain.

People who do not read modern research don't realize lots of the things they think are true about the state of research are totally false.

They also think that it's Proof of Work that provides a lack of trust. While that's involved, what's actually more meaningful is the demand to quickly select a "profitable" branch to mine and re-mine on. That can exist in PoS as well.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#472

Post by KirinDave »

amitbr wrote: post #331
QML wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nakamoto consensus isn't the only protocol that exists; there's also things like Raft and Paxos with different tradeoffs.

What you mentioned does not cover byzantine faults... pow is the only known solution

If only someone could think to google "BFT Raft extension" or "BFT paxos extension" and find published research. And if only papers from that search had citations. And if only those cited had links to foundational research on generalized BFT strategies. Oh if only we lived in such a world.

If only. If Only. IF ONLY. iF oNLY. If OnLy. iF oNlY.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#473

Post by KirinDave »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #449
tim333 wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm invested a bit in Credits which claims it'll do a million transactions per sec but it's kind of bs - they can do nearly half a million in very limited conditions but in the real world the numbers will probably be far less and I'm a bit skeptical of such claims. I'm not sure that fast is necessary though - credit cards do a few thousand transactions a sec globally so if you can handle that you could potentially at…

Yeah, Hashgraph appears to do high tps at relatively small number of nodes, aka will probably work in permissioned/consortium style environment with limited nodes, but whether it can scale in a public environment with unlimited nodes is an open question.

You only need to beat like 14 transactions a second to start doubling and tripling bitcoin's average throughput.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#474

Post by hyprCoin »

s73v3r_ wrote: post #308
hyprCoin wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

That was an example of how to avoid conversion to 'real money' through spending and accepting only crypto.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#475

Post by zodiac »

drak0n1c wrote: post #398
SkyMarshal wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

A non sharded public blockchain that doesn't do some kind of validator delegation will always be bottlenecked by a single validators computational capacity, which is on the order of 100-1000. Hedera is really pushing the line on making fraudulent claims here.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#476

Post by donmatito »

simias wrote: post #433
donmatito wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

More like a rogue actor sending you a truckload of parts that are not what they're supposed to be. Take for instance the blockchain De Beers (the diamond cartel) says it wants to create to track diamonds. Things like country of origin, quality etc... Tracking diamonds is especially important because you want to make sure that the diamonds you buy are not from a conflict zone, the so-called "blood diamonds". Now imagi…

would the 3rd-party database be natively open to 4rth party apps, like an open API ? Given that no third-party actor has offered a tracability solution from source to consumer (the only one that comes to my mind is the beef tracability in Europe following mad cow disease, very paper intensive), what has changed that makes you think the industry can pull it?

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#477

Post by donmatito »

JamesLeonis wrote: post #453
m00n wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never quite got my head around the value proposition for distributed ledgers in logistics ('smart warehouses / supply chains') and manufacturing ('industry 4.0'). Say you want to trace eco paper rolls around the globe. What could the blockchain do for you? Who are the nodes/miners/coins in this application? When you suspect some intermediate in the paper chain to exchange eco paper for cheaper ordinary paper, how d…

Logistics are a great place for this technology, but first you must purge your mind of Cryptotokens and their economics. They aren't applicable for a logistics use case. To understand this, first you have to understand why we structure mining. In the case of Bitcoin or Ethereum, you need a method that allows any arbitrary computational device to verify and add to a given blockchain. In lieu of trusting that device, t…

Thank you for expressing all this much better than I could

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#478

Post by ric2b »

JamesLeonis wrote: post #467
shanghaiaway wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You also did not answer the question. How do you verify that the physical objects the digital certificate is attached to, is actually attached to the things it is meant to certify, and not replacement counterfeit?

The same way you verify it now. The technology does not change the process of physically inspecting the product. It makes it far easier to coordinate the paperwork of certifying and verifying. At it's heart logistics is a global concurrency problem. The "locks" we use now are large sprawling bureaucracies that manually coordinate the transfer of information among many independently moving agents. Getting information…

Ok, but if _someone_ is certifying who can and who cannot write to the blockchain, why wasn't this solved 2 decades ago with that someone running a database with an API front-end that all involved parties can use?

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#479

Post by ric2b »

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.

> being able to undo transactions is a feature not a bug of the modern financial system.

No reason why this can't be implemented on top of a cryptocurrency for anyone who wants it.

Just like banks were able to add that feature on top of gold and cash.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#480

Post by ric2b »

illlogic2 wrote: post #447
evnn wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it also protects you in cases where someone holds a gun to your head and forces you to make a transaction. No. The only case when someone ever threatened to hold gun to my head and demanded money was taxation. With cryptocurrency it's possible to avoid that, because they don't know how much money you have. And even when they do know, it's much harder for them to take it, they need to know password.

But in reality no one has ever held a gun to your head because of taxes.

Because there's no point in going through all the steps, but that's exactly where it would end if you absolutely refused to pay taxes and refused to pay fines or go to jail for not paying.
Post reply on HN