81–90 of 312 posts
Speaking as a longtime skeptic, A16Z has actually produced the single clearest answer I've seen to that question: blockchains may be good for bootstrapping new network effects by giving early participants in a network (in a Metcalfe's Law sense of network) an incentive to participate. Pure utility tokens can be like call options on the eventual value of the network if it gets off the ground. It's a novel way of solvi…
The skepticism of blockchain technology is borne out of a lack of specific problems it solves. Which happens to also be the bedrock of the conventional startup wisdom -- value derived from solving a problem or exploiting an opportunity. So much of the blockchain hype is focused purely on the technology and the valuation of the tokens / coins. Not the problem it solves. It's distributed trust. That's the problem it so…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's distributed trust. That's the problem it solves. It's incredibly cool technology. That solves a specific problem. That's still not it. "Distributed Trust" isn't a problem, its a trait. What actual problem is solved by distributed trust?
> "Distributed Trust" isn't a problem, its a trait I like how you phrased it. It tickled the Rustacean in me.
> Modularity, DRY, SRP, etc. is never a goal, it’s a trait. Don’t let the pursuit of theory get in the way of actual productivity.
> That’s not to say Modularity, DRY, SRP, etc. aren’t great ideas—they are!—but understand that they’re approaches and not achievements.
I know it might sound lame, but these two tweets have stuck by with my as probably the best piece of advice I've ever read. "approaches and not achievements" has found itself useful on so many occasions.
I totally agree with A16Z here. Blockchain skepticism is not hard to find on HN and beyond. First, the ecosystem is vast and evolving quickly. If you've "tuned out" by dismissing blockchain, then don't be surprised when your industry gets disrupted in 5-10 years. I think we'll begin to see business logic open-sourced on the blockchain. For example, existing SaaS model incentivizes closed-source, centrally managed rep…
Have you heard of GDPR? Customer data must be deletable and only shared with third parties based on user consent. A blockchain is an immutable data structure that unknown third parties can copy. It's literally the exact opposite of what you should be using for customer data. How does this CRM-focused blockchain make any sense at all?
So one can probably suspect that a business whose ledger is totally different to the publicized hashes might be laundering money. And to make sure the publicized hashes aren't faked in the first place, somehow one would need to combine it with the hash of a receipt.
Just thinking out loud: taxman-sanctioned smartphone software that takes as input the time, business ID, and the purchased products, and generates a hash as an output. A shopper can compare the hash to the hash on the receipt she got, and later on she can check if the hash is in the blockchain.
Trust isn't really a feature of blockchains, nor is it a byproduct (or "software primitive") of blockchains. Bitcoin was designed to avoid a need for trust, so it really just steps around the issue of trust in a distributed ledger. This is a critical misunderstanding that a lot of people are still preaching and perpetuating. You can't really build systems that rely on trust on top of a blockchain, and those who have…
But while reputational trust is cheap and a well-solved problem, the trust you're using _requires_ large amounts of computing value to be burned continuously, in the hopes that electricity and computation are decentralized enough in the real world that multiple non-collaborating actors will be burning it.
I'm happy to see that people are taking decentralization seriously. Blockchain has its place as a public ledger, but as everyone knows, scaling it has issues.
Recently, MaidSafe released a new whitepaper for a new decentralized consensus mechanism, called PARSEC, which they detailed in their blog post[0]. It does not use a blockchain. I'm surprised it didn't get more attention. I'd like to see some serious peer review on the paper.
Perhaps A16Z should get in touch with them?
[0] https://medium.com/safenetwork/parsec-a-paradigm-shift-for-a...
The skepticism of blockchain technology is borne out of a lack of specific problems it solves. Which happens to also be the bedrock of the conventional startup wisdom -- value derived from solving a problem or exploiting an opportunity. So much of the blockchain hype is focused purely on the technology and the valuation of the tokens / coins. Not the problem it solves. It's distributed trust. That's the problem it so…
The skepticism of blockchain technology is borne out of a lack of specific problems it solves. Which happens to also be the bedrock of the conventional startup wisdom -- value derived from solving a problem or exploiting an opportunity. So much of the blockchain hype is focused purely on the technology and the valuation of the tokens / coins. Not the problem it solves. It's distributed trust. That's the problem it so…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is just the next round of the "Uber for X". Little attention is paid specifically to what that technology and business model provide. We end up getting hundreds of startups that use the buzzword to secure funding but quickly flame out when they realize that the advantages don't really matter to their specific market. However that doesn't mean there are not viable "Uber for X" or blockain business ideas out there.
Totally fair point. It's especially great for the investment world -- especially VC, which only needs one billion-dollar exit to make a return. So this makes sense!
The skepticism of blockchain technology is borne out of a lack of specific problems it solves. Which happens to also be the bedrock of the conventional startup wisdom -- value derived from solving a problem or exploiting an opportunity. So much of the blockchain hype is focused purely on the technology and the valuation of the tokens / coins. Not the problem it solves. It's distributed trust. That's the problem it so…
1. Imagine you use FB. Instead of FB having all of your data, it's stored on the blockchain (encrypted). The problem we have now is if a new social network comes along if you create an account you lose all of your previous data (which may or may not be what you want). This would let you easily bring in any old data that you want.
2. I want to transfer funds/ownership or whatever to someone in X number of years. Instead of going through a lawyer, paying money, I make this a smart contract.
3. Right now most payment processors do not work with adult industries and the ones that do charge exorbitant fees. Blockchain can bring those fees down a lot and let performers keep a lot more of their money.
4. We rely on sites like stackoverflow and what not. If those sites were to go down we would lose all of that information (if it wasn't archived). If that was run on the blockchain as long as a few people were still using the site it could stay running.
5. It's also just a solution to the problem of "send money to someone". That was solved by banks and cash, but blockchain can be another solution that doesn't require an insane amount of infrastructure, employees, call centers, etc to run. Ya, it creates its own set of problems (no chargebacks, still may need escrow services, etc) but maybe those can be run more efficiently than our current system.
6. I think voting is something that could happen on the blockchain. Boom, now anyone can verify the results of the election. People can't as easily scream election fraud.