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The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

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Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#2
People who create and sell puff of smoke will make some money, but may not last long. The others may be side victims when they go down.

But if you can not see the potential of trustless censorship resistant value transfer and smart contract among other things, you will also be a victim.

There is money to be made, without any need for shenanigans.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#4
I was about to make a snarky comment about sitting next to one idiot on an airplane and coming to a conclusion about a whole field. But then he sort of covered it in the last paragraph:

> although the dot-com crash walked back valuations and chastened investors, a mature climate of internet businesses emerged in its wake. Today, technology firms account for 7 of the 10 largest companies in the world. The market didn’t overestimate the Internet, only the current crop of entrepreneurs.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#5
The blockchain & cryptocurrency industry is becoming too big to say the _whole thing_ will pop. If you're telling me AI + Blockchain starts-ups with windbag CEOs are a bubble that will pop, then that premise may have legs.

Will that drag the _whole thing_ down with it? Most likely not. It's like saying Groupon were every to sink as a company, all coupons everywhere would vanish & lose all their value, and people would lose their money.

A business managed poorly is not a reflection of the quality of the raw materials they were intending to work with, or of the rest of the industry for that matter.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#6
The problem with blockchain is actually rooted in hazy, unexamined assumptions about the viability of 'decentralization' that are are used as if they are conclusions rather than premises for justifying the technology's utility.

I think ultimately the conversation will turn to discuss the cost premium entailed by a decentralized coordination problem solving system of any kind, and whether it centralization is really a problem that needs such an redundantly-expensive solution in the first place. Also whether decentralization is really sustainable indefinitely or merely a transitional phase from one centralized regime to another one.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#7
I used to think that the blockchain bubble was like the dotcom bubble, in that the core technology was actually genuinely transformative, so that even after the bubble burst and all the over-valued companies went bust, the technology would remain and continue change our lives. However, I must admit I'm starting to have my doubts now.

It was 10 years in to the dotcom era that the dotcom bubble burst, and by that time we'd had massive maturation of the technology and the start of mass adoption.

However, we're approaching 10 years since the start of the blockchain era, and there are signs that the bubble is bursting already, but in terms of progress it is nowhere near where the dotcom era had got to by this stage, and there's not much indication of anything that appears that it will be particularly long lasting or widely adopted. Sure there's niches like settlement systems and security tokens, but not something that a member of the public is going to use on a daily basis like they do with many of the internet based companies.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#9
News flash: it already popped. 70‰ from top. ICOs dried up.

Blockchain market cap is about $300 billion now. Should the next major tech wave be worth half a Facebook? IMO, yes, and more.

Blockchain has already proven 2 major use cases (e-gold and ICOs) and several minor ones (unstoppable casinos, prediction markets). Doubters are in for a bunch of regret.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#10
I receive a salary in cryptocurrency for quite a long time, and I always try to be as objective and unbiased about articles on the future of blockchain and cryptocurrencies as much as I can. But articles like this truly disappoint me because there is no actual reasoning for such a strong and confident statement in the title.

The whole article just says that a single encounter with a not-the-cool-tech-guy confirmed author's suspicions that there is no underground value in blockchain technology. Which is strange to hear from a professor in ML – the last person you would suspect to make such a generalization from the single data point.

And that's not to mention that observable "blockchain boom" is, in fact, just trading on the crypto-exchanges boom, which has nothing to do with actual potential and benefits of blockchain and cryptoeconomy, which is itself a field of research even more complicated than ML world.

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