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The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?
21–30 of 340 posts
Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?
#22In all seriousness, what are the advantages Blockchain has over a public SQL database with limited reads and writes that also maintains a public transaction history? Cause when I hear people talk about the problems Blockchains solves (outside of cryptocurrency which is a whole other topic), I don't see what advantages Blockchain has over that. A public SQL database isn't the most "clean" solution, but it'll save ever…
The SQL database has to be maintained by someone and with enough political or legal pressure the maintainer can be forced to change it, not so with a blockchain.
Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of the utility from blockchain doesn't come from being able to do "new" things. They come from being able to do old things better: cheaper, more securely, free from the interference of trusted parties / government. It remains to be seen which processes the blockchain will take over. Some are obvious, ie. prediction markets, sports gambling, money remittance. Some are more complex, and will require frameworks to…
Maybe not government, maybe just humans in general. Decentralisation, blockchain, smart contracts, cryptocurrency, AI and IoT could really start coming into their own further into the future when we start having more autonomous agents performing those little tasks on our behalf, like a smart fridge ordering more milk and interacting with a drone to ensure payment and delivery without having to bother a human. But I'm…
You sound incredulous about this – VCs have a pretty clear business model, funding slow-growing steady businesses is not it.
Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?
#24Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?
#25News 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.
How many people do you know with savings in physical gold? How big do you think the consumer market is for that?
The major holders of gold bullion are banks and governments – they are not going to pile in to a pyramid scheme style system where by a small number of early adopters become worth the GDP of a small country.
Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?
#26In all seriousness, what are the advantages Blockchain has over a public SQL database with limited reads and writes that also maintains a public transaction history? Cause when I hear people talk about the problems Blockchains solves (outside of cryptocurrency which is a whole other topic), I don't see what advantages Blockchain has over that. A public SQL database isn't the most "clean" solution, but it'll save ever…
Append-only/log-structured databases are worthwhile (SQL databases end up similarly structured internally). "Mining" and all the overhead it entails is only worthwhile if you need zero-trust, and few if any use cases do.
Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?
#27In all seriousness, what are the advantages Blockchain has over a public SQL database with limited reads and writes that also maintains a public transaction history? Cause when I hear people talk about the problems Blockchains solves (outside of cryptocurrency which is a whole other topic), I don't see what advantages Blockchain has over that. A public SQL database isn't the most "clean" solution, but it'll save ever…
The SQL database has to be maintained by someone and with enough political or legal pressure the maintainer can be forced to change it, not so with a blockchain.
Not as easily.
Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?
#28In all seriousness, what are the advantages Blockchain has over a public SQL database with limited reads and writes that also maintains a public transaction history? Cause when I hear people talk about the problems Blockchains solves (outside of cryptocurrency which is a whole other topic), I don't see what advantages Blockchain has over that. A public SQL database isn't the most "clean" solution, but it'll save ever…
The SQL database has to be maintained by someone and with enough political or legal pressure the maintainer can be forced to change it, not so with a blockchain.
Instead, with a blockchain such pressure results in a fork of the chain, which in some cases (notably those involving token ledgers) may be even worse.
Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?
#29In all seriousness, what are the advantages Blockchain has over a public SQL database with limited reads and writes that also maintains a public transaction history? Cause when I hear people talk about the problems Blockchains solves (outside of cryptocurrency which is a whole other topic), I don't see what advantages Blockchain has over that. A public SQL database isn't the most "clean" solution, but it'll save ever…
The SQL database has to be maintained by someone and with enough political or legal pressure the maintainer can be forced to change it, not so with a blockchain.
You've never heard of a blockchain fork? Where the developers change the blockchain... It's happened before for different reasons.
Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?
#30I 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…
I'm confident that there is significant real value to be gained from blockchain technology but at least 99% of projects today are just empty buzzwords. Most wealthy people in the blockchain space are well-meaning but they don't know what they're doing; they invest their money all over the place based on superficial whitepapers and buzzwords.
I think that it will take several more years before we start seeing useful blockchain applications.
It's possible that the bubble may have to burst before the industry can progress though. Right now, smart people might be intrigued by blockchain technology but most of them don't want to get into the space because of the level of speculation.
Right now, it's just more profitable to launch some generic buzzword coin that does nothing than to launch one that actually does something useful.
Just like in AI right now, there are a lot of people who just want to make a lot of money and they don't care how.