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The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

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Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#41

Post by BenoitP »

rpedela wrote: post #12

I think blockchain will end up like PageRank. Both are amazing algorithms with very narrow use cases. And maybe a few companies can generate enormous value with blockchain like Google did with PageRank, but that will be it. That's my prediction.

While I agree with you, I would not have chosen PageRank as a comparison. I cannot think of another domain where it made billions, but to me it is a pretty neat way of extracting information inside a graph.

It just needs a concept that has transitive properties in order to shine. For web pages, the transitive part is that a high quality page is more likely to mention another high quality page. It uses the indifference one might have about a lower quality page, it uses the author's implicit contract with the reader that he should be showing (and linking to) high quality content. It builds on top of man.millionYears of painstaking content filtering.

In a graph, you can run it about any property that has that transitivity. There is a paper running it on citations in physics papers [1], and it can identify some Nobel Prize winners, even if the paper has a low number of citations; the paper just has the important ones.

I deeply believe that corporations could greatly benefit from continually asking their employees "who in your coworkers had a positive impact on your work this week?", and running PageRank on top of it. You could have natural leaders emerge out of that.

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/physics/0604130.pdf

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#42

Post by [deleted] »

bepotts wrote: post #17

In 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…

[deleted]

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#43

Post by herbst »

bepotts wrote: post #17

In 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…

I haven't seen a better approach for decentralised verifyable databases yet. Postgres for example offers several approaches for mirroring or decentralisation however non of them feels certanly clean and all of them come with their own downsides.

I agree that we are not there yet to use it as a simple drop in solution for such problems. But we are certanly getting there.

Also there are no limited reads (or writes for that matter) every actor of the blockchain can modify their local version as much as they want.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#44

Post by pembrook »

tCfD wrote: post #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…

People have an abstract distaste for "trusted intermediaries" because they think the intermediary just sits in between you and somebody else while collecting fees for adding no value. In many cases the fees absolutely need to be reduced through market competition.

However the root of this thinking is wrong. Intermediaries do add value. Humans are inherently un-trustworthy animals, and you pay your fees to buy the valuable peace of mind the intermediary provides.

So we know trust costs money. The question is whether the cost of decentralized cryptographic trust will ever be lower than centralized trust. The Rube Goldberg machine that is bitcoin has proved the answer at least for the foreseeable future (the next few decades) is...no.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#45

Post by themagician »

tCfD wrote: post #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…

It’s strange. Blockchain and crypto currencies biggest advantages are simultaneously its biggest detractors.

It may have its day if global systems fail for some reason, but right now it’s just not something that anyone really wants. Both people and companies are inherently risk averse and like stability.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#46

Post by vivab0rg »

albertgoeswoof wrote: post #32
divan wrote: post #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 au…

getting your salary paid in crypto currency is nuts. But fair play to you. How do you pay bills? What cryptocurrency do you get? How do you / your employer handle currency fluctuations?

I got my full salary payed in Bitcoin for almost a year when it was worth less than 1000 USD per coin. Only cashed what I needed. I'm very happy now.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#47

Post by mortdeus »

smsm42 wrote: post #19

I just have been at OSCON, and they were talking about blockchain all the time, blockchain this, blockchain that, private blockchain, enterprise blockchain, blockchain plus this thing and blockchain on top of that thing. But still I couldn't figure out or find any explanation how anything of it would be useful for the member of the public, and indeed how it can work sustainably without the hype that would drive the c…

blockchain is useful outside the context of cryptocurrencies because it represents a verifiable chain of custody.

For example, imagine how blockchain could solve the problem of a patient who has control of their health records. In the current system we have an issue where anytime you move somewhere away from your doctor, the new doctor you see has to retrieve records directly from your doctor because there is no way to verify that the records you would present to the new doctor are the most up to date records. If your doctor gave you your records from before your last visit, and say during your last visit he wrote into your files that you no longer needed opiates for pain management, but you are addicted and want the pills still. Well if you have outdated records and take them to a new doctor you might be able to still receive the drugs, despite the fact that the doctor that initially diagnosed you took you off them. This is why most states require by law that they obtain records directly from the source. To avoid being able to scam the system.

Now imagine what happens if your doctor dies, his practice is shut down for whatever reason, or for some other reason your records become virtually unobtainable.

What do you do then? Go through the entire process of trying to get a doctor to re-diagnose you for an ailment that has already seen years of therapy and might no longer be as obviously in need of say pain therapy?

It's a problem. And something that blockchain could fix better than just having some federally regulated centralized medical record repository that in it's very nature allows the government or any bad actor a straightforward method to hack into and invade your privacy.

Blockchain allows you to maintain personal and private control of your records, while allowing a doctor to consult the blockchain network of doctors, to verify that the chain of custody of your medical history is up to date.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#48

Post by stale2002 »

pembrook wrote: post #20
coralreef wrote: post #11

Earlier 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…

>"They come from being able to do old things better: cheaper, more securely, free from the interference of trusted parties / government." Name one thing that blockchain has made, or is even close to making cheaper or more secure or trustless? The largest application of the technology has been bitcoin thus far, and bitcoin is more expensive; less secure than the traditional financial system (where if you get hacked yo…

I'll give you one.

The year is 2010. And I am a normal citizen and I want to donate money to WikiLeaks without the banks colluding to stop my financial transaction, even though nobody has been convicted of a crime.

How do you do it? The only way I can think of to do this easily (easily being the key word!) is a cryptocurrency transaction.

Banks and credit card companies collude all the time in order to censor financial transactions between people who have committed no crimes.

Do you have a better way of easily sending censorship resistant financial transactions? Because Bitcoin worked just fine back in 2010 for this usecase, even though the banks tried to censor it on their platform.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#49

Post by zzzcpan »

bepotts wrote: post #17

In 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…

But Blockchain cannot exist outside of cryptocurrencies. It's a system where popularity of a cryptocurrency is crucial for blockchain's security. So if it can't succeed as a cryptocurrency there is no blockchain to talk about. And once it succeeds we can start solving hard peer to peer trust problems with it.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#50

Post by deboboy »

everdev wrote: post #33
m-i-l wrote: post #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…

The public didn't buy most of their stuff online 10 years into the web either, but now Amazon dominates. Blockchain needs a dominant company to stay relevant. As with Amazon, the entire company doesn't have to be tied to it, it can have onchain/offchain components. I think this becomes easier as tooling becomes easier as well for developers and for users.

"I think this becomes easier as tooling becomes easier as well for developers and for users." Agree, this is what we're working on.
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