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The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

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Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#51

Post by fastball »

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?

Maybe he's getting paid in DAI[0], a decentralized stablecoin?

0: https://makerdao.com/

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#52

Post by s_m_t »

mortdeus wrote: post #47
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…

Can't you do the same thing with a simple chain of hashs a la version control?? Why would you need distributed consensus on a patient's health record. My understanding is that Blockchains only make sense in a low trust distributed environment... If you have that low of trust in your doctor it doesn't even make sense to show up.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#53

Post by castlecrasher2 »

nostrademons wrote: post #39

My thinking about the blockchain/cryptocurrency space shifted significantly when I changed my perspective from thinking about technology to thinking about problems . The web caught on because in the late 80s, the biggest problem in the world was that we were starved for information. We didn't know it yet, because we'd never lived in any other world, but once we could fire up Netscape and view homepages from people wh…

>The biggest problem in the world today is lack of trust and the failure of institutions.

That's a pretty strong statement, one that I would disagree with, mostly because it's so vague. How did you come to that conclusion?

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#54

Post by fastball »

aidanlister wrote: post #25
fivedogit wrote: post #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.

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.

Nobody has savings in physical gold because it's a PITA to acquire and store. Digital gold obviously doesn't suffer from these problems.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#55

Post by empath75 »

BenoitP wrote: post #41
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 indifferenc…

> 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.

The second it becomes relevant to people’s paychecks, people will start gaming it and it’ll be political bullshit.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#56

Post by gibsons »

nostrademons wrote: post #39

My thinking about the blockchain/cryptocurrency space shifted significantly when I changed my perspective from thinking about technology to thinking about problems . The web caught on because in the late 80s, the biggest problem in the world was that we were starved for information. We didn't know it yet, because we'd never lived in any other world, but once we could fire up Netscape and view homepages from people wh…

This is exactly right in my opinion. The dotcom era was all about the decentralization of information, whereas blockchains are all about the decentralization of trust. Contrary to the OP, I believe that blockchain technology really started in the first alt coin boom around 2012-2013. That's when the tinkerers came out. I think blockchain infrastructure is still very early days, and scalability is still among the biggest problems to solve currently, but it's definitely being worked on and it's solvable.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#57

Post by greggman »

mortdeus wrote: post #47
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…

How does block chain solve this problem any more than a plain old text file with your medical history?

IIUC the only thing keeping bitcoin's blockchain trustworthy is millions of people mining new coins and therefore distributively verifying the blockchain. Who would be doing that for your medical records and what would their incentive be to do it?

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#58

Post by rpedela »

BenoitP wrote: post #41
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 indifferenc…

That is precisely why I chose PageRank as a comparison. I think it is one of the most beautiful equations invented in computer science on par with some physics equations. Yes, if you can turn your problem into a graph then you can use PageRank to determine which nodes are more important relative to the others. You can answer questions like which academic paper or website is the best? Who are the influencers in a social network? What is the summary of this article (sentences are nodes)? But the domains and use cases where it is useful is still limited and so far no one has been able to use it to generate billions other than Google.

In other words, an algorithm, no matter how amazing, is not a platform.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#59

Post by s3m4j »

nostrademons wrote: post #39

My thinking about the blockchain/cryptocurrency space shifted significantly when I changed my perspective from thinking about technology to thinking about problems . The web caught on because in the late 80s, the biggest problem in the world was that we were starved for information. We didn't know it yet, because we'd never lived in any other world, but once we could fire up Netscape and view homepages from people wh…

Disregarding the validity of your argument in itself, trust issues cannot be solved by black boxes. Humans laws have to be enacted by humans, because the real world is messy and rules and laws need "messy wiggle room".

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#60

Post by walterstucco »

mortdeus wrote: post #47
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…

An append only logfile is easier, more reliable and more interoperable

Just require that each change is digitally signed with the doctor's key

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