71–80 of 340 posts
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…
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…
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 b…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>"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 financi…
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…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 b…
we are -80% from ATH, I don't understand why peoppe talk about the bubble will burst in the future. It happened already.
The biggest problem is that blockchains are inherently not scalable. That is more or less by design, but it limits the types of applications that can run on top of them. I think a more likely outcome is that most types of payment infrastructure and settlement/transaction layers move to blockchains and not actual applications. For example, it’s not too difficult to imagine the stock market switch to tokenized stocks t…
Do you use an intel processor vulnerable to Meltdown/Spectre, or with a vulnerable IME? Do the people you know and love know and understand about these? What if you lose your token? You can't sell your house anymore? Custody of crypto-currencies is a giant headache. It feels like moving away from bank accounts and payment cards and going back to gold coins and bearer bonds. Great for people in the business of selling vaults, sucks for everyone else.
The biggest problem is that blockchains are inherently not scalable. That is more or less by design, but it limits the types of applications that can run on top of them. I think a more likely outcome is that most types of payment infrastructure and settlement/transaction layers move to blockchains and not actual applications. For example, it’s not too difficult to imagine the stock market switch to tokenized stocks t…
Blockchains can be made extremely scalable. You can break the problem into transaction volume (how many transactions can be processed on average per sec) and transaction velocity (how fast a particular transaction can be approved).
Transaction volume scalability results almost entirely from checking that the rules of the system have been followed i.e. that each block in the chain is valid. We now have very fast systems for recursively proving the validity of blockchains. For instance coda [0] requires very little space or computation (constant in the number of transactions) for a party to be convinced the blockchain is valid. Under such a system you could increase transaction volume by orders of magnitude.
Layer two protocols, such as the lightning network [1], offer near instant transaction velocity.
We can solve the scalability problems of blockchain. The thing that keeps me up at night is not scalability, it is user adoption beyond the use cases which Bitcoin already successfully fulfills.
[0]: https://codaprotocol.com/ [1]: https://lightning.network/
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 bubble is barely even starting. There might even be another bubble and crash before we get to the real one. These are just practice bubbles.
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…
It sounds senseless that purchasing power of someone that is averse to risk (which I would say is almost everyone in western countries) is that volatile.
With this I'm not saying thay I'm pro fiduciary money or central banks controlled by established institutuions but this is the way it works.
Again I'm not saying this is your case.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.