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The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

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Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#91

Post by apo »

Chatting between sips of stale coffee, I collected enough data points to discover he too had no great expertise in cryptography or fintech more broadly.

I've run into way too many people like this to count. Fortunately, they're easy to spot and I'm sure someone has even created a taxonomy.

All of them, without exception, have already launched or plan to launch a token on Ethereum. That's red flag #1.

Ask them why their product/service needs a token. 9/10 can't even answer the question. Red flag #2.

The few who can mutter something about decoupling the value of their utility token from ether. You may be able to have an interesting conversation from there, but it's more likely the answer is nothing more than a highbrow version of "because money is flowing through the rivers and we aim to grab some of it." Red flag #3.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#92

Post by Max_aaa »

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…

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

Only if we are talking about the custody of a purely digital asset, or purely digital information (as in not linked to anything in the real/physical world).

> For example, imagine how blockchain could solve the problem of a patient who has control of their health records....

If you have control over your own "blockchain" medical records, what is stopping you from omitting the last few records too? How is this going to stop your data from being leaked by someone who hacks your current doctor? How will all doctors be forced to use it (if it is not put into law by a government body) and this case, why would this be chosen vs a centralised system? Who will be "mining" and why?

What happens if you are taken to an ER, and you are not conscious? How will the ER get your records if they are somehow sealed? All it takes would be some dying because of lack of access to the records for the system to be scrapped. As people would be more interested in saving lives vs worrying about governments and corporations snooping on them. Hell today we are giving up our privacy for things are mundane and pointless like Social Media.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#93

Post by lvs »

Not pretending to favor one buzzword bubble over another, but the author seems to think that it's particularly blockchain technology that's being irrationally pursued, not AI. No doubt, blockchains are being completely inappropriately sold to investors to perform all sorts of miracles that truly require nothing more than a database, but the very same is true of AI. This is an obvious case of the old adage, "When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail."

In particular, I fear a future where too many rational algorithms have been supplanted with their irrational AI counterparts. The latter cannot be debugged, and analyzing the mechanisms of trained networks will become increasingly opaque with increasing complexity. Since we're comparing these buzzwords, blockchain is, at the end of the day, just another algorithm that can be debugged by reason and logic. It's behavior is definite and provable. In terms of thinking of the brittleness of complex systems, I much prefer ones where all the parts can be analyzed by reasoning.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#95

Post by lev99 »

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.

Surely climate change, wealth inequality, or nuclear proliferation are larger issues...

If you want to say "institutions failed us and caused those problems" you might be correct, but you better back up that statement with a good replacement.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#96

Post by lvs »

gibsons wrote: post #80
s_m_t wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think it starts to make sense if you can hold your data and only it share it using hashes of that data without exposing it. For example, I could hold the private key to my DNA, where each strand would be hashed allowing me to share portions of my DNA data with companies without sharing the entire thing. And it makes sense to do that over a public ledger.

But the hash of health data isn't informative. It doesn't make sense for a doctor to view, for example, the hash of a blood test result. They need to see the actual result, not its hash. The same thing is true of DNA sequencing results. The only thing I could learn from the hash of a DNA sequence is that it's different from one I have in a database. But I need to know exactly how it is different -- precisely the clear text content of the sequence -- for that to be useful information for a patient or for research.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#97

Post by stale2002 »

Max_aaa wrote: post #89
stale2002 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

With bitcoin, what would stop governments from passing laws making certain addresses tainted resulting in people that send coins to or receive coins from them to be audited and having to explain why and how they linked to certain causes. What makes you think if bitcoins (or any *coin) becomes the main currency in a country or region, we would not have laws were all addresses would need to be linked to people (or comp…

Well, for one, the government would actually have to make such a law, and then suffer the political consequences.

I would much prefer that the government is forced to actually follow the legal process, instead of what happened in 2010 with WikiLeaks, where the government made vague illegal threats against the banks, in order to censor transactions between people who broke zero laws.

It forces everything out in the open, instead of giving a couple banks the power to made hidden agreements between each other in order to collude and censor perfectly legal financial transactions.

And so far, the government has NOT made such a law. So guess what, that means it works!

This is not about people breaking the law. This is about people following the law, and yet private parties are STILL able to censor transactions through collusion and because of a few vague, and probably illegal, threats from the government.

The fact that the government has so far NOT been able to pass such laws, is innovation in and of itself. It means that it works right now for the purpose of making censorship resistant transactions, because before people WERE succeeding in censoring them, and yet now they aren't!

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#98

Post by coralreef »

Max_aaa wrote: post #89
stale2002 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

With bitcoin, what would stop governments from passing laws making certain addresses tainted resulting in people that send coins to or receive coins from them to be audited and having to explain why and how they linked to certain causes. What makes you think if bitcoins (or any *coin) becomes the main currency in a country or region, we would not have laws were all addresses would need to be linked to people (or comp…

The government can do whatever it wants, the point is that it’s decentralized design makes it basically impossible to censor.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#99

Post by [deleted] »

LAMike wrote: post #73
stale2002 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Most of the people downvoting you probably never had to think about making a censorship free transaction

[deleted]

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#100

Post by jcranmer »

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. (Which, ironically, may have been been caused by the web and the huge amount of information it made available.) And blockchains address this.

The big rub in your belief is that social groups don't scale. In a group of size of 100 people or so, standard social techniques (such as peer pressure and ostracization) can keep order. But at 10,000 people, that doesn't work. Delegation does scale. Society and civilization essentially works by creating structures that can impose norms, rules, and punishment among others and offloading the cost of doing so to people who specialize in those tasks. Now, that doesn't mean that there aren't issues of "who watches the watchmen," but it does mean that that is the question you should be asking.

One example of the problems of decentralization is the modern information delivery mechanism. Because it's feasible to serve smaller groups, our social groups have broken up into smaller echo chambers where we're fed only the information we want to hear. The ease of spreading information is also ease of spreading misinformation, and objection to censorship means there's no way to control spread of misinformation.

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