101–110 of 340 posts
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.
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…
Maybe there are some slight advantages in some edge use cases - but if someone came out with a company that was "modified public SQL database technology" would people be investing their money and declaring it important to the future of technology? The answer would be no.
I was about to make a snarky comment about sitting next to one idiot on an airplane and coming to a conclusion about a whole field. But then he sort of covered it in the last paragraph: > although the dot-com crash walked back valuations and chastened investors, a mature climate of internet businesses emerged in its wake. Today, technology firms account for 7 of the 10 largest companies in the world. The market didn’…
All industries will pop (I predict there will be another recession!), the only thing of value is knowing when and by how much.
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…
The main innovation is that blockchain is decentralized and yet still verifiable. A public SQL database is in nature centralized. Even if you were to try and shard it out to everybody in the network you have the difficult time of cross verifying such data heavy records.
Why would a SQL database be centralized in nature?
Just as your n nodes hold the entire blockchain, you would have n nodes holding the entire SQL database.
Of course, you could have a blockckain only on one node, centralised. That wouldn't make it inherently "centralized", however.
Same with SQL databases.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
true. it's not like Governments falsify data, forge evidence and all that. It's crazy to think the world needs zero trust.
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…
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.
Just as the NSA runs almost all the Tor exit nodes nowadays, what would stop a government from running the majority of blockchain nodes and gain consensus majority?
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…
If ownership of a house is decided by contracts, written by lawyers, then adding a blockchain will only add issues, since it can get out of sync with reality. And if the blockchain is the source of truth, it means that stealing your house-token will result in you losing your house. Do you use an intel processor vulnerable to Meltdown/Spectre, or with a vulnerable IME? Do the people you know and love know and understa…
That might sound scary, but I'd point out a few things:
1. That future is still a long time away. The legal system is very conservative.
2. These systems don't have to be perfect, just better than what we have today.
Yes, I certainly wouldn't trust ownership of my house to a general purpose laptop or smartphone on which I install lots of other apps and which are optimised for high performance and low cost. I wouldn't trust ownership of my house to any computer today.
But the idea that bank-run paper based systems are 100% secure is not true - they routinely go wrong just through basic mistakes and screwups, let alone actual fraud.
Consider all the cases of ID theft in America. There's a specific kind of ID fraud where someone literally steals your house:
https://www.lifelock.com/education/deed-fraud-losing-your-ho...
Or how about this case where convicted murderers learned how to forge their own release paperwork whilst inside the prison, and then successfully got themselves released:
https://www.cnn.com/2013/11/06/justice/florida-inmates-mista...
Possible because the only thing authenticating prisoner release orders was easily duplicated patterns on a piece of paper.
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…
>The biggest problem is that blockchains are inherently not scalable. 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…
What’s the value proposition for an average Joe to use bitcoin over fiat currency?
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…
Time will tell if Wikileaks was really a noble cause, or if the banks were right all along.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The main innovation is that blockchain is decentralized and yet still verifiable. A public SQL database is in nature centralized. Even if you were to try and shard it out to everybody in the network you have the difficult time of cross verifying such data heavy records.
> A public SQL database is in nature centralized Why would a SQL database be centralized in nature? Just as your n nodes hold the entire blockchain, you would have n nodes holding the entire SQL database. Of course, you could have a blockckain only on one node, centralised. That wouldn't make it inherently "centralized", however. Same with SQL databases.
I am the lead engineer on Corda, which is an open source 'enterprise' (i.e. institutional/industrial) blockchain-inspired platform. But if you don't like the B word you can think of it as a decentralised database that can be queried using SQL. The intro to the technical white paper describes some of the issues with "just run a public SQL database" approach:
https://www.corda.net/content/corda-technical-whitepaper.pdf
Why not just use a shared relational database? This would certainly solve a lot of problems using only existing technology, but it would also raise more questions than answers:
• Who would run this database? Where would we find a sufficient supply of angels to own it?
• In which countries would it be hosted? What would stop that country abusing the mountain of sensitive information it would have?
• What if it were hacked?
• Can you actually scale a relational database to fit the entire financial system?
• What happens if the Financial System™ needs to go down for maintenance?
• What kind of nightmarish IT bureaucracy would guard changes to the database schemas?
• How would you manage access control?
So, it's ultimately a system that tries to address these questions and many others too. If you can solve these issues then you can suddenly actually propose an entire market putting all data into a single database engine, and at that point things can get a lot more robust and efficient. But it just wouldn't be politically possible on any sort of scale to do that with Postgres.