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The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

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Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#111

Post by stale2002 »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #109
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…

> 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. Time will tell if Wikileaks was really a noble cause, or if the banks were right all along.

It is now 8 years later, and yet the organization has not been convicted of any crimes. Time already did tell who was right and who was wrong.

But even IF they are convicted of a crime sometime in the future, this is 8 years later.

Censoring financial transactions should require a court order. Signed by a judge, and done through the normal criminal justice system. And it should be done publicly, so that judges and politicians are held accountable for their actions.

In America, due process is a constitutional right, and if someone is guilty of a crime, there is a process that we should be going through.

Punishment should not be inflicted upon others outside the court system via secret agreements and collusion between oligopolies.

We have laws and human rights for a reason. Don't be so quick to throw them away.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#112

Post by sp527 »

EthanHeilman wrote: post #77
craigc wrote: post #18

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…

> The thing that keeps me up at night is not scalability, it is user adoption beyond the use cases which Bitcoin already successfully fulfills.

This felt like the canary in the coal mine that the anarchist crowd has wholesale ignored for years. Joe and Jane LIKE that the dollar is backed by the full faith and credit of USG. From the POV of the average person, crypto is fairy dust next to a currency endorsed by what is perceived to be the most economically stable nation on the planet.

Joe and Jane don't understand nearly enough about economics or technology to really care about crypto or to ever be capable of using it securely independent of a third-party facilitator like Coinbase. They want cheap, fast transactions with guarantees, insured bank accounts, and a human being they can call for support when something goes wrong. Visa and JPM already give them that. Coinbase is a total reinvention of a system with no marginal benefit. Bitcoin doesn't solve a problem Joe and Jane will ever care about. About the only thing is does solve, at least in the short-term, is their FOMO about living analog in a world beset by runaway digital progress.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#113

Post by EthanHeilman »

craigc wrote: post #87
EthanHeilman wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> 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. Fair point. But none of the biggest chains right now are nearly as scalable as using something like AWS or Azure or Google Cloud. Unless they are able to handle the same amount of traffic, there is no reason for someone to…

>But none of the biggest chains right now are nearly as scalable as using something like AWS or Azure or Google Cloud.

I agree, just because we can scale them doesn't mean we will invest the time and energy to do it. Lots of solvable problems in cryptography but very few people working on them.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#114

Post by purerandomness »

mike_hearn wrote: post #110
purerandomness wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

There aren't any decentralised SQL engines really. There are distributed databases that provide SQL-like abilities, like Spanner, but they're optimised for huge scale and not low trust. They're still expected to be run by a single organisation, not a p2p network of many organisations. I am the lead engineer on Corda, which is an open source 'enterprise' (i.e. institutional/industrial) blockchain-inspired platform. Bu…

Thanks for the writeup and the whitepaper.

I find it hard to follow the distinction between decentralised and distributed, especially since all of the points above would apply to your implementation, as well:

All the decentralised networks rise and fall with enough political pressure, becasue they all have a weak spot - some form of organizational structure that needs to be kept alive by some entity. In your case (from the whitepaper):

> A network map service that publishes information about nodes on the network.

The legal entity that will maintain this service will be faced with enough pressure to shut it down once the state in which this entity happens to operate in implements laws that happen to render some of the content in the database illegal.

If someone provides a solution to this, that would be groundbreaking. Until today, no such thing exists.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#115

Post by reificator »

m-i-l wrote: post #14
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…

Maybe not government, maybe just humans in general. Decentralisation, blockchain, smart contracts, cryptocurrency, AI and IoT could really start coming into their own further into the future when we start having more autonomous agents performing those little tasks on our behalf, like a smart fridge ordering more milk and interacting with a drone to ensure payment and delivery without having to bother a human. But I'm…

> True story: VCs specialising in funding blockchain projects told a dev team "You guys are building a proper business, that's great but it means it won't 100x in a short period, so isn't really what we're after".

Sounds like that VC firm knows what VC is, and would correctly give that answer regardless of specialization. Nothing to do with blockchain.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#116

Post by jancsika »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #109
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…

> 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. Time will tell if Wikileaks was really a noble cause, or if the banks were right all along.

Let's go to slide #2 then-- Scihub. They take Bitcoin which they ostensibly use to pay for the servers that serve up the science journals.

Do we need time to tell if Scihub is a noble cause?

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#117

Post by michaelchisari »

stale2002 wrote: post #48
pembrook wrote: post #20

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…

> I want to donate money to WikiLeaks

Trustworthiness of Wikileaks aside, do you think that's a $500 billion market? Donating to activist organizations?

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#118

Post by codebje »

mike_hearn wrote: post #107
Xixi wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

One end goal of blockchains is indeed that they become the system of record, and that legal agreements are English translations of what the code says rather than the other way around. 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 wo…

Blockchains aren't better than what we have today for property.

At least the victim in your deed fraud article was able to recover their property, albeit at significant cost. How are people going recovering funds from the Mt. Gox theft?

Let alone the oracle problem, people keeping a digital asset secure and safe for decades, the chance of the software being 100% bug free first time, the total lack of incentive to run a blockchain node on a registry chain, or the complexity of rolling crypto when the current algorithm becomes too weak in 10-15 years…

Nope. This is yet another problem blockchains are hopelessly ill-suited to tackling.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#119

Post by fastball »

jcranmer wrote: post #90
fastball wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

After all, it's not like people breaking into computers and stealing stuff from them is anywhere near as common as people breaking into houses or bank vaults.

I don't have the stats, but I actually would guess that robbery is way more common than hacking personal computers which results in the retrieval of useful information.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#120

Post by zaphar »

mike_hearn wrote: post #107
Xixi wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

One end goal of blockchains is indeed that they become the system of record, and that legal agreements are English translations of what the code says rather than the other way around. 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 wo…

Banks and paper based systems don't have to be perfect because when they go wrong I have recourse to fix it. The blockchain technologies that everyone talks about have no recourse because they are peer to peer. Because they have no recourse the bar they have to meet is significantly higher than the bar that a bank run paper system has to meet. They effectively have to be perfect. Without that perfection they will have to build in some form of recourse and as soon as you do that you are on the road to duplicating the very things= they claim to eliminate, centralization.
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