The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

Post by ghthor » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 4:03 AM UTC

pembrook wrote: post #20

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…

>"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…

Post by jaequery » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 4:09 AM UTC

skewart wrote: post #150

Here's the big reason I've gotten skeptical about blockchain: it seems like very few people are excited about actually using it. Almost everyone talking about it is excited about getting rich from trading currencies or starting a blockchain-based company. And plenty of people are excited about a grand vision for how it might transform society one day, or how it might solve problems they think other people might have.…

Post by hn_throwaway_99 » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 4:15 AM UTC

malloryerik wrote: post #121

m-i-l wrote: post #7

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…

Maybe we should consider that the blockchain's killer app is the truth. This is the case with bitcoin, since the purpose of the blockchain is to be, for example, trustless, protecting you from someone whom you don't trust lying about your bitcoin transactions. Bitcoin will show you the truth about those transactions. The blockchain also tries to protect against fraudulent double spends and do on, and this like all fr…

Post by coralreef » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 4:17 AM UTC

rspeer wrote: post #146

coralreef wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you lived in Greece or Venezeuala, you may have a different opinion about your government's fiscal policies and trustworthiness.

Why do proof-of-work fans believe that the only alternative to trusting nobody is trusting everybody ? You get out of the proof-of-work mess by trusting one entity, and it doesn't have to be the government. And to use proof-of-work, you implicitly trust the people who wrote all the code you use anyway.

Post by ghthor » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 4:19 AM UTC

acdha wrote: post #82

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…

> Remember TCP/IP was developed in the 1970s so it took almost twenty years before HTTP came out, and another 5-10 years before people really started using it. There were significant barriers to entry – network connections were slow and enormously expensive into the 90s – but TCP already had significant value by the 80s (see e.g. FTP). Within a few years of the web arriving in the 90s, there were businesses using it…