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The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

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Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#241

Post by new_guy »

jmknoll wrote: post #214
vkou wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The simple feature of reducing settlements from days into seconds is by itself a great use-case. The reasons for why settlements take days, and not seconds, is procedural, not technical. If the financial world wanted instant settlements, we would have had them decades ago. The financial world optimizes for intent and compliance, not speed. This is why settlements take days, and why cryptocoins aren't very interesti…

Can you expand on this a little more? Why does the financial sector want settlements to take longer?

They also get the interest on your money before passing it onto the next party, multiply that by everyone and it's a not insubstantial sum.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#242

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

aiCeivi9 wrote: post #235
vkou wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The simple feature of reducing settlements from days into seconds is by itself a great use-case. The reasons for why settlements take days, and not seconds, is procedural, not technical. If the financial world wanted instant settlements, we would have had them decades ago. The financial world optimizes for intent and compliance, not speed. This is why settlements take days, and why cryptocoins aren't very interesti…

> If the financial world wanted instant settlements, we would have had them decades ago. As a confirmation - they wanted it and they have it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Euro_Payments_Area#SEPA...

Australia also has instant transfers between banks, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Payments_Platform

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#243

Post by grey-area »

speedplane wrote: post #200
vinni2 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought the blockchain technology had the potential to help financial sector. Not the virtual currency itself but there are a lot of agreements, transactions and settlements which are done in a untrustworthy environment which makes it slow and resulting in settlements [0]. I thought this is also the reason why it takes so long to transfer money from one bank to another. I thought these processes could benefit from…

The simple feature of reducing settlements from days into seconds is by itself a great use-case. However, there is a lot of structural incentives against it. If you're a big bank and make nice transaction fees because your clients trust you to make a secure, legal, and successful transaction, you probably don't want blockchain, because it's a threat to your business model. That's certainly one of the major reasons it…

The simple feature of reducing settlements from days into seconds is by itself a great use-case. However, there is a lot of structural incentives against it. If you're a big bank and make nice transaction fees because your clients trust you to make a secure, legal, and successful transaction, you probably don't want blockchain

A centralised system with trusted nodes is far better for transaction times - this is the worst use-case for a distributed ledger. Blockchains try to avoid trusted nodes, and thus their transactions are slower, because they are multi-node, by design.

Banks already provide transfers in seconds (perhaps not in your country).

Banks make money because clients trust them, they are insured, provide reversible transactions etc, not because their transactions are slow.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#244

Post by puranjay »

zaarn wrote: post #239
speedplane wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The simple feature of reducing settlements from days into seconds is by itself a great use-case. However, there is a lot of structural incentives against it. If you're a big bank and make nice transaction fees because your clients trust you to make a secure, legal, and successful transaction, you probably don't want blockchain, because it's a threat to your business model. That's certainly one of the major reasons it…

>But long term, banks will need to accept faster transaction times. Blockchain or not, it's ridiculous you need to wait days to transfer money when you can send email in milliseconds. Already happening. SEPA Instant is either being released or in trial phases. My bank is trialing it, a And banks offer me more in terms of personal security. If I lose my debit card, I get all damages reimbursed. If the bank gets hacked…

I don't understand this thing about slow financial transactions. Does it really take days to send money from one account to another in the US?

Here in India, we have a thing called IMPS. You can send money instantly from one account to another. Transaction cost is a flat Rs. 5 (less than $0.10) for any transaction size.

There are other newer protocols as well such as UPI which I haven't really used because IMPS serves my needs perfectly.

Sending money to another account is basically a non-issue here.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#245

Post by sky_rw »

Kadin wrote: post #180
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.…

People were pretty excited about using Bitcoin to buy drugs, but it turns out you need a more stable and convenient currency even for drug dealers to be interested. That was the high water mark of consumer interest as far as I've seen. Everything else is just intrigue driven by the get-rich-quick aspect.

For hard drugs you may be correct, however there is a booming online pharmaceutical black market where BTC reigns king.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#246

Post by zaarn »

puranjay wrote: post #244
zaarn wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But long term, banks will need to accept faster transaction times. Blockchain or not, it's ridiculous you need to wait days to transfer money when you can send email in milliseconds. Already happening. SEPA Instant is either being released or in trial phases. My bank is trialing it, a And banks offer me more in terms of personal security. If I lose my debit card, I get all damages reimbursed. If the bank gets hacked…

I don't understand this thing about slow financial transactions. Does it really take days to send money from one account to another in the US? Here in India, we have a thing called IMPS. You can send money instantly from one account to another. Transaction cost is a flat Rs. 5 (less than $0.10) for any transaction size. There are other newer protocols as well such as UPI which I haven't really used because IMPS serve…

From my understanding, US transactions can take a week if you're unlike and the banks need to shovel around a bit.

And tbh, the banking situation in the US is just amazingly bad. Horrifyingly bad if I believe the more out-there stories I hear from people.

The only time I got charged a fee was for a transaction into the US (the fee was currency exchange fee and nothing else). And the fee was seperate so the transaction amount was unchanged.

Yet in the US it seems possible that banks will take a piece of a transaction for themselves.

---

In search of a solution to a problem nobody but the US had, we have blockchain now.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#247

Post by ygypsy »

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.…

One of the most intriguing projects involving blockchain I’ve noticed is e-Estonia which I would file under useful, however it may not qualify as solely a blockchain-based product. Here the reasoning for incorporating the (KSI) blockchain is to prevent tampering.

Citizens have access to a number of digital services that includes but aren’t limited to voting, banking, and healthcare.

They've reported; “Since 2014, more than 27,000 people from 143 different countries have been granted Estonian e-residency”.

I find this example to be exciting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Estonia

https://e-estonia.com/

https://estonia.ee/enter

> A lot of the grand visions behind blockchain mania are indeed compelling, and I suspect something blockchain-ish will take off at some point in the future.

Totally agree. Recently had a discussion with a friend regarding what we felt would be an ideal approach to implementing blockchain and email. Essentially and selfishly how we needed it to behave.

Naturally upon doing a little bit of research lo and behold this endeavor had already been taken up. Exciting I found myself thinking, That’s pretty cool my friend agreed. Fast forward and read past a few more paragraphs and again lo and behold this project is an ICO and with this token you can send emails and blah blah blah.

Very disheartening (at least for me personally) to say the least. Not to say a project like this will fail, just saying that it seems the imagination for blockchain products as of now seems to be limited to just ICO’s.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#249

Post by sky_rw »

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…

Coinbase seems to already do this to a degree. If you transfer to a flagged address your account is banned with zero explanation or recourse. This will likely be the norm going forward for any reputable exchange.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#250

Post by rusk »

Kadin wrote: post #185
SubiculumCode wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If so then the ultimate application of blockchain is authentication of recorded video as actual, unadulterated video of an event.

Yes, that is a possible application of "blockchain technology", given a broad-enough definition of what constitutes "blockchain technology". But the consensus-based proof-of-work (or proof of storage, or proof of memory, etc.) models aren't really necessary or even clearly desirable. There are timestamping systems dating from long before "blockchain" (at least 1990, probably before) which involve sequential hashes, w…

> sequential hashes, with each subsequent hash also including the previous one

Isn't this "in principal" what a blockchain is? Just because they didn't call it a blockchain back then doesn't mean it isn't.

You could also consider Git to be a blockchain of sorts.

What distinguishes Bitcoin in particular is proof of work which provides a means by which distributed untrusted actors can transact in a trusted way. The actual chain of hashes just records these transactions.

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