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The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

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Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#251

Post by tialaramex »

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.…

The Internet in some sense starts with, at the very latest, the Treaty of Bern in 1874. Because the Internet is just the current physical incarnation of the Network.

(The Treaty of Bern says how to make physical letter post work internationally the way we're used to today, before that it was a colossal pain in the arse)

The Network is like the Word, it's fundamental to what we are, the precise implementation may change, but the idea is forever.

Automobiles, T-shirts, babies brought up almost exclusively by their immediate biological parents, cow milk as a normal human beverage, portraits, funerals, the novel - these are all "just" culture and might become unfashionable and go away over the longer term or in other contexts - they're not fundamental to what we are. But the Word and the Network are right at the centre of what we are, as people.

Blockchain is just a weird cultural blip. It's not even T-shirts, it's Pork Pie Hats. People keep trying to make it a thing, but it's not a thing.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#252

Post by pjc50 »

vkou wrote: post #205
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…

> 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…

As others have pointed out, plenty of other countries have this. The United States doesn't because it's "not a country": there isn't a single financial services regulatory jurisdiction, there's 50 different ones, and enough people are opposed to the federal government on "principle" (?) that there's no support for useful coordination efforts.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#253

Post by pingec »

ygypsy wrote: post #247
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, mor…

I keep hearing about this e-residency, but what can you actually do with it? What is it useful for?

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#254

Post by kalleboo »

zaarn wrote: post #246
puranjay wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 transactio…

> the banking situation in the US is just amazingly bad

At one time I used to get paid from a US employer's Bank of America account. I also had an account in the same bank, but transferring the money between our accounts in the same bank took 3 days. I presume due to some split between business/personal banking, but still absolutely ridiculous. We switched to sending the payments to my European account through SWIFT, and those payments happened same-day.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#255

Post by icebraining »

acover wrote: post #213
Kadin wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People are also excited to launder money

How is BTC any better than USD or EUR for laundering money?

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#256

Post by m-i-l »

lojack wrote: post #69
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…

> Sure there's niches like settlement systems and [...] but not something that a member of the public is going to use on a daily basis ... I'd argue that settlement systems aren't a niche system and is something most of us use on a daily basis -- if not more frequently. Unless you're using cash for everything, every transaction you make goes through a settlement process, sometimes multiple times. People often talk ab…

One of the points is that settlements systems are private permissioned blockchains, which don't take advantage of one of the main innovations of the public blockchains, i.e. decentralised trust. Interestingly I noticed that the recent Bank of England Real Time Gross Settlement Proof of Concept report[0] didn't even use the term "blockchain", preferring instead to use the term "distributed ledger technology" - I wonder if they are concerned about negative connotations the term "blockchain" might be starting to have.

[0] https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/payments/r...

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#257

Post by DoctorOetker »

s3m4j wrote: post #59
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…

Disregarding the validity of your argument in itself, trust issues cannot be solved by black boxes. Humans laws have to be enacted by humans, because the real world is messy and rules and laws need "messy wiggle room".

I respectfully disagree partially.(I agree black boxes are insufficient, unless the democratic process is modeled/accepted as a black box)

I believe in the utility of separation of powers: a true democratic legislative branch, a provable executive branch, and a mechanically verifiable judgement branch.

I don't mind if you call the democratic facet of the legislative branch messy. Learning to make proper decisions for novel situations tends to be messy, because we learn from our mistakes, and mistakes are messy.

As long as the way the population would democratically prefer the case to be judged is captured/modeled accurately by the law, the formal mechanical law is suitable. If the way the mechanical law is applied does not capture the way we want things to be handled (what I presume you refer to with a messy case) the legislative branch should be activated to change the law, and we want the legislative branch to be democratic because it's what makes sure that the population consults their ethics and feelings (community taste can not be proven, except by poll).

So the mess is restricted to just the first instance of unforeseen situations. ("History repeats itself, the first time as a tragedy, and from then on as a farce")

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#258

Post by icebraining »

ygypsy wrote: post #247
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, mor…

"There is no blockchain technology in the X-Road"

https://www.niis.org/blog/2018/4/26/there-is-no-blockchain-t...

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#259

Post by healsjnr1 »

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.…

I am constantly surprised by this point of view. Blockchain is a solution to a number of problems that were previously unsolvable, yet so much of the discourse is around the idea that decentralised trust doesn't really solve any useful problems. True many of the applications are hype, but we need to recognise these for what they are and move on to more interesting things.

To me the best example is the travel industry. Decades ago a small number of companies managed to get manual back office systems moved to centralised booking and reservation systems. This had a huge impact on the ability to sell inventory and open up the world of online travel agencies.

These centralised platforms are still around and they are now a huge problem. The software is bloated, complicated and slow, integrating with any GDS is painful and only ever allowed on their terms. It is amazing to me the amount of time and effort and startups that have gone into just trying to find the cheapest flight available.

This is fertile ground for decentralised trust. Having a local copy of the live flight inventory or a large aggregate set of hotel inventory would revolutionise the travel industry. Sure there are also applications around settlement and financing, but to me the most exciting thing is the ability to build customer applications on large sets of provably correct, trusted data. And to do this freely in the manner you chose with the technology you chose.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#260

Post by greggman »

ghthor wrote: post #168
greggman wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does block chain solve this problem any more than a plain old text file with your medical history? IIUC the only thing keeping bitcoin's blockchain trustworthy is millions of people mining new coins and therefore distributively verifying the blockchain. Who would be doing that for your medical records and what would their incentive be to do it?

You need that text file signed by your previous doctors, and your new doctor needs to be able to verify the public keys of your previous doctors using some type of PKI. You also need to locally manage your health records data, its storage can't be easily automated and paid for. Blockchain solves all of those problems in one nice bundle, it provides PKI, signed log of changes, and distributed automated storage. That's…

As far as I understand the point is supposed to be the blockchain is distributed trust. The longest chain = proof of most work = the truth. The only reason someone can't basically change the entire history of the blockchain is because no one has 51% control of the chain. The only reason no one has 51% control of the chain in bitcoin is because so many people are mining it to earn coins.

But, for medical records there is no such incentive. Therefore anyone can easily change the records or add new ones and claim everyone else who has a shorter chain has the wrong chain (which will be like no one since there is no incentive to mine).

So I'm probably just informed how blockchain is supposed to help here. Without the distributed trust there's no plus to blockchain. And without the incentive to mine that generates millions of miners there is way to have the distributed trust.

I'm happy to be wrong but I haven't see an explanation how this issue is solved for all these non virtual currency uses cases.

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