The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next? • Hacker News Board

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#291

Post by Nursie » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 12:57 PM UTC

DoctorOetker wrote: post #257

s3m4j wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

I would hate to live in your world. The law is the way it is because it governs humans, and because legislation cannot capture every aspect of all facets of the law.

Mechanical application of the law is a pretty dreadful idea.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#292

Post by m-i-l » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 1:09 PM UTC

aidanlister wrote: post #23

m-i-l wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You sound incredulous about this – VCs have a pretty clear business model, funding slow-growing steady businesses is not it.

But VCs normally try to fund genuine businesses - in this case, by suggesting they weren't interested in a "proper business" (as in a legitimate business) and were wanting something to exit in the "short term", the insinuation was that they just wanted a sham / fake business that they could use to fool people just long enough to do a 100x pump and dump.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#293

Post by chosenbreed » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 1:14 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #252

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…

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.

Good point. A lot of comments here about relative settlement times. But it occurs to me that most of these are in the context of transfers/settlements within a jurisdiction. What is the story on moving money between countries? At the moment I'm have to pay significant premiums to accomplish this (and it is not usually instant). Am I missing something?

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#294

Post by Joeri » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 1:36 PM 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.…

I was highly skeptical about blockchain as well because the only practical application seemed to be cryptocurrencies, and those will never be allowed to grow to a point they become dominant (they can be regulated in such a way normal people won’t want any).

But ... then I went to an evening where the identity applications were explained. Using a blockchain to have assertions made about your identity, like where you studied, where you were born, what employer’s you’ve had in such a way that the assertions can’t be forged, can’t be doctored, can’t be stolen, and aren’t locked away in the databases of an institution. I heard stories of people who lost their proofs of identity by having to flee a warzone and were unable to prove to EU governments and employers they were who they were (to the point of being stripped of their bank accounts because banks only let people with official paperwork hold accounts). And I have to say, there’s something there. I’m still skeptical about cryptocurrency, but not about blockchain.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#295

Post by api » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 1:50 PM UTC

Vendan wrote: post #86

api wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dot com era actually started in the late 1960s with packet switching networks. It took 50 years to get mass adoption. The first really working cryptocurrency was in 2008. I expect mass adoption by 2058.

Web != packet switched network. But, if you want to go that far, the first cryptographic hash functions were being designed in the late 1970s, so cryptocurrency has a decade or so to go before it'll be "late" by that standard, and it's progress so far has been lackluster compared to the internet's as of 40 years after it's "packet switching network ancestry".

The web is an application. PSNs are a fundamental innovation. A fundamental innovation is a conceptual leap that brings about a qualitative (not quantitative) jump in capability. Before it something is simply impossible. After it that thing is possible.

The fundamental innovation was the development of the very first practical decentralized network that can achieve secure reliable consensus among minimally trusted peers. Bitcoin's way is not very efficient and may not be the only way to do it, but it proves that it's possible and shows one way it can be done.

It generally takes an absolute minimum of twenty to thirty years for something to go from lab bench prototype to mass adoption, and that's fast. 50 is more typical. Bitcoin was a lab bench prototype.

But what about the bubble? Cryptocurrency is indeed in a bubble, but it's a bubble built on radically underestimating the amount of time (and work) it will take to go from proof of concept to mass adoption. As the saying goes people tend to over-estimate progress in the near term and under-estimate it over longer spans of time.

The cryptocurrency bubble is also not very big. The numbers are huge from the perspective of an individual or a small company but from the perspective of the global economy it's the equivalent of taking a piss in the ocean. If you look at the global financial industry as the target market, cryptocurrency collectively hasn't scratched the surface. Far more money than the entire cryptocurrency valuation crosses the Atlantic and Pacific in the form of conventional wire transfers every day.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#296

Post by zaphar » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 1:53 PM UTC

ghthor wrote: post #165

zaphar wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trust has always been a problem. A trustless currency doesn't solve the problem any more than anything else has. Blockchains can't and won't solve the UK brexit problem. It won't solve the US politics problem. It won't solve the businesses too big to fail problem or the politics, power, and money corrupting people problem. I agree that trust in institutions is a problem but blockchain won't solve it. It will just dis…

The difference here is that the source code for the EVM is open source and auditable. And I wouldn't use a smart contract that isn't the same, open source and auditable. This is my realm of expertise, this is how I think about systems and interactions, it's my turf so I have far higher levels of trust executing a smart contract then walking through the TSA scanners.

Yes, but our demographic is a very small part of the wider target audience so what makes sense for us does not at all make sense for them. Any solution that requires the market as a whole to level up to our level of expertise has the same problem for them that we have when walking through TSA scanners. The only difference is that now you are the TSA which again only shifted the problem. It didn't solve it.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#297

Post by DoctorOetker » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 2:03 PM UTC

Nursie wrote: post #291

DoctorOetker wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. I would hate to live in your world. The law is the way it is because it governs humans, and because legislation cannot capture every aspect of all facets of the law. Mechanical application of the law is a pretty dreadful idea.

the transition towards mechanical would of course prompt an enormous amount of decisions to be settled democratically (since we have been doing them ad hoc all the time), but the democratic decision is a decision by humans, and all the following similar cases would mechanically follow the same ruling, until either the population changes its mind (through the democratic process) or the population realizes it misformalized a law by an unforeseen case which again prompts a democratic consultation.

So it would still be decisions by humans, the resolution of the law would increase and capture more detail messy real world situations of our daily lives.

The only horror is that it would force us to either treat everyone as equals before the law, or force us to democratically change the law back and forth when we choose to be inconsistent, forcing us to realize we are discriminating on some (un)identified factor.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#298

Post by chosenbreed » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 2:13 PM UTC

pingec wrote: post #253

ygypsy wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You can setup a company and base it from there. You can be in Timbuktu, Ulaanbatar, etc and be running a European company trading with parties all over the world. There are probably other benefits but that one clinches it for me ;-)

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#299

Post by TylerE » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 2:27 PM UTC

kalleboo wrote: post #254

zaarn wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No, it's not slow (for the most part) because "reasons", it's slow because they are legally allowed to be slow and they can finagle a bit more profit that way.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#300

Post by catbird » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 2:29 PM UTC

Joeri wrote: post #294

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 was highly skeptical about blockchain as well because the only practical application seemed to be cryptocurrencies, and those will never be allowed to grow to a point they become dominant (they can be regulated in such a way normal people won’t want any). But ... then I went to an evening where the identity applications were explained. Using a blockchain to have assertions made about your identity, like where you s…

That all sounds great, but how does it actually work? So there's an immutable entry describing you in a database, then how do you convince someone that you're the person it describes? Do you need to memorize a private key? If it gets forgotten/compromised, then you've lost your identity forever.

The only way I can imagine physical verification would be to have a microchip implanted in your arm, but that would be unthinkably worse than the current system of (thankfully) mutable, replaceable paper documents we use today.