Related, NIST's answer to do you need a block chain.
Blockchain study finds zero success rate and vendors don't call back
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Re: Blockchain study finds zero success rate and vendors don't call back
#12Not really surprising, to be honest.
I'm really tired of the overused "blockchains are really slow databases" phrase. They're not, and if you're using one as that, you're doing it wrong almost 90% of the time.
Here's a great question to ask yourself if you need a blockchain: Do I need game theoretical enforced security?
There are many networks and protocols that can be improved with such security mechanisms. There are more that can't be improved. Just in another thread, someone asked the question if Tor could be improved with it. There's plenty to experiment with here and figure out what makes a blockchain application great.
The entire idea is that you can incentivize good behavior and disincentivize or punish bad behavior. Consensus comes into play here when deciding, "Was this operation done correctly? If so, do this. If not, do that." This has the ability of enforcing correct operation in decentralized networks. My associates and I have taken to calling these "Decentralized Incentive Networks". Yes, there are many problems that have yet to be solved, but people are working on them. I'm really interested in seeing solutions to the oracle-problem, but I'm unsure if it will ever be solvable.
Even then, a lot of these applications won't be fit for enterprise (or even small business) use. Many of these applications will benefit (and survive) from community adoption and rely on being open source.
Hopefully, when the hype is gone, we will have made some really great technological advancements to peer-to-peer and distributed applications. This is where I think blockchain apps will find their niche.
Re: Blockchain study finds zero success rate and vendors don't call back
#13I'm really not surprised. The most interesting thing about your business shouldn't be your choice in data-store.
Well put. Block chain certainly has applications but they're almost entirely a design choice.
The reality of block chains is that they'll always be complicated enough that there will always be a man in the middle. Mt. Gox demonstrated that block chains will always be exploitable because the man in the middle is easily compromised. And anything that's worth going to the trouble of protecting with block chain is worth compromising.
Re: Blockchain study finds zero success rate and vendors don't call back
#14I'm really not surprised. The most interesting thing about your business shouldn't be your choice in data-store.
Hear hear.
And this assessment is cause for optimism. Look at many of the upcoming cohort of blockchain-based projects: LivePeer, Fluence, Augur, dare I say NuCypher (I'm on this team) - all of them have far more interesting things to offer than their use of blockchain tech. They render unto the blockchain what is the blockchain's, but all do way more interesting things.
Re: Blockchain study finds zero success rate and vendors don't call back
#15I've been working on DLT / enterprise blockchain technologies since 2014 and have insight into hundreds of projects, a small number of which made it to live production. Here is the bottom line: yes, it's mostly hype, but this technology does have genuine use cases - when you want to build an interparty database-driven application, and cannot find a suitable place to put the database, because of business concerns or r…
I've only worked on a single blockchain application, but this was my experience too. I was actually pretty skeptical when I was told we'd be working on it and figured it was just a hype thing, but the use case involved a B2B process that was well-established and used a paid intermediary to correlate data across businesses. We were pretty happy with the result. I doubt we'll ever see a middleman-free decentralized utopia, but I agree that it's a technology with some genuine applications.
Re: Blockchain study finds zero success rate and vendors don't call back
#16I used blockchain in a project successfully, but it is not a distributed consensus application. My problem was file sharing. Torrent files send a big list of SHA1 hashes, one for each piece of the file. I replaced that idea with a single block which contains the hash of the next block (as well as two other blocks so verification isn't linear one block to the next). This allows a single block to represent the entire file, allowing you to get blocks from many peers while verifying them. You can just send out a coverage map of what you have, and your peers can calculate what you can verify and send you a random block from that set.
If anyone is interested, [1] and [2] are the project. No one is using it, but it's a peer to peer chat and file sharing system.
1. https://party-line.lol 2. https://github.com/tacixat/party-line
Re: Blockchain study finds zero success rate and vendors don't call back
#17Not really surprising, to be honest. I'm really tired of the overused "blockchains are really slow databases" phrase. They're not, and if you're using one as that, you're doing it wrong almost 90% of the time. Here's a great question to ask yourself if you need a blockchain: Do I need game theoretical enforced security? There are many networks and protocols that can be improved with such security mechanisms. There ar…
There's quite a few people working on the oracle problem. But there's always risk at some level.
And even oracle solutions get broken down into decentralized/centralized platforms.
Re: Blockchain study finds zero success rate and vendors don't call back
#18I've been working on DLT / enterprise blockchain technologies since 2014 and have insight into hundreds of projects, a small number of which made it to live production. Here is the bottom line: yes, it's mostly hype, but this technology does have genuine use cases - when you want to build an interparty database-driven application, and cannot find a suitable place to put the database, because of business concerns or r…
> when you want to build an interparty database-driven application, and cannot find a suitable place to put the database, because of business concerns or regulation
If you're operating a legal business, a centralized database hosted by an industry mutual or regulator beats a blockchain.
Re: Blockchain study finds zero success rate and vendors don't call back
#19I said this in another thread but I'll say it again here.
I am downright shocked at just how much of a failure this technology has turned out to be. How can this many brilliant people work on an area for this long and produce almost nothing of value?
I suppose it happens in areas of "pathological science" like infinite energy machines, but those are areas where the tech doesn't work and probably violates laws of physics. In this case the tech does work in the general sense but seems to have little to no utility in most cases. When you consider scams and fraud it may even have negative utility.
I'd like to be proven wrong. I keep waiting for that killer cryptocurrency app but it never arrives. Meanwhile the core use case of digital money seems almost abandoned.
It's not even that good anymore for black and grey market commerce. It was in the beginning because the authorities didn't understand it. It was security through obscurity. Now they're developing both expertise and legal frameworks for dealing with it. It's no longer a free-for-all.
I have trouble thinking of another technology that actually works that has attracted this much hype, brains, and investment and then failed this badly to deliver.
It's not like fusion, which has a very clear use case but faces so far insurmountable technical challenges. It's not like nuclear fission power which works, has a clear use, but has downsides.
I think the nearest comparison I can come up with are failed government mega-projects like the US Reagan-era "Star Wars" laser missile defense system, airplane-like space shuttles, or giant planned utopian cities that get built and then sit vacant.
I'm also shocked and a little horrified at just how much fraud there is in this space. I'd expect some, but the sheer volume of fraud is breathtaking. Almost all ICOs seem to be scams. Many exchanges are likely scams. Tether looks like a scam. It makes me disappointed in humanity that there are this many bad actors out there just waiting for a new way to fleece people.
Just... wow. What a waste.
Re: Blockchain study finds zero success rate and vendors don't call back
#20I've been working on DLT / enterprise blockchain technologies since 2014 and have insight into hundreds of projects, a small number of which made it to live production. Here is the bottom line: yes, it's mostly hype, but this technology does have genuine use cases - when you want to build an interparty database-driven application, and cannot find a suitable place to put the database, because of business concerns or r…
I've always seen it as the following equation: is the cost of distrusting the other parties in the transaction lower than the cost of running a decentralized ledger? if yes, you shouldn't use blockchain. this is obviously oversimplification but i think you get my point.