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I Looked into 34 Top Real-World Blockchain Projects So You Don’t Have To

weh.wtf

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Re: I Looked into 34 Top Real-World Blockchain Projects So You Don’t Have To

#211

Post by rossdavidh »

__ryan__ wrote: post #120
rossdavidh wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of those cases, however, had anywhere near as much money put into them that early. It may be that, if blockchain technologies had grown in size much, much slower, that good uses would have been found. Regardless, once this much real money (and the resources of electricity, labor, technical expertise, etc. that they represent) have been invested into something, something impressive should have resulted by now.

How much of that money was based on capitalizing on an unregulated speculative investment market? Just because a lot of resources flow in the general direction of a technology doesn’t mean it wasn’t put to misguided use.

Oh, absolutely. I do think, however, that the very nature of trying to make a new currency (the first and still primary use case for blockchain) is almost inevitably going to have this problem.

Re: I Looked into 34 Top Real-World Blockchain Projects So You Don’t Have To

#212

Post by matthewdgreen »

MBCook wrote: post #113
hash872 wrote: post #14

I have an extremely low opinion of blockchain/crypto, but in the interest of fairness, I did read an FT piece a few months ago about how banks are apparently actually using the blockchain for currency trading: "HSBC and Wells Fargo are cutting out a key part of the currency market’s infrastructure from some trades after the two banks agreed to settle transactions directly on blockchain technology. From Monday, they w…

Why do two institutions need a blockchain for transacting only between themselves? They’re banks. They have lots of agreements and lawyers. They already trust eachother. And there’s no 3rd party involved. I’d be surprised if there was an actual blockchain involved instead of spinning a simple log as a blockchain for hype.

Presumably whatever 1970s tech they were using previously was creaky and needed to be replaced. It probably had long settlement times. You’re correct that if two extremely trusted parties are going to handle all settlement, you can just have one party run a centralized database. But this gets more challenging when you expand from one party to dozens, and the trust relationships get less clear. Since you’re building a new platform anyway, you might as well build a database that’s replicated and decentralized and doesn’t require trusting any single party for availability and correctness, at which point you’ll either use a blockchain or something functionally equivalent.

Re: I Looked into 34 Top Real-World Blockchain Projects So You Don’t Have To

#213

Post by jll29 »

There's a simple "bs filter": ultimately, a block chain is just a simple data structure. So when I read about hype stories, I mentally replace

  s/blockchain/linked lists/g;
  s/artificial intelligence/regression/g;
If the story still makes sense, good; most of the time, it turns into a laugh.

Re: I Looked into 34 Top Real-World Blockchain Projects So You Don’t Have To

#214

Post by westurner »

CodeShmode wrote: post #119
ChainOfFools wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having heard this argument a nauseating number of times, it's fairly clear that people on both sides who say this use "the internet" when they mean "the web." So 1999 is a better "after 10 years'" benchmark here.

The web was the killer app built on the infrastructure of the internet. The blockchain ecosystem is still building it's infrastructure.

# 1970s: The Internet (US Research Institutions, ARPA, IETF, IEEE,)

TCP/IP, DNS (/etc/hosts), Routing Protocols for multiple DUN (Dial-Up Networking) links between schools, Gopher

# The Web (TimBL (@CERN), IETF, W3C)

HTTP, HTML: "Hyperlinks" between "Hypertext" documents; edges with "anchor text" types.

[No-crypto P2P]

# Web 2.0 (CoC Web Frameworks, AJAX, open source SQL, LAMP,)

Interactive HTML with user-contributed-content to moderate

# ~~Web 3.0~~ (W3C,)

Linked Data; RDF, RDFa

5-Star Linked Data: https://5stardata.info/

- Use URIs in your datasets; e.g. describe the columns of the CSVs with URIs: CSVW

# Web3 ("Zero-Trust")

SK: Secret Key

PK: Public Key

Crypto P2P: resilient distributed system application architectures with no points of failure

ENS (Ethereum Name Service) instead of DNS. ENS binds unique strings to accounts; just like NFTs.

(A non-fungible-token is a like a coin where each bill has a unique serial number. A fungible-token is a thing that there are transactable fractions of that needn't have unique identities: US coinage, barrels of oil, ounces of gold/silver. Non-fungible tokens are indivisible: you can't tear a bill in half because there's only the one serial number (and that's actually a federal crime in the USA, to deface money). Similarly, ENS entries - which map a string to an account id (hash of a public key) - can't be split into fractions and sold, so they're Non-FTs; NFTs)

(DNS is somewhat unfixably broken due to the permissiveness necessary to interact with non-DNSSEC-compliant domains resulting in downgrade attack risks: even with e.g. DNS-over-TLS, DNS-over-HTTPS, or DNS-over-QUIC securing the channel; if the DNS client does not reject DNS responses that do not have DNSSEC signatures, a DNS MITM will succeed. If you deny access to DNSSEC-unsigned domains at your DNS client config or the (maybe forwarding) DNS resolver on the router, what is the error message in the browser?)

Re: I Looked into 34 Top Real-World Blockchain Projects So You Don’t Have To

#215

Post by actionablefiber »

drexlspivey wrote: post #130
m3kw9 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could have had similar effect by holding any other currency that isn’t equally hyper inflating. Like the USD

Get out of your bubble. Countries with hyper inflation do not allow you to exchange for another currency obviously.

There's something I've been curious about for a long time.

If your country's currency is in a state of hyperinflation and you want to buy crypto to shield yourself from it, who's your counterparty? Who is willing to sell you that crypto and expose themselves to that inflation, and how are they able to do so profitably?

Re: I Looked into 34 Top Real-World Blockchain Projects So You Don’t Have To

#217

Post by BlueTemplar »

HWR_14 wrote: post #151
chrisabrams wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What country do you live in? Because I know plenty of folks in certain countries with massive inflation and projects such as bitcoin are their refuge from 100-1000% inflation a year. When you say “in 10 years” when did that 10 year time frame start and end? Are talking about the 1960s or the 1990s? Because most people I knew didn’t start using the internet regularly until the mid to late 90s or about 30 or so years a…

> I know plenty of folks in certain countries with massive inflation and projects such as bitcoin are their refuge from 100-1000% inflation a year. Countries with hyperinflation lend to not have a ton of assets. Even if this were a use-case, it doesn't seem to justify anywhere near the valuation of BTC or other crypto. And why on earth you would you use BTC as opposed to a stable-coin in that case?

Because stablecoins - aren't ?

(Well, maybe in the medium term, I guess this can fit some use cases, but the illusion of stability still seems to be a concern ?)

Re: I Looked into 34 Top Real-World Blockchain Projects So You Don’t Have To

#218

Post by no_circuit »

simonw wrote: post #26
hash872 wrote: post #14

I have an extremely low opinion of blockchain/crypto, but in the interest of fairness, I did read an FT piece a few months ago about how banks are apparently actually using the blockchain for currency trading: "HSBC and Wells Fargo are cutting out a key part of the currency market’s infrastructure from some trades after the two banks agreed to settle transactions directly on blockchain technology. From Monday, they w…

That sounds to me like someone used excitement about "blockchain" as an excuse to upgrade a two-decades old system to something a bit more modern. It looks like it's a private blockchain shared between two (at the moment) institutions, which means it's probably being used basically as an append-only log.

You'd be right if you thought that just using for an append-only log doesn't seem like a big difference. But the key thing to note is that they said it could replace CLS, the current settlement system which makes sure the net direction of monies is paid out. So I believe this to mean that instead of using CLS to settle up with currency transfers like USD or EUR, the banks agreed for certain subset of trades they are willing to agree on how to value Bitcoin, or some other crypto, versus the currencies they trade, and then settle the trades by periodic, usually daily, Bitcoin transfers.

If Bitcoin's value isn't stable, then it would be risky for these banks to hold a lot of it in order to settle trades. Perhaps this is what would sink this usage of the blockchain, but probably only a quant would be able to answer that.

I did find it somewhat amusing that the article claims a benefit of real-time visibility of settlement status. I believe some settlement systems still work by sending csv files over ftp (+ssh / sftp).

Re: I Looked into 34 Top Real-World Blockchain Projects So You Don’t Have To

#219

Post by yao420 »

seibelj wrote: post #206
gitanes wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Argentina. 100% of annual inflation. People use crypto everyday to get money in and out of the economy.

This is absolutely true - binance plus stablecoins is how the economy works there.

Any proof? Have you personally seen and used it?

Seeing as you’re the CTO of a nft company you clearly have bias.

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