271–280 of 340 posts
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People are also excited to launder money
How is BTC any better than USD or EUR for laundering money?
I'm not sure why blockchain has become a perennial 'love to hate' favorite on a forum dedicated to 'disruptive' startups. The cynic in me would say the people complaining are the ones who sold their bitcoin for $100 back in the day and cannot stand the fact that they're out millions for not being forward-looking enough. If that describes you, go invest in a new blockchain tech. There aren't actually that many -- most…
But trade is a motivation to build trust and cooperate - to not be terrible. Blockchain weakens this glue effect.
I don’t buy the hype of the blockchain as much as the average hacker news user, but this article lacks anything but anecdotal data. A bubble needs two things: 1. Misallocated hype 2. Real money As far as I can tell no one has done much digging on how much money blockchain ventures represent in terms of real world investment dollars. Can you call something a bubble if there isn’t much “real” money in it? If all the bl…
this estimate for example says $1.3B was invested in 2018 alone!
https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/20/with-at-least-1-3-billion-...
this one is on a similar track: https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS43526618
plenty of cash to be lost!
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Is your salary in cryptocurrency, or is it really in USD/Euros/whatever, converted to cryptocurrency at the current exchange rate on payday?
For now it's tied to EUR amount and converted on the average exchange rate for the last 5 days before payday.
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…
In broad brush strokes for someone wanting to skim money off people booking hotel rooms by selling rooms cheap (e.g. lastminute.com) the holy blockchain does indeed sound like the answer to all their prayers but it does not do anything to solve the hard problems that cannot be simplified even with a simple country hotel.
Only if you have been at the sharp end of fixing hotel booking systems do you appreciate some of the finer points. You really cannot double book rooms and yet every day that simple country guest house might have someone on the phone wanting the same room at the same time that there is someone at the front desk and someone trying to book through lastminute.com. Locking that record is a time critical thing even if the hotel is out in the countryside where nothing ever happens and time moves slowly. That room could also have bookings on it from people that got married there five years previously and are on the way back for their anniversary, therefore there could be a substantial amount of data tied into that slot. Furthermore, that room could be booked but if the guest does not show up before a given time then it is up for sale again. So that availability presented as yes/no on the website is not as simple as a yes/no, there are other provisional states depending on what has been paid and who has showed up. There might not even be the option to bump those guests into a more deluxe room if those more deluxe rooms have someone walk through the door and take them.
Ian Dury and the Blockheads probably have better insight and knowledge than a venture capitalist and the blockchains have about how to improve upon the current state of the art when it comes to hotel inventory management. Rome was not built in a day and neither were the booking systems needed to cater for visitors to Rome. It is just not that simple. Fast broadband cannot be relied upon for a lot of hotels, so the idea of updating a blockchain and sending it out to every Tom Dick and Harry chancer on the internet hoping to sell 'cheap rate' rooms with them all being instantly updated is not the hospitality system I would want to be doing support for.
If the de-facto was 'decentralized' and I worked in hospitality systems support and a new 'centralized' idea came along I would be straight on that bandwagon and you would not be able to stop me!
Maybe it just depends on what end of the telescope you are on. My perspective is the business end, with the dawn starts, skipped break times and extra hours put well into the small hours, fixing real problems for real people with real expectations of service.
The people I see in the blockchain space do not have any knowledge of the problem space that their change the world solutions purportedly seek to address, as mentioned I was with you at the start of what you had to say here, but, on second thoughts I don't think that blockchain is a magic bullet even for the simple task of getting a room booked in the smallest of hotels. Furthermore, the task isn't just getting a room booked as a yes/no thing, there is this bigger problem of hotel booking management and centralised systems, well trained staff, hard working staff and technical support is the glue that makes it all work as an apparently 'yes/no' thing. At best blockchain is woefully naive and, from a support perspective, a disaster if ever implemented in this seemingly simple 'use case'.
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If ownership of a house is decided by contracts, written by lawyers, then adding a blockchain will only add issues, since it can get out of sync with reality. And if the blockchain is the source of truth, it means that stealing your house-token will result in you losing your house. Do you use an intel processor vulnerable to Meltdown/Spectre, or with a vulnerable IME? Do the people you know and love know and understa…
One end goal of blockchains is indeed that they become the system of record, and that legal agreements are English translations of what the code says rather than the other way around. That might sound scary, but I'd point out a few things: 1. That future is still a long time away. The legal system is very conservative. 2. These systems don't have to be perfect, just better than what we have today. Yes, I certainly wo…
If someone sneaks into your house when you leave your computer logged on, and transfers your house to them, do you legally have to move out immediately?
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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…
This is only a problem in the USA. By contrast, in Britain, the Faster Payments Service (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster_Payments_Service) has provided transfers within a few minutes for more than 10 years now.
You manifestly do not need a "blockchain" to solve that problem.
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…
Decentralisation and anonymity are useless to the travel industry and from the point of view of the industry players, public access to local copies of all their [current and historical] inventory and reservation data is an alarming bug, not a feature. What they actually want is for a buyer to be able to via an API (i) access the current price for each relevant item of inventory that's currently on sale from lots of providers (ii) update a single private canonical record belonging to the one [necessarily trusted] party they buy from (which may or may not affect the availability of inventory for future queries). The reason the systems are slow is because pricing and routing is incredibly complex and diverse, and the associated datasets are enormous (and often computationally expensive to process even without a layer of cryptographic crap on top). It's something of an understatement to say that turning that into thousands of local copies of an ever-growing blockchain which needs to be updated to account for a million reservations per minute is not going to be an improvement...
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…
The public didn't buy most of their stuff online 10 years into the web either, but now Amazon dominates. Blockchain needs a dominant company to stay relevant. As with Amazon, the entire company doesn't have to be tied to it, it can have onchain/offchain components. I think this becomes easier as tooling becomes easier as well for developers and for users.