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Blockchain study finds zero success rate and vendors don't call back

theregister.co.uk

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Re: Blockchain study finds zero success rate and vendors don't call back

#41

Post by Jakawao »

Alex3917 wrote: post #34
manmanic wrote: post #8

I'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…

> This is fairly niche, perhaps 1% of all interorganizational database applications, but there are certainly cases where it is the right solution. So I personally think DLT is going to be one of those multi-quadrillion dollar technologies that come around every few hundred years. The real benefit of DLT is that it enables new types of human relationships. So thinking about it in terms of what percentage of your exist…

I can’t tell if you are being sarcastic or not, so I assume this is a serious comment.

Can you share some examples of use cases where DLT is going to be transformative?

Re: Blockchain study finds zero success rate and vendors don't call back

#42

Post by [deleted] »

dragontamer wrote: post #7
krmmalik wrote: post #2

I've spoken to a number of vendors and come across similar findings as well. Though of course, this is just observational on my part and not a detailed investigation or study, but I have been getting much the same impression. There's a lot of unnecessary hype and people jumping on the bandwagon just because it's currently a buzzword. That said, I still have a lot of faith in what Blockchain will eventually be able to…

> That said, I still have a lot of faith in what Blockchain will eventually be able to achieve. It might just take longer to get there than we thought. Why should anyone care more than say... the adoption rate of SkipLists or Bloom Filters? Blockchain IS a usable datastructure with some interesting properties. But so are Cuckoo Hashes. But no one is going around talking about how Cuckoo Hashes will take over the worl…

[deleted]

Re: Blockchain study finds zero success rate and vendors don't call back

#43

Post by narrator »

manmanic wrote: post #8

I'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…

The only successful applications of business blockchain I've seen is in businesses where nobody trusts the brokers. For example, the diamond business has to keep track of where the diamonds came from and nobody trusts the brokers to not lie, so blockchain works here.

Re: Blockchain study finds zero success rate and vendors don't call back

#44

Post by anongraddebt »

hudon wrote: post #10
krmmalik wrote: post #2

I've spoken to a number of vendors and come across similar findings as well. Though of course, this is just observational on my part and not a detailed investigation or study, but I have been getting much the same impression. There's a lot of unnecessary hype and people jumping on the bandwagon just because it's currently a buzzword. That said, I still have a lot of faith in what Blockchain will eventually be able to…

> in 1999, even though the internet had been out a while and there had been lots of talk about e-commerce no one had really solved the problem particularly well in terms of providing a platform to the average Joe I'm not sure why you focused on e-commerce as a use case, as well as the average Joe as the user. The article in question talks about them trying to find ANY industry use case. The Internet was useful pretty…

The percentage of people saying blockchain doesn't have a substantial use case, is about the same percentage as there were in the late 70's or early 80's saying the internet didn't have a substantial use case.

Initially, few people thought file transfer over the internet was a substantive use case because the transmission speed was too slow. Then throughput capacity picked up, but people then shifted the argument to something like, "It's good for medium size file transfer, and I guess I can sometimes send this clunky email thing instead of picking up the phone or sending a fax." This process repeats itself, with goalposts ever shifting, until someone talks about the possibility of selling everything over the internet, starting with books, and most think it's nutty, but believe hearing "you've got mail" every morning might get mass adoption.

I'm not sure whether 'blockchain' is a database or a universal computer or a new software primitive. Or whether we can even tell. What I know is that it is at the very least some sort of network infrastructure (in the most abstract sense of the term). Just like with the internet (another network infrastructure), the space of substantial use cases increases as more people and technologies are connected to it.

Could it end up being a dud apart from some random use cases? Emphatically yes. Could it end up being pretty important? Possibly (we don't know).

Ironically, the best evidence I have for being agnostic about the potential of 'blockchain' is the number of educated and non-educated people making wild claims about the benefits of decentralization, etc.

When the telegraph arrived, a substantial mass of people said it would usher in world peace. When the internet arrived, a substantial mass of people made wild claims about breaking us free from corporate power, educating the masses, etc.

Re: Blockchain study finds zero success rate and vendors don't call back

#45

Post by plorkyeran »

oldgradstudent wrote: post #22
TACIXAT wrote: post #16

I 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 f…

If I understand your short description, this sounds more like a Merkle tree[1] than a blockchain. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle_tree

Depending on how you define "blockchain", it's either the same thing as a merkle tree or most non-bitcoin things that claim to be using blockchains actually are just using merkle trees.

Re: Blockchain study finds zero success rate and vendors don't call back

#46

Post by obtino »

manmanic wrote: post #8

I'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…

Wasn’t this type of stuff around well before the hype of the blockchain? E.g distributed hash tables?

Re: Blockchain study finds zero success rate and vendors don't call back

#47

Post by micksabox »

api wrote: post #19

I 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 phys…

Well said. I got swept up in the hype and my job suffered for it. This is a negative value.

But I do think in terms of vision and coordination, blockchain has extended the horizons of what can be achieved.

Re: Blockchain study finds zero success rate and vendors don't call back

#48

Post by wyldfire »

this_user wrote: post #28
Animats wrote: post #9

That's bad. I thought someone would be using a blockchain for some kind of back-end settlement system somewhere, but apparently not. On the ICO front, the SEC is now cracking down effectively. First they went after the outright frauds, such as the coin backed by nonexistent land and diamonds. They won in court. Then they went after the ones that promised big returns and didn't deliver. The SEC won again. That settled…

> That's bad. I thought someone would be using a blockchain for some kind of back-end settlement system somewhere, but apparently not. The problem in that area is not the previous lack of available technology, it is institutional inertia. You don't need a blockchain to speed up settlements, because the technology to do it did exist before. What you need is buy-in from a bunch of old and conservatively run institution…

> What you need is buy-in from a bunch of old and conservatively run institutions that do not particularly like change.

They are currently paying someone to shuttle certificates/titles/deeds/bonds as a part of settlements. This involves expense and risk and probably gates outstanding trade activity and maybe even the exchange's duty cycle to some extent. There's opportunity to those institutions to save some expense here (taking on [not insignificant] new kinds of risk).

Re: Blockchain study finds zero success rate and vendors don't call back

#49

Post by maxxxxx »

manmanic wrote: post #8

I'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…

Sounds a little like the NoSQL trend where everybody jumped on it only to find out that NoSQL is only applicable for a few use cases.

Re: Blockchain study finds zero success rate and vendors don't call back

#50

Post by Alex3917 »

Jakawao wrote: post #41
Alex3917 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is fairly niche, perhaps 1% of all interorganizational database applications, but there are certainly cases where it is the right solution. So I personally think DLT is going to be one of those multi-quadrillion dollar technologies that come around every few hundred years. The real benefit of DLT is that it enables new types of human relationships. So thinking about it in terms of what percentage of your exist…

I can’t tell if you are being sarcastic or not, so I assume this is a serious comment. Can you share some examples of use cases where DLT is going to be transformative?

I mean a good example of the need for DLT is the fact that no one in the country can buy romaine lettuce right now. Does it really make any sense whatsoever that no one in the country can eat lettuce for the next couple months just because one farm got contaminated with E. coli?
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