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Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

reuters.com

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Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#441

Post by lucozade »

speedplane wrote: post #438

I've never understood why large companies want to get into blockchain. At best, a distributed ledger (blockchain or not), is able to provide a trustworthy database that anyone can engage with. Large banks also provide a trustworthy database, but which only they can edit. With blockchain, the trust is built upon protocols and technology. With banks, the trust is built upon reputation and insurance. They seem in direct…

There’s probably not a lot of interest for retail use for the reasons you state. Outside of wealth management that is more about the cryptocurrencies than the tech.

But there is still interest in peer to peer usage. When each bank keeps their own version(s) of the truth, the cost of reconciling, resolving disputes etc is huge.

The most interesting features, in this scenario, are the mutable->immutable and time ordering aspects. The literal blockchain, in other words. The consensus and transparency aspects aren’t particularly interesting though.

And the key (excuse the pun) to these useful aspects is the cryptography used in interesting ways. Blockchains didn’t invent any of this stuff but they did open people’s eyes to the possibilities.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#442

Post by speedplane »

lucozade wrote: post #441
speedplane wrote: post #438

I've never understood why large companies want to get into blockchain. At best, a distributed ledger (blockchain or not), is able to provide a trustworthy database that anyone can engage with. Large banks also provide a trustworthy database, but which only they can edit. With blockchain, the trust is built upon protocols and technology. With banks, the trust is built upon reputation and insurance. They seem in direct…

There’s probably not a lot of interest for retail use for the reasons you state. Outside of wealth management that is more about the cryptocurrencies than the tech. But there is still interest in peer to peer usage. When each bank keeps their own version(s) of the truth, the cost of reconciling, resolving disputes etc is huge. The most interesting features, in this scenario, are the mutable->immutable and time orderi…

> When each bank keeps their own version(s) of the truth, the cost of reconciling, resolving disputes etc is huge

I'm not a banker, but I'm not sure I entirely believe this. There is undoubtedly a cost of reconciliation, but is it "huge"? Seems low on the totem poll.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#443

Post by evnn »

kosievdmerwe wrote: post #362
atomicUpdate wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Blockchain is perfect for a digital currency It's not perfect for that either. There have already been cases where tokens were stolen and blockchains were forked to recover them. The very last thing I want for my money is for errors and/or malicious acts to be permanent and uncorrectable.

Yup being able to undo transactions is a feature not a bug of the modern financial system. EDIT: it also protects you in cases where someone holds a gun to your head and forces you to make a transaction.

> it also protects you in cases where someone holds a gun to your head and forces you to make a transaction.

No. The only case when someone ever threatened to hold gun to my head and demanded money was taxation. With cryptocurrency it's possible to avoid that, because they don't know how much money you have. And even when they do know, it's much harder for them to take it, they need to know password.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#444

Post by dozzie »

sadgit wrote: post #387
dozzie wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> PoW is just one of available consensus algorithms. No, because blockchain is not a consensus protocol .

Blockchain does imply a consensus protocol, though. Thats what the block is for.

No, very much not. There is no such thing as consensus in blockchain. Can you (you in particular) even define the term "consensus"? Can you explain how does your definition relate to what is commonly used in computer science and how it works with the impossibility proofs?

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#445

Post by lucozade »

speedplane wrote: post #442
lucozade wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s probably not a lot of interest for retail use for the reasons you state. Outside of wealth management that is more about the cryptocurrencies than the tech. But there is still interest in peer to peer usage. When each bank keeps their own version(s) of the truth, the cost of reconciling, resolving disputes etc is huge. The most interesting features, in this scenario, are the mutable->immutable and time orderi…

> When each bank keeps their own version(s) of the truth, the cost of reconciling, resolving disputes etc is huge I'm not a banker, but I'm not sure I entirely believe this. There is undoubtedly a cost of reconciliation, but is it "huge"? Seems low on the totem poll.

10s of millions per year per bank. More for the really big banks.

Thay have large totem poles.

Edit. That’s not including the op risk of screwing up. That has costs too and can easily reach millions

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#446

Post by pandalicious »

this_user wrote: post #22

What does "blockchain" even mean in this generalised context? When we are talking about crypto currencies, it is a distributed database with a consensus mechanism that is extremely costly to run. But this is not something you would need or want in most other situations, because there is always some degree of trust with your counterparties (and legal recourse if necessary). If we strip away the consensus mechanism, al…

It's funny how all these replies are almost an answer in an of themselves. You laid down a basic truth: the only thing technically distinctive about a blockchain is the trustless consensus algorithm. The rest of it is perfectly run of the mill tech. And yet the deluge of replies is completely focused on the run of the mill tech like merkle trees and distributed datastores. Some good ideas maybe but nothing to do with blockchains.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#447

Post by illlogic2 »

evnn wrote: post #443
kosievdmerwe wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup being able to undo transactions is a feature not a bug of the modern financial system. EDIT: it also protects you in cases where someone holds a gun to your head and forces you to make a transaction.

> it also protects you in cases where someone holds a gun to your head and forces you to make a transaction. No. The only case when someone ever threatened to hold gun to my head and demanded money was taxation. With cryptocurrency it's possible to avoid that, because they don't know how much money you have. And even when they do know, it's much harder for them to take it, they need to know password.

But in reality no one has ever held a gun to your head because of taxes.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#448

Post by SkyMarshal »

QML wrote: post #287
SkyMarshal wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there other means of distributed trustless consensus as secure as PoW? Secure being the operative word here. Lots of attempts, but none yet convincingly as or more secure.

Nakamoto consensus isn't the only protocol that exists; there's also things like Raft and Paxos with different tradeoffs.

Of course, but those aren't trustless per my question. They're designed for single administrative environments like corporate data centers where a trusted entity controls the environment.

The other two possible environments being multi-administrative (permissioned DLT deployed among a consortium of banks or entities sharing administrative privileges) or no-administrative (public permissionless blockchains like Bitcoin/Ethereum). The hard problem is developing consensus algos for the latter that scale while maintaining security of the shared ledger.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#449

Post by SkyMarshal »

tim333 wrote: post #407
drak0n1c wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hedera Hashgraph recently revealed that it supports more than a million transactions per second based on current usage by developers, that's enough to support decentralized servers and open source MMO environments. It uses gossip protocol and a form of voting protocol. 1) Non-technical friendly overview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzWiiOLv96I 2) https://www.hederahashgraph.com

I'm invested a bit in Credits which claims it'll do a million transactions per sec but it's kind of bs - they can do nearly half a million in very limited conditions but in the real world the numbers will probably be far less and I'm a bit skeptical of such claims. I'm not sure that fast is necessary though - credit cards do a few thousand transactions a sec globally so if you can handle that you could potentially at…

Yeah, Hashgraph appears to do high tps at relatively small number of nodes, aka will probably work in permissioned/consortium style environment with limited nodes, but whether it can scale in a public environment with unlimited nodes is an open question.

Re: Wall Street rethinks blockchain projects as euphoria meets reality

#450

Post by Mithorium »

donmatito wrote: post #430
CPLX wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK great. Now how do you get "the blockchain" to know which paper rolls went into which shipping container.

how about scanning a barcode or a RFID reader ? This information is already read and stored in ERP. Is it such a technological step to imagine a RFID reader or an ERP module that would write the information in a blockchain? I don't see the objection here. The blockchain would be a decentralized papertrail accessible to all actors of the supply chain, down to the end consumer ideally, instead of the current nightmare…

lazy actor: I print out the barcodes, and stick them on the paper rolls at random

bad actor: I manufacture the cheaper rolls, and stick labels for the expensive ones on, and scan them

How will "the blockchain" prevent either scenario

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