Hopefully this thread will be different than all the others. Someone is likely to appear here with a counterargument, which I'm looking forward to reading.
However, in addition to any counterarguments, please describe why standard tech and/or a 3rd_party is insufficient for your proposed use-cases. This is HackerNews after all, and we desire the deeply technical discussion and context, not propaganda.
“What’s the point of http when you can write a custom protocol”.
It’s not about the single solutions themselves, it’s about the ecosystem of solutions that you can integrate relatively painlessly. Same reason why standards are important.
I know this isn't an answer that you will like....but blockchain allows me to invest in high risk investments that would typically only be allowed for accredited investors. Having the shares/coins in a blockchain provides for transparency and authenticity and makes legit companies act in a way that is generally favorable for the small time investor
Can you explain how having shares/coins in the blockchain increases transparency/authenticity? Easily audit-able records would exist just the same if you bought your shares via wire transfer.
So imagine an ICO company that has a premine. You know the address of all their funds that they raised, and you know all the funds that are held through their premine. You can easily track the money to make sure nothing fishy is going on. This isn't that big of a deal for a tiny company, but imagine this for a huge corporation or government body.
All of them CAN produce auditable records for the consumer, but they don't, blockchains force the issue.
but isn't that just taking advantage of a (temporary) loop hole? The real problem there imho is that for some reason the government has decided that oh we need to step in and protect the unwise. Strangely this is by the same people that say government shouldn't be involved in the financial markets. There is no guarantee that having an ICO makes the investment any more bullet proof.
Entire industries can be built on regulatory loopholes, Uber and Lyft come to mind.
Cryptocurrencies are forcing govts to reexamine regulations that I argue are generally favorable to massive institutions/ high net worth individuals and unfavorable to the small timers
How would you expect someone in a third-world country to keep money away from a hyperinflating currency, without access to international banking? And no, we-will-suspend-your-account-if-you-look-at-us-funny PayPal is not an option. Cash in foreign currencies is extremely risky.
jewelry is a good option, as long as you can tell real jewelry from fake: valuable, somewhat liquid, holds value reasonably well, easy to hide, portable
The people who are so poor that they don't have reliable access to banking services very often are lacking reliable access to internet connected computing devices and sometimes even electricity. Additionally, trading cryptocurrency for spendable money is time consuming and expensive. The idea that cryptocurrency is a viable option for the participants of third-world economies is absurd. I'm not saying that nobody in the third-world uses cryptotokens but its very uncommon.
As society advances, the lowest rung is brought up even though corruption persists. Many years ago, it wasn't likely for people in third world countries to have access to vaccination or clothing, but today we've eliminated smallpox and nobody wears animal skins except uncontacted tribes and people who choose to. Internet connectivity is very cheap in per capita terms and cell phone towers have gone up in places like Afghanistan and Somalia.
Furthermore, the poorest people generally aren't the ones looking to evade hyperinflation, because they lack savings in the first place. Venezuela had a middle class once upon a time, though.
The bottom line is that blockchain token technology is not a fit for the problem of 3rd world banking and hyperinflation, it is stunningly out of touch to suggest that crpyo-tokens are having any significant impact on the ground in these places.
You don't know anything about the bottom line. I made claims about the potential for use, not that it was actually used. You seem to be operating on the assumption that third world = mud huts and subsistence farming, which is very untrue.
I'm unsure what you mean by this. "The bottom line" is just a manner of expression.
> I made claims about the potential for use, not that it was actually used
And I stated why I believe this to be a dubious claim; crypto-tokens are totally impractical. Your allusion to advancements in medicine and internet connectivity is a red herring argument that hand waves away the reality of using crypo-tokens in the real world.
> You seem to be operating on the assumption that third world = mud huts and subsistence farming, which is very untrue.
Wow. I illustrated concerns surrounding limited accessibility to internet in the developing world and you disingenuously twisted it into an insult to the citizens of the developing world. You don't even have to venture into a 3rd world country to see the impracticality of crypo-tokens in the real world, they're barley usable even in the developed world, and at the first sign of trouble they are useless, e.g. see how far crypo-tokens take you on the ground in Puerto Rico. Jumbling around private keys, trying to coordinate meet-ups to trade crypto for money, managing all the technical issues surrounding wallet management, insane volatility, transaction fees, the concept of confirmations, client versioning, security best practices, staying abreast of blockchain politics surrounding forks and protocol changes that impact security, price, usability... it's a quagmire of impracticality.
> people who are so poor that they don't have reliable access to banking services very often are lacking reliable access to internet connected computing devices
That's absolutely true when you get to the bottom ~3-4 billion people in the world. However it also used to be true about the ~2 billion people above them as well. Mobile banking - smart phones - have legitimately reshaped that for people in nations that have for example GDP per capita levels of around $3,000 to $8,000. It wasn't very long ago that the context for those people wasn't too dissimilar to that of what third world people are still dealing with today. Go back before ~2009 in small to mid size towns in Romania, Vietnam or Nigeria; today these people widely have access to easy, relatively secure banking via their phones. In the near future their mobile banking systems will provide easy access to something like Bitcoin as well, and obviously some of them already are.
His comment doesn't mention poor people "someone in a third-world country to keep money away from a hyperinflating currency". Not that many people living in third world countries are considered poor anymore. It is not a middle-class (European style) but they certainly are able to save some money. Banks are not interested in that low-middle-class which make up most of the population in cities like Mexico City, Sao Paolo, Kolkata or Beijing, so the only store of value they have access to are state-sponsored/controlled pension funds (which they may never get back) or real estate in areas where property rights are not that well defined. So crypto is a very real answer to these people that are connected to the internet 24/7 through their smartphones.
Your comment mostly applies to rural areas in 3rd countries.
It's been a while, but https://youtu.be/WnEYakUxsHU
has some interesting thoughts on it. Essentially trust based companies are the logical product of blockchain, but they will require an essential shift in how we approach business.
It's hard to write a good counterargument to this. The article goes in so many directions that it could never cover all his points.
Any counterargument I can construct boils down to a difference of opinion & values. The author trusts his bank and his government to (a) handle his money in the way that he thinks is responsible and (b) handle disputes in a way that benefits him. On the other hand, I trust myself to handle my money responsibly, and I view my government as a great uncertainty because I don't understand the limits of their power (in the least nefarious, but relevant point, who can predict by how much my government will increase the monetary supply and deflate my purchasing power over the next decades? More nefarious, if I dissent, government can trivially lock most of my digital assets that aren't cryptocurrencies - e.g. bank account or investment funds).
Sure, but there are plenty of dissenters that manage to escape being in the physical custody of their government. One might reasonably decide to leave the country before dissenting, in some scenarios.
You can bet that Edward Snowden had all his US assets seized, for example. But if he had any cryptocurrency, he may have been able to take those with him.
Say I'm someone like Ed Snowden (again). I own a house, a car, the clothes on my back, and Bitcoin. I up and leave one day to share government secrets with the press and hide in a different country.
Did the car aid in the crime? Probably, to some degree - it let me physically make my way to the airport, and on to journalists to whom I shared secrets. Did the house aid the crime? Did the clothes on my back aid the crime? Both of those allowed me to live a safe and comfortable life. I wouldn't have made it past airport security without my clothes, after all.
Did the Bitcoin aid the crime? Only in the same sense that a treadmill and a good diet aids a bank robber by making it easier for him to leave the scene in a hurry.
So I think the claim that having bitcoin in your possession when committing a crime necessarily enables that crime (to a greater deal than any other everyday thing) is a bit nebulous. It didn't facilitate the crime, it just lessened the punishment. Possession of $USD cash provides a similar thing in the form of being used to pay bail.
The ability of the government to freeze your bank account is based (to some degree) on a consensus (or at least tolerance) of the people in the country that the government should have these powers.
Same is true for crypte-currencies. If some hacker manages to steal a big amount of money then (almost) everybody agrees to make a hardfork and the hacker looses his money. It is more decentralized and the hacker could keep some part of the money if there is a side chain.
Hacker scenario already happend. But there is no need for a crime to happen to cause a tokens redistribution. If 80% of all token holders (miners for bitcoin?) are poor what stops them from redistributing the tokens of the rich token holders?
Internet connected the world, and changed how we interact fundamentally. Blockchain uses the internet to create politically resistant money as a primary use case. Just not seeing how blockchain fits into any ongoing revolution, in part because it only can exist because of government/corporate controlled pipes on which it relies.
That doesn't seem to me like a fundamental law. Certainly with "internal blockchains" or other cases where at least a majority of the operators are trusted, mining and tokens are completely unnecessary.
A blockchain is a decentralized trustless ledger. If the operators are trusted, you can just use a database. It’s much more efficient. It’s pretty clear from the comment that you don’t understand Bitcoin or why, when people say “we like blockchain but not bitcoin”, that they’re talking nonsense.
> If the operators are trusted, you can just use a database. It’s much more efficient.
This is true! But databases don't have that magic "blockchain" tech.
David Gerard's book Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain touches on the ridiculousness of this idea, actually. And, yes, it's ridiculousness, but it's what some people are trying to sell.
So should I take it that you're one of the people who thinks blockchains have little applications outside of currency?
No, I think blockchains provide many useful functions. However, providing a token with value is a necessary feature. I’m very excited about things like Rootstock which add smart contract functionality to the bitcoin blockchain.
As far as I can tell, the purpose of tokens is to provide an incentive for running the ledger client and processing transactions: mining for uptake and transaction fees to maintain scale long-term. You need as many people to run the client as possible.
If you can find some other reason for processing transactions and can guarantee that the population is big enough then the coin becomes unnecessary.
Distributed ledgers (e.g. blockchain) are based on security by game theory. It's financially rewarding to agree with each other, and financially very costly to disagree or attack it. You can't have game theory in the protocol without intrinsic rewards, as far as I know.
I assume you mean extrinsic reward. Yeah, it's unrealistic to expect people to burn CPU cycles processing the ledger client just for the fun of seeing the dials on their power meter spin faster.
An extrinsic reward doesn't have to be financial though, it's anything that you want to get out of an activity that isn't part of the activity itself.
If the blockchain ledger was a part of a greater whole and the client software of which it forms a part was somehow intrinsically fun, useful or needed, the token itself wouldn't be necessary.
Similarly, during the late 1990s, people tried to make an internet version of EVERYTHING, even when it made zero sense. That’s where we are with blockchain today.
The internet was undeniable back then, too, which is a huge difference. Millions of people used it for a ton of different purposes, so even though a bunch of businesses were pricing below cost the customer demand was clear. In contrast, nobody has come up for a legal use for bitcoin which many people need and is better than the alternatives. Some of the other blockchain ideas are more useful but again struggle to beat traditional PKI.
The hype reminds me more of Second Life. People put everything on Second Life, but no-one could ever say quite what it was for. It never "crashed" as such, it just gradually faded away.
Talking of PKI, Blockchains are actually a great use case to render PKI more secure [1]. It can help secure CAs' and Keybase is using it as well as a second factor [2].
All that stuff still need some more development obviously. We're still in the early days.
"Blockchain tech" is not the Internet, though. It's like a different kind of Internet, one that is slower, more expensive and has less capacity, which was invented after the real thing has already been created. And then people would ask why you would need this if the real Internet can already do almost all of what this worse version does.
I'm having a hard time seeing the pros. What can a "blockchain" do that we cannot do with existing technology? The only application so far is crypto currencies where it solves a very specific problem.
Moreover, what even is a "blockchain"? The most basic definition would be an inversely linked list with an added hash in each node. That's not much of an innovation. On the other end of the spectrum we have something like Bitcoin with a distributed network of "miners" who compete against each other by wasting energy, because the participants do not trust one another. This is not something most people would want or need. In most use cases we probably have trusted agents, but then we don't even need a mechanism like PoW/PoS to facilitate trust. This means we're really just left with a distributed database.
This reminds me of the reporter that asks Jeff Bezos in a sarcastic tone “So your telling me Amazon will be bigger than Sears??” https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6cTjhzSgdwE
Has anyone thought about this in terms of a hype cycle [1]? Basically, the theory says that any new technology will be hyped at first and then falls into a state of disillusionment, where all the hopes of the first phase are shattered. Finally, when integration barriers etc are resolved the technology picks up.
Recently I saw a question asking if there were any social impact projects going on that were using blockchain technologies.
I have no idea how blockchain technologies can apply to social impact projects; all I could come up with was verifying that my donated can of soup made it into the hands of Homeless Joe via a verifiable route, but I don't know how much I'd need that. I trust that the soup kitchen [or whatever] directly feeds people, and if I didn't I'd be volunteering up front as well or not even bother at all.
Perhaps again I just haven't applied my imagination to it.
A solidity developer I spoke to a couple of times told me much the same as this article. He believed in the blockchain as a concept; but its current overall benefit to human society is meagre (and some might argue destructive). This represents a first awkward phase for everyone.
We'll definitely see blockchain become dominant in a some or multiple fields of business. When? Perhaps not for 20 years. Internet as we know it took decades for it to fully develop and take off. We could get a crash before this succes happens, the word "blockchain" and "cryptocurrency" might become toxic for a while. Thinking of the 2000 IT bubble, so much money poured into any crazy business proposal with "web" in it; and suddenly the music stopped. Billions evaporated.
All the while I'll just be grabbing popcorn and hoping to sell my coins on time ;-)
agree. I seen the same comparison between the internet and AI/Data science/ML. a big bubble, everyone is 'doing it' but most are doing it wrong, and then a big collapse. When the smoke clears, the ones that 'got it right' are the big future titans, and the whole sector grows again.
As it stands, block-chains do not scale. So it's hard to say if lack of adoption is due to lack of actual use cases, or inability to implement use-cases given state of the network. I think prediction markets may be one of the first real use-cases.
This reminds me of the naysayers from the early internet, and I think we can look at each stage of the internet's growth with these same glasses.
1) email: it will never replace the post-office. You can only send text. Oh, ok, they've added images now, well, its' too slow for most people to download them, and now I've got all this spam. We use it in our company, but it isn't really for consumers. Oh, then hotmail...
2) You're not going to buy things online. The shipping costs will be too high. The logistics are all wrong. Will you trust an online shop with your credit card?? No way! This e-commerce thing is dead in the water. Sure, you point to the 'growth', but it's equal to "the proportion of US GDP comprised by toothpick sales"
3) Blogs?? Seriously. We're a news agency. We pay professional journalists to research and write compelling stories. Can you trust some random person in their basement writing a blog? Sorry, no contest. Blogs can't compete with major media companies.
4) Music downloads? Why would you spend 20 minutes downloading a song ILLEGALLY?? Where are you going to get it from. We'll stop all of this. CDs are the way forward. Oh, this internet thing has just destroyed our business model, iTunes to the rescue. But now people want to stream music. No they don't internet speed isn't fast enough to stream, and people want to own music, this music streaming thing isn't going anywhere!
5) Video? You've got to be kidding. Oh, that youtube thing is fine for weirdo's who want to make video's for their friends, but people will keep going to movies and paying for cable. The quality isn't good enough, and they don't have the great content. This internet thing isn't going anyway.
6) Rent someone's apartment online? Are you nuts! I'm not going to let some crazy person stay in my place, and I'm not going to stay in somebody else's. These internet people are crazy. Our hotel business is just fine. In fact, I think we should increase prices and start charging people hidden fees like "resort charges"...
7) Get in a stranger's car? A stranger that I found online!!??? Look, when I was a kid, my parents had two rules. Don't talk to strangers, and never get in a strangers car. Now you're telling me to go online, find a stranger and get in their car! This is madness. Just get in a cab! They'll take you where you want to go and you can trust them!
Please add your own "this is going nowhere" stories, I'm keen to see what else is out there, there are TONS.
The blockchain may use the internet as an underlying protocol, but it is as disruptive to the finance industry as Napster was to music, AirBnB to hotels, Uber/Lyft (please come to Australia Lyft) was to cabs, Amazon to retail, etc. etc.
The difference being, that blockchain is an open technology that is enabling this disruption, rather than a single company.
This whole crypto thing is a bubble. You will see it fall and never recover. No, not like the other 7000 times it crashed by more than 40%, no this time it will be impossible to recover, because people can't inherently value something that doesn't exist. Here use this paper I got from a place I pay to keep my money for me instead.
Just try to get your money out of crypto!
You will see, one day one of the big guys is going to sell all his coins and cause a market crash from which it won't recover. Then you are going to be glad to have this gold-backed paper (Oh wait, don't try and test that last part).
Some big banks are gearing up to use a blockchain to track interbank settlements.[1] But this isn't a coin, nor is there mining. It's simply a shared ledger that can't be altered without cooperation between a majority of the parties. All alterations are clearly visible to all parties, which is good for auditing. Only big banks who have signed up for this have active nodes, and they are not anonymous.
This is an alternative to setting up a neutral party for the purpose, such as the Bank for International Settlements or Depository Trust Corporation. Those organizations are expensive to run. It's a real shared ledger, but it's no more than that.
It's interesting too that it will be much easier for them to agree on architectural changes when necessary to compensate for scaling or other issues.
This is a major issue for something like Bitcoin, but a small speed bump for banks utilizing agreed upon blockchain tech.. It's at least interesting to consider the benefits of centralized(exclusive?) guidance coupled with distributed execution.
I don't understand how they go around the confidentiality. If you are a trader at big bank A, the last thing you want is traders at big bank B and C to know everything you have in your book.
This probably has to do with payments the banks are making to each other, not between banks and clients. If banks are paying each other, there's going to be a nonzero cost associated with the accounting for those transactions, and this system would remove that cost.
What I didn't understand from the article was the point about membership. If the contributing banks are the only ones using it, why is it giving information about what _I_ could do with one of these USCs - apparently nothing because I won't be able to join the chain
> If banks are paying each other, there's going to be a nonzero cost associated with the accounting for those transactions, and this system would remove that cost
Wouldn’t it just amplify it? Right now, central banks just set up swap facilities between each other. It’s akin to opening a bank account with one another. Crediting, debuting and undoing anything nefarious is cheap and easy.
You are confusing transaction clearing with actual account settlements.
Banks want to use Blockchain as a more reliable alternative to SWIFT it won’t be doing actual account settlements which in your case you mentioned corresponding banking.
That said many of the more progressive institutions stopped calling it Blockchain a while ago they all are talking about distributed ledgers, hyper ledger and the likes are being either used or piloted by many institutions.
The ones that do use Blockchain often mean today actual crypto currency or a settlemen token a good example of a “real world” implementation would be Royal Mint Gold which is a crypto token offered by the Royal Mint which is pegged to gold.
This captures what is Banks interest in blockchain in a nutshell
> Banks want to use Blockchain as a more reliable alternative to SWIFT it won’t be doing actual account settlements which in your case you mentioned corresponding banking.
> That said many of the more progressive institutions stopped calling it Blockchain a while ago they all are talking about distributed ledgers, hyper ledger and the likes are being either used or piloted by many institutions.
At least one commercial company I've heard of has a sophisticated permissioning model, so that the owner of the chain can publish it and have its causal history and/or integrity be validated by all participants, but with specific permission scopes so that subscribes to the blockchain can only see inside of transactions they have permissions for.
I disagree that something with those properties is a blockchain. It's simply a distributed append-only ledger.
The exact same functionality could be accomplished with a git repository they each pull/rebase/push between themselves... or with any of a number of append-only databases with WALs and synchronous replication, where each of them runs a replica.
Since only the trustworthy bodies can join the party, they can do the job more efficiently by not using any of the trendy blockchain which may technically prevent the fraud but otherwise inefficient.
And since there are only banks can join the network, I doubt it can technically prevent the fraud among banks because unlike public cryptocurrencies, it does not give incentives to the banks to spend a lot of computational power to the network. So any banks allowed to join can put enough computation power than other banks combined and succeed the attack.
A blockchain system will still work if a minority of the players are down or disconnected. When they come back, they resync to the majority view. That's a useful robustness feature.
I think you misunderstand how private blockchains work:
> "they can do the job more efficiently"
They ARE doing the job more efficiently by not using proof of work, and instead most likely going with a quorum approach based on public keys.
> it does not give incentives to the banks to spend a lot of computational power to the network
Right, because it doesn't use proof of work, it uses a quorum vote. The banks would still need to form a cartel in order to get a (super)majority of the vote.
For one, the use of the word blockchain itself is posing a problem. If I remember correctly there was a case made to use the word - distributed ledger instead to avoid confusion.
And I have never understood one part of it. How are contentious settlements are resolved? Today for any disputes people can approach BIS or DTC and once issue is resolved everything can be rolled back. Who acts as the "watcher" in this case? Surely, going by what majority says is not a solution.
While your comment is in good faith, I don't think the OP was trying to minimise the complexity of a distributed ledger. Instead they were trying to distinguish their mentioned use-case from the currency use-case.
I was just wondering why blockchain doesn't get used to manage government data on citizens. One immutable record of a person with all the metadata stored in sidechains.
Yeah, government is sure first to get on a hyper new tech. In the US alone you got like XYZ ways to count votes on elections in different counties, most of which are decades or more old.
People always overestimate the short term and underestimate the long term.
Go to any country perhaps with the exception of Estonia and you will see that digitalization was supposed to change governments for the better. Instead they mostly have created very sporadic successes but a lot of failed implementation sometimes even making it worse. Yet there is no doubt that in the long run things are changing for the better.
The problem isn't the technology but the problems around legality and implementation and who it disrupts.
There is however plenty of usages for blockchain just off the top of my head.
Digital Pokemon cards, 2nd hand ebooks market, 2nd hand digital assets market, digital art certification, tracking of how money for NGO's are being spent and of course as a gold standard for important deals done between large organization and of course as a truly international wiretransfer system.
All these things will happen with new generations growing up and finding natural uses for them.
So 10-15 more years? In the meantime we can use blockchain/bitcoin to scam money from grandmas, retired folks, and millenials. So they can hate us technologists even more.
Oh, and cause global warming and destroy the planet. That way humans will have to come up with a non-government backed currency.
I can read. I’m a millennial and I haven’t been scammed. Bitcoin is changing lives for the better and has allowed me and my family to join you in wealth but you seem to hate that.
In these slides, Richard gives several examples that match this model and includes several additional explanations.
For example:
• First window system: Stanford/SRI/Xerox PARC ~1975, MIT ~1976
• First commercial use: Symbolics (1979), LMI (1979), Xerox Star (~1980), Apple Lisa
(~1982), Apple Macintosh (1984)
• First use by a successful company: Microsoft (~1989)
• Technology acceptance: Microsoft (~1995)
Spreadsheets are another example that is given in the slides.
In fact, 25 years for acceptance are quite common in software. Sometimes, it also takes much longer.
The internet was based on a foundational protocol built to withstand nuclear attacks and is 50 years old.
Either you understand this perspective or you don't.
We are talking about blockchain not one of the ways it can be realized, bitcoin.
Furthermore, I gave a couple of examples of how the blockchain can be used no one is being scammed with that. In fact it allows for things that have never been possible before because you will not see nation-states work together in any meaningful way to solve these problems.
We've banned this account for repeatedly violating the HN guidelines. Would you please stop creating accounts to do that with? Ideological battle, flamewars, and personal attacks are not wanted here.
The problem isn't the technology but the problems around legality and implementation and who it disrupts.
The immediate problem is that an "automatic" contract circumvents the regular legal system and thus is going to be ... not-legal. The larger problem is that this is how things should be.
That the regular system isn't automatic but rather includes considerations of intentions and individuals involves is not a bug but a feature, an extremely important feature (the non-enforceability of unconscionable contracts is pretty important today [1]). Unbreakable contracts open the door for unlimited abuses (how does an automatic contract system prevent contracts for illegal activity? Given legality is going to continue to depend on intentions, etc).
The Etherium Fork illustrated all this and essentially discredited the approach.
Also, it can take a while for successful tech to be successful. But there's also the tech that people spend years trying to get going without success.
This is an excellent point. I've been looking into blockchain as used in supply chain integrity. Here is a company currently doing it: https://www.provenance.org/whitepaper I have been wondering about how this will circumvent the diminishing scope of regulations in the US food and textile industries, and how this will present much better provenance data for the principled consumer and how this might disrupt current interests of US corporations. This would be great for the consumer, but bad for the corporations' bottom line. I can see it somehow being legally derailed via what you just outlined since it could direct consumers to better options hurting the profits of corporations who paid hefty lobbying sums. I hope this won't be the case, because I like the use of blockchain to help with supply chain integrity. It is a path toward sustainability in an increasingly hostile-to-sustainability market.
Interesting. So you have an original piece of digital art and the owner of the art is verified on the blockchain? How would that work? Can't I just take a screenshot or something of the art and have a copy? What's the advantage of having one "true" piece of digital art and is it feasable?
Genuinely curious how this would work. It's a very intriguing idea.
I went to Ars Electronica in Linz years back (highly recommended) one of the big discussions that year was digital art and how it could be sold (and things like do you pay for a software upgrade)
The "problem" with digital art is that if you get a hold of the source code you could just reproduce it and "double spend" and thus it has diminishing value.
If you use the blockchain to verify you have the original you make it possible for the value to follow the owner.
Same thing with ebooks. You could be buying the version of a book that Eminem owned and it could increase in value.
Many people misunderstand what value can be. Sometimes it's the actual "thing" (ex. the chair) but often, very often, it's the idea of the thing.
"Verisart is the world's leading platform to certify and verify artworks and collectibles using the Bitcoin blockchain. Since its launch in 2015, Verisart has provided contemporary artists including Shepard Fairey with a free and easy way to generate permanent certificates of authenticity and reduce the scope for fraudulent activity. Verisart combines museum certification standards, distributed ledger technology and image recognition to its provenance and registry services. The company is headed by Robert Norton, formerly CEO & co-founder of Saatchi Online & Sedition Art and its Board Advisers include Peter Todd, Bitcoin core developer and Dr. Ahmed Elgammal, Professor of the Art & Artificial Intelligence Lab at Rutgers University."
Not certification of digital art, digital certification of art. Some people are excited about this. It is just a DRM thing, transfer of rights, records of provenance etc.
Makes sense if you think of art as an asset, which is kind of a philistine thing to do...
> Digital Pokemon cards, 2nd hand ebooks market, 2nd hand digital assets market
None of these are realistic examples. Do you think Nintendo won't want a piece of that digital trading market? Or Amazon, for ebooks?
Digital assets aren't going to be decentralized. Never. Corporations are going to maintain their walled garden platform, and make sure all transactions are conducted within that platform so they scrape off a few dollars here and there. You don't need all the complexity of a blockchain when a centralized architecture works just fine.
"Digital pokemon cards" is already a thing it of course wasn't meant literally https://www.cryptokitties.co/ some of those got sold for $100K
There are plenty of opensourced games out there and plenty of opensource projects and there will only be more in the future.
Every new generation growing up is a new generation who will be affected by other things than the previous generation.
Everyone also laughed when I in the 90'ies said you would one day be able to score girls from being good at playing computer games.
Either you understand this perspective or you don't. It's cool with me that you don't understand it, but it's already happening while you say it never will.
> Everyone also laughed when I in the 90'ies said you would one day be able to score girls from being good at playing computer games.
I legitimately can't tell if this is trolling or sarcastic.
Regardless, the fact that something else seemed ridiculous but ended up not being so has no bearing.
People can predict arbitrary things and will only remember the ones that turned out right; for every thing that seemed wrong but succeeded, there are a million things which seemed wrong and were wrong.
Just because there are examples of things succeeding in spite of predictions of failure doesn't mean predictions of failure are signs of success.
Why do you assume it's trolling? You forgot the sentence which came before here is the entire argument.
"Every new generation growing up is a new generation who will be affected by other things than the previous generation.
Everyone also laughed when I in the 90'ies said you would one day be able to score girls from being good at playing computer games."
The point is that looking at your own generation is not a good indicator of where things will go. Look at those younger generations which haven't yet been affected by what is right or wrong.
That was my argument. Girls will grow up knowing what it takes to be good at a computer game it won't just be something nerds do, but something they themselves do.
The point here is to understand what allows progress.
Sure something might or might not come to fruition but this one my predictions were based on understanding what it would take for it to be popular.
Cryptokitties is little more than a scam to bring kids into the world of Ethereum speculation. They make part of their money via their marketplace, which of course has zero to do with the blockchain. Most people aren't going to care who "owns" the digital asset, as you can't do much with the asset outside of the software that uses the digital asset. Which is going to be 100% owned by the digital creator. Nintendo isn't going to give up copyright of Pikachu so that some third party can create an app to interact with a blockchain Pikachu. Come on now. The visual and audio representation dictates where centralization will happen.
Not to mention that Cryptokitties is "backdoored" by CEO/CFO/COO functions. Which means the company has full control over the contract, even if the contract itself is "decentralized" (more like externalized, if anything). They can halt trading of the assets any time they desire.
> Everyone also laughed when I in the 90'ies said you would one day be able to score girls from being good at playing computer games.
I have no idea where you're going with this. Are you talking about e-Sports? This is the first I've heard of anyone "scoring girls" with computer games.
I think the larger point being made here is how does blockchain add substantial value for all parties in digital trading cards? What motivates the creator of the cards to do so when they give up so much control?
> None of these are realistic examples. Do you think Nintendo won't want a piece of that digital trading market? Or Amazon, for ebooks?
This sounds a lot like arguing in 1995 that people wouldn't buy stuff online because entrenched retail stores are where everyone does their shopping. Its so simple to buy stuff in a store why add the complexity of online shopping?
There are undoubtedly benefits for consumers when you have a decentralized marketplace/ architecture. As the technology matures it should become easier to build these kinds of architectures
> undoubtedly benefits for consumers when you have a decentralized marketplace
I'm not disputing that. What I'm disputing is the idea that corporations are willing to give up that much control over their copyright so that consumers get some false impression that they "own" a Pikachu.
Where are you going to see that Pikachu? Through officially-licensed Nintendo software. Not through third party apps and websites. They will get hit with the DMCA hammer.
There is no benefit of the blockchain, when all representation of that data is centralized. Nintendo won't do it because, who cares. Other than a buzzword, the blockchain is irrelevant. That's like caring about whether a website is running on Ruby or Node, or some other stack. It doesn't matter. It's an implementation detail.
You are reading this too literally. Pokemon was just an example there will be others based on the blockchain and yes it does have the same benefits that physical cards have. It's unique and doesn't need a centralized place to work.
Implementation details are not what's relevant here.
>Digital Pokemon cards, 2nd hand ebooks market, 2nd hand digital assets market
Are you kidding? So the big use of the blockchain is to take things that have zero marginal cost of production, and enforce a completely artificial cost of production, to make non-scarce goods scarce?
I wouldn't describe turning Infinity into One as having "quite a lot of value". I'd describe that as pointing a machine gun at value and spraying it with bullets.
You can describe it any way you want. It doesn't change the fact that "value" is not something which is easily defined which again the art scene is a good example but also stamps, coins, stickers, physical Pokemon cards and so on.
You build an economy of all sorts of things including pokemon cards. The economy is already there. Not sure what you are trying to get at other than you don't believe in the blockchain which is fine, you don't have to.
Just don't claim that you are somehow making an arugment against it cause you aren't for reasons already outlined.
There is nothing new about the types of businesses which can be created on top of the blockchain other than that they can be digital. But as a value system they are as solid as physical items.
> and enforce a completely artificial cost of production, to make non-scarce goods scarce?
Yes, that is the entire point of this blockchain stuff, isn't it? You get ownership of large natural numbers (coins) that would be trivial to copy otherwise.
The folks at https://sweetbridge.com/ make a case for supply chain being a natural fit. Some of the low hanging fruit here is international trade between less developed countries, where settlement has to be done in dollars, and independent truckers.
The thesis is that huge amounts of capital is tied up in invoice settlement all along the supply chain. (And supply chain refers to every thing from the dirt -- grown or mined -- all the way to the end consumer.) Settling invoices on the blockchain would eliminate a huge amount of friction and open the possibility of immediate low interest (or even no interest) loans on a substantial amount of outstanding invoices.
I've been asking this exact question of blockchain enthusiasts and evangelists for over a year now, and have never received a clear response.
I understand the difference between a distributed ledger and a database, but in all use cases I've heard mentioned as ripe for blockchain derived innovation, not once has a blockchain really been necessary or even an improvement over a traditional database based solution.
To give you an idea of how buzzwordy this all is, my friend works in venture capital and was trying to explain to me how blockchain was going to change the world after he got back from a blockchain conference, saying that it would "revolutionize VR/AR, AI, etc...", technologies that have absolutely nothing to do with one another. I just laughed.
Nothing to do with each other, in the way that internet protocols would have nothing to do with how we purchase goods. Crypto creates a validated economy in a VR/AR world. Digital goods have a certain tangibility with crypto inside of a VR/AR environment, that creates true ownership.
I suspect it boils down to the international trade part. Which party would have control over the centralized database? Each participating nationality might prefer to not have that database under the control of any of the other nations. In any case, the centralization represents a single point of failure with potentially a fairly large risk.
I don't necessarily believe this myself, but here goes:
A database under control of any one entity is prone to undue influence by hacking or bribing or other leverage. An append-only database that is controlled by consensus of all club members is safe from malfeasance on the part of a minority. There is value in that. Of course this has nothing to do with mining coins and stuff.
Now you can argue the society already solved these problems with rigorous administrative processes around existing databases. I would reply that blockchain-based process may end up being cheaper and/or faster to settle and reconcile. In the same way the computing previously done by humans was turned over to machines. It may have looked like the problem is under control and there is nothing to solve here, but it turned out there was a lot to be gained from dramatically increased computational power.
One issue with cryptocoins is that the security demands are far higher because there is little recourse when hacks happen. Of course, you could put them in an exchange, but this is basically just reinventing banks.
It has at least one psychological use. For many it is a vehicle of self-deception, wherein they persuade themselves they are in the purportedly honourable class of investors, connoting productive use of wealth. They must understand somewhere underneath the fakery that they are speculators/gamblers.
I used to work for these guys https://guardtime.com . They do keyless digital signatures/timestamps based on block chain way before bitcoin and are quite useful.
Well they issue timestamps/signatures at a rate up to 2^64/second without PKI to provide tamper evident guarantees for data integrity. Their ledger is public and based on universally accepted proofs/primitives. Is it distributed, I suppose no, is it a good use for blockchain I’d say yes.
Personally I believe in blockchain, but not current blockchain.
Like anything it will take multiple steps and failing several times before it works.
The perfect example is the internet, it was so wrong at the start, so ugly, and so naive. But it was free and open. Everybody said "internet is the future", and that created the dotcom bubble when everybody agreed and wanted to profit from it.
I had friends at the time that got rich in the process, and I have friends today that have gotten rich with bitcoins(they have already sold all of them).
At the end of course Internet was the future, but not "that Internet", it has evolved a lot and will continue evolving.
With blockchain the same is happening: we have a tremendous bubble right now that will be painful when it pops. But it will continue evolving into something extremely useful in my opinion.
It will be no bitcoin, it will something else be easier to mine, with more transactions, and so on...it will evolve over time learning from its errors, like anything in the History of mankind.
I think you haven't been following the scene very closely.
There's already multiple solutions to these problems. Take a look at RaiBlocks (raiblocks.net) for example, which has instantaneous zero-fee transactions with very high throughput (hardware limited) without losing decentralization or other security properties (not proven atm). RaiBlocks uses delegated proof-of-stake with a block-lattice architecture.
Another example would be Cardano, which has the first provably secure proof-of-stake protocol with same security guarantees as Bitcoin, and is also secure in a scalable setting with blockchain sharding (as is planned in Ethereum too). Proof-of-stake doesn't require energy to mine blocks and can be scalable but is very hard to secure.
There's multiple other solutions as well, such as IOTA, Byteball, Steem, BitShares and others which might be more centralized and less secure to achieve scalability. Then there is Bitcoin Lightning Network almost ready, and also MimbleWimble coming out soon (http://grin-tech.org/). Lots of things are certainly happening faster than you can anticipate.
Additionally, there's projects like Enigma and Aion, which add scalability, privacy and interoperability on top of existing blockchains. This territory starts to get a bit complex for me.
That is actually fascinating. You could build a ledger on top of github, transactions are push requests,there’d be a centralized party approving valid push requests and merging forks, but following a standardized formula that anyone can check and audit. Token ingress and egress are potentially hard to do, but it would be a fun idea to develop.
I know it’s not very good explanation, the site was put up quickly before we pitched to a large government contract and it was aimed at them and not a casual reader.
New site coming soon with examples and a demo.
It’s a generic asset management platform - so one current use case is tracking the movement of goods through a supply chain, and also recording transactional history in an industry that is currently full of corruption and tax avoiders. Having an immutable transaction record that’s publicly visible is the correct usage of blockchain and it solves this problem very well. We are talking about amounts that are so large, this system will likely be regulated by the government.
Another current use case is tracking physical (and very valuable) assets - again the use case is an immutable pubic record.
The immutability is key - sure you could Store this data in a database, but the problems we are solving are the fact that when you have a single entity running a database then at a certain level of wealth you’re practically guaranteed corruption or unethical behaviour. This is the reason we use blockchain - blockchain has a good use case for avoiding the corruption that massive centralised systems are often plagued with
Sure, if you don’t consider a decentralized and trustless currency a use. If you don’t consider a store of value a use. If you don’t consider a public ledger of transactions a use. If you don’t consider programmable money a use. If you don’t consider permissionless payments a use. If you don’t consider a financial system wich never close a use. If you don’t consider instant payments a use. Then sure, no use has been found.
"Blockchain" the data structure probably will have some persistent uses. "Proof of waste" on the other hand is like leaded petrol or cloroflurocarbons: it certainly works, but the environmental downsides are going to have to result in it being banned.
Don't forget that lasers were a solution in search of a problem for ages. Blockchain's potential uses are great, but they have to overcome the deficit of (maybe) lack of privacy and (usually) big and busy ledgers - traffic you'd probably rather not have going constantly, but if you outsource it to a local specialist you're defeating the purpose.What blockchain needs is an application where privacy doesn't matter but depth and resolution do. I wonder if it secretly longs to be united with mapping applications.
Distributed Ledgers have real application, blockchains are one way of solving them. DLT 2.0 like hash graphs and DAGs are interesting, but Blockchain is the whats in "production" thus far.
Maersk is using blockchain to validate container ownership claims. Revolutionary tech in a world where crime meant the confirmation papers cost more than the container to ship.
Several countries outside the west are moving to do registration of land ownership on blockchain tech because their bureaucratic system is corrupt.
Banks have moved to cryptocurrencies for transfers. Sure it's not the unregulated ones, but it's still block chain.
In government in Scandinavia we're doing various proofs of concepts on blockchain. Because it cuts out the need for a legal "middle man" it has huge potential even in less corrupt parts of the world. Everything from simple paperwork to lock/key systems in elder apartments (don't know the English word sorry) is being tested.
Blockchain is certainly full of scams, but it actually offers tremendous value in enterprise, especially when you do any form of bureaucracy. The thing is though, in this world 10 years is nothing. Just look at RPA, it's a tech from before the internet and it's only now beginning to be applied in real world situations that isn't cheating in a video game.
Why not? Blockchain is a document timestamping system, which means its whole
purpose is to tell which of the two connected documents was issued earlier. As
such, it doesn't care if the document was subtracting a number from one
account and adding the same number to another account or if it was some text
telling who gets the ownership of a described plot.
In fact, this particular use is one of the few that blockchain is actually
good for (because it was designed as document timestamping), unlike stuff like
voting or databases.
This is a particular use for a public database. The public database must be writable (only) by the corrupt authorities. What exactly does a blockchain do to make the authorities non-corrupt here?
The data is stored on a decentralized database (many nodes). I buy my house and am send the rights to that land on a blockchain. Only someone with the private keys to my address/account/whatever could send that house to someone else. The scale of the network should make it impossible for the database to be corrupted.
> Only someone with the private keys to my address/account/whatever could send that house to someone else.
And that is exactly the opposite of what a land title database is. The authorities must be able to transfer your house to your heirs if you die. The authorities must be able to take away your deed in certain cases. The authorities must be able to correct entries in the database. They must be able to override things.
Land titles are worthless if they are not enforced by courts, and courts will not enforce land titles in a database that has illegal entries.
> And that is exactly the opposite of what a land title database is.
It's exactly what it is where I live. When you purchase property both parties log in with their state issued digital id to sign the transfer of ownership.
This isn't done by blockchain in Denmark, which means the nationstate owns and operates the system with little openness. NOT a problem in one of the least corrupt countries in the World, but it might as well have been done through blockchain and in 20 years I imagine that it will.
No. Yes, you can do it online, great. And yes, no other private person can fraudulently do it in your name, also great. But it does not follow that it's impossible to do it without your key; it is possible, and it must be possible, for the authorities.
Should the database be public for reading? Yes, absolutely. But you don't need a blockchain for that.
> The public database must be writable (only) by the corrupt authorities. What exactly does a blockchain do to make the authorities non-corrupt here?
Wrong. In selling land to somebody else, authorities -- corrupt or not -- have
nothing to say. The only thing authorities are needed for is to put an
official stamp on the sale document.
This official stamp is generally a good thing; land is too valuable, so such
transactions need some friction, like public notary's involvement, so one
cannot sell a property by merely clicking "accept" under EULA. Corrupt
authorities, as I understand, can delay the process of stamping the sale for
indefinite time, so what blockchain is supposed to do here is to do away with
authorities altogether.
> Several countries outside the west are moving to do registration of land ownership on blockchain tech because their bureaucratic system is corrupt.
Speaking as a citizen of such country[1]. The problem is not in ledger/registry. The problem is that you can get a fake shareholders notice, a court order from corrupt judge, etc. and change the ownership in the registry. I don't see how blockchain solves anything that a simple publication of all changes wouldn't.
Unsuitable parallels are the bread and butter of hypers and shills.
Just imagine it's 1893 and no one can see how big cars are going to be. Well this gizmo XYZ is just like cars were then! You'll wanna get in on this now! And so this gets internalized and repeated to friends and family regardless of objective merit. Because it sounds "truthy".
The parallels between blockchain and the Internet are similarly contrived. They are different phenomenon and the line "X is like Y thus what happened to X will happen to Y" doesn't have objective merit in this case near as I can tell. (Apologies to the half a dozen or more posters who have probably posted something to this effect on the thread).
The _potential_ uses for blockchain are much more limited than potential uses for the Internet for instance. (And there are a number of other differences).
That being said I have no doubt there are uses for blockchain technology. Making people rich with cryptocurrency for one. And hey, I'm all in favor. Let's just don't get carried away with the parallels.
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[ 13.7 ms ] story [ 255 ms ] threadHowever, in addition to any counterarguments, please describe why standard tech and/or a 3rd_party is insufficient for your proposed use-cases. This is HackerNews after all, and we desire the deeply technical discussion and context, not propaganda.
It’s not about the single solutions themselves, it’s about the ecosystem of solutions that you can integrate relatively painlessly. Same reason why standards are important.
What do you consider standard tech btw?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzhXncTVOzA
Whether or not it will be a successful project or not is up for debate.
All of them CAN produce auditable records for the consumer, but they don't, blockchains force the issue.
Right now it's the exact opposite. There's nothing less bullet-proof (eg in the US) than investing into an ICO, outside of perhaps junk penny stocks.
Cryptocurrencies are forcing govts to reexamine regulations that I argue are generally favorable to massive institutions/ high net worth individuals and unfavorable to the small timers
Furthermore, the poorest people generally aren't the ones looking to evade hyperinflation, because they lack savings in the first place. Venezuela had a middle class once upon a time, though.
I'm unsure what you mean by this. "The bottom line" is just a manner of expression.
> I made claims about the potential for use, not that it was actually used
And I stated why I believe this to be a dubious claim; crypto-tokens are totally impractical. Your allusion to advancements in medicine and internet connectivity is a red herring argument that hand waves away the reality of using crypo-tokens in the real world.
> You seem to be operating on the assumption that third world = mud huts and subsistence farming, which is very untrue.
Wow. I illustrated concerns surrounding limited accessibility to internet in the developing world and you disingenuously twisted it into an insult to the citizens of the developing world. You don't even have to venture into a 3rd world country to see the impracticality of crypo-tokens in the real world, they're barley usable even in the developed world, and at the first sign of trouble they are useless, e.g. see how far crypo-tokens take you on the ground in Puerto Rico. Jumbling around private keys, trying to coordinate meet-ups to trade crypto for money, managing all the technical issues surrounding wallet management, insane volatility, transaction fees, the concept of confirmations, client versioning, security best practices, staying abreast of blockchain politics surrounding forks and protocol changes that impact security, price, usability... it's a quagmire of impracticality.
So what? Every technology starts off slow and impractical including the ones that fail.
That's absolutely true when you get to the bottom ~3-4 billion people in the world. However it also used to be true about the ~2 billion people above them as well. Mobile banking - smart phones - have legitimately reshaped that for people in nations that have for example GDP per capita levels of around $3,000 to $8,000. It wasn't very long ago that the context for those people wasn't too dissimilar to that of what third world people are still dealing with today. Go back before ~2009 in small to mid size towns in Romania, Vietnam or Nigeria; today these people widely have access to easy, relatively secure banking via their phones. In the near future their mobile banking systems will provide easy access to something like Bitcoin as well, and obviously some of them already are.
Your comment mostly applies to rural areas in 3rd countries.
Any counterargument I can construct boils down to a difference of opinion & values. The author trusts his bank and his government to (a) handle his money in the way that he thinks is responsible and (b) handle disputes in a way that benefits him. On the other hand, I trust myself to handle my money responsibly, and I view my government as a great uncertainty because I don't understand the limits of their power (in the least nefarious, but relevant point, who can predict by how much my government will increase the monetary supply and deflate my purchasing power over the next decades? More nefarious, if I dissent, government can trivially lock most of my digital assets that aren't cryptocurrencies - e.g. bank account or investment funds).
You can bet that Edward Snowden had all his US assets seized, for example. But if he had any cryptocurrency, he may have been able to take those with him.
Say I'm someone like Ed Snowden (again). I own a house, a car, the clothes on my back, and Bitcoin. I up and leave one day to share government secrets with the press and hide in a different country.
Did the car aid in the crime? Probably, to some degree - it let me physically make my way to the airport, and on to journalists to whom I shared secrets. Did the house aid the crime? Did the clothes on my back aid the crime? Both of those allowed me to live a safe and comfortable life. I wouldn't have made it past airport security without my clothes, after all.
Did the Bitcoin aid the crime? Only in the same sense that a treadmill and a good diet aids a bank robber by making it easier for him to leave the scene in a hurry.
So I think the claim that having bitcoin in your possession when committing a crime necessarily enables that crime (to a greater deal than any other everyday thing) is a bit nebulous. It didn't facilitate the crime, it just lessened the punishment. Possession of $USD cash provides a similar thing in the form of being used to pay bail.
Same is true for crypte-currencies. If some hacker manages to steal a big amount of money then (almost) everybody agrees to make a hardfork and the hacker looses his money. It is more decentralized and the hacker could keep some part of the money if there is a side chain.
Hacker scenario already happend. But there is no need for a crime to happen to cause a tokens redistribution. If 80% of all token holders (miners for bitcoin?) are poor what stops them from redistributing the tokens of the rich token holders?
Progress is generally on the exponential (or sigmoid) curve, so it’s slow at first, but explosive later.
Not really true that it depends on the government. And even if it is, you only need like one government supporting it for it to be valuable.
Why couldn’t your argument be used to say the internet won’t work?
This is true! But databases don't have that magic "blockchain" tech.
David Gerard's book Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain touches on the ridiculousness of this idea, actually. And, yes, it's ridiculousness, but it's what some people are trying to sell.
So should I take it that you're one of the people who thinks blockchains have little applications outside of currency?
If you can find some other reason for processing transactions and can guarantee that the population is big enough then the coin becomes unnecessary.
An extrinsic reward doesn't have to be financial though, it's anything that you want to get out of an activity that isn't part of the activity itself.
If the blockchain ledger was a part of a greater whole and the client software of which it forms a part was somehow intrinsically fun, useful or needed, the token itself wouldn't be necessary.
But internet right now is undeniable. Block chain will be the same.
All that stuff still need some more development obviously. We're still in the early days.
[1] https://www.cryptomathic.com/news-events/blog/how-digital-si... [2] https://keybase.io/docs/server_security/merkle_root_in_bitco...
You should remember this then, from 1994:
"It's not only going to revolutionize the Net, it will change the global economy."
https://www.wired.com/1994/12/emoney/
And this, from 1999:
"The next internet revolution will put central bankers out of business."
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/1999/nov/04/onlinesup...
Moreover, what even is a "blockchain"? The most basic definition would be an inversely linked list with an added hash in each node. That's not much of an innovation. On the other end of the spectrum we have something like Bitcoin with a distributed network of "miners" who compete against each other by wasting energy, because the participants do not trust one another. This is not something most people would want or need. In most use cases we probably have trusted agents, but then we don't even need a mechanism like PoW/PoS to facilitate trust. This means we're really just left with a distributed database.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle
I have no idea how blockchain technologies can apply to social impact projects; all I could come up with was verifying that my donated can of soup made it into the hands of Homeless Joe via a verifiable route, but I don't know how much I'd need that. I trust that the soup kitchen [or whatever] directly feeds people, and if I didn't I'd be volunteering up front as well or not even bother at all.
Perhaps again I just haven't applied my imagination to it.
We'll definitely see blockchain become dominant in a some or multiple fields of business. When? Perhaps not for 20 years. Internet as we know it took decades for it to fully develop and take off. We could get a crash before this succes happens, the word "blockchain" and "cryptocurrency" might become toxic for a while. Thinking of the 2000 IT bubble, so much money poured into any crazy business proposal with "web" in it; and suddenly the music stopped. Billions evaporated.
All the while I'll just be grabbing popcorn and hoping to sell my coins on time ;-)
1) email: it will never replace the post-office. You can only send text. Oh, ok, they've added images now, well, its' too slow for most people to download them, and now I've got all this spam. We use it in our company, but it isn't really for consumers. Oh, then hotmail...
2) You're not going to buy things online. The shipping costs will be too high. The logistics are all wrong. Will you trust an online shop with your credit card?? No way! This e-commerce thing is dead in the water. Sure, you point to the 'growth', but it's equal to "the proportion of US GDP comprised by toothpick sales"
3) Blogs?? Seriously. We're a news agency. We pay professional journalists to research and write compelling stories. Can you trust some random person in their basement writing a blog? Sorry, no contest. Blogs can't compete with major media companies.
4) Music downloads? Why would you spend 20 minutes downloading a song ILLEGALLY?? Where are you going to get it from. We'll stop all of this. CDs are the way forward. Oh, this internet thing has just destroyed our business model, iTunes to the rescue. But now people want to stream music. No they don't internet speed isn't fast enough to stream, and people want to own music, this music streaming thing isn't going anywhere!
5) Video? You've got to be kidding. Oh, that youtube thing is fine for weirdo's who want to make video's for their friends, but people will keep going to movies and paying for cable. The quality isn't good enough, and they don't have the great content. This internet thing isn't going anyway.
6) Rent someone's apartment online? Are you nuts! I'm not going to let some crazy person stay in my place, and I'm not going to stay in somebody else's. These internet people are crazy. Our hotel business is just fine. In fact, I think we should increase prices and start charging people hidden fees like "resort charges"...
7) Get in a stranger's car? A stranger that I found online!!??? Look, when I was a kid, my parents had two rules. Don't talk to strangers, and never get in a strangers car. Now you're telling me to go online, find a stranger and get in their car! This is madness. Just get in a cab! They'll take you where you want to go and you can trust them!
Please add your own "this is going nowhere" stories, I'm keen to see what else is out there, there are TONS.
The blockchain may use the internet as an underlying protocol, but it is as disruptive to the finance industry as Napster was to music, AirBnB to hotels, Uber/Lyft (please come to Australia Lyft) was to cabs, Amazon to retail, etc. etc.
The difference being, that blockchain is an open technology that is enabling this disruption, rather than a single company.
It goes like this: proxy (cash/cryptocurrency) -> belief -> result/other resource
e.g. Netscape, Yahoo, Nokia, Blackberry, Real Networks...
This is an alternative to setting up a neutral party for the purpose, such as the Bank for International Settlements or Depository Trust Corporation. Those organizations are expensive to run. It's a real shared ledger, but it's no more than that.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-blockchain-banks/six-big-...
This is a major issue for something like Bitcoin, but a small speed bump for banks utilizing agreed upon blockchain tech.. It's at least interesting to consider the benefits of centralized(exclusive?) guidance coupled with distributed execution.
What I didn't understand from the article was the point about membership. If the contributing banks are the only ones using it, why is it giving information about what _I_ could do with one of these USCs - apparently nothing because I won't be able to join the chain
Wouldn’t it just amplify it? Right now, central banks just set up swap facilities between each other. It’s akin to opening a bank account with one another. Crediting, debuting and undoing anything nefarious is cheap and easy.
Banks want to use Blockchain as a more reliable alternative to SWIFT it won’t be doing actual account settlements which in your case you mentioned corresponding banking.
That said many of the more progressive institutions stopped calling it Blockchain a while ago they all are talking about distributed ledgers, hyper ledger and the likes are being either used or piloted by many institutions.
The ones that do use Blockchain often mean today actual crypto currency or a settlemen token a good example of a “real world” implementation would be Royal Mint Gold which is a crypto token offered by the Royal Mint which is pegged to gold.
http://rmg.royalmint.com
> Banks want to use Blockchain as a more reliable alternative to SWIFT it won’t be doing actual account settlements which in your case you mentioned corresponding banking.
> That said many of the more progressive institutions stopped calling it Blockchain a while ago they all are talking about distributed ledgers, hyper ledger and the likes are being either used or piloted by many institutions.
The exact same functionality could be accomplished with a git repository they each pull/rebase/push between themselves... or with any of a number of append-only databases with WALs and synchronous replication, where each of them runs a replica.
And since there are only banks can join the network, I doubt it can technically prevent the fraud among banks because unlike public cryptocurrencies, it does not give incentives to the banks to spend a lot of computational power to the network. So any banks allowed to join can put enough computation power than other banks combined and succeed the attack.
> "they can do the job more efficiently"
They ARE doing the job more efficiently by not using proof of work, and instead most likely going with a quorum approach based on public keys.
> it does not give incentives to the banks to spend a lot of computational power to the network
Right, because it doesn't use proof of work, it uses a quorum vote. The banks would still need to form a cartel in order to get a (super)majority of the vote.
[0] https://www.bis.org/publ/qtrpdf/r_qt1709f.htm
And I have never understood one part of it. How are contentious settlements are resolved? Today for any disputes people can approach BIS or DTC and once issue is resolved everything can be rolled back. Who acts as the "watcher" in this case? Surely, going by what majority says is not a solution.
Go to any country perhaps with the exception of Estonia and you will see that digitalization was supposed to change governments for the better. Instead they mostly have created very sporadic successes but a lot of failed implementation sometimes even making it worse. Yet there is no doubt that in the long run things are changing for the better.
The problem isn't the technology but the problems around legality and implementation and who it disrupts.
There is however plenty of usages for blockchain just off the top of my head.
Digital Pokemon cards, 2nd hand ebooks market, 2nd hand digital assets market, digital art certification, tracking of how money for NGO's are being spent and of course as a gold standard for important deals done between large organization and of course as a truly international wiretransfer system.
All these things will happen with new generations growing up and finding natural uses for them.
Oh, and cause global warming and destroy the planet. That way humans will have to come up with a non-government backed currency.
Did you diversify into other crypto currencies? You are only worth anything once you actually cash out into USD
• Technology in the lab (t=0)
• Technology in the first company (t=2–10 years post-lab)
• Technology in the first successful company (t=5–20 years post-lab)
• Technology acceptance (t=10–25 years post-lab)
Source:
https://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/AcceptanceModels.pdf
In these slides, Richard gives several examples that match this model and includes several additional explanations.
For example:
• First window system: Stanford/SRI/Xerox PARC ~1975, MIT ~1976
• First commercial use: Symbolics (1979), LMI (1979), Xerox Star (~1980), Apple Lisa (~1982), Apple Macintosh (1984)
• First use by a successful company: Microsoft (~1989)
• Technology acceptance: Microsoft (~1995)
Spreadsheets are another example that is given in the slides. In fact, 25 years for acceptance are quite common in software. Sometimes, it also takes much longer.
Either you understand this perspective or you don't.
We are talking about blockchain not one of the ways it can be realized, bitcoin.
Furthermore, I gave a couple of examples of how the blockchain can be used no one is being scammed with that. In fact it allows for things that have never been possible before because you will not see nation-states work together in any meaningful way to solve these problems.
The immediate problem is that an "automatic" contract circumvents the regular legal system and thus is going to be ... not-legal. The larger problem is that this is how things should be.
That the regular system isn't automatic but rather includes considerations of intentions and individuals involves is not a bug but a feature, an extremely important feature (the non-enforceability of unconscionable contracts is pretty important today [1]). Unbreakable contracts open the door for unlimited abuses (how does an automatic contract system prevent contracts for illegal activity? Given legality is going to continue to depend on intentions, etc).
The Etherium Fork illustrated all this and essentially discredited the approach.
Also, it can take a while for successful tech to be successful. But there's also the tech that people spend years trying to get going without success.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconscionability
Sure everything can fall apart, nothing is perfect. But it doesn't need to be perfect to be useful.
The blockchain is, directly and indirectly, undermining nation states so I am under no illusion that it will be easy peasy spread.
But why should that ever be a bigger problem than spending millions of dollars on all sorts of foundational research that never goes anywhere?
Opportunity cost.
Interesting. So you have an original piece of digital art and the owner of the art is verified on the blockchain? How would that work? Can't I just take a screenshot or something of the art and have a copy? What's the advantage of having one "true" piece of digital art and is it feasable?
Genuinely curious how this would work. It's a very intriguing idea.
The "problem" with digital art is that if you get a hold of the source code you could just reproduce it and "double spend" and thus it has diminishing value.
If you use the blockchain to verify you have the original you make it possible for the value to follow the owner.
Same thing with ebooks. You could be buying the version of a book that Eminem owned and it could increase in value.
Many people misunderstand what value can be. Sometimes it's the actual "thing" (ex. the chair) but often, very often, it's the idea of the thing.
The whole art scene is based on this principle.
"Verisart is the world's leading platform to certify and verify artworks and collectibles using the Bitcoin blockchain. Since its launch in 2015, Verisart has provided contemporary artists including Shepard Fairey with a free and easy way to generate permanent certificates of authenticity and reduce the scope for fraudulent activity. Verisart combines museum certification standards, distributed ledger technology and image recognition to its provenance and registry services. The company is headed by Robert Norton, formerly CEO & co-founder of Saatchi Online & Sedition Art and its Board Advisers include Peter Todd, Bitcoin core developer and Dr. Ahmed Elgammal, Professor of the Art & Artificial Intelligence Lab at Rutgers University."
Makes sense if you think of art as an asset, which is kind of a philistine thing to do...
None of these are realistic examples. Do you think Nintendo won't want a piece of that digital trading market? Or Amazon, for ebooks?
Digital assets aren't going to be decentralized. Never. Corporations are going to maintain their walled garden platform, and make sure all transactions are conducted within that platform so they scrape off a few dollars here and there. You don't need all the complexity of a blockchain when a centralized architecture works just fine.
There are plenty of opensourced games out there and plenty of opensource projects and there will only be more in the future.
Every new generation growing up is a new generation who will be affected by other things than the previous generation.
Everyone also laughed when I in the 90'ies said you would one day be able to score girls from being good at playing computer games.
Either you understand this perspective or you don't. It's cool with me that you don't understand it, but it's already happening while you say it never will.
I legitimately can't tell if this is trolling or sarcastic.
Regardless, the fact that something else seemed ridiculous but ended up not being so has no bearing.
People can predict arbitrary things and will only remember the ones that turned out right; for every thing that seemed wrong but succeeded, there are a million things which seemed wrong and were wrong.
Just because there are examples of things succeeding in spite of predictions of failure doesn't mean predictions of failure are signs of success.
"Every new generation growing up is a new generation who will be affected by other things than the previous generation.
Everyone also laughed when I in the 90'ies said you would one day be able to score girls from being good at playing computer games."
The point is that looking at your own generation is not a good indicator of where things will go. Look at those younger generations which haven't yet been affected by what is right or wrong.
That was my argument. Girls will grow up knowing what it takes to be good at a computer game it won't just be something nerds do, but something they themselves do.
The point here is to understand what allows progress.
Sure something might or might not come to fruition but this one my predictions were based on understanding what it would take for it to be popular.
I am not trolling but 100% serious.
Not to mention that Cryptokitties is "backdoored" by CEO/CFO/COO functions. Which means the company has full control over the contract, even if the contract itself is "decentralized" (more like externalized, if anything). They can halt trading of the assets any time they desire.
> Everyone also laughed when I in the 90'ies said you would one day be able to score girls from being good at playing computer games.
I have no idea where you're going with this. Are you talking about e-Sports? This is the first I've heard of anyone "scoring girls" with computer games.
You are missing the larger point because you focus on the smaller technical details.
Things don't have to be perfect to be successful.
Again. Either you understand the larger perspective of cryptocurrencies, blockchain and tokens or you don't.
It's like investing in the TCP/IP protocol.
This sounds a lot like arguing in 1995 that people wouldn't buy stuff online because entrenched retail stores are where everyone does their shopping. Its so simple to buy stuff in a store why add the complexity of online shopping?
There are undoubtedly benefits for consumers when you have a decentralized marketplace/ architecture. As the technology matures it should become easier to build these kinds of architectures
Amazon has a to
I'm not disputing that. What I'm disputing is the idea that corporations are willing to give up that much control over their copyright so that consumers get some false impression that they "own" a Pikachu.
Where are you going to see that Pikachu? Through officially-licensed Nintendo software. Not through third party apps and websites. They will get hit with the DMCA hammer.
There is no benefit of the blockchain, when all representation of that data is centralized. Nintendo won't do it because, who cares. Other than a buzzword, the blockchain is irrelevant. That's like caring about whether a website is running on Ruby or Node, or some other stack. It doesn't matter. It's an implementation detail.
Implementation details are not what's relevant here.
Are you kidding? So the big use of the blockchain is to take things that have zero marginal cost of production, and enforce a completely artificial cost of production, to make non-scarce goods scarce?
From a value perspective, it's an upside just ask the art-scene.
Just don't claim that you are somehow making an arugment against it cause you aren't for reasons already outlined.
There is nothing new about the types of businesses which can be created on top of the blockchain other than that they can be digital. But as a value system they are as solid as physical items.
Yes, that is the entire point of this blockchain stuff, isn't it? You get ownership of large natural numbers (coins) that would be trivial to copy otherwise.
I have a lot more reading to do, but that is what I understand from what I have read so far. Cryptokitties is blowing my mind.
The thesis is that huge amounts of capital is tied up in invoice settlement all along the supply chain. (And supply chain refers to every thing from the dirt -- grown or mined -- all the way to the end consumer.) Settling invoices on the blockchain would eliminate a huge amount of friction and open the possibility of immediate low interest (or even no interest) loans on a substantial amount of outstanding invoices.
I understand the difference between a distributed ledger and a database, but in all use cases I've heard mentioned as ripe for blockchain derived innovation, not once has a blockchain really been necessary or even an improvement over a traditional database based solution.
To give you an idea of how buzzwordy this all is, my friend works in venture capital and was trying to explain to me how blockchain was going to change the world after he got back from a blockchain conference, saying that it would "revolutionize VR/AR, AI, etc...", technologies that have absolutely nothing to do with one another. I just laughed.
A database under control of any one entity is prone to undue influence by hacking or bribing or other leverage. An append-only database that is controlled by consensus of all club members is safe from malfeasance on the part of a minority. There is value in that. Of course this has nothing to do with mining coins and stuff.
Now you can argue the society already solved these problems with rigorous administrative processes around existing databases. I would reply that blockchain-based process may end up being cheaper and/or faster to settle and reconcile. In the same way the computing previously done by humans was turned over to machines. It may have looked like the problem is under control and there is nothing to solve here, but it turned out there was a lot to be gained from dramatically increased computational power.
Like anything it will take multiple steps and failing several times before it works.
The perfect example is the internet, it was so wrong at the start, so ugly, and so naive. But it was free and open. Everybody said "internet is the future", and that created the dotcom bubble when everybody agreed and wanted to profit from it.
I had friends at the time that got rich in the process, and I have friends today that have gotten rich with bitcoins(they have already sold all of them).
At the end of course Internet was the future, but not "that Internet", it has evolved a lot and will continue evolving.
With blockchain the same is happening: we have a tremendous bubble right now that will be painful when it pops. But it will continue evolving into something extremely useful in my opinion.
It will be no bitcoin, it will something else be easier to mine, with more transactions, and so on...it will evolve over time learning from its errors, like anything in the History of mankind.
There's already multiple solutions to these problems. Take a look at RaiBlocks (raiblocks.net) for example, which has instantaneous zero-fee transactions with very high throughput (hardware limited) without losing decentralization or other security properties (not proven atm). RaiBlocks uses delegated proof-of-stake with a block-lattice architecture.
Another example would be Cardano, which has the first provably secure proof-of-stake protocol with same security guarantees as Bitcoin, and is also secure in a scalable setting with blockchain sharding (as is planned in Ethereum too). Proof-of-stake doesn't require energy to mine blocks and can be scalable but is very hard to secure.
There's multiple other solutions as well, such as IOTA, Byteball, Steem, BitShares and others which might be more centralized and less secure to achieve scalability. Then there is Bitcoin Lightning Network almost ready, and also MimbleWimble coming out soon (http://grin-tech.org/). Lots of things are certainly happening faster than you can anticipate.
Additionally, there's projects like Enigma and Aion, which add scalability, privacy and interoperability on top of existing blockchains. This territory starts to get a bit complex for me.
I will die on this hill if I have to.
Https://hydrachain.io/
New site coming soon with examples and a demo.
It’s a generic asset management platform - so one current use case is tracking the movement of goods through a supply chain, and also recording transactional history in an industry that is currently full of corruption and tax avoiders. Having an immutable transaction record that’s publicly visible is the correct usage of blockchain and it solves this problem very well. We are talking about amounts that are so large, this system will likely be regulated by the government.
Another current use case is tracking physical (and very valuable) assets - again the use case is an immutable pubic record.
The immutability is key - sure you could Store this data in a database, but the problems we are solving are the fact that when you have a single entity running a database then at a certain level of wealth you’re practically guaranteed corruption or unethical behaviour. This is the reason we use blockchain - blockchain has a good use case for avoiding the corruption that massive centralised systems are often plagued with
Several countries outside the west are moving to do registration of land ownership on blockchain tech because their bureaucratic system is corrupt.
Banks have moved to cryptocurrencies for transfers. Sure it's not the unregulated ones, but it's still block chain.
In government in Scandinavia we're doing various proofs of concepts on blockchain. Because it cuts out the need for a legal "middle man" it has huge potential even in less corrupt parts of the world. Everything from simple paperwork to lock/key systems in elder apartments (don't know the English word sorry) is being tested.
Blockchain is certainly full of scams, but it actually offers tremendous value in enterprise, especially when you do any form of bureaucracy. The thing is though, in this world 10 years is nothing. Just look at RPA, it's a tech from before the internet and it's only now beginning to be applied in real world situations that isn't cheating in a video game.
Do you have a source for this? I can't imagine how it might work.
In fact, this particular use is one of the few that blockchain is actually good for (because it was designed as document timestamping), unlike stuff like voting or databases.
The whole idea here is distributed trust
And that is exactly the opposite of what a land title database is. The authorities must be able to transfer your house to your heirs if you die. The authorities must be able to take away your deed in certain cases. The authorities must be able to correct entries in the database. They must be able to override things.
Land titles are worthless if they are not enforced by courts, and courts will not enforce land titles in a database that has illegal entries.
It's exactly what it is where I live. When you purchase property both parties log in with their state issued digital id to sign the transfer of ownership.
This isn't done by blockchain in Denmark, which means the nationstate owns and operates the system with little openness. NOT a problem in one of the least corrupt countries in the World, but it might as well have been done through blockchain and in 20 years I imagine that it will.
No. Yes, you can do it online, great. And yes, no other private person can fraudulently do it in your name, also great. But it does not follow that it's impossible to do it without your key; it is possible, and it must be possible, for the authorities.
Should the database be public for reading? Yes, absolutely. But you don't need a blockchain for that.
Wrong. In selling land to somebody else, authorities -- corrupt or not -- have nothing to say. The only thing authorities are needed for is to put an official stamp on the sale document.
This official stamp is generally a good thing; land is too valuable, so such transactions need some friction, like public notary's involvement, so one cannot sell a property by merely clicking "accept" under EULA. Corrupt authorities, as I understand, can delay the process of stamping the sale for indefinite time, so what blockchain is supposed to do here is to do away with authorities altogether.
Speaking as a citizen of such country[1]. The problem is not in ledger/registry. The problem is that you can get a fake shareholders notice, a court order from corrupt judge, etc. and change the ownership in the registry. I don't see how blockchain solves anything that a simple publication of all changes wouldn't.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-03/ukraine-t...
Just imagine it's 1893 and no one can see how big cars are going to be. Well this gizmo XYZ is just like cars were then! You'll wanna get in on this now! And so this gets internalized and repeated to friends and family regardless of objective merit. Because it sounds "truthy".
The parallels between blockchain and the Internet are similarly contrived. They are different phenomenon and the line "X is like Y thus what happened to X will happen to Y" doesn't have objective merit in this case near as I can tell. (Apologies to the half a dozen or more posters who have probably posted something to this effect on the thread).
The _potential_ uses for blockchain are much more limited than potential uses for the Internet for instance. (And there are a number of other differences).
That being said I have no doubt there are uses for blockchain technology. Making people rich with cryptocurrency for one. And hey, I'm all in favor. Let's just don't get carried away with the parallels.