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The discussion about whether or not blockchain technology is useful has literally nothing to do with cryptocurrency bubbles. Further, I gave specific examples,

The discussion about whether or not blockchain technology is useful has literally nothing to do with cryptocurrency bubbles. Further, I gave specific examples, and you reply with a joke tweet (which, as an aside, no one has any duty or obligation wasting their time replying to, and is the sort of thing that yields an insular bubble of groupthink) and then more hand waving. Neat. The rest of us are just busy building solutions as the industry evolves.

jmull 9y ago
> The discussion about whether or not blockchain technology is useful has literally nothing to do with cryptocurrency bubbles. These seem very closely related at this point. A cryptocurrency bubble seems to be the primary use of blockchain tech so far, and the eye-popping amount of money seemingly involved appears to be the primary driver of interest in the technology. You can hardly think about one without the other. E.g., suppose you had a great use for blockchain -- say, your book of record/holdings -- along with a great plan to develop and roll a system based on it that had nothing to do with cryptocurrencies. You'd still have to account for what you plan to do if (when) enough money has been lost on cryptocurrencies that blockchain becomes a dirty word that will kill your system if it because associated with it. Beyond any technical differences, your non-blockchain competitors won't have to convince potential participants that their system's architecture isn't actually some tricky way to rip them off.
simias 9y ago
>The discussion about whether or not blockchain technology is useful has literally nothing to do with cryptocurrency bubbles. You really think people would be talking about "blockchains" if bitcoins wasn't worth thousands of dollars? Is there currently any notable application of this technology beyond cryptocurrencies? >Further, I gave specific examples That you immediately dismissed yourself as "just a write-only distributed database....with a layer of asymmetric cryptography". >you reply with a joke tweet (which, as an aside, no one has any duty or obligation wasting their time replying to It's true, but they did reply nonetheless, wouldn't have hurt to actually come up with a decent argument while they were at it. Still, it's really a common pattern in bitcoin discussions in my experience (just say that the author doesn't know what they're talking about without coming with any counterargument). You can find plenty of examples in the comments of this very much non-joke article: https://medium.com/@thedrbits/why-i-also-find-iota-deeply-alarming-99d4f2da3282 https://medium.com/@thedrbits/why-i-also-find-iota-deeply-al... I could probably come up with other examples but I don't have any duty or obligation to waste my time doing that so... > then more hand waving. Who's waving hands at whom in this scenario? >The rest of us are just busy building solutions as the industry evolves. Godspeed. I don't have any problem with that. I just wish the discussion around these technologies revolved more around technical arguments than ambiguous terminology.
- endorphone 9y ago
  People have been talking about blockchains for many years (and in the financial space there are massive orgs all working together on concrete implementations. Change takes time). The fevered anti-blockchain pitch, on the other hand, has picked up in lockstep with the cryptocurrency hype. If you can't separate them that's a failing. It's a bit like the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, with people who woke up to cryptocurrency hype thinking that everyone became aware simultaneous with them. That you immediately dismissed yourself as "just a write-only distributed database....with a layer of asymmetric cryptography". That is the literal definition of a blockchain. In these sorts of arguments people are so desperate to shoot down "Bitcoin" that we end up with a No True Scotsman situation where everyone completely loses sight of the technology.
- dsacco 9y ago
  > You really think people would be talking about "blockchains" if bitcoins wasn't worth thousands of dollars? Is there currently any notable application of this technology beyond cryptocurrencies? Academic cryptographers and computer scientists specializing in Byzantine fault-tolerant distributed systems have been working on blockchain technology for several years now - since one Bitcoin was worth merely hundreds of dollars. To put this gently: you're being very snarky and combative in this thread, but you do not appear to be familiar with the basic academic literature and engineering that has gone into very legitimate blockchain technology research. Obviously there has been an influx of uninformed, trend-following funding recently, but it's a serious mistake to conflate those parties with the totality of work in the field. In fact, I gave two specific examples in a reply to another of your comments.
ryanjshaw 9y ago
I'm also in the finance industry. I'll give a concrete example of where I see blockchain technologies helping in my space, regulatory reporting of OTC derivatives transactions: 1. Regulators need to accept transaction reports, volume is in the hundreds of millions/reports/day so they don't have the technical competency to accept reports themselves 2. 3rd parties ("trade repositories") currently provide this infrastructure but regulators are learning that aggregating data across multiple trade repositories with different implementations is very difficult (particularly where dual-sided reporting across different trade repositories occur!); financial institutions are also ending up having to pay far more than cost to comply with regulations because the trade repositories are profit-driven enterprises 3. A private blockchain (e.g. Quorum and/or maybe Hyperledger's PoEL) solves these problems cleanly: a. regulators have confidence that market participants are playing by the rules and not manipulating (or submitting) reports after the fact. For those who don't know, there's a lot of incentive to 'fix missing reports' -- consider e.g. Merrill Lynch being fined 34.5m GBP for not reporting just 2 years worth of transactions [1]; how would a 'distributed database' give regulators confidence when that kind of 'incentive money' is involved in retro-fitting reports? b. market participants are happy because their highly confidential reporting data can delivered to regulators via simple access controls (even after the fact!) and infrastructure costs are fairly split across market participants in proportion to volume, and the industry effectively "self-regulates" itself (rather than trusting 3rd parties), which is generally an attribute of preferred solutions in the finance industry [1] https://www.fca.org.uk/news/press-releases/fca-fines-merrill-lynch-failing-report-transactions https://www.fca.org.uk/news/press-releases/fca-fines-merrill...

jmull 9y ago

> The discussion about whether or not blockchain technology is useful has literally nothing to do with cryptocurrency bubbles. These seem very closely related at this point. A cryptocurrency bubble seems to be the primary use of blockchain tech so far, and the eye-popping amount of money seemingly involved appears to be the primary driver of interest in the technology. You can hardly think about one without the other. E.g., suppose you had a great use for blockchain -- say, your book of record/holdings -- along with a great plan to develop and roll a system based on it that had nothing to do with cryptocurrencies. You'd still have to account for what you plan to do if (when) enough money has been lost on cryptocurrencies that blockchain becomes a dirty word that will kill your system if it because associated with it. Beyond any technical differences, your non-blockchain competitors won't have to convince potential participants that their system's architecture isn't actually some tricky way to rip them off.

simias 9y ago

>The discussion about whether or not blockchain technology is useful has literally nothing to do with cryptocurrency bubbles. You really think people would be talking about "blockchains" if bitcoins wasn't worth thousands of dollars? Is there currently any notable application of this technology beyond cryptocurrencies? >Further, I gave specific examples That you immediately dismissed yourself as "just a write-only distributed database....with a layer of asymmetric cryptography". >you reply with a joke tweet (which, as an aside, no one has any duty or obligation wasting their time replying to It's true, but they did reply nonetheless, wouldn't have hurt to actually come up with a decent argument while they were at it. Still, it's really a common pattern in bitcoin discussions in my experience (just say that the author doesn't know what they're talking about without coming with any counterargument). You can find plenty of examples in the comments of this very much non-joke article: https://medium.com/@thedrbits/why-i-also-find-iota-deeply-alarming-99d4f2da3282 https://medium.com/@thedrbits/why-i-also-find-iota-deeply-al... I could probably come up with other examples but I don't have any duty or obligation to waste my time doing that so... > then more hand waving. Who's waving hands at whom in this scenario? >The rest of us are just busy building solutions as the industry evolves. Godspeed. I don't have any problem with that. I just wish the discussion around these technologies revolved more around technical arguments than ambiguous terminology.

endorphone 9y ago
People have been talking about blockchains for many years (and in the financial space there are massive orgs all working together on concrete implementations. Change takes time). The fevered anti-blockchain pitch, on the other hand, has picked up in lockstep with the cryptocurrency hype. If you can't separate them that's a failing. It's a bit like the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, with people who woke up to cryptocurrency hype thinking that everyone became aware simultaneous with them. That you immediately dismissed yourself as "just a write-only distributed database....with a layer of asymmetric cryptography". That is the literal definition of a blockchain. In these sorts of arguments people are so desperate to shoot down "Bitcoin" that we end up with a No True Scotsman situation where everyone completely loses sight of the technology.
dsacco 9y ago
> You really think people would be talking about "blockchains" if bitcoins wasn't worth thousands of dollars? Is there currently any notable application of this technology beyond cryptocurrencies? Academic cryptographers and computer scientists specializing in Byzantine fault-tolerant distributed systems have been working on blockchain technology for several years now - since one Bitcoin was worth merely hundreds of dollars. To put this gently: you're being very snarky and combative in this thread, but you do not appear to be familiar with the basic academic literature and engineering that has gone into very legitimate blockchain technology research. Obviously there has been an influx of uninformed, trend-following funding recently, but it's a serious mistake to conflate those parties with the totality of work in the field. In fact, I gave two specific examples in a reply to another of your comments.

ryanjshaw 9y ago

I'm also in the finance industry. I'll give a concrete example of where I see blockchain technologies helping in my space, regulatory reporting of OTC derivatives transactions: 1. Regulators need to accept transaction reports, volume is in the hundreds of millions/reports/day so they don't have the technical competency to accept reports themselves 2. 3rd parties ("trade repositories") currently provide this infrastructure but regulators are learning that aggregating data across multiple trade repositories with different implementations is very difficult (particularly where dual-sided reporting across different trade repositories occur!); financial institutions are also ending up having to pay far more than cost to comply with regulations because the trade repositories are profit-driven enterprises 3. A private blockchain (e.g. Quorum and/or maybe Hyperledger's PoEL) solves these problems cleanly: a. regulators have confidence that market participants are playing by the rules and not manipulating (or submitting) reports after the fact. For those who don't know, there's a lot of incentive to 'fix missing reports' -- consider e.g. Merrill Lynch being fined 34.5m GBP for not reporting just 2 years worth of transactions [1]; how would a 'distributed database' give regulators confidence when that kind of 'incentive money' is involved in retro-fitting reports? b. market participants are happy because their highly confidential reporting data can delivered to regulators via simple access controls (even after the fact!) and infrastructure costs are fairly split across market participants in proportion to volume, and the industry effectively "self-regulates" itself (rather than trusting 3rd parties), which is generally an attribute of preferred solutions in the finance industry [1] https://www.fca.org.uk/news/press-releases/fca-fines-merrill-lynch-failing-report-transactions https://www.fca.org.uk/news/press-releases/fca-fines-merrill...