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Could anyone explain to me a scenario where bitcoin and/or blockchain does not make a huge impact on the world within 5-10 years? There seems to be so much exci

by tw1010 9y ago

Could anyone explain to me a scenario where bitcoin and/or blockchain does not make a huge impact on the world within 5-10 years? There seems to be so much excitement and real action moving in its direction that I have a hard time imagining how exactly this would all just go nowhere.

pjc50 9y ago
It doesn't necessarily have to go somewhere good. Collapsing pyramid schemes caused a civil war in Albania. I suspect all the financial-instrument like coins will end up banned in the West, and one or two of the blockchain apps will survive. Maybe "filecoin". There will also be a lot of things called "blockchain" that are very unlike cryptocurrencies; the X509 PKI of the future.
- atomical 9y ago
  Why Filecoin? It hasn't launched and it isn't even traded. There are several startups backed by ERC-20 tokens that have been building a product and will launch this year. One is even a YC startup, Request Network. Another, FunFair, has developed its own state channel technology because of an innovation gap with Ethereum.
atomical 9y ago
I can think of a few reasons why most blockchain technology won't take off. 1) Centralized solutions are cheaper. Consider Amazon vs. Filecoin. Amazon can buy hard drives in bulk and receive large discounts. They can pass those savings onto their customers. The Filecoin users providing storage to customers will have to 1) convince customers that their technology is safe 2) offer cheaper service. There isn't a trust issue with Amazon. So why would customers move to Filecoin? 2) Centralized solutions are much faster. Yes, there is a bunch of work being done now to allow for smaller transactions (lightning networks, plasma). There's no proof this is going to work. High level scaling solutions remain academic. 3) Development takes longer because the software has to operate in a trustless environment. Every update, no matter how minor, requires an independent security audit. There are quite a few examples of why security audits are not optional. 4) Because money is involved forks can be contentious. The default is to do nothing. A centralized solution with a board of directors and CEO can outpace a blockchain community in development speed and time to market. 5) If the private keys are lost or stolen the consumer is screwed. That makes blockchain technology incredibly risky. It's still safer to pay friends with Chase QuickPay. Banks also have insurance. How can a blockchain be insured? EDIT: Thought of one more. 6) Smart contracts are too rigid to replace the legal system. One option is to use an oracle as a source of information. However, using oracles to pull data from outside the blockchain means most of the logic is centralized.
- 0800 9y ago
  Why blockchain technology may take off: 1) Centralized solutions are costly to freedom of choice and privacy. Consider a solution where Dropbox, Google Drive, Facebook photos, S3, and YouTube is run through Filecoin. No more "You haven't used DropBox in a year, so we are closing your account". No more "This video has been demonetized for all advertisers in our network.". No more "we ran these nets over all your photos and use the information gathered to make a better advertisement profile for you". This is what happens when users make and own software: Limewire, Bittorent, Popcorn Time, DC++, Napster, Kazaa. Though most of these are now depricated/forced shut down, it was not for having a better alternative available. 2) Centralized solutions are currently much faster, but they may not be in the future. Also, other coins (that offer spare computing power) or commercial enterprises could act as a power nodes (sub-centralized solutions) in a decentralized network, to speed it up for a fee when needed. Decentralized peer2peer content delivery is currently owned by centralized players, like Akamai. I see no reason why it could not work when it is owned by its users. 3) Because the software has to operate in a trustless environment, a lot of attention has to be spend in making these systems more secure. Security through obfuscation is not a fall-back anymore. If we had known that LastFM stored password hashes as unsalted MD5, would we have trusted it with our accounts? We will have fuzzing tools and static program analysis to help automate checking the security of a contract. 4) Forks can be dealt with in a decentralized manner: voting power being assigned by a provable amount of tokens you own. You can run an entire election in this manner, cryptographically voiding any "vote rigging" argument. 5) You may have so much freedom as to shoot yourself in the foot. Therefore, Cryptocurrency banks may provide support for payment solutions, insurance, lending, for people who don't want to store all their money under their flammable mattress. 6) Smart contracts will fully replace the paper notarial system. Criminals will be booked into networked systems where their identity is biometrically verifiable for the duration of their "stay". Trading and lending circle contracts will be heavily vetted and proven standard smart contracts one can select from a library.
  - atomical 9y ago
    1) > "You haven't used DropBox in a year, so we are closing your account". The cost of storing data long-term is non-zero. How would Filecoin offer free storage? > No more "This video has been demonetized for all advertisers in our network." YouTube creators want community guidelines. They don't always like the way that they are interpreted and enforced. I'm sure a small minority wants to build something where they can upload absolutely anything without being censored. For those folks there is Gab.ai. It will never become mainstream though and the advertisers with big budgets will opt out. > Limewire, Bittorent, Popcorn Time, DC++, Napster, Kazaa Users chose Netflix and other centralized streaming services because of their ease of use. Also, copyright enforcement may have played a small role. Some users were claiming that they weren't using the above software to download pirated content. That was a bunch of bullshit. 2) > Decentralized peer2peer content delivery is currently owned by centralized players, like Akamai. I see no reason why it could not work when it is owned by its users. There's no reason why it couldn't work, but there's also no business need driving it. 3) Once an account is compromised in a trustless environment there is no way for the owner to take ownership of that account again. Also, in a trustless environment it's always possible for A) a smart contract to be hacked and B) a bug in the virtual machine to be exploited. Both centralized and decentralized face security issues. 4) They will still be contentious though. Look at Bitcoin. Imagine the last election but applied to software. It's not going to end pretty and unlike a normal company people in the community may not "move on." 5) There may be services in the future, but that would be anathema to the movement. The cryptocurrency apologists want each individual to manage their private keys. They would argue that 1) if you don't have control of your private keys you do not have control of your cryptocurrency 2) it's centralization. 6) This didn't address my criticism. There is no proof that anything like this is even remotely possible.
rifung 9y ago
This is merely a made up scenario and not a prediction but.. The bitcoin bubble could burst as all the people who only bought it thinking it would just keep going up panic and sell. Nobody wants cryptocurrencies anymore after this event and the negative connotation of anything related to cryptocurrencies/blockchain is so strong that nobody cares to do anything with it anymore and it just dies.
- DSingularity 9y ago
  Yeah. I’ve always thought if there was one thing that might kill it is all the manipulation and Pump and dumps that are happening. It’s not a free market and if people get burned hard, they’ll never come back.
JustAnotherPat 9y ago
What impact exactly? It's not up to people to disprove that bitcoin won't take over the world, when proponents fail to come up with viable use cases.
nostrademons 9y ago
I don't suppose you remember the last P2P bubble, which started with Napster in 1999 and effectively ended when Mark Zuckerburg decided Facebook was a better bet than WireHog in 2004? That also was a period of incredible excitement and real action - within 5 years, we got Napster, Gnutella, FreeNet, Kazaa, Audiogalaxy, Bittorrent, and Skype, along with lots of little programs that nobody's heard of (among them Red Swoosh, Travis Kalanick's first startup, and WireHog, the product that Facebook almost became) and academic research projects like Chord and Kademlia. The recording industry was being eviscerated - it did manage to kill Tower Records - and everyone was saying that movies would be next, and that P2P technology (with no central server, no single point of failure, and nobody to sue or imprison) would lead to the downfall of nation states and dictatorships and a fundamental change in the power balance of the world. It did change the world, in that Tower Records is still dead, nobody buys albums anymore, and peoples' music tastes have diverged markedly. But the change everyone wanted - where power devolves from government entities and big corporations to ordinary people like you and I - never happened. Instead, the public lost interest. Instead of decentralized systems like IRC and Jabber, they got on Facebook. Instead of censorship-resistant systems like FreeNet, they got the Great Firewall of China. Instead of easy music sharing like Napster and Audiogalaxy, they got streaming services like iTunes and Spotify. Change came, but it just meant replacing one set of overlords with another. It's very likely the same will happen with Bitcoin & Blockchain. It already is - that's what the article is about.
majani 9y ago
It might just settle in a tiny corner of the web eventually. This is not the first wave of excitement about decentralisation. I remember there was a similar wave of excitement with torrents and decentralised file storage, but convenience and regulation helped centralised storage to win. If I'm to bet it'll be the same case with cryptocurrency

by tw1010 9y ago

pjc50 9y ago

It doesn't necessarily have to go somewhere good. Collapsing pyramid schemes caused a civil war in Albania. I suspect all the financial-instrument like coins will end up banned in the West, and one or two of the blockchain apps will survive. Maybe "filecoin". There will also be a lot of things called "blockchain" that are very unlike cryptocurrencies; the X509 PKI of the future.

atomical 9y ago
Why Filecoin? It hasn't launched and it isn't even traded. There are several startups backed by ERC-20 tokens that have been building a product and will launch this year. One is even a YC startup, Request Network. Another, FunFair, has developed its own state channel technology because of an innovation gap with Ethereum.

atomical 9y ago

I can think of a few reasons why most blockchain technology won't take off. 1) Centralized solutions are cheaper. Consider Amazon vs. Filecoin. Amazon can buy hard drives in bulk and receive large discounts. They can pass those savings onto their customers. The Filecoin users providing storage to customers will have to 1) convince customers that their technology is safe 2) offer cheaper service. There isn't a trust issue with Amazon. So why would customers move to Filecoin? 2) Centralized solutions are much faster. Yes, there is a bunch of work being done now to allow for smaller transactions (lightning networks, plasma). There's no proof this is going to work. High level scaling solutions remain academic. 3) Development takes longer because the software has to operate in a trustless environment. Every update, no matter how minor, requires an independent security audit. There are quite a few examples of why security audits are not optional. 4) Because money is involved forks can be contentious. The default is to do nothing. A centralized solution with a board of directors and CEO can outpace a blockchain community in development speed and time to market. 5) If the private keys are lost or stolen the consumer is screwed. That makes blockchain technology incredibly risky. It's still safer to pay friends with Chase QuickPay. Banks also have insurance. How can a blockchain be insured? EDIT: Thought of one more. 6) Smart contracts are too rigid to replace the legal system. One option is to use an oracle as a source of information. However, using oracles to pull data from outside the blockchain means most of the logic is centralized.

0800 9y ago
Why blockchain technology may take off: 1) Centralized solutions are costly to freedom of choice and privacy. Consider a solution where Dropbox, Google Drive, Facebook photos, S3, and YouTube is run through Filecoin. No more "You haven't used DropBox in a year, so we are closing your account". No more "This video has been demonetized for all advertisers in our network.". No more "we ran these nets over all your photos and use the information gathered to make a better advertisement profile for you". This is what happens when users make and own software: Limewire, Bittorent, Popcorn Time, DC++, Napster, Kazaa. Though most of these are now depricated/forced shut down, it was not for having a better alternative available. 2) Centralized solutions are currently much faster, but they may not be in the future. Also, other coins (that offer spare computing power) or commercial enterprises could act as a power nodes (sub-centralized solutions) in a decentralized network, to speed it up for a fee when needed. Decentralized peer2peer content delivery is currently owned by centralized players, like Akamai. I see no reason why it could not work when it is owned by its users. 3) Because the software has to operate in a trustless environment, a lot of attention has to be spend in making these systems more secure. Security through obfuscation is not a fall-back anymore. If we had known that LastFM stored password hashes as unsalted MD5, would we have trusted it with our accounts? We will have fuzzing tools and static program analysis to help automate checking the security of a contract. 4) Forks can be dealt with in a decentralized manner: voting power being assigned by a provable amount of tokens you own. You can run an entire election in this manner, cryptographically voiding any "vote rigging" argument. 5) You may have so much freedom as to shoot yourself in the foot. Therefore, Cryptocurrency banks may provide support for payment solutions, insurance, lending, for people who don't want to store all their money under their flammable mattress. 6) Smart contracts will fully replace the paper notarial system. Criminals will be booked into networked systems where their identity is biometrically verifiable for the duration of their "stay". Trading and lending circle contracts will be heavily vetted and proven standard smart contracts one can select from a library.
- atomical 9y ago
  1) > "You haven't used DropBox in a year, so we are closing your account". The cost of storing data long-term is non-zero. How would Filecoin offer free storage? > No more "This video has been demonetized for all advertisers in our network." YouTube creators want community guidelines. They don't always like the way that they are interpreted and enforced. I'm sure a small minority wants to build something where they can upload absolutely anything without being censored. For those folks there is Gab.ai. It will never become mainstream though and the advertisers with big budgets will opt out. > Limewire, Bittorent, Popcorn Time, DC++, Napster, Kazaa Users chose Netflix and other centralized streaming services because of their ease of use. Also, copyright enforcement may have played a small role. Some users were claiming that they weren't using the above software to download pirated content. That was a bunch of bullshit. 2) > Decentralized peer2peer content delivery is currently owned by centralized players, like Akamai. I see no reason why it could not work when it is owned by its users. There's no reason why it couldn't work, but there's also no business need driving it. 3) Once an account is compromised in a trustless environment there is no way for the owner to take ownership of that account again. Also, in a trustless environment it's always possible for A) a smart contract to be hacked and B) a bug in the virtual machine to be exploited. Both centralized and decentralized face security issues. 4) They will still be contentious though. Look at Bitcoin. Imagine the last election but applied to software. It's not going to end pretty and unlike a normal company people in the community may not "move on." 5) There may be services in the future, but that would be anathema to the movement. The cryptocurrency apologists want each individual to manage their private keys. They would argue that 1) if you don't have control of your private keys you do not have control of your cryptocurrency 2) it's centralization. 6) This didn't address my criticism. There is no proof that anything like this is even remotely possible.

rifung 9y ago

This is merely a made up scenario and not a prediction but.. The bitcoin bubble could burst as all the people who only bought it thinking it would just keep going up panic and sell. Nobody wants cryptocurrencies anymore after this event and the negative connotation of anything related to cryptocurrencies/blockchain is so strong that nobody cares to do anything with it anymore and it just dies.

DSingularity 9y ago
Yeah. I’ve always thought if there was one thing that might kill it is all the manipulation and Pump and dumps that are happening. It’s not a free market and if people get burned hard, they’ll never come back.

JustAnotherPat 9y ago

What impact exactly? It's not up to people to disprove that bitcoin won't take over the world, when proponents fail to come up with viable use cases.

nostrademons 9y ago

I don't suppose you remember the last P2P bubble, which started with Napster in 1999 and effectively ended when Mark Zuckerburg decided Facebook was a better bet than WireHog in 2004? That also was a period of incredible excitement and real action - within 5 years, we got Napster, Gnutella, FreeNet, Kazaa, Audiogalaxy, Bittorrent, and Skype, along with lots of little programs that nobody's heard of (among them Red Swoosh, Travis Kalanick's first startup, and WireHog, the product that Facebook almost became) and academic research projects like Chord and Kademlia. The recording industry was being eviscerated - it did manage to kill Tower Records - and everyone was saying that movies would be next, and that P2P technology (with no central server, no single point of failure, and nobody to sue or imprison) would lead to the downfall of nation states and dictatorships and a fundamental change in the power balance of the world. It did change the world, in that Tower Records is still dead, nobody buys albums anymore, and peoples' music tastes have diverged markedly. But the change everyone wanted - where power devolves from government entities and big corporations to ordinary people like you and I - never happened. Instead, the public lost interest. Instead of decentralized systems like IRC and Jabber, they got on Facebook. Instead of censorship-resistant systems like FreeNet, they got the Great Firewall of China. Instead of easy music sharing like Napster and Audiogalaxy, they got streaming services like iTunes and Spotify. Change came, but it just meant replacing one set of overlords with another. It's very likely the same will happen with Bitcoin & Blockchain. It already is - that's what the article is about.

majani 9y ago

It might just settle in a tiny corner of the web eventually. This is not the first wave of excitement about decentralisation. I remember there was a similar wave of excitement with torrents and decentralised file storage, but convenience and regulation helped centralised storage to win. If I'm to bet it'll be the same case with cryptocurrency