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It is interesting that even in an article like this that they still say things like "for all its potential, blockchain is still in its early days." It is sticki

by nwah1 9y ago

It is interesting that even in an article like this that they still say things like "for all its potential, blockchain is still in its early days." It is sticking with the unfounded assumption that it will be a success in the future, if only it is given more time. In technological terms, it is old. Innumerable efforts have been attempted, yielding almost no fruit. At what point are the fundamental assumptions going to be questioned?

hudon 9y ago
I think the fundamental assumption is that "Satoshi invented a useful solution to decentralized consensus". What people don't realize is that Satoshi's solution only works if two assumptions hold true: 1. Mining is decentralized: If mining is centralized than relying on proof-of-work for consensus is waste since the centralized entity controls the blockchain anyway. 2. Consensus rules don't change: If you see the threat of #1 and so take power away from miners (like Bitcoin has done), then you cannot ever change the consensus ruleset because aside from proof-of-work, Satoshi did not give any solution to the problem of choosing between 2 chains that have slightly different consensus rules. If you change the consensus ruleset (ie. make any changes where 2 nodes disagree on if a block is valid or not), then you need an oracle to tell you which chain to choose. We've seen this when Core developers chose the 0.7 Bitcoin chain in 2013 and when Vitalik chose the forked Ethereum chain in 2016. At the end of the day, the blockchain's decentralization is a myth because it relies on false assumptions. Satoshi invented a Rube Goldberg machine that is currently using as much electricity as a medium-sized country (and also enabling things like money laundering, drug trafficking, etc.).
- darawk 9y ago
  It's pretty clear that neither of those things are actual problems, though. There are plenty of issues with crypto-currencies - those just aren't it.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- mirekrusin 9y ago
  PoW is just one of available consensus algorithms. Blockchain doesn’t imply decentralised consensus, you can run it on paxos, raft, authority round or something else, especially for internal, private or semi-private networks. What you get is trail log with proofs that’s immutable and strongly protected against temper.
  - hudon 9y ago
    If your definition of "blockchain" is any distributed database with signed rows and a public read-only API, it's miles away from what Satoshi was talking about... Why don't you just call it a "distributed database with signed entries" or something.
    - dilyevsky 9y ago
      or simply "git"
      - majewsky 9y ago
        When meeting my company's Head of Blockchain (not sure if the pun is intended) a while ago, I asked him if git would qualify as blockchain technology. He replied that "blockchain is not a technology, It's a paradigm shift". Literally. That statement was so absurd I didn't even know what to say, so it worked out well for him.
        s73v3r_ 9y ago
        That is exactly the kind of thing I would expect to hear from a "Head of Blockchain". Your company made a great hire, and they will clearly push the boundaries of marketing bullshit with regard to blockchain.
        radicalbyte 9y ago
        This is exactly what's driving my skepticism. The people who I've met who are most vocal about "blockchain" are also the ones who know little to nothing about the algorithm itself (and algorithms in general).
- yxhuvud 9y ago
  No, the fundamental assumption is that distributed consensus in itself is useful. So far, there are some applications (databases), but for the stuff they are using the blockchain for, not so much.
  - KirinDave 9y ago
    If distributed trustless consensus is useful, there are cheaper ways to get it than PoW mining. It's just that most folks don't understand them. The principle value of Bitcoin as a protocol is its incredible (even detrimental, from a technical perspective) simplicity.
    - SkyMarshal 9y ago
      Are there other means of distributed trustless consensus as secure as PoW? Secure being the operative word here. Lots of attempts, but none yet convincingly as or more secure.
      - narrator 9y ago
        People who are not crypto-anarchists don't realize that the only reason for proof of work is so you don't have to trust anyone. If there is trust, a centralized database is better in every way vs. Blockchain.
        KirinDave 9y ago
        People who do not read modern research don't realize lots of the things they think are true about the state of research are totally false. They also think that it's Proof of Work that provides a lack of trust. While that's involved, what's actually more meaningful is the demand to quickly select a "profitable" branch to mine and re-mine on. That can exist in PoS as well.
      - QML 9y ago
        Nakamoto consensus isn't the only protocol that exists; there's also things like Raft and Paxos with different tradeoffs.
- jcoffland 9y ago
  > If you change the consensus ruleset...then you need an oracle to tell you which chain to choose. What are you talking about? The rule to choose the correct chain is well defined and simple. The longest chain, i.e. the one with the most work done, is the correct chain.
  - hudon 9y ago
    I'm not sure if you've spoken to any Bitcoin developers recently, but they'll tell you you're wrong and that it is the valid chain with the most work, not the chain with the most work. They'll then tell you what valid means. Some developers would agree with you though, like Gavin Andresen [0]. Either way, you end up with either centralized miners deciding the fate of the chain, or centralized developers deciding the fate of the chain. Both outcomes are contrary to what Satoshi envisioned. [0] http://gavinandresen.ninja/a-definition-of-bitcoin http://gavinandresen.ninja/a-definition-of-bitcoin
    - jcoffland 9y ago
      That's the beauty of it. It does not matter what Blockstream says. The longest chain is Bitcoin.
      - spookthesunset 9y ago
        > The longest chain is Bitcoin. Useless pedantry that doesn't even map into real world use. The real world has shown your definition is incorrect. Ethereum forked. Which ethereum fork is the "correct" one? Bitcoin forked. Which one is the correct one? Depends on who you ask...
      - makomk 9y ago
        A sufficiently large miner could, right now, create a block which created a million bitcoins from nowhere and gave those to them and it would - for a while at least - be the longest chain. No other clients would accept it, of course, but by your definition the chain where someone just made themselves a billionaire would be Bitcoin.
    - 9y ago
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago
  > Mining is decentralized Cryptocurrency mining is as close as one can get to a theoretical free market in the real world. Free markets have known modes of failure [1]. One of these is where first-mover advantage and economies of scale combine to produce a barrier to entry; the result is oligopoly or monopoly. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_failure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_failure
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - xapata 9y ago
    And availability of cheap inputs, like cheap electricity.
    - lisper 9y ago
      Actually, it's the exact opposite. The security of a blockchain is fundamentally dependent on mining being expensive. That is the only defense against a 51% attack. Cheap energy just drives up consumption to the point where mining is expensive enough to deter attacks. This is ultimately what I think will sink blockchain as a medium of exchange (not necessarily as a store of value). By its very nature it cannot be cheap, so TTPs will always be able to beat it on price.
      - bunderbunder 9y ago
        I'm not even sure that mining being expensive is a great defense against a 51% attack. If things do end up being an oligopoly, then any one of the members of that oligopoly will only have a relatively small sprint between their current position and a 51% attack. And quite a few options for how to attempt such a sprint.
      - xapata 9y ago
        I meant that the variation in electricity costs harms the reputation of the blockchain. Work needs to be approximately the same difficulty for everyone.
- zanny 9y ago
  I disagree with 1, because the real controller in any cryptocurrency is the software users of the coin are running. You could have trillions in mining hardware but that doesn't matter a bit if a popular implementation changes the mining algorithm to no longer work on your hardware and the userbase starts using that hard fork. Its the problem that the advocates for larger blocksizes in BTC ran into. So long as the ecosystem itself was predominantly going to stay on the bitcoin core implementation, the advocates for change couldn't force it. Eventually they just hard forked into BCH, while the more popular original chain keeps on going. That also means that nothing is really decentralized unless you can cause sea change amongst all participants in a cryptocurrency - if you disagree with what the most common implementation is doing, you can't do squat about it, and commit access is never decentralized or democratized. Theres always someone with the master key to the repo. And we have seen plenty of evidence that once established unseating a popular implementation of any crypto is nigh-impossible, regardless of what the developers do.
- brightball 9y ago
  But one of the biggest selling points of Bitcoin itself was mathematically limited supply. A new cryptocurrency appearing every day fundamentally undermines the value proposition. Blockchain may have value as a decentralized ledger in other areas, but “lots of blockchain based currencies” aren’t really one of them since it’s self-sabotaging.
  - chrisco255 9y ago
    Not really. Network effects matter. Otherwise we would see social networks and other free services replaced on the regular.
    - paulgb 9y ago
      > Otherwise we would see social networks and other free services replaced on the regular. Don't we? I can think of a dozen or more social networks of one sort or another that I've belonged to in the last decade or so.
      - chrisco255 9y ago
        And how many of those have the market cap of Facebook?
        k_sh 9y ago
        From 2007: "Will MySpace Ever Lose Its Monopoly?"[1] Past performance does not beget future success. [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2007/feb/08/business.comment https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2007/feb/08/business....
        varjag 9y ago
        2007 was 11 years ago. That's glacial on tech timescale.
        adventured 9y ago
- syshum 9y ago
  >and also enabling things like money laundering, drug trafficking, etc. And that is bad?
- cgmg 9y ago
  > (and also enabling things like money laundering, drug trafficking, etc.). If you're trying to take a dig at blockchain technology for its decentralized nature and ability to circumvent government controls, you should be aware that this is considered a good thing. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16702684 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16702684, for instance. The recent SESTA/FOSTA debacle is one example of why such decentralized networks are needed.
- dozzie 9y ago
  > I think the fundamental assumption is that "Satoshi invented a useful solution to decentralized consensus". And this very assumption is so untrue. What Satoshi invented is document timestamping protocol, not consensus protocol.
- nickbauman 9y ago
  Aside from the fact that proof-of-work on a world scale utterly defies the CAP theorem, there has never been an economic system that can scale to the level of, say, one order of magnitude close to ubiquity where there are no trusted intermediaries. Human civilizations just won't organize this way.
- elmar 9y ago
  >(and also enabling things like money laundering, drug trafficking, etc.) "Darknet markets are no longer a major use of Bitcoin, accounting for less than 1% of Bitcoin transactions in 2017" https://blog.chainalysis.com/crypto-crime/ https://blog.chainalysis.com/crypto-crime/
  - rootusrootus 9y ago
    Mainly because known markets were shut down (maybe some new ones have cropped up which are not in that tracker?) and the dominant use of bitcoin transactions currently is wild speculation.
- wpietri 9y ago
  > "Satoshi invented a useful solution to decentralized consensus". I think that even if decentralized consensus is workable, it's irrelevant for Wall Street projects because these organizations already have experience creating strong trust relationships and useful governance for collaboration (e.g., traditional contracts).
- joering2 9y ago
  > and also enabling things like money laundering, drug trafficking, etc. At this point, I don't worry about those; criminals would operate with or without Bitcoin and we have government agencies dealing with those; I'm more concern about suicide rate that will spike due to BTC/altcoins losing 80% of value. I have too many acquaintances on my Twitter that last summer were showing me "this cool blue app that helps make 15% a day" and now they remain silent. I tried to contact two of them via cell and it goes nowhere. Looking at BTC/ETH/altcoins charts, I can only image brain-halt it caused so many people that we putting second/third mortage on their house just to "invest in a blue iphone app" and many cashing out their 401k just to be lest with 5% of their money not even year later.
- speedplane 9y ago
  There is another, more social, assumption he is making: value that is stored on mathematical concepts (e.g., blockchain) is more appealing as value that is stored on more traditional concepts (e.g., reputation, trust). The social question is the more interesting one. Tech history has suggested that people slowly but surely gravitate to more open systems, but asking folks to hold their life savings in digital currencies that rely on mathamatical promises completly foreign to the average user seems like quite a stretch. It does not exactly help that just about day there is a news article of some new data breach of an online system.
akerro 9y ago
I have 1 Bitcoin therefore blockchain will succeed.
- _eht 9y ago
  Hodl
- aje403 9y ago
  The very worst part of this is these are elected officials too
- mkirklions 9y ago
  Bitcoin needs blockchain to verify that a bitcoin is authentic. I have no idea why a company would use blockchain for logistics or file storage considering how its massively expensive to constantly pay miners for transactions. My centralized server can do everything needed for logistics or file storage. Benefits of blockchain are overblown. There are uses, but centralized servers are really good.
  - bringtheaction 9y ago
    You can have a blockchain without miners. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-stake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-stake Now I agree that a lot of ideas for how blockchain will be used are just unnecessary and stupid, but there are some good ones as well. You mentioned file storage but actually I think blockchain could be useful for this. Allow me to elaborate. I don’t want to rely on Dropbox or Google or any other single company for the long-term storageof my data. And I don’t want to accidentally upload unencrypted data. And I don’t want a single company to decide what platforms they will support. I want an open protocol and a nice open source client. Different people have different wishes. For me that would be far more attractive than the centralized storage you are suggesting, because it’s not just about the servers and the storage it’s also about the people and the software ecosystem around it. And besides, if I gave like hundreds of GB of data to one company then they could easily start charging me more in the future and I might not be able to do much about it. With a distributed system I think there is a better chance that competition might drive prices down more. And that’s just one kind of use-case. There are more as well. I think blockchain in general is cool and also I like projects that aim to make worldwide payment be really fast and cheap and for the banks to hold less power over my money.
arisAlexis 9y ago
governmemts are thinking of putting assets and laws on Blockchain, stock exchanges are waiting for scalability to start putting everything on the blockchain. Immutable government records already exist. Where do you base your argument?
- seanalltogether 9y ago
  If there is a definitive source of trust (ie. the government) then a blockchain is a very inefficient mechanism for distribution.
  - __s 9y ago
    Don't trust the government
  - arisAlexis 9y ago
    yes very little corruption in governments worldwide and records are never counterfeited. I agree
    - namdnay 9y ago
      But if the government is corrupt they'll just say that the original transaction was invalid for X Y Z reasons and carry on... the truth being obvious has never been a problem for corrupt regimes
    - visarga 9y ago
      The government will outmine everyone and change the records.
    - seanalltogether 9y ago
      Are you suggesting governments (corrupt or not) would consider handing over the signing authority for legal processes to external anonymous parties?
    - smileysteve 9y ago
      Git provides centralized version tracking that can be cloned easily -- no miners required. And authenticity, while not truly unique is likely unique enough.
malvosenior 9y ago
> yielding almost no fruit Bitcoin and Ethereum are "almost no fruit"? Combined they're sitting at ~$165 billion dollars in created value.
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  > Combined they're sitting at ~$165 billion dollars in created value. Huh? Bitcoin and Ehtereum are purely speculative assets, they have not enabled any new production or efficient distribution, they have not increased economic activity. They aren't even marginally useful in electronics production like gold is. This is like saying printing dollars creates value (though the dollar is at least useful as an instrument of trade).
  - malvosenior 9y ago
    > they have not enabled any new production or efficient distribution You know of another way to transfer massive amounts of money around the globe without middle men? This claim that cryptocurrency offers no value is completely ignorant of the most basic and fundamental properties of the technology.
    - darpa_escapee 9y ago
      > You know of another way to transfer massive amounts of money around the globe without middle men No, because I have to go through various middlemen to transfer Bitcoin and turn them into real money.
    - x220 9y ago
      You do need middlemen. The middleman is whatever service you must use to convert btc or eth to local currency which will actually be accepted for payments.
      - evnn 9y ago
        No. You don't need "local currency". With widespread adoption you can just pay sellers directly with cryptocurrency.
barnabee 9y ago
It's younger than most technology is when it becomes successful. Much younger when you realise you think about the age of the concepts, designs, algorithms, etc. that eventually become successful rather than a specific attempt at implementation.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago
  Imagine if a bunch of investors walked into the Homebrew Computing Club [1] in 1976 and offered to buy anything and everything its members made for $1 million. With the benefit of hindsight, blockchain is the story of a neat database technology trashing its near-term prospects by marketing itself as a currency. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homebrew_Computer_Club https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homebrew_Computer_Club
  - darawk 9y ago
    Blockchain is a shit database concept. It's use as a currency is one of its best uses. This idea that blockchains are a good database is an absurd myth. Blockchains are useful specifically for doing distributed consensus, and almost nothing else. Currencies are one of the best applications of distributed adversarial consensus. There are others, but currency is pretty near the top of the list.
    - asimpletune 9y ago
      Can you elaborate why you think it’s a terrible DB?
      - simias 9y ago
        Why is it not? It's slow, expensive and wasteful. You could host a regular MySQL on commodity hardware that could handle ten times the rate of transactions of the bitcoin blockchain. You could publish signed dumps publicly for people to replicate and monitor as they see fit. The only interesting feature of bitcoin is the trustless consensus but it's not as useful or revolutionary as the hype would have you believe. In particular it's only working as intended as long as you remain withing the digital world, as soon as meatspace is involved you need trusted third parties and arbiters. "Blochain technology" whatever that is, is a solution in search of a problem.
cvaidya1986 9y ago
There are no guarantees only probabilities.
xtracto 9y ago
I think about 70% of blockchain related stuff is hype. However, there have been blockchain related projects that have been useful: In Mexico for example: http://iireporter.com/amis-and-ibm-collaborate-on-blockchain-protype-for-mexican-insurance-industry/ http://iireporter.com/amis-and-ibm-collaborate-on-blockchain... I saw a very good presentation regarding this HyperLedger project, and IMO this kind of projects are the ones that will form the future of blockchain technology.
- icebraining 9y ago
  There's zero need for a blockchain in that case; all you need is for each insurance company to public a hash-chained log of their policies. The closest example is the CT logs, but every single invoicing software in my country was doing that before the Bitcoin paper was published, as part of the mandatory implementation of SAF-T: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAF-T https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAF-T
- wpietri 9y ago
  This is an announcement of a future prototype. It is literally not useful. It is hype. I'm all for people trying things out; prototypes are how we learn. So good for them for trying it and seeing what happens; maybe one day it will be useful. But it's maddening that people keep confusing marketing-driven press releases for actual delivered utility.
  - xtracto 9y ago
    The reason I put that link was to provide some context. I know one person in IBM (here in Mexico) related to this project in Mexico and the project is already working in production. Don't be dense.
    - wpietri 9y ago
      I'm not "being dense". Every time I ask for examples of a blockchain project actually delivering value in a way that a simple database or checksummed transaction log wouldn't, I get pointed at proposed projects by people who have seen exciting presentations. Every time. You were responding in a contradictory fashion to somebody saying, "Innumerable efforts have been attempted, yielding almost no fruit." The only thing that could usefully contradict that is proof of something yielding fruit. A press release isn't. Neither is the fact that they've managed to get the prototype running. There are a lot of blockchain prototypes running. Many of them are proposed and built by consulting companies that get paid by the hour, whether or not any actual business value is delivered. IBM has such an enormous conflict of interest here that they're just not a reliable source. I'm sure you're friend's sincere, but there are plenty of sincere blockchain proponents. There were plenty of smart, sincere people who believed in 3D TV, Google Glass, and the Zune as well.
lifeisstillgood 9y ago
The idea of a neutral "third party"(!) operating a globally available transaction ledger, with standardised APIs and agreed meanings to contracts and data structures is appealing to everyone in every sector. the sizzle of blockchain is enticing, it solves huge problems that are darn well intractable without "disruption". for example in finance the global clearing system is an embarrassing hodge podge that only benefits the fraudulent and the incompetent - and replacing that completely over night has enormous attractions for pretty much every actor. but ... it is really a silver bullet - if it was so easy to replace global clearing, to get everyone agreeing on one representation of a trade or an instrument or a hundred other things i honestly never understood, if it was that easy it would have happened. this sort of sector wide cohesion comes with either one dominant player or many years of government level negotiations The web only blew past everyone in most areas because there were no global communications between parties at all in the areas the web now dominates (cf social media vs international shipping documentation)
- tomatocracy 9y ago
  I don't see how blockchain fixes any of the clearing/settlements issues in a way which is better than a trusted third party (or which doesn't involve trusted third parties). Let's take settlements. Some instruments are (still, in this day and age) ultimately issued in bearer form (ie, if you have the piece of paper, you own the bond/shares/title to the land/whatever, just like cash). This has a number of problems (you'd be surprised how many people lose bearer instruments). There's a similar, but less serious, problem with requirements for paper certificates in registered form. The only real way to fix those is to change the law so that instruments can be dealt with in purely electronic registered form and the bearer instruments don't exist to start with. Some jurisdictions haven't changed the law to allow this so we are stuck with legal title being bearer or paper certificate based. Blockchain by itself as such can't fix the problem of "what happens if you lose the instrument" and can't fix the problem of "what happens if you refuse to hand over the instrument in performance of a valid contract". A trusted third party (nominee/custodian/etc), by contrast, can fix some of this pretty well (trusted third party keeps the instrument in a vault and issues its own electronic registered form instruments which confer "good enough" title most of the time).
discoMAN 9y ago
Crypto does not equal blockchain. Blockchain has a huge number of potential industry uses other than cryptocurrency. IBM has done a lot of work with companies making blockchain products that don't involve cryptocurrencies. When multiple companies are in a shared relationship they can benefit greatly from the tech. There are government regulation opportunities keeping track of sales and trades on regulated public markets. Crypto is just the craze that got the word out. Even calling crypto a failure feels like an over statement.
- the_new_guy_29 9y ago
  Examples ? Blockchain is a technology in need of a problem to solve.. I dont know any commercial usage outside of cryptocurrencies.
  - throwawaylolx 9y ago
    Examples: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16708567 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16708567
  - Nuzzerino 9y ago
    Here's a graphic that lists some examples. Most of them will fail, but these are still good-faith projects nonetheless. https://imgur.com/a/ShRoW https://imgur.com/a/ShRoW
- pgwhalen 9y ago
  What does blockchain provide for those use cases over a simpler distributed database?
the_cat_kittles 9y ago
by me, now, and in the past. and by lots of other people. but websites and tv probably get a lot more views for articles that talk about people getting rich quick. i bet alot of people who have followed bitcoin since the early days are pretty neutral on it, or even negative.
djyaz1200 9y ago
Good point. Having a strong 3rd party intermediary moderating/backing transactions is a feature not a bug. This is why people bank with JP Morgan and similar huge banks. Although they charge fees you do get something for the money. They are governed by laws, have physical locations, people to talk to, fraud prevention and raw financial, legal, and regulatory power. I have no love for them but I believe they will guard my money effectively.
- chrisco255 9y ago
  Did 2008 teach us nothing?
  - michaelchisari 9y ago
    By cryptocurrency standards, 2008 was any given Tuesday.
    - mjmj 9y ago
      Trusting banks, not comparing crashes.
      - abakker 9y ago
        2008 was not really a question of trusting banks in a way that our savings were harmed. It was more that our investments were harmed. Separating bank liability for either of those things is hard, but it is not a simple case to assign all the blame on them.
      - vkou 9y ago
        The problem in 2008 was the investment, not the deposit arm of banks. Bitcoin has had problems with both the investment, and the deposit arms. Most ICOs are pure fraud, and i've lost count of the number of robbed exchanges.
- ftlio 9y ago
  You're probably referring to a strong 3rd party intermediary as the aggregate of our financial system when you refer to its regulatory power here, but that it reads like the bank itself has regulatory power is the critique of money provided by Bitcoin in a nutshell. Regulatory capture IS the problem of scalability with our monetary system. Bitcoin exists to prove this.
kerng 9y ago
BTC alone has a market cap of more then 100 billion USD, hence your statement and premisse is inaccurate. Wall Street firms just attempt to use it in places where it's not useful and where there are simple alternatives.
- 0xFFFF0000 9y ago
  Yeah, I agree the way Wall Street approaches this seemed rather defensive. They are trying to appear on top of things, while in reality still are not sure how to tackle bitcoin long term.
tCfD 9y ago
It took centuries for the fundamental hermetic assumptions of alchemy to be questioned, and it had to come from 'insiders' (like Boyle and Newton) rather than total skeptics. Even then it was never refuted in any official sense, it just sort of faded out of fashion as its surrogate children, the sciences, took over more and more of its academic spotlight. Blockchain-ism, the alchemy of the internet age, will probably have to follow the same arc, though sped up by an order of magnitude thanks to the much improved knowledge-sharing network of the present day.
jesusthatsgreat 9y ago
> In technological terms, it is old. TCP was created in the mid 70's. The internet as we know it didn't offer the average user much value until the mid 90's and even then it was a very small amount of the population capable of using it / benefiting from it. Electric cars were around in the late 1800's. In the early 1900's they were on a par with gasoline / steam powered car sales. It has taken us well over 100 years to get to a stage where they're considered a viable option again for most people again... Bottom line - technology morphs over time so long as there are people passionate about it and continuously working to improve it. There are literally thousands of developers working full time in the blockchain space and it's one of the hottest growth areas around in technology in terms of developer mindshare. It's not going to die any time soon, regardless of what price Bitcoin is.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago
  > The internet as we know it didn't offer the average user much value until the mid 90's The Internet was useful to academic, financial, government and military users in the 1970s [1]. It was built and iterated to solve real problems. Real users' inputs, many of whom were experts in their fields, were incorporated into its design. [1] http://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1970s/ http://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1970s/
  - adventured 9y ago
    Not to mention corporate email was popular in the 1980s, long before the Web reached a large number of traditional consumers. Even the Queen of England sent an email across Arpanet back in 1976. Microsoft Mail came along in the late 1980s.
- bunderbunder 9y ago
  > TCP was created in the mid 70's. The internet as we know it didn't offer the average user much value until the mid 90's and even then it was a very small amount of the population capable of using it / benefiting from it. Using it directly. I don't personally own any equipment that speaks ATM, but I benefit from the existence of networks that use that protocol all time. Heck, I doubt I'll ever touch a Bloomberg terminal, and I'm not entirely sure if their existence really benefits me at all, directly or indirectly, but that doesn't mean financial companies can't easily find uses for them.
Alex3917 9y ago
> In technological terms, it is old. No it's not. It took double entry accounting hundreds of years to spread around the world, why would you expect triple entry accounting to take over any faster? We already know it's going to succeed because it's objectively better by a very significant margin, but that doesn't mean it's not going to take decades to do so.
- spookthesunset 9y ago
  > It took double entry accounting hundreds of years to spread around the world, why would you expect triple entry accounting to take over any faster? Here in modern times information moves orders of magnitude faster than when double entry accounting was invented. By modern standards, blockchain is ancient and has yet to move beyond its current use as the world's greatest platform for financial fraud ever invented.
  - Alex3917 9y ago
    > Here in modern times information moves orders of magnitude faster than when double entry accounting was invented. The speed of information is about as relevant as the cost of tea in China. What matters is how fast people actually change their minds, which isn't any faster. All of the older generation basically just has to die before the new best practices can get widely adopted. If anything change likely happens more slowly these days because people are living longer.
    - spookthesunset 9y ago
      Blockchain shysters speak in such vague terms that they are effectively saying absolutely nothing while still reeling in the rubes to buy into their scams. Case in point. Your post.
cgmg 9y ago
> In technological terms, it is old. Doubtful. In what sense is it 'old'? In the words of Roy Amara: We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.
staticassertion 9y ago
> In technological terms, it is old. Really? This doesn't seem true at all. I feel like it takes decades for many good ideas in tech to get traction, usually going through many, many failed iterations.
- lazaroclapp 9y ago
  As We May Think[1], anyone? Or self-driving cars, which go back to at least 1984 in CMU, and yet are still "[near] future tech" now. Neural Nets were a half-century old idea[2] before they became actually useful... I mean, the question is not "Is Bitcoin as implemented by following the original whitepaper going to be the future of mankind?" It is whether or not there is something big in that whole area (blockchains, decentralized tokens of exchange, PoW/PoS/etc) and, if so, how big? Of course, for a lot of people, the question is "By, say 2025, is my BTC going to make me rich or is it is not even going to be worth the bits it is encoded in?" Equally hard question to answer, but much less interesting. The current cycle of blockchain furor could all end up badly (I hope it doesn't, but who knows), and yet that won't mean the tech has no future. Now, it could be like VR/AR/AGI, which are always the future, of course ;) [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m... [2] McCulloch, Warren; Walter Pitts (1943). "A Logical Calculus of Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity". Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics
bitxbitxbitcoin 9y ago
There are some fruits that are technically impressive and expandable even without much mainstream use or attention: e.g. Time stamping.
antiics 9y ago
The first release of Unix was in 1970. Linus started working on Linux in 1991. Red Hat went public in 1999. In technological terms, it is actually quite young.
hammock 9y ago
Is blockchain old, or is this a classic case of the trough of disillusionment? https://www.google.com/search?q=trough+of+disillusionment&safe=off&rlz=1C5CHFA_enUS778US778&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiJnKryxpLaAhUT2GMKHfX_DZYQ_AUICigB&biw=1200&bih=586#imgrc=_ https://www.google.com/search?q=trough+of+disillusionment&sa...
neom 9y ago
I cannot agree with you more. I'd actually love to chat more about this so feel free to reach out if you're interested. I work on building new technology for municipal governments, and the last 9 months have consisted of cities asking me about my blockchain strategy. I'm still struggling to explain a distributed ledger does not solve any of the problem they describe. Yet "cutting edge technologists" have told them it's the most important thing for distributed data. I ask what they think about SQLite and they ask me what SQL is.

by nwah1 9y ago

hudon 9y ago

I think the fundamental assumption is that "Satoshi invented a useful solution to decentralized consensus". What people don't realize is that Satoshi's solution only works if two assumptions hold true: 1. Mining is decentralized: If mining is centralized than relying on proof-of-work for consensus is waste since the centralized entity controls the blockchain anyway. 2. Consensus rules don't change: If you see the threat of #1 and so take power away from miners (like Bitcoin has done), then you cannot ever change the consensus ruleset because aside from proof-of-work, Satoshi did not give any solution to the problem of choosing between 2 chains that have slightly different consensus rules. If you change the consensus ruleset (ie. make any changes where 2 nodes disagree on if a block is valid or not), then you need an oracle to tell you which chain to choose. We've seen this when Core developers chose the 0.7 Bitcoin chain in 2013 and when Vitalik chose the forked Ethereum chain in 2016. At the end of the day, the blockchain's decentralization is a myth because it relies on false assumptions. Satoshi invented a Rube Goldberg machine that is currently using as much electricity as a medium-sized country (and also enabling things like money laundering, drug trafficking, etc.).

darawk 9y ago
It's pretty clear that neither of those things are actual problems, though. There are plenty of issues with crypto-currencies - those just aren't it.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
mirekrusin 9y ago
PoW is just one of available consensus algorithms. Blockchain doesn’t imply decentralised consensus, you can run it on paxos, raft, authority round or something else, especially for internal, private or semi-private networks. What you get is trail log with proofs that’s immutable and strongly protected against temper.
- hudon 9y ago
  If your definition of "blockchain" is any distributed database with signed rows and a public read-only API, it's miles away from what Satoshi was talking about... Why don't you just call it a "distributed database with signed entries" or something.
  - dilyevsky 9y ago
    or simply "git"
    - majewsky 9y ago
      When meeting my company's Head of Blockchain (not sure if the pun is intended) a while ago, I asked him if git would qualify as blockchain technology. He replied that "blockchain is not a technology, It's a paradigm shift". Literally. That statement was so absurd I didn't even know what to say, so it worked out well for him.
      - s73v3r_ 9y ago
        That is exactly the kind of thing I would expect to hear from a "Head of Blockchain". Your company made a great hire, and they will clearly push the boundaries of marketing bullshit with regard to blockchain.
      - radicalbyte 9y ago
        This is exactly what's driving my skepticism. The people who I've met who are most vocal about "blockchain" are also the ones who know little to nothing about the algorithm itself (and algorithms in general).
yxhuvud 9y ago
No, the fundamental assumption is that distributed consensus in itself is useful. So far, there are some applications (databases), but for the stuff they are using the blockchain for, not so much.
- KirinDave 9y ago
  If distributed trustless consensus is useful, there are cheaper ways to get it than PoW mining. It's just that most folks don't understand them. The principle value of Bitcoin as a protocol is its incredible (even detrimental, from a technical perspective) simplicity.
  - SkyMarshal 9y ago
    Are there other means of distributed trustless consensus as secure as PoW? Secure being the operative word here. Lots of attempts, but none yet convincingly as or more secure.
    - narrator 9y ago
      People who are not crypto-anarchists don't realize that the only reason for proof of work is so you don't have to trust anyone. If there is trust, a centralized database is better in every way vs. Blockchain.
      - KirinDave 9y ago
        People who do not read modern research don't realize lots of the things they think are true about the state of research are totally false. They also think that it's Proof of Work that provides a lack of trust. While that's involved, what's actually more meaningful is the demand to quickly select a "profitable" branch to mine and re-mine on. That can exist in PoS as well.
    - QML 9y ago
      Nakamoto consensus isn't the only protocol that exists; there's also things like Raft and Paxos with different tradeoffs.
jcoffland 9y ago
> If you change the consensus ruleset...then you need an oracle to tell you which chain to choose. What are you talking about? The rule to choose the correct chain is well defined and simple. The longest chain, i.e. the one with the most work done, is the correct chain.
- hudon 9y ago
  I'm not sure if you've spoken to any Bitcoin developers recently, but they'll tell you you're wrong and that it is the valid chain with the most work, not the chain with the most work. They'll then tell you what valid means. Some developers would agree with you though, like Gavin Andresen [0]. Either way, you end up with either centralized miners deciding the fate of the chain, or centralized developers deciding the fate of the chain. Both outcomes are contrary to what Satoshi envisioned. [0] http://gavinandresen.ninja/a-definition-of-bitcoin http://gavinandresen.ninja/a-definition-of-bitcoin
  - jcoffland 9y ago
    That's the beauty of it. It does not matter what Blockstream says. The longest chain is Bitcoin.
    - spookthesunset 9y ago
      > The longest chain is Bitcoin. Useless pedantry that doesn't even map into real world use. The real world has shown your definition is incorrect. Ethereum forked. Which ethereum fork is the "correct" one? Bitcoin forked. Which one is the correct one? Depends on who you ask...
    - makomk 9y ago
      A sufficiently large miner could, right now, create a block which created a million bitcoins from nowhere and gave those to them and it would - for a while at least - be the longest chain. No other clients would accept it, of course, but by your definition the chain where someone just made themselves a billionaire would be Bitcoin.
  - 9y ago
JumpCrisscross 9y ago
> Mining is decentralized Cryptocurrency mining is as close as one can get to a theoretical free market in the real world. Free markets have known modes of failure [1]. One of these is where first-mover advantage and economies of scale combine to produce a barrier to entry; the result is oligopoly or monopoly. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_failure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_failure
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- xapata 9y ago
  And availability of cheap inputs, like cheap electricity.
  - lisper 9y ago
    Actually, it's the exact opposite. The security of a blockchain is fundamentally dependent on mining being expensive. That is the only defense against a 51% attack. Cheap energy just drives up consumption to the point where mining is expensive enough to deter attacks. This is ultimately what I think will sink blockchain as a medium of exchange (not necessarily as a store of value). By its very nature it cannot be cheap, so TTPs will always be able to beat it on price.
    - bunderbunder 9y ago
      I'm not even sure that mining being expensive is a great defense against a 51% attack. If things do end up being an oligopoly, then any one of the members of that oligopoly will only have a relatively small sprint between their current position and a 51% attack. And quite a few options for how to attempt such a sprint.
    - xapata 9y ago
      I meant that the variation in electricity costs harms the reputation of the blockchain. Work needs to be approximately the same difficulty for everyone.
zanny 9y ago
I disagree with 1, because the real controller in any cryptocurrency is the software users of the coin are running. You could have trillions in mining hardware but that doesn't matter a bit if a popular implementation changes the mining algorithm to no longer work on your hardware and the userbase starts using that hard fork. Its the problem that the advocates for larger blocksizes in BTC ran into. So long as the ecosystem itself was predominantly going to stay on the bitcoin core implementation, the advocates for change couldn't force it. Eventually they just hard forked into BCH, while the more popular original chain keeps on going. That also means that nothing is really decentralized unless you can cause sea change amongst all participants in a cryptocurrency - if you disagree with what the most common implementation is doing, you can't do squat about it, and commit access is never decentralized or democratized. Theres always someone with the master key to the repo. And we have seen plenty of evidence that once established unseating a popular implementation of any crypto is nigh-impossible, regardless of what the developers do.
brightball 9y ago
But one of the biggest selling points of Bitcoin itself was mathematically limited supply. A new cryptocurrency appearing every day fundamentally undermines the value proposition. Blockchain may have value as a decentralized ledger in other areas, but “lots of blockchain based currencies” aren’t really one of them since it’s self-sabotaging.
- chrisco255 9y ago
  Not really. Network effects matter. Otherwise we would see social networks and other free services replaced on the regular.
  - paulgb 9y ago
    > Otherwise we would see social networks and other free services replaced on the regular. Don't we? I can think of a dozen or more social networks of one sort or another that I've belonged to in the last decade or so.
    - chrisco255 9y ago
      And how many of those have the market cap of Facebook?
      - k_sh 9y ago
        From 2007: "Will MySpace Ever Lose Its Monopoly?"[1] Past performance does not beget future success. [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2007/feb/08/business.comment https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2007/feb/08/business....
        varjag 9y ago
        2007 was 11 years ago. That's glacial on tech timescale.
        adventured 9y ago
syshum 9y ago
>and also enabling things like money laundering, drug trafficking, etc. And that is bad?
cgmg 9y ago
> (and also enabling things like money laundering, drug trafficking, etc.). If you're trying to take a dig at blockchain technology for its decentralized nature and ability to circumvent government controls, you should be aware that this is considered a good thing. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16702684 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16702684, for instance. The recent SESTA/FOSTA debacle is one example of why such decentralized networks are needed.
dozzie 9y ago
> I think the fundamental assumption is that "Satoshi invented a useful solution to decentralized consensus". And this very assumption is so untrue. What Satoshi invented is document timestamping protocol, not consensus protocol.
nickbauman 9y ago
Aside from the fact that proof-of-work on a world scale utterly defies the CAP theorem, there has never been an economic system that can scale to the level of, say, one order of magnitude close to ubiquity where there are no trusted intermediaries. Human civilizations just won't organize this way.
elmar 9y ago
>(and also enabling things like money laundering, drug trafficking, etc.) "Darknet markets are no longer a major use of Bitcoin, accounting for less than 1% of Bitcoin transactions in 2017" https://blog.chainalysis.com/crypto-crime/ https://blog.chainalysis.com/crypto-crime/
- rootusrootus 9y ago
  Mainly because known markets were shut down (maybe some new ones have cropped up which are not in that tracker?) and the dominant use of bitcoin transactions currently is wild speculation.
wpietri 9y ago
> "Satoshi invented a useful solution to decentralized consensus". I think that even if decentralized consensus is workable, it's irrelevant for Wall Street projects because these organizations already have experience creating strong trust relationships and useful governance for collaboration (e.g., traditional contracts).
joering2 9y ago
> and also enabling things like money laundering, drug trafficking, etc. At this point, I don't worry about those; criminals would operate with or without Bitcoin and we have government agencies dealing with those; I'm more concern about suicide rate that will spike due to BTC/altcoins losing 80% of value. I have too many acquaintances on my Twitter that last summer were showing me "this cool blue app that helps make 15% a day" and now they remain silent. I tried to contact two of them via cell and it goes nowhere. Looking at BTC/ETH/altcoins charts, I can only image brain-halt it caused so many people that we putting second/third mortage on their house just to "invest in a blue iphone app" and many cashing out their 401k just to be lest with 5% of their money not even year later.
speedplane 9y ago
There is another, more social, assumption he is making: value that is stored on mathematical concepts (e.g., blockchain) is more appealing as value that is stored on more traditional concepts (e.g., reputation, trust). The social question is the more interesting one. Tech history has suggested that people slowly but surely gravitate to more open systems, but asking folks to hold their life savings in digital currencies that rely on mathamatical promises completly foreign to the average user seems like quite a stretch. It does not exactly help that just about day there is a news article of some new data breach of an online system.

akerro 9y ago

I have 1 Bitcoin therefore blockchain will succeed.

_eht 9y ago
Hodl
aje403 9y ago
The very worst part of this is these are elected officials too
mkirklions 9y ago
Bitcoin needs blockchain to verify that a bitcoin is authentic. I have no idea why a company would use blockchain for logistics or file storage considering how its massively expensive to constantly pay miners for transactions. My centralized server can do everything needed for logistics or file storage. Benefits of blockchain are overblown. There are uses, but centralized servers are really good.
- bringtheaction 9y ago
  You can have a blockchain without miners. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-stake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-stake Now I agree that a lot of ideas for how blockchain will be used are just unnecessary and stupid, but there are some good ones as well. You mentioned file storage but actually I think blockchain could be useful for this. Allow me to elaborate. I don’t want to rely on Dropbox or Google or any other single company for the long-term storageof my data. And I don’t want to accidentally upload unencrypted data. And I don’t want a single company to decide what platforms they will support. I want an open protocol and a nice open source client. Different people have different wishes. For me that would be far more attractive than the centralized storage you are suggesting, because it’s not just about the servers and the storage it’s also about the people and the software ecosystem around it. And besides, if I gave like hundreds of GB of data to one company then they could easily start charging me more in the future and I might not be able to do much about it. With a distributed system I think there is a better chance that competition might drive prices down more. And that’s just one kind of use-case. There are more as well. I think blockchain in general is cool and also I like projects that aim to make worldwide payment be really fast and cheap and for the banks to hold less power over my money.

arisAlexis 9y ago

governmemts are thinking of putting assets and laws on Blockchain, stock exchanges are waiting for scalability to start putting everything on the blockchain. Immutable government records already exist. Where do you base your argument?

seanalltogether 9y ago
If there is a definitive source of trust (ie. the government) then a blockchain is a very inefficient mechanism for distribution.
- __s 9y ago
  Don't trust the government
- arisAlexis 9y ago
  yes very little corruption in governments worldwide and records are never counterfeited. I agree
  - namdnay 9y ago
    But if the government is corrupt they'll just say that the original transaction was invalid for X Y Z reasons and carry on... the truth being obvious has never been a problem for corrupt regimes
  - visarga 9y ago
    The government will outmine everyone and change the records.
  - seanalltogether 9y ago
    Are you suggesting governments (corrupt or not) would consider handing over the signing authority for legal processes to external anonymous parties?
  - smileysteve 9y ago
    Git provides centralized version tracking that can be cloned easily -- no miners required. And authenticity, while not truly unique is likely unique enough.

malvosenior 9y ago

> yielding almost no fruit Bitcoin and Ethereum are "almost no fruit"? Combined they're sitting at ~$165 billion dollars in created value.

seanmcdirmid 9y ago
> Combined they're sitting at ~$165 billion dollars in created value. Huh? Bitcoin and Ehtereum are purely speculative assets, they have not enabled any new production or efficient distribution, they have not increased economic activity. They aren't even marginally useful in electronics production like gold is. This is like saying printing dollars creates value (though the dollar is at least useful as an instrument of trade).
- malvosenior 9y ago
  > they have not enabled any new production or efficient distribution You know of another way to transfer massive amounts of money around the globe without middle men? This claim that cryptocurrency offers no value is completely ignorant of the most basic and fundamental properties of the technology.
  - darpa_escapee 9y ago
    > You know of another way to transfer massive amounts of money around the globe without middle men No, because I have to go through various middlemen to transfer Bitcoin and turn them into real money.
  - x220 9y ago
    You do need middlemen. The middleman is whatever service you must use to convert btc or eth to local currency which will actually be accepted for payments.
    - evnn 9y ago
      No. You don't need "local currency". With widespread adoption you can just pay sellers directly with cryptocurrency.

barnabee 9y ago

It's younger than most technology is when it becomes successful. Much younger when you realise you think about the age of the concepts, designs, algorithms, etc. that eventually become successful rather than a specific attempt at implementation.

JumpCrisscross 9y ago
Imagine if a bunch of investors walked into the Homebrew Computing Club [1] in 1976 and offered to buy anything and everything its members made for $1 million. With the benefit of hindsight, blockchain is the story of a neat database technology trashing its near-term prospects by marketing itself as a currency. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homebrew_Computer_Club https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homebrew_Computer_Club
- darawk 9y ago
  Blockchain is a shit database concept. It's use as a currency is one of its best uses. This idea that blockchains are a good database is an absurd myth. Blockchains are useful specifically for doing distributed consensus, and almost nothing else. Currencies are one of the best applications of distributed adversarial consensus. There are others, but currency is pretty near the top of the list.
  - asimpletune 9y ago
    Can you elaborate why you think it’s a terrible DB?
    - simias 9y ago
      Why is it not? It's slow, expensive and wasteful. You could host a regular MySQL on commodity hardware that could handle ten times the rate of transactions of the bitcoin blockchain. You could publish signed dumps publicly for people to replicate and monitor as they see fit. The only interesting feature of bitcoin is the trustless consensus but it's not as useful or revolutionary as the hype would have you believe. In particular it's only working as intended as long as you remain withing the digital world, as soon as meatspace is involved you need trusted third parties and arbiters. "Blochain technology" whatever that is, is a solution in search of a problem.

cvaidya1986 9y ago

There are no guarantees only probabilities.

xtracto 9y ago

I think about 70% of blockchain related stuff is hype. However, there have been blockchain related projects that have been useful: In Mexico for example: http://iireporter.com/amis-and-ibm-collaborate-on-blockchain-protype-for-mexican-insurance-industry/ http://iireporter.com/amis-and-ibm-collaborate-on-blockchain... I saw a very good presentation regarding this HyperLedger project, and IMO this kind of projects are the ones that will form the future of blockchain technology.

icebraining 9y ago
There's zero need for a blockchain in that case; all you need is for each insurance company to public a hash-chained log of their policies. The closest example is the CT logs, but every single invoicing software in my country was doing that before the Bitcoin paper was published, as part of the mandatory implementation of SAF-T: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAF-T https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAF-T
wpietri 9y ago
This is an announcement of a future prototype. It is literally not useful. It is hype. I'm all for people trying things out; prototypes are how we learn. So good for them for trying it and seeing what happens; maybe one day it will be useful. But it's maddening that people keep confusing marketing-driven press releases for actual delivered utility.
- xtracto 9y ago
  The reason I put that link was to provide some context. I know one person in IBM (here in Mexico) related to this project in Mexico and the project is already working in production. Don't be dense.
  - wpietri 9y ago
    I'm not "being dense". Every time I ask for examples of a blockchain project actually delivering value in a way that a simple database or checksummed transaction log wouldn't, I get pointed at proposed projects by people who have seen exciting presentations. Every time. You were responding in a contradictory fashion to somebody saying, "Innumerable efforts have been attempted, yielding almost no fruit." The only thing that could usefully contradict that is proof of something yielding fruit. A press release isn't. Neither is the fact that they've managed to get the prototype running. There are a lot of blockchain prototypes running. Many of them are proposed and built by consulting companies that get paid by the hour, whether or not any actual business value is delivered. IBM has such an enormous conflict of interest here that they're just not a reliable source. I'm sure you're friend's sincere, but there are plenty of sincere blockchain proponents. There were plenty of smart, sincere people who believed in 3D TV, Google Glass, and the Zune as well.

lifeisstillgood 9y ago

The idea of a neutral "third party"(!) operating a globally available transaction ledger, with standardised APIs and agreed meanings to contracts and data structures is appealing to everyone in every sector. the sizzle of blockchain is enticing, it solves huge problems that are darn well intractable without "disruption". for example in finance the global clearing system is an embarrassing hodge podge that only benefits the fraudulent and the incompetent - and replacing that completely over night has enormous attractions for pretty much every actor. but ... it is really a silver bullet - if it was so easy to replace global clearing, to get everyone agreeing on one representation of a trade or an instrument or a hundred other things i honestly never understood, if it was that easy it would have happened. this sort of sector wide cohesion comes with either one dominant player or many years of government level negotiations The web only blew past everyone in most areas because there were no global communications between parties at all in the areas the web now dominates (cf social media vs international shipping documentation)

tomatocracy 9y ago
I don't see how blockchain fixes any of the clearing/settlements issues in a way which is better than a trusted third party (or which doesn't involve trusted third parties). Let's take settlements. Some instruments are (still, in this day and age) ultimately issued in bearer form (ie, if you have the piece of paper, you own the bond/shares/title to the land/whatever, just like cash). This has a number of problems (you'd be surprised how many people lose bearer instruments). There's a similar, but less serious, problem with requirements for paper certificates in registered form. The only real way to fix those is to change the law so that instruments can be dealt with in purely electronic registered form and the bearer instruments don't exist to start with. Some jurisdictions haven't changed the law to allow this so we are stuck with legal title being bearer or paper certificate based. Blockchain by itself as such can't fix the problem of "what happens if you lose the instrument" and can't fix the problem of "what happens if you refuse to hand over the instrument in performance of a valid contract". A trusted third party (nominee/custodian/etc), by contrast, can fix some of this pretty well (trusted third party keeps the instrument in a vault and issues its own electronic registered form instruments which confer "good enough" title most of the time).

discoMAN 9y ago

Crypto does not equal blockchain. Blockchain has a huge number of potential industry uses other than cryptocurrency. IBM has done a lot of work with companies making blockchain products that don't involve cryptocurrencies. When multiple companies are in a shared relationship they can benefit greatly from the tech. There are government regulation opportunities keeping track of sales and trades on regulated public markets. Crypto is just the craze that got the word out. Even calling crypto a failure feels like an over statement.

the_new_guy_29 9y ago
Examples ? Blockchain is a technology in need of a problem to solve.. I dont know any commercial usage outside of cryptocurrencies.
- throwawaylolx 9y ago
  Examples: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16708567 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16708567
- Nuzzerino 9y ago
  Here's a graphic that lists some examples. Most of them will fail, but these are still good-faith projects nonetheless. https://imgur.com/a/ShRoW https://imgur.com/a/ShRoW
pgwhalen 9y ago
What does blockchain provide for those use cases over a simpler distributed database?

the_cat_kittles 9y ago

by me, now, and in the past. and by lots of other people. but websites and tv probably get a lot more views for articles that talk about people getting rich quick. i bet alot of people who have followed bitcoin since the early days are pretty neutral on it, or even negative.

djyaz1200 9y ago

Good point. Having a strong 3rd party intermediary moderating/backing transactions is a feature not a bug. This is why people bank with JP Morgan and similar huge banks. Although they charge fees you do get something for the money. They are governed by laws, have physical locations, people to talk to, fraud prevention and raw financial, legal, and regulatory power. I have no love for them but I believe they will guard my money effectively.

chrisco255 9y ago
Did 2008 teach us nothing?
- michaelchisari 9y ago
  By cryptocurrency standards, 2008 was any given Tuesday.
  - mjmj 9y ago
    Trusting banks, not comparing crashes.
    - abakker 9y ago
      2008 was not really a question of trusting banks in a way that our savings were harmed. It was more that our investments were harmed. Separating bank liability for either of those things is hard, but it is not a simple case to assign all the blame on them.
    - vkou 9y ago
      The problem in 2008 was the investment, not the deposit arm of banks. Bitcoin has had problems with both the investment, and the deposit arms. Most ICOs are pure fraud, and i've lost count of the number of robbed exchanges.
ftlio 9y ago
You're probably referring to a strong 3rd party intermediary as the aggregate of our financial system when you refer to its regulatory power here, but that it reads like the bank itself has regulatory power is the critique of money provided by Bitcoin in a nutshell. Regulatory capture IS the problem of scalability with our monetary system. Bitcoin exists to prove this.

kerng 9y ago

BTC alone has a market cap of more then 100 billion USD, hence your statement and premisse is inaccurate. Wall Street firms just attempt to use it in places where it's not useful and where there are simple alternatives.

0xFFFF0000 9y ago
Yeah, I agree the way Wall Street approaches this seemed rather defensive. They are trying to appear on top of things, while in reality still are not sure how to tackle bitcoin long term.

tCfD 9y ago

It took centuries for the fundamental hermetic assumptions of alchemy to be questioned, and it had to come from 'insiders' (like Boyle and Newton) rather than total skeptics. Even then it was never refuted in any official sense, it just sort of faded out of fashion as its surrogate children, the sciences, took over more and more of its academic spotlight. Blockchain-ism, the alchemy of the internet age, will probably have to follow the same arc, though sped up by an order of magnitude thanks to the much improved knowledge-sharing network of the present day.

jesusthatsgreat 9y ago

> In technological terms, it is old. TCP was created in the mid 70's. The internet as we know it didn't offer the average user much value until the mid 90's and even then it was a very small amount of the population capable of using it / benefiting from it. Electric cars were around in the late 1800's. In the early 1900's they were on a par with gasoline / steam powered car sales. It has taken us well over 100 years to get to a stage where they're considered a viable option again for most people again... Bottom line - technology morphs over time so long as there are people passionate about it and continuously working to improve it. There are literally thousands of developers working full time in the blockchain space and it's one of the hottest growth areas around in technology in terms of developer mindshare. It's not going to die any time soon, regardless of what price Bitcoin is.

JumpCrisscross 9y ago
> The internet as we know it didn't offer the average user much value until the mid 90's The Internet was useful to academic, financial, government and military users in the 1970s [1]. It was built and iterated to solve real problems. Real users' inputs, many of whom were experts in their fields, were incorporated into its design. [1] http://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1970s/ http://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1970s/
- adventured 9y ago
  Not to mention corporate email was popular in the 1980s, long before the Web reached a large number of traditional consumers. Even the Queen of England sent an email across Arpanet back in 1976. Microsoft Mail came along in the late 1980s.
bunderbunder 9y ago
> TCP was created in the mid 70's. The internet as we know it didn't offer the average user much value until the mid 90's and even then it was a very small amount of the population capable of using it / benefiting from it. Using it directly. I don't personally own any equipment that speaks ATM, but I benefit from the existence of networks that use that protocol all time. Heck, I doubt I'll ever touch a Bloomberg terminal, and I'm not entirely sure if their existence really benefits me at all, directly or indirectly, but that doesn't mean financial companies can't easily find uses for them.

Alex3917 9y ago

> In technological terms, it is old. No it's not. It took double entry accounting hundreds of years to spread around the world, why would you expect triple entry accounting to take over any faster? We already know it's going to succeed because it's objectively better by a very significant margin, but that doesn't mean it's not going to take decades to do so.

spookthesunset 9y ago
> It took double entry accounting hundreds of years to spread around the world, why would you expect triple entry accounting to take over any faster? Here in modern times information moves orders of magnitude faster than when double entry accounting was invented. By modern standards, blockchain is ancient and has yet to move beyond its current use as the world's greatest platform for financial fraud ever invented.
- Alex3917 9y ago
  > Here in modern times information moves orders of magnitude faster than when double entry accounting was invented. The speed of information is about as relevant as the cost of tea in China. What matters is how fast people actually change their minds, which isn't any faster. All of the older generation basically just has to die before the new best practices can get widely adopted. If anything change likely happens more slowly these days because people are living longer.
  - spookthesunset 9y ago
    Blockchain shysters speak in such vague terms that they are effectively saying absolutely nothing while still reeling in the rubes to buy into their scams. Case in point. Your post.

cgmg 9y ago

> In technological terms, it is old. Doubtful. In what sense is it 'old'? In the words of Roy Amara: We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.

staticassertion 9y ago

> In technological terms, it is old. Really? This doesn't seem true at all. I feel like it takes decades for many good ideas in tech to get traction, usually going through many, many failed iterations.

lazaroclapp 9y ago
As We May Think[1], anyone? Or self-driving cars, which go back to at least 1984 in CMU, and yet are still "[near] future tech" now. Neural Nets were a half-century old idea[2] before they became actually useful... I mean, the question is not "Is Bitcoin as implemented by following the original whitepaper going to be the future of mankind?" It is whether or not there is something big in that whole area (blockchains, decentralized tokens of exchange, PoW/PoS/etc) and, if so, how big? Of course, for a lot of people, the question is "By, say 2025, is my BTC going to make me rich or is it is not even going to be worth the bits it is encoded in?" Equally hard question to answer, but much less interesting. The current cycle of blockchain furor could all end up badly (I hope it doesn't, but who knows), and yet that won't mean the tech has no future. Now, it could be like VR/AR/AGI, which are always the future, of course ;) [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m... [2] McCulloch, Warren; Walter Pitts (1943). "A Logical Calculus of Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity". Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics

bitxbitxbitcoin 9y ago

There are some fruits that are technically impressive and expandable even without much mainstream use or attention: e.g. Time stamping.

antiics 9y ago

The first release of Unix was in 1970. Linus started working on Linux in 1991. Red Hat went public in 1999. In technological terms, it is actually quite young.

hammock 9y ago

Is blockchain old, or is this a classic case of the trough of disillusionment? https://www.google.com/search?q=trough+of+disillusionment&safe=off&rlz=1C5CHFA_enUS778US778&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiJnKryxpLaAhUT2GMKHfX_DZYQ_AUICigB&biw=1200&bih=586#imgrc=_ https://www.google.com/search?q=trough+of+disillusionment&sa...

neom 9y ago

I cannot agree with you more. I'd actually love to chat more about this so feel free to reach out if you're interested. I work on building new technology for municipal governments, and the last 9 months have consisted of cities asking me about my blockchain strategy. I'm still struggling to explain a distributed ledger does not solve any of the problem they describe. Yet "cutting edge technologists" have told them it's the most important thing for distributed data. I ask what they think about SQLite and they ask me what SQL is.