3 ms·

It’s very interesting as a matter of pure technology. I’m just not sure it’s that useful as a banking system.

C14L 9y ago
Have to try it to find out. That's what we are doing right now.
ghthor 9y ago
It doesn't have to be either or, the banking system of the future can be a mix of different technologies. Personally I see bitcoin(and friends) as the higher layers of a hierarchy used by humans to securely trade value. The 3rd record of account doesn't have to contain 100% of all transactions taken by it's holders, but when the transaction is big enough, or the values held by 2 parties is questionable because the time since either of them updated the 3rd record has been too long, then write to the blockchain. Most other transactions can be taken care of between the 2 parties without involving the chain at all, as long as in the future someone squashes all their transactions and writes to the public ledger, to prove they haven't cheated or made a mistake.
specialist 9y ago
IMHO, banking & finance are its least interesting potential use cases. --- Medical Records Mid aughts, I was trying to figure out how to use tamper evident logs (rolling hashes) for our electronic medical records infrastructure. To answer questions like "what did you know and when did you know it?" and "where did this bad data come from?" Coupled with the notions for Translucent Databases (all data at rest is encrypted) to protect privacy. We hadn't even gotten to the consensus and trust issues. --- Authenticity I'm now most interested in verification of sources. Where did this cotton or wheat or cobalt come from? Are these pills authentic? Is the data cited by this paper legit? Verify copyrights, perhaps even a realization of Ted Nelson Xanadu's notions of transcopyrights. (Disney's DragonChain and others have floated those use cases.) Is this news report real or agitprop? Is this quote actually legit? Did someone(s) silently update some published information? Etc, etc. --- Tursted Rules & Constraints Satisfaction Since seeing a presentation on using ethereum style smart contracts for medical claims processing, I've been reading up. I can barely wrap my head around this stuff. Computability, Turing complete, N vs NP, etc. But the domain experts I heard told a great narrative, so now I'm interested too.
- spookthesunset 9y ago
  All of this is hype. Blockchain is only useful when you bolt a speculative asset on top because otherwise, who the heck will pay for the miners to make it work? If your answer is "the people using it will", that means there is already enough trust in the system to just use a Real Database.... And even if you manage to solve that problem, the blockchain still doesn't help with medical records, authenticity or anything else. You still have to trust the people entering those records. you still have to trust that the person who said "those pills are authentic" on the blockchain. Smart contracts are also the biggest pile of hype. You can't have "code is law" because other wise you wind up with The DAO.... All code has bugs. All code has corner cases where assumptions fall apart. You can't code law. Blockchain is pure, 100% hype. Almost every single use case falls apart under even a small amount of scrutiny. The only use the blockchain serves is as a platform for fraud. If you are a scammer, there is no better place to be than in crypto.
  - specialist 9y ago
    FFS. It's turtles all the way down, right? None of my proposed use cases rely on PoW, bitcoin. Perhaps I should have said it more clearly: I'm not interested in currency et al, because best as I can tell, bitcoin is just a better escrow, or worse a collectable (like baseball cards). And those things don't interest me. -- Have you done accounting, bookkeeping, auditing? Another way to think about blockchains is an interoperable ledger. If your data doesn't leave your org, you can just using tamper evident logs (rolling hashes), no consensus stuff required. I worked on election integrity issues for a decade. I'm the biggest technoskeptic. I pretty much oppose all things new until they're battle proven. The biggest challenge for election administration is verifying and publishing the physical chain of custody of all the gear and materials. And no matter how hard you try, there's always some yahoos (flat earther types) that will demand ever greater proof. Whaddya gonna do? Well, based on my experience, applying some blockchain technologies to document and publish chain of custody would simplify A LOT of the public accountability and transparency issues. At the end of the day, it's just double ledger accounting. Debits match credits. The parts of blockchain that interest me make it easier to "show your work".

C14L 9y ago

Have to try it to find out. That's what we are doing right now.

It doesn't have to be either or, the banking system of the future can be a mix of different technologies. Personally I see bitcoin(and friends) as the higher layers of a hierarchy used by humans to securely trade value. The 3rd record of account doesn't have to contain 100% of all transactions taken by it's holders, but when the transaction is big enough, or the values held by 2 parties is questionable because the time since either of them updated the 3rd record has been too long, then write to the blockchain. Most other transactions can be taken care of between the 2 parties without involving the chain at all, as long as in the future someone squashes all their transactions and writes to the public ledger, to prove they haven't cheated or made a mistake.

specialist 9y ago

IMHO, banking & finance are its least interesting potential use cases. --- Medical Records Mid aughts, I was trying to figure out how to use tamper evident logs (rolling hashes) for our electronic medical records infrastructure. To answer questions like "what did you know and when did you know it?" and "where did this bad data come from?" Coupled with the notions for Translucent Databases (all data at rest is encrypted) to protect privacy. We hadn't even gotten to the consensus and trust issues. --- Authenticity I'm now most interested in verification of sources. Where did this cotton or wheat or cobalt come from? Are these pills authentic? Is the data cited by this paper legit? Verify copyrights, perhaps even a realization of Ted Nelson Xanadu's notions of transcopyrights. (Disney's DragonChain and others have floated those use cases.) Is this news report real or agitprop? Is this quote actually legit? Did someone(s) silently update some published information? Etc, etc. --- Tursted Rules & Constraints Satisfaction Since seeing a presentation on using ethereum style smart contracts for medical claims processing, I've been reading up. I can barely wrap my head around this stuff. Computability, Turing complete, N vs NP, etc. But the domain experts I heard told a great narrative, so now I'm interested too.

spookthesunset 9y ago
All of this is hype. Blockchain is only useful when you bolt a speculative asset on top because otherwise, who the heck will pay for the miners to make it work? If your answer is "the people using it will", that means there is already enough trust in the system to just use a Real Database.... And even if you manage to solve that problem, the blockchain still doesn't help with medical records, authenticity or anything else. You still have to trust the people entering those records. you still have to trust that the person who said "those pills are authentic" on the blockchain. Smart contracts are also the biggest pile of hype. You can't have "code is law" because other wise you wind up with The DAO.... All code has bugs. All code has corner cases where assumptions fall apart. You can't code law. Blockchain is pure, 100% hype. Almost every single use case falls apart under even a small amount of scrutiny. The only use the blockchain serves is as a platform for fraud. If you are a scammer, there is no better place to be than in crypto.
- specialist 9y ago
  FFS. It's turtles all the way down, right? None of my proposed use cases rely on PoW, bitcoin. Perhaps I should have said it more clearly: I'm not interested in currency et al, because best as I can tell, bitcoin is just a better escrow, or worse a collectable (like baseball cards). And those things don't interest me. -- Have you done accounting, bookkeeping, auditing? Another way to think about blockchains is an interoperable ledger. If your data doesn't leave your org, you can just using tamper evident logs (rolling hashes), no consensus stuff required. I worked on election integrity issues for a decade. I'm the biggest technoskeptic. I pretty much oppose all things new until they're battle proven. The biggest challenge for election administration is verifying and publishing the physical chain of custody of all the gear and materials. And no matter how hard you try, there's always some yahoos (flat earther types) that will demand ever greater proof. Whaddya gonna do? Well, based on my experience, applying some blockchain technologies to document and publish chain of custody would simplify A LOT of the public accountability and transparency issues. At the end of the day, it's just double ledger accounting. Debits match credits. The parts of blockchain that interest me make it easier to "show your work".