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Most decentralized projects are approaching the problem in the wrong way. Blockchains are a new, early technology, and most of the developers building blockchai
by Taek 8y ago
Most decentralized projects are approaching the problem in the wrong way. Blockchains are a new, early technology, and most of the developers building blockchains don't understand them very well and aren't using them correctly. I think the dotcom bubble was much the same way - suddenly everyone had a website, but almost nobody had a useful website, because people didn't really understand how a website was best able to serve a business.
Federation over decentralization makes sense in any context where there is pre-existing trust. Federation is faster, more scalable, more easily upgraded, if something goes wrong it's easier to pause things and make a surgical change to the system. But federations are also easier to subvert, and users more or less end up controlling the maintainers of the system entirely. If you are a group of international banks, that's not a problem. But if you a single human being that expects corporations, banks, and governments to more or less always behave sociopathically, then it doesn't make sense.
Blockchain core infrastructure needs more time. The hype train took off way too early. I think we're looking at 5 to 10 more years of heavy improvements to things like the wallets, custody process, governance models, scripting systems / dapp languages, the cryptography itself, the peer to peer network, cross-chain exchanges, and other big developer and interoperability features, and just general education / common sense about what blockchains can and can't do.
We'll get there. Blockchain technology is absolutely revolutionary, and it's going to change a lot of things about our global infrastructure. But 2018 or even 2020 isn't the year that we see blockchains really start to get traction. There's a lot of groundwork that we still need to put in place.
- sanderjd 8y agoIt's been a pretty long time since the Bitcoin paper. About the same or longer than the time between the definition of HTTP and the emergence of the web as a useful mainstream technology. Why does this seem to be developing more slowly than the web? Maybe a better analogy is the time it took arpanet to develop into the modern web? Perhaps analogies like this are not worth looking at? I'm not sure about any of this, but I feel like lots of people recently have been making the argument that it's really early, hasn't had time to develop, etc., when I've been waiting for it to turn into something for a long time now and becoming increasingly skeptical as the goal posts have continued to move.
- lostctown 8y agoI believe this has to do with the level of fuck you money made by early devs of these systems and the nature of liquidity in crypto. I'm sitting here working on my non-blockchain product, exhausted after a long weekend of work and mentally preparing for another week of it. I can assure you if there were 10 million plus in my bank account I would have taken the weekend off and explored some of my less profitable interests. I would have written code, read papers, and all of that, just in a more relaxed way. Instead I focused solely on making the product of my business better. Unlike a tokenized system, I can only liquidate the value I have created once I have taken it to the finish line. Myself and my team won't be fat and happy until we get there. I've had a few people hand wave this explanation, but I've been involved with Ethereum for about 2 1/2 years and this absolutely happens. Productive work is rarely the work that makes us happiest in the moment. That's why we must force founders to hold out for liquidity.
- lightedman 8y ago" Blockchains are a new, early technology" Permissionless distributed databases have existed since the late 70s. This is not a new technology by any means. "Blockchain core infrastructure needs more time." I'd say 50 years is more than enough time to see that it doesn't work because it can't scale as-designed.