7 ms·

Developing Blockchain Use Cases for CMU Coin

26 points by ArtWomb 7y ago

outside1234 7y ago
This is the exact opposite of how you should go about product market fit and is an anti-pattern that they are teaching students. If they were doing this the right way, they would identify problems that exist that existing currency does not address and then work back to how they can solve them, which might include a blockchain based currency. But not the opposite approach. That said, can't wait for the students to come up with applications like "buying drugs" and "paying for kegs when you are underaged".
- Isamu 7y ago
  They are teaching them about blockchain applications specifically. This isn't about market fit. They appear to be attacking the VERY widespread problem of people applying a blockchain solution where it doesn't necessarily add value. What does a blockchain solution buy you? What doesn't it do for you? Do you really understand what it does and does not do? Given a student's proposed application, you could critique it based on whether the properties of a blockchain solution provide something unique that couldn't be provided easily with other approaches.
  - wrs 7y ago
    The interesting thing will be whether any proposed applications would survive the critique. Perhaps the whole plan is to have the students learn that there are almost no sensible applications! (Is the CS department participating to generate alternative implementations for comparison?)
- carlosdp 7y ago
  > they would identify problems that exist that existing currency Modern blockchain cryptocurrencies aren't just about money use-cases. The currency is just the electricity in the wiring that drives more interesting applications, ie. things you can build with smart contracts.
- excalibur 7y ago
  If they were doing this the right way, they would not even consider using cryptocurrency and advise everyone they interact with against it, because it is egregiously wasteful and completely unsustainable.
  - tuesdayrain 7y ago
    Your comment is only true for a subset of cryptocurrencies that use Proof of Work.
- rolltiide 7y ago
  It doesn't seem like they are doing any of what you said > Next, we will use these tools to evaluate existing, real-world blockchain use cases with an eye towards developing our own applications of these emerging technologies. Along the way, we will learn practical development skills in distributed ledger technologies to understand blockchain programming and application development. Finally, students will propose their own blockchain use cases for CMU's own proprietary blockchain.
  - shadowgovt 7y ago
    Agreed. The course appears to be an exploration of the technology's potential, not an exploration of what it's already been used for or applications that may use the technology but could be solved some other way instead. From a pedagogy perspective, the technology is what is being taught and applications for the technology are being used as teaching tools.
DonHopkins 7y ago
CMU and other schools with blockchain courses should be teaching about the ethics and legal penalties and ecological consequences of running blockchain pyramid schemes and scams, instead of teaching students how to hype, evangelize, and retroactively contrive use cases for existing Ponzi schemes like CMU Coin. The world already has more than enough Bitcoin shills. Universities don't need to be pumping and dumping more of them out. David Gerard's book "Attack of the 50 Foot BlockChain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts" would be an excellent down-to-earth textbook for a realistic course about blockchain. https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/book/ https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/book/ >Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: The Book >“A sober riposte to all the upbeat forecasts about cryptocurrency” — New York Review of Books >“A very convincing takedown of the whole phenomenon” — BBC News https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3165196 https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3165196 >An experimental new Internet-based form of money is created that anyone can generate at home; people build frightening firetrap computers full of video cards, putting out so much heat that one operator is hospitalised with heatstroke and brain damage. A young physics student starts a revolutionary new marketplace immune to State coercion; he ends up ordering hits on people because they might threaten his great experiment, and is jailed for life without parole. Fully automated contractual systems are proposed to make business and the law work better; the contracts people actually write are unregulated penny stock offerings whose fine print literally states that you are buying nothing of any value. The biggest crowdfunding in history attracts $150 million on the promise that it will embody the steadfast iron will of unstoppable code; upon release it is immediately hacked, and $50 million is stolen. How did we get here? David Gerard covers the origins and history of Bitcoin to the present day, the other cryptocurrencies it spawned including Ethereum, the ICO craze and the 2017 crypto bubble, and the attempts to apply blockchains and smart contracts to business. Plus a case study on blockchains in the music industry. Bitcoin and blockchains are not a technology story, but a psychology story. Remember: if it sounds too good to be true, it almost certainly is. https://www.infoq.com/articles/Attack-50ft-Blockchain-Review/ https://www.infoq.com/articles/Attack-50ft-Blockchain-Review... >Key Takeaways >The book discusses Bitcoin, blockchain and cryptocurrencies in economic and social terms, rather than purely technical >It discusses various Bitcoin case studies, including Mt Gox and the Silk Road >Bitcoin mining is no longer decentralised but is instead controlled by a small group of miners that control a large majority of the hash power >The book concludes with a detailed examination of the possible use of blockchain for rights management in the music industry >David Gerard's 2017 book, "Attack of the 50ft Blockchain" is an in-depth look at the cryptocurrency space. >The book takes a straightforwardly skeptical angle, and is explicitly intended as a non-technical overview. Rather than focus on details of cryptography and code that describe how a cryptocurrency or a blockchain works, the book discusses the phenomena that have emerged as part of the rise of Bitcoin and blockchain. This includes things such as the anonymous founder, Satoshi Nakamoto, the multiple high-profile failures of Bitcoin exchanges, as well as clear examples of human folly, fraud and unconstrained greed. https://cmichel.io/book-review-attack-of-the-50-ft-blockchain/ https://cmichel.io/book-review-attack-of-the-50-ft-blockchai... >Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts by David Gerard is a book that summarizes every important event around bitcoin, including the dozens of scams, hacked exchanges, and the false promises of blockchain technology. Everyone that is hyped about this technology should read this book to get his excitement levels back to normal. It’s written really well and understandable while still being technically correct. It’s unintentionally funny most of the time and explains things in a dry humor that I really enjoyed. >However, it sometimes reads too negative and is too bitcoin and smart contract coins specific, therefore ignoring other aspects of cryptocurrencies which often have a real use case. For example, it doesn’t talk at all about privacy coins (Monero / ZCash), Storage Coins (STORJ / Siacoin / Filecoin), social communities with rewards (STEEM), RIPPLE, etc. That being said, I agree with the sentiment that for most of the projects nowadays the blockchain isn’t even needed, and would arguably work better in a centralized way. Blockchain has just become a new buzzword to get investors interested.
seibelj 7y ago
Ah, that time of day when a blockchain article makes HN front page and the same critiques of a $100 billion asset being completely worthless get made. Then after commenting, they go back to their jobs data mining children watching videos, or selling more banner ads, or whatever...
- shadowgovt 7y ago
  Worthless? Hardly. Not what it claims it is on the tin? Yes. Buyer beware.
- DonHopkins 7y ago
  https://www.nbcnews.com/news/all/five-charged-alleged-722-million-cryptocurrency-ponzi-scheme-n1099511 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/all/five-charged-alleged-722-mi... LOS ANGELES — Five men were charged Tuesday in connection with what federal prosecutors called a lucrative cryptocurrency scheme that fleeced investors out of $722 million in a business model that one of the defendants described as built "on the backs of idiots," according to court documents.
  - seibelj 7y ago
    https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/sep/20/danske-bank-money-laundering-is-biggest-scandal-in-europe-european-commission https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/sep/20/danske-bank... Danske Bank money laundering 'is biggest scandal in Europe' Lars Løkke Rasmussen said he was outraged at the scale of the money-laundering operation at Danske’s Estonian branch. An independent investigation published on Wednesday found that 15,000 customers were involved in suspicious transactions. “The fact that Denmark has been at the centre of a money laundering of this size is frankly quite horrible,” Rasmussen told reporters at the European Union meeting in Salzburg. The bank’s chief executive Thomas Borgen resigned on Wednesday but Rasmussen said: “The case does not end with this.”
    - DonHopkins 7y ago
      Are you saying they should have been using Bitcoin if they wanted to launder money?

26 points by ArtWomb 7y ago

This is the exact opposite of how you should go about product market fit and is an anti-pattern that they are teaching students. If they were doing this the right way, they would identify problems that exist that existing currency does not address and then work back to how they can solve them, which might include a blockchain based currency. But not the opposite approach. That said, can't wait for the students to come up with applications like "buying drugs" and "paying for kegs when you are underaged".

Isamu 7y ago
They are teaching them about blockchain applications specifically. This isn't about market fit. They appear to be attacking the VERY widespread problem of people applying a blockchain solution where it doesn't necessarily add value. What does a blockchain solution buy you? What doesn't it do for you? Do you really understand what it does and does not do? Given a student's proposed application, you could critique it based on whether the properties of a blockchain solution provide something unique that couldn't be provided easily with other approaches.
- wrs 7y ago
  The interesting thing will be whether any proposed applications would survive the critique. Perhaps the whole plan is to have the students learn that there are almost no sensible applications! (Is the CS department participating to generate alternative implementations for comparison?)
carlosdp 7y ago
> they would identify problems that exist that existing currency Modern blockchain cryptocurrencies aren't just about money use-cases. The currency is just the electricity in the wiring that drives more interesting applications, ie. things you can build with smart contracts.
excalibur 7y ago
If they were doing this the right way, they would not even consider using cryptocurrency and advise everyone they interact with against it, because it is egregiously wasteful and completely unsustainable.
- tuesdayrain 7y ago
  Your comment is only true for a subset of cryptocurrencies that use Proof of Work.
rolltiide 7y ago
It doesn't seem like they are doing any of what you said > Next, we will use these tools to evaluate existing, real-world blockchain use cases with an eye towards developing our own applications of these emerging technologies. Along the way, we will learn practical development skills in distributed ledger technologies to understand blockchain programming and application development. Finally, students will propose their own blockchain use cases for CMU's own proprietary blockchain.
- shadowgovt 7y ago
  Agreed. The course appears to be an exploration of the technology's potential, not an exploration of what it's already been used for or applications that may use the technology but could be solved some other way instead. From a pedagogy perspective, the technology is what is being taught and applications for the technology are being used as teaching tools.

DonHopkins 7y ago

CMU and other schools with blockchain courses should be teaching about the ethics and legal penalties and ecological consequences of running blockchain pyramid schemes and scams, instead of teaching students how to hype, evangelize, and retroactively contrive use cases for existing Ponzi schemes like CMU Coin. The world already has more than enough Bitcoin shills. Universities don't need to be pumping and dumping more of them out. David Gerard's book "Attack of the 50 Foot BlockChain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts" would be an excellent down-to-earth textbook for a realistic course about blockchain. https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/book/ https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/book/ >Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: The Book >“A sober riposte to all the upbeat forecasts about cryptocurrency” — New York Review of Books >“A very convincing takedown of the whole phenomenon” — BBC News https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3165196 https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3165196 >An experimental new Internet-based form of money is created that anyone can generate at home; people build frightening firetrap computers full of video cards, putting out so much heat that one operator is hospitalised with heatstroke and brain damage. A young physics student starts a revolutionary new marketplace immune to State coercion; he ends up ordering hits on people because they might threaten his great experiment, and is jailed for life without parole. Fully automated contractual systems are proposed to make business and the law work better; the contracts people actually write are unregulated penny stock offerings whose fine print literally states that you are buying nothing of any value. The biggest crowdfunding in history attracts $150 million on the promise that it will embody the steadfast iron will of unstoppable code; upon release it is immediately hacked, and $50 million is stolen. How did we get here? David Gerard covers the origins and history of Bitcoin to the present day, the other cryptocurrencies it spawned including Ethereum, the ICO craze and the 2017 crypto bubble, and the attempts to apply blockchains and smart contracts to business. Plus a case study on blockchains in the music industry. Bitcoin and blockchains are not a technology story, but a psychology story. Remember: if it sounds too good to be true, it almost certainly is. https://www.infoq.com/articles/Attack-50ft-Blockchain-Review/ https://www.infoq.com/articles/Attack-50ft-Blockchain-Review... >Key Takeaways >The book discusses Bitcoin, blockchain and cryptocurrencies in economic and social terms, rather than purely technical >It discusses various Bitcoin case studies, including Mt Gox and the Silk Road >Bitcoin mining is no longer decentralised but is instead controlled by a small group of miners that control a large majority of the hash power >The book concludes with a detailed examination of the possible use of blockchain for rights management in the music industry >David Gerard's 2017 book, "Attack of the 50ft Blockchain" is an in-depth look at the cryptocurrency space. >The book takes a straightforwardly skeptical angle, and is explicitly intended as a non-technical overview. Rather than focus on details of cryptography and code that describe how a cryptocurrency or a blockchain works, the book discusses the phenomena that have emerged as part of the rise of Bitcoin and blockchain. This includes things such as the anonymous founder, Satoshi Nakamoto, the multiple high-profile failures of Bitcoin exchanges, as well as clear examples of human folly, fraud and unconstrained greed. https://cmichel.io/book-review-attack-of-the-50-ft-blockchain/ https://cmichel.io/book-review-attack-of-the-50-ft-blockchai... >Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts by David Gerard is a book that summarizes every important event around bitcoin, including the dozens of scams, hacked exchanges, and the false promises of blockchain technology. Everyone that is hyped about this technology should read this book to get his excitement levels back to normal. It’s written really well and understandable while still being technically correct. It’s unintentionally funny most of the time and explains things in a dry humor that I really enjoyed. >However, it sometimes reads too negative and is too bitcoin and smart contract coins specific, therefore ignoring other aspects of cryptocurrencies which often have a real use case. For example, it doesn’t talk at all about privacy coins (Monero / ZCash), Storage Coins (STORJ / Siacoin / Filecoin), social communities with rewards (STEEM), RIPPLE, etc. That being said, I agree with the sentiment that for most of the projects nowadays the blockchain isn’t even needed, and would arguably work better in a centralized way. Blockchain has just become a new buzzword to get investors interested.

seibelj 7y ago

Ah, that time of day when a blockchain article makes HN front page and the same critiques of a $100 billion asset being completely worthless get made. Then after commenting, they go back to their jobs data mining children watching videos, or selling more banner ads, or whatever...

shadowgovt 7y ago
Worthless? Hardly. Not what it claims it is on the tin? Yes. Buyer beware.
DonHopkins 7y ago
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/all/five-charged-alleged-722-million-cryptocurrency-ponzi-scheme-n1099511 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/all/five-charged-alleged-722-mi... LOS ANGELES — Five men were charged Tuesday in connection with what federal prosecutors called a lucrative cryptocurrency scheme that fleeced investors out of $722 million in a business model that one of the defendants described as built "on the backs of idiots," according to court documents.
- seibelj 7y ago
  https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/sep/20/danske-bank-money-laundering-is-biggest-scandal-in-europe-european-commission https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/sep/20/danske-bank... Danske Bank money laundering 'is biggest scandal in Europe' Lars Løkke Rasmussen said he was outraged at the scale of the money-laundering operation at Danske’s Estonian branch. An independent investigation published on Wednesday found that 15,000 customers were involved in suspicious transactions. “The fact that Denmark has been at the centre of a money laundering of this size is frankly quite horrible,” Rasmussen told reporters at the European Union meeting in Salzburg. The bank’s chief executive Thomas Borgen resigned on Wednesday but Rasmussen said: “The case does not end with this.”
  - DonHopkins 7y ago
    Are you saying they should have been using Bitcoin if they wanted to launder money?