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I worked for a non-ICO blockchain company (no longer in business). We used Hyperledger Fabric for our offering and after leaving the company was informed that A

I worked for a non-ICO blockchain company (no longer in business). We used Hyperledger Fabric for our offering and after leaving the company was informed that AWS was hosting Fabric and if I could develop anything to leverage that I'd have their support. And after some contemplation, could not come up with a compelling pitch for a blockchain solution -- a pity because I liked Fabric and would have been happy to take it to the cloud.

wpietri 5y ago
Exactly. This makes me think of a funnel. Into the top, you pour all of the people interested in maybe using a blockchain. A lot of sober evaluators of technology exit the funnel for the same reason: blockchains don't provide much advantage for most real-world projects. That means further down the funnel you end up with a lot of people who for whatever reason miss or ignore that. I remember a meeting with a would-be entrepreneur whose product was "reporting sexual harassment in the the workplace but with blockchain". When I asked what "blockchain" brought to the project, they said it brought security. When I asked how users would see that, the answer was basically that users would just have to take the company's word for it. I explained that if that was the case, they didn't have an advantage over competitors. The entrepreneur did not like that one bit, and that was basically the end of the meeting. n
leifg 5y ago
Not to mention that most blockchain enthusiasts don’t even consider Hyperledger a blockchain (it’s not public).
- pstuart 5y ago
  Meh. It's a private blockchain and the general principles stand. The company I worked for was so incompetent that they wanted to have customers access the data directly through their APIs, and that the blockchain entities were all the same -- effectively making it a really slow and expensive K/V store. I should write up the story of my time there -- it was insane. When I came aboard their system was a MySQL frontend with a ton of code to replicate it to the chain (because they couldn't figure out how to get more than one transaction per second, which was because they had no idea how Fabric actually worked).

wpietri 5y ago

Exactly. This makes me think of a funnel. Into the top, you pour all of the people interested in maybe using a blockchain. A lot of sober evaluators of technology exit the funnel for the same reason: blockchains don't provide much advantage for most real-world projects. That means further down the funnel you end up with a lot of people who for whatever reason miss or ignore that. I remember a meeting with a would-be entrepreneur whose product was "reporting sexual harassment in the the workplace but with blockchain". When I asked what "blockchain" brought to the project, they said it brought security. When I asked how users would see that, the answer was basically that users would just have to take the company's word for it. I explained that if that was the case, they didn't have an advantage over competitors. The entrepreneur did not like that one bit, and that was basically the end of the meeting. n

leifg 5y ago

Not to mention that most blockchain enthusiasts don’t even consider Hyperledger a blockchain (it’s not public).

pstuart 5y ago
Meh. It's a private blockchain and the general principles stand. The company I worked for was so incompetent that they wanted to have customers access the data directly through their APIs, and that the blockchain entities were all the same -- effectively making it a really slow and expensive K/V store. I should write up the story of my time there -- it was insane. When I came aboard their system was a MySQL frontend with a ton of code to replicate it to the chain (because they couldn't figure out how to get more than one transaction per second, which was because they had no idea how Fabric actually worked).