6 ms·

I kinda question the scientific methodology of "take the first N Google results". Not only for obvious reasons, but also for the reason that a lot of infrastruc

by smsm42 4y ago

I kinda question the scientific methodology of "take the first N Google results". Not only for obvious reasons, but also for the reason that a lot of infrastructural projects that have a lot of real world effects are not routinely discussed in the press (because they are extremely boring to everybody but specialists, also because nobody but the specialists knows they exist, or understands how they work) and thus would not show up at the top results. What would show up is more marketing than technology. And, of course, since we are living through the initial hype cycle, there would be a lot of marketing to sort through. Limiting oneself to look only at the most hyped projects virtually guarantees you never see the deeper infrastructural ones. I am not passing judgement on how good are those or how many of them use blockchains properly - I am just saying the methodology used here is doomed to miss them. It's a good entertaining reading, but it's more gossip column than industry research quality. That said, it is true that companies like Chainalysis (it is in no way alone in this field, of course), which bring visibility, analytics, risk assessment and so on into the blockchain world, have a real world impact. I think the accusation of "censoring transactions" is misplaced - first of all, on a decentralized blockchain you can not really censor a transaction (you can do it if you're a centralized exchange gatekeeping an access route to the chain, but that's a different thing) - but the impact is there and is going to grow nevertheless.

vkou 4y ago
The list wasn't taken from the top N google results, the list was hand-curated by a web3-focused publication, and was found by a google search. It would be like a construction-focused publication hand-curating the top N/most important N construction projects in the world, of which N-1 are some mixture of cancelled, fictional, or not actually having anything to do with construction. It would, of course, be utterly farcical - in any space other than web3. But in this space, we smile, nod, close our eyes, and hope that our token/ico/ape.jpg will go to the moon. This isn't actually a good thing.
- smsm42 4y ago
  builtin.com does not seem to have any specific focus on blockchain - their site says "Built In is the online community for startups and tech companies. Find startup jobs, tech news and events" and their "Our story" page does not seem to mention blockchain or crypto at all, and if anything, is focused on recruiting ("career" is mentioned a lot). I have no idea how they ended up being #1 in google for that specific query, maybe mostly because of randomly matching some search terms, or they have a very good SEO team. The author's credentials are: Sam Daley is a Built In associate product manager who formerly covered AI, blockchain and emerging tech trends for BuiltIn.com. Prior to Built In, Daley worked as a CNN production assistant and development coordinator for Rotary International. Which does not suggest he has any special insight into any blockchain technology or industry beyond being assigned to "write about all that new stuff because you young people understand those". OTOH, his previous title on Linkedin is "SEO Strategist" - which may be the explanation for the #1 result. At least we know he's good at that job, congrats, Sam. His credentials on being the arbiter of blockchain project prominence are still not clear - and I suspect his methodology of compiling the list differs little from the original article's methodology. Maybe I'm wrong but his bio doesn't show any signs of any relation to crypto. Maybe he still has huge knowledge of it, I don't know, there's no way for me to see it at least. So, not a "construction-focused publication" but more like "local newspaper worker who covers any news about manufacturing industry, construction, agriculture, food industry and anything else nobody wants to". So yeah, random list of startups has most of them dead or pivoted in several years. That's how it works with startups.
xmprt 4y ago
How can you distinguish between infrastructure products and hype products? If you said that a dating website turned video sharing platform would become on of the bedrocks of the online content creator economy you'd probably be laughed out of the room 20 years ago but that's what YouTube is today. I think the same thing applies to technology infrastructure. ETH came out in 2015 but it took a few years before it became as ubiquitous as it is today. Basically, it's hard to predict what's going to be an important infrastructure product.
- smsm42 4y ago
  > How can you distinguish between infrastructure products and hype products? If you don't understand the industry, you can't. That's what hype is for - to make you unable to distinguish those. If you really need to do that - you find somebody who knows the industry and who you can trust, and ask them. Otherwise, you just accept that you have no idea and would have to wait till the results are clear to know. > it's hard to predict what's going to be an important infrastructure product. Yes. Even for people that know what it is about. Virtually impossible for people that don't.
- giantrobot 4y ago
  > If you said that a dating website turned video sharing platform would become on of the bedrocks of the online content creator economy you'd probably be laughed out of the room 20 years ago but that's what YouTube is today. You've omitted a significant portion of YouTube's history. A dating website turned video sharing platform that struggled for years until one of the world's largest bought them, has become a bedrock of the content creator community. The core of what YouTube was has little relation to their current position in the industry. No one would have laughed at you for saying in 2002 that a video sharing website would enable people to make money. Video streaming (Real, QuickTime, Flash) had already been around for years. Porn websites were already selling access to videos (MPEG-1 or WMV) in 2002. Affordable DV cameras existed as did user friendly editing software. The first 3G cellular services were rolling out as were phones that could stream video over those networks. Computing power, storage, and bandwidth were limitations in 2002 but no one at that time would have laughed if you said "this will improve over the next two decades". Apple was by 2002 selling computers by advertising how easy video editing was on their platform. You'd have a better point if your horizon was a little further off. YouTube (in concept) would be far more laughable to someone in 1992 or 1982 than someone in 2002. Everything for YouTube needed to exist was extant in 2002. YouTube itself was only two years from existing. Cryptocurrency is a lot less interesting today if it's utility will take another 30 years to become evident.
simonw 4y ago
He didn't "take the first N Google results". Read the top of the article again. He took the projects listed in this article https://builtin.com/blockchain/blockchain-applications https://builtin.com/blockchain/blockchain-applications on this basis: > Apart from being the top #1 result, and a reasonably recent article, Builtin.com has 300+ employees (per linkedin), and is a company built around the tech startup community. Part of their business seems to be maintaining a database of startup companies, including the ones mentioned in the Blockchain article — so they have some business incentive for the data to be accurate.
YetAnotherNick 4y ago
> first of all, on a decentralized blockchain you can not really censor a transaction This is not true. Even though blockchain is decentralized there could be a single chain/few chains of truth if you want to convert it to real money. And that chain could only be the one that would be approved by coinbase, bitfinex etc. If they want to censor an address they simply could stop accepting those transactions, and then miners will have no choice but to censor those transaction else they couldn't convert it to money. The same affect could also be created by bitcoin developers or government. Till now, AFAIK only developers along with exchange have been successful in censoring a transaction[1][2], but government came close[3]. [1]: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Value_overflow_incident https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Value_overflow_incident [2]: https://levelup.gitconnected.com/how-ethereum-reversed-a-50-million-dao-attack-cee528d8c030?gi=f1d200d61b6 https://levelup.gitconnected.com/how-ethereum-reversed-a-50-... [3]: https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2021/05/07/marathon-miners-have-started-censoring-bitcoin-transactions-heres-what-that-means/ https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2021/05/07/marathon-miners-hav...
- smsm42 4y ago
  Well, yes, technically you are right - if the majority of the miners agreed to "censor" a specific transaction, then it would be censored. But that's not what the article claimed - Chainalysis, or any company like that, certainly wouldn't have power to command the majority of miners to do that. If there's a reasonable valid reason - such as a bug in the software - then you'd expect the majority of miners to accept that. If somebody like Coinbase would be able to control the majority of miners, then yes, they'd also would gain the ability to censor transactions. But I don't see any sign of that actually happening.
  - geraldyo 4y ago
    You need to follow through your logic... > if there's a reasonable valid reason Who says it's a valid reason? Who says the reason is what they say it is? Who decides the best fix would be to censor a transaction? What if FakeBlockchainCorp decides to target you, then says there was a bug with these transactions, everyone agrees... Where's your bitcoin?

by smsm42 4y ago

vkou 4y ago

The list wasn't taken from the top N google results, the list was hand-curated by a web3-focused publication, and was found by a google search. It would be like a construction-focused publication hand-curating the top N/most important N construction projects in the world, of which N-1 are some mixture of cancelled, fictional, or not actually having anything to do with construction. It would, of course, be utterly farcical - in any space other than web3. But in this space, we smile, nod, close our eyes, and hope that our token/ico/ape.jpg will go to the moon. This isn't actually a good thing.

smsm42 4y ago
builtin.com does not seem to have any specific focus on blockchain - their site says "Built In is the online community for startups and tech companies. Find startup jobs, tech news and events" and their "Our story" page does not seem to mention blockchain or crypto at all, and if anything, is focused on recruiting ("career" is mentioned a lot). I have no idea how they ended up being #1 in google for that specific query, maybe mostly because of randomly matching some search terms, or they have a very good SEO team. The author's credentials are: Sam Daley is a Built In associate product manager who formerly covered AI, blockchain and emerging tech trends for BuiltIn.com. Prior to Built In, Daley worked as a CNN production assistant and development coordinator for Rotary International. Which does not suggest he has any special insight into any blockchain technology or industry beyond being assigned to "write about all that new stuff because you young people understand those". OTOH, his previous title on Linkedin is "SEO Strategist" - which may be the explanation for the #1 result. At least we know he's good at that job, congrats, Sam. His credentials on being the arbiter of blockchain project prominence are still not clear - and I suspect his methodology of compiling the list differs little from the original article's methodology. Maybe I'm wrong but his bio doesn't show any signs of any relation to crypto. Maybe he still has huge knowledge of it, I don't know, there's no way for me to see it at least. So, not a "construction-focused publication" but more like "local newspaper worker who covers any news about manufacturing industry, construction, agriculture, food industry and anything else nobody wants to". So yeah, random list of startups has most of them dead or pivoted in several years. That's how it works with startups.

xmprt 4y ago

How can you distinguish between infrastructure products and hype products? If you said that a dating website turned video sharing platform would become on of the bedrocks of the online content creator economy you'd probably be laughed out of the room 20 years ago but that's what YouTube is today. I think the same thing applies to technology infrastructure. ETH came out in 2015 but it took a few years before it became as ubiquitous as it is today. Basically, it's hard to predict what's going to be an important infrastructure product.

smsm42 4y ago
> How can you distinguish between infrastructure products and hype products? If you don't understand the industry, you can't. That's what hype is for - to make you unable to distinguish those. If you really need to do that - you find somebody who knows the industry and who you can trust, and ask them. Otherwise, you just accept that you have no idea and would have to wait till the results are clear to know. > it's hard to predict what's going to be an important infrastructure product. Yes. Even for people that know what it is about. Virtually impossible for people that don't.
giantrobot 4y ago
> If you said that a dating website turned video sharing platform would become on of the bedrocks of the online content creator economy you'd probably be laughed out of the room 20 years ago but that's what YouTube is today. You've omitted a significant portion of YouTube's history. A dating website turned video sharing platform that struggled for years until one of the world's largest bought them, has become a bedrock of the content creator community. The core of what YouTube was has little relation to their current position in the industry. No one would have laughed at you for saying in 2002 that a video sharing website would enable people to make money. Video streaming (Real, QuickTime, Flash) had already been around for years. Porn websites were already selling access to videos (MPEG-1 or WMV) in 2002. Affordable DV cameras existed as did user friendly editing software. The first 3G cellular services were rolling out as were phones that could stream video over those networks. Computing power, storage, and bandwidth were limitations in 2002 but no one at that time would have laughed if you said "this will improve over the next two decades". Apple was by 2002 selling computers by advertising how easy video editing was on their platform. You'd have a better point if your horizon was a little further off. YouTube (in concept) would be far more laughable to someone in 1992 or 1982 than someone in 2002. Everything for YouTube needed to exist was extant in 2002. YouTube itself was only two years from existing. Cryptocurrency is a lot less interesting today if it's utility will take another 30 years to become evident.

simonw 4y ago

He didn't "take the first N Google results". Read the top of the article again. He took the projects listed in this article https://builtin.com/blockchain/blockchain-applications https://builtin.com/blockchain/blockchain-applications on this basis: > Apart from being the top #1 result, and a reasonably recent article, Builtin.com has 300+ employees (per linkedin), and is a company built around the tech startup community. Part of their business seems to be maintaining a database of startup companies, including the ones mentioned in the Blockchain article — so they have some business incentive for the data to be accurate.

YetAnotherNick 4y ago

> first of all, on a decentralized blockchain you can not really censor a transaction This is not true. Even though blockchain is decentralized there could be a single chain/few chains of truth if you want to convert it to real money. And that chain could only be the one that would be approved by coinbase, bitfinex etc. If they want to censor an address they simply could stop accepting those transactions, and then miners will have no choice but to censor those transaction else they couldn't convert it to money. The same affect could also be created by bitcoin developers or government. Till now, AFAIK only developers along with exchange have been successful in censoring a transaction[1][2], but government came close[3]. [1]: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Value_overflow_incident https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Value_overflow_incident [2]: https://levelup.gitconnected.com/how-ethereum-reversed-a-50-million-dao-attack-cee528d8c030?gi=f1d200d61b6 https://levelup.gitconnected.com/how-ethereum-reversed-a-50-... [3]: https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2021/05/07/marathon-miners-have-started-censoring-bitcoin-transactions-heres-what-that-means/ https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2021/05/07/marathon-miners-hav...

smsm42 4y ago
Well, yes, technically you are right - if the majority of the miners agreed to "censor" a specific transaction, then it would be censored. But that's not what the article claimed - Chainalysis, or any company like that, certainly wouldn't have power to command the majority of miners to do that. If there's a reasonable valid reason - such as a bug in the software - then you'd expect the majority of miners to accept that. If somebody like Coinbase would be able to control the majority of miners, then yes, they'd also would gain the ability to censor transactions. But I don't see any sign of that actually happening.
- geraldyo 4y ago
  You need to follow through your logic... > if there's a reasonable valid reason Who says it's a valid reason? Who says the reason is what they say it is? Who decides the best fix would be to censor a transaction? What if FakeBlockchainCorp decides to target you, then says there was a bug with these transactions, everyone agrees... Where's your bitcoin?