"But that's just a write-only distributed database....with a layer of asymmetric cryptography". Yeah...
It is aggravating when some in the industry try to champion everything as a silver bullet, but it is just as flawed when many instantly veer to being anti-that thing just because.
As an aside, proof-of- schemes are not necessary in many/most alternative blockchain scenarios. The egregious inefficiency of platforms like Bitcoin is not relevant for most other uses.
Glad we got that out of the way.
>It is aggravating when some in the industry try to champion everything as a silver bullet, but it is just as flawed when many instantly veer to being anti-that thing just because.
I disagree, it's not "just because". We're not talking about whether or not Rust or your Javascript framework du jour has a future. We're talking about a highly speculative bubble where people are dumping millions because they believe that the technology has a future. If Rust fails I'll have one more useless programming skill and a few codebases to rewrite. If cryptocurrencies collapse people are going to lose their homes.
The whole "blockchain tech is here to stay" argument plays into that. I've heard some close friends use it to justify their investments in cryptocurrencies. Surely if everything is going to run on blockchains 10 years from now then surely at least one of the cryptocurrencies in my portfolio is going to be worth a ton then, right?
Maybe let me rephrase my question in an other way: if somebody had asked you 10 years ago to solve the problem you're describing, what would you have replied? "I'm sorry I don't think that technology exists" or "you need some kind of write-only distributed database with a layer of asymmetric cryptography"?
So no, it's not just me being a contrarian naysayer, there are real consequences to all this bullshit and pixie dust surrounding cryptocurrencies. I mean look at the replies for this joke tweet somebody linked elsewhere in the thread: https://twitter.com/MalwareTechBlog/status/93264913325659750...
Note the number of defensive tweets claiming the author doesn't know what they're talking about and how the blockchain is actually great:
>Maybe learn how the technology works before pretending to be a snarky expert. This doesn't make you look smart.
>very funny, but blockchain has some interesting use cases that might make some cros domain and cross org stuff better.
>No one will need/want Blockchain is today's version of no one will need more than 640k RAM.
>Blockchain has applications far beyond just coining it.
>That’s a pretty short sighted way of thinking. Block chain based voting is a really good idea.
Because apparently block chain voting is something that exists.
I like this one too:
> give me an actual current non hypothetical real world use case.
Reply:
> I'd be more inclined to answer this publicly if I were not actively working on a related project that I am not at liberty to discuss openly
I could go and and on and on. I've gone through pages of this and the only actual use case I see mentioned is:
>Might be useful for monitoring chain of custody for secure documents. Not that that’s a huge use case.
Which I assume is related to the use case I mentioned in my previous comment.
In my experience these types of replies are common on every public discussion of anything criticizing bitcoins or cryptocurrencies.
So yeah, I don't think the bullshit is on my side, and neither is the burden of proof.
* Block chain voting does exist; here's an example of it actively distributing real funds to real projects: https://www.dashcentral.org/budget
* The fact that cryptocurrency prices are volatile does not allow one to draw any kind of inference that either blockchain-based solutions or cryptocurrencies have no future. Was the .com bubble proof that Internet was a waste of time?
* I give a solid use case I'm currently exploring in a comment further down the thread; there are plenty of people out there smarter than I am, so if I have a real use case you can be sure some of those smarter people will come up with something equally valid
* Finally, why are you trying to hard to prove a negative, and what makes you think you are able to foresee the future of a technology better than all the other immensely skilled technologists out there? You can't. Wait a couple years and if you're right you'll get to smirk at all the early adopters. If you're wrong, good luck with the job hunt. If that seems like a rational set of trade-offs to you, all the best.
Neat.
The rest of us are just busy building solutions as the industry evolves.
1. Regulators need to accept transaction reports, volume is in the hundreds of millions/reports/day so they don't have the technical competency to accept reports themselves
2. 3rd parties ("trade repositories") currently provide this infrastructure but regulators are learning that aggregating data across multiple trade repositories with different implementations is very difficult (particularly where dual-sided reporting across different trade repositories occur!); financial institutions are also ending up having to pay far more than cost to comply with regulations because the trade repositories are profit-driven enterprises
3. A private blockchain (e.g. Quorum and/or maybe Hyperledger's PoEL) solves these problems cleanly:
a. regulators have confidence that market participants are playing by the rules and not manipulating (or submitting) reports after the fact. For those who don't know, there's a lot of incentive to 'fix missing reports' -- consider e.g. Merrill Lynch being fined 34.5m GBP for not reporting just 2 years worth of transactions [1]; how would a 'distributed database' give regulators confidence when that kind of 'incentive money' is involved in retro-fitting reports?
b. market participants are happy because their highly confidential reporting data can delivered to regulators via simple access controls (even after the fact!) and infrastructure costs are fairly split across market participants in proportion to volume, and the industry effectively "self-regulates" itself (rather than trusting 3rd parties), which is generally an attribute of preferred solutions in the finance industry
[1] https://www.fca.org.uk/news/press-releases/fca-fines-merrill...
You really think people would be talking about "blockchains" if bitcoins wasn't worth thousands of dollars? Is there currently any notable application of this technology beyond cryptocurrencies?
>Further, I gave specific examples
That you immediately dismissed yourself as "just a write-only distributed database....with a layer of asymmetric cryptography".
>you reply with a joke tweet (which, as an aside, no one has any duty or obligation wasting their time replying to
It's true, but they did reply nonetheless, wouldn't have hurt to actually come up with a decent argument while they were at it.
Still, it's really a common pattern in bitcoin discussions in my experience (just say that the author doesn't know what they're talking about without coming with any counterargument). You can find plenty of examples in the comments of this very much non-joke article: https://medium.com/@thedrbits/why-i-also-find-iota-deeply-al...
I could probably come up with other examples but I don't have any duty or obligation to waste my time doing that so...
> then more hand waving.
Who's waving hands at whom in this scenario?
>The rest of us are just busy building solutions as the industry evolves.
Godspeed. I don't have any problem with that. I just wish the discussion around these technologies revolved more around technical arguments than ambiguous terminology.
These seem very closely related at this point. A cryptocurrency bubble seems to be the primary use of blockchain tech so far, and the eye-popping amount of money seemingly involved appears to be the primary driver of interest in the technology.
You can hardly think about one without the other. E.g., suppose you had a great use for blockchain -- say, your book of record/holdings -- along with a great plan to develop and roll a system based on it that had nothing to do with cryptocurrencies.
You'd still have to account for what you plan to do if (when) enough money has been lost on cryptocurrencies that blockchain becomes a dirty word that will kill your system if it because associated with it. Beyond any technical differences, your non-blockchain competitors won't have to convince potential participants that their system's architecture isn't actually some tricky way to rip them off.
For some that entry barrier might be a feature :-)
