What problem could early steam powered cars solve that horses couldn’t solve better? I doubt the earliest ones performed better than the animal based solutions for ANY specific use.
Yet writing off automobiles at that stage would’ve been a mistake only obvious in retrospect.
Especially for something as truly bizarre as Ethereum, why write it off at this early stage?
What are these truly innovative uses for a nested chain of data blobs whose contents include a hash of the previous link?
He isn't praising anything. He is simply saying not being anti-something that early. The world isn't all black and white, there's nuance, not being anti-something doesn't means praising it.
> I don’t understand why you would be anti- something so new at all. >[...] > why write it off at this early stage?
What if there's actually nothing good that we can do out of it but you aren't there to talk against it? Well it will die naturally. What if there's actually something good that we can do with it but there's a bunch of anti-something people? Well that add unnecessary friction to something good being made and that just make you a jerk adding it.
You see how it's better?
I agree that a token based currency is not required, I'm just interested in what people define a blockchain as for intellectual curiosity.
A (potentially distributed) datastructure of some kind, which resembles a linked-list, and ensures its integrity using some sort of cryptographic hash of the previous link such that changing any link but the most recent invalidates the whole chain. Literally -- a chain of (data) blocks.
A non-engineering description of a "blockchain" should be considered to be misleading.
edit - also, I'd take cryptocurrencies more seriously if they could stay out of the headlines for a while
It feels like the world suddenly discovered the hammer, and now we think everything is a nail
This narrative that "Internet time" transforms the world every other year should have died in the 90s. Real work takes time.
Building the infrastructure for the Internet took decades. Even after it won, most people used modems over badly insulated copper wire for the better part of ten years.
The reason nobody has found a good use for block chain yet is that the only time it offers any benefits over a traditional relational data store is when you cannot trust anybody. The truth is you can trust someone almost all the time. And even if you can’t really, it might be more efficient to just pretend. The truth is that trust is a substantial optimization and it eliminates vast quantities of waste and inefficiency in the proof of work model. That’s why people don’t want blockchains.
A really clean way of expressing this idea is that when you deposit a paper check at the bank they don’t check the signature. They don’t check the signature because they trust you, or rather it’s more efficient to just assume the money is being deposited legitimately. The amount of effort signature verification takes makes it more expensive than just eating the fraud losses. The same is true in many of these block chain powered proof of work situations. The cost of computing the proof of work outweighs the cost of managing fraud. Not to mention all the ridiculous fraud perpetrated on this unregulated market but that’s neither here nor there.
I wonder if investors are pushing developers away from infrastructure plays, towards consumer apps and sub-platforms.
I imagine that's happening in VR. I hear a lot about headsets, games, medical applications, etc, but I haven't heard anyone get excited about research into better Fresnel lens production.
Is there anything that your argument wouldn’t work for? Do you truly have to wait a decade before making any judgements about the hype around a technology? When will we be able to say if smart contracts have been overhyped?
The only reason they would even make sense to pursue would be because of how successful the train was. Similar to how this bitcoin stuff makes more sense when you look at the success of the internet/paypal/amazon.
In what - concrete - way is bitcoin related to the success of Amazon or the internet? Please be specific and don't hand-wave if you're going to make such bold claims.
[1] https://knowledgenuts.com/2014/02/24/gasoline-used-to-be-con...
[2] http://www.attendly.com/rockefellers-unconventional-approach...
So, where are the results?
Your car analogy doesn't add up, for quite a while horses were undoubtedly more convenient than automobiles. Then automobiles improved and took over. We have a similar situation with electric cars today.
Blockchain technologies are not a few cycles of optimizations away from being able to compete with PostgreSQL, they work fundamentally differently and they have fundamentally, per design, strong limitations about how efficient they can be. That's the cost of trustless decentralization.
To overcome these limitations you don't need "a blockchain but more better", you need a fundamental breakthrough in the way these things work. I suppose you could hope for such a breakthrough but that's akin to hoping that we're going to figure out cold fusion and solve the energy crisis. Sure, it can happen but it's not unreasonable to be skeptical of it.
If a new invention is truly transformative, it will thrive even after long doubt. At this stage the public, forced demonstration of cryptocurrencies deserve to be criticized no matter it will be successful or not. (I don't want to criticize general cryptocurrency researchers of course, because, well, they are just studying.)
