Blockchain: Next tech juggernaut?
-
F-ES Sitecore wrote:
So is the internet so why isn't the US shutting that down too?
Dunno. If someone told Trump that he can shut down something Al Gore invented, he'd probably do so :)
F-ES Sitecore wrote:
If they wanted to shut it down they'd legislate, no need to do something underhand that might harm their reputation and democracy.
There's no need to shut it down directly; discrediting works well enough. Harming US reputation and democracy is left to the Americans themselves, doesn't look from here like you need help with that.
Bastard Programmer from Hell :suss: If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^] "If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
Eddy Vluggen wrote:
Dunno
The same reason they haven't shut down Bitcoin.
-
Reading this book about Blockchain technologies and it is convincing me that blockchain is a juggernaut (unstoppable). Blockchain: A Practical Guide to Developing Business, Law, and Technology Solutions [^] It really is going to be used everywhere (identity, finance, healthcare, file storage/sharing, supply chain). If you check out Hyperledger Projects - Hyperledger[^] you will see that there are major blockchain projects being backed by major corps (SawTooth = Intel, Fabric = IBM) And everyone has heard of Bitcoin but Ripple (Company - Learn About Ripple)[^] is getting huge and backed by large corps. A nice summary of the technology:
Blockchain book said:
Simply put, a blockchain is a database encompassing a physical chain of fixed-length blocks that include 1 to N transactions, where each transaction added to a new block is validated and then inserted into the block.
The concepts behind the blockchain really are interesting.
The only "demonstrated" application has been cryptocurrencies. It has not been shown to be cost-effective for much else; particularly "private" use. Only the "vendors" seem to have all the answers ... Where else are you going to get all those "nodes" for your computations?
"(I) am amazed to see myself here rather than there ... now rather than then". ― Blaise Pascal
-
Eddy Vluggen wrote:
How often is SHA256 hacked again?
Once every mihoye? :D And it should be doable with quantum computers or so I'm told, which isn't a very distant future. Anyway, they should've used MD5 instead!
Eddy Vluggen wrote:
Digiconomist is spouting crap :thumbsup:
They're the only ones comparing it to gold, but they all say BC is quite polluting! I for one don't want to live next to a polluting BC mining serverfarm ;p Anyway, I've learned from this thread that the BC mining process is just their implementation of blockchain, so the expensive/pollution point only goes for BC and not other blockchain implementations. That makes it a lot more doable for regular businesses as well, I might even look into it!
Best, Sander Continuous Integration, Delivery, and Deployment arrgh.js - Bringing LINQ to JavaScript Object-Oriented Programming in C# Succinctly
Sander Rossel wrote:
Once every mihoye? :-D And it should be doable with quantum computers or so I'm told, which isn't a very distant future.
Haha, and so it would be "theoretically" possible? How? It is not even the hash that is the problem, but the amount of ledgers :)
Sander Rossel wrote:
They're the only ones comparing it to gold, but they all say BC is quite polluting!
And you believe them? Seriously?
Sander Rossel wrote:
I for one don't want to live next to a polluting BC mining serverfarm ;-P
Afraid of loose bits that come to byte you?
Sander Rossel wrote:
Anyway, I've learned from this thread that the BC mining process is just their implementation of blockchain, so the expensive/pollution point only goes for BC and not other blockchain implementations.
No, it's not; a blockchain and mining are two different things altogether. Mining should be expensive.
Bastard Programmer from Hell :suss: If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^] "If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
-
Eddy Vluggen wrote:
It's not; you don't use an unlocked door instead of a locked door simply because your spouse is a "weak link".
Yes but you don't buy a more costly door with a lock if its not required - see below!
Eddy Vluggen wrote:
Monetary costs? Which, if you transact from wallet to wallet? There is none! Environmental cost is another nonsense-argument; it is a lot lower than actual cash.
Unfortunately there are, every Blockchain change requires the participant in the chain to be updated or at least enough of them. One of the reasons it takes a lot longer to process a Bitcoin than a credit card payment (if using pure Bitcoins). i.e. Every is processed, not once but multiple times (its a blockchain!), this doesn't come for free - read data centers, networks etc, all cost with environmental impacts.
Eddy Vluggen wrote:
That's vague as can be; despite your promise of problematic, it is used. Doesn't look like it is going away either.
Yep - vague as I don't know what the solution is! Not saying there isn't a role for blockchain technology somewhere, but as it stands its not that good a performer in terms of efficeincy. Bitcoin took another dive this week based on an article with similar points to above Bubble trouble? Bitcoin hits one-week low - London Business News | London News | Londonlovesbusiness.com[^]
Bob1000 wrote:
Yes but you don't buy a more costly door with a lock if its not required - see below!
Enough people do.
Bob1000 wrote:
Unfortunately there are, every Blockchain change requires the participant in the chain to be updated or at least enough of them. One of the reasons it takes a lot longer to process a Bitcoin than a credit card payment (if using pure Bitcoins). i.e. Every is processed, not once but multiple times (its a blockchain!), this doesn't come for free - read data centers, networks etc, all cost with environmental impacts.
A minor bit of electricity on PC's that are already turned on.
Bob1000 wrote:
Yep - vague as I don't know what the solution is
No, vague because you are trying to project a problem where there is none.
Bob1000 wrote:
Not saying there isn't a role for blockchain technology somewhere, but as it stands its not that good a performer in terms of efficeincy.
The free market claims otherwise.
Bob1000 wrote:
Bitcoin took another dive this week based on an article with similar points to above
Yes, the dives are highlighted, yet still it climbs. Or are other currencies just sinking? :)
Bastard Programmer from Hell :suss: If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^] "If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
-
KBZX5000 wrote:
I'm still pissed-off about Edison.
I know. That was a crazy situation. I actually won an Edison in a contest and when I got it I thought it was too complicated (for what it was). What I mean is that if I wanted that level of a thing -- running Linux -- then I'd just go with the RPi. and if I didn't want something running Linux then I'd just go with a basic Arduino. It was as if they created this thing without looking around at all. It was crazy they just killed it like that though. People were just starting to use it a bit.
-
Great points all around. It is worth noting that it has proven to be useful for inventory tracking and it's nature lends itself to cross-company resource tracking, making the possibilities for ERP solutions interesting.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity." - Hanlon's Razor
Yes, it can be applied for B2B inventory tracking, but you'd need a trustworthy intermediary to provide the infrastructure / inventory service, and you'll probably pay a hefty premium to integrate it with your ERP out-of-the-box. Alternatively, maintaining a plain-old REST point and a SignalR hub is cheaper and aligns better with a healthy software stack. And, to be cautious, you'd probably want trusted interactions when doing any B2B related activity. Companies tend to sue each other a lot when something goes wrong.
-
Yes, it can be applied for B2B inventory tracking, but you'd need a trustworthy intermediary to provide the infrastructure / inventory service, and you'll probably pay a hefty premium to integrate it with your ERP out-of-the-box. Alternatively, maintaining a plain-old REST point and a SignalR hub is cheaper and aligns better with a healthy software stack. And, to be cautious, you'd probably want trusted interactions when doing any B2B related activity. Companies tend to sue each other a lot when something goes wrong.
Not denying any of that. Just emphasizing that while it's largely snake oil, there are practical concerns that it can address which are largely being lost in the current buzzword mess.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity." - Hanlon's Razor
-
I guess for me blockchain == Bitcoin, while I know that's not true. Your post simply proves that I don't know jack shit about the subject except the general idea and the Bitcoin implementation :laugh:
Fabio Franco wrote:
I have been working on blockchain projects for big corps for a while now and I got exposed to many types of business that not only are using it, but are actually expanding its usage.
Can you tell a bit about the use cases?
Best, Sander Continuous Integration, Delivery, and Deployment arrgh.js - Bringing LINQ to JavaScript Object-Oriented Programming in C# Succinctly
Sorry for taking so long. Yes, I can tell you a bit about a couple of use cases: Inter-company settlement: With programmable smart contracts and a token implementation a lot of inter-company transactions and accounting can be automated. Even payments. There can be a direct link between the custom cryptocurrency and Euro in such a way that speculation is not an issue. The settlement cease to even be an issue and with a private network, legal entities can all have blockchain authority nodes eliminating the need of trust. There is the possibility to give a node to tax authorities so trust is not an issue when it comes to paying taxes. We can get reduced costs and mitigate risks of legal fines while also making it impossible for actors inside the company to manipulate numbers which can cause all kinds of harm, therefore inhibiting personal agendas. Voting: I participated of a pilot project to count the votes of an election process. The idea is to give transparency and validation to the vote counting process (not for actually voting). I also helped writing this [white paper](https://www.stemmen-telt.nl/groningen/download/Technical\_Documentation\_Counting\_Votes\_V1.0.pdf) wich goes into details of the objectives of using blockchain for the elections. The pilot happened in the Netherlands and the code is open sourced. So there is a lot of material if you would like to explore more. So, in summary, blockchain is waaaayyyy more than bitcoin. To me bitcoin is a blockchain 0.1 alpha release and currently we are in Blockchain 4.0. The thing is that it's not mainstream yet, so there is a lot of misconception and little widespread material about it. To make it harder, there are many different implementations of blockchain (like JS frameworks). The materials we find about blockchain many times only talks about it so make it too theoretical and hard to grasp. It's not until you get hands-on the code that you can actually realize how it really works.
To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems - Homer Simpson ---- Our heads are round so our thoughts can change direction - Francis Picabia
-
Also it is going to hit a wall sooner or later. The more transactions, the longer the chain is. By ten years, it is going to consume a whole town's electricity just to handle one new transaction. I don't know what kind of book that the thread starter read, but I will never hop unto the ship.
Daniel Wilianto wrote:
I don't know what kind of book that the thread starter read, but I will never hop unto the ship.
Your book is probably wrong too. Your incorrect assumption is that blockchain needs to hog a lot of electricity, see my response to Sandel to get a little more context. It's actually better if you hop unto the ship now while it's still early and you can get ahead of the crowd. As a matter of fact I get so many job offers just by having blockchain on my linkedin profile. ;)
To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems - Homer Simpson ---- Our heads are round so our thoughts can change direction - Francis Picabia
-
Sorry for taking so long. Yes, I can tell you a bit about a couple of use cases: Inter-company settlement: With programmable smart contracts and a token implementation a lot of inter-company transactions and accounting can be automated. Even payments. There can be a direct link between the custom cryptocurrency and Euro in such a way that speculation is not an issue. The settlement cease to even be an issue and with a private network, legal entities can all have blockchain authority nodes eliminating the need of trust. There is the possibility to give a node to tax authorities so trust is not an issue when it comes to paying taxes. We can get reduced costs and mitigate risks of legal fines while also making it impossible for actors inside the company to manipulate numbers which can cause all kinds of harm, therefore inhibiting personal agendas. Voting: I participated of a pilot project to count the votes of an election process. The idea is to give transparency and validation to the vote counting process (not for actually voting). I also helped writing this [white paper](https://www.stemmen-telt.nl/groningen/download/Technical\_Documentation\_Counting\_Votes\_V1.0.pdf) wich goes into details of the objectives of using blockchain for the elections. The pilot happened in the Netherlands and the code is open sourced. So there is a lot of material if you would like to explore more. So, in summary, blockchain is waaaayyyy more than bitcoin. To me bitcoin is a blockchain 0.1 alpha release and currently we are in Blockchain 4.0. The thing is that it's not mainstream yet, so there is a lot of misconception and little widespread material about it. To make it harder, there are many different implementations of blockchain (like JS frameworks). The materials we find about blockchain many times only talks about it so make it too theoretical and hard to grasp. It's not until you get hands-on the code that you can actually realize how it really works.
To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems - Homer Simpson ---- Our heads are round so our thoughts can change direction - Francis Picabia
Thanks, very interesting! I'll be sure to check out that whitepaper too :)
Best, Sander Continuous Integration, Delivery, and Deployment arrgh.js - Bringing LINQ to JavaScript Object-Oriented Programming in C# Succinctly
-
Daniel Wilianto wrote:
I don't know what kind of book that the thread starter read, but I will never hop unto the ship.
Your book is probably wrong too. Your incorrect assumption is that blockchain needs to hog a lot of electricity, see my response to Sandel to get a little more context. It's actually better if you hop unto the ship now while it's still early and you can get ahead of the crowd. As a matter of fact I get so many job offers just by having blockchain on my linkedin profile. ;)
To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems - Homer Simpson ---- Our heads are round so our thoughts can change direction - Francis Picabia
My bad. It seems that cryptocurrencies hogs a lot of electricity because of how long their chains are. Blockchain (the design) itself wil probably have a good future in banking and business. But I still jump on the ship. Sorry. I don't see how it can become practical use everywhere.
-
Thanks, very interesting! I'll be sure to check out that whitepaper too :)
Best, Sander Continuous Integration, Delivery, and Deployment arrgh.js - Bringing LINQ to JavaScript Object-Oriented Programming in C# Succinctly
You're welcome. If you have any question, let me know :)
To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems - Homer Simpson ---- Our heads are round so our thoughts can change direction - Francis Picabia
-
My bad. It seems that cryptocurrencies hogs a lot of electricity because of how long their chains are. Blockchain (the design) itself wil probably have a good future in banking and business. But I still jump on the ship. Sorry. I don't see how it can become practical use everywhere.
Daniel Wilianto wrote:
It seems that cryptocurrencies hogs a lot of electricity because of how long their chains are
It actually has to do with the consensus algorithm and the difficulty of a network based on Proof of Work consensus. The Proof of Work consensus was the first to be established on blockchain solutions. Today there are many more, which don't depend on heavy calculations to include a new block in the chain. In the case of proof of work (Bitcoin, Ethereum ethash), what determines the energy consumption is the current difficulty of the network. In the case of Bitcoin you're right, the difficulty increases with the length of the chain, but it's by the design. Ethereum PoW works slightly different, which is more related to the amount of transactions in a given timeframe + the amount of miners on that given timeframe. The length of the chain plays a role in Ethereum too, but it's not it alone what determines the energy requirements. What happens is, the longest the chain, the harder to break it: Imagine blocks are like this: [hash]<-[hash]-<[hash]<-[hash] For the sake of simplicity let's say the hash of the next block is an increment of the previous: [1]<-[2]<-[3]<-[4] Changing the first block implies on having to recalculate the entire chain, because this state is invalid: [5]<-[2]<-[3]<-[4] To make it valid and attacker would have to do the first block's calculation, plus all of the following blocks: [5]<-[6]<-[7]<-[8] Only that by itself is already computationally infeasible. The attacker not only needs to do that, but also convince the entire network that his chain is correct instead of what they have. That means controlling at least 1 third of the minder nodes of the network. So in the case of ethereum with ethash (PoW) algorithm, which has around 10k simultaneous miners, the attacker would need to control over 3k's worth computing power for a "chance" to convince the network. So very undersimplifying it, understand that the next block basically takes the previous block hash + a nonce (difficulty) + current pending transactions, to calculate the current's block hash. Which is an implementation of Merkle's tree. The length of the chain has no direct correlation with the next block's difficulty to compute. I hope to have clarified that for you.
Daniel Wilianto wrote:
I don't see how it can become practical use everywhere.
It's not for everywh
-
Not denying any of that. Just emphasizing that while it's largely snake oil, there are practical concerns that it can address which are largely being lost in the current buzzword mess.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity." - Hanlon's Razor
-
jschell wrote:
Nothing is used everywhere.
How about atoms? I believe they are even used in the most distant suns and at the far edges of the Universe. :rolleyes:
jschell wrote:
So certainly not an unbiased view of the potential.
And yet, where is there an unbiased view of anything? Many people like chocolate and yet other fools do not. And people who sell chocolate like it even if they don't eat it themselves, all because they are trying to make money. I have yet to find the human who has an unbiased view of anything. Whether they know it or not. :rolleyes: But, that's just my biased opinion. :laugh: I get your points though. I know there will be vast challenges for blockchain tech but that is what struck me the most -- the huge corps who are getting behind it. I'm not really _for_ blockchain since there are some inherent dangers in it. I just think the technology behind it (merkle trees) is interesting and since I don't like large systems I find it to be interesting that so many large companies are backing it so strongly already.
raddevus wrote:
the huge corps who are getting behind it.
Large companies use a lot of things. And they try a lot of things because they have the money to throw away. That doesn't mean anything. Even more so because marketers like to promote exactly that usage.
raddevus wrote:
that so many large companies are backing it so strongly already
What statistics? How many fortune 500 companies have invested more than 50 percent of their total IT dollars in it? How does the actual investment of those same companies over the past 20 years in other technologies compare?
