Blockchain: Next tech juggernaut?
-
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?
