That’s not how this works. The transactions aren’t the encrypted bit.
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Fair enough, but by that definition, a file system like ZFS might be considered a blockchain, it seems? This based on my quick research on Merkel trees.
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I actually had the same thought 
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She’s a smart, accomplished lady.
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The question is, if she has a tree, does it make her a blockchain? 
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Yeah probably. For me, the Merkel chain is one of the most beautiful data structures ever created in computing.
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For sure. In practical terms I suspect what you’d see is that some baseline rate of people getting out of the game or otherwise transacting bitcoin leading to some baseline rate of growth. Then I am guessing (as I alluded to in my edit) that what people would do is exit when they see an opportunity to purchase something that’s going to gain value faster than the baseline bitcoin churn (or when they just need to liquidate). But the more people that do this, the more transactions there are and the more the value will go up. So people getting out of the game will (possibly?) incentivize others to stay in the game longer. I imagine some sort of equilibrium will be achieved at some point.
Or something? I 100% cop to being out of my depth in this analysis.
First: VC-funded projects last about 3 years until the investors want a payday, and about 90% of them fail. So that’s pretty much exactly what the failure rate the author cites is. So that doesn’t seem quite the startling indictment that perhaps he hopes.
Missing entirely, except for an oblique reference to Honduras with no detail, is the likely future of blockchain: providing reliable records in regions where governance is non-existent, grossly underdeveloped, corrupt, contested, or some combination thereof.
That probably applies to 40% of the planet right now. I was CTO on a blockchain based project to manage remittances from a population of about 2m economic migrants in Thailand, remitting to Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos and Bangladesh. Here, there were no systems of any kind, apart from what the criminal gangs that had smuggled the workers in in the first place provided. That included hawalla networks, who in the area that we investigated, had purchased the right to issue visas from corrupt officials, and were in the process of setting up a huge office to manage this.
I’ve been working with a prominent epidemiologist in a neighbouring S.E. Asian country, who works on testing for malaria and other infectious diseases that kill and disable tens of thousands every year in the region. There is no infrastructure around recording test results, and the paper-based models cost about 4 times what the test itself does, to transfer from the field for recording at the National Epidemiology Institute. That means that 20% of the budgets actually do tests – and that many fewer people get the diagnostics they need.
We’ve worked through this with some very qualified epidemiologists in various locations, and blockchain is the only feasible, secure way to ensure that this kind of data management works.
People forget how much bigger the world is than their experience. The majority of people in the world have no systems for KYC that enable the kinds of transactions that have been the norm in Amazogoogleania for twenty years now. From that point of view, and the general lack of global awareness the author has, this was a pretty provincial point of view.
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I saw a fantastic video online the other day on Hamming codes, and gotta say — exceptionally bad-ass as well!
To put It in economic terms, an economy based on bitcoin would be inherently deflationary. People would spend less in anticipation of the value of their money going up in value.
So rather than more money leading to Inflation and rising prices (with some caveats), you would have falling prices in general as bitcoin is hoarded and the money supply.
Having generally falling prices sounds good but is actually a horrible economic situation. Typically debts don’t fall while the price of goods and services you are selling to pay such debt does.
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Thanks! What’s the net effect for a sub-economy that’s deflationary, given that it’s a subset of a larger economy that’s generally inflationary? What does the long-term future of bitcoin look like under my analysis given that we also have, you know, actual currency?
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Good question and a couple of thoughts come to mind.
First, I would argue we already have segments of the economy that are deflationary where the prices of certain things are falling while others are rising (I.e., some manufactured goods(falling) vs healthcare(rising)).
Longer term for bitcoin or other crypto currencies, I don’t see it catching on as a medium of exchange because people will be reluctant to spend something that is going up in value compared to paper money or credit/debit cards. So it’s only monetary use is a possible store of value like gold. Gold has storage and transaction costs which may be comparable to and possibly cheaper than blockchain‘s energy costs. So I don’t see it lasting.
(This is not investment advice, just my take. People can and will gain and lose money with cryptocurrencies.)
And full disclosure, I own a little stock in a bitcoin miner trying to profit off the mania. And on further thought I will probably sell in thinking about the social and environmental costs.
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I worked for a blockchain startup that was not doing cryptocurrencies, and they had a good pitch (enough to get me to join (plus a sweet salary)).
Their pitch was a lie. They had “blockchain technology” but it was actually being used as a really slow and limited database; there was no distributed access (all interaction was through their APIs) and no plans to change that.
I ultimately was forced out because of questioning their approach. I think in the end it was a kind of pump and dump to feed off of all that VC money looking for love.
I learned enough about how to build a real blockchain solution but I’ve yet to find a real-world use case that would truly benefit from it.
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I accept the veracity of this anecdote … primarily because of the properly matched parentheses.
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ReplyAll did a story on this recently. They interviewed a guy who tracks down BitCoin for a living, and it’s apparently not that difficult to deduce who people are from the transaction history. Anonymous in principle, maybe, but not in practice.
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Sometimes it is even worse than that- it starts to flirt with religion. I work at a “big data” company, and daily I watch people assume that applying enough machine learning to terrible noisy data will somehow make it useful signal. People are then making million-dollar decisions based on this. Just because there are numbers, people think the information is real, but it’s just useless noise that has been pumped through a transformation that nobody understands and comes out the other side as different noise.
As a computer scientist, the whole thing makes me very uncomfortable. ML has done great things for speech recognition and other a few other fields, but when it starts getting applied to very weak medical sensors, election demographics, and other bad data sets, the hair on my neck stands up.
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:100 emoji:
I think there’s a serious dose of engineer hubris here too. Can’t help thinking of that classic XKCD:
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LOL IRL.
They were using Hyperledger Fabric, but as a black box, fronted by a mysql database. Everything came into mysql, and they had a microservice to handle replication to Fabric, because when used directly it ran at a couple transactions per second. This had been built by a team at a technical school in a third world country and had been inherited by the current engineering staff, which had basically polished this turdball so that it had lots of unit tests and support tooling. An extreme case of cargo-cult engineering.
It didn’t take me long to determine the reason was because they had multiple sessions trying to update the same value, and you can only do that once per block. By restructuring the data and access patterns I was able to get them up to the edge of what was feasible with Fabric.
They then took that design and re-built the original system, but with a different database system. It burns me to this day.
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