My suspicion is that, because a much higher percentage of the population isn't going to be able to make sense of blockchain, it will be easier for the finance industry and startups to trick idiots into investing, and they will have a deeper pool of idiots to draw from.
Just like the .com bubble, there is real value in blockchain. You just can't judge that from the investments.
People say this, but I maintain it isn't true. The only thing the blockchain is good for is when you cannot have any kind of central trusted authority. "Central authority" typically meaning government institutions like regulations and the legal system. Once you remove a central trusted authority, transaction costs get very expensive very fast. If you can't trust anybody but yourself it means you bear the cost of validating every single part of a transaction. You see this in the blockchain--it is massively more expensive to process a transaction than using a simple database. You see this in "smart contracts" because without a legal system to fallback on, you have to code every single edge case no matter how remote or you'll get fucked (which is actually impossible anyway, and is one of the reasons why the entire idea of "smart contracts" is a bunch of baloney...).
My point is, for 99.9% of every day things we have no need for any kind of distributed trustless ledger. The transaction costs for them outweigh the alternative of simply trusting people and using our legal system when something goes bad.
The only real use case for trustless distributed ledgers are for stuff that cannot use the legal system--eg organized crime, crypto-ransomware software, illegal drug trade, etc. For everything else, a database is all you need.
By the way, I'm not even going to go into the fact that "The Blockchain" only functions with mining, and the only way to incentivize mining is to bolt a "currency" on top like Bitcoin or ETH and then find a market to sell all the "coins" the miners generate. Take away that, and who the hell pays for the mining? If your answer is "the banks would" or "the parties would"... well, if they are gonna do that why the hell wouldn't they just pay for a traditional database instead? After all, that kind of cooperation sounds pretty centralized anyway and a large Postgres instance is a lot cheaper than thousands and thousands of miners....
I'm not very informed but I was under the impression that the blockchain is just a technology that happens to be used for cryptocurrencies. When used for currencies it requires "mining".
But if one were to use the technology for tracking shipping containers or mail then what sort of mining would need to be done?
So to answer your question indirectly, unless you like using inappropriate, inefficient data structures--if you are gonna be tracking shipping containers or the mail.... a good old fashioned database is what you need.
Greenspan called it "Irrational Exuberance" in 1996 [1], although I personally don't remember it being that bad then.
By 1999, the word "bubble" was all over the media.
I specifically remember hearing him address the question (it might have been rhetorical or from the audience) as to how this was sustainable given that most of companies involved didn't actually earn any profits.
Most of the overvalued companies involved during the bubble was consultancy companies making web pages for other companies.
I still remember being somewhat stunned by the answer he gave. He explained that that was not an issue since the new economy worked differently compared to the old one.
At that point I shook my head, focused my attention back on the servers and came to the conclusion that the bubble would burst sooner than later.
Yes, people who worked in dot com expected it. Those who did not thought they were smarter than us. Going to coffee shops was surreal - there were people who were telling us what our companies were doing.
In the dotcom bubble, people were buying shares at prices such that justifying those prices would require companies to make more money than any company had made before. But people, including experts, said this time it's different because the internet will change everything, and those companies really will make more money than any company has before. Even though no actual hard data justified that optimism.
If, in the mania of the 2000s, things could head towards $6.7tn, I don't believe that this bubble will be smaller in the age of loose monetary policy.
Money is essentially free today. A few weeks ago, Saudi Arabia paid $450m for a painting. If that isn't a sign of how money has lost its value, I don't know what is.
Would I bet everything I own on crypto? No, of course not. Can you still get a 10x return on money you invest today? I wouldn't be surprised. Even knowing there will be a major correction at some point, it's probably a mistake not to own at least some.
They're both Turing-complete blockchains which can run decentralized apps/smart contracts, and of course be used for transactions directly.
Ethereum (ETH):
Created in 2015, currently successfully running. Right now ETH uses a proof of work consensus algorithm with plans to move to a proof of stake algorithm over time. Its smart contracts can be coded in two purpose-built languages, and work is being done on cross-compilers to facilitate writing in more. ETH can currently handle ~20 tx/sec, but the community is very active in working toward vast improvements in this regard via very technical solutions (sharding, plasma), but they're not quite there yet. Ethereum is truly decentralized and runs tens of thousands of validating nodes.
EOS:
Planned creation date is in June 2018. Its smart contracts will use WASM (allowing the use of many general purpose computer languages), support parallel computation, and have some sort of ability to change deployed contracts to allow for debugging and updates. It will handle 100,000+ tx/sec out of the box, and transactions will have 0 fees. Instead of fees, percentage of holdings determines allowable transaction bandwidth (If you have 1% of EOS, you get 1% of EOS transaction throughput).
However, instead of tens of thousands of validating nodes, EOS will have 21, with all coin holders having the ability to vote for who these validators are. EOS will trust the consensus of these validators for transaction security. This is how EOS achieves such high transaction volume and zero fees. IMO, this is the main weakness of EOS.
Look at Bitcoin. Clearly a bubble. But... do you pull out, or do you roll the dice and see if it goes to $30k?
Hey don't diss Kozmo. I remember being a punk teenager and ordering a single 20oz bottle of soda and having it delivered by some dude in a car an hour later. Clearly, it wasn't a bubble :-)
I was just 15 but one of my current day co-workers was active at the time and he lost a lot of money in shares that he thought would keep their value.
Shares he had received from employers.
But with cryptocurrencies people can't stop talking about how it will burst. Maybe that will change things in a somewhat psychological way.