Not being left behind if you're wrong.
I'm in a tech-adjacent industry and see it all the time. Competitor A comes out with "shiny new technology" and markets the hell out of it. My company panics because we're suddenly lagging behind and rushes a competing project into development. Competitor B sees all of this and hops in too. All of a sudden it's the new direction of the industry and dominating trade shows, despite the origin being a mediocre product with some clever marketing. 5 years later it's never spoken of again.
I'm not familiar enough to say for sure this is what happened with "blockchain", but from a distance it has a lot of familiar markers.
In 2018 it's still hanging around but realizing a 20% speedup on certain classes of problems. Maybe.
I was part of a group that developed signal processing algorithms and my boss's boss pulled me aside and asked me what we ought to do about this stuff. I told him that there are a few applications where this works very well, but it's pretty niche overall and we shouldn't do more than what we'd already done. He was a bit surprised because he thought I'd be one of the kool-aid drinkers given how much I knew about and liked playing with the tech. But he deferred to my judgement.
It turned out to be one of the most significant conversations I've had. I was still a junior engineer fresh out of college, but my bosses realized that I could be trusted put aside naive enthusiasm about the tech and make cool-headed decisions about what was strategically important. And I learned to trust my intuition about what was useful and what was just hype.
> it's still hanging around but realizing a 20% speedup on certain classes of problems
It really varies though. In grad school I felt like god when some molecular dynamics simulations running on my pair of GTX 760s finished faster than the same thing running on my advisor's 96-core CPU cluster.
Point taken, though, that it was over-hyped. There were lots of conference presentations with GPU-acceleration in the title (kind of like deep learning is now).
I'm definitely not an expert so I'm maybe missing something here.
I'm sure there are other disciplines that have seen a larger benefit.
"IT" has for long been this back-office area where specialists get to dictate business policies because they know computers. (A classic on this genre is the Bastard Operator from Hell [0]) -- but now lusers bring their own computers and phones to work, and hell if they don't have technological ideas of their own. IT has been commoditized, cloudified, outsourced.
If "digital transformation" sounds bogus is because management consultants are bogus. But in practice it can be a real thing that's not as much about new sexy tech (in the sense of blockchains, RISC chips and so on) as about putting what's already available into operation using business knowledge.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bastard_Operator_From_Hell
Decentralisation is the selling point of blockchain technology.
Anyone building on a blockchain that doesn't think decentralisation is beneficial in and of itself is a conman.
The sad part is that the blockchain is the least interesting part of this hype. The interesting part is making all mutations of state require signed inputs which has given a really needed push to the PKC UX. Metamask is fucking amazing and interacting with applications that utilize metamask as the source of identity is so simple, something that you'd be hard pressed to find before all this hype.
https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees...
https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-confirmation-time
Who knows what they would be if bitcoin was actually used to buy things.
That is why it takes time to get approved on coinbase and other exchanges that try to follow the law.
BTC is just a widely distributed set of middlemen imposing delays and costs (both mining rewards and transaction fees are costs to everyone holding or using BTC that run from holders/users to miners.)
At some point I will exchange to USD to pay whatever I owe in taxes and to pay any vendor that does not take crypto. I imagine if I were an unscrupulous actor I would skip the tax step and avoid vendors that don't accept crypto.
For less than $5,000 it is free and instantaneous in the United States (e.g. Zelle). For more, it is free and instantaneous (wire; my bank waves the fee; most charge $15 to $35).
The number one thing holding back the blockchain from becoming a proper database technology is its proponents insistence on applying it to problems that already work faster and cheaper.
I take the point that in other places the norm is a lot worse and blockchain systems are producing better results, but it won't be long before banks get their act together and improve their services to match modern expectations (for fear of becoming obsolete), and then the blockchain competitive advantage is gone.
As to decentralized, there seems to be a wonderful libritarian ideal around cryptocommodities but I’m reality they are much more centralized than anyone wants to admit. There are probably 10 people that if they wanted to could absolutely demolish bitcoin.
Too much hype around all of this. Not even getting into the massive waste of power and potential.
Having worked in computational finance the entirety of my career, I still don't totally understand how this combination of Dunning-Kruger and Libertarian leanings somehow became a thing.
The financial times while back had an interesting take: there's a structural reason why VC throws money at seemingly non-nonsensical ideas (Theranos, wireless charging etc) - many have a policy portfolio mandate to shoot for 100x returns and as such they will throw money at impossible things as part of their fiduciary duty. So, especially in the climate of free money, funding a slightly-better-widget-startup takes a backseat to things with lottery odds that may not make any sense at all.
It is the fatal flaw of POW. It is like just pretending that the power cost is not part of the cost of a transaction.
For big amounts, transfers of money are either slow (big wire transfers between banks) or unsecure (cash, how do you know if those bills are real?). Therefore either the money or ownership stays insecurely in limbo on one side.
Therefore escrow services currently provide a solution for this, or notaries. But in the end they are still not atomic, and not free either.
If both money and proof of ownership are both on blockchain, you can do a REAL atomic transaction. This could work for selling cars, houses, etc, on an international level without much fuzz.
That strikes me as a very rich question that would be interesting to investigate. Yes, we know people can get involved in hype cycles, but what was it about this technology that made it the thing that got hyped exactly?
Perhaps a subconscious association with BitCoin and getting rich quick hit the people most prone to hype? Some of the blockchain projects being proposed, I honestly couldn't see how they were planning on profiting from it. I don't just mean profiting enough, but profiting at all; what was the mechanism by which money is transferred from some set of customers to the blockchain creators? Preferably with the transfer of some valuable good or service in the other direction, but, you know, technically that's optional from a business perspective.
I understand the answer for new cryptocurrencies; the creators start with more of it than the incoming users and that becomes valuable as the currency becomes valuable. The non-currencies I didn't always see an answer. Which is why my best guess is some sort of subconscious belief that anything that has a blockchain will automatically somehow become wildly valuable via (underpants gnomes step 2 here). It's kinda a copout answer but it's the best I've got. Improvements? (Again, beyond just "people do hype." Why this hype and not something else?)
Brick-and-mortar plus mail-order was a viable business model for decades. Building the network infrastructure and software interconnections to move from that state to today’s online commerce and delivery model took years to accomplish and was (is) filled with hyped innovations.
Blockchains may never reach their hyped potential, or we may simply be attempting to evaluate at very early stages vs. the point where utilities are clear.
I try to keep a measured view of the optimisic hype and the pessimistic nay-saying, and don’t expect clarity for a few more years regarding blockchains’ potential.
In general this philosophy towards technology has served me well enough. I miss out on the bleeding edge, but don’t fall into the trap of being “all in” before realizing a concept’s promise was oversold.
I'm not saying that blockchain is not a valid solution to a problem, but as a veteran of the online industry, I can say I've seen a lot of hype around new technology, actual effort being put into it, and then the realization that the effort was for nothing. Either the solution is no better than the old solution, just different, or the solution is so obscure, that the cost of maintaining it is greater than the value it generates.
In the end, the costs of the choices of these institutions are being paid for by you and I, and I hope they don't go too deep into their project before realizing: “Basically, it became a solution in search of a problem,”