(The Treaty of Bern says how to make physical letter post work internationally the way we're used to today, before that it was a colossal pain in the arse)
The Network is like the Word, it's fundamental to what we are, the precise implementation may change, but the idea is forever.
Automobiles, T-shirts, babies brought up almost exclusively by their immediate biological parents, cow milk as a normal human beverage, portraits, funerals, the novel - these are all "just" culture and might become unfashionable and go away over the longer term or in other contexts - they're not fundamental to what we are. But the Word and the Network are right at the centre of what we are, as people.
Blockchain is just a weird cultural blip. It's not even T-shirts, it's Pork Pie Hats. People keep trying to make it a thing, but it's not a thing.
That was the high water mark of consumer interest as far as I've seen. Everything else is just intrigue driven by the get-rich-quick aspect.
Sure, there will be a lot of space left, but what he said is technically correct :D
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payment_system
[1] http://cjel.law.columbia.edu/preliminary-reference/2016/deve...
But long term, banks will need to accept faster transaction times. Blockchain or not, it's ridiculous you need to wait days to transfer money when you can send email in milliseconds.
Rather than accept Bitcoin, it's far more likely big-banks will get together and form their own crypto coin, which will enable faster transfers, but keep them in control. They'll get regulations passed that will make Bitcoin and most other crypto currencies illegal or legally risky, whereas their system will be blessed by regulators.
Under this scenario (I think the likeliest), the existing power hegemony stays this same, crypto-currency's idealistic roots become viewed as naive and antiquated, and consumers get slightly faster transfers through their same old banks with marginally lower transaction fees.
A centralised system with trusted nodes is far better for transaction times - this is the worst use-case for a distributed ledger. Blockchains try to avoid trusted nodes, and thus their transactions are slower, because they are multi-node, by design.
Banks already provide transfers in seconds (perhaps not in your country).
Banks make money because clients trust them, they are insured, provide reversible transactions etc, not because their transactions are slow.
The reasons for why settlements take days, and not seconds, is procedural, not technical. If the financial world wanted instant settlements, we would have had them decades ago.
The financial world optimizes for intent and compliance, not speed. This is why settlements take days, and why cryptocoins aren't very interesting to it.
Transferring money from one account to another account is as simple as updating two rows in a database. That the database is not a distributed proof-of-work ledger has nothing to do with it taking days.
As a confirmation - they wanted it and they have it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Euro_Payments_Area#SEPA...
In my country there's a scam where people find out you're buying a house through a particular solicitor with a large cash transfer, then they send you an email or even a physical letter saying there's a problem, the solicitor just found out their firm got a new bank, or whatever, please transfer the house money to the new account. Of course it's a lot of money so most people will want to check this is right - they provide their phone number on the message. This number, of course, is part of the scam and a "secretary" will answer saying your solicitor is busy right now, but yes, they're very sorry, the message is genuine and please use the new account details.
The large sums involved mean this scam is very lucrative even if it doesn't work on say, 99% of potential victims.
If the victim realises they've been scammed ten minutes after the transfer, chances are good the bank can fix it, because settlements aren't really instant. If they realise the next day, or two, or three days later, the money is gone. It went to a mule, who has already forwarded it, the police might arrest the mule if they can find them, but the mule doesn't have your money, they're just another sucker.
Already happening.
SEPA Instant is either being released or in trial phases. My bank is trialing it, a <10 second transaction costs 1€ fee flat, normal SEPA is still free.
And banks offer me more in terms of personal security. If I lose my debit card, I get all damages reimbursed. If the bank gets hacked, there is insurance.
Unless I fuck it up myself, I'm going to be saved by the bank.
On the other hand, on Bitcoin I can fuck it up myself but if someone else fucks me up then I'm SOL and can go eat ham for all that Bitcoin cares.
For the average users the question of using Bitcoin has become irrelevant with SEPA Inst. Banks are faster with it and offer more features.
Here in India, we have a thing called IMPS. You can send money instantly from one account to another. Transaction cost is a flat Rs. 5 (less than $0.10) for any transaction size.
There are other newer protocols as well such as UPI which I haven't really used because IMPS serves my needs perfectly.
Sending money to another account is basically a non-issue here.
And tbh, the banking situation in the US is just amazingly bad. Horrifyingly bad if I believe the more out-there stories I hear from people.
The only time I got charged a fee was for a transaction into the US (the fee was currency exchange fee and nothing else). And the fee was seperate so the transaction amount was unchanged.
Yet in the US it seems possible that banks will take a piece of a transaction for themselves.
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In search of a solution to a problem nobody but the US had, we have blockchain now.
At one time I used to get paid from a US employer's Bank of America account. I also had an account in the same bank, but transferring the money between our accounts in the same bank took 3 days. I presume due to some split between business/personal banking, but still absolutely ridiculous. We switched to sending the payments to my European account through SWIFT, and those payments happened same-day.
E.g. debit from Bob's account on Monday, put in <money market/whatever> from Monday until Thursday, and then put it Alice's account on Friday.
This is only a problem in the USA. By contrast, in Britain, the Faster Payments Service (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster_Payments_Service) has provided transfers within a few minutes for more than 10 years now.
You manifestly do not need a "blockchain" to solve that problem.
To me the best example is the travel industry. Decades ago a small number of companies managed to get manual back office systems moved to centralised booking and reservation systems. This had a huge impact on the ability to sell inventory and open up the world of online travel agencies.
These centralised platforms are still around and they are now a huge problem. The software is bloated, complicated and slow, integrating with any GDS is painful and only ever allowed on their terms. It is amazing to me the amount of time and effort and startups that have gone into just trying to find the cheapest flight available.
This is fertile ground for decentralised trust. Having a local copy of the live flight inventory or a large aggregate set of hotel inventory would revolutionise the travel industry. Sure there are also applications around settlement and financing, but to me the most exciting thing is the ability to build customer applications on large sets of provably correct, trusted data. And to do this freely in the manner you chose with the technology you chose.
Decentralisation and anonymity are useless to the travel industry and from the point of view of the industry players, public access to local copies of all their [current and historical] inventory and reservation data is an alarming bug, not a feature. What they actually want is for a buyer to be able to via an API (i) access the current price for each relevant item of inventory that's currently on sale from lots of providers (ii) update a single private canonical record belonging to the one [necessarily trusted] party they buy from (which may or may not affect the availability of inventory for future queries). The reason the systems are slow is because pricing and routing is incredibly complex and diverse, and the associated datasets are enormous (and often computationally expensive to process even without a layer of cryptographic crap on top). It's something of an understatement to say that turning that into thousands of local copies of an ever-growing blockchain which needs to be updated to account for a million reservations per minute is not going to be an improvement...
Those two things aren't mutually exclusive. Blockchain solved some very interesting technical problems, much like a lot of advanced math might do. But as you pointed out, the discourse is around whether or not blockchain solved any useful problems, not just interesting problems.
Like others, I have yet to be convinced of a use case for which blockchain is the best solution (other than cryptocurrencies).
Name one.
In broad brush strokes for someone wanting to skim money off people booking hotel rooms by selling rooms cheap (e.g. lastminute.com) the holy blockchain does indeed sound like the answer to all their prayers but it does not do anything to solve the hard problems that cannot be simplified even with a simple country hotel.
Only if you have been at the sharp end of fixing hotel booking systems do you appreciate some of the finer points. You really cannot double book rooms and yet every day that simple country guest house might have someone on the phone wanting the same room at the same time that there is someone at the front desk and someone trying to book through lastminute.com. Locking that record is a time critical thing even if the hotel is out in the countryside where nothing ever happens and time moves slowly. That room could also have bookings on it from people that got married there five years previously and are on the way back for their anniversary, therefore there could be a substantial amount of data tied into that slot. Furthermore, that room could be booked but if the guest does not show up before a given time then it is up for sale again. So that availability presented as yes/no on the website is not as simple as a yes/no, there are other provisional states depending on what has been paid and who has showed up. There might not even be the option to bump those guests into a more deluxe room if those more deluxe rooms have someone walk through the door and take them.
Ian Dury and the Blockheads probably have better insight and knowledge than a venture capitalist and the blockchains have about how to improve upon the current state of the art when it comes to hotel inventory management. Rome was not built in a day and neither were the booking systems needed to cater for visitors to Rome. It is just not that simple. Fast broadband cannot be relied upon for a lot of hotels, so the idea of updating a blockchain and sending it out to every Tom Dick and Harry chancer on the internet hoping to sell 'cheap rate' rooms with them all being instantly updated is not the hospitality system I would want to be doing support for.
If the de-facto was 'decentralized' and I worked in hospitality systems support and a new 'centralized' idea came along I would be straight on that bandwagon and you would not be able to stop me!
Maybe it just depends on what end of the telescope you are on. My perspective is the business end, with the dawn starts, skipped break times and extra hours put well into the small hours, fixing real problems for real people with real expectations of service.
The people I see in the blockchain space do not have any knowledge of the problem space that their change the world solutions purportedly seek to address, as mentioned I was with you at the start of what you had to say here, but, on second thoughts I don't think that blockchain is a magic bullet even for the simple task of getting a room booked in the smallest of hotels. Furthermore, the task isn't just getting a room booked as a yes/no thing, there is this bigger problem of hotel booking management and centralised systems, well trained staff, hard working staff and technical support is the glue that makes it all work as an apparently 'yes/no' thing. At best blockchain is woefully naive and, from a support perspective, a disaster if ever implemented in this seemingly simple 'use case'.
Even then there were exciting, compelling use-cases.
I met a blockchain company co-founder at a conference in Silicon Valley that we can call "Alfie" for the purposes of this post. After a brief chat at the conference Alfie graciously took me out for a nice dinner. During the dinner Alfie asked if I wanted to be an advisor to their company. Another well respected friend of mine was already tying their name to the company so I had hope that it would be reasonably legit. They told me that they had raised $30M in foreign funding
The #1 thing I have learned about advising startup founders is that if they don't communicate well then they typically don't do business well. In this case after our dinner Alfie basically vanished on me and stopped responding to my emails/messages. When Alfie finally got back in touch and offered to send the advisory agreement I told them I wanted to take it slow. That I didn't feel comfortable linking my name with their company just yet but I would help them unofficially for now. I've learned to trust my gut and never do something until I feel comfortable with tying my name to it.
A month or so after Alfie got back in touch with me another friend we can call "Sally" reached out to grab dinner in SF. Sally was at that same Silicon Valley blockchain conference that I met Alfie. Sally was visiting SF for work again so we had dinner. Sally told me that they were recently in a foreign country at another blockchain conference when Alfie couldn't muster up the funds to pay for their hotel room. Sally ended up letting Alfie stay in their room for the night.
Sally learned that Alfie has not actually closed $30M in funding yet. They had instead been verbally committed a $30M investment. They had actually raised over $1M but it was spent with all the traveling. No tech built at all. No money to build tech.
I ran into Alfie and their partners again at a NYC blockchain event a few months after that. Alfie confirmed the story but said they had now closed on the $30M. Yet they were at the event fundraising for more money.
It just doesn't add up.
Anyway, Alfie aside there are even bigger scammers out there. Lots of pump and dump nonsense.
However, I believe in the team behind ShopIn (http://www.shopin.com). The founding tech team for PriceLine is being led by a serial entrepreneur I have known for years. I think they have a reasonably good chance of proving that you can do something disruptive with blockchain.
Time will tell.
But ... then I went to an evening where the identity applications were explained. Using a blockchain to have assertions made about your identity, like where you studied, where you were born, what employer’s you’ve had in such a way that the assertions can’t be forged, can’t be doctored, can’t be stolen, and aren’t locked away in the databases of an institution. I heard stories of people who lost their proofs of identity by having to flee a warzone and were unable to prove to EU governments and employers they were who they were (to the point of being stripped of their bank accounts because banks only let people with official paperwork hold accounts). And I have to say, there’s something there. I’m still skeptical about cryptocurrency, but not about blockchain.
The only way I can imagine physical verification would be to have a microchip implanted in your arm, but that would be unthinkably worse than the current system of (thankfully) mutable, replaceable paper documents we use today.
Citizens have access to a number of digital services that includes but aren’t limited to voting, banking, and healthcare.
They've reported; “Since 2014, more than 27,000 people from 143 different countries have been granted Estonian e-residency”.
I find this example to be exciting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Estonia
> A lot of the grand visions behind blockchain mania are indeed compelling, and I suspect something blockchain-ish will take off at some point in the future.
Totally agree. Recently had a discussion with a friend regarding what we felt would be an ideal approach to implementing blockchain and email. Essentially and selfishly how we needed it to behave.
Naturally upon doing a little bit of research lo and behold this endeavor had already been taken up. Exciting I found myself thinking, That’s pretty cool my friend agreed. Fast forward and read past a few more paragraphs and again lo and behold this project is an ICO and with this token you can send emails and blah blah blah.
Very disheartening (at least for me personally) to say the least. Not to say a project like this will fail, just saying that it seems the imagination for blockchain products as of now seems to be limited to just ICO’s.
https://www.niis.org/blog/2018/4/26/there-is-no-blockchain-t...
Depends on how high the corporate taxes are in your country. If it's worth it, the big advantage is that everything can be done online.
I'd get excited about that.
Maybe, but why is it a bad thing? This can create powerful network effects. Facebook benefited from network effects derived from the fact that people want to be liked. Cryptocurrencies benefit from network effects derived from the fact that people want to get rich. The problem is that the network effects of cryptocurrency are so powerful that people didn't even need to offer an underlying product/service in order to benefit from it; I think that will change in the future though because the market is now saturated.
Compare to the web, which brought huge change, but decentralized governance is much harder for the lay person to understand. Most people haven't even considered many of the problems it proposes to solve.
So the value of Bitcoin/crypto is held up by the excitement of the change it heralds. It's just going to take a while. (And the trading and investment is the means to the end in getting it going).
But yes, let us wait for the clowns to depart.
This is all in stark contrast to the 90s internet boom when, sure, there were lots of speculators and lots of get-rich-quick dreamers, but there were also tons of random people genuinely excited about using the internet who never stood to make a dime from it.
A lot of the grand visions behind blockchain mania are indeed compelling, and I suspect something blockchain-ish will take off at some point in the future. But it will probably be a distant descendant of anything that exists today.
Am I wrong about this? Are there blockchain-based products that have lots of users who are using them because they like using the product and not just because they're hoping to get rich off the hype?