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Re:Blockchain study finds zero success rate and vendors don'... by ghaff on Friday November 30, 2018 @08:24PM (#18574370)
The fact that a blockchain can’t always be guaranteed to always represent the ground truth about physical assets is certainly a limitation. But I agree with you. This isn’t about 100% guarantees. It’s about making fraud harder and more expensive, increasing visibility, and streamlining the whole process. I remain something of a skeptic but there’s certainly a lot of interest in and money for things like provenance and supply chain tracking. Just reducing fraud and otherwise cutting costs could be a big win.
Re:Blockchain study finds zero success rate and vendors don'... by Alex3917 on Friday November 30, 2018 @08:30PM (#18574399)
> Just reducing fraud and otherwise cutting costs could be a big win.

I mean that alone is a several trillion dollar a year improvement that will continue on indefinitely, and that's only one of the many applications for blockchain.

Consider that roughly 75% of American adults of working age are either unemployed or underemployed, and in most countries it's vastly worse than that. The reason most of them are unemployed or underemployed isn't (for the most part) that they're unable or unwilling to work or that they don't have valuable skills, but rather that double entry accounting doesn't enable a broad enough spectrum of economic relationships to capture the long tail of human talent.

When I say this is going to be a multi-quadrillion dollar technology I'm not kidding around. 99% of the stuff you own today wouldn't have been possible without the invention of double entry accounting, which vastly expanded the types of economic relationships that were possible and thereby vastly expanded the types of goods and services that could be produced. DLT isn't a replacement for your MySQL instance, it's a replacement for double entry accounting, and a 10x improvement at that. When people look back 500 years from now they're going to see that the vast majority of the (then) modern world wouldn't have been possible without it.

It's going to largely replace the middle class in the same way that automation has largely replaced the working class, because if you go down the Bureau of Labor Statistics list of jobs it's pretty clear that most middle class American jobs are basically just fulfilling glorified accounting functions.

Even just considering supply chain, as the profitability of creating counterfeit items decreases that doesn't just reduce the percentage of things you buy that are counterfeit, but it also makes it possible to make entirely new classes of (genuine) products that wouldn't have been economically viable previously.

Re:Blockchain study finds zero success rate and vendors don'... by spookthesunset on Friday November 30, 2018 @09:11PM (#18574603)
Mind telling the world what the hell “DLT” means?

Dynamic link tracking? Database Local Transformation?

And let’s be honest here, I’m gonna assume it is a clever buzzword designed to sell the failed blockchain technology to a new set of rubes, right?

Re:Blockchain study finds zero success rate and vendors don'... by Alex3917 on Friday November 30, 2018 @09:18PM (#18574641)
Distributed ledger technology. This is the preferred industry term because there are many newer systems that offer or claim to offer the same guarantees as blockchains but that are implemented in different ways under the hood.
Re:Blockchain study finds zero success rate and vendors don'... by kthejoker2 on Saturday December 01, 2018 @07:11AM (#18576448)
Wait, you think 75% of working age adults are unemployed or underemployed? Where'd you come up with that?

And from the naked eye it definitely doesn't look like "most" middle class jobs are accounting - I see teachers, engineers, architects, healthcare, legal workers, protective services ..

https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/emp-by-detailed-occupation.ht...

So my skepticism about your assessment of our labor situation and needs bleeds over to your enthusiasm about DLT.

Re:Blockchain study finds zero success rate and vendors don'... by tim333 on Saturday December 01, 2018 @11:38AM (#18577462)
I doubt distributed ledgers will do any of that. Maybe if you swapped AI for DLT it would be closer to the truth.
Re:Blockchain study finds zero success rate and vendors don'... by tomrod on Friday November 30, 2018 @08:34PM (#18574414)
> It’s about making fraud harder and more expensive, increasing visibility, and streamlining the whole process

It may cut fraud costs, but there are other ways to do that. Blockchain replicates computing costs relative to centralized data stores, so implementations have non-zero scaling costs.

Re:Blockchain study finds zero success rate and vendors don'... by Alex3917 on Friday November 30, 2018 @08:36PM (#18574427)
> Blockchain replicates computing costs.

Which is about as relevant as the cost of tea in china.

Or, to steal another analogy, counting on database efficiency as the competitive advantage for your business is like picking up nickels in front of a steamroller. Especially since DLT efficiency will eventually be figured out. Even if it takes another five or ten years or even twenty years, that's nothing in the grand scheme of things.

Re:Blockchain study finds zero success rate and vendors don'... by spookthesunset on Friday November 30, 2018 @09:17PM (#18574637)
> Especially since DLT efficiency will eventually be figured out.

Lol. The BlockChain is inefficient by design! It is that exact inefficiency that makes it trustless.

Re:Blockchain study finds zero success rate and vendors don'... by atq2119 on Saturday December 01, 2018 @06:22AM (#18576315)
Yes, it is. But to be fair to the DLT people, distributed ledgers could be useful without proof of work. They simply need a different, domain-specific consensus mechanism.

Git is basically a distributed ledger without the proof of work inefficiency.

Re:Blockchain study finds zero success rate and vendors don'... by tomrod on Sunday December 02, 2018 @08:40PM (#18585774)
Right. But that's just distributed info, it's more or less a solved problem for many things (P2P, git, etc.). The proof of work is the "value add" of the enterprise, as it were, and there are certainly valuable use cases. But the implementation of distributed, cryptographically secure ledgers are not without tradeoffs--there is no free lunch.