NIST has a really good document, Blockchain Technology Overview (NISTIR 8202):
* https://csrc.nist.gov/publications/detail/nistir/8202/final
Chapter 8, Application Considerations, has a good yes/no flowchart that asks a series of question before saying "maybe Blockchain"
* Do you need a shared, consistent data store?
* Does more than one entity need to contribute data?
* Data records, once written, are never updated or deleted?
* Sensitive identifiers WILL NOT be written to the data store?
* Are the entities with write access having a hard time deciding who should be in control of the data store?
* Do you want a tamperproof log of all writes to the data store?
If the answer to any of the above questions is "no", NIST suggests something else.
This is a big "no" for every project excluding bitcoin.
* https://csrc.nist.gov/publications/sp
The NISTIR series also worth perusing.
And some of them argue in what they would call good faith, for they have drunk the koolaide, want to believe, for this allows them to believe that they hold a valuable asset, were clever in getting in early, etc.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
It does a disservice to say the technology is already there, because it suggests that the current version is as good as it gets. To me, blockchain or something that incorporates its best features (decentralization, immutability) will need to process transactions for:
- Fractions of a cent - Confirm in seconds
So far that is not possible, and there is no clear way to achieve it, but with blockchain as a base there is no doubt that it will eventually be done. At that point, if you have not sacrificed decentralization or immutability, you have something truly amazing.
Has anybody brought up how user friendly bitcoin is?
I too enjoy having to print bitcoin private keys on archival paper, wrap them in ten ziplock bags, shove that into a watertight container and bury it under the backyard bird feeder. Otherwise somebody would get my keys and take ownership of my entire net worth, leaving me destined for the poor house.
Because with bitcoin, whoever has the key owns the bitcoin.
Too bad it is still vaporware.
LND 0.4-beta was released March 15, 2018. Today there are 11k nodes, 35k channels, $9,000,000 network capacity:
Seen it pretty commonly on reddit for various topics.
This particular issue of the privacy of the blockchain is one of the best examples, I very commonly see discussions in CC circles where it's both argued that blockchain respects its user's privacy and at the same time that we shouldn't be worried about bad actors abusing an anonymous, unregulated system to fuel corruption or highly illegal stuff because "everything is public on the blockchain, it's completely transparent". I guess that's why many of them have this obsession about quantum resistance, there's clearly a state superposition at play in there somewhere.
An other favorite of mine is "what do you mean cryptocurrency is unpractical? I use it to pay everyday using <centrally operated credit card service provided by a centrally operated cryptocurrency exchange using an off-chain ledger that may or may not eventually be settled in bulk on the blockchain>". Sounds like Visa with extra steps to me.