I agree with this completely, and I agree with the peer comment that pinpoints the motivation for this stance to be these peoples' desire to disassociate themselves with the idea of Bitcoin and/or Bitcoiners.

Up to now, I've pretty much scoffed at this stance. The real breakthrough here is Bitcoin, or so I've always thought.

However, I've recently come across a project that made me realize that the blockchain technology may indeed bring about other revolutionary changes in addition to Bitcoin itself. One in particular is assembly.com and Coin, the blockchain-driven ownership records that formalize projects hatched under the assembly.com organizational framework. I'm most familiar with Assembly, but I wouldn't be surprised if other similar projects are actively underway.

If successful, assembly.com's approach to organizations has the potential to change the way we form companies, for the better. If you're interested in big societal changes brewing around us, I'd suggest going to take a look at how assembly.com works with the technologies that enable this type of organization (git and Github, in particular, in addition to the blockchain). If you've ever read the books of Visa-founder Dee Hock and his ideas about chaordic organizations, you'll immediately recognize this phenomenon. It's pretty fascinating, and as soon as I finish my current contract I intend to start working on an Assembly project.

But as for the power driving the blockchain technology (and thus enabling all of this), I agree completely that this is indeed Bitcoin and its underlying incentives. Pretty amazing stuff...

Assembly is really cool. But one problem ive had with it is how founding a project 600,000 coins for free, even for projects that aren't fully fleshed out. This makes it much more fruitful to start your own projects.

To be clear, those are 600,000 representing only the project you are founding. Each project has different app coins. So each person or group starting a project with Assembly gets 100% ownership of the project they start themselves, nothing more, nothing less.

It's a high-tech, blockchain version of a partnership. What I think is so innovative is the way this has the potential to combine kickstarters with traditional business partnerships, with the blockchain to formalize the relationship.

It's been pretty fascinating watching new projects start up there and gain steam.

(disclosure: I work for Assembly)

I think startups in general are a good analogy for this. Sure, it's more fruitful in terms of percentage of equity to start your own startup than to join one, but it's immensely difficult to get that company you own 100% of to become something valuable.

For a product to succeed on Assembly, it's often really important for a strong visionary to play an active day-to-day role. That initial ownership makes the whole thing more fruitful for them, but only in the cases where they do lots of heavy lifting to make something succeed.

If you throw a random idea up on Assembly and someone else in the community shows up and ships that idea and makes it into a successful business, then you'd have a fortunate outcome without much work, but that's not an expected outcome.

edit: as eric_bullington pointed out (and I should have), it's important to note that the ownership you have over a product you start is only ownership of that product. If that product never ships, the ownership doesn't translate to the success of other products on Assembly.

So, you can get 100% ownership of a thing that is just an idea with a few clicks, or you can jump in on a product like Coderwall that makes $20,000/month, and any work you do will earn you a portion of that revenue for as long as Coderwall is around. Both of these avenues are fun. :)

Are you going to create a new assembly project or join an existing one?

I've also seen this behavior pattern a lot. I think there is a subtle line between disassociating yourself from evangelical Bitcoin fanatics and pushing a technology without really understanding it.

Also, isn't blockchain style computing obscenely inefficient? It would be great if someone well versed in these matters could weigh in.

There are two ways to secure the blockchain with a guaranteed level of security. Proof-of-work, and proof-of-stake. I use the second term very broadly, and I'm not referring to the consensus schemes that NXT or BitShares use. Anybody who says otherwise today regardless of the "marketcap" of their coin doesn't know what they're talking about from a CS/game-theory point of view, or they're ignoring the costs of proof-of-work schemes.

Proof-of-work is expensive and will ultimately be replaced with better consensus schemes that require no mining, namely those that only rely on cryptographic signatures, a good balance of incentives and penalties, and an underlying byzantine consensus algorithm.

Disclaimer: I'm one of a handful of people working on new consensus algorithms.

Proof of stake, while probably achievable technically within the next few years, has a major incentive problem. Anyone can show up and start mining a proof of work coin, and earn some. In contrast, all coins ever available in a proof of stake system must be given out by someone at some point. Most people distrust a system that claims to be decentralized, but has a central group or person giving out all tokens that will ever exist at the beginning.

You have to buy hardware to mine. Arguably buying stake directly is simpler.

Simpler probably, but unless you can buy stake from anyone (like you can with hardware), it lacks the same decentralized advantages.

In the Bitcoin world there are multiple exchanges and multiple ASIC vendors. Any healthy ecosystem should have multiple exchanges.

What proof-of-stake blockchain is presently working and stable without checkpoints?

Are there any (serious question)?

None are working yet. They're being developed. No centralized checkpoints.

It's only seemingly inefficient. It's basically the price you have to pay for maintaining a trustless distributed ledger.

If you were to run an organization/bank/Paypal clone that maintains a centralized ledger, it would be just as expensive (if not more), because you'd have to hire thousands of employees, compliance officers, lawyers etc. You probably see what I'm getting at.

There's always going to be a price for maintaining accurate accounting ledgers. The only questions is where those expenses are going to be pushed and whether it's going to be your payroll or your power bill.

You don't need mining to secure a consensus ledger.

People just think that way because so far mining is the only way it's being done with any level of security. There are a couple of algorithms based on academic research that are being implemented now, and the public hasn't seen it yet.

Links?

Just... stay tuned :)

I believe one of these secure communal computing systems was used recently in Holland to securely allow for bidding on tulip growing rights.

Hard to respond to that considering you could be making a jab at several things -- either altcoins, or crypto in general, or all of money and securities as we know it. Fix your jab and I'll respond with a quip.

Let's not jump to conclusions. I was talking about real events, not a "jab."

The event I was referencing turns out to have taken place in Denmark, not Holland, and was auctioning sugar beets, not tulips. They are using secure multiparty computation algorithms to auction sugar beet growing rights to farmers.

https://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/aliaga/cs197-10/papers/boget...

Oh, well, Denmark and sugar beets then :)

The paper shows a practical use of secret sharing and secure multiparty computation to discover the market price of a commodity. Not sure how secure it is, but it's interesting.

It's not the same thing as securing consensus of a blockchain ledger. In the paper they have over a thousand participants and 3 (or some small number of) servers. In the blockchain problem, each participant runs his own server. The fault tolerance model is different, and also the blockchain requires continuous consensus.

Well that was an unexpected end to a virtual tussle.

Well, in practice the Bitcoin block chain is now "secured" by about four centralized mining pools which control more than half the hash rate. Those pools operate big mining centers, many of which are in China.

Bitcoin mining is now less distributed than steel manufacturing. Home mining is now insignificant.

I couldn't agree more. But I think many VCs use this line as an easy, soft no. There are always those who truly mean what they say when they say "we love blockchain technology but we don't believe in bitcoin," but those people don't know what they're talking about

Isn't there still a clear tendency towards centralization though with a handful of mining pools dominating the market.

It also has a problem of transparency in this respect because you cannot know whether two miners are actually just one miner manning two machines.