srbl

Haven't seen any business school professors chime in yet, so as one I'll do so: Increasingly, what "elite" undergraduate schools offer at the graduate level is less valuable than what research universities offer. The best professors are sequestered in individual labs or in large research universities, not in schools valued for ratings that are focused on undergraduates. The best educations are provided by people who understand learning and make themselves available to assist in the process - nothing about Harvard, Wharton, Tuck, etc. is better suited than University of California, University of Texas, NYU, many other state universities to perform those tasks. Furthermore, and it might deserve an entirely separate post, but many of the best professors in business are being bought up by Asian business schools. I think the net result is the American business school experience is both more valuable in terms of the topics covered and less valuable in terms of the educational experience than it once was.

As a fellow enthusiast, this doesn't look particularly agile (or fun).

I think you should re-examine the notion that toxic workplaces in tech (particularly w/r/t sexism) result from forces entirely unrelated to the behavior of "actual" computer nerds.

I agree with you that the public use case makes more sense than the private one, though really I feel that it's not about "public" or "private" but rather about different sides in some market, whether it is public or private.

But I'm not sure I understand, were any of those use cases "private?" When I mentioned "manage property, contracts, microtransactions, data commerce, file storage, or certification, to name a few things", I think pretty much all of those besides file storage (on which I'd defer to Blockstack) represent agreements or exchanges between different sides in a market or platform.

So I can't provide a strictly bank-oriented response, but blockchain is just a distributed ledger system. I think some disservice is done in not clearly separating out the functions of blockchain from those of cryptocurrencies. You could use blockchain to manage property, contracts, microtransactions, data commerce, file storage, or certification, to name a few things. I think it's mostly a question of what can be fit into the ledger framework. Some people think that various local networks and other functionalities in the Internet of Things could be a testing ground for its broader uses (e.g., managing ownership of smart devices). Blockstack envisions it as kind of a backbone for a new Internet browsing paradigm, leveraging blockchain as a sort of DNS replacement if memory serves correctly. It's unclear if any of these ideas will take off in the near term.

Going back to these blockchain applications being separate from cryptocurrencies, to me Ethereum is a step away from the coupling of the two, because it is designed with contracts in mind rather than just money. And a number of folks have signed on to developing systems that leverage Ethereum - take a look at the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance. Still I suspect that given the fact that it's unproven, the actual investment made in personnel and capital by these firms is low. Also, the ironic counterpoint to this view is that Ethereum also has ETH, a cryptocurrency. I'm an investor in ETH, but even so, I am not sure what it is worth at this point, since the value of Ethereum seems to lie not in currency but in other applications of the blockchain.

For what it's worth, Ross Ulbricht also paid to have 5 people killed. (They of course were not killed, because it was part of the larger sting, but that's irrelevant to his repugnant behavior)

I work on several DARPA programs and agree with most of this. But some programs are by design far more basic or applied than others. Also worth noting - DARPA generally doesn't pay contractors anything like what the private sector pays employees.

The programs (and their vision, and their success) depend quite a bit on the PM, and on their ideas and engagement. To a lesser extent success depends upon the SETAs as well.