thedancollins

Phft, amateur. I've forgotten more ways to screw stuff up than this person ever knew.

Take two software startups. StartupA hires nothing but the stereotypical "software engineer". StartupB hires nothing but the stereotypical "product engineer". Which startup will be more likely to have a future?

I would think the positive feelings are mostly what I've heard called "Opponent Process Theory". I mean, if you subject yourself to the violence, lyrics, melody, rhythms, of death metal it is like an assault. There is usually nothing soothing about it. Your body has to defend itself. It would be analogous to marathoners and the high they experience when running long distances. #throwupthehornsfordio

We used Jira for a year doing a "semi-Scrum" development framework ... you know the one where you throw Agile terms around like you have any idea what they mean ... it went well enough but I and my lead engineer wound up going to Scrum Master training. We left Jira and went to Axosoft. Each had pros and cons of course. Pro-tip: the best software in the world will not help if your business users do not understand anything but waterfall methodology.

Can anyone tell us if WeChat's inability to flex to the Indian market was intentional and "arrogant" or was it unintentional? They call them "blind spots" for a reason.

Sorry it took me so long to get back to you. Yes, the breathless proclamations of blockchain Armageddon (or Paradise) are tiring. I agree. And it is part of my souring on the whole topic. There is potential for something like blockchain to make a radical impact. But you know how it is - freedom is wonderful but it comes at the cost of diligence. And banks are just so freaking comfy. And they seem to demand so little of us.

The idea of the government creating a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve is interesting. You are right, whatever the current players can do to control any new financial instruments they will. I suppose the libertarian response to such an action on such a chain would be to abandon the chain. And I am WAY out over my skis here but there is a drastic difference between the money printing that is happening in America as opposed to the American govt attaching its keys to a large amount of a cryptocurrency. If they did that and did not transact with that coin then they could have a marked impact on the coin's liquidity and that would affect its value. It could also impact the transactability as fewer and fewer people would be active on that blockchain. But I keep coming back to the true difference being transparency and not being under centralized control as being the POTENTIAL game changers. I am not sure the populace has the stomach for such responsibility. Heck, I am not sure I do.

>Nope, no barter - exchanged goods for currency, not for goods Tomayto - tomahto amigo!

I mean when the seller receives payment. And I concede that there are banks that are releasing funds on a tighter timeline. But that decision is still backed by a credit requirement at some level and at the whim of a centralized bank. What they deign to grant to us they can also take away from us.

The current system is familiar and comforting but it is not the stable panacea we like to think it is in comparison to a scary blockchain. The stability is manufactured at the cost of the occasional blow-up - which we conveniently forget about as the market rebound to new and loftier heights.

I mean that the potential impact that a blokchain-based system could have on the way we generate and exchange value - could be revolutionary. It could be one way that wealth distribution could be facilitated if you buy the idea that data is the new currency. Blockchain brings power to the people because it puts data in the hands of the person with the keys to that data. Ideally, we are careful enough to maintain those keys and not abdicate control of them to yet another centralized authority.

One of the ideas is that smaller payment amounts are viable on a blockchain - and there will be mining or transaction fees assessed but there will be fewer and smaller fees. Point-to-point transactability cuts out the ubiquitous payment middlemen and it gives the person making the transactions CONTROL of their transaction data. No longer will business pay credit companies to learn about you - they will have to pay YOU to learn about you.

Data is worth billions and trillions of dollars. And blockchain allows you to take control of it.

>Because in the real world fiats are orders of magnitude more stable than cryptos.

Yes, but if you'll allow me a little latitude - the fiat currency is under centralized control. And in that case is remarkably stable - until it is not. And 2008 happens. Blockchain is decentralized and yes, volatile. But fiat currency is FALSELY stable - it is engineered to be stable by a centralized authority that does not understand what it is doing and the machinations are generating an increasingly problematic economic environment. I can't stress this enough - the stability that is trumpeted as such a wonderful aspect of fiat currency is manufactured and at the whim of fools.

And absolutely, point taken about banks. I do not fully appreciate the role of centralized banking and certainly, few do. I should qualify some of my statements with the idea that banking is an option, but not a necessity. and that optionality certainly applies to the marble facade we see all over the American landscape.

And finally, yes, you can setup as many accounts as you like - and that behavior will be partially obfuscated because those IDs do not have to be linked. But if you would please give me a modicum of credit (pun intended) - the smart contract would likely require its own level of background on any given ID. If shenanigans are present - the ID is not permitted access to the transaction. Or it might not care - I guess it would depend on the potential exposure. Trivial problems have trivial solutions. There are much bigger problems that would need to be tackled. Thoughts?

Ah, point taken! One of the obvious courses is that there wiull be multiple blockchains each handling various arenas. In that case we run into the interesting blockchain-of-blockchains problems where we have to engineer not only under one blockchain but we have to figure out how to overcome the "slowest node" problem. Truly an engineering feat waiting for a hero (or heroine). Thoughts?

My friend, we are living in the Age of Complexity. Do you see ANY aspect of our lives that is getting simpler? Saying that the world doesn't need a realtime market for the valuation of chocolate bars - well, maybe it does. Maybe the end result is then cheap and freely available chocolate! What sort of monster are you, depriving the world of delicious chocolate?!

This is a perfectly cromulent response (see what I did there)?

I'd argue that you did not settle a transaction but more exchanged in a barter of one item for another. I am glad it worked out well for you and pray that you will experience continued expedient transactions in the future - blockchain-powered or not.

And the reason for the spikes - blockchain technology struggles to handle large transaction volumes. The consensus mechanism monitors block creation time and tries to keep it at 10 minutes. Ideally, there are never more than a block's worth of transactions to be created at any given time. When that is not the case a backup occurs and yes, the settling takes far too long. This is the technical challenge that must be overcome before a PoW backed blockchain should be considered "viable" ready-for-prime-time. It is a significant engineering problem that I am excited to try to solve.

I would offer that the value is the distributed ledger. Where everyone would see the quality of your business dealings because you kept them on a stable blockchain for all to see.

Yes, you have paper money in your possession that is only worth as much as a centralized bank SAYS it is. And the awesome thing about that is that centralized banks never print ridiculous amounts of money and devalue their own currencies. That would be crazy and short-sighted. What sort of idiots would do that?

Crytpocurrencies are useful to people for a variety of reasons. And if a bank wants to deal in crytpocurrency, that is fine with me. I am glad that you have no doubt they will be profitable but you are pulling such sentiment out of thin air. There is not a precedent for cryptocurrency and how it may affect and integrate with existing systems. But consider that if you consider having a bank involved is a good thing for cryptocurrency - you might not understand the point of blockchain.

And the final point, the ledger is open, and everyone can see everything. You must consider this aspect in your scenario. I would imagine such a microtransactions agreement manifested into a smart contract or if not, prepaid. But again, only at a 15 minute. There is a level of credit there but still much smaller than 30 days worth.

The technology cannot support millions of transactions per second - at least not in the case of a bitcoin blockchain which uses a PoW consensus mechanism. I am not sure how to respond to the second statement as there is some hand-waving and dogmatic proclamation that scalability is not an issue. Saying that cryptocurrencies are used in certain cases today and therefore - scalability is not an issue is like saying you once ate an apple and therefore all apples are edible.

You are not grasping the import of being able to exchange value WITHOUT a banking system in place.

As for the credit requirements comment, yes - good point. But in the case of a micro-transaction, realtime agreement. I can consume 15 minutes of power and pay for it at 15:01. A credit requirement still exists -0 but it is one second as opposed to 60-90 days worth of power. This idea assumes many things into existence that do no currently exist - I am merely offering the idea as a thought experiment. Blockchain could make everything pay-as-you-consume.

A blockchain is a ledger of all transactions, yes. Son the result is transparency.

Well ok, buit I was talking about transactability - not throughput. I have stated numerous times that the tech struggles to be viable at scale. On Bitcoin's blockchain you can transact and settle in 10 minutes. That beats 2 to 3 days all day long in a fiat-based system.

FWIW, if a single actor could take command of more than 50% of a chain's hashrate then yes, they could take over and rewrite history. The theory was that this would be far too expensive in power and time for any such attack to succeed and if it did - the chain would simply fork at time pervious to the attack and the person that had taken the now defunct chain over would be the only person operating on that blockchain.

I am not that Dan Collins. And as for an example - credit card transactions. I am sure somebody else can provide more color but it is my understanding that there are 6 or 7 intermediaries that each credit card transaction travels through - each taking their fraction of a penny and delivering questionable value - all to eventually have that transaction finally settle 2-3 DAYS later. On a blockchain that can happen in as little as 10 minutes and nobody else is involved (other than the miners in the case of a PoW consensus-backed blockchain like Bitcoin).

But more importantly, blockchain might provide a way to get around the information asymmetry problem that dominates financial value exchange. Blockchain is better in the idea that the entity trying to transact exposes all their cards on the blockchain - if they want to extract value from a transaction it will not simply be because they "know more than you". Power to the people.

I like the Bangkok example because it highlights that one of the problems we have in the "more developed" world economies is that we have existing systems and financial institutions to hurdle. Developing economies do not and it is giving them a fast track tot he new way of doing business. There is a good chance that when blockchain takes off - it will catch Wall Street off-guard.

Ok, but counterpoint is obvious. Are there people using blockchain for illicit purposes? Yes. And also water is wet. There are also many people using cash for illicit purposes.

And of course, you can always include as many people in your transactions as possible but what blockchain does is to make those people unnecessary. Why is this important? Because it enables micro-transactions and credit-less agreements. A blockchain provide options that fiat-based systems can never provide.

From a technical perspective, yes. But the case for blockchain is difficult to make from a technical perspective so I do not bother talking about it. The tech struggles to be viable. With that said, everything is impossible .. until it is not. Somebody will figure it out.

That is a good point and it is why I am slowly moving towards gadfly - the use cases typically do not NEED blockchain. The thing that is compelling about blockchain is not the tech, which is not ready for prime time - but in the idea of pseudonymous transparency, faster transactability, fewer middlemen in any given transaction, decentralized control ...

Because it finally provides a mechanism by which bad actors on a network could face repercussions for their activity. Consider how different the internet would be if hyperlinks were two-way rather than one-way. Again, it is not only about data, it is about the speed of transactability that would result when value could be exchanged instantaneously with radical transparency behind the actors on the chain. Bankers go away, auditors go away, credit requirements for market participation go away. What could be do with the trillions of dollars tied up and sitting in credit collateral accounts? Liquidity is a good thing.

Well, it certainly had to be said so I am glad somebody did so.

Over the past year I have gone from Blockchain enthusiast to more blockchain gadfly. The concept is truly revolutionary but the use cases I typically see trotted out are not compelling in any significant sense and could be solved without blockchain. I believe the reason for this is due to the fact that the true value of a blockchain solution is not in the data aspect of it (which everyone gravitates to and can quickly grasp and understand) but more in the transactability that a blockchain solution can offer. And the value of radical transactability requires much less of a myopic understanding of a person's business vertical than many professionals possess. In energy for instance, much talk about the financial aspect of a blockchain-based energy solution but absolutely zero talk of how the physical grid and infrastructure would engage to support the financial activity.

Survivorship bias/fooled by randomness. If a system can be abstracted to a model that can account for the bizarre stuff that the business throws at it, then the domain you are operating in is either Simple or slightly Complicated (as defined by the Cynefin framework). The real problem lies in Complex/Chaotic.