It has the potential to decentralize the internet, making it both safer and more versatile in one fell swoop.
I don’t really get why a lot of projects want to do everything on a blockchain. These blockchains can handle like 7 Ts/sec. so far. The internet of things will become very big. So when you want access to an hotel room, why on earth would you use a blockchain? And why do we want all these little computers interact with a blockchain? It will go to 7 Ts/sec. quite fast, and than we need bigger blocks, and these get filled as well! So we need sidechains, and bla bla bla. I think the blockchain is great for contracts, and giving out your own coin or so. But we definitely need something like SAFE next to it for storage, surfing and more.
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IIRC, there are versions of the blockchain protocol that don’t have the 10min confirmation time or any of the other restrictions that Satoshi him/herself said would be removed at some point, and thus can operate at network speeds. In addition to that, blockchains allow for total perfect survilleance of everyone for all time, which is a wet dream for the public sector gang. IBM no doubt being friends with the government, probably has the latter point in mind.
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Because you can be (pretty) sure that the blockchain record that tells you the room is yours for the next 24 hours is not fake and won’t be altered at will. Even if the info itself is stored in another blockchain and just checkpointed periodically to the Bitcoin blockchain, it can be useful like that.
The 3.5 (or 7, theoretically) tps limit is going away next year. It’s going to double several times by 2020.
There’s plenty of opportunities for many different applications and technologies. Some apps may use more than one technology (“public ledger”).
Personnaly I wouldn’t trust a blockchain coming from of the blue chips.
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From TFA:
IBM has announced that it will soon release its own, open source version of blockchain software…
It’s unclear what is it that the thing does. If it’s targeted at financials, you maybe won’t get a chance to use it.
But if it’s OSS, it is likely that it will be accepted by governments and enterprises who trust IBM now. For them it wouldn’t take a leap of faith - many already run their business on OSS delivered by IBM.
This is complete nonsense. First of all, why should the whole world see that I logged in to my hotelroom? Because that’s what’s gonna happen. It’s 1984, East Germany in the 80’s and all the bad things our beloved @Warren warns us about all the time. Next to that, whenever I check in in a hotel, I never have a problem at all. They just give me a key to my room. Same for Airbnb, it works great, no need to use a blockchain for that, I trust that the company’s database is working well.
And did you ever heard of Bitcoin spam attacks? I’m sure you did. For under $10K some folks can slow the blockchain down with a click of the mouse. I did a transaction a few weeks ago and it took over 14 hours to get trough. And these where just little attacks. Imagine some dictator spending a few 100K on killing the blockchain. It would go trough it’s knees quite fast. Right at the moment you, and thousands of other people are checking in their hotels rooms. Good luck with that technology.
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The blockchain is a notary. It provides rather indisputable proof that something happened. It does not require the disclosure of what happened to record that it did happen. If two parties have a dispute one can provide the document in question - and it is either in the blockchain or it is not in the blockchain. That provides solid cryptographic proof that a document existed in a particular form at a specific time in history. That makes contract enforcement and auditing of books a ton easier and much less expensive… That is why everyone is excited to put all kinds of things on a blockchain…
It is easy to criticize blockchains based on the bitcoin implementation. But the IBM implementation probably has learned from Satoshi’s mistakes. There is no reason for a 7t/sec limit aside from the fact the he coded one… And if that wasn’t there - the bitcoin spam attacks would not be an issue.
Further - If you include a reasonable fee - miners are going to prefer your transaction over the spam – If you are recording indisputable proof of the state of your books for example you can put it in the blockchain and add a few dollars in fees to beat the spammers, or you can pay some Price Waterhouse Cooper auditors to spend an extra few days on-site reconstructing the transactions that went into those books for several thousand dollars per day… It isn’t a close call.
Ethereum is also limited on that nr. of transactions so far. Bitshares was talking about 100K transactions a second, but that was in theory.
For now the existing protocol can easily handle 3x the volume of Bitcoin which is over 30x the current volume of BitShares transactions.
This means after years of research and debugging etc. The fastest blockchains can only process under 40 Ts/sec. And again, I like Ethereum, Bitshares and even good old Bitcoin. But we shouldn’t register any toilet flush on a blockchain. And that’s exactly what a lot of religious blockchain people are proposing. From renting a car, to checking in a hotel room, all should be registered in blocks. And now they’re even talking about the IoT. Meaning millions of sensors spewing stuff to blockchains as well. That really sucks in my opinion. The blockchains can’t handle that. Current systems for renting a car, checking in to a room are working fine. Let’s keep the bockchain for more important stuff.
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Why do you think that is? Can you express it in a scientific/mathmatical reason? or is it just “nobody is doing it so it must not be possible”?
My view is that there certainly are trade offs between that amount of data you can process and the number of people willing to shell out the money to store all of that data.
Decentralization is pretty vitally important if you are a rogue anarchist group trying to disrupt industry, but it is significantly less important if you are the industry, and you are trying to adopt the inventions being wielded against you… Banks don’t care about centralization, and they are more than happy to store terabytes upon terabytes of transactional data…
I don’t know what are you worked up about here, but in “tech speak” what I said means
- You go to something like HotelShift.io and buy 1 HILTONNYCSEP19, instructing the site to send it to your one-time address. You send BTC from address A, and HotelShift.io sends you 1 HILTONNYCSEP19 to address B.
- Upon arriving to your hotel in New York City you claim your 1 day key by transferring the token from address B to a room key vending machine in the hotel. You get your key that works until noon the next day.
Most hotels will probably ask you to ID yourself not just because of stupid government regulations, but because they need to be able to recover damages or deal with issues reported by other guests.
Here privacy is not a technical, but a societal issue, but I’m curious to see how much more private it’d get with Safecoin or Ethereum!
What is this supposed to be compared with? Technologies that don’t work, technologies that kind of work but aren’t ready, or fiat?
In my scenario above I could go to hotel staff, show I have a token that entitles me to my room, they’d write down my address B and give me the key to my room. I sign to confirm receipt of the key. It’s an ugly fallback scenario, but it can work. I still have 1-2 hand-written boarding passes from not so distant times when computer systems failed.
Bitcoin spam doesn’t bother me at all. The fact that it’s being conducted shows that Bitcoin transactions are too cheap. Those who need transactions to happen faster should spend money to fix that (or pay higher transaction fees for their own transactions).
It only means that it’s now more likely than not that the max. block size will be upped to 2 MB to double the maximum number of possible transactions per unit of time. Then such attacks will become more expensive.
I translate a post I did for a spanish forum…
Neither IBM, in its own paper, clarifies too well what it claims to do. The idea is to join three solution (Telehash messaging, Bittorrent distribution and Ethereum blockchain) and set up a system to control and management of hundreds of billions of devices.
As they say the challenges are enormous and with potential scalability issues. Referring to blockchain poses the problem to manage hundreds of billions of devices so suggest solutions as sidechain, treechain or mini blockchain. They also point out the problem with the actual cryptocurrency format not adapted to the IoT environment.
With these two issues It does not seem feasible use the actual ethereum network so, to continue with this project, possibly would use a fork.
However Adept is nothing more than a simple proof of concept and, in my view, not feasible. IBM itself, in the Internet of Things vehicle service, are using other designs that have nothing to do with any blockchain.
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Yeah, but organizations like Target and Home Depot are not happy to do so. They’ve been bitten and will likely be again. It’s a huge liability. I think we’re going to see push from a lot of different organizations to decentralize financial transactions so they don’t face the liability of being honey pots for hackers, with no way to really combat it.
Banks are going to have to give some ground. They’re working on it. I guarantee that every major bank has a working group on blockchain technology, at least for internal and inter-bank clearing. But the technology is incompatible with centralized banking on a currency level. They are in a very scary position, whether they realize it or not. Probably don’t, though.
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Yes, But my point was that I don’t think that companies like target and home depot would mind using a blockchain controlled by IBM, or a coalition of banks over the bitcoin blockchain.
Big players like IBM are not going to have to worry about “block size” causing a centralization of mining, because they will most likely be the centralization of the mining. They also would have far less trouble implementing changes than the bitcoin folks do…
The upside of decentralization is that the system is nearly impossible to corrupt… The downside is that sometimes it needs to be corrupted and you cannot fix things without a civil war of sorts…
The reason Bitcoin needed to be decentralized is so that it could not be outlawed, sued, or raided… I doubt the oligarchs will have such concerns…
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I agree, and the silver lining for “wild” crypto is users will become familiar with cryptocurrencies. This is a huge plus.
No need to explain what a digital wallet is, no need to “prove” it’s safe, etc.
Maybe IBM’s solution will have short wait times (in order to make it more convenient for retail, if they are going to be targeting that).
I suspect IBM is not targeting the currency part so much as the notary and settlement part.
I don’t see retail crypto being too successful until the banks get behind it. – and at that point it will be your debit card signing transactions – It won’t feel like Crypto at all, even if it is…
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I wonder what this means:
“However, according to the scarce information about the IBM project that has been released so far, there seems to be an important difference between Ethereum and the upcoming IBM platform: the concept of “miners” – end users who contribute computing to validate transactions and receive a financial reward in the native crypto-currency carried by the blockchain – would be absent in IBM’s implementation.” – IBM Developing Blockchain Without Bitcoin for Record-Keeping and Smart Contracts - Bitcoin Magazine - Bitcoin News, Articles and Expert Insights
How is IBM’s blockchain built if not by miners?
By trusted parties I guess.
I don’t really understand why banks are seemingly so interested in blockchains. The concept of centrally held or controlled blockchains seems to totally remove the point of having information or a network state verified by thousands of unknown and untrusted nodes.
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For them it’s about the blockchain’s cryptographic validity, not the trustlessness.
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