Corporate America's Blockchain and Bitcoin Fever is Over (axios.com)

S&P 500 executives are dropping blockchain buzzwords less on earnings calls and during presentations to analysts and investors. Analysts are also asking about it less. From a report: The hype was just that. The odds of a company turning blockchain "headlines into reality" are slim, as Forrester Research predicts. The prospect of incorporating blockchain technology or cryptocurrency into businesses excited investors and drove up share prices temporarily -- just look at Kodak, beverage company Long Blockchain, or Hooters franchisee Chanticleer Holdings -- so it's no wonder executives wanted shareholders to know that they too might get in on the new technologies. At the peak earlier this year, "blockchain" was mentioned 173 times, according to an analysis of company transcripts by Axios. The number has since fallen as much as 80%.

Comments

Re:Blockchain is like the Internet or "the cloud"

[Anonymous Coward]

No it won't.

Those issues will never be solved. Its been like 5 years and no none has made blockchains into something useful.

Its not going to happen

Re:Power requirements

[religionofpeas]

It's not the blockchain technology itself that requires a lot of power. What requires the power is the distributed trust model (which bitcoin uses).

You could make a public blockchain where a central trusted agent just signs all the blocks with their private key. This would take no effort at all, and would be suitable for most private companies. The rest of the world can verify all the transactions, but cannot add to them directly.

If the chain is public how do you prevent

[rsilvergun]

tampering without the large computation requirement (and matching power requirement)? And if it's not public why not just use a regular database?

I guess I still don't understand the point of blockchain by itself. I get the idea of having a distributed database. You can make your customers' computers do your database computation for you. It'd be like Bit Torrent for databases. You'd shift those costs onto your customers and they probably wouldn't notice since it's a few bucks a year in aggregate.

But then you throw in heavy users. If it's a currency you get lots of those and the chain stays "democratic" for lack of a better word; e.g. no one person can take control of the chain and make updates. But if I understand things correctly it's a mess if one person has too many nodes on the chain. They can start controlling what gets committed to the chain.

Again, I haven't looked that closely into it (I mostly cared because I was shopping for a graphics card a year ago and couldn't find one for less than $500 bucks). But it just seems like Blockchain doesn't really do what people wanted it to do. Bitcoin works because, let's face it, it's being used to launder money and buy drugs, so it's always got a market. But I don't see any other practical applications. By "practical" I mean, "it's the best solution to this problem".

Legalize drugs

[rsilvergun]

completely. Treat the hard stuff (Meth/Heroine/Cocaine) as a medical condition. Let addicts go to gov't clinics for their fixes and the as soon as they come down from their high they go into rehab. Netherlands did this and it works. It'll kill the primary use for Bitcoin.

Then crack down on money laundering and you're pretty much set. This crack down is coming btw. Police are slow to react to new tech, but it's not hard to trace money laundering through Bitcoin. It works today because the police haven't caught up. They will in a few years. There's already been a few folks nailed for money laundering via bitcoin and they'll be more soon.

Anyway do those two things and Bitcoin goes back to being a curiosity and a hobby toy for anarchists. It's too slow for regular transactions and the solutions to the speed problem all have centralized authorizes similar to how the Credit Card companies work or they're easy for hackers to break.