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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%.
I'm certainly no expert, but last time I checked, Ethereum was trying to get a viable proof-of-stake algorithm up and running.
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
Blockchain and huge power requirements aren't synonymous. Bitcoin, and other cryptocurrencies that use the technology are where the power usage is, and that is because it is actually built into the algorithms for the currency.
Blockchain methodologies are actually very cheap to compute and use, it just the matter of other resource usages over time as the "chain" spreads out and is housed in more places in part or in whole. A big chain can be many, many petabytes in aggregate stored over hundreds and thousands of machines. That doesn't even cover the bandwidth required to transmit all of that data. Granted, some chains are "self contained" in that they aren't spread widely, mainly used in house, but they can be anywhere in between.
Anyway, that's my take on it. Not an expert by any means. Some some schmuck with an opinion.
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.
Miners should be fined for every kilowatt they wasted on mining.
Yes, they already do that. It's called the electricity bill. Is that not enough ? Then raise the price of electricity.
The power requirements only get high if your ecosystem involves competing over solving the blocks, it becomes an arms race. If you are just using the blockchain as a tool to track things then the power requirements are fairly inline with other tools like conventional databases.
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".
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Those issues are being solved - and the solutions are being tested and proven right now. We live in a very exciting time. Here are some examples;
- Bitcoin's lightning network is hoping to move the bulk of day-to-day transactions off of the blockchain with only final settlement happening on-chain
- Bitcoin cash has opted to use larger blocks so more transactions can be mined into a block at a time
- IOTA & Nano's DAG offers better sharding & scalability than a traditional single blockchain
- Pre-mined coins, like Ripple, can remove the need to spend CPU cycles creating new coins if they can solve (or ignore) decentralisation via other means
- Coins like Ethereum are looking to move away from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake for a bunch of reasons, including better scalability & throughput
There are loads of cryptocurrencies that use blockchain or some derivative of it to achieve safe transactions with immutable history - which is the key use case for cryptographically secure chains of data.
Many of the buzzword-bandwagoners who haphazardly throw words like 'blockchain' into their earnings calls often miss the point of what a blockchain is good for and often just think blockchains can solve everything.
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.
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The power requirements only get high if your ecosystem involves competing over solving the blocks
And if your ecosystem doesn't involve competing over a scarce resource to solve blocks; then the entire ecosystem is at greater risk that a single actor, such as a nation state, can get enough computing power to rewrite the entire chain.
POW secures Bitcoin, because not even a 3-letter agency could afford to procure enough computing power to double-spend or rewrite history. "Blockchains" that aren't reliant on a scarce resource won't work, because there are single actors out there who can afford to corrupt the network.
Proof of Stake coins like REDD have a similar issue ---- instead of the validation power being distributed rather well, and anyone that can stand up a mining operation of a certain size - Under PoS the power is concentrated in a small number of entities (usually the founders) that horde large quantities of the coin; corrupt 1 or 2 of these people, and you can undermine a Proof of Stake coin easily ---- that is well within the compass of a state actor to do : target the people Hording / HOLDING / MINING PoS crypto. And the perfect pre-text exists to do so...... controlling a large number of crypto tokens can be deemed a basis for suspicion
How is a list of records NOT a type of database?
The above article then goes on to describe blockchain technology, using the word "database" no less than 11 times.
Blockchain is also frequently referred to as a "distributed ledger":
Let's lookup Cryptocurrency:
Looks like everyone considers it a database except you.
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
Blockchain refers specifically to the distributed nature of the beast where there is no possibility of a central trusted authority.
The essence of a blockchain is just a set of transactions, combined in blocks, where each block contains a secure hash of the previous one, hence they form a chain. It is typically used in a distributed fashion, but that doesn't mean that this is the only possible way to apply the technology.
(if the data is in one place then there is only one place to change it)
No, because if all the blocks are published, and stored in multiple places, then it's impossible to change any of them without people noticing.
(if there is only one place the calculation has happened then how can you verify it is correct).
You can verify the correctness by means of the public key that's also published.
Blockchain solves a very specific kind of problem: one which involves the need to have "anonymous" transactions stored in a public manner. In the business world, there are not very many real applications for this. Businesses want to keep their data private, not public. They want their transactions tied to specific people, not anonymous. Yes, I'm sure there are real applications for blockchain, but it's more or less the opposite of the mentality of most businesses. The fad was always just that: a fad.