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Blockchain Study Finds 0% Success Rate and Vendors Don't Call Back When Asked For Evidence (theregister.co.uk)
Though Blockchain has been touted as the answer to everything, a study of 43 solutions advanced in the international development sector has found exactly no evidence of success. From a report: Three practitioners including erstwhile blockchain enthusiast John Burg, a Fellow at the US Agency for International Development (USAID), looked at instances of the distributed crypto ledger being used in a wide range of situations by NGOs, contractors and agencies. But they drew a complete blank. "We found a proliferation of press releases, white papers, and persuasively written articles," Burg et al wrote. "However, we found no documentation or evidence of the results blockchain was purported to have achieved in these claims. We also did not find lessons learned or practical insights, as are available for other technologies in development."
Blockchain vendors were keen to puff the merits of the technology, but when the three asked for proof of success in the field, it all went very quiet. "We fared no better when we reached out directly to several blockchain firms, via email, phone, and in person. Not one was willing to share data on program results, MERL [monitoring, evaluation, research and learning] processes, or adaptive management for potential scale-up. Despite all the hype about how blockchain will bring unheralded transparency to processes and operations in low-trust environments, the industry is itself opaque." Burg was an enthusiastic advocate for blockchain until recently -- as he explained in this Medium post.
Blockchain vendors were keen to puff the merits of the technology, but when the three asked for proof of success in the field, it all went very quiet. "We fared no better when we reached out directly to several blockchain firms, via email, phone, and in person. Not one was willing to share data on program results, MERL [monitoring, evaluation, research and learning] processes, or adaptive management for potential scale-up. Despite all the hype about how blockchain will bring unheralded transparency to processes and operations in low-trust environments, the industry is itself opaque." Burg was an enthusiastic advocate for blockchain until recently -- as he explained in this Medium post.
I have similar results for "AI". A lot of press releases and white papers but nothing that is really more than computers running algorithms.
Similarly, blockchain will give you greater choice and clarity when it comes to how your taxes are spent and the government goods and services you can benefit from...Blockchain is like a loom that can weave together multiple strands of separate things, including these technologies I mentioned above, into an integrated fabric where you can see what the data means and adjust resources in response.
Blockchain does none of this actually.
Block chain technology could be useful, but since people seem to have forgotten that there's more than just that hammer, this bullshit pervades. Guessing everyone is still upset MjÃlnir is broken, and that's why we have this hammer obsession.
In a world where despite the importance most people can barely manage to deal with http certificates, attempts to adopt a much more complicated technology for much more dubious use cases fell short.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Not really. *People* have been successful at various ventures involving trading BTC, but they've either cashed out at a profit (e.g. are betting it won't go up any more), are acting as a brokerage so they make money either way as long as it doesn't collapse entirely, or have used it as marketing fluff to pump investment money (above board or not). None of those are really strong indicators of the tech itself being successful.
At best, the jury is still out - if it significantly recovers in value and starts being seen as a worthy long term investment again and/or becomes established as a viable mainstream currency replacement, then perhaps you might be able to make that claim. Right now, however, the general trajectory for BTC - and crypto currencies in general given how all the major alternates generally take a dump in sympathy whenever BTC farts - doesn't look good.
At least one Doge still equals one Doge though, so that's a plus. Right?
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Dissociated Press (DP) — FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Physicists identify new fundamental particle May herald a new particle family and restructuring of the Standard Model Geneva, Switzerland — December 3, 2018 Keywords: hypino, shinyon, blockchain High energy particle physicists at the CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nullité) facility have confirmed the existence of the long-conjectured hypino (hy-PEE-no). It is thought to be the first member of a new class of particles known as shinyons (SHY-nee-ons), distinct from bosons and fermions. Unlike other subatomic particles, hypinos carry no charge, and have neither rest nor relativistic mass. Their only defining quantum property is spin. Hypinos are thought to be the fundamental unit of marketing hyperbole. To date, hypinos are the only known members of the proposed class of shinyons, which are of especial interest to tech investors and holders of the MBA degree. Dr. Martin Waugh, of the Institute for Advanced Squander, further posits that the hypino may be the carrier of the so-called “weak-minded force”, a mutual repulsion between fools and their money. It is theorized that, upon sufficiently accelerated spin, hypinos transform into super-excited hyperinos, detectable only by Chief Information Officers. The discovery of the hypino is recounted by Drs. Robert Crawford and Robert Jensen as follows: “It was a Friday afternoon, and we and our colleagues were returning from a long lunch. Maintenance on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was scheduled to start Saturday morning, and the apparatus would be unavailable for two months. We were in a ‘what the hell’ kind of mood, so we thought we'd take a fantasy shot, just for grins and giggles. “We had a few leftover Higgs Bosons from 2012 on the shelf, so our lowly lab technician, Garth Dennis, breech-loaded them into the beast , set up a blockchain for the target, positioned the extremely sensitive Swindleometer at the intended point of collision, energized the superconducting electromagnets, and let it rip. Upon collision, the blockchain shattered into a shower of the elusive hypinos. Examination of the debris field revealed that the blockchain and all of our cash were gone! Apparently the hypinos were entangled with our funding.” There may be natural sources of hypinos. The strongest natural emitters appear to be located in Redmond, Washington, and Armonk, New York.
Feels like a Rube Goldberg machine with the way it is turning out, or worse, like a perpetual motion machine, or snake oil, etc.
Since no browsers use Certificate Transparency to warn against fake certs, I'm not sure it's a huge success.
Google created Certificate Transparency, yet when I go to a site with a cert that isn't using CT, I get no warning in Chrome. My Chrome is a couple months old, but I haven't heard that this has changed. When even the creator of the system doesn't use it, is it a big success?
What, like git?
Sort of exactly like git but also has a (inefficient) way to automatically resolve conflicting "check-ins".
Exactly. Except a blockchain adds a voting scheme to decide who gets to approve the pull requests.