Crypto Currency ??

eskbanker

abash said:

Blockchain is still very nascent.

Personally I think that's stretching a point - Bitcoin has been going for over fifteen years now....

flaneurs_lobster

General question - are there any proven commercially available products/services that make use of public blockchain technology (other than crypto)?

abash

There are a few things I want to clarify.

1. I mentioned already that crypto is a distraction, so I'm not suggesting that buying crypto is good or bad investment. I've been involved with companies who are into building real world use-cases on the blockchain and I can see its advantages. So, I'm more focussed on blockchain as a utility and not crypto. 

2. The issue is not about who would want something or not, it's about control of information. Personal information should be under the control of individuals. Today, it isn't. Banks, tech companies, service providers, all have your DOB, Address, SSN.. etc. They take it from you as a part of the identification process or KYC. Tomorrow, they'll have access to your biometrics for the same reason - KYC. But, there's massive risk in your information being leaked involuntarily (hacks) and the company can also use it for nefarious use. Blockchain presents a technology where, just as in this case, one can confirm their identify without sharing their personal information (check out Zero-Knowledge (ZK) proofs). 

3. Medical records can be tampered with, farm ownership records can be tampered with. I've seen this happen in south-asian countries. That's because of current centralized owned and controlled databases. Distributed ledger technology (DLT).. aka blockchain, helps in ensuring that things can't get tampered. It lets the user determine who should have access to what.

4. I agree with you that banking system is closed for a reason. But, the same can be internally tampered with and if there's a need for an investigation into a financial firm, it gets muddy. Banks can have private blockchains which is not easy to tamper with.

I'm NOT saying everything needs a blockchain, but I do see real world use cases for the blockchain. Companies working in these areas will flourish in the future. Not every use case needs a blockchain. For such cases, even if they are on the blockchain they'll eventually perish. 

Another example is the carbon markets. One of the issues with carbon credits, carbon offsets is about 'double counting' where the same carbon credit is issued / counted more than once in some circumstances. Blockchains can prevent this. 

I see blockchain as a game-changer, but not a panacea for all the issues we currently face wrt privacy, integrity.. etc.

abash

eskbanker said:

abash said:

Blockchain is still very nascent.

Personally I think that's stretching a point - Bitcoin has been going for over fifteen years now....

Bitcoin is not blockchain. Unfortunately, everyone equates bitcoin to blockchain. Bitcoin is just 1 small utility on the blockchain and it's a first generation blockchain network.

As an analogy, internet was launched on 1st Jan, 1983. It didn't gain popularity until mid 1990s. 

Web 1.0 - News sites ... only way flow of information - one can only read 
Web 2.0 - Starting with email ... two way flow of information ... 1996 and beyond (when hotmail launched)

abash

flaneurs_lobster said:

General question - are there any proven commercially available products/services that make use of public blockchain technology (other than crypto)?

Any commercially available blockchain would need to have some kinda fee-paying mechanism and hence launch their product with their own cryptocurrency. So, I'm not sure of a commercial, yet non-crypto blockchain. 

But her are a few companies that have commercial products on the blockchain. 

1. Chainlink - It is an oracle - a data layer than connects blockchain with the internet. Blockchain is a parallel data layer to the internet. Oracles connect the 2 thru datafeeds (price, stocks, forex, weather.. etc). Chainlink is the leading player in Oracles. Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google is a part of Chainlink. 

2. Ethereum - It is a first smart contract solutions provider. A smart contract is a contract on the blockchain which is mathematically binding and encrypted. Ethereum is considered the 2nd gen blockchain, if you consider Bitcoin to be the first. Any contract can be created on Ethereum and executed. Due to the nature of the blockchain, it cannot be tampered with (terms being altered). The problems with Ethereum are being overcome with next gen smart contract blockchains like Polkadot, Algorand, Cardano and other... All in the smart-contract space. 

There are something called Layer 2s - They reside on the Ethereum blockchain, but have advanced tech to make the process cheaper and faster. Some of them are Polygon, Optimism, Arbitrum and Starknet. 

Special mention about Starknet, which is the only quantum resistant blockchain technology. (Some background here. Quantum computers can break the existing 256 / 512 encryption of the internet and blockchain encryption too. Starknet has come up with a tech that is almost impossible for a quantum computer to break into). 

3. There are many blockchain based products in DeFi - Decentralized Finance, whereby one can take collatelarized loan which smart contract enabled terms, at low interest, and get back the collateral on payment. But all deal in crypto (stablecoins - pegged 1:1 with USD).

4.There are other blockchain based products Farcaster (twitter on blockchain), DeSo (Decentralized Social Network) and many others in varied fields. I haven't done enough research on many of the products.

eskbanker

abash said:

eskbanker said:

abash said:

Blockchain is still very nascent.

Personally I think that's stretching a point - Bitcoin has been going for over fifteen years now....

Bitcoin is not blockchain. Unfortunately, everyone equates bitcoin to blockchain. Bitcoin is just 1 small utility on the blockchain and it's a first generation blockchain network.

I'm well aware of the difference, thanks, but was simply highlighting that one of the best-known breakthrough applications of blockchain has been the most prominent cryptocurrency, which was introduced over fifteen years ago, and therefore blockchain itself obviously preceded that.

I should perhaps have included the rest of that part of your post when quoting (in a thread specifically about crypto):

abash said:

Blockchain is still very nascent. Think of the internet in early 1990s. That's where blockchain and crypto is today. Today, 30 yrs later, the world runs on the internet. That's the potential of blockchain and crypto

but yes, agree that non-crypto uses of blockchain are likely to have more growth potential ahead.

Linton

In the past there have been other programming techniques and algorithms that have changed the world. Take databases for example. No significant business or organisation could now exist without using them in some way. However investing in companies that use and develop database software is hardly a particularly lucrative strategy.

if blockchain in the future becomes useful it will just be part of the environment not an opportunity for generating great returns.

Malthusian

abash said:

flaneurs_lobster said:

General question - are there any proven commercially available products/services that make use of public blockchain technology (other than crypto)?

Any commercially available blockchain would need to have some kinda fee-paying mechanism and hence launch their product with their own cryptocurrency. So, I'm not sure of a commercial, yet non-crypto blockchain. 

But her are a few companies that have commercial products on the blockchain. [snip]

...followed by a list of around a dozen scatcoins. Fantastic. Still so early.

For those unfamiliar with the names, Chainlink is a crypto token, Ethereum as most of us probably know is a crypto token, Farcaster is a token in its pre-ICO stage (translation: if you put money in you can't get it out, yet), DeSo is a token which rugged three years ago... all the "commercially available products / services" listed are cryptocurrency tokens. 

Nobody uses Deso or Farcaster as a social network; the only product anyone cares about is to buy tokens which you then try to sell to somebody else for more than you paid. 

Blockchain as a technology has been around since 1982 - so around the same length as the Internet using Abash's very debatable definition. The idea that it is "new" comes solely from conflating its start point with Bitcoin's launch in 2008-2009. A mere 15 years ago.

In reality the Internet only truly launched to the public in the early 1990s, when Tim Berners-Lee and CERN made the HTML protocol available royalty-free, creating the World Wide Web. The Internet existed before then, but only if you were into BBSes, Usenet or had a Compuserve email account. For most lay users "Internet" is synonymous with "WWW", and that began in 1993.

Its potential was immediately obvious to anyone with two brain cells to rub together. Banks, major news channels and governments all had their own websites up and running by the mid-90s. There were also of course hundreds of junk dot-com companies that launched, sucked in investor capital and died - but the Internet didn't consist of nothing but failure for 15 years. 

Whenever you ask for an example of blockchain being implemented commercially in the real world, you usually get a press release from 2020 or 2021 of some big company claiming their putting whatever they're doing on the blockchain. Try to find out what has happened to these projects three years on, and all you find is the sound of crickets. That is because blockchain has been around for 40 years and remains a solution looking for a problem. All of its perceived advantages disintegrate as soon as it comes into contact with the real world, leaving you with an inefficient read-only database.

We had all these discussions in 2017 and it's kind of cute that we're still having them seven years on because Bitcoin is pumping (spasmodically). So, so early.

abash

I don't have any bitcoin. I don't believe it to be the currency of the future. 

In my first post, I said that 99.5% of the cryptocurrencies have no utility. In every bull-bear crypto market cycle,  90% of the coins disappear as they had no long term goal, vision or utility and were was mostly speculative. 

The information I shared had nothing to do with bitcoin pumping now. It was more of a coincidence. I joined this forum 3 days ago.

All the comments I've shared in this group is about blockchain as a tech and nothing to do with crypto. I believe in Chainlink and Ethereum from a tech standpoint. I've read about Starknet, ZKProofs and ZKSnarks and its utility in the future. The fact that they all have a token is secondary to me. They do it as a fee mechanism and its price is not of relevance to me. 

I mentioned that I haven't done any research about Farcaster (launched a few months ago) or DeSo, other than finding it interesting experiments from a 'freedom of speech' perspective. Whether they'll be successful or not, I don't know (friend tech failed in 4 months of launch).

I'm only talking about the blockchain tech and utility. I've no intention in convincing people to invest in crypto. I myself don't know about it. 

eskbanker

abash said:

All the comments I've shared in this group is about blockchain as a tech and nothing to do with crypto.

[...]

I've no intention in convincing people to invest in crypto. I myself don't know about it. 

Didn't you think that a thread with this one's title was an odd one to jump into then?