Blockchain is a lot like teen sex: Everybody talks about it, no one has a clue how to do it

Colour me unsurprised.

It's not that there's no uses for blockchain. Just that there are no conventional uses for blockchain, which is not quite the same thing.

The problem with blockchain is it's going to be entwined with BitCoin for a long time to come, which blinds people to the reality. Which is that blockchain is a computing state machine publicly distributed across the internet. Or rather that's what it should be.

I think I'll avoid both just to be on the safe side.

Solution looking for a problem

The underlying technology of blockchain has been around for over 10 years now. If people haven't found another use for it, they probably never will.

Fairly simple

Blockchain is a ledger, first and foremost. If you don't need an immutable log of data, you don't need blockchain. There are more exotic uses for that but they are niche and too cumbersome for business use.

If you don't understand the internet of value and how that is changing financial services around the world through blockchain innovation perhaps you should just STFU?

"Oh its just a solution without a problem"

Yeah that'll be why every major financial institution on the planet is bollock deep in this technology then...........

followed by the "Slope of Enlightenment", ending at the "Plateau of Productivity".

Or not as the case may be.

The real problem is that the value of transaction fraud has to _significantly_ exceed the transaction cost of blockchain technology to combat that fraud. We have lots of systems to combat transaction fraud that are working just fine - credit card transactions, title insurance etc. Otherwise at best its just another marginally better way of doing something we already have. If a measurable percentage of global electricity consumption becomes part of the solution - you clearly aren't considering things rationally.

Nonsense. The problem was how to make people buy even more servers and use even more power to execute computing services. Block-chain is the solution.

"of the supply chain projects that got past sign-off, most remain in the pilot phase."

That sounds like praising with faint damns.

Highly poisonable well

In most countries, hosting or harboring things like terrorist propaganda or child pr0n can be severely punished. All it takes is for one person to embed illegal content into a blockchain record, and the entire uneditable blockchain can become illegal to access or host.

Gartner predicted that at least one cryptocurrency-funded, non-mainstream political party will win a national election by 2023

Obviously Garner's thought through the legal ramifications of anonymous donations from abroad before letting us know its opinion.

De centralised identity management.

I have got one of those. It's a plastic card with my picky and a little chip inside which holds a copy of my public key and other relevant data.

Admittedly it was issued by a centralised system, but, then again I cannot imagine an identity management system that is not.

Certainly beats the "can you provide utility bills" ballocks that goes on in the UK.

Cynically speaking, the reason there are any pilot projects is that it must be very expensive to keep the scammers at bay for the giant credit card companies. If this cost could have been "disintermediated" by distributed ledgers or such, so that it is the individual consumer that gets stiffed, or else needs to build their own personal defenses against fraud (preferably using toolkits sold by the same well-connected companies, of course), well... big bonus time.

So far, no one has articulated a really plausible cover for the con, but you never know - some free-market fundamentalists could find the right formulation to push the as a deregulation measure and "taking responsibility for your own actions". However, the word blockchain is too tainted by cryptocurrencies now, so if and when this concept next appears it will have a different name.

All we need is to blockchain the AI in the self-driving cars

or whatever it is this month.

Distributed?

There is an interesting difference between distributed and non distributed blockchains. Distributed blockchains have esoteric benefits such as immutability but they come at the cost of needing multiple independent parties to run them. This leads to the problem of how to remunerate them for their efforts. If you have to pay them directly their independence is compromised, so ideally the act of running the blockchain needs to generate revenue on its own. This basically leads you to a cryptocurrency solution. Alternatively you opt of a private blockchain and remind yourself that absolute immutability was never actually needed.

Sigh. Blockchain is a COMPUTER.

Sorry to shout.

Forget ledgering - that's not what blockchain is about. BitCoin almost managed to demonstrate the power of blockchain, until the sharks moved in and bloodied the water into a frenzy of gee-whizzery greed.

The real power of blockchain is that a blockchain is a self contained computer in the von-Neumann sense of the idea. It's a stored-program computer. Not only that, it is (or can be, which is the power) a totally decentralised processing entity. Owned by nobody and available to all. In essence you connect to a blockchain using crypto, drop a series of instructions onto it, and let it run. With each iteration of the blockchain those instructions are evaluated and executed - if appropriate. And it's that "if appropriate" where the power lies.

So in the future (and as the article suggests, possibly a long time in the future, since it seems there's a lot of catching up to do in meatspace) people will be using that power - delivering smart contracts - without blinking.

There's a hell of a lot of real-world processes that can be mirrored, automated and secured using blockchain. In a way that's totally transparent and unlike anything we have today. Unless I missed something, and we are allowed into banks server rooms to have a shufty through their ledgers ?

The biggest problem with blockchain development is that it was initially picked up by the people who - very quickly - realise it was meant to subvert. If you can instantiate a blockchain properly you have effectively created a bank.

When I took the trouble - as a Strategy Consultant in 2012 - to bone up on blockchain (and make a few hundred quid on BitCoin, but that's another story) I knew within 10 minutes of presenting the work that a lot of people would need to retire before we started picking up blockchain properly.

It would help if..

...blockchain meant something.

Even I don't understand what it means, but then I am a little bit of an idiot.

To me, it just seems like another marketing buzzword bullshit word.

Anyone care to explain really simply what the word actually means?

There are two types of blockchain

There is the truly open one (proof of work and non-authenticated) i.e. bitcoin. The exciting thing about this version is that it (supposedly) allow untrusted participants to agree that something happened. The fact it does it by a chain of hashblocks is completely immaterial to the average person. The fact that money gets stolen from this blockchain on a reasonably regular basis a) scares me b) never makes the main news!

The second are more closed blockchains (often proof of stake and authenticated). I still get lost as to what's so special about an authenticated blockchain and why it's better than a distributed/shared database. As soon as I know who someone is then why do I need consensus? I trust them don't I ? I don't get how we don't get contention - I must use transactions ?

Most of the business focussed (think maersk) are run on the latter type of blockchain and therefore aren't costing the earth in electricity to run (well, not much more than any of the rest of our day-to-day computing tasks do.). Also, I believe that the banks are using the shared ledgers to share information like codes - that don't change a lot and aren't public per se. Again - why not a DB with an API fronting it - I'm lost. I guess they like the idea of saying they literally have a ledger technology holding their ledger of codes. Sort of makes sense, but, to me, there's other tech that can (and presumably did?) do it. I'm betting that blockchain will be "just another tech" sometime in the not too distant future that has a niche or two - the rest of us will just use DBs.

Smart contracts ..

blockchain implements smart contracts. That's it.

The reason they're "smart" is they execute automatically without banks, lawyers, courts and governments.

Maybe now, people can see the reason blockchain development has gone very quiet ?????

or thsi

"Yep, these are people who were burying jars filled with their own Piss in their backyard before ShitCcoin came along.