Agreed, nearly every commercial use seems better off simply relying on a centrally trusted authority.
"This has to be on the blockchain. But! don't look behind the curtain to everything else in our company that relies (and thrives) on a single point of trust.
Including quick money transfer. FED is working on an upgrade that will allow instant USD transfers. There's absolutely no reason why the central banks of the world cannot have instant transfers using their non-blockchain databases.
BTC is only good as a deflationary pseudo-commodity, like gold. And like gold a good holding amount is probably below 10%, I'd say below 5% of the portfolio.
The underlying blockchains often do not have central authority; that is, no one entity can make a rash decision for bitcoin tomorrow.
Cryptokitties can manipulate their contract, so in that case it is true a central authority is in control. Even though Bitcoin has been around 10 years there is still a lot of development and people are still figuring out how to approach this type of thing. The obvious answer is to start with a central contract and have a mechanism to slowly decentralize or remove ownership. It’s going to take time to get it right but it will happen (and even cryptokitties can upgrade their contract to include this logic).
If you take a look around you'll see it's mostly non-technical people throwing their money into the crypto space (see reddit.com/r/bitcoin), unfortunately, this applies to investors too. How many years has it been and still all we have is 200 different shitecoins.
There is a very useful application for blockchain: Leverage banks desire to stay current and not loose out in the next wave of change in order to sell them platforms which generate far more interesting press releases than a regular database would..
Like no CTO ever got fired for choosing IBM - No digital transformation manager ever got hired without at least mentioning blockchain.
(Edited to add: Note this isn't a bad thing per-say. Ive seen blockchain used as ammo to do push something through thats actually useful, regardless of whether it was the most apt tech choice or not.)
Since the author doesn’t cite a source for his graphs, we are left to speculate on how recent the data is. Blockchain certainly seemed to me to be very hot in 2018. Not so much this year.
Blockchain allows protocols for finance. Derivative contracts like perpetual futures are inherently better than old-school futures. The innovation is much more rapid. Building a new exchange becomes permissionless. Assets can flow from old exchanges to new, or be moved around to many rapidly. All of this is simply better than the current exchange situation - 24/7 trading, low fees, rapid innovation, easy capital formation. Finance will move to the crypto rails because it’s better.
How is a perpetual futures contract inherently better than "old-school futures"? It is my understanding what cyrpto calls a perpetual future _isn't_ a future which makes them difficult to compare. I'm reading this comment as if perpetual futures are going to replace our current futures system somehow, and I don't see this possibility.
Don't we have 24/7 trading without the block chain? And low fees?
It appears all the many of these benefits you mention are for those just transacting in a crypto currency, and not for the other 99% of finance transacting in other currencies (and physical goods).
> Derivative contracts like perpetual futures are inherently better than old-school futures.
Can you elaborate on this? Physically settled futures are important to producers and consumers of commodities. I can imagine that replacing these with a cash settled contract might increase spot volatility.
Blockchain has many useful applications: art, insurance, property inference. imo the problem is the systemic changes are not worth the gains (inertia is strong, therefore not that useful?).
Trustless/trust-lite blockchains are a strong fit for many applications, but far from proportionate to the number of applications being attempted.
Take, for example, property titles on the blockchain. Sounds promising. But property rights are ultimately enforced by governments (namely, the government that projects control over the area on which the property sits) through their legal systems.
In this case, for the majority of reasonable threat models, blockchains add complexity without adding value. Say that your wallet is holding a title token. I hack your computer and use your private key to transfer the token to my wallet. According to the blockchain, I am now the rightful of the property. However, it's very unlikely that your government would recognize me as the owner. The government wouldn't let me move all my stuff over and start living there just because the property token is in my wallet. The blockchain state and de facto/de jure state have diverged.
Similarly, say the government becomes tyrannical and begins seizing property. The property token in your wallet will, once again, not save you. You will be jailed. The "code is law" of blockchains becomes redundant to the "law is law" of governments.
I didn’t downvote you, but that’s a pretty extraordinary statement that could use some explanation. How do you see it being used such that it reaches that level of ubiquity?
The charts look lovely but is this even worth discussing without knowing were the data comes from? From all I know the author could have made those in Microsoft Paint O_o.
This is a bit of a personal plug, but as for examining trends of funding and startup activity in the “AI” realm, I wrote up a brief summary of some CB insights investment data earlier this year [1]. I thought it was interesting to examine the difference between investment activity and entrepreneur activity, as there is always some inherent information asymmetry between entrepreneurs and investors. Not a deep analysis, but a few basic charts :)
As others have pointed out, this article really needs to be backed up with sources.
> Software - up more than 3x, Software is a perennial category. Automating expensive internal processes in novel ways is Levi’s 501 jean of the startup world: a stylish classic that will never go out of style.
I agree with the above text but the graphic for software shows a clear plateau and doesn't quite bear this out.
I loved the graphs in this article. Would be interesting to plot some of the most successful companies in each category and see if there was any correlation to whether they were formed at the start, peak, or tail of a "wave".
Also, some categories had multiple waves, e.g. "pre-mobile social media" (early '00s) and "post-mobile social media" (early '10s).
Funding doesn't mean it's succeeding. It just means it's really hot right now. I would much rather see which category of startups are actually succeeding: as in getting revenue, profits and user traction.
Revenue numbers for early stage startups might be hard to come by.
I was in an accelerator with a bunch of startups and one in particular was having a lot of trouble putting together a series A. And strangely, they were one of the few that had decent revenue numbers.
At the suggestion of a savvy fundraiser, they took all mention of their actual revenue out of their pitch and they immediately started getting real interest.
They were then able to raise the funds.
It seems that actually having revenue just really dashed the pie in the sky dreams of many investors. With no revenue or profit, they were free to pretend that when the money started flowing, it would be hockey stick growth.
With revenue numbers, they could crunch the numbers and see the gradual growth curve and that would scare them away.
Consumer fintech definitely feels like a bubble. There are a few promising entries in the space, but the overarching trend is price wars in various sectors (trading/investing, loan underwriting, wage advances, bank accounts) competing for the same (scarce) millenial dollars. The TAM is certainly large, but margins will quickly go to zero, and with the sheer amount of contenders in each space, I don't see the majority making it out alive.
Readit News
"This has to be on the blockchain. But! don't look behind the curtain to everything else in our company that relies (and thrives) on a single point of trust.
BTC is only good as a deflationary pseudo-commodity, like gold. And like gold a good holding amount is probably below 10%, I'd say below 5% of the portfolio.
Cryptokitties can manipulate their contract, so in that case it is true a central authority is in control. Even though Bitcoin has been around 10 years there is still a lot of development and people are still figuring out how to approach this type of thing. The obvious answer is to start with a central contract and have a mechanism to slowly decentralize or remove ownership. It’s going to take time to get it right but it will happen (and even cryptokitties can upgrade their contract to include this logic).
Like no CTO ever got fired for choosing IBM - No digital transformation manager ever got hired without at least mentioning blockchain.
(Edited to add: Note this isn't a bad thing per-say. Ive seen blockchain used as ammo to do push something through thats actually useful, regardless of whether it was the most apt tech choice or not.)
DeFi is the most concentrated aspect of blockchain at the moment. Assets going into DeFi are up and to the right: https://defipulse.com/
Don't we have 24/7 trading without the block chain? And low fees?
It appears all the many of these benefits you mention are for those just transacting in a crypto currency, and not for the other 99% of finance transacting in other currencies (and physical goods).
Can you elaborate on this? Physically settled futures are important to producers and consumers of commodities. I can imagine that replacing these with a cash settled contract might increase spot volatility.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle
Deleted Comment
Take, for example, property titles on the blockchain. Sounds promising. But property rights are ultimately enforced by governments (namely, the government that projects control over the area on which the property sits) through their legal systems.
In this case, for the majority of reasonable threat models, blockchains add complexity without adding value. Say that your wallet is holding a title token. I hack your computer and use your private key to transfer the token to my wallet. According to the blockchain, I am now the rightful of the property. However, it's very unlikely that your government would recognize me as the owner. The government wouldn't let me move all my stuff over and start living there just because the property token is in my wallet. The blockchain state and de facto/de jure state have diverged.
Similarly, say the government becomes tyrannical and begins seizing property. The property token in your wallet will, once again, not save you. You will be jailed. The "code is law" of blockchains becomes redundant to the "law is law" of governments.
In 50 years there won’t be a single Fortune 500 company that isn’t built on DLT.
It's R package ggplot2. The title isn't center by default and those colors are the color ggplot2 tend to use by default.
But I do share your concern in term of lack of clarification in where the poster got his data from.
[1] https://medium.com/@kevinconnolly/the-top-100-ai-startups-91...
> Software - up more than 3x, Software is a perennial category. Automating expensive internal processes in novel ways is Levi’s 501 jean of the startup world: a stylish classic that will never go out of style.
I agree with the above text but the graphic for software shows a clear plateau and doesn't quite bear this out.
Also, some categories had multiple waves, e.g. "pre-mobile social media" (early '00s) and "post-mobile social media" (early '10s).
I was in an accelerator with a bunch of startups and one in particular was having a lot of trouble putting together a series A. And strangely, they were one of the few that had decent revenue numbers.
At the suggestion of a savvy fundraiser, they took all mention of their actual revenue out of their pitch and they immediately started getting real interest.
They were then able to raise the funds.
It seems that actually having revenue just really dashed the pie in the sky dreams of many investors. With no revenue or profit, they were free to pretend that when the money started flowing, it would be hockey stick growth.
With revenue numbers, they could crunch the numbers and see the gradual growth curve and that would scare them away.