Is anyone else starting to become a bit worried? mod note in first post

smacl · 29-03-2018 09:15AM

Anthracite wrote: »

Further to this, if a company actually has a valuable product to sell, why would they not simply create their own currency to use it?

Caveat, points below are based on my own understanding of where we're currently at as a relative newbie to this;

First of all, it won't all be currency and it is a mistake to think of blockchain as such. For example, Acronis have recently added blockchain technology to their backup software for data protection and authenticity purposes. There are an ever increasing number of live applications of blockchain tech in use emerging that aren't financial in nature. These apps are likely to be built on existing solutions and infrastructure such as ETH.

Secondly, they type of currency transactions that blockchain is most likely to excel at in the short term will be micro-transactions. Again these will use existing tech and infrastructure, with IOTA being mooted as a strong candidate here along with ETH and XRP.

It is worth remembering that this technology by and large requires an extensive distributed infrastructure to work, so there is a bit more to rolling your own blockchain than downloading and compiling a few projects from Github. You need either miners or network peers to authenticate transactions, and the easiest way to do this is to piggyback on the likes of ETH.

breadmond · 29-03-2018 03:41PM

I work for a large multinational tech company who are definitely looking at blockchain for things like inventory management, micro-payment systems and supply chains. All the talk I've seen is around private chains though. From a large company's perspective there is no need to tie their business to a token that they don't control. They will simply develop suitable techs in-house or license the code from someone else. Blockchain clearly has enormous potential but that doesn't mean any existing coin will be worth anything in 5 years time. For all people talk about the value of decentralization and no government control, I don't believe that either is a good enough reason for the average joe to abandon FIAT currency. Unless you're buying drugs or expecting the value to skyrocket, the benefits just aren't there to justify the effort involved.

At the end of a day, a blockchain is just a distributed database with some verification built in. The number of use cases is endless but I would rank 'alt money' very low on the list in terms of utility.

Bob24 · 29-03-2018 03:52PM

breadmond wrote: »

At the end of a day, a blockchain is just a distributed database with some verification built in. The number of use cases is endless but I would rank 'alt money' very low on the list in terms of utility.

Agreed.

Also as per previous posts, I think a big issue if there are no strong restrictions on what can be sorted on those blockchains will be who is legally liable for what they contain.

JohnnyFlash · 29-03-2018 04:04PM

Bob24 wrote: »

Agreed.

Also as per previous posts, I think a big issue if there are no strong restrictions on what can be sorted on those blockchains will be who is legally liable for what they contain.

Or in how many can be created. It's now trivially easy to create a coin. The value pool is tiny. There's a post on Medium somewhere that shows that the 2.5 billion of tethers floating round the ecosystem is making up over 90% of the entire trading volume some days. There's absolutely no new money going into crypto, and you'd have to be worried about the likes of coinbase and kraken and other sites that allow you to exchange coins for real money. The liquidity must be taking a battering.

Bob24 · 29-03-2018 04:36PM

JohnnyFlash wrote: »

Or in how many can be created. It's now trivially easy to create a coin. The value pool is tiny. There's a post on Medium somewhere that shows that the 2.5 billion of tethers floating round the ecosystem is making up over 90% of the entire trading volume some days. There's absolutely no new money going into crypto, and you'd have to be worried about the likes of coinbase and kraken and other sites that allow you to exchange coins for real money. The liquidity must be taking a battering.

I was actually talking about legal implications of using blockchains for other applications than coins (if you start being more open about what can be stored in it than just a financial ledger).

For exemple if someone came up with a blockchain based photo sharing service and child pornography became rampant on it. What would be the practical ways for a country to enforce the law and have the picture removed, and it is not possible who would be held legally responsable for keeping the content available online?

smacl · 29-03-2018 04:48PM

breadmond wrote: »

At the end of a day, a blockchain is just a distributed database with some verification built in. The number of use cases is endless but I would rank 'alt money' very low on the list in terms of utility.

Very true, but that begs the question which network are you distributing your database across, who's computers are authenticating transactions, and at what cost. Ask yourself what are the advantages of an open distributed database over a proprietary centralised database and what you need to leverage those advantages. Open databases allow for independent verification and traceability and hence create trust. Distributed databases provide robustness, redundancy and scalability to massive datasets. This all demands massive computing infrastructure and if you're considering using existing infrastructure 'alt money' becomes 'alt transaction processing and storage fees'.

smacl · 29-03-2018 04:52PM

Bob24 wrote: »

For exemple if someone came up with a blockchain based photo sharing service and child pornography became rampant on it. What would be the practical ways for a country to enforce the law and have the picture removed, and it is not possible who would be held legally responsable for keeping the content available online?

You don't need blockchain here, you simply need P2P networking such as BitTorrent, which is how this data is already moved around. Blockchain would be a serious dis-advantage here as those involved in such illegal activity are hardly looking for authentication and traceability.

Bob24 · 29-03-2018 04:56PM

smacl wrote: »

You don't need blockchain here, you simply need P2P networking such as BitTorrent, which is how this data is already moved around. Blockchain would be a serious dis-advantage here as those involved in such illegal activity are hardly looking for authentication and traceability.

It’s just an exemple to ask the legal questions, not saying blockchain would be the best solution.

If you want an ogganised and updatable database of pictures with some kind of presentation layer, regular P2P networking alone won’t work though as a database is needed for the metadata.

GreeBo · 29-03-2018 05:21PM

smacl wrote: »

You don't need blockchain here, you simply need P2P networking such as BitTorrent, which is how this data is already moved around. Blockchain would be a serious dis-advantage here as those involved in such illegal activity are hardly looking for authentication and traceability.

Correct, using a photo sharing framework thats built on blockchain would allow you to trace exactly who first provided the illegal content and trace them.

Adding blockchain to a system such as this would be much safer for the owners and other/legal users of the system.

meanwhile, its all continuing to tank

smacl · 29-03-2018 05:40PM

Bob24 wrote: »

It’s just an exemple to ask the legal questions, not saying blockchain would be the best solution.

If you want an ogganised and updatable database of pictures with some kind of presentation layer, regular P2P networking alone won’t work though as a database is needed for the metadata.

Thing is though, blockchain would actually be just about the worst solution imaginable for sharing nefarious material, so it really isn't a great example.

Supercell · 29-03-2018 05:49PM

My wife just came back from China (visiting family) and she was amazed at the changes there in the last few years. Fiat isn't used in cash form pretty much anywhere anymore. You use your mobile to pay for everything from taxis to street sellers, its all using WeChat Pay and Alipay, nobody carries cash any more apart from the very elderly who don't have phones.

Personally I think this is the future, fiat is what is electronically exchanged utilising apps, I really dont see any need for crypto to replace that unless you want to hide your tracks somehow which means the person you are buying from also wanting the same which limits daily useage.

Have to agree with others saying here that its now pretty trivial for large companies who want to use the blockchain to make their own inhouse and keep control. For the rest of us fiat physical cash will be replaced by the app not by the blockchain.

Bob24 · 29-03-2018 06:19PM

smacl wrote: »

Thing is though, blockchain would actually be just about the worst solution imaginable for sharing nefarious material, so it really isn't a great example.

As per previous posts there is child porn on the bitcoin blockchain and it is not clear who put it there and how to remove it. So yeah it is a very practical example.

smacl · 29-03-2018 06:46PM

Bob24 wrote: »

As per previous posts there is child porn on the bitcoin blockchain and it is not clear who put it there and how to remove it. So yeah it is a very practical example.

Eight actual images spammed into free-form note records in an open database of that size is neither significant nor suggests a ready mechanism to form a child porn ring, so no not really a practical example at all. At worst it indicates a minor security flaw that will in all probability be corrected in the short term.

Bob24 · 29-03-2018 08:12PM

smacl wrote: »

Eight actual images spammed into free-form note records in an open database of that size is neither significant nor suggests a ready mechanism to form a child porn ring, so no not really a practical example at all. At worst it indicates a minor security flaw that will in all probability be corrected in the short term.

Your point was that "blockchain would be a serious dis-advantage here as those involved in such illegal activity are hardly looking for authentication and traceability."

If you post here a trace of where those pictures come form and who added them to the blockchain, I will happily agree you are right.

Until then, I don't see how my exemple is invalid.

Autochange · 29-03-2018 09:04PM

Is there a bit of a consensus developing here?
Since I posted nobody has commented in support of the future of crytpocurrencies.

Is there anyone out there???

On another note has anyone in this continued downtrend tethered their alts or sold to BTC and then into fiat ?

lifeandtimes · 29-03-2018 10:08PM

Supercell wrote: »

My wife just came back from China (visiting family) and she was amazed at the changes there in the last few years. Fiat isn't used in cash form pretty much anywhere anymore. You use your mobile to pay for everything from taxis to street sellers, its all using WeChat Pay and Alipay, nobody carries cash any more apart from the very elderly who don't have phones.

Personally I think this is the future, fiat is what is electronically exchanged utilising apps, I really dont see any need for crypto to replace that unless you want to hide your tracks somehow which means the person you are buying from also wanting the same which limits daily useage.

Have to agree with others saying here that its now pretty trivial for large companies who want to use the blockchain to make their own inhouse and keep control. For the rest of us fiat physical cash will be replaced by the app not by the blockchain.

Yes but with fiat you will always need a bank and again there in lies a 3rd person you need to trust.

As with all business they look to remove the 3rd person to mitigate costs

Crypto was created to remove the 3rd person and remove fees and time frames in transferring money.

If people are getting on board with tap and pay then once they find out there is a free way to do it in a quicker manner and further distances they will quickly adapt.

Which crypto (s) that is, is yet to be seen

Wombatman · 29-03-2018 10:12PM

The value of blockchain technology and that of an individual concurrency implementation, like Bitcoin or Ether, should not be confused.

JohnnyFlash · 29-03-2018 10:50PM

Wombatman wrote: »

The value of blockchain technology and that of an individual concurrency implementation, like Bitcoin or Ether, should not be confused.

Even the value of blockchain is starting to come under the periscope of reality all of a sudden. It's extremely computationally expensive, and doesn't offer much in the way of additional functionality over plain old distributed databases. As an outsider, you could see use cases for the creation of smart contracts between parties that don't have that trust model in place, but there's an argument that IBM and Microsoft are making shapes in their clouds about offering that as a service.

It's this Microsoft Azure thing I'm becoming fascinated about all of a sudden. Those bucko's are lining all the ducks up in a row about the future of computing. I'll be having a sniff at their shares, and DYOR on whether to invest a few quid on it.

smacl · 30-03-2018 08:31AM

JohnnyFlash wrote: »

Even the value of blockchain is starting to come under the periscope of reality all of a sudden. It's extremely computationally expensive, and doesn't offer much in the way of additional functionality over plain old distributed databases. As an outsider, you could see use cases for the creation of smart contracts between parties that don't have that trust model in place, but there's an argument that IBM and Microsoft are making shapes in their clouds about offering that as a service.

The periscope? AFAIK, the only thing under a periscope is a submarine

The computational cost of mining something like bitcoin is due to the artificially limited number of coins, it is not something inherent in blockchain technology. The additional functionality is possibility of open and verifiable ownership and transaction history for every record independent of the publisher across massive datasets. This has huge ramifications for asset management and proof of ownership for various physical and digital assets.

It's this Microsoft Azure thing I'm becoming fascinated about all of a sudden. Those bucko's are lining all the ducks up in a row about the future of computing. I'll be having a sniff at their shares, and DYOR on whether to invest a few quid on it.

Microsoft play a reasonably good marketing game, but I don't think there's anything exceptional about their tech. I say that as someone who's been using their dev tools since the early 80s as a full-time code monkey professional software engineer (any other MASM fans out there?). I still use their tools for many hours every day and find them great, but won't be buying any shares. I'd find technologies like OpenCV far more exciting, and if I was taking a punt would be more tempted by the like of Boston Dynamics than MS. As you say, DYOR.

smacl · 30-03-2018 09:00AM

Autochange wrote: »

Is there a bit of a consensus developing here?
Since I posted nobody has commented in support of the future of crytpocurrencies.

Is there anyone out there???

Personally, I still think that cryptocurrency has a strong future. As I already commented previously, I suspect price levels will fall to the level they were at in early autumn of last year at which point I'll be looking to buy back in. It's worth remembering that over a one year time-frame, the big coins are still about 500% up so I'd say there is still a bit of descending to do before a more stable period and future growth.

On another note has anyone in this continued downtrend tethered their alts or sold to BTC and then into fiat ?

Been using Kraken for FIAT transactions, typically through ETH rather than BTC. Haven't touched tether and no need nor intention of ever doing so. Hung on to all of my alts, and while I've managed to increase my holding slightly through some FIAT switches, down in the order of 60% all in at present. The money put in was on the assumption of losing it entirely, so not particularly concerned.

lifeandtimes · 30-03-2018 11:19AM

https://cointelegraph.com/news/big-investors-will-make-all-hell-break-loose-in-crypto-in-2018-says-abra-ceo

And wow

https://news.bitcoin.com/russian-hotels-to-surprise-world-cup-fans-with-bitcoin-payments/

seannash · 30-03-2018 01:40PM

lifeandtimes wrote: »

https://cointelegraph.com/news/big-investors-will-make-all-hell-break-loose-in-crypto-in-2018-says-abra-ceo

And wow

https://news.bitcoin.com/russian-hotels-to-surprise-world-cup-fans-with-bitcoin-payments/

I wouldn't say wow per se. People who are gonna pay in bitcoin already know about bitcoin.
Also Abra stand to benefit from any growth in Crypto's so like and company spokes person the future is nothing but positive.

Bob24 · 30-03-2018 05:39PM

As of today all that had been recovered since the previous February bottom for bitcoin is now gone again ...

Bob24 · 30-03-2018 06:51PM

Bob24 wrote: »

Agreed.

Also as per previous posts, I think a big issue if there are no strong restrictions on what can be sorted on those blockchains will be who is legally liable for what they contain.

A lot more on legal questions related to blockchain technology: https://cointelegraph.com/news/how-new-eu-privacy-laws-will-impact-blockchain-expert-take

Basically in its current state it seems like the concept of blockchain is quite possibly at odds with GDPR regulations which will apply to anyone who deals with EU citizens data starting in May (and which btw are a great thing for us European internet users).

august12 · 30-03-2018 07:51PM

Bob24 wrote:

Basically in its current state it seems like the concept of blockchain is quite possibly at odds with GDPR regulations which will apply to anyone who deals with EU citizens data starting in May (and which btw are a great thing for us European internet users).

Does that mean, our info from crypto sites cannot be shared with any institutions.

lifeandtimes · 30-03-2018 08:27PM

august12 wrote: »

Does that mean, our info from crypto sites cannot be shared with any institutions.

I don't think traceability is a data protecrion breach to be honest, if it was then every piece of fruit or meat from board bia couldn't have the appeal from farm to plate with their farmers on the pack or tuna with what vessel caught it

Think this is being blown out of proportion

Bob24 · 30-03-2018 08:39PM

august12 wrote: »

Does that mean, our info from crypto sites cannot be shared with any institutions.

I think the main concern is that GDPR says that user consent should be gained for any collection/sharing of their private data (with a fairly wide definition of private data is - for example a connection IP address is considered private data), and very importantly that at any time the person has the right to ask for their data to be corrected or deleted.

With a blockchain it is hard to make sure all the data related to an individual can be identified and deleted from every single note.

Basically if you were running a blocking network or even just a node as a miner on than network and I knew that blockchain contained information about me that don't want in there anymore, I could come to you and request that all of my private information is deleted from the blockchain or from your node. And legally you would have to comply with my request or face hefty penalties, but technically and with current blockchain technology it might be difficult or even impossible to do.

smacl · 31-03-2018 08:38AM

Good article on Wired covering all this here; Why porn on the blockchain won't doom bitcoin, and another on EU rights relating to retrospective removal of personal data. My reading of both is that blockchain software that allows free-form data entry will need modifying in terms of what can be stored as immutable data, and what is effectively an editable attachment but does not form part of any contract. Not exactly rocket science, and block chain software does receive regular updates to cover potential issues such as these.

Bob24 · 31-03-2018 09:58AM

smacl wrote: »

Good article on Wired covering all this here; Why porn on the blockchain won't doom bitcoin

I think this opinion piece doesn't really alleviate concerns related to blockains in general. They are giving a legal argument and a technical one but both are fairly limited in scope.

On the legal side

They are referring a lot to US law which I don't know and their point might all be correct, but even if they are they are largely irrelevant as when it comes to a global distributed system like a blockchain with both users and nodes across all countries, what matters will be the most restrictive law (which clearly isn't US law, EU countries have much more restrictive laws in the area which will soon become even more restrictive with GDPR). Their points would only be valid with an assumption that a blockchain's nodes and users are all exclusively located in the US, which might makes sense in some cases but most of the time it would defeat the purpose of the technology.

For example, they spend of lot of time to explain that because a node holds potentially illegal data it doesn't mean the person running that node is liable for it as long as their is no intend to hold it. But this is completely at odds with GDPR which is clear on the fact that both data controllers and data processors (someone who oversights a network and a network node in blockchain terminology) have a liability. It also specifies that data controllers need to ensure all their data processors are compliant wit the regulation can can be liable for breaches in the regulation if this is not the case. So every stakeholder in the operations of the blockchain is on the hook if there us a breach of the regulation.

And the beauty of GDPR for us EU internet users is that even if both the data controller and all the data processors are located in the US, as soon as they start storing EU citizen's data GDRP does apply to them related to that data. So we don't care about what US folks are saying in this piece and what applies to us is our own more restrictive/protective rules. This is not just a legal risk for the node operators who might not be clear on whether they are holding data illegally and how to technicaly go back to legality without stoping the node altoghether, but it is also a risk for a company which would be running a system which collects data and distributes it across thousands of nodes around the world (as per the regulation of a single of those nodes becomes non compliant, the company who shared data personal data with them is liable for any potential mis-uses of the data).

On the technical side

They state that "Blockchains are shared ledgers that record cryptocurrency transactions" and argue that simply removing any free field comment with fix the problem.

And yes this is the obvious solution for bitcoin and nothing new compared to what we had said on this theead already.

BUT leaving it at this is a very restrictive view of the potential of blockchain technology, limited to cryptocurrencies. This doesn't answer the wider question I was asking, and if it is the only technical answer available it essentially means that blockchains can not be used store any personal data, any free entry data, or any file uploaded by a user as there will be no control over these and the only suggested fix is to ban them from the system. This limits the scope/potential of the technology drastically (an as a side note is reinforces the point that they will not be able to offer traceability to the original person who added content aside from an anonymised identifier).

In conclusion

The opinion piece does explain how to fix bitcoin (which we knew already) and how blockchain technology might not pose legal challenges in the US according to the authors. But it certainly doesn't aleviate legal challenges for blockchain technologies in general.

smacl · 31-03-2018 10:43AM

Bob24 wrote: »

The opinion piece does explain how to fix bitcoin (which we knew already) and how blockchain technology might not pose legal challenges in the US according to the authors. But it certainly doesn't aleviate legal challenges for blockchain technologies in general.

The challenges in relation to the right to be forgotten, and data protection with respect to the person, go far beyond blockchain though, as can be seen with recent and ongoing controversy surrounding facebook and other social networks. In the EU there is a clear demand for much greater transparency and personal protection in this regard. When you think about it, this need for transparency and controlled mutability is something that is ideally suited to blockchain technology and favours it hugely over closed, propitiatory, and centralised systems. This short term controversy will most likely be a huge advantage for blockchain in the medium to long term. At a technical level, it is all very achievable.

Is anyone else starting to become a bit worried? mod note in first post

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