<story><title>Beyond the Bitcoin bubble</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/16/magazine/beyond-the-bitcoin-bubble.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nabla9</author><text>I hope the technology matures beyond &amp;#x27;blockchain&amp;#x27;  and marketing drops the &amp;#x27;coin&amp;#x27; moniker and the gold rush dies down.&lt;p&gt;Cryptographically verified distributed log files should have negligible hype value and be hidden part of the infrastructure. I predict that 10 years from now normal relational databases have infrastructure for shared, authenticated and verified rows and columns and we laugh at the ICO era.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>simias</author><text>&amp;gt;I predict that 10 years from now normal relational databases have infrastructure for shared, authenticated and verified rows&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not sure I understand what you&amp;#x27;re predicting exactly. The big breakthrough of bitcoin is having a globally shared ledger without requiring any trust. In my experience most relational databases have a relatively straightforward trust model (i.e. the DB belongs to the organization using it and is fully trusted). In these situation the blockchain is completely overkill and unnecessary as far as I can tell.&lt;p&gt;There are cases where one might want to distribute the database for redundancy or archival (like the contents of Wikipedia for instance) but in this case you trust the original issuer and you only need to be able to validate the authenticity and integrity of a copy which can be easily achieved by having Wikimedia signing a hash (or merkle tree) of the dump. All these technologies are involved in the blockchain but they&amp;#x27;re not innovations. Basically you have bitcoin minus the mining, so just a fancy linked list of SH256 hashes.&lt;p&gt;On the other hand if you have a use case where you want to arbiter a database across untrusted people then you must make mining rewarding enough that you reach a critical mass that makes attacks impractical. I can&amp;#x27;t imagine how you could do that without the &amp;quot;coin&amp;quot; part. People mine cryptocurrencies not because they want to protect it but rather because they want to make a profit out of it. Remove the mining rewards out of Bitcoin and watch as the mining power collapses to a tiny fraction of its current value. If you want to protect your distributed Wikipedia article history and there&amp;#x27;s no direct monetary reward for it I doubt you&amp;#x27;ll reach a very high hash rate which will make it relatively easy for a dedicated attacker to rewrite history.&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;coin&amp;quot; moniker is not just a lack of imagination by people working with this technology, it&amp;#x27;s an integral part of why it works in the first place.</text></comment>
<story><title>Beyond the Bitcoin bubble</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/16/magazine/beyond-the-bitcoin-bubble.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nabla9</author><text>I hope the technology matures beyond &amp;#x27;blockchain&amp;#x27;  and marketing drops the &amp;#x27;coin&amp;#x27; moniker and the gold rush dies down.&lt;p&gt;Cryptographically verified distributed log files should have negligible hype value and be hidden part of the infrastructure. I predict that 10 years from now normal relational databases have infrastructure for shared, authenticated and verified rows and columns and we laugh at the ICO era.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lt</author><text>I view the current cryptocurrency wave as proof of concept experiments of some very exciting technology. Building blocks that allow new design oportunities for things that were not viable or easily previously.&lt;p&gt;Hopefully we do leave the laughable ICO era behind, and even if traditional relational databases get cryptographic features, but I feel the sum of capabilities the new technology can offer is larger than that.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m unsure if incentives (the coins) must be a part of every application of this technology. I was open to thinking that it might not, but recently saw this presentation from a Andreessen Horowitz&amp;#x27;s partner [1] where he strongly asserts that yes, it must, and I&amp;#x27;m thinking he might have a point.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;a16z.com&amp;#x2F;2017&amp;#x2F;12&amp;#x2F;08&amp;#x2F;summit-crypto-alex-rampell&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;a16z.com&amp;#x2F;2017&amp;#x2F;12&amp;#x2F;08&amp;#x2F;summit-crypto-alex-rampell&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>