<story><title>The Blockchain Is Bigger Than Any Bubble</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-11-30/the-blockchain-is-bigger-than-any-bubble</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rdslw</author><text>the problem many praising blockchain minus bitcoin people forget, is that blockchain strength (distributed reconciliation) is possible only because of incentive (sth you get in exchange for doing all the etahashes per second).&lt;p&gt;The moment you take incentive (bitcoin) out of the equation, whole blockchain will lose its strenght.&lt;p&gt;You can not take out greed^H^H^Hincentive out of the picture.&lt;p&gt;p.s. this is black and white written in bitcoin whitepaper.</text></item><item><author>olalonde</author><text>&amp;gt; Bitcoin is a poor currency and a crazy investment -- but the technology behind it is a real breakthrough.&lt;p&gt;I feel like that should be the other way around. When all the &amp;quot;blockchain startups&amp;quot; and ICOs blow up, Bitcoin will be left standing. The true innovation behind the &amp;quot;blockchain&amp;quot; was its decentralised consensus mechanism. That mechanism is only secure as long as no single entity controls over 50% of the hash rate. Some of the largest Bitcoin miners have so much hash rate today that they could attack any (SHA-256 based) blockchain but the Bitcoin one.&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The Internet is a poor network and a crazy investment -- but TCP&amp;#x2F;IP is a real breakthrough.&amp;quot;... Sure!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>basseq</author><text>The need for incentives is true, but the community has—erroneously, in my opinion—conflated &amp;#x27;incentive&amp;#x27; with &amp;#x27;currency&amp;#x27;.&lt;p&gt;Follow this:&lt;p&gt;- The core technology here is a crypto-backed distributed ledger. We call this the &amp;#x27;blockchain&amp;#x27;.&lt;p&gt;- You need a unit of trust to enable the blockchain to work. We call this unit of trust a &amp;#x27;bitcoin&amp;#x27;, or to be more precise, the smallest divisible unit thereof. (1 Satoshi = 0.00000001 BTC)&lt;p&gt;- These units of trust have value, which also gives you incentive to create (&amp;#x27;mine&amp;#x27;) them.&lt;p&gt;If we stop here, that&amp;#x27;s all well and good. The problem with &amp;#x27;bitcoin&amp;#x27; and the currency argument is that we&amp;#x27;re &lt;i&gt;basically&lt;/i&gt; going back to the barter system. Instead of gold or foodstuffs, we&amp;#x27;re trading one good (a unit of trust) for another (whatever you&amp;#x27;re buying with BTC). Then, on top of that (and as a result), we&amp;#x27;ve created a speculative commodities market in BTC. There&amp;#x27;s no true scarcity here.&lt;p&gt;This is why the arguments get so confusing. I could transfer &lt;i&gt;any&lt;/i&gt; currency on the blockchain and get the so-called benefits of bitcoin: immutable transactions, low transaction costs, etc.&lt;p&gt;-----&lt;p&gt;Then you also get gems like this, from the article:&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  A more radical idea is to use digital currency, issued 
  and supervised by the central bank, at the retail level 
  to replace physical cash.
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
What percentage of retail transactions &lt;i&gt;today&lt;/i&gt; are in physical cash? What percentage of USD holdings (bank deposits, etc.) can be backed up with physical notes and coins? (Hint: not 100%). USD is already a digital currency.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Blockchain Is Bigger Than Any Bubble</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-11-30/the-blockchain-is-bigger-than-any-bubble</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rdslw</author><text>the problem many praising blockchain minus bitcoin people forget, is that blockchain strength (distributed reconciliation) is possible only because of incentive (sth you get in exchange for doing all the etahashes per second).&lt;p&gt;The moment you take incentive (bitcoin) out of the equation, whole blockchain will lose its strenght.&lt;p&gt;You can not take out greed^H^H^Hincentive out of the picture.&lt;p&gt;p.s. this is black and white written in bitcoin whitepaper.</text></item><item><author>olalonde</author><text>&amp;gt; Bitcoin is a poor currency and a crazy investment -- but the technology behind it is a real breakthrough.&lt;p&gt;I feel like that should be the other way around. When all the &amp;quot;blockchain startups&amp;quot; and ICOs blow up, Bitcoin will be left standing. The true innovation behind the &amp;quot;blockchain&amp;quot; was its decentralised consensus mechanism. That mechanism is only secure as long as no single entity controls over 50% of the hash rate. Some of the largest Bitcoin miners have so much hash rate today that they could attack any (SHA-256 based) blockchain but the Bitcoin one.&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The Internet is a poor network and a crazy investment -- but TCP&amp;#x2F;IP is a real breakthrough.&amp;quot;... Sure!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ambicapter</author><text>My roommate gave me a book to read about blockchain yesterday, and that was my thought exactly. A lot of &amp;#x27;advocates&amp;#x27; like to tout the decentralized consensus as useful for all kinds of application, but imo they constantly overlook the -financial- incentive that supports the bitcoin network (you could attack the network with a bunch of hashpower...but it would be more profitable for you to mine).</text></comment>