After all those years, there's still not a single useful blockchain application around.
These days I see lots companies telling me, they put their "supply chain on blockchain" and while I understand what they probably want to tell me ("you can't tamper with where our stuff comes from") I don't see the point in that. If you've got trust issues with your subcontractors you should fix those and not "seal" the willingly wrong information in a blockchain.
Maybe we should just declare blockchain a "failed technology".
I think the decentralized web pieces are starting to fall in place: decentralized file storage, decentralized domain names, decentralized communities and streaming, decentralized payments, etc.
I wouldn't declare it "failed technology" just yet.
Just because something doesn't work in the first attempt doesn't mean it never will (see various attempts at ecommerce, online news, streaming video, or just general computer-network-for-the-masses attempts from the 80s and early 90s).
It does work, that's the problem. Because even though it's working, few people are actually using it for anything other than speculative trades (and its been working for ~11 years).
Seems they recently launched late last year [0], some of the miners went on strike seeing the actual mining deal worse than they expected in several ways [1], and current price is going up a bit in the last few days, but consistently down vs BTC [2].
They may be having some success on their original purpose, having just passed 2.5 billion GB on the network, i.e., 2.5 exabytes, and 1300 miners, 200+ projects and 5900+ GitHub contributors [3].
Do you know if they list the price of storing/accessing 1 GB on Filecoin compared to say AWS?
It's obvious that people who own Bitcoin would want to use the system in order to show usefulness, demand, however I'm wondering if there's any use of people who aren't financially incentivized (like early adopters who have the most to gain).
Good question, but IDK. Current price is around $37/Filecoin, falling from $45 earlier in the week, but I have no idea what one Filecoin buys in terms of storage. Let me know if you find out more, and I'll do the same
Will do. It's always been odd to me that that is never listed prominently - as price is always the main competitive factor for anything, and even if it's 100x more expensive than similar solutions - at least people get a frame of reference to then see if the multiple is worth the value of storing in the Filecoin system; and with whatever risks may come with that.
I just don't get the logic behind going for PoW for Siacoin than going PoS. If people have to invest in hardware already, then why make them invest in even more unrelated hardware.
I know someone who got a 7 figure loan backed by cryptocurrency collateral in a matter of minutes using makerdao. The best part? They didn't even had to provide their name. This is the future folks, I highly recommend that you actually try some of these projects before writing them off.
The banking system doesn't work like a tech company. They're highly dependent on a credit eco-system. If the debt they sell is backed by highly volatile collateral, their own debts will become unsustainably expensive with the additional risk factors. Yes I know the future of crypto is sunshine and rainbows but the price swings of the past three months makes this a highly volatile asset class (regardless if the price is moving up). Even security backed debt negatively effects risk factors, but at least securities have accompanying rights to offset losses--crypto has absolutely zero safety nets.
I don't think law would prevent a fully collateralized loan on the basis of borrower/lender risks.
It doesn't.
AML seems a non issue too, as the loan only moves the question.
No, anti-money-laundering laws are at the heart of why the financial system can't do this. KYC laws apply at the customer level, so you only need to handle KYC once per customer. AML laws apply at the transaction level, so you need to apply them to each loan.
Cryptocurrency solves absolutely none of the existing legal reasons that banks can't issue large loans in minutes or seconds to existing (or new, well collateralized) clients.
> Cryptocurrency solves absolutely none of the existing legal reasons that banks can't issue large loans in minutes or seconds to existing (or new, well collateralized) clients.
Yes, this is definitely correct in that crypto does nothing to solve the legal requirements of the banks and does not help the banks.
But it's worth mentioning that this sort of fully collateralized and anonymous borrowing does not (and would not) happen through banks, but through platforms like AAVE and Compound. It's a financial tool separate from banks. And these tools cannot be shutdown, as long as ethereum exists, these tools exist.
Banks don't need to issue fully collateralized loans. That is not a thing people need to do in the real world, because banks will gladly issue partially collateralized loans.
As for anonymous loans, those exist solely to service criminal customers, so that is not an advantage of cryptocurrency.
For people holding crypto assets which they don't plan to sell, it's a valid way to borrow other assets for use. Potentially for other investments. Definitely not just for criminals.
And overall, it's a demonstration of a financial product which can only be built in the space of decentralized finance. I do not know of another tool which allows anyone around the world to borrow significant amounts of money anonymously and without an account. Whether it's a net good for the world I don't know, but I do believe it's a powerful technology and space.
People who equate privacy from banks and the state with criminality are the reason the financial system has normalized mass-surveillance and the principle of 'guilty until proven innocent' inherent in AML laws, and the reason why the financial system has become so laden with financial friction, power disparities, and exclusion of marginalized populations.
It's an interesting thought. Any online brokerage, lender or retail banker could probably set up an anonymous verification of asset ownership without going through background checks or credit agencies. You just need 2-party consent and verification, not a whole blockchain. The trick is not proving you own a thing, it's that you need to prove you haven't used it as collateral for anyone else or don't hold outstanding debts somewhere else. Blockchain will be completely useless for solving that. A universal identity (ie SSN) is the only option.
I mean I don't care why they can't, right? These financial systems are so old, corrupt and broken, you have to pretty much start from scratch in my opinion.
I really am struggling to see the practical value here. You have to provide collateral worth more than your borrowed amount. The rates are HORRIBLE for borrowers. Straight up predatory.
The anonymity part is cool, but if I want to borrow to get a mortgage how exactly does this help me? I do not have $500,000 in crypto laying around and a traditional lender will give me a 2% interest rate instead of 15%
So the stability fee you pay is 4.50%. You're still holding on to your assets appreciation, so if Bitcoin continues to appreciate at 300% per year, the 4.50% is a drop in the bucket and you didn't have to pay a capital gains tax.
Eventually, some companies are working on tokenizing homes, so once that happens, you could potentially deposit that as collateral just as easily, but that's still far out.
The fees I am seeing on Uniswap/Aave are much much higher than 4.5%. Even at 4.5% that equates to six figures of additional interest payments over my 30 year mortgage.
> and you didn't have to pay a capital gains tax.
This isn't true. Any conversion between crypto assets is technically a taxable event...even if we both can agree that the rules are silly.
> Eventually, some companies are working on tokenizing homes, so once that happens, you could potentially deposit that as collateral just as easily, but that's still far out.
Okay great, but how does this promised future development help me secure a loan for the home I want to buy? Or the business I want to start? Again, I do not have 500k in bitcoin laying around nor a "tokenized home."
It was super easy to get approved for a 500k mortgage just based on my income.
The idea is that it's not a conversion, it's a loan. The collateral is held in a smart contract and when you pay off the loan you get it back. In much the same way, people take out loans on their stock portfolios, and they don't pay capital gains either.
Is there any definitive source on this? I get lots of conflicting information from my brief google search. Equities and Cryptocurrencies are not treated the same for tax purposes by the IRS. It seems like they are treated as property and do not qualify as a "fungible" asset like stock or USD.
I don't know and I haven't consulted a CPA, which is why I described it as an "idea" instead of a fact. I know technically how it works, but not how the IRS will view it.
But to my amateur mind, treating it as property doesn't seem like a problem for this view. If you get a loan from a pawn shop, you're not selling them your property, you're just putting it up for collateral while you pay back the loan.
This. It took me a long time to understand this. I was so focused on the volatility that I failed to look at the larger trend. It clicked for me only a couple of months back.
Same here, it took me a while to understand why anyone would get an over-collaterized loan until it just clicked, then I was like this is the future, it doesn't make any sense to sell the most valuable and appreciating asset ever, but you can still use the money from it.
So if Bitcoin grows 300%, that means your collateral is now worth 300% more.
You can either withdraw a portion of it back to your normal wallet or you can just borrow more against the same collateral. So it's like a credit line that's always appreciating in value.
If one day, you need the whole collateral for whatever reason, then you'd pay the loan to unlock it fully and withdraw it.
ie. So they can have cash while continuing to be speculatively exposed to eth.
I think that ethereum might have great applications, but a loan backed by more collateral than it is worth doesn't seem like one of them, unless Dao starts allowing for the use of collateral that is less liquid than eth.
The issue is that contracts don't have any way of "calling in" to the legal API, so you can't put up your house as collateral.
They also avoid capital gains tax which would be pretty significant. They can use the money to hedge their bets against crypto by buying traditional markets if they wanted.
For house mortgages, there are companies that are "tokenizing" houses on the blockchain, so putting it up collateral would be as simple as depositing that token. That said, I think this is far from becoming reality anytime soon, just because there's lots of legal issues, etc. Nonetheless, the future is pretty exciting!
I believe that technically, any conversion between crypto assets is still a taxable event. If you want to follow the (silly) rules, you have to pay taxes on your gains once you purchase something using your borrowed stablecoin.
So yes, you'd pay capital gains tax on the DAI that you've borrowed when you transfer it back to USD, but DAI is a stablecoin that's pegged to 1$ and the volumes are pretty high on many exchanges.
Once you include your exchanges fees in your cost basis, you actually lost like 30-40$, so it's a taxable event with capital gains loss.
This is more applicable to liquidity providers or things like AAVE and compound where your crypto is actually loaned out. With maker, your crypto doesn't move anywhere and isn't loaned out to anyone.
For what it's worth, if you use AAVE or Compound, you also have to declare interest income on what you've earned.
With maker, you'd be responsible for capital gains if it was liquidated because you fell below the 150% minimum ratio.
Admittedly, I am not familiar with maker I will have to go take a look.
I guess the difference between me and someone who would use these DeFi apps, is that they are using crypto as a speculative investment (which is fine, I speculate with other assets all the time). But most people do not have a significant portion of their net worth in crypto tokens. For me, it is much cheaper/easier/safer to just get a traditional loan.
Presumably the point is to avoid triggering capital gains tax with the low cost basis of your coins by borrowing someone else's coins to make purchases.
It gives freedom to people, how is that bad? The whole point is that it's a permissionless, borderless technology that anyone can participate in. There's really nothing holding innovation back.
Flash loans are an example of that innovation, where if you see an arbitrage opportunity in the market, you can profit from it even if you don't own huge capital, so it levels the playing field for all these financial actors.
This seems akin to looking at someone's code and saying "This is crap! We should throw it out and rewrite it from scratch" without understanding how and why it got the way it did.
Everything we do impinges on someone else's freedom. Being legally allowed to walk in the street? Impinges on someone else's freedom to block me from walking in the street.
It is always a tradeoff. In the case of the particular tech discussed, it's a tradeoff between being able to somewhat control crime (e.g, making payment for human trafficking harder, making it possible to reverse theft) and financial privacy. It's freedom from having things stolen and freedom from being regulated.
There's a big cultural gap here, because your description sounds obviously shady to me. If my car financing agreement said "the terms of the loan are whatever happens when you run this program we wrote", I would never in a million years have signed it.
I can inspect the code I write professionally too, but I still end up shipping bugs from time to time. So I'm not really convinced that the ability to read the code will let me reliably determine what it does. Have you heard of the DAO hack?
Interesting. I think I know somebody who might be interested in something similar: ie, put X BTC as collateral for a loan, and pay it back after a year to get X BTC. Any pointers for where I could learn how this could work?
Or you could just treat that collateral as a credit line that's always growing, if it grows faster than your spending, just withdraw a portion of your collateral. Just look at Youtube videos on makerdao, there's some good ones out there and try it for yourself once you feel comfortable with small amounts.
Once you actually try it, you're going to be like "this is the future", every single one of my friends that tried came to the same conclusion.
Do you have any sense about what happens in the limit, like what if literally every person is sitting on a bunch of Bitcoin they earned at their job, which now pays in Bitcoin.
Everything is denominated in Bitcoin, which is always going up in price. Everyone borrows some lame legacy asset X and collateralixes with Bitcoin.
Do weird things happen? for example of Bitcoin is ubiquitous then the price of Bitcoin essentially gets factored out of the equation, so this magical leverage goes away. There are other effects but this idea that this is the future (or rather that this is a superior future ) seems a bit naive to me. Gravity will catch up to you no matter what.
It's over-collaterized, so if you fall below the 150% minimum collateral ratio, maker smart contract could liquidate the asset to cover the loan and then return the remaining 50%-liquidation fees back to you. As long as you're conservative in your borrowing (as in you borrow up to 25%-50% of your holding), your chances of getting liquidated are pretty slim.
I think a big part of this is that old tech companies like IBM, Oracle and probably every big management consulting trying to hype the technology up. You see consultants recommend taking on big challenges, sort of like snake oil applying it to all kinds of nonsensical scenarios around finance, insurance, supply chain, regulatory reporting, etc.
Contrary to general perception it’s not a new data transfer cure all that will actually solve problems of sharing data between organizations. It also doesn’t replace hard work required to make a new industry standard. It’s barely useful in either of those but that’s the common misconception I usually hear from nontechnical people who seem to be excited about blockchain.
Are we just trapped in a hype cycle that will inevitably end or does Bitcoin growth spell forever renewing waves of hype?
I mean it "works", but so do steam powered cars. The problem is most people don't actually use it, just trade it. The space used to mostly involve people who actually wanted to decentralize currencies, now it's almost exclusively "hodl $$$$$ to the moon etc". This article is articulating what's been clear to many people who really believed in the promise of decentralized currency: crypto in its current iteration has essentially failed. Time to try something else.
Maybe you're hearing only "hodl" because those people are loud? Just like Vitalik doesn't give a shit about making money on speculation, so do many people working around this tech, a lot don't hold anything in crypto or purely symbolic amounts, trading takes a lot of time, energy and can drain emotionally very quickly, with more than 80% of new traders loosing money after 1 year not everybody is interested in it.
To put it in other words - crypto trading is different kind of hobby than programming. Many people are interested in what kind of systems can be built and don't give much crap about monetizing it or worry about how many people are using it.
It's a bit like getting upset at Fabrice Bellard because he created quickjs that "nobody is using" - it's completely missing the point.
Exactly. Nevermind this article because Bitcoin and a blockchain from JP Morgan have nothing in common (also JP's enthusiasm for blockchains have been steadily waning and their earlier attempts are already dead on the vine). People have no interest in the tech, just gainz, bcs blockchain finance, consensus, future, JP Morgan and whatever word cloud pumpers want to use to get you excited don't actually reflect realities. If you have so much faith in the tech, start using it for real-world transactions, which you can do right now. If you're just hodling with some vague assumptions of moon money, you're not supporting the actual purpose of crypto. But let's be honest, most people aren't really supporting it or have any interest in actually using it, that's why crypto has been failing (even though it technically "works").
Full supply chain documentation takes a long time to put together. If the application could generate the full supply chain documentation for an item with a certain serial number, that would be very useful.
It is also very common for suppliers and various intermediaries to have bad document management practices that get further muddled by digital file issues (e.g. people just generating documents from their software that may be different from the real invoice).
The issue with that is that not everyone involved wants transparency or wants to know, because you can get discounts from illegal or merely hinky behavior such as through gray market imports. There are good reasons as to why a lot of people involved in bringing products to customers want to see no evil / hear no evil / speak no evil. There's room here for the law to push people into adopting better technology than what is currently used.
This is another case in which the paper tech is better for fraud, negligence, and crime than the blockchain tech. It is also more forgiving because it prevents participants in the supply chain from becoming aware of fraud further up the chain, so it prevents them from taking on liability. Transparency sounds great until you learn it means that you have to pay more for the same units because the crime / lax practices that lubed the system up is now infeasible.
Blockchain is just a ledger. So "the Blockchain" does not make anything significantly better. Its in fact ridiculously expensive.
The idea is that everytime sweat shop X finishes sewing sequins on a dress, they can scan the RFID tag on the dress with their smartphone, and the ledger gets updated, and then Walmart can prepare for that dress, the shipping company can print out labels etc.
Its a good idea.
Industries are supposed to work this out, create their own cheaper blockchains that just need some sort of simple KYC to get started, then its as cheap as email to add your little bit to the supply chain.
I dont know of any successful implementations
Edit: no blockchain will solve the grey market problems. Everything will have to be made genuninely on the chain. Which starts to lead to probelsm with if you cannot get permission to write to the chain ... etc etc
I appreciate the response, but it's still entirely unclear how blockchain would help here. In a supply chain, why would blockchain be better than a centralized process? It seems to be trying to put a square peg in a round hole.
1. If the central database is proprietary then it is enforced (usually by a major retailer ie Walmart drives all sorts of RFID supply chain requirements for its suppliers. If blockchains come in this is likely how)
1.a. But which other retailer will sign up to walmart's versions ? So it is hard for all suppliers to sign up to the same standards
2. Open standards make it easier for anyone to write apps to join the chain.
3. it's not at all clear how this is better I will admit beyond "decentralised" and "open". But those are excellent places to start.
I understand your point, nothing is perfect, but surely a public easily-audited blockchain does more to deter corruption and, if it occurs, find the perpetrators? As compared to a traditional system which is basically a log file that anyone with access (such as a rogue IT admin) can change?
You can sign entries but unless you have each subsequent entry build on what came before like in a blockchain, entries can be removed entirely and no one will know. There is a reason companies like DHL are interested in such things.
Example: Our product is sourced from a company and this providence is on the blockchain. It comes to light they employ slave labour and we'd rather cover it up. How do we alter these original transactions without the evidence being in plain sight?
Brave (the browser) uses blockchain in their privacy protecting ad technology.
Skynet uses a blockchain to allow users to share their extra computer storage space for a CDN.
And I'm sure there are a few others. It's just that the amount of use cases send legitimate applications using them are... limited. Most of the ones I'd consider valid uses have a substance-full technical goal, like the two I mentioned above.
Iirc the idea behind brave is to create a sustainable alternative to the ad/data collection of big tech. They use blockchain to enable microtransactions for content.
Not really. Some people do that. Most just leave it on auto-contribute which means you'd get paid per view.
It's also not terribly hard to get verified so you get paid. As long as someone is reasonably familiar with technology, I think it'd be pretty easy for them. Haven't tried it for myself though (but the guide is up there so you can see it for yourself if your curious).
There is Sia/Skynet which I think is really cool. Sia is the decentralized storage layer and Skynet provides file-sharing and HTTP-access through webportals. It's actually working and can compete with AWS S3 in terms of security, performance and price, while being completely decentralized. Check out https://siasky.net and the Skynet App Store: https://siasky.net/hns/skyapps/#/apps/all
> to digitise a sector that still uses millions of paper documents
So, they now use blockchain where sending documents as a PDF would have been sufficient...
I'm so proud!
edit: Read the article! That's truely their main selling point. Formerly it was done on/with paper, now it's "on the blockchain". This is another great example why we don't need blockchain.
The problem is that the purpose of the Blockchain is to achieve distributed trustless consensus. Any time the Blockchain interacts with the physical world you need to introduce a centralised trusted entity (the oracle problem)
I've read some detailed discussions from people in the industry explaining how blockchains don't help. And I've read some very high level, breezy assertions from people outside the industry asserting that blockchains can help (although they never spell out how, exactly).
As far as I can tell:
1. There's a pretty big issue with containers having the wrong contents (eg, counterfeit items loaded initially, or contraband added during transit). Current solutions are focused around physical security, seals, locks, etc., but it's fairly easy to bypass and forge these physical measures.
2. There's no real issue with tracking containers. We don't always know what's actually in them, but we know really well where they are and what's meant to be in them.
3. There's some efforts to try and replace the electronic systems for tracking where they are and what should be in them with blockchains. But as above, that's the bit that's currently working fine.
Not needing to trust middlemen is a good goal, I just don't see how tracking containers on blockchains reduces my need to trust middlemen. When Customs seizes the container at the border and finds someone has added 100kg of cocaine to the container, how does the blockchain prove who jimmied the lock open and then replaced the tamper seals?
I've worked in shipping for decades. There is no problem with BOLs magically changing with no traceability (which blockchain could solve, I guess, if that problem existed?). There is no problem with checking that the seal on a box at arrival is the same seal that was on the box when it departed.
The only viable purpose I've heard for blockchain is quasi-anonymous decentralized trust negotiation. This purpose doesn't match any real-world use case in shipping. A shipper doesn't want to ship product from an anonymous untrusted producer and no carrier wants to carry goods from an anonymous untrusted shipper.
Blockchain won't stop companies from misdeclaring hazardous (but otherwise legal) goods[1], it won't stop traffickers from misdeclaring illegal goods (or smuggling illegal goods among legal goods)[2], it won't stop trucks from running overweight[3], it won't stop ships from being misloaded[4]...
Trust is a lower energy state than distrust. I find it unlikely that society wants to incur the massive expensive of climbing that trust gradient for no benefit.
Any society that adopts trust will be able to compete very well against a society of no trust.
"shit in, shit out" is still the working principle. I don't see why the middlemen should make true statements, if that's not in his interest after all. Instead he will just enter wrong information, which will then become "correct" information, "because it's on the blockchain!!11".
Are the middlemen competing with each other to change the supply chain tracking information after it's been recorded in a system over which the purchaser has no control? If so, then maybe blockchain could help with that specific risk. But it can do nothing to prevent middlemen from putting fraudulent information into the record in the first place.
Putting supply chain on a blockchain isn't about verifying the authenticity of the goods. Its about being able to buy and sell the goods at any time, hedge out price risk, etc.
> Its about being able to buy and sell the goods at any time, hedge out price risk, etc.
Can you explain this in greater detail? I don't wish to be a naysayer, but I don't understand how those concepts are blockchain-specific. Goods being re-sold/diverted while in transit was a regular occurrence prior to the existence of blockchain technologies. What is being brought to the table that is new?
All actors having better access to these tools and others, more open markets. Someone with knowledge of new tools can build services aimed at various market participants, without needing much capital etc.
Goods were sold before the Internet, too.
These days I see lots companies telling me, they put their "supply chain on blockchain" and while I understand what they probably want to tell me ("you can't tamper with where our stuff comes from") I don't see the point in that. If you've got trust issues with your subcontractors you should fix those and not "seal" the willingly wrong information in a blockchain.
Maybe we should just declare blockchain a "failed technology".