
This Is Your Company on Blockchain - adventured
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-25/this-is-your-company-on-blockchain
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wpietri
Dumb question time: Aren't 95% of these use cases more easily implemented with
a single central source of truth, possibly with distributed read-only
replicas?

I think the blockchain innovation is amazing in the context where you have no
trusted party. Bitcoin, for example. But almost all the other blockchain uses
I see discussed have obvious central parties that people trust. E.g., Nasdaq
already knows exactly how to run a very reliable registry at low computational
cost and very low latency. [1]

So what cases actually benefit, and which ones are more (mis)applying the
latest fashion?

[1] As an example, look at the LMAX architecture, which is orders of magnitude
faster and cheaper to run than a distributed blockchain:
[http://martinfowler.com/articles/lmax.html](http://martinfowler.com/articles/lmax.html)

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infinite8s
That's the only place where blockchains are genuinely useful - when there
isn't a single trusted party to maintain a ledger. In this case everybody
participating in transactions (which don't have to be monetary in nature) can
be sure that their transaction is both unrevocable and untamperable.

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ilostmykeys
that is just the story. In reality powerful actors can tip the balancein their
favor and even revoke and tamper with old transactions

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mccoyspace
Good to see there is still room for the high-concept blockchain puff piece
article.

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greggman
Can someone explain how blockchains work outside of Bitcoin? My poor
understanding is Bitcoin only works because you get paid to mine (compute the
chain). Since so many people want money there's enough people computing the
chain to check for consensus

How will there be any incentives to mine in non financial chains?

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wmf
These blockchains shouldn't use mining at all; they should use algorithms like
PBFT or SCP. Such algorithms require out-of-band agreement on who is and isn't
running a node, but once that has been set up they are similarly secure as
POW.

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Unbeliever69
"Gobs of accountants, bankers, lawyers, and company bureaucrats would vanish."

Oh what a world this would become! What other "necessary evil" could we add to
this list?

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FlailFast
As someone who works at a Bitcoin/Ethereum company, and has passionately
followed Bitcoin since 2011, every time I hear "blockchain" as a proper noun a
piece of me dies inside. It's like saying "This Is Your Company on Website."

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jackweirdy
Blockchain, on the cloud. Synergised and vertically integrated for streamlined
UX.

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koolba
> Blockchain, on the cloud. Synergised and vertically integrated for
> streamlined UX.

Shit! Where's my checkbook?! I have to cut these guys a seed round before they
try to actually build anything.

Otherwise it'll become apparent that this series of words have nothing to do
with each other!

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ChemicalWarfare
[un]fortunately this is no longer the case in the blockchain/vc world, which
is the main reason you don't really hear much about new blockchain/bitcoin (or
some other crypto) companies popping up and getting funded.

These days the blockchain world revolves around large companies(or groups of
companies) setting things up for internal consumption and consulting companies
trying to get in on the action to help those large companies with the setup.

