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I guess for me blockchain == Bitcoin, while I know that's not true.
Your post simply proves that I don't know jack sh*t about the subject except the general idea and the Bitcoin implementation 
Fabio Franco wrote: I have been working on blockchain projects for big corps for a while now and I got exposed to many types of business that not only are using it, but are actually expanding its usage.
Can you tell a bit about the use cases?
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Sorry for taking so long.
Yes, I can tell you a bit about a couple of use cases:
Inter-company settlement: With programmable smart contracts and a token implementation a lot of inter-company transactions and accounting can be automated. Even payments. There can be a direct link between the custom cryptocurrency and Euro in such a way that speculation is not an issue. The settlement cease to even be an issue and with a private network, legal entities can all have blockchain authority nodes eliminating the need of trust. There is the possibility to give a node to tax authorities so trust is not an issue when it comes to paying taxes. We can get reduced costs and mitigate risks of legal fines while also making it impossible for actors inside the company to manipulate numbers which can cause all kinds of harm, therefore inhibiting personal agendas.
Voting: I participated of a pilot project to count the votes of an election process. The idea is to give transparency and validation to the vote counting process (not for actually voting). I also helped writing this white paper wich goes into details of the objectives of using blockchain for the elections. The pilot happened in the Netherlands and the code is open sourced. So there is a lot of material if you would like to explore more.
So, in summary, blockchain is waaaayyyy more than bitcoin. To me bitcoin is a blockchain 0.1 alpha release and currently we are in Blockchain 4.0. The thing is that it's not mainstream yet, so there is a lot of misconception and little widespread material about it. To make it harder, there are many different implementations of blockchain (like JS frameworks).
The materials we find about blockchain many times only talks about it so make it too theoretical and hard to grasp. It's not until you get hands-on the code that you can actually realize how it really works.
To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems - Homer Simpson
Our heads are round so our thoughts can change direction - Francis Picabia
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Thanks, very interesting!
I'll be sure to check out that whitepaper too 
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You're welcome. If you have any question, let me know
To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems - Homer Simpson
Our heads are round so our thoughts can change direction - Francis Picabia
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Also it is going to hit a wall sooner or later. The more transactions, the longer the chain is. By ten years, it is going to consume a whole town's electricity just to handle one new transaction. I don't know what kind of book that the thread starter read, but I will never hop unto the ship.
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Daniel Wilianto wrote: I don't know what kind of book that the thread starter read, but I will never hop unto the ship.
Your book is probably wrong too. Your incorrect assumption is that blockchain needs to hog a lot of electricity, see my response to Sandel to get a little more context. It's actually better if you hop unto the ship now while it's still early and you can get ahead of the crowd. As a matter of fact I get so many job offers just by having blockchain on my linkedin profile. 
To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems - Homer Simpson
Our heads are round so our thoughts can change direction - Francis Picabia
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My bad. It seems that cryptocurrencies hogs a lot of electricity because of how long their chains are. Blockchain (the design) itself wil probably have a good future in banking and business. But I still jump on the ship. Sorry. I don't see how it can become practical use everywhere.
modified 2-Aug-18 22:36pm.
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Daniel Wilianto wrote: It seems that cryptocurrencies hogs a lot of electricity because of how long their chains are
It actually has to do with the consensus algorithm and the difficulty of a network based on Proof of Work consensus. The Proof of Work consensus was the first to be established on blockchain solutions. Today there are many more, which don't depend on heavy calculations to include a new block in the chain.
In the case of proof of work (Bitcoin, Ethereum ethash), what determines the energy consumption is the current difficulty of the network. In the case of Bitcoin you're right, the difficulty increases with the length of the chain, but it's by the design. Ethereum PoW works slightly different, which is more related to the amount of transactions in a given timeframe + the amount of miners on that given timeframe. The length of the chain plays a role in Ethereum too, but it's not it alone what determines the energy requirements. What happens is, the longest the chain, the harder to break it:
Imagine blocks are like this:
[hash]<-[hash]-<[hash]<-[hash]
For the sake of simplicity let's say the hash of the next block is an increment of the previous:
[1]<-[2]<-[3]<-[4]
Changing the first block implies on having to recalculate the entire chain, because this state is invalid:
[5]<-[2]<-[3]<-[4]
To make it valid and attacker would have to do the first block's calculation, plus all of the following blocks:
[5]<-[6]<-[7]<-[8]
Only that by itself is already computationally infeasible. The attacker not only needs to do that, but also convince the entire network that his chain is correct instead of what they have. That means controlling at least 1 third of the minder nodes of the network. So in the case of ethereum with ethash (PoW) algorithm, which has around 10k simultaneous miners, the attacker would need to control over 3k's worth computing power for a "chance" to convince the network.
So very undersimplifying it, understand that the next block basically takes the previous block hash + a nonce (difficulty) + current pending transactions, to calculate the current's block hash. Which is an implementation of Merkle's tree. The length of the chain has no direct correlation with the next block's difficulty to compute.
I hope to have clarified that for you.
Daniel Wilianto wrote: I don't see how it can become practical use everywhere.
It's not for everywhere, that's for sure. But there are many applications.
To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems - Homer Simpson
Our heads are round so our thoughts can change direction - Francis Picabia
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raddevus wrote: It really is going to be used everywhere (identity, finance, healthcare, file storage/sharing, supply chain).
Nothing is used everywhere. And the bigger the system, the more disparate the sub-systems will be. And that is guaranteed by economics, not technology.
raddevus wrote: you will see that there are major blockchain projects being backed by major corps (SawTooth = Intel, Fabric = IBM)
And Oracle had support for Object Oriented Databases in the 90s (if you will the precursor to NoSQL) and yet it was used very little.
raddevus wrote: Reading this book about Blockchain technologies...
If you check it out you will find the author (at least the first one) is specializing in providing legal support for companies that use blockchain. So certainly not an unbiased view of the potential. To be fair pretty much any technology that reaches even a small audience is going to attract cheerleaders that seek to promote the technology while basing their own financial future on the success of what they are promoting.
And there could be success stories. But there will be failures as well. Guaranteed since some of those have already happened.
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jschell wrote: Nothing is used everywhere.
How about atoms? I believe they are even used in the most distant suns and at the far edges of the Universe. 
jschell wrote: So certainly not an unbiased view of the potential.
And yet, where is there an unbiased view of anything? Many people like chocolate and yet other fools do not. And people who sell chocolate like it even if they don't eat it themselves, all because they are trying to make money. I have yet to find the human who has an unbiased view of anything. Whether they know it or not. But, that's just my biased opinion. 
I get your points though. I know there will be vast challenges for blockchain tech but that is what struck me the most -- the huge corps who are getting behind it. I'm not really _for_ blockchain since there are some inherent dangers in it. I just think the technology behind it (merkle trees) is interesting and since I don't like large systems I find it to be interesting that so many large companies are backing it so strongly already.
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raddevus wrote: How about atoms?
They were not invented by humans, only discovered. 
M.D.V.
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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raddevus wrote: And yet, where is there an unbiased view of anything?
You get an unbiased view when people share theoretical implications and practical applications.
You get a biased view when people are sharing an emotional stance about something.
Some people employ both and expect you to discern between the two.
Some people only employ the latter.
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raddevus wrote: the huge corps who are getting behind it.
Large companies use a lot of things. And they try a lot of things because they have the money to throw away. That doesn't mean anything. Even more so because marketers like to promote exactly that usage.
raddevus wrote: that so many large companies are backing it so strongly already
What statistics? How many fortune 500 companies have invested more than 50 percent of their total IT dollars in it? How does the actual investment of those same companies over the past 20 years in other technologies compare?
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Jokes and interesting facts aside, we shouldn't gloss over the fact that it almost doesn't solve anything.
Pragmatically speaking, it's just a persistent data-store.
Noteworthy characteristics are:
- it's highly distributed
- data authenticity is expected to be safe, as long as no bad actor owns ~40% of the distributed parts
- it's not high volume
- it's not high capacity
As a result, it's an expert-system than only works when you have a lot of users and can't trust anyone, and these need to be your primary concerns.
The only profitable market that has these requirements is the illicit drug trade. And mayhaps cyber warfare, in 2 or 3 years time.
In all other circumstances where you could apply a distributed design, you're better of with a trust-based system (= certificates) and support for high volume and capacity.
This is like data-mining all over again.
People who don't understand profit and the practical application of software are writing books and giving seminaries about things that no-one will pay for.
Marketing to idiots doesn't count, because that's short-term only. Idiots don't have a long attention span.
To be honest, It just annoys me that enterprise is faking interest again and fanning the flames.
Intel and IBM have a track record of publicly investing during hype cycles and then abandoning those projects when their stakeholders stop noticing.
I'm still pissed-off about Edison.
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Great points all around.
It is worth noting that it has proven to be useful for inventory tracking and it's nature lends itself to cross-company resource tracking, making the possibilities for ERP solutions interesting.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity."
- Hanlon's Razor
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Yes, it can be applied for B2B inventory tracking, but you'd need a trustworthy intermediary to provide the infrastructure / inventory service, and you'll probably pay a hefty premium to integrate it with your ERP out-of-the-box.
Alternatively, maintaining a plain-old REST point and a SignalR hub is cheaper and aligns better with a healthy software stack.
And, to be cautious, you'd probably want trusted interactions when doing any B2B related activity.
Companies tend to sue each other a lot when something goes wrong.
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Not denying any of that. Just emphasizing that while it's largely snake oil, there are practical concerns that it can address which are largely being lost in the current buzzword mess.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity."
- Hanlon's Razor
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Well, the hype cycle is already going down, so maybe in a year or so we'll have sensible applications.
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KBZX5000 wrote: I'm still pissed-off about Edison.
I know. That was a crazy situation. I actually won an Edison in a contest and when I got it I thought it was too complicated (for what it was). What I mean is that if I wanted that level of a thing -- running Linux -- then I'd just go with the RPi. and if I didn't want something running Linux then I'd just go with a basic Arduino. It was as if they created this thing without looking around at all.
It was crazy they just killed it like that though. People were just starting to use it a bit.
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I wanted the prototype.
The prototype Edison was packaged on an SD-card format with WiFi capabilities.
Power draw was promised to be compatible with standard SD-card max draw.
I know at least 1 of those got build.
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Someone drank the Kool-Aid!
"Blockchain: A Practical guide..." isn't that an oxymoron?
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MKJCP wrote: Someone drank the Kool-Aid!
*glug* delicious
MKJCP wrote: A Practical guide
It simply means that there are code examples to follow.
Do you know about the tech behind blockchain? Merkle trees? Quite interesting. How might they be used. That's the interesting part. And seeing how the BC is implemented on top of that. Quite interesting.
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I agree, it is quite interesting. If it is to be a tech juggernaut the world may need a couple dozen reactors and some tons of uranium. I hear implementation gobbles electricity like Joey Chestnut eats hot dogs.
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MKJCP wrote: I hear implementation gobbles electricity like Joey Chestnut eats hot dogs.
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The only "demonstrated" application has been cryptocurrencies.
It has not been shown to be cost-effective for much else; particularly "private" use.
Only the "vendors" seem to have all the answers ... Where else are you going to get all those "nodes" for your computations?
"(I) am amazed to see myself here rather than there ... now rather than then".
― Blaise Pascal
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