Blockchain

[imoldernu]

If there is any interest....

https://rsmus.com/what-we-do/services/blockchain-consulting/featured-topics/blockchain-by-industry.html

Prompted by discussions that went astray on this thread:
http://www.early-retirement.org/forums/f27/food-preference-restaurants-97689.html

Some more links on this post #36...

http://www.early-retirement.org/forums/f27/food-preference-restaurants-97689.html#post2235958

 

[donheff]

When interest in the topic first starting peaking during the Bitcoin run-up a couple of years ago I took an online college course in blockchain technology. Interesting but probably overhyped.

 

[SumDay]

When interest in the topic first starting peaking during the Bitcoin run-up a couple of years ago I took an online college course in blockchain technology. Interesting but probably overhyped.

Can you explain it to me in English? Megacorp was getting into this a year or so before I retired, and I never did understand it.

 

[donheff]

Can you explain it to me in English? Megacorp was getting into this a year or so before I retired, and I never did understand it.

Not really. Even after a course I didn't fully get it. But, basically, it is a public ledger of transactions. Each transaction is cryptographically secured and as "blocks" of transactions are built up they are locked and verified with a cryptographic hash that further blocks must contain thus proving that the whole ledger is genuine. This is how Bitcoin transactions are verified. The Bitcoin Blockchain is just one of many. Some are public like Bitcoin's, others are private, used for corporate or other transaction records.

I never really got how the blockchain approaches could scale to deal with the sort of volume that enterprise applications support - like credit card transactions. We shall see.

 

[BigMoneyJim]

donheff described blockchain at least as well as I could.

Basically it's a crypto ledger process, whereas Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency are built on top of the blockchain ledger process.

I also think scaling to the general public is likely very difficult. And of course as a 'currency' I find it impractical, especially with the speculative investment into it.

But I expect sooner or later someone will figure out how to save money moving chunks of money or other assets between institutions with blockchain, and although I'm really far out on a limb of light knowledge here, I expect if the two institutions aren't actually anonymous then the blockchain ledger can be more cheaply maintained than it is with the publicly-distributed blockhain management.