Enterprise Blockchain Struggles To Carve Out A Niche

[mathesmith]

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2018/09/09/enterprise-blockchain-struggles-to-carve-out-a-niche/#116ff9d1600a

Interesting take on the state of blockchain.  For once a Forbes contributor that isn't a Bitcoin maximalist, and is actually forecasting its doom for the very reason (decentralization) people like Laura Shin are saying it will succeed over XRP.  He's pretty hard on XRP though.  Although not directly mentioning it, he talks about the speculative nature of most tokens (XRP included) will prevent them from ever having any value - early investors selling and depressing the price of most tokens will prohibit adoption & use.  He only mentions Ripple, and spends much more time talking about IBM/Stellar and the introduction of 'StableCoin' on the Stellar blockchain.  Overall it's more thoughtful than the usual pieces put out by Forbes, but there's one point he's trying to make that leaves me scratching my head:

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People like to compare today’s emergence of blockchain to the early days of the commercial Internet. However, this is a poor comparison, as the Internet’s early success depended on broad acceptance of basic protocols like TCP/IP, and for the Web, HTTP and HTML.

Blockchain has no such acceptance. Not only are there no meaningful protocol standards in the works, but there isn’t even any agreement on the best mechanisms for making blockchain work at all.

 

HUH???  What about ILP?

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Blockchain fanatics around the world refuse to believe it, but the long-term opportunity for blockchain falls well short of Internet-level disruption that would indicate that this technology is anything close to revolutionary.

I would love to hear in greater detail as to how he arrived at this conclusion.  Yes, there is a lot of hype in this space, but to me, preventing value from copying itself the way information does on the internet is a pretty big problem.  And when it is solved, that disruption may not be felt as much in the "West", but there are billions of people whose lives will be changed (hopefully) in a good way.  I guess time will tell...

 

 

 

 

[Guest]

These authors are just completely unaware of the urgent need, by new applications, to be able to deal with payments the same way they can deal with information. Not just an Internet of Value will emerge, on top of that, and incredibly more advanced internet will be built, with better features, crowdfunded by its users. This is unstoppable.

[King34Maine]

1 hour ago, lucky said:

These authors are just completely unaware of the urgent need, by new applications, to be able to deal with payments the same way they can deal with information. Not just an Internet of Value will emerge, on top of that, and incredibly more advanced internet will be built, with better features, crowdfunded by its users. This is unstoppable.

At a CSail conference, Evan Schwartz (co-developer of ILP) alluded to the possibility of ILP serving as a replacement for the Internet itself. Where ILP not only becomes the backbone for the IoV but morphs into a new platform for the exchange of Information or the Internet 2.0. As has been mentioned by Stefan Thomas, "Interledger can process TRILLIONS of TPS without any central authority." This underpins the thesis behind Schwartz's idea that ILP shouldn't be relegated to only financial transactions, but any value transfers whether they be monetary or informational. Which is why I believe that (ILP) will eventually replace TCP/IP as the ideal protocol for the transfer of value and information in the future.