Corporate America Cools On Blockchain. Gartner Sees 'Disconnect Between Hype and Reality' (bloomberg.com) 84
"Corporate America's love affair with all things blockchain may be cooling," reports Bloomberg. An anonymous reader quotes their report. [Alternate version here.]
A number of software projects based on the distributed ledger technology will be wound down this year, according to Forrester Research Inc. And some companies pushing ahead with pilot tests are scaling back their ambitions and timelines. In 90 percent of cases, the experiments will never become part of a company's operations, the firm estimates. Even Nasdaq Inc., a high-profile champion of blockchain and cryptocurrencies, hasn't moved as quickly as hoped. The exchange operator, which talked in 2016 about deploying blockchain for voting in shareholder meetings and private-company stock issuance, isn't using the technology in any widely deployed projects yet...
"The disconnect between the hype and the reality is significant -- I've never seen anything like it," said Rajesh Kandaswamy, an analyst at Gartner Inc. "In terms of actual production use, it's very rare...." Only 1 percent of chief information officers said they had any kind of blockchain adoption in their organizations, and only 8 percent said they were in short-term planning or active experimentation with the technology, according to a Gartner study. Nearly 80 percent of CIOs said they had no interest in the technology. Many companies that previously announced blockchain rollouts have changed plans
Problems include the fact that most blockchains "also can't yet handle a large volume of transactions," and worries about compatibility with other software -- which some hope to address next year with software certification testing. But at least two big tech companies are aggressively pushing blockchain.
"So far, IBM and Microsoft have grabbed 51 percent of the more than $700 million market for blockchain products and services, WinterGreen Research Inc. estimated earlier this year,"
"The disconnect between the hype and the reality is significant -- I've never seen anything like it," said Rajesh Kandaswamy, an analyst at Gartner Inc. "In terms of actual production use, it's very rare...." Only 1 percent of chief information officers said they had any kind of blockchain adoption in their organizations, and only 8 percent said they were in short-term planning or active experimentation with the technology, according to a Gartner study. Nearly 80 percent of CIOs said they had no interest in the technology. Many companies that previously announced blockchain rollouts have changed plans
Problems include the fact that most blockchains "also can't yet handle a large volume of transactions," and worries about compatibility with other software -- which some hope to address next year with software certification testing. But at least two big tech companies are aggressively pushing blockchain.
"So far, IBM and Microsoft have grabbed 51 percent of the more than $700 million market for blockchain products and services, WinterGreen Research Inc. estimated earlier this year,"
Holy Vapor, Batman (Score:5, Informative)
Because 'blockchain' sounds better than 'redundant distributed database', a term (and technology) that's been around & constantly improved for ages.
Buzzword bullshit does not create reality, unless you are in the Cult of the Orangutan.
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Agreed.... My favorite version of this is Elasticsearch, but there are numerous others, all optimized for various use cases.
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Is it webscale? Can it write to /dev/null for extra performance?
Re:Holy Vapor, Batman (Score:5, Insightful)
Blockchain technology is real, and has some interesting applications and uses, but I guess the business folks are figuring out it's not some magic get-rich-quick sauce. I'm fine with the hype cooling off, as now the computer scientists / programmers can settle down and start figuring out how to make use of it for real and fix some of its deficiencies and problem areas, rather than slapping a label on a product or service by less scrupulous folks to manipulate stock prices.
Dare I hope the same thing happens with "AI" soon? Personally, I just substitute "advanced pattern recognition" anywhere I see the term "AI", which helps, but I'm still getting a bit tired of the hype.
Re:Holy Vapor, Batman (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: Holy Vapor, Batman (Score:2)
Re: Holy Vapor, Batman (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: Holy Vapor, Batman (Score:3)
Sorry,but those are in direct conflict. Anywhere that property records are in concern, that implies the government is the final authority on the record. The entire purpose of block chain is that there is no final authority...the authority is collective. Without that feature of block chain, you just have a public database with checksums and redundancy. You are welcome to make copies of that database if you want, just like you are welcome to keep copies of the public records. If the government is corrupt eno
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You are confusing the block chain with the consensus protocol
A block chain is useful by itself to assert the integrity of historical records. That integrity is only as good as the strength of the digest algorithm and the data structure being used and even behavior of apps that work with it.
For some reason lots of people also conflate the idea of a block chain with the specific implementation in Bitcoin... A block chain is a conceptual list where each item includes the digest of the previous item. It can be
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Re: Holy Vapor, Batman (Score:3)
You are confusing the block chain with the consensus protocol
No I'm not. You seem to be confusing the fact that consensus is the ONLY new feature that block chain brings to the table. Every other feature...digital signatures to verify authenticity, hashed history chaining, multi-master redundancy...all of it has existed for decades. Using block chain without the consensus is like chemotherapy without chemicals.
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"Corruption" is not binary but a sliding scale, a "government" is not an expression of a singular will but an activity of a wide number of people with a wide number of individual goals, and "authority" means many different things in many different shades.
Blockchains won't stop Mugabe from expropriating farms and distributing them to his supporters, but there are any number of cases of quietly-bribe-three-clerks scams in (for example) India that blockchain property records could potentially make impractical.
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"Corruption" is not binary but a sliding scale, a "government" is not an expression of a singular will but an activity of a wide number of people with a wide number of individual goals, and "authority" means many different things in many different shades.
Blockchains won't stop Mugabe from expropriating farms and distributing them to his supporters, but there are any number of cases of quietly-bribe-three-clerks scams in (for example) India that blockchain property records could potentially make impractical. And with the increasing numbers of smartphones even in the poorer places on Earth, a blockchain-based method is potentially far more practical, infrastructure-wise, than trying to make sufficient duplicates of paper records or maintain secure backups of centralized databases.
Great, but you didn't really address my criticism of using "blockchain" in this situation. So lets go with your bribe-three-clerks example and try to see what "blockchain" will do for this.
So what can I do by bribing three clerks?
1) I could bribe them to file a lien on your property. How does blockchain stop that? A lien can't require my signature, otherwise I could just refuse legitimate liens. So the government needs the ability to file the lien without me signing off. Thus I could still bribe someone to
Re: Holy Vapor, Batman (Score:2)
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Even countries with low corruption benefit from "blockchain" based registries. I know some who are considering such things. But, calling it a blockchain would be a bit much since it will probably just be some version of a Merkle tree. All the mining crap is not necessary for record keeping.
The problem with many registries in first world countries is that you can't be certain all documents are in the registry and in the original form. Errors happen for all kinds of non-corruption based reasons. Things are mi
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Re: Holy Vapor, Batman (Score:3)
Well, its good for making IBM and Microsoft at least $357 million.
Re: Holy Vapor, Batman (Score:2)
You're full of it Re:Holy Vapor, Batman (Score:1)
Really? You asked it before? Did you ask Google? I did and I got quite a few answers. You might argue with them, but I can't believe you're honestly asking for blockchain uses.
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I see very few real applications for blockchain technology. Also, even fewer of them cannot be serviced with an append-only, cryptographically signed public ledger. The only thing blockchain adds onto this is "distributed," which isn't actually needed in most cases. And, as you can see in current applications that claim to use blockchain technology, a vast majority of the work occurs OFF of the chain, with occasional results dropped on the chain just to say that they're using it.
You may see some uses in the
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Even "figuring out how to make use of it for real" is still outrageous hype.
"Solutions in search of problems," as they say... or even "when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail."
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Blockchain is about probabilistically solving Byzantine Generals Problem in a trustless environment. It has very little to do with your 'redundant distributed database'. Get some 101 course on cryptology, distributed systems and blockchain please.
Re: Holy Vapor, Batman (Score:2)
Inevitable (Score:5, Insightful)
Because almost no one in the corporate world even understood what "blockchain" even means. They heard and saw a bunch of hype, they were afraid of missing the bandwagon, so they just reflexively "adopted" it.
It's very similar to the era where if you "had a website", your lack of a business plan or completely idiotic business plan, everyone jumped because "websites are going to be big!" Nobody know what they were really getting then, either, hence. Pets.com. etc.
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In the private sector sure. This is government, they probably have the oldest still (somewhat) functional IP phones ever. The ones with the 'pass through' that might or might not actually pass-through, and if they did, it was 10Mbps half duplex.
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Have you BEEN in a government office?
Funny (Score:1)
Re:Funny (Score:5, Insightful)
Translation: "I bought bitcoin at $19000 with borrowed money and now it's under $7000. If it will only get back to like $12000, I'll be able to get out and not have to sell my car."
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Or maybe he's working for a blockchain startup. Which as with any startup requires a leap of faith. But as we all know, sometimes that leap pays off, in money or other ways.
Though if he really bought bitcoin he can only hope it pays off with money.
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no, while (barely) adequate for cryptocurrency blockchain is a lousy solution for most business processes though, a very bottlenecked architecture. superior solutions exist for other business distributed databases and trust mechanisms.
as far as saying "it can only go up from here", er, no markets never have that guarantee. bitcoin could have its value sabotaged by government actions, for example.
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I started buying bitcoin
I didn't know anyone was dumb enough to actually do that... I mean, other than paying for juice and hardware, anyhow.
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cryptocurrency is one thing, but other business use of blockchain is another. Blockchain architecture is lousy for distributed database systems, that's a long solved problem. Right now various groups are trying to push blockchain as a solution for the wrong types of problems.
Re:Funny (Score:5, Insightful)
As for retailers accepting BTC, there is very little upside there for either the merchant or the customer, unless that customer is someone who happens to already hold a decent amount of them. Another more efficient and stable cryptocurrency may eventually rise to become a widely accepted means of payment for the masses, but it won't be BTC and it won't be in the next 5 years. I'm willing to stake a good bottle of Scotch on that.
I'm not very surprised that corporations are cooling on the notion of "using blockchain". I work on innovation in a reasonably large entity, and if I would have gotten a Dogecoin for every time someone said "we are planning to do an experiment with Blockchain" or "Should we do something with cryptocurrencty?", I'd be able to retire by now. By the way, the best way to silence those idiots is to ask: "What?". What should we do with cryptocurrency, what is your blockchain experiment? No one is able to give a concrete answer to that, or propose something that couldn't be handled just as well or better with a database.
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yes and the market was so overjoyed with the news that BTC went to the moon...
except today it plummeted below $7K
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Funny
Definitely.
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Anyone who wants to back Bitcoin is an idiot. Either that or is making big bucks off it. Bitcoin is a terrible coin.
I told you (Score:2)
https://youtu.be/9AajslFuPro [youtu.be]
I know of at least one company (Score:2)
who's stock value increased well about 100% when they announced plans to do their own microcurrancy and Blockchain implementation.
All of that gain and another 40% decrease plummeted their stock value when they announced: "Just kidding."
Thoughts (Score:2)
As with every new technology there come a lot of people who are willing to get VC money under the pretext of changing the world for the better and inventing the things which will net insane profits and blockchain is no different.
I'm not sure too many people have suddenly cooled on blockchain. More like journalists have failed to unveil a hype with little to no substance in time. I'm not saying the technology is useless, I'm just saying that blockchain just cannot solve all the world problems, yet it's exc
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Is the energy-consumption problem particular to Bitcoin (or crypto-currencies in general), or is it fundamental to "blockchain"?
Many of the folks that love Bitcoin are folks that hate many ways of generating electricity.
Re: Thoughts (Score:2)
It's specific to certain cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin. Block chain is essentially a group consensus algorithm. Consensus is whatever 51% of the nodes agree on. The problem is, its trivial to use 1 computer to spawn nearly limitless copies of the software mimicking as many individual nodes. So to deal with that, you need some methodology to identify each node by some form of limited resource.
Proof of work uses the limited CPU/GPU resources to solve this. You can spin up 2 or more copies of the softwa
Re: Thoughts (Score:2)
Gartner.. (Score:2)
"The disconnect between the hype and the reality is significant -- I've never seen anything like it," said Rajesh Kandaswamy, an analyst at Gartner Inc.
That's pretty much the case for most things Gartner sings the praises of from the rooftops. Gartner and IDC's business is largely made at senselessly hyping things up to scare companies into paying them for analyst insight on 'the new hot thing' that they don't get, but must be important....
I've never seen anything like it, (Score:3)
And this is why Gartner is full if it. They are part of the hype train. They are part of the constant annoyance of C*O to lower level employees to jump on the train and not address the real issues.
All this has happened before... (Score:2)
Sure, there were some actually viable and profitable businesses that came out of it, but most of the businesses that got investors excited were garbage companies with no viable path to profitability. Thus when they finally figured out th
There's an unspoken reason for corporate distaste. (Score:1)
Basically, whether you call it "distributed redundant database" or "blockchain," it's something that does NOT lend itself to the monopoly dream all of the corporations have. It is neither owned nor controlled by one single party, so the Party of Greed, aka Corporate America, simply cannot abide it.
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Wrong.
Corporations don't contest money put into or taken out of accounts or put into transactions, they don't contest your home address, phone number, credit card....
You're someone implying they want to falsify something. Bullshit, that's not how most corporations make money.
The issue is the bottle necked architecture.
Quit pushing blockchain as a solution for normal business databases, it isn't. It's a very shitty low-performance distributed database that is ill suited for most business use.
Dumbest blockchain proposal I saw/heard (Score:1)
I was working a contract where some of the tech leads were heavily pushing block-chain as a solution to many of the organizations problems. Chiefly they were looking to solve issues with non-repudiation and centralization of records. The hitch in their whole plan was they primarily dealt with homeless individuals, who (shock) often don't have access to computers or smartphones, much less own one. When I asked them how these individuals would maintain their keys for signing (critical for non-repudiation t
Typical "buy high, sell low" mentality (Score:2)
The biggest problem with bitcoins? (Score:2)
The fact t that 81% of all mining takes place in one country, China, which is under totalitarian control. The blockchain ledger contains what they want it to contain. And blockchain has serious scaling problems as well. Supposedly a "distributed" system, most transactions take over an hour to verify if one has downloaded and users their own local blockchain ledger. Most cryptocurrency owners avoid the use of local ledgers by using "wallets" which connect to the ledger on a blockchain server accesse