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In 20 years time, I wonder if anyone here will face this question from their kids.
Take a look at this: https://coin.dance/volume/localbitcoins
Looking at the above chart we see ongoing OTC demand for an asset where there's only 21 million units. Keep in mind every halving event reduces supply even further. Eventually there comes a point where price must rise, it's inevitable in a world where population is increasing at a rapid rate (360,000 babies are born each day) and turmoil is rising. This should result in demand for an asset that can be moved with relative ease.
A lot of people in the public think Bitcoin is a fad, completely ignoring the fact we are living in a world whereby digital money is being embraced by a new generation of humans. If this demand continues, in 20 years time, kids will be asking their dad why they didn't own at least 1 bitcoin "back when it was $6k each". Dads of the future will then have to go through all the same crap their previous generations muttered, "Well son, if I had known property and land would be worth this much back in the 60's, I would of bought the entire neighborhood, it was so cheap back then, I didn't know these worthless houses would be worth so much". Failing to realize that world population was dramatically rising and had been well documented in the 60s.
Hopefully Reddit still exists in 2039.
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If you're not sure what kind of discussion belongs in this thread, here are some example posts. News, TA, and sentiment analysis are great, too.
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The following post by anythingtechpro is being replicated because some comments within the post(but not the post itself) have been silently removed.
The original post can be found(in censored form) at this link:
np.reddit.com/r/ Bitcoin/comments/blja74
The original post's content was as follows:
i've recently uncovered some "obvious convincing evidence" that proves Dave Kleiman "was" Satoshi Nakamoto. Dave Kleiman was a computer forensics expert and co/author of multiple books and noted speaker at security related events. Dave Kleiman was born on 1967 and died April 2013, seemingly of natural causes related to complications from a MRSA infection. Many sources say Dave Kleiman was possibly Satoshi Nakamoto, and there is other evidence to backup this theory. The most compelling evidence in my opinion is in plain sight, if you read over both the original Bitcoin white paper and Satoshi Nakamoto's profile/posts on the bitcoin talk forms you can tell after each sentence, period there are two spaces (keep in mind this is not very a common thing people do). This pattern repeats throughout every message on the bitcoin talk forum and the white paper (as described above). If you do some research on this, it's common with the use of typewriters which would put Satoshi Nakamoto around his 40's or 50's. Now my thoughts would be that during his time in the military he heavily used a typewriter, because the military required that all evidence and information be typed out on hard copy... If you look at a presentation (can be obtained from http://davekleiman.com via archive.org) you will see double spaces at the end of periods. Maybe this is just a coincidence? I will link a few screenshots as well the document below.
Documents: http://www.filedropper.com/2009ceicconferenceforensics-featuringpowershelllogparserperlsysinternals
Other links:
https://web.archive.org/web/20090412030700/http://davekleiman.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Kleiman
https://www.coindesk.com/craig-wright-ordered-to-disclose-bitcoin-addresses-in-kleiman-court-case
https://www.ccn.com/us-court-orders-craig-wright-bitcoin
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=3;sa=showPosts
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About a week ago my mother-in-law gave me five Blockchain/Bitcoin Gift Cards with a minimum value of $25 and a maximum of $500. She told me that she won these cards in a raffle at an event in 2014. Being the Bitcoin enthusiast that I am, I jumped at the opportunity to help her find out if they held any value. I followed the links on the card, gogocoin.com, redeem.bitcoin.com, and scanned the QR code, but they all lead to error code 404 or nowhere at all.
Because they were purchased in 2014, they are worth at the least 4 times as much now and could be worth as much as 22x purchase price. Maybe not much at all. But I think it would be fun to find out either way.
Can anyone help me find out how to check /redeem the balance?
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The following post by hellybeaner is being replicated because some comments within the post(but not the post itself) have been openly removed.
The original post can be found(in censored form) at this link:
np.reddit.com/r/ CryptoCurrency/comments/blg20t
The original post's content was as follows:
Firstly: It’s so annoying dealing with all these butt hurt investlets who got burned buying bitcoin at 20k and ethereum at 1,300. Literally no one gives a shit about your $100 coinbase investment, so stop FUDing every single god damn event in crypto with your irrelevant perspective which is based off faulty understanding of both finance and crypto technology.
Secondly: what are some cool vacation spots that aren’t popular yet? Looking to plan another vacation.
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We are now doing 48hr trials
Beast TV is the best out there with it's main focus on Live TV and Sports.
Streams are very stable, high quality (50-60/UHD for most of the sports), and cover everything that a sports nut needs. Watch all of your PPV events like UFC,WWE,Boxing and more. It has UHD, HD, SD it is a clear picture and runs smooth just like cable. Beast TV gives users 3 connections over 2 ips when you choose M3U. It has 200+ USA Regionals 170+ Canada channels and tons more. It works on any device, mag, buzz, formuler,dreamlink, firestick, stbemu, smart stb, pc, mobile, nvidia shield, android boxes.
All for the low cost of $20 CAD
We accept
E-Transfer
Paypal
Bitcoin
Any questions feel free to message me or even join the telegram group.
https://t.me/joinchat/H8SpDBcrfIAFY5mNgI01Gg
I look forward to talking and letting you enjoy the best IPTV service out there.
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Firstly: It’s so annoying dealing with all these butt hurt investlets who got burned buying bitcoin at 20k and ethereum at 1,300. Literally no one gives a shit about your $100 coinbase investment, so stop FUDing every single god damn event in crypto with your irrelevant perspective which is based off faulty understanding of both finance and crypto technology.
Secondly: what are some cool vacation spots that aren’t popular yet? Looking to plan another vacation.
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Although not often discussed, there were several digital currency attempts prior to Bitcoin that were largely failures due to major factors such as lack of adoption or interference from government bodies that prevented the projects from moving ahead. Bitcoin, on the other hand, managed to overcome these boundaries, opening up the financial world to the myriad of cryptocurrency products that we know and love today.
For those who are just entering this economy or for those who were accustomed to the early developments, the new market can be rather confusing as there are far more assets available that go beyond the basic Bitcoin model of digital currency. To get a better grasp on some of these products and their functions, take a look at some of the coins or tokens below that you may come across as you dive deeper into the crypto ecosystem.
https://i.redd.it/va1gtx6cwlw21.png
Bitcoin and many of the altcoins that followed suit operated as digital currencies, meaning that they had value and could be transferred between peer-to-peer as a form of payment or simply as an exchange of money. The biggest issue with these earlier models is that their value was entirely speculative and highly-volatile, which resulted in (and still results in) wild price fluctuations that proved dangerous to those who held the coin and intended in using it as a cryptocurrency rather than treating it as an asset. Stablecoins such as Tether, USDC, or DAI, entered the market in an effort to remedy this major underlying issue by backing the cryptocurrency with something that provided a true, almost unwavering store of value. (In the case of Tether, the U.S. Dollar, although the full backing of Tether is subject to debate). Therefore, stablecoins operate as a more secure form of digital currency for those who wish to treat their crypto as a usable currency.
Security tokens are tokens that represent a real asset such as equities or gold. Because they are tokenized representations of real-world assets, this makes them subject to regulatory laws and makes it (sometimes) easier for certain companies to begin their venture into crypto and it makes it easier for individuals to invest in and trade assets without the use of third-party services that often make the process more expensive and drawn-out.
Utility tokens are categories of tokens that have use and value within a certain decentralized application. Take, for example, the Brave Browser. The Brave Browser is a decentralized-application designed to improve user-privacy by changing the way that ads are presented to the user and by making it so that ads are tailored to the user’s needs and don’t contain any malware that could put them or their computer at risk. The utility token for this decentralized app, the Basic Attention Token, powers the network and provides incentive for each of the advertisers, content creators, and network users to engage with each other. The value of utility tokens depends entirely upon popularity and use.
A protocol token or a platform token acts as a platform on which applications can be built on top of. Ethereum is the biggest example of this type of token as there are numerous platforms that have since been launched that were built on the backbone of Ethereum, which allows for the launch of the tokens listed above. While Ethereum is the most popular protocol token, some of the others that you may know include EOS and NEO.
While there are additional models out there, such as the cryptocollectible token, the products mentioned above are some of the more popular offers and ones that you are more likely to encounter. Before you start looking into any crypto investments, use the brief guide above to brush up on your token and coin knowledge to learn more about the assets that are made available to you.
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Hi! I am new to the Lightning Network and I am seeking to install a Lighting Network full node on my PC.
I already have Bitcoin Core installed and my full bitcoin node working (version 0.17.1).
I went through some steps to install the LN full node on a video on YouTube, following instructions from a Medium post: "How to run a Lightning Network node on Windows" (https://medium.com/coinmonks/guide-setup-a-lightning-network-node-on-windows-8475206807f).
I installed Eclair (v0.2-beta9) from their Github page.
But when I try to launch Eclair (with my Bitcoin Core node up and running), an error message pops us, saying:
Could not connect to Bitcoin Core using JSON-RPC.
Make sure that Bitcoin Core is up and running and RPC parameters are correct.
Here is what I have in my Bitcoin Core .conf file:
testnet=0
server=1
rpcuser=foo
rpcpassword=bar
txindex=1
zmqpubrawblock=tcp://127.0.0.1:29000
zmqpubrawtx=tcp://127.0.0.1:29000
addresstype=p2sh-segwit
deprecatedrpc=signrawtransaction
And in my eclair.conf file:
eclair.chain=mainnet
eclair.bitcoind.rpcport=8332
eclair.bitcoind.rpcuser=foo
eclair.bitcoind.rpcpassword=bar
eclair.node-alias=”myalias”
eclair.node-color=ff9900
By the way, I went through an old thread on the same topic (https://www.reddit.com/r/lightningnetwork/comments/7rlk1e/could_not_connect_to_bitcoind_using_jsonrpc_any/), but the solutions proposed did not work for me.
Your help would be greatly appreciated :-) Thanks!
Travala.com, the leading blockchain-based hotel booking platform will be the official accommodation partner of Bitcoin 2019, the annual peer-to-peer conference for the bitcoin community, offering attendees up to 40% off their hotel stays.
The San Francisco located event is focused on accelerating Bitcoin adoption and expanding Bitcoin’s potential, and is set to welcome over 2,000 attendees, 50+ speakers and panelists, and a reputable suite of media.
👉 Read the full press release here: https://blog.travala.com/book-with-bitcoin-travala-com-becomes-the-official-travel-partner-of-the-bitcoin-2019-conference/
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Hey everyone! Just got my 1st BTC article published last night. If you would like to check it out here is the link https://cryptominertips.com/what-is-bitcoin-a-beginners-guide-to-the-future/ Thanks!!!
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1) BTC is designed to have hype cycles. As we near halvening in May 2020, this will draw in more and more speculators and money. Barring a black swan event, this is almost guaranteed.
2) Much of the world's population isn't rich enough to own a full BTC, regardless of whether it's trading at $10K, $20K or $50K. At this price level, unless BTC is re-denominated in satoshis, it will gradually look more and more expensive (per unit).
3) Many normies still do not recognize the concept of being able to own <1 full BTC, and will choose to look down the list for the next best, legit coin.
4) Even if they know BTC is subdivisible, they would rather psychologically want to own one full unit of something (that's just human nature)
5) Ethereum has the best chance of being the next-in-line due to its heavy mindshare and its relative "cheapness" vs BTC's humongous number, while not going down the list too far. This will amplified by the media turning its attention to Ethereum as the dominant smart contract platform, with DeFi + entreprise adoption finally gaining serious traction.
6) How many of us have once balked at Berkshire's enormous share price? Bitcoin's price will rise to a price which will make owning 1 BTC unimaginable for the non-1-percenters, and the spillover capital will be massive.
7) ETH will be the silver to Bitcoin's gold. Let's put aside comparing its utility; there is always a silver to gold, even if Bitcoin continues to remain #1. In a raging precious metal bull market, silver outperforms gold by a few folds (check the famous XAG/XAU ratio). Speculators love silver for this reason.
8) During the mania phase, this ratio may even exceed 0.17 (where ETH flippens BTC) as while BTC's supply can be dumped on the market at any point of time, once PoS is live, some ETH will be permanently locked away forever (in the form of dynastic crypto-wealth), and will never enter circulation again.
9) There is always a price for BTC (even if its not for fiat) but at a sufficiently high valuation, where a hodler may choose to trade some BTC away from real estate, as another form of SoV. However, if ETH is the dominant smart contract, then there is only one such smart contract platform in the world. Most of the 120m ETH will be permanently staked to generate a yield, staking your undilutable claim on the "world computer" <replace with meme of your choice>.
10) Just like trophy real estate, once your family owns Building XXX or Castle XXX, trust structures hold the dynastic wealth through generations and simply live off the yield it generates. Control over Ethereum will push prices into the stratosphere.
THERE IS SIMPLY NO SUBSTITUTE FOR ETHEREUM if it wins the platform wars.
BITCOIN WILL CONTINUE TO HAVE TO CONTEND WITH REAL ESTATE.
In the very long-term (30-50 years), I see Bitcoin achieving $500k+ ($9 trillion cap) or 2.5% of the world's wealth. Ethereum will be worth more. Ethereum will not only capture some of the SoV wealth, it will create completely new wealth from ideas we cant' even dream of today (just as the Internet created $100 trillion+ of new wealth).
Hodl strong, because we're going to $160,000 per ETH. ($20 trillion cap)
1) BTC is designed to have hype cycles. As we near halvening in May 2020, this will draw in more and more speculators and money. Barring a black swan event, this is almost guaranteed.
2) Much of the world's population isn't rich enough to own a full BTC, regardless of whether it's trading at $10K, $20K or $50K. At this price level, unless BTC is re-denominated in satoshis, it will gradually look more and more expensive (per unit).
3) Many normies still do not recognize the concept of being able to own <1 full BTC, and will choose to look down the list for the next best, legit coin.
4) Even if they know BTC is subdivisible, they would rather psychologically want to own one full unit of something (that's just human nature)
5) Ethereum has the best chance of being the next-in-line due to its heavy mindshare and its relative "cheapness" vs BTC's humongous number, while not going down the list too far. This will amplified by the media turning its attention to Ethereum as the dominant smart contract platform, with DeFi + entreprise adoption finally gaining serious traction.
6) How many of us have once balked at Berkshire's enormous share price? Bitcoin's price will rise to a price which will make owning 1 BTC unimaginable for the non-1-percenters, and the spillover capital will be massive.
7) ETH will be the silver to Bitcoin's gold. Let's put aside comparing its utility; there is always a silver to gold, even if Bitcoin continues to remain #1. In a raging precious metal bull market, silver outperforms gold by a few folds (check the famous XAG/XAU ratio). Speculators love silver for this reason.
8) During the mania phase, this ratio may even exceed 0.17 (where ETH flippens BTC) as while BTC's supply can be dumped on the market at any point of time, once PoS is live, some ETH will be permanently locked away forever (in the form of dynastic crypto-wealth), and will never enter circulation again.
9) There is always a price for BTC (even if its not for fiat) but at a sufficiently high valuation, where a hodler may choose to trade some BTC away from real estate, as another form of SoV. However, if ETH is the dominant smart contract, then there is only one such smart contract platform in the world. Most of the 120m ETH will be permanently staked to generate a yield, staking your undilutable claim on the "world computer" <replace with meme of your choice>.
10) Just like trophy real estate, once your family owns Building XXX or Castle XXX, trust structures hold the dynastic wealth through generations and simply live off the yield it generates. Control over Ethereum will push prices into the stratosphere.
THERE IS SIMPLY NO SUBSTITUTE FOR ETHEREUM if it wins the platform wars.
BITCOIN WILL CONTINUE TO HAVE TO CONTEND WITH REAL ESTATE.
In the very long-term (30-50 years), I see Bitcoin achieving $500k+ ($9 trillion cap) or 2.5% of the world's wealth. Ethereum will be worth more. Ethereum will not only capture some of the SoV wealth, it will create completely new wealth from ideas we cant' even dream of today (just as the Internet created $100 trillion+ of new wealth).
Hodl strong, because we're going to $160,000 per ETH. ($20 trillion cap)
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Travala.com, the leading blockchain-based hotel booking platform will be the official accommodation partner of Bitcoin 2019, the annual peer-to-peer conference for the bitcoin community, offering attendees up to 40% off their hotel stays.
The San Francisco located event is focused on accelerating Bitcoin adoption and expanding Bitcoin’s potential, and is set to welcome over 2,000 attendees, 50+ speakers and panelists, and a reputable suite of media.
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Welcome to the weekly general discussion thread of /r/btcsv! Thread topics include, but are not limited to: General discussion related to the weeks events, questions that don't deserve their own thread. Please discuss prices in the Weekly Bitcoin markets and price discussion thread.
Welcome to the Newbie Monday Weekly thread at /r/bitcoinmarkets!
This is a weekly thread where you can ask any basic questions related to bitcoin trading without shame or embarrassment.
Some rules:
First and foremost, check out the links on the subreddit bar on the right as well as our Wiki for answers to common questions and good reading material on basic guides, strategies and indicators.
There are no questions too stupid, as long as they are about what to do and how to do it in bitcoin trading. If you don't like a question being asked - you don't have to answer it.
Be respectful, no name-calling.
Try to source your answers or support with chart examples, links, etc where possible.
This is not a a thread to ask rhetorical questions about the state of bitcoin. "With the halvening coming up, isn't it stupid not to buy every dip?" or "With only 2.7TPS how can bitcoin support a global economy" are better questions for the weekly fundamental thread.
Past Newbie Monday Threads - Link
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A trading cryptocurrency guide must provide reviews of all of the top crypto exchanges out there, so that you can find the best cryptocurrency exchange site for you. This review of OOOBTC consists of four parts: general information, fees, deposit methods and security.
OOOBTC’s domicile country is unclear. This is not a red flag per se, but we recommend all visitors to be careful and form their own opinion on whether OOOBTC is a legitimate exchange our not.
We have not been able to find any information stating that US-investors can’t trade at this exchange. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they can though. We urge any US-investors interested in trading here to form their own opinion on any issues arising from their citizenship or residency.
Different exchanges have different trading views. And there is no “this overview is the best”-view. You should yourself determine which trading view that suits you the best. What the views normally have in common is that they all show the order book or at least part of the order book, a price chart of the chosen cryptocurrency and order history. They normally also have buy and sell-boxes. Before you choose an exchange, try to have a look at the trading view so that you can ascertain that it feels right to you.
For further information, visit; https://www.ooobtc.com
There were not many major players in the private permissioned blockchain space; a big name was IBM, whose contributions to Hyperledger Fabric has since brought its tech in front of the likes of Walmart, Nestlé, and Aetna.
You would think that the prominence and history of IBM’s brand would result in wide industry adoption of their blockchain tech, but instead, adoption has been sluggish and most solutions are still in the nascent proof-of-concept stages. This suggests that many of IBM’s enterprise customers are not satisfied.
IBM’s Hyperledger isn’t really a “blockchain,” and what it does offer is hard to use and difficult to scale.
When I worked at JP Morgan in 2016, I led an emerging technology group that researched and vetted blockchains for the bank’s potential use and strategic investment. At the time, we did in-depth analyses of early versions of Hyperledger, Axoni, Symbiont, Tendermint, Ripple, and Ethereum.
My team discovered that the blockchain options in the market were technologically subpar for real enterprise use cases. These tech problems ranged from having code compiled down to computer “bytecode” that rendered business logic unreadable — and therefore hard to check for auditors — to running so slowly that one couldn’t perform helpful business transactions any better than with a traditional database.
We would be laughed out of the room.
So we came up with a list of questions that we asked at JP Morgan while looking at blockchain vendors.
Questions like:
Using these questions as a framework, I believe that blockchain requires architectural elements that IBM’s system fundamentally lacks.
I’m also not the only one who has since suggested that IBM’s performance claims don’t add up; and while my colleagues and I don’t see the numbers game (transactions per second, node count) as the only factor in blockchain adoption, we do think it’s important to educate people on what a blockchain is and is not. This education will hopefully help everyone better understand the landscape of this emerging technology.
In order to really understand where IBM’s blockchain fails to satisfy, we need to look at the very definition of a blockchain itself.
A blockchain is a decentralized and distributed database, an immutable ledger of events or transactions where truth is determined by a consensus mechanism — such as participants voting to agree on what gets written — so that no central authority arbitrates what is true.
IBM’s definition of blockchain captures the distributed and immutable elements of blockchain but conveniently leaves out decentralized consensus — that’s because IBM Hyperledger Fabric doesn’t require a true consensus mechanism at all.
Instead, it suggests using an “ordering service” called Kafka, but without enforced, democratized, cryptographically-secure voting between participants, you can’t really prove whether an agent tampers with the ledger.
IBM’s architecture exposes numerous potential vulnerabilities that require a very small amount of malicious coordination.
For instance, IBM introduces public-key cryptography “inside the network” with validator signatures, which fundamentally invalidates the proven security model of Bitcoin and other real blockchains, where the network can never intermediate a user’s externally-provided public key signature.
In a Hyperledger node, the only signatures that matter for consensus are the validator’s, while the user signatures disappear into arbitrary data in the “RWSet” which is replicated through the network (see diagram below).
https://i.redd.it/seg59q9q9jw21.png
IBM plays very fast and loose with performance numbers due to their complicated architecture. The architecture, or shape of a blockchain, matters because it controls how information moves on the digital ledger.
The architecture of IBM’s platform is complex, involving non-uniform nodes, unreliable smart contracts, and many points of failure. Security-wise, its architecture provides assurance only within the system, meaning that there is always a risk that someone can subvert the intention of a user.
Moreover, the performance numbers that IBM Hyperledger Fabric claims are misleading. Hyperledger uses a multi-chain environment (they call them “channels”) as part of their confidentiality/network security. However, their transactions cannot be replicated across channels, meaning each channel should be evaluated independently from a performance point of view.
Thus, to achieve maximum performance with IBM, you must deploy multiple channels, which require extra configuration, to achieve maximum performance (which still can’t exceed 1800 tps) with latencies soaring into the 10-30 second range.
Furthermore, that multi-channel network in real life would also be extremely complex to deploy, making it unlikely to actually get used in business.
The final point of consideration consists of the smart contract languages used to program commands in a blockchain.
A smart contract is not just a piece of code; it is a representation of business logic.
A smart contract may secure a house on the blockchain, assure a digital identity, or even just represent an escrow transaction between people buying and selling an old TV. It is important that a smart contract is reliable and always does what it says it will.
When it comes to building anything on a blockchain, you need to be able to represent what you want to do (buy, sell, package data, etc.) through smart contracts. The easier or simpler your language is to use, the faster you will build the thing you want and get it in front of the eyes of stakeholders.
IBM Hyperledger Fabric smart contracts (“chaincode”) can be written in a number of programming languages including general Javascript or Go. Supporting multiple languages might seem beneficial because it allows people to pick up blockchain without necessarily learning a new language.
But there are trade-offs between the convenience of a programmer already knowing a general purpose language and the security and safety that a domain-specific language provides. When the stakes are as high as in blockchain — where millions of dollars can be lost if code is buggy or incorrect because it wasn’t designed for blockchain — the smart contract language must be purpose-built and safe by design.
Finally, if programming languages are measured by user-friendliness, then coding for Hyperledger isn’t exactly simple.
In order to spell out the classic programmer intro sequence of telling a computer to say, “hello world,” you needed 150 lines of code that look like this:
https://i.redd.it/q96hzi8oajw21.png
While IBM still dominates a lot of the enterprise blockchain press cycle with their relationship announcements, it‘s important to look under their hood at what the technology actually can do.
When I participated in evaluating the tech at JP Morgan, we found that IBM’s technology did not stand up to its performance claims and definitely was not offering the simplest or safest solutions for digital ledgers. I believe that challengers will arise offer better tools, better blockchains, and a better vision for the future of our society and how we use technology.
Co-founder & President, Kadena — Stuart Popejoy is a co-founder of Kadena and has 15 years experience in building trading systems and exchange backbones for the financial industry. Prior to starting the company in 2016, Stuart worked at JP Morgan in the new products division, where he led and developed their main blockchain product, Juno.
NOTE FROM OP:
This piece has been extracted and formatted for better digestion from thenextweb.
I find it interesting because we're seeing that IBM's Hyperledger doing a lot of marketing and partnership deals lately, they have a clear advantage because of their roots and credibility. Very insightful but it would be interesting to see how projects with existing blockchain deployments tackle this, from Aergo's Hybrid Blockchain by Blocko (Samsung backed), to LTO's network, and of course, Stuart's own, Kadena. Set up by an ex JP-Morgan & ex SEC. Not disregarding the host of other enterprise blockchains out there too. But could IBM be off guard with all this?
There were not many major players in the private permissioned blockchain space; a big name was IBM, whose contributions to Hyperledger Fabric has since brought its tech in front of the likes of Walmart, Nestlé, and Aetna.
You would think that the prominence and history of IBM’s brand would result in wide industry adoption of their blockchain tech, but instead, adoption has been sluggish and most solutions are still in the nascent proof-of-concept stages. This suggests that many of IBM’s enterprise customers are not satisfied.
IBM’s Hyperledger isn’t really a “blockchain,” and what it does offer is hard to use and difficult to scale.
When I worked at JP Morgan in 2016, I led an emerging technology group that researched and vetted blockchains for the bank’s potential use and strategic investment. At the time, we did in-depth analyses of early versions of Hyperledger, Axoni, Symbiont, Tendermint, Ripple, and Ethereum.
My team discovered that the blockchain options in the market were technologically subpar for real enterprise use cases. These tech problems ranged from having code compiled down to computer “bytecode” that rendered business logic unreadable — and therefore hard to check for auditors — to running so slowly that one couldn’t perform helpful business transactions any better than with a traditional database.
We would be laughed out of the room.
So we came up with a list of questions that we asked at JP Morgan while looking at blockchain vendors.
Questions like:
Using these questions as a framework, I believe that blockchain requires architectural elements that IBM’s system fundamentally lacks.
I’m also not the only one who has since suggested that IBM’s performance claims don’t add up; and while my colleagues and I don’t see the numbers game (transactions per second, node count) as the only factor in blockchain adoption, we do think it’s important to educate people on what a blockchain is and is not. This education will hopefully help everyone better understand the landscape of this emerging technology.
In order to really understand where IBM’s blockchain fails to satisfy, we need to look at the very definition of a blockchain itself.
A blockchain is a decentralized and distributed database, an immutable ledger of events or transactions where truth is determined by a consensus mechanism — such as participants voting to agree on what gets written — so that no central authority arbitrates what is true.
IBM’s definition of blockchain captures the distributed and immutable elements of blockchain but conveniently leaves out decentralized consensus — that’s because IBM Hyperledger Fabric doesn’t require a true consensus mechanism at all.
Instead, it suggests using an “ordering service” called Kafka, but without enforced, democratized, cryptographically-secure voting between participants, you can’t really prove whether an agent tampers with the ledger.
IBM’s architecture exposes numerous potential vulnerabilities that require a very small amount of malicious coordination.
For instance, IBM introduces public-key cryptography “inside the network” with validator signatures, which fundamentally invalidates the proven security model of Bitcoin and other real blockchains, where the network can never intermediate a user’s externally-provided public key signature.
In a Hyperledger node, the only signatures that matter for consensus are the validator’s, while the user signatures disappear into arbitrary data in the “RWSet” which is replicated through the network (see diagram below).
IBM plays very fast and loose with performance numbers due to their complicated architecture. The architecture, or shape of a blockchain, matters because it controls how information moves on the digital ledger.
The architecture of IBM’s platform is complex, involving non-uniform nodes, unreliable smart contracts, and many points of failure. Security-wise, its architecture provides assurance only within the system, meaning that there is always a risk that someone can subvert the intention of a user.
Moreover, the performance numbers that IBM Hyperledger Fabric claims are misleading. Hyperledger uses a multi-chain environment (they call them “channels”) as part of their confidentiality/network security. However, their transactions cannot be replicated across channels, meaning each channel should be evaluated independently from a performance point of view.
Thus, to achieve maximum performance with IBM, you must deploy multiple channels, which require extra configuration, to achieve maximum performance (which still can’t exceed 1800 tps) with latencies soaring into the 10-30 second range.
Furthermore, that multi-channel network in real life would also be extremely complex to deploy, making it unlikely to actually get used in business.
The final point of consideration consists of the smart contract languages used to program commands in a blockchain.
A smart contract is not just a piece of code; it is a representation of business logic.
A smart contract may secure a house on the blockchain, assure a digital identity, or even just represent an escrow transaction between people buying and selling an old TV. It is important that a smart contract is reliable and always does what it says it will.
When it comes to building anything on a blockchain, you need to be able to represent what you want to do (buy, sell, package data, etc.) through smart contracts. The easier or simpler your language is to use, the faster you will build the thing you want and get it in front of the eyes of stakeholders.
IBM Hyperledger Fabric smart contracts (“chaincode”) can be written in a number of programming languages including general Javascript or Go. Supporting multiple languages might seem beneficial because it allows people to pick up blockchain without necessarily learning a new language.
But there are trade-offs between the convenience of a programmer already knowing a general purpose language and the security and safety that a domain-specific language provides. When the stakes are as high as in blockchain — where millions of dollars can be lost if code is buggy or incorrect because it wasn’t designed for blockchain — the smart contract language must be purpose-built and safe by design.
Finally, if programming languages are measured by user-friendliness, then coding for Hyperledger isn’t exactly simple.
In order to spell out the classic programmer intro sequence of telling a computer to say, “hello world,” you needed 150 lines of code that look like this:
While IBM still dominates a lot of the enterprise blockchain press cycle with their relationship announcements, it‘s important to look under their hood at what the technology actually can do.
When I participated in evaluating the tech at JP Morgan, we found that IBM’s technology did not stand up to its performance claims and definitely was not offering the simplest or safest solutions for digital ledgers. I believe that challengers will arise offer better tools, better blockchains, and a better vision for the future of our society and how we use technology.
Co-founder & President, Kadena — Stuart Popejoy is a co-founder of Kadena and has 15 years experience in building trading systems and exchange backbones for the financial industry. Prior to starting the company in 2016, Stuart worked at JP Morgan in the new products division, where he led and developed their main blockchain product, Juno.
NOTE FROM OP:
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I find it interesting because we're seeing that IBM's Hyperledger doing a lot of marketing and partnership deals lately, they have a clear advantage because of their roots and credibility. Very insightful but it would be interesting to see how projects with existing blockchain deployments tackle this, from Aergo's Hybrid Blockchain by Blocko (Samsung backed), to LTO's network, and of course, Stuart's own, Kadena. Set up by an ex JP-Morgan & ex SEC. Not disregarding the host of other enterprise blockchains out there too. But could IBM be off guard with all this?
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