This is a great article explaining what Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are, and why they are valuable, why they might turn out to not be valuable. It's probably one of the best nontechnical explanations for the entire cryptocurrency phenomenon I've read in a long time. I learned a lot reading it.
https://blog.chain.com/a-letter-to-jamie-dimon-de89d417cb80Thanks wiser, great article! I read every word, but I think there are many points of interest missing from the equation, here are just a few.
Participation. People love to participate in things. Cryptocurrency, ICO's, all of the successful projects are built around the fact that everyone can participate and benefit from that participation. People will even sacrifice some functionality or ease of use for the ability to truly participate. This is why youtube is wildly successful, but it is starting to go the other way where only certain people and ideas can fully participate.
Incorruptible governance and issuance, relative to consensus. Like the issuance of money everywhere in the world, it is confusing and often corrupted to the point where many people suffer and just a few benefit. This is playing out all over the world and virtually no currency is immune, only to what extent. The incorruptible part is a little more complicated, just like bitcoin and all the forks. You may create your own fork, but unless you get other people to agree to use, as well as convince everyone not to use the original, the original will continue, or exists in it's own world despite the incompatible new rule set. The great thing is, you don't have to even agree with consensus, and start your own little consensus.
Centralized integration. All of the considerations in article exclude the posibility for a third party to take advantage of the best of the benefits of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology. The participation effect, the incorruptible governance and issuance, among many other things, and solve the other issues externally.
We understand the problems raised in the article, among others, and came to the realization that there is a best of both worlds by mixing the awesome decentralized world with the necessary centralized world and it all started with the company and shared stake concept.
These are good points, and I'd like to add what I noticed missing or disagreed with:
From the article:
"In fact, on almost every dimension, decentralized services are worse than their centralized counterparts:They are slowerThey are more expensive"The other day I suddenly needed to buy flights from London to Australia, and my partner discovered an excellent deal that saved us about US$400. But the airline's website failed to accept Visa payment because our bank's link to the 'Verified by Visa' service was not working properly. So we tried multiple cards, transferred money between us to do so, and even tried other websites selling the flight. All failed. Fortunately my Cambodian bank was able to instantly create and use a virtual Master Card via the mobile app and make the payment. But the failure of the centralised system nearly cost us $400.
So I would add reliability to the list in favour of cryptocurrency. The system, depending on independent nodes never goes down. Banks post messages saying that mobile payments will be unavailable on [date-time] due to system maintenance on a regular basis.
Due to my profession, I often receive payments by wire transfer. This typically costs me between US$30–40. Compare that to the average bitcoin transaction fee of around $5 which is much cheaper. There are other payment options that use a percentage system for calculating fees and this gets very expensive for higher values. And when the same processing is required regardless of risk or value, there is no excuse for percentage based charges.
And my experience of bank transfers is 3–5 business days, wire transfer is more than 24 hours, and bitcoin is about ten minutes. So in my opinion, bitcoin wins on speed as well.
So the basis of the comparison appears to be seriously flawed. Then the opinion about future functionality of distributed applications might also be flawed. Currently the majority of nodes supporting blockchains are based on Proof of Work. And this was necessary at the beginning of bitcoin as the network was finding its feet. But Proof of Stake has proven to be successful and much more efficient. But POS does not do an effective job of leveraging excess processing power or unwanted storage space. That is where we're at today. That is not where we will be in the near future.
There is no reason why a hybrid POW/POS system can't be implemented that also uses unwanted storage space and network capacity. There is also no reason for the POW processing to be duplicated across multiple nodes. Imagine a node setup where the user can set their min-max processor usage, cap their Internet data, and define usable storage. Then each node could be working as a cluster of artificial-neural-networks contributing unique processing with some redundancy to an AI-SAAS. They could then earn tokens based on resource contribution. And those tokens would be worth money because customers have to purchase and spend them for AI services. This massive and unique distributed processing power would be far superior and much more stable than any centralised server options. So claiming that decentralised apps will always be less powerful might be a bit near-sighted.
After saying all that, I still think it was a well written and informative article. And I really appreciated how value was identified and discussed.