Its so funny to see these type of things.
Blockchain / crypto was started as a decentralized thing, than gambling happened.
And now it transforms to 'whatever people thought it would be' to 'normal big companies we all know and use are leverging it now in a way to be able to say "But we also do blockchain and crypto" completly destroying the originally idea of it.
But i don't mind. Make the ecosystem even more complicated and complex so that even less people care and use it.
Crypto/Blockchain/NFT was the biggest 'transfer money from a lot of people to a few people' scam for a while now.
It’s permissionless, anyone can deploy anything on those networks
I’m missing the joke about what’s funny or ironic about large companies using it
Can you explain it more? Its still permissionless when the production environment is deployed on the public blockchain so how does that “completely destroy the original idea of it”, which was permissionless
Visa can permissionlessly deploy a permissioned asset backed by off chain collateral that you dont have to interact with at all
a network concept thats used Visa’s capabilities as a goal post for nearly 2 decades now has Visa using it
The blockchain is decentralized (as far as you can call it decentralized when a lot of stuff is running on well known cloud providers or you actualyy don't know if someone circumvented the staking mechanism and owns more staking server that you know, imagine a state actor like china) but all the assets are not.
You still need the centralized classical PoS system to make sure that these assets are actually lawfully owned by the right people.
Also for plenty of big companies, a decentralized system is dimetral to their standing. I 'trust' visa.
"For example, a bank could automate processes like administering complex lines of credit using smart contracts and use fiat-backed tokens to release payments when payment terms are met." this even reads like a weird joke. Imagine some expert being needed by a smart contract to evaluate if a flat has the estimated value. The expert needs to verify themselve against a system to even be able to add this trusted expertise onto the blockchain. This requires an additional trust anker because again blockchain doesn't add any trust at all and than nothing is left of the original blockchain besides a standardized way of publishing some information decentral.
You could have done this 20 years ago with public/private keys, certificate authority and ah yeah i think you know how our ca system works right? :P
Edit: "There is a growing ecosystem where tokenized real-world assets are being issued across multiple permissioned and public blockchain networks. " thats even a better joke. Cross blockchain transactions are not a solved problem. Peple lost billions due to this... Apparently who ever does this project in Visa has 0 idea what they are doing. Dead on birth
what you’re missing is that its not about an ethos of decentralization, its about the alternatives being inadequate in having a similar platform at all
using standardized public smart contract platforms sufficiently abstracts the level of development needed to maintain these clients and accounts, since the platform and other nodes handle that. the alternative is some other cloud platform, where you have to write everything from scratch and do all the typical dev ops and system design and pay for it all, in smart contract platforms you deploy once and there is unlimited free reading bandwidth and your users pay to write to your application. until that is seen anywhere else, the blockchains will continue attracting developers and their audiences forever
interfacing with liquidity pools and the rest of the infrastructure on smart contract platforms is also part of the benefit
it doesn't matter that you could do this 20 years ago, the frictions towards doing it were too high
not having an ethos of decentralization aside, the reduced friction does rely on the permissionless, transparent, and at least distributed aspect of the public blockchain
they can interact with blockchains that way, you can choose not to use it while still using blockchains your way. who cares if they are using blockchains for a centralized product, organizations have been doing that for 10 years which means the fact you're only triggered now means the permissionless aspect of blockchains is working
Just that you need to aling on one blockchain (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_blockchains). So if i would be VISA or anyone else, i would just create a visachain without any need for distributed, public etc.
And cross chain transaaction is not a solved problem.
Also for financial transactions and things, i do not want them public. Now i need some magic zero knowledge system and a trust anker. Who verifies the trust anker? again a company.
Its not getting easier or frictionless at all just because blockchain and smart contracts.
I also don't see any advantage for a company to let random people run my transactions and paying others instead of just doing it myself.
Also user don't run blockchains. A normal company will just go to another company to do that the same thing as we do today. Do you think a company will just deploy a smart contract and then out of thin air someone else calls it? No another computer system would call it which also needs to run somewhere.
Visa chose public EVMs already supported by the industry and market
Take it up with them, “visachain” doesn’t inspire the same level of confidence for their stakeholders and shows competitors how to offer something without spinning up or maintaining their own blockchain, and wouldn’t have the rest of the DeFi infrastructure, namely liquidity pool from unrelated parties
Private transactions is its own niche that happens in parallel to this
The existence of either application doesnt preclude each other from occurring or gaining traction or changing the nature of the permissionless distributed system
If big businesses uses this somehow fine, but i really hope all the crypto scams and other cryptobro shit dies sooner than later.
If people would even be smarter about it, we would not mix all the shady shit with the other shit together.
Like having some conference about it but not inviting companies who scammed others
Do you have an actual point in your previous paragraphs or does it all essentially boil down to very highbrow pearl clutching?
> You could have done this 20 years ago with public/private keys, certificate authority and ah yeah i think you know how our ca system works right? :P
This comment made me chuckle a little bit because blockchain has been around since at least 2009, which was ~15 years ago.
I guess this shows you how long it takes a big company to ship software, because there's no way they started this project after 2022.
I was right since the beginning, the cryptocurrency fad was a test, to both harden and crowdfund the development of a CBDC
To make people perhaps want to "want" it
https://www.edps.europa.eu/press-publications/publications/t...
https://www.federalreserve.gov/central-bank-digital-currency...
What's interesting tho, is Brazil (Lula's administration), let Visa acquire their crypto fintech Pismo last year
https://investor.visa.com/news/news-details/2023/Visa-to-Acq...
Ethereum’s smart contracts are inherently insecure. Look at all the money lost through oracle hacks and bridge attacks. If crypto ever becomes viable, mark my words - Ethereum will not be that platform.
I wish we could still do gas rebates, the sub 1 gwei prices on Ethereum right now are the perfect time to load up when gas prices skyrocket again
That’s unless they’re building on an Ethereum rollup, similar to what Sony and Coinbase are doing
OotL: (Why) don't gas future contracts work no more? Did they nerf the "refund-discount-on-free" hack?
They still exist but were nerfed in 2021’s London hard fork
Maybe a good time to renew ENS
because the gas is cheap for transactions? and visa going to bring attention to the network
A Visa run corollary to the ethereum blockchain? Why wouln't a bank just issue its own ERC-20 token?
Its a package of friction reducing things that simply launching a standard or non standard erc20 token doesnt do
Blockchain and b2b banking infrastructure seems like a more sensible use case, since the transaction processing infrastructure can be offloaded to the ethereum network instead of the visa’s infrastructure for some kinds of transactions.
What used to take days may now only take minutes.
Unless this is just another avenue for speculative trading…
I always had a dumb question on this.
Say I'm Walmart and I want to adopt blockchain to hold distributors accountable or whatever usecase. Why does that have to be tied to some coin / why does it have to be public?
aka... I'm sure Walmart has (many) instances of things like free-open-source software like Postgres, Redis, etc.
Why not "blockchaind"? Big companies host their own infrastructure (or use it hosted by AWS). Why do we have to buy into this proof of work, proof of stake, public, tied to NFTs and memecoins crypto-currency for blockchain?
Why would anyone use a private blockchain instead of a regular database?
Byzantine generals not trusting each other
If your blockchain is private, you already need to approve and this trust each member.
That's why we had to bring in the Ponzinscheme Generals.
They don't have to trust each other, they just have to trust Walmart.
> What used to take days may now only take minutes.
A transaction is processed in 2-3 seconds on modern L1 blockchains
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