More clickbait blockchain nonsense articles

I read an article today on wine, alcohol and supply chain and rolled my eyes. 
Things like "…that solution is blockchain…Big companies like Walmart and large grocery stores are already using blockchain to manage supply chain management especially when it comes to food. "

No, no they really aren't. Most of these big companies are actually full of it. They were full of it in the early big data and hadoop days.  They are full of it with the AI and machine learning and data science marketing pitches.  And they are definitely full of it when it comes to blockchain. Many do test.  Many don't have the time, resources or care.  And many don't even like new potentially disruptive Technologies.  Ever. 

Decentralized blockchain?  Yeah Wal-Mart and Amazon and the big banks are all for that.  Not.  They are more for testing private permissioned centralized blockchains. And really there is some need for a system that doesn't give all the transaction information to the world. Transportation and logistics and suppliers have tons of deals and contracts. 

Maybe in due time things will change, but Wal-Mart isn't showing the world how cheap or how difficult it is to negotiate with them.  Or worse , for the vendors, partners and Distributors, killing their price points and value.  

So when people on medium or other social media platforms start writing how it's all changing, maybe they should dig a little deep and provide actually facts and evidence of this. 

In theory these things are great, in reality the Wal-Mart's of the world aren't going to productionize a public decentralized etherium based blockchain system.  In fact Wal-Mart partnered with IBM and made two patents for some kind of "blockchain". 

We know Wal-Mart tried to build their own payment system before and it sucked.  They tried to build their own Netflix at one point too.   Now it seems they want another logistics like payment system and a blockchain that will act like a database.

  It doesn't solve any problem though. If Wal-Mart controls the Walmart blockchain system, that defeats the entire purpose of a decentralized immutable ledger. And why would any one trust Wal-Mart or IBM? 

All we see are many of these big firms jumping on the bandwagon and trying to create another version of a centralized controlled system. And patent it no less, so it's not even open source.  But the clickbait articles jump on this nonsense.

https://medium.com/@jpvehovic/craft-beer-blockchain-32f52feaa31c

What is Hashgraph video explained...

https://youtu.be/RDLdGsDX41s

Help or more dystopian government control ?

Austin , Texas is piloting a program for putting the homeless population on the blockchain. Sounds great and great for society in general. There are some others around the globe attempting something similar.  There is a huge need for poor people and affordable housing as well as homelessness in many many cities and rural areas.  

  But will this be a program to help the homeless or a pseudo subtle attempt to control and know everything about everything and everyone by government agencies and corporations ?  

I used to think a blockchain ID system was the perfect use case for many verticals and industries.  Now it's starting to look like another attempt at control by your typical governments and mega corporations.

  Will it help the homeless or just be another tool to control more people? 

Problem with blockchain and cryptocurrency

The underlying Technology behind blockchain and cryptocurrencies has phenomenal possibilities.  Even using  things like tangles and DAG graph theory (Hashgraph and IOTA in a sense) can change logistics and IOT.   The problem is it's a bunch of fake news. Hype nonsense.  Faux advisors who are snake oil salesmen and sales women with a fancy suit and nice story, not much else. 

Decentralized and disruption?  Not really, it's worse than the dot com and COBOL 1999 ending the world nonsense.  It's clickbait and paid shills on all the media websites. It's great  peer reviews but no real world use case. Or private investors like Goldman Sachs under some other name pumping money into a 'decentralized' company. 

The problem with Ethereum is it's not even decentralized. Most of these blockchains and cryptocurrencies and platforms are not.  Add the ICO and crowd funding and crowd building and crowd marketing nature and it's a lot of wanna be Steve Jobs and Elon Musks and Mark Zuckerbergs.

  At least Bitcoin has a person or person(s) that disappeared years ago and isn't pimping it out at every  conference and Meetup and on social media.  Yes it has core developers that have opinions and ideas and eventual forks, but that's no different than most Apache open source projects.  Then again that's not exactly decentralized or autonomous either. 

And then you have the IBM nonsense. A company with a CEO that should have been fired years ago and an organization that's been irrelevant for twenty years.  Great they built a machine to win on Jeopardy.  Now they pimp that out like it's some advanced AI system.  And they jump on the blockchain bandwagon selling more nonsense and marketing bull.

IBM is a joke and in a year or two they will abandon hyperledger and jump to something new or different.  It's what they do. Any company tying themselves to some IBM backed  hyperledger stellar blockchain is asking to redo it all by 2020.  That's what IBM does.  They did it with Hadoop and big data. They are a terribly run organization.   Why anyone would pay them to use their Technology is confusing to me.  The old saying was "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" should now be "anybody should be fired for buying IBM." Run from them. 

   The problem with blockchain really is it's become just like most of the internet.  It's all based on lies and fake stories.  "Oh build the future" and have nothing more than a white paper.  And sometimes not even that. Oh let's name it Kodak coin or ice tea on the blockchain or whatever. 

The blockchain really needs to be decentralized. And used for what it's good at , not based on some fantasy from people who have no idea how most of the technology actually works. But hey raise 100 million because people are idiots and listen to someone selling them the moon.

There are tons of possibilities and opportunities, but until the nonsense fades and the moon, hodl, and lambo shills fade, it'll be all hype. Until then the people actually building the infrastructure and scale and real world use cases will build in silence, in a sense.  

ElasticSearch at CoinBase

https://youtu.be/u5j0MOpIkV0

ElasticSearch and big data on Coinbase.  Cool presentation on how they implented ElasticSearch. 

Tangles, DAGs, and IOTA

https://youtu.be/I_jNH9BlEEo

In IOTA every user is a 'miner' and it's not really a blockchain, but Tangles , DAGs and graph theory in a sense.   Good video.

POS vs POW challenges still ahead

https://medium.com/@hugonguyen/proof-of-stake-the-wrong-engineering-mindset-15e641ab65a2

Great write up on the consensus challenges for POS.  POW has proven to work at scale on various cryptocurrencies.  POS still seems in it's academic infancy as far as moving forward into the Proof of Stake less energy utilization world of cryptocurrency and blockchain.