https://www.coindesk.com/tensions-emerge-between-hyperledger-blockchains-biggest-supporters
IBM has become a marketing engine with very little substance behind any of their products and services these days. Sad really. But it's interesting to see sawtooth being pushed forward and not just some centralized on IBM dlt Product.
https://blockmanity.com/news/cardanos-founder-says-that-the-sec-will-target-eos
Most of these were securities or flat out scams. And EOS was interesting till it was just a joke of a "company". But can the SEC target Companies that didn't actually offer tokens or do an ICO in the US or to US citizens?
https://pennylane.readthedocs.io/en/latest
Quantum computing and pennylane sandbox.
I agree a decentralized internet is needed, but many people don't like paying for things anymore or don't have an extra buck to send an individual email. The other reality is companies like at&t and Comcast collect just as much data and are forgotten, ignored or thought to be the cost of living.
Skynet and 1984 and big brother has been freely given away and created and we didn't care.
https://www.thedrum.com/news/2018/12/11/consumers-go-cold-automated-chatbots-finds-acquia-research
" Widespread dissatisfaction with the service provided by chatbots has done nothing to dent the enthusiasm of marketers, with 80% of CMOs either already using the technology or planning to do so by 2020 according to a separate Oracle survey."
I played around with chatbots and smart chatbots a couple years back. I still lived in California when a friend and I thought about a health and wellness chatbot for new and expecting parents. Never figured the monetary business model for it though and it was early stages before things like dialogflow basically abstracted away natural language processing (NLP).
It was interesting how you had to come up with a natural conversation flow script. Otherwise it be kind of a dumb chatbot like we had in the early 90s.
Fast forward to the world of Alexa and Google home and Siri and even my kids call Alexa dumb. At least Google hole explores the internet a little better. But I don't think it's Technology problem as it's a customer centric problem. Companies have offshored support to places like India for years. And you'd speak to a Tom Smith who wasn't a Tom Smith pretending to live in the same state as you. And they spoke English very poorly and read from a limited script.
They were the human version of a dumb chatbot, sadly. Deviate away from that script and it was a useless phone call and nothing good would come out of it. But wow, pay nothing to create a dumb chatbot with the same weak script and little programmatic or NLP or rules and you get a worse version of the offshore customer support human being that people hated for years. No wonder chatbots are useless.
A tier one, two, three model makes sense , but a dumbed down version of a cheap Sweatshop like human being customer support center becomes a get what you pay for and why most of these chatbots offer a few lines and not much else .
From the report,
"
blockchain has the potential to significantly cut trade costs by increasing transparency and facilitating processes automation, including financial intermediation, exchange rate costs, coordination, and other aspects. “The removal of barriers due to blockchain could result in more than $ 1 trillion of new trade in the next decade
"
https://www.coindesk.com/ethereum-developers-are-quietly-planning-an-accelerated-tech-roadmap
Interesting possibilities in 2019. But accelerated roadmaps and timelines make sense If more developers are involved, otherwise it's a system already with vulnerabilities probably adding more because they want speed over quality. Happens all the time everywhere, but not always good thing.
The other interesting tidbit is renting costs for the storage of smart contracts. I understand why they need to do it. 1TB isn't something most people are going to want to download as a miner or eventual staker. But if you build a dapp and have to pay digitalocean for the front end web mobile app portion; then pay for gas; and pay for storj or ipfs for regular file storage; and then pay to rent space for your smart contract ...
At some point it's an expensive experiment and gets into why would anybody build real applications on it ? Most companies and startups aren't going to benefit a ton compared to the costs of these new systems. And it's already a challenge to get normal people to want to use blockchain and crypto.
The bigger challenge is not everything needs to be written to the blockchain. So you can avoid certain gas like Costs. I guess you can say not everything needs to be a smart contract. But the more things like state channels and side chains and JavaScript front end logic is needed, what exactly is decentralized about most of it ?
