Sunday, March 31, 2019

Who killed Blockchain?

We have all been to a notary to complete a transaction or an application for important events in our lives. The general procedure involves one signing/dating the document followed by a signature/stamp from the notary. The notary also makes a entry into his/her ledger. The purpose of the ledger to some time in the future validate the notarization. Now what if we had a technology that automagically places all the millions of entries across hundreds of thousands of notaries into a access controlled ledger on the internet? That would enable notarization by any citizen, entity not in the bad books of society. It would enable cross border notarization (read trade). Extend this use case further and you could apply this technology to validate your credentials, your deeds on your assets, your birth/death/marriage records. This technology would fundamentally change the way humans are organized today.Everybody agrees it would be great to have this technology flourish, but alas I read it obituary everyday.

To understand why, I would invite you to watch the movie who killed the electric car? There is something in the movie for both bulls and bears of blockchain. The bulls will say but wait.. EVs are not dead and so there is hope for blockchain. Bears will say, but those tactics (like filing patents and locking up competitive innovation) worked as it delayed the  EV for several decades. (My own first experience with EV was Sun's Java car in 1999). I think blockchain is going through one of those moments where the ones whose empires will fall ("trusted intermediaries") first joined the party and then played party pooper.

Llama 3 - More ways to run it, but still nothing new

 Llama 3 is out and getting to it can be a challenge. The approval email's URL expires in 24 hours. It can take 8hrs to download. But af...