Bitcoin Forum

The article: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/11/30/blockchain_study_finds_0_per_cent_success_rate/

My thoughts:

People were telling "Blockchain, not Bitcoin" for so many years, but the reality is the exact opposite. Bitcoin's technology is showing so many progress, we have adopted SegWit, LN is on mainnet for a year, even though it's still in beta, developers are discussing potential features. Bitcoin keeps growing, both in price and in number of users.
Meanwhile, blockchain fails to show any noticeable results during the last 3-4 years, so many talking, so many millions invested in ICO's, so many money spent on test and research and barely anyone actually uses it.

Blockchain is a separate entity from bitcoin now since many services are wanting to get their own version of the blockchain for their own private gain. What else would you expect on a tech that's being utilized by a lot of companies for their own good, while the rest of the open-source developments are only for tweaking and no major update on the existing code. Anyways the bottomline is many companies are creating their own blockchains, and we might not see how those things work, so the development might still be underway but we won't see them since they're being kept as secrets by the companies that are creating them.

Well, are you sure about Bitcoin growing in price and number of users?

In respect to price, we can see that it is not growing (and far from that), so you kinda have to check your sources. But how do you know that the number of Bitcoin users is actually increasing? What metric are you looking at specifically? Number of wallets (addresses)? Given that any user can create any number of addresses, it is a useless and utterly misleading metric

Other that that, I agree that Bitcoin is the epitome of the blockchain, while cryptocurrencies in general are likely the best use cases that this technology could potentially have. That's why they are evolving while the blockchain doesn't (outside cryptocurrencies)

The future of the blockchain tech will be the private blockchains. Medium/Large companies have the financial resources to invest massively in. In a near future, we will probably use it without knowing. 3-4 years isn't a lot to "blockchainize" a company. As it's new probably most of them are still in their research phase (at the beginning). And if you don't see them talking about is because there is a financial side in

Thank you for pointing that out, because if you didn't I would have.  The statement that "bitcoin increases day by day" or words to that effect get parroted all over the forum, even when it's obvious that it's not true.

When I used to frequent the old JREF forum (for skeptics, in case you never heard of it), some of the members there used to call bitcoin a solution in search of a problem--meaning that it doesn't solve any current problems the world is having.  While I don't completely agree with that, it does not surprise me in the least that bitcoin hasn't been more widely adopted than it has.  The average person isn't looking for a new form of currency and would not see the purpose of paying for something in a currency that you'd have to buy somewhere and hope that volatility doesn't cause it to lose value before you can spend it.

As far as blockchain in general, I don't hear anything in real life about how it's changing the way people do things and I'm not sure if it's going to solve any problems that need solving.  Granted, I'm not an expert in blockchain tech--not even close--but it's been around for 10 years now and you'd think that corporations/governments/individuals would have latched onto it by now if it would be to their advantage.

Haven't read the article OP linked to yet, but I'm going to right now.

Edit:  Read it, and I liked this quote:

That's exactly what all these ICO projects are doing, promising that their tech will revolutionize whatever industry they're targeting, and the only ones who make money from them are the devs.  Everyone else loses out when they're stuck with a token that's not even traded on an exchange.  Can anyone show me a successful ICO where the project is actually benefiting something/someone other than the project developers?

Considering the number of useless icos and shitcoins out there i am surprised it is only 43. I guess the other crap projects have marginal use as 1 person might use it as a case study

The good thing is cryptocurrencies can be easily modified to suit any demand or utility, hence it can technically be applied to different use cases. I do not see any need ro alienate cryptocurrency from blockchain.

OP is late with his post (article) at least for a couple of years


This is my thought exactly (which I decided not to dwell on in my post)

Nevertheless, I can give you one example where the blockchain technology can make a difference, actually a life-changing one, though it doesn't have anything to do with corporations in particular and business in general. The blockchain technologies can really help with the electoral system by making it totally transparent and incorruptible (we just need its Satoshi Nakamoto to pop up). It kinda goes without saying that the corrupted governments will never agree to a possibility of tamper-proof elections, but that's a different question


It's in fact an age-old adage about selling shovels in a gold rush

Perhaps I've choose my words poorly, what I've meant is that over the course of the last 3-5 years, the period when people were actively saying "Blockchain, not Bitcoin", Bitcoin's price increased by a lot, which I think is a sign of trust. Even the current bear market is in my opinion not a sign of weakness, but totally normal considering the prices during the last bull period.


I too agree and disagree with this statement. Bitcoin is not going to achieve mass adoption and replace fiat, like many people here think, but Bitcoin has many uses, and there will always be people who value their freedom and privacy, even if they are a minority. And "a solution in search of a problem" sounds like a perfect description of blockchain, rather than Bitcoin.

Bitcoin won't ever be successful if the majority of user are using it in the centralized exchange and ignore their own privacy/anonymity. Nowadays Bitcoin is getting away from the original vision and mission which is to use it in decentralized, open, borderless, trustless ways. Those kinds of purpose are disregarding by most of the community. The goal of Bitcoin and how we measure the success of Bitcoin is when we are using it in decentralized ways without any centralized entity, borderless without worrying any regulations, and trustless.

a regression of all price history shows an uptrend, so yeah, it's growing (until proven otherwise). you would have to cherry pick and ignore pre-2018 data to say it's not growing.


all metrics of public usage can be gamed by wallet generation, spamming, spinning up economically irrelevant nodes, etc so i agree, those need to be taken with a grain of salt.

i simply defer to price, since price discovery represents supply and demand at any given moment. so i'm banking on the long term price trend as being representative of the trend in user growth. (think metcalfe's law)

Your approach clearly demonstrates why it should be taken with a grain of salt and followed with caution (read, avoided)

Basically, you simply look at the stats without taking into account the underlying forces that move the markets. I suspect that in the dotcom era there were enough people who also looked at the data when everything had already begun collapsing and thought along the same lines ("you cherry pick and ignore previous data"). If it worked like that, we would all have been billionaires by now, while in actuality most of us are hapless bagholders

It looks like a satire website to me.
Look at all the other "news" from the source, most of them look like satire and written in a language that doesn't take anything seriously. Blockchain and bitcoin has been in a war between the supporters because of big places praising blockchain instead of bitcoin and bitcoin supporters saying they are connected and all that so I understand the need to find ways to demonize blockchain.

But in reality, there is absolutely no reason to get panic since this source doesn't seem to be reputable source of knowledge. You can see them mocking almost everything in technology world and talking about companies like they are small business or something. Be supportive of both bitcoin and blockchain, they are both amazing inventions.

I think that people generalize the term crypto too much these days.

When people talk about investing in crypto, they are often talking about investing in crypto-based projects that have tokenized securities. These projects are very rarely worth investing in my opinion and the vast majority of them are only there to get their owners money.

Even though this sample size of the study may be small, it does tell a clear tale. Real, decentralized cryptocurrencies like bitcoin that aren't profit driven rarely will need public investments. Low success rate should be expected when there isn't even a problem to begin with, even though they are trying to solve it.

It's not a satire website: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theregister.co.uk

The article refers to this article as their source: http://merltech.org/blockchain-for-international-development-using-a-learning-agenda-to-address-knowledge-gaps/

Blockchain is hardly amazing, because both ICO's and traditional startups and companies are full of scams, and to this day there are no truly big success stories of blockchain being used by big companies. Instead, we head years of hype and empty statements that led to nothing. There were tons of articles about companies and organizations saying "we are going to use blockchain for...", and then it was the last thing we ever heard about blockchain from them.

Maybe there will be or already are some legitimately good use cases for blockchain, but by seeing how rare they are, I can safely conclude that Bitcoin is far more important and impactful.

Blockchain was integrated with bitcoin so how come bitcoin became successful while blockchian was not? All I know that blockchain was being integrated for bitcoin because bitcoin has its feature which is the peer to peer transactions and does not need any possible third parties. This is why block chain became so important. Now, Bitcoin and block chain is considered as one and vital to each other. I do not think that blockchain is a failure.

I think you make incorrect comparisons and draw incorrect conclusions

The scams you mention are only using the term as a buzz word to attract guileless investors. They could use any other word (provided it attracts people as honey attracts bees), I don't know what they were using in the dotcom era, let it be Internet, for example. Does it take anything from the technology itself if these ICO's and startups had never really intended to deliver a working product in the first place, based on the blockchain or whatever else?


This point most of us can safely agree with

if they say like that maybe they just want to give bad news so that it will make many traders affected and will make the minds of traders confused to stay afloat or sell their assets.

i do believe that the heart of the problem lies in the attitude of people. they don't really want any progress, they instead want to make money so  the altcoin developers aren't developing anything anymore, instead they give them what they want which is pump and dump shitcoins for maximum profitability.
there are still good innovations going on among altcoins though. but sadly they are always at the bottom of all the lists because they don't get pumped.

It's only the beginning. This is a very young market, but I am sure that the future is in the blockchain. We just observe the tip of the iceberg, but we do not see it completely. Many developments with the use of the blockchain are conducted as covertly as possible in order to prevent competitors from learning about developments. It takes years to get a good, finished product. It is possible that in a few years we will see working projects on the blockchain. With ICO, the situation is different. Many projects in due time using HYIP collected money without having either useful ideas or an exact project implementation plan. And many of the ICO just copied the already created projects.

The article is pretty vague. It does not mention the specific cases and issues (apart from scalability) related to blockchain. I agree with dothebeats that we have reasons to look at bitcoin and blockchain separately. Let's start with bitcoin. Is it suitable for transactions in supermarkets or other cases in which a lot of small transactions are performed in a short period of time? Probably not. At the same time, it's awesome for transactions that involve a significant amount of money and should be performed, say, within a day (SWIFT transfers suck). As for blockchain, it has shown to be successful for voting and purchasing tickets, from what I can recall, and I am sure there are many other areas where it can be effective.

I think blockchain is not fail technology, its work technology. Blockchain technology will adopted by banks and for bussiness company. Blockchain is different with cryptocurrency or ICOs. Cryptocurrency is long term investment and i think it will work and used for payment in near future

even after about 10 years, the blockchain and bitcoin have not had an impressive impact at all, it looks like this will also apply for the next few years? do you agree with that?
so it's more or less just like moving assets from someone to another person and vice versa, and also with some of third party  ;D

You are absolutely correct.

The article makes it seem like that bitcoin is the problem here, but it's really got nothing to do with bitcoin.

If anything, this should be called an analysis on the success rates blockchain startups which use sort of an IPO structure to raise funds in the beginning. It's not a surprise to me that the success rate is so low even though again, the article may be completely biased with their data collection and wanting to make a sensationalist headline.

Most of these so called blockchain startups have absolutely no substance with their project, and their end goal is raising the money that they need, and not to develop their projects to their fullest extent. Most of these also aren't regulated by anyone. That's the underlying problem here. Not bitcoin.

 I myself see that people currently interested in blockchain are mostly because of the tantalizing price of bitcoin to become an investment commodity not because of the actual function of the blockchain and bitcoin itself, so it's natural that a lot of research says that the successful blockchain project is 0% because most people don't see the function of the ICO blockchain-based application project but from the price offered whether it is profitable or not, and ignores the function of the blockchain application.

wherever, the product is always the best while supporting technology is only a complement. there is no supporting technology that actually defeats the popularity of the product itself. for example, a credit card from a bank, and the technology, then the conversation is the credit card, not the system or technology behind it. this is a very normal thing.

Blockchain is what made Bitcoin. Without Blockchain we wouldn't have Bitcoin. Thus, when you say that there is a progress in Bitcoin this is because the blockchain got upgraded.

They have turned the word of Bitcoin to Blockchain because it hears better in Marketing terms. Bitcoin is regulated and it has been attacked from media many times. It is better to state Blockchain for this way.

You can't really equate blockchain and all Bitcoin's technology, because blockchain is only one part of Bitcoin's stack. Using proof of work for timestamping is another important invention of Satoshi that gets overlooked most of the time, and many people even claim that it's inefficient or outdated, while in reality this is what makes Bitcoin truly trustless. The other aspects of Bitcoin are game theoretic approach, open network of nodes, ability for every user to verify everything, valuing security and stability over reckless experiments are all not present in most of the blockchain use cases.

Whether this will improve or deteriorate, it depends on how the Blockchain users currently look. If they use the perspective like 4-5 years ago, it won't give any change within, or even it will get worse. More stuff about getting instant profit will come.