...by Daniel Szego
quote
"On a long enough timeline we will all become Satoshi Nakamoto.."
Daniel Szego

Thursday, March 31, 2016

Notes on Agile software development


The role of Agile development is sometimes pretty much overestimated. Actually, the problem is that in most of the agile development methods it is supposed that the specification and the deliveries can be changed sprint by sprint or delivery by delivery. However most of the software projects have got a fix budget and a fix delivery time that is pretty much a contradiction....

Wednesday, March 30, 2016

Notes on infrastructure reversal


I heard today a great and genial presentation from Andreas M. Antonopoulos about Bitcoin and he used an analogy that is pretty much existing: that is infrastructure reversal at appearance of a new emerging technology. He used three examples for demonstration: 

Automobile industry: well nowadays it seems to be trivial that driving by car is much better than riding a horse, however at the appearance or invention of the car the situation was much less trivial. Most of the roads were "optimised" for horses and the lack of petrol stations actually implied that driving a car was less effective, slower, more complicated, more expensive than riding a horse. From pure economical point of view the automobile industry did not have the chance: there were no need for better asphalt streets and more petrol stations because there were not enough demand : people who drove care. There were no demand for more cars, because due to the lack of infrastructure the it was actually worse than riding a horse. Despite slowly the infrastructure has been changed, giving place for asphalt roads and petrol stations provided a better infrastructure to the cars, but allowing riding the horse as well....

Electricity: a similar process can be recognized by making light and heating with electricity. As actually infrastructure for gas provided both the infrastructure and technology for heating and lighting houses, actually there were no need for electricity. As there were no infrastructure for electricity, it was not very much logical to use electricity, on the contrary as there were not too many customers for electricity there were not very much logical to invest in the infrastructure itself. Despite a couple of 10 years later there only electricity used for lights and sometimes for heating as well...

Internet: imagine the heroic age for internet, you use the classical telephony network that is highly optimized only for voice transfer with modems to transfer data. It is actually a big fight, the network is optimized for voice transfer, having to filter only a couple of Kbytes, so transferring data is not easy. From a supply - demand perspective it is not very much logical that the situation changes: there is not really a good transfer for data, so it makes not really sense to invest into the technology. On the other hand there is not enough people who uses the internet, so there is no sense to invest into the infrastructure. Despite only a couple of years later, there are practically only digital transfer possibilities optimized for data and even voice transfer is released on the top of digital transfer....  

After that I would have just three questions...

Microeconomics:  Why did supply and demand model not work in these examples ? Or did I learned only bullshit from this subject ?

Cloud ?: Do we have the same effect with cloud ? Will we have in 5 years something like on-premise infrastructure or just special parts of the cloud ?

Blockchain ?: Do we have the same effect with Blockchain or Bitcoin ? Do we have in 10 years something like national central banks, or just special implementations of the Blockchain ?



Thursday, March 24, 2016

Notes on Blockchain Apps

Bitcoin and Blockchain technologies seem to live theirs second hype cycle. The focus however seem to be chaining. Previously the major focus seem to be to create new digital currencies, like BitcoinLitecoin or for instance Dogcoin. However the focus is getting to go to technologies that are build on the Blockchain technology but not necessarily focusing on a digital currency, rather general applications as well, like private decentralized web sites (Zeronet), or blockchain based contracts (Smart Contracts) or Smart Property. It is however more interesting that not only out of the box products (or perhaps I should say networks) are possible, but general development framework as well. As an example Ethereum provides not only a general Blockchain product but rather a framework that allows to build further applications on the top, the so called decentralized Apps or simply Dapps. As of course it is still questionable if ethereum will succeed on the market, despite such platforms provide the opportunity for individual developers or developer companies to create small scale projects and application without the challenges of a whole product development.