News: Oracle Blockchain, Cloudflare bans website miners, securing bitcoins, IBM Watson hype, Bitcoin paleo diet

  • Oracle is introducing Blockchain on the Oracle Cloud! Specifically, hosted Hyperledger Fabric. Speaking from inside the IT industry, as far as I can tell Oracle is regarded as the “me too” cloud provider — Amazon for most people, Microsoft Azure for Windows shops, Google if you want to set up a second source to Amazon, Ali’s clone of Amazon if you’re doing business in China — and trust in Oracle is not very high. (Ask anyone who’s finally replaced Oracle’s database and never wants to speak to Oracle licensing — otherwise known as the “Postgres Marketing Department” — ever again.) So this looks like an attempt to differentiate themselves. They joined Hyperledger in late August; I can’t see any public code contributions as yet.
  • Compare the “IBM Blockchain” hype cycle to this piece on the IBM Watson hype cycle. “The promise of AI integration into products was dangled to him routinely but never materialized … It was all proof of concept.”
  • For that last, note Matt Levine at Bloomberg’s successful July prediction:

    The conventional wisdom is that cryptocurrency is about re-learning all of the lessons of modern finance in a sped-up way … But what if it’s the opposite? What if the story arc of cryptocurrency is about traveling back in time? First bitcoin was a way to make electronic payments without using banks; now it is a way to keep money in a safe deposit box at a bank without being able to use it to make payments; at this rate, in a decade, it will be a face-to-face barter system. By 2050, bitcoin users will undiscover fire.



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