Master Card, Cisco, and Scotiabank Join the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance

https://entethalliance.org/enterprise-ethereum-alliance-becomes-worlds-largest-open-source-blockchain-initiative/

by 52-6F-62 • 9 years ago

448 163 9 years ago

entethalliance.org

33W• 9 years ago

I see the mastercard logo, but not included in the list.

tyrust2• 9 years ago

See this reddit comment (https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/6o2o3d/enterprise...):

AK on behalf of EEA here. Mastercard is indeed a new member of EEA. They asked not to be in the press release document but approved being on the EEA official website. They may be doing their own communications on this.

45h34jh53k4j• 9 years ago

If you are into the EEA, you should check it out its cousin, the Monero Enterprise Alliance: https://mea.business/

086421357909764• 9 years ago

I've heard great things about their fungability.

wmf• 9 years ago

I find the backstory pretty funny (because I didn't lose money, of course): One of the leaders of Monero decided to red-team his own community. http://bitsonline.com/fluffypony-speaks-troll-monero-market/

OJFord• 9 years ago

Slightly off-topic: it's a pretty unfortunate acronym, also standing for European Economic Area.

52-6F-628• 9 years ago

I heard the head of R&D (of Scotiabank) talk at a conference a little over a month ago and at the time he made it seem like Scotiabank had experimented with existing cryptocurrencies and blockchain tech and were disatisfied and thought it would be some time before the technology was approachable for their bank. I guess they were just playing coy.

sputknick• 9 years ago

Or, that statement is true, but the genuinely want to explore blockchain technology and thought joining the EEA would be the best way to do that.

52-6F-628• 9 years ago

Quite possible. They've definitely obfuscated their hand. Their R&D department is respectable, I have to say, so I'm sure whatever approach they're taking is measured.

Seeing as the EEA is primarily a group to coordinate research and development on this implementation of blockchain tech, it makes sense to join even as an investigation into it.

mbloom1915• 9 years ago

I too saw that guy speak and spoke to him before he went on. Oddly dismissive of all things crypto/blockchains....

52-6F-628• 9 years ago

At BigDataTO/AIToronto?

There was a lot of positivity toward blockchain tech on whole. My favourite was Dr. Dan McGillivray (Associate, Yeates School of Graduate Studies)[0] dept discussing Toronto's [and Brooklyn's] microgrid projects.

I really enjoyed Suhail's[1] talk. He came from engineering as I recall, so as a lead he was very in tune with the technicals. He was also very cautious. I don't think he was too down on blockchain tech as a potential solution for certain problems (otherwise why bother experimenting), but he was very clear about their sentiment toward existing cryptocurrencies. However, I'm starting to think maybe he was referring more to Bitcoin because of the selection of his audience -- which was largely bankers and other corporate non-technicals receiving an introduction to new tech.

But overall the sentiment seemed to lean toward positivity, even if it was not directed at a singular implementation.

[0] https://www.canadianinstitute.com/ontario-power-277w15-tor/s...

[1] https://twitter.com/suhailshergill?lang=en

[1] https://github.com/suhailshergill

dx0345• 9 years ago

Being part of such an alliance is helpful to make sure that you can implement it once it works. It's probably not expensive for them to be part of the network and it gives them the chance to be one of the first to make use of it if they want.

lpasselin• 9 years ago

What are the advantages Ethereum has over Bitcoin, except faster transactions?

JoshTriplett• 9 years ago

More capable embedded code that can implement interesting criteria to be enforced on transactions.

benmowa• 9 years ago

I'm just learning but are there any real world examples of this yet? any idea what % of transactions utilize this today?

metroidfan8323• 9 years ago

That is a disadvantage. You can shoot yourself in the foot with real money.

mpfundstein• 9 years ago

a Turing complete scripting language for smart contracts that looks like Java

ajmurmann• 9 years ago

Looks like JavaScript

metroidfan8323• 9 years ago

That is not an advantage though.

JumpCrisscross2• 9 years ago

Better politics, internally and externally. Internally because the community isn't as hardcore. Externally because it hasn't been publicly associated with black markets the way Bitcoin has.

raesene9• 9 years ago

As a relative outsider, it doesn't seem to me like ethereum has a great history of good politics, given the whole DAO, hard fork, eth classic setup (https://www.cryptocompare.com/coins/guides/the-dao-the-hack-...)

wideem2• 9 years ago

ETH is a premined coin, that is also much more centralized that bitcoin

ojr• 9 years ago

the developer experience and tooling is easier the bitcoin I believe, it has an official javascript api for its blockchain, and also has a framework/language (Solidity) for creating financial applications on top of it

throwaway91111• 9 years ago

I would also list this in the "con" side. It can be very difficult to spot malicious bugs in the blockchain scripts.

metroidfan8323• 9 years ago

The price is lower and market less deep so it is easier to get rich by buying now.

skulquake2• 9 years ago

People like to compare the two but they are actually quite different. Bitcoin is supposed to be a store of value, Ethereum is a new decentralized web protocol. ETH is the gas used to power smart contracts on this protocol.

joeblau• 9 years ago

They are two different technologies for two different problems. Your question is analogous to asking what advantages gold has over oil.

Genrally:

- Bitcoin is a store of value token with the goal of becoming a decentralized reserve currency.

- Ethereum is a smart contracts token with the goal of turning all business operations into programmatic traceable transactions.

icelancer• 9 years ago

Aside from the technical upside of Ethereum, the community around BTC is about as toxic, fractured, and petty as it gets.

Torai• 9 years ago

The EEA describes itself as a standards group designed to help enterprises build their own interoperable technology, mostly using private versions of the ethereum blockchain.

Ether price soaring right now, but isn't Master Card's bussiness direct competition of the public Ethereum blockchain as a payment system?

52-6F-628• 9 years ago

They were reportedly doing research about two months ago into using Ripple as a cross border payment solution.[0]

Circle is using Ethereum presently for cross-border payments.

It might be that they're investigating Ethereum for a similar purpose.

[0] edited for link: http://www.amis.org.mx/amis/img/convenciones/2017/PDF/Plenar...

wuliwong• 9 years ago

I have always thought that but it just crossed my mind that credit cards are basically just terrible loans. You could still give out loans in cryptocurrencies. Maybe Master Card could just switch if a particular crypto currency gained wide adoption. They could start issuing new cards with some sort of technology that allowed for cryptocurrency transactions at businesses. Or maybe they can use existing card tech, I really don't know anything about that.

SomeStupidPoint• 9 years ago

What makes them terrible loans?

Also, much of the benefit of credit cards is from the fraud protection and mediation that companies provide -- it's not so much that they're loaning me $X00, but that they're covering the transaction details against fraudulent use and provide a dispute mechanism if don't feel the merchant has lived up to their offer post payment.

I find it much more likely that MC is trying to be the MC of cryptocurrencies -- eg, by packaging up a USB dongle that automates transactions using "secure" means, which they then insure against abuse. From that perspective, ETH makes a reasonable platform.

jerguismi3• 9 years ago

Credit card loads are the best to me as a consumer, since there is 0% interest for 1,5 month on average.

JackFr• 9 years ago

So maybe I don't understand this, but one of the purported advantages of cryptocurrencies is that the supply cannot be expanded by loose credit.

Thus it is seemingly impossible (to me at least) for a bank to for a bank to extend credit.

JustAnotherPat• 9 years ago

Not really. Ethereum payments sell on being trustless, which means you have to upfront the money. Mastercard deals in credit. You'll never get the benefits of a credit based system in ethereum. This is why all ethereum dapps stink so far too. People are used to exchanging trust for goods and perks.

tehlike• 9 years ago

mastercard deals in credit? banks deals in credit, mastercard is a payment network.

jethro_tell2• 9 years ago

I don't understand why the coin would increase in value, it's the tech that they are looking at, to use among themselves on private block chains.

DennisP3• 9 years ago

For now, because the public chain doesn't have the privacy and scalability they need. They expect that to change, and which point they plan to migrate some applications to the public chain. In the meantime they're being careful to stay compatible, and contributing development resources. Also JP Morgan has a client that bridges public and private chains.

Source: I watched the EEA conference, and some smaller presentations later.

joshschreuder• 9 years ago

Them using the tech privately is seen as an indication of support (or at least interest) in the platform. So the public coin benefits from exposure and validation of its tech.

heliumcraft• 9 years ago

Ethereum is a platform and is not meant to be a payment system per se. One can however build a payment system (and other things) on top of the platform.

jdlyga• 9 years ago

It's too bad that Etherium prices are down so much right now from a few weeks ago.

hackbinary• 9 years ago

Does that make it a good time to buy?

andrey-g• 9 years ago

yes

drcode• 9 years ago

It certainly makes "yesterday" a good day to buy.

nxsynonym• 9 years ago

It's only bad if you bought in at the peak expecting it to keep climbing.

ETH price fluctuates wildly. The latest dip had no real connection to any news, all speculation.

My advice: If you believe in the tech, buy in. If you are looking for a get-rich-quick investment, be prepared to lose a ton of money.

loceng2• 9 years ago

The only tech you need to technically believe in is that blockchain could be used as a currency - which it already does act as, and then it is a matter of adoption.

Veelox2• 9 years ago

It seems like Ethereum is getting a lot more industry support than Bitcoin ever did.

If Ethereum continues it looks like it could kill off Bitcon, the looming possibility of a hard fork might be contributing make that happen really soon.

jerguismi3• 9 years ago

Is this industry support, or more collaborative research project like R3?

I have talked to some bank representatives, and while they have been testing ethereum technology, they do it on their private chains on their private networks. No word of production use. In general banks seem to budget a lot of funds towards various r&d activity, on which majority of stuff never ends up anywhere.

52-6F-628• 9 years ago

It's industry support for this particular implementation of blockchain tech, which seems to have a validating effect on the larger community surrounding it.

There have been talks/speculation about interaction between the public chain and private chains in an analog to internet/intranet relationships -- that is, being of a common protocol.

Veelox2• 9 years ago

It might just be research on private chains for now but that is something I never saw someone as big as MasterCard do for Bitcoin.

TearsInTheRain• 9 years ago

The hard fork will likely have enough hash rate and industry support that it will go smoothly.

s_dev• 9 years ago

It seems like Ethereum is getting a lot more industry support than Bitcoin ever did.

Why do crypto currencies need industry support?

dx0345• 9 years ago

So that consumers without technical knowledge can profit from the technology.

CalChris• 9 years ago

I suppose the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance should be contrasted with IBM and friends Hyperledger. These are a couple of well backed consortia which from 30,000 feet are similar.

https://www.hyperledger.org/

2_listerine_pls• 9 years ago

What exactly is hyperledger solving?

jcousins• 9 years ago

From what I have seen and read, they aren't solving problems that haven't already been solved, merely attempting to improve the security and efficiency of a solution. One example they have touted is their work with Maersk on tracking shipping containers and their contents in a tamper-proof fashion as well as providing a way to interact with that data. Will any of this really result in greater efficiency, interoperability and savings? Time will tell.

iosDrone• 9 years ago

To the moon!

Asdfbla• 9 years ago

Always surprises me a bit because it seems to me like those large corporate players don't necessarily need all the features offered by Ethereum (or Bitcoin), especially proof-of-work, since there's enough non-adversarial cooperation between them that a simple distributed ledger with traditional (efficient) consensus mechanisms would suffice for most of their applications. They wouldn't have to deal with the drawbacks of Ethereum's very strict threat model.

I'm curious what applications they have in mind, or if they maybe just participate to get in on the hype and explore their options.

lifeisstillgood• 9 years ago

> maybe just participate to get in on the hype and explore their options.

Yes. Or rather a small group in the company, that is trying to get political advantage, improve its profile, or simply impress the boss' boss, put together a convincing internal reason to join the alliance, and with high enough backing it becomes real. Something like that project was undoubtedly tried in every major bank and finance house - the few that got through shows that the internal decision making at those other places is actually working quite well :-)

PretzelPirate• 9 years ago

Those companies are using Ethereum without PoW in their private networks. They plug in a different consensus model.

kaoD• 9 years ago

Are they? I know it's possible but I can't think of a single use where traditional software and/or contracts are more convenient.

What does Ethereum with no PoW bring to the table?

bo1024• 9 years ago

I don't understand what you mean by this. To my understanding, the companies' transactions/data are either on the Ethereum blockchain or not. Do you mean that they are using some other type of distributed ledger algorithm unconnected to Ethereum?

cptskippy• 9 years ago

EDI and other JIT Hub technologies have nonrepudiation as a core feature. I always wondered if blockchain could be adapted for that. If so then it would make sense for almost every B2B interaction.

avip• 9 years ago

Why the assumption they have "applications" in mind?

Big-corps sit on piles of cash. They have an "innovation department". They have VC arm. They throw money in accelerators, they organise fintech hackathons, They invest in small startups. They do many a strange thing with their money!

EDIT:

just participate to get in on the hype

This.

taysic• 9 years ago

I thought this Factom video was interesting, describing how companies like BoA paid billions of dollars in fines due to fraud in mortgages. Presumably, if the documents were on the block chain this could be adverted.

https://youtu.be/2Dj3qZeSLdY

spocklivelong• 9 years ago

I'm really surprised at seeing Govt. of Andhra Pradesh here. Curious how they got here in the first place.

Angostura• 9 years ago

Microlending applications?

otto_ortega• 9 years ago

Based on this, it seems to me that financial corporations didn't want to take the risk of decentralized crypto-currencies making them obsolete, so they decided to create their own crypto-currency, one they can control...

komaromy2• 9 years ago

Regardless of your opinions about Ethereum, its origins were decidedly non-corporate.

avaer• 9 years ago

According to Wikipedia it was started as, and at, a Swiss corporation, followed by raising a crowd investment.

So it was a funded corporation before it was a cryptocurrency.

colordrops• 9 years ago

That is the opposite of the truth.

cmurf• 9 years ago

Andhra Pradesh, one of the four who have joined this alliance in the announcement, is a state of India. Visakhapatnam is its largest city, with just about 50 million people, more than the state of California.

dx0345• 9 years ago

And it's great to see that they're interested in the technology. Blockchain could be a great way for governments to keep track of data in a transparent way and could potentially be implemented much cheaper than current database solutions.

wideem2• 9 years ago

Ethereum as a currency will never go mainstream with a price swings like this

companyhen• 9 years ago

It's still very young, and I think there may be multiple dApps built with eth that will be used in real life in the next 5 years.

smnplk• 9 years ago

maybe, but hundreds will just sit there without gas :)

sailingparrot• 9 years ago

Enterprise Ethereum Alliance is not about the currency, so I fail to see how this is relevant.

julian_1• 9 years ago

There are various price-stable currency projects hosted on the eth/evm, backed by uncorrelated off-chain and on-chain collateral.

flashmob• 9 years ago

Unlike bitcoin which was originally intended to be used by the consumer for paying for real-world things, ETH is mostly intended to be used for paying for 'gas' in order to execute code in the virtual machine. The good thing is that gas and ETH have been decoupled, which means that the gas prices are always constant, and what you pay per transaction tends to get automatically adjusted based on the price of Ether, so transaction costs don't fluctuate as much.

What you're probably interested in are "Stable Coins", crypto that is pegged to a fiat currency such as the USD or EUR. It may be possible that stable coins may be developed to run on top of Ethereum as smart contracts. One interesting project under development is Maker Dao, see https://makerdao.com/

dx0345• 9 years ago

No crypto-currency will be mainstream because payment verification takes longer. Credit cards can now confirm a payment in less than a second with contactless payments.

Where those technologies will rather be used is in the background. Storing those payments or access to details across companies could be done more efficiently than currently.

abrkn• 9 years ago

At this time, there are 78 comments to this post, none of them addressing technical concerns. Quite unusual for HN.

I've devoted my life to cryptocurrency since 2011 and still question whether or not this system even makes sense. It seems too expensive with the technology we have today. Once privacy, such as zk-SNARK, is added, it becomes unreasonable.

Perhaps this is what a bubble looks like. I wasn't there for the dotcom boom. Loss of critical thinking.

vm• 9 years ago

Really intrigued by your comment!

Could you elaborate on what drives the high cost? Or what would need to change for this to viable?

hudon6• 9 years ago

Decentralized validation and ordering of transactions is expensive. In Bitcoin, it requires:

1. Miners to validate 1MB of transactions every 10 minutes

2. Users to be able to confirm that the entire chain of transactions was properly validated by the miners

Some ways to make #1 more efficient make #2 more difficult, so they are somewhat at odds with each other. For now, we're looking at a write throughput of between 1tps to 20tps for Bitcoin and Ethereum.

If you don't care about #2, then you don't need the mining model anymore, or even a blockchain. You can just put all your transactions in MySQL, Cassandra, R3 Corda or whatever and you can subsequently crank up your transaction throughput. You can get >10,000tps with MySQL.

keyle• 9 years ago

It'd be great if you could expand on that. Why doesn't it make sense, why is it too expensive, why unreasonable?

Laforet3• 9 years ago

Not the poster above, but I think the main issue is with the cost to provide proof of work in a trustless network. For example, bitcoin is already at or close to the point where the most efficient mining operations have a hard time turning profit without a major bubble drawing in outside capital. 3 years from now it may well be unsustainable.

52-6F-628• 9 years ago

I think there is little technical to discuss at the moment, because a lot of these companies have not made their direct technicals known. In fact a few of them have been patenting development[0] they've done with blockchain expressly to protect it from the public (and as one would assume, any potential for gain).

We can only speculate on the technical problems if we don't really know for certain what the application is that they have in mind.

Everybody seems to see value in blockchain tech, though nobody seems certain what the best applications of it are. I admired the UN's use of Ethereum as a tokenized payment method for refugees to 'purchase' relief supplies at camps in Jordan[1]. Problem is, scale that up to consumer-level transactions and we have a problem (at present, anyway).

If you want to go back to discussing the root viability of Ethereum's tech, sure -- but I think that's another subject than the main one in this thread.

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-21/who-owns-... [1] https://www.wired.de/collection/tech/blockchain-fluechtlinge...

vitaIikbuterin• 9 years ago

At this time, there are 78 comments to this post, none of them addressing technical concerns. Quite unusual for HN.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ethtrader/comments/6o3hev/link_to_e...

sharemywin• 9 years ago

as long as it doesn't go to 0 than I would say there is something to cryptocurrency. Having a way for early adopters to partake in the value creation of metcalfe's law is also an innovation.

dpc_pw• 9 years ago

How pointless.

The whole point of Bitcoin was to have uncensorable, decentralized asset that can be used to exchange value without any trust etc.

That is the only reason we endure this utterly shitty and inefficient blockchain thing, and we exchange money for this otherwise pointless online points.

I have no problem with ETH as cryptocurrency / smart contract platform. But this whole Enterprise Ethereum Alliance is just one big BS. Etherum community is trying to pump ETH value by associating with brand names, and corporations are trying to pump their stock value by presenting themselves as innovative. BS - empty words and marketing gimmicks. Just read through that page.

Just watch Blockchain vs. Bullshit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMEOKDVXlUo

subway5• 9 years ago

Enterprise Ethereum has almost nothing to do with Ethereum the public blockchain, or crypto-currency. Ethereum based blockchains (that is based on Ethereum the software, not the canonical global instance of that software) provide an ability to create an auditable log of events.

Those events might be "who accessed my credit card account and when" or "who requested access to my health records and when". These chains can exist entirely independently of of the global "Ethereum" chain, and can operate entirely without the concept of a crypto-currency (aside from using it as a scheduling mechanism within your blockchain cluster).

People need to stop getting hung up the cryptocurrency aspect of blockchains.

52-6F-628• 9 years ago

I agree. Also, the EEA is more of an R&D coordination group than anything else. It's to see if there really is something there, and these companies have joined up their R&D departments and innovation labs to do so. They have a lot of industry pull, especially together -- so if there is something viable that comes out of it, most [North American/Asian at least] people can expect it to impact the way they do things, or the way the tools they use operate.

hudon6• 9 years ago

Ethereum based blockchains provide an ability to create an auditable log of events

If all they want is a log of events, why not use a tried and true database whose performance is more well understood? MySQL, Cassandra, whatever.

You can add the ability to audit the tables by signing data updates with public key crypto.

xorcist4• 9 years ago

That doesn't make sense. Read accesses couldn't possibly be logged. You probably wouldn't want sensitive information like health records in a block chain. The risk for leaks is obvious.

Both credit cards records and health records are data where there is a single authoritative data source. You want to know who actually accessed the data, and not any sort of decentralized consensus about the matter.

Agree about the wider aspects however, but those are probably about payouts to stakes in immaterial data or zero knowledge trading of cryptographic keys rather than your health data.

squiggy22• 9 years ago

There's even evidence of vote manipulation on this very HN thread on the announcement over on Reddit.

ScottAS• 9 years ago

The EEA was formed in response to Hyperledger, the heavily IBM-backed private blockchain. I think it was the only possible move. The risk of Hyperledger taking over the world of blockchain was too great. EEA is sort of to Ethereum/Blockchain what RedHat is to Linux. A necessary evil.

kgin• 9 years ago

It's an industry working group to shape the direction of the Ethereum project, similar to a million working groups (ex Bluetooth) where companies are motivated to agree on and advance a technology.

Nothing about being in EEA says that company will use the public chain. Most of them will probably use private chains.

You presenting it as if it's possible for an open source project to recruit a long list of multinational corporations to sign on to collude on a pointless project just to make everyone involved look "cool" and get rich. If only.

Animats2• 9 years ago

Where are the press releases from Master Card, Cisco, and Scotiabank about this? Press releases of "big company partners with little company", coming from the little company, are always suspicious. It may just mean "they signed up for our mailing list".

QML• 9 years ago

Seems like they're doing a separate press release.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/6o2o3d/comment/dk...

Abishek_Muthian• 9 years ago

Title didn't mention the significant partner showcased in the website - 'Andhra Pradesh Government'. The first state govt (India) outside the US to join the alliance. AP was recently divided into separate state (Telengana) and lost it's capital (Hyderabad- home to top IT MNC's) to it. They are actively investing in Fintech, including a new institute for blockchain - http://www.apeita.in/blockchain/

evanvanness• 9 years ago

If you'd like an easy way to keep up to date on Ethereum: http://www.weekinethereum.com

whazor• 9 years ago

Ethereum itself can be used as a financial language, which can be quite revolutionary for the banking industry. Instead of using the proof of work consensus, banks could have their own consensus method. Which does allow for the order of scale that the real world needs.

ComodoHacker• 9 years ago

No mention of Master Card. Mods please edit the title.

Master Card, Cisco, and Scotiabank Join the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance

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