There’s no divorce in Bitcoin

There’s no divorce in Bitcoin

I attended a presentation hosted by the BCS, and given by Ron Ballard, based on his article in IT Now, “Blockchain: the facts and the fiction”. What he said inspired some thoughts and reminded me of others, some of which I have previously published on my blog. I wrote an article, called Learnings of Bitcoin, which was meant to be a spoof on the Borat film title and posted it on my linkedin blog, The article looks at the tight coupling of Bitcoin, and its consensus mechanism, the proof of work, together with its costs and vulnerabilities. It examines the goal of eliminating trust authorities and its questionable ability to meet the necessary roles of money as a means of exchange and a store of wealth. In the comment pushing it, I say, "This might be a bit basic for some, but you can't have a coinless immutable blockchain, at least not one based on 'proof of work'.", at which point you need to consider if there are better data storage platforms for your use case. I use more words to explore these issues below/overleaf ....

Sybase UK TECHSelect 2005, London

I popped over to the Sybase UK TechSelect conference. Its been a while since I met up with the Sybase and User Group people. I’ll always remember one of the opening presos made by one of Sybase’s VPs in the early ’90s. It sounded like Harry Enfield’s “loadsa money”, “here’s our results – you see all this money – it was yours but now its ours!” – “How much does it cost? Loads – if your asking that question, your too poor to have one”. Most businesses, including Sybase, have learned that you need more humility when speaking about company results. So Simon Cattlin, Sybase UK’s recently appointed MD gave an interesting and different presentation; he felt his personal newness made the traditional MD’s approach inappropriate, but he shared some of his thoughts about why he joined Sybase and the research he’d undertaken while making his mind up. …

Making Sybase Scream

This article is about running Sybase on a sophisticated UNIX. It discusses sizing Sybase’s max engines parameter, the effect of resource management tools & leveraging UNIX & Consolidation. Also note that this is not a Sun Blueprint, its meant to show you that you can, not how to.  …

Sybase 15

I popped into the Brewer’s Hall at the invitation of Sybase for their UK launch of Sybase 15. The have three great new features to help them compete with Oracle and the free ones, and its good to see them spend some money and more importantly intellect on the database server. …