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>Noone talks about people who created stuff that works and doesn't scam people. And there's a lot of such stuff. No, there isn't. It's always been nebulous tal

>Noone talks about people who created stuff that works and doesn't scam people. And there's a lot of such stuff. No, there isn't. It's always been nebulous talk of "potential" without any concrete uses beyond scams and criminal activity. There have just been iterations of tools for those areas. Then you have the near-religious libertarian True Believers who promote as a matter of faith, regardless of what the reality is. This article remains ever-so-relevant: >Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain https://hackernoon.com/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-a-use-case-for-blockchain-ee98c180100 https://hackernoon.com/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-...

AlexCoventry 9y ago
> It's always been nebulous talk of "potential" without any concrete uses beyond scams and criminal activity. I suppose it might count as criminal activity, but as far as I know, it's the only way to donate to Sci Hub. http://sci-hub.tw/#donate http://sci-hub.tw/#donate
- Stranger43 9y ago
  Part of why bitcoin was semi viable before it's intentional scarcity killed all of growth potential is that any society needs a gray market of things that are illegal but often essential for social mobility(like pirated textbooks and academic papers, or unmonitored cross border communication). The problem for bitcoin arrived when people begun to see it as something that could be more then an underground activity and started treating it like an investment object and essentially reinvented the old failed concept of "wildcat currencies" with an intentional scarce currency, something made viable by the libertarian refusal to even look at the real world history of economics. What we now have is a bitcoin economy thats hit a hard(intentional) limit of growth forcing people to branch away from bitcoin as the revolutionary application of blockchain in a world where some minor advances are made in actually using the underlying theory for something other then scams, creating a market ripe for new wildcat currencies pretenting to be be "what bitcoin failed to become".
sametmax 9y ago
True democratic and transparent electronic voting system is a legitimate use case for the block chain. The fact it's hard to not only implement correctly, but to promote to society does not mean it's not relevant. Good things take time. Remember that people thought for some time that general relativity and the Law of large Numbers would never have practical applications.
- shkkmo 9y ago
  > True democratic and transparent electronic voting system is a legitimate use case for the block chain. Full public transparency isn't that great a property of a voting system. And it's hard to call it a "legitimate use case" before it's successful.
  - sametmax 9y ago
    Transparency of votes doesn't have to map to identity of voters. The blockchain is transparent, what you put inside is left to the implementer to choose. And come on, it's a highly experimental technology whise use cases impact the most controversial aspects of our society : money, vote, accountability, transparency, power to the masse. Of course it's going to take time and fail in many spectacular ways.
- Sangermaine 9y ago
  >True democratic and transparent electronic voting system is a legitimate use case for the block chain. As always with these claims (that, as noted below, have not actually been implemented and so can only be speculated on), the question isn't whether this could be done with the blockchain, but rather whether this requires the blockchain to be done. All too often the claimed magical things the blockchain will allow can be implemented far more easily with other, existing technology. So far it's a solution in search of a problem.
  - sametmax 9y ago
    Nobody is talking magic. We have a system with characteristics that maps to problems we wish to solve and we try to do it. Nothing wrong with that. The fact crypto is riddle with quick money making claims and project using the blockchain for sheer buzziness tends to make skeptics extra pessimistics in their views. It's unfair to the technology. We have a transaction oriented temper proof distributed transparent database. Those are objective features, and they deserve we give them a try.

AlexCoventry 9y ago

> It's always been nebulous talk of "potential" without any concrete uses beyond scams and criminal activity. I suppose it might count as criminal activity, but as far as I know, it's the only way to donate to Sci Hub. http://sci-hub.tw/#donate http://sci-hub.tw/#donate

Stranger43 9y ago
Part of why bitcoin was semi viable before it's intentional scarcity killed all of growth potential is that any society needs a gray market of things that are illegal but often essential for social mobility(like pirated textbooks and academic papers, or unmonitored cross border communication). The problem for bitcoin arrived when people begun to see it as something that could be more then an underground activity and started treating it like an investment object and essentially reinvented the old failed concept of "wildcat currencies" with an intentional scarce currency, something made viable by the libertarian refusal to even look at the real world history of economics. What we now have is a bitcoin economy thats hit a hard(intentional) limit of growth forcing people to branch away from bitcoin as the revolutionary application of blockchain in a world where some minor advances are made in actually using the underlying theory for something other then scams, creating a market ripe for new wildcat currencies pretenting to be be "what bitcoin failed to become".

sametmax 9y ago

True democratic and transparent electronic voting system is a legitimate use case for the block chain. The fact it's hard to not only implement correctly, but to promote to society does not mean it's not relevant. Good things take time. Remember that people thought for some time that general relativity and the Law of large Numbers would never have practical applications.

shkkmo 9y ago
> True democratic and transparent electronic voting system is a legitimate use case for the block chain. Full public transparency isn't that great a property of a voting system. And it's hard to call it a "legitimate use case" before it's successful.
- sametmax 9y ago
  Transparency of votes doesn't have to map to identity of voters. The blockchain is transparent, what you put inside is left to the implementer to choose. And come on, it's a highly experimental technology whise use cases impact the most controversial aspects of our society : money, vote, accountability, transparency, power to the masse. Of course it's going to take time and fail in many spectacular ways.
Sangermaine 9y ago
>True democratic and transparent electronic voting system is a legitimate use case for the block chain. As always with these claims (that, as noted below, have not actually been implemented and so can only be speculated on), the question isn't whether this could be done with the blockchain, but rather whether this requires the blockchain to be done. All too often the claimed magical things the blockchain will allow can be implemented far more easily with other, existing technology. So far it's a solution in search of a problem.
- sametmax 9y ago
  Nobody is talking magic. We have a system with characteristics that maps to problems we wish to solve and we try to do it. Nothing wrong with that. The fact crypto is riddle with quick money making claims and project using the blockchain for sheer buzziness tends to make skeptics extra pessimistics in their views. It's unfair to the technology. We have a transaction oriented temper proof distributed transparent database. Those are objective features, and they deserve we give them a try.