I actually thought the plantoids example was pretty cool. I’m pretty cautious about blockchain technology in general, but I think using it to keep a record of

I actually thought the plantoids example was pretty cool. I’m pretty cautious about blockchain technology in general, but I think using it to keep a record of digital art and collectibles (including plants and pets) is a great idea. Look at digital pets. They’re kind of a dumb waste of money, but people love them. Now imagine some website dealing in digital pets that has a limited edition pet. It’s kind of pricey, but there’s only 100 of them. So, people go for it. Here’s thing though, as things currently stand you really have no way of knowing that there are 100 of these things in existence unless all the owners formed a special club and realized there were more than 100 members. This gets harder to do once if the limited edition pet becomes a little less limited and 1000 are issued instead. Now, despite all the ills of the blockchain, it’s a perfect fix for this problem by virtue of being a public ledger. What’s more, you could trade your limited edition pet with someone else, possibly for cold, hard cash. In general, centralized platforms don’t let you do that. You’re still wasting tremendous amounts of energy on some very non-tangible items, but Neopets at it’s peak must have certainly burned a lot of coal to keep the servers running. When you think about it, the only real difference between a cryptocurrency and a crypto-collectible is that the latter just has more fun, meaningless attributes associated. Such as how red it is. I get where the author is coming from. I know a guy trying to launch an ICO. He has to be one of the 10 most annoying people I’ve ever met. Still, this article feels like a strange broad-stroke dismissal against all applications of blockchain...except currency. Currency is spared with no good explanation as to why. I would take this article a little more seriously if the author included currency as well, but then again bitcoin is doing really well so I guess we’ll call it a success. Everything else is obviously dumb though.