4 ms·

A lot of the utility from blockchain doesn't come from being able to do "new" things. They come from being able to do old things better: cheaper, more securely,

A lot of the utility from blockchain doesn't come from being able to do "new" things. They come from being able to do old things better: cheaper, more securely, free from the interference of trusted parties / government. It remains to be seen which processes the blockchain will take over. Some are obvious, ie. prediction markets, sports gambling, money remittance. Some are more complex, and will require frameworks to work within trusted parties: ie. tokenizing physical assets or securities that exist outside the blockchain world. Identity management.

m-i-l 8y ago
Maybe not government, maybe just humans in general. Decentralisation, blockchain, smart contracts, cryptocurrency, AI and IoT could really start coming into their own further into the future when we start having more autonomous agents performing those little tasks on our behalf, like a smart fridge ordering more milk and interacting with a drone to ensure payment and delivery without having to bother a human. But I'm not getting the sense that any of the huge amounts of money being invested is going into much other than feeding the crypto ecosystem at the moment. True story: VCs specialising in funding blockchain projects told a dev team "You guys are building a proper business, that's great but it means it won't 100x in a short period, so isn't really what we're after".
- aidanlister 8y ago
  You sound incredulous about this – VCs have a pretty clear business model, funding slow-growing steady businesses is not it.
  - freshhawk 8y ago
    To be fair, that business model includes obscuring that aspect of the business model as much as possible.
  - m-i-l 8y ago
    But VCs normally try to fund genuine businesses - in this case, by suggesting they weren't interested in a "proper business" (as in a legitimate business) and were wanting something to exit in the "short term", the insinuation was that they just wanted a sham / fake business that they could use to fool people just long enough to do a 100x pump and dump.
- reificator 8y ago
  > True story: VCs specialising in funding blockchain projects told a dev team "You guys are building a proper business, that's great but it means it won't 100x in a short period, so isn't really what we're after". Sounds like that VC firm knows what VC is, and would correctly give that answer regardless of specialization. Nothing to do with blockchain.
pembrook 8y ago
>"They come from being able to do old things better: cheaper, more securely, free from the interference of trusted parties / government." Name one thing that blockchain has made, or is even close to making cheaper or more secure or trustless? The largest application of the technology has been bitcoin thus far, and bitcoin is more expensive; less secure than the traditional financial system (where if you get hacked you at least have some recourse); and you still have to trust intermediaries like Coinbase to acquire the Bitcoin and Bitpay to actually buy anything with it. And I know the canned response to that is usually "why can't X new cryptocurrency solve these problems eventually? The internet had its problems at first as well." But you solve those problems by making bitcoin exactly like our current financial system, with intermediaries and trust and regulation. And minus the hilarious waste of time, money, and energy that is proof-of-work.
- stale2002 8y ago
  I'll give you one. The year is 2010. And I am a normal citizen and I want to donate money to WikiLeaks without the banks colluding to stop my financial transaction, even though nobody has been convicted of a crime. How do you do it? The only way I can think of to do this easily (easily being the key word!) is a cryptocurrency transaction. Banks and credit card companies collude all the time in order to censor financial transactions between people who have committed no crimes. Do you have a better way of easily sending censorship resistant financial transactions? Because Bitcoin worked just fine back in 2010 for this usecase, even though the banks tried to censor it on their platform.
  - LAMike 8y ago
    Most of the people downvoting you probably never had to think about making a censorship free transaction
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - Max_aaa 8y ago
    With bitcoin, what would stop governments from passing laws making certain addresses tainted resulting in people that send coins to or receive coins from them to be audited and having to explain why and how they linked to certain causes. What makes you think if bitcoins (or any *coin) becomes the main currency in a country or region, we would not have laws were all addresses would need to be linked to people (or companies) and the ledger would not be used for figuring out and persecuting people supporting certain causes?

m-i-l 8y ago

Maybe not government, maybe just humans in general. Decentralisation, blockchain, smart contracts, cryptocurrency, AI and IoT could really start coming into their own further into the future when we start having more autonomous agents performing those little tasks on our behalf, like a smart fridge ordering more milk and interacting with a drone to ensure payment and delivery without having to bother a human. But I'm not getting the sense that any of the huge amounts of money being invested is going into much other than feeding the crypto ecosystem at the moment. True story: VCs specialising in funding blockchain projects told a dev team "You guys are building a proper business, that's great but it means it won't 100x in a short period, so isn't really what we're after".

aidanlister 8y ago
You sound incredulous about this – VCs have a pretty clear business model, funding slow-growing steady businesses is not it.
- freshhawk 8y ago
  To be fair, that business model includes obscuring that aspect of the business model as much as possible.
- m-i-l 8y ago
  But VCs normally try to fund genuine businesses - in this case, by suggesting they weren't interested in a "proper business" (as in a legitimate business) and were wanting something to exit in the "short term", the insinuation was that they just wanted a sham / fake business that they could use to fool people just long enough to do a 100x pump and dump.
reificator 8y ago
> True story: VCs specialising in funding blockchain projects told a dev team "You guys are building a proper business, that's great but it means it won't 100x in a short period, so isn't really what we're after". Sounds like that VC firm knows what VC is, and would correctly give that answer regardless of specialization. Nothing to do with blockchain.

pembrook 8y ago

>"They come from being able to do old things better: cheaper, more securely, free from the interference of trusted parties / government." Name one thing that blockchain has made, or is even close to making cheaper or more secure or trustless? The largest application of the technology has been bitcoin thus far, and bitcoin is more expensive; less secure than the traditional financial system (where if you get hacked you at least have some recourse); and you still have to trust intermediaries like Coinbase to acquire the Bitcoin and Bitpay to actually buy anything with it. And I know the canned response to that is usually "why can't X new cryptocurrency solve these problems eventually? The internet had its problems at first as well." But you solve those problems by making bitcoin exactly like our current financial system, with intermediaries and trust and regulation. And minus the hilarious waste of time, money, and energy that is proof-of-work.

stale2002 8y ago
I'll give you one. The year is 2010. And I am a normal citizen and I want to donate money to WikiLeaks without the banks colluding to stop my financial transaction, even though nobody has been convicted of a crime. How do you do it? The only way I can think of to do this easily (easily being the key word!) is a cryptocurrency transaction. Banks and credit card companies collude all the time in order to censor financial transactions between people who have committed no crimes. Do you have a better way of easily sending censorship resistant financial transactions? Because Bitcoin worked just fine back in 2010 for this usecase, even though the banks tried to censor it on their platform.
- LAMike 8y ago
  Most of the people downvoting you probably never had to think about making a censorship free transaction
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- Max_aaa 8y ago
  With bitcoin, what would stop governments from passing laws making certain addresses tainted resulting in people that send coins to or receive coins from them to be audited and having to explain why and how they linked to certain causes. What makes you think if bitcoins (or any *coin) becomes the main currency in a country or region, we would not have laws were all addresses would need to be linked to people (or companies) and the ledger would not be used for figuring out and persecuting people supporting certain causes?