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Here's the big reason I've gotten skeptical about blockchain: it seems like very few people are excited about actually using it. Almost everyone talking about i

Here's the big reason I've gotten skeptical about blockchain: it seems like very few people are excited about actually using it. Almost everyone talking about it is excited about getting rich from trading currencies or starting a blockchain-based company. And plenty of people are excited about a grand vision for how it might transform society one day, or how it might solve problems they think other people might have. But it seems like almost nobody is genuinely excited to use any blockchain product themselves purely because it does something useful or fun or cool, and with no monetary interest in the tech taking off. This is all in stark contrast to the 90s internet boom when, sure, there were lots of speculators and lots of get-rich-quick dreamers, but there were also tons of random people genuinely excited about using the internet who never stood to make a dime from it. A lot of the grand visions behind blockchain mania are indeed compelling, and I suspect something blockchain-ish will take off at some point in the future. But it will probably be a distant descendant of anything that exists today. Am I wrong about this? Are there blockchain-based products that have lots of users who are using them because they like using the product and not just because they're hoping to get rich off the hype?

sixstringtheory 8y ago
To extend your analogy to the internet, just consider that ARPANET was being developed decades before the dotcom boom. And it didn’t look anything like the AOLs/Compuserves through which I first experienced the internet. I agree that if blockchain takes off like that, it’ll probably be in a form we can’t yet imagine.
- Nursie 8y ago
  But what makes you think it's an arpanet? Even then there were exciting, compelling use-cases.
jaequery 8y ago
I just think of what it'd be like - once companies actually starts utilizing "blockchain" with real purpose.
cachvico 8y ago
Blockchain is so much more complex than the basic internet/web. The excitement is about building the first gen of blockchain tech, and the vision is over many decades - the last Bitcoin will be mined around 2140. Compare to the web, which brought huge change, but decentralized governance is much harder for the lay person to understand. Most people haven't even considered many of the problems it proposes to solve. So the value of Bitcoin/crypto is held up by the excitement of the change it heralds. It's just going to take a while. (And the trading and investment is the means to the end in getting it going). But yes, let us wait for the clowns to depart.
Kadin 8y ago
People were pretty excited about using Bitcoin to buy drugs, but it turns out you need a more stable and convenient currency even for drug dealers to be interested. That was the high water mark of consumer interest as far as I've seen. Everything else is just intrigue driven by the get-rich-quick aspect.
- penagwin 8y ago
  I'll say that for that category they haven't lost interest. Although many places have moved to monero for obvious reasons. They don't care too much they can just exchange it immediately. That industry REQUIRES that payments can't be stoppped/tracked so decentralization makes perfect sense here. Most industries don't have that requirement, and usually benefit from centralized systems.
- acover 8y ago
  People are also excited to launder money
  - icebraining 8y ago
    How is BTC any better than USD or EUR for laundering money?
    - rm_-rf_slash 8y ago
      Density. A single 128GB microSD card can hold a lot of bitcoin in the space that could not fit even one $100 bill. No enormous briefcase and predetermined set of answers for law enforcement.
      - Juuouzou 8y ago
        wow, you dont know how bitcoin works because that analogy is really stupid. nobody holds bitcoin, they hold private keys that connect to a bitcoin wallet address.
        8y ago
vinni2 8y ago
I thought the blockchain technology had the potential to help financial sector. Not the virtual currency itself but there are a lot of agreements, transactions and settlements which are done in a untrustworthy environment which makes it slow and resulting in settlements [0]. I thought this is also the reason why it takes so long to transfer money from one bank to another. I thought these processes could benefit from blockchains and smart contracts. Basically speeding up the whole process not requiring the banks to trust anyone [1]. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payment_system https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payment_system [1] http://cjel.law.columbia.edu/preliminary-reference/2016/developing-blockchain-real-time-clearing-and-settlement-in-the-eu-u-s-and-globally-2/ http://cjel.law.columbia.edu/preliminary-reference/2016/deve...
- speedplane 8y ago
  The simple feature of reducing settlements from days into seconds is by itself a great use-case. However, there is a lot of structural incentives against it. If you're a big bank and make nice transaction fees because your clients trust you to make a secure, legal, and successful transaction, you probably don't want blockchain, because it's a threat to your business model. That's certainly one of the major reasons it's taking so long to be accepted by mainstream banks. But long term, banks will need to accept faster transaction times. Blockchain or not, it's ridiculous you need to wait days to transfer money when you can send email in milliseconds. Rather than accept Bitcoin, it's far more likely big-banks will get together and form their own crypto coin, which will enable faster transfers, but keep them in control. They'll get regulations passed that will make Bitcoin and most other crypto currencies illegal or legally risky, whereas their system will be blessed by regulators. Under this scenario (I think the likeliest), the existing power hegemony stays this same, crypto-currency's idealistic roots become viewed as naive and antiquated, and consumers get slightly faster transfers through their same old banks with marginally lower transaction fees.
  - vkou 8y ago
    > The simple feature of reducing settlements from days into seconds is by itself a great use-case. The reasons for why settlements take days, and not seconds, is procedural, not technical. If the financial world wanted instant settlements, we would have had them decades ago. The financial world optimizes for intent and compliance, not speed. This is why settlements take days, and why cryptocoins aren't very interesting to it. Transferring money from one account to another account is as simple as updating two rows in a database. That the database is not a distributed proof-of-work ledger has nothing to do with it taking days.
godzillabrennus 8y ago
The vast majority of the "decentralized" trend is nonsense. I met a blockchain company co-founder at a conference in Silicon Valley that we can call "Alfie" for the purposes of this post. After a brief chat at the conference Alfie graciously took me out for a nice dinner. During the dinner Alfie asked if I wanted to be an advisor to their company. Another well respected friend of mine was already tying their name to the company so I had hope that it would be reasonably legit. They told me that they had raised $30M in foreign funding The #1 thing I have learned about advising startup founders is that if they don't communicate well then they typically don't do business well. In this case after our dinner Alfie basically vanished on me and stopped responding to my emails/messages. When Alfie finally got back in touch and offered to send the advisory agreement I told them I wanted to take it slow. That I didn't feel comfortable linking my name with their company just yet but I would help them unofficially for now. I've learned to trust my gut and never do something until I feel comfortable with tying my name to it. A month or so after Alfie got back in touch with me another friend we can call "Sally" reached out to grab dinner in SF. Sally was at that same Silicon Valley blockchain conference that I met Alfie. Sally was visiting SF for work again so we had dinner. Sally told me that they were recently in a foreign country at another blockchain conference when Alfie couldn't muster up the funds to pay for their hotel room. Sally ended up letting Alfie stay in their room for the night. Sally learned that Alfie has not actually closed $30M in funding yet. They had instead been verbally committed a $30M investment. They had actually raised over $1M but it was spent with all the traveling. No tech built at all. No money to build tech. I ran into Alfie and their partners again at a NYC blockchain event a few months after that. Alfie confirmed the story but said they had now closed on the $30M. Yet they were at the event fundraising for more money. It just doesn't add up. Anyway, Alfie aside there are even bigger scammers out there. Lots of pump and dump nonsense. However, I believe in the team behind ShopIn (http://www.shopin.com http://www.shopin.com). The founding tech team for PriceLine is being led by a serial entrepreneur I have known for years. I think they have a reasonably good chance of proving that you can do something disruptive with blockchain. Time will tell.
grosjona 8y ago
>> Almost everyone talking about it is excited about getting rich from trading currencies Maybe, but why is it a bad thing? This can create powerful network effects. Facebook benefited from network effects derived from the fact that people want to be liked. Cryptocurrencies benefit from network effects derived from the fact that people want to get rich. The problem is that the network effects of cryptocurrency are so powerful that people didn't even need to offer an underlying product/service in order to benefit from it; I think that will change in the future though because the market is now saturated.
ygypsy 8y ago
One of the most intriguing projects involving blockchain I’ve noticed is e-Estonia which I would file under useful, however it may not qualify as solely a blockchain-based product. Here the reasoning for incorporating the (KSI) blockchain is to prevent tampering. Citizens have access to a number of digital services that includes but aren’t limited to voting, banking, and healthcare. They've reported; “Since 2014, more than 27,000 people from 143 different countries have been granted Estonian e-residency”. I find this example to be exciting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Estonia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Estonia https://e-estonia.com/ https://e-estonia.com/ https://estonia.ee/enter https://estonia.ee/enter > A lot of the grand visions behind blockchain mania are indeed compelling, and I suspect something blockchain-ish will take off at some point in the future. Totally agree. Recently had a discussion with a friend regarding what we felt would be an ideal approach to implementing blockchain and email. Essentially and selfishly how we needed it to behave. Naturally upon doing a little bit of research lo and behold this endeavor had already been taken up. Exciting I found myself thinking, That’s pretty cool my friend agreed. Fast forward and read past a few more paragraphs and again lo and behold this project is an ICO and with this token you can send emails and blah blah blah. Very disheartening (at least for me personally) to say the least. Not to say a project like this will fail, just saying that it seems the imagination for blockchain products as of now seems to be limited to just ICO’s.
- pingec 8y ago
  I keep hearing about this e-residency, but what can you actually do with it? What is it useful for?
  - lagadu 8y ago
    If their corporate taxes are lower than in your country (after calculating for what you have to pay according to the double taxation agreement the two countries have) then it's worth it opening your company there. Depends on how high the corporate taxes are in your country. If it's worth it, the big advantage is that everything can be done online.
  - chosenbreed 8y ago
tialaramex 8y ago
The Internet in some sense starts with, at the very latest, the Treaty of Bern in 1874. Because the Internet is just the current physical incarnation of the Network. (The Treaty of Bern says how to make physical letter post work internationally the way we're used to today, before that it was a colossal pain in the arse) The Network is like the Word, it's fundamental to what we are, the precise implementation may change, but the idea is forever. Automobiles, T-shirts, babies brought up almost exclusively by their immediate biological parents, cow milk as a normal human beverage, portraits, funerals, the novel - these are all "just" culture and might become unfashionable and go away over the longer term or in other contexts - they're not fundamental to what we are. But the Word and the Network are right at the centre of what we are, as people. Blockchain is just a weird cultural blip. It's not even T-shirts, it's Pork Pie Hats. People keep trying to make it a thing, but it's not a thing.
healsjnr1 8y ago
I am constantly surprised by this point of view. Blockchain is a solution to a number of problems that were previously unsolvable, yet so much of the discourse is around the idea that decentralised trust doesn't really solve any useful problems. True many of the applications are hype, but we need to recognise these for what they are and move on to more interesting things. To me the best example is the travel industry. Decades ago a small number of companies managed to get manual back office systems moved to centralised booking and reservation systems. This had a huge impact on the ability to sell inventory and open up the world of online travel agencies. These centralised platforms are still around and they are now a huge problem. The software is bloated, complicated and slow, integrating with any GDS is painful and only ever allowed on their terms. It is amazing to me the amount of time and effort and startups that have gone into just trying to find the cheapest flight available. This is fertile ground for decentralised trust. Having a local copy of the live flight inventory or a large aggregate set of hotel inventory would revolutionise the travel industry. Sure there are also applications around settlement and financing, but to me the most exciting thing is the ability to build customer applications on large sets of provably correct, trusted data. And to do this freely in the manner you chose with the technology you chose.
- JustFinishedBSG 8y ago
  > Blockchain is a solution to a number of problems that were previously unsolvable, Name one.
  - nannal 8y ago
    Byzantine Generals Problem?
    - spamizbad 8y ago
      Is there a formal proof of that yet? (Not being sarcastic, genuinely curious)
  - dorgo 8y ago
    Paying for porn without revealing identity
Joeri 8y ago
I was highly skeptical about blockchain as well because the only practical application seemed to be cryptocurrencies, and those will never be allowed to grow to a point they become dominant (they can be regulated in such a way normal people won’t want any). But ... then I went to an evening where the identity applications were explained. Using a blockchain to have assertions made about your identity, like where you studied, where you were born, what employer’s you’ve had in such a way that the assertions can’t be forged, can’t be doctored, can’t be stolen, and aren’t locked away in the databases of an institution. I heard stories of people who lost their proofs of identity by having to flee a warzone and were unable to prove to EU governments and employers they were who they were (to the point of being stripped of their bank accounts because banks only let people with official paperwork hold accounts). And I have to say, there’s something there. I’m still skeptical about cryptocurrency, but not about blockchain.
- catbird 8y ago
  That all sounds great, but how does it actually work? So there's an immutable entry describing you in a database, then how do you convince someone that you're the person it describes? Do you need to memorize a private key? If it gets forgotten/compromised, then you've lost your identity forever. The only way I can imagine physical verification would be to have a microchip implanted in your arm, but that would be unthinkably worse than the current system of (thankfully) mutable, replaceable paper documents we use today.
chemmail 8y ago
You are obviously living in a privileged, rich society. In many poor countries were inflation is insanely rampant, and banks are not trusted, everyone wants a way to store wealth without the government,bank,or person robbing them blind.
mettamage 8y ago
Hmm... I don't know. The more I think about blockchain, the more I get excited about quicker app creation because the payments channel is less hard. Though, I'm idealizing blockchain here, I haven't looked into the technicalities of how to integrate bitcoin, for example, into an app. But ideally this ease of use for developers would be a thing. I'd get excited about that.

sixstringtheory 8y ago

To extend your analogy to the internet, just consider that ARPANET was being developed decades before the dotcom boom. And it didn’t look anything like the AOLs/Compuserves through which I first experienced the internet. I agree that if blockchain takes off like that, it’ll probably be in a form we can’t yet imagine.

Nursie 8y ago
But what makes you think it's an arpanet? Even then there were exciting, compelling use-cases.

jaequery 8y ago

I just think of what it'd be like - once companies actually starts utilizing "blockchain" with real purpose.

cachvico 8y ago

Blockchain is so much more complex than the basic internet/web. The excitement is about building the first gen of blockchain tech, and the vision is over many decades - the last Bitcoin will be mined around 2140. Compare to the web, which brought huge change, but decentralized governance is much harder for the lay person to understand. Most people haven't even considered many of the problems it proposes to solve. So the value of Bitcoin/crypto is held up by the excitement of the change it heralds. It's just going to take a while. (And the trading and investment is the means to the end in getting it going). But yes, let us wait for the clowns to depart.

Kadin 8y ago

People were pretty excited about using Bitcoin to buy drugs, but it turns out you need a more stable and convenient currency even for drug dealers to be interested. That was the high water mark of consumer interest as far as I've seen. Everything else is just intrigue driven by the get-rich-quick aspect.

penagwin 8y ago
I'll say that for that category they haven't lost interest. Although many places have moved to monero for obvious reasons. They don't care too much they can just exchange it immediately. That industry REQUIRES that payments can't be stoppped/tracked so decentralization makes perfect sense here. Most industries don't have that requirement, and usually benefit from centralized systems.
acover 8y ago
People are also excited to launder money
- icebraining 8y ago
  How is BTC any better than USD or EUR for laundering money?
  - rm_-rf_slash 8y ago
    Density. A single 128GB microSD card can hold a lot of bitcoin in the space that could not fit even one $100 bill. No enormous briefcase and predetermined set of answers for law enforcement.
    - Juuouzou 8y ago
      wow, you dont know how bitcoin works because that analogy is really stupid. nobody holds bitcoin, they hold private keys that connect to a bitcoin wallet address.
      - 8y ago

vinni2 8y ago

I thought the blockchain technology had the potential to help financial sector. Not the virtual currency itself but there are a lot of agreements, transactions and settlements which are done in a untrustworthy environment which makes it slow and resulting in settlements [0]. I thought this is also the reason why it takes so long to transfer money from one bank to another. I thought these processes could benefit from blockchains and smart contracts. Basically speeding up the whole process not requiring the banks to trust anyone [1]. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payment_system https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payment_system [1] http://cjel.law.columbia.edu/preliminary-reference/2016/developing-blockchain-real-time-clearing-and-settlement-in-the-eu-u-s-and-globally-2/ http://cjel.law.columbia.edu/preliminary-reference/2016/deve...

speedplane 8y ago
The simple feature of reducing settlements from days into seconds is by itself a great use-case. However, there is a lot of structural incentives against it. If you're a big bank and make nice transaction fees because your clients trust you to make a secure, legal, and successful transaction, you probably don't want blockchain, because it's a threat to your business model. That's certainly one of the major reasons it's taking so long to be accepted by mainstream banks. But long term, banks will need to accept faster transaction times. Blockchain or not, it's ridiculous you need to wait days to transfer money when you can send email in milliseconds. Rather than accept Bitcoin, it's far more likely big-banks will get together and form their own crypto coin, which will enable faster transfers, but keep them in control. They'll get regulations passed that will make Bitcoin and most other crypto currencies illegal or legally risky, whereas their system will be blessed by regulators. Under this scenario (I think the likeliest), the existing power hegemony stays this same, crypto-currency's idealistic roots become viewed as naive and antiquated, and consumers get slightly faster transfers through their same old banks with marginally lower transaction fees.
- vkou 8y ago
  > The simple feature of reducing settlements from days into seconds is by itself a great use-case. The reasons for why settlements take days, and not seconds, is procedural, not technical. If the financial world wanted instant settlements, we would have had them decades ago. The financial world optimizes for intent and compliance, not speed. This is why settlements take days, and why cryptocoins aren't very interesting to it. Transferring money from one account to another account is as simple as updating two rows in a database. That the database is not a distributed proof-of-work ledger has nothing to do with it taking days.

godzillabrennus 8y ago

The vast majority of the "decentralized" trend is nonsense. I met a blockchain company co-founder at a conference in Silicon Valley that we can call "Alfie" for the purposes of this post. After a brief chat at the conference Alfie graciously took me out for a nice dinner. During the dinner Alfie asked if I wanted to be an advisor to their company. Another well respected friend of mine was already tying their name to the company so I had hope that it would be reasonably legit. They told me that they had raised $30M in foreign funding The #1 thing I have learned about advising startup founders is that if they don't communicate well then they typically don't do business well. In this case after our dinner Alfie basically vanished on me and stopped responding to my emails/messages. When Alfie finally got back in touch and offered to send the advisory agreement I told them I wanted to take it slow. That I didn't feel comfortable linking my name with their company just yet but I would help them unofficially for now. I've learned to trust my gut and never do something until I feel comfortable with tying my name to it. A month or so after Alfie got back in touch with me another friend we can call "Sally" reached out to grab dinner in SF. Sally was at that same Silicon Valley blockchain conference that I met Alfie. Sally was visiting SF for work again so we had dinner. Sally told me that they were recently in a foreign country at another blockchain conference when Alfie couldn't muster up the funds to pay for their hotel room. Sally ended up letting Alfie stay in their room for the night. Sally learned that Alfie has not actually closed $30M in funding yet. They had instead been verbally committed a $30M investment. They had actually raised over $1M but it was spent with all the traveling. No tech built at all. No money to build tech. I ran into Alfie and their partners again at a NYC blockchain event a few months after that. Alfie confirmed the story but said they had now closed on the $30M. Yet they were at the event fundraising for more money. It just doesn't add up. Anyway, Alfie aside there are even bigger scammers out there. Lots of pump and dump nonsense. However, I believe in the team behind ShopIn (http://www.shopin.com http://www.shopin.com). The founding tech team for PriceLine is being led by a serial entrepreneur I have known for years. I think they have a reasonably good chance of proving that you can do something disruptive with blockchain. Time will tell.

grosjona 8y ago

>> Almost everyone talking about it is excited about getting rich from trading currencies Maybe, but why is it a bad thing? This can create powerful network effects. Facebook benefited from network effects derived from the fact that people want to be liked. Cryptocurrencies benefit from network effects derived from the fact that people want to get rich. The problem is that the network effects of cryptocurrency are so powerful that people didn't even need to offer an underlying product/service in order to benefit from it; I think that will change in the future though because the market is now saturated.

ygypsy 8y ago

One of the most intriguing projects involving blockchain I’ve noticed is e-Estonia which I would file under useful, however it may not qualify as solely a blockchain-based product. Here the reasoning for incorporating the (KSI) blockchain is to prevent tampering. Citizens have access to a number of digital services that includes but aren’t limited to voting, banking, and healthcare. They've reported; “Since 2014, more than 27,000 people from 143 different countries have been granted Estonian e-residency”. I find this example to be exciting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Estonia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Estonia https://e-estonia.com/ https://e-estonia.com/ https://estonia.ee/enter https://estonia.ee/enter > A lot of the grand visions behind blockchain mania are indeed compelling, and I suspect something blockchain-ish will take off at some point in the future. Totally agree. Recently had a discussion with a friend regarding what we felt would be an ideal approach to implementing blockchain and email. Essentially and selfishly how we needed it to behave. Naturally upon doing a little bit of research lo and behold this endeavor had already been taken up. Exciting I found myself thinking, That’s pretty cool my friend agreed. Fast forward and read past a few more paragraphs and again lo and behold this project is an ICO and with this token you can send emails and blah blah blah. Very disheartening (at least for me personally) to say the least. Not to say a project like this will fail, just saying that it seems the imagination for blockchain products as of now seems to be limited to just ICO’s.

pingec 8y ago
I keep hearing about this e-residency, but what can you actually do with it? What is it useful for?
- lagadu 8y ago
  If their corporate taxes are lower than in your country (after calculating for what you have to pay according to the double taxation agreement the two countries have) then it's worth it opening your company there. Depends on how high the corporate taxes are in your country. If it's worth it, the big advantage is that everything can be done online.
- chosenbreed 8y ago

tialaramex 8y ago

The Internet in some sense starts with, at the very latest, the Treaty of Bern in 1874. Because the Internet is just the current physical incarnation of the Network. (The Treaty of Bern says how to make physical letter post work internationally the way we're used to today, before that it was a colossal pain in the arse) The Network is like the Word, it's fundamental to what we are, the precise implementation may change, but the idea is forever. Automobiles, T-shirts, babies brought up almost exclusively by their immediate biological parents, cow milk as a normal human beverage, portraits, funerals, the novel - these are all "just" culture and might become unfashionable and go away over the longer term or in other contexts - they're not fundamental to what we are. But the Word and the Network are right at the centre of what we are, as people. Blockchain is just a weird cultural blip. It's not even T-shirts, it's Pork Pie Hats. People keep trying to make it a thing, but it's not a thing.

healsjnr1 8y ago

I am constantly surprised by this point of view. Blockchain is a solution to a number of problems that were previously unsolvable, yet so much of the discourse is around the idea that decentralised trust doesn't really solve any useful problems. True many of the applications are hype, but we need to recognise these for what they are and move on to more interesting things. To me the best example is the travel industry. Decades ago a small number of companies managed to get manual back office systems moved to centralised booking and reservation systems. This had a huge impact on the ability to sell inventory and open up the world of online travel agencies. These centralised platforms are still around and they are now a huge problem. The software is bloated, complicated and slow, integrating with any GDS is painful and only ever allowed on their terms. It is amazing to me the amount of time and effort and startups that have gone into just trying to find the cheapest flight available. This is fertile ground for decentralised trust. Having a local copy of the live flight inventory or a large aggregate set of hotel inventory would revolutionise the travel industry. Sure there are also applications around settlement and financing, but to me the most exciting thing is the ability to build customer applications on large sets of provably correct, trusted data. And to do this freely in the manner you chose with the technology you chose.

JustFinishedBSG 8y ago
> Blockchain is a solution to a number of problems that were previously unsolvable, Name one.
- nannal 8y ago
  Byzantine Generals Problem?
  - spamizbad 8y ago
    Is there a formal proof of that yet? (Not being sarcastic, genuinely curious)
- dorgo 8y ago
  Paying for porn without revealing identity

Joeri 8y ago

I was highly skeptical about blockchain as well because the only practical application seemed to be cryptocurrencies, and those will never be allowed to grow to a point they become dominant (they can be regulated in such a way normal people won’t want any). But ... then I went to an evening where the identity applications were explained. Using a blockchain to have assertions made about your identity, like where you studied, where you were born, what employer’s you’ve had in such a way that the assertions can’t be forged, can’t be doctored, can’t be stolen, and aren’t locked away in the databases of an institution. I heard stories of people who lost their proofs of identity by having to flee a warzone and were unable to prove to EU governments and employers they were who they were (to the point of being stripped of their bank accounts because banks only let people with official paperwork hold accounts). And I have to say, there’s something there. I’m still skeptical about cryptocurrency, but not about blockchain.

catbird 8y ago
That all sounds great, but how does it actually work? So there's an immutable entry describing you in a database, then how do you convince someone that you're the person it describes? Do you need to memorize a private key? If it gets forgotten/compromised, then you've lost your identity forever. The only way I can imagine physical verification would be to have a microchip implanted in your arm, but that would be unthinkably worse than the current system of (thankfully) mutable, replaceable paper documents we use today.

chemmail 8y ago

You are obviously living in a privileged, rich society. In many poor countries were inflation is insanely rampant, and banks are not trusted, everyone wants a way to store wealth without the government,bank,or person robbing them blind.

mettamage 8y ago

Hmm... I don't know. The more I think about blockchain, the more I get excited about quicker app creation because the payments channel is less hard. Though, I'm idealizing blockchain here, I haven't looked into the technicalities of how to integrate bitcoin, for example, into an app. But ideally this ease of use for developers would be a thing. I'd get excited about that.