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> Just reducing fraud and otherwise cutting costs could be a big win. I mean that alone is a several trillion dollar a year improvement that will continue on i
by Alex3917 8y ago
> Just reducing fraud and otherwise cutting costs could be a big win.
I mean that alone is a several trillion dollar a year improvement that will continue on indefinitely, and that's only one of the many applications for blockchain.
Consider that roughly 75% of American adults of working age are either unemployed or underemployed, and in most countries it's vastly worse than that. The reason most of them are unemployed or underemployed isn't (for the most part) that they're unable or unwilling to work or that they don't have valuable skills, but rather that double entry accounting doesn't enable a broad enough spectrum of economic relationships to capture the long tail of human talent.
When I say this is going to be a multi-quadrillion dollar technology I'm not kidding around. 99% of the stuff you own today wouldn't have been possible without the invention of double entry accounting, which vastly expanded the types of economic relationships that were possible and thereby vastly expanded the types of goods and services that could be produced. DLT isn't a replacement for your MySQL instance, it's a replacement for double entry accounting, and a 10x improvement at that. When people look back 500 years from now they're going to see that the vast majority of the (then) modern world wouldn't have been possible without it.
It's going to largely replace the middle class in the same way that automation has largely replaced the working class, because if you go down the Bureau of Labor Statistics list of jobs it's pretty clear that most middle class American jobs are basically just fulfilling glorified accounting functions.
Even just considering supply chain, as the profitability of creating counterfeit items decreases that doesn't just reduce the percentage of things you buy that are counterfeit, but it also makes it possible to make entirely new classes of (genuine) products that wouldn't have been economically viable previously.
- spookthesunset 8y agoMind telling the world what the hell “DLT” means? Dynamic link tracking? Database Local Transformation? And let’s be honest here, I’m gonna assume it is a clever buzzword designed to sell the failed blockchain technology to a new set of rubes, right?
- Alex3917 8y agoDistributed ledger technology. This is the preferred industry term because there are many newer systems that offer or claim to offer the same guarantees as blockchains but that are implemented in different ways under the hood.
- spookthesunset 8y agoSo in other words, databases? Or some new revolutionary thing that I need to BUY NOW!! It’s a scam dude. The whole space is a giant get rich quick scheme. Putting new labels on it won’t hide it.
- kthejoker2 8y agoWait, you think 75% of working age adults are unemployed or underemployed? Where'd you come up with that? And from the naked eye it definitely doesn't look like "most" middle class jobs are accounting - I see teachers, engineers, architects, healthcare, legal workers, protective services .. https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/emp-by-detailed-occupation.htm https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/emp-by-detailed-occupation.ht... So my skepticism about your assessment of our labor situation and needs bleeds over to your enthusiasm about DLT.
- tim333 8y agoI doubt distributed ledgers will do any of that. Maybe if you swapped AI for DLT it would be closer to the truth.