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I’ve been in the same boat for a long time, and still haven’t seen an application that’s compelling. But I think I’m starting to warm to the ecosystem, despite

I’ve been in the same boat for a long time, and still haven’t seen an application that’s compelling. But I think I’m starting to warm to the ecosystem, despite all the obvious silliness, so let me run my thinking by you to see if it’s crazy: Blockchains don’t really let you do anything useful that you couldn’t do before. But they make some things much easier and more accessible, by a big enough margin that they unlock some kinds of broad experimentation that weren’t really feasible before. Take what I assume will eventually be a category-defining use case, “Facebook, but owned and governed by its users.” With some imaginative lawyering, you could build that in a durable way today. But it would take capital and know-how most kids in dorm rooms don’t have access to. It’s like how the launch of AWS didn’t let you do anything that was _impossible_ to build with on-premise hardware, but it unlocked a lot of innovation anyway. Right now Ethereum is a very shitty version of Lambda plus DynamoDB, but with some interesting primitives around payment, ownership, and governance baked in. I actually have very little faith in the Ethereum roadmap given some dabbling I did in it a few years ago, but there are competing protocols with much much better performance and developer ergonomics, so they’ll either catch up or get replaced like a bad operating system.

yashg 5y ago
"Facebook, but owned and governed by its users" Only good in theory, not in practice. A Facebook or Twitter built on blockchain will be too expensive. The PoW requirement will make it expensive to add new posts to the chain. Over time, as more and more people join the network, the cost will only increase. Yes, noone will be able to ban the President of the US from this network but only select few who can afford to pay the huge gas fees will be able to post.
- acdha 5y ago
  The other side of that is abuse: if no one can be stopped from posting, that means no one can stop spammers and other phishers, prevent things like revenge porn which are required in many jurisdictions (e.g. how would it go if you couldn’t ban Nazi content in Germany?). Whether or not that system could even function, it doesn’t sound like something many people would choose to pay for. It seems like it would be Usenet except far more expensive and slowed by the inability to function asynchronously.

yashg 5y ago

"Facebook, but owned and governed by its users" Only good in theory, not in practice. A Facebook or Twitter built on blockchain will be too expensive. The PoW requirement will make it expensive to add new posts to the chain. Over time, as more and more people join the network, the cost will only increase. Yes, noone will be able to ban the President of the US from this network but only select few who can afford to pay the huge gas fees will be able to post.

acdha 5y ago
The other side of that is abuse: if no one can be stopped from posting, that means no one can stop spammers and other phishers, prevent things like revenge porn which are required in many jurisdictions (e.g. how would it go if you couldn’t ban Nazi content in Germany?). Whether or not that system could even function, it doesn’t sound like something many people would choose to pay for. It seems like it would be Usenet except far more expensive and slowed by the inability to function asynchronously.