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I'm still very opposed to the idea of taking a technology and then searching a problem for it. Why? Back in 2017 during the first hype cycle, blockchain compani

I'm still very opposed to the idea of taking a technology and then searching a problem for it. Why? Back in 2017 during the first hype cycle, blockchain companies raised hundreds of millions with ICOs. I became very interested in the technology too, and some friends still work in this space. 4 years later in the web3 era, there is not a single product aside from trading/finance that got traction. Use cases like storing the history of a car on-chain, transparent supply chains, public voting... this all sounds interesting but never made it to product-market fit. I always assume that I'm wrong, so I'll keep looking for successful applications and I'm sure you can prove me wrong :)

echopurity 5y ago
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systemvoltage 5y ago
This is literally how research in the Universities makes it to the world. Spin-offs like Boston Dynamics are essential to building things that may not have immediate use but payoff can potentially be huge. We need to do more of this. Don’t throw the baby with the bathwater. I really don’t think generalizations of certain jaded experience and then seeing the entire world with the same broken lens does any good. Probably the opposite. We ought to try new tech and keep an open mind. Before people go off on Boston Dynamics - there are thousands of spin-offs, pick some other charitable example. The point isn’t about BD.
- 5e92cb50239222b 5y ago
  Except that university research does not tend to produce that many charlatans and snake oil salesmen. I'll keep my skepticism until this technology gives us at least one useful mainstream thing.
  - systemvoltage 5y ago
    I don’t understand your point. So if University research makes it out to the world - but the world decides to create scams from it, is it University’s fault? I get it. People are angry about blockchain. Let’s shoot the world, not the messengers. Otherwise, we’ll be blaming the Bell Labs engineers for 4chan.
    - gls2ro 5y ago
      I don't think people are angry about blockchain (the technology) but about promises people make that with this technology will solve almost any society or world problem and then attracting people to invest and then if it does not work make the promise larger and atrract more money. To use your example: it is like Boston Dynamics and people around will start saying invest in our IRO (Initial Robot Offering) as we will solve with robots everything. We can fix with our robots democracy flaws, we can fix with our robots inflation ... and when asked how will this actually work world wide they will say "We will just build more robots, invest more money into this and then when everybody will have one then that is how we fix those problems". See the problem here? The problem is not the robot but the company/organisation and business model trying to sell it as a solution for everything without actually talking about the solution itself nor explaining how a robot will help with our financial system at large scale. At every critique they will just say "The solution is to build more robots and thus having robots everywhere so people will think about robots and not about other stuff".
      - galaxyLogic 5y ago
        Right. Maybe the big problem is not the lack of solutions, but the fact that we don't really understand the problems?
        tinco 5y ago
        There's no big problem, science and technology are progressing at a great pace. The whole marketing of snake oil solutions is just a nuisance, they're not really affecting anything of value significantly. People are annoyed by Blockchain the same way people were annoyed by Justin Bieber, it's a whole lot to do about a person who is just a kid, a cool kid maybe, and he did make some good songs when he got older, but he didn't change the world, and he probably isn't going to either.
  - baby 5y ago
    That’s just the downside of money being involved
- yunruse 5y ago
  From my very (admittedly very inexperienced) perspective, both views here are valid: it's foolish to scour the world for nails, but it doesn't hurt to make a hammer. Build the technology, think of how it could help, and if you can't find a niche in the world that it fits, don't force the issue. Move onto new things: perhaps re-use some old ideas, of course, but actively get a wider experience, so that you increase your surface area of finding some way for your technology to help.
  - systemvoltage 5y ago
    I have no idea what blockchain does or not. But just because its applications have turned out to be scammy, is it possible that it still has good uses in the future? May be and may be not. OP is saying more generally that we should stop looking at tech that has no uses. I am disagreeing with that stance and it is just silly to be so wound up about Blockchain zeitgeist to not see through the fog.
    - adgjlsfhk1 5y ago
      the problem with Blockchain is that it is strictly less efficient than centralized databases. therefore the only reason to use it is if you can't trust a centralized database. it's like torrents in the alternate universe where torrents were slower than a download from a server.
      - leppr 5y ago
        It's not a bad analogy. Torrents have more cumbersome UX and are less data efficients than direct downloads, yet they are widely used for some types of applications.
        xchaotic 5y ago
        How is a torrent less efficient in data transfer? Do you mean protocol overhead?
    - xchaotic 5y ago
- ryandamm 5y ago
  The primary difference is that basic research is conducted with everyone's money -- mostly via grants, and a lot of it in the US underwritten by the federal government -- for everyone's benefit. Even the venture capital industry is largely averse to basic research; they want more Ubers, or companies that can bring University tech to market. Blockchain? The money flowing in is substantially from retail investors. And that's the problem. This is why we have regulations.
  - galaxyLogic 5y ago
    If Bitcoin is like gold, then there's really not much money going into it, into how to make better bit-coin, how to make better gold. All the money just goes into buying the bit-gold itself, or perhaps buying more mining equipment. But Bitcoin is not a replenishable resource so mining it will have diminishing returns, and like with every mining industry the nature is at risk.
- tinco 5y ago
  Boston Dynamics is and always has been on a trajectory to build useful products based on technology that is promising. Whether they're going to be successful or not is dependent on financing and time and luck of technology. Blockchain was awesome technology in 2008, and Ethereum brought very interesting developments. But in the end there's only one thing it can do, and that's be an irrefutable ledger, and for most purposes that are of interest to the common person that is an insignificant improvement on centrally governed ledgers.
  - clairity 5y ago
    boston dynamics has never even been close to being on a trajectory to build useful products. they’re a grant-harvesting company first and foremost. they simply do not know how to build efficient and useful locomotors despite at least 3 decades of practice and millions of years of evolutionary precedents literally living right outside its doors. in that way, the analogy to blockchain is apt: technology focused efforts are not product (read: marketing) oriented ventures.
    - tinco 5y ago
      They literally have a product for sale now. You make it sound like they're somehow worse at making locomotors than other companies are. Do you have any competitors in mind that achieved more with less practice?
      - clairity 5y ago
        there is no market, other than the DoD (a literal monopsony). having a product for sale is for show, not a profitability move.
        tinco 5y ago
        My company seriously considered buying a couple. There will be a market, especially if they perform well.
    - cuteboy19 5y ago
baby 5y ago
People are doing research and deploying cool stuff that others are actively using. You can criticize that as much as you want but it won’t do much.
- foepys 5y ago
  Can you show some examples?
  - baby 5y ago
    I work on Mina, check it out
  - hunterb123 5y ago
    Tipping site owners, BAT token. Incentivizing IPFS content pinning, Filecoin. Allowing censorship-resistant / chargeback free donations, most coins. Enabling private transactions, Monero. Most "dapps" empower decentralization, distributed exchanges, trading, DNS, ownership contracts (DOAs), etc. NFT's for art as silly as it is, more importantly for Handshake domain names and other cases where ownership proof comes into play. Please feel free to go and attack all of those ideas and projects, but don't think for a second you can really gaslight people into believing they aren't worth of pursuit.
    - foepys 5y ago
      > Please feel free to go and attack all of those ideas and projects, but don't think for a second you can really gaslight people into believing they aren't worth of pursuit. This hostility is completely unnecessary. But if you want I can add one more to the list: funding the North Korean nuclear weapons program. https://www.zdnet.com/article/north-korean-hackers-stole-a-record-breaking-amount-of-cryptocurrency-last-year/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/north-korean-hackers-stole-a-r...
      - pygy_ 5y ago
        Also, let Iran burn a fair bit of its oil to mine ฿S.
rvz 5y ago
> Back in 2017 during the first hype cycle, blockchain companies raised hundreds of millions with ICOs. Yes. Those scams have been put an end to by regulations by the SEC, as unregistered ICOs are now illegal since 2017. [0] > there is not a single product aside from trading/finance that got traction. So what is wrong with using blockchain domain names like ENS for identity, or sign in use cases? Are we going to look back at this in 10 years time and we will see this sort of adoption? [1] [0] https://www.investor.gov/introduction-investing/general-resources/news-alerts/alerts-bulletins/investor-bulletins-16 https://www.investor.gov/introduction-investing/general-reso... [1] https://www.skiff.org/updates/skiff-ens https://www.skiff.org/updates/skiff-ens
wodenokoto 5y ago
In Dubai, buying real estate with bitcoin is a real thing, and by the looks of it also a big thing. If nothing else, it shows that crypto has succeed in one of its goals: moving money between countries, without being detected/hindered by governments. I mean, I don't know who buys real estate with crypto, but I am assuming that people who live in dubai and have large crypto values are bullish on crypto, and won't waste it for a low roi investment like realestate. So that leaves rich foreigners who wants realestate away from their own government and I can see them purchasing bitcoins as a way to siphon money out of their country. Other than that, I am also out of ideas for useful uses of crypto currencies
- galaxyLogic 5y ago
  Buying real estate with bit-coin, isn't that close to money laundering?
  - cinntaile 5y ago
    Why would that be the case?
    - missedthecue 5y ago
      Yeah it's difficult to see how this facilitates money laundering. Say you're a drug kingpin who has a billion in literal paper cash that you need to make appear legitimate. Somehow, you've got to do a billion dollars in cash to bitcoin transactions, but what's the point of buying middle eastern real estate with the bitcoin after that? Why not just rinse the bitcoin through a tumbler and sell it on an exchange and tell the taxation ministry that you simply made a great investment? Then you have a billion dollars minus tax in your bank account that you can do anything with. Dubai real estate is completely irrelevant to the process. I think "money laundering" is like "ponzi scheme". The more likely someone on the internet is to use it, the less likely it is that they actually understand the term.
      - georgeecollins 5y ago
galaxyLogic 5y ago
'Public voting' is not a technological problem but political one. There's a lot of opposition to making voting more accessible to everyone. Voting should be easy, and you don't need blockchain for that but maybe it could help. The question is who wants "voting rights".
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  Unfortunately, trust in voting can only be achieved with paper voting, there is no technological solution to improve it that doesn't completely remove trust as well.
  - shrimpx 5y ago
    Trust as in the public trusting the vote? I'm afraid you can put political spin on and create distrust in pretty much anything.
    - tsimionescu 5y ago
      Of course, the public can mistrust a paper vote, for good or bad reasons. But, it's not possible to reasonably trust an electronic voting system - the people installing and maintaining the system have myriad ways to manipulate the vote that are almost impossible to discover or prove (at least as long as you don't accept public voting, which has different issues).
      - baobabKoodaa 5y ago
        There are many different ways to construct an electronic voting system. What you are describing is a traditional, centralized electronic voting system. There are electronic voting systems out there that provide certain guarantees without the need to trust.
        acdha 5y ago
        No, there aren’t. There are systems designed to solve the problem of the inventor not getting paid by election officials but voting is an extremely hard problem once you learn about it and safe electronic voting is unsolved. The big challenge is that it needs to be anonymous even in the case of attacks. Electronic systems offer many ways to cheat which you may have thought about in the context of making purchases but voting also needs to deal with unique problems like changing votes or coercion. If I buy a coffee, I don’t care if the owner alters their database as long as I get my coffee. I also don’t have a reason to fear that charge showing up on my statement but most proposed systems re-enable old attacks where, say, your boss/union/neighborhood crime leader/etc. could use the verification mechanism to confirm that you voted the way they told you to. Paper ballots are the best system known because the system is easy to understand and doesn’t require huge amounts of trust. We just went through this in the United States where the leader of the country backed by a multibillion dollar propaganda machine tried to claim fraud but lost repeatedly because there was no plausible way to have altered or replaced paper ballots at scale. Electronic systems would have made it much easier to cast that doubt because the babble they tried about hacks would have been harder to disprove for the average voter and there would have been far more leeway for a partisan judge to find doubt.
jl6 5y ago
The tech-first approach also distracts from real problems that remain unsolved while cash circles the blockdrain.
neiman 5y ago
It seems you are looking for a product blockchain enables you, but there are activities the blockchain enables which are not products, and are very difficult up to impossible without. One example is sustainable (financially) open-source project is one I use now. Before that it was always impossible. You get a bunch of people all over the world, many of them are identified only by Internet handles. There's no investment to handle all the legalities of establishing a business, and anyway there's no legal framework for international businesses with psuedo-anonymous people. But with blockchain we've been using DAOs and online voting tools etc. since 3-4 years now, and it works great. It handles the governance and the finance in a way the traditional system cannot offer.
- BoiledCabbage 5y ago
  I'm trying to understand. You're saying that you wouldn't be able to perform online votes or surveys and remotely send money without a blockchain? Could you expand more on what functionality that the blockchain provides that the other solutions in this space (online surveys and remotely send money) don't?
  - tintor 5y ago
    They don't have to trust each other. ie. No need to have a dedicated treasurer.
    - jhrmnn 5y ago
      In the end, someone has power over the things in the real world, like releasing a version of the software or purchasing stuff. So everyone involved has to trust that someone at the least.
      - neiman 5y ago
        Open-source has the great advantage that it's auditable by everyone, hence the trust is distributed. That's a comment for open-source in general, not about blockchains.
travbrack 5y ago
Online shopping hadn't hit product market fit in the late 80s even though the Internet had already been around for a few years.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- speedgoose 5y ago
  France had online shopping in the early 80s with the Minitel.
  - myrion 5y ago
    Plus, it was clear that online shopping could work and offered certain advantages (and disadvantages). It was also pretty clear that online access was only going to expand, which would make online shopping more attractive. It hadn't hit a peak, but it was clearly _doing_ something that wasn't scams.
malwarebytess 5y ago
That is what financialization does. Finance is a parasite that will destroy all potential if given room. To force finance to be symbiotic you must never allow them to control anything. These ideas are best left in the academy, and then later financialized. The exception to this is internal R&D (like Bell Labs and countless other extremely productive corporate divisions.)
- boppo1 5y ago
  Out of curiosity: How well have significant Bell Labs contributors been compensated? It seems to me that lost of current tech, and even 'future tech' not yet adopted has come out of Bell Labs. But how many of the engineers that came up with said advances settled for relative peanuts? Getting paid $250K for something that changes the world seems... less than adequate. Maybe I'm just greedy. I don't think so.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - shlurpy 5y ago
    Those people are represent labor, not capital, and thus are never paid their share of profit under capitalism.
ique 5y ago
The idea that blockchain tech is somehow invented out of nothing and then we search for a problem to match couldn't be further from the truth. Talk to anyone who works in the industry and they're trying to solve a problem. I used to work in blockchain tech and the main problem I was focused on was "How do we prevent internet monopolies like Facebook and Google?". If you don't see those monopolies as a problem, then you're disagreeing with the problem space, that doesn't make it "trying to find a problem".
- x86_64Ubuntu 5y ago
  There's quite a bit of distance between blockchain tech and preventing Facebook/Google monopolies isn't there? And as long as blockchain tech has some dependency on capital investment, your better funded outfits are always going to have the terrain tilted in their favor.
  - ique 5y ago
    If it has dependency on capital investment, it's not blockchain tech. Like almost by definition. Unless you adopt a super dumb idea of "blockchain = linked list". If you're talking about more than the data structure then what you're saying makes no sense.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- tjs8rj 5y ago
  How does blockchain tech prevent monopolies exactly? Any environment that respects property rights and has activities that can be done more efficiently with scale and concentration will have centralization. Cryptocurrencies themselves are centralized by almost every dimension because mining exhibits those characteristics. Nearly any interesting on chain technology is centralized in that a minority disproportionately receives the vast majority of the upside. None of this kills monopolies
  - 5y ago
darawk 5y ago
> I'm still very opposed to the idea of taking a technology and then searching a problem for it. So, you're opposed to the internet, then?
- vba616 5y ago
  Maybe you could refer to some history more specifically? Are you saying networking technology was developed in advance of a concept of what it's useful for? Or is it that a global network of networks was a qualitative step beyond simple networking that didn't have a clear justification?
  - darawk 5y ago
    > Maybe you could refer to some history more specifically? Are you saying networking technology was developed in advance of a concept of what it's useful for? I'm saying that networking technologies original intended use (resilient nuclear launch capability) is a tiny irrelevant fraction of what it is used for today. I'd argue that most transformative technologies are in fact not relegated to their original intended use. Following cool/interesting/powerful technologies to see where they lead, rather than knowing the destination in advance, is how we have gotten almost everything that we have.
    - vba616 5y ago
      Being resilient to unreliable connections in general is a feature that was important initially and has never stopped being relevant. The purpose of ARPANET was to implement applications like telnet, ftp, and email, so people could benefit from remote access to computers. The first network link went up in 1969 and the basic applications were implemented by 1973. It seems to me that people knew exactly what they wanted to do from the get-go, it was useful almost immediately, and even though we have exponentially more people, computers, and applications today, the internet itself hasn't fundamentally changed. This is not a proof that cryptocurrency is a dead end, but I think it's as clear as it can be that it has not been developed and adopted like internetworking was. One could argue that the internet was in fact not innovative, transformative or interesting, and identify that as where it is different from cryptocurrency. Isn't connecting existing networks to each other as obvious, mundane, and utilitarian as it gets? There is a RAND paper from the 60s that suggests the development of the internet over the next 50 years was fairly obvious: https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P3717.html https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P3717.html It talks about online shopping, videoconferencing, etc. There are bound to be anachronisms, but even so.
rileyphone 5y ago
Blockchain is proving a more than capable solution in the ransomware payments space, enabling a whole new class of malware.
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
  It also enables people to finance themselves despite tyrannical restrictions imposed by bad governments. Using bitcoin I can send money to someone in Chi no a who's social rating was degraded by the CCP and who is forbidden from using banks. This alone trumps any arguments against bitcoin. Crime will exist forever and criminals will find ways to finance themselves anyway, so the use of cryptocurrencies for their operations is not really a factor.
  - red_trumpet 5y ago
    And of the CCP ever finds out, he will end up in jail. And if they can link your wallet to you, you will not be able to travel to China anymore.
  - 3825 5y ago
    > Using bitcoin I can send money to someone in Chi no a who's social rating was degraded by the CCP and who is forbidden from using banks How will they convert it into something they can use to pay rent and buy groceries? > Crime will exist forever and criminals will find ways to finance themselves anyway, so the use of cryptocurrencies for their operations is not really a factor. Does this make it easier for the wealthy to evade taxes? I find just signing transactions using something like gpg a much easier to reason about. My biggest concern about cryptocurrency is fees. There is no reason why fees should be based on payload as far as I understand. Whether I’m sending one satoshi (or any other unit of money) or a trillion, the cost should be the same and ideally as close to zero as possible if not zero. This was the original reason I was drawn to bitcoin but it was obvious it would never be the case.
    - yashg 5y ago
      > How will they convert it into something they can use to pay rent and buy groceries? Exactly my question. Exchanges where you can sell the crypto for real money are still regulated and require KYC. > My biggest concern about cryptocurrency is fees. High fees are required to pay for the insane electricity bills and specialized hardware. PoW cryptos are expensive and inefficient by design so there will always be more transactions waiting in the queue to get on the chain than the processing power required to mine the next block.
heroiccocoa 5y ago
Then you should be opposed to most basic (theoretical computer) science and mathematics research too that doesn't have any immediately apparent application. The scientific research to engineering pipeline is the backbone of our rapid technological progress. Basic research can target unexplored areas in a more organized fashion, allocating resources properly instead of industry's ad-hoc approach. Sort of like breath first instead of depth first. Industry will waste resources solving just their own individual instances of a mini-problem one by one resulting in a total resource consumption that is greater than what academia would have used in solving the overarching problem.
- pmlnr 5y ago
  Pour the same amount of money into math as people poured into cryptocurrencies then.
  - faeyanpiraat 5y ago
    How can I buy math?
    - pmlnr 5y ago
      By pouring money into universities who do math.
      - danaris 5y ago
        ...Just be aware that when you're investing in math, it's not an "investment" that pays out for you personally. It's an investment in all of humanity.
        pmlnr 5y ago
        That's the point.
- awild 5y ago
  General mathematics and computer science don't require burning energy on the scale of nations just to function
cmews 5y ago
Helium network is an example of a successful blockchain project/application in my opinion. They created the biggest decentralized lorawan network in the world that is used by more internet of things companies everyday. Also they are trying the same thing for creating a decentralized 5G network. It’s still early days for them because I think they started in the end of 2020 or the start of 2021, but they have grown to 490000 lorawan hotspots already. The network usage could be better, but is increasing (saw increased sensor data activity for my hotspot in 2021).
- maxfromua 5y ago
  Sorry, can you please explain (or give some link) how it is related to blockchain? https://www.helium.com/lorawan https://www.helium.com/lorawan doesn’t mention this word In general, I was under the impression that IoT devices are underpowered for such usage. Thank you!
  - cmews 5y ago
    It’s on their homepage (helium.com) with the following text: ‘’’ Powered by the Helium Blockchain, The People’s Network represents a paradigm shift for decentralized wireless infrastructure. ‘’’ They use the blockchain in combination with a proof of coverage algorithm to reward hotspots. https://docs.helium.com/blockchain/proof-of-coverage/ https://docs.helium.com/blockchain/proof-of-coverage/
    - Animats 5y ago
      Now that's an interesting idea. I'd wanted to have "proof of decentralization" - require that nodes be physically distant from each other, to prevent mining farms. But I couldn't figure out a way to prevent cheating. It's easy to fake that you are far away, but hard to fake that you're close, because the speed of light limits ping time. But if you have something that's a useful network in its own right that keeps track of its own coverage, you can use that to enforce decentralization. The higher the density of nodes in an area, the lower the reward.
tomputer 5y ago
> Use cases like storing the history of a car on-chain, transparent supply chains, public voting... this all sounds interesting but never made it to product-market fit. Anything that does not exist natively on the blockchain doesn't need a blockchain at all. If a token on the blockchain would represent you as the owner of a car and one day someone steals your private key which represents your car ownership, that person is now the owner of your car. Still, the car keys are located in your house, the license plate is registered on your name and address, the insurance is on your name. I guess I don't need to explain further how ridiculous that idea is that a token would officially represent you as the car owner.
- axg11 5y ago
  Couldn’t you say the same thing about the deed for a house?
  - duskwuff 5y ago
    Physically possessing the deed to a house doesn't make you its owner either.
    - bratwurst3000 5y ago
      The law makes me the owner… good we have something to trust that my house is my house… the law and not crypto ;)
      - arlcode 5y ago
        Well the law and the fact that (eventually) someone will come and physically remove whoever claims to own your house. A Blockchain without the ability to initiate (and complete) such a process is worthless for questions of real world ownership. Of course a Blockchain could be empowered to do that....through a law.
        cinquemb 5y ago
        A blockchain (or the contracts that run upon any particular one) could also incentivize a distributed group of participants to take it upon themselves to temporarily and physically enforce some ones else's real world claims (a signed tx from the same addr with the on chain claim putting their owner ship up as collateral to be liquidated at a discount conditional if the buyer can secure the premises by any means necessarily, some onchain decentralized AMM prediction markets already have alot of this functionality and more), esp if those up for the task already have the means to do so and the potential payout is enough… irrespective of a particular jurisdiction laws. Gets even more interesting when people can buy puts and calls on someones liquidation via options dex. A few of the ex-mil people in a DAO i'm apart of are really interested in this space growing for services like that, for obvious reasons.
rvba 5y ago
> web3 era There is no web3, nor web3 era. It is a marketing buzzword.
- CRConrad 5y ago
  Maybe "eras" nowadays aren't defined by anything real any more, but by buzzwords.
waffle_maniac 5y ago
Brave has micropayments for creators. It achieved 50M MAU last year. In a few years it will surpass Firefox.
- xfz 5y ago
  That's a very energy-inefficient way of rewarding content creators. Given that most users are going to go through Coinbase et al, it's no different from any of the other similar schemes (anyone remember Flatr?) except that you have a volatile wallet and a payment mechanism that somehow manages to be even more expensive than Amex!
  - waffle_maniac 5y ago
    Cashing out BAT happens with either Uphold or Gemini. Coinbase isn’t supported. But you don’t have to do that. I earn BAT and donate it to creators. It’s not perfect. Neither are the solutions we have now that don’t compensate users for their attention. Over time it will improve.
nly 5y ago
Bitcoin had a problem to solve, it had a use case, from day dot... Satoshi set out to replace central banks that can inflate the money supply. It was supposed to be relatively boring tech solving a niche problem (from the guy on the streets point of view)
- grey-area 5y ago
  It was also designed as a pyramid scheme though to drive adoption. This was an unfortunate mistake and that and the inefficiency at scale doomed it as a currency.
- pirate787 5y ago
  This is wrong. The original purpose was cashless payments between untrusted parties.
NicoJuicy 5y ago
I think PartChain of BMW is the only one i know of: https://www.press.bmwgroup.com/global/article/detail/T0307164EN/bmw-group-uses-blockchain-to-drive-supply-chain-transparency?language=en https://www.press.bmwgroup.com/global/article/detail/T030716...
wahnfrieden 5y ago
Issuing tokens is still probably illegal in both countries I live/work in. Regulatory and tax compliance immaturity are holding back a lot of people besides at the wild frontier or offshore operations with the resources to navigate that
lkrubner 5y ago
I've been documenting this with specific companies. A recent one that I worked with was Omnichains: https://www.omnichains.com https://www.omnichains.com "Omnichain CEO Pratik Soni speaks to Inbound Logistics about the growing number of blockchain use cases in the supply chain, including in reverse logistics, product authentication and sustainability." Apparently this company started with the idea that they would use the blockchain to make supply chains more transparent. And they raised money from investors with that goal in mind. But they have since retreated from that goal. I worked with a retailer that worked with Omnichains. None of Omnichains tools had anything to do with the blockchain. Certainly, we were never given access to a blockchain, nor was it mentioned after we had signed the contract. Instead, we were granted limited access to an API that I believe was run with Ruby on Rails and MySQL. So at a certain point this company retreated to traditional technologies, rather than trying to use the blockchain. This is one example. At some point I hope to write up some of the other examples that I've seen. I do not believe anyone will ever find a legal use for blockchains that cannot be more easily served with traditional technologies.
- edem 5y ago
  You're missing the point. The goal when you use blockchain is not to more easily serve. It is all the things that don't matter to you until it is too late, like censorship resistance.
  - 300bps 5y ago
    There is no censorship resistance with blockchain. You’re still beholden to the whims of centralized developers and miners. You’re still beholden to a court order. If the government wants to confiscate your crypto assets they can simply put you in jail until you provide the location of your private key. If the government can penetrate offshore bank accounts they’ll have no trouble with your crypto wallet. I’m happily mining ETH with gminer on flexpool.io and selling the coins as fast as I get them just like I did with BTC a decade ago. Because I know this whole thing is a temporary pyramid scheme.
    - edem 5y ago
xvilka 5y ago
Biggest logistics companies in the world use it: https://www.tradelens.com/ https://www.tradelens.com/
- yashg 5y ago
  Do you know of any logistics company that actually uses it? What exactly do they store on blockchain? Who gets to add blocks to the chain? Are those permissioned blockchains? Can a private permissioned blockchain even be called blockchain? How does a private blockchain differ from a centralized database?
boringg 5y ago
I had the same experience. The thing that gets me as well is that normally with the rise of new technology you get an excitement that is tangible. Like when the internet first xame around there were emails, multiplayer games via modem, websites. A whole plethora of new wonderful experiences. So far all I've really gotten after doing a lot of research is some good projects and a long tail of terrible projects/websites and a lot of scammers. It really feels like with the NFT backlash in the gaming world right now that crypto hasn't found its landing and it really hasn't taken off - its kind of in this weird purgatory. Im hopeful but very suspicious at this point. I wasn't suspicious of “the internet” until it was around for a long time. Crypto is past its wave of this is cool and lets build stuff phase afaik and now everyone is trying to make money off it.
cdiddy2 5y ago
I like the idea that the chain can be used as the source of truth when other sources of truth have failed us. first 15 minutes of this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cwbbxb987vE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cwbbxb987vE
- acdha 5y ago
  This is disproving the claim: once you introduce oracles, you are acknowledging that the trust of the system comes from outside the chain.
  - cdiddy2 5y ago
    that will always be the case for anything off chain. the question is do oracles and well constructed systems provide better data than what we have access to today
    - acdha 5y ago
      And the answer is no, because anything which can be done to improve the trusted third-parties can be done more efficiently without the extra overhead of a blockchain. Blockchains require expensive always-on networks whereas many operations can run with much lower data requirements and even work entirely offline.
      - cdiddy2 5y ago
        but it adds verifiability and immutability that others can't offer
        acdha 5y ago
        You can do that using public-key cryptography much cheaper, without depending on a massive network and expensive processing fees. The only time a blockchain can make sense is if the parties don’t know or trust each other, and by definition you’re trusting an oracle.
wbl 5y ago
Buying drugs on the Internet. The penetration might be low now, but the TAM is sizeable.
agumonkey 5y ago
It's muddy waters. I just heard some guy from a public office saying they used DOT for some specific need (related to managing bonds somehow). And it was before last year boom. It's all very fuzzy
- CRConrad 5y ago
  > some guy from a public office saying they used DOT for some specific need Department of transport?
  - agumonkey 5y ago
    dot is a blockchain
czbond 5y ago
Decentralized, anonymized identity is one application. It sounds amazing in theory - and can work for the general use cases of sharing information with corporations. But, I believe it won't really be anonymized, as "data exhaust", "identity touch points revealing identity in aggregate" can help identify. An example I use, is people expect bitcoin is anonymous. Yes, it is anonymous to the general layperson and corporation - but not to say NSA/FBI for "people of interest". And once bitcoin to USDollar transactions or financial institutions are more common - banks will sell your wallet information to credit bureaus, and eventually corporations will be able to de-anonymize chains for profiling just as today.
twelve40 5y ago
I'm glad someone remembers the (2-year) history. NFTs=ICOs, just another scam to keep "crypto" afloat. Neither ICO nor NFT resulted in anything useful, wait, maybe Bored Ape??
UnpossibleJim 5y ago
I can think of small problems that use blockchain as a solution, but they're relatively niche and only make the game-space straddle the real world, so they tend to be a bit on the vaporware side. Handy, sure, but I'm not sure they are A) 100% necessarily or B) as revolutionary as everyone seems to think blockchain is meant to be =[ EDIT: forgot to say, this could be a complete lack of imagination on my part past what's been done with blockchain already or just my horrible indoctrination into the game-space like some kind of cult =)

echopurity 5y ago

[dead]

systemvoltage 5y ago

This is literally how research in the Universities makes it to the world. Spin-offs like Boston Dynamics are essential to building things that may not have immediate use but payoff can potentially be huge. We need to do more of this. Don’t throw the baby with the bathwater. I really don’t think generalizations of certain jaded experience and then seeing the entire world with the same broken lens does any good. Probably the opposite. We ought to try new tech and keep an open mind. Before people go off on Boston Dynamics - there are thousands of spin-offs, pick some other charitable example. The point isn’t about BD.

5e92cb50239222b 5y ago
Except that university research does not tend to produce that many charlatans and snake oil salesmen. I'll keep my skepticism until this technology gives us at least one useful mainstream thing.
- systemvoltage 5y ago
  I don’t understand your point. So if University research makes it out to the world - but the world decides to create scams from it, is it University’s fault? I get it. People are angry about blockchain. Let’s shoot the world, not the messengers. Otherwise, we’ll be blaming the Bell Labs engineers for 4chan.
  - gls2ro 5y ago
    I don't think people are angry about blockchain (the technology) but about promises people make that with this technology will solve almost any society or world problem and then attracting people to invest and then if it does not work make the promise larger and atrract more money. To use your example: it is like Boston Dynamics and people around will start saying invest in our IRO (Initial Robot Offering) as we will solve with robots everything. We can fix with our robots democracy flaws, we can fix with our robots inflation ... and when asked how will this actually work world wide they will say "We will just build more robots, invest more money into this and then when everybody will have one then that is how we fix those problems". See the problem here? The problem is not the robot but the company/organisation and business model trying to sell it as a solution for everything without actually talking about the solution itself nor explaining how a robot will help with our financial system at large scale. At every critique they will just say "The solution is to build more robots and thus having robots everywhere so people will think about robots and not about other stuff".
    - galaxyLogic 5y ago
      Right. Maybe the big problem is not the lack of solutions, but the fact that we don't really understand the problems?
      - tinco 5y ago
        There's no big problem, science and technology are progressing at a great pace. The whole marketing of snake oil solutions is just a nuisance, they're not really affecting anything of value significantly. People are annoyed by Blockchain the same way people were annoyed by Justin Bieber, it's a whole lot to do about a person who is just a kid, a cool kid maybe, and he did make some good songs when he got older, but he didn't change the world, and he probably isn't going to either.
- baby 5y ago
  That’s just the downside of money being involved
yunruse 5y ago
From my very (admittedly very inexperienced) perspective, both views here are valid: it's foolish to scour the world for nails, but it doesn't hurt to make a hammer. Build the technology, think of how it could help, and if you can't find a niche in the world that it fits, don't force the issue. Move onto new things: perhaps re-use some old ideas, of course, but actively get a wider experience, so that you increase your surface area of finding some way for your technology to help.
- systemvoltage 5y ago
  I have no idea what blockchain does or not. But just because its applications have turned out to be scammy, is it possible that it still has good uses in the future? May be and may be not. OP is saying more generally that we should stop looking at tech that has no uses. I am disagreeing with that stance and it is just silly to be so wound up about Blockchain zeitgeist to not see through the fog.
  - adgjlsfhk1 5y ago
    the problem with Blockchain is that it is strictly less efficient than centralized databases. therefore the only reason to use it is if you can't trust a centralized database. it's like torrents in the alternate universe where torrents were slower than a download from a server.
    - leppr 5y ago
      It's not a bad analogy. Torrents have more cumbersome UX and are less data efficients than direct downloads, yet they are widely used for some types of applications.
      - xchaotic 5y ago
        How is a torrent less efficient in data transfer? Do you mean protocol overhead?
  - xchaotic 5y ago
ryandamm 5y ago
The primary difference is that basic research is conducted with everyone's money -- mostly via grants, and a lot of it in the US underwritten by the federal government -- for everyone's benefit. Even the venture capital industry is largely averse to basic research; they want more Ubers, or companies that can bring University tech to market. Blockchain? The money flowing in is substantially from retail investors. And that's the problem. This is why we have regulations.
- galaxyLogic 5y ago
  If Bitcoin is like gold, then there's really not much money going into it, into how to make better bit-coin, how to make better gold. All the money just goes into buying the bit-gold itself, or perhaps buying more mining equipment. But Bitcoin is not a replenishable resource so mining it will have diminishing returns, and like with every mining industry the nature is at risk.
tinco 5y ago
Boston Dynamics is and always has been on a trajectory to build useful products based on technology that is promising. Whether they're going to be successful or not is dependent on financing and time and luck of technology. Blockchain was awesome technology in 2008, and Ethereum brought very interesting developments. But in the end there's only one thing it can do, and that's be an irrefutable ledger, and for most purposes that are of interest to the common person that is an insignificant improvement on centrally governed ledgers.
- clairity 5y ago
  boston dynamics has never even been close to being on a trajectory to build useful products. they’re a grant-harvesting company first and foremost. they simply do not know how to build efficient and useful locomotors despite at least 3 decades of practice and millions of years of evolutionary precedents literally living right outside its doors. in that way, the analogy to blockchain is apt: technology focused efforts are not product (read: marketing) oriented ventures.
  - tinco 5y ago
    They literally have a product for sale now. You make it sound like they're somehow worse at making locomotors than other companies are. Do you have any competitors in mind that achieved more with less practice?
    - clairity 5y ago
      there is no market, other than the DoD (a literal monopsony). having a product for sale is for show, not a profitability move.
      - tinco 5y ago
        My company seriously considered buying a couple. There will be a market, especially if they perform well.
  - cuteboy19 5y ago

baby 5y ago

People are doing research and deploying cool stuff that others are actively using. You can criticize that as much as you want but it won’t do much.

foepys 5y ago
Can you show some examples?
- baby 5y ago
  I work on Mina, check it out
- hunterb123 5y ago
  Tipping site owners, BAT token. Incentivizing IPFS content pinning, Filecoin. Allowing censorship-resistant / chargeback free donations, most coins. Enabling private transactions, Monero. Most "dapps" empower decentralization, distributed exchanges, trading, DNS, ownership contracts (DOAs), etc. NFT's for art as silly as it is, more importantly for Handshake domain names and other cases where ownership proof comes into play. Please feel free to go and attack all of those ideas and projects, but don't think for a second you can really gaslight people into believing they aren't worth of pursuit.
  - foepys 5y ago
    > Please feel free to go and attack all of those ideas and projects, but don't think for a second you can really gaslight people into believing they aren't worth of pursuit. This hostility is completely unnecessary. But if you want I can add one more to the list: funding the North Korean nuclear weapons program. https://www.zdnet.com/article/north-korean-hackers-stole-a-record-breaking-amount-of-cryptocurrency-last-year/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/north-korean-hackers-stole-a-r...
    - pygy_ 5y ago
      Also, let Iran burn a fair bit of its oil to mine ฿S.

rvz 5y ago

> Back in 2017 during the first hype cycle, blockchain companies raised hundreds of millions with ICOs. Yes. Those scams have been put an end to by regulations by the SEC, as unregistered ICOs are now illegal since 2017. [0] > there is not a single product aside from trading/finance that got traction. So what is wrong with using blockchain domain names like ENS for identity, or sign in use cases? Are we going to look back at this in 10 years time and we will see this sort of adoption? [1] [0] https://www.investor.gov/introduction-investing/general-resources/news-alerts/alerts-bulletins/investor-bulletins-16 https://www.investor.gov/introduction-investing/general-reso... [1] https://www.skiff.org/updates/skiff-ens https://www.skiff.org/updates/skiff-ens

wodenokoto 5y ago

In Dubai, buying real estate with bitcoin is a real thing, and by the looks of it also a big thing. If nothing else, it shows that crypto has succeed in one of its goals: moving money between countries, without being detected/hindered by governments. I mean, I don't know who buys real estate with crypto, but I am assuming that people who live in dubai and have large crypto values are bullish on crypto, and won't waste it for a low roi investment like realestate. So that leaves rich foreigners who wants realestate away from their own government and I can see them purchasing bitcoins as a way to siphon money out of their country. Other than that, I am also out of ideas for useful uses of crypto currencies

galaxyLogic 5y ago
Buying real estate with bit-coin, isn't that close to money laundering?
- cinntaile 5y ago
  Why would that be the case?
  - missedthecue 5y ago
    Yeah it's difficult to see how this facilitates money laundering. Say you're a drug kingpin who has a billion in literal paper cash that you need to make appear legitimate. Somehow, you've got to do a billion dollars in cash to bitcoin transactions, but what's the point of buying middle eastern real estate with the bitcoin after that? Why not just rinse the bitcoin through a tumbler and sell it on an exchange and tell the taxation ministry that you simply made a great investment? Then you have a billion dollars minus tax in your bank account that you can do anything with. Dubai real estate is completely irrelevant to the process. I think "money laundering" is like "ponzi scheme". The more likely someone on the internet is to use it, the less likely it is that they actually understand the term.
    - georgeecollins 5y ago

galaxyLogic 5y ago

'Public voting' is not a technological problem but political one. There's a lot of opposition to making voting more accessible to everyone. Voting should be easy, and you don't need blockchain for that but maybe it could help. The question is who wants "voting rights".

tsimionescu 5y ago
Unfortunately, trust in voting can only be achieved with paper voting, there is no technological solution to improve it that doesn't completely remove trust as well.
- shrimpx 5y ago
  Trust as in the public trusting the vote? I'm afraid you can put political spin on and create distrust in pretty much anything.
  - tsimionescu 5y ago
    Of course, the public can mistrust a paper vote, for good or bad reasons. But, it's not possible to reasonably trust an electronic voting system - the people installing and maintaining the system have myriad ways to manipulate the vote that are almost impossible to discover or prove (at least as long as you don't accept public voting, which has different issues).
    - baobabKoodaa 5y ago
      There are many different ways to construct an electronic voting system. What you are describing is a traditional, centralized electronic voting system. There are electronic voting systems out there that provide certain guarantees without the need to trust.
      - acdha 5y ago
        No, there aren’t. There are systems designed to solve the problem of the inventor not getting paid by election officials but voting is an extremely hard problem once you learn about it and safe electronic voting is unsolved. The big challenge is that it needs to be anonymous even in the case of attacks. Electronic systems offer many ways to cheat which you may have thought about in the context of making purchases but voting also needs to deal with unique problems like changing votes or coercion. If I buy a coffee, I don’t care if the owner alters their database as long as I get my coffee. I also don’t have a reason to fear that charge showing up on my statement but most proposed systems re-enable old attacks where, say, your boss/union/neighborhood crime leader/etc. could use the verification mechanism to confirm that you voted the way they told you to. Paper ballots are the best system known because the system is easy to understand and doesn’t require huge amounts of trust. We just went through this in the United States where the leader of the country backed by a multibillion dollar propaganda machine tried to claim fraud but lost repeatedly because there was no plausible way to have altered or replaced paper ballots at scale. Electronic systems would have made it much easier to cast that doubt because the babble they tried about hacks would have been harder to disprove for the average voter and there would have been far more leeway for a partisan judge to find doubt.

jl6 5y ago

The tech-first approach also distracts from real problems that remain unsolved while cash circles the blockdrain.

neiman 5y ago

It seems you are looking for a product blockchain enables you, but there are activities the blockchain enables which are not products, and are very difficult up to impossible without. One example is sustainable (financially) open-source project is one I use now. Before that it was always impossible. You get a bunch of people all over the world, many of them are identified only by Internet handles. There's no investment to handle all the legalities of establishing a business, and anyway there's no legal framework for international businesses with psuedo-anonymous people. But with blockchain we've been using DAOs and online voting tools etc. since 3-4 years now, and it works great. It handles the governance and the finance in a way the traditional system cannot offer.

BoiledCabbage 5y ago
I'm trying to understand. You're saying that you wouldn't be able to perform online votes or surveys and remotely send money without a blockchain? Could you expand more on what functionality that the blockchain provides that the other solutions in this space (online surveys and remotely send money) don't?
- tintor 5y ago
  They don't have to trust each other. ie. No need to have a dedicated treasurer.
  - jhrmnn 5y ago
    In the end, someone has power over the things in the real world, like releasing a version of the software or purchasing stuff. So everyone involved has to trust that someone at the least.
    - neiman 5y ago
      Open-source has the great advantage that it's auditable by everyone, hence the trust is distributed. That's a comment for open-source in general, not about blockchains.

travbrack 5y ago

Online shopping hadn't hit product market fit in the late 80s even though the Internet had already been around for a few years.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
speedgoose 5y ago
France had online shopping in the early 80s with the Minitel.
- myrion 5y ago
  Plus, it was clear that online shopping could work and offered certain advantages (and disadvantages). It was also pretty clear that online access was only going to expand, which would make online shopping more attractive. It hadn't hit a peak, but it was clearly _doing_ something that wasn't scams.

malwarebytess 5y ago

That is what financialization does. Finance is a parasite that will destroy all potential if given room. To force finance to be symbiotic you must never allow them to control anything. These ideas are best left in the academy, and then later financialized. The exception to this is internal R&D (like Bell Labs and countless other extremely productive corporate divisions.)

boppo1 5y ago
Out of curiosity: How well have significant Bell Labs contributors been compensated? It seems to me that lost of current tech, and even 'future tech' not yet adopted has come out of Bell Labs. But how many of the engineers that came up with said advances settled for relative peanuts? Getting paid $250K for something that changes the world seems... less than adequate. Maybe I'm just greedy. I don't think so.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- shlurpy 5y ago
  Those people are represent labor, not capital, and thus are never paid their share of profit under capitalism.

ique 5y ago

The idea that blockchain tech is somehow invented out of nothing and then we search for a problem to match couldn't be further from the truth. Talk to anyone who works in the industry and they're trying to solve a problem. I used to work in blockchain tech and the main problem I was focused on was "How do we prevent internet monopolies like Facebook and Google?". If you don't see those monopolies as a problem, then you're disagreeing with the problem space, that doesn't make it "trying to find a problem".

x86_64Ubuntu 5y ago
There's quite a bit of distance between blockchain tech and preventing Facebook/Google monopolies isn't there? And as long as blockchain tech has some dependency on capital investment, your better funded outfits are always going to have the terrain tilted in their favor.
- ique 5y ago
  If it has dependency on capital investment, it's not blockchain tech. Like almost by definition. Unless you adopt a super dumb idea of "blockchain = linked list". If you're talking about more than the data structure then what you're saying makes no sense.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
tjs8rj 5y ago
How does blockchain tech prevent monopolies exactly? Any environment that respects property rights and has activities that can be done more efficiently with scale and concentration will have centralization. Cryptocurrencies themselves are centralized by almost every dimension because mining exhibits those characteristics. Nearly any interesting on chain technology is centralized in that a minority disproportionately receives the vast majority of the upside. None of this kills monopolies
- 5y ago

darawk 5y ago

> I'm still very opposed to the idea of taking a technology and then searching a problem for it. So, you're opposed to the internet, then?

vba616 5y ago
Maybe you could refer to some history more specifically? Are you saying networking technology was developed in advance of a concept of what it's useful for? Or is it that a global network of networks was a qualitative step beyond simple networking that didn't have a clear justification?
- darawk 5y ago
  > Maybe you could refer to some history more specifically? Are you saying networking technology was developed in advance of a concept of what it's useful for? I'm saying that networking technologies original intended use (resilient nuclear launch capability) is a tiny irrelevant fraction of what it is used for today. I'd argue that most transformative technologies are in fact not relegated to their original intended use. Following cool/interesting/powerful technologies to see where they lead, rather than knowing the destination in advance, is how we have gotten almost everything that we have.
  - vba616 5y ago
    Being resilient to unreliable connections in general is a feature that was important initially and has never stopped being relevant. The purpose of ARPANET was to implement applications like telnet, ftp, and email, so people could benefit from remote access to computers. The first network link went up in 1969 and the basic applications were implemented by 1973. It seems to me that people knew exactly what they wanted to do from the get-go, it was useful almost immediately, and even though we have exponentially more people, computers, and applications today, the internet itself hasn't fundamentally changed. This is not a proof that cryptocurrency is a dead end, but I think it's as clear as it can be that it has not been developed and adopted like internetworking was. One could argue that the internet was in fact not innovative, transformative or interesting, and identify that as where it is different from cryptocurrency. Isn't connecting existing networks to each other as obvious, mundane, and utilitarian as it gets? There is a RAND paper from the 60s that suggests the development of the internet over the next 50 years was fairly obvious: https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P3717.html https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P3717.html It talks about online shopping, videoconferencing, etc. There are bound to be anachronisms, but even so.

rileyphone 5y ago

Blockchain is proving a more than capable solution in the ransomware payments space, enabling a whole new class of malware.

Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
It also enables people to finance themselves despite tyrannical restrictions imposed by bad governments. Using bitcoin I can send money to someone in Chi no a who's social rating was degraded by the CCP and who is forbidden from using banks. This alone trumps any arguments against bitcoin. Crime will exist forever and criminals will find ways to finance themselves anyway, so the use of cryptocurrencies for their operations is not really a factor.
- red_trumpet 5y ago
  And of the CCP ever finds out, he will end up in jail. And if they can link your wallet to you, you will not be able to travel to China anymore.
- 3825 5y ago
  > Using bitcoin I can send money to someone in Chi no a who's social rating was degraded by the CCP and who is forbidden from using banks How will they convert it into something they can use to pay rent and buy groceries? > Crime will exist forever and criminals will find ways to finance themselves anyway, so the use of cryptocurrencies for their operations is not really a factor. Does this make it easier for the wealthy to evade taxes? I find just signing transactions using something like gpg a much easier to reason about. My biggest concern about cryptocurrency is fees. There is no reason why fees should be based on payload as far as I understand. Whether I’m sending one satoshi (or any other unit of money) or a trillion, the cost should be the same and ideally as close to zero as possible if not zero. This was the original reason I was drawn to bitcoin but it was obvious it would never be the case.
  - yashg 5y ago
    > How will they convert it into something they can use to pay rent and buy groceries? Exactly my question. Exchanges where you can sell the crypto for real money are still regulated and require KYC. > My biggest concern about cryptocurrency is fees. High fees are required to pay for the insane electricity bills and specialized hardware. PoW cryptos are expensive and inefficient by design so there will always be more transactions waiting in the queue to get on the chain than the processing power required to mine the next block.

heroiccocoa 5y ago

Then you should be opposed to most basic (theoretical computer) science and mathematics research too that doesn't have any immediately apparent application. The scientific research to engineering pipeline is the backbone of our rapid technological progress. Basic research can target unexplored areas in a more organized fashion, allocating resources properly instead of industry's ad-hoc approach. Sort of like breath first instead of depth first. Industry will waste resources solving just their own individual instances of a mini-problem one by one resulting in a total resource consumption that is greater than what academia would have used in solving the overarching problem.

pmlnr 5y ago
Pour the same amount of money into math as people poured into cryptocurrencies then.
- faeyanpiraat 5y ago
  How can I buy math?
  - pmlnr 5y ago
    By pouring money into universities who do math.
    - danaris 5y ago
      ...Just be aware that when you're investing in math, it's not an "investment" that pays out for you personally. It's an investment in all of humanity.
      - pmlnr 5y ago
        That's the point.
awild 5y ago
General mathematics and computer science don't require burning energy on the scale of nations just to function

cmews 5y ago

Helium network is an example of a successful blockchain project/application in my opinion. They created the biggest decentralized lorawan network in the world that is used by more internet of things companies everyday. Also they are trying the same thing for creating a decentralized 5G network. It’s still early days for them because I think they started in the end of 2020 or the start of 2021, but they have grown to 490000 lorawan hotspots already. The network usage could be better, but is increasing (saw increased sensor data activity for my hotspot in 2021).

maxfromua 5y ago
Sorry, can you please explain (or give some link) how it is related to blockchain? https://www.helium.com/lorawan https://www.helium.com/lorawan doesn’t mention this word In general, I was under the impression that IoT devices are underpowered for such usage. Thank you!
- cmews 5y ago
  It’s on their homepage (helium.com) with the following text: ‘’’ Powered by the Helium Blockchain, The People’s Network represents a paradigm shift for decentralized wireless infrastructure. ‘’’ They use the blockchain in combination with a proof of coverage algorithm to reward hotspots. https://docs.helium.com/blockchain/proof-of-coverage/ https://docs.helium.com/blockchain/proof-of-coverage/
  - Animats 5y ago
    Now that's an interesting idea. I'd wanted to have "proof of decentralization" - require that nodes be physically distant from each other, to prevent mining farms. But I couldn't figure out a way to prevent cheating. It's easy to fake that you are far away, but hard to fake that you're close, because the speed of light limits ping time. But if you have something that's a useful network in its own right that keeps track of its own coverage, you can use that to enforce decentralization. The higher the density of nodes in an area, the lower the reward.

tomputer 5y ago

> Use cases like storing the history of a car on-chain, transparent supply chains, public voting... this all sounds interesting but never made it to product-market fit. Anything that does not exist natively on the blockchain doesn't need a blockchain at all. If a token on the blockchain would represent you as the owner of a car and one day someone steals your private key which represents your car ownership, that person is now the owner of your car. Still, the car keys are located in your house, the license plate is registered on your name and address, the insurance is on your name. I guess I don't need to explain further how ridiculous that idea is that a token would officially represent you as the car owner.

axg11 5y ago
Couldn’t you say the same thing about the deed for a house?
- duskwuff 5y ago
  Physically possessing the deed to a house doesn't make you its owner either.
  - bratwurst3000 5y ago
    The law makes me the owner… good we have something to trust that my house is my house… the law and not crypto ;)
    - arlcode 5y ago
      Well the law and the fact that (eventually) someone will come and physically remove whoever claims to own your house. A Blockchain without the ability to initiate (and complete) such a process is worthless for questions of real world ownership. Of course a Blockchain could be empowered to do that....through a law.
      - cinquemb 5y ago
        A blockchain (or the contracts that run upon any particular one) could also incentivize a distributed group of participants to take it upon themselves to temporarily and physically enforce some ones else's real world claims (a signed tx from the same addr with the on chain claim putting their owner ship up as collateral to be liquidated at a discount conditional if the buyer can secure the premises by any means necessarily, some onchain decentralized AMM prediction markets already have alot of this functionality and more), esp if those up for the task already have the means to do so and the potential payout is enough… irrespective of a particular jurisdiction laws. Gets even more interesting when people can buy puts and calls on someones liquidation via options dex. A few of the ex-mil people in a DAO i'm apart of are really interested in this space growing for services like that, for obvious reasons.

rvba 5y ago

> web3 era There is no web3, nor web3 era. It is a marketing buzzword.

CRConrad 5y ago
Maybe "eras" nowadays aren't defined by anything real any more, but by buzzwords.

waffle_maniac 5y ago

Brave has micropayments for creators. It achieved 50M MAU last year. In a few years it will surpass Firefox.

xfz 5y ago
That's a very energy-inefficient way of rewarding content creators. Given that most users are going to go through Coinbase et al, it's no different from any of the other similar schemes (anyone remember Flatr?) except that you have a volatile wallet and a payment mechanism that somehow manages to be even more expensive than Amex!
- waffle_maniac 5y ago
  Cashing out BAT happens with either Uphold or Gemini. Coinbase isn’t supported. But you don’t have to do that. I earn BAT and donate it to creators. It’s not perfect. Neither are the solutions we have now that don’t compensate users for their attention. Over time it will improve.

nly 5y ago

Bitcoin had a problem to solve, it had a use case, from day dot... Satoshi set out to replace central banks that can inflate the money supply. It was supposed to be relatively boring tech solving a niche problem (from the guy on the streets point of view)

grey-area 5y ago
It was also designed as a pyramid scheme though to drive adoption. This was an unfortunate mistake and that and the inefficiency at scale doomed it as a currency.
pirate787 5y ago
This is wrong. The original purpose was cashless payments between untrusted parties.

NicoJuicy 5y ago

I think PartChain of BMW is the only one i know of: https://www.press.bmwgroup.com/global/article/detail/T0307164EN/bmw-group-uses-blockchain-to-drive-supply-chain-transparency?language=en https://www.press.bmwgroup.com/global/article/detail/T030716...

wahnfrieden 5y ago

Issuing tokens is still probably illegal in both countries I live/work in. Regulatory and tax compliance immaturity are holding back a lot of people besides at the wild frontier or offshore operations with the resources to navigate that

lkrubner 5y ago

I've been documenting this with specific companies. A recent one that I worked with was Omnichains: https://www.omnichains.com https://www.omnichains.com "Omnichain CEO Pratik Soni speaks to Inbound Logistics about the growing number of blockchain use cases in the supply chain, including in reverse logistics, product authentication and sustainability." Apparently this company started with the idea that they would use the blockchain to make supply chains more transparent. And they raised money from investors with that goal in mind. But they have since retreated from that goal. I worked with a retailer that worked with Omnichains. None of Omnichains tools had anything to do with the blockchain. Certainly, we were never given access to a blockchain, nor was it mentioned after we had signed the contract. Instead, we were granted limited access to an API that I believe was run with Ruby on Rails and MySQL. So at a certain point this company retreated to traditional technologies, rather than trying to use the blockchain. This is one example. At some point I hope to write up some of the other examples that I've seen. I do not believe anyone will ever find a legal use for blockchains that cannot be more easily served with traditional technologies.

edem 5y ago
You're missing the point. The goal when you use blockchain is not to more easily serve. It is all the things that don't matter to you until it is too late, like censorship resistance.
- 300bps 5y ago
  There is no censorship resistance with blockchain. You’re still beholden to the whims of centralized developers and miners. You’re still beholden to a court order. If the government wants to confiscate your crypto assets they can simply put you in jail until you provide the location of your private key. If the government can penetrate offshore bank accounts they’ll have no trouble with your crypto wallet. I’m happily mining ETH with gminer on flexpool.io and selling the coins as fast as I get them just like I did with BTC a decade ago. Because I know this whole thing is a temporary pyramid scheme.
  - edem 5y ago

xvilka 5y ago

Biggest logistics companies in the world use it: https://www.tradelens.com/ https://www.tradelens.com/

yashg 5y ago
Do you know of any logistics company that actually uses it? What exactly do they store on blockchain? Who gets to add blocks to the chain? Are those permissioned blockchains? Can a private permissioned blockchain even be called blockchain? How does a private blockchain differ from a centralized database?

boringg 5y ago

I had the same experience. The thing that gets me as well is that normally with the rise of new technology you get an excitement that is tangible. Like when the internet first xame around there were emails, multiplayer games via modem, websites. A whole plethora of new wonderful experiences. So far all I've really gotten after doing a lot of research is some good projects and a long tail of terrible projects/websites and a lot of scammers. It really feels like with the NFT backlash in the gaming world right now that crypto hasn't found its landing and it really hasn't taken off - its kind of in this weird purgatory. Im hopeful but very suspicious at this point. I wasn't suspicious of “the internet” until it was around for a long time. Crypto is past its wave of this is cool and lets build stuff phase afaik and now everyone is trying to make money off it.

cdiddy2 5y ago

I like the idea that the chain can be used as the source of truth when other sources of truth have failed us. first 15 minutes of this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cwbbxb987vE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cwbbxb987vE

acdha 5y ago
This is disproving the claim: once you introduce oracles, you are acknowledging that the trust of the system comes from outside the chain.
- cdiddy2 5y ago
  that will always be the case for anything off chain. the question is do oracles and well constructed systems provide better data than what we have access to today
  - acdha 5y ago
    And the answer is no, because anything which can be done to improve the trusted third-parties can be done more efficiently without the extra overhead of a blockchain. Blockchains require expensive always-on networks whereas many operations can run with much lower data requirements and even work entirely offline.
    - cdiddy2 5y ago
      but it adds verifiability and immutability that others can't offer
      - acdha 5y ago
        You can do that using public-key cryptography much cheaper, without depending on a massive network and expensive processing fees. The only time a blockchain can make sense is if the parties don’t know or trust each other, and by definition you’re trusting an oracle.

wbl 5y ago

Buying drugs on the Internet. The penetration might be low now, but the TAM is sizeable.

agumonkey 5y ago

It's muddy waters. I just heard some guy from a public office saying they used DOT for some specific need (related to managing bonds somehow). And it was before last year boom. It's all very fuzzy

CRConrad 5y ago
> some guy from a public office saying they used DOT for some specific need Department of transport?
- agumonkey 5y ago
  dot is a blockchain

czbond 5y ago

Decentralized, anonymized identity is one application. It sounds amazing in theory - and can work for the general use cases of sharing information with corporations. But, I believe it won't really be anonymized, as "data exhaust", "identity touch points revealing identity in aggregate" can help identify. An example I use, is people expect bitcoin is anonymous. Yes, it is anonymous to the general layperson and corporation - but not to say NSA/FBI for "people of interest". And once bitcoin to USDollar transactions or financial institutions are more common - banks will sell your wallet information to credit bureaus, and eventually corporations will be able to de-anonymize chains for profiling just as today.

twelve40 5y ago

I'm glad someone remembers the (2-year) history. NFTs=ICOs, just another scam to keep "crypto" afloat. Neither ICO nor NFT resulted in anything useful, wait, maybe Bored Ape??

UnpossibleJim 5y ago

I can think of small problems that use blockchain as a solution, but they're relatively niche and only make the game-space straddle the real world, so they tend to be a bit on the vaporware side. Handy, sure, but I'm not sure they are A) 100% necessarily or B) as revolutionary as everyone seems to think blockchain is meant to be =[ EDIT: forgot to say, this could be a complete lack of imagination on my part past what's been done with blockchain already or just my horrible indoctrination into the game-space like some kind of cult =)