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I find it strange that people keep promoting that YouTube documentary. Ignoring tone issues, there is a lot of cherry picking and other logical fallacies. For e

I find it strange that people keep promoting that YouTube documentary. Ignoring tone issues, there is a lot of cherry picking and other logical fallacies. For example, he talks about how terrible Tether is and then completely ignores USDC. He also claims that none of the popular blockchains can scale, but Solana is frequently in the top 5 most popular cryptocurrencies. It seems to me that people that do an hour of research are polarized hard. Either love it or hate it. The more time you spend understanding the space the more nuanced it becomes. Many are using the technology to facilitate scams and overpromising, but that doesn't make the technology fundamentally useless or bad.

opportune 5y ago
Solans is centralized. The fact devs can take it down for maintenance or that it can be trivially ddosed is proof it is not nearly as decentralized or robust as cryptos promise.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
> Many are using the technology to facilitate scams and overpromising, but that doesn't make the technology fundamentally useless or bad. True enough, but since I have yet to see a use for the technology that isn't pretty much just a means to scam people, I'm totally fine calling the entire space a giant scam.
- rschachte 5y ago
  Blockchain is an immutable ledger. Sure there are scams, just like there are on the regular internet, however, I think there is a lot of potential for blockchain. We're in the early phases of it, but there is more to blockchain that just the currency aspect of it.
  - invaliduser 5y ago
    «We're in the early phases of it» I've been hearing this for years now. How long can something stay in early phases ?
    - rschachte 5y ago
      Some things take time to develop, be adopted and optimized. Not everything in tech is a Javascript framework.
      - kkielhofner 5y ago
        Not being snarky, but was anyone still saying this about the web in 2006 when it was 13 years old? Going from Mosaic to what we had in 2006 was quite a bit more effort than a JavaScript framework - multiple browser engines and JS frameworks themselves were created in that time. Not to mention JavaScript itself.
    - pcthrowaway 5y ago
      Defi is roughly 2-3 years old, and smart contracts are less than 7. To put it in perspective, when the internet was 7 years old, the world wide web didn't even really exist beyond a concept yet.
      - runarberg 5y ago
        Yeah, but wen the World Wide Web was 7 years old we already had MSN, Google, imdb, geocities, the Space Jam website, etc. Nobody was pushing the internet to the general public in the 1970s, and hardly anyone saw it as a technology to be used by them anyway. When the technology became cheap enough for the general public in the late 80s, then first did we see experiments aimed at the general users and we got stuff like IRC, email, etc. soon after. Blockchain technology—in contrast—has been available to the public from day 1 and and so far the record is far poorer then that of the Internet in terms of usefulness.
      - kkielhofner 5y ago
        Using the internet is a terrible comparison because of the physical and hardware issues at play. The web is an appropriate comparison. The web is a network application on the internet. Blockchain is a network application on the internet. After 13 years the total number of blockchain users is likely less than 100 million worldwide. From 1993-2006 the web grew to a billion users. In 1993 only 8% of US households had a computer with a modem… Considering the web, mobile, and social media that blockchain has been able to leverage over the past 13 years it should have at least 20X the number of users. Blockchain user adoption has been a complete failure up to this point. I wrote a rant about this earlier this week: https://blog.cryptostars.is/blockchain-the-most-poorly-adopted-platform-in-recent-history-6f5d97f7d51f https://blog.cryptostars.is/blockchain-the-most-poorly-adopt...
  - 300bps 5y ago
    The word immutable has a meaning. Blockchain does not fit that meaning. Immutable doesn’t mean, “as long as 51% of miners want it to not change”. Immutable doesn’t mean, “doesn’t change unless we get hacked and then we’ll change it”. I could give more examples. Blockchains are not immutable.
    - rschachte 5y ago
      The statistical likelihood of a 51% attack happening on the blockchain seems statistically way less likely than a hack targeting our existing financial system. I mean, it's pretty easy why blockchains are considered immutable, you can even code one from scratch in Python in less than 200 lines of code. To control 51% of all those hashing power, an entity would need to power computers that works as much as that, along with paying for the equipment and energy consumption and whatever costs needed for the operation. Current estimates of Bitcoin mining energy usage stands at 71 TeraWatthour, enough to power the whole country of Austria.
      - Eddy_Viscosity2 5y ago
        The OP's point was that 51% of miners could agree to a change, and in a system where there are very large players that might not involve that many people.
        philistine 5y ago
        And it already happened a bunch of times. Bitcoin has been forked a bunch of times, and one could argue the fork that gave birth to Bitcoin Cash was a successful 51% attack on Bitcoin itself.
      - CamperBob2 5y ago
        To control 51% of all those hashing power, an entity would need to power computers that works as much as that, along with paying for the equipment and energy consumption and whatever costs needed for the operation. Current estimates of Bitcoin mining energy usage stands at 71 TeraWatthour, enough to power the whole country of Austria. Or they'd need to find a way to break SHA256. That's a risk you don't hear much about.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
    People keep saying that and yet when pressed for some hypothetical application that might make sense to do with a Blockchain they just put forth ideas that don't stand up to scrutiny like deed management or transferable game assets.
    - CiPHPerCoder 5y ago
      I took things a different direction: https://paragonie.com/blog/2017/07/chronicle-will-make-you-question-need-for-blockchain-technology https://paragonie.com/blog/2017/07/chronicle-will-make-you-q...
- xtracto 5y ago
  > True enough, but since I have yet to see a use for the technology that isn't pretty much just a means to scam people, I'm totally fine calling the entire space a giant scam. Your comment reminds me of Guns... and how crazy the US people are about them haha.
- chairmanmow 5y ago
  Has it ever occurred to you that the scammers are just loudest voice in the room? They're not known for being passive.
- brian_cloutier 5y ago
  Filecoin offers an S3-like service for a radically lower price: https://filecoin.io/blog/posts/filecoin-in-2021-looking-back-at-a-year-of-exponential-growth/ https://filecoin.io/blog/posts/filecoin-in-2021-looking-back... You have now seen a use for the technology which is not a scam.
  - SebastianKra 5y ago
    I don't get it. Why does this need crypto to work? From what I've seen, its an auction to provide a service. Why would I ask my neighbour to host data, rather than two or three expert companies that understand backups, power- and temperature requirements?
    - dlubarov 5y ago
      I'm no storage expert, but it seems like the reputable cloud storage providers tend to have lousy pricing. A quick search turns up the quote "I’d be surprised if their S3 gross margin were lower than 70%". I think people use S3 not because their prices are great, but because they're not comfortable trusting some no-name company that offers better pricing. Protocols like Filecoin aim to remove the need for trust, by having untrusted storage providers prove that they're storing some data. These anonymous storage providers almost certain aren't following convention best practices in terms of RAID, UPSs etc, so a single copy of the data has a greater likelihood of being lost, but we can compensate for that with extra redundancy.
    - brian_cloutier 5y ago
      I'll start by saying it doesn't matter whether you get it. The GP made a claim that there is no use for the technology which is not a scam. But people, today, are using filecoin to store files and are not being scammed. It doesn't matter whether you personally would want to use Filecoin; the point I'm trying to make is that claims of the form "the entire space is a giant scam" are simply false. But I'll also try to answer your new question: You're right that it's just an auction to provide a service, but crypto enables the auction! S3 can charge such high margins because they're a trusted brand, the chance they'll lose my data is much lower than the chance I'll lose my own data, but this makes it hard for anyone else to enter the market without spending a lot of time proving themselves. Filecoin includes fancy cryptography and incentive schemes which, if you trust them, allow you to trust any storage provider using Filecoin. Crypto payments means that anybody, anywhere in the world, can participate in the auction without spending any time negotiating contracts or setting payment rails. They can turn their computer on and start storing files. This turns file storage into a commodity service and allows you to store your files for commodity prices, that's an incredible win!
agilob 5y ago
>Tether is and then completely ignores USDC. He also claims that none of the popular blockchains can scale, but Solana is frequently in the top 5 most popular cryptocurrencies. This is very frequent tone on many subreddits, whether you used it intentionally or not, you became part of the problem: none blockchains can scale and all are bad for planet, but have you seen how good solana actually is? This week Solana had some problems with network congestion, subreddit was instantly flooded by what initially looked to be anti-CC movement, but quickly turned out to be Stellar supporters looking for new buyers, day before trading value dropped 15%... Edit: This is it, look at what I did. I didn't say anything bad about solana or PoS but people jumped to comments to protect this project asking me to explain myself from something I did not say. I didn't even state my opinion on blockchain, PoS, Solana nor Stellar.
- jonwalch 5y ago
  Why is Proof of Stake bad for the planet?
- pcthrowaway 5y ago
  > none blockchains can scale and all are bad for planet How is Solana bad for the planet exactly? I don't use Solana, or particularly like it, but it's proof of stake, so if you'd resist the urge to jump to conclusions, you'd find with a couple of minutes of research that its energy usage is comparable to a few average households.
  - endisneigh 5y ago
    > In total, the entire Solana network — with 1,196 validator nodes and an estimated 20,000,000,000 transactions — uses an estimated 11,051,066 kWh per year. This is the equivalent of the average electricity usage of 1038 American households. https://solana.com/news/solana-energy-usage-report-november-2021 https://solana.com/news/solana-energy-usage-report-november-...
    - sib301 5y ago
      How much does AWS use for a comparable number of transactions? Your numbers don’t mean anything without additional context.
kethinov 5y ago
At this point the enthusiasts need to start getting very specific about how blockchains or cryptocurrency is making the world a better place if they want people to stop calling for it to be banned globally, because the explicit harms caused by it are piling up really fast.
- PretzelPirate 5y ago
  The issue is with what it means to “make the world a better place”. Many people think blockchains are working towards that while others don’t see value in what is offered. As long as we transition to Proof of Stake networks, people who aren’t interested in blockchains should just ignore them and governments can go after anyone who uses blockchain (or any other technology) to scam people.
  - cuteboy19 5y ago
    Bitcoin has made it very clear that proof of waste is a hill they will die on
brown9-2 5y ago
didn’t Solana have an outage this weekend?
- hi5eyes 5y ago
  SOL has been ddosed multiple times, its laughable that people consider solana anything but a centralized vc shitcoin the point of blockchain technology is decentralization, the chain going down over some "features", design flaws; barely qualifies it as a layer 1 "you know you've done something wrong when a blockchain has a status page"
- cuteboy19 5y ago
  Yes, even the good people at r.cryptocurrency turned on the project and see it as a naked cash grab
betwixthewires 5y ago
I've begun to watch the video, I'm about 15 minutes in. Already I've seen an admission of bias against "hypercapitalism" as a cornerstone to the entire viewpoint, several obvious attempts to gloss over inconvenient details that the filmmaker is clearly aware of and understands, and a sequence of ad hominem attacks against prominent capitalist figures in the industry. Still, I'll hold judgment on the documentary as a whole until I've completed it, which I will.
- tchock23 5y ago
  There are definitely some weak spots in the video that are easy to attack, but it doesn't discredit the overall premise. Also, it's too long which is unfortunate because few people will watch to the end.
  - betwixthewires 5y ago
    I'm about an hour in now, the video doesn't actually present a compelling case so far as to the validity of it's premise. I'm entering NFT land in the video and they appear to be overall right about the NFT market, not right about a lot of the technical details but right about the market being an empty hole, but up until this point it's all been hand wavy self supporting nothingness. And even though I agree with their premise on NFTs, I have yet to see an explanation of the premise on them. All in all it seems the guy is preaching to the choir and grinning along with head nodders and not actually educating anyone on anything. Edit: finally finished the video, the guy did a pretty good job criticizing the current state of affairs, the relative uselessness of organization on blockchains, NFTs in particular, web3 and the tokenization of the universe, but I think he's wrong about the utility of cryptocurrency as currency, and the potential to tokenize real world assets that are already bought and sold, for record keeping purposes.
jstnwill 5y ago
I argue that the whole blockchain approach is a solution designed for the needs of the early adopter... and is just seeking a mass market problem to solve. I reach this conclusion, not as a cynic, but as a skeptical advocate. I ask everyone I can this line of question and have yet to get an answer that doesn't involve magical thinking. Question: Other than "decentralization", what value does blockchain provide that can't be provided with existing technology (which will always be inherently less technically complex and thus easier and cheaper) can't do? My sense is that the answer is "nothing" (except decentralization). If that's correct, then all of the technical complexity is to be able to achieve decentralization. However... The mass market (everyone to the right of the chasm... early majority, late majority and laggards) has proven with our dollars that we don't care about a goal of decentralization. In fact we make sacrifices to have more centralization because we love it. It simplifies our lives. So if the major market doesn't care about the only real value, then there is no real mass market value. In that case, blockchain would be just another early adopter solution trying to not die off in the chasm.
- philistine 5y ago
  I always come back to this detail : > For example, in April and May alone, more than 30 thousand unique wallets bought NFTs from popular marketplaces such as nonfungible.com on any given day this month! This is down slightly from the 39,000 buyers throughout March. I've heard on a podcast that there are only 400 000 wallets owning NFTs. It's a minuscule market, and it's not getting invariably hotter. It's very possible we're hearing so much about them now because the market is already contracting. And this terrible detail coming from a scourge of the Earth website all in on NFTs and other scams: https://earthweb.com/nft-statistics/ https://earthweb.com/nft-statistics/
- dorgo 5y ago
  >Other than "decentralization", what value does blockchain provide that can't be provided with existing technology (which will always be inherently less technically complex and thus easier and cheaper) can't do? My opinion: The problem is not that traditional technology can't provide the same value. It could, but it doesn't. The world is still in the process of mapping all societal/legal/finacial rules and procedures to a digital framework. In germany it is called "digitalization". And (at least) germany mostly sucks at doing this. In a way, blockchains provide a playground to explore possibilities no traditional framework i know of does.

opportune 5y ago

Solans is centralized. The fact devs can take it down for maintenance or that it can be trivially ddosed is proof it is not nearly as decentralized or robust as cryptos promise.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago

> Many are using the technology to facilitate scams and overpromising, but that doesn't make the technology fundamentally useless or bad. True enough, but since I have yet to see a use for the technology that isn't pretty much just a means to scam people, I'm totally fine calling the entire space a giant scam.

rschachte 5y ago
Blockchain is an immutable ledger. Sure there are scams, just like there are on the regular internet, however, I think there is a lot of potential for blockchain. We're in the early phases of it, but there is more to blockchain that just the currency aspect of it.
- invaliduser 5y ago
  «We're in the early phases of it» I've been hearing this for years now. How long can something stay in early phases ?
  - rschachte 5y ago
    Some things take time to develop, be adopted and optimized. Not everything in tech is a Javascript framework.
    - kkielhofner 5y ago
      Not being snarky, but was anyone still saying this about the web in 2006 when it was 13 years old? Going from Mosaic to what we had in 2006 was quite a bit more effort than a JavaScript framework - multiple browser engines and JS frameworks themselves were created in that time. Not to mention JavaScript itself.
  - pcthrowaway 5y ago
    Defi is roughly 2-3 years old, and smart contracts are less than 7. To put it in perspective, when the internet was 7 years old, the world wide web didn't even really exist beyond a concept yet.
    - runarberg 5y ago
      Yeah, but wen the World Wide Web was 7 years old we already had MSN, Google, imdb, geocities, the Space Jam website, etc. Nobody was pushing the internet to the general public in the 1970s, and hardly anyone saw it as a technology to be used by them anyway. When the technology became cheap enough for the general public in the late 80s, then first did we see experiments aimed at the general users and we got stuff like IRC, email, etc. soon after. Blockchain technology—in contrast—has been available to the public from day 1 and and so far the record is far poorer then that of the Internet in terms of usefulness.
    - kkielhofner 5y ago
      Using the internet is a terrible comparison because of the physical and hardware issues at play. The web is an appropriate comparison. The web is a network application on the internet. Blockchain is a network application on the internet. After 13 years the total number of blockchain users is likely less than 100 million worldwide. From 1993-2006 the web grew to a billion users. In 1993 only 8% of US households had a computer with a modem… Considering the web, mobile, and social media that blockchain has been able to leverage over the past 13 years it should have at least 20X the number of users. Blockchain user adoption has been a complete failure up to this point. I wrote a rant about this earlier this week: https://blog.cryptostars.is/blockchain-the-most-poorly-adopted-platform-in-recent-history-6f5d97f7d51f https://blog.cryptostars.is/blockchain-the-most-poorly-adopt...
- 300bps 5y ago
  The word immutable has a meaning. Blockchain does not fit that meaning. Immutable doesn’t mean, “as long as 51% of miners want it to not change”. Immutable doesn’t mean, “doesn’t change unless we get hacked and then we’ll change it”. I could give more examples. Blockchains are not immutable.
  - rschachte 5y ago
    The statistical likelihood of a 51% attack happening on the blockchain seems statistically way less likely than a hack targeting our existing financial system. I mean, it's pretty easy why blockchains are considered immutable, you can even code one from scratch in Python in less than 200 lines of code. To control 51% of all those hashing power, an entity would need to power computers that works as much as that, along with paying for the equipment and energy consumption and whatever costs needed for the operation. Current estimates of Bitcoin mining energy usage stands at 71 TeraWatthour, enough to power the whole country of Austria.
    - Eddy_Viscosity2 5y ago
      The OP's point was that 51% of miners could agree to a change, and in a system where there are very large players that might not involve that many people.
      - philistine 5y ago
        And it already happened a bunch of times. Bitcoin has been forked a bunch of times, and one could argue the fork that gave birth to Bitcoin Cash was a successful 51% attack on Bitcoin itself.
    - CamperBob2 5y ago
      To control 51% of all those hashing power, an entity would need to power computers that works as much as that, along with paying for the equipment and energy consumption and whatever costs needed for the operation. Current estimates of Bitcoin mining energy usage stands at 71 TeraWatthour, enough to power the whole country of Austria. Or they'd need to find a way to break SHA256. That's a risk you don't hear much about.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  People keep saying that and yet when pressed for some hypothetical application that might make sense to do with a Blockchain they just put forth ideas that don't stand up to scrutiny like deed management or transferable game assets.
  - CiPHPerCoder 5y ago
    I took things a different direction: https://paragonie.com/blog/2017/07/chronicle-will-make-you-question-need-for-blockchain-technology https://paragonie.com/blog/2017/07/chronicle-will-make-you-q...
xtracto 5y ago
> True enough, but since I have yet to see a use for the technology that isn't pretty much just a means to scam people, I'm totally fine calling the entire space a giant scam. Your comment reminds me of Guns... and how crazy the US people are about them haha.
chairmanmow 5y ago
Has it ever occurred to you that the scammers are just loudest voice in the room? They're not known for being passive.
brian_cloutier 5y ago
Filecoin offers an S3-like service for a radically lower price: https://filecoin.io/blog/posts/filecoin-in-2021-looking-back-at-a-year-of-exponential-growth/ https://filecoin.io/blog/posts/filecoin-in-2021-looking-back... You have now seen a use for the technology which is not a scam.
- SebastianKra 5y ago
  I don't get it. Why does this need crypto to work? From what I've seen, its an auction to provide a service. Why would I ask my neighbour to host data, rather than two or three expert companies that understand backups, power- and temperature requirements?
  - dlubarov 5y ago
    I'm no storage expert, but it seems like the reputable cloud storage providers tend to have lousy pricing. A quick search turns up the quote "I’d be surprised if their S3 gross margin were lower than 70%". I think people use S3 not because their prices are great, but because they're not comfortable trusting some no-name company that offers better pricing. Protocols like Filecoin aim to remove the need for trust, by having untrusted storage providers prove that they're storing some data. These anonymous storage providers almost certain aren't following convention best practices in terms of RAID, UPSs etc, so a single copy of the data has a greater likelihood of being lost, but we can compensate for that with extra redundancy.
  - brian_cloutier 5y ago
    I'll start by saying it doesn't matter whether you get it. The GP made a claim that there is no use for the technology which is not a scam. But people, today, are using filecoin to store files and are not being scammed. It doesn't matter whether you personally would want to use Filecoin; the point I'm trying to make is that claims of the form "the entire space is a giant scam" are simply false. But I'll also try to answer your new question: You're right that it's just an auction to provide a service, but crypto enables the auction! S3 can charge such high margins because they're a trusted brand, the chance they'll lose my data is much lower than the chance I'll lose my own data, but this makes it hard for anyone else to enter the market without spending a lot of time proving themselves. Filecoin includes fancy cryptography and incentive schemes which, if you trust them, allow you to trust any storage provider using Filecoin. Crypto payments means that anybody, anywhere in the world, can participate in the auction without spending any time negotiating contracts or setting payment rails. They can turn their computer on and start storing files. This turns file storage into a commodity service and allows you to store your files for commodity prices, that's an incredible win!

agilob 5y ago

>Tether is and then completely ignores USDC. He also claims that none of the popular blockchains can scale, but Solana is frequently in the top 5 most popular cryptocurrencies. This is very frequent tone on many subreddits, whether you used it intentionally or not, you became part of the problem: none blockchains can scale and all are bad for planet, but have you seen how good solana actually is? This week Solana had some problems with network congestion, subreddit was instantly flooded by what initially looked to be anti-CC movement, but quickly turned out to be Stellar supporters looking for new buyers, day before trading value dropped 15%... Edit: This is it, look at what I did. I didn't say anything bad about solana or PoS but people jumped to comments to protect this project asking me to explain myself from something I did not say. I didn't even state my opinion on blockchain, PoS, Solana nor Stellar.

jonwalch 5y ago
Why is Proof of Stake bad for the planet?
pcthrowaway 5y ago
> none blockchains can scale and all are bad for planet How is Solana bad for the planet exactly? I don't use Solana, or particularly like it, but it's proof of stake, so if you'd resist the urge to jump to conclusions, you'd find with a couple of minutes of research that its energy usage is comparable to a few average households.
- endisneigh 5y ago
  > In total, the entire Solana network — with 1,196 validator nodes and an estimated 20,000,000,000 transactions — uses an estimated 11,051,066 kWh per year. This is the equivalent of the average electricity usage of 1038 American households. https://solana.com/news/solana-energy-usage-report-november-2021 https://solana.com/news/solana-energy-usage-report-november-...
  - sib301 5y ago
    How much does AWS use for a comparable number of transactions? Your numbers don’t mean anything without additional context.

kethinov 5y ago

At this point the enthusiasts need to start getting very specific about how blockchains or cryptocurrency is making the world a better place if they want people to stop calling for it to be banned globally, because the explicit harms caused by it are piling up really fast.

PretzelPirate 5y ago
The issue is with what it means to “make the world a better place”. Many people think blockchains are working towards that while others don’t see value in what is offered. As long as we transition to Proof of Stake networks, people who aren’t interested in blockchains should just ignore them and governments can go after anyone who uses blockchain (or any other technology) to scam people.
- cuteboy19 5y ago
  Bitcoin has made it very clear that proof of waste is a hill they will die on

brown9-2 5y ago

didn’t Solana have an outage this weekend?

hi5eyes 5y ago
SOL has been ddosed multiple times, its laughable that people consider solana anything but a centralized vc shitcoin the point of blockchain technology is decentralization, the chain going down over some "features", design flaws; barely qualifies it as a layer 1 "you know you've done something wrong when a blockchain has a status page"
cuteboy19 5y ago
Yes, even the good people at r.cryptocurrency turned on the project and see it as a naked cash grab

betwixthewires 5y ago

I've begun to watch the video, I'm about 15 minutes in. Already I've seen an admission of bias against "hypercapitalism" as a cornerstone to the entire viewpoint, several obvious attempts to gloss over inconvenient details that the filmmaker is clearly aware of and understands, and a sequence of ad hominem attacks against prominent capitalist figures in the industry. Still, I'll hold judgment on the documentary as a whole until I've completed it, which I will.

tchock23 5y ago
There are definitely some weak spots in the video that are easy to attack, but it doesn't discredit the overall premise. Also, it's too long which is unfortunate because few people will watch to the end.
- betwixthewires 5y ago
  I'm about an hour in now, the video doesn't actually present a compelling case so far as to the validity of it's premise. I'm entering NFT land in the video and they appear to be overall right about the NFT market, not right about a lot of the technical details but right about the market being an empty hole, but up until this point it's all been hand wavy self supporting nothingness. And even though I agree with their premise on NFTs, I have yet to see an explanation of the premise on them. All in all it seems the guy is preaching to the choir and grinning along with head nodders and not actually educating anyone on anything. Edit: finally finished the video, the guy did a pretty good job criticizing the current state of affairs, the relative uselessness of organization on blockchains, NFTs in particular, web3 and the tokenization of the universe, but I think he's wrong about the utility of cryptocurrency as currency, and the potential to tokenize real world assets that are already bought and sold, for record keeping purposes.

jstnwill 5y ago

I argue that the whole blockchain approach is a solution designed for the needs of the early adopter... and is just seeking a mass market problem to solve. I reach this conclusion, not as a cynic, but as a skeptical advocate. I ask everyone I can this line of question and have yet to get an answer that doesn't involve magical thinking. Question: Other than "decentralization", what value does blockchain provide that can't be provided with existing technology (which will always be inherently less technically complex and thus easier and cheaper) can't do? My sense is that the answer is "nothing" (except decentralization). If that's correct, then all of the technical complexity is to be able to achieve decentralization. However... The mass market (everyone to the right of the chasm... early majority, late majority and laggards) has proven with our dollars that we don't care about a goal of decentralization. In fact we make sacrifices to have more centralization because we love it. It simplifies our lives. So if the major market doesn't care about the only real value, then there is no real mass market value. In that case, blockchain would be just another early adopter solution trying to not die off in the chasm.

philistine 5y ago
I always come back to this detail : > For example, in April and May alone, more than 30 thousand unique wallets bought NFTs from popular marketplaces such as nonfungible.com on any given day this month! This is down slightly from the 39,000 buyers throughout March. I've heard on a podcast that there are only 400 000 wallets owning NFTs. It's a minuscule market, and it's not getting invariably hotter. It's very possible we're hearing so much about them now because the market is already contracting. And this terrible detail coming from a scourge of the Earth website all in on NFTs and other scams: https://earthweb.com/nft-statistics/ https://earthweb.com/nft-statistics/
dorgo 5y ago
>Other than "decentralization", what value does blockchain provide that can't be provided with existing technology (which will always be inherently less technically complex and thus easier and cheaper) can't do? My opinion: The problem is not that traditional technology can't provide the same value. It could, but it doesn't. The world is still in the process of mapping all societal/legal/finacial rules and procedures to a digital framework. In germany it is called "digitalization". And (at least) germany mostly sucks at doing this. In a way, blockchains provide a playground to explore possibilities no traditional framework i know of does.