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Ask HN: Am I going insane or is there genuinely no value in blockchain tech?

• hestefisk 4y ago
  As with most things, I think the answer isn’t black or white. DLT has some use. It’s not useless. It’s not here to revolutionise computing or banking. But it has some value such as with trust-less computation tasks.
  • ak_111 4y ago
    I agree with this sentiment, I am not calling it useless. In fact I think it makes perfect sense as an "experimentalist technology", it is just the disproportionate attention it is getting by serious people over a long period of time that I find most baffling ("blockchain to fight climate change/ improve vaccination/ ease supply chain bottlenecks/ destroy oligarchs")
    • cburgdorf 4y ago
      Let's assume rich countries of the world (e.g. G7) set up a climate change fund in a smart contract. They could just lockup some funds there to be claimable after x months/years for any country (except the G7) proportionally to how far they managed to reduce their CO2 emissions. This assumes that we can trustlessly get the CO2 emissions for all countries (Let's just assume satellites can provide that data in a trustless way to the blockchain via some clever oracle mechanism). Instead of having a handwritten weak contract like the Paris climate act, you'd have actual enforceable code that can not be gamed. I'm obviously oversimplifying things here but this is just to give an idea how blockchain tech can improve coordination games in the future.
      • pjc50 4y ago
        > This assumes that we can trustlessly get the CO2 emissions for all countries Classic blockchain advocacy: it works great provided we solve this unsolved problem of communicating "trustlessly" with the real world! > you'd have actual enforceable code that can not be gamed People keep "gaming" smart contracts all the time. Just recently there was a defi attack where someone simply flash-borrowed all the tokens, voted themselves a reward, and returned the tokens.
        • cburgdorf 4y ago
          There are a lot of well proven live projects that use external oracle data and haven't suffered any serious issues. Just throwing DAI and RAI out as examples.
      • ak_111 4y ago
        Let's assume this is true. There are many simpler and smaller-scale coordination games out there. Why hasn't any of these adapted blockchain? It is quite a stretch to think that you can go from 0 adaptability to 100% adaptability in one of the largest scale coordination games imaginable (tracking carbon consumption). For example if you told me in 2002 that one day most of the world would be on Facebook I would have been very skeptical, if then you showed me all of Harvard using it like crazy, my scepticism would have decreased significantly. It is the lack of successful use cases even at smaller scale that I think preventing many people believing in the grand vision.
• emmes 4y ago
  I'm also a blockchain skeptic when it comes to building the best technological solution. However, I've worked for a successful startup in the blockchain space. Blockchain was instrumental in generating interest and securing funding for the first rounds of financing. If blockchain had not been part of the company elevator pitch, it worked never have gotten off the ground. If adding shiny object Y to solution X is what causes your product to succeed at having the largest market share of X, then Y has value. Many companies have succeeded by having the most customers, not the best technology.
• code_devil 4y ago
  Blockchain technology helps you create applications without the need to have a trusted 3rd party. What it solves?: - Sending money from Alice to Bob without the need of a trusted party like Venmo/Paypal/Bank. - Vehicle registration / House title deeds are maintained by the local government. A decentralized application can potentially mint an NFT (ERC-721) and maintain such a DB. (Although, the physical society would need to come with laws to tie up physical good's with NFT's) - In today's Gaming Economy all the digital goods bought/earned are controlled by the company (Zynga/Roblox). A blockchain powered game will allow the owners to have actual control of the digital goods ( money - tokens, wearables - NFT's) bought/purchased that they can sell/exchange in the open market. Imagine buying a souvenir from Disney Land and then not being able to sell/exchange it.
  • pensatoio 4y ago
    In my opinion, none of those things are real problems that need solving. They’re fabricated to fit a technology.
    • aeschylus 4y ago
      I don't subscribe to Netflix because I'm not entertained by such things. That doesn't mean others don't have a need for low-cost narrative diversion. The fact that you don't acutely feel the need for a trustless digital money is very telling of your position in the world. I would recommend you read the book "Check Your Financial Privilege", by Alex Gladstein. You will find that, as an absolute fact, the use case is in extremely dire need of solving, and Bitcoin is the solution.
• syntheweave 4y ago
  Blockchains are a tech for commons records among consenting parties. As a "database", it's really quite niche. But as a fundamental tech it's an advancement, because it lets you set up some basic rules and then know that the log henceforth doesn't need a designated custodian, and can accommodate many contributors. The surface area for indiscretion is reduced, and the chain doesn't need highly visible maintenance to stick around. This quality also makes it actually pretty unsuitable for capitalism: capitalism premises enclosure of the commons through the enforcement of the state. It desires strong identity and legibility everywhere. So it becomes "pointless" by definition - a bad database - if the state or some other body is assumed in control. Thus the commonplace scenario of blockchains being a legitimizing veneer for scams has taken hold: actually using their best qualities is anti-capitalistic, but using them to obscure a scheme can be done if you tinker around with the financing enough so that you stay a step ahead of regulation. But there is genuine activity, gradually increasing over time, through the contrasting role of blockchain stewardship. This starts with the role of miners in the technical substrate; and it proceeds towards more general ideas around governance and solving decentralized coordination problems. Markets often appear in the midst as a way of ranking things by price as well as by name or category, but markets aren't necessarily special. The speculative market does has a role in building up these ideas, though, because each time the tide goes out, those projects that have done the best at addressing coordination issues become survivors. There's a holistic element to the tech really working well that is just barely being touched upon.
• faangiq 4y ago
  The main purpose is to scam idiots. It’s very effective at that.
• simonblack 4y ago
  There's no intrinsic value in Blockchain Tech. Numbers in a computer merely signify what you are willing for them to signify. In that sense, blockchain tech is no different from fiat currency. That piece of colored paper in your pocket is merely a promise of worth. People can renege on their promises, either because they want to or because they are forced to. So tell me, how many hamburgers have you bought with Confederate Dollars or Nazi Reichsmarks lately?
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• zinglersen 4y ago
  I made the choice to use Firefox because of the monopolistic direction that we're headed, but I think it will become harder and harder to argue for Firefox. I wonder if there is another way to create an information network that simplifies the user experience by scraping website code and reformatting it into a simple template with defined ux-patterns like navigation, font, text size, colors, buttons, links, media, etc. and excluding unwanted content like ads, filler bg images and such. So basically creating a design system that you apply to all websites. The scaping/tagging would need to be smart and there would probably be a need for separate templates for some use cases (could twitter work?) but maybe the focus should be on information-driven sites like blogs, wiki, search, media, etc.
• mattdesl 4y ago
  “why the distributed ledger?” (Jan 2022) https://mirror.xyz/mattdesl.eth/2WNUAK_DuQsxj3Ei3CY-IlWyVb8VZzQl0mgvYj3TAjQ https://mirror.xyz/mattdesl.eth/2WNUAK_DuQsxj3Ei3CY-IlWyVb8V...
• TimJRobinson 4y ago
  I'm always happy to talk anyone's ear off about Blockchain, it is by far the most interesting space I've ever worked in. Feel free to ask me your hardest questions. Decentralized Finance (DeFi) is my favorite aspect. It's honestly outstanding how far behind the curve of DeFi knowledge HN is and so few are willing to debate and learn. I work at a company called Balancer, we've built an app that allows you to essentially invest in index funds of tokens. You can put money into a pool of say 40% ETH, 30% Bitcoin, 20% LINK, 10% USD. Then instead of you paying fees for someone else to manage this fund, you get paid - often 5% - 20% per year, to have this fund. How? Traders use your funds as an arbitrage opportunity when the ratios go out of wack. There are a lot of day traders in crypto right now and every time they make a trade through your pool they pay a 0.3% - 1% fee. These tokens are mostly crypto coins right now but they can be anything, including tokens that track oil, gold, share prices, or even housing index funds. Other companies build these tokens and as they are standardized they can be used in Balancer pools. Balancer the app is completely decentralized and open access to all. Your money is yours, we have no access to user funds. This is barely the tip of the iceberg, eventually the entire financial system is going to be overtaken by open, permissionless systems and they will be much bigger than today because there are far fewer rent seekers, and entire world gets to participate.
  • goldenbikeshed 4y ago
    If the entire world gets to participate, wouldn't that make everyone a rent seeker?
• TimJRobinson 4y ago
  I'm going insane reading these replies and seeing not a single mention of DeFi. It's the fastest growing startup sector maybe of all time, going from nothing to half a trillion dollars in 3 years and yet somehow HN has completely missed the boat and still thinks nothing is being built on blockchains. I guess all the crypto folk got sick of the pessimism on here and went to build with more optimistic open minded communities.
• readonthegoapp 4y ago
  yes -- but the (positive) value is to only certain parties. you're not missing anything. both bombs and blockchain tech are destructive for most people -- not positive/additive. but bombs and blockchain tech can also make megafortunes for the people that own, control, and use them. there are some edge cases where bombs and blockchain tech could theoretically be more useful than the alternatives, but a sane/decent world would save those experiments for the philosophy lecture room.
• easytiger 4y ago
  > I am talking committees formed in parliaments and central banks around the world to discuss its benefits, serious universities dedicating whole programs on the subject, elite investors pouring money into its potential, and the list goes on. This worries me too. These people don't understand much beyond a 3 minute sales pitch
  • ak_111 4y ago
    True, but there is a long list of "smart" intellectuals/academics/investors who are believers in the space, which is where "am I going insane?" part comes in.
    • ryanobjc 4y ago
      So, how much do you trust your own intelligence? When has it failed you? I think you have too much hubris. What do these people know that you do not? What non technical things do they know that you do not, that totally change the context and the reasoning behind these solutions?
      • ak_111 4y ago
        I am not sure if you are trolling, but this is exactly why I posted this... Far from being hubristic, I feel I am missing something and want to figure out what it is.
  • john_the_writer 4y ago
    Agreed.. It's seems like an answer to a question no-one asked. It solves a problem no-one had.
    • threeseed 4y ago
      > It solves a problem no-one had Actually it solves the problem of a lot of money given to VCs by LPs that is just sitting around unspent.
  • rinze 4y ago
• TekMol 4y ago
  The value of blockchains seem so obvious to me, that I wonder if OP can be genuine. ask_111: How can having a public log that is extremely tamper resistant not have value? Let's look at a concrete example: Bitcoin. You can write something into the Bitcoin blockchain and be very sure that the information you wrote into it will stay there pretty much forever. Is that enough, or do we also have to discuss why having such a tamper proof log has value?
  • ak_111 4y ago
    I do agree that tamper proof log is very useful, but I don't believe that it is something you can't achieve using traditional database tech. I have a question for you that can short-circuit our discussion. You claim that the value is "so obvious" to you, why then one decade in there isn't one serious application of blockchain in the real world (not even in the dark web with early adpaters)? I mean a workflow that has been entirely transformed by it, despite all the investment and smart people working in the space? The lack of examples is the point that I find most baffling at all.
    • rebuilder 4y ago
      Selling illicit goods seems to have been transformed by Bitcoin.
      • ak_111 4y ago
        A bit of contentious point but I want to distinguish between bitcoin blockchain and blockchain tech. Even as a bitcion skeptic, its market cap went from $0 to $1T and you can't argue with that. But circa 2012 people started marketing blockchain as an independent technology that can solve all sort of problems. This is the bit I have issues with, there hasn't been a single successful use case sense.
      • aerique 4y ago
        This can be a good thing. Just because a government prohibits something doesn't mean it is bad. (Yes, now we can devolve into a discussion about what "bad" means.)
• king_magic 4y ago
  You’re not going wrong. For the most part, blockchain is snake oil, at least in how it’s positioned.
• ryanobjc 4y ago
  A centralized database of fungible and useful assets is going to eventually be hacked. Just ask OKTA about that. Whereas there is no central point of hack for a well designed and tested blockchain. Distributed custody in an adversarial environment with mutual trust and dis-trust. Yes it's not everything, but tradfi solutions are not 150% bulletproof either - they may only seem that way to the outside, but there are massive hazards lying just under the surface waiting to blow up. See: GME settlement risk end of Jan 2020. EDIT: I used to be a huge skeptic of Eth and smart contracts. But I knew basically nothing about how they actually worked in practice. I learned a lot more and now I am a big believer. The reality is you just likely do not know enough. Your skepticism of the space prevents you from learning and seeing the value that's sitting right in front of your eyes. You also have baked in presumptions that existing systems are somehow... workable or great, when they are not.
  • threeseed 4y ago
    * Centralised database is eventually going to be hacked. * Decentralised blockchain can't be hacked because it's well designed and tested. Problem is neither of these statements are always true.
    • ryanobjc 4y ago
      Yet if they are true often enough, then the use case makes sense. Also don't forget insider problems. Every major financial institution has massive insider threat problemss.
      • threeseed 4y ago
        I work at a major financial institution and there is no insider threat problem. There are systems in place built over decades and regulated by the government that audit and monitor the behaviour of all employees. In particular those who have a higher ability to conduct fraudulent activities. If you really want to see an insider threat issue you should look at the pump/dump schemes in the NFT world. That sort of immorality (and hopefully soon to be illegality) is truly shocking.
  • 4y ago
• anotherhue 4y ago
  Public writable block chains seem to be a dead end due to the cost of 'proof of x' in any Sibyl safe way. Private blockchains, such as for cross company account clearances, complex asset exchanges (planes, land) may help dislodge the rent seeking lawyers. They can be publically readable also which could be useful, e.g. For querying a land registry.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • nlitened 4y ago
    By the way, as far as I understand, git is an example of a private blockchain.
    • funklute 4y ago
      How so? With git, you have to manually resolve merge conflicts. With blockchain, the general point is to use PoW (or something equivalent) to automatically do a vote on which is the correct version. Isn't that also the case in a private blockchain?
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      • nlitened 4y ago
        I think git has: 1. A chain of blocks referencing its parents by hash, thus verifying their validity and immutability 2. A rules for consensus on choosing what blocks can be appended (both technically and organizationally through each company’s PR review process) That makes git a blockchain.
        • funklute 4y ago
          Good point, had not thought of it in this way before!
  • 4y ago
• paulsutter 4y ago
  The sole purpose of blockchain is to prevent double spending without a trusted party Other proposed applications are mostly dumb / misguided, like immutable storage, social network posts, etc, these can be done with hashing or digital signatures alone If you have a better way to avoid double spending than blockchain folks woukd get very excited. Traditional database can’t do that (requires a trusted party)
  • ASalazarMX 4y ago
    The current Mexican government is trying to take control of elections, banana republic style, from the INE, the independent institution in charge of those. Our president is suggesting blockchain tech to make votes electronic, and defunding the INE since physical votes won't be needed anymore. A blockchain would not guarantee fair elections, is just a buzzword.
  • TimJRobinson 4y ago
    How do you build Alchemix with a hashing / digital signature algorithm? How about Uniswap? Balancer? Curve? Aave? Don't know these names? Together they hold over $100B in assets. It's crazy how out of touch with what's going on in DeFi HN is. That you can say there is nothing useful meanwhile there are tens of thousands of people using billions of dollars with these apps all of which depend on a Blockchain to function.
  • goldenbikeshed 4y ago
    See that's the point. Having a trusted party is a better solution.
  • Fnoord 4y ago
    I have a better way: with a trusted party. Seriously. And if these suck, then perhaps there's not enough competition between them. I mean, Mastercard and Visa is practically a duopoly, and while a duopoly is better than a monopoly, it still sucks. I also know a good use case for blockchain: scamming. Practically all the current use cases revolve around that. The trusted party wasn't so bad after all, eh? But to be honest, I feel like there's one good use case for cryptocurrencies which isn't a use case for me, but is for people who live in oppressed regimes: the ability to not use the currency of the autocratic government. This would be true for some South American countries, but also nowadays for a country like Russia. Other than that, I see no use case.
• armada651 4y ago
  A lot of people pushing Blockchain technology have a vested interest in making it a more pervasive technology. Because Blockchain applications drive up the value of their crypto assets and offer more opportunities for speculation using crypto. Blockchain applications don't necessarily need to use existing cryptocurrencies. However in that case you need to find some other incentive to get people to mine your blockchain, which is hard. And consequently having a small mining pool makes you vulnerable to a 51% attack defeating the entire purpose of a "tamper-proof" log. Thus it's easier to just use Ethereum, which in turn drives up demand for that cryptocurrency.
  • ak_111 4y ago
    The funny thing is that I don't believe there is a "blockchain lobby" that is driving hype similar to bitcoin and other fads, that would at least make it more compressible. In fact it is not clear who benefits if it gets "adapted", whatever that means. It just seems collective delusion in pushing the technology by people who have little stake in it if at all, and sensible people have just given up trying to point out that it is vapourware, but the attention seems to be increasing year on year if anything...
    • armada651 4y ago
      > In fact it is not clear who benefits if it gets "adapted", whatever that means. People who hold cryptocurrency benefit from increased demand and hype around it. It drives up the value of their assets even if indirectly. Not everyone may even be aware that they have this conflict of interest. They may genuinely buy into the hype, which is why they hold cryptocurrency in the first place. However as always we should be skeptical of technology advice from people who stand to make money from you choosing one technology over the other.
    • gravitycorn 4y ago
      Adaption benefits those who adapted earlier. It’s always funny to see early adopters’ criticisms of inflation politics and power to the 99% rhetoric when all they want to do is flip the curve around and apply the same “upward distribution” to their monetary system, but in reverse (timewise) and worse (distribution wise).
• oxff 4y ago
  You are confused. The distributed ledger described in whitepaper is valuable when you need to form a consensus about past events under dispute (or which could possible be disputed). Also the ponzi-space of cryptocurrency / blockchain is clearly valuable since you can generate 1000% moons in there for joke coins, it's valued by real money and you can earn real money by trading them.
• thanatos519 4y ago
  Por que no los dos?
• syzygyhack 4y ago
  It is simply trust reduction/removal through distributed consensus. Any industry or application that depends on trust could be improved through use of blockchain for trust minimization. But just as easily as a knife can cut a slice of bread, it could be used to slice a jugular. In short, don't confuse the technology with the use cases. It's just a tool, some people will misuse it.
  • nosianu 4y ago
    You don't minimize trust, you greatly increase the complexity of it. There's a lot more entities and processes involved and it becomes harder to understand. You need to trust quite a lot more things now, only that it's much harder, so many don't even try and just assume trusting many through some hard to understand and changing mechanism must be easier, which I don't quite see the logic of. As far as I can see - and when the blockchain hype started I made an effort and even took courses and did some programming with the new tech - many proposed benefits rely on them being hard to refute without quite a bit of effort for this reason, it's a lot of assertions that are hard to follow, to understand and to prove or disprove. The effort made for an assertion of some alleged benefit always is very low, but trying to disprove the claim without equally resorting to just making the statement is a lot of effort. I must say though I'm skeptical this discussion, especially with the stated question, is useful on this site and at this point, after it has already been discussed so many times, and now with that kind of question I doubt this leads to any better discussion than what we already had.
    • syzygyhack 4y ago
      > There's a lot more entities Yes. That's decentralization. Rather than trusting one person irrevocably, you trust cryptographic security and the rational economics that emerge from alignment of incentive. Minimal trust in all other actors in the system, rather than maximum trust in one entity. > it becomes harder to understand Not really.. The general principles underlying blockchain are relatively simple. I'd agree that the finer implementation details can be complex, especially when it comes to consensus, sharding, or cryptography. But that varies between protocols. Do you have any examples of the assertions you find hard to follow?
• lr4444lr 4y ago
  People transacting large amounts of an economy in a currency not controllable by central banks or sovereign bond inssuance is a really serious issue. Parliaments and regulators absolutely need to get a handle on this.
  • yashg 4y ago
    Don't worry, governments and centrals banks won't let go of one of the fundamental powers of a sovereign. The anarcho-capitalist dream of being your own bank isn't sustainable in real life anyway.
• hatenberg 4y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15RTC22Z2xI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15RTC22Z2xI sums it up nicely.
• djohnston 4y ago
  You're not going insane but you are wrong.
  • funklute 4y ago
    Perhaps you could explain why?
  • yashg 4y ago
    He's not.
• threeseed 4y ago
  Blockchain reminds me a lot of peer to peer e.g. Bitorrent. At the time people thought it was also going to change the world and usher in a new era of decentralisation.
  • ak_111 4y ago
    Maybe in terms of concept, but in terms of real life cases and adaptability Bitorrent was arguably and still is a very successful technology that many people have engaged with.
    • threeseed 4y ago
      There are many great uses of the technology e.g. asset distribution. But in its hey day it was going to change everything like Web3 claims it will do.
  • yeetsfromhellL2 4y ago
    Well it very well could have if things went a little different. Bittorrent was revolutionary, but slow to adapt. Maybe if it was more user friendly, or had more browser integration earlier on, and the protocol had more development, you'd see it more widely used. Imagine if "the cloud" was just bittorrent swarms. It could have happened. As for blockchain...decentralized databases have their place, the problem is that centralized organizations are trying to make a use for them when a centralized db already did what they wanted just fine.
• yashg 4y ago
  Blockchain has no use other than to store tokens for speculative gambling. Take a look at this presentation - https://bit.ly/3OB5G18 https://bit.ly/3OB5G18 Proof-of-work - the USP of blockchain makes it slow and expensive and planet destroying at scale. But it's not a bug, it's a feature. You take it out and the blockchain is neither public not permission-less. A private, trusted, permissioned blockchain is pointless. The whole blockchain, web3, crypto, NFT, DeFi, DAO ecosystem is a massive ponzi scheme. The proponents keep cooking up new buzzwords to keep the pot boiling and to attract new starry eyed idiots who will bring in real money into the system to keep the ponzi going. Blockchain is a hammer in search of nail. A solution for problems that do not exist.
  • httptoolkit 4y ago
    > A private, trusted, permissioned blockchain is pointless Not at all - it's a verifiable audit log. Git is an example of exactly this.
    • yashg 4y ago
      Git is not a blockchain. An audit log doesn't need to be blockchain. The whole point of blockchain is that is is decentralized, trust-less and permission-less. You take it away and what is left?
      • FabHK 4y ago
        That is largely an issue of nomenclature, but there is a school of thought that distinguishes between public, open, trust-less blockchains (which then need a consensus mechanism), and private, permissioned blockchains (which have a central authority and thus don't need a consensus mechanism). Whether the latter has many use cases is a good question, but git certainly fits the definition.
  • FabHK 4y ago
    I wonder whether one can postulate an impossibility theorem (call it SEV, similar to CAP) for public blockchains (at least using PoW, and whether one can overcome it with PoS or similar is an open question): You can't have a (PoW) public blockchain that is Secure, Efficient (=not planet destroyingly wasteful), and Valuable. Pick any two.
• jph 4y ago
  Blockchains are excellent for logging that uses trustable peer participation, distributed append, and tamper resistance. For example, each peer can add their own chain links, and also see all the chain links added by other peers, and also be sure that the log hasn't been corrupted by any of the peers. Some examples IMHO are logs of participation (e.g. voting), agreements (e.g. contracts), exchange (e.g. payments), and auditing (e.g. compliance). A blockchain can be public or protected i.e. private just to the participants. A blockchain can store plain text information or access-controlled information i.e. encrypted information or links to sign in systems. All of these capabilities provide massive trust advantages over a traditional database as managed by a central administrative entity, which requires the participants must trust the central administrative entity to be truthful, unbiased, secure, and with sufficient high availability and disaster recoverability.
  • ak_111 4y ago
    "Blockchains are excellent for logging with peer participation, distributed append, and tamper resistance. For example, each peer can add their own chain links, and also see all the chain links added by other peers, and also be sure that the log hasn't been corrupted by any of the peers." This sounds very close to a git repository, which Linus wrote using only SHA libraries.
    • icelancer 4y ago
      It is. Except if you used SHA libraries for mission critical logging, it would be insecure by default, since it's demonstrably possible to force SHA-1 collisions. git is moving (slowly) to SHA-256, which is also the hashing function of Bitcoin.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • ak_111 4y ago
      Edit: if you are saying blockchain allows non-tech people the benefit of something like a git repo to run there everyday business, then this is a view I sympathetic to but it is arguably failing in this aspect as well since there is no non-tech people using it.
• jokoon 4y ago
  Unless government regulates something, that thing is not going to have proper value. This is true for everything, and this is true for blockchain. Society needs to officially recognizes something through government and law. Libertarians don't like this, but it's true.
• tern 4y ago
  It's all in Timothy May's email signature from the cypherpunks mailing list: Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero knowledge, reputations, information markets, black markets, collapse of governments. The key concept is: sovereignty. In the end, this will reshape the nation state.
  • hyperman1 4y ago
    Expecting the nation state to just sit there and watch seems naive. When it becomes a big enough threat to make them notice, the nation state will regulate it stone dead.
    • forum_ghost 4y ago
      you mean, fully embrace it to front-run the laggards, like El Salvador did?
      • FabHK 4y ago
        A journalist that went to El Salvador and tried to use BTC to pay begs to differ: > By Friday the final tally looks grim for crypto fans. Only 10 of almost 50 businesses had taken Bitcoin, amounting to $485 out of $1,700 I’ve spent. And only four crypto transactions—at the pool hall, the peanut vendor, a Starbucks, and a Caterpillar-brand T-shirt store—had been entirely seamless. My experience isn’t a fluke. In a recent Chamber of Commerce survey of 337 businesses, only 14% said they’d transacted in Bitcoin since September. https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2022-bitcoin-travel-problems/ https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2022-bitcoin-travel-probl...
        • forum_ghost 4y ago
          What percentage of the businesses, in any country, use your software? 15%, in a few months, is an astounding penetration rate for a brand new currency with 50% fluctuations. Looking forward to the list of your global achievements.
    • 4y ago
• WaxedChewbacca 4y ago
• icelancer 4y ago
  >> I am talking committees formed in parliaments and central banks around the world to discuss its benefits, serious universities dedicating whole programs on the subject, elite investors pouring money into its potential, and the list goes on. Most of this is indeed nonsensical. However, I think you may be letting the hype train move the goalposts in your mind. The vast majority of "blockchain tech" out there is indeed a scam, useless, and of no value. The same was true about what people promised about the Internet. Pets.com and all that. This is nothing new. I've owned a small amount of cryptocurrency for a long time, because to own $0 in a modern portfolio is probably not too smart if you're an index-type investor, given the market cap of BTC + ETH. However, I am no zealot of the tech and was very skeptical for a long time. I still am skeptical, but the thing that convinced me to give cryptocurrency a bit more run was the concept of decentralized financial instruments. I know the HN poster reading this can't wait to reply with any number of links of scams and rugpulls after I mention this, and it's true, scams abound. This happened on the Internet big time when people would "never put their credit card online," for example. All I can say is that the applications of decentralizing financial instruments and methods appeals to me in a way no other derived technology from cryptocurrency/blockchain has. Maybe it won't ring true for you, but I can see some novel services and products coming out of this area of blockchain technologies that will be a benefit for global payments and humans in general. Plenty will disagree, and that's fine. I'm not saying I am definitively correct. Just saying I was in a similar spot to you, and with an open mind, eventually found something.
• ronreiter 4y ago
  You’re right.
• matthewmacleod 4y ago
  There is for sure some value in blockchain technology, but you’re not insane for being baffled by the attention being paid to it. The whole space is riddled with nonsense, with very few concrete and practical use-cases being put forward. Cryptocurrencies in particular are awash with outright scams that just drown out the interesting and useful stuff. I like this well-know NIST flowchart as a starting point: https://images.app.goo.gl/wsK2e2zPUnQW5agRA https://images.app.goo.gl/wsK2e2zPUnQW5agRA It’s a bit pessimistic perhaps, but it kind of gets to the point: a blockchain is an interesting technology for solving problems where you need to achieve some sort of shared, trustless ledger. That’s useful in some cases, including the implementation of digital currencies.
• swalsh 4y ago
  You say you've done research, i'm curious how you did the research? The standard go to reference from people who don't like crypto is now is a 2 hour video that makes zero effort to look for any good. It's not alone, there are hundreds of videos that make bad faith effort to "investigate" crypto. On the progressive left, for some reason it is becoming part of their culture to hate crypto (which is ironic considering a huge amount of their goals could be achieved easier using it) I will say though, the more I dug into crypto the more I see a lot of actually amazing things. I moved into the Avalanche chain, and it's a radically differenent experience from Bitcoin and ETH frankly. I don't think ETH or Bitcoin got close to accomplishing their vision, but AVAX is different. I'm making transactions all the time (I made almost 700 transactions last year... the taxes part absolutely sucks). I'm not going to try enumerate the ways I think crypto is useful but i'd question the sources you're using. One big thing i'd point out, the vision of crypto is still pretty far out. There are many infrastructure pieces missing. DAPP's Development seems WAY slower than centralized services. A smart contract is like hardware development. You basically want to get it perfect before you release it. Move fast and break things could mean a 50 million dollar hack in crypto. That doesn't make crypto useless or bad. Just a thing you need to think about. EDIT: I went back about 3 seconds after positing this to fix a spelling mistake, and I was downvoted. It would be nice to get a comment with each of your downvotes. In the past upvotes and downvotes were signal of quality (not agreement)
  • strken 4y ago
    How is it a different experience? How is it actually amazing? I don't want you to enumerate the ways crypto is useful, I want you to give me one or two concrete use cases that aren't money laundering or buying illegal things.
    • kayamon 4y ago
      Bitcoin has no unique use cases. It's simply a form of money that's secure, a worldwide trading economy that works. The reason that's interesting is because as humanity we never had one of those before.
    • swalsh 4y ago
• xwdv 4y ago
  What people have to understand is blockchain is more than just about coins. Blockchain is a way for everyone to have a global, universal database that anyone can read and write data to. That has value.
• golergka 4y ago
  Drug trade, tax avoidance, banking for the unbanked and sanctioned. I'm currently living from airbnb to airbnb, with all my Russian banks banned from SWIFT, and crypto is the only way I'm abe to access my money.
• asaddhamani 4y ago
  I recently watched this video (Line Goes Up) and it covers a lot of ground, from crypto to NFTs to DAOs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g
• dageshi 4y ago
  You're missing the fact that it enabled purely online/digital money people will actually use. You could build an online currency with a database much more easily than blockchain but people won't use it because it relies on a central authority to maintain the database and not enough people will trust that central authority not to misuse their power. It was tried a bunch of times in the past and never worked. Fundamentally though it isn't about the technology it's about the transition. It's about money transitioning to a purely digital form which people will use. In the past entire industries have been revolutionised multiple times by such transitions. Music moved to digital via mp3. TV, Movies via efficient video codecs and streaming. In both cases those shifts caused massive and unpredictable changes to how we consume and buy music/tv. Now that money is making the same transition, people are jumping on it hoping to profit from it and money is much much more important a technology than music or tv/movies, it's the fundamental technology of society.
  • tsimionescu 4y ago
    People were using money online just fine well before Bitcoin, and even today, actually using BTC for non-investment purposes is a tiny minority. What exactly makes a dollar or euro less "online/digital" than a bitcoin?
    • dageshi 4y ago
      Speed of iteration/development/experimentation. You can't fork EUR/USD, experiment with it and see if it works better than the existing EUR/USD. You can with online currencies and people are doing just that. Most will be failures in the same way that most new businesses/startups are ultimately failures. BUT the difference is there is actual experimentation with money now in a way that there never was before.
      • dangerwill 4y ago
        None of these are experiments with the concept of money. You still transact in the exact same fundamental way as with traditional online payments, just 1000x worse. 99.9% of this "experimentation" is simply companies tying ownership of a token to a permission to access a web service. And the remainder of it are clueless tech brained morons finding ways to re-invent financial instruments (like residuals, profit splitting, and derivation) that have been around for hundreds of years. You don't have any new insights into financial systems, you just want to be at the top of the financial system and collect rents
• rvz 4y ago
  So one of YC's finest and most valuable startup, Stripe that needs no introduction here, also thinks there is 'no value' in using it for payments then? Right then why did they announce this then? [0] Also just yesterday, a very low turn out in discussion about it [1], even less when they announced their Stripe Crypto post [2]. Why? Where is the scam? How exactly is Stripe scamming? Or is it because Stripe is spared somehow? Or most likely, they waited for regulations to be clearer first and then re-entered back in with their crypto payouts products. Perhaps they still see some value in it. So when it is Stripe that actually releases something, there is zero instant extreme outrage of predictable 'crypto is scam', 'snake oil' comments to be found like the ones I see here. [0] https://stripe.com/blog/expanding-global-payouts-with-crypto https://stripe.com/blog/expanding-global-payouts-with-crypto [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31121177 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31121177 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30628677 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30628677
  • yashg 4y ago
    Crypto is scam. Some people at Stripe are trying to capitalize on the hype. We'll see how it goes. Something can't be both a currency as well as a speculative asset. Bitcoin was conceived as a currency. It promised fast transaction, low fees and no central trust provider authority like a government or a bank. But it and countless other cryptos have morphed into something people speculate on for gains. There is still very little you can actually buy using crypto. It's useless as a medium of exchange (volatility, high fees, non-reversible, slow etc). The high volatility and lack of any underlying utility whic can give it a value means it is a ponzi scheme and only those who got in early will come out richer. Late entrants will end up holding bags of worthless digital tokens.
    • rvz 4y ago
      Assuming you have read the whole article that I have linked [0], did it say or mention anything about 'Bitcoin' being used for payments there? [0] https://stripe.com/blog/expanding-global-payouts-with-crypto https://stripe.com/blog/expanding-global-payouts-with-crypto
• monkeydust 4y ago
  There might be something in it with regards to reshaping the debt (fixed income) markets. Starting with issuance process then secondary trading. On secondary trading side the economic value comes from participants being able to transact with each other, with instant settlement and no delivery risk. Still exploring this concept with a few others but. Email me if interested in this use case.
• captaincrowbar 4y ago
  There is genuinely no value in blockchain tech. However, I regret that I am not qualified to help you with the other part of your question.
• go_prodev 4y ago
  Your post reminded me, I had a meeting with Amazon when they first started offering a Blockchain technology. The rep said they had implemented it, but didn't have a clear use case and were interested in seeing what customers might use it for. I've heard that Audi have a Blockchain to record car service history, so I believe we'll see more niche applications like that in future.
  • swalsh 4y ago
    I could see smart contracts revolutionizing PBM's. There's so much infrastructure around looking for violations, auditing dumb contracts, and executing them etc. If the contract was a smart contract that the manufacturer, and payer, and retailer interact with the whole process would be easier, more reliable, and faster.
• abetusk 4y ago
  I'm not sure if you're pushing back on cryptocurrency in general and using blockchain as proxy or if you're actually pushing back against blockchain as a technology buzzword that is being used by businesses. In the case it's digital currency: Saying blockchain technology is nothing more a distributed database is like saying TCP/IP is nothing more than flipping voltages on a wire. It misses the point of what the technology can be used for. Blockchain technology is the underylying mechanism for digital currency. Digital currency in the short term will allow less friction for online payments and has the potential to allow for easier banking options and a unifying global currency in the long term. For places that have a strong banking system, the need for digital currency isn't so apparent. For places that have failing banking infrastructure or are building new banking infrastructure, digital currency is an attractive option as we're steadily becoming more connected and "wired". There's a lot of hype, much of which is unwarranted, but behind that hype is the realization that digital currency and the implications of implementing it worldwide and having it widely available will have far reaching consequences for many aspects of our digital lives. In the case you're talking about blockchain without the digital currency aspect then I agree with you to a certain extent. My generous read on the situation is that businesses want to modernize their supply chain infrastructure and are looking for some standard to adopt that will provide them with guidance and "best practices". This could allow them to use something that can be implemented and maintained with lower costs and potentially even be used for outside audits and federation/communication with other entities. Personally, I think this is more akin to the Java/XML "craze". XML was adopted as a sort of standard but the underlying reason wasn't that XML was any panacea, it just happened to be the technology that was in vogue for businesses and was an excuse to modernize/digitize their infrastructure. The move to digitize data instead of either having a hap-hazard scheme or using paper was the motivation, not that XML was any great technology. Using XML also created it's own hap-hazard data schema realizations and, in the end, JSON provides more of the spirit of what XML promised but the move from pre-digitization to post-digitization provided such a strong incentive that it didn't really matter. In other words, we're seeing businesses try to modernize different aspects of logistics. The current trend is blockchain because it provides enough key words that they can rally around it. The motivation, in my opinion, is more that they want to modernize/digitize their supply chain so they're looking for something/anything that provides guidance, standards or other infrastructure to that effect.
• zthrowaway 4y ago
  Noob question: Can anyone explain storage concerns of the blockchain? Right now the BTC blockchain is 320GB in size. Won’t this get too big at some point for speedy lookups of ledgers and all that?
• jokethrowaway 4y ago
  BTC is nice tech on the paper (solving the consensus problem in a decentralised way) but it's kinda slow and unpractical for real world usage. If it's meant to be used only by some banks while you do other transactions off chains - then you reintroduce trust and lose the benefits. The value is all baseless speculation and hoping a central government won't class it as illegal once they get to do their own "crypto" to control their citizens better. The main value in BTC is that it's at the moment less regulated than the financial mess we have in the standard market. I think a better model would be to have tons of small private banks without a central banks and use a currency 100% backed by a basket of goods of prime necessity (wood, wheat, iron, gold). That said, I hope will somehow they will succeed in replacing central banks and I hope some of the revolutionaries who got rich with crypto will topple governments and create a decentralised society without (or better - with less) central points of failures.
• francisruiz 4y ago
  Tulips. Speculative value and nothing more.
• EverywhereTrip 4y ago
  There is a blockchain based system for doing podcast updates called PodPing. It reduces the overhead of checking hundreds of thousands of RSS feeds, and cuts down the time it takes for notification of new episode of a show. It can currently update everyone in the system in under 40 seconds from hitting publish. You can watch new podcasts get published live at podping.watch.
  • viraptor 4y ago
    A single message queue piping to Google notification service can do that for podcast apps with simpler setup / more efficiency. The sad state of podcast feeds doesn't make podping a particularly good system.
• sprain 4y ago
  One of the most hyped use cases of blockchains is event ticketing. We had a close look. It cannot solve most problems it claims to solve. The only thing it might be useful for is digital collectible tickets. This may be interesting for a tiny fraction of events and attendees. Full detailed analysis here: https://medium.com/@ticketpark/nft-tickets-a-realistic-look-at-a-big-trend-ae813d6f885d https://medium.com/@ticketpark/nft-tickets-a-realistic-look-...
  • GrumpyNl 4y ago
    We do ticketing, no need for blockchain. Ownership of the tickets is in a regular mysql db.
    • TimJRobinson 4y ago
      How do I resell my ticket? How can a company give lifetime tickets to all future shows? Do you have an API so I as a new indie startup can find people who have bought tickets to similar shows and give them special offers? These are the benefits NFT tickets unlock.
• anonu 4y ago
  I would tend to agree with you. I believe that payments is probably the major driving force here but we have yet to see anything that rivals the Visa network for example. Having some concept of money that isn't tied to a government is compelling. Take Lebanon for example which has seen 90% inflation in the last 2 years, the worst economic collapse in modern history... People's savings have been wiped out. This may not have been the case had there been a global alternative to keeping your money safe. Big trading firms now make billions of dollars trading crypto. In some sense they are "keeping the networks alive"... There's a ton of creativity in the entire space. I think maybe 98% of it goes away and we're left with the few gems that are useful or truly change society. In that sense there's a benefit.
• lui8906 4y ago
  Putting my bias at the front, I own crypto and am "pro" crypto if we can boil it down simply. I'm also deeply skeptical of a lot of projects in crypto, most OG's are because there is a lot of vaporware and scams and ponzis. Nonetheless, the vision of having a shared consensus truth that the whole world can rely on for transacting I find very compelling. I like the way Anatoly from Solana puts it: "Global information symmetry" Source: https://youtu.be/35_rr8Vf-4k?t=28939 https://youtu.be/35_rr8Vf-4k?t=28939
• anovikov 4y ago
  Of course there is nothing. It is just a very valuable scamming tool, just something extremely useful for siphoning money from dumber to smarter people's pockets. It has no actual, practical usages. Was never meant too. All clutter around it is just to conceal it's true nature: scam (oh ok, also money laundering, that's big too).
• dathinab 4y ago
  There is value in blockchain tech, but not necessary in crypto currencies, nfts or fully Byzantine decentralized tech. Like for example a distributed federate ledger is useful for checking/auditing/simplifying some federated tasks, like around supply-chain or to e.g. make it a bit more viable to interlink to game servers of the same game operated by different entities which have a real-mony related in-game economy (non of this are silver bullets, just make abuse harder). > At the same time, the amount of coverage and attention it is getting and for a sustained period makes me believe I am missing something. What you are missing is people gaining money through high risk investments, pyramid schemes. As well as rich people which hope this tech allows them to further avoid state control and taxes. I also have seen a bunch of times that some problems the US has are believed by tech, especially crypto people to be fundamental problems which need tech to be solved, while they pretty clearly are 100% fault of bad politics. Like personal banking in the US is crazy bad (for anyone not wealthy) that some very poor very unstable countries do a better job. I was competently shocked when I realized that in the US it's not the norm for poor people to have a bank accounts and neither is it trivial to safely send money between two private bank accounts in a not too long amount of time. If you either don't want to accept that such problems are caused by politics or accept it but don't think it can't be changed it's not hard to see crypto currencies as a good idea. Also crypto can be good to avoid government control, in a stable countries this is quite often related to crime but if you life idk. in a autocratic country while still being crime technical it might be ethically "good" from a western point of view. Like sending money into an embargoed country for you family to live from is still technically circumventing an (lets assume for a moment) reasonable embargo, but is ethically ok because you help your family to survive.
  • moron4hire 4y ago
    > game servers of the same game operated by different entities which have a real-mony related in-game economy Are you thinking like poker and other traditional card games of chance and skill? I would think the only way a distributed, multi-entity-operated game would work is if the game had very well-established, static rules, with little to no chance of any changes to the rules occurring. That's one of the major problems I see with NFTs for game assets. Games are ever evolving systems as issues of balance need to be tested and worked out. The higher the stakes (i.e. me competitive, more it involves real money), the more necessary it becomes that the games rules not be unfairly exploitable. A game like poker has the benefit of have ~150 - 200 years of play testing applied to it. Also, nobody owns the game of poker. There are no licensing agreements to negotiate, no standards bodies purchase specifications from, no gate keeper. Anyone can make their own poker implementation and nobody can say a thing about it. That is, except your local government. In the US, poker is treated differently than other gambling games, as it's considered a game of skill versus chance. But it's still regulated, just not as regulated as games of chance. So while the whole, global, CryptoPokerStars or whatever network couldn't be shut down, individual entities need to operate somewhere, and users need this entities to operate in jurisdictions they can trust to regulate the entities and make sure they aren't building in back doors and cheats like pocket card x-ray vision for company employees.
• kebman 4y ago
  > there is nothing here more than you can get with traditional database technology? Here are some questions that you can test your hypothesis with: * Can you get distributed and trust-less settlement mechanisms with a centralized database? * Can you seamlessly send value across jurisdictions and closed borders without meddlers and middlemen with traditional database technology (regulation resistance and unconfiscatableness)? * Can you escape coercion and control with a centralized database (regulation and coercion resistance), while at the same time attaining great protection against criminal coercion and theft (resistance against crime and corruption)? * Can a centralized database offer the same and relative anonymity as cash? * How would any of the above be valuable without markets and speculation? I.e. how would you know the value of what is being sent or traded with you without something else to compare it to? If you want to answer without merely saying yes or no, then I'd love to see your answers! Perhaps you can convince me to update some of my beliefs. :)
  • yashg 4y ago
    >seamlessly send value across jurisdictions I have money. How can I get some crypto? From a middleman. Need to pay fees. Then I send it to someone. Transaction fees. The receiver wants to buy groceries or pay kid's school fees, so they need to convert the crypto to money. Again fees. So lots of middlemen and fees are involved. And most of the time, One would need to provide full KYC and need to have a bank account to convert to/from crypto. Tell me more about how it is better, cheaper and faster than regular banking system.
    • kebman 4y ago
      Please refrain from putting words in my mouth. I never said that Bitcoin doesn't have fees. Inventing arguments against things I never said is very uncool. With that said, using Bitcoin to send value across jurisdictions is still seamless and far cheaper than most alternatives, except perhaps for some other cryptos... As for using Bitcoin to pay for stuff, sure there are fees, but then there are also fees for using banking services, except more of them are conferred to the vendors and to other banking fees, thus making Bitcoin a pretty great alternative anyway. However it's not the fees alone that makes Bitcoin a preferred choice over banks. It's the whole package, of unconfiscatableness, cutting out middlemen, privacy, and so on, and I happen to think the small fee you pay for that package is a lot better than what you get with fiat. Either way, that doesn't take anything away from the fact that you can do a lot more with crypto than you can with transactions stored in a centralized database.
• cynusx 4y ago
  It's 100% deregulated finance and even if regulators want to regulate it, they basically can't because unlike regulators, crypto is global. All the activities that regulators are designed to prevent are very successful in the crypto world. I don't think crypto will fail or go bust; but I do think retail investors are completely abandoned by regulators who have a democratic mandate to protect them. I suppose they don't want to be seen as stifling an innovative technology and politicians don't want to get blowback for efforts that would fail anyway. Anyway, until we have global governance there will not be global regulation of the space so it will go on for many more decades.
  • moron4hire 4y ago
    They can regulate where it counts: in the pockets of constituents. The US regulators don't care if UAE companies are running pump-and-dump schemes on Cameroonian citizens (or whatever other random countries you'd like to insert) as long as they keep US companies and US citizens out of it. So crypto being ungovernable doesn't matter. The people who use crypto are governable.
  • sho 4y ago
    You don't need global regulation, you need regulation in your local market and currency or you can't actually spend any of the theoretical value you may possess. What's the point of being a crypto millionaire in theory if you can't actually cash out? It is already very hard to, eg., secretly cash out BTC to AUD to spend on something you actually want. It will be reported and it will be taxed. It may as well be actual dollars.
• upwardbound 4y ago
  My understanding is that it originally came out of the cyberpunk & anarchist subcultures (e.g. the use of the Japanese nom de plume Satoshi Nakamoto is in my view a call-out to the glamorization of Japan in cyberpunk and cypherpunk culture). I believe Bitcoin really was indeed meant as an anarchist or libertarian way to have something like gold but digital - something that could be used to buy & sell anything forbidden by governments. Illegal online activity has been highly glamorized since before the start of the tech boom in culturally-foundational novels like Neuromancer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuromancer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuromancer - where the main hero is a suicidal amphetamine-addicted criminal hacker and his frenemies / semi-allies are an arms dealer and an assassin. To be honest, I think this glamorization of digital crime is rather naive. Even if someone takes the very niche position that drugs should be fully decriminalized, Bitcoin is also used for truly fucked up things like human slavery. In this thread, you can see an example by golergka, who uses bitcoin as I believe it was originally intended: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31132987 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31132987 "Drug trade, tax avoidance, banking for the unbanked and sanctioned. I'm currently living from airbnb to airbnb, with all my Russian banks banned from SWIFT, and crypto is the only way I'm abe to access my money." What is strange and I think you are rightly confused about is why did a very niche crypto-anarchist technology enter mainstream society in a big way? I think it's primarily a speculative bubble BUT there's a chance that it could be a bubble that never pops. Think of diamonds - we now have the technology to very affordably make beautiful synthetic diamonds, so from a first principles standpoint the price of diamonds should collapse any day now but it hasn't, and probably won't. Diamonds being expensive is too deeply baked into our culture, and it is possible that cryptocurrency could similarly become a bubble that never pops if it becomes a point of cultural agreement that crypto "should be" valuable, not for fundamental reasons but because of mass belief that is strong enough that it persists indefinitely, even across centuries.
• davidguetta 4y ago
  There's two value for me: - the possibility to hide some transactions out of the traditional system (monero / zcash). I mean you may disagree, it's mostly ideological for some honest people and practical to some dishonest / drug dealers / evaders. - the fact they are decentralised currencies that are now an actual alternative to people's national currency. this may look silly to you if you live in europe / usa, but a LOT of less developed countries such as lebanon, turkey, and a lot in south america and africa have seen the value of their currency decrease steadily wrt the dollar. So ANY of this people would have been better of buying either dollars (which may be hard locally / with taxes), and even better off any crypto in the past 10 years instead and they would have better life savings. tlrd The biggest value of bitcoin now is to be alternative store of value, which you can acess pretty much anywhere in the world in a decentralised fashion. Even if the tech were useless, its DE FACTO an alternative now which doesn't have less value that 80% of local / national currencies.
  • roland35 4y ago
    I understand the appeal of a currency not controlled by a bad government, but could we honestly expect third world residents to be able to understand and use the technology required for crypto? I have been writing software for a decade and I still can barely keep up with what is going on.
    • davidguetta 4y ago
      What ? exchanging bitcoin in the street seemed pretty simple last time I checked on localbitcoins. you dont need to know the tech at all. Plus, you'd be surprised how moder and tech-saavy young people in developing countries are (at least in the major cities).
      • roland35 4y ago
        Ok I just looked at local Bitcoin... I need to select a currency and pick traders, then select one who accepts an actual method I can use to exchange fiat currency such as a specific bank or zelle... How is this easier exactly? It just seems like a bunch of rigamarole for no benefit, with the added risk of scams
• isaacimagine 4y ago
  Blockchain-like distributed concensus mechanisms do have a few practical applications: https://slightknack.dev/blog/chain/ https://slightknack.dev/blog/chain/.
• chrischattin 4y ago
  I've said the same for years. Most blockchain ideas could be better solved with a traditional database, or simple cryptographic signatures. However, the killer app for blockchain already exists... currency. The societal benefits and implications from that alone are tremendous.
• danieltanfh95 4y ago
  I was skeptical for many years until it sort of clicked. Blockchain is important because it allows us to solve the issue when a company providing a service goes bankrupt or closes off the service, the service stops being available. This is especially horrible when said service requires a social network to work. We can't just say "let the users run the servers" because most users can't do that, thats why they trust centralised services. We need to split people to two groups of people: people who simply use a service, and people who can sustain a service. I'm seeing a potential future where apps and services are run on separate, individual blockchains. It will work similarly like the Tor network except now the permissionless, decentralised network can hold *state*! I envision a world where people running the network can be incentivised within the service itself, this doesnt have even to be tied to fiat money, like "honor" or "trust". Too bad the current crypto community isn't exploring this much yet, because there's a few cryptographic problems thats yet to be solved, but I see people also trying like this : https://github.com/stellar/slingshot https://github.com/stellar/slingshot
  • Zerverus 4y ago
    Nice theory. In practice intellectual property goes to someone and that’s it. See many real world examples such as the recently discontinued F1 game.
• thegabriele 4y ago
  Hopefully a sustainable blockchain solution will be the sole currency for a future civilization on another planet.
• martin_vejmelka 4y ago
  Blockchains provide computational integrity across geographic regions and jurisdictions requiring no trusted intermediary. You can run a computation and guarantee that others running that computation are using the same inputs and will get the same result. Even if Russia or France decide that they no longer allow Ethereum (just an example), this does not affect computations anywhere else. This is a massive shift in power balance toward participants. No other computational platform before the blockchain has provided all these features at the same time.
  • Cynddl 4y ago
    > No other computational platform before the blockchain has provided all these features at the same time. What about PGP/GPG?
    • martin_vejmelka 4y ago
      PGP/GPG provides primitives for managing some sort of PKI but beyond that, I don't follow your argument. For the sake of concreteness, here's for example how an auction can run on the blockchain: At time T an asset A owned by an anonymous seller is locked into a smart contract for H hours at minimum price M. Participants are free to enter their bids until time T+H. At the end of the period, the smart contracts examines all bids - if all bids are less than M, no-one gets asset A and ONLY then is asset A released back to original seller. If at least one bid is above M, the highest bid is picked and the asset is automatically transferred to the bidder's address. Everyone else is re-funded automatically. The seller is the only one able to extract the cash from the contract. Anyone can check the contract code and ascertain: - the seller can't withdraw their asset and run away with it before auction ends - the seller cannot reject a valid bid (>M) if the auction is already started - everyone but the winner will be re-funded their money back - winner (if any) is the only one who can retrieve the asset after auction is over ... and any other interesting properties. Regardless of whether Alice is from Argentina or from Zimbabwe. How would you do this on top of PGP/GPG? Note that source code bugs and hacks happen and are part of the process of working out how to do this stuff safely. There's a recent example of someone messing up a contract and $36M is stuck* forever because the refund functionality had a bug.
• baby 4y ago
  I’ll paste what I wrote in https://cryptologie.net/#article_555 https://cryptologie.net/#article_555 The simplest abstraction is to see cryptocurrency / blockchain / distributed ledger technology as a database running on a single computer. Everybody can access this database and there’s some simple logic that allows you to debit your account and credit someone else’s account. The computer has a queue to make sure transactions are processed in order. Blockchains that support smart contracts allow for people to install programs to that computer, which will add a bit more logic than simply debiting/crediting accounts. Others can then just send transactions to this computer to make a function call to any program (smart contract) that was installed on the computer. The cool thing really is that we’re all using the same computer with the same database and the same programs. Now in practice, nobody would trust a single point of failure like that. What if the computer crashes, or burns in a fire? Distributed systems to the rescue! We use distributed system protocols to run the same database on many computers distributed around the world. These distributed system protocols effectively simulate a single database/computer so that a few computers failing doesn’t mean the end of the blockchain. On top of that, we refuse to trust the computers that participate in this protocol. They could be lying about the balance in your account. We want the computers to police one another and agree on the database they are simulating. That’s where consensus protocols are used: to make the distributed database secure even when some of the participants are malicious. And that’s it. That’s blockchain tech for you. The obvious application is money, as the secure and simulated single computer is useful to simplify a payment system, but really any distributed database that cannot trust some of its participants can benefit from the advances there.
  • FabHK 4y ago
    Yes, it is a slow computer that uses the resources of about a billion modern computers. (Note that you could achieve basically any desired fault tolerance with a minuscule fraction of that with a trusted central authority.)
    • programmarchy 4y ago
      Your second statement presupposes central authorities can be trusted. Some presuppose that they cannot.
• deleted 4y ago
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• Konterstein 4y ago
  Even if this is all true what is missing here is self reflection. What exactly has any so called value in the finance or digital industry? Really not much, Finance has literally no value at all. So what i read here is bitterness that something without value displaces what you do know that has no value.
• GaelFG 4y ago
  I think "effective rebranding for marketing purposes of database technologies" alone justify all the fuss, business wise. I'm working in gaming, and in pc gaming today, when you ask 5$ pretax and preplatform fee, customers think you own them to dedicate your entire company to support the product fot the next 10 years for no additional fee, you will never heard of 90% of your customers, 5% will insult you on your steam page for any trouble they encountered, 4% will insult you and your game on youtube and social media for entertainement and self promotion, and maybe 1% will have positive feedback. Meanwhile with a good marketing, you can potentially sell low effort proceduraly generated random png 30$ to 3000$ piece in blockchain collection/games and each of your customer will probably actually spend time promoting your game even if he disliked it, if nothing to resell that it bought or earn interests. Of course i'm greatly exaggerating, but no wonder gaming company dream to develop the market. And I think video game market today is awfull. Every one want everything for free and no one want to actually pay. It's probaly a big part of why VR market is nearly empty : investing what is required to make good content is probably nearly impossible to recover on sales. It need a way to reinvent itself and allow content maker to make profits, and it may be the blockchain where it's 'normal' to pay around 100$ to try a new game and be ready to see it fail more often than not. The fact it's purely psychological is irrelevant marketing and business wise. I even think today the console market exist for purely commercial reasons. Console player accept to spend more on video game than computer players. Then developping for console make sense, even if probably today you could probably have exactly the same game on a same price range computer.
  • libertine 4y ago
    >Meanwhile with a good marketing, you can potentially sell low effort proceduraly generated random png 30$ to 3000$ piece in blockchain collection/games and each of your customer will probably actually spend time promoting your game even if he disliked it, if nothing to resell that it bought or earn interests. This mechanic works because people have something to gain from promoting the thing, because the mindset is that this "lottery" only works if people hop on their train. It's gambling on steroids: your perceived odds of success increase with how many players are playing the game. So you better hype it. >Every one want everything for free and no one want to actually pay. I think it has always been like that, only now you found ways to monetize on players that wouldn't otherwise play your games. Back in my days it was people that used piracy to play games, because they couldn't afford it. Now with micro-transactions, kids can make purchases that wouldn't make in the past. The problem might be rooted further down, like the cult of getting rich and famous easy and quickly, even while playing games (imagine).
• user3939382 4y ago
  The best proposal I’ve seen for it is accounting for shares on the stock market, there are some talks by the DTCC about this years ago before the GME fiasco.
• svara 4y ago
  This is not a debate that has to be had in the abstract anymore. It's been more than 10 years. Where's the cool stuff that those supposed technology breakthroughs enabled? I think we all know what the proponents would point to. Are we really impressed by any of that?
  • TimJRobinson 4y ago
    You've seriously never heard of DeFi? There are literally hundreds of apps processing billions of dollars now and new innovative things are launching every day. I work 24/7 in this space and can't even keep up. Defillama had a list of the biggest apps, just work your way through the list. Or listen to the bankless podcast.
    • kirso 4y ago
      I feel like what you described actually draws people to the tech. The sense of belonging being one of the hackers trying to fix the current issues with current systems. The issue is that many of them are indeed broken, but decentralization is not an answer to 99% of them. What I love about the industry is that it really attracts a lot of cool and smart people similar to what 2000s internet used to be. I just hope you guys won't get REKT.
  • unsupp0rted 4y ago
    The stock answer to this question from Crypto proponents is that the internet also took decades to bring about societal changes. Initially the internet was bulletin boards and poor quality online versions of print shopping catalogues, news articles with no images or low-res images, etc. It took a while for internet-enabled capabilities to noticeably surpass things you could do by dialing an 800-number or mailing a cheque to a PO Box.
    • somenewaccount1 4y ago
      It took decades because people couldn't afford computers, nor could they manufacture at today's modem scale, that's what took long. In terms of adaptation, once someone had access to a computer, with few exception people found some utility in their daily lives for it. IMHO, folks who have access to crypto are not finding any immediate use for it in their daily lives. And further, it doesn't seem to scale very well. Sure, enough coins exist, but they can't be transacted without massive fees. Ergo, doesn't scale currently. If some breakthrough solves the scaling problem while retaining it's decentralized nature, it may gain some utility.
• pluc 4y ago
  Once everyone gets over the cryptocurrency feature of blockchain tech we may start to have actual interesting technology. Right now - and ever since it started - the scene is filled with financial types who heard they could make a buck or fuck over some neophytes. Just go to a blockchain/crypto conference and you will see exactly what I mean. Once that phase goes away we may get actual technical folks with actual decent ideas.
• igorkraw 4y ago
  No, you aren't going insane. Cryptocurrency (block Chain ledger+distributed consensus) so far has no use case that is not covered by better technology. The one thing it facilitates (an online, permissionless, trustless, decentralised,ledger) has no real use case in human society, because in order to run the infrastructure to go online you already need to solve a lot of not-on-chain problems, and we have solved them with the technology of trust facilitation: the rule of law, legitimate authority, checks and balances etc. are all social technologies which are not perfect but have been honed over centuries and when combined with the internet to augment human discussion and decision making are incredibly efficient and low cost. It is pure insanity to try and replace this with cryptocurrency. What makes sense is for governments and other societal trust anchors to run federated ledgers with cheap APIs, that everyone involved take local backups of and can verify, but go through specialised adapted write APIs (i.e. consensus through regulations, governance, checks and balances etc). Because that is useful and can automate notaries for example. Everything else so far is either a decentralised Ponzi scheme (no clear owner/central figure, everyone can profit by luring in more suckers, but unlike the trust based economy no actual value is produced and the system would collapse if the trust based economy shut down the inflow of new capital - while even Venezuela and north Korea still produce things under heavy sanctions and could maybe be fine if they got rid of their cleptocrats and went back to an agrarian society, albeit with a lower QOL than the rest of the world) and/or derives it's value from using the Ponzi driven price of the currencies to launder money or provide tools to speculate/keep the game going. It's all recursive and contingent on going to the moon, with no there there. The epitome of default dead. The market can stay irrational longer than we can bet against it. It is fully possible (and I'm afraid of it happening) that crypto bros get enough lobbying power to regulatory capture and insert themselves as "decentralised middlemen" into governmental processes. If this happens, they might point to the "value added" by Cryptos in the same way TurboTax in the US currently claims its usefulness. Bug we should not believe these lies, cryptocurrency is pure rent seeking. That's why you're not going insane, nor missing something. There is simply no there there, just a bubble big enough to capture the very state it claims to dislike while it uses energy and IT infrastructure only that state and its society enabled
• KronisLV 4y ago
  > I am still unable to alleviate my scepticism that this entire space is vapourware, there is nothing here more than you can get with traditional database technology? Technically, there could be some value in an append-only datastore that can be distributed - such as verifying where some product has come from throughout its supply chain and tracking evolution of various data series over time. Of course, there's nothing to prevent someone from entering malicious data into the chain anyways (e.g. if people did that with COVID vaccinations and recorded someone as vaccinated after taking a bribe, who's to say that someone couldn't do that with "ethically" sourced coffee, for example). > At the same time, the amount of coverage and attention it is getting and for a sustained period makes me believe I am missing something. We largely live in a post-factual world, so as soon as there is some supposedly advanced technology (the blockchain, machine learning, AI, serverless, Kubernetes, a while ago cloud computing also fit the bill) that nobody understands all that well, people tend to conflate speculation with fact and claim that every potential problem could be solved with this technology, oftentimes to extract resources from potential investors or other people with decision making powers (e.g. software engineers striving for resume driven development). To those people, it doesn't actually matter whether the technology will solve the problems or actually even work, even the people that believe that these things will work oftentimes only do so due to deluding themselves, because it's not like you can easily test those claims. In my eyes: - the blockchain (in any its form, excluding event-sourcing which is an architectural pattern and basically a generalization of the approach) isn't preferable to a MariaDB instance most of the time. - machine learning is good for a few problems but in many cases linear regression and simple algorithms are enough - we are decades if not centuries away from "true" generalized AI, most of the current progress is simply research, not products that solve complex problems, use cases will be limited for now - serverless is still someone else's machine, there is merit to the approach, but it's not suited for all systems - Kubernetes is cool when you have the resources to support it, which is more than many companies out there are willing to spend (many don't even need it) - cloud computing is cool for certain systems but in the end just boils down to the CapEx/OpEx question, it's just a different set of tradeoffs - you can apply the same reasoning to other advanced yet hard to "test" technologies, like full self driving cars and the "hyperloop" and other concepts like that I'm reminded of the Gartner hype cycle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle In our current world, it's really easy to end up in the "Peak of Inflated Expectations" which will also make plenty of millionaires out there, which also should be recognized - so at worst, it doesn't hurt to explore even the improbable technologies and maybe work for a well funded startup every now and then, unless you're not about that life. You might not always solve all of the problems that you chase after, but the money in your bank account will still be very real. At the same time, it kind of hurts to see speculants get rich off of projects like "Earth 2" and empty promises.
• olejorgenb 4y ago
  One interesting application is the ability prove that something existed at a specific point in time (at scale). Publish the hash of the content to the chain. This can be scaled by combining an arbitrary number of items into the same hash using a merkel tree (https://petertodd.org/2016/opentimestamps-announcement#how-opentimestamps-works https://petertodd.org/2016/opentimestamps-announcement#how-o...). It's not a new idea - you could also publish the hash in a bunch of newspapers, but it's not as easily scalable, still relies somewhat on a third party, and the cost of independent verification is much higher. How useful it actually is and if it's worth the cost is another question.
  • deleted 4y ago
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• hamilyon2 4y ago
  I can share my perspective on it. It might not be correct or very popular or even coherent. But here you go. I want few things from future technology. I want permissionless payments, including robotic payments, just so I can run several companies worldwide, accepting and reinvesting money with, like, no accounting besides internal, no taxes besides blockchain rewards, no corporations. You can think of it as of HFT, but for everyone. I want tamper-proof, censorship-resistant identity built-in my browser. A pseudonim, which enables everything else, like delegation of some rights to another pseudonim. With identification and authorization out of the way, in turn, backend-as-a-service - like cloudflare, but with actual data and state - will be possible. This will enable all kind of global permissionless cooperation, including robotic one. Removal of every login button on the web will be a nice side-effect. The third thing I want is open secure computing. You can think of it like Intel Management engine, but for everyone. Anti-treacherous computing, if you like it that way. Hardware, which bricks if it detects code running without my signature, down to microcontrollers. With transparent transfer of rights and revocation, of course. I don't think the last one is possible without some global blockchain of sorts, from my point of view. I don't know if web3 and blockchain will bring me any of these, but I like where they are moving and their rhetoric and what they did so far.
  • dangerwill 4y ago
• nazka 4y ago
  There will be value when we can break the increasing time and complexity of each transaction on a math level. Not with all the current solutions that really break the whole purpose of the blockchain. Until that not really. Only for special cases and still (like maybe big transfer for banks between banks or to manage gold exchange at a Gov level…) Stuff like this. After that yes sure! For now the ecosystem is really full of greedy people with scammers and criminals…
• altdataseller 4y ago
  The most convincing use case for Bitcoin I’ve heard the other day from another post is for the “backpage ladies”.
• aaron695 4y ago
• t_mann 4y ago
  I'm almost tempted to say that you're wrong on both accounts, that vapourware doesn't get prolonged attention and that blockchain is pure vapourware. But to focus on the first one: homeopathy was invented in 1796 and is still going strong, with national health systems having committees on how to deal with it, even some accredited universities offer courses at least covering homeopathy too. And that's despite its impressive 200-year record of complete absence of evidence that it has any effects. Various forms of alchemy were complete vapourware and yet courted and sponsored by monarchs. Also in our enlightened days there are people building (and crashing with) rockets to 'prove' that our earth is flat, newspapers print horoscopes and the previous US president touted things worse than vapourware as cures for a global pandemic. Looking at the history of ideas, I'd almost say we're living the exception, with so many ideas that actually work. Re blockchain, if you take it to include the whole "crypto" (web3) space, it's gone from implementing papers from 20+ years prior (Byzantine Fault Tolerance) to papers from a few years ago (Zero Knowledge Proofs). It's had societal impact in creatig a global subculture of crypto 'bros' that donated (at least) $100m to Ukraine (and also to other causes like India Covid relief), and created outlandish investment returns for early adopters. In terms of the tech or what it can do, blockchains allow trustless peer-to-peer transactions, and smart contracts allow making trustless binding future commitments. The latter is no small feat if you consider that the difference between cooperative and non-cooperative game theory is precisely the ability to make binding commitments (think of what the rational action in a prisoner's dilemma would be if you had a third move of entering a smart contract that plays the cooperative move on behalf of both parties if and only if both sides committed, and defects on behalf of that player if only one committed - would you still choose to defect unilaterally, or would you rather enter the contract?). You might say that we already have a legal system and courts that can enforce commitments, but in reality not everyone on this planet has equal access to such a system. Smart contracts will always be "beneath" the courts (as in, if someone wants to renege on their commitment, eg because the contract didn't do what they thought it would, the courts will always have the final word), but they can remove a lot of friction, especially for smaller projects and if parties are in muliple countries.
• throw0101a 4y ago
  See also "Ask HN: What are real-life useful use-cases for blockchain (not currencies)?" from 2020: * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24881140 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24881140
• nl 4y ago
  There is a second use-case (outside the "digital cash") that actually makes some technical sense. It's possible to use a blockchain as a distributed identity store, where people prove their ownership of an address by signing with the private key. This is an interesting application because it's an ownerless identity system that works because of the distributed consensus mechanism.
• kylebenzle 4y ago
• keithalewis 4y ago
  The most valuable commodity in the world is trust. You can't buy it, it can't be manufactured, and it can vanish in an instant. Crypto currencies are used to take advantage of trust. Shamans have existed since the beginning of recorded history to take advantage of gullible people. Blockchain technology enables that on a global scale. P. T. Barnum was right.
• Capira 4y ago
  Bitcoin disrupts fiat money. Having a hard money aligns the incentives for a lower time preference and thus more healthy and sustainable societies.
• Marazan 4y ago
  There's zero value. Trust your instincts.
• jccalhoun 4y ago
  I think there are theoretically some benefits. If music, movies, or games were sold as nfts then you could resell an album if you didn't want it any more like you can with physical media. But the major labels won't do it since that could eat into their profits. So right now we are stuck with the scammy nfts of jpgs we have now.
• codethief 4y ago
  Moxie wrote a blog post about a similar topic ("web3") earlier this year which I liked a lot. He echos your sentiment, albeit for different reasons: https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html
• j3th9n 4y ago
  It's programmable and trustless allowing worldwide instant micro-payments with very low fees enabling the automation of machine 2 machine payments, or something like that.
• Spooky23 4y ago
  It’s a Ponzi scheme. The crypto people tried to position it as digital gold, but obviously the market doesn’t see it that way.
• MrGuts 4y ago
  Blockchains are accounting procedures, not money. The only use I've ever figured out for blockchain is to support a hawala among untrusted partners. But real value (goods/services) must eventually be transferred in the network. Blockchain "currencies" feature: - high costs and slow speed of clearing transactions; - volatility WRT to other stores of value; - routine abuse and theft (with little chance of being made whole); - association with criminal enterprise These are pretty good reasons not to invest in blockchains.
• ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  I just loved Scott Kurtz' take on NFTs: http://pvponline.com/comic/2022-01-31 http://pvponline.com/comic/2022-01-31
• todd3834 4y ago
  The use case that opened my mind is blockchain domain registrars. You can buy a domain and own it forever without a monthly payment. Everyone knows it is owned by a wallet and you can update the blockchain with your DNS info. As far as I can tell it might be a little while before some of the TLD are supported by major browsers without an extension but I do believe support is inevitable. Domains are a great blockchain product in my opinion. Another aspect is products that can be tokenized without a company controlling things. The smart contracts are really cool in that you can make it so that you get paid a percentage of future sales. Forget about digital photos but think of it from owning a musicians album (royal does this). These are things that can be done without the blockchain but you end up paying companies to manage it for you. They also set rules and they can also cancel you. Free from management fees and no company dictatorship.
  • tasuki 4y ago
    Agreed about the domains. To add to this, for me the main problem aren't even the domain registrars, but rather the certificate authorities. It is madness that any certificate authority can issue certificates for any domain! With blockchain domains, you can put the public part of your certificate on the blockchain and no one has to trust any third party to issue certificates - the domain owners issue their own certificates and they're guaranteed by the blockchain. A whole useless industry would become obsolete! (Eg https://handshake.org/ https://handshake.org/ attempts to do this. Disclaimer: I'm not a totally disinterested party :)
• occamrazor 4y ago
  Currency exchange. In the banking system it’s hard to exchange currencies for a fee lowe than ~0.5%, even for amounts in the tens of thousands USD.
  • hocuspocus 4y ago
    I regularly exchange currencies using Wise or Revolut for a lot less than that. If adding another layer was somehow more efficient, then all the companies in this space would do it under the hood. Yet almost none of them do.
    • occamrazor 4y ago
      I use Wise regularly and pay about 0.5% for EUR/GBP/CHF transactions. The reason why DeFi exchanges offer low fees is that they are not “companies”, they are fully automated and have no overhead. For a company offering forex services the main expense are salaries, not fees (that on wholesale markets are on the order of 0.01%), therefore they would not benefit from using a blockchain as an underlying layer.
• ykevinator2 4y ago
• mmcnl 4y ago
  Blockchain is a decentralized database. I think very little use cases actually require decentralization. Also, decentralization is not better per se than centralization or the other way around. It's different. Imo there are very little use cases that actually require blockchain technology.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• vitalekj 4y ago
  The blockchain prevents double spending without a trusted party--that's its only TECHNOLOGICAL solution. Where you "are going wrong" (your words--not mine) is not appreciating the value of what SOCIAL solutions can from that, and refusing to accept that these subsequent solutions may be valuable to others for purely non-technical reasons. --- SOCIAL USE CASE #1: Cryptocurrency If you're privileged enough to live your whole life without ever being denied access to any degree of financial services, I'm happy for you. However, Satoshi created cryptocurrency at a time when SOCIAL trust in traditional money networks was at its absolute lowest--this context is so important. Cryptocurrency (built on blockchains) offer global financial networks which anybody to participate in, and you are free to form a opinion around how valuable that is to you personally. SOCIAL USE CASE #2: Permission-less Smart Contracts If you have a digital payment network wherein anyone can transact, why not create programmable flows around that economic activity? Decentralized financial applications--savings accounts, payment channels, compounding interest, asset swaps, escrow--were all the lowest hanging fruit and so they came first because the network protocol they've been built upon includes a monetary asset natively. Back in the Web1 days, there was an application called GameSpy. The service provided a way to find a list of community-owned gaming servers that hosted multiplayer sessions for various PC games. Technically speaking, it was the epitome of what the Internet was capable of and it failed because there was no viable monetization strategy for either the middleware or the server hosts that didn't involve centralizing the platform. A web3 version would survive with decentralized coordination, could stream payments to gaming servers, reward players for playing on the platform, and would make a good case for a DAO to provide upkeep of the middleware layer. SOCIAL USE CASE #3: NFTs Our lives continue to move towards fully digital experiences, and NFTs are key to commemorating moments in the metaverse. To be clear: a NFT is a single number (ID index) sitting in a 256-bit address space, which is recorded to belong to some cryptographic data that you keep secret. It MAY have a visual representation you can find with a URL, but that is not a requirement. --- That's my 2 gwei.
• jqpabc123 4y ago
  Blockchain is all about eliminating trust in transactions. For the most part, it doesn't work. An extremely small number of crypto trades are done without trusting some 3rd party. For example, what is your crypto worth? Most people trust unregulated crypto exchanges to tell them. Exchanges that can and do engage in minting their own crypto and using it (and other means) to manipulate the "free" market. Blockchain solves a problem that most people don't have --- it eliminates trust in banks and government --- and replaces it with trust in unregulated exchanges that are free to scam and collude at will.
• vvpan 4y ago
  Automatic market makers, Argent, RAI, multi-sig wallets, Baseline Protocol, Helium, FOAM Space, lending, digital ownership (say of in-game items), anonymity (I donate to Russian opposition in crypto only), improved payment UX. All things that work well and do it better than non-blockchain.
• globalise83 4y ago
  I cam to the same conclusion in 2016, and I am not aware of any useful applications that have been developed since.
• bufferoverflow 4y ago
  You didn't try hard. Blockchain is clearly different from a centralized database. 1) Noone can arbitrarily change the contents of the blockchain, the concensus is needed to even append to it. 2) Blockchain solves the Byzantine generals problem. 3) Blockchain doesn't have one central authority (only the code that governs it, but the code must be first accepted by the participants). So if you build a payment system on top of a blockchain, there's no single entity that can freeze or seize your money.
• cdiddy2 4y ago
  Just because you come from a place of great financial privilege does not mean others have no use for a censorship resistant form of money. Afghanistan: https://theintercept.com/2022/01/19/crypto-afghanistan-sanctions-taliban/ https://theintercept.com/2022/01/19/crypto-afghanistan-sanct... Argentina: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-60912789 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-60912789 Russia: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/navalny-ally-urges-donors-use-cryptocurrency-due-crackdown-2021-06-02/ https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/navalny-ally-urges-dono... Lebanon: https://www.reuters.com/article/lebanon-crypto-currency-youth/feature-young-lebanese-driving-crypto-revolution-after-banks-go-bust-idUSL8N2QH1MW https://www.reuters.com/article/lebanon-crypto-currency-yout... Nigeria: https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2020/10/16/nigerian-banks-shut-them-out-so-these-activists-are-using-bitcoin-to-battle-police-brutality/ https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2020/10/16/nigerian-banks-shut... Ukraine: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/23/ukrainian-flees-to-poland-with-2000-in-bitcoin-on-usb-drive.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/23/ukrainian-flees-to-poland-wi... Myanmar: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-13/myanmar-s-shadow-government-uses-tether-amid-anti-junta-campaign https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-13/myanmar-s...
  • uh-quan 4y ago
    Canada: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/ottawa-protests-frozen-bank-accounts-1.6355396 https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/ottawa-protests-frozen-bank...
• narrator 4y ago
  I did research for a Blockchain class a few summers ago. One of the use cases for private Blockchain is if multiple competitors want to cooperate to provide a single service. The most successful example is Maersk's Tradelens. Multiple competitors can hand off a package between each other and a customer or customs official can see the whole journey of that package and sensitive data like invoices without all competitors having access to that data or having to trust a central authority to keep everyone's secrets.
• FR10 4y ago
  Yes, to me blockchain at this moment is more a solution looking for a problem. Regarding the biggest implementation, aka, Cryptocurrencies, what if they are "Too big to fail"? Should we as a society just let it happen to avoid a negative net economic welfare (in the short run)?
• kseifried 4y ago
  Web3 - The sequel nobody wanted but the studio had to make https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1V7UGmTw1pR6HsT8kF8dhpC46Y_BN4jck/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=112969240696754954097&rtpof=true&sd=true https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1V7UGmTw1pR6HsT8kF8dh... TL;DR: All the current stuff is flaming garbage, but that's ok, we're basically where the web was in 1995. Just with a lot more scams instead of VC pitches.
  • googlerx 4y ago
    Except the web actually has value.
• simne 4y ago
  Ask ordinary people in developing country, and you will know, why they need decentralized money. In short, their government is corrupted, and they can't trust government or some standard centralized private company, because centralized mean, it could been easily corrupted. Also corrupted officials usually limit usage of gold and other material things, but thanks to western tech, it is easy to hide flash with crypto and ignore those limitations. Because of this very high share of people in exUSSR use crypto. Sure, in developed countries of old democracies, all these things are not so important as their governments works much better than in developing countries, they just have not such problems, so in G7 talks about crypto transforms to lazy talks of sharp end of egg vs other end.
• soueuls 4y ago
  I think, it’s just another intellectuel and speculative game to play. Fun as well with some interactive products. But I think it’s more rigged than the stock market, insider trading and rug pull are too many
• googlerx 4y ago
  You're not wrong.
• mvkel 4y ago
  I personally follow where devs are naturally curious. Where I see devs making cool stuff: - AI/ML - traditional coding Where I don't see devs: - Blockchain tech - AR/VR Ultimately I think what happened is the hype cycle made crypto seem like the next Internet, when it's really just fintech. It's interesting to Wall Street, not engineers. Even the whole DAAP thing is DoA. Can't think of a single app that is more than a tiny demo.
• crnkofe 4y ago
  I see a lot of value in blockchain tech that cannot be replaced by any DB. In fact a DB is incomparable with a blockchain. Whatever you can do today with an average blockchain requires a lot of upfront work to make a system that works to replicate any of the value that a blockchain brings. First of all it functions as a currency which inherently brings with it a lot of value. You can exchange and hold virtual currency with minimal fees. This applies primarily to proof-of-stake blockchains (Algorand, Tezos, Cardano). Ethereum/Bitcoin have due to proof-of-work become less a currency and more an investment. There's more value just holding them than actually converting them. Blockchain tech is trustless and decentralized both of which is very valuable to me personally. I've lost trust in the modern banking system. I guess the turning point at which I became more attent to what the financial salarymen are doing was the 2008 financial crisis. But I'd say that's just the tip of the iceberg. Between all the tax havens hiding billions in plain sight, various scandals such as Wirecard, disappearing money balance on my bank accounts, evaporating loans for large defunct companies, there is just so much crime based around hidden centralized systems. I see blockchain as having the potential to level the field in a system where (centralized) banks are just trying to ripoff the average Joe. Then we have the stablecoins which work as a safe haven for hyperinflation. While I'm not affected I find this a very serious use case. There's a constant set of countries that are failing to stabilize their local currency and who knows when this is going to hit the reader. Being able to keep value to your monthly wage is a use case in a failing economy. Stablecoins have been found to be an essential part for decentralized finance and pretty much every smart contract-capable cryptocurrency is/has added them. Also note that having a wallet for a cryptocurrency does not incur monthly charge. Banks charge you for just keeping a balance if you have more than X amount of currency on you account. There's also no maintenance costs which are common for some types of accounts. And plenty of crypto currencies allow you to stake and get a passive income that is higher than what you get on any bank account. Then there's the DeFI loans. You can basically take a loan as long as you lock a collateral. That's the only condition. Now feel free to go read any of the contracts you signed for a leasing/loan and compare the user experience. DeFI loans are risky due to possibility of liquidation but I see this tech improving and maturing moving on. While this may sound like I'm the greatest fan I'm more of realist. Blockchain does have a lot of issues. Account recovery is a impossible. Scams are rampant. Transaction speeds are a lot slower than non-blockchain tech can do. Also the immature community praying for a 10x is a pain to follow. But saying it's just a bad DB is plain false.
• buchmanster 4y ago
  Blockchains are the natural evolution of fault tolerant database systems into the multi-stakeholder domain. Databases that are not just architecturally fault tolerant (eg. using Paxos or Raft), but politically fault-tolerant (using BFT). Money is an obvious and natural use case for such multi-stakeholder database systems, but conceivably much other critical infrastructure is as well. Though of course, since we are talking about multi-stakeholder, uptake in commercially meaningful areas will inevitably be slower and riddled with political conflict.