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I mean, I could say that you sound like the old fogies in each generation like Steve Ballmer who famously yelled "search is not a business!" People just don't g
by EGreg 4y ago
I mean, I could say that you sound like the old fogies in each generation like Steve Ballmer who famously yelled "search is not a business!" People just don't get how the next generation of users could POSSIBLY find something useful, which they don't see useful. It's like people drew the future with flying cars, when in reality the innovation was in something else.
In a regular database, I can't have an election because someone can go in there and change all the votes or stored procedures. I can't trust the code. I can't trust the database. One person with one key can change everything.
You know what's better than that? People being able to only act as themselves, and the rules being enforced by multiple machines. As I said, it doesn't have be "a blockchain", but what I described is the defining features of "smart contracts". It's simply more resilient than any middleman, and it makes it much, much harder to corrupt the system to extract rents. The system ends up being neutral, and all the "profits" are either taken out of circulation or accrue to the participants. There is no parasitic investor class in the end. People sell the tokens once and then they circulate among network participants. There are multiple gateways to get or cash out of the token instead of one (like cashing in/out of PayPal using PayPal Inc only). It's very hard to shut the system down or exclude certain groups from it. In all these ways (except the last one perhaps, depending on who you ask), it's strictly BETTER than centralized, closed, privately-owned systems. Why do Web2 maxis hate all these improvements?