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Yes, there are a lot of scams in the crypto space. Yes, the terminology and hype make the SOA craze look like a toddler's tea. However, don't throw the baby o

Yes, there are a lot of scams in the crypto space. Yes, the terminology and hype make the SOA craze look like a toddler's tea. However, don't throw the baby out with the bath water. Some of the underlying technologies are valid, valuable, and might just play into whatever is in the future of the networking. The technologies I am talking about are: * Distributed Hash Tables (DHTs) * Distributed Ledgers * Abstracted distributed filesystems such as IPFS, BlockSpace,etc. * Prediction markets with virtual currencies (I like virtual currency over cryptocurrency, though I know no one else uses it) * Decentralized identifiers * Decentralized and distributed communication * Smart contracts * Blockchains (for things other than a financial bank)

acdha 4y ago
Most of those, and all of the useful ones, aren’t cryptocurrency technologies and were in use beforehand. When cryptocurrency salespeople complain about negativity it is in many cases because they’re pitching a system which shows no awareness of the problems encountered a decade or more before. Now, maybe there’s some value in a prediction market which uses its own currency but that’s again not exactly revolutionary and a bit limited to build an entire field on.
jeroenhd 4y ago
Many of these are already in use. A PGP key is a decentralized identifier, for example, as is a self-signed certificate you load into your browser for TLS auth. WebAuthn and friends are the next step for those types of identifiers. Torrents and other file sharing systems have used DHTs and merkle trees before Bitcoin even existed. XMPP had decentralized and distributed communication. I'd argue that smart contracts are new, though they're not inherently linked to currencies necessarily. I don't know any practical use for them outside the cryptocurrency/NFT/blockchain speculation niche, but they're a cool invention. The prediction market that these new currencies have created are little more than the latest version of a tulip mania. These monetized cryptography projects often manage to combine very cool software design elements but they rarely come up with something new that's useful outside of their business model.
- UncleEntity 4y ago
  > I'd argue that smart contracts are new, though they're not inherently linked to currencies necessarily. I don't know any practical use for them outside the cryptocurrency/NFT/blockchain speculation niche, but they're a cool invention. I think the fuddy-duddy web2 folks call those lambda cloud functions or something like that. Except in web3 land you pay per execution while the web2 peeps charge per, umm, execution? Though they’re obviously different because the smart contracts can change the state of the blockchain while lambda functions can only modify their own database. And a smart contract can act as an oracle to the outside world while lambdas are restricted to web2 APIs.

acdha 4y ago

Most of those, and all of the useful ones, aren’t cryptocurrency technologies and were in use beforehand. When cryptocurrency salespeople complain about negativity it is in many cases because they’re pitching a system which shows no awareness of the problems encountered a decade or more before. Now, maybe there’s some value in a prediction market which uses its own currency but that’s again not exactly revolutionary and a bit limited to build an entire field on.

jeroenhd 4y ago

Many of these are already in use. A PGP key is a decentralized identifier, for example, as is a self-signed certificate you load into your browser for TLS auth. WebAuthn and friends are the next step for those types of identifiers. Torrents and other file sharing systems have used DHTs and merkle trees before Bitcoin even existed. XMPP had decentralized and distributed communication. I'd argue that smart contracts are new, though they're not inherently linked to currencies necessarily. I don't know any practical use for them outside the cryptocurrency/NFT/blockchain speculation niche, but they're a cool invention. The prediction market that these new currencies have created are little more than the latest version of a tulip mania. These monetized cryptography projects often manage to combine very cool software design elements but they rarely come up with something new that's useful outside of their business model.

UncleEntity 4y ago
> I'd argue that smart contracts are new, though they're not inherently linked to currencies necessarily. I don't know any practical use for them outside the cryptocurrency/NFT/blockchain speculation niche, but they're a cool invention. I think the fuddy-duddy web2 folks call those lambda cloud functions or something like that. Except in web3 land you pay per execution while the web2 peeps charge per, umm, execution? Though they’re obviously different because the smart contracts can change the state of the blockchain while lambda functions can only modify their own database. And a smart contract can act as an oracle to the outside world while lambdas are restricted to web2 APIs.