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The actual value of crypto as a technology seems to have receeded past visibility. At its origin, it promised enduring new forms of interconnected computing. Bu

The actual value of crypto as a technology seems to have receeded past visibility. At its origin, it promised enduring new forms of interconnected computing. But overwhelmingly, there seem to be no contemporary applications of any note, just endless cryptocoins of unremarkable note as far as the eye can see.

forgetfreeman 3y ago
Probably because there never was any actual value to be had in the underlying technology. If there was someone would have found it at some point in the last decade.
- epgui 3y ago
  That’s a bit overly dismissive, and I am usually the dismissive one when it comes to crypto. IMO we’ll eventually have CBDCs which may or may not have a blockchain, but these things happen slowly. I’ve always said that money is not fundamentally a tech problem, but a social problem. That doesn’t make the tech inherently worthless though.
  - forgetfreeman 3y ago
    I mean, it's been 14 years now, if some actual valuable use of strapping intentionally onerous calculations to a transaction model was waiting, you'd think we'd have found it by now.
    - rektide 3y ago
      I disagree. Although I have extreme cynicism so far, I am far from making a long term conclusion. I think it's a hugely contemporary disease to expect short term results to indicate long term value, something tech in particular has made us totally wildly out of touch on. We have had two or three decades of ongoing massive tectonic shifts, and seem huge new entities arise, and I strongly feel this view has dis-tempered our expectations & realism about growth. Worse, when there is a huge movement, when something is so ballyhooed & hype trained, the expectations are all the more wild. I really think block chain has been utterly unable to show it's value, has failed miserably to even try to establish use cases or flows to express it's value on. But even still, after all this time, even while being a huge cynic of what's happened, I'm not going to deny that there are possibilities out there. That we did get so hyped, that the cryptocoins hype train so dominated took away the creative energy, stole the nutrients that real value might have used to establish itself & grow. It's hard to imagine how we can get out of such deeply intermediated ridiculously centralized & incredibly costly & inefficient forms of block chains. But it's also not my field & I still easily can believe these are great enclaves of stability out there, places of value lurking, waiting to be found. I think in general we radically over dismiss tech as not valuable, if it doesn't meet our hockeystick growth expectations. I've seen web spec after web spec cast aside because only 0.3% of web sites adopted it after 3 or 5 years. I think we really need a radical realignment for how to expect technology adoption to happen. We need to allow ourselves much more Uncertainty about what is happening, and when things do go wrong, that is often less reason to cancel the idea, and more reason to restart the clock from 0, after mis-interpretation.
      - epgui 3y ago
        > I really think block chain has been utterly unable to show it's value It's just an append-only distributed database. If you need that for some application, then you find it valuable. These discussions are often so hyperbolic-- Imagine saying that columnar databases have not lived up to their expectations (or have been unable to show their value) because postgres and mysql are still quite popular... it sounds about the same to me.
        rektide 3y ago
        It is an append only database. But being the world's universally-accessible infinitely-resilient append only database is a very notable difference from what came before. The post bitcoin technologies have a lot of interesting other ideas too, about distributing computing, about roll-up transactions (where you can prove your writes without them necessarily be readable).
        lxgr 3y ago
        > infinitely-resilient This is complete hyberbole. The security of most blockchains can be quite explicitly expressed as a number (of hashes per second, coins of staking, or whatever the consensus mechanism of the day uses as its scarce resource for allowing appends to the database), and it's very finite. Another very real danger is a lack of interest and/or economic incentives to keep it going. I wouldn't be surprised if we've already lost many terabytes of data on "infinite append-only ledgers", since disk space still isn't free, and massively replicated disk space even less so.
      - lxgr 3y ago
        > I think it's a hugely contemporary disease to expect short term results to indicate long term value, Maybe, but why should humanity throw significant resources (mindshare, money, energy) at a technology that purports to solve a large number of important problems, yet doesn't have any track record of actually achieving any of it? > has failed miserably to even try to establish use cases or flows to express it's value on That burden is always on the proponents of a new technology.
      - 3y ago
    - epgui 3y ago
      When I said slowly, I meant slowly. And like I said, it's not like we're waiting on a technical breakthrough: it's a social problem, and without getting too political... society can sometimes change insanely slow even when "solutions" have existed for a long time.
      - forgetfreeman 3y ago
        We aren't talking about novel particle physics here. It's a fucking database that's intentionally hard to write to.
nailer 3y ago
Digital art where artists get paid and royalties are enforced, instant global money transfer, software standards for fractionalised investments in stocks real estate physical collectibles and other asset classes, retail without 3% going to visa, digital gold, a world where everybody has a friendly name for their public key and we can communicate privately, probably others.
- XorNot 3y ago
  Blockchain can solve no problem (by technical means) which depends on the status of physical assets. Which ironically also includes digital assets, on account of the analog-hole existing (you have to shoot light into eyeballs at some point).
  - nailer 3y ago
    The contract pays a physical asset custodian for storage, property taxes or whatever other costs. So blockchain specifically provides a financial incentive for a custodian. Eyeballs thing is true, but hasn’t stopped cryptography being effective in other areas for example, Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Apple TV etc seem to be doing well despite the electrons reaching my eyeballs unencrypted. The same applies to collectible images, videos and code.
    - XorNot 3y ago
      > The contract pays a physical asset custodian for storage, property taxes or whatever other costs. So blockchain specifically provides a financial incentive for a custodian. How does a smart contract ensure the custodian is doing any of the things it assumes they are? What is the actual mechanism meant to be, that resists someone inputting "yes I definitely have this car here" when they do not?
      - nailer 3y ago
        This is correct, blockchain does not stop Fraud. I don’t think anyone is asserting that it does.
auscad 3y ago
> At it's [sic] origin, it promised enduring new forms of interconnected computing. Have you read the Bitcoin whitepaper? You should, it’s not that long. This is not what was promised. We were promised a decentralized peer to peer currency with a fixed supply that couldn’t be inflated at the whims of a central bank. We got that. And we sort of also got “new forms of interconnected computing”. We now have new types of zero knowledge proofs which were designed for smart contract verification but are more generally useful. We have things like IPFS allowing you to store data in a decentralized way. There’s helium, a mesh network for IoT devices. We have ENS. Then of course we have an endless supply of sophisticated financial instruments which you probably wouldn’t be able to access otherwise. Your position is easy to take because it’s sort of the “default” that an uninformed person would believe, and those people will side with you.
- hpeter 3y ago
  Helium is kind of a failure tho. Last I heard it has very little users. I'm into ETH big time, but there are not many applications for it that are worth the fees.
- prepend 3y ago
  > Your position is easy to take because it’s sort of the “default” that an uninformed person would believe, and those people will side with you. Isn’t it also the position of the well informed that think crypto is BS and are waiting (14 years now) for a non-drug use case?
  - hpeter 3y ago
    You can launder money with it also /sarcasm
  - GoblinSlayer 3y ago
    You're poorly informed. I used it for donations. It's the only pseudonymous network-native currency that I know.
- rektide 3y ago
  The value being completely unapparent & unappealing to the world sort of sells my prospective though, doesn't it? Using block chain to store data or transact is incredibly costly & inefficient. Most of the systems surrounding those usages are an incredible obtuse pain in the ass, no fun at all. Most uses rely on one or more extremely intermediated centralized systems. The whole thing seems bankrupt. There hasn't been a single notable use. The most well known use case so far beyond cryptocoins is crypto kitties.
rvz 3y ago
> But overwhelmingly, there seem to be no contemporary applications of any note, just endless cryptocoins of unremarkable note as far as the eye can see. There is a use case. NFTs for example can be used for ticketing systems. Here is a real world use case which you can see for your own eyes. [0] [0] https://www.ledgerinsights.com/uks-wembley-stadium-adopts-blockchain-ticketing-tixngo-starting-with-sheeran-concert/ https://www.ledgerinsights.com/uks-wembley-stadium-adopts-bl...
- danaris 3y ago
  When most people say "a use case", they mean "a use case that is beneficial, and that provides enough advantage over existing ways to do the same thing that it outweighs the significant drawbacks of using a blockchain." Ticketing isn't exactly a hard problem. It gains nothing meaningful by using NFTs for it.
  - rvz 3y ago
    > When most people say "a use case"... Nope. This is the original claim: > ...there seem to be no contemporary applications of any note... It is a valid use-case and it is an improvement, otherwise it would not be possible at all, especially when I gave a direct source proving that there is a real world business using NFTs to solve their ticketing problem, especially for anti-fraud purposes and all verifiable on a public blockchain. > Ticketing isn't exactly a hard problem. Is that why many are using NFTs for ticketing systems, including Ticketmaster? [0] [1] Looks like a great use case for NFTs and they seem to gain a lot from using them. [0] https://boxoffice.sitickets.com/ https://boxoffice.sitickets.com/ [1] https://business.ticketmaster.com/business-solutions/nft-token-gated-sales/ https://business.ticketmaster.com/business-solutions/nft-tok...

forgetfreeman 3y ago

Probably because there never was any actual value to be had in the underlying technology. If there was someone would have found it at some point in the last decade.

epgui 3y ago
That’s a bit overly dismissive, and I am usually the dismissive one when it comes to crypto. IMO we’ll eventually have CBDCs which may or may not have a blockchain, but these things happen slowly. I’ve always said that money is not fundamentally a tech problem, but a social problem. That doesn’t make the tech inherently worthless though.
- forgetfreeman 3y ago
  I mean, it's been 14 years now, if some actual valuable use of strapping intentionally onerous calculations to a transaction model was waiting, you'd think we'd have found it by now.
  - rektide 3y ago
    I disagree. Although I have extreme cynicism so far, I am far from making a long term conclusion. I think it's a hugely contemporary disease to expect short term results to indicate long term value, something tech in particular has made us totally wildly out of touch on. We have had two or three decades of ongoing massive tectonic shifts, and seem huge new entities arise, and I strongly feel this view has dis-tempered our expectations & realism about growth. Worse, when there is a huge movement, when something is so ballyhooed & hype trained, the expectations are all the more wild. I really think block chain has been utterly unable to show it's value, has failed miserably to even try to establish use cases or flows to express it's value on. But even still, after all this time, even while being a huge cynic of what's happened, I'm not going to deny that there are possibilities out there. That we did get so hyped, that the cryptocoins hype train so dominated took away the creative energy, stole the nutrients that real value might have used to establish itself & grow. It's hard to imagine how we can get out of such deeply intermediated ridiculously centralized & incredibly costly & inefficient forms of block chains. But it's also not my field & I still easily can believe these are great enclaves of stability out there, places of value lurking, waiting to be found. I think in general we radically over dismiss tech as not valuable, if it doesn't meet our hockeystick growth expectations. I've seen web spec after web spec cast aside because only 0.3% of web sites adopted it after 3 or 5 years. I think we really need a radical realignment for how to expect technology adoption to happen. We need to allow ourselves much more Uncertainty about what is happening, and when things do go wrong, that is often less reason to cancel the idea, and more reason to restart the clock from 0, after mis-interpretation.
    - epgui 3y ago
      > I really think block chain has been utterly unable to show it's value It's just an append-only distributed database. If you need that for some application, then you find it valuable. These discussions are often so hyperbolic-- Imagine saying that columnar databases have not lived up to their expectations (or have been unable to show their value) because postgres and mysql are still quite popular... it sounds about the same to me.
      - rektide 3y ago
        It is an append only database. But being the world's universally-accessible infinitely-resilient append only database is a very notable difference from what came before. The post bitcoin technologies have a lot of interesting other ideas too, about distributing computing, about roll-up transactions (where you can prove your writes without them necessarily be readable).
        lxgr 3y ago
        > infinitely-resilient This is complete hyberbole. The security of most blockchains can be quite explicitly expressed as a number (of hashes per second, coins of staking, or whatever the consensus mechanism of the day uses as its scarce resource for allowing appends to the database), and it's very finite. Another very real danger is a lack of interest and/or economic incentives to keep it going. I wouldn't be surprised if we've already lost many terabytes of data on "infinite append-only ledgers", since disk space still isn't free, and massively replicated disk space even less so.
    - lxgr 3y ago
      > I think it's a hugely contemporary disease to expect short term results to indicate long term value, Maybe, but why should humanity throw significant resources (mindshare, money, energy) at a technology that purports to solve a large number of important problems, yet doesn't have any track record of actually achieving any of it? > has failed miserably to even try to establish use cases or flows to express it's value on That burden is always on the proponents of a new technology.
    - 3y ago
  - epgui 3y ago
    When I said slowly, I meant slowly. And like I said, it's not like we're waiting on a technical breakthrough: it's a social problem, and without getting too political... society can sometimes change insanely slow even when "solutions" have existed for a long time.
    - forgetfreeman 3y ago
      We aren't talking about novel particle physics here. It's a fucking database that's intentionally hard to write to.

nailer 3y ago

Digital art where artists get paid and royalties are enforced, instant global money transfer, software standards for fractionalised investments in stocks real estate physical collectibles and other asset classes, retail without 3% going to visa, digital gold, a world where everybody has a friendly name for their public key and we can communicate privately, probably others.

XorNot 3y ago
Blockchain can solve no problem (by technical means) which depends on the status of physical assets. Which ironically also includes digital assets, on account of the analog-hole existing (you have to shoot light into eyeballs at some point).
- nailer 3y ago
  The contract pays a physical asset custodian for storage, property taxes or whatever other costs. So blockchain specifically provides a financial incentive for a custodian. Eyeballs thing is true, but hasn’t stopped cryptography being effective in other areas for example, Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Apple TV etc seem to be doing well despite the electrons reaching my eyeballs unencrypted. The same applies to collectible images, videos and code.
  - XorNot 3y ago
    > The contract pays a physical asset custodian for storage, property taxes or whatever other costs. So blockchain specifically provides a financial incentive for a custodian. How does a smart contract ensure the custodian is doing any of the things it assumes they are? What is the actual mechanism meant to be, that resists someone inputting "yes I definitely have this car here" when they do not?
    - nailer 3y ago
      This is correct, blockchain does not stop Fraud. I don’t think anyone is asserting that it does.

auscad 3y ago

> At it's [sic] origin, it promised enduring new forms of interconnected computing. Have you read the Bitcoin whitepaper? You should, it’s not that long. This is not what was promised. We were promised a decentralized peer to peer currency with a fixed supply that couldn’t be inflated at the whims of a central bank. We got that. And we sort of also got “new forms of interconnected computing”. We now have new types of zero knowledge proofs which were designed for smart contract verification but are more generally useful. We have things like IPFS allowing you to store data in a decentralized way. There’s helium, a mesh network for IoT devices. We have ENS. Then of course we have an endless supply of sophisticated financial instruments which you probably wouldn’t be able to access otherwise. Your position is easy to take because it’s sort of the “default” that an uninformed person would believe, and those people will side with you.

hpeter 3y ago
Helium is kind of a failure tho. Last I heard it has very little users. I'm into ETH big time, but there are not many applications for it that are worth the fees.
prepend 3y ago
> Your position is easy to take because it’s sort of the “default” that an uninformed person would believe, and those people will side with you. Isn’t it also the position of the well informed that think crypto is BS and are waiting (14 years now) for a non-drug use case?
- hpeter 3y ago
  You can launder money with it also /sarcasm
- GoblinSlayer 3y ago
  You're poorly informed. I used it for donations. It's the only pseudonymous network-native currency that I know.
rektide 3y ago
The value being completely unapparent & unappealing to the world sort of sells my prospective though, doesn't it? Using block chain to store data or transact is incredibly costly & inefficient. Most of the systems surrounding those usages are an incredible obtuse pain in the ass, no fun at all. Most uses rely on one or more extremely intermediated centralized systems. The whole thing seems bankrupt. There hasn't been a single notable use. The most well known use case so far beyond cryptocoins is crypto kitties.

rvz 3y ago

> But overwhelmingly, there seem to be no contemporary applications of any note, just endless cryptocoins of unremarkable note as far as the eye can see. There is a use case. NFTs for example can be used for ticketing systems. Here is a real world use case which you can see for your own eyes. [0] [0] https://www.ledgerinsights.com/uks-wembley-stadium-adopts-blockchain-ticketing-tixngo-starting-with-sheeran-concert/ https://www.ledgerinsights.com/uks-wembley-stadium-adopts-bl...

danaris 3y ago
When most people say "a use case", they mean "a use case that is beneficial, and that provides enough advantage over existing ways to do the same thing that it outweighs the significant drawbacks of using a blockchain." Ticketing isn't exactly a hard problem. It gains nothing meaningful by using NFTs for it.
- rvz 3y ago
  > When most people say "a use case"... Nope. This is the original claim: > ...there seem to be no contemporary applications of any note... It is a valid use-case and it is an improvement, otherwise it would not be possible at all, especially when I gave a direct source proving that there is a real world business using NFTs to solve their ticketing problem, especially for anti-fraud purposes and all verifiable on a public blockchain. > Ticketing isn't exactly a hard problem. Is that why many are using NFTs for ticketing systems, including Ticketmaster? [0] [1] Looks like a great use case for NFTs and they seem to gain a lot from using them. [0] https://boxoffice.sitickets.com/ https://boxoffice.sitickets.com/ [1] https://business.ticketmaster.com/business-solutions/nft-token-gated-sales/ https://business.ticketmaster.com/business-solutions/nft-tok...