The blockchain facilities standardised transfer across a decentralised medium. I'm not sure how much clearer I can make my point. You could code alternatives to all the use-cases mentioned, but when you have an existing platform on which to interact, why bother? You want the game developers to implement the winery's API?
dmitriid|4 years ago
It hasn't. It standardised the transfer of otherwise meaningless numbers, that's true.
In order for your winde order to work, a centralised, trusted party has to verify and accept those numbers, and say that, yes, they represent something meaningful to them.
The same goes for every other example. "Want to trade something for an in-game weapon": This only works if that game a) provides means of trading in-game items, b) can verify that a number in the blockchain actually represents an in-game item etc.
Without countless external entities agreeing to and cooperating on the meaning of this data this "standardised transfer" is literally meaningless. And these agreements will go as well as they already do in reality. How does blockchain factor into this?
> if you're trading that weapon let's both sign up for a pre-agreed escrow service online and pay them a commission to arbitrage.
Now who's attacking straw men.
jsmith45|4 years ago
>It hasn't. It standardised the transfer of otherwise meaningless numbers, that's true.
Sure, but that alone can have value. The idea being that people have already built entire trading platforms around tokens, fungible or not. Somebody who wants to enable easy trading of some asset (or futures contract or whatever), hoping for improved liquidity, could see using the platforms built for crypto token trading as much easier than trying to build their own exchange. Especially if it is anticipated that physical settlement demands will not be especially common.
To be more concrete: It might be simpler to get your single-vineyard wine futures up and running on crypto than trying to get it listed as a new contract type in a traditional futures exchange.
Now sure, nothing about getting your weird futures contract into some form of widely used exchange requires blockchain technology. It is merely leveraging the existing infrastructure others have already built around crypto.
This is not too dissimilar from the various ways people have found to get say precious metals as listed items on stock exchanges, despite traditional commodity exchanges or brokered OTC trades also existing. Obviously nothing about speculating on (or maintaining market liquidity for) precious metals requires a stock exchange, since we have those other ways of trading. However people have found getting access to the stock trading market to be worthwhile.
Obviously settlement for physical goods is a centralized processes (or possibly a somewhat decentralized process relying on courts and contracts). This is equally true for any exchange, crypto-based or not. The actual order matching process somewhat separate from the settlement process in traditional exchanges too.
I certainly would not argue that similar platforms could be set up not reliant on crypto in any way, and those could be superior (although network effect problem tend to plague attempts to set such things up if any sort of scale is desired). Most crypto stuff is still extremely overhyped, and a lot of interest in crypto seems to stem from crazy speculation, or people trying to avoid their government in some manner. (The latter is not just things like drugs, arm sales, or money laundering. It also includes more innocent reasons like people in countries with failing economies being terrified that their government can just seize the contents of forex accounts, stock exchanges etc, making their attempts to hedge against local economic collapse potentially futile. But governments cannot readily seize crypto wallets the same way, at least not unless you leave your holdings at some exchange.)
darkFunction|4 years ago