I'm increasingly seeing "web 3.0" as basically a two headed beast:
1) a way to part greater fools from their money until the hype has died out
2) a hot topic to drive clicks and discussions for nerds and, increasingly, the tech press, from other more pressing issues that exist in terms of tech and culture and finance
In other words, its a bullshit scam, can we please move on already?
When I was a young engineer in 2006, the marketing about Web 2.0 was in every tender for IT projects, so much that my boss created the “Web 4.3 dev community” in my city to point out the ridiculousness of it.
Every versioning of that idea is marketing speech.
It's a way to authenticate yourself without a centralized authority. So right now it's being used to create exclusive communities, access to which theoretically has some value. In the future, there may be application ecosystems which operate solely against your wallet information, no need for registration. Maybe that has some value too - time will tell.
I don't follow the details of the web3 market closely, so not speaking in support or against here.
i suggest learning it properly before jumping to conclusions. everything has pros and cons. e.g. cars pollute but would you want to go back to riding horses? judge less, learn more
It's funny how HN is negative towards crypto and web3 (see all upvoted articles on the topic, and related comments). Yet can't seem to stop talking about it.
I get it, you don't like it.
So I agree with your last point: let's all please move on.
A few months ago I agreed with her entirely. Tether is an unbacked fraud and NFTs are being front-run [1, 2]. The mid-level marketing Ponzi vibe is crazy. The latency of applications on the blockchain is atrocious. But more recently after learning from and interacting with people building in the space my assessment changed. There is an interesting intersection between tech, communities, and economics. There exists a transparency in the open-source code of smart contracts that will disrupt the current gatekeepers like the internet did.
Certainly, there are problems, but some things will live beyond the crash that is coming and change things in ways no one can be sure of. The internet started in the 1960s and was opened up commercially in 1989.[3] It feels like we are somewhere between 1995 and 2000. The energy feels similar with people trying to shove old paradigms into a new world, vaporware companies, and insane investments. I don’t think we’ve seen the top and it will likely make the crash of 2001 look small by comparison. I may be wrong, but if I’m not, it still is early.
> All that to say, a lot has changed in the technology world in the past six to twelve years
It sure has. But not really that fundamentally, since 2009.
A lot has changed in the blockchain space too. Just because you don't know about it doesn't mean it isn't true. A lot of those changes are on par with some of the tech advancements mentioned before my quote in the article. In 2009, you had bitcoin, so basically a distributed consensus workaround that enables artificial scarcity of fungible digital items. Today, you have sharded blockchains, triple entry bookkeeping, proof of stake, blockchains that handle incentivized file storage, alternate name lookup systems, purchasing compute power on an automated order book, liquidity pools (a major, major fintech advancement if you're not familiar with then), arbitrary code execution with a canonical record of it.
It is absolutely still early days.
Because these are decentralized consensus networks, there's inertia. Bitcoin is never going to be cutting edge. Because there's a lot of money to be made, there will be scams. Most of the "cutting edge" isn't cutting edge at all. But there are some real developments happening, allowing novel use cases, enabling very interesting things to be done.
I'm not a fan of the whole web3 concept. I think 99% of the selling points that the charlatans hype every market cycle are nonsense. But a little digging beyond an animated JS bloat landing page (a red flag all it's own) and you can quickly figure out what projects potentially have something and what's bullshit. Or you can do what I do and assume a project is a scam until proven otherwise.
The central problem in this entire debate is two groups talking past each other. The skeptics say "what is it for?" expecting a detailed answer, and the response from crypto enthusiasts is vague and high level; most of what I hear is heavy on words like "revolutionize" and "decentralize" but very, very short on specifics. Or I get argument by analogy to other technologies.
If I heard a single use case where blockchain technology actually created real value in the world, and was better than other alternatives, I'd listen. But it has to create real value, based on the real world and not some fantastical notion of what money is or governments are for.
I think we skeptics want a grounded narrative, and we're stuck hearing a thesis statement and nothing to back it up.
I also find funny how all the fighters for the bright future, peace and rainbows are planning to become filthy rich in the process of making the world a better place. People like Vitalik and Charlie Lee (Litecoin) happily cashed out their coins into dirty filthy USD in 2018 and became millionaires. You remove the chance to become crazy rich and who really gonna stay there?
How about uncensorable donations? For example Wikileaks got blocked by banks and payment processors when they wrote about the war crimes the US committed.
The US could block the banks, but they could never block crypto donations.
Of course there are awesome use-cases, but the real problem of the skeptics is that they can't let go of their fiat.
Take Nano for example: sub-second, 0-fee transactions, of any amount, to any (unbanked) person in the world. Of course, there is no way that any other (fiat) system can achieve this (due to operation costs, regulation, etc)
But the response of skeptics will always be "but I have to convert my fiat money". And at that point, it's not free and instant anymore.
But just because the new system loses its benefits because of backwards compatibility with the old system, doesn't mean that it is inferior. Maybe for some things, you don't need to pass through the old system anymore. One example is mining pool payouts, which can do payments through Nano to get the 0 fee transactions. (see https://2miners.com/blog/how-to-get-payouts-for-ethereum-min...).
You can argue that this mining is all a scam etc, but in the end real value is transferred using the most optimal network. More optimal than any central system that you can think of (remember 0-fee, instant trancations).
The crux of what makes it popular is decentralization which is a fantastic feature and I'd argue the single feature that it has that regular currencies can't ever have. However, everyone doesn't have a wallet and about 60% of all bitcoin is in the hands of only about 10,000 wallets. It's one of those things, if everyone had it then it would work great but because no one has it, it doesn't work at all. In order to get it you need someone you trust to trade you it, which means a centralized exchange, high fees, and slow transactions. However, if you only ever live in a bitcoin or other decentralized coin economy, meaning you never have to trade out of it into another currency, then it can work for you. Say Tesla accepts bitcoin, and everyonjhe pays in bitcoin, it still has to pay it's suppliers who don't accept bitcoin, this means it has to make a conversion to regular currency, adding an additional step, making things slower and less liquid. It's one of those things that just won't work, until it does.
I'm still very opposed to the idea of taking a technology and then searching a problem for it. Why? Back in 2017 during the first hype cycle, blockchain companies raised hundreds of millions with ICOs. I became very interested in the technology too, and some friends still work in this space. 4 years later in the web3 era, there is not a single product aside from trading/finance that got traction. Use cases like storing the history of a car on-chain, transparent supply chains, public voting... this all sounds interesting but never made it to product-market fit.
I always assume that I'm wrong, so I'll keep looking for successful applications and I'm sure you can prove me wrong :)
"Omnichain CEO Pratik Soni speaks to Inbound Logistics about the growing number of blockchain use cases in the supply chain, including in reverse logistics, product authentication and sustainability."
Apparently this company started with the idea that they would use the blockchain to make supply chains more transparent. And they raised money from investors with that goal in mind. But they have since retreated from that goal.
I worked with a retailer that worked with Omnichains. None of Omnichains tools had anything to do with the blockchain. Certainly, we were never given access to a blockchain, nor was it mentioned after we had signed the contract. Instead, we were granted limited access to an API that I believe was run with Ruby on Rails and MySQL. So at a certain point this company retreated to traditional technologies, rather than trying to use the blockchain.
This is one example. At some point I hope to write up some of the other examples that I've seen.
I do not believe anyone will ever find a legal use for blockchains that cannot be more easily served with traditional technologies.
> Use cases like storing the history of a car on-chain, transparent supply chains, public voting... this all sounds interesting but never made it to product-market fit.
Anything that does not exist natively on the blockchain doesn't need a blockchain at all.
If a token on the blockchain would represent you as the owner of a car and one day someone steals your private key which represents your car ownership, that person is now the owner of your car. Still, the car keys are located in your house, the license plate is registered on your name and address, the insurance is on your name.
I guess I don't need to explain further how ridiculous that idea is that a token would officially represent you as the car owner.
I had the same experience. The thing that gets me as well is that normally with the rise of new technology you get an excitement that is tangible. Like when the internet first xame around there were emails, multiplayer games via modem, websites. A whole plethora of new wonderful experiences. So far all I've really gotten after doing a lot of research is some good projects and a long tail of terrible projects/websites and a lot of scammers.
It really feels like with the NFT backlash in the gaming world right now that crypto hasn't found its landing and it really hasn't taken off - its kind of in this weird purgatory. Im hopeful but very suspicious at this point. I wasn't suspicious of “the internet” until it was around for a long time. Crypto is past its wave of this is cool and lets build stuff phase afaik and now everyone is trying to make money off it.
In Dubai, buying real estate with bitcoin is a real thing, and by the looks of it also a big thing.
If nothing else, it shows that crypto has succeed in one of its goals: moving money between countries, without being detected/hindered by governments.
I mean, I don't know who buys real estate with crypto, but I am assuming that people who live in dubai and have large crypto values are bullish on crypto, and won't waste it for a low roi investment like realestate. So that leaves rich foreigners who wants realestate away from their own government and I can see them purchasing bitcoins as a way to siphon money out of their country.
Other than that, I am also out of ideas for useful uses of crypto currencies
That is what financialization does. Finance is a parasite that will destroy all potential if given room. To force finance to be symbiotic you must never allow them to control anything.
These ideas are best left in the academy, and then later financialized. The exception to this is internal R&D (like Bell Labs and countless other extremely productive corporate divisions.)
'Public voting' is not a technological problem but political one. There's a lot of opposition to making voting more accessible to everyone. Voting should be easy, and you don't need blockchain for that but maybe it could help. The question is who wants "voting rights".
Decentralized, anonymized identity is one application. It sounds amazing in theory - and can work for the general use cases of sharing information with corporations. But, I believe it won't really be anonymized, as "data exhaust", "identity touch points revealing identity in aggregate" can help identify.
An example I use, is people expect bitcoin is anonymous. Yes, it is anonymous to the general layperson and corporation - but not to say NSA/FBI for "people of interest". And once bitcoin to USDollar transactions or financial institutions are more common - banks will sell your wallet information to credit bureaus, and eventually corporations will be able to de-anonymize chains for profiling just as today.
I can think of small problems that use blockchain as a solution, but they're relatively niche and only make the game-space straddle the real world, so they tend to be a bit on the vaporware side. Handy, sure, but I'm not sure they are A) 100% necessarily or B) as revolutionary as everyone seems to think blockchain is meant to be =[
EDIT: forgot to say, this could be a complete lack of imagination on my part past what's been done with blockchain already or just my horrible indoctrination into the game-space like some kind of cult =)
the final paragraph seems to summarize the article :
"The more you think about it, the more “it’s early days!” begins to sound like the desperate protestations of people with too much money sunk into a pyramid scheme, hoping they can bag a few more suckers and get out with their cash before the whole thing comes crashing down."
Well, 10y ago is not ages ago. Email existed for 30 years before it was ready for consumers. Same is with the internet. Certain types of technologies require decades research and development. I would argue that in 20 years it will still be "early days" of blockchain. And only in mid 40 we will figure out apps and who nows what to fully utilize underlining technology. Right now we are just coping what we have outside of blockchain and put it on the blockchain. Same as people couldn't imagine how internet could possibly transform their business and life, we now can't imagine how Bitcoin and blockchain will transform our business and life in the future. It's too early.
I'd say with email the application was always crystal clear: It's like sending a letter, but electronically and therefore instantly. This must have been obvious to everyone in that space even 40 years ago. Maybe it wasn't obvious how big email would be one day, but there were definitely no doubts about what it would be used for. As someone who is trying to understand the applications of "crypto", it is very frustrating to hear stuff like "we now can't imagine how Bitcoin and blockchain will transform our business and life in the future". Please give me something! If we can't imagine it, maybe there is nothing there.
we now can't imagine how Bitcoin and blockchain will transform our business and life in the future
40 years ago people on the cutting edge of tech had VHS video recorders to record broadcast TV. The tech grew slowly, became the dominant standard, and after 15 years in the mid-90s they were everywhere. 25 years later no one has one, or wants one, or even has an equivalent.
Don't assume too much about the future based on the present. Things can change in strange and unexpected ways.
I'm not saying Bitcoin and blockchain won't be around in 2040. They may well be. I'm saying current trends aren't a particularly good predictor of the future. They're wrong more often than they're right.
It might be that the idea is too complex to be viable or useful. The graveyard of technologies created in the past decades stretches to the horizon, so if something doesn't work after 10 years doesn't mean it will work in the future. This is kind of obvious.
Specifically with blockchain my intuition is that, if its main selling points - immutability and decentralization - are already invalidated in the early days (10 years that is), the chances that it will recover are slim.
Complex tech tends to centralize to become cheaper. Also immutability is very problematic in terms of the right-to-forget and also in terms of illegal content and illegal operations.
Email's purpose and utility was super-obvious from day one, we just had to figure out how to make it more secure. Notice how email too became centralized, however.
> "somehow no one appears to have managed to find a positive use for blockchains that wouldn’t be better served by blockchainless technologies"
There is now a sovereign nation state that accepted Bitcoin as a currency, and, mark my words, no doubt more will follow this 2022.
Replacing central banks, and by extension, their grasp on the limitless money printing, is the whole reason why bitcoin and it's blockchain exist. And it is working wonderfully well.
People in countries where the central bankers and politicians are letting them down are flocking to bitcoin and other later inventions (such as stable coins).
> "Rampant inflation is once again plaguing Turkey’s local currency, the lira, but one saving grace could be its citizens using bitcoin to supplant the plunging fiat currency."
IMO L1 (Ethereum, Solana, Fantom, etc.) development is closer to building out a communications or telco network.
From that “hard” technology perspective, it’s very early days. And the apps that run on top of these L1s are fully limited by L1 bandwidth, latency, and blockspace.
So, I think we’re in the pre-dial-up days for blockchains and will need a couple more orders of magnitude improvement to be (universally) on par with today’s app performance.
My purely anecdotal experience so far has been that crypto bulls have tended to be more business-y/finance type people and, even among technical people, the technical people who don’t actually know how a blockchain works. Not a good sign for the technology and its applications but I don’t think all crypto is useless… but a lot of the hype is definitely by people trying to get rich quick with a hand-wavy understanding of the technology.
A lot of people missed out on Bitcoin early days… best way to cash in is to fork it and voila, the crypto Cambrian explosion where most of the forks will eventually die off.
"Crypto" shat itself in the area of payments (noone really needs or wants it and it provides 0 value), so now they are trying other angles - NFT, DeFi. The problem is the crypto influencers are losing touch with reality. You could at least bullshit someone clueless about cryptocurrency and payments, but it's really hard to sell the idea of collecting JPEGs or investing into DeFi (which aggressively described in the terms of a classic ponzi scheme for some reason) to the general public.
So there is no progress in non Proof-of-Work coins today? Perhaps the author is saying that there are no blockchains that are being used as the basis of regulated stable-coins and CBDC projects that are being tested by central banks today?
I mean, the author is arguing as if Bitcoin, and Ethereum are the only blockchains that exist today. Hence why this is another blog-post that associates all cryptocurrencies having the same characteristics as Bitcoin, and Ethereum, which that isn't true and the author knows it.
This is all given that they 'claim' to have done 'research' even though they feel 'annoyed' by all of this. [0] If you are going to argue about cryptocurrencies and blockchains technologies in general, at least attack the current alleged 'state of the art' rather than using the same old arguments on the same old cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin, Ethereum) that everyone knows its faults already.
Not related to blockchain but just an interesting difference in perspective. Using 2010 to refer to "ages ago" is almost comical. The internet was created in the 60s and I'd say 2000-2010 was still early days for the internet. So saying something is old because it was created 10 years ago is just ridiculous.
The hype around the blockchain reminds me of the hype around XML around 2000. People were blown away by the potential... but no one could quite demonstrate it with a product. Now the blockchain can point to cryptocurrencies as a success story, and XML can kind of point to HTML, but it is a reminder that real change in tech happens when someone comes out with a product where the rubber meets the road. When everyone is talking potential potential potential, I am very skeptical.
It's truly incredible that people still confidently proclaim that there is "no use case" today.
Because of the technical nature of the underlying tech, it's hard for the average individual to recognise how and why it's different. However, it's not possible to explain away the particular applications and their properties.
Here are 2 use cases which are live and working today:
-Taking a collaterised USD loan without permission or interference from a third party.
- Creating a public digital object which lives forever and can be exchangeable and extendable without a third party involved.
The immediate response from critics then is to question the validity of the use case. But that requires to admit that the use case is there.
The author's description of 2015 doesn't sound like some ancient era to me.. Have things moved on and changed so dramatically from ML hype, Microsoft Edge, Apple Watch, and ES6?
I'm not really here to argue about blockchains being good or not, I just don't feel great about how the article tosses out a body of technology for not keeping pace with Uber. It's a bit like saying it can't possibly be early days for reusable rocketry, mm-wave communications, or quantum tech, because all those things were being developed decades before some guy named Satoshi wrote a very popular blog post.
How's this any different than the typical technology hype and adoption cycle? Perhaps we are just at the "peak of inflated expectations" right now, and are about to dive into the "trough of disillusionment".
This certainly happened with AI at least twice... remember the AI summers of 1970 and 2010 and the AI winters in between...before certain applications of machine learning became industrial tools.
I'm personally in agreement with the author that crypto is probably a waste of energy and a way to scam people, but I can look at the 30,000 foot view and admit there might be some applications in the future as we climb the "slope of enlightenment".
My wife recently suggested a possible one: NFTs minted by your university as proof of your diploma. Or perhaps your academic transcript. No way to forge a fake diploma again.
Memorable moments from interacting with the Internet -- and web3
It's 1993. We are given a tour of the university I just got admitted to. I peel off the group at the physics building where the university VAX is. Something, something Internet. What is that. I get an account. I begin to use Usenet and IRC where I can talk to people so far away. Usability of these are on par with any other application (say, WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS) at the time. My mind is immediately blown. No one needs to give a pitch how useful or how fundamentally different this is to anything we had prior.
It's 2006. I began travelling the world, settling in Canada in 2008. I can chat with family for free. Later, even do video calls. I remember the weekends when we wrote a letter to my uncle who moved to the United States in the 80s. It took months to get a reply. Phone calls were rare and short. By the time my grandfather passed in 2011, my uncle was talking to him daily for a long time for free -- thanks to the 'Net.
It's 2007. I am wintering out in Israel. Moving around is very challenging, as I don't read Hebrew and I don't drive.
It's 2015. I am again in Israel. For a week, every night I sleep in a different apartment, booked online. Moving around is trivial, my phone tells me where and when to get on and off buses.
It's 2022. This a quote from someone touting the advances in the so called crypto"currency" space:
> Today, you have sharded blockchains, triple entry bookkeeping, proof of stake, blockchains that handle incentivized file storage, alternate name lookup systems, purchasing compute power on an automated order book, liquidity pools (a major, major fintech advancement if you're not familiar with then), arbitrary code execution with a canonical record of it.
[+] [-] rsanheim|4 years ago|reply
1) a way to part greater fools from their money until the hype has died out
2) a hot topic to drive clicks and discussions for nerds and, increasingly, the tech press, from other more pressing issues that exist in terms of tech and culture and finance
In other words, its a bullshit scam, can we please move on already?
[+] [-] laurent92|4 years ago|reply
Every versioning of that idea is marketing speech.
[+] [-] heurist|4 years ago|reply
I don't follow the details of the web3 market closely, so not speaking in support or against here.
[+] [-] freemanon|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] koonsolo|4 years ago|reply
I get it, you don't like it.
So I agree with your last point: let's all please move on.
[+] [-] poof131|4 years ago|reply
Certainly, there are problems, but some things will live beyond the crash that is coming and change things in ways no one can be sure of. The internet started in the 1960s and was opened up commercially in 1989.[3] It feels like we are somewhere between 1995 and 2000. The energy feels similar with people trying to shove old paradigms into a new world, vaporware companies, and insane investments. I don’t think we’ve seen the top and it will likely make the crash of 2001 look small by comparison. I may be wrong, but if I’m not, it still is early.
[1] https://bitfinexed.medium.com/tether-is-setting-a-new-standa... [2] https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1457749433844568066 [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet
[+] [-] betwixthewires|4 years ago|reply
It sure has. But not really that fundamentally, since 2009.
A lot has changed in the blockchain space too. Just because you don't know about it doesn't mean it isn't true. A lot of those changes are on par with some of the tech advancements mentioned before my quote in the article. In 2009, you had bitcoin, so basically a distributed consensus workaround that enables artificial scarcity of fungible digital items. Today, you have sharded blockchains, triple entry bookkeeping, proof of stake, blockchains that handle incentivized file storage, alternate name lookup systems, purchasing compute power on an automated order book, liquidity pools (a major, major fintech advancement if you're not familiar with then), arbitrary code execution with a canonical record of it.
It is absolutely still early days.
Because these are decentralized consensus networks, there's inertia. Bitcoin is never going to be cutting edge. Because there's a lot of money to be made, there will be scams. Most of the "cutting edge" isn't cutting edge at all. But there are some real developments happening, allowing novel use cases, enabling very interesting things to be done.
I'm not a fan of the whole web3 concept. I think 99% of the selling points that the charlatans hype every market cycle are nonsense. But a little digging beyond an animated JS bloat landing page (a red flag all it's own) and you can quickly figure out what projects potentially have something and what's bullshit. Or you can do what I do and assume a project is a scam until proven otherwise.
[+] [-] ryandamm|4 years ago|reply
If I heard a single use case where blockchain technology actually created real value in the world, and was better than other alternatives, I'd listen. But it has to create real value, based on the real world and not some fantastical notion of what money is or governments are for.
I think we skeptics want a grounded narrative, and we're stuck hearing a thesis statement and nothing to back it up.
[+] [-] magicjosh|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] democracy|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lawn|4 years ago|reply
How about uncensorable donations? For example Wikileaks got blocked by banks and payment processors when they wrote about the war crimes the US committed.
The US could block the banks, but they could never block crypto donations.
[+] [-] rednerrus|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] koonsolo|4 years ago|reply
Take Nano for example: sub-second, 0-fee transactions, of any amount, to any (unbanked) person in the world. Of course, there is no way that any other (fiat) system can achieve this (due to operation costs, regulation, etc)
But the response of skeptics will always be "but I have to convert my fiat money". And at that point, it's not free and instant anymore.
But just because the new system loses its benefits because of backwards compatibility with the old system, doesn't mean that it is inferior. Maybe for some things, you don't need to pass through the old system anymore. One example is mining pool payouts, which can do payments through Nano to get the 0 fee transactions. (see https://2miners.com/blog/how-to-get-payouts-for-ethereum-min...).
You can argue that this mining is all a scam etc, but in the end real value is transferred using the most optimal network. More optimal than any central system that you can think of (remember 0-fee, instant trancations).
[+] [-] Sparyjerry|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mirekrusin|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] okwubodu|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aaron695|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] hubraumhugo|4 years ago|reply
I always assume that I'm wrong, so I'll keep looking for successful applications and I'm sure you can prove me wrong :)
[+] [-] lkrubner|4 years ago|reply
https://www.omnichains.com
"Omnichain CEO Pratik Soni speaks to Inbound Logistics about the growing number of blockchain use cases in the supply chain, including in reverse logistics, product authentication and sustainability."
Apparently this company started with the idea that they would use the blockchain to make supply chains more transparent. And they raised money from investors with that goal in mind. But they have since retreated from that goal.
I worked with a retailer that worked with Omnichains. None of Omnichains tools had anything to do with the blockchain. Certainly, we were never given access to a blockchain, nor was it mentioned after we had signed the contract. Instead, we were granted limited access to an API that I believe was run with Ruby on Rails and MySQL. So at a certain point this company retreated to traditional technologies, rather than trying to use the blockchain.
This is one example. At some point I hope to write up some of the other examples that I've seen.
I do not believe anyone will ever find a legal use for blockchains that cannot be more easily served with traditional technologies.
[+] [-] tomputer|4 years ago|reply
Anything that does not exist natively on the blockchain doesn't need a blockchain at all.
If a token on the blockchain would represent you as the owner of a car and one day someone steals your private key which represents your car ownership, that person is now the owner of your car. Still, the car keys are located in your house, the license plate is registered on your name and address, the insurance is on your name.
I guess I don't need to explain further how ridiculous that idea is that a token would officially represent you as the car owner.
[+] [-] rileyphone|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] boringg|4 years ago|reply
It really feels like with the NFT backlash in the gaming world right now that crypto hasn't found its landing and it really hasn't taken off - its kind of in this weird purgatory. Im hopeful but very suspicious at this point. I wasn't suspicious of “the internet” until it was around for a long time. Crypto is past its wave of this is cool and lets build stuff phase afaik and now everyone is trying to make money off it.
[+] [-] wodenokoto|4 years ago|reply
If nothing else, it shows that crypto has succeed in one of its goals: moving money between countries, without being detected/hindered by governments.
I mean, I don't know who buys real estate with crypto, but I am assuming that people who live in dubai and have large crypto values are bullish on crypto, and won't waste it for a low roi investment like realestate. So that leaves rich foreigners who wants realestate away from their own government and I can see them purchasing bitcoins as a way to siphon money out of their country.
Other than that, I am also out of ideas for useful uses of crypto currencies
[+] [-] malwarebytess|4 years ago|reply
These ideas are best left in the academy, and then later financialized. The exception to this is internal R&D (like Bell Labs and countless other extremely productive corporate divisions.)
[+] [-] galaxyLogic|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nly|4 years ago|reply
It was supposed to be relatively boring tech solving a niche problem (from the guy on the streets point of view)
[+] [-] czbond|4 years ago|reply
An example I use, is people expect bitcoin is anonymous. Yes, it is anonymous to the general layperson and corporation - but not to say NSA/FBI for "people of interest". And once bitcoin to USDollar transactions or financial institutions are more common - banks will sell your wallet information to credit bureaus, and eventually corporations will be able to de-anonymize chains for profiling just as today.
[+] [-] jl6|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] UnpossibleJim|4 years ago|reply
EDIT: forgot to say, this could be a complete lack of imagination on my part past what's been done with blockchain already or just my horrible indoctrination into the game-space like some kind of cult =)
[+] [-] jjtheblunt|4 years ago|reply
"The more you think about it, the more “it’s early days!” begins to sound like the desperate protestations of people with too much money sunk into a pyramid scheme, hoping they can bag a few more suckers and get out with their cash before the whole thing comes crashing down."
[+] [-] mirzap|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _fizz_buzz_|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onion2k|4 years ago|reply
40 years ago people on the cutting edge of tech had VHS video recorders to record broadcast TV. The tech grew slowly, became the dominant standard, and after 15 years in the mid-90s they were everywhere. 25 years later no one has one, or wants one, or even has an equivalent.
Don't assume too much about the future based on the present. Things can change in strange and unexpected ways.
I'm not saying Bitcoin and blockchain won't be around in 2040. They may well be. I'm saying current trends aren't a particularly good predictor of the future. They're wrong more often than they're right.
[+] [-] mojuba|4 years ago|reply
Specifically with blockchain my intuition is that, if its main selling points - immutability and decentralization - are already invalidated in the early days (10 years that is), the chances that it will recover are slim.
Complex tech tends to centralize to become cheaper. Also immutability is very problematic in terms of the right-to-forget and also in terms of illegal content and illegal operations.
Email's purpose and utility was super-obvious from day one, we just had to figure out how to make it more secure. Notice how email too became centralized, however.
[+] [-] unityByFreedom|4 years ago|reply
Blockchain has been waiting on a useful implementation since inception.
[+] [-] janandonly|4 years ago|reply
> "somehow no one appears to have managed to find a positive use for blockchains that wouldn’t be better served by blockchainless technologies"
There is now a sovereign nation state that accepted Bitcoin as a currency, and, mark my words, no doubt more will follow this 2022.
Replacing central banks, and by extension, their grasp on the limitless money printing, is the whole reason why bitcoin and it's blockchain exist. And it is working wonderfully well.
People in countries where the central bankers and politicians are letting them down are flocking to bitcoin and other later inventions (such as stable coins).
Just check these countries:
- Lebanon: https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2020/2/25/distrust-in-leba...
- Turkey: https://etfdb.com/crypto-channel/as-turkey-lira-falls-bitcoi...
> "Rampant inflation is once again plaguing Turkey’s local currency, the lira, but one saving grace could be its citizens using bitcoin to supplant the plunging fiat currency."
- Also Turkey: https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/turkeys-inflation-is-an-exam...
- El Salvador: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/09/el-salvador-bi...
- And El Salvador again: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/bitcoin-el-salvador-geop...
[+] [-] larsiusprime|4 years ago|reply
"If something is too early to criticize it's also too early to evangelize."
[+] [-] Dwolb|4 years ago|reply
From that “hard” technology perspective, it’s very early days. And the apps that run on top of these L1s are fully limited by L1 bandwidth, latency, and blockspace.
So, I think we’re in the pre-dial-up days for blockchains and will need a couple more orders of magnitude improvement to be (universally) on par with today’s app performance.
[+] [-] chrischen|4 years ago|reply
A lot of people missed out on Bitcoin early days… best way to cash in is to fork it and voila, the crypto Cambrian explosion where most of the forks will eventually die off.
[+] [-] democracy|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stupidworld|4 years ago|reply
Well which means 3B people dont ever need crypto.
[+] [-] baby|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rvz|4 years ago|reply
I mean, the author is arguing as if Bitcoin, and Ethereum are the only blockchains that exist today. Hence why this is another blog-post that associates all cryptocurrencies having the same characteristics as Bitcoin, and Ethereum, which that isn't true and the author knows it.
This is all given that they 'claim' to have done 'research' even though they feel 'annoyed' by all of this. [0] If you are going to argue about cryptocurrencies and blockchains technologies in general, at least attack the current alleged 'state of the art' rather than using the same old arguments on the same old cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin, Ethereum) that everyone knows its faults already.
[0] https://blog.mollywhite.net/blockchain/
[+] [-] friedman23|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jopsen|4 years ago|reply
Before the dot-com bubble there was hype about anything involving the internet.
Just like today, any business plan involve blockchain is awesome.
[+] [-] magpi3|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] disruptalot|4 years ago|reply
Because of the technical nature of the underlying tech, it's hard for the average individual to recognise how and why it's different. However, it's not possible to explain away the particular applications and their properties.
Here are 2 use cases which are live and working today:
-Taking a collaterised USD loan without permission or interference from a third party.
- Creating a public digital object which lives forever and can be exchangeable and extendable without a third party involved.
The immediate response from critics then is to question the validity of the use case. But that requires to admit that the use case is there.
[+] [-] mNovak|4 years ago|reply
I'm not really here to argue about blockchains being good or not, I just don't feel great about how the article tosses out a body of technology for not keeping pace with Uber. It's a bit like saying it can't possibly be early days for reusable rocketry, mm-wave communications, or quantum tech, because all those things were being developed decades before some guy named Satoshi wrote a very popular blog post.
[+] [-] mizzao|4 years ago|reply
https://setandbma.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/technology-ado...
This certainly happened with AI at least twice... remember the AI summers of 1970 and 2010 and the AI winters in between...before certain applications of machine learning became industrial tools.
I'm personally in agreement with the author that crypto is probably a waste of energy and a way to scam people, but I can look at the 30,000 foot view and admit there might be some applications in the future as we climb the "slope of enlightenment".
My wife recently suggested a possible one: NFTs minted by your university as proof of your diploma. Or perhaps your academic transcript. No way to forge a fake diploma again.
[+] [-] chx|4 years ago|reply
It's 1993. We are given a tour of the university I just got admitted to. I peel off the group at the physics building where the university VAX is. Something, something Internet. What is that. I get an account. I begin to use Usenet and IRC where I can talk to people so far away. Usability of these are on par with any other application (say, WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS) at the time. My mind is immediately blown. No one needs to give a pitch how useful or how fundamentally different this is to anything we had prior.
It's 2006. I began travelling the world, settling in Canada in 2008. I can chat with family for free. Later, even do video calls. I remember the weekends when we wrote a letter to my uncle who moved to the United States in the 80s. It took months to get a reply. Phone calls were rare and short. By the time my grandfather passed in 2011, my uncle was talking to him daily for a long time for free -- thanks to the 'Net.
It's 2007. I am wintering out in Israel. Moving around is very challenging, as I don't read Hebrew and I don't drive.
It's 2015. I am again in Israel. For a week, every night I sleep in a different apartment, booked online. Moving around is trivial, my phone tells me where and when to get on and off buses.
It's 2022. This a quote from someone touting the advances in the so called crypto"currency" space:
> Today, you have sharded blockchains, triple entry bookkeeping, proof of stake, blockchains that handle incentivized file storage, alternate name lookup systems, purchasing compute power on an automated order book, liquidity pools (a major, major fintech advancement if you're not familiar with then), arbitrary code execution with a canonical record of it.
Excuse me for being skeptical about web3.