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Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain

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Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain

#21

Post by aaavl2821 »

kemonocode wrote: post #12
provost wrote: post #2

Hopefully this thread will be different than all the others. Someone is likely to appear here with a counterargument, which I'm looking forward to reading. However, in addition to any counterarguments, please describe why standard tech and/or a 3rd_party is insufficient for your proposed use-cases. This is HackerNews after all, and we desire the deeply technical discussion and context, not propaganda.

How would you expect someone in a third-world country to keep money away from a hyperinflating currency, without access to international banking? And no, we-will-suspend-your-account-if-you-look-at-us-funny PayPal is not an option. Cash in foreign currencies is extremely risky.

jewelry is a good option, as long as you can tell real jewelry from fake: valuable, somewhat liquid, holds value reasonably well, easy to hide, portable

Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain

#22

Post by hanselot »

provost wrote: post #2

Hopefully this thread will be different than all the others. Someone is likely to appear here with a counterargument, which I'm looking forward to reading. However, in addition to any counterarguments, please describe why standard tech and/or a 3rd_party is insufficient for your proposed use-cases. This is HackerNews after all, and we desire the deeply technical discussion and context, not propaganda.

It's been a while, but https://youtu.be/WnEYakUxsHU has some interesting thoughts on it. Essentially trust based companies are the logical product of blockchain, but they will require an essential shift in how we approach business.

Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain

#23

Post by hanselot »

kemonocode wrote: post #12
provost wrote: post #2

Hopefully this thread will be different than all the others. Someone is likely to appear here with a counterargument, which I'm looking forward to reading. However, in addition to any counterarguments, please describe why standard tech and/or a 3rd_party is insufficient for your proposed use-cases. This is HackerNews after all, and we desire the deeply technical discussion and context, not propaganda.

How would you expect someone in a third-world country to keep money away from a hyperinflating currency, without access to international banking? And no, we-will-suspend-your-account-if-you-look-at-us-funny PayPal is not an option. Cash in foreign currencies is extremely risky.

This is exactly what happened in Zimbabwe.

Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain

#24

Post by Animats »

Some big banks are gearing up to use a blockchain to track interbank settlements.[1] But this isn't a coin, nor is there mining. It's simply a shared ledger that can't be altered without cooperation between a majority of the parties. All alterations are clearly visible to all parties, which is good for auditing. Only big banks who have signed up for this have active nodes, and they are not anonymous.

This is an alternative to setting up a neutral party for the purpose, such as the Bank for International Settlements or Depository Trust Corporation. Those organizations are expensive to run. It's a real shared ledger, but it's no more than that.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-blockchain-banks/six-big-...

Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain

#25

Post by hanselot »

pedalpete wrote: post #19

This reminds me of the naysayers from the early internet, and I think we can look at each stage of the internet's growth with these same glasses. 1) email: it will never replace the post-office. You can only send text. Oh, ok, they've added images now, well, its' too slow for most people to download them, and now I've got all this spam. We use it in our company, but it isn't really for consumers. Oh, then hotmail...…

This whole crypto thing is a bubble. You will see it fall and never recover. No, not like the other 7000 times it crashed by more than 40%, no this time it will be impossible to recover, because people can't inherently value something that doesn't exist. Here use this paper I got from a place I pay to keep my money for me instead.

Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain

#27

Post by LV-426 »

adamnemecek wrote: post #3

This article reminds me of Clifford Stolls 1995 article http://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirva... In which he says how the promises of the internet have been inflated. Progress is generally on the exponential (or sigmoid) curve, so it’s slow at first, but explosive later.

> This article reminds me of Clifford Stolls 1995 article

You should remember this then, from 1994:

"It's not only going to revolutionize the Net, it will change the global economy."

https://www.wired.com/1994/12/emoney/

And this, from 1999:

"The next internet revolution will put central bankers out of business."

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/1999/nov/04/onlinesup...

Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain

#28

Post by hanselot »

hanselot wrote: post #25
pedalpete wrote: post #19

This reminds me of the naysayers from the early internet, and I think we can look at each stage of the internet's growth with these same glasses. 1) email: it will never replace the post-office. You can only send text. Oh, ok, they've added images now, well, its' too slow for most people to download them, and now I've got all this spam. We use it in our company, but it isn't really for consumers. Oh, then hotmail...…

This whole crypto thing is a bubble. You will see it fall and never recover. No, not like the other 7000 times it crashed by more than 40%, no this time it will be impossible to recover, because people can't inherently value something that doesn't exist. Here use this paper I got from a place I pay to keep my money for me instead.

Just try to get your money out of crypto! You will see, one day one of the big guys is going to sell all his coins and cause a market crash from which it won't recover. Then you are going to be glad to have this gold-backed paper (Oh wait, don't try and test that last part).

Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain

#29

Post by ThomPete »

People always overestimate the short term and underestimate the long term.

Go to any country perhaps with the exception of Estonia and you will see that digitalization was supposed to change governments for the better. Instead they mostly have created very sporadic successes but a lot of failed implementation sometimes even making it worse. Yet there is no doubt that in the long run things are changing for the better.

The problem isn't the technology but the problems around legality and implementation and who it disrupts.

There is however plenty of usages for blockchain just off the top of my head.

Digital Pokemon cards, 2nd hand ebooks market, 2nd hand digital assets market, digital art certification, tracking of how money for NGO's are being spent and of course as a gold standard for important deals done between large organization and of course as a truly international wiretransfer system.

All these things will happen with new generations growing up and finding natural uses for them.

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