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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

#31

Post by jackfoxy »

The folks at https://sweetbridge.com/ make a case for supply chain being a natural fit. Some of the low hanging fruit here is international trade between less developed countries, where settlement has to be done in dollars, and independent truckers.

The thesis is that huge amounts of capital is tied up in invoice settlement all along the supply chain. (And supply chain refers to every thing from the dirt -- grown or mined -- all the way to the end consumer.) Settling invoices on the blockchain would eliminate a huge amount of friction and open the possibility of immediate low interest (or even no interest) loans on a substantial amount of outstanding invoices.

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

#32

Post by nerfhammer »

kc1116 wrote: post #11

This reminds me of the reporter that asks Jeff Bezos in a sarcastic tone “So your telling me Amazon will be bigger than Sears??” https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6cTjhzSgdwE

Doubly amusing because Sears was the Amazon of the 1900's.

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

#33

Post by crispinb »

It has at least one psychological use. For many it is a vehicle of self-deception, wherein they persuade themselves they are in the purportedly honourable class of investors, connoting productive use of wealth. They must understand somewhere underneath the fakery that they are speculators/gamblers.

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

#34

Post by root_axis »

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.

The people who are so poor that they don't have reliable access to banking services very often are lacking reliable access to internet connected computing devices and sometimes even electricity. Additionally, trading cryptocurrency for spendable money is time consuming and expensive. The idea that cryptocurrency is a viable option for the participants of third-world economies is absurd. I'm not saying that nobody in the third-world uses cryptotokens but its very uncommon.

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

#36

Post by lotyrin »

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...…

Thing is, is blockchain as of today the internet-financial http or gopher?

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

#37

Post by pipio21 »

Personally I believe in blockchain, but not current blockchain.

Like anything it will take multiple steps and failing several times before it works.

The perfect example is the internet, it was so wrong at the start, so ugly, and so naive. But it was free and open. Everybody said "internet is the future", and that created the dotcom bubble when everybody agreed and wanted to profit from it.

I had friends at the time that got rich in the process, and I have friends today that have gotten rich with bitcoins(they have already sold all of them).

At the end of course Internet was the future, but not "that Internet", it has evolved a lot and will continue evolving.

With blockchain the same is happening: we have a tremendous bubble right now that will be painful when it pops. But it will continue evolving into something extremely useful in my opinion.

It will be no bitcoin, it will something else be easier to mine, with more transactions, and so on...it will evolve over time learning from its errors, like anything in the History of mankind.

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

#40

Post by etr-strike »

Sure, if you don’t consider a decentralized and trustless currency a use. If you don’t consider a store of value a use. If you don’t consider a public ledger of transactions a use. If you don’t consider programmable money a use. If you don’t consider permissionless payments a use. If you don’t consider a financial system wich never close a use. If you don’t consider instant payments a use. Then sure, no use has been found.
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