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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

#111
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As society advances, the lowest rung is brought up even though corruption persists. Many years ago, it wasn't likely for people in third world countries to have access to vaccination or clothing, but today we've eliminated smallpox and nobody wears animal skins except uncontacted tribes and people who choose to. Internet connectivity is very cheap in per capita terms and cell phone towers have gone up in places like…

The bottom line is that blockchain token technology is not a fit for the problem of 3rd world banking and hyperinflation, it is stunningly out of touch to suggest that crpyo-tokens are having any significant impact on the ground in these places.

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

#112
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are just some of the examples and yes it has quite a lot of value. Many things in the physical world is also built on these simple principles.

That's a downside of physical, not an advantage.

It's both an upside and a downside depending on perspective.

From a value perspective, it's an upside just ask the art-scene.

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

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Digital Pokemon cards, 2nd hand ebooks market, 2nd hand digital assets market Are you kidding ? So the big use of the blockchain is to take things that have zero marginal cost of production, and enforce a completely artificial cost of production, to make non-scarce goods scarce?

Those are just some of the examples and yes it has quite a lot of value. Many things in the physical world is also built on these simple principles.

I wouldn't describe turning Infinity into One as having "quite a lot of value". I'd describe that as pointing a machine gun at value and spraying it with bullets.

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

#114

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…

> Digital Pokemon cards, 2nd hand ebooks market, 2nd hand digital assets market None of these are realistic examples. Do you think Nintendo won't want a piece of that digital trading market? Or Amazon, for ebooks? Digital assets aren't going to be decentralized. Never. Corporations are going to maintain their walled garden platform, and make sure all transactions are conducted within that platform so they scrape off…

> None of these are realistic examples. Do you think Nintendo won't want a piece of that digital trading market? Or Amazon, for ebooks?

This sounds a lot like arguing in 1995 that people wouldn't buy stuff online because entrenched retail stores are where everyone does their shopping. Its so simple to buy stuff in a store why add the complexity of online shopping?

There are undoubtedly benefits for consumers when you have a decentralized marketplace/ architecture. As the technology matures it should become easier to build these kinds of architectures

Amazon has a to

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

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Digital Pokemon cards, 2nd hand ebooks market, 2nd hand digital assets market None of these are realistic examples. Do you think Nintendo won't want a piece of that digital trading market? Or Amazon, for ebooks? Digital assets aren't going to be decentralized. Never. Corporations are going to maintain their walled garden platform, and make sure all transactions are conducted within that platform so they scrape off…

"Digital pokemon cards" is already a thing it of course wasn't meant literally https://www.cryptokitties.co/ some of those got sold for $100K There are plenty of opensourced games out there and plenty of opensource projects and there will only be more in the future. Every new generation growing up is a new generation who will be affected by other things than the previous generation. Everyone also laughed when I in th…

> Everyone also laughed when I in the 90'ies said you would one day be able to score girls from being good at playing computer games.

I legitimately can't tell if this is trolling or sarcastic.

Regardless, the fact that something else seemed ridiculous but ended up not being so has no bearing.

People can predict arbitrary things and will only remember the ones that turned out right; for every thing that seemed wrong but succeeded, there are a million things which seemed wrong and were wrong.

Just because there are examples of things succeeding in spite of predictions of failure doesn't mean predictions of failure are signs of success.

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

#116
post #18

A solidity developer I spoke to a couple of times told me much the same as this article. He believed in the blockchain as a concept; but its current overall benefit to human society is meagre (and some might argue destructive). This represents a first awkward phase for everyone. We'll definitely see blockchain become dominant in a some or multiple fields of business. When? Perhaps not for 20 years. Internet as we kno…

As it stands, block-chains do not scale. So it's hard to say if lack of adoption is due to lack of actual use cases, or inability to implement use-cases given state of the network. I think prediction markets may be one of the first real use-cases.

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

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Digital pokemon cards" is already a thing it of course wasn't meant literally https://www.cryptokitties.co/ some of those got sold for $100K There are plenty of opensourced games out there and plenty of opensource projects and there will only be more in the future. Every new generation growing up is a new generation who will be affected by other things than the previous generation. Everyone also laughed when I in th…

> Everyone also laughed when I in the 90'ies said you would one day be able to score girls from being good at playing computer games. I legitimately can't tell if this is trolling or sarcastic. Regardless, the fact that something else seemed ridiculous but ended up not being so has no bearing. People can predict arbitrary things and will only remember the ones that turned out right; for every thing that seemed wrong…

Why do you assume it's trolling? You forgot the sentence which came before here is the entire argument.

"Every new generation growing up is a new generation who will be affected by other things than the previous generation.

Everyone also laughed when I in the 90'ies said you would one day be able to score girls from being good at playing computer games."

The point is that looking at your own generation is not a good indicator of where things will go. Look at those younger generations which haven't yet been affected by what is right or wrong.

That was my argument. Girls will grow up knowing what it takes to be good at a computer game it won't just be something nerds do, but something they themselves do.

The point here is to understand what allows progress.

Sure something might or might not come to fruition but this one my predictions were based on understanding what it would take for it to be popular.

I am not trolling but 100% serious.

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

#118
Here's a vague idea... How about a reputation ledger? My reputation will accumulate over time, and people will trust me, simplifying some transactions. For example I could rent a short-term stay at a lower rate because I am such a nice fellow and will never mess anything up.

Because my reputation has direct monetary value I would be hesitant to mess it up by being a dick, unless for a very big gain. The counter-parties will know the value of my reputation as well as the total value of outstanding liabilities against my reputation, so they will not give me any resources worth more than my current reputation capacity.

This has nothing to do with mining or coins, just an immutable public ledger. For all I care every notary public will be given a right to sign a block in the ledger, and collectively they will establish consensus.

Yelp on steroids, basically.

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

#120
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? Blockchain is a document timestamping system, which means its whole purpose is to tell which of the two connected documents was issued earlier. As such, it doesn't care if the document was subtracting a number from one account and adding the same number to another account or if it was some text telling who gets the ownership of a described plot. In fact, this particular use is one of the few that blockchain…

This is a particular use for a public database. The public database must be writable (only) by the corrupt authorities. What exactly does a blockchain do to make the authorities non-corrupt here?

The data is stored on a decentralized database (many nodes). I buy my house and am send the rights to that land on a blockchain. Only someone with the private keys to my address/account/whatever could send that house to someone else. The scale of the network should make it impossible for the database to be corrupted.

The whole idea here is distributed trust

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