131–140 of 312 posts
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It provides distributed trust for the class of problems wherein you have multiple competitive parties trying to achieve consensus on a sequence of transactions (or contracts, if you will). I believe a massive number of social and societal problems are solved by distributed trust models in the same ways free market economies generally lead to more equality and democracy leads to more freedoms.
Can you give me an example?
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> It's distributed trust. That's the problem it solves. It's incredibly cool technology. That solves a specific problem. That's still not it. "Distributed Trust" isn't a problem, its a trait. What actual problem is solved by distributed trust?
You're right, I pointed to the solution instead of the problem. I'm still an engineer at heart, it seems! What should I have said instead? Centralization of data? Unreliability of single-points-of-failure?
Actual problems are things like "I want to buy this candy bar," or "I want to fly to New York in August and I need to pay for the ticket." Those are problems Bitcoin, as "a purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash" [1], was intended to solve. It didn't.
As far as I can tell, the main problems blockchains "solve" are things like, "I would like to run a Ponzi scheme and not go to jail." Or, "I would like to hype something and make a lot of money off people." Or, "I would like my consulting company to bill a lot of hours." Or, "I would like to gamble on price fluctuations, and gold isn't volatile enough for me." But I wouldn't call any of those real problems in the sense of being things where solving them is positive sum for the society as a whole.
I would be happy to be proven wrong, of course. Blockchains are a cool technology. But I've spent nearly a decade asking for actual customer problems that are demonstrably solved better by a blockchain. I haven't found one yet.
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I think I'd have to argue that real estate has existed for much, much longer than a few decades :D I'm a pretty big sceptic on all of this crypto BS, but the ownership of real estate assets seems like a pretty archaic system of not easily inspected pieces of paper. Having a public, provable system for recording this information (and possibly other related info, e.g. liens) seems like it would be of some use. The syst…
> the ownership of real estate assets seems like a pretty archaic system of not easily inspected pieces of paper. Having a public, provable system for recording this information (and possibly other related info, e.g. liens) seems like it would be of some use. The system we have works, but it could work better. This already exists in many states. It's a political problem (whether or not to use of tax money to pay for…
'I presided over the digitization of all old records' isn't something an MBA type necessarily wants on their CV, so they won't push for it no matter the value to the company.
However 'I lead a team implementing a solution to digitize and store records on the blockchain' is how the MBA type gets a promotion/new job offer and how the technical guys can get the budget to do important stuff that was otherwise too unglamorous to be prioritized...
Speaking as a longtime skeptic, A16Z has actually produced the single clearest answer I've seen to that question: blockchains may be good for bootstrapping new network effects by giving early participants in a network (in a Metcalfe's Law sense of network) an incentive to participate. Pure utility tokens can be like call options on the eventual value of the network if it gets off the ground. It's a novel way of solvi…
The best thing I've seen blockchains used for, besides currency, is as an integration platform for a non-centralized supply chain. There's really no money in it, since there aren't any gatekeepers, but that's sort of the point. The idea is that the farmer picks his carrots, puts them in a box and sends them off to the carrot juice guy. When he does this he puts a upc code on the side of the carrot box and then puts t…
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If the only problem is that we've wasted a lot of time, and in the end one company builds one product that changes the world, then maybe it's worth it.
The existence of a positive net result is not sufficient justification for a poor, inefficient, or wasteful process that led to that result.
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You're right, I pointed to the solution instead of the problem. I'm still an engineer at heart, it seems! What should I have said instead? Centralization of data? Unreliability of single-points-of-failure?
The original bitcoin whitepaper is focused on avoiding double-spend of digital cash, facilitating non-reversible transactions in a way that's not vulnerable to collapse or suborning of the central counterparty. It has the following statement in its introduction: "Completely non-reversible transactions are not really possible, since financial institutions cannot avoid mediating disputes. The cost of mediation increase…
Speaking as a longtime skeptic, A16Z has actually produced the single clearest answer I've seen to that question: blockchains may be good for bootstrapping new network effects by giving early participants in a network (in a Metcalfe's Law sense of network) an incentive to participate. Pure utility tokens can be like call options on the eventual value of the network if it gets off the ground. It's a novel way of solvi…
The best thing I've seen blockchains used for, besides currency, is as an integration platform for a non-centralized supply chain. There's really no money in it, since there aren't any gatekeepers, but that's sort of the point. The idea is that the farmer picks his carrots, puts them in a box and sends them off to the carrot juice guy. When he does this he puts a upc code on the side of the carrot box and then puts t…
More breathless fawning rhetoric and nebulous jargon, but I guess the target audience is blockchain enthusiasts so that makes sense. At the end of the day it's their money, so what I do I care? I find it frustrating when I hear comparisons of the blockchain to internet and cellphone communication platforms. The potential use cases for the internet and cellphones were immediately obvious (instant remote communication)…
>The potential uses cases for the internet and cellphones were immediately obvious (instant remote communication) and available on day one, compared with blockchains which has given us bitcoin and nothing else of unique value. Bitcoin has unquestionably provided folks looking to work outside traditional financial systems (and governance) value. You can see it in the black market use and its use in ransoming everythin…
Yes, I covered that when I said the blockchain gave us bitcoin, and that's all it's done as far as unique value.
> Also, the use of smartphones as this "instant remote communication" doesn't begin to describe where the technology led, which was to the smartphone which is some type of multimedia device capable of far more than its initial concept.
So what? My point is that "instant remote communication" was a communication revolution that did not need to hunt for use-cases, the technology itself was inherently useful and it developed into something more because its ubiquity (a result of its near universal utility and appeal) created a market for competition between selling this device that literally everyone wanted.
The blockchain is not at all comparable to this. Most people can't even understand what the blockchain is (and that includes many technical people) and those who can at least understand what the blockchain does mostly come to the conclusion that they don't really have a use case for it (including the large majority of enthusiasts who don't do more than shuffle bits around between arbitrarily delimited distributed spreadsheets).
> you don't make a stronger point by downplaying the difference in value between when cellphone launched and what cell phone technology offers today.
You're incorrect. The two have nothing to do with eachother. "Smart devices" like palm-pilots existed for a long time but never took off because most people couldn't justify the purchase (since it really didn't do much for them). Fast forward to a time when everyone is already carrying around portable network computers because... and here it is again... they were clearly useful in their communication capability... it was a clever but natural opportunity to replace these "dumb phones" with computing devices that resemble computer systems that were already validated by the desktop market.
Speaking as a longtime skeptic, A16Z has actually produced the single clearest answer I've seen to that question: blockchains may be good for bootstrapping new network effects by giving early participants in a network (in a Metcalfe's Law sense of network) an incentive to participate. Pure utility tokens can be like call options on the eventual value of the network if it gets off the ground. It's a novel way of solvi…
The best thing I've seen blockchains used for, besides currency, is as an integration platform for a non-centralized supply chain. There's really no money in it, since there aren't any gatekeepers, but that's sort of the point. The idea is that the farmer picks his carrots, puts them in a box and sends them off to the carrot juice guy. When he does this he puts a upc code on the side of the carrot box and then puts t…