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The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

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Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#62

My thinking about the blockchain/cryptocurrency space shifted significantly when I changed my perspective from thinking about technology to thinking about problems . The web caught on because in the late 80s, the biggest problem in the world was that we were starved for information. We didn't know it yet, because we'd never lived in any other world, but once we could fire up Netscape and view homepages from people wh…

A lot of good points.

> People still get screwed when transacting in Bitcoin, they just get screwed by scammers & hackers rather than the government & big corporations

I‘d remove the „rather than“ out of the sentence: hackers can get bought by governments. Which leaves us with scammers, hackers, governments and businesses as possible screwers, no?

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#64

Anonymous blockchain sounds like fertile soil for the emergence of simple, autonomous AI. Howard Bloom's cosmology centers around Replication Strategy and Iteration. The medium of blockchain provides convenient and abundant opportunity for both. Imagine a smart contract that could sort of recursively fuel itself with prediction market earnings, and clone itself programmatically. A relatively simple 'mother' script co…

You get it man. Autonomous agents that want to exchange value for services or with each other would be better off using a blockchain than traditional fiat.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#67
post #7

I used to think that the blockchain bubble was like the dotcom bubble, in that the core technology was actually genuinely transformative, so that even after the bubble burst and all the over-valued companies went bust, the technology would remain and continue change our lives. However, I must admit I'm starting to have my doubts now. It was 10 years in to the dotcom era that the dotcom bubble burst, and by that time…

> we're approaching 10 years since the start of the blockchain era

By that standard, the start of the internet era was in the early 80s, almost 20 years before the dot com crash.

Don't forget that Ethereum has only been live for 3 years. This is still very early technology.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#69
post #7

I used to think that the blockchain bubble was like the dotcom bubble, in that the core technology was actually genuinely transformative, so that even after the bubble burst and all the over-valued companies went bust, the technology would remain and continue change our lives. However, I must admit I'm starting to have my doubts now. It was 10 years in to the dotcom era that the dotcom bubble burst, and by that time…

> Sure there's niches like settlement systems and [...] but not something that a member of the public is going to use on a daily basis ...

I'd argue that settlement systems aren't a niche system and is something most of us use on a daily basis -- if not more frequently. Unless you're using cash for everything, every transaction you make goes through a settlement process, sometimes multiple times.

People often talk about how inefficient blockchain is, but they rarely have a grasp on how horribly inefficient our current settlement systems are. They are slow, expensive, inefficient, and complex.

I have doubts if it'll be widely used outside of the financial space, and I recognize that may be the context in which you were using the adjective "niche", but I do think it has the potential to be transformative within that space, and I think that space is potentially bigger than many of us realize.

Re: The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?

#70
post #18

The biggest problem is that blockchains are inherently not scalable. That is more or less by design, but it limits the types of applications that can run on top of them. I think a more likely outcome is that most types of payment infrastructure and settlement/transaction layers move to blockchains and not actual applications. For example, it’s not too difficult to imagine the stock market switch to tokenized stocks t…

nobody wants to censor Uber. Think bigger. Censorship, transparency etc. Uber and Airbnb are wrong examples, they don't need those kind of things. Now think governments
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