Ask HN: Are there any substantial examples of blockchain solving a real problem?

I agree.

> timestamping services are trivially cheap already

what does it cost, where can I do it right now?

> A "perfectly designed" decentralized system may be superior, but I don't believe it's possible to perfectly design an incentive structure from the get-go. The world is incredibly complex, and once you have a bug or mistake in your decentralized system, it's doomed because it can be exploited. There are already countless examples of various tokens and blockchains being hacked/exploited. A centralized, human-led organization is less efficient, but more resilient to such things.

Part of the issue here is that the blockchain space as a whole has been _super_ eager to rush ahead of the safety margins and build everything they can imagine rather than build everything that's comfortably within our understanding of how it works.

I would describe a lot of the building happening today to be similar to Mesopotamians trying to build aircraft carriers. Like yeah, boats are one of the most important inventions in history, but you can't just go from river boat to crossing the ocean in one step.

The main use case for blockchain is as a financial instrument to represent shares in a community's economy. A community economy is like a national economy except that the value of its currency does not rely on the coercive legal powers of a government. Aside from that, it functions exactly like any normal economy; if participants in this economy (token holders) export more services than they import, then their cryptocurrency's total value (market cap) will go up relative to other national currencies.

I think cryptocurrency is the best use case for blockchain technology. It is a very narrow use case but an extremely important one. It gives a group of people access to powerful financial tools that are otherwise completely out of reach for regular people.

The idea that communities can have their own micro-economies is going to be radical and completely change how we do business.

One specific use case which I've identified is the ability to use a cryptocurrency to represent shares in a business. It offers small businesses powerful financial tools which are not available to normal businesses of that size. For example, you can use business profits to do token buybacks (which are like share buyback which corporations use); with decentralized exchanges, it's even possible to do buybacks without relying on any intermediaries (e.g. no accountants or brokers). Token buybacks are a simpler alternative to distributing dividends to shareholders. Token buybacks (and subsequent burning of bought tokens) allow a company to pay shareholders through capital appreciation by diluting the cryptocurrency's total supply; this gives small businesses access to the same financial tools which big corporations use to reduce their shareholders' tax liability among other things (capital gains are typically taxed much lower than income and only paid when they are realized; I.e. when tokens are sold). Also, having a tradable cryptocurrency gives a business exposure to influential outsiders (e.g. journalists, wealthy investors, politicians) who have an incentive to participate in the underlying small business and then use their influence to help grow that business and its cryptocurrency. 'Airdrops' can also be carried out in highly targeted ways to create a favorable economic and political environment for the business.

With cryptocurrency it's also possible to pay contributors (employees) using the token instead of fiat. It also helps make sure that contributors' incentives are aligned with all other stakeholders. I'm currently part of a business which works like this. We have 7 contributors and everyone has only been paid using crypto for the past few months. We have a buyback-and-burn deflationary mechanism in place so everyone knows that each token is (on average) guaranteed to always go up in value. You can also pay for marketing and other services using the token - I was quite surprised by how many people were willing accept our cryptocurrency in exchange for services; it feels like the majority of people.

Have the Internet Archive archive a document and it’s hash. Courts have accepted Internet Archive snapshots as evidence.

More costly services would be something like DocuSign.

> It didn't take us 10+ years to find a useful purpose for smartphones or the internet.

It took decades before the internet and mobile phones had any significant market penetration, and then within the space of a few years there are fewer people without it than with it. Technology adoption typically follows a Gompertz function: initially slow, but then rapid adoption before declining as there's no larger audience to adopt it.

Bitcoin presents a fundamental shift in how we treat money which can have a knock on effect on every other industry, just as the internet did. If you think it's time to call it off after 10 years (despite continued new interest over that time), this is a bit short-sighted.

The issue with "cryptocurrency," is unlike Bitcoin, they don't actually provide us with any new innovation. They are scams designed to enrich their creators, who pretend that changing a few variables in a codebase can replicate the invention of Bitcoin. All "cryptocurrency" are useless because they don't have the permanent fix for inflation that Bitcoin has. They introduce inflation by design - they are fiat money made digital. Bitcoin's key innovation is the fix for inflation, which is now impossible to replicate because Bitcoin already exists.