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Blockchain might be a relevant tool for a group of strangers to maintain books (a database) which cannot be easily tampered with (or it is virtually impossible). Prime example is sound money. But it could go beyond that. Say you can run a land registry or domain name system this way.
I’d like to go back to 1988 and ask “Is anyone actually using the Internet?” I’m sure the responses would be similar. Blockchain is still in its infancy, give it a decade or two and I think you’ll be surprised how it became “an overnight success”.
Blockchain has existed as a widespread technology for what, a little over a decade now? And people are already proclaiming its fundamental uselessness? Seems like a massive lack of patience and long term thinking. It took nearly a century for the first airplane to go anywhere and another half-century for it to be widespread and practical.
With blockchain it’s the other way around.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For information technology that's really long. It didn't take us 10+ years to find a useful purpose for smartphones or the internet. If for many years so much money is thrown at it and so many intelligent people are working at it and nothing fundamental comes it, I think it's safe to conclude that it's nearly useless.
> 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…
With blockchain it’s reversed: we have suddenly tech but after 11 years still no idea other than use it to sell drugs, and boil the oceans.
Double Spending
Git comes to mind.
Here’s some examples of things that blockchains can/do help with: - Currencies that cannot be manipulated/controlled by a government / external forces (plenty of examples why that’s a real problem in history, including runaway inflationary policies, payments restricted from certain individuals eg sex workers) - Cheap accounting (see digital autonomous companies), you can run a company with lower costs by programmatic…
Bitcoin solves a real problem: It creates a permanent fix for monetary inflation, which allows people to save money without being taxed on their savings. The rest of "cryptocurrency" is snake oil. Most of it attempts to reintroduce inflation and undermine the fix which Bitcoin introduced. While they may come up with a bunch of reasons for their decision to mint new tokens - the sole purpose of the new inflation is to…
I want my money to be backed up by a government that wants to keep society stable.
Sad to see that bc is always so tied to distrust of governments. That way of thinking seems so naive.
problem #1 - protect freedom, liberties problem #2 - adaptation to the needs of the complex system like modern society those are kind of ‘significant’ problems, technologies like Internet, blockchain etc, provide sequential approximations to the solution of those problems.
Asking "what is blockchain good for other than cryptocurrencies" is like asking "what is internet good for other than websites" pre-broadband Blockchain TODAY is the backbone for a $200B financial system that lets you store or transfer billions of dollars worth of value within minutes for cents in transaction fees, completely peer-to-peer with no middle men Scalable blockchains will generalize this same benefit to le…
You mean, email and group messaging, file transfer, reference lookups, access to remote servers and other things which people were paying for and generating real business value from?
There were plenty of companies which were generating value significantly prior to broadband becoming universal and that was despite the much higher barriers to entry (computers were far more expensive, phone charges were a major barrier for non-rich people).
The blockchain comparison isn’t valid either because despite a much longer period of time before showing positive results there isn’t much real-world impact: the paper value may look high, almost all of that is within the system — the number of outside businesses which would have problems if it disappeared is close to zero, and a large fraction of the people “using” it are using a middleman service rather than directly participating.