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Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing

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Re: Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing

#51
post #15
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ethereum developers have been working extremely hard to move to proof of stake to remove this massive power requirement. It's too bad that wasn't mentioned in the article.

Slide side track but I never get the complaints about power usage. It’d be great if crypto used less energy obviously but doesn’t fiat also use a ridiculously high amount of energy?

I'd like to point you to this Vice article titled "One Bitcoin Transaction Consumes As Much Energy As Your House Uses in a Week". Meanwhile swiping a credit card uses slightly more electricity than a google query.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ywbbpm/bitcoin-mining-ele...

Re: Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing

#52

Can we add Graph Databases to the list of things that are kinda cool but with very limited applications too?

Facebook's entire backend is built on a graph database. https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/tao-the-...

Yes. Social networks and categorising artistic output both seems like great uses and then ... very little else.

Re: Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing

#53
post #28
post #8

An article about blockchain where the thesis is that it doesn't solve any problems and it doesn't even mention Ethereum? This article is extremely poorly researched (maybe on purpose) and reads like clickbait.

Could you elaborate on what problems Ethereum has solve? Genuinely curious, as I shared this article’s preconceptions.

https://www.bitsorbricks.com/writing/the-government-of-the-f...

Re: Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing

#54
post #49
post #19

This article is misinformed. The past two years have seen a Cambrian explosion of apps on ethereum. financial apps on ethereum - https://defipulse.com/ - https://uniswap.info/home - https://compound.finance/ - https://nexusmutual.io/ - https://bloom.co/ - https://baseline-protocol.org - https://augur2.eth.link/ non-financial apps on ethereum - https://audius.org/ - https://ens.domains/ - https://decentraland.org/ pop…

https://magic.link/ also pretty cool and https://handshake.org/ also awesome

Isn't Handshake the thing premised on IANA handing over control of the DNS to a premined cryptocurrency network so they can resell it? I keep wondering if I can do that with ARP. It's like that episode of The Office with the business seminar and the guy whose business idea is just that he gets a 1c cut of every credit card transaction.

Re: Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing

#55
post #19

This article is misinformed. The past two years have seen a Cambrian explosion of apps on ethereum. financial apps on ethereum - https://defipulse.com/ - https://uniswap.info/home - https://compound.finance/ - https://nexusmutual.io/ - https://bloom.co/ - https://baseline-protocol.org - https://augur2.eth.link/ non-financial apps on ethereum - https://audius.org/ - https://ens.domains/ - https://decentraland.org/ pop…

I looked through a few of those, and I struggle to see how those are superior to traditional solutions to the same problems. Care to enlighten me?

There is a single private key log in to ALL of them and they interoperate without requiring partnerships by way of sharing protocols and token specifications. It's quite unlike traditional banking verticals where each is siloed and never let the user share data or make it portable. (think 2-3 day processing times, shitty PDF exports and incompatible data exports).

Re: Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing

#56
post #7

> But isn’t it strange that you won all those awards, even though you aren’t actually using the blockchain? Kinda like all those AI startups that aren't actually using AI.

Artificial Artificial Intelligence?

We're working on the air for our start up. In the mean time the interns are matching stuff in spread sheets.

Re: Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing

#57
As a distributed ledger, that does not require a consolidated authority, it has the potential to have many uses.

Many think blockchain as a synonym for BitCoin and the like, while the central technology seems to be the distributed ledger.

However, with anything distributed, the network is only as good as it's participants. Which means, when thinking long term, it fails to give confidence in the system, because who knows, 20 years from now, will there by any participants in the distributed ledger?

Re: Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing

#58
post #41
post #19

This article is misinformed. The past two years have seen a Cambrian explosion of apps on ethereum. financial apps on ethereum - https://defipulse.com/ - https://uniswap.info/home - https://compound.finance/ - https://nexusmutual.io/ - https://bloom.co/ - https://baseline-protocol.org - https://augur2.eth.link/ non-financial apps on ethereum - https://audius.org/ - https://ens.domains/ - https://decentraland.org/ pop…

We've been hearing this same story about various blockchain technologies for a decade.

“composability” has absolutely changed that

Its the interchangeably parts feature of smart contracts. Was missing before this year.

Analogous to how interchangeable parts heralded the industrial revolution.

The DeFi space would not be growing by orders of magnitude a quarter without that.

Re: Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing

#59
post #19

This article is misinformed. The past two years have seen a Cambrian explosion of apps on ethereum. financial apps on ethereum - https://defipulse.com/ - https://uniswap.info/home - https://compound.finance/ - https://nexusmutual.io/ - https://bloom.co/ - https://baseline-protocol.org - https://augur2.eth.link/ non-financial apps on ethereum - https://audius.org/ - https://ens.domains/ - https://decentraland.org/ pop…

DefiPulse - a scheme for speculating in the future price of Etherium.

Uniswap - a scheme for assisting with speculating in cross rates between various cryptocurrencies.

Compound - it pays interest. But who's paying the interest? It doesn't seem to make loans. Possible Ponzi.

Nexus Mutual - insurance against failure of smart contracts, based on smart contracts.

Bloom - "validate anything about anyone." A signing service for identity document / email / etc tuples.

Baseline - Main use seem to be sealed-bid RFPs.

Augur - "Your global, no-limit betting platform".

All of these are either gambling schemes or solve a non-problem.

Re: Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing

#60
post #25

Bitcoin has lots of uses: - Getting money out of China. Buy into a mining consortium with yuan, get a fraction of the bitcoins, sell outside China for dollars or euros. You're manufacturing and exporting, which the government of China likes. - Extortion. The ransomware extortion business depends on Bitcoin. - Drugs. Delivered to your door in a plain wrapper.

For drugs you must mean Venmo or Cash App, where orders of magnitude greater numbers of drugs are ordered.
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