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It’s not still the early days of blockchain

blog.mollywhite.net

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Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#31

Post by xmprt »

lunch wrote: post #29
xmprt wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like even after zooming out and seeing the big picture, it's hard to imagine blockchain solving real world problems. Blockchains are good when there's a lack of trust and decentralization is absolutely necessary. There are very few problems that actually need a blockchain. Anything that has the government in the loop (like buying houses or property) is a non starter and anything that runs on centralized server…

> Blockchains are good when there's a lack of trust and decentralization is absolutely necessary. There are very few problems that actually need a blockchain. How about the current status quo of the Internet? Do you think being mined, sold, and endlessly tracked is OK?

No. But you don't need blockchain to solve that. Things like BitTorrent work perfectly fine without the needless blockchain element.

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#32

Post by Dwolb »

obstacle1 wrote: post #19
baby wrote: post #11

I think the author hasn’t heard about DeFi. It’s pretty mind blowing what people are building on top of blockchains these days. But of course users who are not directly affected are oblivious to the advances and are just upset that they are not being served as users. If you think blockchain is useless: you are not the target user. The day it becomes useful to you, then you can choose to use it or not, but that day yo…

I'm not aware of any serious financial application running at scale and relying on blockchain under the hood. Are you? What is it? Specifically.

Curve Finance with $14B locked to its platform. Serves up low slippage stablecoin swaps.

Some background on Curve (and Convex): https://medium.com/coinmonks/convex-curve-curve-d7e28cd6c1d9

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#33

Post by hubraumhugo »

I'm still very opposed to the idea of taking a technology and then searching a problem for it. Why? Back in 2017 during the first hype cycle, blockchain companies raised hundreds of millions with ICOs. I became very interested in the technology too, and some friends still work in this space. 4 years later in the web3 era, there is not a single product aside from trading/finance that got traction. Use cases like storing the history of a car on-chain, transparent supply chains, public voting... this all sounds interesting but never made it to product-market fit.

I always assume that I'm wrong, so I'll keep looking for successful applications and I'm sure you can prove me wrong :)

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#34

Post by jrumbut »

rvz wrote: post #3

So there is no progress in non Proof-of-Work coins today? Perhaps the author is saying that there are no blockchains that are being used as the basis of regulated stable-coins and CBDC projects that are being tested by central banks today? I mean, the author is arguing as if Bitcoin, and Ethereum are the only blockchains that exist today. Hence why this is another blog-post that associates all cryptocurrencies having…

I don't think the complaint is about the lack of new ideas for coins. No shortage there.

There have been a lot of prototypes, trials, testing, and scams, but not a lot of hits.

The only major exceptions are the same old cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin and Ethereum) where the same old arguments still apply.

Part of the problem here is that, with no centralized authority, it takes much, much longer to make changes. Perhaps that's what the author is missing and that's why we're many years in without the kind of success you might expect for a web technology that's not destined for failure.

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#35

Post by [deleted] »

ajross wrote: post #25
kjgkjhfkjf wrote: post #9

To be fair, it took decades for e-commerce on the web to become mainstream. Remember what a joke Webvan used to be in 2001?

Uh, 2001 happens to be the year that Amazon became the biggest bookseller in the world, having been founded five years earlier. That's literally about as mainstream as you can get, and it was half a decade. Whether or not you agree with the arc of the linked article, the basic facts are correct: blockchains have been with us for a decade now and haven't done much or made anything that wasn't itself a speculation abou…

[deleted]

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#36

Post by codebolt »

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #5

Blockchains exist for a reason completely other than performance. Of course a centralized database would perform better. That’s not the point. I think engineers keep getting hung up on this and don’t zoom out and see the big picture.

'Zooming out and seeing the big picture' seems to mean buying into a libertarian vision of the world where the current money system is horribly broken and blockchain technologies are a viable and superior alternative. I profoundly disagree on all points of that analysis.

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#37

Post by CryptoPunk »

throwawaylinux wrote: post #26
JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #5

Blockchains exist for a reason completely other than performance. Of course a centralized database would perform better. That’s not the point. I think engineers keep getting hung up on this and don’t zoom out and see the big picture.

What is the big picture then? I've never got anything concrete that doesn't sound like the usual buzz word snake oil. Blockchains solve the wrong problem for a lot of the proposed applications I've seen, like handwaving about "supply chain". The biggest difficulty is not that you don't trust the database, it's that you don't trust the connection between the electronic data and reality. How do you trust a person to ha…

>>So aside from coins, where else is it that you would not trust a central database, but you can verify/trust the entries being added to that database?

I would not trust a central database for any application, even those where I have to trust the verifiers of the entries to that database.

E.g. I would prefer stablecoins over credit in a bank.

With a decentralized database, immutability and permissionlessness are the default, until the trusted third party actively intervenes to strip you of these privileges.

With a centralized database, access is by default denied, and requires active intervention from the trusted third party, in the form of a grant of permission, to acquire.

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#40

Post by lunch »

xmprt wrote: post #31
lunch wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Blockchains are good when there's a lack of trust and decentralization is absolutely necessary. There are very few problems that actually need a blockchain. How about the current status quo of the Internet? Do you think being mined, sold, and endlessly tracked is OK?

No. But you don't need blockchain to solve that. Things like BitTorrent work perfectly fine without the needless blockchain element.

BitTorrent is wonderful for sharing information, but it's not really a platform to build on. Something like Ethereum on the other hand is literally a decentralized computer that no single entity controls. The blockchain part enables this.
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