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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

#221
post #200

Well, 10y ago is not ages ago. Email existed for 30 years before it was ready for consumers. Same is with the internet. Certain types of technologies require decades research and development. I would argue that in 20 years it will still be "early days" of blockchain. And only in mid 40 we will figure out apps and who nows what to fully utilize underlining technology. Right now we are just coping what we have outside…

Email required everyone to have a computer, plus infrastructure to connect them.

Blockchain has been waiting on a useful implementation since inception.

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

#222
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you show some examples?

Tipping site owners, BAT token. Incentivizing IPFS content pinning, Filecoin. Allowing censorship-resistant / chargeback free donations, most coins. Enabling private transactions, Monero. Most "dapps" empower decentralization, distributed exchanges, trading, DNS, ownership contracts (DOAs), etc. NFT's for art as silly as it is, more importantly for Handshake domain names and other cases where ownership proof comes in…

You can tip people with normal money.

Paying for hosting with extremely volatile and environmental harmful tokens that only a part of population pretends has a real value, that you want to hoard rather than spend, and that might go to 0 at some point? To have basically torrents?

Sending deflationary ponzi scheme tokens to people is not helping them. Also, fees are high.

Private transactions are great if you are a criminal, I'll give you that.

Tell me one "dapp" (or "extremely wasteful programs that run on a CPU that is orders and orders of magnitude slower than an actual one) that is doing something useful. I haven't found one yet and I've been searching for some years now.

With NFTs you don't own anything, unless there's an actual contract that comes with it. Also you buy a hyperlink that points to central storage. Also money laundering and wash trading are rampant.

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

#223
post #29
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?

I don't want to be tracked so I'm going to put everything in a public ledger.

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

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Centralize it and implement something like M-Pesa, or build it on top of the existing mobile networks. The solution is selling standardized contracts to small hold farmers that pay out automatically; the problem has nothing to do with decentralization or trustless transactions. The blockchain adds nothing here, and creates a layer of complexity that makes it more brittle.

> The solution is selling standardized contracts to small hold farmers that pay out automatically And how easy do you think that is in Kenya? You and I being able to take stable banking and government for granted says more about our own position in the world than it does about the efficacy of the technology itself.

You think Kenya doesn't have even a single, large, stable bank/trust/underwriter? You think they don't have underwriters that can delegate most of the money and authority to overseas institutions, worse comes to worst? Countries with bad credit frequently issue bonds and instruments in the state of New York. If it's good enough for a nation I'm sure companies can work something out.

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

#225
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good stuff, so you would suggest to the author that their examples are too narrow. Perhaps that smartphones, Uber, and Facebook all represented somewhat minor "time has come" type innovations, whereas you see Bitcoin as a development more like the internet itself, and that instead we are in the Arpanet days. (Disclosure I own Bitcoin and Ethereum)

Yeah narrow or just on a different layer/level of abstraction. Yup my mental model is we’re either in Arpanet days or multiple-competing-DOS days.

Early day Arpanet was infinitely more useful than all of this blockchain stuff.

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

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Dubai, buying real estate with bitcoin is a real thing, and by the looks of it also a big thing. If nothing else, it shows that crypto has succeed in one of its goals: moving money between countries, without being detected/hindered by governments. I mean, I don't know who buys real estate with crypto, but I am assuming that people who live in dubai and have large crypto values are bullish on crypto, and won't wast…

Buying real estate with bit-coin, isn't that close to money laundering?

That is classic money laundering. The only use case for funny money.

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

#227
post #134
post #98

A few months ago I agreed with her entirely. Tether is an unbacked fraud and NFTs are being front-run [1, 2]. The mid-level marketing Ponzi vibe is crazy. The latency of applications on the blockchain is atrocious. But more recently after learning from and interacting with people building in the space my assessment changed. There is an interesting intersection between tech, communities, and economics. There exists a…

> There exists a transparency in the open-source code of smart contracts that will disrupt the current gatekeepers like the internet did. Could you elaborate which gatekeepers it will disrupt?

IMO social media needs competition but I don't think it will be disrupted by blockchain or decentralization. It will be disrupted by a continued pursuit of competition by doing things like supporting net neutrality. That keeps the playing field level and prevents current big players from becoming further entrenched. Big tech's monopolies are encouraged by lower-level-monopolies owned by Comcast and the other internet media conglomerates. To solve the problems higher in the tree we should get at the roots.

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

#228

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 stori…

In Dubai, buying real estate with bitcoin is a real thing, and by the looks of it also a big thing. If nothing else, it shows that crypto has succeed in one of its goals: moving money between countries, without being detected/hindered by governments. I mean, I don't know who buys real estate with crypto, but I am assuming that people who live in dubai and have large crypto values are bullish on crypto, and won't wast…

Doesn't Dubai have anti money laundering laws? It doesn't matter if you pay with seashells, don't they ask you where the money is from?

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

#229
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems you are looking for a product blockchain enables you, but there are activities the blockchain enables which are not products, and are very difficult up to impossible without. One example is sustainable (financially) open-source project is one I use now. Before that it was always impossible. You get a bunch of people all over the world, many of them are identified only by Internet handles. There's no investme…

I'm trying to understand. You're saying that you wouldn't be able to perform online votes or surveys and remotely send money without a blockchain? Could you expand more on what functionality that the blockchain provides that the other solutions in this space (online surveys and remotely send money) don't?

Sure.

"Remotely send money" is a super hard thing to do. I literally just struggled for a month with a transfer that included 3 countries, none of them is English speaking. It required letters from banks, accountants, plenty of forms of different countries, translations, stuff which is lost in translation (the bank was unhappy with the word selection of a non-English speaker accountant, for example), different formats, different standards and navigating countless options and tricks in order to avoid ridiculous exchange and transfer fees.

This was for a "simple" action in the real world, involving me and a regular seller of something. Now take this and try to divide donations between 5 participants of your project, each from a different country and a different language. Good luck with that.

Hwoever, in my open source project we did the same thing in 20 seconds with crypto. Not because we avoid tax (we don't), but because the international mechanism is cumbersome and inaccessible if you're not an expert, and expensive probably even if you are.

We manage the donations/profits with votings, and are not familiar with a platform offering a safe way to do that in our settings.

Besides, my experience with platforms for open source projects (or in general) is bad. There is no one platform offering all the services we need, so we end up having dozens of accounts (which is actually a source of tension, because when you offer to use a new platform, an argument starts with those who "have enough accounts in their life"). Moreover, platforms eventually close, so you get stuck (migration is a hard thing to do).

Let me ask a question that maybe will look at it from a different angle. Which problems remotely sending money and online platforms solve that crypto has for managing votings and finance of an international online open source project? Seems to me it beings 100% extra problems and 0% solutions.

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

#230
post #54

How's this any different than the typical technology hype and adoption cycle? Perhaps we are just at the "peak of inflated expectations" right now, and are about to dive into the "trough of disillusionment". https://setandbma.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/technology-ado... This certainly happened with AI at least twice... remember the AI summers of 1970 and 2010 and the AI winters in between...before certain applicatio…

> My wife recently suggested one: NFTs minted by your university as proof of your diploma. Or perhaps your academic transcript. No way to forge a fake diploma again. This is once again better served by a database. Diplomas are inherently centralized and issued by a trusted authority. Guess we gotta keep brainstorming for use cases -- that's how technology development works, right?

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