The problem is that we’re still in the phase of “it’s good because it’s blockchain” so people are trying to get in early to make some free bucks. It will only work when someone comes up with a decentralized product backed by blockchain that simply works, and users don’t even need to know it’s a blockchain. It needs to be a blockchain use case instead of attempts to retrofit the blockchain into current problems.
It’s not still the early days of blockchain
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Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain
#372Kelsey Hightower said it best: https://twitter.com/kelseyhightower/status/14778718907230781... "If something is too early to criticize it's also too early to evangelize."
But it’s not too early to be a cult
Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain
#373Earlier quoted context omitted.
Blockchain is proving a more than capable solution in the ransomware payments space, enabling a whole new class of malware.
The thing is it's not really particularly good at that. No moreso at least because of any attributes of the blockchain. It's really because of external reasons: 1. Lack of tooling and cooperation for investigating fraud 2. Lack of regulation 3. Programmatic interfaces 4. There are markets like the NFT space that are amazing for laundering But no part of why it's good for crime has to do with blockchain.
"Censorship resistance" was the original use case for blockchain, and demanding money with menaces remotely is the one area where it's unquestionably superior to being discreet about where your money is stored
Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain
#374Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
The university can shut down, suffer data loss or get hacked. Decentralized storage is an improvement. No sense in diplomas being transferable though.
No need for a blockchain though. The University can just key-sign the diploma. Then the user can choose to keep it wherever they like.
Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain
#375Reminds me of something Elon Musk said. A lot of the content on the internet is a "projection of our limbic system". (Elon saying this https://youtu.be/ycPr5-27vSI?t=1074)
I see the craze around crypto the same way. It is a representation of something in our limbic system. Perhaps greed?
Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain
#376The author's description of 2015 doesn't sound like some ancient era to me.. Have things moved on and changed so dramatically from ML hype, Microsoft Edge, Apple Watch, and ES6? I'm not really here to argue about blockchains being good or not, I just don't feel great about how the article tosses out a body of technology for not keeping pace with Uber. It's a bit like saying it can't possibly be early days for reusabl…
Regarding ES6: Definitely. It used to be that there’d be a new JS framework every week, and the language was rapidly evolving to catch up with over 10 years of programming language innovation. No change to the language as big as ES6 has happened since, and the Cambrian Explosion of frameworks has largely subsided.
Nowadays things are way more stable. I’m sure someone will pop in and mention how their workplace just changed from Webpack to Vite, or how hard it is to keep track of Angular, React and Vue. To which I’d chuckle and note that when I got started in 2014 we had AngularJS, Ember, React, Backbone, Knockout, Google FOAM, Polymer, OJ.js and Aurelia (which emerged as Google announced that AngularJS 1.x would be deep-sixed and Angular 2 would essentially be a totally different framework). To build/bundle your app you would use one or more of Grunt, Gulp, Brunch, Webpack, Browserify, 6to5, Traceur Google Closure Compiler and/or RequireJS (so far we’re assuming you’re not using CoffeeScript, ClojureScript, or one of their downstream variants like IcedCoffeeScript).
Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain
#377Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. Anything that does not exist natively on the blockchain doesn't need a blockchain at all. If a token on the blockchain would represent you as the owner of a car and one day someone steals your private key which represents your car ownership, that pers…
Not to say your completely wrong, just that the purpose of car tokens on the blockchain is to replace perhaps your insurance, but not the keys.
I don't see why something like insurance needs a token on a decentralized blockchain. The Bitcoin blockchain needs a token because the token itself represents the value (BTC) inside the network. The token is also needed because it adds an incentive for nodes (miners) to support the network.
Note: this is my current view of it. If someday it turns out it is useful, I am happy to admit that I was wrong.
Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain
#378Depends on how you define early. When comparing the situation of crypto to the internet, I would say we are at around 1997 now. 1996 was the year when Yahoo went public and 2021 was the year when Coinbase went public. The usability of crypto solutions also reminds me of 1997. It is still so bad that it makes them almost unusable. Reminds me of acoustic couplers where you had to manually plug your cable bound phone in…
Adoption of the Internet had serious pre-requisites in terms of the availability of computers in the general population so it’s not really surprising. One thing that was amazing about it was our ability to reuse existing networks to connect them all together.
Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain
#379Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is what financialization does. Finance is a parasite that will destroy all potential if given room. To force finance to be symbiotic you must never allow them to control anything. These ideas are best left in the academy, and then later financialized. The exception to this is internal R&D (like Bell Labs and countless other extremely productive corporate divisions.)
Out of curiosity: How well have significant Bell Labs contributors been compensated? It seems to me that lost of current tech, and even 'future tech' not yet adopted has come out of Bell Labs. But how many of the engineers that came up with said advances settled for relative peanuts? Getting paid $250K for something that changes the world seems... less than adequate. Maybe I'm just greedy. I don't think so.
Those people are represent labor, not capital, and thus are never paid their share of profit under capitalism.
Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain
#380Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have wondered for awhile why the crypto mega-whales in my vicinity are trading USDT at par or better over the last year or two. My conspiracy theory is that when insiders trade a distressed asset at par or better it’s often a bailout expectation that’s really being traded. Who has unimaginable access to financing, a “stablecoin” going so/so, and a primary line of business critically dependent on Tether, like, I don…
What you've described is metastasized moral risk. We could argue that maybe some risk should be rewarded. But not all risk, such as spending billions in beanie babies as a corporate strategy.
Eh, there are some important distinctions here. Pricing risk is an activity with fairly clear value, and as a result you can make a ton of money by being good at it. Assuming risk is something that every individual and organization does to one degree or another, and to the extent that they do so in a rational way it’s because they are pricing risk well or delegating that.
Your use of the word moral makes me think that you might be talking about shifting risk off onto others. Keeping the upside in some more favorable ratio to handing others the downside is (IMHO) immoral but also one of two main ways that people get rich, the other being inheritance.