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It’s not still the early days of blockchain

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

#771

Post by fragmede »

Ekaros wrote: post #448
baby wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah they can send money abroad easily?

How often they need to? How often average person actual does that? Maybe there just isn't that big of an market there outside things like web payments. Or a market that doesn't involve complexities of dealing with money...

Just because you ~never do, doesn't mean there's no market. In this case, there's a huge market for remittances, on the order of hundreds of billion (USD) in 2020 for the industry globally. Every immigrant with family back home is saving local currency and sending as much as they can back home because of the difference in exchange rate. The incumbent players aren't very good, having been created before the Internet. Western Union is still a choice in this area, though it's worth noting that they did close down their telegram service in 2006. Whether cryptocurrencies are competitive in this area depends on if theres a way locally to get local cash for crypto. In countries where this illegal, it's a bit harder to do so, and the old ways are still the best, depending on how high the service fees are.

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

#772

Post by betwixthewires »

Daishiman wrote: post #218
betwixthewires wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well then what's the point of this discussion? The thread is "how has it advanced? How long can you call it early days?" If you just stop reading rebuttals as soon as they're mentioned you're better off talking to a wall, and you'd waste less people's time that way too.

Because technical minutiae are completely irrelevant if they don't eventually convert into useful features for products with at least some level of mass-market appeal. I have yet to see a single enticing idea for blockchain/web3/whatever for a consumer or business not related to finance. If that requires an ever-increasing number of technical challenges to be solved for that to happen, then we're just looking at vapo…

But the things I mentioned aren't technical minutiae, they're real technological advances with real applications, today.

> ...not related to finance.

Why place that arbitrary restriction? If all this stuff does is improve finance is that not enough? Again, I'm not a web3 evangelist, this stuff was originally created strictly to create financial tools. All I expect any of this stuff to do is change finance.

But still, the development of new cryptography, new consensus mechanisms, new routing protocols and network topologies, these are all advances that have come as a result of all this and they're not related to finance. Again, just because you don't know about an advancement doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

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

#773

Post by big_youth »

lumost wrote: post #754
poof131 wrote: 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…

You know, it's funny. I've worked in and around analytics for a long time now, and I've had the thought that blockchain enables the following. 1) A common "universal" transaction data source 2) A shared, readable format So the thought occurred to me that as soon as blockchain apps/currencies became popular, people would want analytics on them. There would thus be a startup opportunity for unprecedented analytics visi…

Blockchain analytics are a big sector. Companies like Coinbase and Binance have spent billions acquiring blockchain analytics firms.

Additionally, I think there is big money in selling blockchain analytics to governments for the money laundering, darknet markets, and fraud sector.

https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2019/02/19/coinbase-acquire...

https://www.coindesk.com/business/2021/04/30/coinbase-to-acq...

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/09/mastercard-to-buy-blockchain...

https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2019/12/03/binance-acquires...

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

#774

Post by cuteboy19 »

tim333 wrote: post #624
crehn wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

It is somewhat disruptive to banks. You can invest stable coins and get interest for example which is higher than bank interest. And the operator doesn't need to spend a fortune applying for banking licenses for each country they operate in.

You say this on a thread that confirms Tether to be an unmitigated fraud. How and why are we supposed to trust in USDC, USDP and all the other permutations of USD to not be frauds themselves. It is easy to give a 10% return when all your really doing is offering unbacked IOUs

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

#775

Post by epinephrinios »

jjtheblunt wrote: post #4

the final paragraph seems to summarize the article : "The more you think about it, the more “it’s early days!” begins to sound like the desperate protestations of people with too much money sunk into a pyramid scheme, hoping they can bag a few more suckers and get out with their cash before the whole thing comes crashing down."

Future will tell. But the author is either acting on bad faith or they are not informed on the innovations that happened since then and are currently happening in the crypto space. And I am not even focusing on NFTs but on hardcore crypto stuff such as multisig and zero-knowledge proof protocols.

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

#776

Post by slg »

meowkit wrote: post #755
slg wrote: post #751

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But when you dig a bit deeper, you'll find that there is true technical and financial innovation. I will give you the technical innovation, but I really have not found anything financially innovative about cryptocurrency. What does crypto do that traditional currencies or payments systems don't? The only thing I see is that it largely replaces the old financial elite with a new financial elite and maybe under the ri…

Seems unnecessary to nitpick innovation between the disciplines. The technology enables many new tools to be developed and many old tools to be augmented. Saule Omarova (Biden’s comptroller pick who resigned) had some interesting ideas in her papers/essays. DLT-based deposit debtor accounts being offered by the government was one that I thought would be pretty great.

>Seems unnecessary to nitpick innovation between the disciplines.

Cool technology has no value if all it is is cool technology. The important question is whether it enables something that wasn't possible before that technology. I have not seen a convincing example in which crypto does that.

>DLT-based deposit debtor accounts being offered by the government was one that I thought would be pretty great.

For example, how is this improved by using a distributed ledger here especially considering that this program would already be centralized by the government?

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

#777

Post by suzzer99 »

throwaway98700k wrote: post #533
janandonly wrote: post #484

I never understand critiques like these. > "somehow no one appears to have managed to find a positive use for blockchains that wouldn’t be better served by blockchainless technologies" There is now a sovereign nation state that accepted Bitcoin as a currency, and, mark my words, no doubt more will follow this 2022. Replacing central banks, and by extension, their grasp on the limitless money printing, is the whole re…

By all accounts the adoption of that tech in El Salvador has been a disaster, the app is slow, buggy, not everyone has access and it’s easily exploitable for crime. Protests against it. Etc. I anticipate a reversal of this by the next government. Current governments cannot admit mistakes, so it’ll take a new term for it to be dismantled.

There may not be a next govt in El Salvador for a while. Their populist president seems intent on staying in power by any means necessary.

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

#778

Post by epinephrinios »

throwaway98700k wrote: post #533
janandonly wrote: post #484

I never understand critiques like these. > "somehow no one appears to have managed to find a positive use for blockchains that wouldn’t be better served by blockchainless technologies" There is now a sovereign nation state that accepted Bitcoin as a currency, and, mark my words, no doubt more will follow this 2022. Replacing central banks, and by extension, their grasp on the limitless money printing, is the whole re…

By all accounts the adoption of that tech in El Salvador has been a disaster, the app is slow, buggy, not everyone has access and it’s easily exploitable for crime. Protests against it. Etc. I anticipate a reversal of this by the next government. Current governments cannot admit mistakes, so it’ll take a new term for it to be dismantled.

Uhm it might be hard to use but I completely reject the "exploitable for crime" part. Actually Bitcoin payments are a blessing for all those people that had to physically travel to Western Union branches to receive cash from abroad. Gangs frequently targeted such poor individuals and stole their cash. Bitcoin fixed this.

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

#779

Post by dmitriid »

tim333 wrote: post #739
dmitriid wrote: post #665

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You buy a bitcoin and you can be fairly confident in a decade or two you'll still have it. And it will be worthless. Most assets that NFTs point to are already gone. Because that useless hash you have in your NFT? It points to a centralised storager somewhere.

>And it will be worthless Well maybe, maybe not. It's been remarkable resilient so far. See https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoin-obituaries/ NFTs I'm less sure of.

You're forgetting that bitcoin is currently propped up by Tether. That Tether will survive two decades is extremely unlikely.

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

#780

Post by dmitriid »

olalonde wrote: post #753
dmitriid wrote: post #682

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But when you dig a bit deeper, you'll find that there is true technical and financial innovation. Ah yes. The good old "just google it". There's literally not a single "dig deeper" resource on the internet that explains the need for blockchains/cryptocurrencies etc. But sure, there are a lot of "innovations" with recursive circular "innovations" (like currency speculation, HFT and flash loans, all of "innovatively…

> Ah yes. The good old "just google it". There's literally not a single "dig deeper" resource on the internet that explains the need for blockchains/cryptocurrencies etc. I just named a rather massive one in my comment.

> I just named a rather massive one in my comment.

Do you mean this one? " For me, Bitcoin's potential to be a programmable money without government or central authority is a very powerful idea."

It's really isn't a true technical and financial innovation.

So, you have a slow and inefficient VM that runs an esoteric programming language, and all this VM allows you to do is exchange fictional tokens whose primary value is derived from ... trading fictional tokens. That's all there is to this great amazing innovative idea.

> The idea that you can be your own bank and do p2p electronic money transfers without an intermediary. That has never been possible before.

Of course it has. Never on this scale, true, but "I will print my own money that you can only use in these specific circumstances, otherwise you have to convert it to actual money at severe discount/penalties" is probably as old as the world itself.

Also, there are reasons intermediaries exist.

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