Why blockchain is not yet working (2018)

I don't disagree about its current feasibility, but I think that's mainly so because of a distortion of incentives and that so many are invested in this model (the few) despite how horrible it is (to the detriment of the many) as so many people are incapable of doing anything else at this point.

They would sooner die than consider opting for something that they know will end their way of life if successful and this terrifies them rather than excites them about starting something new in life; the sad reality is the legal system is already getting disrupted as we speak all over the World and it's innovating at the edges, but also manifests as distrust and disillusionment and lost of confidence in even basic things like anti-masker, vaccine conspiracy, and refusing to follow curfew and business closures and can lead to having the National Gaurd in Washington DC due to the storming of the Capital by imbeciles fomented by Trump.

All of these are legal matters that are complicated and messy, without a doubt, but the current legal system is to blame for why so many loss confidence as it cannot solve them either, and we can easily be overrun with a 'burning of Alexandria' situation if we don't attempt to solve these problems. And I mean in the next decade given how fast things are escalating not just in the West but in Asia: Thailand, Hong Kong and Mynmar are all in revolt right now for obvious break down in trust with thier systems and legal systems. The CCP is the benefactor from these disolving in the region as they can expand their influence in the turmoil and they simply don't care how corrupt their legal systems are or how they appear to the outside World and will disappear you if you resist which is where I think this is all heading.

> Except fixed supply currency is going back in the other direction. And the hard parts about eliminating scarcity have nothing to do with the monetary system.

WHAT?!!!

This smacks of outright detached privilege only HNers can conjure up from its ivory tower, go to countries that suffer from hyperinflation and still suffer from severe capital controls after that period all of which prevent wealth creation before you make such a claim.

Otherwise I cannot take you seriously as your ignorance is almost palpably painful to me... I've lived and worked in Eastern Europe in the last decade and I went to baja before the revaluation of the peso in the 90s quite often as tourists, and the amount of poverty is incredibly sad... it was crazy to see how my single dollar bill bought 1000s worth of X in pesos down there. I honestly would buy absurd stuff like 10kg of packaged laundry detergent because it cost something absurd like 96 cents and I had a story to tell when I got back to school.

Ill still remember to this day how upset I felt as a kid using quarters on the arcade machines outside the store instead of going to the counter and exchanging my USD to credits for 'free play' tokens, and then suddenly realizing how spoiled I was and how the $10 I spent in that store after a few hours probably helped feed the owners entire family for a week. It's funny how much those experiences make you grow up, and I fear you cannot relate.

What you have just said is just beyond belief and I cannot seriously take what you say serious.

I can address lending as that is already a thing, BTC is the collateral and fiat is the lent out. But the short is we just revert to a satoshi standard rather than whole Bitcoin (satoshi is 100 millionth of a Bitcoin)... But I seriously don't feel like I can muster the energy to go into depth as to how that would look like because of how struck I am by that statement.

I'm not trying to be a SJW trigger queen, but that is just so painfully ignorant that my head literately hurts now and I have to get offline for a while.

NoSQL was a nice buzzword to bunch up web caches and log processing tools for analytics, especially for the creepy-spying-ads corps.

The blockchain niches seem to be much, much smaller than what it's sold for. Once the dust settles (~5 years from now) it's likely that not much will be left behind an all this money spent on it will have been wasted.

Heck, NoSQL databases have wider applicability than blockchain and few people consider them a major technological revolution, let alone a social or economical one.

See also Enron, WorldCom, Nortel, Bre-X (for the Canadians out there).

> […] and lately corporations put into Bitcoin as a store of wealth and a hedge against inflation.

Given its volatility, I'm not sure how useful it is as a store of wealth. Less than a year ago it lost half its value in two days (before the recent run-up):

* https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/13/bitcoin-loses-half-of-its-va...

If you think inflation is coming, then you need to stop working in economics and/or finance, as you're burning up returns hedging against it, at least in the US/industrialized world. The last time it was a problem was >40 years ago (mostly due to OPEC):

* https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FPCPITOTLZGUSA

Outside of specific circumstance, deflation is the predominant force:

> But Inflation is not inevitable. There are numerous countervailing forces that have been at work for much of the past 50 years. The three big Deflation drivers: 1) Technology, which creates massive economies of scale, especially in digital products (e.g., Software); 2) Robotics/Automation, which efficiently create more physical goods at lower prices; and 3) Globalization and Labor Arbitrage, which sends work to lower cost regions, making goods and services less expensive.

> Put into this context, Inflation is periodic, driven by specific events; Deflation is consistent, the background state of the modern economy. To fully understand this requires grasping how scarcity and abundance act as the drivers of the price of labor and goods. My suspicion is many economists who came of age during earlier eras of inflation fail to discern how the world has changed since.

* https://ritholtz.com/2021/02/stop-stressing-about-inflation/

There is nothing preventing cryptocurrencies from utilizing blockchain technology in combination with inflationary currency generating models, and in fact plenty of them do. They are less well known partially because they were later to the game, and partially because they lack the get-rich-quick pump and dump appeal of bitcoin and co.