First of all, the hype of different blockchains has garnered attention. People who fall into the hype hasn’t learned about the financial literacy and the risks of investing into those.
When Axie Infinity became popular in my country, influencers have started promoting the game and so-called scholarship, which is to refer to a new player. Within a few months of playing, people lost money. Influencers haven’t spoken about the players losing money.
Remember, investment into such blockchains carries a risk. Those are called the digital Ponzi scheme by some people.
I thought the same as you about the exciting technological fundamentals before realising that it was unfortunately also very overblown.
Basically Blockchain technology is a solution in search of a problem. It was invented by someone who was convinced that decentralised currency would realise the ancap utopia. In order make it mainstream, people have been trying very hard to find better use cases and it turns out that you always end up concluding that the centralised approach is always better.
Proof of stake could make the thing not too environmentally damaging but it’s been years that major blockchains are saying they will implement it the next year. And again, the use cases would remain weak in the end
There are other cryptographic mechanisms at play, which are amazingly interesting but it is not going to revolutionise the internet since it’s already being used everywhere (for example asymmetrical keys).
I gave a number of real life use cases where it would solve real problems. There are so many more, especially “boring” ones like official documents, research, and medical records that would benefit from it tremendously. Blockchain does not equal crypto, but they complement each other really well.
What do you mean, Ethereum is pos.
I guess I wasn’t up to date. That’s cool actually!
Interesting! I will do more research then.
I sort of understood the premise for chain-of-custody style use cases, but the other side of the coin is that these usually, or always, have a final arbiter of validity. Typically it’s a court system or an end purchaser who decides if the data is valid.
For example, an obvious use case is “record a will or deed on the blockchain, cryptographically signed and timestamped, to eliminate any disputes about ownership.” Except the same problem is trivially solved by a scheme where I could register my will/deed with the legal system itself, which is already pretty good at storing documents, and no need to cart around a big, heavy blockchain. Most of the problems in that space come from spotty, inconsistent record keeping (why aren’t these documents centrally registered in the US?) and more centralization solves them.
That’s why the fixation on decentralization is often a waste. I suspect the real appeal is fear of human institutions. A banking or legal system subject to laws and social norms might refuse to honour the documents you file, but soulless decentralized code will dance as it’s told to. For example, I could imagine wiring a smart contract triggered to irrevocably pay on the event of someone’s death, while writing “hitman fees” in the memo of a paper cheque probably raises a few eyebrows at the bank.
How are you elucidating Satoshi’s intent? The Bitcoin white paper doesn’t say anything to indicate it would predicate a utopia. It puts forward decentralisation as meaningful. If you don’t think it is, chances are it’s because the existing centralised systems cater to you. That’s great, but there are millions in the global south for whom that isn’t the case. For whom those systems serve to restrain and restrict. For whom there is no reason for a “better use case” than simple and fair value transfer they don’t have access to. IMO, that empowerment alone justifies the means, by which I mean proof of work. As real value transfer always has a cost, whether or not it’s realised by the transactor at the time of the transaction. And under any non-anarchical system of government, someone is realising that cost. PoW doesn’t worsen that cost, it is more transparent about it.