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Comment by darkFunction | Hacker News Reader

It's worth noting that many new blockchain implementations are not intending to merely facilitate the transfer of monetary value but aim to decentralise resources, which is a less "fictional" goal. Look at Sia / StorJ / Maidsafe, for secure decentralised storage (Storage on Sia is currently something like 20x cheaper than Amazon S3 and offers the potential for storage providers to compete on price per TB alone, without having to provide a front-end or marketing). Then there are distributed computing applications such as Golem and iExec.

All of these are in the early development (even concept) stages but investors are seeing the obvious huge upsides if the teams can pull it off, and to me these are the most exciting technologies which counter the aged arguments about crypto's worth as an exchange of value with solid real-world use cases which can be compared in real terms to current centralised solutions.

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>decentralize Bitcoin has central banks you just call them exchanges and wallet providers. Most cryptocurrencies depend on specific websites and central developer teams(who may decided to fork the currency blockchain at their whim).

Many but not all. Sia for instance will continue to exist independent of the company, it is fully decentralised. I believe your statement is true of StorJ as they rely on centralised services but I can't comment on the others.

Bitcoin would continue to exist without the exchanges and wallets, they are peripheral to the core technology. Blockchains can't be 'forked at a whim' without majority consensus, that's the whole point. ETH is the obvious example where the devs forked with support from the community and it led to the ETH/ETC divide.

What you would do if developers turn corrupt and force a new version with unwelcome changes? Most people see developers as some kind of robots, but cryprocurrencies are often fraud schemes where developers control the market.

How exactly would developers 'force a new version' without consensus?

Well consensus can be manufactured or ignore smaller players. e.g bitcoin seqwit hard fork was decided by large-scale mining companies. If a small cryptocoin you have most of the hashing power in some side company, you can fake it as majority of miners consensus.

The network effect makes this unlikely.

You could ask what would happen if Cisco tried to force a new version of TCP/IP with unwelcome changes?

The comparison isn't quite the same yet, but it could be in the future and many bitcoin supporters think that's how it will turn out.

Ethereum is one exception to this; it's defined by a written spec and there are multiple independent clients, written in different languages. One of the most popular clients is the open source product of a private company independent of the Ethereum Foundation.

Of course Ethereum is one chain that infamously forked. That was only possible because all the client devs agreed to do it, and most users chose to use the new software. (Some didn't, so the original chain still exists as ETC.)

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