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Comment by dharness | Hacker News Reader

Can't win a free ETH if you use a simple database.

Haha, well actually we could do that regardless. The purpose of the giveaway is to source more ideas for what people actually want to do with cryptocurrencies, and to make sure our product can serve those use cases.

All of the examples you gave don’t need a decentralised cryptocurrency and I reckon could be done more easily with a regular database.

Unless you can give a reason why those examples require decentralisation then, as much as I respect your attempt at finding an actual use for decentralised Merkel trees, I ultimately think it’s doomed to failure.

I can offer a few reasons, but they might not convince you. Tokens are provably scarce, meaning the supply is limited and can't be changed by the creator of the currency. They're easily exchangeable, which means they can move between platforms and communities. Finally, they can interact with smart contracts, meaning people can enforce the way the token behaves.

I'm actually interested if you can think of a reason too. This is an incredibly difficult brainstorming exercise. So many ICO's have failed to justify their use-cases, but tokens are so interesting that I have to believe there are good reasons to use them. Is there any case that you do find particularly helpful?

If you think your users are smart enough to figure out all you've mentioned, then they are smart enough to use databases for their usecases.

I think there are lots of people out there that can come up with interesting use cases, without being software developers and not wanting to learn about databases. If something like this can make it easier for more people to be inventive, then I think that is a good thing.

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