I don't think there's that much disagreement over the effectiveness of blockchain for managing decentralized ledgers (cryptocurrencies). There's rather more contention about the applicability of blockchain to other spaces.
Agreed. A lot of people have forgotten to ask the question - do I really need a decentralized and trustless ledger?
I haven't heard any convincing yes answers to all of these questions outside of financial instruments.
But there is no general answer. It depends on the circumstances.
One fairly strong legitimate use case is people who are consistently shunned by credit card networks. Lots of people working in adult industries, weed (in states where it's legal), certain high risk spaces... though _even then_ it's not about decentralization, just abut needing some form of competition (debit card network?)
Meanwhile there are real costs to the decentralized networks
Suffice to say that this would likely be very against a bunch of KYC money laundering laws, but it's a decent trick
Cash is not decentralized. Governments can print as much as they want.
The fact that gov't can print money has roughly the same effect as speculation has on cryptocurrencies
I find it telling that places where the government is bullish on cryptocurrencies (Venezuela, Moscow) have reputations as places with high amounts of graft.
The math is theoretically sound. Anyone disagreeing with that is a fool.
A good example is the argument over network control. The mathematics of blockchain very precisely describe what percentage of accumulated mining power introduces the opportunity to defeat distributed consensus. But it's the fact that there is a human behavioral incentive to try and accumulate that aggregate mining power that might be a real problem, not the math. Granted that's a low likelihood event.
This dichotomy emerges in countless different facets of blockchain, and I think is the simplest way of delineating the line between believers and naysayers.
Why do I want that?
> you want to build truly denctralized digital identity, this is perfect
That sounds useful. The technique of using a blockchain for distributed consensus has been around a long time now; why hasn't this killer app identity system emerged yet?
> Its basically a history layer on top of TCP/IP
That doesn't seem accurate. Do you mean that it could be that? Is there any chance of scaling a blockchain to that level of activity?
Why do you expect digital identity to be solved by blockchain in just 10 years with only the last 3 of them having had any serious investments. Not sure what universal rule it is you think it's not following.
It's accurate in perspective of both 2nd hand market and digital identity. The network is the concensus model that validates the history of the transactions and allow you to claim if something is historically an ebook owned by Bill-Gates or not. If you don't think that's valuable you haven't spend enough time in the artmarket to understand how humans apply value to things of basically no actual value (other than what other humans apply to it)
My question in the identity system was actually an honest one (though I don't blame you for having me pegged as a skeptic and answering as such): why isn't this a thing yet? 10 years seems like a long time; 3 years seems like long enough for me to have heard of at least one promising work in progress system. What are the challenges?
You need scarcity in a digital world because you need things to be unique sometimes or have a unique history and because we need a way to establish "experience points" and to leave a trail that is uniquely yours and so that we can transfer that from one domain to another. That doesn't mean everything have to have a history or that we shouldn't take advantage of the Copy/Paste abilities digital gives us but there are plenty of areas where it's important to have scarcity.
Some exampels are:
Voting
Intellectual Property
Currency
Contracts
Documentation
Som even more interesting although more speculative areas IMO are: As a base for AI (there should be a cost associated with everything AI do the closer we come to Generalized AI) The ability for the individual to own their own data while still making it available to others (This can apply to everything from healthcare to buyer data)
I am of the belief that you want more fluidity in those areas the more digital our interactions become. Because that actually increases the need for "micro" agreements and history trails across organisationer or between humans. In other words I want a world where it's very easy for two or more parties to make agreements in the digital domain without being hooked up to some specific organisations interest. Just like I can freely trade my old book with the person next door.
If you have a secondhand market you have the ability to freely move between organizations and people without any need for a middle man who
With regards to the challenges for a Identity system it actually goes hand in hand with the second hand market in the sense that you want the ability to be able to know that a person/digital entity is what she/he/it say claim they are. The best way IMO is to create a unique finger print through our accumulated behaviors.
I wrote an essay about this a while back:
http://000fff.org/the-ghost-protocol-digital-identity-for-im...
But it will take time because it has to be a bottom up approach and it will require a lot more accumulation of our behavior plus perhaps some large player like FB, Google or Amazon to start accepting it. But that's why the second hand market is interesting in that it could allow for it to happen without big players.