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Comment by brokensegue | Hacker News Reader

dapps are a dud. just look at all the dapps eth has

Seriously, do take a look at it: https://dappradar.com/

The most used dapp had just over 4000 users in the last 24 hours, while CryptoKitties, arguably the most famous dapp, didn't even have 400.

All the most used dapps are games and distributed exchanges for coins. Distributed exchanges do not justify the existence of these coins (which are meant to power distributed apps not just be tokens for speculation). The games don't need to be dapps they are just novelties.

Find me a dapp that isn't one of those two things with appreciable usage and I'll be impressed.

You can start looking into Dai which serves as a stable coin using collateral or more generally into Security Tokens (here an explanation on STO https://medium.com/crypto-oracle/prepare-yourself-the-securi...) Those are going to be big very soon!

I'm well informed already about these things. Note that neither of them have significant adoption.

Security tokens are a Bad idea.

Dai is basically only useful for speculating on cryptocurrencies and so I dismiss it like I dismiss exchange dapps. This whole industry can't be built on speculating on the value of nonces.

Could you elaborate on why you believe security tokens to be a bad idea?

To quote some random other person here:

> It's awesome until your private key gets stolen and suddenly a hacker in Russia owns your house.

I like the legal system. The transactions I'm involved with are already cheap and the non-cheap transactions aren't made cheaper with the blockchain.

Why could not you have both ? No one said that you need Securities transactions to be irreversible. STO can bring more liquidity to property assets and simplify dramatically otherwise complex financial operation (title emission, splitting of subsidiaries and so on). I do hate the point that talks about adoption when we are talking of a technology that has less than 5 years of age (Ethereum for that matter). I hear it a lot and I cannot stop myself to think that this is the same kind of reasoning could have been use again Amazon in 1996 (Bookstore are a small business and Internet has no adoption)

bitcoin is closer to 10 years old really

Stable coins are a terrible idea that one day people will realize as such. The economics of a stable coin make no sense. All it takes for it to be totally useless is just enough people to refuse to accept it or the market crashing to the point where trade volume is so low you can never cash out. Just because there is 1 for 1 fiat backing, doesn’t mean you can actually claim your money.

I’ve been at BEF the last couple of days and http://www.dapp.com is exhibiting. They are launching a service to help promote these kinds of decentralized apps.

Might be a bit too early. Don’t know if the market is even close to ready.

yeah the issue isn't promotion. there's just no compelling services

I havent tried using them, but what makes them stink?

Expensive/Slow?

Ensuring the integrity of your distributed application by running the same code on every node in the network is a fundamentally bad idea. It only makes sense in zero trust, monetary applications like Bitcoin and Ethereum itself - or speculative tokens built on top of them.

> It only makes sense in zero trust, monetary applications like Bitcoin and Ethereum itself - or speculative tokens built on top of them.

Which only make sense in a very narrow "technically correct" kind of way. From a larger perspective they still don't make sense. Pissing away small countries worth of electricity to validate an incredibly small number of transactions is a horrible idea.

...And that is just one of the deep, fundamental flaws in blockchain-based currency.

The duplicated code can be as simple as a few cryptographic operations for each broadcasted transaction. This can easily scale to tens of thousands of nodes and transactions per hour without requiring significant computing resources over the baseline of running a high bandwidth internet node.

When the consistency algorithm is proof of work chains, or when the proof of work is used to control the scarcity and disbursement of the valuable token, only then you have the whole "world turning into fucking Mordor" problem.

No connection to the actual world outside of the blockchain.

So mostly they are gambling apps (with source of randomness the blockchain itself), exchanges, or artificially scarce "collectibles" (like cryptokitties).

turn that dapp into a dab

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