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Comment by tastroder | Hacker News Reader

>For all its downsides, Bitcoin is the last exciting open standard I can remember that has done well and maybe has a future.

If you don't mind elaborating, this point comes up rather frequently nowadays about bitcoin/other blockchain tech. So far the only thing that fell into the "exciting" category for me was ipfs and even that didn't really convince me that it's a viable thing.

I get that blockchain tech is an industry nowadays but from my outside perspective 99% of it and the applications they promote seem rather, for the lack of a better word, self serving. Either that or it's some niche that I don't see will get any mass adoption anytime soon.

Lots of these technologies seem to be technical solutions to problems that are social in nature and thus, again - from my outside perspective, prone to failure. Proof of X tech often looks like stuff that's solved as soon as parties agree on using it in the first place.

edit: formatting

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> > For all its downsides, Bitcoin is the last exciting open standard I can remember

> I get that blockchain tech is an industry nowadays but from my outside perspective 99% of it and the applications they promote seem rather, for the lack of a better word, self serving

Blockchain might have been as exciting as the internet at the start, but it has turned bad (i.e. been exploited for profit by big corporations at the user's expense) much more quickly. In my view it is because blockchain puts money before technology rather than the other way around, i.e. during the dot-com era it was often "let's just build something useful and worry about monetisation later" whereas with blockchain it is more "we've got the monetisation in place and we'll worry about actual use cases for the technology and mass user adoption later".

In other words it's a solution in search of a problem

I think its a bit more subtle than that. Imagine on one hand if a printing press was invented that outputs the printed material to anyone in the world for free. At first there could be lots of great materials printed with it, but then the question would be asked - can we start charging money for some of it? Imagine on the other hand if a silver church collection tray was invented that could collect money from anyone of that particular religious persuasion anywhere in the world. At first it could collect great amounts of money, but then the question would be asked - can we do anything else with this silver church collection tray besides collecting money?

I also put `ipfs` in that category, of ya, maybe this will be interesting / enabling.

Bitcoin is internet money. Yes, it is also totally full of scams, pump and dump schemes and everything else, but it is the nearest analog to the web for money anybody has come up with. It is decentralized, open, resistant to attack and open to everyone on the globe.

Whether it is viable from a political (and to some extent technical) aspect is still an open question, but as a standard it is pretty awesome.

I don't know if it will last or manage to deliver on its promises in the end, but for me it fits in the same mold as the original web.

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