Comment by chrisco255 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chrisco255 | Hacker News Reader

Yes. Decentralized finance is coming and it's maybe the most important technology of the 21st century. If you want anything resembling autonomy and liberty in the future, and if you want to avoid ending up in a world straight out of a Black Mirror episode, I recommend supporting open-source monetary blockchain systems like Bitcoin and Ethereum. There will be an attempt at some point by governments to centralize blockchain technology. China is already doing this. Western societies should embrace freedom and openness in finance. Besides being aligned with our core principles, it's incredibly powerful, and it can power the capital infrastructure in very innovative ways if we let it.

To your point, cryptocurrency enables reconstructing the entire financial infrastructure on blockchain. Everything from car loans (https://twitter.com/DMMDAO) to rental real estate (https://twitter.com/RealTPlatform) to interest-bearing savings accounts (https://compound.finance/) to derivatives and trading (https://www.synthetix.io/), to decentralized storage (https://sia.tech/), etc. There's hundreds of projects I follow regularly and I find new ones cropping up all the time. There's a Cambrian explosion of apps in blockchain right now.

I recommend reading https://bankless.substack.com/ and https://thedefiant.substack.com/ to stay on top of the topic. Watch some of the presentations from ETHDenver 2020 that was held 2 months ago (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgz9NU06t_FkT0Py1Vadczw)

Follow some of the thought leaders on Twitter, et al. Tons of promise in this space.

The OP specifically asked to leave cryptocurrencies out of it and judging by the post does not consider finance to be a 'substantial' example. Are there any concrete examples where blockchains are both useful and necessary?

Yes I literally posted 5. The disentanglement of blockchain from cryptocurrency is senseless. The entire point of a blockchain is to serve as a distributed ledger. If it's truly decentralized, it has to be monetized somehow to incentivize the maintenance of the blockchain.

Hyperledger is a blockchain that is mainly used for these private blockchains that are used in corporate settings. However, a public chain has 100% uptime, is permissionless, and is by far the most useful application of the tech.

https://www.baseline-protocol.org/ Baseline Protocol is a collaboration between Ernst & Young and Microsoft to use Ethereum as a secure, cross-enterprise business process collaboration layer, which is powerful but you'll have to some knowledge of how back offices in enterprises currently work in order to grasp it.

Finance is incredibly substantial. Everything you know is powered by finance. It's a multi hundred trillion dollar industry.

You haven't explained how blockchain is both useful and necessary in finance. The useful part you asserted without elaborating, the necessary part I don't see.

wow, you did not understand almost anything from that post.

> and if you want to avoid ending up in a world straight out of a Black Mirror episode, I recommend supporting open-source monetary blockchain systems

Could you provide a reason why, with some examples?

Because if Government-run blockchains become the norm, they'll be able to dictate whatever you spend your money on and you'll have no recourse. There will be no cash alternative. China's social credit system is a perfect example, also shown in Black Mirror. If governments can have control over both behavior and spending in such a way, they own you. You're in 1984.

Ok, but why wouldn't governments simply prohibit the use of these systems then?

It seems easy to do because anyone wanting to pay or be paid has to somehow advertise this.

Some will, some won't. The ones that don't will win the 21st century. The ones who embrace draconian measures and disincentivize innovation to protect stale and outdated institutions will lose big time.

That’s a very big claim without supporting evidence. Remember when the internet was going to bring freedom everywhere and China’s economy would fall behind until they embraced democracy? That was gospel in many quarters in the 90s but there’s a reason it’s not mentioned much any more.

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