Two questions:
1) Why would a user prefer an app that "runs on Bitcoin"?
2) Why would I as a developer want to target those users?
1) Why would a user prefer an app that "runs on Bitcoin"?
2) Why would I as a developer want to target those users?
Or perhaps you would just like to take down the entire bitcoin network if you ever become mildly successful.
It's a lot like that.
Both types of trading (crypto and public market) are gambling. The difference is that some public securities have intrinsic value (dividends and voting rights), whereas crypto mostly doesn't.
If bitcoin only were silly technologists playing around with pie-in-the-sky software projects, that would be one thing. But people's money is being stolen. Lives are being ruined, for real. Real people suffer because of this technology, and criminals prosper.
That is an objective evil. The sooner bitcoin dies, the better for humanity.
I wrote a reply recently to an article posted here by someone pro-Bitcoin - an "early adopter" as they call themselves - who has more critical thinking, however they've been indoctrinated into and must have ignored looking into or trying to understand the pitfalls in order to remain indoctrinated, and to which their own bias of being financially incentivized into seeing the positive in Bitcoin has allowed them to be misguided; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25551114 - you'll probably be aligned with what I say.
TL;DR - It's not helpful to use inflammatory language like "[all] Bitcoiners today are extremely gullible."
This is interesting, but I'd still want to know a specific.
Most document authentication works fine with a centralized source of truth. It could be a postal service (the postmark proves a document was mailed at a certain time), Docusign, Google Drive, or just plain email.
> decentralized DNS
DNS is already decentralized. You can choose whom you trust, or you can build your own DNS database and just trust yourself.
Perhaps you meant "decentralized domain registries" (like the way Verisign manages official .com registrations).
That's more interesting, but it would also be terrifying. A bug or 51% attack could kill your entire company if you trusted that registry.
I suspect you would also get some sophisticated attempts at buying up millions or billions of the domain names in order to sell them later at a profit, which essentially centralizes all those names.
> provably fair gambling
Why would you need a blockchain for this? Couldn't you cryptographically sign each round of bets without a blockchain?
> prediction markets
No idea what the application is here, but curious for your explanation.
As proof, I offer the number of domains that have been seized by random <insert 3 letter agency here> censoring authorities over the course of the internet's existence.
You and your DNS provider are free to ignore those seizures if you want. You could have a whole network of people who ignores those kinds of things. Maybe someone could call it the Dark Web, and it could be 20+ years old.
Epic Games with Unreal Engine/Fortnite seems to be on the verge of creating a Ready Player One ecosystem, and there will be no need for them to utilize Bitcoin - however an immutable blockchain database could be ideal, there could also be a legal framework they create and then democratically elected government laws in place to further that stance (enforce it with centralized authority if necessary).
I'm looking for specifics, though. As a typical person, what problem do I have that these solve? And why is that problem large enough that I will go out of my way to find a dApp to solve it?
> There's no place to say "I did X" with my item in a way every other app agrees happened, without relying on a central party, and this is really what Bitcoin solves.
That doesn't prove that anything happened with X at all, though. It just proves that someone logged it to a blockchain as such. There is no actual evidence that it's true, only that it's being retold to you as it was originally told to the blockchain.
Worse, there's no proof that any app is exclusively storing/retrieving data on a blockchain. As a user, I'd need a second app to verify that the first app actually did what it claimed -- logged my data to a public chain.
2) You target users who you think you can help or make money off of? You have to state your goal as a developer, can’t answer that for you.