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> All those things will never break among the common folk.

To be fair, when I was a 10 year old kid in the nineties, I'd never ever suspect that everyone and their grandma* would be so internet savvy as they are.

* Obviously not all grandparents ;-) But I've seen quite a few grandparents of whom I'd never suspect to use internet services like WhatsApp.

"All those things will never break among the common folk."

Just like normal folk will never use TCP/IP, know HTML etc?

Nobody needs to know that something runs on a blockchain or how NFTs work. Yes you need to know now but in 10 years my mum will use these things without having any idea what they are. Same as she's using an ipad now without knowing objective C or any underlying protocols and tech.

> Yes you need to know now but in 10 years my mum will use these things without having any idea what they are

Sure but she will use the Spotify app or the Sotheby app to buy NFTs

Spotify and Sotheby on the other hand they will not even use a blockchain. Just like Coinbase doesn't use a blockchain

This whole decentralization mania solely work when people are are terribly scared of something: Government diluting their purchasing power via printing money and inflation.

That's a really deeply rooted thing in our brain as governments did that since the stone age. That's the only killer app of decentralization. As shown by the marketcap of king BTC and the success of exchanges like Coinbase and Binance.

NFTs, DeFi...all the other stuff...the user doesn't hate Spotify or Sotheby or the Google Store , but let's say for a moment that it does..well even if the ease of use and fees of DeFi were on par with legacy companies (they are not)...the consumer will always keep using the legacy company product and ask the government to tax them more. So they'd have the best of both worlds: a functioning product and a way to express their hatred

I disagree. Decentralization makes it possible to cut out the middle man, Sotheby is no longer needed to do art deals, you can buy directly via smart contract. Will some people buy via Sotheby's still because they provide value in curating items? Sure but they will have much more competition than they do now.

It also makes new things possible, for instance the original artist could get a cut of every resale of his art. People can own parts of art, music etc. Artists can go directly to their fans.

Another example is Defi which also cuts out the middleman. I want to send you 100 usd. I have euro, right now I need to go to my bank app and they will convert for a pretty big fee , they will also take 5 days to send it to you if it's international and god help me if there are holidays involved. With defi I send instantly and I will be able to choose what kind of value I send and you will be able to choose what kind of value you want to receive. I don't even need to know. I could send you euros and you receive in usd, it passes through a defi smart contract on the way without any of us knowing. If I'm a farmer and I have corn futures I could probably pay in that and you would still just get usd. Again cuts out the middleman.

Does it help that it's also censorship resistant and trustless? Yes. The ease of use is not on par with legacy for my mum.. yet. But that was also the case in 1995 with the internet.

> Sotheby is no longer needed to do art deals, you can buy directly via smart contract.

Sotheby's was never about the actual transaction, there has historically been little technical barrier in this area - the real barrier has been grift, fakes, and limited market pools. Crypto doesn't solve any of these things, so they will remain the real barrier.

> for instance the original artist could get a cut of every resale of his art. People can own parts of art, music etc. Artists can go directly to their fans.

There is no technical barrier to any of these things now, other than the difficulty of setting up contracts. You can speculate that making the contracts easier to set up will result in lots more of it; but that is a pretty strong assumption that this is the "real" barrier. Like the fine art case, it may well not be. I suspect that in some areas it will result in some interesting things that are low enough value (at least per transaction) that nobody bothered to figure out an agreement on them, particularly across borders. But this has a huge risk of being shut down for being at minimum tax-evasion adjacent, even if useful.

> I could send you euros and you receive in usd, it passes through a defi smart contract on the way without any of us knowing.

This is easily done now by traditional financial transactions, the only problem is the FX risk and transaction fees may be a) higher than you want and b) unpredictable.

Neither of those things are "solved" by using defi, you are basically hoping that the fees are/remain smaller, and possibly handwaving about the FX risk on some future with the underlying is useful to both parties.

All these products are amazing technical feats, but they all aim to do one thing: cutting the middleman

The middleman is a social necessity, not solely a technical one. Retail doesn't want the responsibility. Is that simple, so enter the middleman there to absorb risk.

A protocol can't be a middleman. A middleman should be capable of being sued and be the fall guy if something goes wrong. Mostly it should be there to give peace of mind to the customer.

A protocol can't give peace of mind to the customer given that such code can't be read by 99.99999999999% of the population.

The middleman needs to exist to give peace of mind to the customer, and as I said it can't be a protocol. So it can only be a company with a brand, spending millions in Ads to earn the trust of the consumer so that he'd feel confident to put his money in it and in turn can sleep tight at night, knowing that his money are with an institution which is somehow trustworthy.

Nobody in the crypto world ever makes a market study or a revenue projection, or even a survey among the population and users.

People go and build stuff. Projecting themselves into the retail user. The only problem is that the crypto founder is not representative of the retail user, not even one bit. The crypto founder wants the responsibility, wants to kick the the final penalty in the World Cup final or be with the ball in your hands and 2 mins to win the SuperBowl. That is not the mindset of the retail user.

"We ship the products we'd want to buy" as Steve Jobs said in a keynote...only he used it as catchphrase to get the applauses and sell Apple to the world and to Wall Street.

People in crytpo , they do it for real. You never do it for real. You end up with your butt on the ground and nothing to show for financially.

A regular centralized company wouldn't want to necessarily use the ETH blockchain. They would use a private blockchain for internal auditing or supply chain partnerships, and would probably build it on something like HyperLedger https://www.hyperledger.org/use/fabric (What?! The Linux Foundation??).

Binance did fork ETH and has built out the Binance Smart Chain. Problem is that is still centralized. The unresolved debate is whether its the code or the network effects that matter.

Oh by the way: Bitcoin is open sourced too. Here's the link! https://github.com/bitcoin

Why would any company build a private blockchain? Private companies have top to bottom control of their systems, which means they don't need proof of work or proof of stake or any other system to establish trust: they can just issue PKI keys to employees from a database.

Private blockchain has never made any sense: you just give all your employees private keys and move on with your life.

EDIT: Which is to say, I'm sure a lot of people are saying they're doing it, and it is yet to be for anything more then to say "we're doing blockchain" to investors and the public.

EDIT 2: Reading through the Hyperledger case studies seems to bare this out as well - the implementations are comparatively small, and keep desperately asking the question "was blockchain vital to any of this, or was the actual innovation you just finally automated something into a database?"

Because consortiums of companies exist?

Because companies don't really trust each other and have huge legal teams review 100+ pg contracts? Even internally trust is lacking at times?

It does have some efficiencies. They are likely tiny compared to separating money and state, like we managed to separate religion and state.

Clearly we have different interpretations of the case studies. Walmart seems interested.

But I guess its all just buzzwords and speculation! All these people wasting their time on something so obviously useless. You should let them know!!

Walmart have literally thousands if not tens of thousands of product lines, but after an initial study are not using their hyperledger implementation for more then 25 according to the website.

But that's not the real problem: the real problem is, how can blockchain contribute anything to this problem for them? The process of validating the origin of goods depends on remotely uploading certificates of authenticity - an artifact produced off-chain.

From that point on, nothing else matters - since it all depends on whether that certificate is legitimate, trust is external to the chain.

The rest does not require "blockchain" at all and is actively made more difficult by it - since every other step is just regular logistics tracking, something Walmart is very good at.

Again: what possible benefit is blockchain bringing here? The original artifact is off chain, the goods in question are offchain and the cited benefit is not "improved security" -- it's "quicker look ups". But...that would've been achieved by just scanning barcode numbers into a database at every location (which again: is trust, it's not a fact which is established on-chain).

So yes, I do believe people are wasting their time on something obviously useless - IBM was involved and their biggest contribution to my country was to call 25 million people logging on to do a census on one night a denial of service attack. Walmart executives aren't technical - they need to know "what the blockchain could do" and IBM sells them some snakeoil.

> Bitcoin is open source

Bitcoin is open source, all right. But the first mover advantage and marketing campaign that it has...well it's insurmountable at this point.

> Problem is that is still centralized

The world doesn't give a damn about that. The only killer app of decentralization as of today is the ability to give people peace of mind that the unit of account they use to store their wealth cannot be tempered with by anybody.

Literally the only application of decentralization was the ability to avoid the ever present threat of money printing because people are scared of inflation and rightfully so. Ever since the stone age people have been diluted by the the central currency authority, it's a fear that is deeply rooted in our brains.

People aren't similarly scared about Paypal or Visa processing their transactions.

Fear is the greatest motivation and fear of inflation is the only thing giving the decentralization thing any market. Everybody , ranging from the supermarket employee to Stanley Druckenmiller...they are all scared as hell about inflation.

And it shows in the marketcap and price of king BTC

BTC gives those 7 billions people a way to express such fears in the market whereas they could only buy Gold, Silver, and Inflation indexed bonds before BTC came about.

>>The only killer app of decentralization as of today is the ability to give people peace of mind that the unit of account they use to store their wealth cannot be tempered with by anybody.

Being able to use a tamper-proof currency in financial applications that are decentralized means one's holdings of that currency remain tamper-proof even when they are employing them in financial applications. That is the value that Ethereum's smart contract functionality provides.

> financial applications

Legacy financial applications are fine. People who are afraid of inflation just convert BTC>USD the sole amount they need to use the financial application and that's it.

Also DeFi apps are very illiquid and extremely complicated to use.

Finally let's not hide the truth: 99% of financial apps are based on loans. Crypto loans are doomed because people don't want to borrow crypto as they anticipate huge appreciation and such appreciation would leave them in a hole financially speaking.

Also without an identity system a borrower can just steal crypto, and never pay back interest or principal

Also the lender requires high interest to separate themselves from their crypto considering how novel is the system and how frequent hacks and as I said people outright fleeing are.

The most successful crypto loans are the ones denominated in USD and happening on centralized platforms (and those crypto never leave the platform as they are used to short)

>>Legacy financial applications are fine.

They are not at all. Governments and financial institutions can lock funds, do 'hair cuts', as they did in the European financial crisis, and engage in other such shenanigans. They can debank or otherwise exclude people and companies from the payment system, or refuse them banking services at all.

But really, your statement says it all. This is what anti-Ethereum advocacy amounts to: advocating for the legacy financial system, and the one Satoshi Nakamoto specifically criticized, including in the Bitcoin white paper:

https://www.bitcoin.com/bitcoin.pdf

"Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments. While the system works well enough for most transactions, it still suffers from the inherent weaknesses of the trust based model. Completely non-reversible transactions are not really possible, since financial institutions cannot avoid mediating disputes. The cost of mediation increases transaction costs, limiting the minimum practical transaction size and cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions, and there is a broader cost in the loss of ability to make non-reversible payments for nonreversible services. With the possibility of reversal, the need for trust spreads.

Merchants must be wary of their customers, hassling them for more information than they would otherwise need. A certain percentage of fraud is accepted as unavoidable. These costs and payment uncertainties can be avoided in person by using physical currency, but no mechanism exists to make payments over a communications channel without a trusted party. What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party. "

>>Also DeFi apps are very illiquid and extremely complicated to use.

Uniswap had $10 billion in trading volume over the last week. That's in the same league as major exchanges like Bitfinex and Kraken. It's also extremely easy to use, with no sign-up/registration required, and a trade being possible with 3 clicks.

> They are not at all. Governments and financial institutions can lock funds, do 'hair cuts', as they did in the European financial crisis, and engage in other such shenanigans. They can debank or otherwise exclude people and companies from the payment system, or refuse them banking services at all.

All that is signed off and approved by the popultion. In the beginning the nascent financial system which today is labled "legacy" was the wild west as well. Then it was an organic growth of scrutiny because it was demanded by the population. Every megasocial system such as US, EU, China...even North Korea organizes itself based on the population desires.

All those things aren't imposed from above by an omniscent and evil dictator or done in the dark, the Patriot Act is supported by the majority of the population, so it's all the rest.

People accept and embrace the government playing the role of policeman in the financial and capital markets.

You are the fringe minority, and frankly people in the cryptospace lack the pragmatism to understand that they are a fringe minority.

People who are the fringe minority should hide and find holes in the power of the controlling authority and USE THEM AND KEEP THEM TO THEMSELVES opposed to creating mega structures to invite and pursue those who sign off and approve the aforementioned authority. Such attempts will fail because the target demographics is totally onboard with the authority.

> Uniswap had $10 billion in trading volume over the last week. That's in the same league as major exchanges like Bitfinex and Kraken. It's also extremely easy to use, with no sign-up/registration required, and a trade being possible with 3 clicks.

Sure in the ETH ecosystem, tell me again where can I spend ETH or Stablecoins based on ETH? Nowhere.

>>All that is signed off and approved by the popultion.

Same with the central banks that inflate the currency. They are created by the government that the population approves of. You're making a selective argument against the principle of financial self-sovereignty that underlies the entire Bitcoin and cryptocurrency movement, that just happens to lead to a conclusion that decentralized finance is bad, whereas a decentralized currency - bitcoin - is good.

>>Then it was an organic growth of scrutiny because it was demanded by the population. Every megasocial system such as US, EU, China...even North Korea organizes itself based on the population desires.

There is nothing organic about massively complex political systems. They are as artificial/non-organic as anything else produced by modern human civilization. They are nascent forms of human organization susceptible to massive corruption and rent-seeking. Putting all that aside, majority approval does not justify violating people's basic liberties/human-rights, like the right to engage with other consenting adults in mutually voluntary economic interactions. That is true whether you are talking about the US, or North Korea.

>>Such attempts will fail because the target demographics is totally onboard with the authority.

What the majority approves of changes when technology changes. When the social costs of enforcing a particular type of law that limits voluntary interaction massively increases, for example as a result of the advent of widely accessible strong encryption, then the majority will become more opposed to enforcing such laws.

>>Sure in the ETH ecosystem

ETH-based assets will gain mass-adoption soon enough. And when they do, your final plausibly pro-crypto objection to DeFi will have disappeared. All you'll be left with is the argument that cryptocurrency, as a whole, is bad for society, by enabling non-compliance with politically enacted forms of centralized gatekeeping.

At that point, it will be even more obvious now that an argument against decentralized finance is an argument against the entire principle that Bitcoin is based on, and was created to advance.

> Same with the central banks that inflate the currency. They are created by the government that the population approves of. You're making a selective argument against the principle of financial self-sovereignty that underlies the entire Bitcoin and cryptocurrency movement

The fed is non elected. there is a separation between Govt and the Fed

Public cannot vote on the Fed Fund Rate

>All those things will never break among the common folk. The common folk wants ease of use above anything else

In my experience the common folk want number go up above anything else.

> All those things will never break among the common folk.

You should google "NFT".

Not exactly broken among the common folk, although there is a sudden wave of artists chasing whale money.

What stops Spotify or Sotheby or any other proper company from forking off the ETH blockchain and sell NFT as a service?

Nothing..they won't even have to pay because the project is opensource.

They can solely focus on ease of use and marketing which is what proper companies do best and just take the technical part without any compensation.

This is also the reason why Larry Page is among the richest men in the world and Linux' Linus is a nobody who is only known and relevant among nerds

> What stops Spotify or Sotheby or any other proper company from forking off the ETH blockchain and sell NFT as a service?

It's as saying if Facebook released all of its code then suddenly it would get competition. It wouldn't.

There's the whole infrastructure behind it: thousands of nodes running the blockchain, thousands of applications running on it, developers in this sphere are very scarce because it's so complicated. If you wanted to try to create yet another "Ethereum killer", you would also need to convince developers to write apps on your chain, and people to run the nodes.

By the way, to say that Linus Torvalds is a nobody is a ridiculous thing. His net worth is humongous to begin with.

> There's the whole infrastructure behind it: thousands of nodes running the blockchain, thousands of applications running on it, developers in this sphere are very scarce because it's so complicated. If you wanted to try to create yet another "Ethereum killer", you would also need to convince developers to write apps on your chain, and people to run the nodes.

Are those things really needed to ...you know commercially sell the product to the public, give them ease of use and make money in the process?

Because if we must ride the blockchain thing for Venture Capital funding or to look hip among the public on twitter...well we can stick an ethereum logo on it and invite Vitalik to the company podcast.

It's much easier and accomplishes the goal in much more straightforward manner.

Of course you can do the Binance thingy (copy of Ethereum and have complete centralization). I don't believe that will prevail in the long term. Decentralization is a must.