It didn't spend its first 13 years up on blocks while its supporters yelled at the skeptical and embezzled money from everyone else.
> The first production of automobiles was by Karl Benz in 1888 in Germany and, under license from Benz, in France by Emile Roger. There were numerous others, including tricycle builders Rudolf Egg, Edward Butler, and Léon Bollée. Bollée, using a 650 cc (40 cu in) engine of his own design, enabled his driver, Jamin, to average 45 kilometres per hour (28 mph) in the 1897 Paris-Tourville rally. By 1900, mass production of automobiles had begun in France and the United States.
So, 11 years after production started, gas-powered cars were not only rather common, but there were rallies involving them.
11 years from introduction, no one has come up with a use-case for blockchain: https://hackernoon.com/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-... and https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustle...
This seems an odd claim to make. Currently there's hundreds of Cryptocurrencies using blockchains as a foundation, and more than half a trillion dollars tied up in them. Right now it seems like they're at least speculative investments. If this does not count as a use-case then we'd better break the news to essentially all of finance.
Years ago before the values jumped you could do plenty of actual currency things with cryptocurrencies: there were ATMs, you could buy beers at a pub or pay for server hosting (something I did myself), etc. Because of all of the speculation cryptocurrencies have generally become too volatile for that. Nobody wants to find out at the pub there was a market crash and they can't cover their outing. At the time though, it all worked and had incredibly low transaction fees.
Then there's the applications for areas like logistics, supply chain, that are all under development. IMO it has absolutely established itself as a technology and like everything new people were quick to try to apply it to every problem and found it largely didn't fit most places. That doesn't mean it isn't useful.
I heard it best put as: blockchain provides trustlessness at very high operational cost -- do we have a business case where trustlessness is a competitive advantage? If not, just use a database or equivalent
So like yes, you can implement insurance and messaging and contracts with blockchain. Is there a need to do that? Does it make sense? Would that business work? (Zero percent of such businesses have worked)
The sending money part is certainly a legitimate use. Unfortunately it's being totally broken by speculation on all the coins (not to mention high gas).
The tricky part of this, of course, is in the Bitcoin space “validity” hinges upon valuation. Unfortunately cryptocurrency valuation is based on narrative entirely, and narratives continue driving trading volumes even in the face of undeniable technological shortcomings, see e.g. the saga of continual unstable “stablecoin” implosions, or Ripple.
So, the great amazing disruptive technology that is going to completely change the world... broke as soon as a tiny fraction of the world start paying any attention to it.
> Then there's the applications for areas like logistics, supply chain, that are all under development.
Literally none of those applications require blockchain, and blockchain solves literally none of the problems in those domains.
> That doesn't mean it isn't useful.
You'd think that the great amazing disruptive technology that is going to completely change the world would actually show some useful applications by now.
This is shifting the goalposts massively. The original comment was that there was no use-case for Blockchain. You are also talking about a component of cryptocurrencies as if they were the whole. The issue with the viability of cryptocurrencies is not tied to the blockchain but rather human investor behaviour.
> Literally none of those applications require blockchain, and blockchain solves literally none of the problems in those domains.
I'm not sure what you've imagined the applications in question are but you appear to have invented them and decided they don't work; I didn't provide any specific examples.
If you want a specific example of where it's addressing things and is being put to use: Provenance. If you don't mind a bit of dry reading the ieee has a decent writeup on the value this provides and the problems it can address: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8909921
We're literally in a comment thread to a comment that compared blockchains to cars. And that was made as an argument against "blockchains are not disruptive".
> The issue with the viability of cryptocurrencies is not tied to the blockchain but rather human investor behaviour.
It doesn't matter. If the only thing that people are doing with this "amazing tech" is speculation, that's all it's good for.
> I'm not sure what you've imagined the applications in question are but you appear to have invented them and decided they don't work; I didn't provide any specific examples.
Indeed, you didn't. Because blockchain apologists very rarely do, since for 100% of cases the proposed blockchain solution doesn't solve the posited problem.
What you did say though was "Then there's the applications for areas like logistics, supply chain, that are all under development". And all the ones that I know of have exactly zero need for blockchain, and blockchain solves none of the problems in those areas.
> If you want a specific example of where it's addressing things and is being put to use: Provenance
1. Doesn't need blockchain
2. Blockchain doesn't solve the problem of "ensuring integrity of food labeling and efficient management of quality and contamination issues."
Let me quote from an article [1]
=== start quote ===
An illustration of the difference: In 2006, Walmart launched a system to track its bananas and mangoes from field to store. In 2009 they abandoned it because of logistical problems getting everyone to enter the data, and in 2017 they re-launched it (to much fanfare) on blockchain. If someone comes to you with “the mango-pickers don’t like doing data entry,” “I know: let’s create a very long sequence of small files, each one containing a hash of the previous file” is a nonsense answer, but “What if everyone keeps their records in a tamper-proof repository not owned by anyone?” at least addresses the right question!
...
It’s true that tampering with data stored on a blockchain is hard, but it’s false that blockchain is a good way to create data that has integrity.
...
Blockchain systems do not magically make the data in them accurate or the people entering the data trustworthy, they merely enable you to audit whether it has been tampered with. A person who sprayed pesticides on a mango can still enter onto a blockchain system that the mangoes were organic.
=== end quote ===
Bute yeah, the article does have a high "bullshit hype per number of words" ratio: Blockchain! Internet of Things!
[1] Part I: https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/ten-years-in-nobody-has-c...
Part II: https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustle...
If you apply that same low threshold of usefulness to blockchain then it became useful just as fast, if not faster.