I'm cyrrently studying for a Certified Blockchain Professional exam - see https://shkspr.mobi/blog/tag/certified-blockchain-profession...
My mind isn't made up. But I'm struggling to find use cases which fit the Blockchain model.
My mind isn't made up. But I'm struggling to find use cases which fit the Blockchain model.
One killer feature that doesn't get nearly enough hype is uptime. Check out these stats: https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/bitcoin-uptime/ The last incident to cause downtime for bitcoin was in 2013. Ethereum has never had downtime.
Another is speed. People like to talk about how slow web3 is, but even Ethereum is super fast compared to a traditional banking transfer. Traditional accounting isn't expected to be instant, so it has a lot of waiting periods and days-long SLAs.
Also trust. Not everyone can trust their local bank or local government. And even if they can, why should the default preference be to have a company with a spreadsheet tell me how many assets they have marked to my name? I'd rather have a decentralized ledger that doesn't require me to place my trust in an individual company or government.
You can't really build these features without some sort of "blockchain". You could try to put together a consortium of companies or individuals to run a shared database with consensus and vote about administration, having it backed by contracts that would be enforceable by world governments. That'd get you 95% of the way there, but it'd still be less good than a public blockchain run by volunteers that provides the same trustless features.
Uptime is legitimately amazing. But when you look at the computational speed - a Raspberry Pi on a UPS is probably more powerful.
Trust is great. How do you do a chargeback on a fraudulent transaction on Ethereum?
There are some amazing theoretical gains for Blockchain technology. I hope they become practical in the near future.
If you believe that all the world is really the divine right of the queen, I suppose sending payments instantly within the UK is more than sufficient.
> Uptime is legitimately amazing. But when you look at the computational speed - a Raspberry Pi on a UPS is probably more powerful.
Way more powerful, but practically useless, as 100% uptime globally is the requirement.
> Trust is great. How do you do a chargeback on a fraudulent transaction on Ethereum?
Blockchains completely prevent chargeback fraud by simply not allowing for reversal of transactions. You might not want this feature if you're buying a cup of coffee, but it's very important if you're dealing with large sums.
Phone credit based economies still exist in Africa. They have internet but no banking infrastructure. Using a blockchain allows people to create accounts and build a credit history as opposed to phone credit balances.
The Gates foundation mentioned a lot of pain points in direct giving was the fees taken along the way. Again, something that could be looked at with crypto.
Digital licenses - they aren’t transferable because the resale market doesn’t give returns to the creators. With NFT licenses you could trade them with fixed royalties going back to the creator.
Etc