> They talk about decentralization which has been done so often before
What’s an example from earlier generations?
What’s an example from earlier generations?
And they are a total empty space. Because it‘s complex to use ans is missing the network effect which is really really hard to get without a central company doing marketing in some form
It’s not a product that needs to be marketed to end users. Think AWS not Amazon.com. The people building products on it will do the marketing.
You might say "those are just digital abstractions — this is native." But so what? What does it matter if my money transfer routine talks to a bank or broadcasts a new block? It does the same thing in the end, except that the blockchain version is slower and more expensive.
Blockchain offers no concrete advantages over traditional finance except for decreased regulation. That's why it's so hard to argue in favour of blockchain as a replacement for traditional financial systems. You end up constructing weak arguments, because you can't play to blockchain's strengths.
Let me present the strong argument in favour of blockchain: "Blockchain helps you make lots of anonymous money through pump & dumps, ransomware, and other assorted scams." This is an unethical argument, but a concretely fact-based one. The track record speaks for itself.
Look how much more robust the strong argument is than any argument about decentralization for its own sake, or about the "native"ness of bitcoin transfers. Occam's razor suggests that the strong argument is the driving force behind blockchain adoption, not the weak ones. Nobody cares about decentralization. They just wanna make a buck.
Obviously this is a double edged sword; having no human override is actually a very bad thing for many things. You can code in human overrides of course, but they are transparent to all parties. When you make a bank transfer or a PayPal transaction, it’s 100% opaque. The terms are not truly binding and it can be reverted or altered for any or no reason.
I’m not arguing this is the reason for valuations currently, but I find it pretty surprising how many people can’t or won’t understand the value of a neutral execution environment for financial transactions. It is not something that exists elsewhere.
2. We aren’t necessarily the target market. Think more large investment / B2B transactions not consumer payments.
Yeah, they can tell that to my lawyer. Banks don't make the rules — regulators do, and I can file suit to have a judge enforce those rules. If my money disappears, I can hold my bank to account.
But a judge can't rewrite the blockchain, so cryptocurrency has become a safe haven for fraud. You've got it exactly backwards: It's blockchain-based banking that puts customers at risk of predation.
> I find it pretty surprising how many people can’t or won’t understand the value of a neutral execution environment for financial transactions
If it had value for banks, banks would be using it. If it has value for customers, then tell me: As a customer, which desirable guarantees does blockchain provide me that banking regulations don't?
It's only with Web 2 that we became addicted to offloading everything to central providers. Their siren call was too much to resist and now they have all our data. It wasn't designed to be like this, we can just go back but a lot lack the skills to roll the full stack now sans AWS/Google Cloud.