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Comment by mypastself | Hacker News Reader

The jury is still out on whether or not blockchain’s originally intended purpose, currency, has value, and if it will see anything resembling widespread adoption in the future. I’m personally skeptical.

But almost all of the problems you list apply to blockchain uses other than cryptocurrency. The failures and scamminess of Web3, DAOs, oracles, and Proof-of-Stake are not arguments against the original Bitcoin whitepaper.

The “tech people” have definitely figured out something. The question is whether or not enough people really want to use whatever that something is.

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It's a distributed ledger that is verified via proof-of-work. People have decided to assign it speculative value, largely as a sort of fin-tech smart-banking pitch. Ultimately though, there just aren't many non-financial usecases for a _public_ distributed ledger. Simply verifying transactions doesn't solve much - you need to vet the _nature_ of the transaction to make sure that screwy things aren't happening using _other_ stores of value (not bound by the laws of proof-of-work). Centralization will appear to "solve" these problems, just as it does with USD.

That's why I feel that bitcoin is always going to be ripe for abuse and highly adjacent to scams, even if the original paper is impressive and an interesting result.

I think we’re mostly in agreement here, I just found it important to distinguish the original idea from the numerous questionable applications that have been developed in its wake.

Fair enough!

In the .com days, I was active in the e-commerce space, using public-key cryptography to solve problems. We had digital certificates, digital signatures, etc, which we used to solve various problems like authenticating and securing access to websites, creating encrypted and signed emails, etc.

One thing was non-repudiation, i.e. if I send you a digitally-signed email with a purchase order, then you can legally rely on it. There were some attempts to use similar techniques to allow trusted third parties to register documents, but nobody was willing to pay for the service.

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