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Comment by scyclow | Hacker News Reader

I'm not trying to swindle you. I'm trying to have an intelligent conversation. You don't need to call all my points bullshit :)

It depends on the level of guarantees you want for that data. If we're communicating, and you're okay with me changing my APIs, or even changing the data itself in ways we didn't previously agree upon, then you 100% don't need a blockchain. And if you don't have a lot of entities that need to coordinate on the data, then there might be an easier solution.

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And introducing a blockchain to the equation changes nothing about that! It doesn't magically make applications interoperate with each other, or make them consume each other's data, or force them to maintain API compatibility. At most, it provides a shared, public location for them to store data -- and even that has some very awkward limitations associated with it.

A lot of the blockchain boosterism I see online comes from a place of assuming that the blockchain represents a solution to a problem, and trying to work backwards from there. Avoid that.

Maybe we're just talking past each other, but this is the entire point of a smart contract platform. I deploy code to it, and you now have a guarantee forever on the interface of that code, as well as its implementation logic. If I'm running the same code on my server and you're hitting my API, then I can change the interface, change the logic, or mutate the data in ways not specified by that code.

So really when I say "applications" I'm referring specifically to other smart contracts.

Smart contracts that cost money to run on a virtual machine with less power than a Raspberry Pi. In order to access a DApp someone needs to buy into some cryptocurrency, providing some early holder the ability to cash out. The DApp user also has to trust that the smart contract doesn't have a stupid bug that will drain their wallet. Oh and thanks to the low transaction rate of a blockchain that DApp might never execute or have a flash crash type spike in cost.

It's a bunch of rent seeking bullshit on top of what could just be a web API. Storage on a blockchain is stupid expensive so there's oracles everywhere pointing to off-chain resources with zero guarantee of availability.

Blockchains aren't adding any value. They're only extracting rent and adding friction.

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