You could suddenly order rare books, book plane flights, find song lyrics, and all sorts of stuff you had wanted to do but couldn’t.
I was there at the time. Every year like 11 new great use cases came along. It’s absolutely nothing like crypto.
People laughed at email, buying online, payment was even illegal in the beginning.
I was also there at the time from the very beginning.
This is the same thing. Hype, then crash then re-construction then normalized.
There is so much use for blockchain especially as infrastructure for society and in 10 years from now we will not even be thinking about it.
It's no different.
The question at the time was how useful, and how quickly things were going to be transformed and what it was all worth since the hype and valuations got out of control.
And there were of course dumb ideas that got funded (like the cue cat) and good but early ideas that were overfunded and poorly executed (like webvan).
But life was changing irreversibly at a very visible pace as digital solutions took over. Remember when every business district had a travel agent?
There are no real uses of blockchain technology today that aren’t a variation on financial speculation (aka gambling) and illicit activity.
Don’t get me wrong those are great use cases. Gambling and banned transactions are a major sector. But that’s the limit of the whole affair and that’s been obviously the case for a while.
Whether I will be right time will tell, I am pretty sure I will, and the idea that this is a useless technology is simply a question of vision.
There are plenty of use cases which are theoretically possible with Web2 but not feasible without Blockchain.
If you can name one that’s not a word salad I’m definitely curious.
This gets repeated a lot, and it's simply not true. It's a telltale sign that there's simply too much emotion in the arguments around blockchain - any post about tor and bittorrent doesn't receive nearly as many (if any) "but it's only for criminals" comments.
Being able to own and trade a digital asset in much the same way a physical asset is traded is potentially a huge use for blockchains. Large players aren't about to model ownership of the digital goods they sell as items on a blockchain, but it's a big opportunity for smaller players.