I believe that putting the equal sign between a blockchain and a database is fundamentally wrong. I also think that a lot of "cryptos" were just get rich quick schemes. After the dust settles we will see if blockchain is really useful or not.
That could be a sign that developers don’t know how to architect blockchain apps but that’s probably the same as saying most people don’t need blockchains. It seems unlikely that there’s sone widespread benefit still to be discovered rather than maybe some niche applications.
This distinction matters because almost no real world situation is like that: people need to know that what they’re buying is what they were promised, sellers want to avoid doing business with anyone who fraudulently claims damages, etc. If you need to add reputations and/or trusted third parties, you get no value from a blockchain to make up for all of the negatives unavoidably added by using one.
IMHO, the dust has already settled and been washed away by the rain water..
Blockchain as a technology is revolutionary and will be used in niche problems outside of crypto.
One thing that most people seem to miss is that money is only as good as our faith in it. No matter what instrument you use this has to apply.
Also it's only trustworthy as far as everything happens on the blockchain. Once you step off it for even a second, it doesn't help. Eg, witness the absolutely amazing number of scams happening in the area, and the number of well known, and supposedly trustworthy services suddenly crashing and burning.
Re: trust the devs: do you trust the electricity in your house? What about the wires in the wall? Do you trust others to follow traffic rules?
Eg, I had a passing interest in BTC, but I my interest was in the very old school "buy pizza with it" kind of use. That usage is of no interest or importance to the current BTC system, and it doesn't matter one bit how many of me there are.
The people who matter are the people who commit to the repo, the people who run miners, and the people who run exchanges. The desires of the 99.9% who aren't any of these are nearly irrelevant.
Reason, too much money has been invested into them. I believe it’ll trickle to zero slowly, but very slowly, over a long period marked by lot of volatility.
But (and this is an honest question) how long should we give this? What is the appropriate amount of time before we can say "This was basically a bust"?
Because AFAICT the blockchain revolution never came. It's been talked about endlessly for over a decade, it's been hyped to hell and back, it's been oh-my-god-so-full-of-amazing-potential-just-think-of-the-uses for all this time and the only thing that ever seems to come out of it is a variety of schemes that reward early entrants and then crash into the dust, without delivering the utility that was so vaguely promised for so long.
If you want my personal opinion: blockchain had/has great potential but once bitcoin exploded the whole crypto world was hijacked by snake oil salesmen whose only goal was to get rich. People have been scammed (and continue to be scammed) by these techno babble and the dream of getting rich.
In what way is a blockchain not a cryptographically-verified, distributed, append-only database? If you added a consensus protocol to git, you'd have a blockchain.
I'd say it's fundamentally right because the fundamentals are the same.
> After the dust settles we will see if blockchain is really useful or not.
Blockchain has been around for more than 10 years. If it had any valid use cases, we'd see them in use already, regardless of what crypto bros are doing.
The innovation is that 2 parties that don't know each other and don't trust each other can transact without a central authority and without trusting eachother.
Has blockchain been around for 10 years? Most of this time was spent in obscurity or making it super hard for the average joe to distinguish useful tech from scams.
Also think about neural nets. How long have neural nets been around? Did we figure interesting new ways to use them in the current AI/ML cycle?
I think modern darknet markets use smart contracts for escrow, so that you don't have to trust the escrow arbiter to not run off with your cryptocoins.
In your stated case, “smart contract” means software. It can’t verify that both sides of the transaction have met their obligations unless both obligations are on-chain, in which case there’s no added value.
It is a lot of work.
While for crypto-escrow you can just do a simple multi-sig with a hot keys that running on admin machines and they sign results there and they couldn't get the money, so no reason to try to hack the system.
Much easier setup.
That situation that it's avoiding is less of a concern with legitimate things where everyone knows who everyone is and law enforcement actually exists.