Have you read the Bitcoin whitepaper? You should, it’s not that long. This is not what was promised. We were promised a decentralized peer to peer currency with a fixed supply that couldn’t be inflated at the whims of a central bank. We got that. And we sort of also got “new forms of interconnected computing”. We now have new types of zero knowledge proofs which were designed for smart contract verification but are more generally useful. We have things like IPFS allowing you to store data in a decentralized way. There’s helium, a mesh network for IoT devices. We have ENS. Then of course we have an endless supply of sophisticated financial instruments which you probably wouldn’t be able to access otherwise.
Your position is easy to take because it’s sort of the “default” that an uninformed person would believe, and those people will side with you.
Isn’t it also the position of the well informed that think crypto is BS and are waiting (14 years now) for a non-drug use case?
And instead we got a fixed-supply currency, completely incapable of adapting to supply and demand for money (which would be a precondition for price stability).
> Then of course we have an endless supply of sophisticated financial instruments which you probably wouldn’t be able to access otherwise.
This very much depends on where you're located, but personally, I really can't complain about a lack of access to powerful financial instruments, including a multitude of footguns. Crypto hasn't meaningfully (and especially not qualitatively) improved things for me. Do you have any specific examples?
Using block chain to store data or transact is incredibly costly & inefficient. Most of the systems surrounding those usages are an incredible obtuse pain in the ass, no fun at all. Most uses rely on one or more extremely intermediated centralized systems.
The whole thing seems bankrupt. There hasn't been a single notable use. The most well known use case so far beyond cryptocoins is crypto kitties.
If this use is not notable or compelling to you, then you are probably very fortunate (for now).
I'm into ETH big time, but there are not many applications for it that are worth the fees.
IMO we’ll eventually have CBDCs which may or may not have a blockchain, but these things happen slowly.
I’ve always said that money is not fundamentally a tech problem, but a social problem. That doesn’t make the tech inherently worthless though.
And like I said, it's not like we're waiting on a technical breakthrough: it's a social problem, and without getting too political... society can sometimes change insanely slow even when "solutions" have existed for a long time.
I think it's a hugely contemporary disease to expect short term results to indicate long term value, something tech in particular has made us totally wildly out of touch on. We have had two or three decades of ongoing massive tectonic shifts, and seem huge new entities arise, and I strongly feel this view has dis-tempered our expectations & realism about growth.
Worse, when there is a huge movement, when something is so ballyhooed & hype trained, the expectations are all the more wild.
I really think block chain has been utterly unable to show it's value, has failed miserably to even try to establish use cases or flows to express it's value on. But even still, after all this time, even while being a huge cynic of what's happened, I'm not going to deny that there are possibilities out there. That we did get so hyped, that the cryptocoins hype train so dominated took away the creative energy, stole the nutrients that real value might have used to establish itself & grow.
It's hard to imagine how we can get out of such deeply intermediated ridiculously centralized & incredibly costly & inefficient forms of block chains. But it's also not my field & I still easily can believe these are great enclaves of stability out there, places of value lurking, waiting to be found. I think in general we radically over dismiss tech as not valuable, if it doesn't meet our hockeystick growth expectations. I've seen web spec after web spec cast aside because only 0.3% of web sites adopted it after 3 or 5 years. I think we really need a radical realignment for how to expect technology adoption to happen. We need to allow ourselves much more Uncertainty about what is happening, and when things do go wrong, that is often less reason to cancel the idea, and more reason to restart the clock from 0, after mis-interpretation.
We saw people put their bitshovel in the bitground and mine up bitgold. And suddenly unsurprisingly everyone wants to go bitmining.
Now that the bad incentive are much ameliorated, we can begin to see what real enduring uses might be. The bad systems aren't stealing all the oxygen.
I'd also say that I think platform evolves at a slower timebase than languages. Posix has been around for omg long now. We were almost a on SysV or very alike until very recent mass migrations off. Http3 is fancy as heck but it does very very nearly what http 0.9 did. Programming languages come and go much faster than these sort of things change. And the next jumps we keep looking to make, most involve pretty significant increases in scope (one counter example might be the Zircon microkernel, https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/concepts/kernel, but it has a sizable platform atop it again).
Maybe, but why should humanity throw significant resources (mindshare, money, energy) at a technology that purports to solve a large number of important problems, yet doesn't have any track record of actually achieving any of it?
> has failed miserably to even try to establish use cases or flows to express it's value on
That burden is always on the proponents of a new technology.
It's just an append-only distributed database. If you need that for some application, then you find it valuable.
These discussions are often so hyperbolic-- Imagine saying that columnar databases have not lived up to their expectations (or have been unable to show their value) because postgres and mysql are still quite popular... it sounds about the same to me.
The post bitcoin technologies have a lot of interesting other ideas too, about distributing computing, about roll-up transactions (where you can prove your writes without them necessarily be readable).
This is complete hyberbole. The security of most blockchains can be quite explicitly expressed as a number (of hashes per second, coins of staking, or whatever the consensus mechanism of the day uses as its scarce resource for allowing appends to the database), and it's very finite.
Another very real danger is a lack of interest and/or economic incentives to keep it going. I wouldn't be surprised if we've already lost many terabytes of data on "infinite append-only ledgers", since disk space still isn't free, and massively replicated disk space even less so.
Retail with digital cash is the closest, but as a consumer there’s no real benefit to me over visa and the “real” coins like eth and bitcoin are very expensive for purchases.
I think a central bank digital currency with transaction fees in the millionth of a cent (the real compute cost) would be so much better for retail.
You are 100% correct regarding Ethereum gas fees. Transaction fees on current generation L1s are 0.0025 cents.
Digital "gold" is a meaningless term.
Retail without 3% going to Visa...instead some variable percent will go to transaction fees.
Distributing royalties to artists is just something called programmable NFTs. It’s just cryptography - a program enforces the artist’s account is credited to allow a transfer and it’s not a big deal. artists are absolutely making money from this. It fixes an issue in traditional art where the resale value of an artists earlier works increases however, the artist doesn’t see any of those returns.
Transaction fees on modern layer 1 crypto platforms are 0.0025 cents.
The meaning of the term Digital gold is an asset that is not subject to quantitative easing from the government. I.e. one cannot mine vast quantities of Gold or produce vast quantities of new bitcoins very easily.
Pardon the edits, I am using voice dictation, as I’m having trouble using my hands.
This is a non sequitur.
"Some software uses draconian DRM" is neither the same as, nor a refutation of, "enforcing ownership of digital goods like art requires draconian DRM."
I am not asserting that some software uses DRM as if DRM is the exception. I am saying that we are in the hellscape You described when nearly everything that wants to uses DRM.
This seems like a goal best solved by a good/fair/efficient legal system, not a technical problem. Recording ownership is easy; determining where intellectual property ends and fair use begins is where the complexity is at. I haven't seen NFTs etc. meaningfully address any of that.
> retail without 3% going to visa
Yes, card payments are quite inefficient, but not anywhere near 3% go to the card networks.
> a world where everybody has a friendly name for their public key and we can communicate privately
What's the connection to cryptocurrency here? We've had that way before Bitcoin.
recording ownership of digital goods at scale has historically been very difficult. fair use is important but does not help artists get paid. Please don’t read that is being anti fair use. It is rather that fair use is orthogonal to this problem.
> Yes, card payments are quite inefficient, but not anywhere near 3% go to the card networks.
Glad we agree on at least one of these. Visa is 2.9 percent plus some other minor fee I can’t remember right now.
> What's the connection to cryptocurrency here?
Usability. I guarantee you more people have crypto wallets now that have ever installed PGP, GPG, or any other similar app in the entire history of computing.
No, that's the total that the merchant pays. The biggest chunk of that goes to the issuing bank and pays for credit card rewards which you get back as the cardholder in some form.
Credit cards (at least in the US) are a fairly efficient payment system, but as long as there will be card rewards, they effectively create a cash surcharge at all merchants that accept them: If you pay by card, the biggest chunk of these ~3% is kicked back to you, so the merchant usually just bakes that 3% into their prices, but you get the biggest part of it back. But since merchants usually don't have two sets of prices (although there are exceptions), cash payers end up net-paying more, i.e. indirectly pay for your card rewards.
This isn't the case in all countries globally; for example, in the EU, card interchange is capped to about 10% of what merchants pay in the US. As a result, merchant fees are much lower, but there are practically no more rewards.
[1] https://www.visa.co.uk/dam/VCOM/regional/ve/unitedkingdom/PD...
Which ironically also includes digital assets, on account of the analog-hole existing (you have to shoot light into eyeballs at some point).
Eyeballs thing is true, but hasn’t stopped cryptography being effective in other areas for example, Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Apple TV etc seem to be doing well despite the electrons reaching my eyeballs unencrypted. The same applies to collectible images, videos and code.
How does a smart contract ensure the custodian is doing any of the things it assumes they are? What is the actual mechanism meant to be, that resists someone inputting "yes I definitely have this car here" when they do not?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35970568
Current generation L1s don’t use the term smart contract anymore because they have almost no resemblance to actual contracts. Rather they are on chain financial programs. I definitely make no attempt to compare on chain programs to legal contracts.
I have repeatedly stated that software cannot prevent fraud.
Specifically, what value is Blockchain providing that is not provided by a simple database run by the trusted party who would be necessary to execute any part of the actual physical interactions where all the value is provided?
Completely agreed, I have not done that. As I’ve mentioned repeatedly, I just want you to pick one of the six use cases so I can answer your questions.
I’m going to respectfully end this conversation as I’ve tried to engage you in good faith and you’re not going to tell me what you want or simply don’t understand what I am asking.
Meaning you actually have no argument, got it.
You remind me of the guy that gets on a train carriage and yells about how he will fight everyone but then backs down when someone takes him up on the offer.
There is a use case. NFTs for example can be used for ticketing systems. Here is a real world use case which you can see for your own eyes. [0]
[0] https://www.ledgerinsights.com/uks-wembley-stadium-adopts-bl...
Ticketing isn't exactly a hard problem. It gains nothing meaningful by using NFTs for it.
Nope. This is the original claim:
> ...there seem to be no contemporary applications of any note...
It is a valid use-case and it is an improvement, otherwise it would not be possible at all, especially when I gave a direct source proving that there is a real world business using NFTs to solve their ticketing problem, especially for anti-fraud purposes and all verifiable on a public blockchain.
> Ticketing isn't exactly a hard problem.
Is that why many are using NFTs for ticketing systems, including Ticketmaster? [0] [1] Looks like a great use case for NFTs and they seem to gain a lot from using them.
[0] https://boxoffice.sitickets.com/
[1] https://business.ticketmaster.com/business-solutions/nft-tok...