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Genuine question from someone on the outside watching all of this: then who are these things for? Apparently not me, nor GP, nor my mum and dad. Are we waiting until the Smart People sort out all of these complex details to make this stuff accessible for regular people?

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I'd say something like this: the average person isn't doing anything that complex with money. They can use cash for instant, real-time payments (with good counterfeit prevention), and can generally rely on their banks. But this is less than ideal because their assets can easily be seized, inflated, frozen, and their banks could fail. The blockchain could offer superior piece of mind or something of an insurance policy. Though the problem with that is most of the world runs on regular money so there would still need to be ways to buy/sell those assets.

To talk about the more specialized use-cases: there are some truly novel things that can only be done with the blockchain. To give you a direct example -- 'provably fair' gambling enables someone to place bets and know for certain that the result will be fair. This is accomplished by having outcomes enforced for a network of computers instead of trusting some shady website to stay fair. It's basically fully transparent. I know there will be people saying that this grasping at straws but the list of use-cases is quite long. I don't have time to research and list all the interesting ones here. But if anyone is interested in the subject I promise you that learning more about it won't be a disappointment.

It's just not easy to explain in short-form posts.

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