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Comment by TuringNYC | Hacker News Reader

Point taken, but how about these:

- My mom cant figure out Blockchain either

- My sister (doctor) and brother (3 degrees) cant figure out Blockchain either, because they are too afraid of scanning the wrong QR code and having their balance drained

My mom, sister, and brother all use ChatGPT. My brother uses it actively for work.

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You can dig deeper.... what exactly are the real-world applications of an immutable transaction ledger? I can't think of very many. Let alone a bunch of kids.

Immutable decentralized public ledgers could have many usages, but the biggest problem is: who is authorized to add new entries? There are different answers to this question depending on use case, but it is really the crux of the matter.

Decentralized is critical to the recipe as well. 'Immutable' centralized ledgers are largely a non-starter because the scenarios you want to use block chain for are zero-trust type scenarios. With centralization, the promise of immutability holds exactly as long as it's convenient for the centralizing power.

In any case, defining public use or accessibility as the metric of relevance of something is quite illogical. You end up with countless absurdities like relativity being worthless and CocaCola being the most relevant invention ever.

I don't blame them since the stakes are much higher, but it probably doesn't help to say "they can't figure out blockchain" because that doesn't make any sense.

Which 'blockchain'? Blockchain is a singular noun, that's like saying "they can't figure out phone".

Sure. I'm not saying Blockchain fulfilled it's promise. I'm just not convinced that every major new thing will be immediately adopted by kids. It seems like it's an orthogonal thing.

> it without being forced to

I think this is an important detail. A lot of "forced into it" numbers will get presented as "happy users" in various unfair metrics comparisons.

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