The blockchain technology itself is a marvel and the safety/security properties of properly decentralized systems are unmatched. The whole financial world would be better written using blockchain/smart contracts, same goes for voting/governance, etc.
But these scammers. So many of them... Easy to smell though, but the problem we need to fix is these scammers get most of the online traction/attention, taking it from truer builders.
Citation needed. Governance and finance absolutely need human judgment recovery edge cases such as "My house burnt down containing my ID (keys) and I need access to my bank account to rebuild it"
Human beings cannot do that.
It seems the common approach now is to make a v2/v3/etc. of your protocol and let your own users migrate. Previous versions will still run forever, but your frontend can push migration paths.
"My house burned down and inside was my spouse, who was my reco ery contact"
"My recovery contact died / isn't speaking to me / is backpacking in the Himalayas"
The problem isn't technical. It isn't a formal mathematical problem. It's that the real world is messy.
There are plenty of other classes of problems too. "This person committed a crime and their assets need to be seized", etc.
No, blockchain really isn't all that amazing. Blockchain is useful when you need something decentralized, immutable, and trustless. That trustless bit is the important part, there are existing solutions for decentralized immutable ledgers that work far better than blockchains and require far less compute power. And it turns out that the vast majority of human and business interactions and transactions are actually based on varying levels of trust.
And that's before you get into blockchain-specific issues like the Oracle Problem.
Decentralization is important but isn't as important. There are many successful chains that aren't decentralized at all and are quite useful.
Most top/real projects in blockchains aren't immutable. Pretty much everything is upgradable/changeable, including blockchains themselves.
Trustless - even this part isn' true for most blockchain systems. They all contain various levels of trusting different entities.
It is the transparency and verifiability that is the key idea and most important improvement that blockchains bring.
You can have transparency and verifiability without blockchain, so long as you trust the parties publishing the ledger. So once again, trustless is really the key part to blockchain.
> Trustless - even this part isn' true for most blockchain systems.
Blockchains are immutable, trustless, permissionless. Otherwise it's called a database.
Rather, blockchains enable anyone to provably check the state of the database. Your fintech app logs you out. No proof, and frustrating customer service hell for days/weeks/months.
Eh? I thought blockchain didn't scale? As far as I can see blockchain swaps trust in banking institutions ( not to simply make up numbers in their banking systems ) - to trust in a majority based voting system where you don't know the people involved and you just hope the bad guys don't have a majority.
And the computational cost of running the distributed voting system - is many of orders magnitude higher than the computational costs of transactions in the we-trust-the-bank-model.
As for smart contracts - a quick google suggests that the cost of deploying a smart contract on Ethereum is 500 dollars - that's quite an overhead for the vast majority of financial transactions.
These are all scams, too. No.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO serves as a nice concrete example. "Code is law" fell apart as soon as the code resulted in a large enough bad outcome for enough people.