Blockchain is just a ledger. Most systems don’t need a ledger, they need a database. It was a solution looking for a problem in most cases and the marketing/business types don’t listen to the engineers if the engineers are even in the room.
it does still hold value, but the value is super niche and generally shouldn’t be exposed to the user… it’s an implementation detail
If I understood it correctly, the main problem it can solve is lack of trust. If the involved parties can’t find a single authority to trust, they can use a blockchain instead.
Finding cases like that is a bit tricky. For example, you trust your ISP, your bank, maybe even your government… to some extent… They’re not your best friend, nor do they have to be. You can still trust them enough to take care of certain jobs. You pay your ISP via bank transfer, and they provide the service you signed up for. As long as there’s just enough trust, the system still works and there’s no need to use a blockchain.
Same goes for banks. Most people trust that the bank isn’t going to run away with your money. As long as that trust exists, there’s no need to use a blockchain.
that’s absolutely the main thing yup… in almost every circumstance where people implement blockchain, a trusted entity is involved so there’s no point to the blockchain
almost always there’s a single entity issuing a thing, and then that same entity also consuming that thing
we are absolutely right now in the trough of disillusionment with blockchain (well, among people who actually understand anything at all - as usual let’s not count trump and his base as rational actors), and at some point there will be useful solutions remain
(and side note too, we’re in the peak of inflated expectations with AI… i can not wait for that crash and to be left only with useful things)
Money got involved and fucked everything up.
As usual.
Oh that? It was bullshit just like AI.
From what I’ve heard, the biggest problem is the inputs. You can write a ‘smart’ contract that says ‘if I get a pizza, user9000005 pays user30000004 XXX bitcoins’ but there’s no direct sensor for ‘user9000005 has a pizza.’ Someone has to manually put it in. At that point, it’s not automated. It’s just a payment processor with way less certainty, so why bother?
Why less certainty? It’s more certain and less censorable than any other digital payment method.
It’s harder to doctor, but that’s not really the big worry with a contract. Contract disputes are usually more along the lines of ‘he didn’t pay me’ or ‘she didn’t deliver the goods.’ It’s much rarer for it to be an ‘I signed a contract that said BLAH, but they forged a contract to say BLAGH and faked my signature on it.’ As for censorship, I’m not sure what you mean. A government would find it difficult to obscure an on-chain contract but that’s also not really an issue. I don’t want to guess what you mean.
You’re thinking on a very narrow definition of a contract, here’s a simple contract example that’s currently being censored and wouldn’t be censorable on Blockchain: Buy NSFW games.
A simple contract could sell you NFTs for game keys that could be redeemed on Steam/Itch/GoG or even the own dev site. So there’s no middleman who could oppose this transaction and say which sort of games can or can’t be sold. This whole thing would be completely automated, secure for every part and non-censorable.
You’re hearing contracts and thinking on paper legal documents, whereas smart contracts usually refer to programs acting on tokens, the code that acts on those tokens is the contract, in the example above the generation and transfer of the tokens would be the contract.
Exhanges can still ban specific users.
So? Just use another exchange, that’s the same as saying paper money is bad because pawn shops might ban specific users.
Its the same problem; any regulation is likely to occur at an exchange level. Successful exchanges will eventually buy out the unsuccessful ones.
They require enough capital to run that they are centralized rather than decentralized. They need to be trusted by users. Its very obvious they’re the weak link here.
The money behind the hype went into “AI” instead
Turned out that those in control of the tech could control the tech, so contrary to the hype nothing was free, decentralized and scalable. Never.
It’s being used for what it’s very good at. That means very little applications (although there are some), on a different scale, and certainly nothing that can promise a quick buck for free. Basically, empty promises just farted out.
Most of the real world usage were bogus, either because they did not actually work as advertised, or because they had lots of negative properties for businesses (imagine a system that would try to prevent fraud if done well… nobody wants that). There’s also the issue that a lot of “funky, interesting stuff”, once you filtered out the bad and the ugly, were just… less efficient, less useful versions of what we already used to do.
There are still people clinging to it (and the recent fuckery in the US might revive that… although for all the bad reasons), but the press moved forward to the next thing.
It’s in the same place as those NFTs that sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Out of those I only know blockchain being used in spain as a way to ensure legality of accounting books, and that business are not commiting fraud by deleting invoices. Not in a public ledger or anything, just a hashed chain that they need to send to irs equivalent.
It doesn’t have the backing of a powerful government unlike fiat does, so its effectively worthless in the eyes of the average person.
So whenever there’s a new tech innovation, there are two instances of it.
The first is the actual tech innovation, that often finds a specific use in a few industries, then just becomes part of how things are.
The second is the venture capitalist innovation. It has nothing to do with the technical stuff (as long as the tech is complex enough to impress the average 5th grader). It’s more a concept or an idea, and a lot of big promises of unending potential. And as soon as the potential is there, stock prices go up. And that’s the only point.
The second one blows up big, then deflates quietly when the next thing takes everyone’s attention away. The actual tech innovation usually just finds its niche and quietly chugs away.
Any time anybody talks about a “tech revolution” or some similar word vomit, they’re presenting the second thing. Currently we’re on “AI” (i.e. LLMs), which will become a niche novelty when the next big thing comes along (I give it a few more years).
Currently we’re on “AI” (i.e. LLMs), which will become a niche novelty when the next big thing comes along (I give it a few more years).
I think llms are overhyped. But at the same time, their two main uses are “better google” and porn, both of which I would hardly describe as “niche”.
Expensive and useless. Decentralization was an illusion and they don’t solve any real problems
To call it useless is just untrue. There are many possibilities, Crypto is just a black hole eating the hype and funding that would otherwise go into valuable tech
Tell that to itch.io and Steam - the latest victims of centralized payments systems.
To my knowlege, unless we completely abandon traditional currency, we still have the same problem. You still need 3rd party payment processors and/or currency exchanges, which have the ability to act as gatekeepers - esspecially since the libertarian markets promoted by crypto tend to end up monopolised eventually.
If Steam still accepted Bitcoin they could use that, unfortunately Bitcoin has been crippled and has been unusable as a currency for years (which is why Steam removed it from the store). No one but Steam and the end user could censor what gets bought, so it’s a problem that it’s literally impossible to happen with cryptocurrency as money, that is exactly the problem they solve, except people usually don’t care about this problem so they think it doesn’t solve anything.
which have the ability to act as gatekeepers
How do you imagine any crypto-exchange acting as a gatekeeper? You can send your crypto from exchange to whatever address and pay for anything from there. To my knowledge, there are no exchanges that ask you to provide any details about addresses you’re sending your crypto to.
Well, for converting from Crypto to government run currencies, you need some information, be it a mailing address, or a bank account. Ignoring that, I know some systems exist for blocking or limitting transactions between specific wallets (currently mostly used to block known scammers), although I’m not sure of the specifics of that.
But how do you use KYC to gatekeep anything regarding crypto? For example, how the thing which happened to Steam and Itch could happen in crypto world?
An exchange, intermediary, or market manager gets large, then blacklists the wallets or bank accounts of the company? Basically the same thing that happened with traditional currency. To my knowledge, theres nothing preventing that.
What stops the company to maintain a team of people whose work is to register new wallets and accounts on exchanges all day every day? How exchange going to figure out that a certain person’s account is linked to the company? Even if they will hire detectives, what will they do if there is a whole team with rotating people? Also, exchanges don’t ask you to pay taxes or declare where you got money from, that happens after you take money from them to your fiat bank accounts. Also, you can go to another exchange. There are countless exchanges, more than 2, and new ones can open every day (a big difference compared to payment processors, where just 2 basically monopolized the market).
AI has taken the spotlight, but this is a good thing.
They were desperately waiting for you to figure those enough promises and now that AI has dominated the narrative, they’ve either skunk off to try and get in on that, or finally just cut their losses and tried to rebuild their ruined lives.
