For a long time, I thought of the blockchain as almost synonymous with cryptocurrencies, so as I saw stuff like “Odyssey” and “lbry” appearing and being “based on the blockchain”, my first thought was that it was another crypto scam. Then, I just got reminded of it and started looking more into it, and it just seemed like regular torrenting. For example, what’s the big innovation separating Odyssey from Peertube, which is also decentralized and also uses P2P? And what part of it does the blockchain really play, that couldn’t be done with regular P2P? More generally, and looking at the futur, does the blockchain offer new possibilities that the fediverse or pre-existing protocols don’t have?
I find it to be an interesting solution looking for a problem. There could be many applications but I’ve yet to see one that blockchain could solve better than anything else that we already have, outside of crypto currencies.
Web3 is an interesting thought experiment but I don’t see how it would work in real life. It would be extremely slow, data loss would be a daily occurrence and it would be a privacy/security nightmare.
NFTs could have a useful case of keeping online records of ownership. Being cars, homes and even cattle. Which coulld also make it easier and cheaper to sell or buy these things.
Ignoring privacy concerns of course.
But you would still need an authority that can unilaterally make changes to these ownership records. People die, things get lost, stuff happens. So it can’t all be based on signing with private keys of individual persons. At that point: Why not run a central database of it all. It’s cheaper, more efficient and you could still publish a public record for traceability.
I really don’t see any problem that Blockchain could solve better than other solutions. Except Cryptocurrency.